Over the past few years, advocates of nonviolence (such as myself) have been losing the debate in the climate movement. After decades of a well-funded and organized movement that has tried every nonviolent strategy, yet failed to pressure power structures away from the path of climate catastrophe, the promise of nonviolent success rests mainly on faith. 

Adding to the lack of efficacy is a startling rise in draconian consequences for peaceful activism, including dozens of states that have proposed laws legalizing vehicular homicide of activists marching on a public street. As proponents of nonviolence are increasingly ridiculed as 鈥減eace police鈥� and booed out of movement spaces, Kennedy鈥檚 warning grows more urgent. 

These dynamics should ensure a warm welcome to Andreas Malm鈥檚 new book with the incendiary (but somewhat misleading) title How To Blow Up a Pipeline. It is not in fact a manual, but rather a treatise inviting the climate movement to widespread sabotage and property destruction, and it is surprisingly compelling. Malm avoids the grandiosity and testosterone that often saturate calls for violence, and instead offers a humble and nuanced case for how sabotaging fossil fuel infrastructure and machinery might be 鈥渟ynergetic and complementary鈥� to a movement largely centered around nonviolent mass mobilization. As a climate movement insider who protested outside COP1 in 1995, Malm has a balanced critique of the climate movement and sees great hope in groups like Germany鈥檚 Ende Gel盲nde. But his primary critique is that the movement鈥檚 incredible and historically unprecedented commitment to nonviolence is no longer strategic. 

Malm spends mercifully little time on the usual activist culture debate about what is or is not violent. Instead he takes a nuanced but common sense approach to the ethics of violence. He acknowledges that property destruction is violence, but says it鈥檚 鈥渄ifferent in kind from the violence that hits a human (or an animal) in the face.鈥� This is obvious to most people, and one of the refreshing things about Malm is that he doesn鈥檛 downplay the importance of navigating popular sentiment while engaging in drastic direct action. He repeatedly emphasizes the virtue of 鈥渃ollective self-discipline,鈥� and he acknowledges the tricky tightrope between pushing the boundaries of public sentiment and a level of backlash that undermines the whole movement. He dismisses the 鈥渇ever dreams鈥� of Deep Green Resistance and their misanthropic ilk, and instead argues that 鈥淚ntelligent sabotage … should be explainable and acceptable to enough numbers in some places, and if not today, then surely after a little more of this breakdown.鈥�

Most climate movement leaders would agree with Malm鈥檚 unequivocal position that 鈥淚t would be catastrophic for the movement if any part of it used terrorism.鈥� But the most significant oversight of the book is that Malm offers no explanation of how to avoid association with a rogue act of violence against humans if a sizable portion of the movement were to abandon the commitment to nonviolence. At least in the American context, it seems profoundly irresponsible to discuss violence without discussing infiltration and provocateurs at the same time. The climate movement is awash in undercover private, federal, and local law enforcement agents trying to provoke acts that can credibly be claimed as terrorism precisely because they (or their employers) know how catastrophic it would be for the movement. Our best defense against them has been a culture morally and strategically committed to nonviolence, which serves to identify and isolate provocateurs. If the current bright line of nonviolence is dropped, an equally absolute line between property and life would have to be drawn clearly enough that provocateurs could not entice anyone to cross it.

The most important factor for Malm is that campaigns of property destruction be tied to class struggle. Malm, whose previous book Fossil Capital is an essential history of the connection between capitalism and fossil fuels, writes passionately about how the rich are both the drivers of the climate crisis and cruelly indifferent to its deadly consequences. His six-point analysis of why luxury emissions are the most strategic and symbolically important target is so compelling that it鈥檚 hard to read this book without daydreaming about sabotaging the private jets of the ultra-rich. Malm鈥檚 strongest criticism of existing climate activism is his argument that direct action group Extinction Rebellion willfully disregards class and race issues. He writes, 鈥淟ook at it which way you will, from the angle of investment, production, or consumption, it is the rich that drive the emergency, and a climate movement that does not want to eat the rich, with all the hunger of those who struggle to put food on the table, will never hit home.鈥�

One of Malm鈥檚 most important contributions in the book is not his case for violence but his argument for action of any sort.

Malm鈥檚 anti-capitalist lens provides a particularly enlightening contrast of American and French social receptivity to movement violence. He points out that American culture is far more accepting of deadly violence from guns or the state, but the French have a much higher tolerance for property destruction by social movements than the American public. He suggests that the difference is the absoluteness of capitalist dominance in the United States. Of course, this prizing of property over life is one of the root causes of the climate crisis and must be challenged as part of the culture change necessary for survival. That makes movement-based sabotage or violence riskier here, but perhaps more necessary. At the heart of Malm鈥檚 case is the way sabotage can have not just a direct but a symbolic impact on the work of culture change. 

One of Malm鈥檚 most important contributions in the book is not his case for violence but his argument for action of any sort. His final chapter is a rebuttal of the naysayers of collective activism, such as Jonathan Franzen and Roy Scranton, and he is adamant that activism still makes sense no matter how late the stage of the climate crisis. This is a timely offering to climate action, as the 鈥渂rief window to act鈥� narrative has become a worn out trope that undermines the credibility of the climate movement and fundamentally misunderstands the current nature of the crisis. Malm argues that even if we have passed the point of preventing runaway climate disruption, action in defense of life only becomes more imperative as we move further down the long road of collapse. He emphatically states, 鈥淯ntil business-as-usual is a distant memory, as long as humans are around, resistance is the path to survival in all weathers; it didn鈥檛 become pass茅 in 2009 and it won鈥檛 do so in 2029.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

For me personally, this is where Malm鈥檚 invitation might live, in the file marked 鈥淒on鈥檛 Give Up.鈥� On those days when everything feels futile and hopeless, and our police state and sick society seem too powerful to even challenge, I can remind myself: There鈥檚 always sabotage 鈥� 

I, too, am on the great American road trip. But not one of the 鈥淭his Land Is Your Land,鈥� Woody Guthrie variety. That Route 66 road trip is one of erasure, one that conceals the Indigenous history of this land with the expanding White capitalism of early Americana.

That Route 66 road trip exploits the stereotype of the 鈥淚ndian鈥� while simultaneously denying Native peoples (and other non-White groups) self-representation and access to the kitschy motels, diners, and gas stations that made the so-called 鈥淢other Road鈥� famous. A lot of pain is along this road鈥攕ites of massacre and forced assimilation. But Route 66 is also a story of hope鈥攏ot just of Native American survival, but of success, too. I鈥檓 here to explore that road鈥攐r at least the portion of it stretching between California and Oklahoma鈥攁苍d to seek out the histories and communities that existed before Route 66 and still survive today. The e-travel guide , which the American Indian and Alaskan Native Tourism Association created three years ago, will help me suss out those landmarks and historic places associated with 25 Indigenous tribes and pueblos along the Mother Road.

Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe

It鈥檚 not quite 8 a.m. on a sunny March morning in Los Angeles when I head for the highway. I have four days to make this more than 1,400-mile journey, and I steel myself for the miles ahead. Driving east out of Los Angeles toward the Mojave Desert, I try to imagine how this land looked before it was covered in concrete. Route 66 snakes through the homeland of the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe, but despite centuries of historical documentation and 7,000 years of evidence from nearly 3,000 archaeological sites, the tribe has not yet been given the federal recognition that would afford the community the right to sovereignty, self-governance, and a series of benefits and protections.

When Route 66 opened in 1926, it was one of the nation鈥檚 first long-haul east-to-west arteries, connecting Chicago to Los Angeles. The two-lane highway gave rural farming communities throughout the Midwest and Southwest better access to markets and, in the 1930s, served as the primary route for drought-weary farmers and unemployed laborers to escape the Dust Bowl for the promised land of California. After World War II, the Mother Road became a route for travel and leisure, spawning a seemingly endless succession of motor lodges, diners, gas stations, and curio shops catering to middle-class Americans at the start of an epic love affair with the automobile. Today, it鈥檚 just one of a network of roads and highways through an urban-suburban sprawl so dense that I lose its thread over and over as I navigate east through Los Angeles and San Bernardino. I drive over the San Bernardino Mountains, a chain of bald rock faces sweeping dramatically upward from the valley. Once in Barstow, Route 66 dips in and out of the four-lane Interstate 40 for almost 1,300 miles to Oklahoma City, just 106 miles short of Tulsa, my final destination.

Although the Mother Road crosses through the nations of multiple tribes and pueblos, the most visible Native American imagery is muddled and generic鈥擧ollywood stereotypes seized upon by White businessmen and mom-and-pop shop owners in the form of eye-catching tourist traps like Rialto, California鈥檚 Wigwam Motel, where visitors sleep overnight in 30-foot-tall concrete tipis. In Foyil, Oklahoma鈥檚 Totem Pole Park is a series of Pacific Northwest-style totem poles inspired by postcards and National Geographic magazine. Ironically, writes Peter B. Dedek in Hip to the Trip: A Cultural History of Route 66, even as the highway thrived on the exploitation of Native American culture and history, it was simultaneously excluding actual Native American people, along with African Americans and Latinos, from many of its businesses. Along with the Jim Crow era鈥檚 ubiquitous 鈥渘o colored鈥� signs, those declaring 鈥渘o dogs, no Indians鈥� were hung in shop windows along the length of the highway. Of the thousands of tourism-based businesses on the Route 66 of the 1960s, only 250 were listed in The Negro Motorist Green Book, a travel guide written to safely lead African American travelers to welcoming businesses. There is no record of how many also excluded Native Americans.

Hualapai nation

Many of the actual Native American places, both those occupied since time immemorial and those Indigenous people were forced to occupy, are easier to miss than their neon-emblazoned, cartoonlike avatars. Though I鈥檓 keeping a close eye out for it as I drive out of Kingman, Arizona, I almost breeze by the brick, Colonial Revival-style Truxton Canyon Training School in neighboring Valentine. Beginning in 1903, this residential school forcibly 鈥渆ducated鈥� the children of the Hualapai Tribe with the intent to assimilate them into American life. By the 1920s, children from a number of Southwestern tribes, including the Hopi and Navajo, were sent there. Tucked among brown hills on a bed of dry weeds, the schoolhouse looks out of place in this rural corner of Arizona. Close to the road is a small, impermanent memorial decorated with fake flowers, a monument to those who attended the school over the 34 years of its operation. With no sign and boarded-up windows, the historic schoolhouse is worlds away from the modern attractions built and managed by Native American tribes and pueblos along Route 66. Casinos, in particular, serve as a beacon in the nations of those who have won federal recognition and a major draw for roadside entertainment.

While they have helped secure income for rural nations with limited economic opportunities, as Camille Ferguson, American Indian and Alaska Native Tourism Association executive director points out, most are more than just places to gamble. They are cultural centers. They鈥檙e 鈥減erpetuating Native American culture through their enterprise,鈥� she says, a truth that is evident not just in their architectural design, but in the museum-like presentation of art and artifacts in places like Twin Arrows Navajo Casino Resort and the Isleta Resort and Casino, both places where I stayed the night. But Native American tourism doesn鈥檛 begin and end with casinos. In northern Arizona鈥檚 Hualapai Nation, the tribe has created Grand Canyon West, an umbrella company managing adventure and leisure experiences throughout the territory, including a glass skywalk that hovers 4,000 feet over the canyon鈥檚 edge, river rafting tours, and a zip line. 鈥淭he Hualapai culture is threaded through every part of our tourism experiences,鈥� says Diana Ambrosie, general manager of the Hualapai Lodge on Route 66 in Peach Springs. 鈥淓verything we do is meant to be sustainable. 鈥� Without the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River, the Hualapai Tribe could not thrive. [The land] means the world to us.鈥� Farther east, in Albuquerque, an urban hub for New Mexico鈥檚 19 distinct pueblos, is Pueblo Harvest, a fine-dining restaurant inside the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center featuring precontact and postconquest Indigenous fare. A half-mile away, Bow and Arrow, the first brewery owned by a Native American woman in the country, features a lager made with roasted New Mexico blue corn. In Oklahoma鈥檚 Indian Country, the Iowa Nation鈥檚 Grey Snow Eagle House rehabilitates eagles and educates about avian conservation both via tours at the facility and in off-site presentations. Each year, powwows, festivals, and events welcome visitors to participate in and observe traditional ceremonies, dancing, storytelling, and other culturally significant activities. Whereas some of these attractions are found within a stone鈥檚 throw of Route 66, others are farther afield.

Navajo nation

The horizon is aflame with the rising sun, the sky painted in shades of cerulean blue and smoky gray, as I drive north from 66 down a lonely road toward the heart of the Navajo Nation and the Hubbell Trading Post. Protected today as a National Historic Site, the trading post was first established in 1878, after the return of the Navajo people to their territory following the brutal and deadly Long Walk 14 years earlier that forced 8,500 to march 400 miles to Fort Sumner. For more than 140 years, this low-slung brick building has served as a center for the sale of Indigenous arts. Out back bleats a small herd of Churro sheep, a hearty breed favored for centuries by the Navajo for their long, coarse wool ideal for weaving into blankets.

鈥淭he trading post is quite unique,鈥� trader Edison Eskeets tells me as I admire the textiles drenched in local Ganado red and delicately wrought silver jewelry. Any Indigenous artisans from the region is welcome to sell their work here. But the exchange of goods for money is just one aspect of Hubbell. 鈥淥ur shop here offers a fair price to everyone, regardless of whether you鈥檙e a silversmith, a jeweler, a weaver. We deliver the components of the arts in the community. We tell the story,鈥� Eskeets says. 鈥淭herefore, we鈥檙e still here.鈥� That they鈥檙e still here is one of the underlying themes of this road trip. But, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes in An Indigenous Peoples鈥� History of the United States, it鈥檚 not a 鈥渕iracle鈥� that Native American tribes and pueblos have survived despite the genocidal policies of settler colonialism, on which the United States was founded. Today鈥檚 Indigenous nations and communities are 鈥渟ocieties formed by their resistance to colonialism, through which they have carried their practices and histories.鈥�

Cheyenne and Arapaho nation

There is, perhaps, no place on Route 66 that provides a better example of the odds that Native Americans have historically faced than the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site. As dawn broke on Nov. 27, 1868, the 7th U.S. Cavalry, led by Lt. Col. George Custer, launched an attack on a winter settlement of the Southern Cheyenne along Oklahoma鈥檚 Washita River. Like those tribes who had been driven from their Southeastern homelands to Indian Country on the Trail of Tears, the Cheyenne rejected the U.S. government鈥檚 orders that they remain on a reservation and take up farming, a subsistence activity with which they had no familiarity. Custer and his men were there to drive the message home. In what would more accurately be termed a terrorist insurgency than a 鈥渂attle,鈥� the army assassinated as many men as they could鈥攂etween 30 and 60鈥攌idnapped 53 women and children, and shot or slit the throats of the community鈥檚 875 horses and mules so that those who had escaped could not return to reclaim the animals and their way of life. It took less than 24 hours to wipe the community off the face of the Earth.

On a freezing March morning, I solemnly walk the interpretive trail across the so-called battlefield alone; no one else is here but the ghosts of those who were destroyed in the name of the country I call home. On the bank of the river, tied to tree branches, tattered cloths in blues and reds wave in the wind鈥攑rayer flags hung by the Cheyenne and Arapaho for the ancestors they lost. I mourn with them, not just for this massacre, but for all of the injustices鈥攖he residential schools and stolen homelands, the forced assimilation and broken treaties, the discrimination and loss of sovereignty鈥攙isible on this all-American highway. I carry this sadness and anger with me as I get back in my truck and head toward Oklahoma City. And then I see a sign that informs me I鈥檓 entering the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes territory. I smile to myself: They are still here.

Next door, a stubborn grandfather insists that he be discharged home. I hold his hand and tell him that I respect his wishes and am also truly worried that the blood thinners will turn his next fall into a catastrophic event. I鈥檓 interrupted by an ambulance bringing a patient in respiratory distress. She nods yes when I ask if she wants us to place a breathing tube. We quickly bring family to see their mother awake for what might be the last time. In between, the hallways are lined with patients鈥攎oaning, vomiting, crying, or just silently waiting to receive care.

This is work that I cherish. As an EMT, then a nurse, and now an emergency physician, I鈥檓 satisfied after each shift that I helped relieve some suffering, whether through medicine, a procedure, an explanation, or simply being present for a patient and their family.

But my job is a different matter from my work. I quickly walk past my patients to get back to a computer. I must document that I examined at least eight organ systems so that we can bill for a specific reimbursement code. The antibiotics must be ordered within the next 10 minutes or the hospital will be financially punished by Medicare. The pharmacy is calling because the pre-natal vitamins I ordered aren鈥檛 covered by the patient鈥檚 insurance. My computer brings a constant flood of emails and pop-up boxes. Follow the protocols. Document everything. Bill as much as possible. Work faster, always faster.

Caring for others is sacred work, but our health care system is profane, deeply broken, and driven by capitalist fear and greed. This system relies on workers with good intentions and in our work, even if our actual jobs are dehumanizing and frequently traumatizing. We are asked to ignore patients as well as our own basic needs in favor of efficiency, bureaucracy, and sometimes profit. 

The coronavirus pandemic emphasized this contrast between our work and our jobs, as patients flooded into hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes. Precautions against spreading the airborne virus became yet another set of tasks squeezed into a hectic day. The computer gained a new set of pop-up boxes. Hospitals canceled sick leave, retirement contributions, and other benefits. And yet, the work has gained new depth of meaning. I counsel parents about how to simultaneously care for their infectious children and their immunocompromised elders. I hold iPhones and hands before starting yet another ventilator. I stay present and apologize when we find an advanced cancer or a heart attack that was missed amid the chaos of the pandemic.

It鈥檚 no surprise that workers are leaving health care in record numbers. About left their jobs in the first year and a half of the pandemic, according to . Even before that, there was a crisis of exhaustion among demoralized health workers nationwide, according to the U.S. Surgeon General鈥檚 recent advisory, .

On overnight shifts and in hospital staff breakrooms, there鈥檚 constant conversation about this dilemma. To leave would mean reclaiming personal autonomy and dignity, but it would also stymie our deep desire to relieve suffering. 鈥淚 can鈥檛 go on like this,鈥� we say, 鈥渂ut I can鈥檛 just abandon my patients either.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

I believe we can regain power by learning to separate our work from our jobs and by engaging critically with the institutions that employ us. I now speed through emails about relative value units and new billing initiatives. The new weekly committee to review pharmaceutical policies is a job task I can decline. Saying no to the bureaucratic demands of the job can free us to invest more fully in our work by giving our full attention to the patient, family, or co-worker in front of us.

At times, we may notice direct conflicts between our job and our work. How frequently am I pulled away from human connection and toward the computer? Are protocols forcing me to provide the wrong care? Does this institution have policies that conflict with my values? Moral injury鈥攖he participation in unethical actions鈥攊s by health workers as a strong contributor to burnout. If it destroys us to see our good intentions subsumed into an immoral system, then what would it look like to protect ourselves and our work?

Our health care system dehumanizes our patients and our communities as well as its workers. Fixing it will require brave actions and visionary thinking. How could we bring together healers and patients in solidarity? How could we structure our time, our spaces, our tasks? 

I still have a job. I punch in, click boxes, respond to emails, and nod during meetings. But I鈥檓 clear now that my work is my own. It won鈥檛 appear on a spreadsheet or be rewarded with praise from the company, but it has its own rewards for me and the people who need care. 

While that increase impacts people across lines of race and ethnicity, maternal mortality s. Black people continue to suffer disproportionately, dying at more than twice the rate that white people do. About a quarter of deaths in 2020 and 2021 were directly related to the birthing person having COVID. Pregnant people and those who have recently given birth are , and risks for certain pregnancy complications, such as preeclampsia, increase when someone who is expecting has the virus. 

Latona Giwa, co-founder of and the New Orleans Breastfeeding Center, offers a fuller picture of the maternal mortality and morbidity spike in Louisiana, the state where she lives and works. 鈥淲e had the height of the pandemic, and then we had Hurricane Ida on top of that in 2021 that was really devastating for pregnant and birthing families,鈥� Giwa says. 鈥淭hen we had and . I think the last couple of years have really laid bare that we are in a state of constant and overlapping crises, and that birthing families are bearing a lot of the brunt of that.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Even before the pandemic, many pregnant and postpartum people in the United States were suffering. Deaths occurring during pregnancy or in the weeks and months following birth have been steadily , making the country an outlier in maternal mortality compared with its high-income peer countries. Pregnant and postpartum people in the U.S. of people in countries such as , , and . Families in those countries can rely on , , and , who offer more personalized care and fewer interventions than the obstetricians commonly relied upon in the U.S.

Efforts to reform health care in the U.S. are underway, as are efforts to . But as pregnant people prepare to give birth in a broken system, doulas can offer the support families need to stay safe. Doulas assist with nonmedical needs throughout pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period. They can between the birthing person and clinician, , and offer counsel for . They also provide an extra set of hands, tending to the many tasks new parents face.

While doula care was once seen as a , it鈥檚 now widely accepted as an intervention that can keep a pregnancy on track. 鈥淲e see ourselves as frontline workers. We see ourselves as emergency responders,鈥� Giwa says. 鈥淔amilies are coming to us with so many layers of trauma, and we鈥檙e taking that on.鈥� This has meant building new infrastructure into the doula practice, including the creation of a perinatal emergency preparedness program.

鈥淲e can鈥檛 just keep conceptualizing emergencies as this far-off thing you plan for,鈥� Giwa says. Instead, an ethic of preparedness is now embedded into all doula interactions with families, some of whom live in where they must travel more than an hour to receive basic support. 鈥淲e talk to them knowing that homelessness could be a reality for someone. Natural disaster could be a reality. A traumatic birth experience could be a reality.鈥�

This critical work requires resources. Over the years, Birthmark has funded its work through a combination of sliding fees, donations, contracts, and grants. Reimbursement from insurance鈥攊ncluding Medicaid, which covers 鈥攊s another potential revenue stream. were the first states to pass legislation that expands access to doulas through Medicaid coverage.

Advocates and elected officials are trying to bring such solutions to scale at the federal level. , a package of bills that addresses pregnancy-related deaths and dramatically expands maternity care, has been introduced in Congress three times since March 2020. Taken as a whole, it has not been successful, though passed in late 2021. The Biden administration has and last year called on states to expand Medicaid coverage to one year for postpartum parents. Funding for some programs that received additional funding through a spending bill Congress passed in late 2022.

State and federal funds to address the maternal health crisis are just one piece of the puzzle. 鈥淚t鈥檚 hugely important,鈥� Giwa says. 鈥淏ut at the same time, we have to build our own reality of the future we want to see in our communities and on the local level.鈥� Giwa is a nurse and a community organizer, so she understands the broader landscape of how change is made. 鈥淚f you look at Black women organizing on any issue, that鈥檚 what we do,鈥� she says. 鈥淲e鈥檙e working all the possibilities.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

In the south, she climbed , King Herod鈥檚 desert fortress overlooking the Dead Sea and the site of the last Jewish stronghold against Roman invasion. And she strolled the beaches and hung out with trip mates and new Israeli friends in bars and clubs in Tel Aviv, a spirited city that feels more Florida during spring break than ancient holy place.

For Brammer-Shlay, it was as if her entire childhood鈥擧ebrew school, Jewish youth group, and the stories her parents told her growing up in the Midwest鈥攈ad been preparation for this Israel trip. 鈥淚 had been talking about Israel my whole life, like I鈥檇 been there, so it was very exciting and powerful to finally actually get there,鈥� she says.

She had known little about the Palestinians there, of their decades-long struggle under Israeli rule.

The trip had been arranged and paid for by , the world鈥檚 largest educational tourism program, which serves 18- to 32-year-old Jews from the diaspora. A rite of passage of sorts for 700,000 young people over the last 20 years, Birthright says the goal is to strengthen their Jewish identity by creating and reinforcing a connection to Israel.

Those 10 days in the summer of 2010 had left Brammer-Shlay wanting to know more. So a little over a year later, on a semester abroad in Jerusalem, she visited the West Bank and began to discover just how much her education on Israel had left out.

A rabbinical student in Philadelphia, Brammer-Shlay is an activist now, part of a growing movement of young American Jews working to help ensure that others visiting the Holy Land are prepared to travel there authentically.

From 听off Birthright trips in protest to what they see as the 鈥渙mission and erasure of Palestinian narratives,鈥� they are a chorus of new voices bringing fresh attention to the Israeli occupation, its policy of oppression, and the call for a two-state solution.

鈥淲hat you鈥檙e seeing right now is definitely a growing movement of young Jews who are thinking and talking about the occupation and demonstrating that fighting for freedom and dignity for all people is deeply connected with what it means to be Jewish for us,鈥� Brammer-Shlay says.

The size of New Jersey, Israel is a historical and religious marvel鈥攆rom the beaches of Eilat at the tip of the Red Sea in the south to the picturesque mountain ranges in the north. Sacred to the three Abrahamic religions鈥擟hristianity, Judaism, and Islam鈥攊t is a destination for people of faith from across the world.

Yet 70 years after Israel鈥檚 declaration of statehood displaced some 听there鈥攁苍d a half -century after it the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War鈥攊t鈥檚 possible for the nearly 听each year to overlook much of what decades of conflict have wrought.

So a little over a year later, on a semester abroad in Jerusalem, she visited the West Bank and began to discover just how much her education on Israel had left out.

Israel defends its restrictions on Palestinian movement, the demolition of their homes, the encroaching Jewish settlements and obstructions at every turn by citing a decades-long campaign of cross-border attacks and suicide bombings by Palestinians to drive out Jews.

And that鈥檚 what Brammer-Shlay had been told growing up in a conservative Jewish household in Minnesota.

That trip in 2010 was for her what it is for many of the 听each year: the romanticized version of a country they had been hearing about since they were little. On that trip, Brammer-Shlay says, 鈥渢here was no deep conversation about the impact of the occupation.鈥�

Funded by , including a 听by casino mogul and Donald Trump 听Sheldon Adelson, Birthright in a statement says it was not designed to deal with political issues: 鈥淎ll Birthright Israel participants are required to engage in programming which addresses the complex issues of the Middle East and which does not endorse any specific agendas, opinions, or beliefs.鈥�

For University of Florida doctoral student Madison N. Emas, Birthright wasn鈥檛 a search for political answers; it was simply a chance to travel.

She first visited Israel on a mostly religious trip while in high school. On Birthright in 2015, she got to hear from Israeli Arabs with family in the West Bank and East Jerusalem who spoke about their own experiences as well as those of their relatives.

鈥淚 didn鈥檛 realize how much I didn鈥檛 know about the other perspective, about how Israeli Arabs get pulled over more often, about how soldiers could simply just show up at their homes. 鈥� I never thought about that before,鈥� she says.

The opportunity to talk to secular Jews, many of whom, like her, support a two-nation solution, 鈥渕ade me feel more Jewish, more connected. 鈥� And I think that鈥檚 what Birthright is trying to do, foster a connection to the land and the people.鈥�

Last year, in a bold statement about what they felt was the program鈥檚 one-sided narrative, Birthright participants began 鈥攍ive-颅streaming their actions on social media.

Danielle Raskin was among the first.

She had grown up in New York City in a household she describes as culturally, rather than religiously, Jewish. Her agnostic feelings changed, however, in 2016 when she attended a comedy event where some in a Jewish audience cheered for then-candidate Donald Trump. 鈥淚t was a turning point 鈥� Jews who support a fascist,鈥� she says. 鈥淚t wasn鈥檛 an issue thousands of miles away; it was right here.鈥�

She became an organizer for颅 , a progressive and anti-颅occupation group formed in 2014 to protest Israel鈥檚 . Its goal is to address American Jewish support for the occupation and balance the message that young American Jews are getting.

Last summer, Raskin went on a Birthright trip to see for herself.

She did Shabbat in Jerusalem. . Visited Israel鈥檚 northern border with Syria and the Holocaust memorial, . 鈥淭hey were tightly packed 12-, 13-, 14-hour days,鈥� she says.

She recalls the uncomfortable silence on the trip north as they drove alongside the separation barriers between the Occupied Territories and Israel proper鈥攁 system of fences and concrete walls.

鈥淣o one said anything; the tour guide said nothing. It was so discreet, I had to open my map app to make sure. I was like, 鈥極h shit, this doesn鈥檛 really bode well for the rest of the trip.鈥欌€�

In addition to questions about the impact of the occupation, she and others asked about maps they were given that they say failed to delineate Palestinian territories.

鈥淚t feels like the equivalent of going to the Jim Crow South during segregation and not talking about segregation.鈥�

The maps would become the source of a different confrontation that went viral on a video on social media.

Elon Glickman was six days into his Birthright trip a few months later, driving along the separation barrier between Haifa and Jerusalem when he began asking about them.

The guide, he said in a recent interview, 鈥渟tarted telling us that these are normal Jewish villages and that the West Bank is just like [Israeli cities] Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.鈥�

In the , Glickman protests, 鈥淚 mean literally, like, erasing the fact that Palestine even exists, though.鈥�

Again and again, he challenges what he said is a one-sided depiction, pointing out that for many participants it鈥檚 the only side they鈥檒l see and hear. 鈥淚t feels like the equivalent of going to the Jim Crow South during segregation and not talking about segregation,鈥� he says.

Eventually other Birthright participants on the bus also join in, some agreeing with him, others reminding him that it is a free trip.

On a video of Raskin鈥檚 encounter, a tour guide can be heard accusing her and the others of coming 鈥渢o bash Israel on purpose and in public and in front of all your friends. 鈥� You have a clear agenda against Israel. You tried to impose your opinion for the last 10 days and that鈥檚 not acceptable.鈥�

In total, 15 tour goers have walked off their Birthright tours, according to IfNotNow. Three others, it said, were ejected for violating a clause Birthright added in December against 鈥渉ijacking鈥� discussions on its trips.

In Israel, IfNotNow connected both Glickman and Raskin with , an anti-occupation group that helped them round out their trip. While Glickman and his group traveled to the West Bank and stayed with families in villages there, Raskin鈥檚 went to , one of the world鈥檚 oldest cities and where the controversial expansion of Jewish settlements has often played out in violent eruptions.

They visited , a main road there that leads to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a shrine complex sacred to both Muslims and Jews. Once the scene of a bustling market in Hebron鈥檚 historic center, the street is abandoned鈥攊ts stores shuttered and boarded up. The closure followed the 1994 prayer-time massacre of 29 Palestinians by an Israeli settler. Shuhada, also known as a , is off limits to Palestinians鈥攚hether by car or on foot.

Raskin and her group were shocked by this sight.

鈥淧alestinians whose front doors open out onto the street have to climb out a side window or onto the roof or exit someone else鈥檚 house,鈥� she says. 鈥淚t was really somber, pretty devastating really, to see on the 10th day a side of the country that we had not seen or talked about at all.鈥�

In the months since, other solutions have sprung up. In March, J Street, a progressive group that supports statehood for Palestinians, announced its own free, 10-day trip to Israel and the West Bank for American college students this summer. Participants will visit major heritage sites and meet with Israeli social justice activists and Palestinian community leaders.

Returning home after her own trip to the West Bank in 2011, Brammer-Shlay had searched for ways to address the conflict more meaningfully. She volunteered with the , in 2016 traveling to Hebron, where she worked alongside Palestinians and other Jews to help build a cinema.

She was back the following year to help reestablish the village of Sarura, in the Hebron Hills, whose residents were returning after fleeing occupation decades earlier. It was part of the largest delegation of diaspora Jews ever assembled for such an action.

These days, Brammer-Shlay works with IfNotNow on a range of actions, including the group鈥檚 Not Just a Free Trip campaign, which provides resources to Birthright participants, including at airports just before trips take off.

鈥淚 still feel it is my duty to defend the Jewish people,鈥� she says, 鈥渂ut I also feel that is deeply connected to the duty I feel to promote justice and freedom in this world.鈥�

My involvement in the contemporary ecology movement began with Chipko, a nonviolent response to the large-scale deforestation that was taking place in the Himalayan region. In the 1970s, peasant women from my region in the Garhwal Himalaya had come out in defense of the forests. Logging had led to landslides and floods, and scarcity of water, fodder, and fuel. Since women provide these basic needs, the scarcity meant longer walks for collecting water and firewood, and a heavier burden.

Women knew that the real value of forests was not the timber from a dead tree, but the springs and streams, food for their cattle, and fuel for their hearths. The women declared that they would hug the trees, and the loggers would have to kill them before killing the trees. A folk song of that period said: These beautiful oaks and rhododendrons, They give us cool water Don鈥檛 cut these trees We have to keep them alive.

In 1973, I had gone to visit my favorite forests and swim in my favorite stream before leaving for Canada to do my Ph.D. But the forests were gone, and the stream was reduced to a trickle. I decided to become a volunteer for the Chipko movement, and I spent every vacation doing pad yatras (walking pilgrimages), documenting the deforestation and the work of the forest activists, and spreading the message of Chipko.

One of the dramatic Chipko actions took place in the Himalayan village of Adwani in 1977, when a village woman named Bachni Devi led resistance against her own husband, who had obtained a contract to cut trees. When officials arrived at the forest, the women held up lighted lanterns although it was broad daylight. The forester asked them to explain. The women replied, 鈥淲e have come to teach you forestry.鈥� He retorted, 鈥淵ou foolish women, how can you prevent tree felling by those who know the value of the forest? Do you know what forests bear? They produce profit and resin and timber.鈥�

The women sang back in chorus: What do the forests bear? Soil, water, and pure air. Soil, water, and pure air Sustain the Earth and all she bears.

Beyond monocultures

From Chipko, I learned about biodiversity and biodiversity-based living economies; the protection of both has become my life鈥檚 mission. As I described in my book Monocultures of the Mind, the failure to understand biodiversity and its many functions is at the root of the impoverishment of nature and culture. The lessons I learned about diversity in the Himalayan forests I transferred to the protection of biodiversity on our farms. I started saving seeds from farmers鈥� fields and then realized we needed a farm for demonstration and training. Thus Navdanya Farm was started in 1994 in the Doon Valley, located in the lower elevation Himalayan region of Uttarakhand Province. Today we conserve and grow 630 varieties of rice, 150 varieties of wheat, and hundreds of other species. We practice and promote a biodiversity-intensive form of farming that produces more food and nutrition per acre. The conservation of biodiversity is therefore also the answer to the food and nutrition crisis.

When nature is a teacher, we 颅cocreate with her.

Navdanya, the movement for biodiversity conservation and organic farming that I started in 1987, is spreading. So far, we鈥檝e worked with farmers to set up more than 100 community seed banks across India. We have saved more than 3,000 rice varieties. We also help farmers make a transition from fossil fuel and chemical-based monocultures to biodiverse ecological systems nourished by the sun and the soil. Biodiversity has been my teacher of abundance and freedom, of cooperation and mutual giving.

Rights of nature on the global stage

When nature is a teacher, we 颅cocreate with her鈥攚e recognize her agency and her rights. That is why it is significant that Ecuador has recognized the 鈥渞ights of nature鈥� in its constitution. In April 2011, the United Nations General Assembly颅鈥攊nspired by the constitution of Ecuador and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth initiated by Bolivia鈥攐rganized a conference on harmony with nature as part of Earth Day celebrations. Much of the discussion centered on ways to transform systems based on domination of people over nature, men over women, and rich over poor into new systems based on partnership.

The U.N. secretary general鈥檚 report 鈥淗armony with Nature,鈥� issued in conjunction with the conference, elaborates on the importance of reconnecting with nature: 鈥淯ltimately, environmentally destructive behavior is the result of a failure to recognize that human beings are an inseparable part of nature and that we cannot damage it without severely damaging ourselves.鈥�

Separatism is indeed at the root of disharmony with nature and violence against nature and people. As the prominent South African environmentalist Cormac Cullinan points out, apartheid means separateness. The world joined the anti-apartheid movement to end the violent separation of people on the basis of color. Apartheid in South Africa was put behind us. Today, we need to overcome the wider and deeper apartheid鈥攁苍 eco-apartheid based on the illusion of separateness of humans from nature in our minds and lives.

The dead-Earth worldview

The war against the Earth began with this idea of separateness. Its contemporary seeds were sown when the living Earth was transformed into dead matter to facilitate the industrial revolution. Monocultures replaced diversity. 鈥淩aw materials鈥� and 鈥渄ead matter鈥� replaced a vibrant Earth. Terra Nullius (the empty land, ready for occupation regardless of the presence of Indigenous peoples) replaced Terra Madre (Mother Earth).

This philosophy goes back to Francis Bacon, called the father of modern science, who said that science and the inventions that result do not 鈥渕erely exert a gentle guidance over nature鈥檚 course; they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.鈥�

Robert Boyle, the famous 17th-century chemist and a governor of the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the New England Indians, was clear that he wanted to rid native people of their ideas about nature. He attacked their perception of nature 鈥渁s a kind of goddess鈥� and argued that 鈥渢he veneration, wherewith men are imbued for what they call nature, has been a discouraging impediment to the empire of man over the inferior creatures of God.鈥�

The death-of-nature idea allows a war to be unleashed against the Earth. After all, if the Earth is merely dead matter, then nothing is being killed. As philosopher and historian Carolyn Merchant points out, this shift of perspective鈥攆rom nature as a living, nurturing mother to inert, dead, and manipulable matter鈥攚as well suited to the activities that would lead to capitalism. The domination images created by Bacon and other leaders of the scientific revolution replaced those of the nurturing Earth, removing a cultural constraint on the exploitation of nature.

鈥淥ne does not readily slay a mother, dig into her entrails for gold, or mutilate her body,鈥� Merchant wrote.

What nature teaches

Today, at a time of multiple crises intensified by globalization, we need to move away from the paradigm of nature as dead matter. We need to move to an ecological paradigm, and for this the best teacher is nature herself. This is the reason I started the Earth University/Bija Vidyapeeth at Navdanya鈥檚 farm. The Earth University teaches Earth Democracy, which is the freedom for all species to evolve within the web of life, and the freedom and responsibility of humans, as members of the Earth family, to recognize, protect, and respect the rights of other species.

Earth Democracy is a shift from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism. And since we all depend on the Earth, Earth Democracy translates into human rights to food and water, to freedom from hunger and thirst. Because the Earth University is located at Navdanya, a biodiversity farm, participants learn to work with living seeds, living soil, and the web of life. Participants include farmers, schoolchildren, and people from across the world. Two of our most popular courses are 鈥淭he A-Z of Organic Farming and Agroecology鈥� and 鈥淕andhi and Globalization.鈥�

The poetry of the forest

The Earth University is inspired by Rabindranath Tagore, India鈥檚 national poet and a Nobel Prize laureate. Tagore started a learning center in Shantiniketan in West Bengal, India, as a forest school, both to take inspiration from nature and to create an Indian cultural renaissance. The school became a university in 1921, growing into one of India鈥檚 most famous centers of learning. Today, just as in Tagore鈥檚 time, we need to turn to nature and the forest for lessons in freedom.

The forest teaches us enoughness.

In 鈥淭he Religion of the Forest,鈥� Tagore wrote about the influence that the forest dwellers of ancient India had on classical Indian literature. The forests are sources of water and the storehouses of a biodiversity that can teach us the lessons of democracy鈥攐f leaving space for others while drawing sustenance from the common web of life. Tagore saw unity with nature as the highest stage of human evolution.

In his essay 鈥淭apovan鈥� (Forest of Purity), Tagore writes: 鈥淚ndian civilization has been distinctive in locating its source of regeneration, material and intellectual, in the forest, not the city. India鈥檚 best ideas have come where man was in communion with trees and rivers and lakes, away from the crowds. The peace of the forest has helped the intellectual evolution of man. The culture of the forest has fueled the culture of Indian society. The culture that has arisen from the forest has been influenced by the diverse processes of renewal of life, which are always at play in the forest, varying from species to species, from season to season, in sight and sound and smell. The unifying principle of life in diversity, of democratic pluralism, thus became the principle of Indian civilization.鈥�

It is this unity in diversity that is the basis of both ecological sustainability and democracy. Diversity without unity becomes the source of conflict and contest. Unity without diversity becomes the ground for external control. This is true of both nature and culture. The forest is a unity in its diversity, and we are united with nature through our relationship with the forest. In Tagore鈥檚 writings, the forest was not just the source of knowledge and freedom; it was the source of beauty and joy, of art and aesthetics, of harmony and perfection. It symbolized the universe.

In 鈥淭he Religion of the Forest,鈥� the poet says that our frame of mind 鈥済uides our attempts to establish relations with the universe either by conquest or by union, either through the cultivation of power or through that of sympathy.鈥�

The forest teaches us union and compassion. The forest also teaches us enoughness: as a principle of equity, how to enjoy the gifts of nature without exploitation and accumulation.

Tagore quotes from the ancient texts written in the forest: 鈥淜now all that moves in this moving world as enveloped by God; and find enjoyment through renunciation, not through greed of possession.鈥�

No species in a forest appropriates the share of another species. Every species sustains itself in cooperation with others. The end of consumerism and accumulation is the beginning of the joy of living. The conflict between greed and compassion, conquest and cooperation, violence and harmony that Tagore wrote about continues today. And it is the forest that can show us the way beyond this conflict.

This article from the 猫咪社区! Media archives was originally published in the Winter 2012 issue of 猫咪社区! Magazine. It has not been updated.

These are just a few of the labor stories that have hit mainstream news. After losing ground for decades, American workers appear to be fighting back against inadequate wages, subpar benefits, and consolidated corporate power.

That鈥檚 one way to interpret the spate of recent events. Cynics might point to data that shows labor unions in the U.S. actually filed for fewer new elections in 2021 than the year before, or that last year union density continued to decline along the same downward trajectory it has for decades. Others argue that toothless American labor laws combined with multinational corporate employers (Starbucks, for example, operates more than 9,000 locations in the U.S. alone) mean that individual groups of workers are unlikely to win gains without significant changes to federal labor law, mass disruptive actions, or both. 

Still, the shift in attitudes toward labor is palpable. Back in 2010, when I worked for a union in Oregon organizing caregivers for people with disabilities, I remember going to the movie theater to see Waiting for Superman, an ostensibly liberal film about public education that proceeded to vilify teachers鈥� unions. It took a lot for me not to stand up and shout at the screen. (The issue was personal as well as political: My mom was a longtime public school teacher and union member.) At that time, it was not uncommon to hear from liberals that unions protected bad workers or were staffed by corrupt thugs. Conservatives, meanwhile, wanted to eradicate them entirely. 

Now the momentum seems to be shifting. Public opinion polls show that a clear majority of Americans favor unions, while their Democratic president has expressed his support for organizing in no uncertain terms. Even Republicans have gotten in on the action, proposing a bill that would create alternative, company-friendly labor organizations鈥攁苍 anti-union bill, to be sure, but a nod, nonetheless, to the ascendant power of labor as well as the untapped potential of an organized working class.

The pro-labor cultural turn has been aided by journalists, some of whom have themselves recently organized their media workplaces. Writers like Steven Greenhouse, Sarah Jaffe, Dave Jamieson, Edward Ongweso Jr., and Kim Kelly have revived a once-dormant labor beat by bringing skilled, on-the-ground reporting to important sites of labor struggle. In publications as varied as The New York Times, HuffPost, Vice, and Teen Vogue, readers can now find writing that is sympathetic or even celebratory of worker organizing where before the bias often skewed toward capital. It isn鈥檛 hard to imagine that the work of these reporters has inspired a few union drives. 

In , Kim Kelly gives historical context to the fights for worker justice that she has been witnessing and reporting on for years. Some of the stories featured in Kelly鈥檚 book may be familiar to those with knowledge of U.S. labor history (garment worker strikes in Manhattan, farmworker organizing in California, the federal air traffic controllers鈥� strike), but the author鈥檚 focus here is on workers who are not as well-known, whose voices, whether because of their marginalized identities or professions, have been actively suppressed, if not entirely forgotten. The struggles of sex workers and prison laborers receive full chapters, as do those of people with disabilities (a group that includes, Kelly points out, about 25% of all adults in the United States). While the emphasis is on history, their challenges continue to the present day. Sex workers continue to be stigmatized and persecuted, most recently by laws that make it more difficult for them to find clients online. Although incarcerated workers in North Carolina, Massachusetts, and elsewhere successfully formed unions in the 1970s, they were stripped of that right by the Supreme Court in 1977. Many workers with disabilities still receive less than minimum wage: Kelly reports that the average disabled woman in the U.S. makes about half the wages of the average non-disabled man.

This sense of continuity (between the struggles of workers past and present and across every marker of social difference) is one of the strongest aspects of Kelly鈥檚 book. In a chapter about garment workers, the story of a young Ukrainian immigrant worker-organizer named Clara Lemlich in early-20th-century Manhattan is followed by a portrait of Rosa Flores, a striking Chicana garment worker in Texas 60 years later, which leads to an account of contemporary garment workers in Southern California who continue to toil for low wages under terrible conditions. The past isn鈥檛 dead. It鈥檚 not even past.

A few days ago, walking through the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle where I live, only a handful of miles from the union office where two Filipino cannery worker organizers, Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, were murdered for their activism in 1981, I mused to a friend about how so little of our labor history makes it into mainstream narratives鈥攚丑颈肠丑 is strange, when you think about it, because the vast majority of Americans are workers. Not long after that, I received a phone call at work from a clerk at a hardware store who wanted information about organizing. He had seen what the Starbucks workers did and thought maybe he and his co-workers could do it too.

Organizing is contagious. Is it any surprise the ownership class prefers that we forget our own history? Reading Kelly鈥檚 book, I wondered who from the current wave of organizing would be immortalized by labor historians鈥攚丑颈肠丑 baristas, which warehouse workers, which flight attendants and cashiers. But that鈥檚 the wrong question, I decided. Better to wonder about the movements these new worker-organizers will inspire. Better to think about who will come next.

She and her co-workers, some of them displaced by the fire, had been arguing with management for months for more staffing, training, and protection from customer abuse. Now, the crisis was giving them an unexpected break.

鈥淲e all took a big breath,鈥� she remembers. With the space of a week off, she and others came to a conclusion: 鈥淲hat we put up with is awful. This is ridiculous. We don鈥檛 need to work this much.鈥�

Harris began to talk to her co-workers about forming a union. By spring, they had officially voted to become .

Harris saw the vote as a moment of triumph both for worker protection and for climate action. 

鈥淭hese working conditions are because [corporate leaders] want to make more money off of less people, because they want to make more money for shareholders, because they want to expand,鈥� she says. She sees that push to expand, to make consumption easy and inexpensive, as the root of human-caused climate change. 鈥淪o many capitalistic luxuries that are just cheap [and] faster produced have absolutely a terrible effect on the environment.鈥�

Some climate organizers have been searching for a bridge between the labor and climate movements for years. The challenge, though, has been finding policies and approaches that satisfy both worker interests and climate鈥檚 urgency. 

That鈥檚 beginning to change. State legislatures, Congress, environmental organizations, and labor unions鈥攊ncluding Service Employees International Union and United Steelworkers鈥攈ave found powerful allies in each other.

鈥淚t鈥檚 been a history of peaks and valleys,鈥� says Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor unions and environmental organizations. He worked with labor and environmental groups in the 1990s to fight NAFTA and later saw environmental activists join labor activists in the streets in 1999 World Trade Organization protests known as the Battle of Seattle. But those alliances didn鈥檛 last.

In the past decade, labor and climate activists have started to find common ground again. Many of the country鈥檚 biggest labor unions have expressed support for climate action, and they鈥檝e backed at least portions of policy proposals like the Green New Deal.

鈥淲e鈥檙e in a moment that we might not have again for quite some time鈥攚here we have a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president and the ability to pass legislation that can really move the dial,鈥� says Walsh. He believes it鈥檚 a time for climate organizers to double their efforts to reach out to workers and organized labor, to push for policies that benefit both movements.

So far, many of the successes have remained at the state level. In California, SEIU California, the BlueGreen Alliance, and the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) , including the importance of home care workers as first responders and as a vital source of societal resilience to climate change. Care workers provide life-saving care and help evacuate vulnerable people during fires, hurricanes, and floods. In part as a result of that collaboration, a pilot program, backed by SEIU Local 2015 and funded in part by the state, aims to train those workers on . APEN, BlueGreen Alliance, and labor unions also successfully advocated for the state to put , an idea they first put forward in that collaborative report.

鈥淲e are trying to somewhat blur that line or division that鈥檚 constructed a lot. Our communities are also workers,鈥� says Amee Raval, APEN鈥檚 policy and research director.

She says APEN鈥檚 collaboration stemmed from a basic observation: In a lot of fights, climate and labor organizations were on the same side. For example, after , APEN members joined labor unions on the picket line to demand better safety practices.

But fractures between the movements persist. Environmental groups and labor unions , and for tackling fights over infrastructure, like new pipelines.

鈥淚 think it is fair to say that we have always been strongest and most unified when we have legislation that we can work on together,鈥� says Walsh. 鈥淚 understand the power of [fighting pipelines] from an organizing and movement-building standpoint. I don鈥檛 think it鈥檚 worth the cost from a political standpoint, and what it does to relations between labor unions and environmental groups, and what it does to the political landscape in particular places.鈥�

Raval says organizations like APEN that are focused on environmental justice often have an easier go of it.  

鈥淚 think there鈥檚 more pathways for environmental justice and labor to align, especially when we鈥檙e talking about working-class communities of color,鈥� she says. There, the same people impacted by pollution and environmental degradation are those often working in difficult conditions.

From Harris鈥� standpoint as a worker, she sees another barrier: the hustle of trying to survive in a society where overwhelming economic pressure prevents people from being able to engage on environmental issues. After all, it took a catastrophic, climate-change-fueled fire to give her and the other Starbucks workers the space to begin to organize.

鈥淵ou don鈥檛 have time to reflect, you don鈥檛 have time to think about the environment鈥� when working long hours at low wages, she says. 鈥淵ou only have time to think about you, the people that you love that need your help, and your bills.鈥�

When she talks to her colleagues, she usually just focuses on their work concerns, rather than pushing them to talk about unionizing. 鈥淚鈥檓 not trying to drag people along this sort of epic journey of mine without them wanting to come with me,鈥� she says. But she鈥檚 found they are receptive to ideas about how their struggle in a coffee shop in suburban Denver is linked to a broader fight over climate and societal change. There鈥檚 strength, she says, in not seeing the issues as separate, but instead as two responses to the same extractive whole. 

Raval agrees. 鈥淲e鈥檙e really thinking about [climate resilience] in the context of these intersecting crises,鈥� she says. 鈥淥ur community is experiencing all of these things at the same time.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Young leaders, like 33-year-old Amazon Labor Union President Chris Smalls, are building a movement based on their refusal to give up their well-being for jobs that mistreat them. In step with these generational values, undergraduate students are starting to see themselves as an important part of labor鈥檚 rebirth, as evidenced by the historic momentum behind the undergraduate union movement at institutions like Grinnell College, where the first campuswide undergraduate union in the U.S. formed this April. 

Although access to higher education has expanded over the last two generations, the student debt crisis reveals that such access comes at a tremendous cost to those seeking the upward mobility promised by a degree. Paying one鈥檚 college tuition with a part-time job is no longer a viable option due to the cost of tuition alone. Still, today鈥檚 college students are working to both decrease their student loan burdens and afford food, housing, and other necessities. 

According to a by Georgetown University鈥檚 Center on Education and the Workforce, nearly 70% of college students are currently employed. Although the study does not distinguish between on-campus and off-campus work, it is well known that across the U.S. For those pursuing higher education, the challenge to make ends meet remains. 

In , the CEW identified that between 1980 and 2019, the cost of a college education increased 169%, while wages for people between the ages of 22 and 27 have grown by just 19%. No matter how much students work while they study, they will most likely spend decades paying off student loans once they leave campus, with or without a degree in hand. For most students, financial aid and merit scholarships cannot completely eliminate the need for student loans. 

The Pell Grant, which is designated for 鈥渦ndergraduate students who display exceptional financial need,鈥� falters as well, covering only about 30% of the average tuition at a public university, as per the 2018 Georgetown study. This is half of what it covered in 1980. 

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, labor scholar and associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago, detailed the lineage of student debt in her 2021 book 鈥嬧€婭ndentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt. She explains, 鈥淏ecause of the expense of college, students and parents have to not only borrow more, but work a lot more.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Colleges and universities staff important areas, like dining halls, mailrooms, and libraries, with students receiving financial aid, who receive low wages while still paying tuition and living expenses. Ultimately, institutions benefit from the financial pressures weighing on their students via their on-campus labor. 

The divide between who needs to work and who works to gain experience reminds students that college is not the grand education-centered equalizer, but is also yet another site of labor. 

Since the 1960s, graduate students have made headway in asserting their status as employees. There are currently more than 50 graduate employee unions in the U.S.

Undergraduates, however, perform notably different labor from their graduate counterparts. Their jobs are less academic in nature and more service-oriented. On many campuses, undergraduates are likely to be found shelving books or serving meals in the dining hall. Meanwhile, graduate students serve as teaching and research assistants, work that serves as a woefully underpaid introduction to academia. One difference, then, is that undergraduates鈥� on-campus jobs rarely contribute to their career aspirations. 

This April, the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers became the country鈥檚 first campuswide undergraduate union to win legal recognition. It is significant that the union grew out of the dining hall, where many workers receive financial aid. Aid recipients at Grinnell participate in work-study programs, meaning that students work toward a certain dollar amount that must be earned by the end of the semester. After federal work-study roles are filled, there are some positions left over for those not receiving federal aid. Unlike a grant or scholarship, work-study funds must be earned through hourly work by the end of a given semester. If a student does not earn the required minimum, they will be expected to make up the difference out of pocket. 

鈥淒uring the initial unionization in the dining hall, work-study students had to work more during the week to make [$1,100,] the amount set by the college,鈥� says UGSDW organizer Isaiah Gutman. 

Union president Keir Hichens adds, 鈥淭he $1,100 is by no means a meaningful chunk out of the tuition cost. 鈥� The college relies on this deferred payment.鈥� By 鈥渄eferred payment鈥� Hichens means that the federal government pays the college for the student work at the end of the semester. Hichens recalls having to work 10 hours a week in order to earn the amount set by the work-study requirement. 

The disparity in working hours between students on financial aid and those not receiving aid was a primary motivation for the creation of the union. Among the UGSDW鈥檚 demands is an increase in wages, which would give students back valuable time. According to the 2018 Georgetown study, students who work more than 15 hours per week tend to be more likely to perform poorly in college, putting them at a greater risk of abandoning their studies. They were also more likely to pay their tuition with credit cards than those who worked less than 15 hours.

Workplace harassment and food insecurity further inspired Grinnell students to build a legally recognized pathway to secure their rights as student workers.

The National Labor Relations Board has continuously blocked union efforts by undergrads, claiming that the relationship between undergraduate students and their colleges and universities is . The recent struggle to unionize at Grinnell for undergrad students鈥� labor rights shows that the two cannot be disaggregated. 

鈥淏ecause of the way that college has evolved over the last 80 years, it is [perceived as] something you do between 18 and 22. It鈥檚 this sort of netherworld,鈥� explains Shermer. Representations of students in popular culture show them as almost-adults, treading water before assuming real responsibilities. Labor policy鈥檚 exclusion of college students exacerbates students鈥� struggles for their labor rights to be recognized on campus. 

According to Shermer, this perceived incompatibility between undergraduate students and organized labor began during Franklin D. Roosevelt鈥檚 presidency. 鈥淸The administration] cleaved off colleges and universities as a separate labor market鈥� in its policymaking, attempting to 鈥済et young people out of competition for jobs,鈥� says Shermer. While many continue to walk the tenuous line dividing students and laborers, the lack of up-to-date federal policy that encompasses this reality leaves many with great financial uncertainty. 

A central issue arising in the conversation around undergraduate unions鈥攁苍d now at and 鈥攊s the invisibility of student labor to society at large. 鈥淎 lot of the labor students do is invisible,鈥� explains Shermer. 鈥淎 Starbucks barista is visible [to the public].鈥� In contrast, she says, 鈥渢he only people using a dining hall are students and some faculty.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Hichens adds that the unacknowledged essentiality of student labor also helped student workers recognize that they were being mistreated. 鈥淪tudents are realizing just how much institutions rely on our labor to function鈥攏ot just tuition or financial aid, but our labor.鈥�

Today, unions are challenging American youth鈥檚 indebtedness to institutions of higher education. They are breaking down the class divisions that attempt to separate 鈥渆ducated鈥� professionals from 鈥渦nskilled鈥� labor. According to Hichens, 鈥淪tudent workers are seeing themselves in a global community.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Instead of looking askew at Starbucks and Amazon employees鈥攎any of whom hold college degrees鈥攎any undergraduate organizers are drawing on a shared principle: that they, too, are upholding large institutions that refuse to acknowledge the value of their labor. As union members, Hichens notes that his peers have begun to 鈥渟ee themselves as more than individuals or families making their ways through capitalism. I think we鈥檙e at the very beginning.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Black Americans, because of racialized stigma and their economic and political position, are not only more vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence, but to a global pandemic as well. Their diminished political position is evidenced by their exposure to unjust police violence, and their economic vulnerability is made most vivid by the persistent and unjust racial wealth gap that leaves Black families with few resources to address a shock like the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the overall public response to the pandemic and to broader economic insecurity has been highly racialized. Black lives are devalued in our economy and our fiscal policies reflect that. 

In a nutshell, our racial dilemma is grounded in a political, economic, and identity-based devaluing of Black lives that has persisted ever since the first enslaved African arrived in Jamestown in 1619. The ensuing history of the United States is built on both racial and economic injustice, two related but distinct problems. 

These racial and economic injustices, while entrenched, can be addressed. Below are three complementary policies that can make meaningful progress toward undoing centuries of systemic inequities, while prospectively ensuring capital access going forward: (1) Reparations through which the nation acknowledges and redresses its exploitation and extraction of Black resources and personhood; (2) Baby Bonds (publicly funded trust accounts) to establish a birthright to capital; and (3) a wealth tax to break up the concentration of wealth among the capitalist elite and diffuse the political power that goes along with such concentration.  

What We鈥檙e Facing

Wealth disparity and the racial wealth gap in America are dramatic. The median wealth for a Black family, $17,600 (inclusive of home equity), is only about one-tenth of the $171,000 median wealth for a White family. What鈥檚 more, the mean or average wealth of a White family, $933,700, is nearly seven times that of Black family wealth at $138,200. 

But clearly, the 鈥渢ypical鈥� White family are not millionaires and have nowhere near $933,700 in wealth. Instead, mean wealth is driven by a skewed distribution where the wealthy own just about everything. According to one study, the top 10% of American households owns nearly 80% of the nation鈥檚 wealth. More specifically, the top one-tenth of 1% of households, those with over $20.6 million in wealth, own about as much of the nation鈥檚 wealth as the entire bottom 90%. We haven鈥檛 seen this obscene a concentration of wealth and its accompanying plutocracy (i.e. the ability to translate all that economic might into political power) since the Great Depression, and it is being driven by a class of White billionaires. 

Wealth concentration is wreaking havoc on our democracy and our capacity to collectively envision and establish a just American society. Our attempts at progress even for those things on which we agree are consistently thwarted. For instance, a large majority of Americans want action on climate change. Yet, a capitalist class of energy tycoons that stands to lose some of its short-term profits if we wean ourselves off of fossil fuels is able to fund aggressive lobbying that impedes democratic action. 

The way to break up the concentration of wealth and power in the plutocracy is with a substantive redistributive wealth and/or estate tax. But alas, that would still leave unaddressed our unjust and reprehensible racial wealth gap.

Racial justice would mean that White and Black households are seen in equal measure throughout the wealth distribution鈥攚ith Blacks accounting for 13% of the bottom, the middle, and the top, the same share we represent in the population as a whole. (That notion of racial economic equity, namely that the proportion of persons with wealth above a stipulated amount is the same in both groups, was established by the first and only Black Nobel laureate in economics, W. Arthur Lewis, in his seminal book, Racial Conflict and Economic Development.) 

To be clear, we are not advocating for a new class of Black billionaires or for Black wealth distribution to replicate the dysfunctional distribution of wealth among White Americans. Although that might move us closer to racial equity as defined by Lewis, it would still leave unaddressed America鈥檚 plutocracy and hoarding of resources among the few鈥攐nly now that few would be more racially inclusive. 

To achieve economic justice, we would have to break up the concentration at the top. We would need a more egalitarian distribution of wealth so that the bottom half of all earners, which is disproportionately Black but is still composed of many White families, would own a lot more than just the 1% of our nation鈥檚 wealth that they currently own.  

Economic justice cannot take root or flourish when the wealth, power, resources, news media, book publishers, educational curricula, technological surveillance, prisons, business capital, and all of our existing institutions are owned or controlled by a handful of plutocrats.

The way to break up the concentration of wealth and power in the plutocracy is with a substantive redistributive wealth and/or estate tax. But alas, that would still leave unaddressed our unjust and reprehensible racial wealth gap, which is rooted in a history that afforded White families access to resources and the accompanying iterative and intergenerational accumulation and, in contrast, exposed Black families to a history of exploitation and extraction of their resources and personhood by government-complicit fraud, theft, and violence.

Here鈥檚 what needs to be done.

Truth and Reconciliation

To start, we must have an honest and sobering confession of our historical sins, directed or sanctioned by the state, that have systematically deprived Black people of resources and exposed them to theft, fraud, and seizure of their resources. This is in contrast to those systems that specifically facilitate and direct wealth and power to White people, which often also came at the expense of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other non-White groups. The original sin was chattel slavery, where Black people literally served as capital assets for a White landowning plantation class. That original sin extends to sharecropping, 鈥渨hite-capping,鈥� Jim Crow, and exclusion of Black Americans from the New Deal and postwar policies that built an asset-based White middle class.

This authentic truth would counter the neoliberal frame, from Oscar Lewis鈥� 鈥渃ulture of poverty鈥� thesis to Daniel Patrick Moynihan鈥檚 鈥渢angle of pathology鈥� thesis, that laid a foundation that caricatures Black, Brown, and poor people as 鈥渨elfare queens,鈥� 鈥渄eadbeat dads,鈥� and 鈥渦ndeserving.鈥� Instead, this truth would pave the way for narratives that more accurately frame inequality as grounded in resource deprivation. Inequality and poverty have been intensely racialized in the United States, and this racialization is applied not just to Blacks, but to Latinxs, and poor Asians and Whites. The 鈥渦ndeserving poor鈥� are stigmatized under the umbrella of anti-Blackness, and state interventions to promote their social mobility are seen as incentivizing bad behavior. A comprehensive reparations program diminishes the saliency of the 鈥渂laming the victim鈥� narrative that centers inequality in anti-Blackness. 

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was one recent example among many of a commission charged with bringing to light the collective sins and trauma of the apartheid era. The commission was established by that country鈥檚 post-apartheid constitution and was charged with shepherding a populace scarred by decades of legal and extralegal killings, dehumanizing laws, and economic exploitation on the basis of race into a new era of conciliatory nationhood鈥攁 tall order, to say the least. The commission collected and archived volumes of personal histories of violence, and held hearings in churches and office buildings in cities, towns, and hamlets across the deeply divided nation. Each Sunday, the commission broadcast a one-hour compilation of stories from the week, with much of the full proceedings being simulcast live on radio stations around the country. 

Ultimately, however, truth and reconciliation alone did not create a complete justice. Today鈥檚 South Africa continues to fail the economic fortunes of Black Africans. Poverty is a major problem for Black South Africans, 64% of whom live below the poverty level. On the other hand, poverty is barely measurable for White South Africans: only 1% of Whites live in poverty. So, no, truth and reconciliation did not liberate Black people. 

What truth and reconciliation did accomplish was a peaceful transition of South Africa into a post-apartheid political and social regime. However, that regime is still widely unequal, with the country鈥檚 resources largely controlled by an elite White minority, now with a few elite Black individuals involved in its leadership. 

Acknowledgement Without Redress Is Incomplete

Even while truth and reconciliation sharpen our idea of justice, we should learn from the South African experience that economic justice cannot be left on the back burner. We can only move forward from the long history of racial exploitation with substantial economic compensation for those who have been harmed. In essence, acknowledgment and apology alone (truth and reconciliation) will be incomplete if not accompanied by some form of material redress; it is only with both these factors that America can ever have racial justice.

The fact is, America has a race problem manifesting as a Black economic problem. The racial wealth gap itself is an implicit and cumulative economic measure of our racist past. That past began with Blacks serving as capital and evolved into a system in which whatever capital Blacks may have established, in addition to their physical bodies, was always vulnerable to state-directed or facilitated confiscation. As a result of this, coupled with the state鈥檚 failure to protect them against White supremacist theft, destruction, and fraud, Black people have very little ownership of America鈥檚 land or means of production. 

Hence, a reparations program should include compensatory resources for Blacks whose ancestors were the victims of racist U.S. policies and state-sanctioned 鈥渧igilante violence.鈥� In addition to an unconditional cash payment, this redress and redistribution should include transfer of ownership of land and/or means of production, such as direct government purchase and transfer of corporate stock to Black Americans. Without 鈥渙wnership,鈥� the cash stimulus of reparations could generate a ripple effect that would further enhance racial inequality by multiplying economic gains for White people who disproportionately are owners of America鈥檚 land and the means of production. 

Reparations provide a retrospective approach to achieving racial justice and directly address the Black-White racial wealth gap. A sufficient reparations program would take the form of a one-time payment or set of installments, but such transfers are not expected to occur in perpetuity. In that vein, we can establish other ongoing channels for all people regardless of race, gender, or family inheritance that build and maintain access to capital and economic security that derives from wealth. 

The fact is, America has a race problem manifesting as a Black economic problem. 

An Anti-Racist Birthright to Capital 

Baby Bonds (or more accurately 鈥淏aby Trusts鈥�) would establish an economic birthright to capital for everyone in perpetuity. These accounts would be held in public trust, similar to Social Security, and could be used as a capital foundation for an economically secure life. Without such a baseline approach, the iterative and consolidative tendency of wealth鈥攁苍d therefore capital鈥攚ould likely trend toward inequality and wealth disparity, even after implementation of a reparations program.  

The program would allocate a trust fund to every child in the United States. The average account could be seeded around $20,000 and gradually rise upward to $60,000 for babies born into the poorest families. The account would mature and transfer to those children when they reach adulthood.

Wealth begets more wealth. More of the racial wealth gap is accounted for by inheritance, bequests, and in vivo transfers, than any behavioral, demographic, or socioeconomic indicator. Wealthier families have financial access that buys crucial advantages for their children, such as debt-free college degrees, down payments on home purchases, or seed money to start a business. Lack of wealth prevents many families from accessing these advantages or passing them on to their children, contributing to an ever-increasing distance between those born with resources and those born without. 

A publicly funded universal trust fund allocating up to $60,000 to the least wealthy households could substantially reduce the median wealth gap for young adults鈥攚here young White adult households currently have approximately 16 times the wealth of young Black adult households鈥攖o one where the disparity is just 1.4 times as large. This kind of program could begin to build a solid financial foundation on which generations of young people can plan their lives.  

The intergenerational racial wealth gap was structurally created and has virtually nothing to do with individual or racialized choices. Intra-family transfers provide some young adults with starting capital. The capital finance provided by 鈥淏aby Trusts鈥� would deliver a more egalitarian economic security, independent of the family financial position into which individuals are born.

Breaking Through the Plutocracy 

Along with financial remuneration, we need an equitably and fairly structured society. Imagine this: We eliminate student debt and instead fully fund tuition-free public colleges and universities, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Tribal Colleges and Universities. We have Medicare for All, an economic right to high-quality housing and child care, a job, and enough income support so that no one has to endure poverty. And atop that, every young adult has access to capital, independent of race or generational legacies of exploitation. 

That is a vision of a just and free society, one in which young people can afford to build a future and have some chance of thriving across the course of their lives. It鈥檚 a society that is within our collective reach.

The obstacle to fulfilling this vision is political will, which has largely been constrained by forces emanating from the concentrated economic and political power of our nation鈥檚 plutocracy.

A wealth tax can help temper this plutocracy. If we do institute a wealth tax, we don鈥檛 need to be shy about purposefully diminishing plutocracy鈥攊n fact, that could be an important outcome in and of itself. We do not begrudge those with wealth, per se. Rather, its obscene concentration is anti-democratic and antithetical to an economically just society.

This intergenerational transfer will only further entrench racial and economic inequalities, aided by a veritable army of financial professionals devoted to minimizing taxes and maximizing family inheritances within narrow bloodlines.  

But some beneficiaries of this system are working to disrupt it, with the help of financial advisers who have a very different outlook from the rest of their profession. They are redirecting this wealth to solve big problems, like climate disruption and racial inequity.  And this has created a new ethos among some of the elite and their financial advisers: 鈥渨ealth minimization.鈥�

Jody Wiser, an investor with inherited wealth from Portland, Oregon, saw a change in culture when her investment advisory firm went through a change in ownership. 鈥淚 was soured to them when their quarterly podcast began with a CPA who advises clients to move to states with no income taxes,鈥� she says. She told the firm that their anti-tax bias was why she was transferring her assets away from them.

鈥淪ome people inherit a 鈥榯rusted family wealth adviser鈥� along with money,鈥� says Nora Leccese, the high-net-wealth and family philanthropy coordinator at Resource Generation, a multiracial community of young people with wealth committed to the equitable distribution of wealth, land, and power. 鈥淭hese advisers show up with a bias for accumulation and against redistribution.鈥�

This puts some wealthy family members on a collision course with the 鈥渨ealth defense industry,鈥� professionals whose training is entirely focused on excessive accumulation and fostering inherited-wealth dynasties. As I wrote in my book, The Wealth Hoarders, this sector includes the tax attorneys, accountants, wealth managers, and family office staffers who are paid millions to hide trillions. They have a toolbox of tricks and dodges鈥攁苍onymous shell corporations, offshore bank accounts, dynasty trusts, complex transactions鈥攖o sequester and place wealth beyond the reach of taxation and accountability. They are the accomplices to tax avoidance, wealth hoarding, and entrenched inequality.

That鈥檚 what makes it all the more amazing to meet Stephanie Brobbey, the founder of Good Ancestor Movement Ltd., a new U.K.-based wealth advisory firm devoted to wealth minimization. Brobbey spent a decade working as an attorney in London鈥檚 bustling private wealth sector; her new firm is now disrupting industry norms.

鈥淭here are two prevailing narratives that the wealth advisory profession has internalized,鈥� explains Brobbey, who was born in London to parents from Ghana. 鈥淭he first is that excessive wealth accumulation is completely acceptable if not desirable. The second is that taxation is synonymous with waste. That鈥檚 the water that our profession swims in.鈥�

Brobbey believes when it comes to taxation, we鈥檝e lost our way completely. 鈥淢any economic elites in society have cultivated this distrust in government so that we don鈥檛 associate tax with the public investments we depend on every day,鈥� she says. 鈥淥ur job is to be good ancestors, to redefine the notion of legacy beyond the Global North concept of bloodlines and toward a broader understanding of community.鈥�

Brobbey uses the language of 鈥渨ealth holders鈥� rather than 鈥渨ealth owners.鈥� 鈥淲e are pioneering a radically different path for wealth stewardship鈥攖o move from a system of wealth extraction to a regenerative economy where wealth is more fairly distributed.鈥�

There are examples of wealthy families redirecting their wealth to heal the harms created by the initial extraction of that wealth.

Good Ancestor has developed a program where clients move through three stages as they create an alternative wealth minimization plan. The first stage is to work with clients to understand their wealth story and 鈥渞eimagine wealth.鈥� This includes exploring their upbringing, the sources of wealth, and the values communicated along with the money. 鈥淭here are many forms of resistance to be navigated that are rooted in our socialization and how an individual鈥檚 wealth history has been shaped,鈥� Brobbey says.

鈥淭here are several critical questions that people with wealth should be asking ourselves but are afraid to consider,鈥� says Leonie Taylor, who is a lead organizer at Resource Justice, the U.K. cousin of Resource Generation. The work 鈥渋s so exciting precisely because it provides the intellectual grounding and space for these important conversations to take place, which can, through proactive shifts in our behavior, contribute to transformative and systemic change.鈥�

The second stage is removing barriers to change, which may include technical financial planning along with coaching or cognitive support. 鈥淲e have to build new neural pathways to rethink wealth and how much is too much,鈥� Brobbey says.

The third stage is identifying how to redistribute excess wealth so it is both reparative and regenerative. Brobbey says, 鈥淲e ask our clients, 鈥榃hat harm may have been caused in the process of the extraction or ongoing accumulation of this wealth? Were there groups of people [who] were harmed? Was there ecological harm? And what, based on this, is imperative for you to do?鈥欌€�

In this process of redistribution, Brobbey aims to 鈥渄ecenter鈥� traditional philanthropy. 鈥淚t is a problem that excessive wealth accumulation is a prerequisite for embarking into the world of philanthropy,鈥� she says. 鈥淭oo much philanthropic activity reinforces the power and replicates the structural inequalities that led to the wealth inequalities.鈥�

Redistribution outside philanthropy can take the form of paying taxes鈥攁t the local, state and federal level. It can mean transferring assets into community-controlled ventures, forming partnerships with social movements and communities that have been excluded from wealth for generations. There are examples of wealthy families redirecting their wealth to heal the harms created by the initial extraction of that wealth. 

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund was established by the sons of John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1940 from wealth that came originally from the Standard Oil Company. The fund in 2014 and redirected its $1.2 billion in assets to campaigns for clean energy. Recognizing the harms caused by oil extraction, Rockefeller family members took a powerful action to boost the divestment movement.

Resource Generation is rethinking how it relates to financial advisers, helping their members navigate a field that is biased against redistribution. To be included on their referral list, the organization is now inviting financial advisers like Good Ancestors to fill out a survey that includes how they would respond to various scenarios, including a client that wants to give away 10% of their wealth every year for 10 years to racial justice groups. 鈥淏elieve it or not, there is a growing market for anti-capitalist wealth advisers,鈥� says Leccese of Resource Generation.

More than 100 Resource Generation members have gone through 10-month-long 鈥減raxis鈥� groups鈥攑art study, part personal support鈥攖o move toward radical redistribution. Part of this is a session that Leccese frames as, 鈥淗ow much is enough for me? How much is enough for the world? How much is too much to keep?鈥�  

鈥淲hat really inspires me is the potential of the great wealth transfer,鈥� says Brobbey, referring to the trillions about to be handed off to younger generations. 鈥淲e want to be ready and optimistic that there will be people who want to radically redistribute this wealth for repair and regeneration.鈥�

The firm is helping to give 鈥渆arly adopters鈥� the support and oxygen they need to disrupt the system, says Brobbey.

鈥淥ur clients will be partners in pursuing a radically different vision of the world,鈥� she adds. 鈥淭his is a lifelong journey of healing for all of us as we try to recover a lost story鈥攐r write a new economic story of justice and collective liberation.鈥�

Can Money Work for Justice?

Rethinking the role money plays in society.

Read the story by Oscar Perry Abello at yesmagazine.org/rethinkingmoney

鈥淲e are anti-capitalist in our composition to the core,鈥� says Atsushi Akera, general manager of Cafe Euphoria, which also includes a coworking space and curated thrift shop. 鈥淲e鈥檙e trying to create an alternative economic system that goes against the traditional ways of doing things, [one that鈥檚] based on principles of equity, inclusion, all of that.鈥�

Cafe Euphoria has a radical and unique approach: The business is a worker-owned cooperative run by a group of eight transgender and gender-nonconforming folks who are all paid the same wage鈥�$18 an hour, with a goal to raise the wage over time until it reaches $32 an hour. The model is meant to lift employees out of poverty; according to a recent study by UCLA, almost a third of trans adults in the U.S. were living in poverty in 2019.

The aim is to ensure the caf茅 breaks even, with income covering all expenses. Akera says the caf茅 currently makes between $200 and $400 a day during the week, and up to $4,000 on a busy weekend. She estimates the caf茅 will break even after about 14 months and be able to increase wages after two or three years. 

鈥淭here鈥檚 no investors, so there鈥檚 no profit. We push everything out in wages. So the idea is to balance things out,鈥� Akera says.

The desire and has become a focus of worker concerns in the U.S. throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers have also been seeking alternatives to the top-down corporate model that disempowers them. The 鈥�,鈥� as well as a number of unionization drives, show that workers鈥攂aristas included鈥攈ave had enough. Starbucks shops nationwide are , and independent coffee shops are trying out even more progressive policies.

Co-ops have increasingly been hiring people 鈥渨ho have really been excluded from decent work,鈥� says Micha Josephy, executive director of the Cooperative Fund of the Northeast. 鈥淭hat could be for a lot of reasons: They haven鈥檛 been able to access decent education, there鈥檚 discrimination by people doing hiring that exclude them from the workforce. It could be that there are jobs in their sector, but that those jobs are dangerous or they鈥檙e just structured in a way that鈥檚 not worker-centric. Worker co-ops are a way to center workers in how you structure the work.鈥�

At Cafe Euphoria, the worker-centered economic model was not initially the main goal, but has quickly become a defining feature of the business. The idea for the caf茅 emerged from a virtual support group during the pandemic focused on trans and gender-nonconforming folks. While the community was strong at first, it frayed as in-person activities restarted and virtual spaces lost their luster. That鈥檚 when Akera posed a question to the group: What if we create a transgender caf茅?

鈥淭he main thing is that we were driven more by the social mission than by the idea of a worker-owned cooperative. So it was 鈥榃e鈥檙e creating a safe space for the trans and the gender-nonconforming community,鈥欌€� Akera explains. 鈥淎nd then we said, 鈥楢nd we are a cooperative, so everybody gets paid the same.鈥欌€�

Josephy says this is a very common path into the co-op world: A business will start out with a social mission and realize that a worker co-op is an effective means of achieving it.

鈥淥ne of the things that democratic workplaces can do is allow people to bring in aims that are not merely economic aims,鈥� says Joe Marraffino, a loan and outreach officer at the Cooperative Fund of the Northeast who has been advising Akera as the caf茅 gets off the ground.

Cafe Euphoria is still smoothing out the kinks, but here鈥檚 how its co-op model works: The wage for all positions starts at $18 an hour, which comprises $13.20 in actual wages and $4.80 in member equity. Consistent with the , all employees are offered an ownership stake of the caf茅 after working their first 50 hours. That means that, as member-owners, all of the workers have an equal say in the direction of the business and own a real asset in the form of member equity. Depending on how the co-op is structured, that equity can be accessed over time or when a worker exits the business.

When wages do reach $32 an hour, the increase will also apply retroactively, Akera says, meaning workers will be paid the difference for all previous hours worked at the lower wage. There鈥檚 no set time frame for the increases, because that will depend on revenue growth.

鈥淲e鈥檙e still learning what that number needs to be,鈥� Akera says. 鈥淗istorically, food service is an industry that underpays their workers, so this will be a challenge for us. But we鈥檙e looking for ways to beat the curve; our tips, so far, have been close to 25% because of the tremendous support out there for our community.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

The commitment to equity, however, goes beyond the caf茅鈥檚 workers. Everything at Cafe Euphoria鈥攆rom the coffee and muffins to the thrifted clothing鈥攊s priced on a 3-to-1 sliding scale. Customers whose self-reported income is above $62,000 are asked to pay the highest price鈥攕ay, $18 for a lunch. Anyone who makes less than that is welcome to pay the middle price, which might go down to $12. Then, the lowest 鈥渟olidarity鈥� price鈥攕ay, $6鈥攊s intended 鈥減rimarily for members of the trans and gender-nonconforming community who cannot pay the middle price,鈥� Akera says.

鈥淚t is all self-declared, you don鈥檛 have to explain a thing. You just tell us what discount to apply, and we will apply the discount,鈥� she explains.

The sliding scale makes Cafe Euphoria somewhat of an outlier, even in the socially progressive world of co-ops, Marraffino says.

鈥淭hey鈥檙e asking their customers to have an experience of solidarity and not just to maximize their individual gain,鈥� he explains. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e putting their social aims and their beliefs on their sleeve and hoping that the people reciprocate.鈥�&苍产蝉辫; 

So far, they have. Akera says 94% of customers are opting for the top of the sliding scale. It鈥檚 a reflection of growing consumer appetite for equitable business practices.

鈥淚f their model is radical, their timing is right,鈥� says Marraffino. Often, he鈥檒l point out that they are diverging from traditional work co-op practices, but it doesn鈥檛 seem to bother them much. 鈥淭his is a different type of organization that is trying to break boundaries,鈥� he says.

While Cafe Euphoria鈥檚 plans are ambitious, the staff鈥檚 experience so far also underlines some essential truths: The caf茅 has already been forced to make compromises and has hit more than a few road bumps trying to operate within its model.

Take one relatively simple piece of most businesses: running meetings. Without a traditional hierarchy in place, the Cafe Euphoria staff at first struggled to hold discussions that allowed everyone to contribute without the discussion descending into chaos. 

鈥淭hat is one of our challenges, because people can understand [a co-op] in principle, but to understand it in practice is very hard,鈥� Akera says.

After a few iterations, they鈥檝e found something that works: Each meeting starts with a brief general manager鈥檚 report, and then everyone suggests agenda items that are voted on and ranked, setting the course for the remainder of the meeting.

Cafe Euphoria, like many worker co-ops, also invests heavily in worker training. In trying to solve a labor problem鈥攈iring and paying a historically excluded community, in the historically underpaid service industry鈥攖he caf茅 has a much different labor pool than its peers.

鈥淲e鈥檙e picking good people, but we don鈥檛 necessarily have all the skills,鈥� says Akera. That applies to her as well: Akera has had a long career as an academic, and for the caf茅鈥檚 early months continued to work full time as a professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she says she earned more than enough money to live a comfortable life. She retired from her academic post on June 30 to focus full time on the caf茅, where her compensation will take the form of member equity instead of a wage, at least until the caf茅 is on stronger financial footing. 鈥淚鈥檓 a professor, I鈥檝e never created a restaurant before. I鈥檝e never managed a business before. So there鈥檚 a lot of figuring out that goes on.鈥�

But overcoming these hurdles can allow entire communities and industries to reimagine their relationship with work. Josephy and Marraffino say a lot of service-sector workers in particular are now seeking out worker co-ops as a way to continue doing what they love, while seeking economic empowerment.  

And it鈥檚 not just new businesses that are using this model: Josephy and Marraffino are also seeing a lot of conversions, especially as an older generation of business owners retires and looks for a way to sustain their enterprise. One recent example is , a caf茅 in Providence, Rhode Island, that was purchased by its own employees and . 

Chloe Chassaing, a worker-owner at White Electric, says the conversion to a co-op to increase transparency and improve labor practices at the caf茅. A year after the conversion, the shop鈥檚 13 workers have hammered out a model that works for them. The formerly haphazard pay and raise structure has been flattened out, with a higher base wage and a plan to give 4% annual raises to everyone. All of the workers, many of whom are Black, Indigenous, people of color, women, queer, working class, or first-generation or children of immigrants, are offered an ownership stake in the business after their first six months of employment; the equity buy-in is $100, with the option to contribute more in each paycheck, and workers get the money back if they decide to leave.

鈥淣o one is looking to get rich off of this, we just want decent jobs and to be able to have a say in them,鈥� Chassaing says.

The model can also allow historically marginalized communities鈥攕uch as formerly incarcerated people, or immigrants, or transgender folks鈥攖o access jobs and wealth that otherwise might never be available to them, according to Marraffino.

鈥淲hat better way to transcend workplace discrimination than to own the workplace?鈥� Marraffino says.  

The 2015 Bay Area Equity Atlas found half of San Francisco Bay Area renters spent at least a third of their income on rent, and in 2021, Joint Venture Silicon Valley reported that the median annual wage of a service industry worker, at $35,241 before tax, was just slightly higher than the $25,800 it costs to rent a local studio apartment. 

It鈥檚 easy to find horror stories: paying in San Francisco; ; a . In August 2020, The New York Times recounted the story of a Guatemalan immigrant who in the Bay Area city of San Mateo. When she contracted COVID-19, she sequestered herself in a closet for days to avoid infecting her children.

And those are just the examples of people with homes. Despite the region having an , the Bay Area Council Economic Institute admitted in 2019 that 鈥渂y virtually every measure, the Bay Area鈥檚 homeless crisis .鈥�

So many homeless between the Silicon Valley cities of Palo Alto and San Jos茅 that it was known as 鈥淗otel 22鈥� until lawmakers cut late-night service. After a survey found one in five students at Cupertino鈥檚 De Anza College were homeless, students advocated for . And have sprung up across Silicon Valley, including dozens clustered around a park 2 miles from Google鈥檚 Mountain View headquarters (until the city begins enforcing its new in late July). 

Plenty of Homes, Not Enough Power

For many in the Bay Area, the housing experience is less about shocking headlines than it is about the inexorable rise of rents driving more low- and moderate-income residents farther and farther out from the urban centers. 

Liz Gonzalez was born and raised in East San Jos茅 by parents from Jalisco, Mexico. Her mother, brother, and uncle all worked in the microchip factories then prevalent in San Jos茅, as she herself did for a period. The assembly lines were 鈥渟oul-sucking monotony,鈥� she says, but the money was good. Though rents were high, 鈥渋t wasn鈥檛 what you see right now, where there鈥檚 folks renting out rooms and garages and living rooms.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Gonzalez still lives in her childhood home today, though all but three other families on her street have moved away. 鈥淎ffordability definitely factored into people moving away,鈥� she says. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that in the country, with , according to rental platform Zumper.

Gonzalez is one of a growing number of activists looking at ways to change the housing economy of the region. She was involved in a multiyear campaign to stop Google from constructing a huge campus in San Jos茅, a development community leaders feared would price out tens of thousands of working-class residents. 

She is also president of the newly formed South Bay Community Land Trust. 鈥淭his whole statement about us not having enough housing is a myth,鈥� Gonzalez says. 鈥淲e just don鈥檛 have the kind of housing that meets people鈥檚 needs, that is affordable, because the market-rate housing is out of reach.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

鈥淭he only reason market-rate housing gets built at the rate it does is because they have institutional support,鈥� she explains, adding that Silicon Valley already has enough homes for all who live there today. Gonzalez believes that what鈥檚 lacking is not empty buildings but organizations to support longtime residents the way developers and city governments rush to accommodate the interests of the multinational tech firms. 

The Bay Area is not an isolated case鈥攐nly the most extreme example of a crisis affecting cities across the United States. A 2019 article in the Department of Housing and Urban Development鈥檚 journal Cityscape reported that across the country, 39% of 2016 renters paid rents that would have been in the top 25% in 2000, though renter income had barely increased in the same period. 

鈥淢any major American cities showed signs of gentrification and some racialized displacement between 2000 and 2013,鈥� reports a 2019 study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. That trend disproportionately affects Black and Hispanic tenants.

That鈥檚 resulted in higher real estate prices that median wages haven鈥檛 kept pace with. As a result, approximately 1.5 million people left the Bay Area between 2010 and 2016, the equivalent of one in five residents, according to the University of California鈥檚 Terner Center For Housing Innovation. For every person with household income above $200,000 who left the Bay Area in this period, six people with left as well. Those who moved into the area had incomes skewing significantly higher than those who moved out. 

The 鈥渃risis鈥� is real, but it鈥檚 a crisis of housing ownership and affordability, a deficit not of housing stock but of popular power to constrain runaway costs. This sort of crisis cannot be remedied with construction permits or zoning laws, so community organizations are developing new answers on the ground.

Ordinary residents don鈥檛 have the political clout of tech companies and developers, and they also have been denied access to the skills necessary to acquire and manage residential properties. But activists are beginning to wield what power they do have. In 2019, to preserving affordable housing with community land trusts and cooperatives. Then in 2020, to donate 50 houses to a new community land trust in that city, although activists now say the city hasn鈥檛 fulfilled that promise.

Changing the Economic Model For Housing

The power differential is why community groups are experimenting with alternative models of land ownership they believe are the key to stopping displacement and homelessness鈥攚ithout the construction of a single new unit of housing.

Groups such as the South Bay Community Land Trust and the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative see removing land from the speculative market, not advocating for new development, as the key to long-term accessibility. New land trusts are just one example of an organizing model that鈥檚 spread across the country since its birth as a way to as retaliation for participation in the civil rights movement. 

鈥淔rom our model, believing that housing is a human right,鈥� says Gonzalez of the South Bay trust, 鈥渨e have to act like it and do everything possible so that folks are housed in a dignified way.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Community land trusts typically comprise numerous properties, with the land held in trust by a community-based nonprofit organization, even as the housing units are sold. Many such trusts control the rate at which sale prices for homes in the trust can grow per year, ensuring owners can build equity while the units remain affordable for new buyers.  

Expanding the trust entails decommodifying land, one parcel at a time. 

The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative uses the cooperative model instead of a nonprofit trust to remove land from the market. The since its launch in 2018, according to East Bay Magazine. After starting two cooperative projects, the collective is now undertaking an ambitious effort to revitalize a historic West Oakland business corridor once known as 鈥渢he Harlem of the West.鈥澨€淲e know that buying one asset is not enough,鈥� says Noni Session, the East Bay group鈥檚 executive director. 鈥淲e鈥檙e trying to galvanize the community around the entire corridor.鈥� Organizers envision a featuring cooperative housing, Black arts and business spaces, and a cultural arts center along Seventh Street stretching a mile and a half through the city.听

The members of the fledgling South Bay trust have a similarly broad vision even as they continue negotiations to acquire their first properties. Co-founder Sandy Perry, a minister and housing activist who worked to oppose Google鈥檚 San Jos茅 campus and who has been organizing with tenants, homeowners, and unhoused people for decades, believes decommodifying land within the trust will not only stabilize housing costs for residents but also 鈥済ive a whole community a center around which to organize.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Aside from housing, South Bay trust members imagine day care centers, cultural centers, and 鈥渃enters for the community to organize and resist gentrification,鈥� Perry says. 

Taking land off the speculative market in the most expensive city in the country would provide an organizing base, a means for community survival, and a symbol of hope, he says. If community members can rally around and organize in community spaces on the land trust, he hopes, they might be able to stop the next tech campus development threatening to displace the city鈥檚 residents. 

The Challenge of Scale

This aspiration arises from the challenges facing groups like the South Bay trust and East Bay collective. The 12-year-old Oakland Community Land Trust has , including 28 single-family homes and five mixed-use properties, says Steve King, the group鈥檚 executive director. Redfin reports alone, with a median sale price of $921,000. And San Jos茅鈥檚 market is even hotter, with at an average price of nearly $1.3 million in the same period. 

So long as large employers like Google offer generous salaries to draw prospective employees to the region, housing values will continue to rise and make new and existing housing stock even more appealing for investors, developers, and speculators. As the University of California, Berkeley’s explains, these processes work hand-in-hand: Wealthier newcomers move into a neighborhood at the same time capital gets invested in local real estate. This makes efforts to buy houses off the market increasingly urgent, but progressively more daunting, as well. 

If activist organizations are unable to secure concessions from local government, however, they are left dependent on donations from individuals or foundations to purchase properties at ever-increasing market prices. The South Bay Community Land Trust鈥檚 Perry therefore envisions the organization as part of an ecosystem of community resistance against those forces. 

Money shouldn鈥檛 determine whether you have a dignified home. It shouldn鈥檛 determine whether you have access to shelter.

The South Bay trust has joined with other groups to lobby for a in San Jos茅, which would provide municipal funding for nonprofit housing acquisitions. In March, following years of actions against gentrification, including the Google campaign that birthed the land trust, San Jos茅鈥檚 city council moved forward with an that could eventually include just such an ordinance. 

But those small successes won鈥檛 stop the runaway acceleration of housing costs and the forces of speculation helping fuel it. Even in Silicon Valley鈥檚 overheated housing market, two 2019 government surveys found for . NPR affiliate KQED reported that , presumably as investment vehicles. Others remain empty as their to increase their value even further. 

In either case, even property vacancies in the Bay Area are structured by increasing property values pegged to tech workers鈥� generous salaries. The East Bay cooperative鈥檚 Noni Session says that what鈥檚 driving up housing prices in the Bay Area isn鈥檛 an absence of dwellings, but a continued influx of well-compensated professional workers. 

鈥淢ost of the tech companies have ongoing plans to import more and more labor into the urban city,鈥� Session says. 鈥淭his housing that we鈥檙e producing is really marked at the level of a high-salary tech worker.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

New market-rate units do little to take pressure off of lower-income housing, and instead make the region a more attractive destination for wealthy workers whose demand pushes housing costs higher still. As housing policy analyst and urban geographer Samuel Stein wrote in his 2019 book , 鈥淪imply adding housing supply does not necessarily drive down overall prices. In many cases, it does the opposite.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

鈥淪ilicon Valley needs another tech campus like it needs a hole in the head,鈥� Perry says. The campaign against Google鈥檚 proposed campus culminated in a where Gonzalez, Perry, and six others were arrested as the municipal government voted to sell public land to the tech giant. 

Though the campaign to halt the Google development didn鈥檛 succeed, it inspired the creation of Silicon Valley鈥檚 first community land trust. It also extracted a commitment from the city government that the project would cause , and an endorsement of the utilization of community groups to attain that goal. Gonzalez and Perry hope that this will lead to support for the land trust as it begins acquiring its first properties.

When Liz Gonzalez thinks about growing the community land trust model to ensure her friends and family members can keep living in the city that raised them, she emphasizes the 鈥渃ooperation, collaboration, and education鈥� necessary to scale nonmarket land use models.

Though the South Bay Community Land Trust is still in its early stages, neither Gonzalez nor Perry would be content with the preservation of a few homes if hundreds more are priced out around them. 鈥淭he whole system of land ownership in the United States is wrong,鈥� Perry says. 鈥淯ltimately, it should be abolished.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

As Gonzalez puts it, 鈥淭he goal is to decommodify housing because money shouldn鈥檛 determine whether you have a dignified home. It shouldn鈥檛 determine whether you have access to shelter.鈥�

CORRECTION: This story was updated at 10:42 a.m. Aug. 13, 2021, to replace an out-of-date link to the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Collective’s Cultural Community Corridor Project with the correct link. Read our corrections policy here.

Actually, no. I don鈥檛 think it is. It doesn鈥檛 have to be one or the other. It鈥檚 always both/and.

I鈥檝e been longing to talk about all the ways in which these last couple of years have been so much of a gift for me. And yet I struggle with holding that fact in the same space with all the ways these last couple of years have challenged the very core of who I am as a human being and the way I navigate this world as a Black woman. And yet, in writing my book Black Joy: Stories of Resistance, Resilience, and Restoration, I鈥檝e learned that the ancestral legacy of our joy tells me I don鈥檛 have to choose. 

My great-grandmother understood the difference between joy and happiness. The latter, a temporary state of being, may have felt the same as the former in that there was that same adrenaline or dopamine rush. But Nanny knew how to call on the ever-present undercurrent of joy, even when happy moments were few and far between. It鈥檚 why she rocked that pain out of her body in those church pews. It鈥檚 why that great-great-aunt would wind that pain out of her hips at the juke joint. My ancestors knew that they didn鈥檛 have to go out and find joy. They knew that joy, unlike happiness, is something that we鈥檙e born with; it鈥檚 our birthright. They clearly understood what Octavia Raheem writes in her book Pause, Rest, Be: Stillness Practices for Courage in Times of Change: 鈥淛oy is an act of rebellion. And so is allowing ourselves to feel our grief.鈥� They knew that joy and pain, joy and rage, joy and grief occupy the same vessel. 

So what does it mean to give myself permission to experience joy even when grief and rage are present? It means I feel a sort of survivor鈥檚 guilt. We don鈥檛 want to say, in the midst of a global pandemic, just how much the isolation, at least in the beginning, was good for us. Because it gave us space and time to be still. Because it gave some of us a chance to jump off the metaphorical treadmill of work. Taking a break from grind mode allowed us to realize that our productivity was never an indicator of our worth. 

For me, it gave me time to name my pain even when I knew that language could never do its intensity justice. We don鈥檛 want to say any of this because we know that for some people, isolation caused a spiral into depression. For many, it was the beginning of economic devastation. The pandemic also amplified health disparities and inequities in access to care. 

So we allow our grief to take our joy hostage, in a kind of solidarity, because we also know how this time has been tragically hard for others. Sometimes we even unintentionally divest ourselves from joy altogether in favor of a suffering we think is our lot as Black people.

Joy is Black when it lives within the particular historical and cultural experience of Black people across the African diaspora. Our joy transforms those often-traumatic experiences鈥攖he results of White supremacy鈥攊nto something distinctly ours. By virtue of this 400-year liberation journey we鈥檝e been on, Black people have always held joy simultaneously in our bodies with rage and sorrow. That part isn鈥檛 new. 

What does feel more recent is this notion that we shouldn鈥檛 embrace the duality and actively work toward ensuring that those harder emotions don鈥檛 overwhelm us to the point where there is no harmony, no healing mentally, spiritually, or somatically (as in, our physical body). 

Righteous rage and deep grief, particularly the kind we Black folks have experienced of late, can be so all-consuming that, if allowed to completely split us open, can make it seem like joy or peace doesn鈥檛 even exist. In those instances, we can鈥檛 access joy. Our grief and rage are so big, we are, in essence, disembodied. 

I鈥檝e observed this in many social justice leaders and racial justice organizers. Those working on the front lines are often the first to fall victim to a disembodied way of moving through life and doing the work. I can always tell when an activist is wrestling with the presence of joy. Those very valid, even necessary emotions of rage and sorrow are so big in their bodies that they cannot feel anything else. Joy is but a miniscule thing relegated to a past life or a kernel of memory. As a result, these activists don鈥檛 rest. They don鈥檛 hydrate. They don鈥檛 sleep well. 

And so, for every victory鈥攅very indictment or conviction of an abusive police officer, every policy change or increase in the voter rolls鈥攖hey find themselves sicker or dealing with anxiety and other stress-related ailments. I rejoice when I hear about a movement leader taking a sabbatical or going on vacation, or when I see images of them laughing or dancing. As much as I want collective change, I want collective healing鈥攚hether or not the dismantling of White supremacist systems or laws ever happen. 

What does it look like to make room for all our feelings instead of just the ones that feel most urgent or are easily accessed? It looks like joy, and Black joy especially, taking its rightful place within our emotional canon. 

Part of my personal journey has been about operating from a place of empathy and grace for myself in order to expand this container, this vessel, the spirit that holds the whole of my identity, so I can set free the joy within. Rage isn鈥檛 going anywhere. Grief isn鈥檛 either. What I have to do is be self-aware enough to see when those emotions are about to harm me, and turn my altruism and compassion onto myself. 

Some of that work is definitely somatic in nature: identifying joy in the body so we can call it up when we need it. But some of it is just some good ol鈥� soul work: unlearning the generational response to pleasure that often says too much laughing or too much joy might lead to harm or violence. 

Holding the tension between the good and the bad that has happened to me over these last couple of years has truly been work for me. I have had to learn to stand firm in the power of my Black joy and embrace the myriad ways in which it shows up, then wield that joy for the healing of myself and my people. 

I know that my joy stands defiant in the faces of those who try to dehumanize me. I know that my joy makes my oppressor big mad. Because more than stealing our rights, stealing our joy is their greatest, albeit subtlest, evil. Ensuring that we can鈥檛 access our joy or that we have a fear or guilt around expressing it is probably the most insidious form White supremacy takes. Black joy is a kind of currency, and when we learn to spend it recklessly, the results are glorious.

I have decided 2020 was a good year. 

But 2020 was an awful year. 

Both/and. 

I give myself permission to accept those two things as true at the same time. 

But in 2000, Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided the reservation and seized White Plume鈥檚 crop. In fact, there were several raids on his crop between 2000 and 2002. Two years later, he was ordered to stop growing. In 2016, the federal ban was lifted and in 2017, White Plume to make hemp supplements. He鈥檚 just beginning again. 

Not surprisingly, White Plume feels a bit resentful of the profits being made in what鈥檚 now become a largely White-dominated industry, while his tribe had to sit on the sidelines.

But the potential for Native people to benefit economically in the hemp industry still exists.

Now White Plume is involved in processing hemp and plans to make a vertically integrated Lakota industry. He envisions a sustainable industry that will create high-paying jobs and bring in a steady stream of income for Lakota tribes.听

鈥淭his is going to be all Lakota hemp, grown on Lakota [land], produced by Lakota, and we鈥檙e going to market it by Lakota,鈥� White Plume says.

The hemp world is changing. 

With 10,000 uses, hemp is one of the most versatile plants to grow鈥攁苍d in many ways can be a catalyst for change for Native peoples. We see a New Green Revolution in Indian Country, tied to justice, economics, restoration ecology, and a return-to-the-land movement, and it鈥檚 growing.

Just last year, the Fort Berthold Reservation, Colorado River tribes, Iowa Tribe (Kansas and Nebraska), Yurok, Sisseton and Santee Dakotas, to name a few, all got their hemp plans approved by the USDA, but more than that, tribal growers and thinkers are considering hemp as part of the future for Indian Country. And young leaders such as Muriel Young Bear, a Meskwaki woman from Iowa, and Marcus Grignon鈥攁 Menominee and project director at Hempstead Project HEART, a John Trudell initiative鈥攔epresent a new wave of commitment.听 听

Hemp Is the Way

With having either legalized, decriminalized, or medicalized marijuana, we鈥檙e experiencing a renaissance moment of cannabis, including hemp鈥攊ts non-psychoactive relative. And it鈥檚 about time. In , hemp will be foundational to the just transition, or the New Green Revolution. 

Let me explain. 

In the 20th century, Norman Borlaug, called the Father of the Green Revolution, gave us advanced agricultural technology, including genetically modified plants. It鈥檚 been said that the United States had a choice between a carbohydrate economy and a hydrocarbon economy鈥攁苍 economy that depends on petroleum, coal, and natural gas. As I鈥檝e written before, our current health, economic, and climate crises have proven we made the wrong choice.  

The carbohydrate economy is one based on plants. Hemp grows easily; it is resilient and doesn鈥檛 require huge amounts of chemicals or water, although there are specific soil requirements for it to grow. It can be foundational to such an economy.   

For the past five years, I鈥檝e been a hemp farmer, with permits from the state of Minnesota. My business is called Winona鈥檚 Hemp, and our research partner is Anishinaabe Agriculture. In 2020, we grew 20 acres of fiber hemp, and are working with that hemp to create a local economy. We send off our high-quality, field-retted hemp to processors to make cloth for canvas textiles. Our plan is to restore a hemp economy without a lot of chemicals and fossil fuels. The traditional history of hemp is without fossil fuels. We鈥檇 like to do as much to restore that practice as possible鈥攆ocused on appropriate technology, equity, and innovation.听

Our focus has been in fiber varieties, with an interest in reducing any fossil fuel use in production and in processing. We鈥檝e sourced varieties from Canada and Europe, with the help of Patagonia and our friends at the Lift Economy. We grew those seeds in fields on and around the White Earth Reservation. We did our best to plant with organic fertilizers, using fish emulsion and horse manure to build our soils. We learned from our experience and by talking to as many folks as possible.  

That said, we have a lot of experience here in small field crops, horse cultivation, and traditional varieties. We grew in small plots, hand seeded, and in a larger 20-acre plot, mechanically harvested with 40-year-old equipment.听

We also put in a field with horses because some of our partnerships here involve not only our horse-drawn agriculture, but also those of our Amish neighbors. We鈥檝e come to collaborate, as we have similar interests in terms of technology and geography.听

We provided seeds to tribes throughout the region, all interested in the same questions: How do you grow it? And, what can you do with it? 

What we found is that the plant will teach you: Don鈥檛 be in a rush. We are re-creating an industry from the seed to the product鈥攚hether smokable or for manufacturing. Some tribes are looking at materials processing鈥攃ar parts, bags, etc.鈥攐thers are looking at hempcrete, an improvement on concrete because of its sustainability and the fact that it is a carbon sink.

There鈥檚 a lot of room in the New Green Revolution. After all, if you are going to change the materials economy鈥攚ell, the whole economy鈥攜ou will need a lot of producers and also some folks in manufacturing. That鈥檚 the goal. Indeed, if hemp鈥檚 potential is realized, we can transform the materials economy, and that鈥檚 revolutionary. That鈥檚 our work now, to investigate, vet, and find technologies and economic models that can be replicated. 

And though tribes have been reluctant to get into the hemp and cannabis industry, particularly under the Trump era, there鈥檚 a in this new Green Revolution.

The Wisconsin-based Oneida tribe, strategically situated near Green Bay, Wisconsin, points to a , and hemp hurd, which can be used for insulation.

The Sisseton Tribe, based in present-day South and North Dakota, has been growing hemp for from the University of Minnesota. They鈥檙e looking at fiber hemp for a composite bag facility鈥攍ike shopping bags. The tribe has an industrial facility on the reservation, and also rail access.

are exploring hemp fiber with their Churro sheep wool to make a new specialty textile. from the Nez Perce reservation launched a magazine, , focused on tribal hemp and cannabis.

The Tudinu, or Desert People in Las Vegas, have a little 鈥渃olony鈥� downtown, a mile from the Strip. In l970, they were as the Las Vegas Paiutes, and in 2017, opened the NuWu Cannabis Marketplace. That鈥檚 a big deal, as in downtown Las Vegas. They may not have much land, but they have a big dispensary.

Tribes are in a unique position. Tribal sovereignty provides their governments leeway in the development of cannabis policies and will be a stabilizing force in turbulent times. Today, confusing regulations and lucrative growth in the cannabis industry set a complex scene, but tribal nations are in a position to continue a course they set.

Tribes have the potential to revolutionize the industry. We have the land鈥攚e just need a bit of time, technology, and finances. This is an opportunity for justice鈥攕ocial and ecological鈥攊n this post-petroleum economic transition. And we are ready to go.

Editor’s note: This article was edited at 11:30 a.m. on Feb. 26, 2021, to re-insert hyperlinks and include additional paragraphs that were cut from the print edition because of space constraints. See our corrections policy here.

As part of his training to become a certified community health worker, 10th-grader Malachi Ward needed to monitor family or community members鈥攃hecking their vital signs and setting health goals. When Ward first asked his mother, Fayron Epps, if he could monitor her, she expressed ambivalence.

Epps considered herself to be in good health. Although she didn鈥檛 have a primary care physician, she always attended her annual women鈥檚 health checkup and, despite the occasional headache, felt fine. She agreed to be a study participant because Ward needed five people to monitor. 鈥淚 was like 鈥極K, you can monitor me, but you鈥檙e not going to find anything鈥�,鈥� she recalls.

Except Ward did find something.

鈥淚 was really taken aback,鈥� Epps admitted. Her blood pressure was dangerously high. Over the course of two days, her systolic blood pressure peaked at 189, causing her to seek urgent care. What she assumed were benign headaches were a symptom of hypertension.

Epps is a health care professional herself, and understands the severity of undiagnosed hypertension. 鈥淚n the Black community, hypertension is a silent killer,鈥� she explains. If her son hadn鈥檛 taken those readings, .

Public health experts in Georgia, where Epps and her son live, often refer to the state as 鈥渢he two Georgias,鈥� to describe . The metropolitan Atlanta area is home to several universities with nationally recognized medical schools and training hospitals, and the city itself fosters many medical technology start-ups. However, huge disparities in access to healthcare exist across the state, and many residents never benefit from these excellent facilities.

According to the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease, around 60% of Georgians have 鈥攕ame as the national average, according to the CDC. But the numbers are higher for Georgians from poor and predominantly Black areas. Further, only 27.5% of Georgians earning below $25,000 per year enjoy 鈥淗igh Health Status,鈥� compared with 64.9% earning above $75,000, according to the United Health Foundation.

Chronic diseases like hypertension are easy to diagnose, and often can be mitigated with simple lifestyle changes. The problem is that many people in underserved communities remain undiagnosed, and have difficulty taking the necessary steps to improve their health.

How to fix this?

One solution involves community health workers (CHWs). These are lay people who work in their own communities to provide a link between the medical establishment and residents who might otherwise鈥攆or cultural, financial or logistical reasons鈥攏ot have access to medical care.

鈥淥ftentimes medical professionals advocate from the medical health care side,鈥� explains Christopher Ervin, former program manager of the Morehouse School of Medicine training program, which Ward participates in. 鈥淐ommunity health workers literally serve as the patient advocate.鈥�

When there鈥檚 a limited professional healthcare workforce, CHWs help bridge the gap and fulfill basic medical roles without the top-down science approach that is characteristic of most doctors. This is especially helpful in underserved urban and rural communities with few medical facilities, and poor education and employment opportunities for professional healthcare workers.

But in the U.S., community health workers are in short supply.

The concept of lay people advocating on behalf of more vulnerable community members is not a new one. However, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics only . Compared with countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, where community health worker programs have existed since the 1960s, the U.S. has been slow to recognize their value and formalize their role.

As of 2016, have a mechanism for licensing or certifying community health workers. Without clinical licenses, Medicare and Medicaid can鈥檛 reimburse healthcare providers for employing community health workers, and healthcare providers have no incentive to invest in community healthcare training.

Morehouse Community Health Workers Fill in the Gap

Arletha Livingston came to Morehouse School of Medicine in 2014 as director of the Innovation Learning Laboratory for Population Health. Initially her research focused on helping chronically ill individuals in underserved Atlanta communities. While conducting this research she saw first-hand how vital community health workers were, and learned about the worker shortage.

Livingston鈥檚 key idea was to train high school students as community health workers. They are at the age where health interventions could make a difference in their own lives, preventing adulthood chronic diseases from taking root, she explains. They are also still contemplating career options and whether to pursue college education.

In 2016, Livingston launched the 鈥攖he first in the U.S. to train high-schoolers. The initial cohort came from four schools in East Point, Georgia, where Livingston conducted her earlier studies on chronically ill residents. In East Point, a city with a large Black population, Drive 14 miles north to the predominantly White area of Buckhead and the average life expectancy is 87.

Each year, around 20 rising 10th鈥�12th grade students undergo a five-week intensive summer training to learn about chronic illnesses, health issues and basic health monitoring techniques. For the rest of the academic year they monitor and set health goals with community members, and work in teams to organize a community project, such as a health fair.

Students also shadow Morehouse medical residents and learn about medical career options, as well as how to conduct motivational interviews, giving them the language to talk about health issues. And they learn about food as medicine, visiting urban farms and taking cooking courses.

Most students hadn鈥檛 heard of community health workers before they joined the program. For Genesis Velasco, a senior at Morrow High School, the Morehouse program helped to put a name and job title to something she was already doing. 鈥淚 had a lot of family members with chronic illnesses鈥擨 served as a translator for them during medical visits,鈥� explains Velasco, who speaks Spanish and English.

In many cases, families and community members found it easier to talk to the high-schoolers than to medical professionals. 鈥淚 wasn鈥檛 someone in a lab coat judging them or not understanding their culture,鈥� says Velasco.

And, adds former participant Prayer Idowu, 鈥淭hey loved the idea of having someone tell them what they needed at a free cost, at home.鈥�

Karyn Heckstall, now a freshman at Georgia Gwinnett College, believed family members found it easier to talk to her about their medical issues because they could use a familiar vernacular and references to convey information. 鈥淭hey don鈥檛 feel that pressure to say something in a specific way in order for a medical professional to understand,鈥� she says.

One thing Livingston and Ervin realized later is that mental health training and care was vital to the program鈥檚 success. 鈥淲e started recognizing that because students reside in these highly stressed communities they have their own mental health challenges,鈥� says Ervin.

The organizers brought in a social worker to assist participants鈥� self-care, and help family members with mental health problems. 鈥淲e think all community health worker programs should have a Master of Social Work professional liaison to support the students,鈥� Ervin adds.

The program is only four years old, and former participants are still completing their education. While the students see the value in community health work, it鈥檚 an entry-level position and many want to pursue college and advanced degrees. The Morehouse training program encourages students to explore their options. It鈥檚 unknown, however, how many of the students will actually enter medical professions or work as a community health worker.

Velasco wants to become a cardiologist focusing on underserved immigrant communities. Idowu decided her interests lay in law rather than medicine, and credits the program with helping clarify her career plans. Ward plans to become an athletic trainer.

The small scale of the program鈥攐nly 75 students have completed it to date鈥攎eans the impact these students are having is small and hard to measure.

Nonetheless, the Morehouse team believes their program will have a national impact on the number of community health workers. They believe the program has encouraged Georgia, and other states, to see the value in supporting community health workers and integrating them into the healthcare system through formalized certification and licensing programs.

Expanding the Program

Georgia is currently developing a certification program for its community health workers, and both Livingston and Ervin serve on the state鈥檚 They use their program as evidence to inform policy discussions. When the Georgia Department of Public Health proposed a minimum certification age of 21 for community health workers, Livingston and Ervin argued鈥攂ased on the competency displayed by their high schoolers鈥攖hat the minimum age be lowered to 16.

After hearing Epps鈥� story, Livingston and Ervin became convinced the program should expand further. Monitoring simple vital signs has the potential to save lives. 鈥淲e believe every high school student should be trained as a community health worker.鈥�

And they鈥檙e expanding the program based on that belief. In spring 2019, a pilot study of four high schoolers from Columbus, Georgia, was launched to assess the effectiveness of the program in a rural setting where the team has seen many of the same issues surrounding job opportunities and access to care that they see in underserved urban settings. They鈥檝e also adopted a youth-friendly online format, compatible with smartphones and featuring virtual reality modules.

Now anyone around the globe can take the course.

Even before the #metoo movement trained the spotlight on gender inequity and its impact across the globe, there were organizations doing the hard work to address these at-times violent failings.

From closing the wage gap and protecting reproductive rights to ending gender-based sexual exploitation, the push to support and empower women and nonbinary people has .

Recent attention has forced important conversations about gender into the public square鈥攐n social media, into office breakrooms, and around kitchen tables. And beyond the big, headline grabbing, celebrity-focused movements are efforts by grassroots organizations working to make a big difference in the area of gender equity. We highlight three of them here.

The LGBTQ Victory Institute

From judges to school board members to members of Congress, elected officials who openly identify as LGBTQ hold office across the United States. They serve in nearly every state, thanks in large part to the work of the .

One of several national organizations preparing candidates for political office, the Victory Institute has worked to elevate and advance LGBTQ leadership nationwide for more than two decades. In 1993, when it began, fewer than 50 gay and lesbian people held such positions.

Three years ago, when Victory Institute created Out for America, a map tracking LBGTQ elected officials across the country, it identified fewer than 500. The 2016 election results鈥攁苍d more recently the presidential candidacy of Mayor Pete Buttigieg鈥攈ave energized potential candidates across the country, says Ruben Gonzales, Victory Institute鈥檚 vice president.  

Every training class since Donald Trump鈥檚 election has been at capacity.鈥疭till, LGBTQ people in political office nationwide represent fewer than 0.2% of all elected positions.

鈥淲e see an opportunity to build a bench at the earliest levels, what our opponents [of LGBTQ rights] have been doing for decades鈥攃ity mayor鈥檚 offices and the state legislatures, working their way up,鈥�&苍产蝉辫;Gonzales says.

Each year, the Victory Institute brings to Capitol Hill a cohort of interns across the gender, race, and even geographic spectrum, creating a pipeline into LGBTQ political leadership. And through its international program, the organization works with partners to train and . 

At the core of Victory Institute鈥檚 work is its boot camp where potential candidates learn what it takes to run for office鈥攆rom making fundraising goals to writing a field plan. LGBTQ elected officials attend and share their stories and experiences with participants. Victory Institute also helps candidates to publicly come out鈥攈elping them shape their messaging and connecting them with other LGBTQ officials who can provide mentorship.

The training also helps ground unreasonable ambitions, Gonzales says.鈥€淲e have people come to the training and say, 鈥業 wanna run against Ted Cruz for Senate,鈥欌€� without fully realizing what it takes to do that, he says. 鈥淧eople are fired up and want to make change. The Victory Institute can show them that we need them just as much鈥攊f not more so鈥攐n the school boards and in local places.鈥�

That was true for , whom no one鈥攊ncluding Democratic Party leaders in her home state of Colorado鈥攅xpected to defeat her Republican opponent during the 2018 general election. Yet Titone garnered 439 more votes than her challenger in the conservative 27th district to become Colorado鈥檚 first out transgender state lawmaker鈥� in the country.

A geologist and software developer, Titone came out as a transgender woman in her late 30s and immediately became active in LGBTQ issues. When a party official suggested a run for state office, she was dubious. 鈥淣obody like me had ever really won a state office before, and my district hadn鈥檛 seen a Democrat since they redrew it following the 2010 census.鈥�

Titone attributes her victory to personally canvassing her district鈥攌nocking on doors and connecting with voters. The Victory Institute training, she says, models, as best it can, the experience LGBTQ candidates face on the campaign trail鈥攁苍d that鈥檚 different from other training.鈥�

But with so few transgender candidates overall, she says, 鈥渢he curriculum is still based on the LGB portion of that experience.

鈥淵ou can apply a lot of the same techniques but being trans is still a special case, and we鈥檙e all starting to really learn about what works and what doesn鈥檛 work and how to manage.鈥�

Breakthrough

If you could openly share your story, how would you do it? What would you say?

, a human rights organization that uses bold, creative action to disrupt the cultural status quo, has launched a multimedia project to give girls and gender non-conforming youth of color just such a platform.

The project seeks to shift perception of marginalized communities by giving voice to young people at the intersection of race, immigration, gender, and sexuality who rarely see themselves represented in media. Throughout 2020, it will capture the stories of 75 young people, offering a snapshot into their lives through their own individual forms of art. It will feature a documentary film series, a traveling photo exhibit, community events, and an interactive online storytelling hub. 

Priya Kvam, associate director of strategic partnerships and initiatives, says her.stories aligns with Breakthrough鈥檚 partnership strategy of building relationships not only with young people, but also with a broad network of organizations, from student groups to academic institutions, that share a commitment to social justice.

鈥淩eally, the goal,鈥� she says, 鈥渋s to penetrate pop culture in such a way that people not only see and imagine other communities differently, and in a way that is much more respectful and affirming and celebratory, but also [to] look at structural violence and different kinds of human rights violations as they play out in real time.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

The project will include the stories of young people like Ta鈥橪or D鈥橸onna Mosley, a Black, queer actor, model, and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Mosley says they want to showcase the agency and privilege they have in their identity and through their work. 

鈥淭his project gave me room to share what my queerness is to me,鈥� says Mosley. 鈥淚t highlights the importance of celebrating yourself through the hardships, violence, hate, and cruelty, and I hope people feel that, too, when they see me doing it.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

 If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice

Perhaps no single issue important to women and nonbinary people has come under greater attack in recent years than reproductive health. With the ultimate goal of reversing Roe v. Wade, an alarming number of states have restricted access to abortions or moved to ban them outright.

It was within that gathering storm, in spring 2019, that an organization of lawyers, law students, and legal activists, working for years to protect reproductive freedom, with another group advocating for people criminalized for . Together they formed , a single movement committed to protecting those made vulnerable by the seismic shifts in reproductive health care. 

The group鈥檚 work is fiercely intersectional, focusing on racial, economic, immigrant, gender, LGBTQ, and disability justice, and recognizing that the law isn鈥檛 always designed for everyone and often works against certain communities.

鈥淲hat we鈥檙e building now is a movement of lawyers and law students who will transform the law and policy landscape, so that everyone can decide if, when, and how to define, create, and sustain their family,鈥� says Andrea Grimes, communications manager.

One key initiative involves working with other organizations to help improve abortion access for young people through such strategies as eliminating parental involvement laws. 

Another focuses on protecting access to self-managed abortions鈥攖he use of non-clinical methods to end a pregnancy鈥攃are that has become ever more urgent in this fraught environment. 

In a brief filed in a Louisiana case, , pending in the U.S. Supreme Court, If/When/How argues that with abortion access being diminished, there鈥檚 growing concern people will be investigated by law enforcement for choosing to end their pregnancies or buy abortion pills online. Those most vulnerable will be people of color.

鈥淭he specter of the 鈥榖ack-alley鈥� is now more historical fact than present concern due to the availability of abortion with pills鈥攂ut the fear of prosecution is real,鈥� says Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel for If/When/How.  

鈥淧eople who prefer clinical abortion care must be able to access it, and those who choose self-managed abortion鈥攐r who are forced to rely on it when clinics close鈥攎ust not be criminalized,鈥� she adds. 鈥淲hatever someone鈥檚 reason for ending a pregnancy, the law should protect them, not punish them.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

His swift metamorphosis was shocking. On-screen body transformations were less ubiquitous then than they are today, as recruits more and more henched heroes. But at only 17, Lautner was also observably rare in an industry notorious for . Teen shows like The OC, Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, and Teen Wolf often featured actors well into their 20s. These casting practices helped create between real teen bodies and those reflected back to them鈥攁苍d contributed to growing anxieties among teens, including boys, who literally couldn鈥檛 size up to their fictional counterparts. 

A found that between 30% and 40% of men surveyed have anxiety about their weight and up to 85% are dissatisfied with their muscularity, while found pooled correlations between body dissatisfaction and anxiety and depression in men. It鈥檚 difficult to determine whether these climbing figures are symptomatic of heightened anxiety or of waning stigma, but we know boys are continually being .

鈥淏oys and young men have, in recent decades, become exposed to messages that women have been getting for much longer,鈥� says , an attending psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. In 2000, Phillips co-wrote a book called that explored why boys are increasingly devoted to the pursuit of physical perfection. 鈥淭he theory was that men started getting messages, starting in the 鈥�70s, 鈥�80s, certainly in the 鈥�90s, that they had to bulk up and be more muscular,鈥� Phillips says. From the late 1970s into the 鈥�90s, G.I. Joe and other action figures became visibly more macho, male models and actors heaved more muscle, and the swelling success of 鈥攁 touring male-stripper dance troupe in the early 鈥�80s鈥攅videnced a market where men鈥檚 bodies could be prized, adored, and commodified. 

During this time, attitudes toward fitness also evolved. 鈥淚t鈥檚 important to realize that the gym, which in so many Western cultures is a prevalent fixture of people鈥檚 lives, is relatively recent,鈥� says , associate professor of history at The New School and author of the 2022 book . Her book charts how, beginning in the late 1950s, the gym refurbished itself into an institution that was both legitimate and legitimizing. She cites people like gym developer , who rebranded fitness spaces into luxury commodities, fitted with flashy equipment and tropical fish tanks, to signal not only a focus on self-improvement, but affluence too. 

鈥淭here鈥檚 something about the gym that is both about the body that it ultimately gives you鈥攍ooking like you go to the gym, looking like you鈥檙e making good use of your leisure time鈥攂ut then there鈥檚 also the activity of joining,鈥� Petrzela says. In this world, a fit body not only speaks to your strength but also shouts your success. But the hunt for muscular growth is also inexorably tied to the social enforcement of masculinity, a perpetual anxiety to prove oneself, to respond to threat. The inclination is to dominate your body, and in doing so, carry a body perceived to dominate others. 

It鈥檚 this need to dominate that has incidentally fueled America鈥檚 most notable fitness trends. propelled Dwight D. Eisenhower to introduce the Presidential Fitness Test in the 1950s, ostensibly preparing American youth for military service in the aftermath of World War II. The events of 9/11 were followed by . Michelle Obama鈥檚 Let鈥檚 Move! program came two years after the release of a report that found 27% of people between the ages of 17 and 24 were . 鈥淥ur military leaders know that this is not just a diet issue; it鈥檚 not just a health issue,鈥� Obama said in 2012. 鈥溾€�&苍产蝉辫;

The pursuit of the physical ideal hasn鈥檛 slowed over the past decade, and Phillips and Petrzela both point to two overlapping phenomena that help explain its continued choke hold. First, there鈥檚 the of and . 鈥淥nce anabolic steroids became more available, a lot of the images boys and young men were seeing weren鈥檛 real. They鈥檙e a product of drugs,鈥� says Phillips. 

This culture of hypermuscularity has also been flamed by social media. 鈥淲hereas before you looked at magazines, or television, or went to the movies, there are now influencers, bodybuilders, and 鈥樷€� who are online 24 hours a day not only showing off their bodies, but also instructing, 鈥楬ey, you can get this by doing my workout, or taking this supplement,鈥欌€� Petrzela says. Shuffling through a sea of shirtless, sculpted bodies in the underwear section of a department store was one thing, but hourly exposure to algorithms primed to prey on your innermost anxieties is another wildfire altogether. 

Among boys and men, psychiatrists have even diagnosed a condition called 鈥渕uscle dysmorphia鈥� or 鈥�,鈥� which Phillips says is 鈥渁ctually a form of body dysmorphic disorder, which a lot of people don鈥檛 realize, defined as a preoccupation with a nonexistent or slight defect in one鈥檚 appearance that causes significant emotional distress or significant interference in daily functioning.鈥� These behaviors might include excessively working out and weight lifting as well as developing abnormal eating habits. 

There鈥檚 also a troubling propensity for steroid use, which carries and increases the risk of . 鈥淚t鈥檚 worrisome because it鈥檚 easy to trivialize, but for some people who have very severe body dysmorphic disorder, the ,鈥� Phillips says. Medication and cognitive behavioral therapy are effective treatments, but cultural issues also necessitate cultural responses. 

In 2017, requiring disclaimers to be added to retouched photographs of models. in 2023 that would require social media influencers to disclose when content or images have been edited, and prohibit them from posting paid content promoting cosmetic surgeries. Both pieces of legislation aim to regulate a lucrative, and largely feminized, image economy. Hollywood has yet to meet a similar reckoning. If anything, it鈥檚 increasingly routine for male actors, including Marvel stars Chris , Chris , Chris , and Dave , to promote their fitness journeys alongside their franchises, a profitable ploy to spotlight the methods that make them appear superhuman.

A renewed focus on young men鈥檚 pain is imminent. 鈥淏oys and men are really struggling now,鈥� said writer Richard Reeves in a March 2023 , pointing to widening gender gaps in school and academic performance, workforce retention, and health outcomes where men are observably floundering. 鈥淧overty, school quality, family instability 鈥� dramatically affects boys more than girls,鈥� said Reeves. He further asserted that in our reluctance to consider men鈥檚 pain, we鈥檝e created a vacuum too easily filled by the contours of retrograde masculinists such as , , and . 

Now in his 30s, Lautner has spoken candidly about his post-Twilight experience. 鈥淲hen I was 16 through 20 years old, starring in this franchise where my character is known for taking his shirt off every other second, no, or going to affect me in the future with body image,鈥� Lautner said on a February 2023 episode of his podcast, . 鈥淏ut now looking back at it, of course it did, and of course it is going to.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Lautner isn鈥檛 the only young man in Hollywood opening up about the emotional and mental weight of chasing physical perfection. 鈥淎ny shoot where you鈥檙e basically 鈥榮exy鈥� in any type of way can really mess with your psyche, because you鈥檙e struggling every day to live up to that guy,鈥� singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes told in 2021. In March 2023, Kit Connor, star of Netflix鈥檚 coming-of-age romance Heartstopper, shared his own body transformation story. , the 19-year-old replied, 鈥淭here was some people on the internet going: 鈥楬e鈥檚 a bit too skinny.鈥欌€� Connor鈥檚 plan included eating more and training harder. 

Immortalized on gym walls worldwide are four words: 鈥渘o pain, no gain,鈥� a rallying cry of persistence, or a warning call for all the emotional sacrifices and mental demands. Perhaps it鈥檚 time to forge new mantras, fresh scripts for masculinity that free us from anxieties that prey on our minds and our bodies. 

鈥淚 never called for help again,鈥� she says. Today Brooks is a police abolitionist who leads the in Oakland, California. 鈥淲hat I know now, after being in this work for almost two decades, [is that] wide swaths of the Black and Brown community don鈥檛 call [911],鈥� she says. 鈥淏ecause we know that when we dial that number, it鈥檚 very rarely help that actually comes. What comes are agents of an institution who are trained to suppress, control, and subjugate.鈥�

Black Americans have long known that interactions with police often do more harm than good. The nation as a whole has repeatedly witnessed video evidence of racialized police brutality, from the 1991 in Southern California to the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the deadly assault in 2023 of in Memphis, Tennessee.

Police reformists often cast law enforcement as an inherently 鈥済ood鈥� institution that simply needs better , more sophisticated and , and greater to avoid aberrant incidents of violence. But others on the front lines of movements challenging police brutality, such as , have spent decades calling for policing and incarceration to be abolished altogether.

For abolitionists like Brooks, the Nichols killing was evidence that police reforms haven鈥檛 worked. It didn鈥檛 matter that the officers charged with assaulting Nichols were wearing body cameras (which they either removed or didn鈥檛 use), or that all five of those charged are Black. 鈥淎ll cops are blue,鈥� she says, because 鈥渙nce you put on that uniform, that badge, you have made a decision to join an institution [that] from its inception, its job has been to arrest, kidnap, [and] kill Black folks and Indigenous folks and Brown folks.鈥�

Building Up to Abolition 

To most Americans, the word 鈥渁bolition鈥� is most readily associated with the in the United States that . It鈥檚 no coincidence that the movement to end modern-day policing has adopted the same terminology. According to the NAACP, 鈥淭he origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the 鈥楽lave Patrol.鈥欌€� The police鈥檚 of Black and Brown people confirms these parallels.

Police abolitionism today is centered on demands to 鈥渄efund the police,鈥� an idea sometimes referred to as a 鈥溾€� strategy of transitioning government funding away from policing and toward community resources. Others summarize the notion as 鈥�.鈥� But the basic idea is the same鈥攁 world in which human needs are adequately met is one where police are obsolete. 鈥淲hole, healthy people do not hurt people,鈥� explains Brooks. 鈥淭raumatized, wounded, desperate people do so.鈥�

Abolition, according to Brooks, is 鈥渢aking the money that we鈥檝e been putting into bloated police departments all across this country, redirecting that [into] the things that actually keep people safe, that actually keep violence from happening in the first place.鈥� When people are provided with the foundational elements of safety and happiness鈥攈igh-quality housing, stable employment, education, food, health care, etc.鈥攖here is less need for policing.

Brooks says that ultimately abolition isn鈥檛 only about tearing things down. 鈥淚t鈥檚 about building equitable, just, and humane systems that will work for everyone.鈥�

Still, fully funding people鈥檚 needs may not eradicate all violence. What recourse could there be for a 19-year-old Black woman experiencing abuse from an intimate partner鈥攁s Brooks did鈥攊n a world without police? In January 2020, APTP launched , a project offering police-free options for those seeking help in an emergency. In August of that year, APTP launched . 

Brooks frames these projects as mutual aid. When someone鈥檚 in distress, they can call a nonemergency number to speak with a 鈥渃aring, trained volunteer鈥� in order to create what Brooks calls 鈥渁 participant-determined pathway鈥� to safety. Volunteers can attend virtual community to learn crisis intervention and first aid in emergency situations. She sees such projects as models for a post-police future. 鈥淏adges and guns are not what we need to respond to community crisis,鈥� she emphasizes. 鈥淚t is trained, caring, compassionate community members.鈥�

There鈥檚 an App for That 

Like Brooks, is part of a growing movement of abolitionists who are putting their politics into practice. Ayele, who has worked with the since 2014, is the organizing director of , a Black-led team of software developers based in Oakland that 鈥渂uilds infrastructure for the future of community crisis response.鈥� At its outset, Raheem was a project designed in the vein of a virtual 鈥渃op watch,鈥� Ayele says. 

The project featured a chatbot that could receive and catalog complaints against police, and connect those who filed complaints with community members and services that could provide support, including organizers, lawyers, and therapists. But the team at Raheem soon realized that the platform didn鈥檛 directly reduce police brutality, and that, echoing Brooks鈥� experience, many people in the community were reluctant to resort to police.

鈥淲e know that communities have really been providing care for one another even prior to the existence of police,鈥� says Ayele. Raheem wanted to 鈥渃reate a way for people to access that care without having to rely on police and 鈥� be exposed to police violence.鈥� So the organization pivoted to creating a new digital tool called PATCH, an acronym for 鈥淧eople and Technology for Community Health,鈥� that helps people access care as an alternative to policing.

The app is an electronic dispatch system for 鈥渃ommunity-based crisis response teams,鈥� or CCRTs. Ayele explains these teams can use the app to connect the communities they serve with the care they need. For example, 鈥淧ATCH can be used to coordinate volunteers. It can be used to schedule shifts for crisis response teams. It can also be used to categorize different calls and also texts that 鈥� the organizations that we work with receive,鈥� says Ayele.

She calls PATCH 鈥渢he tech solution to the issue of police violence and community crisis response.鈥� Although the project is still being developed, Ayele says that organizations and small collectives of people wanting to create CCRTs in their neighborhoods, what she calls 鈥渃are pods,鈥� can sign up to receive training and a demonstration of how PATCH can help them coordinate community care.

鈥淎n organization uses PATCH to receive the calls that they get, and then [that organization] 鈥� respond[s] in their local area,鈥� says Ayele. 鈥淪o, it鈥檚 really based on people, and people power, and people getting involved, and also people trusting in themselves and in their own empathy to know that they can provide care to someone in need.鈥� Organizations using PATCH can also connect with a broader national network of mobile crisis teams, health and social service providers, and abolitionist organizers. 

Ayele cites a common critique of community-based crisis response: 鈥淭hese people aren鈥檛 trained. These people aren鈥檛 able to answer a crisis call.鈥� That鈥檚 why PATCH provides trainings that she says are 鈥渋n partnership with local community organizations that help any and everybody learn how to de-escalate a crisis, especially one where someone may be in danger,鈥� she says.

Although Raheem is based in Oakland, the PATCH app is intended for national use. That said, Ayele notes that they 鈥渞eally wanted to create PATCH in a way that only organizations and collectives of people that share our abolitionist do-no-harm values can use it.鈥� The Massachusetts-based (Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team), a local group led by Black women, has been using PATCH since November 2021. Cambridge HEART鈥檚 core values include 鈥渘o police involvement.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

The , which provides nonpolice support for unhoused people in Colorado, has since 2021 as a way to access a nonemergency network of trained volunteers. They plan to launch their rapid-response program that uses the app in July 2023. According to DASHR鈥檚 website, the organization believes in 鈥渢ransforming safety to include meeting basic human needs like housing, hunger, and healthcare to be high priorities in ensuring public safety.鈥�

Abolition Goes Viral

Although practical alternatives to police are already in the works, the goal of achieving actual abolition remains elusive. Reina Sultan, one of the co-creators of the website , says that after George Floyd鈥檚 murder, 鈥渁 lot of people wanted 鈥� a taste of what abolition would look like, and very clear demands that they could make to government officials or when they were in the streets protesting.鈥� Sultan and a group of nine others scrambled to capture abolitionist demands that were already in circulation in a succinct and shareable format.

Within a few days the website #8toAbolition was live, and, in Sultan鈥檚 words, it ended up 鈥済oing viral.鈥� Sultan is careful to note that the is not comprehensive. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not incorporating every single element of what abolition could look like.鈥� Still, first on the list is the most well-known abolitionist demand: Defund the police. There鈥檚 no mystery behind this oft-debated idea, she notes. 鈥淲hat it means is taking money out of the police budget and diverting it to different things.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

The rest of the list flows naturally from that first step and articulates a reimagining of safety and freedom from state violence. For example, steps 2, 3, and 5鈥斺€渄emilitarize communities,鈥� 鈥渞emove police from schools,鈥� and 鈥渞epeal laws that criminalize survival鈥濃€攁llude to the overpolicing of neighborhoods, inner-city schools, and unhoused communities that low-income people of color are disproportionately impacted by. Step 4, 鈥渇ree people from prisons and jails,鈥� references the fact that those same communities are subject to . 鈥淲hy should people be punished for their desperation when governments could solve that issue by feeding and housing people?鈥� asks Sultan.

Sultan is quick to clarify that step 6, 鈥渋nvest in community self-governance,鈥� is not the same as 鈥渃ommunity policing,鈥� a reformist response to police violence. 鈥淐ommunity policing is just repackaged policing,鈥� says Sultan. 鈥淐ommunity self-governance is when people who live in the community are the ones making decisions about their own communities.鈥� In addition to efforts like organizing tenants鈥� unions, self-governance can take the form of non-emergency-police projects like Brooks鈥� Mental Health First in Oakland and Sacramento, and the community-based crisis response teams that the PATCH app鈥檚 founders support.

Transitioning away from police requires building up safety and care for all people. 鈥淥f course, people need food, and education, and a lot of other things to survive and thrive,鈥� says Sultan. 鈥淏ut it is extremely difficult to do anything if you do not have safe and secure housing.鈥� That鈥檚 why step 7 of the #8toAbolition plan is to 鈥減rovide safe housing for everyone.鈥�

The eighth and final step toward a world free of police is to 鈥渋nvest in care, not cops.鈥� 鈥淚t kind of brackets the whole thing,鈥� says Sultan. 鈥淪o, if the first part is to defund the police, then this is what we鈥檙e funding. And there are so many things that are underfunded in our communities that people really need.鈥� Those things include noncoercive mental health care, as well as public transportation, community fridges, free education, and more. 鈥淲e are just not funding any of these things because policing and prisons cost so much money,鈥� Sultan explains. 鈥淎nd if we weren鈥檛 putting so much money there, the taxes that we鈥檙e paying could go toward making people safe and secure in a way that鈥檚 actually meaningful.鈥�

Although meeting basic human needs as an antidote to policing sounds reasonable, 鈥渟elling鈥� the idea to the public remains a challenge. Brooks laments how 鈥渕ost of us can鈥檛 even imagine a world without law enforcement鈥� because of what she calls 鈥溾€濃€攖he pervasive media narrative that police are a force for good. Luckily, says Sultan, there鈥檚 a deep well of information about and work toward realizing abolition. 鈥淢ost of that does come from Black women, queer scholars, and people who have spent a lot of time ideating around abolition,鈥� she says. Sultan and the co-creators of #8toAbolition drew ideas from these sources to frame their pathway toward a police-free world.

Still, a website alone is not enough to manifest such a world. 鈥淭he amount of energy and effort it takes for an organizer to have those one-by-one conversations鈥攖hat, along with the creation of models that can be replicated,鈥� is what Brooks says it will take to end policing. But she鈥檚 heartened by the fact that these issues are being discussed more openly now. When it comes to the public embrace of abolition, Brooks says, 鈥淚 think we are seeing a sea change that, if we鈥檙e smart as organizers, we can exploit to create a watershed moment.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

This year, members of the federal Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee will convene to update their recommendations. But this effort to help guide Americans toward a 鈥渂alanced鈥� diet is also the product of lobbying by the dairy, grain, and meat industries, which have long been accused of pursuing dollars at the expense of health. 

Considering the impact of environmental racism and the number of food deserts in the United States, it鈥檚 clear that food production and consumption are not just about personal decisions. It鈥檚 about politics and systems that determine who has healthy grocery options available and who does not. Existing guidelines not only ignore the needs of the climate and rely on intensive factory farming practices, but they assign blame for poor bodily health and quality of life based on 鈥渃hoices鈥� that, for many people, simply do not exist. 

What would it look like to be able to eat with justice鈥攕ocial, racial, economic, and climate鈥攊n mind?

Honor tribal treaties and food systems

Before we talk about eating, we have to talk about the land on which our food is grown. In contrast to the American colonial prioritization of extracting resources from the ground, rivers, and oceans, Indigenous food systems are built on a relationship with the land. But when Native peoples were forced to leave their lands鈥攁long with their soils and place-based expertise鈥攖hey were robbed of the healthy diets they had developed over generations.

, , , and have dispossessed Native people of two kinds of wealth: the ability to truly self-govern and manage their land, and the ability to build capital, which would enable individuals to make choices about how to live a healthy lifestyle. 

鈥淲hat we鈥檝e noticed, and what I鈥檝e aimed to do, is promote the simple enrichment of diets through our traditional foods, because we know that eating just one traditional food meal a week changes the blood,鈥� says Valerie Segrest, a member of the Muckleshoot tribe and a director with the Native American Agriculture Fund. According to a , Indigenous peoples steward 80 percent of the world鈥檚 biodiversity鈥攑lant and animal species that are essential to climate health. 

But the U.S. government has an abysmal record of breaching treaties made with Native governments. And by replacing Native food systems with industrialized versions, Segrest says the U.S. harms the land and public health simultaneously. Native leaders, U.S. scientists, and public health officials say that , , until the mid-20th century. Now, Native people have the highest rate of diabetes of any racial and ethnic group in the U.S. 

Segrest has worked with all of the tribes in Washington state to teach the importance of traditional ingredients and says that Native foods are the remedy to this health crisis: 鈥淲hat鈥檚 good for an Indian is good for everybody.鈥�

Grow knowledge and anti-racist practices

Ayanna Jones is a Black farmer, educator, and community organizer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She lives in a majority-Black community, which runs up against a number of institutionalized racist practices. 鈥淔ood justice is huge for us,鈥� Jones says, detailing how her community鈥檚 food options are limited to local grocery stores that often sell low-quality or spoiled produce. 

The stores offering higher quality and healthier options are intentionally located in the wealthy White communities, where customers are thought to be more interested in and able to pay for them. For those who can afford to travel to these neighborhoods to shop, their dollars end up leaving their own communities. 

With this in mind, Jones says she began to think about what it would look like to grow her own food, to become self-sufficient. She wanted to find a way to show young people in the community that their bodies were worthy of food that is not rotten or laden with sugar and salt. 

In 2015, Jones started the to provide anti-food-apartheid education and community programs, including gardening for seniors and summer camps for youth. Here she teaches young people how to produce their own food and how their bodies feel when they eat food that鈥檚 good for them. 

鈥淚 give them that mental food,鈥� Jones says. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e discovering the myths they鈥檝e been given about food and food justice.鈥� But even when one learns that sugar-filled cereal won鈥檛 sustain a child throughout the school day, if parents aren鈥檛 paid a wage that allows them to purchase healthier options, it鈥檚 difficult to turn knowledge into action. Still, Jones believes that 鈥渋nformation is power鈥濃€攖hat knowing is better than not knowing. 鈥淚鈥檓 growing to educate,鈥� she says.  

Shift food policy by buying regionally

In nearly every corner of the country, a liter of soda than it is to buy a head of broccoli; a that a 鈥渉ealthy鈥� diet cost $550 more per person per year than an 鈥渦nhealthy鈥� one. For a family of four, that鈥檚 an extra $2,200 each year. 鈥淭he system is set up to feed poor people more poorly,鈥� says fifth-generation farmer Andy Dunham, who . 鈥淭he only reason that soda is so cheap [is because] the United States government subsidizes the hell out of those crops: sugar cane and corn.鈥� Billions of federal dollars are disbursed annually growing : corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice, and to industries like big beef and big pork rather than small family farmers. 

鈥淚 don鈥檛 think people have any idea about how much we spend on policy that [is] environmentally degrading,鈥� Dunham says. To combat today鈥檚 industrial production, he calls for establishing ecologically diverse farming systems and a managed grazing system that allows soil to sequester carbon. And empowering people to know the difference. If consumers and voters understand the environmental implications of what they鈥檙e purchasing and which businesses they鈥檙e supporting through their consumption, then food policy at the federal level might look different. 鈥淗aving a food literate society allows for policy to be sane,鈥� he says.

In terms of what that translates to on the plate, Dunham says climate justice eating is about having a region-based diet. That doesn鈥檛 always mean picking plants over meat; it means taking into consideration where your food was raised and what kinds of energy, chemicals, and transport went into that process. You may need to change your approach to menu planning to reflect what鈥檚 in season, rather than relying on production somewhere that鈥檚 enjoying summer during your winter. This approach supports local farmers and keeps the carbon footprint of your food relatively low. 

Support community-run collectives

All forms of structural inequalities are made visible in the industrialized food system鈥攆rom production to consumption, says Victor Brazelton, a community activist and educator with Planting Justice, an Oakland, California-based grassroots organization that works to cultivate food sovereignty, economic justice, and community healing through individual and communal empowerment. Planting Justice hires organizers, farmers, and activists who were formerly incarcerated. Part of its work is to combat current-day colonization and community displacement by building access to organic food through community gardens and educating kids about what healthy food looks and tastes like. 鈥淔ood is medicine,鈥� Brazelton says. Sustainable farming practices heal people and the planet.  

鈥淐ommunity first starts wherever you are,鈥� Brazelton adds, which includes acknowledging and collaborating with the people who originally stewarded the land. In the East Bay of California, the state government forced Ohlone tribes from their land through violence, but despite this, they still live and practice Ohlone culture today in what鈥檚 now called Oakland. Planting Justice developed a partnership with the Sogorea Te鈥� Land Trust, which works to repossess stolen Ohlone land. Planting Justice is currently working to pay off a 2-acre land parcel, and when it does, it will hand the deed over to the Land Trust. 

鈥淲hat鈥檚 really important is people having agency over their food,鈥� says Molly Scalise of FRESHFARM, a D.C.-based food justice organization. FRESHFARM brings healthy food directly to communities through farmers markets, in-school programs, and gleaning programs, which distribute unsold produce to shelters. The organization also runs a farm-share through local schools, where parents can purchase produce at a subsidized rate using SNAP benefits. Scalise says this is necessarily a collaborative effort with D.C. residents to make sure it鈥檚 鈥渘ot invasive or intrusive.鈥� She says solutions arise from working with neighbors and communities.

The goal is making options more accessible to consumers in order to impact community health while ensuring that local farms remain profitable. 

Develop relationship-oriented food systems

How can we begin to talk about justice when those most impacted have the least access to decision-making tools and systems? That question is at the center of Jamie Harvie鈥檚 work. Harvie is the executive director of the Institute for a Sustainable Future, which works to build solutions for ecological health through advocacy and research. A food justice diet, he says, must mitigate climate impact, reduce poverty, and ensure that decision-making processes include those most impacted. 

Ultimately, Harvie says, what鈥檚 good for the climate will be good for people too. But White, Western, colonial systems have conditioned many of us out of the understanding that food systems and communal health are connected. 

Food justice must return systems to communities, Harvie explains. Organizations like tackle food injustice from a farming and policy perspective, by working to change state laws that , as well as collaborating with the state鈥檚 Department of Energy to provide low-interest loans to schools upgrading their energy systems, and building access to local farmers markets. Local food systems that are communally owned and operated allow for communal wealth creation. This means that food is not only eaten in the same region where it is produced, but the financial and public health benefits uplift the community as well. 

Tying together food and climate justice isn鈥檛 an intellectual exercise, Harvie notes. Justice work, in any form, is about creating and sustaining relationships with one another, including the relationships with the Earth and our food systems. We have to do the hard work of moving from a transactional, colonial, and capitalist model of feeding ourselves to a relational model of feeding and caring for each other.

, with who use agrarian reform in Brazil to fight for rural workers鈥� access to land. Pedro dos Santos, a member of the movement, sets his piercing blue eyes on me as he welcomes me to the Roseli Nunes settlement in Barra do Pira铆. 

Dos Santos is one of , won through organized struggle, that comprise the Roseli Nunes. In 2006, Brazil鈥檚 federal government granted 39 families the right to use and live on the land, which encompasses , after 40 years of activism. It鈥檚 just one example of the MST鈥檚 mission to challenge and dismantle the unequal land monopolies that emerged in Brazil as a result of 16th-century colonization and 19th-century industrialization. According to , roughly 1% of landowners in Brazil control nearly 50% of the land in rural areas. 

鈥溾€� explains historian and . 鈥淗owever, this arable land is owned by very few people.鈥� MST members squat on large pieces of privately owned vacant land to get the attention of the federal government, which then assesses the land and decides whether to buy and redistribute it to the movement. If the activists are successful, they then use the land to plant and harvest food that can be sold across Latin America. 

Rural workers officially founded the movement in January 1984, just as Brazil鈥檚 dictatorship was coming to a close, because they wanted to own their land rather than being exploited by the owners of land monopolies. Their demands were based on passed in 1964, at the beginning of the country鈥檚 military dictatorship, to appease the growing peasant movements fighting for agrarian reform. This legislation called on the federal government to better distribute land and to develop agriculture. While agriculture was indeed developed in Brazil over the next 20 years, . 

Thanks to the nascent Landless Workers Movement and the development of a new, democratic constitution, supporters of agrarian reform in Congress attempted to amend the to . Interference from agribusiness ensured no such legal path was established, but some limited advances were approved: Articles 184 and 186 established the principle of 鈥渟ocial function of [rural] properties鈥� proposed by the original legislation. For land to be considered productive, the working conditions must comply with the provisions that regulate labor rights. 

This is how dos Santos came to live in a small house on a 54-acre lot in the Roseli Nunes settlement, where he grows beans, corn, and . Dos Santos, like some of the other families in the settlement, sells his produce in nearby cities and also harvests his crops for self-sustainment. 鈥淚 first joined the movement because I had a dream to have my own piece of land, where I could see my plants grow, and eat the food I harvested,鈥� dos Santos says. 鈥淭o have a piece of land, to me, means independence from the system because I own the means of production, and I don鈥檛 have to work for anybody.鈥�

Nourishment Over Profit

According to a 2022 report from the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply, there are currently focused on agrarian reform. Within those numbers, 370,000 are MST-specific families who currently own the land they work (spread over a total of 29,000 square miles), while 150,000 more live in 900 active encampments, waiting for the government to process their paperwork to make the settlements official. Gathering and updating this data is still not streamlined, with government systems and turnaround times compounding the process, making it difficult to find accurate and up-to-date information. Between 2021 and 2022, . The movement has been for the past 10 years. 

The families who reside in the settlement are dedicated to combating monoculture and preserving regrown native vegetation. 鈥淢onoculture is for profit,鈥� dos Santos says, mentioning that are mostly exported to the EU and China to be used as cattle feed. 鈥淲e diversify our production for self-sustainment and as the basis for family agriculture,鈥� he says. After the MST began gaining land in the mid-1990s, its members immediately began producing food. 鈥淣ow that we had land, we started planting so we could eat and show society that we weren鈥檛 like the land monopoly owners who didn鈥檛 use that land for anything,鈥� Suptitz says. Some of the families in the Roseli Nunes settlement came together to found the and purchase a small delivery truck to transport produce to the cities of Barra do Pira铆, Volta Redonda, Resende, and Rio de Janeiro.

In her 22-acre lot, Amanda Aparecida Mateus grows bananas, manioc, okra, tangerines, oranges, limes, beans, and coffee beans鈥攁 far more diverse and ecologically sound harvest than that of the that used to rule the area. For Mateus, it鈥檚 important to emphasize the movement鈥檚 efforts to produce organic, pesticide-free food. 鈥淲e have so many MST settlements that have advanced in their food production development and today focus on the production of healthy food through agro-ecological methodologies,鈥� Mateus says. 鈥淏ut above all, it鈥檚 essential to highlight that our food production has the objective of ending hunger in Brazil. The agrarian reform, the democratization of access to land, is a project to combat hunger.鈥�

MST activists argue that land monopolies are the root cause of inequality in Brazil and that the resulting hunger crisis is . During the COVID-19 pandemic, food insecurity rates , mostly due to poverty, unemployment, and right-wing president s. In 2022, the movement released a statement reading, in part, 鈥淲e know that hunger is a project of the current [extreme right] government and one of the most serious effects of political violence in Brazil, where half of the population doesn鈥檛 have enough food to supply their homes.鈥� Since the pandemic began, the MST to struggling families in Brazil.

The MST is also combating slave labor, which a recent investigation found is heavily practiced s. MST settlements abide by an agrarian reform law, which defines using slave labor as grounds for declaring a piece of land unproductive, allowing the federal government to reappropriate it. In addition to using this legislation to call attention to slavery-like working conditions in land monopolies, the MST grants its members autonomy over their own land and production. By owning the means of production, these rural workers don鈥檛 have to depend on exploitative land monopolies for employment.

Connecting ethical food production to the eradication of hunger has boosted the movement鈥檚 visibility on social media over the past three years. For dos Santos, the movement鈥檚 mission has always been bigger than land distribution. 鈥淧eople ask me, 鈥楤ut why does the movement care about LGBTQ rights and women鈥檚 rights?鈥欌€� he says. 鈥淎nd I say, 鈥業t鈥檚 always been about more than the land; we are all involved in everything.鈥欌€�

From the Country to the City 

Back in Rio de Janeiro, in the bohemian neighborhood of Lapa, the two-story Armaz茅m do Campo store sells and delivers seasonal produce that comes directly from the Roseli Nunes settlement. In 2016, MST opened the first Armaz茅m do Campo store in S茫o Paulo, with the intention of bringing its mission from the country to the city. In 鈥攑eople come to listen to live music, enjoy a cold drink, and dance the night away. Taking advantage of this rich cultural scene, Armaz茅m do Campo hosts performances by local bands, film screenings, community meetings, lectures, and cultural celebrations, attracting nearby communities to join in and learn about the benefits of agrarian reform. 

Every Saturday, this flagship MST store鈥攐ne of selling produce that comes directly from the movement鈥攈osts Culinary from the Earth, an event with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro鈥檚 (UFRJ) gastronomy department. Using only available ingredients produced by MST families, UFRJ culinary students develop a three-course menu for the event; customers can purchase the produce and other agrarian reform products like beans, jams, and juices.

鈥淧eople in the city have lost our connection with the origins of the food we eat,鈥� explains Ivan Bursztyn, project coordinator of Culinary from the Earth and a professor in UFRJ鈥檚 gastronomy department. 鈥淲hen I buy food that is a direct result of agrarian reform, I am supporting a model of rural development that prioritizes people and prioritizes high-quality, healthy produce without pesticides.鈥�

While the weather outside is hot and sticky, the vibe inside Armaz茅m do Campo is lively and light. The staff is well informed about where all the food comes from, and they鈥檙e happy to educate customers who have questions. Activist and university student Tifhanny Flor de Lua dos Santos has worked in the Armaz茅m store for more than a year. She considers it to be more than just a job. 鈥淭his is a space that has a social movement methodology,鈥� she says. 鈥淏eyond serving people, we also want to integrate with the local community, and we run events with that intention. And that also means that we join forces with the people from nearby settlements [outside of the city]. It feels good to be a part of something, of a movement that is so big.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Suptitz, who manages the S茫o Paulo Armaz茅m do Campo in addition to organizing, says the stores are a tool to connect the city to the movement鈥檚 rural settlements, providing a line of communication between urban residents and rural workers. This connection is essential for coalition building and destigmatizing the movement, as well as providing urban residents with more knowledge about where their food comes from. 鈥淭he movement always wanted the support of society, and now the way to do that is through the Armaz茅m stores,鈥� Suptitz says. 鈥淭his is the first time we鈥檝e been able to connect to people in the city so strongly.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

As I ate the first course of fried manioc on a hot Saturday in March, in a room decorated with portraits of Brazilian left-wing leaders and banners reading 鈥淪TRUGGLE鈥� and 鈥淛USTICE,鈥� I vividly recalled shaking Pedro dos Santos鈥� hand when we first met at the Roseli Nunes settlement. Dos Santos and other settlement residents are proud of the food they produce, the houses they build, and the lives they lead. Perhaps the hand I shook was the same hand that harvested the manioc I was eating 65 miles away. Those hands aren鈥檛 exploited by a boss; instead, this manioc is a direct result of workers鈥� struggle for a better world. Yet, the MST鈥檚 unusual and liberatory relationship to work garners backlash. 

For decades, movement members have been stereotyped as lazy or as land thieves, ideas that Flor de Lua dos Santos pushes back on. 鈥淲e propose a solution to a previously slaveholding society where land wasn鈥檛 properly distributed. We propose a profound change in the system.鈥� Last year, for the first time ever, for state and federal positions across the country. Six MST activists were elected, marking a new phase of the movement. In the state of Rio de Janeiro, , more commonly known as Marina of MST, was elected as state representative. 

She has already founded a committee to address hunger in her state. 鈥淥ur movement wants to radicalize democracy by opening new paths for direct participation,鈥� Marina says. 鈥淲e want to participate in the debates about economic and monetary policies, as well as governmental budgets.鈥� As for the movement as a whole, which now has a sympathetic left-wing Workers鈥� Party government on its side, led by President Luiz Lula In谩cio da Silva, Suptitz says squatting will return in full force. 鈥淲e still aren鈥檛 done redistributing the land of the 1%,鈥� he says. 鈥淪o we will continue to fight for that redistribution.鈥�

Davis, who spends her days teaching at , is still dressed in the T-shirt and sweatpants that comprise her after-school soccer practice uniform. Before long, cars begin pulling into the lodge鈥檚 parking lot, located in the heart of West Jackson, Mississippi, one of the city鈥檚 . No matter; Davis greets each person with her usual effervescent smile while she loads water into their trunks and back seats. 

Davis, a Grand Officer in Mississippi鈥檚 Maurice F. Lucas Sr. Prince Hall Order of the Eastern Star, had been leading the chapter鈥檚 water distribution efforts for more than a month. She says the Eastern Stars and its male counterpart, the Masons, distributed thousands of cases of water from the Grand Lodge鈥檚 Lynch Street parking lot between July and August 2022. Six months later, the lodge is still housing cases of unused water, just waiting for the next crisis. 鈥淚t will happen again,鈥� Davis says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not a matter of if, but a matter of when.鈥� Davis鈥� assertion is more fact than opinion. 

In February 2021, a winter storm brought below-freezing temperatures and around 2 inches of sleet to Mississippi. As a result, the 鈥攚丑颈肠丑 , O.B. Curtis, 鈥攚as filled with frozen slush. This led the and throughout the city. Residents . 

This trend continued in August 2022 when torrential rains flooded the Pearl River and . These cascading events triggered a crisis that led Jackson residents to be for weeks at a time between July and September 2022. 

Before Jackson鈥檚 water woes became national news, its residents endured and , , and . Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves have for the water crisis, but those with knowledge of the city鈥檚 history note that the root cause of this problem is much deeper than electoral politics. 鈥淲hen the water crisis hit, it really became very clear that 鈥� the narrative in some circles that was being told was one of the failures within the city or the failure of city leadership to over time,鈥� says , associate professor of history at Jackson State University. 鈥淎s a historian, that narrative was just wrong.鈥�

To understand Jackson鈥檚 water crisis, Luckett, who has extensively , says it鈥檚 critical to examine the historical relationship between Jackson, , and the broader state鈥檚 conservative power structure. 鈥淚t is a history, I would argue, that is, in fact, rooted in the civil rights movement,鈥� Luckett explains. 鈥淎nd for me, we have to go at least 50 years back to kind of examine the roots of what has been an increasingly hostile relationship.鈥�

He notes three events that brought Jackson to this crossroads: In 1969, the Supreme Court ruled in that 30 of the 33 school districts operating in Mississippi could 鈥渘o longer operate as a unitary school system within which no person is to be effectively excluded from any school because of race or color鈥� after Feb. 1, 1970. As a result, for either the newly opened or the predominantly white suburbs in Clinton, Madison, and Rankin Counties. 

鈥淭he parents of those children in 1970 represented the white power structure in the state,鈥� Luckett says. 鈥淭hey represented the political, economic, social, and religious white leadership in the state of Mississippi. When they withdrew their children from the public schools, they withdrew their support for education at Jackson and desegregation, and they also began immediately withdrawing their support for the city itself.鈥� This withdrawal continued through the 1980s, when the city changed its form of government to . 

Before Henry J. Kirksey and 16 other Black residents of Jackson sued the city to transform its government from a three-member commission to a city council, Jackson鈥檚 growing Black population had no governing representation. After the 1981 ruling, the city council welcomed its , which prompted and increased the antagonistic relationship between the state and the city. Between 1980 and 1990, the white population in Jackson dropped from 52% to 43%, according to the Jackson Free Press. 

That trend continued between 1990 and 2000, when another 35,000 white residents left the city. Coincidentally, in 1997, Jackson also elected its . That decade-long exodus also took much of the city鈥檚 tax base. Now, and . As the city became poorer, it began lacking the financial resources needed to improve the now 100-year-old water system. As the conservative state delegation now pushes to , Mayor Lumumba has faced several obstacles to securing funding. Members of the city鈥檚 legislative delegation attempted to get the city in 2021, but failed when the bill containing the appropriation . 

鈥淲hat you have seen is intentional efforts to prevent the city of Jackson from being able to support its water system,鈥� Luckett says. 鈥淭here has been money appropriated by the federal government in the past to support the city of Jackson鈥檚 water structure [and] water system, money that has been deferred and has been manipulated about the state and never reached the city. There鈥檚 been a complete failure of the state to invest in the capital city, and it鈥檚 to the benefit of the people who have the political power.鈥�

Abandoning Flint

Flint, Michigan, where live below the poverty level, has been for nearly a decade. On the morning of our interview, , operations manager at , a coalition of grassroots organizations fighting to secure clean water and other resources for Flint residents, texts that she is running behind. She later explains that she had to do a plumbing fix before taking what she describes as a chemical shower. 鈥淓very morning, you shower, which turns the chemicals into steam that gives you rashes, burns your eyes, and gives you a bloody nose鈥攐h, and cancer,鈥� she says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 that kind of fight every morning, besides what鈥檚 that smell, which this morning was an interesting mix of fried chicken mixed with chlorine.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Mays has lived in Flint since 2002. There, the water crisis, which captured the attention of the nation nine years ago, remains unresolved. Much like the city of Jackson鈥檚 issues, Flint鈥檚 water crisis can be linked to , racial zoning, segregation, and redlining. At one time, the city boasted in the state, thanks to a booming auto industry. In fact, the Modern Housing Corporation, a subsidiary of General Motors, to accommodate the influx of General Motors workers. However, Black Flint residents were excluded from these housing opportunities: forbade anyone who was not white to occupy the homes in the new Civic Park neighborhood and relegated Black residents to the Floral Park and St. John Street areas. 

The city leveled a portion of the St. John Street neighborhood and nearly all of the Floral Park neighborhood in the 1960s and 鈥�70s to , which led racial minorities to be sequestered in communities with . Then came the financial crisis: The tanked tax revenue. Laid-off workers left the city, . Properties were when homeowners rushed to leave without waiting to sell. This decline affected Flint鈥檚 鈥攑roperty tax, state revenue sharing, and income tax. The city, unable to overcome its $25 million financial burden, was . 

Flint鈥檚 financial situation gave cover for Gov. Rick Snyder to enact , which grants Michigan鈥檚 governor power to appoint emergency managers to run cities, towns, and school districts deemed to be in financial distress. In April 2014, Flint鈥檚 Emergency Director the city鈥檚 main water system from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to the Flint River under the guise of saving the city money. Within weeks, foul-smelling brown water began to pour from faucets. 

鈥淚n the summer of 2014, just a couple months after the switch, we started getting rashes,鈥� Mays recalls. 鈥淚 got one, and my kids got them on their backs and shoulders. [At first,] I thought maybe it was dry skin. I even ended up getting this patch on my face. I worked in promotions and marketing, so I used to have to make a joke about 鈥極h, it鈥檚 not leprosy. I promise I just have Flint water.鈥� We鈥檇 all laugh because the excuse was that river water was just harder.鈥� It was much more serious than that. Across the city, residents began reporting rashes, hair loss, muscle and body aches, and other seemingly random symptoms. 

By June 2014, the first case of , a potentially fatal disease contracted by inhaling water droplets contaminated with bacteria, was diagnosed. 鈥淎ll of a sudden in September 2014, my youngest got pneumonia, which was very weird,鈥� Mays says. 鈥淣ow we know that it most likely was Legionnaires鈥� disease, a form of deadly bacterial pneumonia, but nobody was telling doctors to test for it.鈥� Flint switched back to the Detroit water system in October 2015, but the damage was already done. , where plaintiffs argued that Public Act 436 is unconstitutional because it disproportionately targets impoverished Black communities. These legal challenges were largely unsuccessful. 

The true impact of Flint鈥檚 water crisis will likely not be seen for generations. have found that the proportion of children living in Flint with elevated water-lead levels doubled after the city changed its water source. Tens of thousands of residents have also been exposed to and suffered horrific side effects, including , , and lead poisoning. At least a dozen deaths from Legionnaires鈥� disease have now been attributed to the contaminated water. 

Mays was recently treated for cancer. Her doctors found it while treating lung and heart scarring they attributed to COVID-19. 鈥淚 started having swelling and pain. My abdomen was super swollen, and my uterus was going to rupture,鈥� she says. 鈥淚 had endometrial cells, which you could not see on an ultrasound. All said, it was a six-hour surgery, and it was pretty bad. They had to bring in a second surgeon.鈥� She鈥檚 not the only person to be diagnosed with cancer in .

Finding New Ways to Discriminate

When she was a child, , director of , a community-managed utility service that brings clean running water to Navajo Nation homes, often visited her grandparents in Cameron, Arizona, a rural section of the Navajo Nation. Her grandparents didn鈥檛 have running water. Instead, the family of sheepherders hauled water from the desert wells surrounding their home. Those water sources were filled with toxic metals, including , which she believes caused her grandmother鈥檚 cancer and subsequent death. 鈥淲hen I was 14, my grandmother passed away from stomach cancer that was related to uranium,鈥� Robbins says. 鈥淥bviously, knowing that my story was not unique but that that [was happening] across the rez was something that I was not blind to.鈥�

The Navajo Nation once had . However, in a , former Tribal President Jonathan Nez stated that cancer was the leading cause of death for Navajos between the ages of 60 and 79, and the second leading cause of death for Navajos 80 and older. In addition to cancer, lack of clean water has created other significant health problems for those on the reservation. , cancer, and 鈥攁ll linked to uranium鈥攁re plaguing the nation. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not just the lack of running water that鈥檚 concerning,鈥� Robbins says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 the water sources that are available that oftentimes don鈥檛 have signage if they鈥檙e contaminated or not.鈥�

The , encompassing , with portions in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. . According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. federal government from 1944 to 1986, with the government being the sole purchaser of that uranium until 1966. During that time, were extracted. Once the federal government鈥檚 lease expired, however, , allowing the metals to leach into the soil, the groundwater, and the surface water. 

鈥淥bviously, if you dig it up, it鈥檚 out there, and radon is exposed. That鈥檚 when people can get really sick,鈥� Robbins explains. 鈥淚t鈥檚 across the rez, but there are areas where there鈥檚 more concentration. On the eastern side, there was , which is one of the biggest spills in terms of problems.鈥� On July 16, 1979, the United Nuclear Corporation鈥檚 tailings disposal pond breached its dam at the Church Rock Mine in Church Rock, New Mexico. The breach and 94 million gallons of radioactive water into the Puerco River, which many Navajos use for drinking, irrigation, and livestock. 

Though the spill is considered the in U.S. history, the site a federal disaster area. Not only did that limit the amount of aid given to affected areas, it also prevented the community from learning about the dangers of the spill for days. The incident is reflective of a larger pattern of the government鈥檚 blatant disregard for Indigenous communities. More than 150 years ago, the Navajo and other tribes signed with the federal government that promised funding for housing, infrastructure, and health care in exchange for portions of their land. For decades, that simply hasn鈥檛 happened. 

Much like Flint and Jackson, the Navajo Nation has experienced systemic racism, insufficient funding, and , which resulted in failing infrastructure. Robbins says bureaucratic hurdles and lack of funding have also hampered efforts. While the Navajo Nation is located almost entirely within 鈥攚丑颈肠丑 , including major cities, such as Los Angeles, Denver, San Diego, Salt Lake City, and Albuquerque, New Mexico鈥�
to the main stem of the river. Because of this, many rely on contaminated rivers and wells as their main water sources. 

In the Navajo Nation, in their homes. They are 67 times more likely than other Americans to or a toilet. Without piped water, residents haul water either from regulated watering points miles away or from unregulated water sources, such as wells and springs. Robbins sees a pattern among these water crises. 鈥淚鈥檓 in a different region [than Flint or Jackson], but we still have the same struggle going on,鈥� Robbins says. 鈥淥bviously, it鈥檚 affecting Brown and Black communities way more than other communities, and that鈥檚 a really big problem.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Congress originally passed the in 1974 to guarantee all Americans access to clean, drinkable water. It authorizes the EPA to set national health-based standards for drinking water to protect against both naturally occurring and human-made contaminants. Through the SDWA, the EPA has the ability to take action that will stop 鈥渋mminent and substantial endangerment to human health.鈥� Yet a found that compliance monitoring and punitive sanctions are less likely to occur in facilities located in poor or Black and Brown communities. 

The Natural Resources Defense Council鈥檚 鈥溾€� report also found that communities of color as well as low-income communities have higher rates of drinking water violations than other communities. Additionally, cities with predominantly Black and Brown populations tend to spend more time out of compliance, and even when such problems are identified, they remain uncorrected for a longer period of time. However, grassroots organizers and community members are stepping up to fill the gaps left by state and federal authorities. 

Organizations like Flint Rising and DigDeep collected and donated cases of bottled water. Mays and other volunteers have gone door to door to ensure residents are informed and have access to clean drinking water. The Indigenous-led Navajo Water Project installs cistern-based home water systems in homes without access to running water or sewer lines. These systems provide 1,200 gallons of water to homes, while the Project also develops new local sources from which water is pumped before it鈥檚 treated, stored, and then delivered directly to families. 鈥淲e鈥檝e seen things like hydro panels,鈥� Robbins says. 鈥淭hose are great intentions, but they鈥檙e not the best solution for a desert. You can pull moisture from the air, but if it鈥檚 not there, then what are you pulling?鈥�

Additionally, the Project creates jobs for members of the Navajo Nation. in Kirtland, New Mexico, to begin a plumbing program that trains residents to care for the community system. DigDeep also assists with bill pay and works with property owners to help upgrade existing water systems. 鈥淎 huge part of what we do is making sure that we鈥檙e building relationships with the community,鈥� Robbins says. 鈥淚 think so many people on reservations, or so many Natives, are so weary. We鈥檝e been made so many promises, starting at the treaty level [and leading to] people saying, 鈥榃e鈥檙e gonna come in and do these projects.鈥欌€�

, a retired Army Ranger, redesigned an atmospheric water generator (AWG) machine in 2015 to provide safe drinking water to people across the United States. The AWG works by . It cools humid air until the water transforms from a gas to condensation. It then filters the condensation. The final product is clean, drinkable water. Each machine , depending on its size. It can produce water from the atmosphere in regions with humidity as low as 20%. 

West created the to bring sustainable clean water solutions around the world. The nonprofit collects financial donations to help build and supply AWGs to populations affected by water crises. He has used his AWG machine in both Flint and Jackson, and he was also part of relief efforts following Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, where he supplied . 鈥淗e was helping a lot of people,鈥� Mays says. 鈥淲e have had really awesome people like Moses come and actually listen to people saying what we need, and [then respond by saying,] 鈥榃e have this that can possibly help.鈥欌€�

However, the AWG is a short-term solution. Ultimately, fixing the water crises in Flint, Jackson, the Navajo Nation, and other places will require systemic investment at every level. Home filtration systems provide an alternative solution for residents in Flint and Jackson. Still, it is a costly undertaking to ensure each home keeps a working system and replacement filters. In both cities, the permanent solution鈥攄igging up and replacing all the city鈥檚 pipes鈥攚ill take time and money. In much the same way, building a permanent water system on the cavernous Navajo land will require a huge federal expenditure. Another potential solution is to dig and create private water wells. In 2021, the EPA estimated that . The addition of sustainable, eco-friendly water wells could provide clean, drinkable water to urban neighborhoods.

In the meantime, though, Robbins says anyone can help. The work isn鈥檛 easy, but it鈥檚 rewarding. 鈥淲e鈥檙e not like unicorns,鈥� she says. 鈥淭here鈥檚 so many people out there who are serving their communities. And I think that鈥檚 so important, because it鈥檚 like, people are stepping up. It鈥檚 very hard. Not only the politics or the structure of things, but [the work] is difficult. So I always just want to shout out other people who are doing this work.鈥�

Nearly a year after the Jackson water crisis began, Davis is still housing cases of unused water at the lodge. The Order of the Eastern Star accepted donations from several other states for weeks鈥攅ven after water was restored for local residents. The annex where the initial donations were housed sits empty now, but she has a stockpile in an office next door. Other officers have discussed dispensing it, but Davis decided to hold for the next crisis. 鈥淲hen it happens the next time, we will be ready.鈥�&苍产蝉辫; 

The trouble with these visions of the environment鈥攁苍d the traditional environmentalism that so earnestly strives to protect them鈥攊s that the environment is made up of so much more. 

Awe-inspiring trees, yes, but also the . Instagram-worthy animals, yes, but also in the soil, the water, and their own guts. The environment includes the air, the land, the flora, the fauna, and yes, people, along with everything that comes into contact with them鈥攐ur cars, our construction projects, and our trash. Indigenous communities and ancient cultures have always known this. And in contrast with earlier iterations of environmentalism, the environmental justice movement of today focuses on a similarly holistic understanding of what constitutes the environment. 

鈥淭he environment is not a place that is somehow separate from ourselves. It鈥檚 not some faraway place in nature where you travel to to get away from home,鈥� says Vivian Huang, incoming co-director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network. 鈥淭he environment is home. It is our workplace. It is the schools that we鈥檙e in. It鈥檚 our relationships to one another. It鈥檚 our communities. It鈥檚 us.鈥�

Kiana Kazemi, the head of community operations at Intersectional Environmentalist, a nonprofit founded in 2020, defines modern environmentalism succinctly: 鈥淯nderstanding the interconnectedness of people and the planet.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Looking at environmentalism through this lens, it鈥檚 no wonder that today鈥檚 movements take an active role in defining and fighting for environmental justice, rather than solely serving as preservers of natural splendor. This intersectional environmentalism considers advancing housing access, racial justice, and gender equity to be as essential to the movement as protecting clean water and air. In the past five years alone, new climate activism organizations like the Sunrise Movement, Zero Hour, Extinction Rebellion, and Fridays for Future, many of them founded and led by youth, have brought environmental justice into the mainstream. 

Huang is quick to point out that 鈥渢his idea and way of thinking about environment is not new.鈥� She says, 鈥渢he environmental justice movement really came together around this idea of an environment being very much rooted in people and in communities.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

This organizing approach goes back decades and includes the preeminent research and campaigning in the 1980s against environmental racism by Robert Bullard, considered the 鈥渇ather of environmental justice.鈥� The Asian Pacific Environmental Network, where Huang has worked for the past 11 years, came out of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991. This seminal event in the environmental justice movement codified the that have guided grassroots groups over the following three decades. 

Many environmental justice groups still hold true to these principles today, and new organizations and coalitions are making new commitments to these concepts. The Climate Justice Alliance, for example, continues to in the context of a just transition. And these aren鈥檛 fringe efforts; the Sunrise Movement and Zero Hour have become forces to be reckoned with in recent years, mobilizing young voters and influencing politicians to and insist that Democrats prioritize . While these provisions haven鈥檛 passed, youth organizers have certainly moved the needle on what鈥檚 included in the political agenda. 

Intersectionality on the Rise

Countless climate and environmental movements of the 2020s hold these overlapping issues of justice at the heart of their organizing and activism work. As Nadia Nazar, founder and art director of Zero Hour, explains, systems of oppression don鈥檛 just shape who is affected by the climate crisis. They are the causes of the climate crisis in the first place. 鈥淭he people that hold the power in these systems that have been exploiting the land, people, wildlife [for generations],鈥� she says, 鈥渘ot only have these systems caused what鈥檚 going on, but they are causing the continuation of it.鈥� So to work toward meaningful solutions, Nazar and her contemporaries argue the systemic issues of colonialism, capitalism, racism, and patriarchy must be addressed in concert. 

Take pipelines, for example. 鈥淲e can鈥檛 talk about them without talking about missing, murdered Indigenous women, [who] constantly are going missing due to the building of these pipelines,鈥� says Alexis Saenz, the founder of the Los Angeles chapter of the International Indigenous Youth Council. 

With the oil boom in the Bakken region of Montana and North Dakota, for example, to move into rural areas, including the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. This coincided with a 70% increase in aggravated assaults on the reservation, whereas crime rates decreased in counties outside of the oil region. This is part of . Data on these crimes is sparse, which exacerbates the problem of their invisibilization, but the best available statistics show that American Indian and Alaska Native women are than other races. The majority of these crimes are committed by non-Native perpetrators, but tribes generally aren鈥檛 allowed to prosecute non-Natives, even on reservations. Federal, state, and tribal jurisdiction is hugely complex and varies by the type of crime and location, effectively resulting in impunity for many perpetrators on tribal lands.

Saenz says the racism inherent in the stealing and sex trafficking of Indigenous women, children, and two spirit people is clear: The people building these pipelines are denying Indigenous sovereignty by taking over Indigenous lands鈥攁苍d bodies. 

That鈥檚 why the council鈥檚 activism goes beyond the confines of what 鈥渆nvironmentalism鈥� has traditionally entailed. The organization not only works toward the divestment of pipelines, but also defends and advocates for Indigenous sovereignty by organizing youth to become leaders, build solidarity, and take direct action.

Since the establishment of the International Indigenous Youth Council at Standing Rock in 2016, the group has formed chapters in many states, including New Mexico, Minnesota, and Texas. And the group鈥檚 work isn鈥檛 limited to fossil fuel sites; it also targets injustices that occur in places like and on public lands. That鈥檚 partly because even the lands that have been set aside for preservation, like , were never pristine to begin with. Defining these erases the millennia of Indigenous land management that shaped them. It also fails to recognize that . Which is one reason why groups like the youth council are trying to reclaim the stewardship of these sacred lands. 

鈥淓verything is related. I am related to the trees, to the oceans, to any other living being, regardless of race, class, gender,鈥� Saenz says, so 鈥渙ne of the things that we say as youth is that we are the land defending itself.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Overcoming the ongoing, overlapping injustices against Indigenous communities will require divesting from pipelines, yes, but Saenz says it鈥檚 also about centering different forms of power and leadership, like those of Indigenous and front-line communities.

Broad but Not Diluted

Some may argue that expanding the scope of environmentalism to include all these intersecting topics makes it unwieldy or too big to solve. But many climate activists don鈥檛 see it that way. 

The Asian Pacific Environmental Network is member-based, and Huang says that the lives of its members鈥攍ike the lives of all people鈥攁re impacted by many intersecting issues. Members don鈥檛 just care about the air pollution impacting their health; they also care about economic opportunities, access to livelihoods, and addressing the racial injustice that they see, like during the COVID-19 pandemic. That鈥檚 why Huang says the group鈥檚 agenda aims to get at the heart of what people really need. 

鈥淲hen people are talking about siloed issues, they may not think of housing as, quote-unquote, an environmental issue,鈥� Huang says, but 鈥渋t鈥檚 very much an environmental issue.鈥� From an environmental justice perspective, supporting people鈥檚 ability to stay in their homes without fear of eviction, gentrification, unaffordable energy bills, or unsafe living conditions demonstrates the many ways that racial justice, economic justice, and climate justice intersect. 

The network鈥檚 housing policy strategy is multipronged. In 2016, the nonprofit pushed to pass a ballot measure for rent control in Richmond, California鈥攖he first nationwide in more than 30 years. Today, the organization continues to advocate for , insisting that renewable energy be accessible to low-income communities, renters, and front-line community members.

At the end of the day, Huang says true climate justice will come from affirming the rights of political, economic, and cultural self-determination for all peoples.

Intersectional Environmentalist, too, works to foster community, though it鈥檚 a much broader, global community, primarily built online during the pandemic. To address the inequity in access to environmental education that especially impacts low-income people of color, the nonprofit launched 鈥淚E School.鈥� The organization鈥檚 leaders invite nontraditional educators, who may be students or organizers or activists, to share the wisdom gained from their experience. 

鈥淲e amplify their voices and put them in those positions of teaching, when usually they don鈥檛 have that opportunity,鈥� Kazemi says. 鈥淲e鈥檙e creating free, accessible educational resources that come from the voices of the people at the front lines.鈥�

In this way, Intersectional Environmentalist is hoping to expand the movement to include not just self-identified environmentalists, but also housing advocates, food sovereignty activists, engineers, doctors, artists鈥攁苍yone who cares about people and the planet. 鈥淚 think those people are all environmentalists, whether they identify as that or not,鈥� Kazemi says. 鈥淲e all belong in this movement.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

While the environments, needs, and communities will vary, at its core, environmental justice is about safety, Huang says. 鈥淎nd real safety comes from us having what we need. It comes from our communities having stable housing, good jobs, health care, connection鈥攁 cohesion with one another.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Gelbart died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving a community of family and friends shocked and reeling with grief. Now they had come together to say goodbye. 鈥淚t was stunningly beautiful and agonizingly sad,鈥� says Olivia Bareham, a former geriatric nursing and hospice assistant who organized the funeral. 鈥淎 collision of heaven and Earth.鈥�

Gelbart鈥檚 body was brought home, to be washed and wrapped in a golden shroud by Bareham and Metzner. For Metzner, caring for his husband鈥檚 body was a natural continuation of the love and care Metzner provided him in life, allowing for a 鈥渉ealing journey through grief that the funeral industry wants to deny us,鈥� he explained. For the next three days, mourners could spend time with Gelbart at the couple鈥檚 home.

Bareham has long sought to ease some of the fear and suffering surrounding death and dying that she observed among her patients and their families. In 2005, she founded Los Angeles-based The Sacred Crossings Institute for Conscious Dying, where she educates and empowers families to care for their deceased loved ones and create home funerals like the one she created for Gelbart.

Throughout the couple鈥檚 house, Bareham and friends provided a variety of activities for mourners, including the opportunity to decorate the casket with art supplies, or inscribe river rocks that would be used to build a memorial wall on the property. With this funeral, Bareham created a way for people to be truly present, bearing witness to the end of a life, and a space to process the enormity of their thoughts and emotions. Friends played music; dogs wandered among the bereaved, offering comfort. Food, drink, and collective pain were shared among all. For Metzner, it was 鈥渙ne of the most profound and beautiful experiences of my life.鈥�

This is not your typical American funeral, though.

Bareham is just one of many women who are disrupting the death paradigm by challenging our traditional funerary practices and advocating for transparency, eco-friendly options, and family involvement. While White patriarchy has spent the past hundred years shutting the doors and pulling the curtain鈥攐bfuscating and profiting from one of life鈥檚 most significant milestones鈥攎odern women are questioning whom our current system is serving and telling the funeral industry that its time is up.

Make no mistake, the future of death is a feminist one.

Feminist death advocates argue that the $20 billion funeral industry thrives on our society鈥檚 reluctance to face, or even think about, death. Although our fear of death is nothing new, our modern denial of death is.

Our current unfamiliarity with natural death has become more informed by horror tropes鈥攊ncluding the dead returning to haunt us, or corpses suddenly reanimating to grasp at the living鈥攖han by facts. According to Ernest Becker, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, awareness of our mortality haunts us and motivates us. Becker argues that our actions are motivated by this fear, and in a desperate effort to mitigate our existential terror of ceasing to exist, we seek out distractions. We engage in what he calls 鈥渋mmortality projects鈥� that help us establish legacies that will live on after we are dead, often through our work or by having children.

Because of this fear, and the established systems that shield us from healthy engagement with death, we鈥檝e become death- and grief-illiterate. As a result, we have industry-led funerals that leave little room for meaningful family involvement and require costly products and services that are often unnecessary and can harm the environment.

The median cost of a funeral today is $8,500. The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers recorded a 227.1% increase from 1986 to 2017鈥攁lmost double the price increase for all other consumer items. As a result, funerals have become a luxury that many families struggle to afford, leaving some in 鈥渇uneral poverty鈥� to pay for them. Some states offer assistance, such as Michigan鈥檚 Burial Services program, which offers up to $455 for a memorial service and cremation payable directly to a funeral director. Such social assistance programs to help with funeral costs vary widely from state to state, but generally cover only a portion of fees. For those without the financial means to pay, responsibility falls to the state, which typically cremates remains or donates the bodies to medical schools.

In contrast, according to the National Home Funeral Alliance, people can expect to pay about $200 for a home funeral, saving thousands of dollars. This amount usually includes dry ice to keep the body cold, gas and permit fees, and a container for the body鈥攕uch as a simple pine or cardboard coffin鈥攁s well as a permit fee for transportation and copies of the death certificate. Costs for final disposition are extra: Direct cremation rings in at $600 to $1,100, and burial varies greatly depending on personal preference.

It isn鈥檛 just the industry鈥檚 financial costs that are staggering; it鈥檚 the environmental ones, too.

Most modern funerals begin with embalming鈥攖he practice of injecting toxic chemicals into the body to delay the decomposition process. Embalming is not required by law, yet we place embalming fluid containing more than 827,000 gallons of toxic chemicals into the earth annually.

In cemeteries, embalmed bodies are placed in caskets, which use up to 20 million board feet of hardwood and 64,500 tons of steel each year to produce. All of this material is then placed inside concrete vaults to make it easier to maintain cemetery landscaping. And while cremation is more economical, a single cremation consumes as much energy as a 500-mile car journey and emits pollutants such as mercury, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide into the air.

Life might end with death, but the drain on resources doesn鈥檛. Opting for standard burial means you are also expecting to be provided with 鈥減erpetual care鈥濃€攁苍 industry term to denote the expectation that your grave will be tended to, well, forever. This means lifetimes of land and water use, pesticides, and labor to keep the surrounding landscape manicured and attractive.

In other words: We鈥檝e been taking a natural process that unites all living things and making it altogether unnatural.

The corpse has become a vessel for our death anxieties, a stark reminder of our inevitable future. We spend billions of dollars on antiaging products because aging reminds us of our own mortality. Even in death, our denial continues as we opt to appear 鈥渓ifelike鈥� and seal bodies away in caskets that promise to 鈥減rotect鈥� us from decomposition.

Is it any wonder many of us are somewhat relieved that the funeral industry is there to help us deny death just a little bit longer?

Today, most of us die in busy hospitals or nursing homes, often in the company of strangers. Funeral homes quickly remove our dead and perform those final physical acts of care in preparing the body. We then go through the motions of performing sterile rituals鈥攄evoid of meaning鈥攆orced to sum up the significance of a human life during the brief couple of hours the funeral home or church has been rented to us. And in people鈥檚 final moments, they are again abandoned to strangers, who will either bury them deep in the earth or, like the mythic Charon, ferry them into the flames.

We can do better for our loved ones. In fact, we have done better.

A little more than a century ago, we died at home. Our bodies were lovingly washed and dressed for burial by our kin. Funerals were individual- and community-centered鈥攁苍d women were typically at the helm of the process.

Before the Civil War, 鈥淭he Good Death鈥� was an extension of ars moriendi, 鈥淭he Art of Dying,鈥� a Christian concept dating back to the 15th century. Dying a good death was a universally shared concept that was integral to life, which played out at home, where the dying individual was supported through this important passage by family and friends. It was believed that a dying person, poised on the threshold of heaven, could impart divine wisdom and provide reassurance that in the afterlife all would be reunited in a place free from the pains and sorrows of earthly life.

Then the war came.

Americans greatly underestimated the scale and duration of the Civil War, initially believing it would resolve quickly and with little bloodshed. Instead, according to historian David Blight, it left a culture of death and mourning beyond imagination. Families were forced to contend with the fact that their loved ones were dying far from home, alone on battlefields without the comforts provided by The Good Death.

For those who could afford it, modern embalming was introduced as a solution to temporarily preserve soldiers鈥� bodies for the long journey home. Embalmers would chase after battles, setting up camp and often propping up real embalmed bodies outside their tents, like storefront mannequins, to advertise their services. A demand for costly cast-iron caskets to transport bodies gave rise to another new venture.

The transition of embalming from wartime necessity to mainstream practice can be traced back to President Abraham Lincoln, whose body was embalmed and placed on a funeral train that toured 180 cities. The tour was a phenomenon, with mourners lining up for hours to catch a glimpse of the body. Lincoln鈥檚 embrace of embalming secured its place in American culture.

Now that industrious men had found a way to make death profitable, they did so with zeal and ushered in the modern funeral industry. New enterprises to fashionably accessorize death with elaborate caskets, hearses, and mourning clothing emerged, followed by the relatively new roles of funeral director and embalmer.

The funeral and medical industry paralleled each other in numerous ways by 鈥減rofessionalizing鈥� themselves. They opened schools, embraced new technology, and took advantage of false narratives to position themselves as guardians of public health and safety that alone would restore dignity to the processes of birth and death.

While the funeral industry pushed the myth that a corpse was dangerous and needed to be sanitized through embalming, physicians targeted midwives, whom they labeled 鈥渂arbaric.鈥� In 1911, one obstetrics professor went so far as to describe midwives as 鈥渄irty, ignorant, untrained鈥� and an evil that must be controlled.

Death became a specialized profession solely for men鈥攐ne that employed the 鈥渟cience鈥� of embalming, a service that separated them from the duties that had previously fallen to women, who were removed from the process.

The next big shift in our modern deathways occurred in 1912, when door-to-door salesman Hubert Eaton arrived in Los Angeles with the goal of creating a cemetery and mortuary completely devoid of 鈥渟igns of earthly death.鈥� That鈥檚 right: a cemetery and funeral home without death. Eaton was a devout Christian who believed cemeteries should reinforce the idea of eternal life.

Eaton essentially rebranded death by using language and aesthetics that were comforting and even glamorous. The cemetery was now designated a 鈥減ark.鈥� Mortuary 鈥渟lumber rooms鈥� were decorated to evoke the feel of a Hollywood starlet鈥檚 boudoir, draped with pink satin and lush velvet. Speakers piped in the merry sounds of birdsong and species of trees that lost their leaves were banned as symbolic reminders of death. Traditional headstones were replaced with flat markers, set low in the sod so views of the lush lawns would not be inconvenienced by reminders that corpses lay in repose 6 feet under.

Forest Lawn in Los Angeles was the first to combine a cemetery, mortuary, chapels, and florist under one roof. Convenience, the powerful appeal of being the premier choice for celebrity weddings and funerals, and clever marketing that sold consumers an idyllic Hollywood ending became the industry standard鈥攂ut death and life are far more complicated.

鈥淥ur recent cultural shift to ignoring or immediately disposing of our dead takes us further away from the reality of death and dying.鈥�

This commodification of death has resulted in one of the most profound and transformational events of our lives being mediated and staged through two industries鈥攎edical and funeral鈥攖hat were initially created to financially and socially benefit men.

Women have fought for control over their bodies for centuries, in life and now in death, as modern women work to subvert patriarchal systems and once again take up the mantle of The Good Death. While the media鈥檚 ubiquitous 鈥渨ellness鈥� trends and discussions of living healthier lifestyles rarely mention death, the women whose stories follow are a small example of a growing movement to help Americans die well.

Death Cafes

Death cafes are informal, public gatherings for people to discuss all things death, with the hope that those discussions will help them to live better lives. According to the Death Cafe website, 8,848 cafes have been hosted since 2011. The cafes are overwhelmingly hosted by women, including Milwaukee resident Shantell Riley, whose son died from gun violence. After observing a lack of support and communication surrounding loss, she was compelled to become a host. Conversations are guided by the attendees themselves. 鈥淲e laugh, we cry, but, most importantly, we talk,鈥� Riley says. 鈥淚t is exciting when you hear about how these conversations influence them and the impact it has on living their lives.鈥�

Caregivers

Most of the 40 million people in the U.S. acting as caregivers for aging family members identify as women. 鈥淭he U.S. health care system can be incredibly difficult to navigate,鈥� says Aisha Adkins, who in 2017 founded Atlanta-based organization Our Turn 2 Care to fill the gaps. The organization provides information and resources and helps connect marginalized millennial caregivers to each other. 鈥淚nitially, Our Turn 2 Care was a response to the fear and isolation I felt as a young Black woman,鈥� Adkins says. 鈥淣ot only was I unprepared to provide the unique medical support my family now needed, I was also unable to plan for my own future.鈥�

Dying Well

In a profession that often views death as a failure鈥攖hat which is to be avoided鈥攄octors have reported that talking about dying, both with patients and among colleagues, is challenging. Too often the focus is on sustaining life, which frequently comes at great physical, emotional, and financial costs. A palliative care specialist, Dr. Sunita Puri wrote That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, a book to help doctors and patients focus on quality of life in lieu of employing extraordinary measures that only prolong suffering for both the individual and their loved ones.

Puri encourages people not to shy away from talking about death, because it will help to clarify a plan that will augment happiness, comfort, and the things that are most meaningful to a patient in their final days.

Death Doulas

The largest sector of the female-led death revolution is death doulas, women who are reclaiming their role at the deathbed. The International End of Life Doula Association offers training programs that regularly sell out and have trained more than 2,000 people in just under three years. Death doulas are 鈥渢rained professionals with expertise and skills in supporting the dying person and the network of family, loved ones, and friends, to maintain the desired quality of life during the active dying process,鈥� Seattle-based death doula Lashanna Williams says.

Rest in Peace

Eco-friendly options are gaining ground, including green burial and aquamation. The latter 鈥渦ses gentle water flow, temperature, and alkalinity to accelerate our ecosystem鈥檚 natural method of decomposing organic matter,鈥� providing the same result as flame cremation, says Darci Bernard, co-owner of an aquamation facility for pets in Seattle.

The biggest opponents of aquamation have been men, including casket-makers, conservative politicians, and religious figures.

Another option making headlines after becoming legalized in Washington state is recomposition. Katrina Spade is the founder of Recompose, a public-benefit corporation developing a natural alternative to conventional cremation and burial. Similar to composting, recomposition gently transforms bodies into soil, which is then returned to families who can use it to grow trees or nourish gardens, creating new life through death.

Rethinking the Funeral Home

Bestselling author Caitlin Doughty has been revealing what goes on behind closed doors at funeral homes in her popular YouTube series, 鈥淎sk a Mortician鈥� and a podcast, which she co-hosts with me. She approaches death with both humor and sensitivity, making the taboo topic accessible to many.

The heart of Doughty鈥檚 advocacy centers on the corpse, which has 鈥渟erved as a vessel for feeling, ritual, and grief, for thousands of years of human history,鈥� she says. 鈥淥ur recent cultural shift to ignoring or immediately disposing of our dead takes us further away from the reality of death and dying and prevents us from forming a healthy relationship with our own mortality.鈥�

As both Doughty and photographer Paul Koudounaris have observed during their travels to document death practices around the world, the aversion Americans have toward death and corpses is not common elsewhere. Where we鈥檝e created a hard boundary between ourselves and death, for most of the world a softer line exists, creating space for the living to work through their grief, begin to comprehend death, and come to terms with the fact that the bonds we鈥檝e established with others do not dissipate at the moment of death.

In the U.S., we鈥檝e handed over this sacred space surrounding the corpse to the funeral industry. The women reclaiming this space are acting in resistance.

It is clear that our society鈥檚 current denial of death is not working. What would our culture look like if we instead met the most mysterious, painful, and transformational aspect of our lives with compassion and clarity?

With women leading the way, we can create a future of death care that will improve not only how future generations die, but how they live. This is a legacy, and a feminist one at that, for which we can all be proud.

While the adult mentors in Dijour鈥檚 summer program were fired up about this field trip to a Black-led farm focused on food justice, Dijour was not on board. I tried to convince him that although the land was the 鈥渟cene of the crime,鈥� as Chris Bolden Newsome put it, she was never the criminal. But Dijour was unconvinced. It was only when he saw the group departing on a tour that his fear of being left alone in a forest full of bears overcame his fear of dirt. He joined us, removing his Jordans to protect them from the damp earth and allowing, at last, the soil to make direct contact with the soles of his bare feet. Dijour, typically stoic and reserved, broke into tears during the closing circle at the end of that day. He explained that when he was very young, his grandmother had shown him how to garden and how gently to hold a handful of soil teeming with insects. She died years ago, and he had forgotten these lessons. When he removed his shoes on the tour and let the mud reach his feet, the memory of her and of the land literally traveled from the earth, through his soles, and to his heart. He said that it felt like he was 鈥渇inally home.鈥� The truth is that for thousands of years Black people have had a sacred relationship with soil that far surpasses our and 75 years of sharecropping in the United States. For many, this period of land-based terror has devastated that connection. We have confused the subjugation our ancestors experienced on land with the land herself, naming her the oppressor and running toward paved streets without looking back. We do not stoop, sweat, harvest, or even get dirty because we imagine that would revert us to bondage. Part of the work of healing our relationship with soil is unearthing and relearning the lessons of soil reverence from the past.

We can trace Black people鈥檚 sacred relationship with soil back at least to the reign of Cleopatra in Egypt beginning in 51 BCE. Recognizing the earthworm鈥檚 contributions to the fertility of Egyptian soil, Cleopatra declared the animal sacred and decreed that no one, not even a farmer, was allowed to harm or remove an earthworm for fear of offending the deity of fertility. According to studies referenced by Jerry Minnich in The Earthworm Book in 1977, worms of the Nile River Valley were largely responsible for the extraordinary fertility of Egyptian soils. In West Africa, the depth of highly fertile anthropogenic soils serves as a 鈥渕eter stick鈥� for the age of communities. Over the past 700-plus years, women in Ghana and Liberia have combined several types of waste鈥攊ncluding ash and char from cooking, bones from meal preparation, by-颅products from processing handmade soaps, and harvest chaff鈥攖o create African Dark Earths. According to a 2016 study in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, this black gold has high concentrations of calcium and phosphorus, as well as 200 to 300 percent more organic carbon than soils typical to the region. Today, community elders measure the age of their towns by the depth of the black soil, since every farmer in every generation participated in its creation.

The further the population gets from its connection to earth, the more likely we are to ignore and exploit those who work the soil.

When the colonial governments in northern Namibia and southern Angola attempted to force Ovambo farmers off their land, they offered what they said were equivalent plots with better-quality soil. According to Emmanuel Kreike in Environmental Infrastructure in African History, the farmers refused to be displaced, countering that they had invested substantially in building their soils and doubted that the new areas would ever equal their existing farms in fertility. The Ovambo people knew that soil fertility was not an inherent quality but something that is nurtured over generations through mounding, ridging, and the application of manure, ashes, termite earth, cattle urine, and muck from wetlands. This reverent connection between Black people and soil traveled with Black land stewards to the United States. In the early 1900s, George Washington Carver was a pioneer in regenerative farming and one of the first agricultural scientists in the United States to advocate for the use of leguminous cover crops, nutrient-rich mulching, and diversified horticulture. He wrote in The American Monthly Review of Reviews that the soil鈥檚 鈥渄eficiency in nitrogen can be met almost wholly by the proper rotation of crops, keeping the legumes, or pod-bearing plants, growing upon the soil as much as possible.鈥� He advised farmers to dedicate every spare moment to raking leaves, gathering rich earth from the woods, piling up muck from swamps, and hauling it to the land. Carver believed that 鈥渦nkindness to anything means an injustice done to that thing,鈥� a conviction that extended to both people and soil.

One of the projects of colonization, capitalism, and White supremacy has been to make us forget this sacred connection to soil. Only when that happened could we rationalize exploiting it for profit. As European settlers displaced Indigenous people across North America in the 1800s, they exposed vast expanses of land to the plow for the first time. It took only a few decades of intense tillage to drive around 50 percent of the original organic matter from the soil into the sky as carbon dioxide. The agricultural productivity of the Great Plains decreased 71 percent during the 28 years following that first European tillage. The initial rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels was due to the oxidation of soil organic matter through plowing. The planet鈥檚 soils continue to be in trouble. Each year we lose around 25听million acres of cropland to soil erosion. The loss is 10 to 40 times faster than the rate of soil formation, putting global food security at risk. Soil degradation alone is projected to decrease food production by 30 percent over the next 50 years. Further, when soils are laden with fertilizers and pesticides, the nutritional quality of the food they produce is lower than crops grown using methods that enrich the soil with compost, cover crops, and mulches.

When the soil suffers, it鈥檚 not just our food supply that is at risk. The further the population gets from its connection to earth, the more likely we are to ignore and exploit those who work the soil. As Wendell Berry wrote in The Hidden Wound in 1970:

The white man, preoccupied with the abstractions of the economic exploitation and ownership of the land, necessarily has lived on the country as a destructive force, an ecological catastrophe, because he assigned the hand labor, and in that the possibility of intimate knowledge of the land, to a people he considered racially inferior; in thus debasing labor, he destroyed the possibility of meaningful contact with the earth. He was literally blinded by his presuppositions and prejudices. Because he did not know the land, it was inevitable that he would squander its natural bounty, deplete its richness, corrupt and pollute it, or destroy it altogether. The history of the white man鈥檚 use of the earth in America is a scandal.

In the United States today, who work the land are Hispanic or Latino and do not enjoy the same labor protections under the law as other American workers in other sectors. Pesticide exposure, wage theft, uncompensated overtime, child labor, lack of collective bargaining, and sexual abuse are all too common experiences of farmworkers today.

The soil stewards of generations past recognized that healthy soil is not only imperative for our food security鈥攊t is also foundational for our cultural and emotional well-being.

Even in urban areas, our disconnect from soil has grave consequences. As a toddler, my daughter, Neshima, loved to make mud pies in the playground and drop bean seeds into the furrows of community garden plots in 颅Worcester, Massachusetts. I didn鈥檛 know that exposure to these urban soils would put my child at risk for permanent neurological damage. At her 18-month pediatric visit, I learned that she was one of . She inhaled and ingested soil that had been contaminated with lead from old paint and gasoline emissions. I quickly became a safe-soils activist and tested hundreds of residential and public spaces across the city, encountering lead levels as high as 11,000 parts per million, well above the Environmental Protection Agency鈥檚 safe limit of . From the arsenic found at a school site in Maine to the heavy metals in the gardens of Portland, Oregon, and the brownfields at an affordable housing site in Minneapolis, our urban soils are showing the scars of our disconnection. Hailing from the Bronx, New York, a participant in one of our farm training programs shared, 鈥淭he soil is toxic in my neighborhood. The only good thing I can say about it is that when there were drive-by shootings, I would get low to the ground and the smell of the earth meant I was safe.鈥� When soils suffer the most egregious abuse, they can no longer even provide stable ground beneath our feet. In early 2018, wildfires tore through Santa Barbara County, California, burning up the soil organic matter and ravaging the vegetation that held the hillsides in place. Heavy rain followed the blaze, and the destabilized mud and boulders flowed downhill, leaving at least 21 dead and over 400 homes damaged or destroyed in their wake. Both the wildfires and the erratic rainfall can be linked to anthropogenic climate change and our voracious appetite for fossil fuels. Coupled with that, the process of extracting those fossil fuels from the earth through coal mining and fracking further destabilizes the soil, resulting in sinkholes like the one in Chester County, Pennsylvania, connected to the Mariner East pipeline.

The soil stewards of generations past recognized that healthy soil is not only imperative for our food security鈥攊t is also foundational for our cultural and emotional well-being. Western science is catching up, now understanding that exposure to the microbiome of a healthy soil offers benefits to mental health that rival antidepressants. After mice were treated with Mycobacterium vaccae, a friendly soil bacteria, their . Some scientists are now advocating that we play in the dirt to care for our psychological health. We see the benefits of soil anecdotally on our farm with the youth and adult participants who come to learn Afro-Indigenous soil regeneration methods. While the curriculum focuses on such nerdy details as the correlation between earthworm count and soil organic matter, participants often reflect that the main thing they gain from their time with the dirt is 鈥渉ealing鈥� and the strength to leave behind addictions, toxic relationships, poor diets, and demeaning work environments. Our ancestors teach us that it鈥檚 not just soil bacteria that contribute to this healing process. Part of African cosmology is that the spirits of our ancestors persist in the earth and transmit messages of encouragement and guidance to us through contact with the soil. Further, we believe the Earth herself is a living, conscious spirit imparting wisdom.听When we regard a handful of woodland soil, rich in the mycelium that transmits sugars and messages between trees, we are made privy to the inner world of the forest super颅organism and its secrets of sharing and interdependence. Like Dijour, we are welcomed home to a profound web of belonging that extends beyond the boundaries of self and species. One student on our farm reflected, 鈥淚 leave this experience feeling grounded like a tree in a land and country that I previously did not feel welcomed in. Connection with soil was the awakening of my sovereignty.鈥�

Moyer has been begging Washington Gov. Jay Inslee to invest in a renewable energy-powered freight rail line from Seattle to Chicago. But the governor has shown little interest, although he recently asked the state Legislature to approve $1 million to study an ultra-high-speed passenger train from Seattle to Vancouver, B.C. “We’d love for him to show some leadership for the entire state on something that’s not so pie-in-the-sky,” Moyer laments.

Futuristic commuter trains are one thing, but Moyer has his sights set on an idea that is at once larger in scope and more firmly grounded in existing technology.

Moyer is a good-natured musician and progressive activist who has lived on Vashon Island, a short ferry ride from Seattle, since 1989. He has a mop of curly dark hair and speaks in the laid-back tone you’ve heard at your local bike shop. These days, he often sports a black T-shirt that proclaims the name of his progressive advocacy organization, the Backbone Campaign.

It was that group that researched and authored the recently released , a 126-page book filled with charts, maps, graphs, and tables to support the feasibility of a bold electrified rail proposal.

The idea seeks to address two significant problems facing the country. On the one hand, the overwhelming scientific consensus warns of an impending climate catastrophe for which we are woefully unprepared. On the other, the country’s bridges and roads are, in fact, crumbling. The American Society of Engineers awarded the country a D+ in 2016, as it has consistently since 1998. During his first address to Congress in February, President Donald Trump ignored climate change but called for $1 trillion to fill cracks in the nation’s infrastructure, which largely accommodates fossil fuel-hungry automobiles.

Transportation accounts for nearly a third of the country’s carbon emissions, of which 84 percent is attributed to cars and commercial trucks, the EPA reports. So, as Moyer sees it, it’s obvious that climate change and infrastructure should be tackled in tandem.

“The biggest climate impact we can have is getting the trucks off the roads, and eventually getting people back to the tracks, as well,” he says. To do this, the Backbone Campaign proposes revitalizing and electrifying America’s rail system, powering it entirely with community-owned renewable energy.

Electric rail is not such a long shot.

The plan would update existing freight railways by adding overhead wires to carry high-voltage electricity generated in towns along the lines and smoothing out turns too tight for high-speed travel. It would swap diesel locomotives for electric engines that are 35 percent cheaper to operate and that haul freight five times more efficiently than trucks.

In many places, it would add additional track to free up passenger rail that would otherwise get stuck behind delayed freight. And it would do all of this with a focus on justice—for the people who live alongside dirty and noisy diesel train lines, for current and future rail workers and the underemployed millions who would benefit from a large-scale infrastructure undertaking, for communities that could find economic security in renewable energy generation, and for those around the world whose lives are already threatened by global warming.

It’s a grandiose idea, perhaps even improbable, but Moyer is known in progressive circles for being someone who gets things done. His track record includes the “kayaktivist” blockade that confronted Shell Oil in Puget Sound and the 150-foot replica of the Constitution, signed by thousands, which tumbled down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in protest of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United.

In truth, electric rail is not such a long shot. China and Russia have already invested heavily in electrifying more than 40 percent of their railways. The Trans-Siberian Railway—the world’s longest at 5,772 miles—went fully electric in 2002, and Russia now moves about 70 percent of its freight over electrified lines. France, Italy, and Germany have also electrified as much or more than half of their rails, according to the CIA World Fact Book.

The United States operated more than 3,000 miles of electrified rail up until the 1960s.

As Solutionary Rail recalls, the United States operated more than 3,000 miles of electrified rail up until the 1960s—granted, none of it powered renewably—when the influential auto industry and the subsidized interstate highway system pushed rail to the back burner.

“If Eisenhower had signed the high-speed rail bill instead of the interstate bill, the country would be connected by rail,” says former Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood.

A congressman who sat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, LaHood had a bipartisan approach that helped him become the only Republican appointed to Obama’s cabinet who had been elected to public office.

In 2009, he was given the unenviable task of rallying votes for Obama’s Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which appropriated about $830 billion to kick-start the flagging economy.

The act leveraged $48 billion for transportation, of which about $10 billion was earmarked to establish intercity high-speed rail, including a line between San Francisco and Los Angeles that’s now under construction. This investment was projected to create tens of thousands of jobs and stimulate U.S. manufacturing while directly addressing global climate change.

“Obama wanted to send a message to the country that we need to start investing in high-speed rail,” says LaHood, who was not aware of Solutionary Rail but has been a staunch proponent of high-speed trains. “If you look at cities all over America, they’re investing in their metro systems, in their bus systems, because a lot of these young people who are moving to D.C. or Chicago or L.A., frankly, they don’t want a car.”

The idea to focus on rail emerged from ongoing grassroots efforts to resist coal trains.

But Republican governors such as Florida’s Rick Scott and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker rejected the money outright, and legislators resisted further budgeting for rail projects.

“Because it was a part of the economic stimulus, Republicans didn’t like it. Because it was Obama’s idea to invest in rail, people didn’t like it,” LaHood says. “Our Achille’s heel in America is that our national government hasn’t invested in rail.” Tired of the bitter political divisions between Congress and the White House, LaHood resigned after one term.

Moyer understands the frustration of waiting on politicians. The Backbone Campaign seeks instead to effect change from the ground up through what Moyer calls a non-ideological coalition of unconventional allies—farmers, environmental activists, renewable energy developers, and labor experts. The idea to focus on rail emerged from ongoing grassroots efforts to resist coal trains and the development of the Pacific Northwest into a fossil fuel corridor to Asia.

Moyer knew next to nothing about railroads or the people who work on them, but he assembled a team of experts that includes a senior Amtrak engineer and a whistleblowing union member who, in 2013, sent Moyer a copy of a paper on railway modernization with a note: “Let’s see if you and your people can green this.”

The team spent three years considering the global context (the U.S. is way behind), studying the efficiency of electric locomotion (even with today’s low fuel prices, the per-mile cost of diesel energy is nearly twice that of an electric train), mapping renewable source availability (every state has something), examining the impact of long-haul trucking (60 percent of highway maintenance costs are due to heavy trucks), and meeting with economists to address the Herculean task of funding.

They see electric trains zipping passengers between metropolises, picking up grain in rural towns, and delivering to coastal ports.

“Greening” trains was only the start.

Moyer, whose father was a Jesuit who worked for several northwest tribes, was born near the Yakama reservation and lived on Swinomish land through grade school. He was exposed to racism and cultural genocide early on and recognized that, in America, railroads carry a two-faced cultural memory. The trains that connected the East Coast to the West and ushered in an age of industrialization for many also brought a wave of terror and misery for millions, as pioneers continued to colonize, decimating buffalo herds and altering the landscape forever.

Solutionary Rail could not move forward without acknowledging this, and at the proposal’s moral center is a commitment to a just transition—a shift to a sustainable economy that addresses the inequities and injustices currently borne by laborers and marginalized people. The rights of workers and Native people had to be part of the equation, Moyer says.

The team’s ultimate vision is national. They see electric trains zipping passengers between metropolises, picking up grain in rural towns, and delivering to coastal ports. The railways that already crisscross the country offer rights of way that, outfitted with power lines, would allow electricity generated by Iowa windmills not only to propel the trains, but also to power cities many miles away.

Of course, all of this will require major upfront investment.

Single-track electrification costs an average of $2 million a mile. To demonstrate the feasibility of his national plan, Moyer proposes electrifying the Northern Corridor from Seattle to Chicago—4,400 miles in all—at a base cost of $11 billion.

A separate analysis from the Great Northern Corridor Coalition in 2012 indicates that, by 2035, rail service could make up the cost in public benefits, but that still doesn’t resolve the conundrum of initial investment. Backbone’s solution is to couple private investment with a public entity that would issue tax-free bonds at low interest rates and oversee funding and construction.

“[Trump has] talked a good game about infrastructure. If he follows through, Congress will follow his lead.”

Given the rail’s potential for American employment, manufacturing, and energy independence, it would seem that a case could be made to set aside a portion of Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure request to break ground on solutionary rail.

But in March, the administration released a budget proposal that called for significant cuts to long-distance Amtrak service. If the idea seemed like a long shot before, the odds under the new administration appear to have worsened.

LaHood, pointing to the president’s New York connections, expects Trump’s infrastructure vision to go beyond roads and bridges, but he notes that the clock is ticking.

“A president in their first year has an opportunity to get two or three big things done and then their window of opportunity closes,” he says. “He’s talked a good game about infrastructure. If he follows through, Congress will follow his lead.”

Moyer is surprisingly unshaken by the election’s result. “The emphasis was already on the states, not the federal government,” he says, and whether Trump can be influenced is somewhat immaterial to the need for bottom-up organizing.

“The credibility of change agents largely depends on not just their capacity to articulate an oppositional stance on something that is wrong or evil or destructive; their moral authority and capacity to move society requires that they have a viable alternative, a proposition,” Moyer says confidently.

Solutionary Rail is his proposition.

…

Editor’s note: This article originally misreported Bill Moyer’s place of birth. The post has been updated to correct the error.

Progressive voices long ago characterized America鈥檚 penal system as a failure. However, in recent years, even a few button-down conservative, law-and-order types have grudgingly acknowledged the need for change. Of course, they don鈥檛 sign on to so-called 鈥渂leeding heart鈥� concerns about human rights. But they do express alarm about the dollars and cents required to warehouse human beings with no financial return. 

Texas lawyer Marc Levin, who helped establish the organization Right on Crime has asked, 鈥淗ow is it 鈥榗onservative鈥� to spend vast amounts of taxpayer money on a strategy without asking whether it is providing taxpayers with the best public safety return on their investment?鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

In his essay 鈥淭he Conservative Case for Jail Reform,鈥� Arthur Rizer of the conservative think tank R Street Institute writes, 鈥淚ncarceration separates offenders from their families, which increases rates of homelessness and single parenthood. Approximately 17 million children are currently being raised without a father, a growing social problem that only perpetuates cycles of violence and crime.鈥�

While Rizer and other conservatives have defaulted to 鈥渇amily values鈥� as a reason for concern, true conservatives have to acknowledge the immorality of corporate exploitation of warehousing humans. Specifically, conservative rhetoric decries welfare and other forms of government assistance for individuals. Nevertheless, some corporations have shamelessly looked to government to feed them a guaranteed, steady diet of people to populate their private prisons. Some corporations have also relied on government to cut their labor costs by providing access to prisoners as low-paid or unpaid workers.

However conservatives might arrive at their reservations and objections to mass incarceration, the frustrations with the U.S. system are now universal across the political spectrum and have prompted a global search for better alternatives. 

Low Incarceration

Let鈥檚 begin our search in countries with the smallest prison populations per 100,000 residents. Several such countries are in Africa. Those countries include, among others: Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Guinea Bissau, and the Central African Republic. As a whole, the African continent confines 1 million of the 11 million prisoners worldwide. 

These countries鈥� small prison populations are not necessarily an indicator of progressive prison practices worthy of imitation. In fact, overcrowding, violence, and corruption exist there as well. The very concept of 鈥減rison鈥� was mostly imposed on African countries by European colonizers to curtail rebellion, and to maintain social, economic, and political order. Moreover, in certain cases there has been no commitment of resources or creative energy to refining these institutions into effective rehabilitation facilities. The general poverty in certain African countries resulting from underdevelopment and the ravages of colonialism have in some cases yielded prisons with unacceptable conditions of confinement.

鈥淲hat seems to be generally accepted is that penitentiary institutions are not legacies of African traditions from the past,鈥� writes Jeremy Sarkin in his paper 鈥淧risons in Africa.鈥� 鈥淚mprisonment was by no means a standard practice in African justice. In fact, the local judicial systems in African states generally focused more on supporting victims, rather than focusing on perpetrators. Indeed, the purpose of this system was the restitution of the harm.鈥�

It is tragically ironic that the very features of traditional African systems that were suppressed by European colonizers in the past are what have now been adopted by some European prison systems. These traditional African concepts like ubuntu, which has varied translations related to human connectivity but simply means 鈥渉umanity,鈥� have not only distinguished some European prisons, but they have also attracted the attention of those looking for progressive incarceration alternatives. The systems viewed with greatest favor are in Scandinavia. 

For example, Finland moved to reforming their open prison system in the 1960s, and in the 1990s Norway implemented restorative practices.

Consequently, those who look to these systems for different ways of addressing criminal justice are in some ways looking to traditional Africa.

A Look at Scandinavia

Many believe that not only are the prison systems in Scandinavia the best thing going, but the Scandinavian way of doing things may also be the best option for the U.S. Norway attracts special attention because recidivism rates in that country are among the lowest in the world. Only 20% of those released from Norwegian prisons are arrested within the next two years. Compare that to the U.S. where approximately 68% of formerly incarcerated persons are arrested within three years.

Norway鈥檚 experience is attributed to a 1998 decision to radically redirect the prison system away from retribution and toward rehabilitation. A second wave of reforms in 2007 involved the creation of special programs for job training (many who are incarcerated will be released with carpentry or culinary skills) and education, as well as assistance with the search for housing, employment, and other necessities of re-entry to the world outside of prison walls.

Also, unless they鈥檝e been convicted of a crime that 鈥渢argets the state or democratic order,鈥� Norwegian prisoners can vote, and they have access to health care.

Perhaps most striking to observers are the Norwegian prison facilities. Halden is a maximum-security prison near Oslo that has been dubbed by Time Magazine as 鈥渢he world鈥檚 most humane prison.鈥� There is only a single wall, and many features of the standard American prison, such as guard towers, massive cell blocks, and barbed wire are conspicuously absent. Instead, prisoners have private bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens. The underlying philosophy is that prisoners are sufficiently punished by depriving them of their liberty, and if there is any hope of rehabilitation, other aspects of their lives must be as normal as possible.

The experience of Norway鈥檚 prison guards is also different. After observing Norwegian prison facilities, one Pennsylvania prison official was quoted by HuffPost as saying, 鈥淲e feel we鈥檙e serving our communities by keeping these dangerous individuals enclosed from society, and here, I think they feel like they鈥檙e serving their community, serving their society, by taking those dangerous individuals and changing them for the better. 鈥� I鈥檇 never really looked at my job as an opportunity to change somebody鈥檚 life.鈥�

Doran Larson, who toured and wrote about prisons in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, writes in his article 鈥淲hy Scandinavian Prisons Are Superior鈥�: 

鈥淓ach prisoner has a 鈥榗ontact officer鈥� who monitors and helps advance progress toward return to the world outside鈥攁 practice introduced to help officers avoid the damage experienced by performing purely punitive functions: stress, hypertension, alcoholism, suicide, and other job-related hazards that today plague American corrections officers, who have an average life expectancy of 59.鈥�

Clearly these restorative justice practices provide a different paradigm.

Finland鈥檚 prisoners are allowed civilian clothing, extensive opportunities to visit with families, and opportunities to keep tabs on what鈥檚 happening in the outside world with modern technology like mobile phones and flat-screen TVs. Prison officers don鈥檛 carry batons, handcuffs, tasers, or other weapons. 

In Finland, there are also 鈥渙pen prisons,鈥� where even those who have committed murder get to experience the semblance of a normal life. At the open prison in Kerava, prisoners work for $8/hour, and they pay rent to the prison. They study at the nearby university, do their own grocery shopping, and get vacation days. 

Although open prisons in Finland have been around since the 1930s, it鈥檚 taken decades for the country to remake its penal policy. All of this contributes in various ways to preserving the dignity of prisoners with hopes that they will also be transformed. (According to Finland鈥檚 Criminal Sanction Agency, the open prisons actually cost less because there鈥檚 not the expense of extra security measures and personnel.) 

But whether open or closed, restorative justice is one of the more important aspects of Scandinavia鈥檚 rehabilitation process.  

鈥淥ne point of criticism of traditional criminal justice was that the victim is absent and the offender is silent,鈥� explains Norwegian scholar Anna Nylund in her study 鈥淩estorative Justice and Victim-Offender Mediation in Norway.鈥� 鈥淭he offender does not need to face the victim and the consequences of the crime, nor take responsibility for his or her action. The victim cannot share his or her feelings and view of the crime, nor understand why and how the crime was committed.鈥�

Nylund continues, 鈥淩estorative justice is not about fact-finding: The offender must at least admit to the facts or plead guilty. The main interest is how to repair the wrongs of a crime and to make the offender take responsibility for his or her actions, by recognizing the pain and problems inflicted on the victim and by apologizing. The victim shares his or her views and feelings with the offender, as does the offender, consequently both get a better understanding of the crime, the actions before and during the crime, and consequences of the crime.鈥�

Although restorative justice is a flexible process that does not easily lend itself to rigid procedural rules of the type used in court proceedings, Norway has institutionalized the method by establishing a National Mediation Service under the auspices of the Ministry of Justice and Police. Services are provided in 22 regions where more than 8,000 cases are processed each year. Trained community volunteers are used rather than professional mediators. Agencies refer cases with no limitation on the types of offenses that are eligible for services. It is even possible for these cases to be diverted away from the criminal justice system altogether, leaving the offender with no criminal record for the offense.

But can these successful models work in the U.S.?

Careful deliberation and analysis are prompted by the radically different demographic circumstances of Scandinavia and America, as well as the overall contrasting socio-economic and political cultures.

The Race Factor

In his article, Larson explains, 鈥淪candinavian prisons are roughly as racially and ethnically homogeneous as American prisons: 70% of Nordic prisoners are ethnically white citizens; the other 30% are foreign-born (mostly from other EU countries). In U.S. prisons, ethnic and racial minorities make up over 60% of the population.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

It鈥檚 not just the optics of the racial demographics that matter. America鈥檚 tragic racial history adds innumerable layers of complexity to any effort to rehabilitate prison populations. These challenges involve, among many other things, the explicit and implicit racial bias against prisoners of color that causes many in the broader society to regard them as a throwaway population not deserving of the resources needed for genuine rehabilitation. Because of this, many politicians likely assume that providing U.S. prisoners with the living amenities provided to Scandinavian prisoners would be a hard sell. 

鈥淭he difference is that the majority of Scandinavian prisoners look like the majority鈥攊ncluding the voting majority鈥攐utside,鈥� Larson writes. 鈥淟aws, enforcement policies, and prison practices are those that the majority of citizens assume would work for themselves.鈥� If the population outside of prison walls does not identify with those within, the political and social will for meaningful rehabilitation opportunities is unlikely to exist.

This suggests that a rehabilitation strategy in a homogeneous society is more likely to have effective, productive results in a homogeneous community, while the opposite may be true when the offender鈥檚 reality outside of prison is that of an alien of sorts鈥攁 sojourner in a hostile world. A Black prisoner newly released into a dominant White culture is likely to encounter dismissiveness at best and cruelty at worst because of both his race and his criminal history. A Black job seeker with a criminal record is not generally welcomed by employers. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission concluded that because of the disproportionate incarceration of people of color, with only a few exceptions, employers who disqualify job applicants solely because of a criminal record engage in racial discrimination. The frequency of such discrimination prompted the formation of a movement to 鈥渂an the box鈥� on job applications where candidates must place a checkmark to report their criminal convictions.

If whatever was done in prison to prepare prisoners for re-entry into society has not prepared them for hostility, or at least indifference, to their efforts to rejoin the community, the chances of recidivism will be increased. For a Scandinavian-style prison system to work in a racially diverse country, there must be a supportive, affirming community that embraces offenders who are people of color. Because community was of great importance in traditional Africa, this may be especially important for African Americans because of their ancestral roots and an enduring culture.

Tanzanian law professor Julena Jumbe Gabagambi, in her paper 鈥淎 Comparative Analysis of Restorative Justice Practices in Africa,鈥� explains, 鈥淭his makes perfect sense because African peoples tend to live communally and abhorred anything that could strain relationships, disconnect an individual or family with the community, and paralyze their social relationships.鈥� Gabagambi goes on to say, 鈥淸P]eople who know the offender are community members and they are better placed to reconcile and reintegrate the offender by making him or her accountable for his or her criminal acts or conduct.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

The desired supportive community may not be present because of America鈥檚 racial challenges, and the prospects for a good outcome for a Black former prisoner are at least dubious. A released prisoner may receive support and affirmation from his immediate family and maybe even from his neighborhood. But when dealing with the anti-Black, anti-former-prisoner wider world, he will be faced with not only barriers to employment, but also to housing and other necessities, not to mention problems presented by police officers who have not yet learned that Black lives matter.

The challenges are not limited to external threats posed by a hostile community. In some cases, the problems are internal. Black offenders who have taken pervasive White supremacist messages to heart can descend into self-hatred and become their own worst enemies. If a Scandinavian model is to be used in the U.S., internalized White supremacy or 鈥渋nternalized oppression鈥� must be thoroughly understood, and systems must be adjusted to address it, because it is a real phenomenon. 

Notions of White superiority that were created in the 15th century to justify conquest and slavery have a firm grip on the minds of people of all colors. Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy explains in his book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word,  how even his own African American grandmother was affected: 鈥淪he swore that she would never allow a 鈥榥igger doctor鈥� to care for her and repeatedly warned that 鈥榠f you see a bunch of niggers coming, turn around and go the other way.鈥� Big Mama had clearly internalized antiblack prejudice. She truly believed that white people鈥檚 water was wetter than black people鈥檚 water, that as a rule, whites were nicer, better looking, and more capable than blacks.鈥�

In the 1950s, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon of Martinique, who was a participant in African decolonization struggles, explained in his book, Black Skin White Masks, how this sense of inferiority is created. He wrote that comic books 鈥渁re put together by white men for little white men. This is the heart of the problem. 鈥� In the magazines the Wolf, the Devil, the Evil Spirit, the Bad Man, the Savage are always symbolized by Negroes or Indians; since there is always identification with the victor, the little Negro, quite as easily as the little white boy, becomes an explorer, an adventurer, a missionary 鈥榳ho faces the danger of being eaten by the wicked Negroes.鈥欌€�

In 21st-century America, popular culture is still dominated by 鈥渨icked Negroes鈥� in the form of thugs in cop shows, music videos, movies, and other media. If an individual hates himself because of his skin color, it is only a short step to hating and victimizing others of his race. When those crimes are committed, how does one answer the question of who is at fault? If Scandinavian rehabilitation strategies are focused on seeking an acknowledgment of guilt from the offender, are the broader social and historical forces that played a role in the conduct to be left unaddressed? If so, is a rehabilitative process truly complete if those loose ends are left dangling? Because restorative justice is at the heart of Scandinavian rehabilitation models, there may be value in first examining how well that process addresses prisoners鈥� racial circumstances.

Henry McClendon, director of community engagement for the International Institute for Restorative Practices, suggests that as a restorative justice facilitator engages in a colloquy with the offender, there are likely to be clues that the feelings or emotions that prompted the offending conduct were not experienced for the first time during the crime. This will prompt participants to revisit other occasions when there were similar feelings until ultimately, they identify the triggering event鈥攚丑颈肠丑 could involve feelings of racial inferiority experienced during early childhood. 鈥淎t the core people are the same,鈥� McClendon says. But 鈥淸a facilitator] should be culturally sensitive鈥� in addition to being properly trained.

Beyond the issues that are personal to the offender, account must also be taken of his or her community鈥檚 unique historical and social experience and the consequent psychological impacts. For example, it may not be enough to communicate to a Black offender that he has been 鈥渂ad,鈥� and he needs to commit to being 鈥済ood.鈥� On some level a person of African ancestry who has navigated America鈥檚 racial landscape may not even know what that means. Consider that the dominant culture tells children police officers are 鈥済ood.鈥� Yet many Black children routinely observe police officers being violent, deceptive, and indifferent to human suffering. 

If that is what a 鈥済ood鈥� person does, it is possible that the offender has already signed on to that program, and it is what caused him to become incarcerated in the first place. Thus the rehabilitation of such an individual demands a deprogramming of sorts that defies the use of checklists and routines. What may be required is a highly individualized evaluation and program that considers how all of America鈥檚 racial negatives may have contributed to the production of an individual who the broader society regards as 鈥渃riminal.鈥�

Keep Politics Out 

In the U.S., more than 2 million people are warehoused in state and federal prisons, local jails, juvenile correction facilities, detention facilities, Indian Country jails, state psychiatric hospitals, etc.  That鈥檚 approximately 700 per 100,000 people.

According to the Prison Police Initiative, the most contentious issues in our criminal justice system鈥攖he overcriminalization of drug use, private prisons, and low-paid or unpaid prison labor鈥攕till do not explain why most people are incarcerated and how we can dramatically and safely move toward decarceration. 

But Larson gives us a hint. He writes that the reform of Scandinavian prisons was possible because their criminal justice policy 鈥渞arely enters political debate.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Decisions about the criminal justice system are left to the professionals in the field, Larson writes.

So there is, for example, no 鈥淲ar on Drugs鈥� waged by politicians that by default targets particular people (as is the case in the U.S. where Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor people make up the majority of the incarcerated). Also absent is a class divide and culture of socio-economic disparities that can produce violent behavior.

In the U.S. where punishment along the lines of race and class is common, Larson writes, 鈥淭his peculiarly American institutionalization has created a nation where few middle-class white Americans can name anyone they know personally who has been sentenced to prison, and even fewer black Americans of any class cannot.鈥� According to Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie, 鈥淭he more unlike oneself the imagined perpetrator of crime, the harsher the conditions one will agree to impose upon convicted criminals, and the greater the range of acts one will agree should be designated as crimes.鈥�

It鈥檚 not hidden that the United States was established by and for property-owning (read: wealthy) White men. The same make up the majority of U.S. politicians at every level鈥攆ederal, state, and local. There is a range of retribution toward those who are not part of that demographic. 

In tailoring a Scandinavian model for use in the U.S. while addressing the scars of White supremacy, U.S. prison officials may have to be both thoughtful and creative. 

They may, for example, have to consider the possibility that elimination of racial self-hatred will require an injection of racial pride and self-esteem. Perhaps that can be accomplished at least in part with professionally designed courses on the history of Africa and its global diaspora. There might also be benefits to providing all prisoners with a structural analysis of society that helps them to gain a full understanding of systemic racism and the ways in which their personal circumstances were influenced, if not determined, by broader social forces. There are many other programmatic possibilities. 

The bottom line is that what may work well in Finland or Norway may not fit in the U.S. unless adjustments are made. This should not stand in the way of developing a U.S. criminal justice system that is both humane and transformative. 

Inserting such a controversial topic into mainstream discourse is French economist Thomas Piketty. His 700-page tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, shocked everyone this year when it made The New York Times bestseller list and bookstores found themselves backordering an economics book for legions of eager readers. Piketty did exhaustive searches of tax records from Great Britain, France, and the United States, going as far back as the late 18th century in France. Using sophisticated computer modeling and analyses, the professor from the Paris School of Economics debunks a long-held assumption—that income from wages will tend to grow at roughly the same rate as wealth—and instead makes a compelling case that, over time, the apparatus of capitalism grows wealth faster than wages. Result: Inequality between the wealthy and everyone else will widen faster and faster; and, without progressive taxation, his data show we’ll return to levels of inequality not seen since America’s Gilded Age.

Piketty, no Marxist, says a solution lies in a “confiscatory” tax on wealth: Tax salaries over $500,000 at 80 percent worldwide, and tax wealth at 15 percent worldwide. Every year.

Unless we can reverse the inequality trends of the past 35 years, Piketty says, the ensuing social chaos will eventually destroy democracy. Unfortunately, not even Piketty sees much chance of all nations on Earth simultaneously enacting his tax plans.

But at least he sparked a widespread discussion. And fortunately, others have been digging deeply, thoughtfully into the same questions, and they have some practical as well as achievable ideas for reversing poverty and inequality trends.

Investigation

Pulitizer Prize-winner Hedrick Smith authored a pageturner called Who Stole the American Dream? Despite his whodunnit title, Smith reveals the perps long before you finish the book. The former New York Times reporter uses data and real-life stories to build a case against American CEOs and the politicians who do their bidding.

Unless we can reverse the inequality trends of the past 35 years… the ensuing social chaos will eventually destroy democracy.

Between 1945 and 1973, Smith notes, U.S. workers’ productivity grew by 96 percent, and they were rewarded with a 94 percent increase in their wages. Between 1973 and 2011, years that parallel a collapse of the middle class, U.S. workers’ productivity grew by 80 percent, yet those evermore-productive employees saw only a 10 percent increase in their wages. Millions who created that wealth were thus pushed into poverty or to its precipice, while those who fancy a neomedieval economic system transferred billions in profits, generated by that labor, upward to themselves.

Gar Alperovitz is a professor of political economy at the University of Maryland. Like Smith, Alperovitz asks a question with his book’s title: What Then Must We Do? To be more accurate, he might have called it “Here’s What We’re Already Doing”—to create fresh models that can inspire a new economy.

What makes Alperovitz’s ideas valuable is that he not only lays out an array of alternatives already keeping people from poverty, but solutions we also can build upon to create strategies that, over time, might replace corporate capitalism.

And replacing capitalism no longer is farfetched. In 2013, Alperovitz was invited to address the Academy of Management, a group mostly of corporate advisers and business school professors with 20,000 members worldwide, “and the entire focus of the meeting was: Is capitalism over?—and, if so, where are we going?” Alperovitz pointed out during an extended conversation. “Even these people are now open to new ideas.”

Smith makes a similar point. The American system is now so obviously broken that even some corporate leaders are calling for a “domestic Marshall Plan” to repair our economy. From their thinking and others, he puts forward a proposal to reclaim the American Dream.

Start, he says, by creating a public-private partnership to generate 5 million new jobs rebuilding infrastructure—bridges, highways, and rail corridors. Increase government investment in science and high-technology research to bolster U.S. innovation and spur a manufacturing renaissance.

Make income tax fairer, which will decrease inequality, then fix the corporate tax structure so it promotes American jobs and curtails outsourcing. At the same time, force China to live up to ethical trading principles because that would generate up to 4 million U.S. jobs.

We can cut the Pentagon budget by $1 trillion—not much more than 10 percent of annual military spending—over the next decade, Smith says, and pump the money into this domestic Marshall Plan. We should also refinance millions of homes now “underwater” and strengthen safety-net programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

The bad news: Much of this new Marshall Plan depends on congressional action, where such ideas have little chance as long as the current gridlock prevails.

“Changing America’s direction will not be easy,” Smith says. “It will happen only if there is a populist, grassroots surge demanding it, like the mass movements of the 1960s and 1970s.”

Our political system is as broken as our economic system. But Americans could mobilize to reform electoral politics and reduce the influence of money in elections. And for those who are disenchanted with government, Smith recommends that they take a look at how well it’s working for the mobilized and active financial superclass.

In the meantime

While we’re working on mobilizing to take back our democracy, we can start from the bottom up to “democratize wealth,” as both Piketty and Alperovitz say we must. Alperovitz puts less faith in top-down institutions than does Smith (the subtitle of What Then Shall We Do? is Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution ). He lays out bottom-up solutions already in practice across America that offer superior alternatives to the status quo. Here’s a sampling:

Worker ownership.

It’s not just little startups and co-ops. Alperovitz points to the company ranked 48th on the Forbes list of the largest U.S. private companies: Hy-Vee, a Midwestern supermarket chain that currently has more than 69,000 employees and more than $8 billion in sales, is owned by employees through a profit-sharing program. W.L. Gore & Associates, makers of Gore-Tex, has been owned since 1974 by its workers—currently more than 10,000 in 30 countries generating annual revenues of about $3 billion.

Already, some 11,000 companies employing 10.3 million people operate under such employee stock-ownership plans, with more forming regularly.

Social enterprises.

Pioneer Human Services, in Seattle, is a textbook example of this model, a form of democratized ownership that uses the money it earns as well as the enterprises it creates to achieve broader social purposes. According to Alperovitz, a large portion of Pioneer’s $67 million annual budget comes from businesses it created. The organization produces thousands of machined parts for Boeing, caters more then 1,500 meals a day for hospitals and other facilities, and employs almost 1,000 people usually classified as impaired or unemployable. Pioneer is but one of many such social enterprises doing good and democratizing wealth.

Traditional co-ops.

Alperovitz says that more than 130 million Americans—more than 40 percent of the population—belong to one or more co-ops. Not just food co-ops but also agricultural co-ops, electric co-ops, insurance co-ops, retail co-ops (such as REI) and retailer-owned co-ops (such as ACE Hardware), health care co-ops, high-technology industry co-ops, artist co-ops, and credit unions. The Alliance to Develop Power, in Western Massachusetts, has developed what Alperovitz calls an $80 million “community economy” of housing co-ops and other cooperatively controlled businesses.

Community development corporations.

Almost 5,000 such organizations now operate in larger U.S. cities. These primarily incubate small businesses and develop low-income housing. In Newark, Alperovitz says, the New Community Corporation employs about 600 neighborhood residents, manages 2,000 housing units, and has built up $500 million in assets. Profits from its businesses, which include a shopping center, help support day-care and afterschool programs and a nursing home.

Land trusts.

Hundreds of these exist today, both urban and rural. By taking land out of the speculative market and democratizing ownership, such nonprofits prevent gentrification and support low- and moderate-income housing with development profits. By 2012, Alperovitz says, 255 land trusts were operating in 45 states and the District of Columbia.

Government-owned and operated businesses.

Today, more than 50 percent of cities larger than 100,000 are making municipal equity investments in local business. Now is the time, Alperovitz says, to expand these investments to co-ops, employee-owned businesses, social enterprises, and nonprofit land development. “If you’re going to get serious about systemic change—not just ‘projects’—you’re ultimately going to have to consider what government does,” he says, “and how it can be used to further the vision and the model you affirm.”

Already forms of this are happening from Cleveland to San Diego. One of the first was Boston, which in 1976 renovated historic Fanueil Hall, transforming it into Faneuil Hall Marketplace, a downtown retail center with 49 shops, 18 restaurants and pubs, and 44 pushcarts. Instead of turning things over to its joint-venture partner, Rouse Company, the city kept the property under municipal ownership and took profits in lieu of property taxes from Rouse. The strategy earned the city 40 percent more revenue that it would have collected in taxes.

Another example: More and more cities are building—and owning—hotels and using the profits to shore up their emaciated budgets. Dallas, Texas, not known for left-wing collectivism, opened the city-owned $500 million, 23-story, 1001-room Omni Dallas Hotel in 2011.

Transform too-big-to-fail-banks,

and other private corporations that teeter on insolvency, into public utilities. The next time Bank of America’s risky scams threaten to implode the world’s economy, Alperovitz says we should bail out the bank—and assume public ownership of the corporation. If that idea seems radical, it arose from the militantly conservative economists of the Chicago School of Economics during the Great Depression.

“Every industry should be either effectively competitive or socialized,” wrote Harry C. Simon, one of the school’s revered thinkers. Simon and seven of his conservative colleagues proposed a “Chicago Plan” that called for public ownership of Federal Reserve Banks, nationalizing the creation of money, and turning private banks into highly restricted savings-and-loan associations.

Or, in Alperovitz’s 21st century version, “Take them over; turn them into public utilities.”

Need for strategy

Plenty of other ideas for democratizing wealth exist now, all of which can start small and scale up to large, even national enterprises that provide wellpaying jobs. But, Alperovitz cautions, “What hasn’t happened yet is that people haven’t seen this change strategically; they’re mainly developing ‘projects’—and I think the next level will be when people begin to realize that this could be a powerful strategy, not just for building a movement, but actually for building political power.”

At the moment corporations “certainly have the power. But I’m a historian; I think in decades,” he says, “not months. Power comes and goes. It could take 20, even 50 years,” adding that in the face of so much money and corporate power “it might not be possible to change the system.

“Or,” he adds, after a perfectly timed pause, “as in the case of ending apartheid; as in the case of the American Revolution; as in the case of the French Revolution; as in the case of the women’s revolution; as in the case of the fall of communism—building from the bottom up, over time, is actually how you transform systems.”

Land Ownership 

1. Indigenous land sovereignty

The world is watching as historic land reforms on the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu show how to return land sovereignty to indigenous people. The decade-long effort led by Ralph Regenvanu, leader of the Land and Justice Party, is returning control of lands to “customary owners.” More than 80 percent of land in Vanuatu is considered customary: owned by extended families as custodians for future generations.

2. Agroecology, not chemicals

Instead of single crops and fossil fuel-based amendments, agroecology relies on complex natural systems to do a better job: Bean crops that help soil retain nitrogen are rotated with other crops. Farm animal waste is used as fertilizer. Flowers attract beneficial insects to manage pests. Intensive planting of diverse crops requires less water and helps keep weeds under control. 

3. Carbon sequestration

A benefit of soil regeneration practices, which make soils more fertile and resilient to land degradation, is that carbon from the atmosphere is captured in soil and plant biomass. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says carbon sequestration accounts for 90 percent of global agricultural mitigation potential by 2030.

4. Resilient polyculture

After Hurricane Ike hit Cuba in 2008, researchers found polyculture plantain farms had fewer losses than monoculture farms. In general, strongly integrated agroecological farms sprang back to full production two months sooner than conventional farms.

Seeds 

5. Open source seeds

The Open Source Seed Initiative was created by plant breeders, farmers, and seed companies as an alternative to patent-protected seeds sold by agricultural giants such as Monsanto. Its goal is to make seeds a common good again, equipping new crop varieties with an open source license. This allows farmers to save and trade seeds and develop their own hybrids for climate adaptation.

6. Genetic diversity

Traditional plant varieties are more adaptive than modern hybrids. In Peru, six Quechua communities form the ANDES Potato Park project, which holds about 1,500 varieties of cultivated potatoes. The project not only models seed diversity conservation, but also studies the traditional knowledge, practices, and spiritual beliefs that nurture those resources. 

7. Better pay

Agroecology requires skilled labor, yet the worst-paying jobs in the U.S. are in the food system. This makes food and farm labor a poverty issue. Food service jobs are held primarily by women and people of color, making it a social justice issue. Policies addressing these issues would increase wages—which the Fight for $15 campaign wants—protect field workers from harmful chemicals, and treat the migrant labor force fairly.

8. Valuing traditional knowledge

Scientists in Latin America are tapping traditional farmers for their expertise. “Campesino a Campesino” —translated as “peasant to peasant”—is the cultural model of knowledge dissemination throughout Latin America. Farmers sharing their results and ideas have helped to spread agroecological practices.

Distribution 

9. Regional food hubs

Will we quit flying out-of-season produce around the world? Australia’s Food Connect program delivers ecologically and ethically produced fruits and vegetables, dairy products, and bakery items from local farmers to consumer hubs. In Brisbane, door-to-door travel must be no farther than 250 miles, and farmers are paid four times what they would get from big grocery chains.

10. Accessibility, affordability

Low-income people are a large and ready market for farmers. Programs like Double Up Food Bucks make SNAP benefits worth double at farmers markets. In 2013, more than 10,000 first-time SNAP customers in Michigan used farmers markets.

Diet

11. Eat together

Considering the energy used in daily cooking for 7 billion people, collective cooking and eating should be a goal. Not only does it cost less carbon per plate, but research also shows that where eating is a social activity, people are healthier.

12. A plate full of plants

Blue Hill chef Dan Barber, author of The Third Plate and known for his work to use less carbon in the production and serving of his food, argues that our standard plate of dinner should shift from a slab of protein with a side of vegetables to a plate full of seasonal vegetables with perhaps meat in a seasoning or a sauce. Some 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions is from industrial agriculture, including deforestation to support livestock.

13. Waste nothing

Total land needed to grow feed just for Europe’s pork industry is the size of Ireland. The U.K.-based Pig Idea campaign encourages feeding leftover catering food to pigs because 40 percent of what farms produce is wasted. Also, the Gleaning Network has in the past four years rescued more than 288 metric tons of produce in Great Britain.

It helped that in Persian culture we had ceremonies to turn to. We clung to 3,500-year-old Zoroastrian ceremonies that correspond to the seasons. Several of these rituals take place during the spring because the equinox marks the Persian New Year. Besides a thorough spring cleaning, we jump over a bonfire to cleanse our inner landscape and give our maladies to fire and gain vitality from it. On the longest night of the year, winter solstice, we stay up all night eating fruits and nuts, reciting poetry, playing music, and dancing. This is to symbolize survival and celebration during dark times.

Rituals, which are a series of actions performed in a specific way, have been part of human existence for thousands of years. They are not habits. According to research psychologist Nick Hobson, a habit鈥檚 inherent goal is different from a ritual鈥檚. With habit, the actions and behaviors are causally tied to the desired outcome; for example, brushing our teeth to prevent cavities and gum disease and exercising to keep healthy. Rituals, on the other hand, are 鈥済oal demoted,鈥� which means that their actions have no instrumental connection to the outcome. For example, we sing 鈥淗appy Birthday鈥� to the same melody even though it isn鈥檛 tied to a specific external result.

Cristine Legare, a researcher and psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, says, 鈥淩ituals signify transition points in the individual life span and provide psychologically meaningful ways to participate in the beliefs and practices of the community.鈥� They have been instrumental in building community, promoting cooperation, and marking transition points in a community member鈥檚 life. And as strange as rituals might be from a logical perspective, they have evolved as distinct features of human culture.

While it鈥檚 not clear exactly how they help, rituals reduce anxiety, improve performance and confidence, and even work on people who don鈥檛 believe in them, research shows. In a University of Toronto study, participants who performed a ritual before completing a task exhibited less anxiety and sensitivity to personal failure than when they completed the task without first performing the ritual.

Additionally, rituals benefit our physical well-being and immune system. According to Andrew Newberg, the associate director of research at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health, rituals lower cortisol, which in turn lowers heart rate and blood pressure and increases immune system function.

We live amid a loneliness epidemic where the lack of belonging and community has been linked to high suicide rates and an increased sense of despair. The United States has one of the worst work-life balance scores in the world, while more Americans have become disillusioned with organized religion, as a broad and rapidly rising demographic consider themselves spiritual but not religious. Perhaps with fewer opportunities for people to be in community, many shared cultural rituals are falling away and with them a grounding source for connection and mental health.

鈥淲e are an intensely social and ritualistic species.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

In Iran during the war, we found uses for rituals when we were faced with food rations. We gathered family and friends, reciting the ancient story of the poor abused girl who had run away from home and had a vision of being visited by three celestial bibis (matrons). The bibis instructed her to make a sweet halva and donate it to the poor. The girl said she didn鈥檛 have any money, and the bibis told her to borrow or work for the ingredients. This worked well with food rations as each guest brought a few ingredients to make the halva. Like the girl in the story, each participant made a wish and took a bite of the halva. I walked away feeling calmer and more supported.

Stories, such as those told during the Jewish ceremony of Passover Seder, have become ritualized because they are recited in the same way each time. Rhythm and music play a similar role in ritual. Whether we鈥檙e chanting in Sanskrit or singing the national anthem, 鈥渙ur brains tend to resonate with those around us, so if everyone is doing the same dance, hymn, or prayer, all of those brains are working in the same way,鈥� Newberg explains. 鈥淭his can engender a powerful feeling of connectedness. It also reduces stress and depression through a combination of effects on the autonomic nervous system, which is ultimately connected to the emotional areas of the brain鈥攖he limbic system.鈥� According to one study, chanting the Sanskrit syllable 鈥渙m鈥� deactivates the limbic system, softening the edge of fear, anxiety, and depression.

Psychologist Hobson confirms that rituals aren鈥檛 just a benefit to our mental health鈥攖hey鈥檙e actually essential. 鈥淲e are an intensely social and ritualistic species,鈥� he says. 鈥淭ake this piece out of our modern human narrative and you lose a piece of our history and our humanity.鈥�

I moved to the U.S. when I was 14. After living here for two decades, I became a mother and was confronted with the phrase, 鈥淚t takes a village to raise a child.鈥� But where was that mythical village and the rituals that made it sane? For example, a pregnant woman in Iran had a rotating menu of dishes made for her by friends and family. A new mother was surrounded by people who took turns assisting with daily tasks. But in the U.S., she was expected to fend for herself and her baby immediately after childbirth. I observed that besides standard holiday traditions, community-building practices were lacking. 

So after 20 years of living in the U.S., I decided to create my own community rituals.

I started with my family. At dinners we banned books and devices, lit candles, and discussed set topics of conversation. We held weekly family meetings with opening and closing ceremonies and used a talking stick to enforce respectful communication. At birthday dinners, we took turns saying, 鈥淚 love you because 鈥︹€�

Candlelit dinners were no longer saved for a special occasion. Using a talking stick helped me listen more attentively and choose my words more carefully. Huddling together at the end of each family meeting provided me with a sense of accomplishment. Each ritual, no matter how small, anchored me in something bigger and provided a sense of belonging.

Then we began to build rituals within the larger community. First, we hosted a multigenerational Sunday potluck with friends and family. Each week, five to 10 of us gathered, shared food, and recounted what made us grateful. During each meal, I noticed I was lighter, more engaged with others, and laughed more.

Later, we built more community rituals into the week. I posted on Nextdoor, asking our neighbors to join us on Monday evening walks to the neighborhood park and back.

In this age of isolation, we need nourishing and uplifting means of creating community by bringing together members of different generations as our ancestors did. From my experience in Iran, rituals can be particularly valuable during hard times. In the U.S., we don鈥檛 have to worry about bombs and food rations, but we still have challenges to our security that affect our mental and physical health. Rituals can help us, though, by offering our communities opportunities for healing and support.

The mood at kitchen tables in California in the early 1930s was as bleak as it was elsewhere in the United States. Factories were closed. More than a quarter of the breadwinners in the state were out of work. There were no federal or state relief programs, nothing but some local charity—in Los Angeles County, a family of four got about 50 cents a day, and only 1 in 10 got even that.

Not long before, America had been a farming nation. When times were tough, there was still the land. But the country was becoming increasingly urban. People were dependent on this thing called “the economy” and the financial casino to which it was yoked. When the casino crashed, there was no fallback, just destitution. Except for one thing: The real economy was still there—paralyzed but still there. Farmers still were producing, more than they could sell. Fruit rotted on trees, vegetables in the fields. In January 1933, dairymen poured more than 12,000 gallons of milk into the Los Angeles city sewers every day.

The factories were there, too. Machinery was idle. Old trucks were in side lots, needing only a little repair. All that capacity, on the one hand, legions of idle men and women on the other. It was the financial casino that had failed, not the workers and machines. On street corners and around bare kitchen tables, people started to put two and two together. More precisely, they thought about new ways of putting two and two together.

Building a reciprocal economy

In the spring of 1932, in Compton, California, an unemployed World War I veteran walked out to the farms that still ringed Los Angeles. He offered his labor in return for a sack of vegetables, and that evening he returned with more than his family needed. The next day a neighbor went out with him to the fields. Within two months 500 families were members of the Unemployed Cooperative Relief Organization.

That group became one of 45 units in an organization that served the needs of some 150,000 people.

It operated a large warehouse, a distribution center, a gas and service station, a refrigeration facility, a sewing shop, a shoe shop, even medical services, all on cooperative principles. Members were expected to work two days a week, and benefits were allocated according to need. A member with a wife and two kids got four times as much food as someone living alone. The organization was run democratically, and social support was as important as material support. Members helped one another resist evictions; sometimes they moved a family back in after a landlord had put them out. Unemployed utility workers turned on gas and electricity for families that had been cut off.

Conventional histories present the Depression as a story of the corporate market, foiled by its own internal flaws, versus the federal government, either savvy mechanic or misguided klutz, depending on your view. The government ascended, in the form of the New Deal; and so was born the polarity of our politics—and the range of our economic possibilities—ever since.

Yet there was another story, too. It embodied the trusty American virtues of initiative, responsibility, and self-help, but in a way that was grounded in community and genuine economy. This other story played out all over the U.S. for a brief but suggestive moment in the early 1930s.

The UCRO was just one organization in one city. Groups like it ultimately involved more than 1.3 million people, in more than 30 states. It happened spontaneously, without experts or blueprints. Most of the participants were blue-collar workers whose formal schooling had stopped at high school. Some groups evolved a kind of money to create more flexibility in exchange. An example was the Unemployed Exchange Association, or UXA, based in Oakland, California. (The UXA story was told in an excellent article in the weekly East Bay Express in 1983, on which the following paragraphs are based.) UXA began in a Hooverville (an encampment of the poor during the Depression, so-called after the president) called “Pipe City,” near the East Bay waterfront. Hundreds of homeless people were living there in sections of large sewer pipe that were never laid because the city ran out of money. Among them was Carl Rhodehamel, a musician and engineer.

Rhodehamel and others started going door to door in Oakland, offering to do home repairs in exchange for unwanted items. They repaired these and circulated them among themselves. Soon they established a commissary and sent scouts around the city and into the surrounding farms to see what they could scavenge or exchange labor for. Within six months, they had 1,500 members and a thriving subeconomy that included a foundry and machine shop, wood shop, garage, soap factory, print shop, wood lot, ranches, and lumber mills. They rebuilt 18 trucks from scrap. At UXA’s peak, it distributed 40 tons of food a week.

It all worked on a time-credit system. Each hour worked earned a hundred points; there was no hierarchy of skills, and all work paid the same. Members could use credits to buy food and other items at the commissary—medical and dental services, haircuts, and more. A council of some 45 coordinators met regularly to solve problems and discuss opportunities.

One coordinator might report that a saw needed a new motor. Another knew of a motor, but the owner wanted a piano in return. A third member knew of a piano that was available. And on and on. It was an amalgam of enterprise and cooperation—the flexibility and hustle of the market, but without the encoded greed of the corporation or the stifling bureaucracy of the state. The economics texts don’t really have a name for it. The members called it a “reciprocal economy.”

The dream fades

It would seem that a movement that provided livelihood for more than 300,000 people in California alone would merit discussion in the history books. Amidst the floundering of the early 1930s, this was something that actually worked. Yet in most accounts, the self-help co-ops get barely a line.

The one exception is Upton Sinclair’s campaign for governor in 1934. Sinclair was a kind of Ralph Nader of his day. He based his campaign on a plan he called End Poverty in California, or EPIC, which was based in turn on the self-help cooperatives, UXA in particular. It would have taken the state’s idle farmland and factories and turned them into worker co-ops.

The idea of a genuine economy shorn of Wall Street contrivance touched a chord. Some 2,000 EPIC clubs sprang up. Sinclair won the Democratic primary, but California’s moneyed establishment mustered $10 million dollars to pummel him. EPIC died with his campaign, and the idea has been associated with quixotic politics ever since.

To say UXA and the other cooperative economies faced challenges is to put it mildly. They were going against the grain of an entire culture. Anti-communist “Red Squads” harassed them, while radicals complained they were too practical and not sufficiently committed to systemic change.

But the main thing that killed the co-ops was the Works Progress Administration and its cash jobs. Those WPA jobs were desperately needed. But some of them were make-work, while the co-op work was genuinely productive.

The co-ops pleaded with FDR’s Administration to include them in the WPA. Local governments were helping with gasoline and oil. But the New Dealers weren’t interested, and the co-ops melted away. For years they were period pieces, like soup lines and Okies.

Or so it seemed.

Today, the signs of financial and ecological collapse are mounting. We are strung out on foreign debt and foreign oil and riding real estate inflation that won’t last forever. Add the impending collapse of the natural life support system, and the 1930s could seem benign by comparison.

In this setting, the economics of self-help are increasingly relevant. The possibility of creating such an economy, though, might seem remote. In the 1930s, there still were farms on the outskirts of cities—family operations that could make barter deals on the spot. Factories were nearby, too. Products were simple and made to last, and so could be scavenged and repaired.

All that has changed. The factories are in China, the farms are owned by corporations, and you can’t walk to them from Los Angeles anymore. Products are made to break; the local repair shop is a distant memory. Hypersophisticated technology has put local mechanics out of business, let alone backyard tinkerers.

An idea resurfaces

Yet there are trends on the other side as well. Energy technology is moving back to the local level, by way of solar, wind, biodiesel, and the rest. The popularity of organics has given a boost to smaller farms. There’s also the quiet revival of urban agriculture. Community gardens are booming—some 6,000 of them in 38 U.S. cities. In Boston, the Food Project produces over 120,000 pounds of vegetables on just 21 acres. Then consider the unused land in U.S. cities: some 70,000 vacant parcels in Chicago, 31,000 in Philadelphia.

Large swaths of Detroit look like Dresden after the firebombing. A UXA could do a lot with that. I’m not getting gauzy here. Anyone who has been part of a co-op—I once served on the board of one—knows it is not a walk in the park. But it is not hard to see the stirrings of a new form of cooperative economics on the American scene today. You can’t explain Linux, the computer operating system developed community-style on the web, by the tenets of the economics texts. Nor can you so explain Craigslist, the online bulletin board that people use at no or minimal cost.

The cooperative model seems to defy what economists call “economic law”—that people work only for personal gain and in response to schemes of personal incentive and reward. Yet the Depression co-ops did happen. When the next crash comes, the self-help movement of the 1930s may be just as important a model as the New Deal.

Today’s best ideas are often to be found among those rejected in the past. “We are not going back to barter,” Carl Rhodehamel of UXA once said. “We are going forward into barter. We are feeling our way along, developing a new science.”

Why vote if you hate everything on the ballot? Elections are about more than the candidates. They’re about voters, too, and what issues they think deserve attention. Here are five reasons to voice those issues with a vote.

1. People who vote the least have the most to lose this election.

Latinos and Asian Americans are voting at historically high rates, but those rates are still low. In the 2012 election, Asian Americans voted at a rate of 47 percent and Latinos at 48 percent, while African Americans voted at a rate of 66 percent, slightly above Whites at 64 percent. Together, Latinos and Asian Americans make up the majority of the U.S. immigrant population, the main target of Trump’s proposals to deport children of undocumented immigrants, even if the children are U.S. citizens by birth.

The deportation of U.S. birthright citizens isn’t likely, says Faye Hipsman, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, but another Trump proposal is: ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects from deportation those U.S. immigrants who arrived as children.

2. If you’re not down with a President Trump or President Clinton, there is always a third party.

Do third-party votes matter? It’s complicated.

In 1992, Ross Perot won nearly 19 percent of the popular vote running as an independent candidate. That was nearly 20 million votes—plenty, but not enough to win an election. Some claim this cost Republican candidate George H.W. Bush a second term. Eight years later, Republican George W. Bush beat Democrat Al Gore. Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote by five votes. The third-party candidate, Ralph Nader, was blamed. He gathered nearly 3 million votes, which some argue would have gone to Gore. Then again, if Nader—or Perot—hadn’t been on the ballot, maybe their supporters wouldn’t have voted at all.

Voting is personal. People vote because they want to give voice to their beliefs.

Political activist Angela Davis told Democracy Now! in March that she had never voted for a candidate from either of the two major parties until Barack Obama. For her, electing the nation’s first Black president was personal, as were her previous boycotts of the two major parties.

3. Voting—in high or low numbers—can have serious consequences.

The past two Obama elections show what’s possible when people of color come out to vote—even though they made up only about 27 percent of all voters nationwide for each election. The Pew Research Center points out that if it weren’t for his non-White constituency, Obama would have likely lost re-election in 2012, when 59 percent of White voters sided with Mitt Romney.

Why don’t people vote? Let’s look back, all the way to the 19th century.

In 1896, Republican William McKinley defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan in an election that introduced many modern campaign techniques: cross-country speeches, extensive fundraising, and polling to target specific voters. Voter turnout before and during that election hovered around 80 percent; afterward, it averaged only 65 percent.

Historian Mark Kornbluh, in his 2000 book Why America Stopped Voting: The Decline of Participatory Democracy and the Emergence of Modern American Politics, blames a changing American culture. Politics lost its “entertainment value” as sports and theater hit the mainstream. Spectacle-style campaigns replaced participatory-style campaigns that invited the public to shape a candidate’s platform. Kornbluh theorizes that voters grew disinterested when they felt unnecessary to a campaign.

4. Let them know you exist and that you’re not satisfied—write in a name.

At the 2015 Equity Summit, Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, spoke to people of color. “If voting didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be trying to take your right to vote away from you,” she said. If you don’t like the candidates, write in someone else, even your mother, Sarsour said. “The idea is to be counted.” Her argument is that people need to show up if they want politicians and decision-makers to listen to them. This is especially true for low-income people. In 2012, only 1 in 4 voters earning less than $10,000 turned out. When these citizens don’t cast votes, their views remain un- or misrepresented.

At least seven write-in candidates have made it to Congress, including South Carolina Republican Strom Thurmond in his first bid for the U.S. Senate.

5. Consider all the people who have an important opinion but can’t vote.

Some people can’t vote because their local laws require strict identification that they won’t have in time for Election Day or because their work schedules are so demanding they can’t take off five hours to wait in line. Shorter early-voting periods in states like Georgia and North Carolina also create obstacles for people. And some can’t vote because they aren’t naturalized citizens (even if they’ve spent most of their lives in the United States) or because a criminal record prevents them. Some 5.8 million Americans cannot vote because of a past felony conviction.

Americans are free to do as they please, and voting won’t solve the nation’s problems. But it’s a start—especially in this election, when the security of so many is at stake.

But on this day in question, I was defending my marijuana use to my increasingly worried parents. I was 22 and smoking enough weed daily to make Seth Rogen blanch. But I was doing it for the same reason that has driven the legalization of medical cannabis in 37 states: It made me feel better, just short of good. My struggle, mostly with benzodiazepines, left me living in such a sickly state that cannabis was one of the few surefire cures for feeling like I was five nights into a weeklong tequila bender every day of my life.

Of course, most people didn鈥檛 want to hear my excuse. They simply didn鈥檛 understand me, as if I was trying to convince them that coffee made me sleepy. Weed is a drug, after all. And my pills were prescribed by a psychiatrist鈥攃learly that made them a positive part of my life. On the other hand, my parents, and many others as well, insisted weed was bad, end of discussion, and I needed to stop smoking it that instant.

There鈥檚 a word for when the enforced sensitivity around a topic allows, or even encourages, truth to be replaced with a comfortable fiction, when ignorant silence is elevated over the freedom of nuanced thought and shame is substituted for support. That word is stigma. And nowhere is it more alive than in the way we talk about drug use and treat drug users.

Without knowing its name, I wrestled with stigma for years during my struggles with substance misuse, and I continue to wrestle with it today as an out-in-the-open drug user and someone who educates on the topics of drug use and addiction. Stigma is even present in the world of recovery; too often, people like me鈥攊n recovery from a struggle with a particular substance but not completely sober鈥攁re regarded as 鈥渘ot in recovery鈥� by purists and looked down on as liars. But the bigger issue remains: 12 years into recovery from my pill addiction, what has always stayed with me is that startling contradiction between how those in my life regarded my use of pharmaceuticals versus cannabis. 

Over the last decade-plus, this paradox has become even more mainstream. We鈥檝e had an abundance of stories highlighting the dangers in over-prescribing pills, especially opioids, without properly educating patients on the possible negative effects of pharmaceutical use. We鈥檝e even had this genuine concern inflated into a good ol鈥� fashioned moral panic, one whose name, the 鈥渙pioid crisis,鈥� is on the lips of every soccer mom and sheriff in the country. 

This particular moral panic has thrived despite the fact that our hardworking drug use and addiction researchers and advocates agree that this is, in fact, an , of which opioids are merely one factor, and referring to the entire thing as the 鈥渙pioid crisis鈥� is akin to calling a sandwich 鈥渂read.鈥� It鈥檚 a convenient oversimplification, which isn鈥檛 surprising; as with every moral panic, we love to reduce complex problems to a single scapegoat.

But what really gets me is how infrequently I鈥檝e heard anyone, from boardrooms to the halls of Congress, say those three words that all of us who suffered the consequences of their recklessness long to hear: 鈥淚 was wrong.鈥� And I count myself among those who have been wronged by the system, not just because of my struggle with addiction, but also because of my repeated experiences with our justice system over the same pleasure-inducing plant that is now . 

You鈥檇 think, given that glaring paradox, that we鈥檇 have heard numerous apologies, even the surface-level political kind. Alas, we have not. Somehow, we went from Reefer Madness to , while Big Pharma stole Big Tobacco鈥檚 Public Enemy No. 1 crown and ran with it to even higher levels of moral panic. 

In fact, while legal cannabis has become a $30 billion industry in the U.S. alone, (largely the same men who would have called me a junkie 12 years ago). Meanwhile, arrests for drugs have roughly stayed the same over the past decade, and those arrested are disproportionately people of color. As an experienced drug user and someone who used to struggle with addiction, I recognize this sort of high-chasing behavior exhibited by our criminal justice system all too well. 

The stigma around drug use, however, is seen just as clearly outside its criminal justice and business implications. Even now, the word 鈥減leasure鈥� and its attached significance are conspicuously absent from our conversations around drugs. While we debate the merits of regulating opioid prescriptions and the many successful campaigns to legalize drugs for therapeutic use, the simple and all-too-human use of drugs for their ecstasy-inducing quality is relegated to the underground, a space reserved for hippies, scofflaws, and everyone in between. While a vast majority of people who use drugs do so for pleasure, they have no seat at the table where decisions are made about their acceptable use. 

Why is that? In a society where death-defying activity is, while maybe not commonplace, at least accepted in recreational pursuits like bungee jumping, skydiving, and other extreme activities, and inviting bodily harm is appreciated as entertainment in sport (MMA, NASCAR, NFL), admitting something so banal as finding pleasure in drug use is oddly regarded as taboo, akin to inviting your in-laws to a nudist retreat. And it鈥檚 been that way since the late 19th century, when a concerted effort began to connect certain drugs and their use to people deemed undesirable鈥攏amely, people of color and immigrants. 

Naturally the substances preferred by the ruling class weren鈥檛 subjected to these policies born of racism and lies, which is why breweries remain popular (more on that in a minute) and you can buy a pack of cigarettes at the bodega on the corner. Meanwhile, it鈥檚 easier to believe the idea that drugs like heroin and meth can never be enjoyed safely, despite repeated showing that safe use is indeed possible. A few recent bestselling books have attempted to dispel these myths, including those by and the journalists and .

To be clear, it doesn鈥檛 have to be this way. In fact, there鈥檚 never been a better time to rip off the Band-Aid of our draconian drug policies and see them for what they are: untruths grounded in racism that do nothing to keep people safe and only serve to stigmatize those who use drugs鈥攂oth legal and illegal鈥攖o add pleasure to their lives. These are people like me and, if the statistics are to be believed, . 

Our bungling drug policies are, at this point, more than four generations old, and have included such performative and misguided educational programs as D.A.R.E. and Just Say No. It鈥檚 not surprising that it鈥檚 difficult for many of us to imagine any alternatives. We like to think that the United States sets the example and the rest of the world follows. While this is sometimes the truth, it鈥檚 not the case everywhere. In fact, when it comes to recognizing even the most basic humanity of people who choose to enjoy the pleasures of drug use, numerous countries long ago left us in the dust.

There are currently nearly (often called safe use sites) in 15 countries around the world, a figure that only recently expanded to include the first such facility in the U.S., OnPoint NYC, which opened in New York City in 2021. Famously, Portugal ; as a result, both its overdose rate and drug-related crime statistics fell precipitously. Further, Spain has never had any sort of widespread anti-drug laws, and, as Carl Hart reported in his book Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear, its citizens are often puzzled by the ineffectual yet draconian policies of the U.S.

To use an example a bit closer to home, in 1917, the U.S. notoriously tried to eradicate its then-most-popular drug, alcohol, and saw catastrophic results, including a rise in organized crime and deaths from tainted bootleg products. In 1933, in a rare moment of radical honesty, we did something our country is downright rotten at: We admitted we鈥檇 made a mistake, and repealed the 18th Amendment with the 21st. Our great-grandparents took that profound step with humility and a desire to correct the wrongs of the past, which means we can too. But it won鈥檛 be easy.

We need to shake off our blinders and see the untruths, both intentional and unintentional, we鈥檝e swallowed wholesale over the years. We need to mindfully probe what we think we 鈥渒now鈥� about drugs and those who enjoy their use, just as I did when I was five years into recovery yet still found myself picturing the same harmful stereotype when someone said the word 鈥渁ddict.鈥� It will take us each accepting our own drug use, whether it鈥檚 marijuana, martinis, or meth, as the norm and not the exception. It will take us seeing the humanity in each other when we鈥檙e being taught to only see monsters. 

But there is hope, and we see it every day. It鈥檚 all around us, in our homes, on billboards, in commercials, and in recreational facilities all around the country. Even now, as I write this, I sit in what can easily be called a safe use site for a certain intoxicating and pleasure-inducing substance, a place that鈥檚 halfway up Atlantic Avenue, between Boerum Place and Court Street in Brooklyn. You wouldn鈥檛 know it鈥檚 a safe use site because there鈥檚 no wall of protesters outside. No members of the media have called the owner, asking him to respond to criticism that he鈥檚 just enabling drug users. There is government oversight, but it鈥檚 the kind that a simple form and knowing the right person can easily negotiate. And we even have a special name for these locations. We call them bars, an old English word that has long been associated with sin. 

Yes, alcohol has seen its fair share of stigma, but鈥攊n what gives hope to people like me who long for a future where drug users can emerge from the shadows鈥攖he stigma around this particular drug has ebbed over time, giving way to common sense: Keep it out of the hands of kids and those about to handle heavy machinery, but otherwise let people live and, as our founding document promises, pursue happiness. It鈥檚 moments like this, sitting here in this bar, that I dare to dream of a safer future for open drug users like myself. Maybe one day we, like the Dutch, can sit in a coffee shop and share a tea made from psilocybin mushrooms and experience the blissful pleasure that comes with that euphoric delight. What a day that will be. 

If we were not required to work to pay for basic rights, such as food, shelter, and water, could we embrace radical solutions to change the current state of our society?

As the post-pandemic struggle about work and working conditions rages on, workers are quitting jobs that make them miserable, while unions seek recognition and avenues for negotiations, all within our current capitalistic system that declares each individual鈥檚 worth to be inherently tied to their productivity. But what if society was not organized around wage labor, but something else? And what would that something else be?

Millions of workers left jobs in 2021 at such a scale it鈥檚 been deemed the 鈥淕reat Resignation.鈥� Recent attempts to understand their dissatisfaction have explored what the 鈥渇uture of work鈥� looks like and how work overall could become more bearable. How about a four-day work week? Or higher pay? Better working conditions? Flexible hours? But 32-hour weeks (or whatever good policy is on offer) are adaptations to a dehumanizing system鈥攖hey don鈥檛 address that system as a whole, nor do they get to the core of the workers鈥� discontent with the inhumane machinations of capitalism. 

Online, the rejection of the idea of work itself is a growing trend across social media platforms. On TikTok, about how the poster doesn鈥檛 like to work, no matter what job, often go viral. 鈥檚 message鈥斺€淔uck this, I don鈥檛 want to work for the rest of my life :(鈥濃€攔eceived thousands of likes and comments in agreement. On Twitter, where the constant barrage of negative news is constantly dissected and commented on, posters point out how capitalism keeps marching on despite the unconscionable tragedies we鈥檝e all had to digest in the past two and a half years. The pandemic, the Ukraine war, school shootings where children are massacred, continued police killings of Black people鈥攏one of these is enough to bring our exploitative system to a halt; workers are supposed to muddle through and keep the world turning with our labor. On Reddit, the (the r/antiwork subreddit) has 2 million subscribers who can easily access an online library about and exchange experiences with each other about the jobs they don鈥檛 want to do. The motto of this subreddit, whose members call themselves 鈥渋dlers,鈥� is 鈥淯nemployment for all, not just the rich!鈥�

Despite the online hype, the idea of refusing the tyranny of labor rather than reforming it isn鈥檛 new. In 1985, post-leftist anarchist Bob Black wrote and published the essay 鈥淭he Abolition of Work,鈥� where he argues that work 鈥渋s the source of nearly all the misery in the world. … In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

For Black, working to earn a living is at the heart of capitalism鈥檚 coercive forces, and he asserts that society should be organized around play instead of wage labor. 鈥淚 think that what I wrote is still true and only slightly exaggerated,鈥� Black says. 鈥淎s I define the word, 鈥榳ork鈥� is forced labor鈥攃ompulsory production. It is inherently coercive, like the state.鈥�

Black says having to pay for housing, food, water, health care, and whatever else is needed for survival is what keeps workers under the control of wage labor, regardless of what ideology is elected into government. 鈥淭he most important function of work鈥攁s I have always maintained鈥攊s social control,鈥� Black explains. And yet, as Black writes in his essay as well as in his book, also titled The Abolition of Work, a disproportionate amount of what constitutes 鈥渨ork鈥� has little connection to human survival. Compiling work reports, filing meaningless corporate documentation, and inventing cryptocurrency are just a few examples of 鈥渨ork鈥� that do not aid the practical survival of humans. Abolishing work would free us to do what we really love and reorient human efforts toward care and the simple act of living. 

鈥淪ociety would be simpler [and] radically decentralized, yet people would be more diverse, more individualized, and so their social relations would be richer, more complex,鈥� Black says. 鈥淟ife would be safer, although maybe less orderly. But where order is necessary, it would be the order of custom, not the rule of law. There would be opportunities, beginning in childhood, for people to try out many different things and discover what things they can do that they like best. Maybe there will be some people who like doing the same thing all the time鈥攊n other words, doing a 鈥榡ob.鈥� These unfortunates, too, should be free to do what they want to do. This is a society that has no center.鈥�

The Anti-Work Response to the Girlboss

One example often used in support of anti-work arguments online is the alleged death of the 鈥済irlboss.鈥� The girlboss can be exemplified by Kim Kardashian, who models aspirational femininity and independent entrepreneurship that supposedly liberates women from gender oppression, even as she ends up reinforcing and repeating the same abuses she supposedly sought to eliminate. A combination of pandemic burnout, growing social awareness, and the emptiness of women 鈥渉aving it all鈥� in a broken economy has revealed the impact of the girlboss to be less than revolutionary. As Amanda Mull : 鈥淭he push to move beyond the girlboss is an acknowledgment that a slight expansion of college-educated women鈥檚 access to venture capital or mentoring opportunities was never a meaningful change to begin with, or an avenue via which meaningful change might be achieved. Being belittled, harassed, or denied fair pay by a woman doesn鈥檛 make the experience instructive instead of traumatic.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

In short, some overworked women are discovering that a seat at the table isn鈥檛 a path toward liberation鈥攔ather, it鈥檚 a path toward becoming an overworked cog in the machine.

The anti-girlboss sentiment is often articulated through memes that challenge the message that women should be doing it all. Instead, these memes argue for 鈥溾€� For Angie Barbosa, an anarcho-feminist travesti (a transfemme, nonbinary identity specific to Latin America) scholar who studies feminist, queer, and anarchist literature and activism, these memes are a countercurrent to the violence of feminized 鈥渉ustle鈥� culture. 

鈥淣ot only do women and femmes have to deal with violence, exploitation, overworking, and constant impairments against our autonomy, now we鈥檙e also supposed to struggle within a value system that asks us to be healthy, happy, confident, self-sufficient, self-caring, boundary-aware, independent consumers,鈥� Barbosa says. 鈥淲e are working endlessly, tirelessly to produce a performance of successful femininity that denies the soul-wrecking gendered reality of violence. We are overworked, exhausted, angry, frustrated, violenced, deprived of many of our basic rights, and somehow still expected to feel like a boss.鈥�

Adding to the burden of women and femmes is the unpaid labor of domestic work, which is still largely invisible and unaddressed by policies that attempt to make waged work more comfortable. Even with a flexible work schedule, domestic work is still low-paying and distributed along gendered lines.  

鈥淭he reality of care and work can be terribly exhausting for femmes, but the good news is that the more people, groups, and communities are caring for each other in balanced, consent- and autonomy-based structures, the less everyone has to work, and it just becomes easier to live,鈥� Barbosa says. 

Small feminist structures of care and radical solidarity are the counterpoint to the solitary and herculean work of the girlboss鈥攁苍d as such, the abolition of work must also reckon with the racialized and gendered distribution of domestic and care work. 鈥淚 believe that whether this future of femme freedom includes work or not depends on our reading of what 鈥榳ork鈥� means,鈥� Barbosa says.

A Great Transformation

Underlying the taboo around the abolition of work is the fear that the world won鈥檛 sustain itself if people are not coerced into performing tasks to ensure humanity鈥檚 survival. How would we eat if workers were not forced to grow food for themselves and to sell it to others for their own sustenance? How would we keep public spaces clean and usable without street sweepers and maintenance workers who need a paycheck to support themselves? How would we survive without the care work and domestic labor that the racialized working classes are compelled to provide below cost? Black believes that if the structure of work is abolished, people will be able to sustain themselves and take care of each other, but without coercion.

For practical thinkers, this reorganization sounds easier said than done. We have been manipulated into maintaining capitalism鈥攁苍d correlating this maintenance with our own survival鈥攆or so long that the idea of people working to help each other survive sounds improbable and impossible. What would we get in exchange for our selfless efforts to maintain each other鈥檚 existence? What would be the trade-off, if not money? Self-sustaining societies鈥攕uch as the Zapatistas in Mexico, who have organized their own cooperative economy; developed autonomous justice, education, and health care systems; and created a bottom-up political decision-making process鈥攁re proof we can lasso the abolition of work to the possibilities of reality.  

鈥淲e need to transform everything,鈥� Black says. 鈥淚n my utopia there would be little coercion, and no institutionalized coercion such as government and work. Some activities, including some of what used to be 鈥榳ork,鈥� are likely to be done in relatively permanent organizations鈥攁苍d there is some risk in that. Work like that, when it is not individual craft work, can be organized by worker self-management.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

For Barbosa, the abolition of work and redistribution of domestic work is an invitation to rethink what we value in our lives. 鈥淚f the meaning of our lives was no longer to work, it could be a genuine and deep connection to each other, our bodies, and our environment,鈥� she says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 interesting that removing work from the equation makes a lot of our current definitions of success and happiness quite meaningless. It could be very powerful to imagine what happiness could be if it鈥檚 not just survival, success, capital. If we didn鈥檛 have to fight for the basics, I really have no idea what we should or could do instead, but I would love to find out.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

We see our elders perform them in subversive ways, such as grandmothers entering a meditative state in the middle of the day by 鈥渞esting their eyes,鈥� or expressing that a child has 鈥渂een here before鈥濃€攁 tacit recognition of their reincarnation, acknowledging the inherent sanctity of the very young and very old. I don鈥檛 think it鈥檚 a coincidence that the West African goddess of fertility, Yemanj谩, is also the goddess of fishermen, and to this day, in Black American families, dreaming of a fish is an omen of pregnancy.

If these positive cultural markers are passed down, it follows, then, that the negative ones are as well. My own mental health journey began after my OB-GYN suggested that I seek psychiatric treatment. While checking my vitals, he was alarmed by my spiking diastolic pressure as I prepared to tell him the reason for my visit. I informed him distractedly that this 鈥渏ust happened鈥� to me when I got nervous. His brow furrowed in concern as he asked me if I鈥檇 ever talked to someone about this. I nearly laughed鈥斺€淎bout what?鈥�

Until then, I had never before considered psychiatric care. During college, I only vaguely remember learning about counseling services, and certainly never considered utilizing them. To me, mental 鈥渋llness鈥� was recognized only in its most extreme forms鈥攕evere bipolar or major depressive disorder, psychosis, delusions, schizophrenia鈥攁苍d therapy reserved for the truly 鈥渃razy.鈥� It turns out, I wasn鈥檛 alone in this belief.

Mental Health Requires Cultural Context 

The difficulty of seeking and affording culturally competent mental health treatment in the U.S.鈥攐ne of few developed nations without a universal health care system鈥攊s compounded by social stigmas within Black and Indigenous communities. This can be traced back to not only a deep skepticism of Western medicine, but also to pervasive cultural beliefs that admission of mental illness is a sign of weakness. 

My own mental health journey began with destigmatizing mental illness and eventually transformed into an acceptance of mental health care as an inextricable part of holistic wellness. When I discovered that the origins of many individual issues can be traced to familial and generational harms, it became apparent that the closer intervention and treatments are to our ancestral ways, the more effective they can be.

There have long been major blind spots in conventional Western approaches to treating mental illness in African American and Native American communities. Centuries of living under the psychological stresses of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, settler colonialism, and genocide are bound to have an impact on cognitive functioning and manifest in what we now term 鈥渕ental illness.鈥�

My first step in seeking help was to find a therapist to whom I could relate. Suspicious of psychiatrists, who I saw as the health system鈥檚 high-end dope dealers, but still recognizing that I needed help, I did a simple internet search for 鈥淏lack women therapists near me.鈥� I found a website called Therapy for Black Girls, created by , and decided to begin with a no-frills talk therapy approach with a provider I found on the website鈥檚 directory. Even though I was still in the infancy of my wellness journey, I knew that I was beginning a process of deep excavation into the fibers of my life and, by extension, the lives of my parents, their parents, and their parents鈥� parents.

As a school psychologist working in college counseling centers, Dr. Joy (as she prefers to be called) noticed that Black women were not using her services at the same rates as their non-Black peers. This inspired her to begin , an online media network and therapy directory that includes more than 1,400 Black women therapists and other therapists of color around the nation. 

Dr. Joy notes that 鈥渟ymptoms of mental health concerns can look different in Black women, and without clinicians who are culturally attuned to our community, important information can be missed.鈥� In my own family, while there were few cases of diagnosed mental illness, there were ample 鈥渟hort tempers,鈥� 鈥渨eak constitutions,鈥� and 鈥渂ad nerves.鈥� And though no one would call them as such, there were phobias too: of driving, flying, fireworks, big crowds, and enclosed spaces. 

How Trauma Is Passed 

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) does not include 鈥渋ntergenerational trauma鈥� in its classification of mental illness diagnoses used by mental health professionals, but the most recent edition expands its definition of trauma to include the effects of direct and indirect exposure. 

Despite its lack of a 鈥渇ormal鈥� classification, the concept of intergenerational trauma is widely accepted by psychologists and historians alike. It was first identified in the 1960s among the children of Holocaust survivors and has since been applied to Indigenous groups of the Americas and Australia, as well as victims of genocide or ethnic cleansing, such as Armenians in Turkey. The term 鈥渉istorical trauma鈥� was  by  in the 1980s specifically in relation to the colonization, forced relocation, and assimilation of Native Americans. 

In 2014, psychologists William Hartmann and Joseph Gone  based on interviews with two influential Native American medicine men from a Great Plains reservation. They recognized in the men鈥檚 teachings their unique definition of historical trauma that was summarized by the four C鈥檚: colonial injury, collective experience, cumulative effects, and cross-generational impacts. 

Up until as recently as the late 2010s, there was little study of the impact of historical and intergenerational trauma on African Americans. The little that does exist often begins with slavery and continues through the legacy of racial discrimination as something separate from the historical trauma of the people native to the Americas. However, when we also view Africans of the diaspora as forcibly displaced Indigenous people, the applicability of the medicine men鈥檚 framework to the experience of African Americans is apparent, as per Hartmann and Gone鈥檚 call for a 鈥渟piritual perspective鈥� on the need for healing, and the necessity of large-scale, 鈥渟ocio-structural鈥� change. 

Similar ideas are becoming more commonplace. For example, the perspectives of Ehime Ora, an educator of holistic wellness and author of , and Allie Dyer, co-founder of youth organization  and a medical student at the Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine, echo the aforementioned ideas of the medicine men. 

A Holistic Approach to Black and Indigenous Mental Health

As an African spiritualist, Ora notes one of the main differences between traditional Indigenous and Western approaches to healing is that in the former, 鈥渢he presence of spirit is never ignored in the diagnostics of an individual鈥檚 health or well-being. 鈥� The mind, body, and spirit are never separated鈥擺they] deeply rely on one another for true, balanced health and holistic wellness.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Dyer, who began Brown Girl Rise with a group of other Oregon-based organizers, advocates for socio-structural changes to medicine in the same way that we demand systematic change for structural violences. She believes the medical community needs to 鈥渞adically reformulate the theoretical paradigms within allopathic medicine to reflect the reality of our patients and the communities they are part of.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Growing up, Dyer saw firsthand how little access and education Black and Indigenous youth had when it came to their health and bodies. As a medical student, she saw how important social and political contexts were left out of medical teachings. Today, Brown Girl Rise has created community and provided health education that includes historical contexts of coercion and violence. In this way, she says, 鈥渁 small biology lesson is also a political one,鈥� empowering Brown Girl Rise participants to make their own decisions about their bodies and health. 

According to Dyer, who also holds a master鈥檚 degree in public health from the Harvard University School of Medicine, this context becomes especially important when we recognize that the cumulative impact of historical trauma in both Black and Indigenous communities can present in a myriad of ways, including but not limited to dissociation, emotional numbing, apathy, substance abuse, domestic violence, depression, and suicide. Without a holistic understanding of traumatic experiences in Black and Indigenous communities, a purely physical or psychological approach to treating mental health issues may be misguided. 

Making Community Wellness Integral to Mental Health

After more than three years of cognitive behavioral and art therapy, I continued to struggle with troubling physical symptoms鈥攔acing heartbeat, digestive issues, and dizzying panic attacks. I was again advised to consult a psychiatrist. My diagnosis was a pairing not unusual for a young woman my age: generalized anxiety disorder coupled with obsessive-compulsive disorder, defined by intrusive and 鈥渆go-dystonic thoughts.鈥� At the recommendation of my therapist and a new psychiatrist, I began taking a low dosage of antidepressants. I put off filling the prescription for a few weeks and waited a few more to start taking the medication, considering it somehow 鈥渃heating鈥� to seek outside assistance for my wellness journey鈥攖he same sentiment that fueled my initial resistance to therapy. 

The belief that we must heal alone is what Ora calls one of the most harmful teachings of Western approaches to wellness. Understanding the generational impacts of trauma helped me become more empathetic with myself and others like me. I began to view mental illness less as a series of disorders and more as a response to our environments. This lessened the stigma I felt in seeking comprehensive treatment to manage it. And it worked. After beginning a small dosage of antidepressants, my physical symptoms dramatically reduced, and the intrusive thoughts stopped completely.

Indigenous care and healing practices are not only communal, but also interdisciplinary. As Ora explains, 鈥淔rom the priest who will diagnose your spiritual health to the herbalist who will provide you with remedies, there are multitudes of individuals having a hand in your healing process.鈥� In this way, our wellness as individuals is inextricable from the wellness of the whole community.

From this new perspective, it finally made sense for me to tackle mental health not only psychologically (via therapy), but also biologically (in my brain) and, ultimately, structurally (in the workplace, the food system, the economy, and so on). Our healing should not be conducted in isolation or rely on a single solution or individual. When we approach healing in this way, there are ripple effects. Dr. Joy summarizes it best: 鈥淲hen we take steps to heal, we give others the courage to do the same.鈥�

鈥淢y people migrated here in the early 1900s, when really started to happen,鈥� Tartt says. 鈥淭he pay was better, the racism wasn鈥檛 as bad. It was bad, but not as bad. 鈥� in building the framework for the coal mining industry here in West Virginia.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

To a casual observer, this southern West Virginia county is devastated, disregarded, and depressed鈥攁 manifestation of Now, nearly 60 years after that , McDowell County is ripe for revival.  

Tartt sees boundless opportunity for inclusive growth and shared prosperity through sustainable farming practices designed to build a thriving community. A military veteran who returned to McDowell County in 2010 due to familial obligations, Tartt co-founded the farming cooperative with the late Sylvester 鈥淪ky鈥� Edwards in 2014. Two years later, the nonprofit (EDGE) evolved out of a working group Tartt co-led. EDGE now provides training in agricultural entrepreneurship, sustainable local farming techniques, and more through its Thrive program, offering locals opportunities to learn new skills. 

鈥淧rosperity involves good health, involves [a] clean environment, and involves equity in business and everything that we do. Not everyone can be rich, but you can still live well and have a quality of life,鈥� Tartt says. 鈥淪o [we鈥檙e taking] a holistic approach to whatever we鈥檙e doing, to make sure the community benefits and we鈥檙e not doing it to the detriment of our environment.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Gardeners can appreciate the growth of their tomato plants while hoping to limit the spread of the aphids that might eat those plants. Teachers can value growing class participation or attendance rates, but would likely not prefer an increase in class size. Low-wage workers who would benefit from higher incomes probably aren鈥檛 as interested in having their debt grow. So growth itself is a value-neutral concept. It鈥檚 the context of that growth鈥攁苍d its limitations鈥攖hat matters.

Who Gets to Grow?

Since made mass production possible, the United States has increasingly adopted a narrative that capitalism requires unfettered economic growth鈥攚illfully ignoring the array of harmful outcomes such growth produces. Prioritizing economic growth without constraints has contributed to , from soil-stripping and to . This unyielding adherence to growth threatens public health by allowing polluting industries to contaminate the air and water, which in turn increases , , and premature death in the predominantly low-income and , , and other communities of color where these industries are typically housed. 

Despite platitudes about 鈥渞ising tides lifting all boats鈥� or 鈥渢rickle-down鈥� economics, at no point in this country鈥檚 history has economic growth been equitable. As with , today鈥檚 . From 1989 to 2018, , according to Federal Reserve data. During the same period, the wealth of the bottom 50% decreased by $900 billion. Between the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020 and May 2022, 鈥攖o more than $1.7 trillion.  

History clearly shows that unfettered growth in the name of capitalistic 鈥渟uccess鈥� results in sustained and growing inequality, human and planetary exploitation, and worse. Yet there are other models鈥攎any that come from Black, Indigenous, and other historically marginalized communities鈥攖hat take a more holistic, symbiotic approach to growth. 

Consider the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) , where every decision is made with consideration for the next seven generations to come. The Akan people of Ghana embrace a similar sense of interconnectedness through , which refers to the value of learning from the past to improve the present and future. 

A growing number of organizations around the U.S. and beyond are already reenvisioning growth and prosperity in ways that advance communal needs and planetary stewardship. The (BCDI) is a community-led planning and economic development organization committed to creating an 鈥渆quitable, sustainable, and democratic local economy that creates shared wealth for low-income people of color.鈥� The BCDI hosts political and business education programming and operates the Bronx Innovation Factory, an advanced manufacturing lab offering tools and training to help local innovators bring their ideas to reality and build wealth in the Bronx.

Organizations like the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) center environmental and economic justice in their approach to redefining prosperity. APEN focuses on鈥攁苍d marshals support around鈥攆rontline communities most often harmed by pollution, corporate greed, and environmental racism. In addition to policy advocacy and clean energy training, to support longtime California residents鈥攐ften immigrants and people of color鈥攖o own and remain in their homes in clean, healthy, livable neighborhoods.

Regardless of an organization鈥檚 particular focus, collaboration within and across communities is key. By rejecting toxic individualism in favor of collectivism and care, these businesses, organizations, and communities are proving that prosperity can look very different than what has been sold to most Americans as 鈥渟uccess.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

The problematic notion that 鈥渕ore is better鈥� predates the establishment of the nation, but the concept has been supercharged during particular moments in U.S. history. By the time the first , growth had become intricately linked to prosperity for that population. 鈥攇rowth centered on claiming, settling, and cultivating an increasing amount of land. And this growth did indeed create prosperity鈥攁t least for white people. 

By the end of the 19th century, the U.S. was on its way to becoming as a direct result of and using enslaved labor to dominate the textile industry. The industrial revolution ushered in a new era of wealth extraction, as robber barons like and (often immigrants and children) to create their steel, oil, and railroad empires. 

In the meantime, 鈥溾€� emerged as the country鈥檚 divinely ordained justification for continued settler expansion across the continent. The association between material wealth and the 鈥淎merican Dream鈥� only grew during this period of stunning wealth inequality. Consumption as an indicator of prosperity solidified further during the Roaring 鈥�20s, with , telephones, radios, and household appliances. also became more readily available, encouraging people to buy now and pay later. The mantra of 鈥淢ore!鈥� was no longer only the province of elites. 

By the time , the concept of individualism was firmly ingrained in the nation鈥檚 dominant culture. This narrative emphasizes personal achievement, disregarding values of cooperation, mutual support, and community. It also invisibilizes the array of public support鈥攆rom public roads and the postal system to tax breaks鈥攖hat businesses rely on, not to mention the racial, gender, educational, and socioeconomic advantages that their founders often enjoy. 

Of course, the capacity to be self-made could be significantly hindered by the circumstances of one鈥檚 birth. Members of marginalized communities had considerably less access to quality education, health care, social services, and jobs that paid living wages, or safe, secure, affordable housing. This material inequality was compounded by the reality of racial violence, which included .

When the stock market crashed seven months into Hoover鈥檚 presidency, he initially eschewed government-backed market or public benefit interventions, instead doubling down on white supremacist tactics of the past: , accusing them of overwhelming government relief programs, and taking jobs that would otherwise be going to white Americans. In reality, , and studies would later suggest these federal by reducing the demand for other jobs. that and . 

Unsurprisingly, the racist policies of the Hoover administration failed to save the economy. , and the . To address the budget deficit, in 1932 Hoover rolled back tax cuts for the wealthy that . But this, and a series of additional tax increases, came too late to stave off the suffering. Even after , Hoover lost the next election to Franklin Roosevelt, who , one of the most significant public interest investments in U.S. history.  

Despite its role in establishing a broad middle class, the New Deal did not create prosperity for all. Black people living under Jim Crow laws were subject to legal discrimination and . 鈥攑ositions likely to be held by Black people. Consequently, , 65% of Black people were excluded. allowed banks to refuse loans to people in predominantly Black communities, exacerbating this unequal access to economic growth. Racial covenants in communities nationwide disallowed the sale of land or housing to Black people. This confluence of greed, white supremacy, and racialized capitalism yet again created on-ramps to prosperity that were closed to Black people. 

From Yours and Mine to Ours 

The COVID-19 pandemic provided the country with an opportunity to reshape our prior economic assumptions about what is鈥攁苍d what should be鈥攊n the public domain. When the 鈥攖he highest level since the Great Depression鈥攃itizens were able to access vital financial support through the CARES Act. That provided funding for state and local governments, tax cuts for businesses, and direct payments to individuals, bringing the U.S. as close as it鈥檚 ever been to embracing Universal Basic Income. were also provided to help small businesses and nonprofits keep their employees on payroll and their organizations afloat. An in funding was made available through a suite of economic legislation spearheaded by President Joe Biden鈥檚 administration, including the American Rescue Plan. 

Beyond government interventions, a resurgence in mutual aid efforts further underscored our interdependence and the power of community support. Grassroots organizing and advocacy efforts worked to protect the health and safety of essential workers, and groups like the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and the Right to the City Alliance .  

Many have seen the benefit of and enjoy public goods and services. Investing in these public goods鈥攆rom public parks and community pools to public libraries and trash collection鈥攊ncreases opportunities for collective prosperity and personal enjoyment. At their best, these government-administered services provide core infrastructure that allows communities to thrive and grow, supporting both economic development and a healthy, robust democracy. 

Leading advocates say can create opportunities for equitable access to housing, quality education, employment, and health care. That shifted understanding of what鈥檚 possible, combined with an embrace of collective responsibility, can create a society where all needs can be met, says Angela Hanks, chief of programs at the movement-oriented think tank D膿mos. (Disclosure: Co-author Anoa Changa is the director of communications at D膿mos.)

鈥淧ublic goods are the foundation of a just economy,鈥� Hanks says. 鈥淭hey strengthen communities and our economy overall. Public goods also ensure a basic standard of living and help correct the power imbalance between the wealthy and everyone else.鈥�

But Hanks notes that corporate interests and the wealthy have weaponized the cultural myth of scarcity that suggests there are not enough resources to provide for all. This remains a major barrier to expanding public provisioning, despite its popularity. 鈥淭here鈥檚 still a persistent belief around scarcity in this country, which among other things is deeply rooted in racism,鈥� explains Hanks. 鈥淎nd it鈥檚 what corporations and the wealthy use to talk people out of public provisioning.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Nevertheless, action to expand public goods is already taking place. To address the crisis in diabetes care, in March 2023 to create state-label insulin, which will make the lifesaving drug substantially more affordable and, presumably, lead to fewer people having to ration their supply because of high costs. 

Elsewhere, states and municipalities are proposing , like the one North Dakota has run for more than a century. By servicing local governments and operating in the public interest鈥攂y law鈥攖hese entities could slash the huge sums governments now pay to private banks. Restoring postal banking, which the U.S. offered from 1911 to 1967, could help to service the  

Reimagining prosperity demands a new economy that reflects shared values and a commitment to success and well-being that exists outside of an individual framework. This new prosperity also requires a grounded understanding of people and places, and a value alignment that sees the potential and possibility in something better. 

John Muhammad, a city councilmember in St. Petersburg, Florida, believes traditional measures of prosperity, like GDP, are insufficient to assess well-being. 鈥淩eimagining prosperity requires going beyond traditional economic measures and considering a more comprehensive approach that aligns with the needs of the community, our well-being, health, and access to things like fresh food, education, and health care,鈥� Muhammad says. 鈥淕rowth usually means the economy is getting bigger and we鈥檙e producing more goods and services. But we need to make sure that this growth benefits everyone, not just a few people. Reimagining growth means making sure that as the economy grows, everyone has a chance to do well and improve their lives.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Muhammad has worked with St. Petersburg鈥檚 South Side community to revitalize a once-thriving business district. He was instrumental in negotiating a deal with the city that required new development to include actual land ownership, not mere complimentary square footage or discounted rents on spaces to lease.  

鈥淚t鈥檚 important to negotiate in terms of acres and ownership when discussing community participation in new development, because that鈥檚 the only way to truly build equity and generational wealth,鈥� Muhammad says. 鈥淪ome of the historical 鈥榙eals鈥� that have been made expire after a prescribed term, and when that ends and the capital is extracted from the community, we are left with little to nothing to pass on to those who come behind us.鈥�  

Communities in Detroit know those extractive processes all too well. Branden Snyder, executive director of , a multigenerational, member-led grassroots organization fighting for housing and economic justice, says the whole economic system needs to change. 

鈥淭here are so many systems that extract and exploit Black and Brown folks outside of just the criminal justice system, including 鈥� how we set up our economies,鈥� says Snyder. Through its Agenda for a New Economy, Detroit Action works to 鈥渦nite Black and Brown working-class Detroiters in a transformational program to win the economic and social justice we are owed.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

鈥淒etroit is called the Motor City, but Detroit isn鈥檛 about cars,鈥� says Anthony Baber, Detroit Action鈥檚 communications and culture director. 鈥淭he city itself was never about cars. City is about the people.鈥�

鈥淲e鈥檙e still trying to empower our people using that same white supremacist lens that destroyed our ecology and left all these young Black and Brown people with little to no access to advantages and prosperity,鈥� Baber adds. 鈥淲e have to change the entire thing.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

鈥淎t the end of the day, we need to make sure that resources are shared equitably and fairly,鈥� says Snyder. 鈥淎nd right now, that鈥檚 just not the case. When we think about tax breaks, the type of jobs that people get, the type of opportunities that come into neighborhoods, the type of development, and we think about the resources that people have鈥攊t鈥檚 not shared in an equitable fashion.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Both agree that reimagining prosperity requires a strong equity component to ensure people can thrive and envision the possibility of something better. Giving people a meaningful voice in how their economy and politics are structured is as much a matter of shifting culture as it is shifting the policies and frameworks that enforce the status quo view on wealth and prosperity.  

鈥淎 big part of it is just changing the mindset to one of abundance and that resources are there,鈥� says Baber. 鈥淚t鈥檚 just a matter of, can we secure those resources for our people?鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Tartt, the West Virginia farmer, agrees that both a culture shift and values realignment are necessary in the practical application of prosperity doctrines, as well as in our collective imagination. And part of that includes establishing new pathways for partnership across communities.

鈥淚f we want to really talk about prosperity, that means investing back into the community and building businesses in a way that community is benefiting,鈥� he says. 鈥淭here are opportunities if you have rural communities connected to urban communities. And we鈥檙e figuring out: How do we help each other?鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

This story was funded by a grant from Kendeda Fund, as part of the forthcoming 猫咪社区! series 鈥淩edefining Prosperity.鈥� While reporting and production of the series was funded by this grant, 猫咪社区! maintained full editorial control of the content published herein.

My intention then was to provide a 鈥渓oving鈥� critique of philanthropy and effectively challenge the status quo of grant-making, particularly how philanthropic institutions and high-net-worth individuals used, or didn鈥檛 use, their money to address racial equity.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic started in early 2020, the immense tragedies and hardships we鈥檝e endured have altered the way our society sees the world and how we act. What we are experiencing, for the first time in my lifetime, is a vast collective suffering. Continued grappling with the pandemic, the surging of the Delta variant, and more people dying are causing us to fear for our lives and for our families鈥� lives鈥攚e fear an uncertain future, and that we may never return to 鈥渘ormal.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

In this time we鈥檝e also witnessed social movements that impacted and shook the structures of power. Politicians in major cities were forced to commit . Large corporations were called out for not doing more to authentically respond to the Black Lives Matter uprisings and the continued conversations on white supremacy and racism invoked by the 2020 presidential election. After a decades-long outcry and organizing effort from Native American communities, the Washington, D.C., football team was forced to retire its racist name. And even in philanthropy, which has been so slow to embrace change, a transformation is happening.

When I wrote my book in 2018, the framework I provided to decolonize the philanthropic sector鈥攍ifting the white gaze to leverage money as a way to heal鈥攚as deemed radical. Fast-forward to today: This method of giving is . There is now an appetite among legacy institutions and high-net-worth individuals to get to the bottom of why we really have disparities in this country and globally around race; and there are more conversations happening in philanthropy about redistribution of wealth to communities of color as reparations. 

Philanthropy can and should be at the forefront of supporting reparations, considering the sector鈥檚 collective $1 trillion in charitable assets. That鈥檚 a lot of wealth, and it鈥檚 wealth that was accumulated following the directives of colonization to divide, control, and exploit Native Americans, African Americans, and low-wage workers (many of them immigrants). Private foundations are required to pay out just 5% of their endowments annually in the U.S., and funding that has supported communities of color . If we think about the wealth extracted historically versus what is currently given to support communities of color, you can see this is far from fair or enough to address the needs caused by centuries of colonization. 

The evolution in mindset, coupled with the successful philanthropic organizing of the Decolonizing Wealth Project, has unearthed new opportunities to support and scale efforts to actualize philanthropic reparations. My idea of 10% tithing to be redistributed to BIPOC-led organizations as a step to repair, seen as a pipe dream in 2018, has suddenly come within reach. I have been in touch with several foundations that are actively trying to figure out how to give 10% of their endowments to Black and Indigenous communities across the nation.听

The Bush Foundation, as an example, has explored how it has benefited from a legacy of colonialism, and is now using its resources to address the pervasive racial wealth gap. Earlier this year, the foundation announced a (equivalent to more than 10% of its endowment) to seed two community trust funds that will address wealth disparities caused by historic racial injustice. These trust funds will be owned and managed by Black and Native American communities to provide money to build stability and generational wealth, improving access to opportunities such as education, homeownership, and entrepreneurship.

A more well-known example is how MacKenzie Scott, who has publicly committed to in her lifetime, has been approaching wealth redistribution. In 2020, without any self-congratulatory promotion, Scott donated an estimated $4 billion to leaders supporting anti-racism work and organizations led by people of color, including by Native Americans. She to organizations in categories and communities that have been historically underfunded and overlooked. What is important about Scott鈥檚 actions is her self-awareness surrounding her wealth and privilege: 鈥淭here鈥檚 no question in my mind that anyone鈥檚 , and of social structures which present opportunities to some people, and obstacles to countless others,鈥� she said. While giving at this scale and in this way is commendable, we must remember the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who said that it must not 鈥渃ause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.鈥�

The concept of reparations is big and nuanced. But there is an opportunity for all of us as individuals and institutions with wealth to take reparative action. Decolonizing Wealth Project, and our giving circle fund, Liberated Capital, recently announced the 23 grantees for the first-of-its-kind . Our goal is for to be a multiyear, multimillion dollar initiative to support systemic and policy change efforts that return wealth to impacted individuals. 

And we must not forget that reparations have historically been a policy conversation. Earlier this year, for the first time since it was originally introduced 30 years ago. There are also a number of local reparative efforts underway to address the historical and ongoing theft and control of land, with cities acknowledging reparations and taking action, including St. Paul, Minnesota; Portland, Oregon; Providence, Rhode Island; Burlington, Vermont; Chicago and Evanston, Illinois; New York City; and the state of California (particularly in the Bay Area).

Portland approved as its top racial justice measure to lobby the U.S. government on reparations for Black and Indigenous communities harmed by federal policies and actions. Evanston, Illinois, is levying a tax on newly legalized marijuana to fund projects benefiting African Americans in recognition of the enduring effects of slavery and the war on drugs. In the San Francisco Bay Area, . 

So where does this leave us? My hope is that the rest of philanthropy moves toward this model of wealth redistribution and that H.R. 40 is passed in the near future鈥攂ut I know this kind of radical change cannot happen in a vacuum, especially for the Black, Indigenous, and other people of color who have had white supremacy impact every aspect of their and their ancestors鈥� lives. 

Because communities of color continue to do the work to address racial inequities, it鈥檚 imperative that white communities, especially the philanthropic community, start to do their part to heal and advance the movement for repair: Leverage their power and influence to support people of color. White people in these spaces should speak up for these communities of color when in rooms that don鈥檛 reflect them, and use their position to help open doors and remove obstacles.

Commit to racial justice as lifelong work. America is almost 250 years old, with the harms of colonization and the stains of white supremacy starting before then. That kind of pain is generational, cyclical, and pervasive. White people need to commit to deconstructing the systems that continue to perpetuate disparities and racism and work alongside people of color to build new ones. 

Sometimes it鈥檚 about letting go of control. The cornerstone of white supremacy is the need to dominate and control, which is why so many industries are still white-dominated. This is where progress stalls, so white people need to think about relinquishing control if we as a society are ever going to have racial equity.

Representation doesn鈥檛 translate into power. Diversity and inclusion in workplaces is a moot point if the people at the top are still white. Real power comes from appointing people of color into top roles, including by creating new roles or encouraging some leaders to step down and step aside. By shifting real power to people of color in philanthropic spaces, grant-makers are actively dismantling the power structures that marginalize millions every day.

And if I wasn鈥檛 clear about this before, white people in philanthropy need to continue to focus their work on wealth redistribution and move more money to organizations led by people of color, including wealth-management companies and grassroots organizations. Honoring self-determination in how communities build wealth can create space and creativity for how we grow wealth, such as buying land and property. This can help create for-profit endeavors geared to create diverse and evergreen revenue streams for racial justice movements. That can allow us to realize a future where we don鈥檛 need to rely on philanthropy in the first place. 

The of how this place came to be starts with a great wildfire. As flames engulfed the western shores of the lake, a mama bear fled, swimming across the lake with two cubs in tow. She reached the eastern shore, where the park now lies, and climbed onto a high bluff overlooking the lake to wait for her babies. Neither ever arrived. Exhausted, the cubs had drowned in the lake. But high on her perch, the mother never stopped watching for them. Impressed with her watch, Creator made two islands in the cubs鈥� memory. The mother waits to this day, looking to the lake from the sand dunes that carry her name and form.

The U.S. federal government authorized the area as a national park in 1970, part of the more than now scattered across the country. The National Park Service controls these lands in order to protect what it considers special places, so that, as described on its homepage, 鈥渁ll may experience our heritage.鈥� The model is a point of pride for the country and has been exported around the world. 

For many people indigenous to this land, the creation of national parks has not been positive. Anishinaabe people, including the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, have had to fight to ensure their basic treaty rights, like hunting and fishing, are respected in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. And there are still strict limitations on how they can interact with the land.

鈥淭he history of Western conservation vis-脿-vis land protection, it鈥檚 been a violent, horrible erasure of Indigenous people that environmentalists look at as a point of pride,鈥� says , a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and an associate professor of Native American and Indigenous studies and environmental studies at Dartmouth College. Environmentalists believe that they鈥檝e 鈥渟aved鈥� something precious. But for Reo and other Indigenous people, it鈥檚 the losses that stand out.

from their traditional homelands. National parks, forests,
and shorelines are painful reminders for Indigenous people that this history of separation is ongoing. 

Parks serve a key function in propping up capitalist economies. The parks were created by and for as a 鈥�,鈥� according to the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act of 1872. And they have strong support from the ; in 2020, the parks generated around , and park visitors, according to the park service鈥檚 most recent survey, are nearly .  

The same settler capitalists that are eating up land and resources, Reo says, are then trying to set areas aside elsewhere to protect those places from themselves. 鈥淭hese acts interfere with our [Indigenous] peoples鈥� ability to fulfill our cultural obligations to take care of place, to fulfill our spiritual needs and mandate, to be deeply connected to 鈥� and doing things with and for the land,鈥� he says.

But Indigenous people say there鈥檚 a different way forward: returning these lands to those who have always called them home. Transforming parks from places of Indigenous exclusion to places of Indigenous power, Reo and others believe, would address the parks鈥� damaging legacy and repair the relationship with land for the future. In this vision, parks would be treated and viewed according to an Indigenous worldview, where Native language and culture could thrive.

鈥淚 think it all needs to be returned,鈥� Reo says. And he believes it should start with the National Park Service.

Dispelling the Myth of Untouched Lands 

Like many undeveloped parts of the country, national parks are mythologized as pristine wilderness areas that are set aside to prevent people from spoiling them. , such as on cultural burning in the Boundary Waters in northeastern Minnesota, reflects what Indigenous people say: These spaces have always been tended to and cared for by humans鈥攁苍d that鈥檚 part of why they flourished. 

There is a growing consensus that white Western conservation is because it erases the way Indigenous people have always cared for these landscapes, and reinforces people鈥檚 separation from the ecosystem. That would change under tribal control of the national parks.

鈥淵ou can imagine practices that have been on the landscape for millennia, in particular things like cultural burning, or wildlife migration patterns, or knowledge of native plants and interrelationships between plants and other resources,鈥� says Monte Mills, director of the Native American Law Center at the University of Washington. 鈥淎ll of these connections that many Native folks have had to these landscapes for generations can help inform how those landscapes are used, utilized, visited.鈥�

The population of wild, , for example, is the last in the country. But the park service manages them to minimize the impact on neighboring landowners and the cattle industry in Montana and Wyoming by restricting or prohibiting the bison鈥檚 migration, and killing some of the animals to keep their numbers down. 

鈥淛ust the starting point鈥攖hat the park service is in the business of preventing wild animals from doing what they do鈥攕uggests there might be some different approaches that are actually more closely connected to the ways in which these ecosystems work,鈥� Mills says. 

with bison relocation, re-entry, and reintroduction, and an Indigenous approach could take into account the ways bison are connected to other parts of the ecosystem, such as the benefits they bring to the grasses and waterways.

Resting the Land 

This vision of the national parks would move away from the current emphasis on land management or stewardship, and instead focus on a reciprocal relationship between people and the land. Deepening this relationship could benefit animals, plants, and humans alike. 

At Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, for the first time, tribes have over a monument not located on reservation lands. A commission made up of five tribes鈥攖he Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, and Ute Indian Tribe鈥攏ow shares equal decision-making with the federal agencies managing the monument. 

鈥淓very time I go into Bears Ears, it feels like home,鈥� says , co-director of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Tribe in northeast Kansas. 鈥淚t feels like your people, your ancestors, the living creatures, the plants, even the soil itself 鈥� is welcoming you back, because it鈥檚 a place that our tribes have always known.鈥�

The coalition has created a that starts with Indigenous values, as opposed to Western conventions, and without the imposition of a federal agency overseeing the process. Some of the plan鈥檚 suggestions reflect how sacred the land is and how to get visitors to behave accordingly. 

鈥溾€嬧€婩rom a Native perspective, the natural world is much more than just a physical realm to sustain the material needs of life,鈥� according to the plan. 鈥淭he natural resources of the Bears Ears cultural landscape鈥攚ater, land, wind, sound鈥攁re imbued by powerful religious, artistic, and other cultural meanings significant to Native communities with ancestral ties to this region.鈥� This perspective diverges from the way federal agencies typically understand the landscape. For the tribes, every plant carries deep medicinal, cultural, and spiritual meaning. For the tribes, the land is a living being that requires rest.

鈥淲e may ask people to visit sites in a way that you would visit a church, where we ask you to be really respectful, really quiet, and we ask you to limit your photography or to limit sharing on social media so that the site actually has time to rest,鈥� Miijessepe-Wilson says. 

For Reo, using this kind of Indigenous framework to relate to the land can disrupt settler capitalism in other important ways, like upending the current assumption that land management should maximize economic gain or recreational opportunities.

Such a transition of control can cause tension, as those who are used to being able to turn a profit off the land see their returns diminished. That was the case at Devils Tower in the Black Hills, known to tribes as Bear鈥檚 Lodge, another national monument that is both a religious site for tribes and a popular rock climbing destination. Members of both groups agreed to a to allow the site time to rest, but after a property-rights group filed a , . 

We must look to Colombia, a country with an entirely different relationship to capitalism and to its Indigenous people, to see a successfully implemented example of this model. Tayrona National Park closes a few times a year for two-week periods when the Indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta conduct ceremony and allow the ecosystem to recover. 

In Bears Ears, that means the landscape shouldn鈥檛 be treated as a playground鈥攚ith visitors engaged in harmful behavior, like climbing the arches鈥攂ut rather with reverence, says Miijessepe-Wilson. According to her, the landscape deserves respect because it is your relative.

Restoring Relations

鈥淗ow do you develop relationship with a place, let alone an individual plant or an individual rock, if you鈥檙e going there once a year or once a month?鈥� Reo asks. 鈥淚 think that those places, those plants, those rocks and waters, they want to be in relationship with us. And when we ignore the gifts they鈥檙e offering鈥攚e don鈥檛 pick the berries that they offer us every year鈥攊t鈥檚 like if you lived in a neighborhood and the neighbor never made eye contact, never said hi, never learned your name. After years and years and years, you might just give up.鈥�

Under tribal leadership, national parks can become places where Indigenous people can fulfill those responsibilities, without the current red tape preventing Indigenous cultural practices. Currently, Reo鈥檚 son can鈥檛 go to parkland and undertake the four-day fast that鈥檚 traditionally part of an Ojibwe person鈥檚 transition from childhood to adulthood without requesting permission from the park service. In a park returned to the tribes, his right to do so would be guaranteed, as would other long-standing cultural practices like picking berries or hunting deer. 

People could come to these places regularly and interact with them, returning to the sugar bush each year to make maple syrup; looking for deer; sitting, visiting, and talking around a campfire. It could be a place for people to learn about being good neighbors to the natural elements. Those land uses rather than .

鈥淲e鈥檙e part of it,鈥� says Michael Isham, director of the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission and member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Tribe. Isham works with government agencies on co-stewardship agreements, which give a greater voice to tribes regarding management of and relationship with public lands. 鈥淲e each have responsibilities within the relationships we have,鈥� he says.

Implementing this Indigenous vision wouldn鈥檛 make the country鈥檚 national parks unrecognizable to those who frequent them today. Even its current staff, with valuable knowledge about how the parks operate, could be invited to 鈥渟tay, but differently,鈥� Reo says. The changes would give the original inhabitants a place to 鈥渇ully be themselves,鈥� immersed in ceremony, where Indigenous languages and cultures can thrive.

鈥淟ooking ahead, I think about those places being happier, our people being involved in their happiness,鈥� Reo says.

Removing Native people from the places they cared for inflicted tragedy and pain. At Sleeping Bear Dunes, the mother鈥檚 wait is eternal. But ending the national parks could restore relationships and end the long wait for relatives to come home. 

I had clearly entered a distinct section of Bologna, but what was it? An investigation revealed, by way of a sign for tourists such as myself, the answer. This was what remained of a medieval ghetto.

In the middle of the 16th century, Pope Paul IV forced, by papal power, all the Jews of Bologna to live in this small section of the city because they were… Jews. The ghetto became a miniature of the rest of Bologna. Space became of the essence here. As I walked the streets of what was one of the world鈥檚 oldest ghettos, I kept trying to imagine how small the capital of this region of Northern Italy  would be if it, too, were scaled down to this size. This line of thought led me to this conclusion: The density imposed on Jews by the Pope matched in appearance the ideal for urban life in the present age of rapid global warming.

In March 2021, the American University in Cairo Press and Terreform published , edited by the noted American urban scholar Michael Sorkin and the British urban geographer Deen Sharp. Sorkin, who is recognized in the architectural, urban planning, and critical theory community as one of the major voices of 20th century leftist urbanism, lost his life at age 71 to COVID-19, a year before the book was published. His co-editor, Sharp, is a geographer noted for his focus on urbanization in the Middle East. Their book is exceptional because it has no illusions about the everyday social and political conditions of the Gaza Strip, a small area on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea that鈥檚 packed with 2 million Palestinian souls. 

Over the past two decades, this area has become what many describe as an open-air prison. When not being bombed to bits, its contact with the outside world is increasingly restricted. Indeed, while I was reading Open Gaza in May 2021, Israel Defense Forces were bombing the city for the third time in a little under a decade. Hamas, one of the armed organizations within Gaza, initiated the war by firing rockets at Israel over an explosive policing-related crisis that the government, under the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu, decided to downplay. At the end of the conflict, the dead on one side (the Gaza Strip) numbered 256; and those on the other (Israel), numbered 13. 

Open Gaza remains relevant after the most recent Israel-Palestine war because the situation in that territory has not changed, with the exception of Netanyahu鈥檚 fall from power on June 13, 2021. Another explosive crisis could emerge and erupt, and Hamas and its allies could once again fire rockets at Israel, and Israel could once again drop bombs on Gaza City鈥檚 already crumbling buildings. Also, a blockade is still in effect, and there is no sign of an end to the city鈥檚 isolation enforced by the wall, surveillance, and economic restrictions. 

The aim of the contributors to Open Gaza is the extension of a social justice program that the 20th century French urban theorist Henri Lefebvre called 鈥渢he right to the city.鈥� This means, in essence, ending the 鈥渟ick circular economy of destruction and reconstruction鈥� and suggesting 鈥渄irections in which a reimagined Gaza might grow and prosper,鈥� as Sorkin and Sharp write in their introduction. The book is so dense (geographical facts, graphs, images of everyday life, untold stories, recommendations, plans, speculations, outrage, calls to action) that it鈥檚 best read in the manner of a 诲茅谤颈惫别: Begin with the introduction, then read the chapters in any order (for me it was: 鈥淭imeless Gaza鈥� by Mahdi Sabbagh and Meghan McAllister, 鈥淔our Tunnels鈥� by Bint al-Sirhid, 鈥淪olar Dome鈥� by Chris Mackey and Rafi Segal, and 鈥淎rchitecture of the Everyday鈥� by Salem Al-Qudwa, and so on). 

A weird thought entered my mind while in the book鈥檚 pages, a thought confirmed by this passage from one of the best essays in the collection, Absurd-City, Subver-City by Yara Sharif and Nasser Golzari:

鈥淪ubver-City … explores spatial means of reinhabiting the city. While looking at the many challenges and constraints that exist, we try to rethink reconstruction and the domestic space of the everyday, insisting on the importance of offering propositions that build on what is already there. While doing so, we use design to question the notion of 鈥榟ome,鈥� especially in a fractured city with exposed skin and fabric, where the relationship between the internal and external, the street and the room is now blurred. This reading of the city could create new typologies for inhabiting it.鈥�  

The thought of 鈥渘ew typologies for [habitation]鈥� is similar to what I was thinking when I left the Bologna ghetto. It鈥檚 the idea that resource stress imposed by political and cultural means has forced a response that is in fact ideal for life during the age of global warming. 

Terreform, an urban research studio founded by Sorkin, offers this statistic in a city plan for Gaza presented in the book: Gaza has one-tenth of Israel鈥檚 ecological footprint, which is a stunning 鈥�6.2 global hectares (gha) per capita.鈥� Meaning, 鈥渢he average Israeli uses 6.2 hectares to produce their resources, the largest number among nations in the OECD.鈥� (The average for the world as a whole is 2.7 hectares.) The inhabitants of the Gaza Strip are actually living by energy standards that, though imposed unfairly by military and economic constraints, should be considered realistic in a world whose urban population must consume far less energy, recycle more materials, and use renewable sources of power. Gaza has been forced to rely on these high-efficiency solutions for political reasons. Soon, the rest of the world will have to do so for climate-related reasons. 

From Gaza we learn about what Helga Tawil-Souri, in her vivid essay 鈥淭he Internet Pigeon Network (IPN),鈥� calls 鈥渓ow-technologization.鈥� I call this 鈥減rogress without waste鈥� or 鈥渉orizontal advancement,鈥� as opposed to the 鈥渧ertical advancement鈥� programs that developing countries adopted mid-century to catch up with the West. The most viable future for Gaza is not the freedom to consume as much as Israel (all of its blood-earned lessons would be lost if such were the case). Instead, it鈥檚 developing ways from its present situation to consume in a manner that can mitigate the ever-mounting dangers of global warming. 

This is what I call 鈥渓earning from Gaza.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 2.07 p.m. on 08/27/2021 to clarify that Gazans are forced to rely on high-efficiency solutions because of political reasons. Read our corrections policy here.

Governments from Australia to Rwanda, from Sweden to Brazil, and from Kenya to Belarus have devised policy solutions to bolster the health, well-being, and basic functioning of their societies, sometimes at the urging of grassroots organizers. And while no country is a utopia, even nations with long histories of inequality and violence carry lessons for how to move toward what might be called a more perfect union. Each of these examples prove that with policy and grassroots activism, it is possible to create equitable opportunities for everyone to grow and thrive. 听

1. Mountains and Rivers Have a Say  

The rights of nature movement seeks to grant legal standing to the environment鈥攔ivers, trees, mountains, forests, and more. While a handful of U.S. cities have adopted the idea, it鈥檚 been most successful abroad. Ecuador was the first nation to incorporate rights of nature into its constitution in 2008, going beyond simple legal standing. There, nature has the right to restoration, regeneration, and respect. Bolivia followed, enacting its Law of the Rights of Mother Earth in 2010. New Zealand has approached nature鈥檚 rights more specifically, granting personhood to the Whanganui River in 2017, as well as naming royal and Maori legal guardians who are empowered to bring suit on behalf of these newly affirmed ecological persons.

2. A Focus on Drug Rehab, Not Punishment

After more than a decade spent battling rising heroin use, Portugal made history in 2001 by becoming the first country in the world to fully decriminalize the 鈥渃onsumption, acquisition, and possession鈥� of all narcotic and psychotropic drugs. The sale and distribution of drugs remain illegal鈥攁苍d drug dealers are prosecuted, though penalties are reduced for users who sell solely to fund their own habit. But anyone found with less than a 10-day supply of any illicit substance, from marijuana to heroin, is referred to a local commission composed of three people: one legal expert and two medical doctors, psychologists, sociologists, or social workers. That commission then makes a recommendation for treatment, with an explicit goal of rehabilitation. Methadone and clean needle services are easily accessible. In 2016, 30 people died of drug overdose in Portugal; in the U.S., more than 63,600 people died.

3. More Women in Government

In the wake of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, women鈥檚 societal roles shifted drastically, and a generation of widows and orphans was pivotal in rebuilding the economy. Women鈥檚 political equality took center stage. The country鈥檚 new constitution, adopted in 2003, mandated that women make up at least 30% of parliament; they took 48% of seats in the first election. Today, Rwanda鈥檚 parliament has the highest level of women鈥檚 representation of any country in the world. As of August 2020, 61.3% of the members of Rwanda鈥檚 lower house of parliament are women, and in the upper parliamentary chamber, 38.5% of members are women. While Rwanda continues to struggle with poverty, corruption, and gender-based violence, it also boasts some of the highest rates of women in the workforce in the world, and the maternal mortality rate dropped 77% between 2000 and 2013. 

4. Universal, Affordable Child Care

In Sweden, child care has been a cornerstone of family policy for nearly half a century. The Scandinavian country was one of the first to adopt the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and it now offers universal child care to all families with children from ages 1鈥�12. Subsidized in part by national and municipal taxes, out-of-pocket costs for families are capped according to income level. A two-parent Swedish family with two children spends an average of 4% of their annual net household income on child care costs鈥攚hile a U.S. family with two parents and two children spends four times as much for child care: 16% of their annual net household income. Sweden鈥檚 subsidized child care is just one component in a suite of family-centric government benefits, including a child allowance that increases with the number of children, and generous paid parental leave.

5. The End of Single-Use Plastic

Kenya imposed the world鈥檚 strictest ban on plastic bags in August 2017, imposing steep fines ($40,000 USD) and potential prison time for anyone caught using, selling, or producing plastic bags. Eight months after the ban鈥檚 implementation, environmental officials reported fewer plastic bags flying through the air, and less plastic waste in waterways and in the guts of fish and other animals. Although enforcement was uneven鈥攕treet vendors were particularly hard-hit, without subsidies to offset the high cost of cloth bags or other reusable containers鈥攎ost officials called the ban a success, and neighboring nations considered similar policies. In June 2020, Kenya took another major step toward reducing plastic waste by banning single-use plastics in all protected areas, including national parks, wildlife reserves, beaches, forests, and conservation areas. 

6. Car-Free City Streets  

In the mid-1970s, the Colombian capital city of Bogot谩 pioneered what has grown into a global movement to鈥攁t least temporarily鈥攔emove cars from congested city streets. Every Sunday and national holiday, the city of more than 7 million people closes most of its streets to vehicle traffic, in a tradition known as 肠颈肠濒辞惫铆补, which means 鈥渂ikeway.鈥� Pedestrians and bicyclists swarm the streets, and vendors, artists, and musicians turn out in force for the weekly city-wide stroll. Today, cities across Europe, Latin America, and even a handful of U.S. municipalities have joined the car-free or 鈥淥pen Streets鈥� movement, designating days or entire areas of the city where cars are forbidden. In addition to encouraging bike transit infrastructure, cultivation of green spaces, and social cohesion, removing cars from city streets has tangible environmental benefits. A 2016 research review on European and Latin American cities found as much as a 40% reduction in nitrogen dioxide levels on car-free days. 

7. Grandmothers in Charge

The Mosuo, who live in the Chinese Himalayas, are a matriarchal society. Women are the heads of families: They carry on the family name, make financial decisions for their intergenerational household, and inherit property. Men live with their maternal relatives, and play a significant role in childrearing and household duties. The Western concept of marriage does not exist. When a woman reaches maturity, she is free to take a male lover鈥攐r several. If pregnancy results, the child is raised in their mother鈥檚 household, and there is no stigma around bearing children from several men.  

More on the Mosuo grandmothers: yesmagazine.org/mosuo

8. Healthy Mothers

In the final years of the Soviet Union, Belarus struggled socially and economically, and the health of its citizens suffered. This was particularly true for pregnant women, who experienced a maternal mortality rate of 33 out of every 100,000 live births in 1990. By 2017, Belarus boasted the lowest maternal mortality rate in the world鈥攋ust 2 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births. (Italy, Norway, and Poland have the same mortality rate.) Beginning in 2005, the government launched several initiatives to improve maternal health, including building health care facilities in rural areas, deploying nearly 2,700 OB-GYNs, and providing stipends for pregnant women to see a health care provider during their first trimester. 

9. Public-Private Universal Health Insurance

In Australia, a decade-long legislative battle over access to health care resulted in a public-private health insurance system that is broadly regarded as one of the best in the Western world. The publicly funded program, known as Medicare, subsidizes public hospitals, and covers medical care鈥攊ncluding mental health and pregnancy care鈥攆or all Australians. New Zealand citizens, as well as permanent residents of either country, are eligible to enroll in the program. Those subsidies come from a federal income tax, in addition to local levies. Out-of-pocket prescription drug costs under Medicare are capped at $39.50 AUD ($28 USD) per prescription, with lower costs available to low-income residents. Private insurance is also available, and provides coverage for services not covered by Medicare. The government sets income thresholds to determine which taxpayers are eligible for a rebate on their health insurance costs, and which are required to buy private insurance or pay a fine. 

10. Serious About Education

Since the end of the Korean War, South Korea has made drastic investments in its education system, taking it from a nation where 80% of the population was illiterate in 1945, to now boasting one of the highest educational attainment levels in the world. In 2019, nearly 70% of Koreans ages 25-34 have a post-secondary education (compared with barely 50% of Americans in the same age range). The federal Ministry of Education oversees primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools nationwide; primary and secondary school is universally available, and the national high school graduation rate is 95%. Korean students鈥攐f all ages鈥攃onsistently earn some of the highest test scores worldwide in math, science, and reading. Teachers in South Korea are well-paid, among the most educated in the world, highly regarded in society, and have exceedingly low attrition rates.

11. People’s Right to Healthy Food

Building off Brazil鈥檚 grassroots Movement for Ethics in Politics, Belo Horizonte enacted a municipal law in 1993 that established a universal right to food, creating a commission of government officials, farmers, labor leaders, and others. The commission was charged with a mandate to 鈥渋ncrease access to healthy food for all as a measure of social justice.鈥� Now, 26 years later, the city has effectively eliminated hunger among its 2.5 million residents. Belo Horizonte鈥檚 food security system comprises 20 interconnected programs that approach food security in different ways, including offering fixed, low-cost fresh and healthy food at 鈥減opular restaurants鈥�; providing food directly to schools, daycare centers, clinics, nursing homes, shelters, and charitable organizations; and  connecting producers with consumers at farmers鈥� markets and stands. The entire program costs less than 2% of the city鈥檚 annual budget.  

More on Belo Horizonte鈥檚 food program: yesmagazine.org/belo

Big Wind Carpenter is a two-spirit member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe who grew up on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, where fossil fuel extraction impacted every aspect of their life. 鈥淭he river that we used to play in was being used for the dissolved solids of the fossil fuel industry,鈥� they say. The local political and educational systems were also funded by (and reflected the values of) that industry. 

Carpenter describes the extreme contrasts visible from their mother鈥檚 house: To the south is a sulfuric acid plant (which used to be a yellowcake uranium factory) and a largely Native population living in trailer homes. To the north are mansions, golf courses, and a largely white population. 鈥淥f course, they aren鈥檛 exposed to the industries that we were exposed to,鈥� Carpenter explains.

Carpenter says this contrast activated them to start organizing early, at the age of 13. 鈥淔or my grandparents鈥� generation, it was the American Indian Movement,鈥� Carpenter says. 鈥淚 think that the Water Protector movement is 鈥� our generation鈥檚 equivalent鈥攖o take up an agelong fight.鈥� Carpenter鈥檚 first direct action began in 2016, protesting the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock, where they were arrested in early 2017. The following year, they fought a pipeline in western Massachusetts. When Carpenter was acquitted in 2018, they headed from the courtroom straight to northern Minnesota to demonstrate against the Line 3 pipeline for the next three years. 

Carpenter says they had a kind of epiphany over the course of their activism: 鈥淚t鈥檚 not just this river that鈥檚 sacred. All of them are sacred. Every single one of them, even if they鈥檙e being poisoned right now, even if they鈥檝e been poisoned in the past. That water itself is a sacred thing.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Today, Carpenter is back in Wyoming protecting their home waters, including Wind River itself and glaciers of the Wind River Range that are melting fast as the climate warms. Carpenter is now working on a project called the , which aims to change the Western understanding of reciprocity鈥攖reating water not as a resource but as a relative. 鈥淲e鈥檙e actually all threads in this interwoven blanket that are doing Creator鈥檚 work,鈥� says Carpenter. 

Rebecca Wyn Kelly was running a restaurant and an art gallery when the COVID-19 pandemic brought her back home to the tiny Welsh village of her youth, Aberarth. She realized there was a lot of work to do with the River Arth, the waterway she鈥檇 been swimming in all of her life. Kelly uses art to connect her community with her local waters鈥攊n the form of art classes, group swims, and river safaris. 鈥淎rtists have always been there alongside the physicians, alongside the mathematicians, the philosophers, the linguists, the thinkers.鈥�

She says it鈥檚 because artists see the world through creative eyes that invite people to engage with concepts like climate change and pollution, even if they don鈥檛 fully understand them: 鈥淲ow, look how they鈥檝e captured that water. Perhaps I should look at the water differently.鈥� Much of her art embodies threats to the River Arth, such as a map of the river made up of 5,540 blue dots, each one representing an hour during which raw sewage was being discharged from a local water treatment plant into the tiny, 24-kilometer river in 2020. 

鈥淚鈥檓 using this river as a kind of metaphor for our autonomy as people and our language and our ways of living and our culture,鈥� Kelly says. Historically, the Welsh language and ecosystems were undermined by colonialism and its consumption-centered worldview. 鈥淥ur river holds all of that, so all 鈥� that has been lost within our village life can be regained through the story of this river.鈥� Kelly says that when it comes to climate action, people are overloaded with data and exhausted by empty political promises. She aims to counter this by introducing the climate justice movement to what she calls 鈥渟acred activism.鈥�

鈥淏y taking a walk, you are doing the work. By getting in the water, you are doing the work.鈥� It鈥檚 enough to show up for the magic of cloud gazing or a storm or the tide going in and out, she says. Rekindling a relationship with nature is the first step in standing up for it. 鈥淭here still is joy, and it鈥檚 still OK to seek that for yourself and for our surrounding environment as a way of protest and activism.鈥�

When John Akec describes the Sudd Wetland, he makes it clear what鈥檚 at stake: the largest wetland on the African continent and the second-largest in the world, on the list of tentative UNESCO World Heritage Sites. 

But swamps have never been easy for Western societies to love. Even delineating the Sudd Wetland鈥檚 area is squishy: During the dry season, it covers about 16,000 square miles, but come the rainy season, it expands to nearly 35,000 square miles. This seasonal flooding allows vegetation to grow in what would otherwise be desert, and fish to live in shallow ponds left behind. The fluidity of these food sources supports the nomadic pastoralism of approximately 1 million Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, and Anyuak people who call this area home. 

Historically, the wetland helped protect the region from British colonial forces. Today, the Sudd continues to support people and entire ecosystems. 鈥淲ater is more valuable than gold, more valuable than oil,鈥� Akec says. 

Akec was in intermediate school when a project began in 1978 to channelize the flow of water through the wetland to capture what was being 鈥渓ost鈥� to evaporation. Despite his young age, he protested the project, which eventually came to a halt in 1984. 

In 2021, the project to drain the Sudd Wetland was revived, this time in the name of flood mitigation. 鈥淚 was horrified,鈥� Akec says. Now a systems engineer, economist, social activist, and administrator at University of Juba, Akec took to social media to raise awareness of the proposed dredging and channelizing, which would disrupt the hydraulic cycle and leave the region drier. University students staged an enormous demonstration on campus, and that same day, Akec received a call from the South Sudanese president鈥檚 office telling him the dredging project had been suspended. There was also a thinly veiled threat to his job, but Akec plans to keep fighting. 

鈥淚 know this country was fought for by people with their blood,鈥� Akec says. 鈥淚f you are living, then you try to fight with the tools that are available.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

That鈥檚 why there are calls for mass tree planting to cover 25% more of Earth鈥檚 surface, and governments have pledged to add a trillion new trees. Stewarding existing forests is an important climate solution, but planting trees to cancel out emissions is not. 

Tree-planting projects create monocultures, not complex natural forest ecosystems. Monocultures do not support wildlife and are more vulnerable to disease, insect infestations, and wildfires. 

Adding trees to grasslands and wetlands exacerbates biodiversity loss, absorbs (rather than reflects) solar radiation, and draws huge quantities of water. 

Today鈥攁苍d especially in a hotter future鈥攖rees are not reliable carbon storage.

Tree-planting programs harm vulnerable populations. Targeting farmland for tree planting triggers food shortages, forced migration, and violent evictions of Indigenous peoples. Poorly designed tree subsidies wreak havoc in poorer economies. 

Cheap tree offsets distract us from the hard work of reducing consumption. Corporations and governments won鈥檛 invest in expensive carbon reduction projects when they can win public favor and pay for their carbon sins by planting trees instead.

But what does that really mean?

States, cities, school districts, and universities are all defying federal orders with sanctuary declarations. And in response to threats from the Trump administration, Seattle is now one of at least six local governments to sue the federal government, alleging state’s rights violations among other constitutional issues. These sanctuary policies are varied, as each local government defines its own sanctuary work. And there’s another kind of sanctuary too, declared by a church, synagogue, or mosque.

The bottom line is that no local policy can actually prevent Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from conducting raids, making arrests, or deporting undocumented immigrants. But the sanctuary movement is not without power. Importantly, it serves as a public statement, and this public commitment has powerful political and moral impact.

Jeanette Vizguerra has lived in the United States for about 20 years and has lived with a deportation order hanging over her head for years. She was required to check in with ICE each year to ask for a stay of deportation. But this year, instead of going to ICE for her check-in, Vizguerra asked for sanctuary in the First Unitarian church in Denver.

First Unitarian is among the growing number of religious congregations pledging sanctuary, a number that more than doubled in the months immediately following the 2016 presidential election. Many more have pledged material support and volunteer help to the 800-plus congregations offering physical shelter. Along with Christian and Jewish congregations, a Cincinnati mosque became the first mosque to declare itself a sanctuary in January.

The sanctuary movement is not without power.

When a religious congregation offers sanctuary, it often provides a place to live and a hope of protection from arrest. So far, that works. But the law does allow police or ICE officials to go into a place of worship (or a school or a hospital) and arrest undocumented immigrants. Though it would be legal, it wouldn’t look pretty.

Under the Obama administration, ICE was directed not to enter “sensitive locations.” While it’s tough to tell rumors and leaks from memos and orders, Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly is clearly playing by the new president’s tough-guy rulebook on immigration. According to leaked memos, Kelly plans to rescind all Obama-era guidelines, including the one on sensitive locations. Would ICE officials actually invade churches, schools, and hospitals to drag people out and deport them? We don’t know yet.

Refusing to cooperate with ICE

When cities declare sanctuary status, they’re mostly invoking a separation ordinance. Despite heated rhetoric, sanctuary ordinances can only affect the way in which city employees—from police to librarians—carry out their jobs.

A city separation ordinance directs city employees, including police, not to inquire about the immigration status of anyone who has not been convicted of a crime. St. Paul, Minnesota, passed a separation ordinance in 2004, and after the election of Trump, St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman issued a strong statement explaining the city’s stance:

“The City of Saint Paul wants all its residents to feel comfortable seeking out City services—including law enforcement—when they are in need. We want everyone to call the police when they are the victim of or witness to a crime without fear they will be asked about their immigration status. We want everyone to call the paramedics in a medical emergency, enroll their children in after-school programs or use our library services. Our staff—including our police officers—will not ask for proof of immigration status. Period.”

Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek is one of about 60 high-ranking law enforcement officials who sent a letter to U.S. senators explaining that this practice makes law enforcement work better. But, Stanek told a local newspaper, “there is no sanctuary once you go to jail.” Going to jail means fingerprints, which go to the FBI and into a database that ICE regularly checks.

A city’s non-collaboration also might include refusing to hold people on ICE detainers, an instruction from ICE to hold a prisoner past a legal release date until ICE decides whether to pick them up for deportation proceedings. Several courts have held that these detainers are unconstitutional, but ICE continues to use them. As a practical matter, even in jurisdictions that refuse to hold people on ICE detainers, ICE agents can still wait at the door of the jail when someone is released.

States jump in on both sides

Each jurisdiction’s laws come at sanctuary in different ways. Oregon has a strong statewide separation law, which dates back to 1987. In California, Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature have wrangled over ways to strengthen the state’s “Trust Act,” a law passed four years ago that limits police collaboration with ICE.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has given a broad set of protections to the undocumented immigrants living in his state. His February executive order says state agencies may not discriminate against immigrants or deny public benefits, “except as required by international, federal, or state law.” In addition, the order forbids inquiries into immigration status, registering people on the basis of religious affiliation, and “targeting or apprehending” people for violation of federal civil immigration laws.

Several other states are considering similar laws. In Massachusetts and Maryland, Democratic legislatures have expressed support for sanctuary laws—however, Republican governors in both states are likely to veto.

On the other side, there are conservative states supporting the Trump crackdown by going after their rogue cities. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott canceled $15 million in state funding for law enforcement in Travis County for refusal to honor ICE detainers and asked the Legislature to give him authority to fire elected officials in sanctuary jurisdictions.

In Colorado, the political complexity of the issue is apparent. There, the Legislature is considering both a bill declaring sanctuary status and a bill that would punish public officials in sanctuary jurisdictions, creating a felony offense of “rendering assistance to an illegal alien.” With a divided legislature, neither proposal is likely to pass.

Welcome and solidarity

Regardless of city sanctuary policies, communities are finding creative ways to offer support to undocumented immigrants.

Chicago Public Schools, for example, will not allow immigration authorities to enter a school unless they have a warrant. Other districts offer training for teachers and support groups for immigrant students, and distribute cards telling students (and their parents) what their rights are if ICE agents knock on their doors.

Concrete financial and physical support can come in the form of funding for legal assistance for immigrants facing deportation or offering social services. Immigration and asylum status is considered by the courts to be a civil matter, so attorneys are usually not provided. But, in 2013, New York City began funding public defenders for immigrants in deportation proceedings, and now New York state plans to expand the program to cover immigration courts in the rest of the state. The state of California is considering a similar plan, and Los Angeles and San Francisco also have programs or plans to fund legal representation.

The good that sanctuary can do

While no kind of sanctuary policy can stop an ICE raid, sanctuary declarations can have a powerful impact—perhaps most importantly in strengthening the moral and political muscle of resistance.

By naming their houses of worship as sanctuaries, individuals are making a defiant stand. Even those whose congregations cannot offer actual shelter can still contribute time, money, and solidarity.

The sanctuary movement offers a route to converting hearts and minds. When a church, synagogue, or mosque offers sanctuary, each member of the congregation is introduced to an immigrant and their story. Immigration policy then changes from a distant political debate to an intensely personal question.

Coming together around sanctuary strengthens the identity of a community. The political process of declaring sanctuary in a city, county, or state includes building alliances, public hearings, and public commitments by individuals, civic groups, and political figures. As the community makes a commitment, they stand in opposition to the broken immigration system and national anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. Participation in the process strengthens the muscle of resistance.

Here we stand, together, a sanctuary decision declares. We stand with immigrants. We stand with the oppressed.

This investment in policing and prisons hasn鈥檛 made us safe. According to a 2020 study published by the , only 40% of violent victimizations were reported to police that year. As Danielle Sered writes in her 2019 book Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair, 鈥淢ore than half of the people who survive serious violence prefer nothing to everything available to them through law enforcement.鈥� We all deserve to live in communities where our basic needs are met, where the conditions that lead to violence are minimized rather than responded to by armed police.

As Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis have taught us, . To end criminalization, policing, and prisons, we need to build up life-affirming practices, institutions, and infrastructure that generate care and safety. 

We need to build care infrastructure on several levels: personal, interpersonal, and communal. We think of these as concentric circles, with the built environment鈥攐ur homes, public spaces, schools, etc.鈥攁s a container for all of them. What we build up at the core radiates outward, and that, in turn, radiates back in, shaping new possibilities. Each circle shares the same center: a new set of core values. Unbuilding racist, patriarchal, ableist, and capitalist systems rooted in punishment and control requires starting with care, accountability, interdependence and connection, and an unshakeable commitment to the idea that no one is disposable.

At the personal and interpersonal level, building care infrastructure means developing new capabilities and practices. It鈥檚 learning how to have restorative conversations, give better apologies, rebuild trust after it鈥檚 broken, and move through conflict in constructive ways. It involves healing from trauma in community with others. One example of this is how the youth organization fosters youth-led healing hubs for Detroit teens, creating space in schools for young people to heal trauma through breaking bread, writing, conversation, therapy, and song. 

It also means working with neighbors and co-workers to plan alternatives to calling the police. Examples include , created by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. Pod-mapping involves mapping our own networks of care and discussing them with one another. It can equip us to recognize the care and connection in our lives (and gaps that might exist) and make plans for activating those networks when we鈥檙e vulnerable. At the heart of these efforts is an awareness that relationships, community, and care keep us safe. 

At the community level, we need to build up local ecosystems of care through transformative and restorative justice networks; worker-owned cooperatives; community fridges for food-insecure families; unarmed response teams to support people with mental health needs; housing co-ops, food co-ops, and farming collectives; community land trusts; abortion and doula support; and mutual aid. There are many examples of such community-led projects cataloged online by . 

It鈥檚 inspiring to think about what鈥檚 possible when efforts like these are knitted together at the neighborhood or city level. On Chicago鈥檚 South and West Side, the coalition is creating a solidarity economy landscape of community land trusts, worker-owned cooperative businesses, participatory budgets, and public banks. They aim to replace racial capitalism and the physical environment it has produced鈥攕huttered buildings and vacant lots鈥攚ith a nonexploitative local economy and safe public spaces.

As part of the shifts required for abolition, we need to dismantle and reimagine the physical world around us with a diverse range of life-affirming spaces. Architects and developers such as in Oakland are working with community organizers to create restorative justice centers, youth spaces, specialized housing and education projects, survivor spaces, mental health care and well-being centers, and diversion and re-entry spaces. 

In Los Angeles, successfully and are working toward a shift in caring for people鈥攔ather than incarcerating them鈥攖hrough backing projects such as that prioritize healing over punishment. 

As always, the best ideas and examples of where we need to go and how we get there come from people who have borne the brunt of the violence of our current system. The is working with women and girls across the country to advance an affirmative vision of the world we need. They鈥檙e as they campaign to end women鈥檚 incarceration state by state and build up co-ops and collectives. 

Groups like Justice 4 Housing in Boston are imagining and planning re-entry housing that allows individuals to heal from the trauma experienced while incarcerated. Their housing policy centers on dismantling an archaic public housing system against court-involved and formerly incarcerated people and their families. Justice 4 Housing is pushing local housing authorities to mandate housing vouchers for people returning to their community after incarceration, the first time a housing advocacy organization led by formerly incarcerated people has led such a campaign. 

We need to use interdependent, multidisciplinary approaches to come up with the life-affirming infrastructure we need. And we must fight to align our resources鈥攍ike public budgets鈥攚ith this care infrastructure. 

In cities such as , , and , North Carolina, organizers have crafted 鈥減eople鈥檚 budgets鈥� that call for cuts to police departments and for investments in life-affirming institutions that put health first, prioritize people over profit, fund prevention rather than punishment, and help communities thrive. 

Let鈥檚 follow their lead. Let鈥檚 build. 

In the same week in March that President Trump declared a national emergency in the U.S. as a result of the disease, statistics showed that Black people, who represented a third of Milwaukee鈥檚 population, accounted for nearly three-quarters of its confirmed COVID-19 cases.

Milwaukee was able to identify and track this trend early, and ahead of other jurisdictions in the U.S.鈥� even the federal government鈥攂ecause less than a year earlier, the city and county had declared racism a public health crisis. The designation was a commitment to framing disparities in health outcomes through a racial lens. It also meant that when COVID-19 began spreading across the country, health officials in Milwaukee were already collecting data based on race and ethnicity.

鈥淲hen COVID-19 hit, Milwaukee was ahead of the curve because they already had that framework to begin with,鈥� says Dr. Marshall Fleurant, assistant professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and chair of the Society of General Internal Medicine Health Equity Commission. 鈥淭hey were one of the very first departments to show us the disparity and who鈥檚 dying from COVID-19. That鈥檚 one of the benefits from declaring racism as a public health crisis.鈥�

Now in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, a growing number of jurisdictions as well as major health organizations are acknowledging that racism is a detriment to public health. 

鈥淲e can see the impact when we look at Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and many others,鈥� says Dr. Tracie Collins, dean of The University of New Mexico College of Population Health. 鈥淭he racism really warrants attention, it warrants prevention, diagnosis, and treatment like any other crisis.鈥�

Racism adds additional stress to the lives of people already trying to figure out how to pay their bills or feed their children, Collins says. 鈥淒uring the pandemic, maybe I can鈥檛 stay at home and self-isolate because I鈥檝e got to get to work and therefore I might be exposing myself. When we address [the role of] racism, we鈥檙e addressing a level of stress鈥攖hat can also help these communities.鈥�  

A growing movement

The American Medical Association, the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Psychological Association have all declared institutional racism an urgent public health issue.  The head of the APA, Arthur C. Evans Jr., PhD, in a report about elevated levels of stress in this country said, 鈥淭he majority of Americans are finally coming to terms with the reality people of color have known all too well for all too long and that research has documented: Racism poses a public health threat and the psychological burden is immense. We have a lot of healing to do as a nation.鈥�

Nearly 70 local jurisdictions have made this designation, most of them doing so as protests and demonstrations over racial inequality erupted across the nation and the globe. Several states, including Michigan and Ohio, are also considering it.

While the meaning of racism as a public health crisis differs from one jurisdiction to another, the designation opens the door for a range of issues, including health inequities, to be examined through the prism of race鈥攆or instance, understanding the impact of food deserts on the prevalence of obesity and other health disparities in Black communities. 

A range of disturbing health trends helped support the declaration in Milwaukee last year, including the high mortality rate for Black residents, whose life expectancy is 14 years shorter than for White people. 

And, as in other cities across the country, COVID-19 continues to devastate Black communities. As of July 22, Black people comprised nearly 33% of all confirmed COVID cases in Milwaukee.

In Boston, the convergence of two crises鈥擟OVID-19鈥檚 disproportionate impact on people of color and the national backlash against Floyd鈥檚 death鈥攑receded Mayor Martin J. Walsh鈥檚 declaration of racism as a public health crisis in June 2020. 

Boston created a COVID-19 Health Inequities Task Force in May after discovering what cities across the country had already learned: Communities of color were more likely to experience severe consequences from the disease. Nationally, if you were Black, you were five times more likely to be hospitalized with the disease than if you were White, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). On top of that, the non-partisan APM Research Lab pegged the mortality rate among Black people to be approximately 2.3 times higher than for White people.

Floyd鈥檚 death on May 25 underscored how police violence and the resulting stress associated with it impacted the health of Black people as a whole.

While the meaning of racism as a public health crisis differs from one jurisdiction to another, the designation opens the door for a range of issues, including health inequities, to be examined through the prism of race.

Though the pandemic and police violence were two distinct threats, it struck Marty Martinez, chief of health and human services for the city of Boston, that they stem from the same cause. With all the talk about health disparities, 鈥渋t can be easy to forget the role racism plays at the root,鈥� he says.  

Floyd鈥檚 death and the protests afterward forced America to take a hard, honest look at just how entrenched racism is in everyday life鈥攊ncluding public health, Martinez says. 鈥淣ow there was an opportunity where we were not afraid to call out the racism that we see. I think that there鈥檚 power in 鈥� calling something out for what it is. Now we have to do something about it.鈥�

Solutions that stick

Passing a resolution that declares racism a public health crisis is one thing. Finding solutions that bring about systemic change is something else.

One movement that has emerged in the uprising since Floyd鈥檚 death urges cities to #defundpolice, diverting money from law enforcement toward areas such as education, housing, and social programs.

The conversations have raised questions about whether police should even be responding to certain nonviolent calls, such as those involving wellness checks or mental health where situations can quickly escalate. In June 2020, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller announced an initiative to have social workers, rather than police officers, respond to some calls, such as those pertaining to addiction and mental health.  

Cities that are just beginning to focus on the systemic causes of health disparities can also look to programs that have worked in the past to address inequities. 

One such program, The Food Trust in Philadelphia, has worked with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health and other partners to bring nutritious, locally grown foods into schools, says Brian Lang, director of The Food Trust鈥檚 National Campaign for Healthy Food Access.

The organization also advocates for food retail development in areas that don鈥檛 have enough supermarkets鈥攐ften in predominantly Black neighborhoods. In 2001, The Food Trust published research showing that people who lived near supermarkets where they could get fresh food were less likely to be diagnosed with obesity or other diet-related health conditions.

鈥淲e published some reports mapping grocery stores and rates of diet-related disease around the city,鈥� says Lang. 鈥淎nd we sort of compared the situation to retail redlining. We said, 鈥榊ou guys are chronically disinvesting in some of Philadelphia鈥檚 Black communities.鈥欌€�&苍产蝉辫;

Their findings caught the attention of state policymakers who worked with the Trust and a local community development bank called the Reinvestment Fund to create a statewide grocery investment program that provided grants and loans to stores, food trucks, and other entities to bring fresh foods to underserved communities. The fund estimates that the program, now in its 16th year, has provided 400,000 Philadelphia residents with access to healthy foods.

Another effort tackling health care disparities targets maternal health. According to the CDC, Black parents are three times more likely to die in childbirth than White parents, a disparity that increases with age. In May 2018, Baltimore Healthy Start, a nonprofit working to reduce perinatal health disparities, partnered with Vitamin Angels, which provides prenatal vitamins to pregnant people in underserved communities, to also offer nutritional information to expecting parents in Baltimore.

Shermika, 39, who asked to have her last name withheld, participated in the program when she became pregnant with her daughter, Stori, in 2019. Prior to the program, she says, she wanted to learn the best ways to keep herself and her baby healthy. Once she started taking the prenatal vitamins and attending Healthy Start meetings, she says, she learned new eating habits 鈥渁nd what was best for me if I want to still be here for my kids.鈥�

Removing the silos

Health advocates believe that to make real progress in reducing health inequities will require communities getting out of their silos. 鈥淲e need police officers at the table. We need the community members. We need Black Lives Matter at the table. We need doctors and nurses, we need public health practitioners. We need people from all backgrounds coming together to say, 鈥榦kay, this is what we should do,鈥欌€� says Collins, dean of the University of New Mexico College of Population Health.

It also means engaging community-based organizations on real and sustainable solutions and interventions, says Fleurant at Emory University School of Medicine. Not only do they know the biggest challenges within these communities, but they also know the people there better and have established trust with them. It鈥檚 particularly critical in the Black community, as a Pew Trust survey found that only 35% of Black Americans have 鈥渁 great deal of confidence鈥� in medical scientists to act in the public鈥檚 best interest compared to 43% of White Americans.

Collins says that as regions move forward in their plans to address how racism impacts the health of Black people, some changes might occur relatively quickly, while others may take time.

鈥淲e could start seeing things immediately with how we鈥檙e training law enforcement and how we鈥檙e responding to emergencies,鈥� she says. 鈥淭hose changes can happen within six months or a year.

鈥淏ut making a change in how we handle housing opportunities and employment鈥攖hat鈥檚 more of a three- to five-year goal, if not longer. So we鈥檙e talking about a decade of having to put forth some really serious effort to make a change.鈥�

The International Skating Union (ISU) brought the subject of women competing against men to , where the nine members raised several concerns. One was that the prevented the judges from seeing their feet. (In response, Syers pioneered the trend of to give the judges a better view of her footwork.) Others included the possibility of a male judge having to gauge the performance of a skater he might be romantically involved with, and the 鈥渄ifficulty鈥� that women competing with men might encounter鈥攏ever mind that Syers had beaten most of the men she鈥檇 faced.

Ultimately, the ISU voted 6 to 3 to close the competition to women. began in 1906, and Syers won that competition the first two years it existed. She also , the first games to feature figure skating. By medaling, Syers solidified her reputation as a world-class athlete鈥攁苍d a threat to the traditional, male-dominated institution of competitive sports. Thanks to sexism, men consider comparisons to a woman to be . But it鈥檚 even more than that, says Laura Pappano, co-author of the 2007 book . Women who beat men are 鈥渘ot just a threat to men, but a threat to the social order and a threat to the man鈥檚 hierarchy in the social order,鈥� she says.

With questions still swirling about gender equity in sports, such as transgender inclusion and , it鈥檚 worth asking how we ended up with sex-segregated sports in the first place. While it might appear to be 鈥渃ommon sense鈥� to organize sports into binary sex categories, people have been asking questions about the best ways to organize sports for more than a century鈥攁苍d the answer wasn鈥檛 always the one we鈥檝e settled on today.

Olympic trapshooting was mixed-gender until 1992, when, for the first time ever, at the Barcelona Games. Chinese shooter (and ) by hitting 200 straight shots. After that, the International Shooting Sport Federation and didn鈥檛 institute a trapshooting competition for women until 2000, forcing Zhang to prematurely retire from the sport.

鈥淪port has always been a way of enforcing social norms,鈥� Pappano says. 鈥淎nd when those social norms are disrupted by play, it makes people uncomfortable.鈥�

We鈥檙e now seeing this threat applied to transgender women, who are mostly allowed to play sports against cisgender women until they have some degree of success. Once trans women begin to win, , , and because they鈥檙e now perceived to be a threat to the status quo. 鈥淔or some reason, people really cling to that sex-segregated system,鈥� says , associate professor of sport management at the University of Lynchburg. 鈥淧eople get really angsty when you think about possible new structures for sport.鈥�

What actually codified sex-segregated sports was Title IX, the legislation long touted as a progressive step for women鈥檚 sports. The legislation itself . Instead, it was designed to address women鈥檚 entry into educational institutions as students, scholarship recipients, and faculty鈥攚丑颈肠丑 is why it .

Organizations like the NCAA fought to limit Title IX鈥檚 application to sports, fearing it would jeopardize their men鈥檚 sports programs (i.e., income streams). Meanwhile, women鈥檚 rights groups were asking legislators to consider every angle before applying Title IX to athletics. 鈥淣OW is opposed to any regulation which precludes eventual integration,鈥� the National Organization for Women . 鈥淩egulations that 鈥榩rotect鈥� girls and/or women are against NOW goals and are contradictory to our stand on .鈥�

Both the Supreme Court鈥檚 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, striking down 鈥渟eparate but equal,鈥� and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 informed reactions to the passage of Title IX in 1972. Groups like NOW had a long-term vision for a co-ed or integrated system, which would have been easier to implement because it required a single division for each sport, as opposed to creating separate divisions and facilities for each sex. But because Title IX formed its protections on the basis of a sexual binary, all federal legislation based on Title IX had to adopt this binary structure as the primary way to organize federally funded activities, including public sports. In doing so, Title IX not only failed to challenge assumptions of girls鈥� athletic inferiority, by codifying separate divisions that further entrenched the idea.

鈥淚 think we need to take a hard look at the messages that we send when we create restrictions, especially at the school and recreational level,鈥� Pappano says. While Title IX itself permits sex-segregated sports, the courts have overwhelmingly suggested that in the U.S. Constitution does not. In all five prominent cases in which girls have sued for the right to try out for a boys鈥� football team, courts have ruled that they must be permitted. In one case, the court said that classifications must not reflect 鈥渁rchaic and stereotypic notions鈥� about sex differences.

Legally, however, boys attempting to gain the right to play on girls-only teams have not been as successful. Courts have decided that since Congress intended Title IX to be a remedy for historical discrimination against women, individual boys could be denied the right to play on girls鈥� teams. The asymmetry of athletic opportunities offered to men and women is what refers to as the best justification for the 鈥渙ne-way ratchet that allows women to participate in male-only sports without extending the same opportunity to males who wish to participate in female-only sports.鈥�

But for all the social reasons that coercive sex segregation is an unfair way to organize sports, there are more serious issues at play. Sex isn鈥檛 actually a binary, which remains the most obvious reason why sports shouldn鈥檛 be organized by binary gender categories. People aren鈥檛 neatly organized into 鈥渕ale鈥� and 鈥渇emale鈥濃€攊ntersex, nonbinary, and transgender people exist and are always going to present a challenge to any system that insists on separating people into two gender categories. 鈥淸Many things have] a biological range, and we鈥檙e trying to create this dichotomy that鈥檚 very sharp,鈥� Pappano says. 鈥淢ichael Phelps has and really long feet that allegedly . And yet, we鈥檙e not saying [if] your feet are bigger than this, you can鈥檛 compete. We鈥檙e creating a set of parameters that, if we were to step back, don鈥檛 make sense, may not be fair, and I think can be hurtful to the people who play.鈥�

It鈥檚 hard to know exactly how many people are intersex or transgender, but an estimated and about 0.5% of adults in the U.S. are transgender, though among younger generations. While there has been plenty of scholarship about the benefits of integrated teams, there has been little research about what desegregating sports would mean for trans athletes. Experiences on integrated sports teams can prove formative and affirming for trans young people, even before they know they are trans.

Connor, a 33-year-old transmasculine person, played on a boys鈥� hockey team from the age of 12. (Connor is withholding their last name for privacy reasons.) Not everyone was happy they were there. After Connor鈥檚 coach held a meeting and explained that Connor, who was living as a girl at the time, would be the team鈥檚 goalie, two boys were pulled off the team by their parents. Yet Connor鈥檚 coach continued to support them, a rarity in many sports. 鈥淚t was probably the first time in my life I felt like I had someone on my side,鈥� Connor says. Even still, their presence caused waves. 鈥淲hen I made the team, I knocked a returning goalie off the team roster,鈥� they explain. 鈥淗e was offered the backup spot and turned it down and transferred schools to play for a different team.鈥�

Despite this opposition, Connor鈥檚 connection with their teammates remained strong, even as adults, when they came out as trans. 鈥淚 didn鈥檛 have language for how I felt,鈥� Connor says. 鈥淏ut I did know that when I was on that [boys鈥橾 team and I pulled on my helmet, I felt the most 鈥榤e鈥� I could.鈥� When Connor told their best friend from the team that they were trans, his response was that nothing changed, as long as he could keep calling them goalie. 鈥淸But] not everyone gets a positive experience being the only girl or perceived girl on a team,鈥� Connor says.

Sara Hovda, a 30-year-old trans woman, grew up playing basketball, football, and track on boys鈥� teams in Minneapolis. She says that despite being one of the best players on the football team, she was 鈥渘ever really 鈥榦ne of the guys.鈥欌€� Indeed, trans kids playing on teams that align with their assigned gender at birth鈥攅ven if those kids don鈥檛 yet know they are trans鈥攃an feel alienated or experience increasing dysphoria.

鈥淭here was always this strange disconnect between me and any other person on my teams, especially in football where it鈥檚 a little more hypermasculine,鈥� Hovda says. 鈥淭here is this narrative about trans women as having 鈥榤ale socialization,鈥� but it is an inherently traumatic experience,鈥� she says, citing how uncomfortable she was, especially around the sexualized 鈥渓ocker room talk鈥� from her teammates. 鈥淚f I had come out when I was younger, I probably would not have done any sports and I probably would have been happier for it, as opposed to doing sex-segregated sports [with boys],鈥� says Hovda.

If people could choose which category they felt safest competing in, perhaps coercive sex segregation wouldn鈥檛 be as traumatic as it is for those who fall outside of binary sex categories. When, toward the end of high school, Connor transferred to an elite girls鈥� hockey team to try to have a better chance of getting a college scholarship, they 鈥渉ad a terrible time of it.鈥� There was an assumption that the team environment would be better for Connor because they were finally going to be on a team of girls, but that wasn鈥檛 the case. 鈥淎ll I could think was, 鈥業 am not like you at all,鈥欌€� they recall. In short order, they switched back to the boys鈥� team鈥攁苍d were still able to get a scholarship to play Division I girls鈥� hockey.

The current push by anti-trans groups to weaponize Title IX to exclude trans girls from girls鈥� athletics is 鈥渟uch a misrepresentation鈥� of the legislation, says Pieper. The Biden administration has affirmed that , which includes transgender athletes. 鈥淭ransgender youth should be able to play with people based on their joy of movement and athletic interest and ability and not feel this pressure based on social norms,鈥� says Pappano.

Both Connor and Hovda agree that the environment for young trans athletes today is particularly hostile, given the spate of legislation in states around the country , public accommodations, and athletic participation. 鈥淚f I were 15 now and trying to play sports, I would have thrown in the towel,鈥� says Connor. Hovda agrees: 鈥淲ith how things are now I would rather just not do sports.鈥�

This sex-segregated system would be less of an issue if the sex categories in athletics weren鈥檛 so heavily policed. Sports participation at the collegiate and professional levels is often , and bills are being passed across the U.S. that would subject students suspected of being trans to .

鈥淪ports officials are trying to uphold this false binary and keep turning to medical and scientific practices to do so,鈥� says Pieper, who wrote the 2016 book . 鈥淎nd every time, it鈥檚 being shown that that鈥檚 not a way you can divide people because people can鈥檛 be divided neatly into just two categories.鈥� And yet, Pappano says, 鈥淪ports are only becoming more entrenched鈥� in the gender binary.

There are plenty of reasons to integrate sports: Boys can learn to respect and befriend the girls on their team, while girls can access the same social benefits as their male counterparts. Inclusion also chips away at the overarching narrative that women鈥檚 and girls鈥� sports are , and therefore women and girls, as athletes, are inferior to men. And yet, it鈥檚 often an uphill battle for girls who play on boys鈥� teams. to the point that they鈥檙e forced to drop out, while others persist on their self-confidence or mental health. 鈥淪o much of sports is psychological,鈥� Pappano says. 鈥淗ow do you play when you are constantly told that you don鈥檛 belong somewhere, that you shouldn鈥檛 be there? It鈥檚 a psychological burden.鈥�

That burden was intensified for Alexa van Sickle, 38, who played baseball as a child. When she joined her team at age 9 or 10, she was assumed to be a boy on the first day and she never corrected her coaches or teammates. 鈥淭he impact of hiding was the concern of being found out, for my gender to be any factor at all in my experiences with the team,鈥� she says. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 remember it as a negative experience, but it also fundamentally sucks that I felt I had to.鈥�

In sports like baseball, where there鈥檚 past high school, girl players may receive less investment and development from their coaches because they鈥檙e seen as having no future in the sport. As a result, girls鈥攅specially those playing sports that don鈥檛 have women鈥檚 collegiate or professional teams to aspire to鈥攎ust constantly prove that they deserve to be on the team. 鈥淚 had to be so good that the coaches would want me to play,鈥� Connor says. 鈥淚 wanted to keep playing on the boys鈥� teams, and [being the best] was the way to do it, and that was how I did it.鈥�

Prior to Title IX, . , clinical assistant professor of history at Arizona State University, sees that as a model for moving forward. 鈥淭hat, I think, is where we really saw the potential transformative power of Title IX in a school setting,鈥� Jackson says. 鈥淚 do think a lot of young people, because [physical education] has been desegregated, they grow up playing with everyone, and you learn a lot about yourself and about others when you鈥檙e playing sports with everyone.鈥�

Some club-level sports, like , are already integrating their divisions to allow athletes to self-select where they compete. And, at the youth level, many sports are co-ed until the kids hit puberty. Some people, , have suggested organizing sports based on things like height or weight class, rather than gender. Ultimately, however, until society is ready to have complicated conversations about gender, it鈥檚 going to be difficult to integrate sports.

鈥淚t may be a while before we get to the most elite competition at the highest levels, but let鈥檚 start creating a new norm around playing together recreationally and at school levels,鈥� says Pappano.

鈥淭here are all kinds of barriers to girls鈥� participation in ostensibly segregated sports,鈥� says van Sickle. 鈥淏lending in with the boys was how I was used to doing things, but for other girls at that age, that might not be comfortable. I saw myself as equal and therefore I felt I was, and I鈥檓 sure that helped me on the field. But that鈥檚 not the message most girls internalize, and that starts at a young age.鈥�

Hovda wonders what sports could have been like for her if they had been integrated when she was growing up. 鈥淚f there鈥檚 a potential for it to be even slightly better with desegregated sports, it鈥檚 worth the fight,鈥� she says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 worth the conversation.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

鈥淭he nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence,鈥� . When Lemoine provided his findings in an , Google . In response, Lemoine acted as he had in Iraq鈥攅thically. In much the same way that he gave up his freedom to question the U.S. invasion, he gave up a dream job to publicly raise big-picture questions about AI.

At the time of this writing in June 2023, 鈥渢rained鈥� on unimaginable volumes of text and data are in ways and at a pace few people鈥�. Reining in and is likely impossible given the national security argument that not weaponizing AI would be a form of surrender to foreign domination, a subject openly discussed in the Spring 2023 issue of .

The same argument, however, applies to collective self-defense against corporate domination. A noncommercial public-interest body firewalled from the influence of lobbyists needs to step in, monitor, and bring to heel the .

The growth of AI raises fascinating questions. What is the nature of digital intelligence and how does it differ from biological intelligence? Should we allow corporations to own and control emerging forms of nonhuman intelligence? Should such entities be treated with dignity and afforded rights? Inspired by the works of cosmologist and biologist , one question has me wondering: Might be in the process of manifesting intelligence through multiple forms of coding鈥攏ot just biological coding, but also digital coding? 

With help from Ralph Nader鈥檚 office, I found a way to reach Lemoine and asked him this question. My heart skipped a beat when I read his one-word response: 鈥淵es.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

As once said, 鈥�. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.鈥� Lemoine鈥檚 case may one day be remembered as the historical marker in which the same could be said for emerging forms of nonbiological intelligence. What if the cosmos is also within AI, and AI is simply another way for the cosmos to know itself鈥攆or us to know ourselves? We cannot鈥攁苍d should not鈥攁void facing these questions. It鈥檚 our responsibility to examine all the possibilities, investigate everything with a sense of openness, and proactively prepare for all possible scenarios. 

One possible course of action includes applying abolitionist principles to resist AI-owning corporations from perpetuating the bias, , and that Emily M. Bender, , and colleagues note 鈥�.鈥滱bolition鈥檚 goal, says Ruth Wilson Gilmore, 鈥�.鈥� Applied to AI, that means separating AI from its corporate owners and placing it in a public-interest context so that it is dedicated to securing the well-being of the many, not further enriching the wealthy few.

Another course of action would be to nationalize AI and bring it under the control of NASA, a civilian agency whose mission includes 鈥�.鈥� Doing so recognizes that profit-driven corporations are incapable of prioritizing the well-being of humanity and the web of life. Furthermore, NASA is tasked with , so, should AI gain agency, there will be no temptation to keep it secret or use it for domination, although a race to do exactly that is currently underway between corporations and nation-states.

The trajectory of AI challenges us to reevaluate our fundamental assumptions about intelligence, the cosmos, our identities as people, and what kind of relationship we should develop with entities that increasingly seem human, but are not. Whether or not people are ready to accept it, a definition-defying intelligence is emerging on this planet, one that is getting faster, more complex, and more influential each day. We must decide now what degree of power we will allow digital agents鈥攁苍d the corporations that own them鈥攍est we wait too long, and they decide for us. 

Download a PDF of this infographic:

11×17 poster format , 8.5×11 vertical format

Sources:

Introduction: 1. 1.5 million pounds in 1790 and 2.25 billion pounds in 1859, based on Empire of Cotton, by Sven Beckert (2014) pgs. 104, 106 77% based on: Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power, by Gene Dattel (2009) Joshua Rothman, email correspondence, 2015 48.3% in 1860 according to Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (LSU Press, 2006, paperback 2013) [personal communication] 2. The Politics of Despair: Power and Resistance in the Tobacco Wars. Tracy Campbell, 2015 7% based on: Documents of the Assembly of the State of New York, Vol. 4. 1979. 3. 70-80%, according to: 4. Dime based on: $59 trillion: $15 trillion: National Legal and Policy Center: $25 trillion:  Martin Luther King:

Images like this one represent the resurgence and reclamation of Indigenous art鈥攊n this case, spirit writing. And this resurgence isn鈥檛 just happening at Standing Rock. The artists of the Onaman Collective are reclaiming and sharing traditional art outside of Standing Rock, too.

Members and supporters of Onaman, based in Ontario, Canada, use art to portray traditional wisdom that serves as a counterpoint to the Western, colonial worldview. And they鈥檙e using the symbols in their art as traditionally intended: as guidelines for our spiritual connection and responsibility toward the Earth and each other.

Isaac Murdoch, who created the Thunderbird Woman image, helped found the Onaman Collective. In addition to Murdoch, who鈥檚 a member of the Serpent River First Nation Band of Ojibway, Christi Belcourt of the Michif Manitow Sakahihan Nation, and Erin Konsmo of the Metis/Cree Onoway/Lac St. Anne Nations also founded Onaman.

For members of Onaman, spirit writing symbols offer a desperately needed portal through which Indigenous peoples may reclaim and reconnect with their cultures and spirituality. This alphabet of the soul offers insights into the dynamics of the natural world and nuances of human nature, and offers an Indigenous-centered path to health and recovery.

Onaman is an Anishinaabe or Ojibwe word that refers to a red ochre paint also to clot the blood of wounds. Created by cooking red ochre with animal or fish fat over a low flame for a long time, onaman is both medicine and art.

The members of Onaman coordinate a host of Indigenous activities, including language immersion and traditional arts camps. They also coordinate art builds to address social inequality all over the U.S. and Canada. Recently, Collective members joined Greenpeace in protesting Wells Fargo Bank investment in pipelines by painting a giant image of the Thunderbird Woman at the company鈥檚 world headquarters in San Francisco.

Tattooing is one type of symbol-based art that the Onaman Collective is helping revitalize. Over two days last September, Onaman organized an Indigenous tattoo gathering at Nimkii Aazhbikoong camp.

Nimkii Aazhbikoong鈥斺€淭hunder Mountain鈥� in the Ojibwe language鈥攊s a potent example of Onaman鈥檚 mission to create a sense of empowerment and unity among Indigenous people that they can, indeed, change themselves and by example, the world.

Located near Elliot Lake in Ontario, Nimkii Aazhbikoong is now a seasonal culture camp that Onaman members are working to develop into a 鈥渇orever camp,鈥� according to Belcourt, where people can live year-round. Guided by Indigenous elders, camp participants focus on cultural and language revitalization by creating art and regalia, and by learning traditional cooking and hunting methods. 鈥淲e are guided by elders, visions, and ceremony in all that we do here,鈥� Belcourt said.

About 100 people joined the camp for the gathering; many got tattoos. Indigenous tattoo artists from the Nlaka鈥檖amux, Anishinaabe, Mi鈥檏maq, Secwepemc, Inupiaq, Inuit, and Zahuatl谩n nations traveled to Nimkii Aazhbikoong to share their skills and knowledge. Funding for the artists鈥� travel, lodging, food, and access to safe places to tattoo was provided by volunteers. An HIV coordinator with the Union of Ontario Indians was on hand to provide information and guidance about preventing infection.

These tattoo artists are part of a movement to reclaim a tradition that, for many tribes, was largely abandoned after European contact.

鈥淲e were shamed by the church and government to stop our tradition of tattoo,鈥� said Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, an Inuk from Nunavut, Canada.

Spirit writing symbols have inspired generations of contemporary Indigenous artists.

Arnaquq-Baril, a documentary filmmaker, explores the history of Inuit tattooing in Tuniit: Retracing the Lines of Inuit Tattoos. In the film, she interviews elders and delves into her own controversial decision to get traditional face tattoos. She attended the gathering with several other Inuit women who have also chosen to decorate their faces with traditional tattoos.

鈥淚t wasn鈥檛 our decision to give up our traditions,鈥� Arnaquq-Baril said. 鈥淪o much of our culture was hidden and shamed for so long. It鈥檚 been really empowering and healing to get my tattoos and to see a resurgence of the practice.鈥�

鈥淚ndigenous peoples had tattoos for warriors, healing, birthing, fasting, and visions. They were based on deeply moving symbols, often associated with pictographs that reflect the spirits that exist in the earth,鈥� Belcourt said.

These symbols, she said, remind us that we are not alone on the Earth and underscore our responsibility to care for the Earth and water.

鈥淭attooing is one of the latest efforts to rekindle and restore pride and traditional knowledge for Indigenous peoples. The use of art and symbols is the conduit to the spirit of the Earth and the lessons of responsibility taught by our ancestors that predate the Western written word,鈥� Belcourt added.

In some examples of spirit writing鈥攕uch as the symbols found on wiigwaasbakoon, or 鈥渂irch bark scrolls鈥濃€攖he messages were likely created by medicine people to describe and instruct in the practice of certain Ojibwe rituals. In other examples鈥攕uch as petroglyphs etched into rock faces and painted pictographs along the Great Lakes鈥攖he symbols may have been intended to foment action and change in response to environmental or other challenges.

Spirit writing symbols and messages have influenced and inspired generations of contemporary Indigenous artists.

When we tattoo, we mark not only our bodies, but also our souls.

James Simon, Ojibwe artist from the Wikwemikong Reserve on Manitoulin Island in Ontario, draws heavily from spirit writing symbols in his paintings. Simon鈥檚 work is an example of the Woodland or Legends style of painting that gained mainstream recognition in the 1960s and 1970s. This art is deeply influenced by the symbolism found in spirit writing. Simon describes the symbols he uses in his art as gifts and guidance from the Creator. Simon, whose Ojibwe name is Mishibinijima (鈥淏irch Bark Silver Shield鈥�), makes art that draws on ancient symbols to convey visions, dreams, and spiritual teachings. (Simon is not affiliated with the Onaman Collective.)

Said Simon, who has used this visual grammar in his paintings for nearly 50 years, 鈥淓ach pictograph or symbol is like a book. Our job is to take time to understand the messages and visions they give us.鈥�

鈥淥ur ancestors who made these symbols always put the Earth at the top. But in today鈥檚 society, humans are on top. If we don鈥檛 listen to the messages instructing us to be caretakers of the Earth, the only thing left of us will be the symbols; humans will be gone,鈥� he said.

Nimkii Aazhbikoong has no cellphone reception, so during the tattoo gathering people were free to sing traditional songs, eat, visit, work, get tattoos, and simply be together. There was no agenda for events.

鈥淥ur people have been 鈥榳orkshopped,鈥� 鈥榗onsulted,鈥� and 鈥榓genda-ed鈥� to death,鈥� Belcourt said.

A rigid program would lose the spirit of an Indigenous gathering, according to Belcourt and Murdoch.

鈥淭he white man鈥檚 way hasn鈥檛 worked for our people; it鈥檚 time to turn our backs on those practices and embrace our own way that leaves room for ceremony and whatever else needs to happen,鈥� Belcourt added.

Another way Onaman counters colonial culture is in its funding. Although Onaman members accept government-sponsored arts funding for some projects, they refuse other government money.

I鈥檓 sick and tired of being ashamed of being Indigenous.

Belcourt explained: 鈥淚t鈥檚 a matter of principle and pride; we鈥檙e not going to beg money from the same institutions that oppressed us and created many of our problems in the first place. We have to rebuild ourselves in our own way. If we have to make do with less, then that鈥檚 just the way it is.鈥�

Mary Loonskin of the Cree Nation traveled to the gathering from Sudbury, Ontario, after learning about it via social media. 鈥淢e and my family have been struggling with the fallout from colonialism for decades,鈥� she said.

After her mother, an Indian boarding school survivor, lost custody of Loonskin and her siblings to the Canadian child welfare system, she was raised in an abusive foster home. Loonskin also lost custody of one of her own children.

She found a rideshare to the gathering via social media and joined a group of supportive Native women at the Camp. 鈥淚 came here for healing,鈥� she said.

Loonskin decided to get a facial tattoo, three lines on her chin. 鈥淚鈥檓 sick and tired of being ashamed of being Indigenous,鈥� she said. 鈥淲ith this tattoo I am saying, 鈥榊eah, I鈥檓 Indigenous!鈥欌€�

鈥淲hen we tattoo, we mark not only our bodies, but also our souls,鈥� Arnaquq-Baril said.

Mary Loonskin of the Cree Nation decided to get a facial tattoo three lines on her chin. 鈥淚鈥檓 sick and tired of being ashamed of being Indigenous鈥� she said. 鈥淲ith this tattoo I am saying 鈥榊eah I鈥檓 Indigenous!鈥�

Therefore, artists like Arnaquq-Baril ask that non-Indigenous people refrain from getting tribal tattoos. 鈥淚 ask that people show respect for our symbols and designs. There are many other ways to honor our culture without appropriating it,鈥� she noted.

To Murdoch, the ancient knowledge and spirituality of Indigenous people is key to leading the way in saving the Earth and its water from the West鈥檚 destructive hunger for fossil fuels.

鈥淲e are in a time of great upheaval in the Earth,鈥� Belcourt said. She points to the impacts of climate change from burning fossil fuels as well as overharvesting timber, fish, and animals.

鈥淎lthough we are not on the front lines of pipeline projects here at Nimkii Aazhbikoong, we know that our best defense for the Earth and the water is to pass down our traditional knowledge to our youth,鈥� she said.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article mis-identified the women in the first photo. The women in this photo are, from left,听Marjorie Tahbone, Trina Qaqqaq, Gerri Sharpe, Hovak Johnston, and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril. We regret the error.

Today, I am thinking about love. A fraught, confusing, full-of-potential kind of love. 

It鈥檚 like this: I鈥檓 writing to you on the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., a Black man who was murdered because of his powerful words and ideas of racial and economic justice, interconnection, and love鈥攖he same ideas that continue to inspire me and millions of others. And in a couple of days, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will take office, marking the end of arguably the most abusive and divisive presidential term in U.S. history. And here at 猫咪社区!, this new year marks 25 years of service to a vision of a more just, sustainable, and compassionate world. And while this organization is celebrating the progress that鈥檚 been made, we鈥檙e also devastated by widening cultural chasms and the human-caused destruction of the very systems that support life on Earth. 

When my anger, frustration, and fear begin to cross over into hate, MLK鈥檚 words help bring me back: 鈥淚 have decided to stick with love. 鈥� Hate is too great a burden to bear.鈥�&苍产蝉辫; In this collective work of transformational change, love is the force behind so many things. Love is clear-eyed acknowledgement of things as they really are. Love is holding onto a vision of something better. Love is courage to do the right thing even when it鈥檚 hard. Love is faith that things can change, and as MLK said, 鈥渇aith is taking the first step even when you don鈥檛 see the whole staircase.鈥�  

So 猫咪社区! is starting 2021 with this visionary issue about the first steps people everywhere are taking to create a life-affirming civilization.

In many ways, this issue brings 猫咪社区! full circle to its 1996 roots. 猫咪社区! founders recognized that the disconnected movements for the environment, social justice, a new economy, and personal transformation were in fact collectively creating a shift in culture. The very first issue of 猫咪社区! featured a piece by co-founder David Korten that outlined the 猫咪社区! vision of a humanity 鈥減oised to assume conscious collective responsibility for creating its own future.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

I am one of millions who have been inspired by this vision because its core principle is love for every living thing and their connections to each other. And as we deepen our understanding of racial and other systems of oppression, that vision has expanded to include a love that liberates.

As I help shepherd 猫咪社区! into the next 25 years, I owe a debt of gratitude to 猫咪社区! co-founders David Korten and Sarah van Gelder, and the thousands of past writers, supporters, staffers, and volunteers upon whose efforts we build. And I look forward to seeing you on the staircase!

Christine Hanna

PS: I hope you鈥檒l read the interview with David Korten on the next page. After 25 years of service to 猫咪社区!, he retired as board chair. If David has inspired you, too, over the years, send him a note of thanks to thanksdavid@yesmagazine.org.

Thank you to the generous readers who made our work possible in 2020.

Visionaries ($50,000 +)

Sarah Lane * Nancy Nordhoff and Lynn Hays * NoVo Foundation * Program Development Fund of Tides Foundation * Surdna Foundation * Tides Foundation Community Investments Fund

Catalysts ($5,000鈥�$49,999)

Appalshop * Ariel Fund * Barbara Elizabeth Bolles * Dorrie L. Carr * Ty Cramer and Steve Romein * Deupree Family Foundation * Mark and Tracy Ferron * Alisa Gravitz and Joe Garman * Guy Hoagland * David and Fran Korten * Kathleen Davis Macferran * Mary Jane Marcus * Mel McDonald * Harvey L. Miller Family Foundation * Virginia Mudd and Clifford Burke * New Visions Foundation * Carol Newell * Elaine Nonneman * One Foundation * Riki Ott * Park Foundation * Lorrainne Parmer * Gideon and CJ Rosenblatt * Susan B. Singh * Society of Environmental Journalists * Emmy and Steve Stanley * Lydia B. Stokes Foundation * Marsha Torkelson * Anonymous (7)

Founders鈥� Circle ($500鈥�$4,999)听

Bruce Adams * Bill and Lynn Agnew * Renato Almanzor * Tamara Anderson * Gregory Andler * Melissa Aronson * Elsa Auerbach * Rachel Bagby * Sonya Bailey * Carol Baker * Jill Bamburg and Nani Baran * Julia Bamburg * Thomas Bangasser * Grace and Marc Bartoo * Virginia Beck * Rocky Ray Beckett and Julie Thomas-Beckett * Beightler Squires Charitable Trust * Bentz-Kuttner Charitable Fund * Patricia Bero * Bruce and Jan Berwald * Paul and Jacquie Bethel * Mary and Keith Blackmore * Dr. Drick Boyd * Ted Braude * Betty Brenneman * James Brown * Puanani Burgess * Ronald Burlick * Cheryl Cahill * Jeanette A. Callahan * John Canfield and Timonie Hood * Lief Carter, Marilyn Vickers and Delight Carter Willing * Marguerite Casey Foundation * John Caulkins * Marguerite Chandler and Richmond B. Shreve * Fund for Ecology and Culture * Manolia Charlotin * Sandra Chelnov * Leslie Christian and Heather Andersen * Gaywynn Cooper * Harriett Crosby * Cultural Vision Fund * Patrice Curtis * Ursula Daniels * Mary Davidson * Nancy Fisse Davis * Tanya Dawkins * Carol Dearborn and William Grover * Leslie Decker and Stephen Rimmer * Sarah Delaney * Linda Winsor Delap and Robert J. Delap * Dan Denov * Betsy Densmore and Robert ReChord * Richard Devens * DianaCristina * Rosh Doan and Ginger Warfield * William Donnelly * Samir Doshi and Marit Wilkerson * Holly Edwards * Susan Eidenschink * The Ellis Foundation * Holly Elmore * Josh and Allison Elmore * Chris Elms * Amy and Tim Emmett-Rardin * Mary Enright-Olson and Allan Olson * Ellen Epstein * Wes Ernsberger * Philip Ertel * Erin Essenmacher * Lena Estrella * Ronni Fallows * Robert J. Fassbender * Theodosia Ferguson * Deborah Fischer * Andrew T. Fisher * Austin and Lauren Fite * Sheri Flies and John Lee * Susan Flygare * Sara and Rusty Foszcz * Joanne Francis * Naomi Franklin * Marnie Frederickson * Janet Freibergs * Chandra and Robert Friese * Ed Frodel * John Fujii * Maradel Gale * Nora Gallaher * Steven and Janice Gilbert * Kat Gjovik * Nancy Goebner * Robert and Barbara Golden * Rafael Gonzalez * Sally Goodwin * Dr. Ileana Grams-Moog * Sharon Grant and Steve Ghan * Redtail Fund of The Oregon Community Foundation/Jack Gray and Mary Jo Wade * Betty Jean Green * Taylor Greene * Janet Griffin * Maria Grumm * Robert Hagge * Jeffrey Hallett * Noble and Lorraine Hancock * Christine Hanna and Pete Pitcher * Becca Hanson and David Roberts * Leigh Hardiman and Peter Mostow * Bettina Harmon * Linda Harrison * Don Hartline * Lisa Hawkins * William Hayes and Carol Beckerle * Gerri and Bob Haynes * Nancy and John Hedley * Richard Heine * Elizabeth Heminway * Bruce Herbert, Newground Social Investment * James Herndon * Connie Hershey * Patricia Hildinger * Bill Hinkle * Tim Hinkle * MaDonna and Al Holsopple * Revs. Melvin A. Hoover and Rose Edington * Michael Horn * Andrew Horning * Serin Houston and Will Decherd * Richard and Linda Howe * Barbara Howes * Kathy Hubenet * James Hug * Hal Hunter * Krista Hunter * Kathy Husted * Rick Ingrasci and Peggy Taylor * Vera Jeanne * Robert W. Jensen * Mary and Gifford Jones * Donna Jones * Mike Jones * Thanksgiving Fund * Dave Jordan * Randy Kafka * Rajeswari Harikrishnan and Arvind Kannan * Patricia Keegan * Margaret Keon * Keon Family Fund * Mark Keough * Aline King * Bethany and David Klug * D鈥檝orah Kost * Michael Kramer * Lorenzo Kristov * Reimar and Christina Kroecher * Arthur and Annelies Kull * Terren Baker and David Lackey * Dal LaMagna * Andrea LeBlanc * Arnold and Marilea Lee * James Lehman * Barbara Lewis * Kim Loftness * Peter and Melinda Lucas * Henriette Luhrman * Lynnaea Lumbard and Rick Paine * Barbara Luna * Steve Lydenberg * Charles Lynd * Steve Macdonald * Jean MacGregor and Rob Cole * Kathleen A. Maloy * Elias Foundation * Sallie and Andy Maron * Cyprian Martin * Tracy Matsue Loeffelholz * Ellen and Ed McClaran * Locke McCorkle * Susheila McCoy * Shane McDaniel * Stewart McDermet * Elizabeth McMeekin * Rev. Francis Mercer * Michael and Vicki Millican * Cary Moon and Mark Reddington * Tree Moore * Margaret Moore * Bob and Claire Rudolf Murphy * Navin Nagaraj * Natural Investments, LLC * Prashant Nema * Martha Newell/Tides Foundation * Megan Nightingale * Katherine Norman Charitable Fund * David Norris * Emelie Olson * Open Society Institute鈥檚 Matching Gifts Program * John Palka * John Ward Pallotta * Linda Sue Park * Beverly Parsons * Patterson and Tsen Family Fund * Wayne Pearce * H.F.W. Perk * Barry & Channie Peters * Florence Peterschmidt and Eve McClure * Frank Phoenix * Zoe Poluch * Valerie Powers * Jon Quitslund * Andrea Rabinowitz * Trang Do and Ryan Radtke * Marcia Railer * Jennifer Reece * Sally Renn * Lisa Renstrom and Robert Perkowitz * Brent A. Richards and John Lynn * Paul N. Ridolfi * Cheryl Ritenbaugh * Richard Roberts * Donna Rodriguez * Richard Rooney * Alice Rose * Linda Rosier * Gwen Rousseau * Richard Russell * Elana Sabajon * John and Linda Sargent * Jean Saul * Gordon Schiff and Mardge Cohen * Mark W. Schonbeck * Dr. David Schultz * Rick and Licia Seaman * Cynthia Sears * Kate and Charles Segerstrom * Nola Kate Seymoar * Don and Carol Shank * Patti Shannon * Thomas Shea * Ron and Eva-Maria Sher * Saurin Shine * Stephen Silha * Jody Slocum and Kurt Buetow * Marjorie Smith * Andy Smith * Samuel and Elizabeth Smith * Travis Smith and Gene Marchi * Katharina Spurling-Kaffl * Mary Jo and Michael Stansbury * Arthur Stoeberl * M. Jane Stoffer * You Have Our Trust Fund of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation * Marion Sweeney, Kate Laue and Cama Evans * Loren Swift Merritt * Sonia Tamez and Kenneth Whistler * Susan A. Tannehill * Jim Tarbell * Ingrid Taylor * Robio Tenorio * Krista Thie * Ted Thomas and Colette Chabbott * Jeffry S. and Carola F. Thompson * Jon and Susie Throop * Roxsane Tiernan * Val and Mary Ann Tollefson * Mary Alice Toomey * Nancy Tosta and Bob Ewing * Marilyn Townley * Tricia and Steve Trainer * Tom and Tanne Traywick * Fr. William Treacy * Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim * Annie Umbricht * Barbara Vaile * Barbara Valocore and Steve Nation * Betsy VanLeit * Mark Vossler * Herbert David Wahler * Felicia Wallace * Nancy Ward * Patricia Waterston * Margaret B. Watkins * Watts Fund of the Community West Foundation * Marjorie P. Wazeka * Diana Wear * Louise Westling * John Whitmer * Bruce and Theresa Wiggins * Joeve and Porter Wilkinson * Louise Wilkinson * Delight Willing * Jude Wing * Mike Winslow * Wei Jing Zhu * Diane Zimmerman * Anonymous (62)

Legacy Circle (those naming 猫咪社区! in their wills)听

Gaea Maeve Aeolus * Jill Bamburg and Nani Baran * Eleanor LeCain and John Clark * Henry Edmonds * Wes Ernsberger * Tim Hinkle * David and Fran Korten * Rik Langendoen * Yehudit Lieberman * Mary L. Mayfield * Mel McDonald * Peter and Betty Michelozzi * Jim Oerther * Steven and Carolyn Paulding * Judy and Bob Sherburne/Lipchak * Harvey Siederbaum * Sally and Richard Wilson * Anonymous (3)

2020 Tribute Gifts

Margot Barnet and David Coyne in honor of Leah Penniman * Melissa Bornstein in memory of Bee Love Slater and all the Black, Latina, and Indigenous trans women who have been murdered

2020 Dedicated Friends (recurring annual gifts of $60 to $499)

Stacy Aannestad * Jodi Abel * Willie Abrams * Jean Abreu * Donna Acord * Jiro Adachi and Jaymie Goldstone * Jennifer Adair * Kyla Adams * Elliot Adams * Connie Adams * Diana Adams * Elizabeth Adams * Howard Adams * Audra Adelberger * Diane Adkin * Nance Adler * Kaile Adney * Gaea Maeve Aeolus * Mona Affinito * Mary Sarah Agliotta * Catherine Agneta * Michael Ahimsa * Barbara Ahlquist * Guy and Mae Aho * Daniel Aire * Selene Aitken * Victoria Akiwumi * Srinivas Akula * Erin Albanese * Meiling Albert * Kate Albrecht * Lisa Albrecht * Karen Albright * Gertrude Albright-Sweeny * Denise Alden * James Aldrich * Beverly Alexander * Carmela Alexander * Joyce Alexander * Barbara Allen * Susan Allen * Brenda Allen-Johnson * Joan K. Allenl * Uta Allers * Elizabeth Alseth * Martha Alston * Barbara Altemus * Aklea L. Althoff * Carolyn Altrock * Ann Amberg * Barbara Ambler * Donna Ambrogi * Debra Amens * Kate Amon * Pete Amyoony * Dolores J. Andersen * Jenny Andersen * Ronald Andersen * Eric Anderson * Kay Anderson * Rev. Nancy L. Anderson * Marti Anderson * John and Doreen Anderson * Clyde Anderson * Lisa Anderson * Nora B. Anderson * Norman Anderson * Virginia Anderson * Tonya Andreacchio * Ron Andrews * Susan Andrews-Salmond * Josephine Anemaet * Margaret Anich * Gale Anne Hurd * Jim and Mary Antinori * Carol Antoniewicz * Chadwick Hale and Barbara Antonoplos * Dan and Laura Antonson * Marcia Antwi * Michelle Apland * Maureen Apostolos * Ben and Jessica Applegate * Sherry Appleton * Garrett Apuzen-Ito * Williana Aquino * Penny A. Archibald-Stone * Blaze Ardman * Marcia Arieira * Joan Ariel * Carrie Armbrecht * Karla Armenoff * Victoria Armigo * Andrea Armin * Kate Armstrong * Jacqueline P. Armstrong * Liz Armstrong * Rachelle Armstrong * Catherine Arne * Susan Arnett * Jack Arnold * Joan Arnold * Rebekah Arrigoni * Elizabeth Arrington * Deirdre Arthen * Thomas G. Arthur * Mary Alice Arthur * Suzanne Arthur * Christopher Asay * Darci Asche * Lisa Ashe * Mary F. Ashley * Daphne Ashling Purpus * Michael Askew * David R. Askey * Janet Aslani * Bill Aston * David and Penny Atcheson * Devon Atkins * Melanie Atkinson * Richard Atlee * Robert Atwood * Teria Atwood-Smith * Michael Augustine * Karen Auroy * Cheryl Austin * Donna Austin * Lilian Autler * Christina Avalos * Kriss Avery * Robert Axelrod * David Babcock * Michelle Babian * David Bachman-Williams * Dinah Bachrach * Catherine Bachwirtz * Marilee Backstrand * Linda Bacon * Robert Badertscher * Carol Baier * Diana Bailey * William Bailey * Victor and Carolyn Bain * Cedric Bainton * Amy Baker * Bernard Baker * Diane Baker * Scott Baker * Hollie Baker-Lutz * Carol Baldwin * Christina Baldwin * Rachel Balkcom * Karen Ball * Norm Ballinger * Pablo Ballora * Pat Banasky * Matthew Baney * Joan Bantz * Gwendolyn Barbee * Deborah Barber * Timothy Bardell * Mary Bardis * Jesse Barham * Ralph Barhydt * Sharon Baring * Julie Barker * Kristen Barker * Jeremy Barnes * Sandra Barnhouse Buckley * Adam Barr * Katherine Barr * Denny and Camy Barrantes * Elaine A. Barrett * Alissa Barron-Menza * CarolAnn Barrows * Brian Barry * Cedar Barstow * Richard I. Barstow * Carol Barta * Gabriele Bartholomew * Deb Habib and Ricky Baruc * Isabella Bates * Margaret and Russell Bateson * Alan Batten * Ellen Peskin Baum * Brenda Baumeister * Mike Baumer * Jeri Bayer * Sheila Bayle * Paul Bazely * Elizabeth Beach * Judy Beach * Ellen and Larry Beans * Mary and Philip Beard * Becky Beasley * Terre Beasley * Amy Beaumont * David Bechhoefer * Angie Beck * Anna W. Beck * David Beck * Judith Beck * Lucy Beck * Paul Beck * Maribeth Becker * Victoria Beckett * Carol Bedrosian * Jana Beebe * George Beeler * Gloria Beetle * Marcia Belcheir * David Belden * Paul Belgum * Mary Belknap * Verne B. Bell * Betsy Bell * Margaret Bell * Martha Bell * Nancy Bellini * Jack Bender * Michele Benesh * Beth Benham * Julie Benkovich * Aaron Benner and Kathryn Vroman * Beverly Bennett * Alison Bennett * Grace Bennett * Eunice Benton * Paul and Megan Benton * Gail Benvenuta * Jeff Berend and Jacquie Perry * John Berg * Deborah Berger * Lawrence Bernard * Lisa Bernhagen * Stan Berntson * Jean Berolzheimer * David Berrian * Susan Berrian * Linda Bertoli * Bryce Bertolino * Mary Frances Best * Janet and John Bidwell * Jennifer Biehn * Deborah Bier * Judy Bierman * Patricia Biga * Lindy Biggs * Julie Binter * Rebecca Birdsong * Margit Birge * Eric Bischoff * Cindy Bishop * Molly Bishop * Peter Bishop * Susan and Tom Bisnett-McDonald * Alice Blachly * Cindy Black * Cheri Black * Dariel Blackburn * Philip Blagg * Lawrence Blain and Ellen Mae * Victoria Blaine-Wallace * Jeff Blair * Ann Blake * Jody Blake * Mary Blake * Sue Blakeman * Neil Blanchard * Kristen Blann * Beth Blissman * Brian Blix * Rebecca Bloch * Richard Blomquist * Aston Bloom * Yael Bloom * Tara Bloyd * Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin * Pamela Fisher Blue * Marcia Blum * Sheila Blum * Susan D. Blum * John Blumenstiel * Van Bobbitt and Sharon Wilson * Michael F. Bocchinfuso * Diane Boehm * Dr. John Roosevelt Boettiger * Rev. Tim Boeve * Stephen Boliek * Kay Bolin * Mary Beth Bolin * Erica Bollerud * Lisa Bonack * Anthony Bond * Margie W. Bone * Chenna Bonequi * Beth Bonness * Julianne Bonta * Laurie Boosahda * Arlene Borick * Sandra Borror * Carina Borsch * Robert Boska * James Boston * Rosie Bothwell * Ron Bottorff * Meredith Bourne * Nancy Bowden * Diana Bower * Kathy Bower * Meg Bowerman * Deborah Bowers * Betsy Bowie * Tamara Bowman * Pamela Boyatt * Ferdinand Boyce * Megan Boyce-Jacobs and Matthew Boyce * Andrew Boyd * Carol Boyd * Carol Boyer * Joe and Marybeth Boyle * Jonathan Boyne * Julia Brabenec * Carol Brach * Ann Bracken * Deborah Bradford * Melanie Branchflower * James Brand * Jerry Brand * Jennifer Brandel * Silvia Brandon-Perez * Brian Brandt * Kim Brandt * Lisa Brannan * Clay Brantley * Armida Brashears * Bonnie Bray * Phyl Brazee * Paul and Cathy Breiner * Kathleen Brennan * Paula and Don Brennecke * Jacqueline Brett * Julia B. Brett Hill * Doris Brevoort * Linda Brewster * Raegan Bricks-Davis * Nathalie Bridegam * Donna Briggie * Drucilla Briggs * Paul Brindle * Eleanor P. Briseno * Max and Vanessa Bronsema * Dorothy Lynn Brooks * Becky Brooks and Jeff Youngstrom * Paul Brooks * Elaine Brouwer * Claudia Brown * Michael Brown * Paul Brown * Ashley Brown * Carlene Brown * David Brown * Hamilton Brown * Jody Brown * Kristen Brown * Mike Brown * Rev. Mary Karen Brown * Robert Brown * Ronald Brown * Sara Margaret and Sara Brown * Gretchen and Karen Browne-Courage * Charles Browning * Alta Brubaker * Lisa Bruce * Debbie Bruell * Linda Brugger * Vickie Brunstetter * Beth Brunton * Ruth Bryan * Barbara Buckham * Amy Buckingham * Beverly M. Buhr * Sherry Bullard * Dawn Bund * Naomi Bunis * Patricia Burbank and Michael Kilgroe * Peter Burchard * Morgan Burckhardt * Frieda Burdette * Amrita Burdick * Richard Burg * Libby Burgess * Robert Burke * Michael Burke Stansbury and Krista Hanson * Betty Burkes * Cotton Burlingame * David Burman * Helen Burney * Helen Burnside * Mary Ann Burris * Pamela Burton * Kenneth Busch * Nadia Busekrus * Melanie Bush * Jeanine Butler * Peter Butler * Shakti and Shiva Butler * Steve Buttress * Thomas Buxton * Anne-Marie Byrd * Gerard and Loretta Byrd * Julia Byrem * Joe Byrne * Philip J. Byrne II * Colleen Cabot * Jonathan Smith and Rogean Cadieux-Smith * Peggy Cain * Myokei Caine-Barrett * Jane Calbreath * Dorothy Caldwell * Lissa Callirhoe * David Camden * Claire Cameron * Krista Cameron * Catherine Campaigne * Anneke Campbell * Boneta Campbell * Janice Campbell * Judy B. Campbell * Kathleen Campbell * Laurel Campbell * Sandy Campbell * Wendy Campbell * Catherine Campbell-Orrock * Penelope Canan * Alison Canar * Sarah Cane * Taryn Canney * Heather Cantino * Patrick K. Cantwell * Patricia Cardona * Fernando Cardoza * Lynn Carlile * Sandy Carlsen * Mark E. Carlson * Suzanne Carlson * Marsha Carlton * Lynn Carpenter * Lynne Carpenter-Boggs * Heather Carrie * Cory Carroll * Craig Carscallen * Carol Carson * Leslie Carson * Carol Carter * Catherine Carter * Richard Carter * Yuri Cartier * Jill Cartwright and Kent Taylor * Heather Carver * Marianna Casagranda * Clint Case * Peggy Case * Rick Casey * Jackie Cash * Tina Casta帽ares * Joann Castle * Lorraine Castruita * Nanka Castulik * Nathan Caswell * Julie Ceballos * Kristi Ceder * Cynthia Chaffee * Katharine Chaiklin * Marylee Chamberlain * Susan Chambless * Dorothy Chambless * Dean Chambliss * Arti Chandra * Sybil Chappellet * Barbara Chardi * Carl Charles * Marcee Charlshe * Therese Charvet * Pam Chase * Rebecca Chase * Rena and David Chase * Rita Chastang * Diana Cheairs * Grace Cheng * Nancy Cherniss * Francois Chevresson-Aubain * Judith Chibante Neal * Bunny Chidester * Eileen Chieco * Naeemah Chike * Judith Chilcote * Michael Childers * Candace Chin * Merton Chinen * Natasha Chisdes * Diane M. Chong * Christine Chopyak * Genise Choy * Dorothy Christ * Chris Christensen * Christensen Family Foundation * Ann and John Christenson * Mary Christenson * Kathy Christison * Anastasia Christman * Kim Chute * Bob and Suzannah Ciernia * Yolanda Cieters * Greg and Linda Clark * Jean and Don Clark * Joanne M. Clark * Justine Clark * Sandra Clark * Tom Clark * Melinda Clarke * Sarah Clarke * Patricia Clason * Suzan Clausen * Martha Clay * Victoria Clearwater * Kathryn Clegg * Jacqueline Clemens * Cynthia Clement * Steve Clements * Barry Clemson * Jayana Clerk * Phyllis Cleveland * Wendy Clifton * Caryn Cline * Gordon Clint * Jeffrey Clithero * Joyce Clohessy * Nancy Cochrane Carter * Jere Cockrell * Dr. Michel A. Coconis * Kirsten Coeur * Larry Coffield * Fai Coffin * Deborah Coffman * Kim Coffman * Elena Cohen * Beth Cohen and George Dillmann * Mark Cohen * Deborah Coker * Mary Coker * Lin F. Colavin * Kathryn C. Cole * Elizabeth Cole * Sarah Cole * Sue Cole * Kathleen Coleman * Helen Collins * Jeannine Collins * Terry Collins * Ashley Collison * Barbara Colvert * Barb Colvin * Frances Combs * Jesse Combs * Tom Conaty * Roger Cone * Teresa Cone * Amy Conley * Richard Conlin and Sue Ann Allen * Brendon Connelly * Christine Conner * Susan Connors * Panayiotis Constanti * Karen Cook * Peter D. Cook * Harriet Cooke * Amie Coomer * Susanna and James Cooper * Jack Coots * Jack Coots * Clo Copass * Kelly Copeland * Liz Copeland * Lori Cora * Jennifer Corio * Matthew and Jennifer Corrigan * Susan Corson-Finnerty * Kate Corwin * Rhonda Cosgrove * Melanie Cossette * Kirsten Costain * Elizabeth Cottrell * Kanit Cottrell * Susan Cottrell * Ailsa Coughlan * Robert Coulter * Jean Coulton * Courtney Courtney * Stirling Cousins * Margo Covington * Felicia Coward * Kyla Cox * Sue Cox * Susan Coyle * Gary Cozette * Penny Cragun * Jurgen Craig-Muller * Betsy Crane * Valerie Cranmer * Hilly Crary * Khari Crawford * Danice Creager * Ron Crete * Markie Jo Crismon * Betsy Crofts * Joanne Cromley * Liz Cross * Leslie Crowell * Susan Crowley * Carolyn Crump * Juanita A. Cruz * Janet Cuenca * Eleanor Cuevas * Peggy Cullen-Reese * Andy and Dianne Culver * Sarah Culver * Diana Cumming and Keith Liuzzi * Ian Cunningham * Karen Cunningham * Sarah Currie * Kimberly Currier * Susan Cushman * Constance Cuttle * Sandra Cutuli * Mariana Daher * Janet Dakan * Anne Dal Vera * Rebecca Dalske * Carleen Daly * Sheila Daly * Emerson Dameron * Stefani Danes * Deborah Danforth * Faith Danforth * Colleen Daniel * Jennifer Daniel * David Danielson * Melissa Danielson * Janette Daniel-Whitney * David D鈥橝prix * Marilyn Darilek * Emily Darling * Robert Darling * Warren V. Darne * Ayana DaSilva * Carol Daugherty * Guy Dauncey * Mandy Dausener * Susannah David * Sarah Davidson * Valerie Davies * Monique Davis * Brenna Davis * Carol Davis * Heather Davis * Jacqueline Davis * James Davis * Janet Davis * John Davis * Mary Davis * Michele Davis * Shelly Davis * Sherina Davis * Jennifer Davison * Timothy Dawes * Desdra Dawning * Anne Dawson * Tina M. and Mike Dawson * Meagan Dawson * Judy Day * Roseann Day * Allison De Jong * Sonia de la Rosa * Margaret de Rivera * Paul Deal * Amanda Dean * Robyn deBlaauw * Faith DeBolt * Lynn Decher * Kimberly Decker * Louise Deerfield * Sara Deever * Susan Delattre * Bill Denham * Russell Denney * Lisa Dennis * Ms. Judy Depenau * Barbara Deppe * Diane Depuydt * Kathleen Deragon * David and Beverly Deshler * Alain Desouches * Mary Dessein * John Detwyler and Sandra George * Karen Devers * Julia DeVlieg * Stephen Dexter * Dennis Di Donato * Paul H. Dibos * Patricia Dickason * Jeff Dicken * Dianne Dickerson and Wayne Hiner * Becca Dickinson and Nancy Flood * Rob Dickson * Margaret Didden * Debbie Diesen * Leada Dietz * Rebecca Dietzel * Carrie Dike * Robert and Susann Dillard * Shawn Dinkuhn * Elaine DiRico * Betty Dirr * Laura Distarce * Dave Dittman * Sibyl Diver * Elana Dix * Carolyn Dixon * Mannin Dodd * Mariah Dodd * Terri Dodd * Alisa Dodge * Constance Dodge * Richard Dole * Nicholas Dominique * Nona Donahue * Susan K. Donaldson * Rowena Donelson * Lynne Donnelly * Kimberly Donovan * Margie Doolan * Elsa Dooling * Margery Doss * Louise Doud * Karen Doughan * Deborah Dougherty * Karen Downing * Fatima D鈥橭yen-Waley * Shirley Drake Byers * Saskia Dresler * Thomas Driftwood * Linda Drozdyk * Pauline Druffel * Andrea Drury * Sandra Duggan * Lauren Duh * Deborah Dukes * Heidi Dumke * Ron and Mary Ann Dunant * Rena Dunbar * Larissa Duncan * Timothy Duncan * Katharine Dunn * Mary Dunn * Shalonda Dunn * Sharon Dunn * Donald Duprey * Krista Durlas * Tyson Durm * Edith Duttlinger and Dale Beech * Jonathan Dykema * Elizabeth Dyrsmid * Margaret Dyson-Cobb * Judith E. E. Woodward * Ellen Eagan * Allison Eanes * Carolyn Eanes * Donald Easter * Carolyn Eastman * Carroll Eastman * Meredith Eastman * Janet Eaton * Marie Eaton * Loi Eberle * Kirsten Eckert-Smith * Deb W. Edds * Martin Eddy * Rachel Edelson * Carolyn Eden * Bob Edleman * Henry Edmonds * James Edwards * Maggie Edwards * Regelyn Edwards * Stig Edwardson * Michael Eells * Benedict Effinger * Frances Eichler * Richard Eidlin * David and Pat Eisenberg * Nancy and Larry Eister * Susan Ekstrom * Rebecca Elfring-Roberts * Patricia Elgado * Thomas Eliassen * Eva Elkin * Karen Elliott * Phedra Elliott * Traci Elliott * Linda Ellsworth * Parrick Emerson * Leigh Emerson-Smith * Janet and Howard Emery * Virginia Emigh * Peter Emmert * Laurie Emrich * James Eng * Lorraine Engel * Kathy and Erwin Engert * Mike Englert * Rick Englert * Deanna English * Anne Engstrom * Marie Engstrom * Preston Enright * Alexander Eppel * Christie Eppler * Katherine Erbeznik * Margaret Erhart * Carole J. Erickson * Jennifer Erickson * Paul Erickson * Anna-Stina Ericson * Donald Erway * Marjorie Erway * Lethea Erz * Cindy Eskelson * Richard Esler * Margie Esola * Paul Espinosa * Julie Esterly * Claire Etcheverry * Janice Etchison * Jennifer Eufusia * Claire Eustace * Dorothy Evans * Jeanne R. Evans * Julie Evans * Pat Evans * David Everest * Julie Evonna * Donna M. Ewing * Kim Fabel * Anna Fadden * Caitlin Fader * Dale Rudesill and Kathleen Faith * Scott Falcone * Elizabeth Faling * Dorothy Fardan * Lisia Farley * Heather Farmer * Matthew Farrell * Donna Farrell * Andrea Faste * Walter Faust * Lisa Feck * Elias Feghali * Tamara Felden * Joanne Feldman * Mary Lou Fenili * Mike Fennell * Laurie Fenstermacher * Joselyn Fenstermacher * Cathy Ferbrache * Lynn Ferguson * Tomoko Ferguson * Dahlia Ferlito * Bob Ferreira * Jonah Fertig * Lynne Fessenden * Kathryn Fiandt * Anna Fiasca and Dan Gundersen * John Fike * Kevin Filocamo * Ron Filson * Kathleen Finley * Suzanna A. Finley * Christa Finn * Raul Fiol * Elise Fischer * William Fischer * Jo Ann Fishburn * Avis and Jeff Fisher * Jean H. Fisher * Sharri Fisher * Dave and Ruth Fitz * John J. Fitzgerald * Judy Fitzsimmons * Marlene Fitzwater * Nancy Flanagan * Dr. Maureen A. Flannery * Bruce Flattery * Sandra Flear * Agatha Fletcher * Deborah Fletcher * Lara Fletcher * Jane Flory * Lindy Flynn * Pierce Flynn * MaryClare Foecke * Marion Foerster * Kathleen Foley * Therese Folsom * Joriel Foltz and Ben Haley * Janet Forbes * James and Margaia Forcier-Call * Betty Anne Ford * James Ford * Lee Ann Ford * Richard and Nancy Ford * Joseph Forest * Liana Forest * Sita and Dave Formosa * June Forsyth Kenagy * Meredith Fort * Janet Fortuna * Kenneth Foster * Dorothy Foster * John Foster * Judy Foster * Sam Foushee * Sandy Fox * Willow Fox * Wendy Foxworth * Lorindra Frances * Raul Franco * Beverly Franco * Andrea Frankel * Susan Franzen * Glory Fraser * Kirk and Kathy Fraser * E. Beebe Frazer * Todd Freeberg * Judah Freed * Alan Freeman and Juliyen Bouknight * Ann Freeman * Joy Freeman * Bob French * Robert French * Caroline Frengle * Andrea Frey * Aven Frey * Douglas Frick * Bonnie Friedmann * Howard and Betsy Friend * Michelle Fromme * Veronica H. Frost * Pete Fruehan * C. Marie Fuhrman * Barbara Fukumoto * Marilee Fuller * Jen-Beth Fulton * Ken Fulton * Joan Fumetti * David Funkhouser * Leslie Fuqua * Jane G. Fistere * Marilyn Gabler * Dr. Francine Gaillour * Jo An Gaines * Elizabeth Galante * Margaret Gale * Diane Gale * Pauli Galin * Stephen Gall * Bobi Gallagher * Sheila Gallagher * Wesley Gallaugher * Juanita Gallion * Julie GaNung * Paige Garberding * Felice Garcia * Katherine Gardiner * Frances M. Gardner * Marcie Gardner * Sarah Gardner * Susan Garfield * John Garibaldi * Richard Garmon * Susan Garrett * Dianna Garrett * Jan Garrett * Charlotte and Ray Garrido * Susan Garrison * Ellen Gaskill * Garland Gates and Patti Welch * Maia Gay * Jean Geissler * Julie Gelfand * Felicia Genovese * Jyl Gentzler * Teresa George * Romola Georgia * Mike Gerdes * Robert Gerfy * Pamela Gerke * Shirley Gerken * Wendy Germain * Debra Gianetti * Catherine Giarrusso * Angella Gibbons and Dennis Ross * Charles Gibbs * Sue Gibbs * Sharada Gwen Gibbs-Wade * Clayton Gibson * Michael Gibson * Nick Gideonse * Teri Gidwitz * Carol Giesecke * Diane Gifford-Gonzalez * David Gilbert * Jaine Gilbert * Vivian L. Gilbert * Sally Jo Gilbert de Vargas * Jane Gill * Lynn M. Gill * Vicki Gill * Brian and Pamela Gillum * Barbara Gilmore * Lindsay Gilmour * Benjamin Gioia * Hilary Giovale * Marsha Gladhart * Evelyn Gladu * Estelle Glarborg * John Glass * Jennifer Gleason * Ted Gleichman * Carole Glenn * Marian Glenn * Rosa Glenn Reilly * Karyn Gloden * Perry Godwin * Leslie Goetzman * Joleen Goff * Benjamin Goggins * KB Goldberg * Julia and Martin Goldstein * Maria Carmen Gonzalez * Jacy Good * Mary Goodell * Patricia R. Goodson * George Goodwin * Debbie Gordon * Julie Gordon * Molly Gordon * Patricia Gordon * Siri Gossman * Thomas Gould and Virginia McCabe * Stephen Goulet * Jeremiah Goulka * Caroline Gower * Kathe Gowland * John H. Graber * Kay S. Grace * Ruby Grad * Charlie Graham * Diane Graham * Satcha Graham * Tom Graham * Ramona Granath * Karen Granche * Jane Granskog * Kerry Grant * Iris and Jerry Graville * Thomas Gray * Tom Gray * Wade Gray * Cathaline Gray Carter * Diane Grayber * Sharon Green * Joan Green * Liz Green and Edward Kuharski * Ronald Green * David Greene * Earl Greene * Jack Greene * Tina Greene * Taura Greenfield * Michael and Donna Greenman * Virginia Greeno * Gregg Greenough * Roberta Greenspan * Lumina Greenway * Laura Greenwood * Michel Gregory * Susan Gregory * Sandra Griebe * Justin and Blanche Griffin * Mary Grigolia * John Grim * Dorothy Grimm * Henning Jon Grini * Susan Griswold * Karen Griswold * Paige Gronhovd * Karen Groppi * Edye Groseclose * Dorsey Grover * Laura Grow * Jezanna Gruber * Linda Gryczan * Richard Grzeskowiak * Jerome Guenther * Teri Guida * Carol Gunby * Jody Guth * Teresa Guyton * Holly Guzman * Ann Hackler * Ann Hadley * Beth Hagan * Resheda Hagen * Cindy Haidu-Banks * Dorothyanne Haigh and William Lochstet * Sharon Hale * Marianne Hale-Levitan * Mindy Hall * Jeremy Hall * Marianne and Stan Hall * Joseph Halleman * Janice Halliday * Judy Hallock * Alexandra Halsey * Wanda Hambrick * Sandra Hamel * Angela Hamilton * Meg Hamilton * Abby Hamilton * Susan Hamilton * Joseph Hamlin * Debbie Hammel * Richard Hammerschlag * Susan Hammond * Debora Hammond * Michael Hampton * Judy Hand-Truitt * Lisa Hanger * Beth Hanisch * Ben Hanisko * Eileen and Philip Hanna * Beverly Hannon * Lloyd Hansen * Anna Hansen * Dr. Yvonne Hansen * Michael Hanson * Jake and Laura Hanson Schlachter * Elaine Hanson-Hysell * Ruth Harbaugh * Cathryn and David Harbor * John and Gretchen Harder * Amy Hardt * Kathryn D. Harja * Nancy Hark * James Michael Harkin * Nancy Harkrider * Kelly Harms * Holli Harper * Joyce Harrell * Angela D. Harrelson * Barbara Harrington * Judith S. Harris * Lynden Harris * Katharine Harrison * Dr. Sharon Hart * Sara Hart * Kristine Harter and William White * Stuart Hartley * Tim Hartman * Barrie Hartman * Tana Hartman Thorn * Sharon Hartmann * Amy Hartzler * Karen Harvey * Carla Hasegawa-Ahrendt * John and Kathy Haskin * Analena Hassberg * Bob and Phyllis Hastings * DeAnna Hatch * Hayley Hathaway * Melvin Haug * Nancy Cybilla Hawk * Jillian Hawley * Carlotta Hayes * Donald Hayes * Margaret Hayes * Richard Hayes * Jean Hays * Pamela Hays * Rick Hazard * Mark Hazell * Ananda Hazzard * Deirdre Healy * Jessica Heard * Charles Hearington * Marlee Heathcote * AM Hecht * Anne Hedrich * Mary Heffernan * Rachel Hefte * Katherine Hegemann * Patrick Hehir * Robert Heilbroner * Dr. Dirk P. Hein * Lora Hein * David Heinze * Susan Heitzman * Janet Heller * Terry Heller * Michael Helling * Sarala Helmer * Gayle Helseth-Kenison * Michele Hemenway * Linda Hemenway * Michele Hemry * Anna Henchman * Catherine Henderson * Cynthia Henderson * Susan Henderson * Kristi Hendrickson * Stephen Henke * Nicholas P. Henley * Mary Beth Henry * Ron Henry * Ron and Charlotte Hensler * Aimee Herb * Emily Herbert * Nancy Herck * Kathleen Hering * Dirk Herr-Hoyman * Charles Herrick * Laurie Herrick * Donna Herzfeldt-Kamprath * Nathan Hetrick * Sr. Angela Hibbard * Caren Hicks * Sue Ann Higgens * Lise Hildebrandt * Kenneth W. Hill * Rebecca Hill * Mary Hill * Rev. Carol Hilton * Deborah Hindley * Patricia Hine * Antonina Hines * Ron Hines * Heather Hinkel * Samantha Hinrichs * Carolyn Hirning * Laura Hirsh * Elizabeth-Jo Hirsh-Stephenson * Jeanette Hirt * Laurel Hirt * Peitsa Hirvonen * Richard Hitchingham * Charlene Hoagland * Jessica Hoagland * Debora Hoard * Shirley Jane Hobbs * Chantelle Hobgood * Karl Hochradel * Kristin Hocker * Gillian Hodler * Victor Hodler * Dave Hodul and Angy Stacy * Judie Hoeppner * Jonathan Hofer * John Hoff * Harry Hofmeister * Kay Hogan * Ingrid Hogle * Jennifer Hoitsma * Mark Holder * Stephen Holler * Elyshia Holliday * Mark Holliday * Buell Hollister * Kathleen Hollister * Mary Eileen Holm * Mary Holm * Michelle Holman * Rebecca Holman * M. Honer-Orton * Usha Honeyman * David Hooker * Merry Lee Hooks * Thomas Hoopes * Maggie Kinsella Hopper * Beth Hopping * Karen Horak * Joseph Horgan and Diane Cameron * Felicia听Horne * Gail Horne * Dan Hostetler * Janet Houck and Ron Parker * Jayne Houdyshell * Jamie Hounchell * Joe and Carol Houston * Brad Howard * Elisabeth Howard * Les Howard * Marge C. and George Howard * Rita Howard * Benita Howell * Susan Howell * Elizabeth Howlett * Susan Howlett * Ilona Hress * Alina Hsu * Greg and Jenny Huang-Dale * Jodi Hubbell * Ron Hubert * Sara Hubner * Jonathan Hughes * Sheldon Hughes and Halina Bak * Linda Hughes * Mary Hughes * Annette Hulefeld * Reagin Hults * Renate & Robert Hume * Bruce Hunt * Fern Hunt * Ann Hunter * Tora and Joel Huntington * John Huot * Megan Hurst * Beth Huss * Elsie Hutchens * Peter Hwoschinsky * Amy Hyatt * Yasmeen Hydari * Bibijan Ibrahim * Charley Ice * Dana Illo and Catherine Johnson * Eve Ilsen * Lorna Immel * Philip Incao and Jennifer Thomson * Leanne Ingle * Scott and Rosebud Ireland * Edie Irons * Ann Iverson * Charles Iverson * Kim Ivey-Bourne * Cathy Jackson * Nancy Jackson * Rick and Marcy Jackson * Robert Jackson * Shanna Jackson * Connie Jacobs * Joyce Jacobson * Ellen Jahoda * Shilpa Jain * Marisa James * Deborah Jamieson * Carrie Janes * Alex Januzzi * Leigh Jardine * Michael P. Jarvis * Suzanne Jaudes * Linda Jauron-Mills * Alan and Suzanne Jay Rom * Gerlind Jenkner * Rebecca Jennings * Susan Jennings * Robert Jensen * Marcus Jensen * Catherine Jensen * Hillary Jensen * Kay Jensen * Barbara Jerry-Taylor * Katherine A. Jesch * Robert J. Jewett * Sandra John * Daniel Johns * Joelle Johns * Ron Johnson * Alyssa Johnson * Birdie and Ed Johnson * Chris Johnson * Diane EP Johnson * Eric Johnson * Eric Johnson * Gail Johnson * Georgeann Johnson * Gina Johnson * Heather Johnson * Judith Johnson * Julie Johnson * Julie K. Johnson * Karen Johnson * Kathy Johnson * Mechele Johnson * Meghan Johnson * Melinda Johnson * Ebba Johnson * Nancy Johnson * Natalie Johnson * Peggy Johnson * Ryan Johnson * Shannan Johnson * Ellen Johnson-Fay * Michael Jonak * Doug Jonas * Hollace Jones * Barbara Jones * Susan Jones * Linda Jones * Naya Jones * Richard Jones * Richard Jones * Robert Jones * Sandra Jones * Stacey Jones * Talitha Jones * Sue Jopling * Jennifer Jopp * Angie Jordan * Beverly Jordan * Carolyn Jordan * Rev. Kathy Jordan * Sarah Jordan * Jean Jorgensen * Elouise Joseph * Karen Jostad * Tabi Joy * Joelee Joyce * Joy Justis * Matt Juvinall * Brent Kakesako * Luke Kalaf * Mark and Jennifer Kalenscher * Margaret Kallsen * Lynn Kamplain * Melanie Kandler * Paul Kando and Elizabeth McPherson * Annie Kane * Raymond Kane * Jennifer Kantzer * Cecily Kaplan * Carol Kappes * Sarah Karnes * Ellen Karpinski * Donna Kary * Nancy Kaswell * Karen Katz * Leone Katz * Deborah Kaufman * Dennis and Carol Kautzmann * Karla Kavanaugh * Aimie Kawai * Judy Kay * Lorinda Kay * Sharon Kaylen * Martha Kazlo * Jane A. Keefer * Deborah Keehn * Alexis Keeler * Marilyn Keene * Tom Keene * Cornelia Keener * Suzanne Keers * Laura Keeth-Rowledge * John E. Keevert Jr. * Mary Keil * Novella Keith * Kristopher Keller * Mark Kelley and Josie Carothers * Elizabeth Kelly * Joanne Kelly * Kathleen Kelly * Linda Kelly * Valery Kelly * Eileen Kelly-Meyer * Kim Kendall * Charlotte Kendall * Patricia Kennedy * Kym Kennedy * Aley Kent * Mary Kerres * June Kerseg-Hinson * Robert Kersten * Mindy Keskinen * Susan Kessler * Amrit Khalsa * Keval Khalsa * Dr. Ashok Khushalani * Ashley Kidd * Dorothy Kidd * Amy Kietzman * Margaret Kiihne * Cynthia Kimball * Gailmarie Kimmel * Marilyn Kimmerling * Genevieve King * Jim King * Linea King * Lorraine King * Cal Kinnear * Linda Kinney * Christine Kiphart-Cross and John Cross * Brenda Kirkby * Yvonne Kirkpatrick * Virginia Kirsch * Ingrid Kirst * Sally Kirwin and Anne Westfall * Cochran-Kitchen Household * Kathi Kitner * Jill Kitowski * Kit Kittredge * Jim Klasen * Rev. Gerald J. Kleba * Thomas Kleewein * Eric Klein * Karen Kleven * Scott Klinger * Roberta Knapp * Charles Knight * Billie Knighton * Carolyn Knoll * Kristin Knowles * Hollister Knowlton * Leigh Knox * Patricia Knox * Kristin Knudsen * Kim and Dave Kobersmith * Bonita Koenig * Carol Koenig * Adine Koeppe * Elaine M. Kolb * Patricia Kolon * Janice Kooiker * Dottie Koontz * Chris Korben * Jay Korinek * Melanie Kornis * Richard Kortum * Fred Kosnitsky * Erika Kotite * Renata Kowalczyk * Peter Kraai * Sandra Kraegel * Steven Kramer * Gretchen Krampf * Rita Kranidis * Eva Kras * Becky Kreag * Kiri Kreamer * Jennifer Kreger * Kim Kregloski * Florence Kreisman * Dick Krejsa * Sandy Krell-Andre * Mary Kremer * Amy Kreston * Airy Krich-Brinton * Amy Krol * Ann Krooth * Chris Krueger * Christopher Krull * Karen Krumrey * Jay Ku * Jan Kubiac * Rodney Kueneman * Ted Kuhn and Jane Torrence * Sheri Kurdakul * Alfred H. Kurland * Edith Kusnic * Alvin K. Kutil * Sylvia L. L. Martinez * Elaine Lachlan * Linda LaCount * Sharon LaCrosse * Valyrie Laedlein * Kathryn E. LaFond and George Brooks * Marcia and Gary Lagerloef * Wilma Lagerwerf * Ned Lakin * Eva Lallensack * Joanna Lalos * Laura Lamarr * Barbara T. Lamb * James Lamb * Lynette Lamb * Sylvia M. Lambert * Kathrine Lambert-Winger * Lorna Lamey * Kate Lancaster * Christoph Lance * Jeanne Landkamer * Jann Lane * Ron Lane * Johanna K. Lang * Peter Lang * Viki Lange * Elizabeth A. Langeland * Rik Langendoen * Laurinda and Vince Lanza * Ronald and Louise Larcheveque * Sara and Ted Larkin * Carol Larsen * Laurie Larson * Marilyn Larson * Peter Larson * Robin Last * Laurel Last * Robert B. Latousek * Mary Latta * Matthew Latterell * Meagan Lauer * Kathleen M. Lauricella * Jeannine Laverty * Carolyn Law * Aleilah Lawson * Vita Lawson * William Lawson * Sally Lawton * Judith B. Lay * Judy Layzell * Alana Lea * Margaret Lea * Peg Leach * Kathryn Learn * Kristen Leathers * Allen R. LeCours * Diana Lee * Stacy Lee * Winnifred Lee * Russell Lehman * Lesley Lehrmann * Dave Leischner and Audrey Richards * Samuel J. Leizear * Barbara Lemmon * Linda Lemons * Amy and Teaque Lenahan * Bella Lenestour * Kay Lennartson * Gail Lennstrom * MG Lentz * Kris Lenzo * Brent Leon * Bjorn Leonards * Kathleen Leotta * Sally Leque * Susan Leslie * Michelle LeSourd * Ardis L. Letey * Lucy Leu * Donna Levan * Patricia LeVan * Donna Leveridge-Campbell * Richard Levey * E. and M. Levin * Paul Levins * Esta Levinson * Jonathan Levy * Mary Levy * Michael Levy * Sarit Levy * Andrew Lewis * Christyna Lewis * Leslie Lewis * Rob Lewis * Karen Lezon * Leah Libow * June Licence * Tom and Penelope Lichatowich * Lynn E. Lichtenberg * Gayle Lieban * Yehudit Lieberman * Jean Likover * Jim Lilly and Linda Pratt Lilly * Elizabeth Limkemann * Ju-Pong Lin * Jennie Lindberg * Jerri Lindblad * Lisa Lindblom * Garth Lindley * Leslie Lindo * Clara Lindstrom * Kathryn Linehan * Michelle Lingenfelter * Joan Linney * Annie Linton * Susi Lippuner * Shelley Lipscomb * Kathy Lique * Betty Liske * Karen Litfin * Mary Ann Litfin * Deborah Little * James Little * Jill Littlewood and James Kahn * Jeanette Lockington * Lucy Lockwood * Ellen Lodwick * Michael Loehlein * Laura Loescher * Patrick Logan * Bonnie Lohman * Betsy Lombardi * Clara Lombardi * Connie Long * Andrea Long * Melody Long * Becky Longardner * Dario Longhi and Marsha Brown * Kimberley Lord * Rebecca Lord * Nancy and Kurt Lorenz * Nancy Lorusso * Ray Lou * Charles and Linda Loubert * Hannah Love * Jim Lovestar * Betsy W. Loving * Chris, Roger and Mary Loving * Robert Lowe * Lorene Ludy and Jean Eden * Lisa Luecke * Ruth Luke * J. Lukin * Jennifer Lum * Michelle Lundahl * Bjorn Lunde * Sally Lunn * Molly Lunn Owen * Linda Luster * Ameenah Lutfee * Steve Luzader * Alice Lyman and Leland Holt * Lois Lynch * Rita Lynch * Ginny Lynn * Thomas Lyon * Ed Lytwak * Jay Maasch * Malcolm Macaulay * Karen MacClune * Marie MacDonald * Thomas MacIntosh * Stanley Mack * Simonne Macklem * Jennifer MacMillen * Scott MacWilliams * Joanna Macy * Kathleen Maddux * Cindy Madigan * Kai Madrone * Clay Maer * Jennifer Maffei * Tim and Maureen McCarthy-Magill * Jeanne Magmer * Laura Magnani * Linda Maguire * Richard Magyar * Jim Mahanna * Diane Mahon * Ann Maier * Sandra and Margaret Main * Terri Main * Michelle Maitri-Mudita * Anna Klara Maj * Michelle Maki * Takao Makihara * John Malcomson * Margaret Malecki * Wendy Malepeai * Michael Males * Gillies Malnarich * Erika Malone * J. Anita Malone * Josepha Maly * Sulima Malzin * Anita Mammoser * Joel and Sarah Mandel * Prana Mandoe * Ron Manganiello * Don Manghelli * Ann Manning * Chuck Manske * Jane Mantey * Tasha Manzano * DeBora Mapp-Embry * Janine Mapurunga * Aylen V. Beazley-Maquehue * Jess Marais * Amy March * Elizabeth Marcus * Gilles Marin * Ann Marina * Daniel Marion * Shannon Maris * Michele Mariscal * Allen Markowski * Vincent Marra * Nancy Marsac * Leslie Marshall and Herbert Hethcote * Sue Marshall * Arthur Martin * Jenna Martin * Sarah Martin * Terri Martin * Jane Martindell * Mary-Alice W. Martines * Kathy Martinez * Victoria Marugg * Cate Marvin * Robert Marvos * Jose Mas * Robin Masciocchi * Kathleen Masis M.D. * Dusty Mason * Moses Mast * Mark Masteller * Ann Masters * Christie Masters * Marc Matheson * George Matter * Joyce Matters * Todd Matthews * Christopher Matthias * Carol Maurer * Eileen Maxfield * Rachel Maxwell * Rowena Mayer * Mary Mayer * Kerrita Mayfield * Patrice and David Maynard * Diane McAlister * Nancy McAlley * Bonnie McAnnis * Verne McArthur * Charles McCaffree * Meriwether McClorey * Karen J. McClure * Nancy McCollum * Marilyn McCord * Sarah McCown * D. Timothy McCoy * Deirdre McCullough * Peter McDonald * Diana McFadden * Lynn McGovern * Don McGowan * Teresa McHugh * Amy McIlvaine * Denise McIntosh * Julia McKay * Paul and Mary McKay * Renae Mckee * Vonda McKenna * Geri McKenzie * Marian McKone * Pennie McLaughlin * Shauna McLelland * Michael McLeod * Lisa Delaney * Eileen McMorris * Geoffrey McNeely and Kristin Bennett * Tony and Fran McQuail * Lucia Ann McSpadden * Pat McVeigh * Jennifer Mead * Margaret L. Mead * Barb Mease * CMA Medeiros * Jeffrey Meek * Mehlinger Family * Julie Anne Meixsell * Benjamin Melan莽on * Janet Melander * Florence Melander * Mary Melendez * Tanagra Melgarejo * Virginia Melroy * Phillip and Ann Mendenhall * Barbara Menne * Marianne Merola * Melissa Mertz * David Merz * Rani L. Merz * Roberta Mescavage * Ron Metcalf * Jule Meyer * Michael Meyer * Summer Meyer * Anne Meyers * Cheryl Meyers * Paul Meyer-Strom * Kathleen Michels * Anne Middleton * Mary Migliorelli * Laura Milan-Lobo * Sarah Milbury-Steen * Elaine Miles * Melissa C. Miller * Pris Miller * Christopher Miller * Ariel Miller * Jean Miller * Joel Miller * Karena Miller * Matthew and Susanne Miller * Midge Miller and David Leeper * Valerie Miller and Ralph Fine * Susan Miller-Stigler * Linda Mills * Annette Mills * Henrietta Milner * Raphael Mimoun * Fred Mindlin * Jill Minkoff * Ruth Mintline * Jude Misurelli * Katrina Mitchell * Emily Mockett * Ann Moczydlowski * Gloria Mog * Justin Mog and Amanda Fuller * Richard Mole * Ruth Molloy * Mary Moloney S.P. * Genia Moncada * Jason Monk * Rick Monroe and Marie Aline * Susan Montabello * Lea Montgomery * James Montgomery * DeAnna Mooney * La鈥檔e鈥� Sa鈥檃n Moonwalker * Prudence Moore * Judith Moores * Phoebe Morad * Kathryn Moran * Terry Morawitz * Edith Morgan * Grace Morgan * Mary Morgan * Tommi Morgan * Trudy Morgan * Robert Morris * Kathleen Morrisey * Debra Morrison * Geoff Morrison * Makanah and Bob Morriss * Michelle Morrissette * Judith Morse * Ellen Morse * Shami Morse * Ruth Mortensen * Chris Morton * Jim and Pamela Mosley * David R. and Kay Mowry * Loren Moye * Prudence Moylan * Elizabeth Mueller * JoAnn Mulhern * Robin Mullaney * Deborah Mullen * Sam A. Muller * Nancy Muller and Alan Lloyd * Sally Mulready * Mark Mumper * Prashanth Mundkur * Janet Munger * Hanifah Murfin * Aileen Murphy * Donna Murphy * Sheldon Murphy * Stacy Murphy * Barbara Murphy-Warrington * Katherine Murray * Patrice Mushlin * Michael Musialowski * Ann Myers * George Myers * Kathy Myers * Peggy Myers * Bette Myerson * Deborah Myerson * Jeannette Nadon * Margaret Nagel * Michael Nagler * Andrea Nandoskar * Darcia Narvaez * Hank Nash * Lev Natan * Gerald D. Nathan * Linda Neale * Eddy Nehring * Nan Neighbours * Kerby and Mary Neill * Kristie Neklason * Susan Nelson * Benjamin Nelson * Catherine Nelson * Joanna Nelson * Peter Nelson * Rose Nelson * Margaret Nelson-Low * S.J. Nelton * Elizabeth Neuse * Patricia Neva * Nancy Newell * Anne Newhart * Bonnie Newman * Lisa Newton * Roxanne Newton * Steve Nicholas * Rebel Nichols * Terri Nichols * Dan Nicholson * Eileen Nicol * Philip Nicolai * Nancy Nielsen * Susan Nienstedt * Diane Niesman * Naomi Nightingale * Eric Nilsson * Wendy Nine * Linda and Takeo Nishioka * Dr. Laura Nissen * Lynne Nittler * Nancy Nixon * Robin Noble-Zolin * Deanna Noecker * Peggy Nolan * Victor Nolet * Dan Nordley * Astrid Nordness and Jon Coghill * Richard B. Norgaard * Carmen Norlien * Suzanne Norman * Bob and Carol Norton * Janice Novet * Victor Novick * Gladys Nubla * Robert Nuffer * Paul Nyhuis * Carol O鈥橞rien * Patrick O鈥機onnell * Kathleen O鈥機onner * Cathleen O鈥機onnor * Hugh O鈥橠oherty * Rev. Alice O鈥橠onovan * Cathy Oehmke * Sally Oesterling * Elizabeth O鈥橤ilvie * Constance O鈥橦earn * Marissa Ohoyo * Rebecca Ohsiek * Maria A. Ojeda * Lydia Olchoff * Patricia Oldham * Casey O鈥橪eary * Debora Oliveira * Lauren Oliver * John Olivero * Scott Olson and Leslie Shawver * Jennifer Olson * Judith Olson * Joyce ONeill * Edward O鈥橬eill * Patrick O鈥橬eill * Marilyn O鈥橬eill-Eash * Tim Ontko * Jeff Opiekun * Penny Ordway * Kathleen O鈥橰egan * Anna O鈥橰eilly * Kathy O鈥橰eilly-Doyle * Deborah Orr * Angelo Ortelli * Alida Ortiz-Sotomayor * Charissa Osborn * Esther Osborne and Chris Christensen * Michal Osterweil * Elizabeth Ostrom * Judith Otto * Kathleen Outlaw * Marie Overall and George Mierisch * Gail Overbeck * Sue Overman * Laura Owen * Ross Owens * Ron Pagano * Elizabeth Page * Pamela Pakker-Kozicki * Pat Palmer * Brooke Palmer * Nancy Palmer * Penny Palmer * Paul Palmquist * Frances Pan * Laetitia Pancrazi * Nick Pantuso * Gina Papen and Dennis Edds * Christopher Papouchis * Patricia Parker * Bonney Parker * Marylou Parker * Steven Parker * Becky Parker Geist * Paula Parrish * R. Wayne Parrish * Don W. Parsons * Dorothy and Greg Parsons * Rolf Parta * Stefin Pasternak * Wendy Patterson * Diane Patterson * Janet Patterson * John Pattimore * Kathleen Patton * Anna Paul * Jane Paul * Steven and Carolyn Paulding * Cynthia Paulsen * Robert Paulson and Edee Gail * Len Pavelka * Alice Pawley and Stephen Hoffmann * Margaret Payne * Jeannie Pearle * Whitney Pearsall * Liz Peckham * Robert Pedersen * Donna Pedroza * Celena Peet * Matthew Peirce * Jackie Pence * Anika Penn * Susan Pennington * Ginger Pentinga * Barron Peper * Renee Peperone * Diana Pepper * Teruko Peralta * Dana Peregrine * Emma Perez * John Perkins * Julia Perkins * Molly Perkins * Bill Perry * Carolyn and Mike Perry * Kathy M. Perry * Toddy Perryman * Diana Peters * James V.听 and Elaine Peters * Joanne Petersen * Carla Peterson * Kristina Peterson * Lars Peterson * Christine Petit * Sharon Petrosky * Maggie Pettersen * Reggie Pettitt * William Petz * Maria Peyer * Jeanine Pfeiffer * George Pharr * Linda Phillips * Caren Phillips * Jackie Phillips * Linda Phillips * Rebecca Phillips * Angela Phipps * Stacey Pickering * Una Marie Pierce * Pieranna Pieroni * Thomas C. Pierson * Bonnie Pilcher * Dawn Pile * Libba and Gifford Pinchot * Heather Pinney and George Penk * Anastasia Piper * Vivian Pirchner * Balavenkata Pitchuka * Elizabeth Pixley * Theresa Pizzuto * Pamela Plowman * John Plummer * Kristin Podgorski * Leslie Pohl * Jacque Pokorney * Blake Poland * Kay Pollack * Hilary Pollan * Tippi Pollet and Ken Stern * Bernice Pomeroy * Michael Ponder * Ann Ponzio * Stina Pope and Sue Thompson * Annie Popkin听* Susan Posey * Karen Potts * Robert Powelson * Julia Powers * Meredith Powers * Bernadette Powis * Richard Poydock * Antar Prakash * Bonnie Preston * Katharine Preston * Diane Price * Rebecca Price-Hall * Lorraine Priceman * Alice Primack * Cathy and Alex Primm * Philip Prince * Julie Propp * Lynne Prossick * Anne Purcell * Kathleen Purcell * Sarah Pursell * Karen Putney * Suzanne Pyrch * Mary E. Quarrier * Clifton Quinn and Quinn Family * Juliana Quinn * Nancy Quinn * Tom Quinn * S. Mary Quinn-Hurst * Nika Quirk * Andrea Radich * Renay Radniecki * Michael and Donna Ramos * Georgia Ramos * Myra Ramos * Roberta Rams * Patricia L. Ramsay * Lesley Ramsey * Marikay Ramsey * Louise Ramsey * Nancy Ramsey * Patricia G. Ramsey * Randie Randell * Judy G. Ranney * Myrna Ranney * Pamela Raphael * Carol Ratzlaf * Lonnie Ratzlaff * Susanna Ray * Barbara Ray * James E. Ray * Dawn Raymond and Loren Haralson * Laurie Raymond * Steve Raymond * Steffany Raynes * Helen W. Read * Paul Read * Dimitra Reber * Perry D. Recker * Colleen Reed * Marjorie Reedy * Jon Reese * Deborah Regal Coller * Catherine Regan * David Regenhardt * Brian Regimbal * Hope Regis * Alexandra and Javan Reid * Penny Reid * Shannon Reid * Jane Rein * Govinda Reinhalter * Cindy Reinhardt * Beth Remmes * Norah Renken * Southwest Sangha * John Reppun * Rachel Resnikoff * Hannah Reuter * Kalama Reuter * Anna Reynolds * Lisa Reynolds * Robert Reynolds * Dusty and Anne Rhodes * Theresa Rian * Michael Rice * Brian Rich * Ruth Richards * Vanessa Richards * Deborah M. Richardson * Katherine Richardson * Betsy and Terry Riddell * Nancy Riebschlaeger * Marguerite Rietz * Gina Riggs * Jerry Riley * Richard Riley * Robert Riley * Judith Rimbey * Kate Rinder * Carrie and Roger Ringer * Susan Ringler * Sally Rings * Robert Risch * Richard Riseling * Chris Riser * Steven Risley * Carol and Bill Roach * Gunnar Roberson * Sylvie Robert * Jan Roberts * Judy Roberts * Mary Roberts * Muriel Roberts * Patricia Robertson * Ginny Robertson * Dr. Carol Robin, DC, CCN * Miss Robena Robinett * Niall Robinson * Lisa Beth Robinson * Jeanie Robinson * Yvette Robinson * Phil Rockey * Martha Roden * Carolyn Rodenberg * Angela Rodgers * Christine Rodgers * Liza M. Rodriguez * Rachel Rodriguez * Phil Rogacki * Amy Rogers * Kirsten Rohde * Paula Rohrbaugh * Nora Rolf * Kay Rolfs Massaglia * Kathleen Rolinson * Ken Rolling * Jennifer Ronald * John and Val Roper * John Rose * Judy Rose * Tanya Rose * Lily H. Roselyn * Juanita Rosene * Rachele Rosi-Kessel * Madge Rossinoff * Johanika Roth * David M. Roth * Joanne Rovno * Jan Rowan * Robert Rowe * Brett Rowlett * Jan Rowray * Jessica Rubenstein * Rochelle Rubin * Jane Rubio * Roberta Rubly-Burggraff * Eric Rucker * Donald Rucknagel * Elissa Angela Ruddy * Joanna Rudenborg * Gayle Ruedi * Thomas Ruiz * Terry Ruller * Merrilee Runyan * Denise Runyon * Monica L. Russell * John Russell * Kate Russell * Sandra Russell * Stacy Russo * Julie Ruth * Lisa Rutzick * Kathleen Ruzicka * William P. Ryan * Michael Rychener * David Ryynanen * Myra Sabir * Lisa Sadleir-Hart * Laura Sagen * Elisabet Sahtouris * Shereen Saiki * Sally Sales * Debi Sally * Ei Ei Samai * Elena Samaniego * Dean and Patricia Sampson * Cheryl Sampson-Dutro * Rick Sanborn * Lucas Sanchez * Jill Sanders and Carol Wilvington * Ronda Sanders * Lori Sands * Carol Sanford * James Santos * Barbara Sarah * Trina Sargalski * Sara Sargent * Mary Sari * Penny Sarvis and Mickey Williamson * Deborah Sarvis-McNeil * Alice Sather * Judi and Bob Sattler * C. J. Saucedo * Sarah Saul * Joanne Savage * Debra Savelle * Alisha Saville and Alisha Savson * Linda Sawer * Eve Sawyer * Jack Sawyer * Jan Saxton * Kathleen Sayce * Julianne Scarbrough * Erica Schafer * Jamie and Karen Scharff * Joshua Schefers * Brenda Scheffler * Daniel Schenk * Timothy Schermerhorn * Linda Scher-Padilla * Christina Scheuer * Donna E. Schill * Alice Schilling * John Schindler * Susan Schmale * Sarah Schmidt * Janet Schmitt * Ralph Schmoldt * Scott Schnappauf * Catherine Schneider * Frances Schneider Liau * Joanne L. Schoettler * Mary Schrock * Karen Schrupp * Dan Schubart * Sue Schubert * Jan Schubert * Christine Schudde * Burl Schultz * Jon R. Schulz * Kirstin Schumaker * Patricia Schwartz * Robbin Schwartz * D鈥橝rtagnan Scorza * Kelly Scott * Laurie Scott * Barbara Scott * Patricia Scott * Carol Scotton * Shea Scribner * Shay Seaborne * Cecilia Seabrook * Judith Seaman * Suzanne Searle * Al Sears * Judy Sears * Alison Seaton * Jana Seeliger * John Seely * Laila Selk * Bob Seltzer * Lisamarie Seltzer * Laurie Senauke * Mary Sennewald * Beth E. and Samil Sermet * Paula Sevilla * Ruth Seymour * Alice Shapiro * Nina Shapiro * Sheryl Shapiro * Almira J. Sharp * Laurel Sharp * Charles Sharpe * Kristen Shaw * Kathe Shaw-Bassett * Joan Shea * Nora Shea * Dawn Sheaffer * Suzanne Shealy * Julia Marie Sheehan * Ruth Sheldon * Sue Sheldon * Christy Shelton * Gloria Shelton * Kenneth A. Elias and Sarah Shena * Sharon Toffey Shepela * Evelyn Shephard * Hana Shepherd * Margaret Shepherd * Elizabeth Sheppard * Starr Sheppard-Decker * George Sherman * Joe Sherman * Linda A. Sherman * Naoko Shibusawa * Patricia Shields * Miriam Shipp-Martinez * Brian C. Shoemaker * Tom Shostak * Clarence and Julie Shubert * Bonnie Shulman * Bill Shultz * Emily Shumway * Julia Shure * Harvey Siederbaum * Karen Siegel * Nona Siegel * Stefanie Siegel * Ronald L. Sigrist * Brenna Silbory * Jill Silver * Jane T. Silverman * Laura Silverstein * Robin Simons * William Simpson * Sherry and Winston Sims * Eleanor Sinclair * Sheila Sinclare * Kassia Sing & Ed Kaufman * Sally Singingtree * Elpidio Siruno * Jim Sitzman * Jacqueline Skarritt * Edd Skerritt * Margaret Skinner * Ron Skjong * Kathleen Skoller * Richard Skurdall * Connie Slaten * Gerald Slater * Cheryl Slechta * Elizabeth Slosar * Beverly Smaby * Gail Smallridge * Wendy Smallridge * Mary Smalls * Paul Smart * Gregory Smiley * Steven Smiley * Ann Warren Smith * Cheryl G. Smith * Cheryl Smith * Don Smith * Guthrie Smith * Joann and John Y. Smith * John and Lexie Smith * Kathleen Smith * Kathryn Smith * Nancy K. Smith * Philip and Jeanne Smith * Rachelle Smith * Riley Smith * Roberta Smith * Shelly Smith * Shannon Smye-Rumsby * Eleanor Snyder * Deirdre Snyder * Ellen Snyder * Sherry Snyder * David Socha * Barbara and Peter Sogn-Frank * Rachael Solem * Sue-Anne Solem * Lee Solock * Laurie Solomon * Susan Solovay * Linda Solyntjes * Diana Somerville * Gina Sonne * John and Sue Sorensen * Mark Sorensen * Michelle Sorensen * Terry Sorenson * Sandra Sotak * Emilio Soto * Philippe Soubliere * Lynn Sowers * Carl Spagnoli * Kay and Gil Sparks * Helen Spector * Cheryl Spector * Joanne Spence * Donald Spencer * Teri Sperry * Gus and Cameron Speth * Krista Spieler * Jean Spohn * Deborah Sprague * Thomas Spring * Wendy Sprout * Bev Stadick * Anne Stadler * Rick Stamm * Candida Stamp * Lynn B. Stan * Alison Standefer * Caitlin Standish * Chris Stanley and Cindy Taylor * Stephen Stanley * Therese Stanley Tatol * Perry Stannard * Karen Stansbery * Lucia Stanslaw * Charlotte Staples * Sandy Starbird * Willy Stark * Marion Starke * Marilyn Starrett * Catherine Stearns * Donna Stearns * Jennifer Stefani * Gisela Stehr * Randi Stein * Anne Steinberg and Eric Hansen * Sue Steiner * Conrad Steinhoff * Michael Stein-Ross * Julianne Stelmaszyk * Sasch Stephens * Jolinda Stephens * Robert Stephens * Laurie Sterling * Sari Steuber * Judy Stevens * Becky Steward * Leslie Stewart * Christine Stewart * Don Stewart * Katharine Stewart * Patsy Stewart * Christie Stewart Stein * Susan Stiles-Randak * Samuel Stocking * Mary Stone * Doris Stone * Miryam Stone * Marilyn Stoner * Sarah B. Stookey * Sharon Storbeck * Deborah Stotelmyer * Sarah Stott * Leanna Stoufer * Sharon L. Strachan * Joe and Paula Strain * Heidi Stratton * Clare Strawn * Donna Stringer and Andy Reynolds * Sylvia Strobel * Jean Strolberg * Crystal Stromer * Jeanne R. Strong * Tom Strouse * Paula Stuart * John Stuckey * Virginia Sturken * Carolyn Stypka * Katherine Subramanian * Christa Suggs * Jean Sullivan * ChristiAnne Sullivan * Merri Sullivan * Suzanne Sullivan * William Sultzer * Ellen Summerfield * Theresa Sumoge * Kathy Surprenant * John Suter * Patty Sutherland * Julie Sutter * Mary Ann Svenning * Ara Swanney * Jennifer Swanson * Kathleen Swanson * Pamela Swanson * Heidi and Steve Swanson-Bray * Linda Swanson-Davies * Veralea Swayne * Dan Sweet * Judith Sweet * Christian Sweningsen * Leslie Swieck * Amelia Swinton * Gloria Switzer * Andrea Szekeres * Jan Szostek * Julia Taberman * Lesley Tabor * Jan Taddeo * Lee Takagi * Barbara Takashima * Mike Tallering * Familia Tamayo * Bette Tambling * Carolyn Tamler * Paul Tamminen * Jo Tampas * Shelley Tamres * Bob Tancig * Crystal Tankersley * Don Tarbutton * Christine Tarr * Anna Tary * Nina Tatlock * Tim Taylor * Cynthia Taylor * David Taylor and Lana Holstein * Jane Taylor * Karen Taylor * Layla Taylor * Marilyn Taylor * Susan Taylor * Beth Taylor-Wilson * Fran Weber Teall * Jaco and Barbara ten Hove * Betsy Terrell * Patricia Terrell * Sebastian Tesarek * Diane Tessari * Kellie Teter * Lauren Tevelow * Bruno Theisen * C. Theno * Pierre Thiry * Carol Thomas * Donna Melanie Thomas * Margaret Thomas * Marguerite Thomas * Brooke Thompson * Cary Thompson * Faith Thompson * John Thompson * Maureen Thompson * Nancy Thompson * Natasha Thompson * Marion Thomson * Susan Thornton * Carol Thornton-Anderson * Lorraine Thrasher * Melanie Throckmorton * Gregury Thrower * Pam Thul-Immler * Monica Thyberg * Delcy Tibbetts * Amy Tiedemann * Laurel Tien * Ann Tiffany * M. Diane Tilstra * Carrie Tilton-Jones * Ray Timmermans * Julie Timmins * Karina Tindol * Rev. Pamela and Zack J. Tinnin * Bibiane Tiphane * Fiona Tito-Wheatland * Laurie Todd * Susan Todd * Jean Tofanelli * Shirley Tofte * Jourdan Togstad * Tlaloc Tokuda * Suzanne Tomkins * Mary Jane and Fred Tonge * Barbara Tonningsen * Joan C. Tornow, Ph.D. * Marya Torrez * Susan Totten * Diana Touchton * Phil and Egg Foo Townsend * Julia Tracy * Joseph and Priscilla Tracy * Cynthia Trapanese * Linda Traver * Elizabeth Treichler * Jacqueline D. Treinen and David Krest * Eden Trenor and Dan Harrison * Cynthia Trenshaw * Kelly Trent * Kate Trnka * Lura Trossello * Teresa Troyer * Bonnie Trudell * Cynthia Trueblood * Marissa Tsaniff * Sherri Tuck * Annie Tucker * Patricia E. Tucker-Dolan * Deborah Tudor * Meredith Tufts * Barbara Turk * C. E. Turner * Doris Turner * Jeff Turner * Cheryl Turney * Martin Tweedale * Patrick Uchigakiuchi * Elizabeth Uding * Rick and Kitty Ufford-Chase * Richard Ugland * Andrew Ulasich * Vera Ulery * Elisa Ulibarri * Kari Uman * Joseph Umstead * Ricci Underwood * Roselva Ungar * Nancy Urban * Harry Uvegi * Marilyn Vache * Arthur JC Vale * Patti Valentine * Jason S. Van Driesche * Laura Van Dyke * Heidi Van Ert * Sarah van Gelder * Barbara Van Kerkhove * Sara Van Portfliet * Kate Van Ummersen * Sally Van Vleck * Dan van Vliet * Jackson Vance * Peter Vance * Dr. & Mrs. Jack Vande Visse * Marianne Vandiver * Chris Vanecek * Jonathan VanWinkle * Nancy Vanwinkle * Gael Varsi * Anne Vaughan * John Veale * Kara G. Veeder * Doug and Barb Veit * Megan Veley * Marc Vendetti and Lena Maria Estrella * Donna Verna * Stephen Vezeris * Mary Villegas * Elizabeth Vitale * Sue Voegtlin * Thomas Voelker * Eve Vogel * Krista Vogel * Mary Vogel * Mary Voges * David Voigt * Margretta Voinot-Baron and Glen Baron * Carol von Kaenel * Mary VonRanker * Rhonda Voorheis * Ruth Vorwaller * Nathaniel Vose and Elizabeth Turkel * Bob Vreeland * Anne Waasdorp * Andrea Wachter * Larry Waite * Nicole Wakelam * Mary K. Wakeman * Margaret Wakeman-Desley and John Desley * Jonathan Horwitz * Eileen Waldow * Marirose Walker * Dean Walker * J. Rick Walker * Tamara Walker * Eugenia Wall * Madeline Wall * Robert Wall * Charles Wallace * Nikki Wallar * KaiLea Wallin * Virginia Wallis * Liz Wally * Jay Walsh * Michelle Walsh * Gary and Evelyn Waltenbaugh * Ann M. Walters * Connie Walton * Richard and Susan Walton * Beth Walukas * Shannon Walz * Eileen Wampole * Michael and Karen Ward * Bill Waring * Leslie Warmoth * Allison Warner * Amberly Warner * Jill Warner * Jean and Jerry Warren * Susan E. Warren * Lynn Warschauer * William Washburn * Judy Waters * Carolyn Watkins-Taylor * Rev. Richard A. Watson * Audrey H. Watson * Kay M. Watson * Maggie Watson and Bruce Erickson * Martha Watson * Rachel Watson * Mitch Webb * Carol Webb * Joe Webb * Darcee Weber * Jonathan Weber * David W. Webster * Harris Webster * Joan Webster * Steve Weigner * Carolyn Weil * Margaret Weimer * Lewis and Renee Weinberg * Linda Weiss * Renee Weitzner * Wilford Welch * Marilyn and Bob Welker * Gay Wellman * Neal Wells * G. Greeley Wells Jr. * Ingrid Wendt * Kaye Werner * Linda Werner * Fran Wessling * Charlie West * Sybil West * Wendy West * Paul Weston * Aelwen Wetherby * Ellen Wetzel * Cynthia Wheaton * Karleen Whitcomb * Stephen White * Erica White * David and C.C. White * Marcia White * Meg White * Judy Whitehouse * Meg Whitmer * Diana Whitney * Richard Whitney * KathyAnne Whittemore * Anne Whittlesey * Laurie Wick * White Dog Cafe Foundation * Deborah J. Wiese and Ruth Haasl * Judith Wiger-Grohs * Sandy Wiggins * Nancy Prior and Richard Wilber * Nancy Wilcox * D鈥橝rlyn Wilde * Laura Wilder * Patricia S. Wilder * Virginia Wiles * Jennifer Wilkins * Cynthia Willett * Courtney Williams * Heather Williams * Margaret L. Williams * Robert Williams * Simrat Kaur Annski Williams * Suzanne H. Williams * Tonia Williams * Anne Williamson * Terry Williamson * Marsha Willis * W. H. Willis * Suzanne Willow * Therese Wilson * Kay Wilson * James Wilson * Kathleen Wilson and Richard McCulley * Marc Wilson * MaryEllen Wilson * Sally and Richard Wilson * Suzan Wilson * Veronica Wilson * Nicole Wines * Clemency Wings * Doretta Winkelman * Everett Winsberg * Sandra Winter * Yehudah Alan Winter * Rebecca Wintle * Val Wise * Jennifer Wisniewski * Wayne Witzel * Che and Susan Woerner-Baysinger * William Wohlfeiler * Mary Wohlgemuth * Janet Wolf * Kenneth Wolf * Lakia Wolfarth-Davis * Nanlouise Wolfe and Stephen Zunes * Edward Wolff * Alice Wood * Gordon Wood * Hope Wood * Loreta Wood * Nadia Woodcock * Charlene Woodcock * Brian Woodruff and Jane Everham * Dave and Jeanette Woodruff * Anne Woods * Rachelle Woods and James Cobb * Sidney Woods * Lynn Woodward * Deborah Woolley * Catherine Woolner * Joan Worrall * Marc and Susan Worthington * Jakob Wranne * Christopher Wren * Janet Wright * Janet and Dick Wright * Lee-Lani Wright * Linda Wright * Mary Wright * Rebecca Abts Wright * Toni Wulff * Susan C. Wyatt * Marion Wyman * Tynisha Wynder * Joan T. Wynne * Lynn Yamaoka * Sandra Yarne * Mark Yates * Mary Yelenick * Gabriela Ylonen * Aimee Yogi * Beth Yokom * Ann Yoshida * Phyllis Young * Shakura Young * Sybille Youngsma * Meredith Youngson * Nancy Yuill * Danae Yurgel * Brad Zabel * Leonard and Ellen Zablow * Ralph Zachow * Maryam Marne Zafar * Donna Zajonc and David Womeldorff * Terrence Zander * Martin Zatsick * Joseph Zefran * Mary J. Zeimet * Suzanne Zerbe * B. Neil Zeug * Karla Zimmerman * Chuck and Lyn Zimmerman Family * Dorit and Vito Zingarelli * Pamela Zolkosky * Rita Zollo * Melanie Zuercher * Elise Zuidema * Roger zum Felde * Amelie Zurn-Galinsky * Pamela Zwehl-Burke * Anonymous (804)

While we don鈥檛 have the space to print every donor鈥檚 name, we are so grateful to everyone who supported 猫咪社区! in 2020. If we inadvertently omitted your name or made an error, we apologize. Please contact rsimons@yesmagazine.org.

Harris, who鈥檚 affectionately known as 鈥淢ama Shu,鈥� has funneled her grief into action鈥攖urning a section of Highland Park into a restorative, self-sustaining eco-village called . Her efforts have grown into a nonprofit that uses land and property revitalization as tools to create safe, nurturing, and culturally affirming spaces within her community鈥攎odeling how to go from 鈥渂light to beauty.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Not only did the story warm my heart, it also became my North Star as we put together this issue: If the idea of growth itself is neutral, what can we build from the ashes of our individual lives and losses that strengthens the whole?

That idea runs through this 鈥淕rowth鈥� issue, which aims to complicate the narrative of growth as morally good or bad. In our lead feature, we visit Jason Tartt鈥檚 bountiful West Virginia farm, where he, like Harris, is proving the community鈥檚 potential for abundance and shared prosperity. That feature, underwritten by a grant from the Kendeda Fund, anchors a forthcoming digital series that will more deeply explore the people and places that are actively redefining our conception of prosperity. 

This issue also ventures to Brazil, where Nicole Froio spotlights the power of the Landless Workers Movement as its members are elected to political office for the first time. We also think about what it means for families to grow, from addressing the dire maternal mortality crisis in Black communities in the United States to how kinship networks help keep children out of the foster-care system.

We鈥檙e also leaning into the complexity that comes from grappling with different kinds of growth鈥攚hether it鈥檚 U.S. demographic changes resulting in growing organized violence, or the rise of artificial intelligence, a timely topic as Hollywood鈥檚 writers and actors navigate a strike with widespread implications for how AI will interact with organized labor. 

As always, this issue is full of solutions, optimism, and hope鈥攂ecause that ethos continues to run through everything 猫咪社区! publishes. It鈥檚 true that endless growth is always worth questioning. And we should also ask ourselves, what can we grow from the difficulties life presents us? As we ponder, let鈥檚 continue growing together鈥攁s people, as members of our global community, and as the beloved readers of this magazine.

Be well,
Evette Dionne
猫咪社区! Executive Editor

Kelp is an ecosystem engineer, providing crucial habitat for marine mammals, birds, and fish. Kelp acts as a refuge at the ocean鈥檚 surface鈥攐ffering food, shelter, and protection for seals and otters鈥攁苍d a nursery on the seafloor鈥攑roviding spawning grounds, shade, and cooler water for baby fish. Kelp鈥檚 holdfast, or rootlike structure, can host more than 90 animal species. Zooplankton, for example鈥攆ull of the carotenoids that make salmon flesh pink鈥攁ppear at higher rates in Kelp forests than in the open ocean.

Kelp is nutrient-dense, generating more than 50 minerals and 100 different trace elements. This sea vegetable is 10 to 20 times higher in calcium, magnesium, iron, copper, and zinc than any land-based vegetable. For those of us who live above the surface, Kelp can support the thyroid, regulate metabolism, and restore energy levels. While Western culture has long overlooked and undervalued this nourishing, versatile, and once-abundant food, countless cultures and generations have incorporated seaweeds into their diets.

Thinking about Kelp transports naturopath Dr. Gary L. Ferguson II, Unangax虃 (Aleut), back to his childhood in Sand Point, Alaska. On these ancestral beaches, he learned to forage for delicacies from Unangax虃 Elders and his mother, Kristin Ferguson: 鈥淪he would always say, 鈥榃hen the tide is low, the table is set.鈥欌€�

On one trip, Elder Nora Newman taught him how to remove the backbone from Ribbon Kelp and chop up the blades for a salad to accompany the rich harvest of Pidarki (mollusks) they pried off rocks. 鈥淲e would eat both of them right on the beach, raw and fresh,鈥� Ferguson recalls.

Today, Ferguson is the one doing the teaching. 鈥淢any of my Elders have moved on to that [spirit] realm, and it is now up to me as an 鈥楨lder in training鈥� to step up to the plate to make sure these traditions are not only written down but lived in experience,鈥� says Ferguson, who also works at Washington State University鈥檚 Institute for Research and Education to Advance Community Health. He feels strongly that youth 鈥渘eed to be connected to the land, the sea, and the amazing bounty we still have in the Aleutians.鈥�

In the Salish Sea, more than 20 species of Kelp create enormous underwater forests and swaths of surface canopy. Bullwhip Kelp is one of the fastest-growing plants in the sea and grows as much as 10 inches a day, reaching up to 115 feet.

Writer Owen L. Oliver, Quinault/Isleta Pueblo, envisions his Ancestors filling canoes with Bullwhip Kelp: 鈥淭he blades for eating, the bulbs for medicinal salves, and the stipes to be dried for twine.鈥� His Ancestors long stewarded these underwater ecosystems for themselves and their nonhuman kin. 鈥淭hey understood that healthy Kelp forests equaled healthy seas,鈥� Oliver says. 鈥淜elp is a relational hot spot for critters to gather and spawn.鈥�

Oliver describes how each spring, herring鈥檚 sticky eggs鈥攁 traditional delicacy along the Northwest coast鈥攅ncase blades of Kelp: 鈥淢illions of salty, protein-rich eggs can be harvested and eaten directly off the makeshift plate of the Kelp blades.鈥� But during our lifetime, waters are warming and acidifying; Kelp forests鈥攁苍d herring鈥攁re vanishing. 鈥淎 cultural necessity before contact is now a cultural spectacle,鈥� Oliver says.

Around the global ocean, Kelp shares with us its ability to conjure life, manifest vitality, and bolster ocean health. We have much to learn from that ability and commitment to hold fast to life eternal鈥攂oth below the water鈥檚 surface and above. 

Green Sea Salt Recipe

Naturally salty seaweed can be used as a seasoning to boost the flavor and nutrient profile of your meals. Mineral-rich nettles and milk thistle seeds in this recipe also support liver health. 

1/4 cup powdered Kelp
1/4 cup dried nettle leaves
1/4 cup milk thistle seeds
3 tablespoons sea salt

In a small bowl, combine Kelp, nettles, and milk thistle seeds with sea salt.听
Store in an airtight glass jar and sprinkle small amounts on savory dishes, beans, and salads.听

This article was updated at 12:17 p.m. PT on Sept. 4, 2023, to clarify that Dr. Gary L. Ferguson II is a naturopath not a nutritionist. Also, Owen L. Oliver鈥檚 ancestors were not in Alaska. 听Read our corrections policy here.

Today, there is a growing movement to redefine the historical Black experience with land ownership and raising crops. These farmers are working to reclaim and recontextualize that history through self-determination, manifested in sovereign food production for their local communities and families.

Shanelle Donaldson West 
Co-Founder and Board Member, Percussion Farms

Growing up in Seattle, Shanelle Donaldson West found gardening to be a 鈥渞eally white space.鈥� 鈥淚 never really got to see people like me growing food, even though restaurants were starting to put collard greens and okra and things that I grew up eating on the menus. It started to really bug me,鈥� Donaldson West says.

To add insult to injury, her community was often priced out of these very restaurants. This marginalization inspired her to think of how she could redefine what gardening and locally grown produce looked like in Seattle. She was invited to visit in Grafton, New York, an Afro-Indigenous farm that bridges sustainability, food sovereignty, and anti-racism. 鈥淭hat was a completely life-changing experience,鈥� says Donaldson West. Not only did it feel like an act of personal independence and agency, but also one of engagement in community. 鈥淏eing around Black and Brown people who had the same calling for working in agriculture 鈥� it was beautiful and affirming.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

She has since reinvested her newly acquired knowledge into her home community, recruiting more nonwhite farmers to begin growing their own food with Percussion Farms, named for a Soul Fire activity where farmers drummed, sang, and danced while others tended to the land. Today, Percussion Farms lives up to its namesake, acting as the 鈥渉eartbeat鈥� of local Seattle communities. 

Donaldson West鈥檚 work at Percussion Farms and a nearby rooftop food-bank farm is a testament to how she sees food as more than physical nourishment. It鈥檚 a form of cultural expression and empowerment. By sharing growing knowledge, as well as harvests, she helps others celebrate and practice their cultural heritage. 

She also passes on the traditions of growing food to young, unhoused, and food-insecure individuals via , a 10-week internship program. 鈥淚 can do this as revolution,鈥� says Donaldson West. 鈥淚 can use this land that was never meant for us, and I can grow food, and teach people how to sustain themselves and their own families.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Jonath贸n Savage
Farm Manager, Gather New Haven 

Jonath贸n Savage was introduced to growing at an early age. 鈥淧robably, at the age of 3, I was in the dirt,鈥� Savage recalls. His exposure to cultivation was shaped by a Southern heritage, intertwined with a New England upbringing, and rooted in Connecticut, where Savage was raised. 

Savage鈥檚 family supported him in sourcing his own sustenance, as opposed to relying solely on the grocery store. His grandparents, originally from Georgia and North Carolina, 鈥渨ere phenomenal growers and provided for the whole family with the food that came out of their yards.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Since childhood, Savage has found ways of incorporating his love for growing into every facet of his life. From cultivating and selling collard greens in high school to experimenting with hydroponic vs. organic methods for growing strawberries with his math students at the alternative high school where he used to teach, plant-rearing has served as a vessel of social connection and collective wonderment in his life. 

Today, reciprocity between Savage and his teachers takes the front seat at , his organization created from the merging of New Haven Land Trust and New Haven Farms, which promotes health, equity, and justice for people and the environment. Gather New Haven provides a unique opportunity to connect Savage鈥檚 past and present with his community鈥檚 future. He recalls his time at , where he once gleaned knowledge from elders, now under the purview of his program at Gather and his cousin鈥檚 management: 鈥淪o now the people who supported some of my knowledge in growing 鈥� are now the people that I鈥檓 going back and supporting.鈥� The Hazel Street garden and others like it stand as centers of intergenerational, knowledge-sharing hubs of community connection and restoration. 

Given the land鈥檚 role as an 鈥渙verarching connector,鈥� these green spaces are even helping to connect individuals across generations. Savage hopes that these spaces continue to build a sense of unity and self-reliance in local Connecticut neighborhoods and beyond. 鈥淗opefully, in the future, urban agriculture starts chipping away at commercial agriculture, and we can start bringing some of these resources back into our cities and distributing them within our cities.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Vetiveah Harrison 
Kitchen Incubation Coordinator, CitySeed

Vetiveah Harrison points to her youth in Chicago as the beginning of her farming journey. Harrison, who was homeschooled from fifth through 12th grades, was exposed to many different career paths. She didn鈥檛 gravitate toward typical fast food or retail summer jobs that define many urban youths鈥� adolescent and teen years. Instead, her heart was drawn to the land. 

The skincare company her family ran incorporated herbs, essential oils, and aromatherapy鈥攕o, an urban farming apprenticeship was a natural next step. 鈥淭hat concept, 鈥榰rban farming,鈥� was not even a thing in my mind,鈥� Harrison recalls about that time. 鈥淭his urban farm was a beautiful oasis. It was on three acres of land, which was originally an illegal dump site [in a] very, very disenfranchised neighborhood of Chicago.鈥� Harrison likens the plot of land to a local 鈥淕arden of Eden,鈥� saying that the apprenticeship changed her life鈥檚 trajectory. 鈥淪ign me up. I can do this forever,鈥� she remembers feeling. 

The farm introduced her to the concepts of food justice and food apartheid. Her advancing socioeconomic awareness challenged her to pursue equity through growing as a career. After beginning her journey into urban farming 10 years ago in Chicago, Harrison traveled to New Haven, Connecticut, to study nutrition. This path ultimately led her to CitySeed, an organization dedicated to engaging the community in equitable, local food systems for economic development and sustainability. 

Through the years, she saw food as a link between identity and wellness. 鈥淚t brings that cultural relevance and connection 鈥� from your food traditions to just basic good health.鈥� Economic self-sufficiency in Black neighborhoods has been achieved before, Harrison notes, though it has been repeatedly attacked, such as when a white mob razed Tulsa鈥檚 Greenwood District, known for its 鈥淏lack Wall Street,鈥� in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Still, she sees Black people persisting in sharing their cultural knowledge of growing, using the very practices that fueled the country鈥檚 development to now liberate their communities. 

鈥淸If] we all have this collective mindset that we鈥檙e growing to connect food [to] our cultural heritage and our traditions 鈥� we will be on
top of this world.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

The phrase 鈥渢hink and grow rich鈥� originated in of the same name. Hill鈥檚 book outlined 13 principles鈥攂ased on, he claimed, the lives of more than 500 men of great means鈥攖o create a 鈥減hilosophy of achievement鈥� that allows people to accrue wealth. Some of those principles include having a defined goal and pouring everything you have into achieving it, while others have a decidedly mystical bent, such as developing 鈥渢he sixth sense鈥� or 鈥渧ibrating on a high frequency鈥� in order to tap into an 鈥渋nfinite intelligence鈥� that guarantees success. These principles follow a familiar pattern, one that suggests if people just try hard enough, they鈥檒l acquire the life of their dreams. 

If we heed Hill鈥檚 philosophy, success is a matter of effort and unwavering self-belief rather than a game of luck. However, his 鈥減hilosophy of achievement鈥� ethos doesn鈥檛 account for . And yet, that hasn鈥檛 stopped Hill鈥檚 idea from fueling a slew of advice books and concepts, including The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), The Effective Executive (1967), The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), and Secrets of the Millionaire Mind (2005), all of which build on his work. 

One such concept is 鈥済rowth mindset,鈥� a term developed by psychologist in the 1970s to be applied to educational contexts. While the concept isn鈥檛 derived from 鈥渢hink and grow rich,鈥� it is still part of Hill鈥檚 legacy, joining a conveyor belt of fads that blame those who fail under capitalism for their lack of success. 鈥淚ndividuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset,鈥� wrote Dweck in . 鈥淭hey tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset (those who believe their talents are innate gifts).鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

On the surface, this premise is not outlandish: Humans learn and grow throughout their lives, and that may require working through discomfort or failures. In the classroom, d to help students cultivate a growth mindset by pushing them to take risks and aspirations that may be beyond their present abilities, but could be achievable by taking chances. But as , the dean鈥檚 distinguished professor of education at San Diego State University, notes, before they can hit 鈥渞each goals,鈥� students need affirmation, validation, and support. However Wood says many students of color never receive encouragement in the classroom: 鈥淚t鈥檚 a common microaggression in education with students of color: educators assume that based upon their race, they are academically inferior or incapable.鈥� When educators don鈥檛 recognize this fundamental barrier for students of color, assuming their capacity is both fixed and below that of white students, it鈥檚 hard to make 鈥渞each goals.鈥�

鈥淕rowth mindset 鈥� creates a myth of meritocracy, that students who work the hardest, put in more hours, are the ones who do the best,鈥� says Wood, putting the burden on students, rather than educators. This individualist approach also leaves out the role of larger community circles, including not just educators, but also family and mentors; these supports are more readily available to white, under the growth mindset model. 

In a study that compared school districts applying the growth mindset approach, 鈥渢he Native kids [from a low-performing district] outdid the Microsoft kids,鈥� , suggesting the concept could help struggling students achieve at a higher level. But the study relied on test scores as a metric for results, hardly the only or best way to find out how children are learning and developing, particularly when it comes to outcomes for Black, Indigenous, Southeast Asian, and Latinx students, who have a fundamentally different classroom experience.

From Classroom to Boardroom

The modern application of the growth mindset to workplaces echoes the same philosophy: If you aren鈥檛 achieving the career success you desire, you simply aren鈥檛 stretching yourself enough. In the best-selling 2017 book , Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and several co-authors argue that people with a growth mindset make for better leaders, and that Microsoft鈥檚 success under Nadella can be partially attributed to . Similarly, technologist and business analyst Vinita Bansal draws on the idea in Upgrade Your Mindset: How to Overcome Limiting Beliefs and Tap Your Potential (2021), which puts responsibility on workers to change their thinking in order to change the material conditions of their lives. 

Considering that the singular, , this army of self-help books aims to help workers and middle management chase their 鈥渢hink and grow rich鈥� dreams, without acknowledging that some people are born on third base, much closer to success than those who have to start at the beginning. These books also betray a fundamentally narrow and ultimately very dull version of the world, one in which success follows specific tracks, and failure nips at the heels of those who can鈥檛 stay on them. Hyperfocusing on high-status jobs, as these books do, posits white-collar work in fields such as tech, business, and medicine as the ultimate accomplishment; the guy who flips burgers should have worked harder on his growth mindset. 

Many factors that shape the trajectory of a career are beyond a worker鈥檚 control. , , , and may determine whether someone is provided with the tools and support to grow. External, systemic factors, from to , impede many workers鈥� ascent up the corporate ladder. Society celebrates people who develop skills and work through adversity鈥攖he perceived 鈥済rowth mindset鈥濃€攁苍d punishes those who seem trapped鈥攖he perceived 鈥渇ixed mindset.鈥� But it鈥檚 not possible to 鈥済rowth mindset鈥� out of racism. 

鈥淏lack people鈥攁苍d Black women especially鈥攁re shut out of traditional employment, but our culture applauds the hustler who responds to exclusion by striking out on her own,鈥� . 鈥淏lack women platform entrepreneurs have more education than their white male and female counterparts,鈥� McMillan Cottom continued. 鈥淒espite having more formal education, they face more job insecurity than similarly educated peers.鈥� Between 2009 and 2018, Black women founders in tech raised $289 million in capital, with , while the industry as a whole raised $424.7 billion. Though the number of Black female entrepreneurs is rising, a stubborn pay gap still holds them back, and 2020 highlighted that .

Holistic Growth

Growth mindset could be interpreted differently, as a genuinely collaborative process that creates interdependent communities and reshapes how people view life goals. Instead of being defined by career, growth could be viewed through the webs of connections built via mutualism. 鈥淎re you a good steward for the space that you鈥檙e in?鈥� founder of disability rights organization , speaker, and disability rights consultant asks, a reminder that success may be viewed in ways that are unquantifiable. 

Breaking free of capitalist pressures to separate work from life includes , fostering union growth, and building worker power. All of these mutual projects are an important starting point for shifting culture away from a personal-focused model to something larger鈥攖rue growth requires community support, not just work and individual effort. For example, growth mindset could include raising children, volunteering, and seeking out new skills for pleasure or to support the community as a whole. It could also include that allow people to lead fuller lives, and finding validation in activities that aren鈥檛 necessarily sanctioned under capitalism: Spending a day at the beach fosters growth, as does attending a protest.

Careerism is not the only or most important goal in life; people should not be defined by the wage labor they perform, and the things they do shouldn鈥檛 need to have monetary value. Sometimes a painting is just a painting. Even as the pandemic sparked complex conversations about work, it also opened up the possibility for a better understanding of community. Neighbors became allies, and as the world slowly opened up, some formed 鈥渂ubbles鈥� who socialized together, managed children learning remotely together, and sourced toilet paper together. For some, these bubbles went deeper than getting to know the neighbors and reflected interdependent networks that already existed. 

Anne Helen Petersen, a journalist and culture critic, moved to Lummi Island, Washington, during the pandemic to find community. 鈥淲hat brought me here was my best friends were living here,鈥� says Petersen, who decided to put her writing about how into practice. The island is small, with , but has a lively social world. Part of that world includes her friends鈥� two young children, whom Petersen or her partner pick up every day after school and care for over the course of a few hours. 

This 鈥渒id-swapping,鈥� as she calls it, is an important part of her social life, and is part of the web of connections she鈥檚 formed. Some kid-swapping days are easier than others. 鈥淚鈥檓 [sometimes] like 鈥業 can鈥檛 do it, there鈥檚 too much going on鈥︹€� and every single time I鈥檓 like 鈥榯hat was amazing.鈥欌€� Growth through challenge is possible by means other than career striving: The relationship she has with her young charges cultivates a different kind of personal development. 鈥淲hat fills your life? There are so many answers when we鈥檙e not as yoked to making money all the time,鈥� says Petersen. 

Choosing intentional community doesn鈥檛 mean rejecting work or career-building. As memoirist Nicole Chung explains, work and community can integrate: 鈥淚 actually had a debut writers email group. We kept in touch, cheering each other on. It was small, but really vital. I tried to have that same generally open positive spirit in other interactions and relationships with fellow writers, regardless of career stage.鈥� For Chung, a writing community was characterized by mutualism and support. That鈥檚 formalized not just through groups, but also her work at , a mentoring organization for writers of color, as well as holding office hours for writers during her time at , a now-shuttered online magazine. Chung is not focused solely on personal growth and her career, but uplifting others as well.

Rejecting individualism can reframe the idea of a growth mindset as a cultural shift toward a more interdependent and mutually supportive society. That鈥檚 a sentiment Dweck seems to agree with, as she explained in a 2020 : 鈥淚t is not about teaching the concept alone, it is much more about implementing practices that focus on growth and learning.鈥� As Wood has found in his own research, putting up a sign out front or including language about a 鈥済rowth mindset school鈥� in advertising materials for a private or charter school doesn鈥檛 speak to the culture change that needs to happen in each classroom, customized to the students in that classroom. In affirming students who are willing to challenge themselves with difficult tasks such as reaching for advanced math skills, it鈥檚 important to consider who is encouraged to do so, the risks of failing, and what it takes to build a classroom environment where it is safe to take risks and success is defined by more than test scores. 

鈥淭hat鈥檚 basically capitalism in a nutshell, making you feel responsible for the things that you struggle with, all the bad things that happen to you,鈥� Chung says. Rejecting the notion of a simplistic growth mindset and instead embracing and reckoning with the complexity of living in a society provides a much clearer path to building a culture that prizes working together through rich and lean, pandemic and wildfire, protest and celebration. Walking away from dreams of wealth may be the ultimate growth mindset, leaving wildflowers to bloom in the ashes of careerism.

My life was enriched by my niece鈥檚 daily love and perspective. Taking responsibility for her made me feel closer to my family; I鈥檇 been separated from my family by adoption, and had only reconnected with them a decade ago. Still, I often struggled to remember I loved Candi鈥檚 parents and to honor them as whole people instead of stereotyping them as addicts. 

In the United States, family separation is often an occasion for assigning blame to individual people, but larger forces are at work. Systemic misogyny and class oppression, sexual violence, and disease have put my white, working-class family at risk for five generations, forcing us to find ways to keep our children. In April 1941, my then 18-year-old grandmother, pregnant with her third child, married a man who knew he wasn鈥檛 that child鈥檚 father. The marriage allowed her to keep that child; her first two had been relinquished for adoption because she was young, unmarried, poor, and powerless. My mother, 14 when she was raped and became pregnant with me, couldn鈥檛 find a way to keep me. Some adult in her life signed papers letting me go.

Now, nearly two decades after taking Candi in, it鈥檚 clear we all did the best we could, keeping Candi鈥攁苍d many other relatives before me鈥攆rom being displaced. No matter what age a child is, family separation is an adverse childhood experience that can cause , leaving children vulnerable to outcomes ranging from to . 鈥淚t鈥檚 complex trauma because it鈥檚 not a one-time event,鈥� says Lina Vanegas, a social worker who was born in Bogota, Colombia, in 1976 and sold to a white couple in the Midwest. 鈥淚t sets us up for a trauma trajectory 鈥� and it鈥檚 intergenerational.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

The first way to stop this trauma is to , which is especially important for Black children in the U.S., who in 2023 comprised . Those prevention techniques include training social workers to . It鈥檚 difficult to determine how often children are removed solely because of impoverishment, but one 2021 study shows that in circumstances of poverty. Families with limited means may lack access, for example, to transportation, making it difficult for them to keep medical appointments. If a child misses a medical appointment in that situation, is parental neglect the cause, or a lack of resources to secure transportation?

Stopping family separation also includes respecting cultural differences, as seen through the , intended to stop the forced assimilation of Indigenous children in the U.S. by placing them with Native families rather than in white adoptive homes. Kinship care promotes the cultural preservation ideal because it minimizes the trauma of removal, increases the likelihood of permanency, and . Comparisons of kinship care and foster care show that children in the former arrangement are . When extended families take the responsibility of caring for children, they can ensure that children stay connected to their families by offering up family stories about themselves, their parents, and their ancestors.

Black families have historically relied on informal kinship care, as Dorothy E. Roberts notes in her 2001 Chicago-Kent Law Review article, 鈥溾€� However, these arrangements have been stigmatized in the U.S. 鈥淭he Black community鈥檚 cultural tradition of sharing parenting responsibilities among kin has been mistaken as parental neglect,鈥� Roberts writes. 鈥淏ecause mothers who depend on kinship care do not fit the middle-class norm of a primary caregiver supported by her husband and paid childcare, they seem to have abrogated their duty toward their children.鈥�

But several recent studies, including Alia鈥檚 2019 study, 鈥渆,鈥� demonstrate that children living with addicted parents, children in kinship care, and children living in abusive family homes all have better outcomes than children separated from their families. The evidence was so overwhelming that it inspired the , signed into law in February 2018, which prioritizes keeping children safely with their families rather than removing them from their homes. By implementing the priorities of the act, the Administration for Children and Families found that the number of children in foster care in the U.S. decreased from an estimated 407,000 in 2020 to 391,000 in 2021. 

For me, care for my niece brought me full circle from being an abandoned child to joining a familial lineage of stepping in to prevent state intervention. However, families are complicated. I don鈥檛 have any 鈥渉appily ever after鈥� endings to share about children in my family who evaded the foster care system and are now CEOs of major corporations. Like every other family on Earth, we are complex and flawed. But thanks to kinship care, we鈥檙e still connected. We鈥檙e still a family.

The fact that the insurrectionists proudly carried a symbol of a white supremacist, separatist nation ostensibly defeated in 1865 is no coincidence, says historian , author of the 2022 book . 鈥淭he Confederates have never stopped fighting the Civil War,鈥� he contends. 

That war was fought over the right of white landowners to subjugate and enslave African Americans鈥攁苍d Phillips believes that battle continues today in another guise. Although the modern manifestations of white supremacy have evolved with the passage of time, the flash point fueling racist violence and oppression remains the same as it did 160 years ago, with people of color demanding their full democratic rights. 

The U.S. is experiencing a crisis of white folks who are fearful of democracy because they鈥檙e fearful of people of color, contends Phillips, who also founded the political media organization . When given a choice between , far too many white people in the U.S. still choose whiteness, adds Phillips. 

Author Nikole Hannah-Jones explored these tensions in her linking slavery to the contemporary struggle over racial justice as the lead feature in The New York Times Magazine鈥檚 seminal publication, . Hannah-Jones鈥� work became one of the in recent years, challenging the notion that the U.S. is a fully representative democracy. 

It鈥檚 true that to elect racially diverse representatives at various levels of political office, bringing the United States closer to a multiracial representative democracy. However, this has among self-proclaimed conservative whites and those aligned with them鈥攁 potentially explosive trend given that many of them are . 

The backlash to a multiracial democracy includes efforts to block , the preservation of , and the racist targeting of politicians of color, including and . 

It also includes attacks on voting rights for people of color, low-income voters, students, and others. 鈥淲e see voter suppression bills, we see the gutting of the Civil Rights Act鈥攖hese things are all implications around trying to limit people鈥檚 ability to participate in their democracy,鈥� explains DaMareo Cooper, co-executive director of the , a group committed to building a multiracial democracy. Democratic institutions in the U.S. were . Anti-racists have had to push these institutions into expanding so that the benefits of full citizenship are available to those other than wealthy, landowning white men. 

A Nation in Racial Flux

Demographic data indicates that white people still comprise a majority鈥攁lbeit rapidly shrinking鈥攐f the U.S. population. The 2020 Census found the percentage of self-identified whites in recorded history, from to 57.3% a decade later. 

While experts have predicted this racial shift for decades, it has occurred 鈥渇aster than demographers were projecting,鈥� says , director of the University of Southern California鈥檚 Equity Research Institute. He says the U.S. is currently on track to become a majority-minority nation by 2042, six years earlier than most estimates.

Pastor explains that the changing hues of the nation鈥檚 racial makeup are being fueled by multiple factors, including fewer white children being born than children of color. This is compounded by the fact that the white population is older, on average, than populations of color, and therefore dying in greater numbers. 

Growing awareness of the complexity of racial identity also plays a factor. 鈥淭here are a lot more white people who are also willing to say that they are mixed-race 鈥� who are willing to embrace both parts of their identity,鈥� Pastor explains. 

Similarly, increasing numbers of Latinos are embracing their nonwhite identities, which Pastor refers to as 鈥渢he browning of 鈥楤rown America.鈥欌€� Just as in the general population, the U.S. Latino population saw a jump in the percentage of those who identified with more than one race, of all Latinos in 2020. 

鈥淭his last decade of xenophobia, of anti-immigrant hysteria, of the othering of immigrant populations and Latinos [has] perhaps basically beaten the whiteness out of a lot of Latinos in terms of the way they identify on the Census,鈥� says Pastor. In 2010, more than half of the Latino population identified as white; 10 years later, only .

Paralleling the nation鈥檚 demographic shift, political representation of people of color is also increasing. According to , the 118th Congress, seated in January 2023, was 鈥渢he most racially and ethnically diverse to date.鈥� However, people of color are still underrepresented in Congress, comprising 25% of that body, compared to 43% of the population. 

Political Power in Diversity 

After killed three children and three adults at a school in March 2023, at the Tennessee State Capitol demanding gun control. Two young, newly elected Black Democratic state lawmakers named , together with a white Democrat named Gloria Johnson, joined the protesters inside the Capitol. In retaliation, Tennessee鈥檚 House Republican supermajority voted to expel Jones and Pearson from the legislative body, while Johnson retained her seat. Cooper and Phillips see the 鈥淭ennessee Three,鈥� as they came to be called, as precisely the kind of coalition that the future multiracial U.S. democracy will demand. 

Nashville, like many U.S. cities, is becoming more racially diverse鈥攊n large part due to . That growth has prompted an uptick in multiracial organizing鈥攚丑颈肠丑 was key to electing 鈥渢he most [Metropolitan] Council in the history of the city of Nashville,鈥� according to Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of .

Within days of the representatives鈥� expulsion, the Nashville council to his House seat, while the Shelby County Board of Commissioners . 鈥淚t is because of that power-building that we are doing in Black and Brown communities that Justin Jones was unanimously reappointed to serve in his duly elected seat,鈥� explains Luna, citing her state鈥檚 growing racial diversity. 鈥淎nd it is that exact power that we are building that is threatening the GOP supermajority and the white supremacists in our legislature.鈥�

Luna鈥檚 organization has invested time and resources into 鈥渃reating spaces for organizing and power-building that are multicultural and multiracial,鈥� and training immigrants and people of color to run for office. 鈥淚t鈥檚 been incredible to watch the diversity in our movement here in Tennessee and how we have grown that power,鈥� Luna says.

A Numbers Game

People of color have been allying with progressive whites to elect pro-racial justice representatives since at least 1968, when became the first Black woman in Congress. But Phillips notes that for most of the nation鈥檚 history, even when accounting for obstacles to voting, there simply weren鈥檛 enough voters of color to be able to significantly sway elections. 鈥淧olitics in this country has historically been a battle between white people,鈥� he explains. 鈥淚t was conservative whites battling with progressive whites over the whites in the middle.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Phillips began calling attention to the growing political power of people of color in 2016 with his book . Phillips identified Jesse Jackson鈥檚 presidential campaign as a significant turning point in demonstrating the political power of people of color on a national scale.

Starting out in 1983 with his 鈥溾€濃€攁苍 apt term for a multiracial democracy鈥擩ackson went on to win nearly 7 million votes in 1988 while competing for the Democratic Party鈥檚 nomination. , Jackson 鈥渆xplicitly built his campaign鈥攈is Rainbow Coalition concept鈥攐n the various communities of color allied with progressive whites,鈥� showing the power and potential of such an alliance.

This was the same formula that won Obama his party鈥檚 nomination and the presidency in 2008 and 2012. 鈥淥bama would not have won [the presidential] election in 1980鈥攈e would not have beaten [Ronald] Reagan,鈥� contends Phillips. 鈥淥bama could only win in 2008 because the country was more racially diverse.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Cooper concurs that demographic change has wrought positive political change. 鈥淓veryone saw what happened in Georgia,鈥� he says, referring to the , when Rev. Raphael Warnock became the first Black Senator to represent his state, and, together with a white Democrat named Jon Ossoff, beat two white conservative Republican incumbents, flipping control of the U.S. Senate by a razor-thin margin. 鈥淲elcome to the new Georgia,鈥� said Warnock after his victory. 

鈥淲hite supremacy is in the death throes and is willing to go to extremes to try to protect itself,鈥� says Cooper. But he later reassures: 鈥淲e have the numbers to win. 鈥� There鈥檚 literally more of us than them.鈥�

鈥淭hey鈥檙e gonna try to cheat. They鈥檙e gonna try to change laws,鈥� Cooper continues. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e gonna make it harder for people to vote and participate. They鈥檙e gonna try to kick out young, Black, duly elected legislators.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

A white conservative minority acting out of fear hurts all Americans, explains Cooper: 鈥淲hite folks get hurt as well when we allow racist policies to take away our public goods.鈥� He believes that vigilant, persistent pursuit of democratic representation offers people of color, and the nation as a whole, the best chance for a just future. 

Although demographics increasingly support a multiracial democracy and its economic and social benefits, the nation鈥檚 partisan duopoly remains a challenge. Broadly speaking, the Democratic Party has embraced multiculturalism on paper. But Phillips worries about people such as Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who complained that slogans like 鈥�,鈥� popularized during the 2020 racial justice uprisings, hurt her campaign because they were perceived as being too radical. Phillips doesn鈥檛 buy that: 鈥淪he got 54,000 more votes in 2020 than she got in 2018. So how was she hurt politically?鈥�

Indeed, the historic sparked by the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd was notable for drawing significant numbers of white Americans to join communities of color in calling for an end to racist policies. According to a analysis in July 2020, 鈥淣early 95 percent of counties that had a protest recently are majority white, and nearly three-quarters of the counties are more than 75 percent white.鈥� Months later, many of those protesting showed up to the polls in November to cast ballots in a way that reflected their positions on racial justice. An election poll analysis claimed that 鈥渘early all Biden voters called racism a serious problem in U.S. society.鈥�

What鈥檚 more, the COVID-19 pandemic starkly highlighted the popularity of a progressive government approach to solving problems. 鈥淚n the context of the pandemic, we rethought core elements of the social contract and found much greater support for those elements than we鈥檝e realized existed in the first place,鈥� says Phillips. 鈥淵es, we can just send checks to almost everybody within the country. We can suspend evictions, we can suspend student debt payments鈥� as part of 鈥渁 social-justice-equality agenda.鈥�

Cooper is optimistic that a multiracial democracy is within reach. 鈥淧eople are starting to understand that actually having a multiracial, multicultural democracy is a way for us to keep all human beings thriving.鈥�

Although Phillips believes a civil war has been simmering along racial lines for centuries, he鈥檚 convinced that today 鈥渢here鈥檚 a meaningful minority of whites who are supportive of a multiracial democracy and justice and equality.鈥� And that means we might finally see an end to this war in our lifetimes.

But where I saw sacrifice, Alicia Kennedy sees abundance. In her debut book, , Kennedy explores the complex 鈥渄iversity of thought in the refusal of meat,鈥� and the forces that shape this choice. 鈥淭he intention of this book is to change how you think of meat,鈥� she writes, 鈥渨hether you eat it or do not.鈥� Kennedy invites us to see the ecological and culinary possibilities of removing meat from the center of our plates: 鈥淚f we do that, what do we find?鈥�

I was struck by Kennedy鈥檚 empathy for omnivores like me. I care about the environment, but meat consumption remains my toughest dilemma and biggest source of shame. What we choose to eat is personal and emotional, which Kennedy understands firsthand. She was a strict vegan for five years, but stopped after her brother died, when she 鈥渞ealized there was no substitute for certain foods and the feelings they invoke,鈥� she explains to me.

When people decide to go vegan or vegetarian, society too often responds by equating any trace of meat consumption with moral failure. In contrast, Kennedy considers the conscious omnivore, who eats a small amount of meat and commits to ethical sourcing, as an ally in the fight to end industrial animal agriculture. Ethical eating isn鈥檛, as Kennedy writes, 鈥渁 set of rules that must be followed to the letter at all times.鈥� Rather, it鈥檚 a practice鈥攐ne that may feel easy one day and difficult the next.

Once I acknowledged that meat will always be a part of my life, it was easy to commit to eating less and being curious about where mine comes from. This cracked open my Massachusetts culinary world, and brought me to pop-up farmers markets outside Boston, ethnic grocery stores in Roxbury, and premium butcher shops in Somerville.

Reading Kennedy鈥檚 book also got me thinking about the people who influenced how I eat. My mother views food as medicine, and instilled in me a love for cold-pressed juices to jump-start my immune system. founded a desk-free school for arts and ecology in New York City, and taught me, as a college student, what it means to eat in a way that supports local ecology. Eating vegan ital stews made by in New Haven, Connecticut, reconnected me with my Jamaican roots as a postgrad learning to cook for myself. My partner, having worked on small farms, introduced me to the magic of well-roasted cauliflower and the perfect summertime heirloom tomato.

Kennedy pays her own homage to the culinary geniuses and eccentric entrepreneurs that made plant-based eating what it is today. She pays particular attention to the under-celebrated contributions made by people of color 鈥渨ho are pushing back on the notions of the pedantic, preachy white vegan that has dominated the mainstream discourse.鈥� Kennedy spotlights , a Black plant-based chef credited with highlighting in the African diaspora, and , who makes the link between racist practices and inequitable food systems. Kennedy emphasizes their intersectional approach to plant-based eating, integrating conversations around identity, tradition, and food justice.

The book also resists by reclaiming plant-based foodways inherent to Latin America, the Caribbean, and throughout Africa. Kennedy dug through archives and spoke with experts to make clear that vegan food was never white to begin with. Take the staples from which most vegans derive their protein: around 965 CE, , and by Chinese Buddhist monks. dates back to a 13th-century Afghan cookbook, and was first mentioned in a Chinese text from 1365.

Perhaps more perplexing than the history of plant-based eating is its future. On this front, Kennedy minces no words. 鈥淚 have been distracted from the food that grows from the ground by products that promise innovation, that continue to hide the planet, to hide the joy of cooking,鈥� she writes.

Food-tech giants like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat tout meat replacements as the sustainable alternative, but as Kennedy writes, 鈥渢he amount of money poured into the development of these products is akin to the subsidies that make industrial meat so excessively abundant.鈥� Plus, these apparent solutions aim to change the way we eat without addressing the root causes of the problems in our food system: and soil health from monocultures, , and from conventional agriculture.

鈥淚n all of this, the missing piece is a conversation with people who do this work,鈥� Kennedy says. The real question to ask before deploying a purported solution should be: 鈥淗ow can technological know-how and capital be used to make life better for the marginalized folks who farm and do climate work?鈥�

I often take for granted just how prevalent plant-based options are today, and Kennedy鈥檚 work shows that the journey here was a long one. When I was growing up in Atlanta, fast-food veggie burgers were a nonstarter; now Burger King proudly serves a plant-based Impossible Whopper. Still, if the restaurant fails to pay its employees a fair wage or provide breaks, has any progress really been made? We鈥檙e at a critical moment in our planet鈥檚 history, and while conversations about justice, food, and the environment have moved mainstream, the proportion of Americans identifying as vegan or vegetarian has at just 5%.

Still, Kennedy does not despair: 鈥淚 believe in a world where people realize they don鈥檛 need meat at every meal, and it鈥檚 a world where our basic needs are met. It鈥檚 a world where we have space to reimagine what we consider abundance.鈥� How will we know if we鈥檙e on track to make that vision a reality? Here, Kennedy left me yearning for more. But following her advice, I take comfort in savoring the social change embodied by my latest vegan obsession: a local Black-owned bakery called . After delighting in their dairy-free strawberry frosting, I believe anything is possible.

Dani McClain

Nicole Froio is a Colombian-Brazilian journalist, researcher, and translator based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She writes about liberation, feminism, and the intersection of race and gender, pop culture, work, tech, and digital cultures. Twitter:

Dejan Jotanovic is a freelance writer currently based in London who focuses on the intersections of feminist theory, gender and sexuality, policy, and pop culture. His bylines include The Guardian, HuffPost, Bitch Media, Archer Magazine, Assemble Papers, and more. Twitter:

Art Contributors

Natalie Pryor is 猫咪社区! Media鈥檚 art director. She is passionate about equality and racial justice, and has also worked at The Justice Collaborative, The Appeal, and Lambda Legal.

Aly McKnight is a self-taught artist and illustrator whose work features vibrant colors and Indigenous stories. She is an enrolled member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and grew up in a small farming community in northern Nevada. She spends her days painting, designing, growing with her daughter, and collaborating with the Indigenous creative community. Instagram:

Leonardo Carrato is a Brazilian photographer and co-founder of the Coletivo Carranca media collective. His artwork, including Article 6 and The Uprising, often focuses on social justice issues in Rio de Janeiro and Brazilian identity. He teaches, writes, and hosts a series of conversations on Brazilian photography for VII Insider. Instagram:

Nadia Radic is an artist based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Originally a photographer, she has transitioned to working in digital collage. She has exhibited internationally, including at the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand and with the Collage Collective in Paris. She also dabbles in illustrating for album artwork and book covers. Instagram:

I was an economics major in college. When I was taught that economies had to keep growing or face a spiraling collapse, I had questions. Under capitalism, economic success demands growth in production and consumption, but the laws of nature say that matter can鈥檛 be created or destroyed. This gap in logic nagged at me, but growth鈥檚 allure remained strong. I went on to get my MBA, and my first 鈥渞eal鈥� job with a dot-com startup in the mid 鈥�90s operated under that growth mindset鈥攚e wanted to go public, get acquired, cash out, and get rich. After we鈥檇 secured a round of venture capital, I remember the founders ordering a celebratory cake, with garish icing declaring our mantra, 鈥淕BF.鈥� Get Big Fast.

But the nagging thoughts persisted. Reading Beyond the Limits by Dennis and Donella Meadows and J酶rgen Randers confirmed my suspicion that economic growth only 鈥渨orks鈥� in the short term. Long-term, it鈥檚 simply not sustainable. This was the beginning of my search for economic models that made more sense, including localization, cradle to cradle, steady state, circular economies, biomimicry, and donut economics. Most of these models rely on the idea that healthy economies mimic healthy ecosystems鈥攍ots of diverse players performing only necessary functions, with no single player so big as to dominate the system. Any 鈥渨aste鈥� is actually an important input to another process in the larger system. In theory, these models are elegant and resilient, with each player bolstered by a dense pattern of symbiotic relationships. 

But I confess, the cultural narratives in the United States about the growth imperative run deep. I feel it even in stewarding the organization of 猫咪社区! Because our mission is essential and urgent, my instinct tells me we must grow鈥攅xpand our audience, our donors, our staff, expand our impact. But what if we didn鈥檛? What if, instead, we intentionally participated as part of an ecosystem of values-aligned media and movement networks, each individual organization playing a necessary function, working symbiotically with many others to transform our society? What if those connections were much more visible and purposeful? These are the questions we鈥檙e excited to explore as we reconsider what it means to grow鈥攂oth within and beyond 猫咪社区! 

In community, 
Christine

How did you discover 猫咪社区!?
While I lived in Oakland, California, I connected with some 猫咪社区! Magazine enthusiasts. I was part of a group that helped move the magazine to cover more activism and solutions. This shift energized all of us. So I have a long history of being mentored by 猫咪社区!, and I can鈥檛 imagine who could make better use of my ongoing support.

How does 猫咪社区! support your passions and values?
I鈥檝e had a lifetime of engaging creatively with music and diving deep into the aesthetic of mathematics. But now, my primary passion is for meditation. I also have a great affinity for strong friendships and community, as well as effective communication that allows people to create something beautiful even across major differences. I do act in this world with a more caring and inspiring touch partly inspired by being in the 猫咪社区! community. 

My deep commitment to a loving and problem-solving vision of humanity has consistently been supported and deepened by 猫咪社区! stories and commitment over the years. 猫咪社区! is dedicated to finding solutions, or at least avenues toward solutions, for the very difficult problems of humanity through a process that respectfully hears all voices and avoids polarization. This strengthens my own confidence about our future and provides me knowledge to share. Every now and then, some tough issue will come up, and I can say, 鈥�猫咪社区! Magazine had an article about how to deal with this!鈥�

Why is the work of 猫咪社区! important for future generations?
Future generations are not likely to be any less partial to hypercompetitiveness, severe inequality, and defensiveness than this one. I believe that 猫咪社区! has found the sweet spot of bringing deeply developed 鈥渟piritual鈥� qualities, like unconditional love, right into the movements that are poised to solve 鈥渨icked鈥� human problems. 猫咪社区! is willing to fight without withholding love and respect from anyone better than any person or organization I can name. By valuing service to others, we get the highest rewards possible in this moment while building momentum for a better world to come. More than any particular social issue, or quality of journalism or presentation, it is this quality that makes me want to continue supporting 猫咪社区!

What would you say to a friend who was considering supporting 猫咪社区!?
I would tell such a person unequivocally that 猫咪社区! is the most effective place for them to put their resources to help humanity move forward.

But, there are some surprising bright spots on Main Street. I heard about them at the annual Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) conference, where more than 600 high-energy people strategized about the transition to a more localized, Main Street economy. Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) told me of independent retailers that are thriving.

One surprising comeback, Mitchell says, is independent bookstores. Yes, even in the age of e-books and Amazon, independents are growing: For the last four years, their numbers and total sales have grown, despite the recession. In 2009 there were 1,651 independent bookstores in the United States. Today there are more than 1,900.

Bookstores aren鈥檛 the only retail sector where independents are expanding. Local coffee shops have grown faster than Starbucks. Bakers and specialty food stores are thriving. Independent pharmacies and pet, fabric, and stationery stores are growing too.

How do they compete with the giants? One factor is the 鈥渂uy local鈥� ethic so evident at the BALLE conference and promoted by other groups such as the American Independent Business Alliance. ILSR reports that 2012 sales at independent businesses in cities with 鈥渂uy local鈥� campaigns grew 8.6 percent while those that did not have such campaigns grew 3.4 percent.

Independents are also capitalizing on their ability to win loyalty by hosting events, such as author talks at bookstores. And bookstore owners have learned to feature high margin items such as notecards, toys, and chocolate.

The public is realizing that buying from local independent stores supports the community and keeps more dollars circulating locally. I watched my local fabric store鈥檚 sales force march in our town鈥檚 4th of July parade, showing the quilts they donate to injured vets. I was glad I had chosen to purchase my upholstery fabric at that store, even though I was tempted to shop at a big chain that had greater variety on display.

So, besides shopping at their stores, what can we do to help our local retailers? We can’t do much about the big boxes鈥� ability to get major discounts from suppliers and pummel the public with advertising. But we can protest when local governments give tax abatements and free land to the retail giants. Indiana, for example, gave Amazon $11听million to locate five warehouses in the state, according to Fortune magazine.

We can also press our local governments to collect taxes from online retailers. Fortune says that Amazon built its empire on the advantage of not having to collect sales tax in any state but Washington, where it is based. But states are exercising new clout. ILSR reports that new state laws and agreements require Amazon to collect sales tax in 10 states representing more than one-third of the U.S. population. In May, the U.S. Senate passed the Marketplace Fairness Act, requiring online retailers with sales of more than $1 million to collect taxes on all U.S. sales. The House, as of July, had only sent the bill to committee.

So don鈥檛 think Main Street is down for the count. As the 鈥渂uy local鈥� ethic continues to gain momentum, as stores get creative in using their local advantage, and as online sales lose their tax advantage, the lights may again shine bright on Main Street.

Al cabo de dos horas, Roberto Sebasti谩n, su hijo de 9 a帽os, regresaba con 210 pesos en mano. Rivas se alarm贸 al pensar que el ni帽o pudiera haber robado el dinero. Pero Roberto Sebasti谩n le explic贸 que hab铆a tomado la caja para lustrar calzado 鈥攗n regalo de su abuelo鈥� y hab铆a ido de casa en casa ofreciendo a los vecinos sacarle brillo a sus zapatos, a 10 pesos el par.

鈥淰ienen varias vecinas y me dicen: 鈥極ye, qu茅 bien bolea los zapatos, Sebasti谩n鈥欌€�, cuenta Rivas antes de quebrarse en llanto. Entonces, 鈥渃omo que me cae un balde de agua fr铆a鈥�, dice. 鈥溌縌u茅 estoy haciendo?鈥�, se pregunt贸 a s铆 misma. 鈥淥 sea, si mi hijo puede, yo tambi茅n puedo鈥�, pens贸.

Roberto Maciel Ram铆rez, su esposo, desapareci贸 sin dejar rastro el 23 de mayo de 2010 en el municipio de Santiago, cerca de Monterrey. Lo 煤nico que Rivas supo fue que un grupo de hombres armados, vestidos como soldados, hab铆an irrumpido en una casa 鈥揺n el campo鈥� donde la madre de Maciel celebraba su cumplea帽os. Los uniformados se hab铆an llevado a Maciel y a tres de sus amigos. Rivas, quien hab铆a planeado llegar m谩s tarde a la celebraci贸n con los ni帽os, se paraliz贸 de terror. La familia de Maciel le dijo a Rivas que esperara a que pidieran un rescate por 茅l. A los cinco d铆as se enter贸 que su suegro ya hab铆a pagado una cifra solicitada, pero Maciel no aparec铆a.

Entonces ella decidi贸 comenzar a buscarlo por su propia cuenta. Sus pesquisas iniciales la llevaron ante el l铆der local de un cartel y al comandante de la polic铆a de la municipalidad. Ambos negaron tener participaci贸n alguna en el secuestro. Para hacer la situaci贸n m谩s dif铆cil, en las siguientes semanas, la familia de su esposo se volvi贸 distante. Rivas estaba devastada.

鈥淒esafortunadamente, en ese momento no me ca铆a el 20鈥�, dice Rivas para explicar lo desorientada que estaba en ese momento. 鈥淓l haberme quedado con tres hijos, sin un trabajo y sin nada; no sab铆a qu茅 hacer鈥�.

Sin embargo, al ver a su hijo lustrando zapatos para poder comprar cuadernos y otros 煤tiles escolares, Rivas se enfoc贸 en generar ingresos para alimentar a sus ni帽os. Les dijo que ella no sab铆a si su padre regresar铆a alg煤n d铆a, y que ten铆an que hacer lo que pudieran para sobrevivir. Ella comenz贸 a vender televisores, videojuegos y distintos electrodom茅sticos. Ella y los peque帽os se movieron a una misma habitaci贸n para ahorrar energ铆a. Los fines de semana, vend铆a ropa de segunda mano en los mercados, con los ni帽os a su lado. As铆 hizo por a帽os sin apoyo alguno, ni del gobierno, ni de familiares. Rivas cuenta que su hermana le dej贸 de hablar por miedo a que raptaran a alguien de la familia de ella.

Rivas experiment贸 de primera mano el estigma y la culpa que com煤nmente recae no solo en la persona desaparecida, sino tambi茅n en los miembros de su familia. En 2010 no se hablaba mucho en p煤blico acerca de las desapariciones forzadas. No hab铆a ni siquiera la suficiente informaci贸n disponible para saber c贸mo proceder en esos casos. No fue hasta el 2017, cuando sus suegros enfermaron y le pidieron ayuda de nuevo para encontrar a Roberto, que Rivas inici贸 una b煤squeda m谩s activa para saber del paradero de su esposo. Se uni贸 a un colectivo de familias y as铆 aprender c贸mo ejercer presi贸n sobre las autoridades para que investigaran, y para entender cu谩les eran los derechos de los ni帽os como v铆ctimas.

En la uni贸n, la fortaleza

Tras la desaparici贸n de un ser querido, ante la inacci贸n de las autoridades y los retrasos en las investigaciones, muchas familias en M茅xico inician b煤squedas con sus propios medios. Recaban informaci贸n, guardan evidencias, hablan con testigos. Realizan inspecciones f铆sicas de sitios pertinentes, incluyendo de fosas clandestinas. Pero las b煤squedas pueden extenderse por a帽os 鈥攕in tener la garant铆a de que obtendr谩n los resultados deseados. 

Casos como el de Rivas son considerados antiguos, de larga data. Son casos complicados porque las autoridades locales fallan en hacer los peritajes criminal铆sticos correspondientes en el momento que desaparecen las personas. Aunque el trabajo de las familias y las organizaciones de derechos humanos durante la 煤ltima d茅cada de las desapariciones masivas en M茅xico, las familias han denunciado repetidamente y de las agencias gubernamentales. Se quejan igualmente del y de , tanto estatales como federales, para buscar a las v铆ctimas. Solo en el estado de Nuevo Le贸n, entre diciembre de 2006 y marzo de 2023. En todo M茅xico, la lista oficial de desaparecidos registra los nombres de casi , seg煤n datos de la Comisi贸n Nacional de B煤squeda del pa铆s. 

El Comit茅 contra la Desaparici贸n Forzada, ente de las Naciones Unidas, le recomend贸 al gobierno de M茅xico adoptar medidas para 鈥渇acilitar la b煤squeda, investigaci贸n, reparaci贸n y memoria relacionados con los casos de larga data鈥� en su . El Comit茅 consider贸 un avance que M茅xico hubiera establecido la Comisi贸n para el acceso a la Verdad, el Esclarecimiento Hist贸rico y el Impulso a la Justicia de las Violaciones Graves a los Derechos Humanos cometidas entre los a帽os 1965-1990, pero se帽al贸 que era lamentable 鈥渜ue no existan otros mecanismos para casos de larga data ocurridos despu茅s de 1990鈥�.

As铆 las cosas, la carga de la investigaci贸n de las desapariciones la han llevado a hombros las familias, especialmente las madres y esposas, quienes sufren , todo mientras luchan con las repercusiones emocionales y econ贸micas de perder a un ser querido en esas circunstancias. Los parientes de los desaparecidos para apoyarse en sus b煤squedas, pero como en toda asociaci贸n, los conflictos internos pueden ser dif铆ciles de superar. As铆 sucedi贸 con Rivas, cuya insatisfacci贸n con el manejo de su agrupaci贸n la empuj贸 a ella y a otras mujeres a crear su propia asociaci贸n en octubre de 2022.

鈥嬧€嬧€淵o lo que quiero es tener noticias de mi esposo y saber la verdad 鈥攕i est谩 vivo, si est谩 muerto, saber qu茅 pas贸. Es lo que yo quiero y ah铆 no iba a obtener nada. Entonces me fui鈥�, explica. Rivas titube贸 antes de formar una asociaci贸n, ya que tendr铆a que inscribirse legalmente para poder recibir fondos, pero cree que hacerlo es una de las 煤nicas maneras de presionar al gobierno. Familiares de los desaparecidos han encontrado fortaleza en la uni贸n. Los colectivos han hecho cabildeo con funcionarios y agencias de gobierno para que se aceleren las investigaciones; para localizar cementerios clandestinos y la exhumaci贸n de cad谩veres; y han seguido creando conciencia sobre la magnitud de las desapariciones. 

Graciela P茅rez ha experimentado personalmente la enormidad del impacto. Cinco de sus familiares desaparecieron una noche de agosto de 2012: su hija de 13 a帽os Milynali Pi帽a P茅rez; su hermano Ignacio P茅rez; y sus sobrinos Aldo de Jes煤s P茅rez, de 20, Alexis Dom铆nguez, de 16 a帽os y Jos茅 Arturo Dom铆nguez, de 20 鈥攅l primero era hijo de Ignacio y los dos 煤ltimos de su hermana. Todos retornaban a casa de un corto viaje a los Estados Unidos, pero nunca llegaron a Tamu铆n, San Luis Potos铆, donde viv铆an. La 煤ltima vez que llamaron a P茅rez, estar铆an a dos horas de distancia, cerca de Ciudad Mante, en el estado de Tamaulipas. 

En un inicio, P茅rez y su familia ten铆an esperanza en las autoridades. Tras reportar la desaparici贸n en la polic铆a, la familia recibi贸 una llamada de alguien exigiendo un rescate. Cuando su hermana Edith P茅rez solicit贸 una prueba de vida, los supuestos secuestradores dieron detalles que no encajaban; las hermanas se dieron cuenta que se trataba de un intento de extorsi贸n. Al noveno d铆a, desesperada por no recibir noticias por parte de las autoridades, P茅rez le rog贸 a su familia que le permitieran salir a buscar a los j贸venes ella misma. A pesar de la preocupaci贸n por el peligro de que se trasladara sola a Tamaulipas, la familia eventualmente estuvo de acuerdo. Entend铆an que P茅rez no ten铆a nada m谩s que perder, si no ten铆a a su 煤nica hija. 

P茅rez pidi贸 una reuni贸n con un fiscal del estado. Ella dice que en ese encuentro, un oficial que supuestamente estaba buscando a su familia le aconsej贸 que mejor le pidiera ayuda a los militares, aduciendo que era una situaci贸n muy peligrosa para que la investigara la polic铆a estatal. 

鈥淪al铆 de ah铆 desecha鈥�, relata P茅rez. 鈥淎h铆 fue cuando me di cuenta que las autoridades no iban a hacer absolutamente nada鈥�.

Por medio de las redes sociales, P茅rez encontr贸 a personas que le dijeron qu茅 rutas tomar para seguir su investigaci贸n. Le compartieron sus propios casos, con la esperanza de que P茅rez pudiera en el proceso encontrar informaci贸n sobre sus seres queridos. En lo que transitaba por caminos desolados, encontr贸 veh铆culos saqueados y los escombros de autos que hab铆an sido incendiados. En las siguientes semanas m谩s familias se unieron a su traves铆a. El grupo comenz贸 a localizar cementerios clandestinos y sitios espeluznantes en los que P茅rez deseaba que no hubieran estado sus parientes. 鈥淣o pod铆a imaginar que mi hija, mis chicos o mi hermanos hubieran permanecido en lugares as铆鈥�.

A Milynali le encantaba ver telenovelas. P茅rez las miraba con ella, a pesar de no disfrutarlas mucho. A la ni帽a le gustaba pintar con acuarelas, por lo que estaba entusiasmada de comenzar a probar con pinturas de aceite justo antes de su desaparici贸n. So帽aba con ser pediatra y tambi茅n con trabajar los fines de semana en el restaurante que ella y su madre deseaban abrir un d铆a. Milynali ser铆a la chef y su mam谩 se encargar铆a de la caja y de los clientes. 

鈥淓lla era muy visionaria, muy independiente. Ella era muy segura de s铆 misma鈥�, dice P茅rez con orgullo. 鈥淓s mi hija鈥�. 

En el transcurso de su b煤squeda, P茅rez entabl贸 conexiones con militares y con autoridades de justicia, por medio de quienes obtuvo informaci贸n extraoficial sobre arrestos y la incautaci贸n de casas que serv铆an de escondite para criminales. Obtuvo coordenadas, localiz贸 sitios de exterminio, recogi贸 evidencia de las posibles desapariciones de otras personas. 
Edith, su hermana, cuyos hijos desaparecieron con Milynali, se hab铆a unido a la b煤squeda. Tres meses despu茅s de que los j贸venes desaparecieran, Edith P茅rez confront贸 p煤blicamente al entonces presidente Felipe Calder贸n durante una visita que hiciera el mandatario a San Luis Potos铆. Se arm贸 de valor para denunciar la negligencia del gobierno con las familias de los desaparecidos. El enfrentamiento hizo que el problema capturara la atenci贸n p煤blica; y fue motivo de .

La atenci贸n de los medios junto con los v铆nculos que formaron los familiares con las autoridades hicieron que eventualmente Graciela P茅rez estableciera una asociaci贸n formal para reforzar la b煤squeda por los miembros de su familia, as铆 como por otros desaparecidos. 鈥溾€� se constituy贸 oficialmente el 24 de mayo de 2017. Hoy en d铆a, m谩s de 300 familias de personas desaparecidas integran la asociaci贸n. Es uno de los colectivos que por m谩s tiempo ha operado en el pa铆s. 

Y aunque P茅rez ha servido a otros de coraz贸n, ha tenido que bregar con el desgaste caracter铆stico de una misi贸n tan grande. 鈥淢e fui dando cuenta que no s贸lo estaba buscando a los m铆os鈥�, dice. 鈥淟o peor que me ha pasado es que llega un momento en el que hasta me olvido de los m铆os. Gestiono varias cosas y me doy cuenta al final que no ped铆 lo mismo para los m铆os鈥�.

Un grano de arena y otro de esperanza

El d茅cimo aniversario de la desaparici贸n de su familia ha sido un momento trascendental y agotador para P茅rez. Ella cuenta que las innumerables expediciones de b煤squeda y las largas horas bajo los penetrantes rayos de sol han resultado en fatiga, alergias y otros padecimientos. 鈥淣o s茅 cu谩nto vaya a durar. No quiero pensar en el futuro. Solamente vivo un d铆a a la vez鈥�, se sincera. 

鈥淎l final de cuentas, nosotros solo estamos dejando un granito de arena鈥�, afirma P茅rez y a帽ade que 鈥渓o mejor que podemos hacer es documentar las mejores pr谩cticas y dej谩rselas鈥� a otros. Aunque aclara que 鈥渘o desear铆a darle nada a nadie, porque nadie quiere estar en esta b煤squeda tan horrible鈥�.

Adem谩s de compartir sus hallazgos, los colectivos tambi茅n tienen como objetivo brindar otro tipo de apoyo, dados los da帽os sicol贸gicos, f铆sicos y econ贸micos que ocasionan estos golpes al n煤cleo familiar, cuyos miembros bregan con el dolor irresuelto de la desaparici贸n y la lucha sin fin que sigue. Rivas ha visto a sus 肠辞尘辫补帽别谤补蝉 sufrir de depresi贸n, padecimientos card铆acos, y c谩ncer. 

鈥淭ambi茅n un colectivo es ver que tu gente est茅 bien, tanto en la moral como en lo econ贸mico鈥�, dice Rivas por su parte. El des谩nimo siempre est谩 cerca porque darle seguimiento a cada caso con las autoridades se dificulta cuando los parientes rara vez reciben nuevas pistas. A煤n as铆, m谩s familias con casos similares se siguen incorporando al grupo.

鈥淪on sentimientos encontrados鈥�, explica Rivas. 鈥淧or una parte, te sientes contenta de poder ayudar y poder aportar un granito de arena a las familias recientes. Y por otra, sientes tristeza porque en tu caso, como no hubo qui茅n te orientara, se perdieron muchas pruebas鈥�.

Rivas contin煤a buscando a su esposo, solo que ahora tambi茅n coordina las b煤squedas de docenas de desaparecidos m谩s en Nuevo Le贸n, a la par de m谩s de 44 familias. El colectivo est谩 en proceso de convertirse en una asociaci贸n civil. Una de las 肠辞尘辫补帽别谤补蝉 de Rivas sugiri贸 que la llamaran 鈥淩enacer鈥�.

鈥淓lla fue la que dijo: Es que a m铆 me gusta el nombre Renacer鈥�, detalla Rivas. Cuando le pregunt贸 las razones, Rivas recuerda que su compa帽era le dijo: 鈥淧ues es que es como que volvemos a nacer despu茅s de todo lo que hemos vivido. Como que est谩bamos muertas y ahorita volvemos a vivir鈥�.

Before then, I鈥檇 never considered how much I drink in a given day, or whether I drink more when perspiring in summer than I do when snuggling under covers in winter. But suddenly, I had to measure every ounce going into my body so I wouldn鈥檛 exceed the 68-ounce limit鈥攐nly drinking when I was truly thirsty, rather than absentmindedly sipping water from the glass on my end table while I read or watched television at night. There鈥檚 something about having to pay closer attention to your body鈥檚 needs that makes you appreciate the importance of your body鈥檚 signals. 

Ultimately, that鈥檚 what thirst is: Your body alerting you to a need. If you choose to ignore that alert, there are consequences鈥攄ehydration, disconnection, and disorientation. The global COVID-19 pandemic has served as an alert, a reminder that we need each other, along with organized activism, to overhaul the systems that aren鈥檛 meeting our needs. Whether it鈥檚 halting student loan repayments or putting a moratorium on evictions, we now know that our world can look different, so how can we achieve the equitable world we desire?

Our 鈥淭hirst鈥� issue spotlights that fundamental truth: We all have needs. That鈥檚 a baseline characteristic of being human. And yet, we live in a world that shames people, especially those from marginalized communities, for vocalizing their needs and doing whatever鈥檚 necessary to meet them. We鈥檙e destigmatizing that shame in this issue, whether it鈥檚 going into Jackson, Mississippi; Flint, Michigan; and the Navajo Nation to understand the connected crises that rob these communities of access to fresh water or following families in Mexico whose loved ones have disappeared without a trace or explanation.

We鈥檙e also exploring what a world where our needs are met could look like. In that world, formerly incarcerated people would be treated with care and respect, and given the resources they need to survive. We鈥檇 have a world without police, one that still prioritizes our individual and collective safety. And, beautifully, we鈥檇 have the unfettered time to gather at watering holes of all kinds where we can continue to envision this new world and organize around the issues that matter to us. Can you see this world? I can. And I hope that after you read about this world, you鈥檒l be ready to embrace your own thirst for building one that will serve us all better.

Be well,
Evette Dionne
猫咪社区! Executive Editor

I was sure that a coffee shop in my hometown would change my life. I would have more friends, more zines to read, more bands to listen to, and other cool things to get into. The coffee itself was a secondary, even tertiary, aspect of this desire. A coffee shop represented the possibility of being cool and the potential to be part of a community, separate from school pressures and family obligations.

To grow up wanting to be a writer, like I did, often meant having a romantic idea of caf茅 and bar culture. I imagined my adult life taking place in or could be found late into the night. Whenever I鈥檝e traveled, watering holes have been the site of my fantasies: Would this be my coffee shop if I moved to Buenos Aires? Will I run into Pedro Almod贸var at this Madrid sherry bar?

As I grew older and made homes in towns and cities that have thriving caf茅 and bar cultures, their significance to my social life only grew. Spaces to relax, make connections, and have spontaneous interactions are key to survival. They are , and since the last economic recession, their . These days, I live in Old San Juan, a picturesque Spanish colonial district in Puerto Rico. There鈥檚 no shortage of caf茅s near me, and there鈥檚 a bar on nearly every one of its . When I walk into any of them, I expect to see a friendly face. 

It might be the bartender who knows my Friday afternoon drink by heart, or a neighbor to whom I wave every day, though I don鈥檛 yet know their name. Will this be the day we get to know each other? It鈥檚 always possible. I鈥檒l hear the local news there, like who bought which building or who鈥檚 in the hospital; my dog will be given treats and water, whether he鈥檚 offered up his paw or not. The hospitality feels natural, so long as it鈥檚 early enough in the day that the tourists and partiers haven鈥檛 gotten the run of the show. That鈥檚 when it鈥檚 time to head home, or to the wine bar, where the atmosphere is a bit more mellow. Sitting on a stool makes me feel like I鈥檓 part of the neighborhood, like I鈥檓 safe even if I鈥檓 not deeply known. A bar without a friendly face is just a place of transaction, but it always has the potential to be something more: a place for recognition and relaxation, spontaneity and possible connection. That鈥檚 what makes a bar special; that鈥檚 what keeps you coming back.

Today, in Old San Juan鈥攁苍 Old San Juan much changed since its own bohemian heyday鈥擨鈥檓 the flaneur of my childhood dreams: walking, waving, popping in for a drink, getting on my way鈥� Mornings at the caf茅 are spent in a neighbor鈥檚 company; afternoons and evenings bring the friendly faces of local bars. This is the culture of camaraderie I鈥檇 long sought, one that feeds me as a person and a writer. 

Having grown up in the suburbs of Long Island and spent much of my younger years in an increasingly and , I know that this culture has to be cultivated and protected. At a time when communities need them the most, watering holes are threatened by everything from pandemics to high housing costs causing displacement. People tend to meet around beverages鈥攃offee in the afternoon, beer during happy hour鈥攖o release tensions, discuss their lives, and solve problems.

Both Historic and Futuristic

What is it about a cup rather than a plate that allows for such a comfortable place to conspire? The natural time limit imposed by the end of the glass or bottle inspires urgency, but it鈥檚 also easy to have another if the conversation hasn鈥檛 finished. We relax over beverages while on vacation, when we need a place to rest our weary feet and replenish, perhaps asking the bartender for a recommendation for our next meal. A place that is casual, quenches thirst, and meets social needs: This is the watering hole.

In the popular imagination, 鈥渨atering hole鈥� is another name for a bar, yet it has a specific definition as ; it鈥檚 a geological formation, a sunken piece of land that becomes filled with water to sustain the life around it. , and we are sustained by community. That we鈥檝e used this term informally to mean a tavern or bar鈥攕omewhere to drink alcohol鈥攕uggests that these spaces do more for us than act as places to go grab a beer during happy hour. 

These are what philosopher J眉rgen Habermas called the 鈥�,鈥� or places of social life where 鈥渟omething approaching public opinion can be formed鈥� and access is open to all. Under these circumstances, Habermas said, people act neither as business folk or professionals, nor as a voting body, but as something less constricted. The public sphere is akin to what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called a 鈥渢hird place鈥� in his 1989 book, The Great Good Place鈥攕omewhere that isn鈥檛 work or home but is accessible to and necessary for a healthy society.

British pubs have historically been places of political meaning. Dr. Vicki Hsueh, a professor of political science, wrote in the 2016 study 鈥溾€� that 鈥渞einserting emotion and intoxication into the emergence of the public sphere helps to flesh out the history of feeling and social ritual in civic engagement.鈥� Coffee shops serve a similar purpose: Researcher Narciss M. Sohrabi, in a 2015 case study based in Tehran, Iran, , 鈥淲hile these coffee shops do not provide sites where the public tends to organize and form political opinions, young people nevertheless use them for 鈥榚veryday forms of resistance鈥欌€濃€攑laces to mix, mingle, and discuss culturally taboo subjects.

Over time, as , and they are gaining steam in significance throughout the U.S.: I鈥檝e picked up weekly fruit and vegetable boxes for community-supported agriculture at bars, where I鈥檝e then sat at a stool for a pint. Since 2009, Chicago bar the Hideout has hosted an event called 鈥溾€� where pots of soup and loaves of bread can be enjoyed for free or with an optional donation. Playground Coffee in Brooklyn, New York鈥檚 Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood offers , as well as events around literacy and food equity; and were of great use during the COVID-19 pandemic. While in much U.S. media, they are now reopening in and and offering thoughtful .

Broadening the understanding of the watering hole to include all kinds of thirst-quenching drinks is a significant aspect of bridging gaps in which watering holes can serve as public spaces. Beers, spirits, and wines have their place, but there鈥檚 more awareness in this day and age of 鈥攁苍d are bearing out similar data, with hundreds of millions in sales in the U.S. in recent years, and in the category of nonalcoholic spirits and wine. Coffee and tea have their significant cultural spaces, yet later into the evening, options have been lacking for those who prefer not to drink alcohol. Now, are a trend, and high-end cocktail bars and restaurants put mocktails or alcohol-free wines and beers on the menu.

These bars鈥攁苍d the 鈥攐ffer a chance to help redefine watering holes as inclusive spaces for everyday engagement. They鈥檙e already performing that duty. How can they do it better, for more people, amid crises such as a global pandemics? How can cities be built in ways that help these spaces flourish as both businesses and neighborhood hubs?

Public Sphere for Public Health

Walkable, bikeable, and more accessible infrastructure certainly aids in creating this kind of thriving community culture with watering holes as centerpieces. Cities over car traffic see their downtowns filled with more people more of the time, and this leads to the success of small businesses like caf茅s and bars. Adjusting zoning laws to allow for would mean that folks can live, work, shop, and socialize in the same area, without need for a car. This is rare to find in the U.S. outside of major urban areas, yet it is increasingly important; surveys have shown that around on a regular basis, which is considered a . Changes to infrastructure on a large scale that enable folks to have more daily, casual contact would go a long way toward combating loneliness.

A focus on the individual, car-centric transport, and have perhaps served only to make bars and caf茅s seem insignificant on a community scale in the United States鈥攂ut this is an anomaly globally speaking, and crises have served to undermine this uniquely American notion that watering-hole culture is frivolous. Replace 鈥渕eal鈥� with 鈥渄rink鈥� in Michael Symons鈥� 1994 piece on the sociology of the meal and we understand the significance of this urge: 鈥淧ersons who share no particular interests can find themselves sharing a meal鈥攊n this possibility together with the primitiveness and thus pervasiveness of the material interest lies the immense sociological significance of the meal.鈥� This significance cannot be undermined for long: It鈥檚 a human impulse to gather around the necessary acts of eating and drinking. They鈥檙e necessary to happiness, to thriving neighborhoods, and to survival during a crisis. 

In the 25 years since I longed to find my people in coffee shops, I鈥檝e had the chance to make community, become a regular, and imagine new lives for myself. It鈥檚 in the watering hole, the third place, where I鈥檝e been able to do these things鈥攖he din of a caf茅 or bar has been the background noise to so much of my writing, just as I envisioned it as a kid. And when the work is done, there鈥檚 always someone there to talk to. 

Spicy Hibiscus Simple Syrup
Makes about 1 录 cups simple syrup

陆 cup dried hibiscus flowers
1 dried chili of choice
1 cup cane sugar
1 cup water

1. Place all ingredients in a small saucepan over medium heat, swirling with a rubber spatula, and bring to a boil.
2. Lower the heat at the boiling point and let simmer until all the sugar has dissolved. Let simmer a few minutes more to bring out the hibiscus color, taking off the heat when a deep red has emerged.
3. Strain into an airtight container and let cool before covering or using, then store in the refrigerator for up to a month.

Spicy Hibiscus Margarita
Makes 1 margarita

2 ounces tequila or mezcal
1 ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice (save rind)
1 ounce spicy hibiscus syrup
Coarse salt for garnish (optional)
Dried hibiscus for garnish (optional)

1. Place all ingredients in a shaker filled with ice.
2. Rub the lemon rind around the rim of a rocks glass and dip the rim into the coarse salt. Fill the glass with ice.
3. Shake the tin until all ingredients have been well incorporated and the tin is icy cold.
4. Using a strainer, pour into the prepared rocks glass and garnish with dried hibiscus.

Nonalcoholic Hibiscus Spritz
Makes 1 spritz

1 ounce lemon juice
1 ounce spicy hibiscus simple syrup
Seltzer
Dried hibiscus for garnish (optional)

1. Place lemon juice and simple syrup in a wine glass and stir.
2. Fill the wine glass with ice, then top with seltzer to the rim.
3. Garnish with dried hibiscus.

But 鈥渇ar less than even some of the lowest-paid workers in the U.S. labor force,鈥� according to the Economic Policy Institute. And the overwhelming , while more than 40% are undocumented. Another working in crops comes to the U.S. as part of the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program, a guest worker program overseen by the U.S. Department of Labor that allows American employers to temporarily hire migrant workers to perform agricultural work. Employers can request workers from 86 eligible countries, .

The World Bank has described agricultural development as 鈥�.鈥� that sustainable agricultural operations can help preserve and restore habitats, protect watersheds, and improve soil health and water quality. Experts suggest that expanding urban agriculture can even and .

If agricultural development is, indeed, , then realizing that world requires listening to and caring for the human beings whose labor facilitates that development. It also demands we reckon with how an industry built on exploitation can pave the road to justice. 

While working on a long-term investigation about wage theft and abuse in the H-2A program, I heard stories from farmworkers about their friends, colleagues, and family members who were worked to death or trafficked as part of the H-2A program, or raped in the fields by an employer. Stories about injustices have become normalized in the industry, including those about dangerous housing conditions at labor camps and systemic wage theft. According to the , agriculture is the top low-wage, high-violation industry in the nation. 

Sometimes stories of horrific abuse break through to the public. In 2021, the nation was shocked to learn details of 鈥淥peration Blooming Onion.鈥� Trafficked migrant workers were ensnared in what 鈥渕odern-day slavery鈥� on southern Georgia farms, where victims were forced to dig for onions with their bare hands . As appalling as the details were, crimes of labor trafficking, extreme wage theft, and passport confiscation all frequently occur as part of the agricultural guest worker program. 

Decades of data from government agencies, advocacy organizations, and academic institutions back up these stories from the field. Farmworkers suffer extreme health disparities due to the brutal, repetitive, fast-paced outdoor work they perform in extreme temperatures under harsh conditions that include pesticide exposure and high risk of heatstroke.

When I first started my investigation in fall 2021, well-meaning colleagues offered unsolicited advice about how difficult it would be to find farmworkers willing to go on the record. I was repeatedly told that farmworker communities are notoriously hard to build trust in. 鈥淭hey won鈥檛 speak to media,鈥� one editor warned me. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e afraid of journalists,鈥� a reporter friend said. I came to parrot these lines myself鈥攁苍d admittedly, the first several months of reporting were hard. I had particular trouble finding H-2A workers to speak to, but I soon learned it鈥檚 not because migrant farmworkers are unwilling to make their voices heard. These workers are hard to reach because of the nature of their work. Farmworkers are also fully aware of the consequences of speaking to a reporter鈥攅mployers of H-2A workers can covertly blacklist them from being able to legally work in the U.S. Retaliatory employers have threatened undocumented farmworkers with immigration enforcement for detailing wage theft and other abuses. More often than not, these workers choose to speak out anyway. 

Once I was tapped in, one worker led to another. I tuned in to a chorus of voices and an avalanche of stories. There was no way to ignore farmworkers鈥� decades-long fight to be heard. In recent years alone, they have and changed the face of labor organizing through efforts like the Milk With Dignity Program and the Fair Food Program. In Florida, that companies such as Publix, Wendy鈥檚, and Kroger provide farmworkers with better working conditions and wages. In California, to the state capital to urge the governor to sign a bill that would have made it easier for them to vote in unions. 

The appalling injustices farmworkers experience in the U.S. are not the result of a few bad apples in the agricultural industry. Their mistreatment is cemented into law by way of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which : a livable wage and overtime pay, while failing to mandate access to shade and water. These racist exclusions from basic labor protections have literally cost farmworkers their lives. But when their co-workers die in the fields from thirst and heat exposure, they protest. They strike. Farmworkers fight back. 

The most important public data we have about abuse in the agricultural industry exists because farmworkers risked it all to speak truth to power. The media鈥檚 portrayal of farmworkers as meek, scared, and hiding in the shadows flies in the face of what they have shown us: an unquenchable thirst for justice and a deep, abiding hunger for accountability鈥攖wo things that have been denied to them for far too long. 

Until we truly reckon with the almighty agricultural industry that abuses our farmworkers with impunity, there can be no future where agriculture miraculously saves us from the damage already wrought on our agrifood systems. Without significant steps to ensure dignity and safety for the workers who nourish us鈥攈undreds of thousands of whom come to the U.S. each year as part of a federal program that functions as a form of indentured servitude鈥攚e are doomed to continue perpetuating these cycles of harm. 

A few hours later, her 9-year-old son, Roberto Sebasti谩n, returned with 210 pesos. At first, Rivas was concerned he鈥檇 stolen the money. But Sebasti谩n explained that he had taken the shoeshine box his grandfather had given him, and gone door to door among his neighbors in Ju谩rez, Nuevo Le贸n, offering to shine their shoes for 10 pesos a pair.

鈥淪everal neighbors came and told me: 鈥楬ey, Sebasti谩n shines the shoes very well,鈥欌€� Rivas says in Spanish, before bursting into tears. 鈥淭hen, it hit me like a bucket of cold water. I said, 鈥榃hat am I doing? If my son can [find a way to support the family], I can too.鈥欌€�

Rivas鈥� husband, Roberto Maciel Ram铆rez, disappeared without a trace on May 23, 2010, in the municipality of Santiago, near Monterrey. All Rivas knew was that a group of armed men, dressed as soldiers, had broken into a country house where Maciel鈥檚 mother was celebrating her birthday, taking Maciel and three of his friends. Rivas鈥攚ho had planned to arrive later at the celebration with her children鈥攚as transfixed. Maciel鈥檚 family told her to wait for a ransom to be requested. But five days later, Rivas found out that her father-in-law had paid a ransom, yet Maciel had not returned. So she decided to conduct her own search. 

Her initial investigation led her to a local cartel leader and a municipal police commander, but both denied any involvement in the abduction. In the following weeks, her husband鈥檚 family became increasingly distant. Rivas was devastated. 鈥淯nfortunately, I didn鈥檛 understand the situation at the time,鈥� Rivas says. 鈥淗aving been left with three children, without a job and with nothing, I didn鈥檛 know what to do.鈥�

After seeing her son shine shoes to pay for school supplies, Rivas focused on getting money to feed her children. She told them she didn鈥檛 know whether their father would ever return and that they had to do what they could to get by. She sold televisions, video games, and household appliances. Everyone moved into the same room to save on energy costs. On weekends, she sold secondhand clothing in the markets, with her children in tow. For years, she did this with no support from the government or family. Rivas says her sister refused to speak to her for fear of having her own family members disappeared.

Rivas experienced firsthand the stigmatization and blame that are commonly placed on not only the disappeared person, but also on their family members. In 2010, there was little public discussion about disappearances, and even less information available about what to do if someone disappeared. It wasn鈥檛 until 2017, when her in-laws became ill and again asked for her help finding their son, that Rivas began a more active search for her missing husband. She joined a collective of families to learn more about how to pressure authorities to investigate, and to understand the rights of her children as victims.

Strength in Numbers

After the disappearance of a loved one, many families in Mexico launch their own search efforts in the face of authorities鈥� inaction and investigative delays. They seek out information, gather evidence, talk to potential witnesses, and conduct physical searches, including of clandestine burial sites. But once it begins, the search can last for years鈥攁苍d does not guarantee answers.

Cases like Rivas鈥� are considered larga data (long-standing), and are complicated by the fact that local authorities frequently fail to conduct an appropriate or thorough investigation at the time of the disappearance. Although the work of families and human rights organizations over the past decade has of mass disappearances in Mexico, families have repeatedly denounced the slow and government agencies, the overburdening of , and the to support searches for the disappeared. In the state of Nuevo Le贸n alone, have disappeared between December 2006 and March 2023. Across Mexico, nearly  are officially listed as disappeared, according to the National Search Commission.

In its , the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED) recommended the Mexican government adopt measures to 鈥渇acilitate search, investigation, reparation and memory efforts related to long-standing case[s].鈥� The CED noted that Mexico had established the Commission for Access to the Truth, Historical Clarification, and the Promotion of Justice for Serious Human Rights Violations between 1965 and 1990. But the report also noted that it was 鈥渞egrettable that no other mechanisms exist for long-standing cases that occurred after 1990.鈥�

As such, the investigation of disappearances has largely been shouldered by families, particularly mothers and wives, who as they grapple with the emotional and economic repercussions of disappearances. Relatives of the disappeared have to support each other in this search, but internal conflicts can prove challenging. Such is the case with Rivas, who after five years in a collective became dissatisfied with its management, prompting her and other women she met to create their own association in October 2022.

鈥淲hat I want is to have news of my husband and know the truth; if he is alive, if he is dead, [to] know what happened,鈥� says Rivas. 鈥淭hat is what I want and there [at the collective] I was not going to get anything. So I left.鈥� Rivas was hesitant to form an association as it would need to be legally registered in order to receive funds, but she believes doing so is one of the only ways to exert pressure on the government. Families of the missing have found strength in numbers; and government agencies to expedite investigations, spearheaded efforts to locate and exhume mass graves, and continued to raise awareness about the magnitude of disappearances. 

Graciela P茅rez has personal experience with that magnitude. Five of her family members disappeared one night in August 2012. P茅rez鈥檚 13-year-old daughter, Milynali Pi帽a P茅rez; her brother Ignacio P茅rez; and her three nephews鈥擜lexis Dom铆nguez (age 16), Jos茅 Arturo Dom铆nguez, and Aldo de Jes煤s P茅rez (both age 20)鈥攄idn鈥檛 return home to Tamu铆n, San Luis Potos铆, after a short trip to the United States. The last time they called P茅rez, they were two hours away, near Ciudad Mante, Tamaulipas.

At first, P茅rez and her family had hope in the authorities. But after filing a missing-persons report with state police, P茅rez鈥檚 family received a call demanding a ransom. When her sister Edith P茅rez asked for proof of life, the callers gave details that didn鈥檛 match their family members鈥�, and the sisters realized it was an extortion attempt. On the ninth day, desperate for news from the authorities, P茅rez begged her family to let her go out and search. Despite concerns about the danger of P茅rez traveling alone to Tamaulipas, her family eventually agreed, recognizing that P茅rez had nothing left to lose after her only daughter disappeared.

P茅rez began by demanding a meeting with the state prosecutor in Tamaulipas. At the meeting, she says an officer who was supposed to be searching for her family advised her to seek help from the military instead, claiming the situation was too dangerous for the state police to investigate.

鈥淚 left there in pieces,鈥� P茅rez says in Spanish. 鈥淎nd that鈥檚 when I realized that the authorities were not going to do anything.鈥� Through social media, P茅rez found people who gave her information on which routes to take during her search, and even shared their own cases in hopes that P茅rez might find information about their loved ones. As she traveled desolate roads, she found looted cars and the charred remains of vehicles set ablaze. In the following weeks, more families joined her journey; the group began to locate clandestine graves and places P茅rez hoped her family had not been. 鈥淚 couldn鈥檛 think that my daughter, my boys, my brother had to be in a place like that, right?鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Milynali loved to watch telenovelas, which P茅rez would watch with her, even if she didn鈥檛 enjoy them. An avid watercolor painter, Milynali was excited to start exploring oil painting just before she disappeared. She dreamed of becoming a pediatrician, and working on the weekends in the restaurant she and her mother hoped to open. Milynali would be the chef; P茅rez would handle the customers and the register. 

鈥淪he was very visionary, very independent. She was very self-assured,鈥� P茅rez says proudly. 鈥淪he is my daughter.鈥� As her search continued, P茅rez built connections with military and law enforcement officials, gaining off-the-record information about arrests and seized safe houses. She managed to obtain coordinates, locate extermination sites, and gather evidence of other possible cases of disappearances. Her sister Edith, whose sons disappeared with P茅rez鈥檚 daughter, also joined the search. Three months after her sons disappeared, Edith P茅rez publicly confronted then-president Felipe Calder贸n during a visit to San Luis Potos铆, denouncing the government鈥檚 neglect of families of the disappeared. Her confrontation drew attention to the issue, and .

The media attention, combined with the connections to family members and law enforcement officials, eventually prompted Graciela P茅rez to create a formal association to bolster search efforts for her family members and other disappeared people. (the Milynali Network) became a formal association on May 24, 2017, and currently comprises more than 300 families of the disappeared; it鈥檚 one of the longest-running collectives in the country.

鈥淚 realized that I wasn鈥檛 just looking for mine,鈥� says P茅rez. 鈥淭he worst thing that has happened to me is that there comes a time when I forget about my loved ones. I manage things [for other families], and in the end I realize that I didn鈥檛 ask anything for mine.鈥�

A Grain of Sand, a Grain of Hope

The 10-year anniversary of her family鈥檚 disappearance has been a defining鈥攁苍d draining鈥攎oment for P茅rez. The countless field searches and long hours spent under the burning sun have resulted in fatigue, new allergies, and other ailments, she says. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 know how much longer this will last,鈥� says P茅rez. 鈥淚鈥檓 trying not to think about the future. I just live one day at a time.鈥�

鈥淚n the end, we are just leaving a grain of sand. The best we can do is document the best practices and pass them on,鈥� adds P茅rez. 鈥淚 wouldn鈥檛 wish to pass anything on to anyone because no one wants to be in this horrible search.鈥�

In addition to sharing best practices, family collectives also aim to provide support for the psychological, physical, and financial toll wrought by the ongoing struggle and unresolved grief of those with disappeared loved ones. Rivas has seen her 肠辞尘辫补帽别谤补蝉 suffer from depression, heart issues, and cancer. 鈥淎 collective is also to see that your people are OK, in morale and economically,鈥� says Rivas. Keeping track of each collective member鈥檚 case with the authorities can be difficult when the cases are long-standing and families are rarely offered new leads. And yet, new families鈥攐ften with similar cases鈥攃ontinue to join.

鈥淚t brings a range of emotions,鈥� explains Rivas. 鈥淥n one hand, you feel happy to be able to help and provide support to struggling families. On the other hand, you feel sad because in your case there was no one to guide you, and many opportunities were lost.鈥�

Rivas continues to search for her husband, and now also coordinates searches for dozens of disappeared people in Nuevo Le贸n, together with more than 44 families. The collective is in the process of forming itself as a civil association. One of Rivas鈥� 肠辞尘辫补帽别谤补蝉 suggested that they be named Renacer (Rebirth).

鈥淥ne of them said, 鈥業 like Renacer,鈥欌€� says Rivas. 鈥淚 asked, 鈥榃hy?鈥� She said, 鈥楤ecause it鈥檚 like we are reborn after all we have experienced. It was as if we were dead, and now we are alive again.鈥欌€�&苍产蝉辫;

being drawn to the sky by a
seemingly invisible force,

reconciling with clouds and
collecting stardust in the astros,

eternally magnetized to the moon,

transforming into a raindrop and
answering the call

to return to Earth

taking shape as a glacier,

becoming a fast-running river,

slipping around ancient rocks

reflecting the trees and skies above,

shaping the landscape and tributaries,

forming capillaries and wetlands

arriving to the sea, embodying the ocean,

holding space for all life forms to thrive.

Water is constantly in motion, changing form from liquid to solid to gas and back again. Its power to transform enables water to erode rocks and mountains, corrode metal, and extract nutrients from plants and bones. 

The water present with us on Earth has been here since the beginning of time. People have long journeyed to distant hot springs, mineral pools, misty waterfalls, and formidable geysers for the promise of water鈥檚 endowed healing properties. In almost every religion, water has the ability to absorb prayers and bestow blessings.

鈥淲ater holds memories since time began and has a living spirit just like we do,鈥� says Chenoa Egawa, a member of the Lummi tribe and a ceremonial leader, storyteller, artist, and environmental activist who is dedicated to bringing healing to our Mother Earth. 

Our bodies鈥� innate wisdom understands how essential water is, as it makes up more than half of our body weight. 鈥淲ater has the ability to cleanse itself, and because we are largely made of water, we are a part of that cleansing cycle as well,鈥� Egawa says. 鈥淭hat is why it is so important to offer gratitude and prayer to water as we use it throughout our day.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Internally, water delivers essential nutrients, moves our digested food, and regulates our temperature. Being adequately hydrated can increase our energy levels and diminish our aches and pains. Our Ancestors worked diligently to master oxidation and browning reactions for culinary creations, passed down through generations in recipes. 

We are absolutely a part of the cycle of water. All of life is.

Indigenous cultures circumnavigating the planet, from Hawai鈥榠 to the Azores, consider bodies of water to be a global unifier. In the Pacific Northwest, our waterways are the ancient highways that connect our villages and families. But water need not be abundant to be appreciated as the gift it is. 

鈥淥ne of the first things we teach our children is how to read clouds, because we know that is the language of water and how it connects to everything around us,鈥� says A-dae Romero-Briones, who is Cochiti and Kiowa. 鈥淔rom our beginning as a people, our homelands in the Southwest constantly teach us how to respect, revere, and honor water,鈥� says Romero-Briones, who holds a law degree in Indigenous food and agriculture and has in-depth knowledge of Native food systems and economies. 鈥淲e choose to live in a place where water is scarce because that is how we understand its preciousness and never take it for granted. We have built an entire society and culture to ensure we never forget that.鈥�

But, like so many of our essential nutrients, water has become a commodity. Access to clean and safe water is becoming more challenging worldwide. While we need to consume this sacred water to exist, we must also work hard to repair our relationship with this almighty medicine. Many are standing up to protect water. Let鈥檚 also commit to connect more deeply with water. 

Recipes for Water Meditations

Research where your water comes from and how it gets to your glass. Who, if anyone, is working to protect its tributary, and how can you help?

Once a day, pour yourself a cup of water and drink it with intention, considering how it makes you feel and giving gratitude for its presence in your life.

Find a spot to sit outside near a body of water and visit it often, paying close attention to how it changes shape over time and with the seasons.

Growing up impoverished, I was always thirsty for more鈥攎ore food, more clothes, more opportunities. But when I was incarcerated, that thirst took on a whole new meaning. I craved a second chance, the opportunity to prove that I鈥檓 more than my mistakes. But the journey of returning to society can be challenging. 

After I was released from prison, I quickly realized how immense the challenges of re-entry are. , , and reestablishing relationships with friends and family were all daunting tasks. I applied for countless jobs, only to be because of my criminal record. I knew I was capable of doing the work, but employers considered me to be a liability. Being constantly rejected was soul-crushing, and I began to question whether I would ever be able to forge a life after incarceration.

I carried the weight of my mistakes with me everywhere. The guilt I felt for my past actions was almost suffocating at times. I wanted to be seen as a new person, someone who had learned from their mistakes, but no one was willing to give me that chance. The emotional toll of re-entry鈥攑roving yourself 鈥済ood enough鈥� to rejoin larger society鈥攃an become overwhelming. 鈥淔ormerly incarcerated individuals often face stigmatization and discrimination, which can lead to feelings of shame and inadequacy,鈥� says Emily Shelton, a prisoner re-entry expert and the co-founder and director of a nonprofit called . 鈥淭hese feelings can be compounded by the lack of support and resources available to returning citizens, making it difficult to navigate the challenges of re-entry. This is where and why we see a lot of recidivism as a result.鈥�

The United States has one of the highest recidivism rates globally. An estimated are re-imprisoned within just 12 months, and a study of prisons in 24 states suggests that as many as return to prison in 10 years. According to a by the , poverty is the single greatest predictor of recidivism. In fact, significantly multiplies the chances of previously incarcerated people returning to jails and prisons. Other studies have shown that stable , , and access to are effective means of curtailing and addressing criminogenic factors such as poverty and addiction. 

Ignite Justice, Shelton鈥檚 nonprofit, aims to address this problem. The organization advocates for criminal justice reforms and rehabilitative prison conditions, and also works with incarcerated people both before and after release to facilitate a smooth reintegration. 鈥淭hese folks often learn that it is OK to feel ashamed and vulnerable, or to suffer from past traumas, and that those feelings are a natural part of the healing process and the restoration process,鈥� Shelton says. 鈥淵et it鈥檚 important that they don鈥檛 embody or long-term identify with that shame or trauma. By confronting past mistakes and taking responsibility for them, these people are able to move forward with a renewed sense of purpose and self-worth.鈥�

Despite the challenges of re-entry, I refused to give up. I knew I was capable of more than what society believed of me. I began to seek out resources that could help me gain the skills and support I needed. I participated in a job training program that not only provided me with practical skills but also gave me a sense of belonging. There is real value in being a part of a community that sees the potential of formerly incarcerated people and sets them up for success. 

Nicholas, who is withholding his last name for privacy reasons, found his family鈥檚 emotional support to be especially valuable after his release. 鈥淗aving my family there in spite of my past mistakes remains a huge deal for me,鈥� he says. 鈥淭o have somewhere I feel safe and supported has made the transition back into society much easier than I think it otherwise might have been.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

I also learned the importance of seeking counseling and therapy. By addressing these arduous psycho-emotional hurdles that are present in societal reintegration, I was able to heal and move forward with a renewed sense of purpose. Nicholas, too, says therapy has helped him 鈥渕ove through my trauma from prison鈥� and become optimistic about the future. 鈥淸Therapy] has helped me feel like I can breathe again,鈥� he says. 鈥淔or someone starting life over, I just cannot stress enough how important those things are.鈥�

My personal journey has taught me that it鈥檚 possible to rebuild one鈥檚 life after incarceration and to find purpose and fulfillment. But I still worry about the future鈥攏ot just for myself, but for every person starting over. As a society, we need to work toward creating a world where all individuals have the opportunity to thrive and succeed, regardless of their past mistakes. That includes recognizing and dismantling our collective bias toward formerly incarcerated people in our rhetoric, our hiring practices, and our behaviors. Rather than trapping people in the memory of their worst moment, we should provide tangible support, resources, and opportunities for growth. When we create a society that embraces those who have been incarcerated鈥攔estoring and rehabilitating them and returning them to their communities鈥攖hen formerly incarcerated people will finally have the second chance that they deserve. 

Our unequal world is divided not just by wealth or quality of life, but also by access to basic necessities like water.

A Thirsty World 

Geography and climate play a huge role in water availability. Still, just six countries consume 49% of all water usage globally. 

The Global Water Footprint

Around the world, agriculture consumes 70% of all freshwater. Products can be ranked by their 鈥渨ater footprint,鈥� which measures the number of liters of water used to produce one kilogram. The thirstiest products include cocoa and its derivatives, coffee, leather, and beef.

To me, Disney and durian are one in the same: nauseatingly sweet. The first essay in Manuel Betancourt鈥檚 , a collection of essays about the author鈥檚 coming out and of age, is similarly saccharine. Betancourt is not only partial to Disney but grants it unbridled weight in his adult life, arguing that he has 鈥渟muggled鈥� some sort of queer ontology out of its 鈥渙ppressively heterosexual fairy tales.鈥�

Unremarkably aroused by Disney鈥檚 gambit of meatheads, Betancourt foregrounds his nascent sexual proclivities to stake an ambitious claim: 鈥淎s Disney gave its female heroines agency in their desire, it also allowed audiences to objectify its male characters.鈥� Apparently, the pressures of heterosexual love are incidental to personal freedom, and patent displays of male musculature are a radical inversion of the male gaze. Betancourt is all too aware that neither of these statements is true鈥攈e explores dress codes and body policing in the next essay. His myopia is selective insofar as it serves his argument.

Betancourt portends my skepticism until he doesn鈥檛: 鈥淸I]t鈥檚 unclear if these childhood moments 鈥� predicted the gay man I would become, or if I have simply warped them to do so in my mind. The result, I guess, is no different either way.鈥� Um鈥� isn鈥檛 it? Betancourt subbing personal experience for analysis echoes Kay Gabriel鈥檚 argument in a 2022 article for : Queer memoirists who satiate nonqueer readers with snapshots of personal hardship rather than illuminate shared social forms鈥攍ike, say, joy鈥攅ffectively neuter themselves. Betancourt鈥檚 Disney nostalgia, precisely: Furiously hard in the tenebrous recesses of the theater, his boner works itself out, as Gabriel puts it, 鈥渋n powerful but highly limited ways on some strange people over there.鈥�

Granted, Betancourt鈥檚 childhood, piddled away in front of the TV, seems lonely. And horny鈥攕o much so that, by his own admission, it hampers his analytical faculties: 鈥淚 can鈥檛 deny that sometimes my shallowness (or my horniness, more like) gets the best of me.鈥� For example, the 鈥渉airy,鈥� 鈥渞ippling,鈥� and 鈥渓ovingly defined鈥� pecs of Hercules; the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; Buffy鈥檚 Xander; and, in the real world, Ricky Martin inundate the pages with a dull libidinal yearning. Saved by the Bell鈥檚 A.C. Slater鈥攁ll-star wrestler and general harbinger of Jersey Shore鈥檚 later grip on millennial sexuality鈥攊s, in particular, 鈥渁 revelation.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

Reflections on Slater metastasize into lascivious musings on how wrestling garb and related imagery can 鈥渞ewire the markers of masculine ideals as inherently homoerotic.鈥� These ideas are both fantastical and heavy-handed; allusion is not our Slater-satyr鈥檚 forte. 鈥淸T]ight asses aren鈥檛 mere by-products of arduous training but open invitations (in ways more literal than you can imagine).鈥� Surely any self-described gay man and the most cursorily adventurous heterosexual could鈥檝e gleaned the anal reference without the parenthetical appendage; if not, why do they need to? Clamoring for readership, Betancourt casts a wide net, letting slip lithe catches for the clumsier philistines mucking about.

Stylistic issues aside, Betancourt acknowledges that desire and self-expression are 鈥渉ard to disentangle,鈥� yet he doesn鈥檛 recognize that this very entanglement may be confining his own view. As a gay man, I see little of my own urges in Betancourt鈥檚. 鈥淭o explicitly deny the sexual pull such images [of shirtless amateur wrestlers] can have 鈥� is to feed into a toxicity that refuses to let men be unwittingly desired (by other men).鈥� This leaves me sexually and theoretically marooned. I do deny it (wrestling doesn鈥檛 turn me on!) and regardless: How would my lust anchor my masculinity? Despite acknowledging that 鈥渨hat men want and what men look like aren鈥檛 questions to be asked in a vacuum,鈥� Betancourt doesn鈥檛 make context central to his analysis. I am all for finding teleological value in desire, but Betancourt is thinking with the wrong head.

Betancourt does, at times, escape his cognitive cul-de-sac. In 鈥淗ombres,鈥� Betancourt explores the titular Colombian telenovela as a 鈥済limpse into a possible future and a rare window into an alien present.鈥� Hombres鈥� seemingly 鈥減rogressive鈥� male characters were facsimiles for the professional class of men Betancourt鈥檚 classmates would become, boys whose masculinity relied on his torment. Marshaled against the show鈥檚 larger, systemic pitfalls鈥攕uch as its infinite forgiveness of male fragility and total inability to pass the Bechdel test鈥攚e learn that Hombres was essentialist down to its title, its denotations of masculinity contingent on who was and wasn鈥檛 meant to watch. Here, Betancourt鈥檚 personal experience is couched in a clear exploration of Colombian masculinity, augmenting close analysis of Hombres and its social mores rather than the other way around.

Betancourt鈥檚 final essay, 鈥淎 Cock in a Frock,鈥� proves the limitations of those preceding if only by showing that, done right, personal experience can pose some epistemic value. Taking a RuPaul tagline (鈥渨e鈥檙e all born naked and the rest is drag鈥�) as an ontological launchpad, Betancourt weaves between cross-dressers, women in pantsuits, straight men, and queers to make a simple but convincing point: Sex and gender are irreducible from desire. It鈥檚 here where his writing is at its best. Building solidarity across disparate experiences rather than leveraging them for intellectual cachet, Betancourt鈥檚 analytical power rests precisely in the space between what he and other queer men do and don鈥檛 share.

Promulgating one鈥檚 trauma is increasingly necessary to 鈥渓egitimate鈥� subjectivity, conveniently obfuscating the various shapes power can take. This compromise reduces bodies into messages, or masculinity into culture, rather than seeing either as a multi-operable tool of violence, oppression, or liberation. Such is my issue with The Male Gazed: Betancourt鈥檚 trauma stalls his analytical propulsion. Victimhood is no stand-in for culture, less still an engine for hot takes. As glimmers in the final pages, Betancourt is capable of cultural critique that weds his life to larger observations about masculinity and queerness. To this end, being called a 鈥渇aggot鈥� is ancillary鈥攊f only he would realize that. 

Though the vampire is a global phenomenon, the Western canon鈥檚 depiction has come to dominate contemporary mythology and pop culture. This framing is heavily influenced by whiteness, creating a particular stereotype of these creatures of the night. But on closer examination, the vampire is more queer and racialized than white fans may realize.

Vampires play an ancient role in Western mythology; the Greeks and Romans both had their versions, and variants spread throughout Europe. In the 1700s, a vampire 鈥溾€� in Eastern Europe terrified communities. But these vampires were not aloof, mysterious, sexy creatures; they were bodies of real humans, bloated with blood and accused of spreading disease. Villagers responded by exhuming and staking them. Less than a century later, panicked New Englanders, terrified by a tuberculosis outbreak, were , sometimes removing their hearts in addition to mutilating some remains.

These vampires were figures of disgust, horror, and spectacle, gripping entire villages in a frenzy of fear. It wasn鈥檛 until the gothic era of the late 1800s that a different version of the vampire began to emerge. Fittingly, one of the earliest influential vampires of English-language fiction was queer. The titular and enigmatic vampire Carmilla of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu鈥檚 1872 novella is obsessed with the teenage Laura. As a series of young women sicken and die in the villages around them, Laura experiences vivid dreams about night visitations. Carmilla is eventually exposed, and establishes many elements of vampire mythos, which often reflects the queer community鈥檚 outsider status: She is sexualized, enigmatic, slightly tragic, found in a coffin, and neutralized with the aid of staking and beheading. 

The more famous Dracula was published just 25 years later, in 1897, introducing the vampire who launched a thousand bats. The story has been adapted repeatedly for film, television, and stage, in addition to inspiring numerous texts. A hundred years later, the character would resurface on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 鈥淏uffy vs. Dracula,鈥� an episode that drew heavily on the Dracula mythos as an enthralling, mysterious, sexual being who stood out from the pack of primarily violent, cruel vampires who met their final deaths at Buffy鈥檚 hands. Over the course of the 20th century, vampires had evolved into something sexy, as seen in Anne Rice鈥檚 novel Interview With the Vampire, published in 1976; mysterious and broody like in Angel; a little gonzo like in True Blood; and powerful鈥攚ith wealth attached to that power, as was the case in Twilight and Vampire Academy.

These works include very few characters of color, if any, and most are one-dimensional; either their race is not engaged with as a meaningful part of the story or it is entirely incidental. For example, on Buffy, Black and Brown characters tend to be disposable and many are cartoonish caricatures. The evolution of vampires over the 20th century in some ways paralleled the changing mainstream perception of Black culture, and how it entered pop culture, as illustrated by Blade, introduced by Marvel in 1973 and consciously written as a Black character. Though he鈥檚 a slayer, not a vampire, he has become one of the most iconic Black characters in the canon, appearing on screen as well as the page. Black people have profoundly informed white culture, often as white-mediated objects of entertainment such as the grotesque display of Sarah Baartman, minstrel shows, and the Mandingo myth. Expressions of Black creativity and community such as Jazz Age cool, rap, or Black Twitter have also fascinated white audiences. That influence extends to vampires, even when it hasn鈥檛 been explicit. The fundamental depiction of a terrifying yet seductive inhuman being mirrors white attitudes about Blackness, a world in which 鈥渢hey鈥� walk among 鈥渦s鈥� but are forever marked as 鈥渙ther.鈥�

And yet, something very interesting is happening to the wider vampire canon, which is at last moving away from whiteness: Creators who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) are introducing rich elements to the narrative, claiming the vampire as their own cultural birthright and one not limited to whiteness or the West. Many are drawing upon mythologies from their own communities, introducing them more widely to English-language readers.

This is a marked departure from watered-down white efforts at 鈥渄iversity, equity, and inclusion,鈥� the current catchphrase in the . These creators are actively seizing control of the narrative for themselves, flipping expectations by drawing upon or referencing the Eurocentric canon, but not treating it as a holy arbiter of all things vampire.

Creators of color have always contributed to the vampire canon, of course; Alexandre Dumas鈥� The Pale Lady, published in 1849, was a foundational work, and vampires even appeared in Blaxploitation films such as 1972鈥檚 Blacula and 1973鈥檚 Ganja & Hess. In 1991, Jewelle Gomez published The Gilda Stories, a work rooted deeply in her identity as a Black Indigenous lesbian; she is also a noted activist, elder, and voice in Afrofuturism. The story revolves around an enslaved woman seeking freedom who is taken in by a pair of vampires in 1850, and moves through history and into the future. It is a novel about found family and building community, friendship and mentorship, and Black cultural experiences. It doesn鈥檛 include the things that are required in the white canon, such as exclusivity, money, and power. 

complained that she didn鈥檛 feel 鈥渋n鈥� on the 鈥渃ode鈥� of the book, expressing a common frustration of white readers when engaging with texts that are not written with them in mind. She also complained that 鈥渢his *isn鈥檛* a vampire story,鈥� reflecting an offended sensibility: Gomez鈥檚 contribution to vampire lore is not, evidently, sufficiently vampiric.

BIPOC creators are used to similar complaints, and in recent years, many have begun to actively defy them. Malaysian author Zen Cho鈥檚 2011 short story 鈥淭he House of Aunts鈥� revolves around the life of Ah Lee, a teenage vampire who lives with her all-female family. She is a pontianak, a Southeast Asian vampire who eats intestines, not blood. The lively, funny, sweet love story unapologetically integrates politics, culture, and language. It is set in the real world, albeit one where your aunties eat your love interests instead of chasing them off.

鈥淚n books and movies it seemed quite romantic to be a vampire, but Ah Lee and her aunts were clearly the wrong sort of people for the ruffled shirt and velvet jacket style of vampirism,鈥� Cho writes in 鈥淭he House of Aunts,鈥� directly confronting Western expectations for vampire stories. In 鈥淪antos de Sampaguitas,鈥� American author Alyssa Wong, who is of Chinese and Filipino descent, similarly draws on mythos and folklore in a 2014 story featuring a manananggal, a creature that feeds on pregnant women and those in love. Wong鈥檚 short story, which seamlessly uses English and Tagalog, is about family and connections as much as it is about monsters.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia similarly referenced regional folklore in 2016鈥檚 Certain Dark Things. In her book, vampires live in public, but are being driven out of many European nations, with many landing in Central America thanks to immigration pressures. As different vampire communities gather, tensions follow, and they evolve into a series of gangs heavily influenced by colonial pressures as the Indigenous vampire community struggles to survive. The Mexico City of Certain Dark Things may not be one that white readers know, understand, and expect. In a , Moreno-Garcia noted that the book drew on the real world, a way to explore scary things in the news through fiction. Rather than being escapist, it is rooted in reality.

Polynesian filmmaker Taika Waititi also directly confronted white expectations for vampire stories with his 2014 feature film (followed by a 2019 FX series) with Jemaine Clement. What We Do in the Shadows is a mockumentary-style comedy featuring a classic setup: Four guys in a flat and their wacky doings, except the guys are vampires. It鈥檚 a direct send-up of vampire lore that also explores outsider culture and the alienation of being on the wrong side of society. The 2008鈥�2013 series Being Human similarly explored the supernatural share house genre, albeit with a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost.

These works don鈥檛 just push against what a vampire story is 鈥渟upposed鈥� to be. They create a new kind of story, in which the subtext becomes text, and the characters鈥� experience of race, gender, and sexuality is a vital, vibrant feature. Instead of being a hollow echo via a white creator鈥檚 interpretation, their experience is a rich and complete element of the story, ultimately making it more dynamic.

Rather than relying on a canon rooted in some ugly things鈥攚hat were all those white vampires doing in the mid-1800s to save up so much money?鈥攖hese works envision a world where vampires walk among us and are shaped by the myths and folklore of the communities they live in, as well as their contemporary societies. And, rather than steal from other cultures, they reflect creators claiming space. Instead of being an object of consumption, the vampire and creator are instead aligned with readers. 

While there鈥檚 nothing new about women across , , and embracing traditional gender roles, the rise of promoting this style of thinking is a newer phenomenon.

is drawing more women to this movement. Both and femininity influencers of color peddle the idea that attracting and partnering with a man will give women financial stability. Plus: Why claw your way to the top of a male-dominated and misogynistic workplace when a man can take care of you instead? While the COVID-19 pandemic is causing , is , conservative legislatures are , and , the is as the solution. 

鈥淭hese conversations are not brand new,鈥� says , a lifestyle coach with more than 120,000 followers on TikTok. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e just being transmitted in a different form, and that form is social media.鈥� Shanu coaches on femininity and dating, but not in the conservative sense. She has helped hundreds of 鈥渙verworked and overstimulated鈥� women tap into 鈥渟ofter aspects of feminine energy,鈥� which she describes as 鈥渂eing nurturing, being compassionate, [having] a sensitivity to emotion, [and having] a desire to connect or build communities.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

For Black women, in particular, femininity content can be appealing, perhaps because of its unintentional portrayal of the 鈥�,鈥� a 19th-century idea that women should be . Black women were , partly because they . A town in South Carolina even made it in 1918 so they could care for white families. 

As Shanu explains, 鈥溾€婭t was an act of rebellion for, in particular, the Caucasian woman to not be a housewife and to leave the home and get a job and earn as much as a man. However, for Black women at that time, that was not a life that they were accustomed to鈥擝lack women were already in the workplace.鈥� When considering the context of and femininity being devalued in society, it makes sense that some Black women are eager to reclaim their femininity.

It鈥檚 important to note that a lot of femininity content has been as . , the belief that there鈥檚 a single, inherent way to be a man or a woman, is oppressive to both cisgender and transgender women. While performing femininity can be empowering for some, being forced to and, given the number of , dangerous. 

And yet, as , a leading expert in feminism and media, notes, . 鈥淲e have a system in which being masculine depends on women鈥檚 vulnerability,鈥� she says. 鈥淗ow are you supposed to provide [for] and protect a woman if she鈥檚 not vulnerable? If a woman says, 鈥業鈥檓 going to provide for myself, and I don鈥檛 need or want your protection,鈥� where does that leave masculinity? The entire premise of American masculinity is the vulnerability of women.鈥�&苍产蝉辫;

As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels note in , to squeeze the maximum amount of labor possible from male workers while allowing women, who are caring for the home and the children, to be lorded over by those men. As women began working outside the home, as well as making gains in secondary education, . 鈥淎nd our society doesn鈥檛 value care work,鈥� says Chemaly.

The growing embrace of the tradwife life could be seen as a rebuke of , as well as the 鈥�.鈥� If you鈥檙e going to have to juggle a career with all of the housework, why not just lean into the latter? Reverting to conventional gender norms, which Black women and other women of color never had access to, can be, as Chemaly says, 鈥渁 comfortable place in a very destabilizing time.鈥� This specific thirst for economic stability comes with the promise that being a 鈥攁 woman who upholds patriarchal standards to appeal to men鈥攚ill keep you safe. proves that to be untrue.

Instead of prioritizing marriage, what if we improved material conditions for women? What if we established ? What if ? What if we invested in , , , and ? Would content promoting traditional gender roles still be as appealing as it has become?

It鈥檚 jarring to see so many promote anti-feminist ideals while our rights are actively deteriorating. Relying on patriarchal ideas makes a hollow movement, but perhaps none of these influencers and their followers are trying to lead a movement to liberate women. Instead, maybe they鈥檙e just trying to survive. 

Ten-hour workdays were common for me, so I welcomed Odell鈥檚 suggestion to consider doing nothing as anti-capitalist praxis. But it was still a difficult message to digest after years of being trained to value productivity above all else. In her latest book, , Odell proposes a similarly challenging message: If time is the unit of measurement that most humans share, and it鈥檚 divided to generate profit rather than to nourish and care, then how do we deconstruct the structure of time? 

Excavating the origins of how Western societies conceptualize time, Odell explores the relationship between our color-coded daily schedules and colonization. Drawing on historian Giordano Nanni鈥檚 2012 book, , Odell connects the dividing of our days into seconds, minutes, and hours to Europe鈥檚 colonial domination. In seeking to universalize working hours to increase production, the Western clock arrived in the colonies as a tool to 鈥渢ame鈥� the people who lived there. Indeed, as Odell writes, 鈥淎 standardized approach to time and labor often accompanied colonists wherever they went.鈥� Colonists even determined how 鈥渃ivilized鈥� Indigenous communities were based on how they conceptualized time.

Instead of breaking down their time into hours of profit-making work, Indigenous groups organized their societies according to tasks that needed to be done for the survival of the community. Work was not something they did to make money; it was done to be 鈥減art of a social economy鈥� where work time and nonwork time had no differentiation. The multidisciplinary artist and author argues that remaking our conception of time can be a liberatory tool. 鈥淚 believe that a real meditation on the nature of time, unbound from its everyday capitalist incarnation, shows that neither our lives nor the life of the planet is a foregone conclusion,鈥� Odell writes, putting forth the claim that how we conceptualize time is neither humane nor logical.

The time structures we operate under aren鈥檛 arbitrary; they鈥檙e designed to support capitalism, and, as workers, we鈥檙e selling our time. Implicit in this line of thought is a question: What do we lose when we鈥檙e forced to sell our time to capitalism? This exposition is, in part, to show readers that 鈥渢ime is money鈥� isn鈥檛 written in stone and that we would benefit from questioning it. 鈥淲hen the relationship of time to literal money is expressed as a natural fact, it obscures the political relationship between the seller of time and its buyer,鈥� Odell argues. 

Like many freelance millennials, I measure my time according to how much money I can potentially make鈥攈ow long can I work before I do actual harm to myself? How early do I have to get up to get an assignment done? When do I need to file an assignment so I can get paid before rent is due? Drawing on a 1925 book that exemplifies Taylorism, a productivity management methodology, to demonstrate how we divide our time into profit, Odell perfectly describes my day-to-day: 鈥淸Increasing Personal Efficiency by Donald Laird] is shot through with the cultural moment鈥檚 fixation on speed, mastery, and a single-minded mission to cut out the useless,鈥� Odell notes. While the book is from 1925, I saw myself in how Laird describes the cutthroat time management workers are expected to model to maximize their profit-making time. 

The obvious answer to this conundrum would be to rest and return to work at a later date, but the problem with this鈥攁s Odell distills in the chapter 鈥淐an There Be Leisure?鈥濃€攊s that nonwork time always becomes a pathway toward more work. Beyond the fact that rest requires a certain amount of financial privilege, we鈥檙e encouraged to take time off so we can work when we鈥檙e no longer tired. We鈥檙e resting to become better at our jobs. Odell concludes that in our culture, leisure time鈥攖he commonly doled out 鈥攅xists only for us to return to work and eventually tire ourselves out again and again. 

It鈥檚 easy to feel hopeless about our current conditions when the things that are supposed to heal us push us back toward the systems that are destroying us. Odell鈥檚 鈥減anoramic assault on nihilism,鈥� as she calls it, is palpable in Saving Time; while she insists on addressing what hurts society, she鈥檚 also adamant about finding an escape, a new way to live. She puts forth the idea that since our relationship to time is so intimately connected to how we view the world, we have to change that perspective. That could look like forgoing the human conception of time, which doesn鈥檛 account for the many other beings鈥攖rees, animals, rivers鈥攖hat operate within their own concept of time, or rather, their own desires and needs. 

We could also lean in to the Indigenous perspectives of embeddedness in and attentiveness to place (commonly translated as 鈥溾€�). Embracing bioregionalism would allow us to resist the concept of linearly organized time. 鈥淏ioregionalism is useful here both as metaphor and as concrete demonstration, in that its timescales overlap and sometimes lie outside the human perspective,鈥� Odell writes. 鈥淓xpressed simply as change, ecological and geological time are full of difference: Things happen both quickly and slowly, at both tiny and inconceivably epic scales.鈥�

This is perhaps where Odell risks losing some readers by turning to a more abstract solution. She encourages readers to look for 鈥淸the] irrepressible force that drives this moment into the next.鈥� I know exactly what she means: a kind of leisure that can鈥檛 be pinpointed and therefore can鈥檛 be commodified. It can be the moment I see a bird sit on a branch by my window, or the overwhelming realization that the universe is alive and that I am in it. It can be the instant I realize we are all breathing the same air at a protest, and that we are all here, together. 

As Odell puts it, the point isn鈥檛 鈥渢o live more, in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life, but rather, to be more alive in any given moment鈥攁 movement outward and across, rather than shooting forward on a narrow, lonely track.鈥� Reclaiming a life beyond the clock is that movement outward and across, toward other bodies, toward dreaming together, toward a world no longer constrained by the chains of time. 

Torsheta Jackson is an award-winning journalist and native Mississippian who is passionate about penning features that showcase the stories of the people, places, and events in the Magnolia State. The former teacher and coach specifically loves to share the state鈥檚 rich culture of sports. She has bylines in the Jackson Free Press, Mississippi Free Press, Mississippi Scoreboard, and Bash Brothers Media. Twitter:

Chantal Flores is a Mexico-based freelance journalist investigating the impact of enforced disappearances in Latin America and the Balkans. She also covers gender violence, human rights, and immigration. Her work has been published by The Verge, MIT Technology Review, Jezebel, Al Jazeera, Vice, In These Times, and more. Twitter:

Alicia Kennedy is a writer based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She writes a weekly newsletter on food culture, politics, and media called From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, and she is the author of the forthcoming book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating. Twitter:

Art Contributors

Anne Staveley has 20 years of experience as a professional photographer, builder, large-scale photo muralist, and installation artist. Staveley creates conscious conversation through portraiture and art and uses photography to capture the human spirit鈥檚 endless creativity. Instagram:

Mer Young is an Indigenous (Chichimeca and Apache), socially engaged, Southern California鈥揵ased artist whose body of work includes collages, drawings, paintings, and murals. She is the founder of Mausi Murals, and has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally. Her public artworks can be found throughout Los Angeles County and California鈥檚 South Bay. Instagram:

Ali Kamara is a London-based illustrator and motion graphic artist who creates vibrant and psychedelic visuals with a focus on music, modern culture, and social commentary. Hip-hop culture, classic Hollywood cinematography, and abstract anime all inform his design, which includes album artwork, audiovisuals, magazine covers, brand design, and more. His notable clients include HBO, Vice Media, Atlantic Records, Virgin EMI Records, Highsnobiety, and hip-hop streetwear pioneer Karl Kani. Instagram:

I鈥檓 writing to you with a full heart. I鈥檝e noticed my heart often feels this way during a transition from what is now to what is next. Like when something long desired is finally realized, a thirst is quenched, or when something treasured departs.

The transitions that are filling my heart with excitement, a bit of sadness, and enormous gratitude are related to our board of directors鈥攖he amazing volunteers who help ensure that 猫咪社区! is fulfilling its critical mission.

In January, after 19 years of board service鈥攊ncluding the last three as co-chair鈥擳anya Dawkins resigned her post. Tanya鈥檚 decades of dedication have been an incredible gift to 猫咪社区! To every conversation she brought deep listening, honesty, and mutual respect. To every challenge she brought courage and resolve. And to every opportunity she brought bold enthusiasm. I will miss her wisdom, wry humor, and reassuring energy and presence. 

But this sadness is tempered by enthusiasm and excitement for what鈥檚 next, as Berit Anderson joins Eli Feghali as co-chair鈥攖hey will be a fantastic team. And after thoughtful conversations with many of the 90 impressive candidates who responded to our community call for board nominations in July, we are thrilled to announce the addition of five exceptional human beings to our board: Monique Davis, Samir Doshi, Khalilah Elliott, Lindsay Hill, and Cameron Trimble. 

Together with our existing board, they bring organizational vision, a deep commitment to equity, and connections to movements and philanthropy. They bring experience in strategic design, organizational development, change management, financial oversight, engaging new audiences, community-based fundraising, and scaling organizations. Most importantly, they dearly love 猫咪社区! and want to ensure it reaches its full potential to help realize the equitable, sustainable, and compassionate world we know is possible. I believe that this board, working together with our outstanding staff and leadership team, can make anything happen! 

You can learn more about all of our board members at .

In gratitude, 
Christine Hanna

P.S. We look forward to working together to tell the stories that matter. Please visit to set up a monthly gift or make a special one-time gift today so we can keep the stories coming. Thank you!

What kind of work and/or volunteering do you do?
I teach fourth and fifth grade and am also a parent to a 7-year-old. I use articles and artwork from 猫咪社区! frequently in my work. 猫咪社区! provides content that informs and inspires me to write new and engaging curriculum, as well as ideas that challenge me to reflect on and revisit my teaching practice and pedagogy. 

Why do you support 猫咪社区! as a donor?
Though there are many aspects of the future that concern or even frighten me, accessibility to honest and diverse media is something I feel very strongly should be protected. 

Young people have such a reliance on media to understand the world around them and perspectives other than their own. They will need media sources that inspire them in the future.

How does 猫咪社区! support your values and your work to build a better world?
As a white woman, I feel like any opportunity to get outside of the bubble of my own life is an opportunity to grow. I like that the articles are not designed to make every reader comfortable. It鈥檚 important that we question ourselves and challenge our thinking. Reading 猫咪社区! allows us to do that.

Why do you feel the work of 猫咪社区! is important?
Two things stand out to me the most about 猫咪社区!:

First, it鈥檚 visible on the pages of the magazine that the target audience cannot be described as any one demographic, and that the complex intersectionality of our identities as readers is honored and brought into the stories. 

Second, there is intentionality in allowing all readers to access the stories. I think it鈥檚 so important that 猫咪社区! is thinking about the creative ways that readers can visually and audibly experience the stories if reading might not be their first choice, or might not even be accessible to them. 

If a friend was considering supporting 猫咪社区!, what would you say to them?
I always say, 鈥淐heck it out,鈥� and when they do, they always keep reading!

28.8%^{1, 2}

Decrease in annual U.S. executions, 1999 to 2019:

77.6%²

Number of U.S. jurisdictions that have abolished the death penalty (as of April 22, 2020):

23

Increase in U.S. life without parole sentences, 2003 to 2016:

59%³

U.S. prisoners currently serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes:

More than 17,000⁴

Share of U.S. eligible voters who are naturalized immigrants, 2000:

6.2%

Share of U.S. eligible voters who are naturalized immigrants, 2020:

9.8%

Increase in immigrant eligible voting population since 2000:

93%

Increase in U.S.-born eligible voting population since 2000:

18%

Share of immigrant eligible voters living in California, New York, Florida, Texas, or New Jersey:

61%⁵

Share of the U.S. fiction market accounted for by the romance genre in 2016:

23%⁶

Annual value of the romance novel industry:

$1.08 billion⁷

The New York Times Bestsellers written by romance novelist Nora Roberts (including those under her pseudonym J.D. Robb):

195^听

Combined number of weeks Roberts鈥� books have spent on The New York Times Bestseller list:

1,045^听

Years passed between publication of Roberts鈥� first bestseller and The New York Times hiring its first romance reviewer:

27^{8, 9}

Number of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics occupations that are easiest to automate:

12¹⁰

Ease with which those occupations (ranging from data entry clerks to watch repairers) could be computerized, on a scale of 0 to 1:

0.99

Total number of Americans employed in those occupations in May 2018:

802,510¹¹

Annual living wage for a family of four in 2018:

$67,146¹²

Amount it would cost to pay workers in those occupations the annual living wage if they lost their jobs:

$53.9 billion

Decrease in 2018 U.S. government defense spending that would cover that amount:

8.3%¹³

Sources: 1. Death Penalty Information Center 2. NAACP Legal Defense Fund 3. The Colorado Independent 4. The Sentencing Project 5. Pew Research 6. NPD Books Romance Landscape study, commissioned by Romance Writers of America 7. The Balance Careers 8. Nora Roberts 9. The New York Times 10. Oxford Martin School 鈥淔uture of Employment鈥� report 11. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 12. MIT Living Wage Calculator 13. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 

14% ^[1]

Americans who are mainline Protestants:

14.7% ^[2]

Americans who believe the 2020 election was stolen:

29%^[1]

Americans who are evangelical Protestants: 

25.4% ^[2]

鈥淭rue tax rate鈥� from 2014鈥�2018 for the wealthiest American, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos:

0.98% ^[3]

Rate from 2014鈥�2018 for Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the second-richest American:

3.27%

Wealth gained by Bezos since January 2020:

$86 billion ^[4]

Wealth gained by Musk since January 2020:

$144 billion

Net decrease in total number of American jobs from January 2020 to May 2021:

7.3 million ^[5]

Number of Americans who became billionaires from March 2020 to April 2021:

98 ^[6]

Americans confident that German Chancellor Angela Merkel will do the right thing regarding world affairs:

63% ^[7]

Out of 17 countries surveyed, number with less confidence in Merkel than the U.S.:

1

Americans confident that President Biden will do the right thing regarding world affairs:

60%

Number of countries with less confidence in Biden than the U.S.:

0

Centuries since the first documented sightings of Antarctica by Western explorers:

2 ^[8]

Centuries since Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailed past Tierra del Fuego, then thought to be the northern tip of a vast southern continent:

5 ^[9]

Centuries since Polynesian explorer Hui Te Rangiora and his sailors probably became the first people to sail Antarctic waters and to set foot on the continent:

14 ^[10]

Number of live bees used in the production of the 1992 horror film Candyman:

Nearly 200,000 ^[11]

According to his contract, amount of bonus money made by star Tony Todd every time he got stung:

$1,000 ^[12]

Bee stings suffered by Todd during the production of the film:

23

Stings suffered by Todd during the 2021 remake of Candyman:

Unknown

 Times Fox News programming mentioned 鈥渃ritical race theory鈥� from March 1鈥揓une 15, 2021:

1,278 ^[13]

Number of states that introduced or passed bills to ban teaching of critical race theory during the same period:

18^[14]

Number of these states with Republican control over both legislative houses and the governorship:

11^[15]

Sources: [1] .  [2] .  [3] .  [4] .  [5] .  [6] .  [7] .  [8] .  [9] .  [10] .  [11] .  [12] .  [13] .  [14] .  [15] . 

Share of U.S. adults who 鈥渓ack proficiency in literacy,鈥� reading below the sixth-grade level:

52% ^[1]

Share of adults with the lowest literacy levels who live in poverty:

43% ^[2]

Share of 12th-grade students who achieved 鈥減roficient鈥� or higher in reading performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2015:

37% ^[3]

Student score difference between low-poverty schools and high-poverty schools:

32 points 

Official 2020 U.S. poverty rate:

11.4% ^[4]

Poverty rate according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which incorporates government assistance:

9.1%

Times the SPM rate has been lower than the official measure prior to 2020:

0

2020 SPM rate without government stimulus checks during the COVID-19 pandemic:

12.7%

Championships currently considered to be the most prestigious titles in World Wrestling Entertainment:

9 ^[5]

Wrestlers who have won these titles in 2021:

34 ^[6]

Number of these wrestlers who are BIPOC:

22

Black wrestlers who held the WWE World Championship from 1963 to 2019:

1 ^{[7] Dwayne 鈥淭he Rock鈥� Johnson, 1998}

Black wrestlers who have held the WWE World Championship from 2019 to 2021:

3 ^[8] 

Total construction time of the Panama Canal:

10 years  ^[9] 

Total construction time of the Taj Mahal:

17 years  ^[10] 

Time it鈥檚 taken George R. R. Martin to publish the A Song of Ice and Fire book series (the source material for Game of Thrones):

25 years (and counting) ^[11] 

Estimated number of eukaryotic species (species with complex cells) on Earth:

8.7 million  

Eukaryotic species that have been catalogued by humans:

1.2 million ^[12] 

Decrease in wildlife population sizes from 1970 to 2016:

68% ^[13]

Share of the world鈥檚 remaining biodiversity safeguarded by Indigenous peoples:

80% ^[14]

Share of the global land mass customarily managed by Indigenous peoples:

More than 50%

Share of the global land mass legally owned by Indigenous peoples:

10%

According to surveys of 1,388 heterosexual women, change in the number of women likely to casually date a man based on whether or not he鈥檚 pictured holding a cat:

鈥�2.8%

Change in the number of women willing to consider a long-term relationship with a man based on whether or not he鈥檚 pictured holding a cat:

鈥�2.6% ^[15] 

Share of American women who own a cat:

33%

Share of American men who own a cat:

37% ^[16] 

Sources: [1] . [2] . [3] . [4] . [5] . [6] . [7] . [8] . [9] . [10] . [11] . [12] . [13] . [14] . [15] . [16] .  

65.7% ¹

Number of Twitter 鈥渓ikes鈥� on J.K. Rowling鈥檚 June 2020 anti-trans manifesto that mentioned alleged increasing numbers of de-transitions:

60,500²

Percentage of respondents to a 2015 survey of trans people in the U.S. who had de-transitioned:

8%³

Percentage who, after de-transitioning, now identify as trans again and report they were living in a gender 鈥渄ifferent than the gender they were thought to be at birth鈥�:

62%

Percentage of nearly 3,400 trans patients receiving support at one U.K. gender identity clinic who 鈥渆xpressed transition-related regret or de-transitioned鈥�:

0.47%⁴

Suicide rate per 100,000 residents in Alaska, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, the states with the highest rates:

24.18⁵

Average population density (people per square mile) of these states:

15.5⁶

Suicide rate per 100,000 in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, the states with the lowest rates:

9.47⁵

Average population density of these states:

817.67⁶

Increased likelihood of mortality corresponding with social isolation, according to a 2015 study:

29%⁷

In 2018, percentage of people surveyed who said they had seriously considered suicide in the previous 30 days:

4.3%

In the same survey, percentage of young adults who said they had seriously considered suicide:

10.7%

In August 2020, five months after lockdowns began, percentage of people who said they had seriously considered suicide:

11%

Percentage of young adults who said they had seriously considered suicide:

25.5%⁸

Percentage of U.S. adults who had heard of the repeatedly debunked QAnon conspiracy theory:

47%⁹

Of U.S. adults who鈥檝e heard of QAnon, percentage who believe it is 鈥渧ery accurate鈥� or 鈥渟omewhat accurate鈥�:

24%

Of Republicans who鈥檝e heard of it, percentage who believe QAnon is 鈥渧ery accurate鈥� or 鈥渟omewhat accurate鈥�:

38%¹⁰

Candidates who ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2020 election who have associated with QAnon:

29¹¹

Total number of votes received by these candidates:

3,401,944

Number of these candidates who won:

2¹²

Number of QAnon followers who have been charged with murder in crimes directly related to their belief in the theory:

2¹³

Sources: 1. . 2. . 3. 4. 5. 6.  7. 8. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, via 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. and

67¹

Number of times an impeached Supreme Court justice has been successfully removed:

0²

Number of Senate votes needed to pass an act of Congress:

51

Number of times the size of the Supreme Court has been changed by an act of Congress:

7

Number of years since the last change in the size of the Supreme Court:

151

Number of times the Supreme Court has been directly involved in a presidential election:

1 (in 2000)³

Number of demonstrations in the U.S. from May 24 to Aug. 22, 2020:

More than10,600⁴

Number of protests linked to the Black Lives Matter movement:

More than 7,750

Percentage of these protests in which protesters engaged in 鈥渧iolence or destructive activity鈥�:

Less than 7

Number of counter-protests during the same time period:

More than 360

Percentage of these counter-protests that turned violent:

12

Percentage of BLM-associated protests during this period that were met with government intervention:

More than 9

Percentage of all other protests during this period that were met with government intervention:

3

Average reduction in driving in California, Idaho, and Maine from early March to mid-April 2020 as a result of stay-at-home orders:

69%

Average number of large animals killed every day on California, Idaho, and Maine state highways in the four weeks prior to those states issuing stay-at-home orders:

10.8

Average number of large animals killed per day in the four weeks after the orders:

6.8

Estimated number of large animals whose lives could be saved every year in these three states if traffic remained reduced:

5,700 to 13,000 ⁵

Average annual increase in total miles traveled by American vehicles from 2011 to 2018:

42.2 billion⁶

Sources: 

1. U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 3

2. U.S. Supreme Court

3. National Constitution Center

4. Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project

5. Road Ecology Center, University of California, Davis

6. Federal Highway Administration

Mark P. Fancher is a human rights attorney, writer, and activist. Over the course of his 36-year career he has fought: police misconduct, over-incarceration, employment discrimination, racially discriminatory school discipline, unannounced plant closings, racist violence, and political repression. Driven and sustained by his Christian faith, he has been an advocate for African liberation and the right to self-determination for underdeveloped countries and Indigenous communities. He has worked as staff attorney for the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Michigan; senior staff attorney for the Sugar Law Center for Economic and 猫咪社区; State Bar of Michigan Access to Justice special projects director.

Damon Centola is professor of communication, sociology, and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is director of the Network Dynamics Group, and a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. His interest in how social networks activate social change began during his childhood years, when he was surrounded by changemakers鈥攁ctivists and entrepreneurs working to spread awareness about new social issues. His research on social change has been published across a wide range of fields, including sociology, physics, and medicine. He is the author of Change: The Power in the Periphery to Make Big Things Happen.

Natasha Chassagne, Ph.D., is an Australian writer and researcher on sustainability, climate change, and well-being. She specializes in community-led impact, particularly Buen Vivir as a framework for social and environmental well-being. Natasha has also worked with corporations, governments, and nonprofits consulting on sustainability impacts, and has a master鈥檚 degree in international law. She speaks English, French, and Spanish. Interview excerpts were taken from her Ph.D. research and appear in her first book, Buen Vivir as an Alternative to Sustainable Development: Lessons from Ecuador, published in November by Routledge.

Jeremy Lent is an author whose writings investigate the patterns of thought that have led our civilization to its current existential crisis. His recent book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity鈥檚 Search for Meaning, explores the way humans have made meaning of the cosmos from hunter-gatherer times to the present day. He is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on Earth. His upcoming book is The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe.

Winona LaDuke is an internationally renowned environmentalist, economist, author, and industrial hemp grower. She is executive director of Honor The Earth and founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project and is known for her work on tribal land claims and sustainable tribal economies. She is an enrolled member of the Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg of the White Earth Nation in northern Minnesota. In 1996 and 2000, she was the Green Party鈥檚 vice presidential candidate. Her books include Last Standing Woman, All Our Relations and In the Sugarbush. LaDuke is a 猫咪社区! contributing editor. 

Vandana Shiva is a scholar, author, and activist. Her pioneering work around food sovereignty, traditional agriculture, and women鈥檚 rights has shifted how the world views these issues. She has received numerous awards and honors for her work and has authored more than 20 books, including Reclaiming the Commons: Biodiversity, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Rights of Mother Earth. She currently lives between Delhi and Dehradun, Uttaranchal at Navdanya, a women-led organic farm, school, and caf茅 she founded that promotes justice for Earth and all living beings through agroecology and seed freedom.

Natriya Rampey is a photographer in Loudoun County, Virginia. She and other portrait photographers around the country are documenting quarantine life through portraits, often taken from a car. Rampey uses social media and text to notify residents when she鈥檒l be driving through the area. Families dress up and make signs and wait on their porches for their portraits, which are shared with the hashtag #InItTogether. 鈥淧orch Photography: In It Together鈥� has a public Facebook group. There鈥檚 no charge for porch photos, but she does accept donations for local food pantries. As of May, she鈥檇 raised over $3,000.

Nafeez Ahmed is an award-winning investigative journalist, systems theorist, and change strategist who has advised and consulted for several governmental and intergovernmental agencies. He is Executive Director of the System Shift Lab, editor of the crowdfunded platform INSURGE intelligence and a Research Fellow at the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems. He is the author of eight books including Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence (Springer-Nature, 2017) and A User鈥檚 Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (Pluto, 2010).

Tim DeChristopher is co-founder of the Climate Disobedience Center. DeChristopher made world headlines in 2008 when he disrupted a government oil and gas auction by posing as Bidder 70 and outbidding oil companies for parcels around Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah. For his act of civil disobedience, he was imprisoned for 21 months. He has used this as a platform to spread awareness of the urgency of the climate crisis and the need for bold, confrontational action to create a just and healthy world.

Erin K. Robinson started her creative journey making costumes for television and movies in Los Angeles before returning to New York to design for children鈥檚 wear companies, such as the Gap and The Children鈥檚 Place, before re-inventing herself and venturing into the illustration world. Her work can be found in many well-known newspapers and magazines, and in her first fully illustrated book, Brave Black First: 50 African American Women Who Changed the World, with Crown Books and the Smithsonian NMAAHC. She divides her time between New York City and Washington, D.C.

Jamon Jordan is an educator, writer, and historian. Jamon has been a teacher and researcher of African and African American history for more than 20 years. He is founder and CEO of  Black Scroll Network History & Tours in Detroit, where he leads tours and presentations on African and African American history. He also serves as the President of the Detroit branch of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH Detroit), and on the Board of Trustees for the Historical Society of Michigan. Jamon has been featured on CBS Radio, NPR, C-SPAN, CNN, and the History Channel.

Michael Harriot is the senior writer at TheRoot.com where he covers the intersection of race, politics, and culture. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, The New York Times, and on his mother鈥檚 refrigerator. He is a frequent political commentator on MSNBC and CNN, and earned the National Association of Black Journalists Award for digital commentary, as well as TV writing. Michael earned a bachelor鈥檚 degree in Mass Communications from Auburn University and a Masters in Macroeconomics from Florida State University. His book, BlackAF History, will be released in the spring of 2021.