Extinction of animals and plants, #climate disasters, #Desert conditions could spread rapidly from groundwater depletion and plant destruction.

By Erika Schelby

The planet is facing multiple severe challenges that require our immediate attention. Putting an end to the dirty and suffocating fossil fuel emissions may be the most significant global priority, but limiting the misuse of water and restoring degraded land are also essential projects.

These two actions could help put the brakes on extreme weather events and slow down mounting losses in biodiversity, biocapacity, and the economy.

The Seeds of Preparedness

Human encroachment, especially in areas rich in biodiversity, has been one of the major threats to the survival of plants and nonhuman animals.

A 2023 report by NatureServe, a conservation group that networks with and analyzes the research of more than 1,000 scientists in the U.S. and Canada, puts the biodiversity crisis into perspective.

Their findings are worrisome: 40 percent of animals and 34 percent of plants are at risk of extinction in the United States. Many of these species are losing their natural habitats: 41 percent of ecosystems are threatened by collapse.

“At this moment, species are going extinct faster than any time in human history,” the report stated. “Given limited resources available for land management, conservation, and research, we need to make the most effective decisions to ensure the survival of natural communities. Data should be driving these decisions.”

The repercussions of our thoughtless actions are finally catching up with us. They threaten our existence. The United States is already experiencing natural disasters at an unparalleled scale. “The U.S. experienced 23 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the first eight months of 2023—the largest number since records began,” according to Axios.

Using resilient native seeds to repair “Earth’s Green Mantle” may help support those Americans who are losing everything due to storms, floods, landslides, or fires. It could offer them a fighting chance to start over and rebuild in a safer spot—for keeps, and not in vain.

What use would reconstruction be if the climate crisis deepens and destroys their homes again? “Without native plants, especially their seeds, we do not have the ability to restore functional ecosystems after natural disasters and mitigate the effects of climate change,” states the report, “National Seed Strategy for Rehabilitation and Restoration.”

To keep the human population sheltered, we can get help from something ancient and fundamental: native seeds, “which have adapted to their local environments over the course of thousands of years,” explained NPR. Sadly, we no longer have enough of them to do even the most urgent repairs. Making sure there will be a sufficient supply is the first task.

In January 2023, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) released the report “An Assessment of Native Seed Needs and the Capacity for Their Supply.” It leaves no doubt about the dire shortage of native seeds and the urgency of supplying them to restore damaged natural areas.

“A limited supply of native seeds and other native plant materials is a widely acknowledged barrier to fulfilling our most critical restoration needs,” said Susan P. Harrison, a professor at the University of California, Davis, and chair of the committee that wrote the NASEM report.

The document outlines a detailed course of action, covering topics ranging from federal to state and local governments, tribal uses of native seeds, cooperative partnerships, and the problematic situations seed suppliers face. Another critical study called “Collection and Production of Native Seeds for Ecological Restoration” by Simone Pedrini and her colleagues in 2020 offered an excellent analysis of native seed requirements.

The “just-in-time” inventory business model of late capitalism is a fiasco for seeds and seedlings. Cities want to plant many more trees to mitigate extreme heat. The U.S. Forest Service intends to plant 1.2 billion trees between 2022 and 2032 to restore scorched land. But the ample supply of hardy seedlings to do this is not available.

“Seedling production in the northern U.S. fell by more than half between 2012 and 2020, the researchers found,” stated an August 2023 article in Anthropocene. It takes planning and years of careful work to harvest the desired seeds and grow the seedlings. The limited quantities of baby trees found in nurseries usually belong to vulnerable species that will not survive the harsh conditions resulting from extreme weather conditions.

Evolution: The Ultimate Disaster Proofing

The resilient seeds needed are the end-product of a long evolution. Plants have accomplished much since starting on solid ground some 500 million years ago, and they have gained far more experience on how to persist on this Earth than we have. They’ve endured the harshest conditions and have been tested and retested to the limits. Those plant species that made it know how to hold on even when heat, drought, erosion, and other perils will cause other plants to fail. Insects, animals, and humans depend on these plants for sustenance, shelter, and more.

In fact, plants have been essential for all living things in the planet’s history, and their germplasm will be crucial for the future. Humans are the new kids on the block, and our cavalier attitude toward the genetic richness of this inconspicuous and diverse greenery has gotten us into the current dilemma.

Global Boiling

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA, July 2023 was the hottest month based on NASA’s records dating back to the 1880s. In the United States, a rising percentage of the population has been confronted by extreme weather events: storms, floods, fires, landslides, long-lasting extreme heat, smoke, toxic air pollution, and drought.

To pick just one day: on July 13, more than 100 million people in several states in the United States faced extreme weather alerts. Then, by July 28, nearly 200 million Americans were under extreme weather alerts, and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres announced that the “era of global boiling has arrived.”

Extreme weather change is no longer something remote and abstract; it is with us, and it is real. We feel it, live it, and must deal with it. It saps energy, sabotages productivity, and destroys livelihoods. The heat boils the human body and precipitates illness and death. Governments, including our own, appear unprepared to deal with the consequences of global warming—their responses look inadequate or sluggish. And to be fair, all this might be too much for our institutions and agencies to handle.

Unprepared to Survive the Climate Catastrophe

A closer look at October 2023 figures provided by the Danger Season map, released by the Union of Concerned Scientists, reveals how the situation is slowly spiraling out of control, as a whopping “96 percent of people in the United States faced an extreme weather alert during Danger Season 2023.”

This climate catastrophe has thrown up a new set of challenges to reckon with at home and globally. While there is a vast Pentagon apparatus in place to protect Americans against threats from abroad—real or invented—we seem unprepared to protect the U.S. population who are being subjected to extreme weather aggression.

Increasingly, images of people who have lost everything in a storm or a wildfire have become common. Often depleted by shock, stress, and the elements, looking worse for wear, they are seen putting on a brave face for the camera, and saying they are thankful to have survived. Then, in tune with their reputation as can-do Americans, they make pledges to rebuild. But the question remains: how? The costs of reconstruction have risen sharply during the last few years. And what about the required homeowners’ insurance that’s far too expensive for many or unavailable altogether?

The big insurance companies, like State Farm General Insurance Company and Allstate Corporation, have stopped providing insurance coverage to new homeowners since June 2023 in climate-stricken states like California and Florida. But these are only the aftermath stories. Just like the people left behind by the weather-related calamities, these stories will rapidly fade away from public attention, when they are no longer deemed newsworthy. But make no mistake: the survivors of these catastrophes are alive. They feel and think.

Desertification of the Sahara

At this point, it is helpful to recall that long ago, the world’s largest hot desert was a lush green place. Between 11,000 and 4,000 years ago, what we now know as the Sahara had rivers, lakes, abundant vegetation, thriving wildlife, and human populations. Later, during Roman times, Tunisia and then Egypt became the breadbaskets of the empire.

Yet today, blending with and bordering on the great Sahara Desert, these countries, which receive little rain, must import much of their wheat to feed their people. What happened? A cyclical change occurred due to the “changing orbital conditions of the [E]arth,” as it has happened since time immemorial.

The Earth’s orbital axis affects climate change. It wobbles. That’s called “the polar motion,” leading to a tilt that alters the angle of solar penetration in the atmosphere. The greater the axial tilt angle, the more extreme our seasons become. This is what happened across the vast Sahara area.

This prompted the desertification of the Sahara, which is “land degradation in arid, semiarid, and subhumid areas, accruing from multiple factors.”

Our continued disregard for nature has led to the expansion of the Sahara Desert, which seems to have grown by 10 percent since 1920. “The results suggest that human-caused climate change, as well as natural climate cycles, caused the desert's expansion,” according to the National Science Foundation.

Ecosystems interact, blend, cooperate, accommodate, get along, and find solutions.

In contrast, humans tend to focus on a problem, plunge in, intervene, and achieve good results in a linear fashion, which may produce unintended side effects and disturbances that can escalate, cause severe difficulties, and even end up in ecological collapse. Projects may succeed in the short term and make a mess in the long term.

These risks shouldn’t scare doers away, but perhaps this could teach us to have far more respect, insight, and even a little awe about the marvelous, interconnected functioning of natural systems. Fit in with it instead of fighting and wrecking it.

Solutions That Become Problems

One instance of how a temporary solution led to more problems comes to mind: the development, use, misuse, and final banning of DDT in 1972. Did we get rid of a bad and toxic habit? Yes, for a while, but then we went a step further and invented neonicotinoid pesticides, or neonics, and these neurotoxins harm the insect’s nerves. Neonics are widely used to coat seeds to protect plants from bugs. But they do much more: they kill pollinators, birds, and butterflies, persist in the environment, and leak into surface water, groundwater, and the soil.

As Amy van Saun of the Center for Food Safety wrote, “Now, almost half of all U.S. farmland is planted with pesticide-coated seeds.” The EPA still permits the use of neonicotinoids. They are super-toxic: one GMO corn seed coated with a neonicotinoid can kill more than 80,000 bees or one songbird, according to Saun. In 2023, scientists discovered that more than half of all species live in the soil, and here we are, saturating that valuable earthly skin with poisons.

It’s not proven that Albert Einstein said it, but he may have done so, and this quote fits the pesticide charade perfectly: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” And that is what we do by holding on to the same bad habits.

How We Tipped the Balance

We have disturbed the equilibrium in nature because of our bad habits, which have caused irreversible damage to the planet. For instance, humanity influenced the Earth’s wobble and made the prolonged transition from wet to arid much faster in some regions than others. They initiated desertification. How? Archeologist David Wright thinks that “humans and their goats tipped the balance.”

Archeological and environmental data show that with the beginning of pastoralism, the raising of domesticated grazing animals, and overgrazing, the elimination of local grasses and plants spread. This changed the albedo, the amount of sunlight reflected off the ground’s surface. Concurrently, subtle orbital changes and atmospheric fluctuations reduced the monsoon rainfall. The result was an unrelenting loss of vegetation, a decreasing albedo, and rising temperatures.

In contrast, an increasing albedo signifies more snow and ice on the planet, and more sunlight is reflected back to space. This allows the planet to stay cooler.

For the Sahara, the combination of human activity decreased albedo, and erasure of the green mantle put regions of this vast terrain on the fast track to desertification.

Another interesting case in point based on the latest research and related to a shift in the Earth’s rotational axis is happening right now—with a focus on water. Anyone not infected by hubris would assume that humans are too inconsequential to initiate momentous orbital alterations, but evidence shows they can do it. Moving and redistributing mass on Earth impacts the planet’s rotation. It makes sense: if you load one side of a vessel—car or boat—with greater weight, there will be a tilt.

Published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in June 2023 is a study by geophysicist Ki-Weon Seo and his team at Seoul National University that researched the impact of water (which includes shrinking ice sheets, glaciers, and snowpacks in the Rocky Mountains or other mountain ranges) on Earth’s rotation.

Seo’s latest findings show that “among climate-related causes, the redistribution of groundwater has the largest impact on the drift of the rotational pole.” Water is heavy, and the rotational pole “has shifted almost one meter in a 20-year period due to groundwater being pumped from one location.”

If just 20 short years of depleting groundwater can shift Earth’s rotational pole, where does this leave us in the arid U.S. Southwest and West? As long as we insist on extreme and unsustainable practices we can expect more dramatic results.

Examples of such practices include growing large-scale water-thirsty irrigated crops like alfalfa in Arizona to feed cattle and dairy cows in other countries; filling every private swimming pool in water-starved states; ignoring about 13 percent of evaporation from our antediluvian way of storing, moving, and managing water (ancient civilizations had somewhat smarter methods); and allowing some 1.5 million grazing cattle to erase native plants on millions of acres of public land whose forests are scorched by wildfires each year.

It is no wonder that we are facing a climate crisis in response to this abuse. It also becomes clear why our age is called the Anthropocene: geological time now seems to be the bygone past; it’s too slow for contemporary Masters of the Universe. The majority of us tend to shoot first and ask questions later. Is that why we are pumping groundwater like there is no tomorrow, stamping out native vegetation, rushing toward desertification, and endangering the food supply?

Little Steps and Multiplying Seeds

It does not have to be this way. The world is beautiful, and we do not have to passively witness how it gets despoiled. People can vote, volunteer for seed-collecting agencies, tend community gardens, rewild small city plots, and get kids involved locally. Or they can do things alone, as independent individuals. Equally, no one is forced to outwait the endless political jousting and the tiresome struggles with vested interests. After all, we have agency, or don’t we?

By simply multiplying one seed collected, one plant raised, one bee spared, less red meat eaten, no food wasted, and personal fossil fuel use reduced as much as possible, there can soon be some significant positive results. As Eduardo Galeano understood: “Many small people, in small places, doing small things can change the world.”

Author Bio: Erika Schelby is the author of Looking for Humboldt and Searching for German Footprints in New Mexico and Beyond (Lava Gate Press, 2017) and Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Future? (Lava Gate Press, 2013), which was shortlisted for the International Essay Prize Contest by the Berlin-based cultural magazine Lettre International. Schelby lives in New Mexico.

 This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

 

A short film and narratives project “Stories for Life” seeks to bring about the shift in culture that humanity needs to survive.

By April M. Short

The stories we do and don’t tell about ourselves and these times in which we’re living shape the direction of our lives and our cultures. Stories have the power to alter how we interact and relate. Those who study cultural anthropology and the origins of humanity are finding that cultural stories—the things people collectively believe about ourselves and our capacities—have forever shaped human societies, going back to our early hominid ancestors. In shifting those narratives now, they argue, we have the realistic potential to evolve on purpose as a species. Given the dire, multifront crises of our times—from climate disaster to war to poverty—this kind of cultural and social evolution is desperately needed.

An animated short film, which screened between acts on the big screens of each of the four main stages at the Glastonbury Music Festival in 2022, delves into the idea of story as a means for change. It is titled, “Stories for Life,” and it opens with scenes of fire, a child digging through a pile of trash, plastic rubbage floating in the water, and smoke billowing from an industrial tower. A narrator’s voice speaks over the imagery: “Life is in trouble. As a species, we are facing multiple crises that we can no longer ignore. At the root of them all is our economy; an economy designed to destroy life; an economy designed by us.”

As the narration continues, a series of illustrated signs seem to lay out the challenges of our world, one by one: “Capitalism is crashing. Society is dividing. Democracy is degrading. Climate is tipping. Ecology is vanishing. Disease is spreading. Inequity is rising. Protest is pervading.”

The film takes viewers through a brief history of humanity’s relationship with the Earth. It delves into the problems of our current ways of living, then offers the potential to rewrite the story of our values, and begin to create livable systems in which value is based on the well-being of all life.

Over animations of cave paintings, constellations, and wildlife, the film reminds viewers that “our ancestors lived in intimate relationship with the more-than-human world” and told stories about, “nature as our family, our guardian, our guide. But then some of… [our ancestors] imagined and created ways to control the natural world. This made them feel more powerful and superior to nature. Separate from it. The more powerful they felt the more disconnected from nature they became. And so they began to tell new stories. Stories that normalized domination, control, and the oppression of life. About how nature is our slave, there to be captured and exploited. They began to scorch, spoil, and suffocate our world. And as they did so, these stories spread, and became common sense.”

This narration comes with animations of the industrialization and commodification of resources: factories, men in suits and wigs, ships with cargo. The film goes on to explain that such stories have led people down the path of greed, grand, hustle, and blind progress, and made people “feel separate, not only from nature but from each other, in constant competition and conflict.”

Horror Stories, Love Stories

The narrator notes that these stories then became horror stories of ruined lives and a ruined world, as images of refugee camps, rubbage heaps, and melting ice caps show on screen. “But, it doesn’t have to go on like this,” the narrator says. “We can choose to live by different stories: Love stories about interconnection and interdependence. Love stories that measure success by well-being—the well-being of all life including our own. Love stories about interconnection and interdependence.” Now, the scene is blooming flowers, mycelial networks, collaborative groups of people, and brightly colored animal life.

The film outlines how these “love stories” will lead us to reconnection, so that we can regenerate our relationships with nature and each other, and create a steam that nourishes and supports the life we all want to live rather than destroying life. It closes with the reminder that “we all have the power to tell these stories,” and that many people are already doing so.

The concept behind the film is part of a larger website project launched in 2020, also called Stories for Life, aimed at highlighting stories that support ways forward for humanity and all life. It began as a collaboration between the Green Economy Coalition, Wellbeing Economy Alliance, and the Spaceship Earth, and as its website states: “This project was inspired by the question ‘how do we tell the story of a new economy?’”

The eventual Stories for Life project was co-created by Dan Burgess and Paddy Loughman with the purpose of helping to “create stories that contribute to the re-design of a healthier economy. To bring forth new and ancient stories into our culture, which weave a narrative of interconnection and help us design a new type of economy,” as notes the Stories for Life website.

Co-creator Dan Burgess—a writer, podcast host, and learning guide—says his work centers on supporting the growth of regenerative cultures and creative activism, all aimed at cultural shifts that may “help people remember we are part of a living Earth.” He says in addition to himself and Loughman, there have been many collaborators and supporters, and that Stories for Life’s creators ultimately wanted to help make more readily accessible and clear “the relationship between everyday stories and how they shape cultural narratives, and how those things shape the design of human systems—in this case, the economic system,” he says. “We wanted to help more people understand that and see that in these times, stories are very powerful and we’re all carrying them. So in that sense we all have the ability to make an impact.”

He adds that another aim was to weave together thinking around how cultural stories are currently shaping westernized economic systems, and the destruction those systems are responsible for.

“What we were trying to do [from the outset] is explore the role of stories in either maintaining and perpetuating these destructive economic designs,” he says.

Stories for Life eventually published eight chapters, each referencing the stories of many people. As the Overview chapter states, “There is a better narrative. A healthier narrative that has been carried by cultures around the world for thousands of years, and is now being recognised by the latest scientific breakthroughs. A narrative grounded in the recognition that we are all entangled, integrated, dependent on each other and the more-than-human world around us.”

Burgess shares that the Stories for Life film and concept are being shared by a number of groups and organizations around the world, as a means of inspiration and provocation.

“Our Indigenous brothers and sisters have always known what our ancestors knew, and what modern science now tells us is true: that we are all entangled and wrapped up with life,” he says, adding that Stories for Life was an opportunity to bring together a lifetime of experiences and learning, in a package that seeks to make these concepts more accessible.

Learning Journeys

Burgess suggests the Stories For Life project is a way of giving permission to people to explore new ways of looking at our world—himself included. On his podcast, the Spaceship Earth podcast, which started in 2018, he began to offer what he calls peer-supported learning journeys, for creative activists and regenerative change-makers.

“It’s a kind of action learning,” he says. “We work as a group and we explore, quite deeply, our connection with the natural world. We support each other to cultivate our creative courage to start to point our creative energies at trying to offer something to these times which is going to slow down the destruction of our living Earth and start to bring people back together.”

Out of this exploration, a collaboration between Stories for Life and Burgess’s learning platform, Becoming Crew, launched a three-month learning journey offering in 2023, for people looking to work with stories in this way.

“It’s this idea of becoming crew on Spaceship Earth, like stepping up in service and becoming active participants in the changes we need,” he says. The learning journey brought together a group of 40 different practitioners from nine countries who work with concepts of story and narrative in our culture, who had been on the podcast.

“We deeply explored some of the Stories for Life work, building practices to help people explore the natural world around them in much more intimate, relational ways—and use that re-entanglement with nature as a way of exploring their creativity, and how stories are evolving for them.”

He says there are two major story themes that Stories for Life is working to shift. One centers on how people can, at the micro and macro levels, steer the stories of our relationship to the natural world away from those that frame it as a commodity resource that is separate from ourselves.

“There are millions of stories every day that people are working with, which keep perpetuating that view of the living world as resource,” he says. “You’ve only got to look at the pollution of the oceans, rivers, the air we’re breathing—the toxicity: We treat the living world as a slave to human progress.”

The other major theme with which Stories for Life is working involves shifting people’s conceptions of what is realistic and possible.

“Can we help people imagine a world where we’ve shifted the dominant story of how we measure success away from productivity, accumulation, and growth to a story of the well-being of all life?” he asks. This is a reframing of value, which measures success by the health and well-being of fellow humans and the ecosystems we are a part of.

Burgess says Stories for Life’s narratives are a way of birthing and seeding new stories that may “bring us back together and help people recognize that we’re entangled with all life… and begin to see cultural stories that completely help us, reframe what success is all about in this culture, what it is to be human, what is our relationship with the natural world.”e stories we do and don’t tell about ourselves and these times in which we’re living shape the direction of our lives and our cultures. Stories have the power to alter how we interact and relate. Those who study cultural anthropology and the origins of humanity are finding that cultural stories—the things people collectively believe about ourselves and our capacities—have forever shaped human societies, going back to our early hominid ancestors. In shifting those narratives now, they argue, we have the realistic potential to evolve on purpose as a species. Given the dire, multifront crises of our times—from climate disaster to war to poverty—this kind of cultural and social evolution is desperately needed.

An animated short film, which screened between acts on the big screens of each of the four main stages at the Glastonbury Music Festival in 2022, delves into the idea 

of story as a means for change. It is titled, “Stories for Life,” and it opens with scenes of fire, a child digging through a pile of trash, plastic rubbage floating in the water, and smoke billowing from an industrial tower. A narrator’s voice speaks over the imagery: “Life is in trouble. As a species, we are facing multiple crises that we can no longer ignore. At the root of them all is our economy; an economy designed to destroy life; an economy designed by us.”

As the narration continues, a series of illustrated signs seem to lay out the challenges of our world, one by one: “Capitalism is crashing. Society is dividing. Democracy is degrading. Climate is tipping. Ecology is vanishing. Disease is spreading. Inequity is rising. Protest is pervading.”

The film takes viewers through a brief history of humanity’s relationship with the Earth. It delves into the problems of our current ways of living, then offers the potential to rewrite the story of our values, and begin to create livable systems in which value is based on the well-being of all life.

Over animations of cave paintings, constellations, and wildlife, the film reminds viewers that “our ancestors lived in intimate relationship with the more-than-human world” and told stories about, “nature as our family, our guardian, our guide. But then some of… [our ancestors] imagined and created ways to control the natural world. This made them feel more powerful and superior to nature. Separate from it. The more powerful they felt the more disconnected from nature they became. And so they began to tell new stories. Stories that normalized domination, control, and the oppression of life. About how nature is our slave, there to be captured and exploited. They began to scorch, spoil, and suffocate our world. And as they did so, these stories spread, and became common sense.”

This narration comes with animations of the industrialization and commodification of resources: factories, men in suits and wigs, ships with cargo. The film goes on to explain that such stories have led people down the path of greed, grand, hustle, and blind progress, and made people “feel separate, not only from nature but from each other, in constant competition and conflict.”

Horror Stories, Love Stories

The narrator notes that these stories then became horror stories of ruined lives and a ruined world, as images of refugee camps, rubbage heaps, and melting ice caps show on screen. “But, it doesn’t have to go on like this,” the narrator says. “We can choose to live by different stories: Love stories about interconnection and interdependence. Love stories that measure success by well-being—the well-being of all life including our own. Love stories about interconnection and interdependence.” Now, the scene is blooming flowers, mycelial networks, collaborative groups of people, and brightly colored animal life.

The film outlines how these “love stories” will lead us to reconnection, so that we can regenerate our relationships with nature and each other, and create a steam that nourishes and supports the life we all want to live rather than destroying life. It closes with the reminder that “we all have the power to tell these stories,” and that many people are already doing so.

The concept behind the film is part of a larger website project launched in 2020, also called Stories for Life, aimed at highlighting stories that support ways forward for humanity and all life. It began as a collaboration between the Green Economy Coalition, Wellbeing Economy Alliance, and the Spaceship Earth, and as its website states: “This project was inspired by the question ‘how do we tell the story of a new economy?’”

The eventual Stories for Life project was co-created by Dan Burgess and Paddy Loughman with the purpose of helping to “create stories that contribute to the re-design of a healthier economy. To bring forth new and ancient stories into our culture, which weave a narrative of interconnection and help us design a new type of economy,” as notes the Stories for Life website.

Co-creator Dan Burgess—a writer, podcast host, and learning guide—says his work centers on supporting the growth of regenerative cultures and creative activism, all aimed at cultural shifts that may “help people remember we are part of a living Earth.” He says in addition to himself and Loughman, there have been many collaborators and supporters, and that Stories for Life’s creators ultimately wanted to help make more readily accessible and clear “the relationship between everyday stories and how they shape cultural narratives, and how those things shape the design of human systems—in this case, the economic system,” he says. “We wanted to help more people understand that and see that in these times, stories are very powerful and we’re all carrying them. So in that sense we all have the ability to make an impact.”

He adds that another aim was to weave together thinking around how cultural stories are currently shaping westernized economic systems, and the destruction those systems are responsible for.

“What we were trying to do [from the outset] is explore the role of stories in either maintaining and perpetuating these destructive economic designs,” he says.

Stories for Life eventually published eight chapters, each referencing the stories of many people. As the Overview chapter states, “There is a better narrative. A healthier narrative that has been carried by cultures around the world for thousands of years, and is now being recognised by the latest scientific breakthroughs. A narrative grounded in the recognition that we are all entangled, integrated, dependent on each other and the more-than-human world around us.”

Burgess shares that the Stories for Life film and concept are being shared by a number of groups and organizations around the world, as a means of inspiration and provocation.

“Our Indigenous brothers and sisters have always known what our ancestors knew, and what modern science now tells us is true: that we are all entangled and wrapped up with life,” he says, adding that Stories for Life was an opportunity to bring together a lifetime of experiences and learning, in a package that seeks to make these concepts more accessible.

Learning Journeys

Burgess suggests the Stories For Life project is a way of giving permission to people to explore new ways of looking at our world—himself included. On his podcast, the Spaceship Earth podcast, which started in 2018, he began to offer what he calls peer-supported learning journeys, for creative activists and regenerative change-makers.

“It’s a kind of action learning,” he says. “We work as a group and we explore, quite deeply, our connection with the natural world. We support each other to cultivate our creative courage to start to point our creative energies at trying to offer something to these times which is going to slow down the destruction of our living Earth and start to bring people back together.”

Out of this exploration, a collaboration between Stories for Life and Burgess’s learning platform, Becoming Crew, launched a three-month learning journey offering in 2023, for people looking to work with stories in this way.

“It’s this idea of becoming crew on Spaceship Earth, like stepping up in service and becoming active participants in the changes we need,” he says. The learning journey brought together a group of 40 different practitioners from nine countries who work with concepts of story and narrative in our culture, who had been on the podcast.

“We deeply explored some of the Stories for Life work, building practices to help people explore the natural world around them in much more intimate, relational ways—and use that re-entanglement with nature as a way of exploring their creativity, and how stories are evolving for them.”

He says there are two major story themes that Stories for Life is working to shift. One centers on how people can, at the micro and macro levels, steer the stories of our relationship to the natural world away from those that frame it as a commodity resource that is separate from ourselves.

“There are millions of stories every day that people are working with, which keep perpetuating that view of the living world as resource,” he says. “You’ve only got to look at the pollution of the oceans, rivers, the air we’re breathing—the toxicity: We treat the living world as a slave to human progress.”

The other major theme with which Stories for Life is working involves shifting people’s conceptions of what is realistic and possible.

“Can we help people imagine a world where we’ve shifted the dominant story of how we measure success away from productivity, accumulation, and growth to a story of the well-being of all life?” he asks. This is a reframing of value, which measures success by the health and well-being of fellow humans and the ecosystems we are a part of.

Burgess says Stories for Life’s narratives are a way of birthing and seeding new stories that may “bring us back together and help people recognize that we’re entangled with all life… and begin to see cultural stories that completely help us, reframe what success is all about in this culture, what it is to be human, what is our relationship with the natural world.”

Author Bio: April M. Short is an editor, journalist, and documentary editor and producer. She is a co-founder of the Observatory, where she is the Local Peace Economy editor, and she is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she was a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Good Times, a weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz, California. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, LA Yoga, the Conversation, Salon, and many other publications. 

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy.

The only way to steer American democracy to safety is to wrest money out of the claws of the wealthiest elites, who now control finances rivaling the economies of whole nations.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

As we count down toward the 2024 general election, we should expect to hear from media pundits about candidates and their viability, swing states and the electoral college, likely voters and poll results, and much more. Occasionally we may hear about some issues of importance. Most likely, we will hear little about the urgent need for wealth redistribution in the United States. Extreme inequality remains an invisible scourge underlying so much of what ails society and, even when discussed, is touted as an unavoidable and inevitable outcome of our economy.

However, there is abundant evidence that wealth inequality is the product of intentional design and the idea that what is good for billionaires is good for society. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Switzerland-based global bank UBS just released its 2023 Billionaire Ambitions report and concluded, “For the first time in nine editions of the report, billionaires have accumulated more wealth through inheritance than entrepreneurship.” Benjamin Cavalli, Head of Strategic Clients at UBS Global Wealth Management said, “This is a theme we expect to see more of over the next 20 years, as more than 1,000 billionaires pass an estimated [$5.2 trillion] to their children.”

That’s more than the economy of the entire United Kingdom. It’s more than the economies of Canada and Mexico combined.

The UBS report was not a critical one and hardly blinked an eye about the obscenity of wealth being hoarded in dynasties. About half of all billionaires around the world use UBS’s banking services, so the bank merely analyzed the investment habits of its most important clients. It did so candidly, referring to “the great wealth transfer” from one generation to the next, avoiding mention of the wealth transfer from the majority of the public to an elite minority.

The report also declared with pride that intent on “continuing the current family legacy, 60% of heirs want to enable future generations to benefit from their wealth.” Of course, they meant future generations of their own families, not in general.

But this wealth transfer is directly the result of tax codes written to benefit the uber-rich. ProPublica’s 2021 analysis of the tax returns of the richest Americans found that they paid an average of 3.4% in taxes, employing armies of lawyers to exploit every loophole carved out to offer special advantages to wealthy elites. Meanwhile, middle-class and working-class Americans pay double-digit tax rates. What this amounts to is collective theft from government revenues.

It’s time to reverse this trend by resorting to a concerted project of wealth redistribution. It’s time to wrest billions, if not trillions, out of the hands of billionaires and their heirs and pour it back where it belongs: to the rest of us.

Call it socialism—which is what the pro-rich rightwing GOP does—or call it progressive taxation, or economic justice. It doesn’t matter; the nation’s fiscal conservatives will demonize any ideas of wealth redistribution and will attempt to instill baseless fears of creeping communism, no matter what specific language we use around fairness. So, we might as well start spelling it out instead of trying to appease the right. After all, there’s a reason why conservatives and wealthy elites want the public to be afraid of socialism: they’re terrified that Americans might be thrilled to embrace policies such as wealth redistribution through taxation.

And if we need any more reasons to put a bullseye on billionaire wealth, it turns out they are vicious, dangerous fascists, whose children are an even more callous lot than their parents.

Billionaires don’t need the protections that democracy offers: earned benefits like Social Security or Medicare, access to free or affordable health care including abortion, labor and wage protections, and due process (they can buy the best legal help when they get in trouble).

In fact, democracy is a threat to their wealth hoarding, which is why they are backing the most dangerous demagogue to have ever occupied the White House: Donald Trump. Economic analyst and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich lists the numerous billionaires backing Trump for a second term and cites Trump’s promise to wealthy elites, that he plans to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Wealthy elites helped bring us Trump’s first term, and they’re itching for a second.

Why wouldn’t billionaires back fascism? It benefits them in ways democracy doesn’t. Indeed, billionaires exist as a design flaw in democracy. The greater the number of billionaires and the greater the wealth they hoard, the weaker the democracy that binds them.

Legislation like Senator Ron Wyden’s Billionaire Income Tax is what they fear if democracy trumps fascism. Wyden’s bill is so modest that it doesn’t target wealth, only income, and would affect fewer than 1,000 Americans, trimming off tiny slivers of their unprecedented hoardings, leaving them as fabulously wealthy as before. After all, is there a real difference between being worth $10 billion versus $9.9 billion?

As to the children of billionaires being worse than their parents, there is a small mention in the UBS report of how heirs of billionaires are far less philanthropic than first-generation billionaires: “while more than [two-thirds] (68%) of first-generation billionaires stated that following their philanthropic goals and making an impact on the world was a main objective of their legacy, less than a third (32%) of the inheriting generations did so.” One could conclude that empathy among children of the ultra-wealthy drops by half each generation. This could be a generation even more determined to fund and fuel fascism in order to protect their riches compared to their parents.

The wealthy are so secure in the protections they have from democratic curbs on their financial power that their biggest worries, as per the UBS report, include “geopolitical tensions,” inflation, recession, and higher interest rates. Fears around a “tight jobs market” and “stricter sustainability rules,” fall low on their list. In other words, they feel secure against threats of wage rebellions and government regulations.

And so, as we hurtle toward authoritarian aristocracy, we must normalize the idea of wealth redistribution. There is no good reason against it, not a single one. We can have either billionaires or democracy, not both.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

 

Pharmaceutical companies are resisting public scrutiny and suing over modest drug price regulations. It’s past time to regulate their profiteering.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Major pharmaceutical companies in the United States are battling with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders over an issue that is at the heart of whether we value human wellbeing over corporate profits. As chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), Sanders has vowed to force CEOs of pharmaceutical companies to publicly answer for why their drug prices are so much higher than in other nations. He plans to bring a committee vote to subpoena them. The subpoenas are necessary because—brazenly—the CEOs of Johnson & Johnson and Merck have simply refused to testify to the HELP committee. What are they afraid of?

In a defensive-sounding letter to Sanders, an attorney for Johnson & Johnson accused the Senator of using committee hearings to “punish the companies who have chosen to engage in constitutionally protected litigation.” The letter does not specify the litigation in question—perhaps because it would sound so ridiculous and would reveal the company’s real agenda. Last July, the company, along with Merck and Bristol Myers Squibb sued the Biden administration fceuticalor allowing the Medicare program to regulate prescription drug prices.

It appears that Johnson & Johnson and Merck are indeed afraid of being questioned by lawmakers about drug-profiteering in the U.S.

One pharmaceutical expert, Ameet Sarpatwari of Harvard Medical School explained to the New York Times that, “The U.S. market is the bank for pharmaceutical companies… There’s a keen sense that the best place to try to extract profits is the U.S. because of its existing system and its dysfunction.” Another expert, Michelle Mello, a professor of law and health policy at Stanford university, told the Times, “Drugs are so expensive in the U.S. because we let them be.”

In other words, it’s been a free-for-all for pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. In 2003, then-President George W. Bush signed a Medicare reform bill into law, promising help for seniors struggling to pay for medications, but that law stripped the federal government of its power to negotiate drug prices for Medicare’s participants. It was a typically Republican, Orwellian move: promise help to ordinary people and deliver the exact opposite.

Nearly two decades later, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which Biden signed into law in 2022, tied Medicare drug prices to inflation and required companies to issue rebates if prices rose too fast. It was the first time since Bush’s 2003 law that drug manufacturers were subject to any U.S. price regulations. Pharmaceutical companies aren’t having it, and not only did they sue Biden over the IRA, they don’t seem to want to answer for their actions publicly.

It’s not enough for Medicare to be able to cut drug prices. There needs to be nationwide regulation on all drug prices for all Americans. After all, American taxpayers generously subsidize the research and development of most drugs. A report by Sanders’ staff explained that “[w]ith few exceptions, private corporations have the unilateral power to set the price of publicly funded medicines.” The report’s authors chided that “[t]he government asks for nothing in return for its investment.”

What’s more, the report rightly points out that people in other nations benefit from having access to lower-cost drugs that Americans have paid global pharmaceutical companies to develop. For example, SYMTUZA, an HIV medication that scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health helped to develop, is available to U.S. patients for a whopping $56,000 a year, while patients in the UK pay only $10,000 a year for the same drug purchased from the same company.

It’s not as if companies like Johnson & Johnson have some perverse preference for European patients over American ones. It’s merely that their prices are regulated by most other industrial nations. The U.S. “happens to be the only industrialized nation that doesn’t negotiate” drug prices, explained Merith Basey, Executive Director of Patients For Affordable Drugs NOW, in an interview on Rising Up With Sonali last fall.

Indeed, countries like the UK, France, and Germany, offer models for the U.S. in drug price controls and much has been written about what works best. Further, there is—unsurprisingly—a strong public desire for price controls. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll in August 2023, “[m]ajorities across partisans say there is not enough regulation over drug pricing.” Moreover, a whopping 83 percent of those polled “see pharmaceutical profits as a major factor contributing to the cost of prescription drugs.”

There is no shortage of ideas for specific price control regulations that could work in the U.S. For example, the Center for American Progress’s October 2023 report, “Following the Money: Untangling U.S. Prescription Drug Financing,” delves deep into how market prices are determined for medications and suggests interventions at every stage of drug price setting.

Frankly, such complex solutions would not really be necessary if all Americans could simply join Medicare health coverage and if Medicare’s bargaining power to negotiate drug prices could be applied to all drugs. But, in the absence of this commonsense holistic approach to healthcare, even complex price controls would be better than no price controls.

Predictably, conservative capitalist critics have trotted out the same, tired arguments against government price regulations of pharmaceuticals. “Drug Price Controls Mean Slower Cures,” declared a Wall Street Journal editorial headline. The paper’s editorial board called the IRA, “the worst legislation to pass Congress in many years,” and went as far as accusing the Biden administration of “extortion.”

But who is engaging in extortion? Economists studying the pharmaceutical industry have found that for years companies have been so flush with cash that they have spent hundreds of billions of dollars in stock buybacks and exorbitant executive bonuses and pay packages. “The $747 billion that the pharmaceutical companies distributed to shareholders was 13 percent greater than the $660 billion that these corporations expended on research & development over the decade,” wrote William Lazonick and Öner Tulum in a report for the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Further, the Wall Street Journal’s screed ignores price controls in the UK, France, Germany, and other nations. If those have no bearing on the speed and quality of drug development, why should U.S. price controls have an impact? And if they do have an impact, then Americans are being unfairly required to bear the burden that people all over the world benefit from.

The Journal’s editorial board made one accurate claim, saying that the IRA “will also give companies the incentives to launch drugs at higher prices and raise prices for privately insured patients to compensate for the Medicare cuts.” The paper made this prediction without any comment on unfettered corporate greed. Indeed, if anyone is engaging in de facto extortion, it appears as though pharmaceutical companies may be the guilty parties in punishing Americans for price controls.

Pharmaceutical companies launched the new year with announced price hikes on at least 500 medications—a massive effort at gouging the public. In contrast, the IRA’s drug price controls apply to only 10 medications so far, and will be expanded to 15 drugs per year for the next four years, and 20 drugs per year thereafter.

Rather than removing price controls on the paltry numbers of medications the IRA can regulate, an easy fix is to apply those same regulations to most or all drugs. Best of all, in order for such a solution to be implemented, pharmaceutical company CEOs wouldn’t even have to drag themselves into committee hearings to explain away their corporate greed.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

As some elite colleges resume SAT requirements in admissions, will we ever see an end to the outdated practice of weeding out prospective students on the basis of race, gender, and class?       

 BY Sonali Kolhatkar

 

When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, higher education institutions throughout the United States started adopting a progressive standard of education that advocates had demanded for decades: they began dropping standardized tests such as the SAT and the ACT as requirements for admissions. As was the case with so many other pandemic-era societal adaptations—government economic relief that lowered poverty rates, a pause in student loan repayments, free vaccines, an end to public library late fees—this offered an opportunity for a grand experiment in promoting equality.

The move to drop the tests can actually be traced to a time before the pandemic, but it was accelerated by students being unable to travel to testing sites during the lockdowns. Further, the mass racial justice uprising of summer 2020 pressured elites into embracing ideas rooted in equity.

Many celebrated the spurning of tests as the right direction for institutions that have ensured the maintenance of white supremacist patriarchy since their inception. But as elite universities such as Yale, Harvard, and Caltech recently reneged on the promise of leveling the playing field by returning to test requirements, are those celebrations premature?

Research has confirmed over and over that requiring students to take the SAT or ACT weeds out women, people of color, and other marginalized groups. As a physics and astronomy undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, I participated in efforts in the early 1990s to address how such tests undermine women’s entry into STEM fields. I was a perfect example: a straight-A student whose academic record had only one stain: a mediocre SAT score which severely narrowed my college options.

Robert Schaeffer, director of public education at FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing, which is one of the leading advocacy groups against required SAT and ACT testing, told the 19th, “Despite the fact that young women get lower scores on the test than young men, they earn higher grades when matched for identical courses in college than the boys.”

Although the SAT has evolved significantly over the years, its origins in racist beliefs are telling. The test’s precursors, the Army Alpha and Beta tests, were analyzed and championed by Carl Brigham, a psychology professor at Princeton University and a eugenicist who believed that testing offered unbiased and scientific proof of white superiority.

Black and Latino students routinely score lower on the SAT’s math section compared to whites and Asians. This is not evidence of a racial difference in educational ability and intelligence as Brigham might have liked to believe. Rather, it is evidence of racial bias in the test.

There is a similar bias based on class. Wealthier students routinely do better on the test than low-income students. This is no surprise given the lucrative industry built on test preparation, helping students navigate the notoriously tricky test in exchange for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The fact that SAT scores are used to determine many a student’s eligibility for scholarships further entrenches class bias.

Indeed, because of the SAT’s racial and class bias, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2019 that officials at the University of California were convinced “that performance on the SAT and ACT was so strongly influenced by family income, parents’ education and race that using them for high-stakes admissions decisions was simply wrong.”

By 2021, in response to a lawsuit brought by the Compton Unified School District, the entire UC system at this experiment has been in place shows promise in opening up higher education to historically excluded communities.permanently dropped tests as requirements for admissions. The move seemed to herald a new era in higher education, and indeed, data from the few years th

But, as advocates of racial, gender, and economic justice painstakingly chipped away at the exclusivity of higher education, conservatives predictably pushed back. A wave of right-wing attacks in recent years has taken aim at affirmative action admissions policies, the teaching of Critical Race Theory, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) campus initiatives.

It was only a matter of time before elite institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Caltech did a backflip on their commitment to equity by reverting back to SAT requirements. Opinions of elite commentators such as New York Times Education Editor David Leonhardt helped validate this decision. Leonhardt wrote, “Standardized tests have become especially unpopular among political progressives, and university campuses are dominated by progressives.”

He highlighted a 2023 paper by an organization called Opportunity Insights to justify reinstating test requirements. The paper concluded that “SAT/ACT scores and academic ratings are highly predictive of post-college success.” It was precisely the ammunition elite institutions were waiting for. Harvard specifically cited the paper in its reversal on testing.

But, according to FairTest’s Schaeffer, the conclusions that Opportunity Insights comes to are flawed. He told the New York Times, “[W]hen you eliminate the role of wealth, test scores are not better than high school G.P.A.” The organization, in a report responding to Leonhardt and Opportunity Insights, accused researchers of omitting student demographics such as “family income, parental education, and race/ethnicity.” They found that when accounting for these critical demographic markers, the SAT fails to predict academic merit and that students’ grade point averages (GPA) in high school are better markers.

Aside from GPA, public school educators have backed the idea of “Performance Based Assessments” (PBA) as a better alternative to the SAT. Such assessments measure the totality of students’ expertise, achievements, and ideas. They are, by design, complex and varied—just as human beings are—and are based on interaction and collaboration—just as society functions in real life.

The SAT is largely a multiple-choice test. It is an individualistic assessment designed for an individualist mindset and is therefore an exceedingly narrow measure of a person. Aside from its essay section, each question has only one correct answer embedded in an array of wrong answers. There is no room for complex thinking and ideas. According to FairTest, “Using the SAT as the gatekeeper for higher education turns out to test one thing above all else: existing station in life.”

Standardized tests, and the idea that universities may revert back to using them, are a source of undue stress on students and their families. Thankfully, thousands of universities and colleges remain test-free or test-optional. Ultimately, only a tiny sliver of the nation’s students are able to attend the institutions that steadfastly cling to elitist practices. If anything, the decision by some to insist on outdated racist, sexist, and classist standards is a further indication of how irrelevant they are to modern American society.

 

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

 This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.