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Archive for Paul Hawken

Bioneers 2008 ~ Day One

13grandmothers

Thirteen Grandmothers from indigenous communities in the Americas,
Nepal, Tibet, Africa, and Japan came on stage to open the Bioneers
conference this morning, each one sharing a blessing in her own language – for the earth,
its creatures and all of humanity, including the 13,000 individuals
gathered here in San Rafael or viewing the program by satellite feed.

In her opening talk, Nina Simons expressed the commitment she has personally made to address her own embedded racism and encouraged us all to stay awake throughout this gathering and challenge our assumptions, reminding us that in order to be the “carriers of a new story that will help seed the restoration of a loving world”, we will all need to make some changes.

Kenny Ausebel’s introduction to the plenary sessions focused on hope and systemic solutions that prove evolution favors the resilient, those who are able to adapt and change.

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Jay Harman
Australian Jay Harman is the impressive CEO of bay area alternative energy firm Pax Scientific, which looks to Nature for energy solutions. Harman used an extraordinarily beautiful video to illustrate how the spiral is nature’s key to smarter energy design while three of is scientists showcased models of this spiral applied in fans, boats, and items designed for the water treatment and industrial mixing industries.

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Judy Baca
Award-winning Mestizo muralist and public artist Judy Baca, whose work chronicles the political landscaping of California, was next. “It all started with a river”, she said, reminiscing about the ‘hardening of the arteries’, or concretization of the Los Angeles river that happened during her childhood.

This act of violence against the community eventually resulted in a half mile of artistry – a mural illustrating the history of the community it had disrupted. The project, led by Baca, was created collaboratively over a period of several years by young people within the effected communities. This mural, which lines both sides of the concrete river, is now recognized and celebrated as a site of public memory. That history is not yet finished, with youth groups now planning a “green bridge” across the river made of channel waste material and lit by solar panels.

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Destiny Arts – the fabulous youth art troupe from Oakland who premiered at Bioneers last year – were back for a brief performance, and their beautifully choreographed dance moves were even more impressive this year.

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Judy Wicks
The next plenary session featured Judy Wicks, social food activist and owner of the famous White Dog Café in Philadelphia, who talked about how ‘beautiful’ business can be. “Business is about relationships” she said, “my business is the way I express my love for the world”.

Spectacularly successful, Wicks made a conscious decision to remain small and expand in relationship and community activism rather than pursue ever-greater economic gains, and her innovative approach extends from her restaurant’s almost unique labor practices and benefit packages to cruelty-free organic food sources, sustainable waste management, extensive local, national and international activism and community celebrations.

What an incredible inspiration to see what a woman can do with a restaurant and the heart and mind to make it much, much more than that.

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John Abrams
Green architect and founder of the employee-owned residential design and building firm South Mountain Company, John Abrams was next with another story of hope and transformation. He and a few friends started by building homes in Vermont for $500 each before eventually returning to his home town in Martha’s Vineyard where he continued building homes for not much more – ‘subsidizing homes for the rich’, as one of his friends described it.

He wasn’t making much money, but that apparent failure was part of Abrams’ initial impetus to invest in the idea of an employee-owned workplace.

That, and the inherent injustice and unsustainability of our current economic model fueled Abrams’ new economic vision and eventually led him to distribute the money and power in his business to all his employees. This model not only galvanized Abrams’ business into a spectacular success story, but inspired a positive business model which can transform the way we work.

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Van Jones
Fabulous as the morning line up had been up to that point, social justice luminary Van Jones, co-founder and Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center, was the uncontested star of the day. Charismatic, generous and entertaining, Jones talked about how environmentalism has been the ‘nice (“white”) face’ that can open the door for long-needed social change, change that the harsher black face of social injustice has been unable to shift.

As the environmental movement moves from the margins to the center of mainstream culture, Van Jones challenges us with a question about who we are going to take with us, and who is going to be left behind.

Using his increasingly famous Fourth Quadrant slideshow (“the presentation Al Gore would do if he were black”), he walked us through an overview of the environmental movement up to now and show us a possible future. In a line from the Grey phase of problems on the left of the page to the Green of solutions on the right, we cross the unseen line of race, class, and gender. This line is often invisible, but when we include it, it creates a grid of four quadrants.

4quadrants

In the top left, in the quadrant of Rich and Grey, we have the problems of species loss, which is of course true, while in the lower left we have problems of human loss and degradation, no less true.

In the upper right quadrant, of Rich and Green, we have wonderful solutions – Priuses, solar panels, and Whole Foods (Whole Paycheck for anyone outside of Marin, Jones quips :-). Ultimately this area consists of business opportunities for rich people and consumer choices for the affluent. This is a good thing, too, Jones says. We WANT people to be investing in this area, and making better choices, but what about those who can’t afford a Hybrid, who are struggling to find rent – is there a place for them in the Environmental movement? In the lower right quadrant is where we begin to deliver the health and work benefits of the Environmental movement with Green-Collar jobs like the People’s Grocery, in Oakland, or the Solar Richmond project.

The moral challenge of the Environmental movement, Van Jones contends, is to bring the green economy to those who most need the advantages it can bring, the youth of color that would otherwise be jail fodder. “You save money, that young person’s life and the soul of this country”, he declares passionately; “in the green economy we don’t have any throw-away resources, throw-away people or throw-away neighborhoods.”

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After lunch I attended my first afternoon session, HotFrog Presents: Writing the Revolution.

The session was led by Laurie Lane-Zucker, co-founder of Orion magazine, former publisher and editor of Mother Jones Mark Dowie, and authors Eddie Yuen and Rebecca Solnit.

Lane-Zucker began by recounting a meeting with Paul Hawken after last year’s Bioneers where he proposed starting an online magazine that would complement Hawken’s work in Blessed Unrest.

Trying to think of a name for the magazine, for a metaphor that would do justice to the power and scope of Paul’s idea, Laurie Lane-Zucker went on a vision quest into ‘dreamtime’ with some friends. In dreamtime, they went down to the water and took off their clothes, because “you have to be naked for this work”, he explains, and they dived way, way down deep to the place where the earth’s plates are separated and they crawled inside…  found themselves a table, lit some cigars and started to think. Gaia … ? (not urgent enough) … The Lemming … ? (urgent enough, but a little suicidal). And then someone surfaced the idea of the frog who sits in the water, even as it begins to boil around him … That was it! Hot Frog!

They needed an image to illustrate the metaphor, because that’s just how it is, so Laurie called an old friend, who happened to be a branding genius, and tasked him to come up with an image that was as beautiful and powerful as the concept they’d revealed. They were looking for an image of a frog that is active, spiritual, totemic; a frog that represents metamorphosis.

With the context set, Lane-Zucker shared his vision for HotFrog as “storying the movement” – giving the power to tell the story to the people, yes, but without forgetting the Writer, who he says was born to tell a particular kind of story. With that he introduced the first of the writers presenting in the session, Rebecca Solnit.

Solnit spoke about the original meaning of revolution as ‘coming around’, cycling’, rather than the ‘great change’ that it has come to mean in our time, and of her view of a ‘revolution‘ that speaks a language of creativity rather than conflict, to tell the stories that are needed now to combat despair & discouragement.

Eddie Yuen picked up her narrative by distinguishing between “lumpers” and “splitters”. The movement of movements, for example, where diversity is a strength, is a “lumper’. But there are times when it is helpful to clarify who is NOT in the movement of movements, in the case of green-washing, for example. He hastened to add that social movements are not reduce-able to the organizations which at times claim to represent them. Movements do not have organizations, he continued, they have the ability to disrupt organizations, and power.

As a writer and wordsmith, Mark Dowie expressed concern with the categorization of Hawken’s database on Wiser Earth as a “movement”. In Dowie’s eyes these groups are making big changes, but they are not yet a movement, rather the grassroots beginnings of movements. He admits that to connect and network them is crucial work, but says we are kidding ourselves if we think that a database in itself is a movement. What creates a movement is a mission, he goes on to say, and there are a lot of different missions represented in those groups. Later, in answer to the question of what would make it a movement, he says “a common enemy”, or the recognition that they were all against the same thing.

I couldn’t keep my hand down at this point, because to my mind we are present at the birth of a new and different kind of movement, a movement of movements, whose very essence is an acceptance of diversity and cannot possibly be defined under one unified “mission” in the old sense. I also believe that groups can unify around a positive goal with diverse manifestations, rather than a common enemy, which again seems like an old model. I love Orion, so I will withhold judgment until I have seen hotfrog, but the conversation with Dowie, who will be the managing editor, did not give me confidence that he understands the new emergent model very well.

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In my second session of the afternoon, Sam Bower, founder of GreenMuseum.org (whose business cards are printed on leaves) chaired a panel called EcoArt Strategies: Towards a Culture of Sustainability.

Starting by sharing the genesis of the green museum as an online resource for art that would not have otherwise been accessible, Bower gave us a brief overview of some of the diversity of environmental art forms that have emerged from the 60s through today.

Before introducing the first artist on his panel, Sam explained that the work of the Green Museum revolves around a series of assumptions – that art is a tool; collaboration makes projects that are more effective and longer lasting than individual work; and sharing information about art can influence and lead to new works.

With that he gave the floor to Susan Leibovitz Steinman of WEAD (Women’s Environmental Artist’s Directory), who took us through a project she did in Sonoma County on wild apples. 

Next up were Canadian artist Nancy Bleck and her native colleague Hereditary Chief Bill Williams of the Skwxwu7mesh Nation. Tomales’ place-specific work is in bringing the Long House of his culture – teachings with an elder trained to speak what needed to be said – out onto the land.

Nancy spoke about looking at the land through indigenous eyes and the protocols that must be honored in order to “be” with them in a respectful way.

Daniel McCormick’s “erosion control” sculptures provide a public art experience in unlikely places. He works in West Marin, using materials from local watersheds, contoured in ways that work with the streambeds they came from in order to benefit it in some way; trap and reduce silt build-up, for example.

Co-founder of the online journal LAND, Anne-Katrin Spiess gave an overview of her ways of working, which include getting lost and driving until she comes to places she describes as ‘nothing’, and described a few of her projects including The Thinking Box, a semi-transparent space where one sits in contemplation and basically does ‘nothing’ in glorious outdoor spaces, Rock Bed, Tree Bed: Homage to Julia Butterfly Hill, and her latest which was a well-chronicled cross-country bicycle trip.

The questions were a little disappointing to me, having to do with whether or not art is ‘useful’ like a tool that is made in response to issue or if it is art as individual expression. That also seemed to me to be an old dichotomy without much real relevance.

On my way to dinner I got a wonderfully useful tour of Google Earth with a couple of new ideas about how to apply it for my clients. Afterwards we were entertained by the Urban Apache and the B Boys. Here’s a little clip I managed to catch on my cell phone:


After Urban Apache, we were all graced by the sound of soulful poet Jahan Khalighi, who is one of my favorite performance artists. He is so deep and beautiful. This one was dedicated to his grandmother, who though he didn’t mention it, is the legendary choreographer and dancer Anna Halprin.

Click here for Bioneers ~ Day Two

Bioneers ~ Last Day

I came in late, just in time for the last few minutes of the first plenary session with Rachel Remen where the whole auditorium was vibrating; everyone in it singing softly as one voice. An auspicious beginning, as it turned out.

Rachel was followed by Maria Durazo, president of the Hotel &
Restaurant Employees Union’s Local 11, who reminded us that the organic
food industry also uses immigrant labor, and doesn’t necessarily treat
their workers, both legal and un-documented, any better. Next, Spencer Beebe, founder of Ecotrust, talking about building a new nation – "Why not call ourselves Salmon Nation?", he asks – based on bioregions governed by nature, on principles much longer-lasting than those of politics.

Beebe was followed by the beautiful Sophia Quintero, a young woman who is helping to transform her world through popular culture. She founded ChicaLuna to support girls of color in developing film-making skills, & because every movie is a political movie, she gives them a solid foundation of political & feminist analysis skills so the films they make can reflect their own values, and not just reinforce the values of the dominant culture that so often demeans them.

The last plenary of the morning was presented by Paul Hawken who was introduced by Kenny Ausubel as a man who has been a human lighthouse to many of us – I know I have been following his thinking ever since he was with Erewhon – a natural foods company he started back in Boston; was it really the very first natural food company? – where I worked with him back in the 70s. Paul is a visionary thinker in the truest sense, but he has always been firmly grounded in the practical, writing books like The Ecology of Commerce and founding many profitable companies including the popular Smith & Hawken gardening supply chain. I lost my pen during his presentation, so I couldn’t take notes, but I was absolutely stunned by what he had to say.

I’m sure I can’t do justice to it… and it might not sound so unusual if you don’t know his history… but Paul shared that he has come to realize the environmental movement has to be based in a spiritual ethos; that to be viable it has to embrace the social justice movement so that the two become one. He said that in fact the environmental movement grew out of social movements that later went on to become religions, like Taoism & Confucianism, and that human beings are born with an altruistic instinct – that the need to care for others is hard-wired into us.

The implications of Paul’s talk are still reverberating in me, and I for one am going to download his words from the Bioneers site – share them with my partner and listen to them again myself.

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This last day was a very different kind of energy for me. Things were happening slower, and a lot more went on, somehow. Perhaps because I was experiencing more outdoors… I took my lunch outside, and after eating laid back on the grass, looking up at the thick tangle of leaves above me, feeling the sun & warm breeze on my skin.

After lunch, I was drawn to a rapper who was on a rough stage in the center of the plaza with a mic in his hand, calling out rhythmically to the crowd "There’s only one God… He’s got a lot of names, but there’s only one God… He’s got a lot of names." This guy, whose MySpace name is GoodFelllow (yep, three ‘l’s) was very good, and he reminded me of my friend Jahan, who is also a rapper that draws on spirituality for his poetics. I hope the two meet, and they take the world by storm. (I just looked up GF and found that he calls himself a ‘Troubador of Divine Bliss’! 🙂

My first post-plenary session after lunch was wonderful, if a bit strange. It was supposed to be an interactive session on EcoArt, with about 30 artists taking part. Apparently they’d only expected 30 additional people because there were 60 chairs set up in a tight circle in the front of the large tent where we were meeting. The trouble was there were more like 90 people in the room, and the circle didn’t expand, so a lot of of us were sitting in rows looking at a solid wall of backs.  Still, there were some fascinating artists there and I heard some wonderful words spoken, even though for the most part it was impossible to know who was speaking.

Answering a question about the kinds of tools they use, one artist said that he thinks of his art as a bridge between those things he carries deep inside him and their manifestation in the external world, and therefore he sees his heart as a primary tool for art-making. Another said that in her experience photography is a tool to bring people into the moment and produce a sort of meditative experience. Helen & Newton Harrison were there, and Nelson said they often use what he calls an eco-flip; they will take something assumed, penetrate the belief or metaphor surrounding it, and then ‘flip’ it – taking their design in a whole new direction. Work on ‘flood control’, for instance, might become a piece with ‘spreading of the waters’ as a central theme. Their creative scope & vision is amazing; I would have liked an entire session focused just on them!

I think I might have saved the best for last, however, because I was truly entranced my my last session, and could have stayed there forever – I didn’t want to leave. It was David Abram, who I absolutely adore because of the pleasure I got from reading Spell of the Sensuous, and the ever-interesting Susan Griffin, in a session called Re-visioning the Language of Environmentalism.

They talked about the extremely transformative metaphoric power of words; their ability to change experience & therefore reality. David said there are ways of speaking that enhance the reciprocity between words and our bodily senses & there are those that stifle this connection and tend to make us live more in our heads, keeping us aloof from our bodies and the earth we live in.

Susan brought up the old split between the spiritual and the material, and how the pejorative way we use the words and association of ‘matter’ effects us and cuts us off from our bodies, each other and the earth. She talked about the need to find a language that can hold the grief
that is commensurate with our times, and David said perhaps this is one
of the reasons for our abstractions, and why we are all in flight from
a body which we fear cannot hold all the grief we know is there.

We talked a bit about the abstraction of a phrase like ‘global warming’ – David prefers the term ‘planetary fever’ because it’s really more like a fever, this world-wide malaise we are all experiencing, where there are extreme oscillations between overwhelming heat and the ‘shivers’ that follow.

Then the phenomenon that is David Abram started to wax poetic – he talked about gravity as eros, the definition of gravity being the natural force of attraction exerted by one body upon another. What if, he reasoned, our every step on earth was a conscious enactment of our love affair with earth? How would knowing this effect the way we experience the simple act of walking?

He impressed upon us the need to rejuvenate oral culture – to language the local culture of which we are part without always needing to bind the words down to paper. Instead, he invites us to share our words, so that you can hear the breath behind them. Speech is shaped breath, he reminds us, and it is the air that carries your words to my ears. Air is the mystery we live in, where all the voices of the ancestors live… we are immersed in this atmosphere, like fish in the sea.

Air is a part of earth – sometimes he calls it Eairth to make this clearer – and when we connect with it in our speech, we remain grounded rather than withdraw into abstraction. What if our minds are not ours, he asks, but the earth’s? If that is so, we are all immersed in the mind of the earth – the air.

Each of us lives in the mystery, in direct relationship to the elements around and within us, & each of us has our own creative access to the ‘real’ of our bodies. He invites us to find the ways & begin speaking from our own skin, our hearts, our bones. Language is just a set of poetics, he says – get in there and play! Be creative!

We need to develop speaking that is contagious, he went on, language that can spread through
the culture like a virus. We all need to become poets, in the sense of
speaking beautifully –
luring people with our words into their senses and skin, helping them
to wake up in their bodies.

See what I mean? 🙂