Conscious Choice: Revolution from the Heart of Nature

July 2001

Revolution from the Heart of Nature

Voices of the Bioneers, October 2000

To give you a feel for the variety and vigor of the bioneers, we have excerpted five sessions from the October 2000 conference. The featured speakers are Rebecca Adamson, Dr. Samuel Epstein, Mark Hertzgaard, Paul Stamets, and Terri Swearingen. These are greatly abridged versions of what they said, but the essence of the work these people do will be readily apparent.

Introductions are by Kenny Ausubel (Stamets, Hertzgaard), Nina Simons (Adamson), J.P. Harpignies (Epstein), or from the biographies on the Bioneers Web site (Swearingen).

Indigenous Investments [top]

Rebecca Adamson has designed and implemented many programs and policies that empower North America’s first nations to regain control of their economic destiny. A Cherokee, she is the founder and President of the First Nations Development Institute, which provides grants to develop native enterprises. She has become the principal advocate and architect of culturally appropriate, values-driven development among North America’s tribes. Adamson set up the first Native American micro-enterprise loan fund and the first tribal investment models. She’s worked for over a quarter century to assure access to capital and fiscal management training for tribes. She’s designed and led programs on crucial land reform issues, on combating the undercounting of Native Americans in the census, on sovereignty issues, on helping indigenous peoples have more control over academic research agendas that involve their cultures, and on many other initiatives vital to indigenous culture and survival. Rebecca is also a professor of indigenous economics, and she’s emerged as one of the most influential figures in the socially responsible funding world. She sits on the boards of several progressive financial institutions, and she’s won many awards for her contributions in developing innovative economic strategies.

One of the key things my mom used to say over and over to me during my adolescent years was, "Rebecca Lee, if you don’t change directions, you’re going to end up where you’re headed." Well, we as a culture have got to change directions, and it’s crucial to understand that we can reorganize our society. We can reorganize socially, politically, and economically, and we can reorganize according to our values.

We are the stewards of the last remaining truly sacred territories. It’s the critical habitats and it’s the biodiversity hot-spots. And indigenous people won’t stand a chance of surviving the twenty-first century without your help.

The liberalization of trade and its corresponding acceleration of globalized markets threatens our survival more now than it ever has before. But this is not just about indigenous people. Nor is it just about the right thing to do. This scenario will destroy all of us.

We have designed a new social investment screen. Its basic screening principles or criteria have been a distillation of all of the international treaties and the rights that have been set forth by these treaties, and we’ve come up with basically about eight principles that go into screening any and every investment. And what we have right now, through this investment screen, is the only international advocacy vehicle for indigenous people.

The investment screen gives us a forum that we can use to have the market protect our culture, not destroy it. In 1982, Calvert became one of the very first mutual funds to take a stand against apartheid. And back then they said it wouldn’t matter. Back then they said it couldn’t be done. Yet we all saw an end to apartheid.

The screen can become a powerful tool and I ask you to use it. In addition, together, we need to build an international campaign taking lessons from the divestiture of South Africa, taking lessons from the environmental movement’s ability to mobilize resources. We need to stop indigenous genocide. We know that we can kill all humankind with a single bomb. We can destroy the ozone. We can blow up the planet. This means the current rules of the game must change. These are not win or lose, power and control scenarios any longer. We all lose.

The interdependency of humankind, the relevance for relationship, the sacredness of creation is returning as a fact of life. It is ancient, ancient wisdom. All things are bound together. All things connect.

What happens to the earth happens to the children of the earth. Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread. Whatever we do to the web we do to ourselves. The environment is perceived as a sensate, conscious entity suffused with spiritual powers through which the human understanding is only realized in perfect humility before the sacred whole.

For tribal people who see the world as a whole, the essence of our work is in its entirety. In a society where all are related, simple decisions require the approval of nearly everyone in that society. It is society as a whole, not merely a part of it that must survive. This is the indigenous understanding. It is the understanding in a global sense. Unless there is something I don’t know, we are all indigenous people on this planet, this community. As indigenous people of this planet, we have to reorganize to get along.

Exposing the Dangers of Biotech Foods [top]

Dr. Samuel Epstein has won countless awards, including the 1998 Right Livelihood Award, the "alternative" Nobel Prize. He’s written a definitive text, The Politics of Cancer, and the updated The Politics of Cancer Revisited. Dr. Epstein is a professor of environmental and occupational medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago and is the world’s leading credible expert on the environmental and occupational causes of cancer.

Industry hasn’t published a single article in a peer reviewed journal on the safety of genetically engineered foods. In any discussion or debate with them, they will cite to you a variety of authorities, a variety of institutions who supposedly lend powerful support to the safety of genetically engineered foods. The industry says, "Trust us. Would we do such a thing to U.S. agriculture? Would we do such a thing to world food supply if we weren’t absolutely sure that what we’re doing is for the benefit of humankind, quite apart from the profit of our shareholders?"

In the spring of‘89, I started getting some calls from farmers in this country and elsewhere who were asking, "What do you know about rBGH? We’re giving the stuff to our cows and the cows are getting sick, and if the cows are getting sick, surely this must do something to the milk."

That was my wake-up call. I started a fairly thorough search of the medical literature, the public health literature, and could find nothing whatsoever on rBGH. I then came across two supplements to the Journal of Dairy Research, the 1987 and the 1988 supplements, which were devoted exclusively to reports on rBGH. And there must have been about 300 articles on rBGH — fairly short articles, each with an abstract and conclusions, but nothing in the medical, public health, or scientific literature.

I started going through the listing of authors in the 300 or so articles in these two supplements. The first thing I noticed was that they all fell into two categories. Either they were by Monsanto scientists and the other companies involved, including Eli Lilly, or from land grant colleges. Over the decades, land grant colleges have become so closely allied with the agrochemical industry that they are literally extensions of agrochemical interests, very largely funded by Monsanto and by other bio-tech companies.

What did I find in these 300 or so articles? When you read scientific material carefully, you find very often that there’s a peculiar disconnect between the abstract at the beginning of the article and the actual data in the article.

The abstracts, universally and uniformly said, "We did milk production trials and most of these milk production trials were based on about five to ten cows. We gave them the hormone. There were no adverse effects reported, and we got an increase in milk production. So everything is fine."

I went through the data with a fine-toothed comb, however, and came upon some very interesting findings. The first was that there was a high incidence of mastitis, inflammation of the udder; either clinical mastitis, in which you actually found pus in the milk, or sub-clinical mastitis, in which you have an inflammation of the breast or udder of the cow and pus is found microscopically.

The second was a high incidence of reproductive problems of a wide range: decreased birth weight, miscarriages, etc. And then a few references to a growth factor known as IGF-1, which is short for Insulin-like Growth Factor 1.

In bloodstreams of all mammals, there’s a growth factor known as Insulin-like Growth Factor 1 secreted by the liver in response to growth hormone. Growth hormone is produced by the pituitary gland, and stimulates the liver to produce IGF-1, which stimulates cell growth, proliferation, and maturity.

Elevations of IGF-1 were mentioned and then brushed aside as being within normal limits. They were normal in the milk very shortly after birth. But when you looked at normal milk, the elevation was quite striking.

When you give a cow the genetically engineered growth hormone, suddenly there’s a massive explosion and concentration of IGF-1 inside the udder — the breast and epithelial cells. So I suggested that there could well be cause for concern as to the potential of IGF-1 in relation to breast cancer.

In October of 1989, I came into my office one morning and found a vast box with no return address. It was a whole stack of confidential Monsanto files, which some idealistic criminal had either stolen from Monsanto or copied from FDA files.

I went through the whole big stack of stuff. It took me a week. There was documentation that showed clearly and unequivocally that contrary to FDA and Monsanto assurances, cows injected with rBGH developed a very wide range of diseases. As an ex-pathologist, let me just use the language of pathology: disseminated granulomatis infiltration. In other words, all over the body, the heart, lungs, kidneys, spleen, there were small areas of chronic inflammation. In addition to that, there was a markedly elevated incidence of mastitis and a markedly elevated incidence of reproductive problems.

Vast amounts of this milk were being sold. FDA and Monsanto were assuring the public that it was totally harmless, no different from normal milk. But the FDA had a whole file of every single study that Monsanto had done that proved otherwise. The FDA did admit that the rBGH hormone was a little different from the natural hormone, just a 2 or 3 percent difference in molecular structure.

But a 2 or 3 percent difference in the overall chromosomal can be very, very significant. Just one amino acid difference can give you, say, the difference between, in a whole long DNA chain, somebody who gets sickle cell anemia and dies from it, and someone who doesn’t. So this isn’t entirely reassuring.

And then there are quantitative abnormalities in rBGH milk. First of all, there’s a reduction in casein levels, which could hurt the cheese industry. There’s an increased concentration of long-chain fatty acids, which of course would be a great boon to cardiovascular surgeons, but not to very many other people. There’s an increased thyroid hormone enzyme, and finally the increased levels of IGF-1 I mentioned earlier.

Clearly, their claims about the equivalence of rBGH milk with normal milk, and the product’s safety are wrong, and Monsanto and the FDA’s behavior in this affair is reprehensible, and unfortunately, far from an isolated episode.

Global Green Deal [top]

Mark Hertzgaard is an eminent investigative journalist for magazines ranging from the Atlantic Monthly to Time. His most recent book, Earth Odyssey, has garnered enormous attention and praise. It documents his experience traveling around the world looking at the environmental situation in the context of how we can begin to change economic structures and use government intervention to shift markets towards a benign, restorative type of natural capitalism rather than the destructive system now in place.

I left the United States in 1991, just as the Persian Gulf War was winding down, to travel around the world and to look at a pretty simple question: "Will we, the human species, act quickly and decisively enough to save ourselves from all the environmental hazards that were crowding in on us at the end of the twentieth century?"

I spent significant amounts of time in nineteen different countries. I interviewed everyone from political leaders like Vaclav Havel and Al Gore to scientists and activists like Jacques Cousteau, but the people who taught me the most about our environmental future were the people who are going to be deciding it, and those are the average people I met all around the world, whether they were land squatters on the plateaus of Brazil, or students yearning for a better future in Moscow, or the peasants and the workers in China.

I think the single most important lesson I learned on these six years around the world is that it is impossible to talk about our environmental future without talking about poverty. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, there is nothing more surely written in the book of fate than that these billions of people will strive in the next century to have a better life. And we should be helping them to do that. We should not be saying "You need to limit your numbers; you need to limit your consumption." We should be trying to encourage this mass ascent from poverty.

That’s not always the way environmentalists have looked at this question. I would submit to you that we really need to fundamentally rethink our prejudices. On the other hand, there’s a reason why we have to be concerned about how we fight poverty because the conventional way to fight poverty is with conventional economic growth and clearly the planet cannot tolerate any more of that.

It was that problem that I tried to confront at the end of my book Earth Odyssey, and the proposal that I came up with is this idea of a Global Green Deal. It starts from this realization that there is no way that we can make any progress on these issues without also fighting poverty.

The idea of a Global Green Deal is to make saving the planet the biggest jobs program of the twenty-first century. Capitalism is not going to go away any time soon. We therefore have to become sophisticated about the Market and moving markets. We have to become sophisticated about how you tip a market, because we don’t have a lot of time for behavior to shift.

We have wonderful technologies in the areas of solar power, agriculture, and transportation. The big obstacle to progress has been the resistance of the market, of large corporations, to incorporating these changes. That’s why we’re not moving fast enough, so we’ve got to find a way around that.

China right now is the number two greenhouse gas producer in the world because of all the coal that it uses. It’s going to be number one, passing even the United States, within ten years if we don’t do something. But China would be using 50 percent less coal tomorrow if it only installed the currently available energy efficient technologies — just more efficient light bulbs and insulation for its incredible drafty buildings.

However, the Global Green Deal cannot just be what we tell the Chinese to do. In order for us to have credibility, we have to be changing here at home. And the government is a key wedge for tipping markets. Let me give a very specific example with cars, probably the foremost symbol of the modern environmental crisis.

Washington buys 200,000 cars every year from Detroit. We’ve done that for forty years. The president, if he were to be sensible, would say to Detroit, "Okay, we’re going to keep buying those 200,000 cars, but we want those to be green cars. We want those to be hybrid electric or fuel cell cars and we will keep guaranteeing your market and your profit but that’s the quid pro quo."

Now Detroit would scream and holler but believe me, they’d go along with it because they’d want those sales. They’d learn to produce those cars at much cheaper prices. The price in the marketplace would go down and Americans would have the opportunity to buy green cars. We know this model works because it’s the same thing that explains why all of you have a personal computer on your desktop today. In the 1960s and the 1970s this is what the federal government did for the computer industry. We can do that with cars.

If we go in this direction of changing our civilization’s fundamental environmental technologies, not only will we reap planetary ecological benefits, but we will get anti-poverty benefits, because it is a much more labor intensive way of operating our economies. We will produce, on average, two to ten times more jobs per dollar of investment if we invest in energy efficiency rather than in oil, coal, and nukes. In other words, this is a huge jobs program. This kind of an approach would address the problem of how to put people to work in such a way that you don’t ruin the planet in the process.

The anti-WTO demonstrations were wonderful in saying what we’re against. We’re against profit-making taking precedence over people. However, there has yet to be articulated a very compelling vision of what we are for, what we want, and how to get there in a very practical way. Something radical, but also practical. Something that starts from the here and now, but that is transformative. That is why I think the Global Green Deal is worth your attention. For it to work, we will need a coalition of a lot of different environmental groups. My hope for this idea is that it forms the substantive foundation for a coalition between labor and the environmental movement worldwide.

Fungal Restoration and the Earth’s Natural Internet [top]

Paul Stamets, mycologist extraordinaire, has at last answered the ancient zen question: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it fall?" The fungi are there to hear it, and they communicate news of this new food source almost instantaneously for miles around. Paul characterizes this mycelial web infiltrating all the world’s land masses as the earth’s natural Internet, and he believes that it is sentient.

Of all the biodiversity of the world, fungi and bacteria are among the least studied and the most poorly understood yet they’re among the most ancient biological keystone systems to all life on earth. Paul has discovered multiple new species of fungi and authored five seminal books on fungi. No one has done more to understand and explore the remarkable nutritional, medicinal, and entheogenic properties of mushrooms. His recent work is on the bio-remediative potential of certain mushroom species to clean up toxic wastes. These are the true bio-technologies.

Paul is the founder of Fungi Perfecti, the educational and technological resource for mushroom cultivators. He’s also a staunch defender of old growth forests and recently founded the Rainforest Mushroom Genome Project.

Mycophilia is a love of fungi. We spend a lot of time in the old growth forest and we’re dedicated to going into endangered habitats trying to find ancient species of polypore mushrooms and clone them. We are strong believers in natural selection. We go after phenotypes. We take a tissue from the inside of a living mushroom and we plate it out in culture.

The forests in our region climax at about 1,000 to 1,200 years, and then they die back. And parasitic fungi usually are the last group of organisms to help knock them down. They decimate the forest, but they don’t destroy it. It’s an essential part of the recycling of nutrients. We haven’t even begun to appreciate the incredible potential in the fungal realm. For example, the gypsy mushroom has recently been identified by Dr. Frank Pirano at the University of Wisconsin Medical School as having a new anti-viral compound that seems to be effective against herpes simplex I, herpes simplex II and the influenza-A virus. This might lead to a whole new family of heretofore undiscovered anti-viral medicines.

Perhaps the most extraordinary and new direction in this field is the use of mushrooms as agents of bioremediation. We can grow oyster mushrooms on coffee grounds and this is very important in Central and South America where there’s a tremendous outflow of caffeine that’s going into the watersheds and destroying fisheries. The mushroom mycelium is exquisitely designed to de-molecularize these large complexes and render them into a form usable to others in the ecological community.

The mushroom mycelium did something that no one had ever reported before. As the mushroom mycelium grows and encounters E. coli, it sends out a group of messenger crystals, little crystalline entities that, as they encounter the E. coli, disintegrate, and send back a chemical signature to the mother mycelium, which then produces a secondary large macro-crystal that becomes like a strange attractant to the E. coli. They’re no longer motile. They’re stunned. They collect around these strange unknown crystals. It stuns them and the mycelium advances and consumes them. So we have developed mycelial mats to throw into sensitive watersheds to collect the E. coli and destroy it.

Also, because the mushroom mycelium produces lignin peroxidases and other enzymes that sever hydrogen-carbon bonds, I was approached by a bio-remediation company and I started playing around with decomposing diesel oil. The mycelium absorbs the oil and breaks down hydrocarbons, the basis of all pesticides, PCBs, PCPs, dioxins etc. That’s why I say these mushrooms are intelligent. We create the greatest debris trails of any organism on the planet and these things are running behind us trying to help, trying to fix the environment, to repair it.

There was a contest in Bellingham, Washington, to see who could break down diesel-contaminated soil. So we mixed up the mushroom mycelium into the diesel. There were six competing companies. One month later we went from pile to pile to pile and the first five piles were dead, smelly, ugly, lifeless. We came to the sixth pile, [our pile], and pulled the tarp over — there were oyster mushrooms, some up to twelve inches in diameter. But something even more remarkable occurred. After eight weeks, the mushrooms started to rot and they produced spores. The spores attracted insects. The flies laid eggs in the mushrooms; larvae were produced. Birds came in to eat the larvae. They brought in seeds and then we started phyto-remediation, i.e. plants growing. So we think we have found a keystone mechanism based primarily on saprophytes, which when they enter the environment cause a domino effect that leads to repair of the ecosystem.

Several reports have come out recently buttressing arguments [for intelligent fungi]. One was about slime mold, confirming that these multi-cellular organisms indeed are sentient and intelligent. They put a slime mold through a maze and challenged it with different food alternatives, and it made intelligent decisions about the quickest way to go through the maze. This has shocked the biological community but it’s exactly what I’ve been saying for years.

Fighting Environmental Injustice [top]

Terri Swearingen, R.N., is an environmental and public health activist renowned for her struggles against dioxin-producing incinerators. She founded the Tri-State Environmental Council (Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania); testified before EPA, National Academy of Science, and congressional committees; and has won countless accolades as well as the prestigious Goldman Prize for environmental activism and the Ohio Environmental Council Lifetime Achievement Award. Terri now sits on the steering committee of her county’s board of health, and is on the board of the Environmental Background Information Center which provides research and training to grassroots environmental-justice activists.

By definition, environmental injustice means that those who are the most powerless in our country are those who suffer disproportionately from environmental destruction.

There’s a saying that one person can make a world of difference and together we can change the world. And I think that is true. You can be the spark plug, but it is so much better when you organize, and in the majority of cases in order to win that’s what we need: people working together toward a common goal. The first step in organizing is to gather information. Get all that you can about the issue that you’re facing. And you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If you know there’s another community with an incinerator, or polluting facility, you network. You find out where they are, and you talk to those people and find out what they have done and what they know about the issue.

Step two is to define your goal. This is really important. You have to decide what you really want. You have to know exactly what you want, and you can’t compromise because if you begin by compromising, you’ll never achieve nearly what you want.

Step three is to plan your work. Develop a strategy. This involves identifying your opponents. Who are they? Who are your constituents? Who are your allies? Who will help you? Find out who can give you what you want; determine who has the decisionmaking authority over your issue. Is it the local government? Is it the mayor? Is it the city council or does it go higher than that? Secondly, communicate. Recognize that our effectiveness is a measure of how well we get our message out. Meet with other people who share your beliefs. Remember power generally consists of having a lot of money or a lot of people. We have a lot of people and our power comes from the people.

Seek out other community members, friends, relatives, colleagues who share your beliefs. Hold a public forum to bring people together. Once you get people together, then you can organize a group. By forming a group we mobilize people power. We build self-confidence in both the organization and the people involved. But make sure that the group has a very clear and common goal. The group and its members have to be very open and honest about what it is they want to do, with no hidden agendas.

Announce the formation of your organization to the press. This does a couple of things. It gets more people involved because it’s announced in the paper and then they know where to go, and it lets the people behind the threatening project as well as the government agencies know that there’s citizen involvement. Once such an organization exists, then they can’t ignore you. They have to include you in the decision-making process.

One of the most effective ways to educate the public on your issue, whatever it is you’re facing, is through the media. But citizen groups don’t generally rate automatic coverage, especially in larger media outlets. We need to aggressively and systematically work really hard to get that media coverage for our issues. It’s so important because this is what’s going to shape public opinion and that’s what you’re trying to do. It will help to define the debate and decide what is politically possible. To get good media coverage we often need something that’s more than just newsworthy. We need good timing, thorough groundwork, great presentation and consistent follow-through. I think these are three important points to remember when you’re working with the media: 1) Make it easy for them. The easier you make it the more likely it is that they’re going to cover your story or your issue. Issuing news releases is a good way of getting your issue in the paper. You’ve done the work for them and all they have to do is check the facts. 2) Be friendly and persistent. You are competing amongst a lot of other issues for that reporter’s attention. 3) And this is really critical: be interesting. Media usually respond well to something that is really funny or really dramatic.

It’s really important to arm yourself with really accurate information. The most important reason is because our credibility is our most prized asset, so we can’t afford to make any mistakes or permit any inaccuracies. Then be vigilant in sharing the information with the rest of the community in press conferences, media events, rallies, public information meetings, banners, yard signs, flyers, newsletters, special events, direct action, and civil disobedience.

Finally, step four is to work your plan. Develop a strategy. Plan your work and work your plan. As Martin Luther King said, "make injustice visible." We need to paint a clear picture of the problem that we’re working to stop. We have to make it easy for everyone to see the injustice. We need to be perfectly clear that we are honest citizens without any hidden agendas. We are not motivated by money. We are motivated by the love of our children and our families and our community. We’re committed to principle and promise, not politics and profit. This is really a battle of love versus greed.

We must appeal to people’s hearts and emotions and, especially as leaders, we have to show how far we’re willing to go by how much we’re willing to give and how much we’re willing to give up.

All material is © 2000 by Rebecca Adamson, Dr. Samuel Epstein, Mark Hertzgaard, Paul Stamets, or Terri Swearingen, respectively. Excerpted with permission of Collective Heritage Institute from the recorded proceedings of Bioneers 2001 Conference, October 19-21, Marin Center, San Rafael, CA. Contact Collective Heritage Institute toll-free at 877-BIONEER or www.bioneers.org.

Resources

Collective Heritage Institute (Bioneers), www.bioneers.org

Dr. Samuel Epstein, www.preventcancer.com

Paul Stamets, www.fungi.com

Rebecca Adamson, www.firstnations.org

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: