Today, I am thinking about love. A fraught, confusing, full-of-potential kind of love. 

It’s like this: I’m 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—the 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 YES!, 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’s been made, we’re 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’s words help bring me back: “I have decided to stick with love. … Hate is too great a burden to bear.”&�Բ�����; 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’s hard. Love is faith that things can change, and as MLK said, “faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”  

So YES! 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 YES! full circle to its 1996 roots. YES! 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 YES! featured a piece by co-founder David Korten that outlined the YES! vision of a humanity “poised to assume conscious collective responsibility for creating its own future.”&�Բ�����;

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 YES! into the next 25 years, I owe a debt of gratitude to YES! 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’ll read the interview with David Korten on the next page. After 25 years of service to YES!, 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–$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’ Circle ($500–$4,999)��

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’vorah 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’s 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 YES! in their wills)��

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)

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Harris, who’s affectionately known as “Mama Shu,” has funneled her grief into action—turning 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—modeling how to go from “blight to beauty.”&�Բ�����;

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 “Growth” issue, which aims to complicate the narrative of growth as morally good or bad. In our lead feature, we visit Jason Tartt’s bountiful West Virginia farm, where he, like Harris, is proving the community’s 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’re also leaning into the complexity that comes from grappling with different kinds of growth—whether it’s U.S. demographic changes resulting in growing organized violence, or the rise of artificial intelligence, a timely topic as Hollywood’s 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—because that ethos continues to run through everything YES! publishes. It’s 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’s continue growing together—as people, as members of our global community, and as the beloved readers of this magazine.

Be well,
Evette Dionne
YES! Executive Editor

Kelp is an ecosystem engineer, providing crucial habitat for marine mammals, birds, and fish. Kelp acts as a refuge at the ocean’s surface—offering food, shelter, and protection for seals and otters—a��d a nursery on the seafloor—providing spawning grounds, shade, and cooler water for baby fish. Kelp’s holdfast, or rootlike structure, can host more than 90 animal species. Zooplankton, for example—full of the carotenoids that make salmon flesh pink—appear 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, Unangax̂ (Aleut), back to his childhood in Sand Point, Alaska. On these ancestral beaches, he learned to forage for delicacies from Unangax̂ Elders and his mother, Kristin Ferguson: “She would always say, ‘When the tide is low, the table is set.’”

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. “We would eat both of them right on the beach, raw and fresh,” Ferguson recalls.

Today, Ferguson is the one doing the teaching. “Many of my Elders have moved on to that [spirit] realm, and it is now up to me as an ‘Elder in training’ to step up to the plate to make sure these traditions are not only written down but lived in experience,” says Ferguson, who also works at Washington State University’s Institute for Research and Education to Advance Community Health. He feels strongly that youth “need to be connected to the land, the sea, and the amazing bounty we still have in the Aleutians.”

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: “The blades for eating, the bulbs for medicinal salves, and the stipes to be dried for twine.” His Ancestors long stewarded these underwater ecosystems for themselves and their nonhuman kin. “They understood that healthy Kelp forests equaled healthy seas,” Oliver says. “Kelp is a relational hot spot for critters to gather and spawn.”

Oliver describes how each spring, herring’s sticky eggs—a traditional delicacy along the Northwest coast—encase blades of Kelp: “Millions of salty, protein-rich eggs can be harvested and eaten directly off the makeshift plate of the Kelp blades.” But during our lifetime, waters are warming and acidifying; Kelp forests—a��d herring—are vanishing. “A cultural necessity before contact is now a cultural spectacle,” 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—both below the water’s 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.��
Store in an airtight glass jar and sprinkle small amounts on savory dishes, beans, and salads.��

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’s ancestors were not in Alaska. ��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 “really white space.” “I 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,” 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. “That was a completely life-changing experience,” says Donaldson West. Not only did it feel like an act of personal independence and agency, but also one of engagement in community. “Being around Black and Brown people who had the same calling for working in agriculture … it was beautiful and affirming.”&�Բ�����;

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 “heartbeat” of local Seattle communities. 

Donaldson West’s 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’s 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. “I can do this as revolution,” says Donaldson West. “I 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.”&�Բ�����;

Jonathón Savage
Farm Manager, Gather New Haven 

Jonathón Savage was introduced to growing at an early age. “Probably, at the age of 3, I was in the dirt,” 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’s 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, “were phenomenal growers and provided for the whole family with the food that came out of their yards.”&�Բ�����;

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’s past and present with his community’s 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’s management: “So now the people who supported some of my knowledge in growing … are now the people that I’m going back and supporting.” The Hazel Street garden and others like it stand as centers of intergenerational, knowledge-sharing hubs of community connection and restoration. 

Given the land’s role as an “overarching connector,” 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. “Hopefully, 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.”&�Բ�����;

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’t gravitate toward typical fast food or retail summer jobs that define many urban youths’ adolescent and teen years. Instead, her heart was drawn to the land. 

The skincare company her family ran incorporated herbs, essential oils, and aromatherapy—so, an urban farming apprenticeship was a natural next step. “That concept, ‘urban farming,’ was not even a thing in my mind,” Harrison recalls about that time. “This 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.” Harrison likens the plot of land to a local “Garden of Eden,” saying that the apprenticeship changed her life’s trajectory. “Sign me up. I can do this forever,” 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. “It brings that cultural relevance and connection … from your food traditions to just basic good health.” 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’s Greenwood District, known for its “Black Wall Street,” 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’s development to now liberate their communities. 

“[If] we all have this collective mindset that we’re growing to connect food [to] our cultural heritage and our traditions … we will be on
top of this world.”&�Բ�����;

“My people migrated here in the early 1900s, when really started to happen,” Tartt says. “The pay was better, the racism wasn’t as bad. It was bad, but not as bad. … in building the framework for the coal mining industry here in West Virginia.”&�Բ�����;

To a casual observer, this southern West Virginia county is devastated, disregarded, and depressed—a 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 “Sky” 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. 

“Prosperity 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,” Tartt says. “So [we’re taking] a holistic approach to whatever we’re doing, to make sure the community benefits and we’re not doing it to the detriment of our environment.”&�Բ�����;

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’t as interested in having their debt grow. So growth itself is a value-neutral concept. It’s the context of that growth—a��d its limitations—that matters.

Who Gets to Grow?

Since made mass production possible, the United States has increasingly adopted a narrative that capitalism requires unfettered economic growth—willfully 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 “rising tides lifting all boats” or “trickle-down” economics, at no point in this country’s history has economic growth been equitable. As with , today’s . 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, —to more than $1.7 trillion.  

History clearly shows that unfettered growth in the name of capitalistic “success” results in sustained and growing inequality, human and planetary exploitation, and worse. Yet there are other models—many that come from Black, Indigenous, and other historically marginalized communities—that 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 “equitable, sustainable, and democratic local economy that creates shared wealth for low-income people of color.” 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—a��d marshals support around—frontline 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—often immigrants and people of color—to own and remain in their homes in clean, healthy, livable neighborhoods.

Regardless of an organization’s 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 “success.”&�Բ�����;

The problematic notion that “more is better” 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. —growth centered on claiming, settling, and cultivating an increasing amount of land. And this growth did indeed create prosperity—at 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, “” emerged as the country’s divinely ordained justification for continued settler expansion across the continent. The association between material wealth and the “American Dream” only grew during this period of stunning wealth inequality. Consumption as an indicator of prosperity solidified further during the Roaring ’20s, with , telephones, radios, and household appliances. also became more readily available, encouraging people to buy now and pay later. The mantra of “������Ƶ!” was no longer only the province of elites. 

By the time , the concept of individualism was firmly ingrained in the nation’s dominant culture. This narrative emphasizes personal achievement, disregarding values of cooperation, mutual support, and community. It also invisibilizes the array of public support—from public roads and the postal system to tax breaks—that 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’s 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’s 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 . —positions 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—a��d what should be—in the public domain. When the —the highest level since the Great Depression—citizens 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’s 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’s 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—from public parks and community pools to public libraries and trash collection—increases 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’s 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 Dēmos. (Disclosure: Co-author Anoa Changa is the director of communications at Dēmos.)

“Public goods are the foundation of a just economy,” Hanks says. “They 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.”

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. “There’s still a persistent belief around scarcity in this country, which among other things is deeply rooted in racism,” explains Hanks. “And it’s what corporations and the wealthy use to talk people out of public provisioning.”&�Բ�����;

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—by law—these 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. “Reimagining 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,” Muhammad says. “Growth usually means the economy is getting bigger and we’re 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.”&�Բ�����;

Muhammad has worked with St. Petersburg’s 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.  

“It’s important to negotiate in terms of acres and ownership when discussing community participation in new development, because that’s the only way to truly build equity and generational wealth,” Muhammad says. “Some of the historical ‘deals’ 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.”  

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. 

“There are so many systems that extract and exploit Black and Brown folks outside of just the criminal justice system, including … how we set up our economies,” says Snyder. Through its Agenda for a New Economy, Detroit Action works to “unite Black and Brown working-class Detroiters in a transformational program to win the economic and social justice we are owed.”&�Բ�����;

“Detroit is called the Motor City, but Detroit isn’t about cars,” says Anthony Baber, Detroit Action’s communications and culture director. “The city itself was never about cars. City is about the people.”

“We’re 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,” Baber adds. “We have to change the entire thing.”&�Բ�����;

“At the end of the day, we need to make sure that resources are shared equitably and fairly,” says Snyder. “And right now, that’s 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—it’s not shared in an equitable fashion.”&�Բ�����;

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.  

“A big part of it is just changing the mindset to one of abundance and that resources are there,” says Baber. “It’s just a matter of, can we secure those resources for our people?”&�Բ�����;

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.

“If we want to really talk about prosperity, that means investing back into the community and building businesses in a way that community is benefiting,” he says. “There are opportunities if you have rural communities connected to urban communities. And we’re figuring out: How do we help each other?”&�Բ�����;

This story was funded by a grant from Kendeda Fund, as part of the forthcoming YES! series “Redefining Prosperity.” While reporting and production of the series was funded by this grant, YES! maintained full editorial control of the content published herein.

, with who use agrarian reform in Brazil to fight for rural workers’ 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 Piraí. 

Dos Santos is one of , won through organized struggle, that comprise the Roseli Nunes. In 2006, Brazil’s federal government granted 39 families the right to use and live on the land, which encompasses , after 40 years of activism. It’s just one example of the MST’s 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. 

“” explains historian and . “However, this arable land is owned by very few people.” 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’s 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’s 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 “social function of [rural] properties” 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. “I 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,” dos Santos says. “To have a piece of land, to me, means independence from the system because I own the means of production, and I don’t have to work for anybody.”

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. “Monoculture is for profit,” dos Santos says, mentioning that are mostly exported to the EU and China to be used as cattle feed. “We diversify our production for self-sustainment and as the basis for family agriculture,” he says. After the MST began gaining land in the mid-1990s, its members immediately began producing food. “Now that we had land, we started planting so we could eat and show society that we weren’t like the land monopoly owners who didn’t use that land for anything,” 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 Piraí, 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—a far more diverse and ecologically sound harvest than that of the that used to rule the area. For Mateus, it’s important to emphasize the movement’s efforts to produce organic, pesticide-free food. “We 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,” Mateus says. “But above all, it’s 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.”

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, “We 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’t have enough food to supply their homes.” 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’t have to depend on exploitative land monopolies for employment.

Connecting ethical food production to the eradication of hunger has boosted the movement’s visibility on social media over the past three years. For dos Santos, the movement’s mission has always been bigger than land distribution. “People ask me, ‘But why does the movement care about LGBTQ rights and women’s rights?’” he says. “And I say, ‘It’s always been about more than the land; we are all involved in everything.’”

From the Country to the City 

Back in Rio de Janeiro, in the bohemian neighborhood of Lapa, the two-story Armazém do Campo store sells and delivers seasonal produce that comes directly from the Roseli Nunes settlement. In 2016, MST opened the first Armazém do Campo store in São Paulo, with the intention of bringing its mission from the country to the city. In —people come to listen to live music, enjoy a cold drink, and dance the night away. Taking advantage of this rich cultural scene, Armazém 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—one of selling produce that comes directly from the movement—hosts Culinary from the Earth, an event with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s (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.

“People in the city have lost our connection with the origins of the food we eat,” explains Ivan Bursztyn, project coordinator of Culinary from the Earth and a professor in UFRJ’s gastronomy department. “When 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.”

While the weather outside is hot and sticky, the vibe inside Armazém do Campo is lively and light. The staff is well informed about where all the food comes from, and they’re happy to educate customers who have questions. Activist and university student Tifhanny Flor de Lua dos Santos has worked in the Armazém store for more than a year. She considers it to be more than just a job. “This is a space that has a social movement methodology,” she says. “Beyond 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.”&�Բ�����;

Suptitz, who manages the São Paulo Armazém do Campo in addition to organizing, says the stores are a tool to connect the city to the movement’s 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. “The movement always wanted the support of society, and now the way to do that is through the Armazém stores,” Suptitz says. “This is the first time we’ve been able to connect to people in the city so strongly.”&�Բ�����;

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 “STRUGGLE” and “JUSTICE,” I vividly recalled shaking Pedro dos Santos’ 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’t exploited by a boss; instead, this manioc is a direct result of workers’ struggle for a better world. Yet, the MST’s 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. “We propose a solution to a previously slaveholding society where land wasn’t properly distributed. We propose a profound change in the system.” 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. “Our movement wants to radicalize democracy by opening new paths for direct participation,” Marina says. “We want to participate in the debates about economic and monetary policies, as well as governmental budgets.” As for the movement as a whole, which now has a sympathetic left-wing Workers’ Party government on its side, led by President Luiz Lula Inácio da Silva, Suptitz says squatting will return in full force. “We still aren’t done redistributing the land of the 1%,” he says. “So we will continue to fight for that redistribution.”

The phrase “think and grow rich” originated in of the same name. Hill’s book outlined 13 principles—based on, he claimed, the lives of more than 500 men of great means—to create a “philosophy of achievement” 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 “the sixth sense” or “vibrating on a high frequency” in order to tap into an “infinite intelligence” that guarantees success. These principles follow a familiar pattern, one that suggests if people just try hard enough, they’ll acquire the life of their dreams. 

If we heed Hill’s philosophy, success is a matter of effort and unwavering self-belief rather than a game of luck. However, his “philosophy of achievement” ethos doesn’t account for . And yet, that hasn’t stopped Hill’s 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 “growth mindset,” a term developed by psychologist in the 1970s to be applied to educational contexts. While the concept isn’t derived from “think and grow rich,” it is still part of Hill’s legacy, joining a conveyor belt of fads that blame those who fail under capitalism for their lack of success. “Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset,” wrote Dweck in . “They tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset (those who believe their talents are innate gifts).”&�Բ�����;

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’s distinguished professor of education at San Diego State University, notes, before they can hit “reach goals,” students need affirmation, validation, and support. However Wood says many students of color never receive encouragement in the classroom: “It’s a common microaggression in education with students of color: educators assume that based upon their race, they are academically inferior or incapable.” When educators don’t recognize this fundamental barrier for students of color, assuming their capacity is both fixed and below that of white students, it’s hard to make “reach goals.”

“Growth mindset … creates a myth of meritocracy, that students who work the hardest, put in more hours, are the ones who do the best,” 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, “the Native kids [from a low-performing district] outdid the Microsoft kids,” , 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’t achieving the career success you desire, you simply aren’t 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’s 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 “think and grow rich” 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’t 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’s control. , , , and may determine whether someone is provided with the tools and support to grow. External, systemic factors, from to , impede many workers’ ascent up the corporate ladder. Society celebrates people who develop skills and work through adversity—the perceived “growth mindset”—a��d punishes those who seem trapped—the perceived “fixed mindset.” But it’s not possible to “growth mindset” out of racism. 

“Black people—a��d Black women especially—are shut out of traditional employment, but our culture applauds the hustler who responds to exclusion by striking out on her own,” . “Black women platform entrepreneurs have more education than their white male and female counterparts,” McMillan Cottom continued. “Despite having more formal education, they face more job insecurity than similarly educated peers.” 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. “Are you a good steward for the space that you’re in?” 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—true 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’t 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’t 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 “bubbles” 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. “What brought me here was my best friends were living here,” 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’ 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 “kid-swapping,” as she calls it, is an important part of her social life, and is part of the web of connections she’s formed. Some kid-swapping days are easier than others. “I’m [sometimes] like ‘I can’t do it, there’s too much going on…’ and every single time I’m like ‘that was amazing.’” 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. “What fills your life? There are so many answers when we’re not as yoked to making money all the time,” says Petersen. 

Choosing intentional community doesn’t mean rejecting work or career-building. As memoirist Nicole Chung explains, work and community can integrate: “I 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.” For Chung, a writing community was characterized by mutualism and support. That’s 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’s a sentiment Dweck seems to agree with, as she explained in a 2020 : “It is not about teaching the concept alone, it is much more about implementing practices that focus on growth and learning.” As Wood has found in his own research, putting up a sign out front or including language about a “growth mindset school” in advertising materials for a private or charter school doesn’t 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’s 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. 

“That’s basically capitalism in a nutshell, making you feel responsible for the things that you struggle with, all the bad things that happen to you,” 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’s daily love and perspective. Taking responsibility for her made me feel closer to my family; I’d 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’s 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’t that child’s 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’t 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’s clear we all did the best we could, keeping Candi—a��d many other relatives before me—from 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 . “It’s complex trauma because it’s not a one-time event,” says Lina Vanegas, a social worker who was born in Bogota, Colombia, in 1976 and sold to a white couple in the Midwest. “It sets us up for a trauma trajectory … and it’s intergenerational.”&�Բ�����;

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’s 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, “” However, these arrangements have been stigmatized in the U.S. “The Black community’s cultural tradition of sharing parenting responsibilities among kin has been mistaken as parental neglect,” Roberts writes. “Because 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.”

But several recent studies, including Alia’s 2019 study, “e,” 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’t have any “happily ever after” 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’re still connected. We’re 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 . “The Confederates have never stopped fighting the Civil War,” he contends. 

That war was fought over the right of white landowners to subjugate and enslave African Americans—a��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’re 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’s seminal publication, . Hannah-Jones’ work became one of the in recent years, challenging the notion that the U.S. is a fully representative democracy. 

It’s 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—a 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. “We see voter suppression bills, we see the gutting of the Civil Rights Act—these things are all implications around trying to limit people’s ability to participate in their democracy,” 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—albeit rapidly shrinking—of 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 “faster than demographers were projecting,” says , director of the University of Southern California’s 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’s 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. “There are a lot more white people who are also willing to say that they are mixed-race … who are willing to embrace both parts of their identity,” Pastor explains. 

Similarly, increasing numbers of Latinos are embracing their nonwhite identities, which Pastor refers to as “the browning of ‘Brown America.’” 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. 

“This 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,” says Pastor. In 2010, more than half of the Latino population identified as white; 10 years later, only .

Paralleling the nation’s demographic shift, political representation of people of color is also increasing. According to , the 118th Congress, seated in January 2023, was “the most racially and ethnically diverse to date.” 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’s House Republican supermajority voted to expel Jones and Pearson from the legislative body, while Johnson retained her seat. Cooper and Phillips see the “Tennessee Three,” 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—in large part due to . That growth has prompted an uptick in multiracial organizing—w�󾱳��� was key to electing “the most [Metropolitan] Council in the history of the city of Nashville,” according to Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of .

Within days of the representatives’ expulsion, the Nashville council to his House seat, while the Shelby County Board of Commissioners . “It 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,” explains Luna, citing her state’s growing racial diversity. “And it is that exact power that we are building that is threatening the GOP supermajority and the white supremacists in our legislature.”

Luna’s organization has invested time and resources into “creating spaces for organizing and power-building that are multicultural and multiracial,” and training immigrants and people of color to run for office. “It’s been incredible to watch the diversity in our movement here in Tennessee and how we have grown that power,” 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’s history, even when accounting for obstacles to voting, there simply weren’t enough voters of color to be able to significantly sway elections. “Politics in this country has historically been a battle between white people,” he explains. “It was conservative whites battling with progressive whites over the whites in the middle.”&�Բ�����;

Phillips began calling attention to the growing political power of people of color in 2016 with his book . Phillips identified Jesse Jackson’s 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 “”—a�� apt term for a multiracial democracy—Jackson went on to win nearly 7 million votes in 1988 while competing for the Democratic Party’s nomination. , Jackson “explicitly built his campaign—his Rainbow Coalition concept—on the various communities of color allied with progressive whites,” showing the power and potential of such an alliance.

This was the same formula that won Obama his party’s nomination and the presidency in 2008 and 2012. “Obama would not have won [the presidential] election in 1980—he would not have beaten [Ronald] Reagan,” contends Phillips. “Obama could only win in 2008 because the country was more racially diverse.”&�Բ�����;

Cooper concurs that demographic change has wrought positive political change. “Everyone saw what happened in Georgia,” 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. “Welcome to the new Georgia,” said Warnock after his victory. 

“White supremacy is in the death throes and is willing to go to extremes to try to protect itself,” says Cooper. But he later reassures: “We have the numbers to win. … There’s literally more of us than them.”

“They’re gonna try to cheat. They’re gonna try to change laws,” Cooper continues. “They’re gonna make it harder for people to vote and participate. They’re gonna try to kick out young, Black, duly elected legislators.”&�Բ�����;

A white conservative minority acting out of fear hurts all Americans, explains Cooper: “White folks get hurt as well when we allow racist policies to take away our public goods.” 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’s 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 “,” popularized during the 2020 racial justice uprisings, hurt her campaign because they were perceived as being too radical. Phillips doesn’t buy that: “She got 54,000 more votes in 2020 than she got in 2018. So how was she hurt politically?”

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, “Nearly 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.” 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 “nearly all Biden voters called racism a serious problem in U.S. society.”

What’s more, the COVID-19 pandemic starkly highlighted the popularity of a progressive government approach to solving problems. “In the context of the pandemic, we rethought core elements of the social contract and found much greater support for those elements than we’ve realized existed in the first place,” says Phillips. “Yes, we can just send checks to almost everybody within the country. We can suspend evictions, we can suspend student debt payments” as part of “a social-justice-equality agenda.”

Cooper is optimistic that a multiracial democracy is within reach. “People are starting to understand that actually having a multiracial, multicultural democracy is a way for us to keep all human beings thriving.”

Although Phillips believes a civil war has been simmering along racial lines for centuries, he’s convinced that today “there’s a meaningful minority of whites who are supportive of a multiracial democracy and justice and equality.” And that means we might finally see an end to this war in our lifetimes.

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. “We 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,” Giwa says. “Then 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.”&�Բ�����;

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’s now widely accepted as an intervention that can keep a pregnancy on track. “We see ourselves as frontline workers. We see ourselves as emergency responders,” Giwa says. “Families are coming to us with so many layers of trauma, and we’re taking that on.” This has meant building new infrastructure into the doula practice, including the creation of a perinatal emergency preparedness program.

“We can’t just keep conceptualizing emergencies as this far-off thing you plan for,” 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. “We 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.”

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—including Medicaid, which covers —is 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. “It’s hugely important,” Giwa says. “But 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.” Giwa is a nurse and a community organizer, so she understands the broader landscape of how change is made. “If you look at Black women organizing on any issue, that’s what we do,” she says. “We’re working all the possibilities.”&�Բ�����;

That’s why there are calls for mass tree planting to cover 25% more of Earth’s 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—a��d especially in a hotter future—trees 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’t invest in expensive carbon reduction projects when they can win public favor and pay for their carbon sins by planting trees instead.

But where I saw sacrifice, Alicia Kennedy sees abundance. In her debut book, , Kennedy explores the complex “diversity of thought in the refusal of meat,” and the forces that shape this choice. “The intention of this book is to change how you think of meat,” she writes, “whether you eat it or do not.” Kennedy invites us to see the ecological and culinary possibilities of removing meat from the center of our plates: “If we do that, what do we find?”

I was struck by Kennedy’s 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 “realized there was no substitute for certain foods and the feelings they invoke,” 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’t, as Kennedy writes, “a set of rules that must be followed to the letter at all times.” Rather, it’s a practice—one 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’s 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 “who are pushing back on the notions of the pedantic, preachy white vegan that has dominated the mainstream discourse.” 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. “I 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,” she writes.

Food-tech giants like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat tout meat replacements as the sustainable alternative, but as Kennedy writes, “the amount of money poured into the development of these products is akin to the subsidies that make industrial meat so excessively abundant.” 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.

“In all of this, the missing piece is a conversation with people who do this work,” Kennedy says. The real question to ask before deploying a purported solution should be: “How can technological know-how and capital be used to make life better for the marginalized folks who farm and do climate work?”

I often take for granted just how prevalent plant-based options are today, and Kennedy’s 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’re at a critical moment in our planet’s 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: “I believe in a world where people realize they don’t need meat at every meal, and it’s a world where our basic needs are met. It’s a world where we have space to reimagine what we consider abundance.” How will we know if we’re 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.

“The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence,” . When Lemoine provided his findings in an , Google . In response, Lemoine acted as he had in Iraq—ethically. 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, “trained” on unimaginable volumes of text and data are in ways and at a pace few people—. 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—not just biological coding, but also digital coding? 

With help from Ralph Nader’s 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: “Yes.”&�Բ�����;

As once said, “. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” Lemoine’s 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—for us to know ourselves? We cannot—a��d should not—avoid facing these questions. It’s 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 “.”Abolition’s goal, says Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “.” 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 “.” 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—a��d the corporations that own them—lest we wait too long, and they decide for us. 

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—a��d contributed to growing anxieties among teens, including boys, who literally couldn’t 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’s difficult to determine whether these climbing figures are symptomatic of heightened anxiety or of waning stigma, but we know boys are continually being .

“Boys and young men have, in recent decades, become exposed to messages that women have been getting for much longer,” 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. “The theory was that men started getting messages, starting in the ’70s, ’80s, certainly in the ’90s, that they had to bulk up and be more muscular,” Phillips says. From the late 1970s into the ’90s, G.I. Joe and other action figures became visibly more macho, male models and actors heaved more muscle, and the swelling success of —a touring male-stripper dance troupe in the early ’80s—evidenced a market where men’s bodies could be prized, adored, and commodified. 

During this time, attitudes toward fitness also evolved. “It’s important to realize that the gym, which in so many Western cultures is a prevalent fixture of people’s lives, is relatively recent,” 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. 

“There’s something about the gym that is both about the body that it ultimately gives you—looking like you go to the gym, looking like you’re making good use of your leisure time—but then there’s also the activity of joining,” 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’s this need to dominate that has incidentally fueled America’s 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’s Let’s Move! program came two years after the release of a report that found 27% of people between the ages of 17 and 24 were . “Our military leaders know that this is not just a diet issue; it’s not just a health issue,” Obama said in 2012. “”&�Բ�����;

The pursuit of the physical ideal hasn’t slowed over the past decade, and Phillips and Petrzela both point to two overlapping phenomena that help explain its continued choke hold. First, there’s the of and . “Once anabolic steroids became more available, a lot of the images boys and young men were seeing weren’t real. They’re a product of drugs,” says Phillips. 

This culture of hypermuscularity has also been flamed by social media. “Whereas before you looked at magazines, or television, or went to the movies, there are now influencers, bodybuilders, and ‘’ who are online 24 hours a day not only showing off their bodies, but also instructing, ‘Hey, you can get this by doing my workout, or taking this supplement,’” 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 “muscle dysmorphia” or “,” which Phillips says is “actually a form of body dysmorphic disorder, which a lot of people don’t realize, defined as a preoccupation with a nonexistent or slight defect in one’s appearance that causes significant emotional distress or significant interference in daily functioning.” These behaviors might include excessively working out and weight lifting as well as developing abnormal eating habits. 

There’s also a troubling propensity for steroid use, which carries and increases the risk of . “It’s worrisome because it’s easy to trivialize, but for some people who have very severe body dysmorphic disorder, the ,” 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’s 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’s pain is imminent. “Boys and men are really struggling now,” 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. “Poverty, school quality, family instability … dramatically affects boys more than girls,” said Reeves. He further asserted that in our reluctance to consider men’s pain, we’ve 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. “When 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,” Lautner said on a February 2023 episode of his podcast, . “But now looking back at it, of course it did, and of course it is going to.”&�Բ�����;

Lautner isn’t the only young man in Hollywood opening up about the emotional and mental weight of chasing physical perfection. “Any shoot where you’re basically ‘sexy’ in any type of way can really mess with your psyche, because you’re struggling every day to live up to that guy,” singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes told in 2021. In March 2023, Kit Connor, star of Netflix’s coming-of-age romance Heartstopper, shared his own body transformation story. , the 19-year-old replied, “There was some people on the internet going: ‘He’s a bit too skinny.’” Connor’s plan included eating more and training harder. 

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

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 ������Ƶ, Archer Magazine, Assemble Papers, and more. Twitter:

Art Contributors

Natalie Pryor is YES! ������Ƶ’s 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’t be created or destroyed. This gap in logic nagged at me, but growth’s allure remained strong. I went on to get my MBA, and my first “real” job with a dot-com startup in the mid ’90s operated under that growth mindset—we wanted to go public, get acquired, cash out, and get rich. After we’d secured a round of venture capital, I remember the founders ordering a celebratory cake, with garish icing declaring our mantra, “GBF.” Get Big Fast.

But the nagging thoughts persisted. Reading Beyond the Limits by Dennis and Donella Meadows and Jørgen Randers confirmed my suspicion that economic growth only “works” in the short term. Long-term, it’s 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—lots of diverse players performing only necessary functions, with no single player so big as to dominate the system. Any “waste” 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 YES! Because our mission is essential and urgent, my instinct tells me we must grow—expand our audience, our donors, our staff, expand our impact. But what if we didn’t? 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’re excited to explore as we reconsider what it means to grow—both within and beyond YES! 

In community, 
Christine

How did you discover YES!?
While I lived in Oakland, California, I connected with some YES! 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 YES!, and I can’t imagine who could make better use of my ongoing support.

How does YES! support your passions and values?
I’ve 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 YES! community. 

My deep commitment to a loving and problem-solving vision of humanity has consistently been supported and deepened by YES! stories and commitment over the years. YES! 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, “YES! Magazine had an article about how to deal with this!”

Why is the work of YES! 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 YES! has found the sweet spot of bringing deeply developed “spiritual” qualities, like unconditional love, right into the movements that are poised to solve “wicked” human problems. YES! 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. ������Ƶ than any particular social issue, or quality of journalism or presentation, it is this quality that makes me want to continue supporting YES!

What would you say to a friend who was considering supporting YES!?
I would tell such a person unequivocally that YES! 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’t 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 “buy local” 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 “buy local” 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’s sales force march in our town’s 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’ 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��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’t think Main Street is down for the count. As the “buy local” 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 Sebastián, su hijo de 9 años, regresaba con 210 pesos en mano. Rivas se alarmó al pensar que el niño pudiera haber robado el dinero. Pero Roberto Sebastián le explicó que había tomado la caja para lustrar calzado —un regalo de su abuelo— y había ido de casa en casa ofreciendo a los vecinos sacarle brillo a sus zapatos, a 10 pesos el par.

“Vienen varias vecinas y me dicen: ‘Oye, qué bien bolea los zapatos, Sebastián’”, cuenta Rivas antes de quebrarse en llanto. Entonces, “como que me cae un balde de agua fría”, dice. “¿Qué estoy haciendo?”, se preguntó a sí misma. “O sea, si mi hijo puede, yo también puedo”, pensó.

Roberto Maciel Ramírez, su esposo, desapareció sin dejar rastro el 23 de mayo de 2010 en el municipio de Santiago, cerca de Monterrey. Lo único que Rivas supo fue que un grupo de hombres armados, vestidos como soldados, habían irrumpido en una casa –en el campo– donde la madre de Maciel celebraba su cumpleaños. Los uniformados se habían llevado a Maciel y a tres de sus amigos. Rivas, quien había planeado llegar más tarde a la celebración con los niños, se paralizó de terror. La familia de Maciel le dijo a Rivas que esperara a que pidieran un rescate por él. A los cinco días se enteró que su suegro ya había pagado una cifra solicitada, pero Maciel no aparecía.

Entonces ella decidió comenzar a buscarlo por su propia cuenta. Sus pesquisas iniciales la llevaron ante el líder local de un cartel y al comandante de la policía de la municipalidad. Ambos negaron tener participación alguna en el secuestro. Para hacer la situación más difícil, en las siguientes semanas, la familia de su esposo se volvió distante. Rivas estaba devastada.

“Desafortunadamente, en ese momento no me caía el 20”, dice Rivas para explicar lo desorientada que estaba en ese momento. “El haberme quedado con tres hijos, sin un trabajo y sin nada; no sabía qué hacer”.

Sin embargo, al ver a su hijo lustrando zapatos para poder comprar cuadernos y otros útiles escolares, Rivas se enfocó en generar ingresos para alimentar a sus niños. Les dijo que ella no sabía si su padre regresaría algún día, y que tenían que hacer lo que pudieran para sobrevivir. Ella comenzó a vender televisores, videojuegos y distintos electrodomésticos. Ella y los pequeños se movieron a una misma habitación para ahorrar energía. Los fines de semana, vendía ropa de segunda mano en los mercados, con los niños a su lado. Así hizo por años sin apoyo alguno, ni del gobierno, ni de familiares. Rivas cuenta que su hermana le dejó de hablar por miedo a que raptaran a alguien de la familia de ella.

Rivas experimentó de primera mano el estigma y la culpa que comúnmente recae no solo en la persona desaparecida, sino también en los miembros de su familia. En 2010 no se hablaba mucho en público acerca de las desapariciones forzadas. No había ni siquiera la suficiente información disponible para saber cómo 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 inició una búsqueda más activa para saber del paradero de su esposo. Se unió a un colectivo de familias y así aprender cómo ejercer presión sobre las autoridades para que investigaran, y para entender cuáles eran los derechos de los niños como víctimas.

En la unión, la fortaleza

Tras la desaparición de un ser querido, ante la inacción de las autoridades y los retrasos en las investigaciones, muchas familias en México inician búsquedas con sus propios medios. Recaban información, guardan evidencias, hablan con testigos. Realizan inspecciones físicas de sitios pertinentes, incluyendo de fosas clandestinas. Pero las búsquedas pueden extenderse por años —sin tener la garantía de que obtendrán 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 criminalísticos correspondientes en el momento que desaparecen las personas. Aunque el trabajo de las familias y las organizaciones de derechos humanos durante la última década de las desapariciones masivas en México, las familias han denunciado repetidamente y de las agencias gubernamentales. Se quejan igualmente del y de , tanto estatales como federales, para buscar a las víctimas. Solo en el estado de Nuevo León, entre diciembre de 2006 y marzo de 2023. En todo México, la lista oficial de desaparecidos registra los nombres de casi , según datos de la Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda del país. 

El Comité contra la Desaparición Forzada, ente de las Naciones Unidas, le recomendó al gobierno de México adoptar medidas para “facilitar la búsqueda, investigación, reparación y memoria relacionados con los casos de larga data” en su . El Comité consideró un avance que México hubiera establecido la Comisión para el acceso a la Verdad, el Esclarecimiento Histórico y el Impulso a la Justicia de las Violaciones Graves a los Derechos Humanos cometidas entre los años 1965-1990, pero señaló que era lamentable “que no existan otros mecanismos para casos de larga data ocurridos después de 1990”.

Así las cosas, la carga de la investigación 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 económicas de perder a un ser querido en esas circunstancias. Los parientes de los desaparecidos para apoyarse en sus búsquedas, pero como en toda asociación, los conflictos internos pueden ser difíciles de superar. Así sucedió con Rivas, cuya insatisfacción con el manejo de su agrupación la empujó a ella y a otras mujeres a crear su propia asociación en octubre de 2022.

​​“Yo lo que quiero es tener noticias de mi esposo y saber la verdad —si está vivo, si está muerto, saber qué pasó. Es lo que yo quiero y ahí no iba a obtener nada. Entonces me fui”, explica. Rivas titubeó antes de formar una asociación, ya que tendría que inscribirse legalmente para poder recibir fondos, pero cree que hacerlo es una de las únicas maneras de presionar al gobierno. Familiares de los desaparecidos han encontrado fortaleza en la unión. Los colectivos han hecho cabildeo con funcionarios y agencias de gobierno para que se aceleren las investigaciones; para localizar cementerios clandestinos y la exhumación de cadáveres; y han seguido creando conciencia sobre la magnitud de las desapariciones. 

Graciela Pérez ha experimentado personalmente la enormidad del impacto. Cinco de sus familiares desaparecieron una noche de agosto de 2012: su hija de 13 años Milynali Piña Pérez; su hermano Ignacio Pérez; y sus sobrinos Aldo de Jesús Pérez, de 20, Alexis Domínguez, de 16 años y José Arturo Domínguez, de 20 —el primero era hijo de Ignacio y los dos últimos de su hermana. Todos retornaban a casa de un corto viaje a los Estados Unidos, pero nunca llegaron a Tamuín, San Luis Potosí, donde vivían. La última vez que llamaron a Pérez, estarían a dos horas de distancia, cerca de Ciudad Mante, en el estado de Tamaulipas. 

En un inicio, Pérez y su familia tenían esperanza en las autoridades. Tras reportar la desaparición en la policía, la familia recibió una llamada de alguien exigiendo un rescate. Cuando su hermana Edith Pérez solicitó una prueba de vida, los supuestos secuestradores dieron detalles que no encajaban; las hermanas se dieron cuenta que se trataba de un intento de extorsión. Al noveno día, desesperada por no recibir noticias por parte de las autoridades, Pérez le rogó a su familia que le permitieran salir a buscar a los jóvenes ella misma. A pesar de la preocupación por el peligro de que se trasladara sola a Tamaulipas, la familia eventualmente estuvo de acuerdo. Entendían que Pérez no tenía nada más que perder, si no tenía a su única hija. 

Pérez pidió una reunión con un fiscal del estado. Ella dice que en ese encuentro, un oficial que supuestamente estaba buscando a su familia le aconsejó que mejor le pidiera ayuda a los militares, aduciendo que era una situación muy peligrosa para que la investigara la policía estatal. 

“Salí de ahí desecha”, relata Pérez. “Ahí fue cuando me di cuenta que las autoridades no iban a hacer absolutamente nada”.

Por medio de las redes sociales, Pérez encontró a personas que le dijeron qué rutas tomar para seguir su investigación. Le compartieron sus propios casos, con la esperanza de que Pérez pudiera en el proceso encontrar información sobre sus seres queridos. En lo que transitaba por caminos desolados, encontró vehículos saqueados y los escombros de autos que habían sido incendiados. En las siguientes semanas más familias se unieron a su travesía. El grupo comenzó a localizar cementerios clandestinos y sitios espeluznantes en los que Pérez deseaba que no hubieran estado sus parientes. “No podía imaginar que mi hija, mis chicos o mi hermanos hubieran permanecido en lugares así”.

A Milynali le encantaba ver telenovelas. Pérez las miraba con ella, a pesar de no disfrutarlas mucho. A la niña le gustaba pintar con acuarelas, por lo que estaba entusiasmada de comenzar a probar con pinturas de aceite justo antes de su desaparición. Soñaba con ser pediatra y también con trabajar los fines de semana en el restaurante que ella y su madre deseaban abrir un día. Milynali sería la chef y su mamá se encargaría de la caja y de los clientes. 

“Ella era muy visionaria, muy independiente. Ella era muy segura de sí misma”, dice Pérez con orgullo. “Es mi hija”. 

En el transcurso de su búsqueda, Pérez entabló conexiones con militares y con autoridades de justicia, por medio de quienes obtuvo información extraoficial sobre arrestos y la incautación de casas que servían de escondite para criminales. Obtuvo coordenadas, localizó sitios de exterminio, recogió evidencia de las posibles desapariciones de otras personas. 
Edith, su hermana, cuyos hijos desaparecieron con Milynali, se había unido a la búsqueda. Tres meses después de que los jóvenes desaparecieran, Edith Pérez confrontó públicamente al entonces presidente Felipe Calderón durante una visita que hiciera el mandatario a San Luis Potosí. Se armó de valor para denunciar la negligencia del gobierno con las familias de los desaparecidos. El enfrentamiento hizo que el problema capturara la atención pública; y fue motivo de .

La atención de los medios junto con los vínculos que formaron los familiares con las autoridades hicieron que eventualmente Graciela Pérez estableciera una asociación formal para reforzar la búsqueda por los miembros de su familia, así como por otros desaparecidos. “” se constituyó oficialmente el 24 de mayo de 2017. Hoy en día, más de 300 familias de personas desaparecidas integran la asociación. Es uno de los colectivos que por más tiempo ha operado en el país. 

Y aunque Pérez ha servido a otros de corazón, ha tenido que bregar con el desgaste característico de una misión tan grande. “Me fui dando cuenta que no sólo estaba buscando a los míos”, dice. “Lo peor que me ha pasado es que llega un momento en el que hasta me olvido de los míos. Gestiono varias cosas y me doy cuenta al final que no pedí lo mismo para los míos”.

Un grano de arena y otro de esperanza

El décimo aniversario de la desaparición de su familia ha sido un momento trascendental y agotador para Pérez. Ella cuenta que las innumerables expediciones de búsqueda y las largas horas bajo los penetrantes rayos de sol han resultado en fatiga, alergias y otros padecimientos. “No sé cuánto vaya a durar. No quiero pensar en el futuro. Solamente vivo un día a la vez”, se sincera. 

“Al final de cuentas, nosotros solo estamos dejando un granito de arena”, afirma Pérez y añade que “lo mejor que podemos hacer es documentar las mejores prácticas y dejárselas” a otros. Aunque aclara que “no desearía darle nada a nadie, porque nadie quiere estar en esta búsqueda tan horrible”.

Además de compartir sus hallazgos, los colectivos también tienen como objetivo brindar otro tipo de apoyo, dados los daños sicológicos, físicos y económicos que ocasionan estos golpes al núcleo familiar, cuyos miembros bregan con el dolor irresuelto de la desaparición y la lucha sin fin que sigue. Rivas ha visto a sus ���dz��貹ñ������� sufrir de depresión, padecimientos cardíacos, y cáncer. 

“También un colectivo es ver que tu gente esté bien, tanto en la moral como en lo económico”, dice Rivas por su parte. El desánimo siempre está cerca porque darle seguimiento a cada caso con las autoridades se dificulta cuando los parientes rara vez reciben nuevas pistas. Aún así, más familias con casos similares se siguen incorporando al grupo.

“Son sentimientos encontrados”, explica Rivas. “Por 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 quién te orientara, se perdieron muchas pruebas”.

Rivas continúa buscando a su esposo, solo que ahora también coordina las búsquedas de docenas de desaparecidos más en Nuevo León, a la par de más de 44 familias. El colectivo está en proceso de convertirse en una asociación civil. Una de las ���dz��貹ñ������� de Rivas sugirió que la llamaran “Renacer”.

“Ella fue la que dijo: Es que a mí me gusta el nombre Renacer”, detalla Rivas. Cuando le preguntó las razones, Rivas recuerda que su compañera le dijo: “Pues es que es como que volvemos a nacer después de todo lo que hemos vivido. Como que estábamos muertas y ahorita volvemos a vivir”.

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’s parking lot, located in the heart of West Jackson, Mississippi, one of the city’s . 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’s Maurice F. Lucas Sr. Prince Hall Order of the Eastern Star, had been leading the chapter’s 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’s 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. “It will happen again,” Davis says. “It’s not a matter of if, but a matter of when.” Davis’ 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 —w�󾱳��� , O.B. Curtis, —was 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’s 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’s history note that the root cause of this problem is much deeper than electoral politics. “When the water crisis hit, it really became very clear that … 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,” says , associate professor of history at Jackson State University. “As a historian, that narrative was just wrong.”

To understand Jackson’s water crisis, Luckett, who has extensively , says it’s critical to examine the historical relationship between Jackson, , and the broader state’s conservative power structure. “It is a history, I would argue, that is, in fact, rooted in the civil rights movement,” Luckett explains. “And 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.”

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 “no longer operate as a unitary school system within which no person is to be effectively excluded from any school because of race or color” after Feb. 1, 1970. As a result, for either the newly opened or the predominantly white suburbs in Clinton, Madison, and Rankin Counties. 

“The parents of those children in 1970 represented the white power structure in the state,” Luckett says. “They 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.” 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’s 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’s 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’s legislative delegation attempted to get the city in 2021, but failed when the bill containing the appropriation . 

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

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. “Every morning, you shower, which turns the chemicals into steam that gives you rashes, burns your eyes, and gives you a bloody nose—oh, and cancer,” she says. “It’s that kind of fight every morning, besides what’s that smell, which this morning was an interesting mix of fried chicken mixed with chlorine.”&�Բ�����;

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’s issues, Flint’s 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 ’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’s —property tax, state revenue sharing, and income tax. The city, unable to overcome its $25 million financial burden, was . 

Flint’s financial situation gave cover for Gov. Rick Snyder to enact , which grants Michigan’s governor power to appoint emergency managers to run cities, towns, and school districts deemed to be in financial distress. In April 2014, Flint’s Emergency Director the city’s 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. 

“In the summer of 2014, just a couple months after the switch, we started getting rashes,” Mays recalls. “I 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 ‘Oh, it’s not leprosy. I promise I just have Flint water.’ We’d all laugh because the excuse was that river water was just harder.” 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. “All of a sudden in September 2014, my youngest got pneumonia, which was very weird,” Mays says. “Now we know that it most likely was Legionnaires’ disease, a form of deadly bacterial pneumonia, but nobody was telling doctors to test for it.” 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’s 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’ 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. “I started having swelling and pain. My abdomen was super swollen, and my uterus was going to rupture,” she says. “I 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.” She’s 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’t 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’s cancer and subsequent death. “When I was 14, my grandmother passed away from stomach cancer that was related to uranium,” Robbins says. “Obviously, knowing that my story was not unique but that that [was happening] across the rez was something that I was not blind to.”

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 —all linked to uranium—are plaguing the nation. “It’s not just the lack of running water that’s concerning,” Robbins says. “It’s the water sources that are available that oftentimes don’t have signage if they’re contaminated or not.”

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’s lease expired, however, , allowing the metals to leach into the soil, the groundwater, and the surface water. 

“Obviously, if you dig it up, it’s out there, and radon is exposed. That’s when people can get really sick,” Robbins explains. “It’s across the rez, but there are areas where there’s more concentration. On the eastern side, there was , which is one of the biggest spills in terms of problems.” On July 16, 1979, the United Nuclear Corporation’s 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’s blatant disregard for Indigenous communities. ������Ƶ 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’t 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 —w�󾱳��� , including major cities, such as Los Angeles, Denver, San Diego, Salt Lake City, and Albuquerque, New Mexico—
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. “I’m in a different region [than Flint or Jackson], but we still have the same struggle going on,” Robbins says. “Obviously, it’s affecting Brown and Black communities way more than other communities, and that’s a really big problem.”&�Բ�����;

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 “imminent and substantial endangerment to human health.” 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’s “” 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’s treated, stored, and then delivered directly to families. “We’ve seen things like hydro panels,” Robbins says. “Those are great intentions, but they’re not the best solution for a desert. You can pull moisture from the air, but if it’s not there, then what are you pulling?”

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. “A huge part of what we do is making sure that we’re building relationships with the community,” Robbins says. “I think so many people on reservations, or so many Natives, are so weary. We’ve been made so many promises, starting at the treaty level [and leading to] people saying, ‘We’re gonna come in and do these projects.’”

, 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 . “He was helping a lot of people,” Mays says. “We have had really awesome people like Moses come and actually listen to people saying what we need, and [then respond by saying,] ‘We have this that can possibly help.’”

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—digging up and replacing all the city’s pipes—will 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’t easy, but it’s rewarding. “We’re not like unicorns,” she says. “There’s so many people out there who are serving their communities. And I think that’s so important, because it’s like, people are stepping up. It’s 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.”

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—even 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. “When it happens the next time, we will be ready.”&�Բ�����; 

Before then, I’d 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’t exceed the 68-ounce limit—only 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’s something about having to pay closer attention to your body’s needs that makes you appreciate the importance of your body’s signals. 

Ultimately, that’s what thirst is: Your body alerting you to a need. If you choose to ignore that alert, there are consequences—dehydration, 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’t meeting our needs. Whether it’s 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 “Thirst” issue spotlights that fundamental truth: We all have needs. That’s 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’s necessary to meet them. We’re destigmatizing that shame in this issue, whether it’s 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’re 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’d have a world without police, one that still prioritizes our individual and collective safety. And, beautifully, we’d 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’ll be ready to embrace your own thirst for building one that will serve us all better.

Be well,
Evette Dionne
YES! 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 café and bar culture. I imagined my adult life taking place in or could be found late into the night. Whenever I’ve 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 Almodóvar at this Madrid sherry bar?

As I grew older and made homes in towns and cities that have thriving café 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’s no shortage of cafés near me, and there’s 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’t yet know their name. Will this be the day we get to know each other? It’s always possible. I’ll hear the local news there, like who bought which building or who’s in the hospital; my dog will be given treats and water, whether he’s offered up his paw or not. The hospitality feels natural, so long as it’s early enough in the day that the tourists and partiers haven’t gotten the run of the show. That’s when it’s 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’m part of the neighborhood, like I’m safe even if I’m 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’s what makes a bar special; that’s what keeps you coming back.

Today, in Old San Juan—a�� Old San Juan much changed since its own bohemian heyday—I’m the flaneur of my childhood dreams: walking, waving, popping in for a drink, getting on my way… Mornings at the café are spent in a neighbor’s company; afternoons and evenings bring the friendly faces of local bars. This is the culture of camaraderie I’d 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—coffee in the afternoon, beer during happy hour—to 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’s also easy to have another if the conversation hasn’t 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, “watering hole” is another name for a bar, yet it has a specific definition as ; it’s 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’ve used this term informally to mean a tavern or bar—somewhere to drink alcohol—suggests that these spaces do more for us than act as places to go grab a beer during happy hour. 

These are what philosopher Jürgen Habermas called the “,” or places of social life where “something approaching public opinion can be formed” 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 “third place” in his 1989 book, The Great Good Place—somewhere that isn’t 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 “” that “reinserting emotion and intoxication into the emergence of the public sphere helps to flesh out the history of feeling and social ritual in civic engagement.” Coffee shops serve a similar purpose: Researcher Narciss M. Sohrabi, in a 2015 case study based in Tehran, Iran, , “While these coffee shops do not provide sites where the public tends to organize and form political opinions, young people nevertheless use them for ‘everyday forms of resistance’”—places to mix, mingle, and discuss culturally taboo subjects.

Over time, as , and they are gaining steam in significance throughout the U.S.: I’ve picked up weekly fruit and vegetable boxes for community-supported agriculture at bars, where I’ve then sat at a stool for a pint. Since 2009, Chicago bar the Hideout has hosted an event called “” where pots of soup and loaves of bread can be enjoyed for free or with an optional donation. Playground Coffee in Brooklyn, New York’s 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’s more awareness in this day and age of —a��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—a��d the —offer a chance to help redefine watering holes as inclusive spaces for everyday engagement. They’re 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 cafés 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 cafés seem insignificant on a community scale in the United States—but this is an anomaly globally speaking, and crises have served to undermine this uniquely American notion that watering-hole culture is frivolous. Replace “meal” with “drink” in Michael Symons’ 1994 piece on the sociology of the meal and we understand the significance of this urge: “Persons who share no particular interests can find themselves sharing a meal—in this possibility together with the primitiveness and thus pervasiveness of the material interest lies the immense sociological significance of the meal.” This significance cannot be undermined for long: It’s a human impulse to gather around the necessary acts of eating and drinking. They’re 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’ve had the chance to make community, become a regular, and imagine new lives for myself. It’s in the watering hole, the third place, where I’ve been able to do these things—the din of a café 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’s always someone there to talk to. 

Spicy Hibiscus Simple Syrup
Makes about 1 ¼ cups simple syrup

½ 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.

“I never called for help again,” she says. Today Brooks is a police abolitionist who leads the in Oakland, California. “What I know now, after being in this work for almost two decades, [is that] wide swaths of the Black and Brown community don’t call [911],” she says. “Because we know that when we dial that number, it’s very rarely help that actually comes. What comes are agents of an institution who are trained to suppress, control, and subjugate.”

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 “good” 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’t worked. It didn’t matter that the officers charged with assaulting Nichols were wearing body cameras (which they either removed or didn’t use), or that all five of those charged are Black. “All cops are blue,” she says, because “once 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.”

Building Up to Abolition 

To most Americans, the word “abolition” is most readily associated with the in the United States that . It’s no coincidence that the movement to end modern-day policing has adopted the same terminology. According to the NAACP, “The origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the ‘Slave Patrol.’” The police’s of Black and Brown people confirms these parallels.

Police abolitionism today is centered on demands to “defund the police,” an idea sometimes referred to as a “” strategy of transitioning government funding away from policing and toward community resources. Others summarize the notion as “.” But the basic idea is the same—a world in which human needs are adequately met is one where police are obsolete. “Whole, healthy people do not hurt people,” explains Brooks. “Traumatized, wounded, desperate people do so.”

Abolition, according to Brooks, is “taking the money that we’ve 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.” When people are provided with the foundational elements of safety and happiness—high-quality housing, stable employment, education, food, health care, etc.—there is less need for policing.

Brooks says that ultimately abolition isn’t only about tearing things down. “It’s about building equitable, just, and humane systems that will work for everyone.”

Still, fully funding people’s needs may not eradicate all violence. What recourse could there be for a 19-year-old Black woman experiencing abuse from an intimate partner—as Brooks did—in 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’s in distress, they can call a nonemergency number to speak with a “caring, trained volunteer” in order to create what Brooks calls “a participant-determined pathway” 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. “Badges and guns are not what we need to respond to community crisis,” she emphasizes. “It is trained, caring, compassionate community members.”

There’s 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 “builds infrastructure for the future of community crisis response.” At its outset, Raheem was a project designed in the vein of a virtual “cop watch,” 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’t directly reduce police brutality, and that, echoing Brooks’ experience, many people in the community were reluctant to resort to police.

“We know that communities have really been providing care for one another even prior to the existence of police,” says Ayele. Raheem wanted to “create a way for people to access that care without having to rely on police and … be exposed to police violence.” So the organization pivoted to creating a new digital tool called PATCH, an acronym for “People and Technology for Community Health,” that helps people access care as an alternative to policing.

The app is an electronic dispatch system for “community-based crisis response teams,” or CCRTs. Ayele explains these teams can use the app to connect the communities they serve with the care they need. For example, “PATCH 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 … the organizations that we work with receive,” says Ayele.

She calls PATCH “the tech solution to the issue of police violence and community crisis response.” 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 “care pods,” can sign up to receive training and a demonstration of how PATCH can help them coordinate community care.

“An organization uses PATCH to receive the calls that they get, and then [that organization] … respond[s] in their local area,” says Ayele. “So, it’s 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.” 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: “These people aren’t trained. These people aren’t able to answer a crisis call.” That’s why PATCH provides trainings that she says are “in 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,” she says.

Although Raheem is based in Oakland, the PATCH app is intended for national use. That said, Ayele notes that they “really 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.” The Massachusetts-based (Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team), a local group led by Black women, has been using PATCH since November 2021. Cambridge HEART’s core values include “no police involvement.”&�Բ�����;

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’s website, the organization believes in “transforming safety to include meeting basic human needs like housing, hunger, and healthcare to be high priorities in ensuring public safety.”

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’s murder, “a lot of people wanted … 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.” 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’s words, it ended up “going viral.” Sultan is careful to note that the is not comprehensive. “It’s not incorporating every single element of what abolition could look like.” Still, first on the list is the most well-known abolitionist demand: Defund the police. There’s no mystery behind this oft-debated idea, she notes. “What it means is taking money out of the police budget and diverting it to different things.”&�Բ�����;

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—“demilitarize communities,” “remove police from schools,” and “repeal laws that criminalize survival”—allude to the overpolicing of neighborhoods, inner-city schools, and unhoused communities that low-income people of color are disproportionately impacted by. Step 4, “free people from prisons and jails,” references the fact that those same communities are subject to . “Why should people be punished for their desperation when governments could solve that issue by feeding and housing people?” asks Sultan.

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

Transitioning away from police requires building up safety and care for all people. “Of course, people need food, and education, and a lot of other things to survive and thrive,” says Sultan. “But it is extremely difficult to do anything if you do not have safe and secure housing.” That’s why step 7 of the #8toAbolition plan is to “provide safe housing for everyone.”

The eighth and final step toward a world free of police is to “invest in care, not cops.” “It kind of brackets the whole thing,” says Sultan. “So, if the first part is to defund the police, then this is what we’re funding. And there are so many things that are underfunded in our communities that people really need.” Those things include noncoercive mental health care, as well as public transportation, community fridges, free education, and more. “We are just not funding any of these things because policing and prisons cost so much money,” Sultan explains. “And if we weren’t putting so much money there, the taxes that we’re paying could go toward making people safe and secure in a way that’s actually meaningful.”

Although meeting basic human needs as an antidote to policing sounds reasonable, “selling” the idea to the public remains a challenge. Brooks laments how “most of us can’t even imagine a world without law enforcement” because of what she calls “”—the pervasive media narrative that police are a force for good. Luckily, says Sultan, there’s a deep well of information about and work toward realizing abolition. “Most of that does come from Black women, queer scholars, and people who have spent a lot of time ideating around abolition,” 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. “The amount of energy and effort it takes for an organizer to have those one-by-one conversations—that, along with the creation of models that can be replicated,” is what Brooks says it will take to end policing. But she’s heartened by the fact that these issues are being discussed more openly now. When it comes to the public embrace of abolition, Brooks says, “I think we are seeing a sea change that, if we’re smart as organizers, we can exploit to create a watershed moment.”&�Բ�����;

But “far less than even some of the lowest-paid workers in the U.S. labor force,” 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 “.” 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 “Operation Blooming Onion.” Trafficked migrant workers were ensnared in what “modern-day slavery” 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. “They won’t speak to media,” one editor warned me. “They’re afraid of journalists,” a reporter friend said. I came to parrot these lines myself—a��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’s 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—employers 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. ������Ƶ 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’ 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’s, 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’s 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—two 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—hundreds 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—we are doomed to continue perpetuating these cycles of harm. 

A few hours later, her 9-year-old son, Roberto Sebastián, returned with 210 pesos. At first, Rivas was concerned he’d stolen the money. But Sebastián explained that he had taken the shoeshine box his grandfather had given him, and gone door to door among his neighbors in Juárez, Nuevo León, offering to shine their shoes for 10 pesos a pair.

“Several neighbors came and told me: ‘Hey, Sebastián shines the shoes very well,’” Rivas says in Spanish, before bursting into tears. “Then, it hit me like a bucket of cold water. I said, ‘What am I doing? If my son can [find a way to support the family], I can too.’”

Rivas’ husband, Roberto Maciel Ramírez, 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’s mother was celebrating her birthday, taking Maciel and three of his friends. Rivas—who had planned to arrive later at the celebration with her children—was transfixed. Maciel’s 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’s family became increasingly distant. Rivas was devastated. “Unfortunately, I didn’t understand the situation at the time,” Rivas says. “Having been left with three children, without a job and with nothing, I didn’t know what to do.”

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’t 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’t 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’ 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—a��d does not guarantee answers.

Cases like Rivas’ 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 León 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 “facilitate search, investigation, reparation and memory efforts related to long-standing case[s].” 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 “regrettable that no other mechanisms exist for long-standing cases that occurred after 1990.”

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.

“What 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,” says Rivas. “That is what I want and there [at the collective] I was not going to get anything. So I left.” 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 Pérez has personal experience with that magnitude. Five of her family members disappeared one night in August 2012. Pérez’s 13-year-old daughter, Milynali Piña Pérez; her brother Ignacio Pérez; and her three nephews—Alexis Domínguez (age 16), José Arturo Domínguez, and Aldo de Jesús Pérez (both age 20)—didn’t return home to Tamuín, San Luis Potosí, after a short trip to the United States. The last time they called Pérez, they were two hours away, near Ciudad Mante, Tamaulipas.

At first, Pérez and her family had hope in the authorities. But after filing a missing-persons report with state police, Pérez’s family received a call demanding a ransom. When her sister Edith Pérez asked for proof of life, the callers gave details that didn’t match their family members’, and the sisters realized it was an extortion attempt. On the ninth day, desperate for news from the authorities, Pérez begged her family to let her go out and search. Despite concerns about the danger of Pérez traveling alone to Tamaulipas, her family eventually agreed, recognizing that Pérez had nothing left to lose after her only daughter disappeared.

Pérez 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.

“I left there in pieces,” Pérez says in Spanish. “And that’s when I realized that the authorities were not going to do anything.” Through social media, Pérez found people who gave her information on which routes to take during her search, and even shared their own cases in hopes that Pérez 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 Pérez hoped her family had not been. “I couldn’t think that my daughter, my boys, my brother had to be in a place like that, right?”&�Բ�����;

Milynali loved to watch telenovelas, which Pérez would watch with her, even if she didn’t 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; Pérez would handle the customers and the register. 

“She was very visionary, very independent. She was very self-assured,” Pérez says proudly. “She is my daughter.” As her search continued, Pérez 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 Pérez’s daughter, also joined the search. Three months after her sons disappeared, Edith Pérez publicly confronted then-president Felipe Calderón during a visit to San Luis Potosí, denouncing the government’s 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 Pérez 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’s one of the longest-running collectives in the country.

“I realized that I wasn’t just looking for mine,” says Pérez. “The 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’t ask anything for mine.”

A Grain of Sand, a Grain of Hope

The 10-year anniversary of her family’s disappearance has been a defining—a��d draining—moment for Pérez. The countless field searches and long hours spent under the burning sun have resulted in fatigue, new allergies, and other ailments, she says. “I don’t know how much longer this will last,” says Pérez. “I’m trying not to think about the future. I just live one day at a time.”

“In the end, we are just leaving a grain of sand. The best we can do is document the best practices and pass them on,” adds Pérez. “I wouldn’t wish to pass anything on to anyone because no one wants to be in this horrible search.”

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 ���dz��貹ñ������� suffer from depression, heart issues, and cancer. “A collective is also to see that your people are OK, in morale and economically,” says Rivas. Keeping track of each collective member’s case with the authorities can be difficult when the cases are long-standing and families are rarely offered new leads. And yet, new families—often with similar cases—continue to join.

“It brings a range of emotions,” explains Rivas. “On 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.”

Rivas continues to search for her husband, and now also coordinates searches for dozens of disappeared people in Nuevo León, together with more than 44 families. The collective is in the process of forming itself as a civil association. One of Rivas’ ���dz��貹ñ������� suggested that they be named Renacer (Rebirth).

“One of them said, ‘I like Renacer,’” says Rivas. “I asked, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Because it’s like we are reborn after all we have experienced. It was as if we were dead, and now we are alive again.’”&�Բ�����;

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’s endowed healing properties. In almost every religion, water has the ability to absorb prayers and bestow blessings.

“Water holds memories since time began and has a living spirit just like we do,” 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’ innate wisdom understands how essential water is, as it makes up more than half of our body weight. “Water has the ability to cleanse itself, and because we are largely made of water, we are a part of that cleansing cycle as well,” Egawa says. “That is why it is so important to offer gratitude and prayer to water as we use it throughout our day.”&�Բ�����;

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‘i 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. 

“One 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,” says A-dae Romero-Briones, who is Cochiti and Kiowa. “From our beginning as a people, our homelands in the Southwest constantly teach us how to respect, revere, and honor water,” says Romero-Briones, who holds a law degree in Indigenous food and agriculture and has in-depth knowledge of Native food systems and economies. “We 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.”

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’s 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—more 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’m 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—proving yourself “good enough” to rejoin larger society—can become overwhelming. “Formerly incarcerated individuals often face stigmatization and discrimination, which can lead to feelings of shame and inadequacy,” says Emily Shelton, a prisoner re-entry expert and the co-founder and director of a nonprofit called . “These 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.”

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’s 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. “These 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,” Shelton says. “Yet it’s important that they don’t 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.”

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’s emotional support to be especially valuable after his release. “Having my family there in spite of my past mistakes remains a huge deal for me,” he says. “To have somewhere I feel safe and supported has made the transition back into society much easier than I think it otherwise might have been.”&�Բ�����;

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 “move through my trauma from prison” and become optimistic about the future. “[Therapy] has helped me feel like I can breathe again,” he says. “For someone starting life over, I just cannot stress enough how important those things are.”

My personal journey has taught me that it’s possible to rebuild one’s life after incarceration and to find purpose and fulfillment. But I still worry about the future—not 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—restoring and rehabilitating them and returning them to their communities—then 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 “water footprint,” 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.

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. “The river that we used to play in was being used for the dissolved solids of the fossil fuel industry,” 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’s 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. “Of course, they aren’t exposed to the industries that we were exposed to,” Carpenter explains.

Carpenter says this contrast activated them to start organizing early, at the age of 13. “For my grandparents’ generation, it was the American Indian Movement,” Carpenter says. “I think that the Water Protector movement is … our generation’s equivalent—to take up an agelong fight.” Carpenter’s 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: “It’s not just this river that’s sacred. All of them are sacred. Every single one of them, even if they’re being poisoned right now, even if they’ve been poisoned in the past. That water itself is a sacred thing.”&�Բ�����;

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—treating water not as a resource but as a relative. “We’re actually all threads in this interwoven blanket that are doing Creator’s work,” 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’d been swimming in all of her life. Kelly uses art to connect her community with her local waters—in the form of art classes, group swims, and river safaris. “Artists have always been there alongside the physicians, alongside the mathematicians, the philosophers, the linguists, the thinkers.”

She says it’s because artists see the world through creative eyes that invite people to engage with concepts like climate change and pollution, even if they don’t fully understand them: “Wow, look how they’ve captured that water. Perhaps I should look at the water differently.” 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. 

“I’m using this river as a kind of metaphor for our autonomy as people and our language and our ways of living and our culture,” Kelly says. Historically, the Welsh language and ecosystems were undermined by colonialism and its consumption-centered worldview. “Our river holds all of that, so all … that has been lost within our village life can be regained through the story of this river.” 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 “sacred activism.”

“By taking a walk, you are doing the work. By getting in the water, you are doing the work.” It’s 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. “There still is joy, and it’s still OK to seek that for yourself and for our surrounding environment as a way of protest and activism.”

When John Akec describes the Sudd Wetland, he makes it clear what’s 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’s 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. “Water is more valuable than gold, more valuable than oil,” 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 “lost” 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. “I was horrified,” 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’s 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. 

“I know this country was fought for by people with their blood,” Akec says. “If you are living, then you try to fight with the tools that are available.”&�Բ�����;

To me, Disney and durian are one in the same: nauseatingly sweet. The first essay in Manuel Betancourt’s , a collection of essays about the author’s 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 “smuggled” some sort of queer ontology out of its “oppressively heterosexual fairy tales.”

Unremarkably aroused by Disney’s gambit of meatheads, Betancourt foregrounds his nascent sexual proclivities to stake an ambitious claim: “As Disney gave its female heroines agency in their desire, it also allowed audiences to objectify its male characters.” 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—he 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’t: “[I]t’s unclear if these childhood moments … 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.” Um… isn’t it? Betancourt subbing personal experience for analysis echoes Kay Gabriel’s argument in a 2022 article for : Queer memoirists who satiate nonqueer readers with snapshots of personal hardship rather than illuminate shared social forms—like, say, joy—effectively neuter themselves. Betancourt’s Disney nostalgia, precisely: Furiously hard in the tenebrous recesses of the theater, his boner works itself out, as Gabriel puts it, “in powerful but highly limited ways on some strange people over there.”

Granted, Betancourt’s childhood, piddled away in front of the TV, seems lonely. And horny—so much so that, by his own admission, it hampers his analytical faculties: “I can’t deny that sometimes my shallowness (or my horniness, more like) gets the best of me.” For example, the “hairy,” “rippling,” and “lovingly defined” pecs of Hercules; the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; Buffy’s Xander; and, in the real world, Ricky Martin inundate the pages with a dull libidinal yearning. Saved by the Bell’s A.C. Slater—all-star wrestler and general harbinger of Jersey Shore’s later grip on millennial sexuality—is, in particular, “a revelation.”&�Բ�����;

Reflections on Slater metastasize into lascivious musings on how wrestling garb and related imagery can “rewire the markers of masculine ideals as inherently homoerotic.” These ideas are both fantastical and heavy-handed; allusion is not our Slater-satyr’s forte. “[T]ight asses aren’t mere by-products of arduous training but open invitations (in ways more literal than you can imagine).” Surely any self-described gay man and the most cursorily adventurous heterosexual could’ve 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 “hard to disentangle,” yet he doesn’t recognize that this very entanglement may be confining his own view. As a gay man, I see little of my own urges in Betancourt’s. “To explicitly deny the sexual pull such images [of shirtless amateur wrestlers] can have … is to feed into a toxicity that refuses to let men be unwittingly desired (by other men).” This leaves me sexually and theoretically marooned. I do deny it (wrestling doesn’t turn me on!) and regardless: How would my lust anchor my masculinity? Despite acknowledging that “what men want and what men look like aren’t questions to be asked in a vacuum,” Betancourt doesn’t 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 “Hombres,” Betancourt explores the titular Colombian telenovela as a “glimpse into a possible future and a rare window into an alien present.” Hombres’ seemingly “progressive” male characters were facsimiles for the professional class of men Betancourt’s classmates would become, boys whose masculinity relied on his torment. Marshaled against the show’s larger, systemic pitfalls—such as its infinite forgiveness of male fragility and total inability to pass the Bechdel test—we learn that Hombres was essentialist down to its title, its denotations of masculinity contingent on who was and wasn’t meant to watch. Here, Betancourt’s 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’s final essay, “A Cock in a Frock,” proves the limitations of those preceding if only by showing that, done right, personal experience can pose some epistemic value. Taking a RuPaul tagline (“we’re all born naked and the rest is drag”) 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’s here where his writing is at its best. Building solidarity across disparate experiences rather than leveraging them for intellectual cachet, Betancourt’s analytical power rests precisely in the space between what he and other queer men do and don’t share.

Promulgating one’s trauma is increasingly necessary to “legitimate” 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’s 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 “faggot” is ancillary—if only he would realize that. 

Though the vampire is a global phenomenon, the Western canon’s 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 “” 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’t 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’s 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’s 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 “Buffy vs. Dracula,” 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’s hands. Over the course of the 20th century, vampires had evolved into something sexy, as seen in Anne Rice’s novel Interview With the Vampire, published in 1976; mysterious and broody like in Angel; a little gonzo like in True Blood; and powerful—with 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’s 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’t been explicit. The fundamental depiction of a terrifying yet seductive inhuman being mirrors white attitudes about Blackness, a world in which “they” walk among “us” but are forever marked as “other.”

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 “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” 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’ The Pale Lady, published in 1849, was a foundational work, and vampires even appeared in Blaxploitation films such as 1972’s Blacula and 1973’s 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’t include the things that are required in the white canon, such as exclusivity, money, and power. 

complained that she didn’t feel “in” on the “code” 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 “this *isn’t* a vampire story,” reflecting an offended sensibility: Gomez’s 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’s 2011 short story “The House of Aunts” 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.

“In 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,” Cho writes in “The House of Aunts,” directly confronting Western expectations for vampire stories. In “Santos de Sampaguitas,” 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’s short story, which seamlessly uses English and Tagalog, is about family and connections as much as it is about monsters.

Silvia ������Ƶno-Garcia similarly referenced regional folklore in 2016’s 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 , ������Ƶno-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’s a direct send-up of vampire lore that also explores outsider culture and the alienation of being on the wrong side of society. The 2008–2013 series Being Human similarly explored the supernatural share house genre, albeit with a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost.

These works don’t just push against what a vampire story is “supposed” to be. They create a new kind of story, in which the subtext becomes text, and the characters’ experience of race, gender, and sexuality is a vital, vibrant feature. Instead of being a hollow echo via a white creator’s 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—what were all those white vampires doing in the mid-1800s to save up so much money?—these 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’s 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. 

“These conversations are not brand new,” says , a lifestyle coach with more than 120,000 followers on TikTok. “They’re just being transmitted in a different form, and that form is social media.” Shanu coaches on femininity and dating, but not in the conservative sense. She has helped hundreds of “overworked and overstimulated” women tap into “softer aspects of feminine energy,” which she describes as “being nurturing, being compassionate, [having] a sensitivity to emotion, [and having] a desire to connect or build communities.”&�Բ�����;

For Black women, in particular, femininity content can be appealing, perhaps because of its unintentional portrayal of the “,” 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, “​It 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—Black women were already in the workplace.” 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’s important to note that a lot of femininity content has been as . , the belief that there’s 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, . “We have a system in which being masculine depends on women’s vulnerability,” she says. “How are you supposed to provide [for] and protect a woman if she’s not vulnerable? If a woman says, ‘I’m going to provide for myself, and I don’t need or want your protection,’ where does that leave masculinity? The entire premise of American masculinity is the vulnerability of women.”&�Բ�����;

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, . “And our society doesn’t value care work,” says Chemaly.

The growing embrace of the tradwife life could be seen as a rebuke of , as well as the “.” If you’re 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, “a comfortable place in a very destabilizing time.” This specific thirst for economic stability comes with the promise that being a —a woman who upholds patriarchal standards to appeal to men—will 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’s 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’re just trying to survive. 

Ten-hour workdays were common for me, so I welcomed Odell’s 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’s 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’s 2012 book, , Odell connects the dividing of our days into seconds, minutes, and hours to Europe’s colonial domination. In seeking to universalize working hours to increase production, the Western clock arrived in the colonies as a tool to “tame” the people who lived there. Indeed, as Odell writes, “A standardized approach to time and labor often accompanied colonists wherever they went.” Colonists even determined how “civilized” 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 “part of a social economy” 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. “I 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,” Odell writes, putting forth the claim that how we conceptualize time is neither humane nor logical.

The time structures we operate under aren’t arbitrary; they’re designed to support capitalism, and, as workers, we’re selling our time. Implicit in this line of thought is a question: What do we lose when we’re forced to sell our time to capitalism? This exposition is, in part, to show readers that “time is money” isn’t written in stone and that we would benefit from questioning it. “When 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,” Odell argues. 

Like many freelance millennials, I measure my time according to how much money I can potentially make—how 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: “[Increasing Personal Efficiency by Donald Laird] is shot through with the cultural moment’s fixation on speed, mastery, and a single-minded mission to cut out the useless,” 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—as Odell distills in the chapter “Can There Be Leisure?”—is that nonwork time always becomes a pathway toward more work. Beyond the fact that rest requires a certain amount of financial privilege, we’re encouraged to take time off so we can work when we’re no longer tired. We’re resting to become better at our jobs. Odell concludes that in our culture, leisure time—the commonly doled out —exists only for us to return to work and eventually tire ourselves out again and again. 

It’s 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’s “panoramic assault on nihilism,” as she calls it, is palpable in Saving Time; while she insists on addressing what hurts society, she’s 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’t account for the many other beings—trees, animals, rivers—that 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 “”). Embracing bioregionalism would allow us to resist the concept of linearly organized time. “Bioregionalism is useful here both as metaphor and as concrete demonstration, in that its timescales overlap and sometimes lie outside the human perspective,” Odell writes. “Expressed simply as change, ecological and geological time are full of difference: Things happen both quickly and slowly, at both tiny and inconceivably epic scales.”

This is perhaps where Odell risks losing some readers by turning to a more abstract solution. She encourages readers to look for “[the] irrepressible force that drives this moment into the next.” I know exactly what she means: a kind of leisure that can’t be pinpointed and therefore can’t 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’t “to live more, in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life, but rather, to be more alive in any given moment—a movement outward and across, rather than shooting forward on a narrow, lonely track.” 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’s rich culture of sports. She has bylines in the Jackson Free Press, Mississippi Free Press, Mississippi Scoreboard, and Bash Brothers ������Ƶ. 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’s endless creativity. Instagram:

Mer Young is an Indigenous (Chichimeca and Apache), socially engaged, Southern California–based 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’s 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 ������Ƶ, Atlantic Records, Virgin EMI Records, Highsnobiety, and hip-hop streetwear pioneer Karl Kani. Instagram:

I’m writing to you with a full heart. I’ve 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—the amazing volunteers who help ensure that YES! is fulfilling its critical mission.

In January, after 19 years of board service—including the last three as co-chair—Tanya Dawkins resigned her post. Tanya’s decades of dedication have been an incredible gift to YES! 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’s next, as Berit Anderson joins Eli Feghali as co-chair—they 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 YES! 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 YES! frequently in my work. YES! 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 YES! 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 YES! 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’s important that we question ourselves and challenge our thinking. Reading YES! allows us to do that.

Why do you feel the work of YES! is important?
Two things stand out to me the most about YES!:

First, it’s 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’s so important that YES! 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 YES!, what would you say to them?
I always say, “Check it out,” 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:

������Ƶ 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^��

Combined number of weeks Roberts’ books have spent on The New York Times Bestseller list:

1,045^��

Years passed between publication of Roberts’ 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 “Future of Employment” 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]

“True tax rate” from 2014–2018 for the wealthiest American, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos:

0.98% ^[3]

Rate from 2014–2018 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 “critical race theory” from March 1–June 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 “lack proficiency in literacy,” 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 “proficient” 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 “The Rock” 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’s 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’s remaining biodiversity safeguarded by Indigenous peoples:

80% ^[14]

Share of the global land mass customarily managed by Indigenous peoples:

������Ƶ 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’s pictured holding a cat:

–2.8%

Change in the number of women willing to consider a long-term relationship with a man based on whether or not he’s pictured holding a cat:

–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 “likes” on J.K. Rowling’s 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 “different than the gender they were thought to be at birth”:

62%

Percentage of nearly 3,400 trans patients receiving support at one U.K. gender identity clinic who “expressed transition-related regret or de-transitioned”:

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’ve heard of QAnon, percentage who believe it is “very accurate” or “somewhat accurate”:

24%

Of Republicans who’ve heard of it, percentage who believe QAnon is “very accurate” or “somewhat accurate”:

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:

������Ƶ than10,600⁴

Number of protests linked to the Black Lives Matter movement:

������Ƶ than 7,750

Percentage of these protests in which protesters engaged in “violence or destructive activity”:

Less than 7

Number of counter-protests during the same time period:

������Ƶ 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:

������Ƶ 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 Social Justice; 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—activists 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’s 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’s 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’s vice presidential candidate. Her books include Last Standing Woman, All Our Relations and In the Sugarbush. LaDuke is a YES! contributing editor. 

Vandana Shiva is a scholar, author, and activist. Her pioneering work around food sovereignty, traditional agriculture, and women’s 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 café 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’ll 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. “Porch Photography: In It Together” has a public Facebook group. There’s no charge for porch photos, but she does accept donations for local food pantries. As of May, she’d 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’s 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’s wear companies, such as the Gap and The Children’s 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’s 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’s 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.

Stan Cox is a research scholar in ecosphere studies at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. His six books include The Path to a Livable Future: Forging a New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic (2021); The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can (2020); Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (2010); and, with Paul Cox, How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe’s Path, from the Caribbean to Siberia (2016).

Andrew Lee’s work and writing engage with emergent social configurations and movements; domestic and international displacements; and land, loss, and liberation. His work has previously appeared in outlets including Notes From Below, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, Plan A Magazine, and Teen Vogue. Andrew is a long-time restaurant worker currently serving as managing editor for Anti-Racism Daily.

Lornet Turnbull is a freelance journalist based in Seattle, where she writes about the region for national publications. She’s a former YES! editor who joined the magazine in 2017, inspired by the organization’s commitment to give voice to marginalized communities following the 2016 election. Over the years, her work has earned her local, state, and national journalism recognition; she was part of the Seattle Times team that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post and other publications. 

]]> /issue/world-we-want/2020/02/19/yes-issue-contributors Thu, 20 Feb 2020 00:00:45 +0000 /?post_type=magazine-article&p=77182

Alexandra Bowman is an illustrator, designer, and muralist based in Oakland, California. She creates art that reflects on the female experience and the importance of representation through inclusive imagery of gender, race, and culture. The Stay Woke glossary shows that language can be a tool of oppression, but when we form a response to that oppression, language can also be used as a tool for liberation. Defining our pain as well as our joy is a form of resistance. Twitter: @alexbowman

Oscar Perry Abello is a New York City-based journalist covering community and economic development across the United States. He is currently senior economics correspondent at Next City. After covering public banking and campaigns supporting it around the country, in the dead of winter, with high temperatures hovering around -1°F, Oscar headed to North Dakota to talk to residents about their unique state-owned bank. He learned how few North Dakotans realize the extent of the bank’s reach and influence on their local economies. Twitter: @oscarthinks 

Irene Rinaldi is a freelance illustrator based in Rome. Her work is inspired by her love of engraving and print-making as well as mid-century graphic design. To illustrate “The World We Want” cover, Rinaldi says: “I imagined our minds as a prism that can transform emotions into a vision, ideas into action, and ideals into reality for a better future. The rainbow coming out the woman’s eyes symbolizes worldwide peace, human rights, diversity, acceptance, and pride, but also a colorful, optimistic vision of the future despite the current state of things. After all, rainbows come after the rain.”

Anoa Changa (she/her) is a Southern-based movement journalist. She has a deep history of working within the realms of advocacy and justice. She hosts the podcast The Way with Anoa, tackling politics and current events through a Black progressive feminist perspective. Changa received a B.A. in sociology and a master’s in city and regional planning from Ohio State University. She was awarded a J.D. from West Virginia University College of Law, where she was a W.E.B Du Bois fellowship recipient.

Edgar Villanueva is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe. He is the founder and principal of Decolonizing Wealth and Liberated Capital. Villanueva is a nationally recognized expert on social justice philanthropy, previously holding leadership roles at the Schott Foundation, the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, and the Marguerite Casey Foundation. He currently serves as the chair of the board of directors of Native Americans in Philanthropy. He is the author of Decolonizing Wealth.  

Molly Costello (they/them) is a White queer illustrator, food grower, beekeeper, and seed saver. Through their art practice they explore themes of interconnectedness, reciprocity, biomimicry, police and prison abolition, as well as our larger capacities for social transformation. Molly hopes that through the making and sharing of their artwork they can play a small role in our deep work of reimagining and reshaping our dominant culture away from patterns of supremacy, violence, and greed toward cultures of accountability, collective wellness, and abundance.

An enchanting blanket of wildflower medicine adorns the continent. Carefully cultivated by Indigenous inhabitants for hundreds of years—often thousands—these blossoms, leaves, roots, and fruits generously cure the commonwealth in return. Each plant carries its own unique gift and healing stories. Deepening root systems and enhancing the health of the soil make these perennials and self-sowing annuals a wise investment for backyard and container gardens. 

Indigenous Americans reference fauna and flora as a People. Through this lens, paradigms shift. Considering our plant neighbors a People requires a different type of relationship, one of reciprocity and respect, the necessary mindset to see the reciprocity as we tend to each other. Meet seven deserving medicinal wildflowers to invite into your world.

Establishing a mindful apothecary is an empowering process and an incredible healing journey rich with stories and memories. For more information on uses and precautions, you can check websites of the Botanical Society of America and National Institutes of Health, or ask naturopathic health care providers. 

Part 1: Summer

A stylish mauve beehive shaped blossom, with a punk-rock spiky seed pod, perches atop a lanky stalk. Underground, a well-established root system builds bioactive compounds from elements in the soil called alkylamides. These compounds produce a tingly and numbing sensation on our tongue. Few plants create such a compound or are as effective at treating infections as Echinacea. 

Dozens of tribes have recorded historical uses and cultivation methods for Echinacea. Eclectic Physicians of the 19th century, who learned botanical healing from Native Americans, used Echinacea for many ailments, including upper respiratory infections, inflammation, throats, coughs, toothaches, and even snake bites.

������Ƶ than just medicine for humans, Echinacea is one of the biggest attractors for pollinators. They bloom from mid-summer to fall, providing ample nectar for the honeybees. Echinacea tolerates poor rocky soil conditions and thrives in full to partial sun. Sow them from seed easily, or buy an established start from a local nursery to grow your own.  

A pocket of brambly canes armed with thorns protects soft silvery leaves and white flowers, which transform throughout summer into ruby raspberry fruits. Raspberry canes have been found in archeological dig sites that date back thousands of years in both North America and Asia. 

So much more than tasty berries, Raspberry offers leaves and roots that are useful for a variety of conditions. Linked to fertility in many traditions, Raspberry invokes the energy of the blood, pumping through the heart carrying good nutrition and love throughout the body. An affinity to the blood and its vessels makes consuming the fruit and drinking the leaf tea a wonderful women’s tonic. For ages, Raspberry has assisted in soothing labor pain, and easing contractions, muscle cramps, and nausea.  

Like its close cousin Rose, its thorns and nourishing qualities remind us to protect the fruits of our labor. This patient attitude comes in handy when beginning to cultivate Raspberry, as the first year’s growth does not produce many fruits; brambles focus on establishing their lengthy stalks. The second year will be more fruitful. In the meantime, the leaves can be harvested for tea. 

A prim apple-scented daisy-petaled flower sits atop a plume of light green lacy foliage. Chamomile does not originate in North America; it was brought by German settlers. Growing wild from North Africa into parts of Germany and Russia, this little flower has made quite a journey across continents and into backyard apothecaries. In South American healing traditions, Chamomile is called “Manzanilla” which means “tiny apples.”&�Բ�����;

This delicate flower imparts Motherly strength to aid sleeping and calm colicky baby tummies. Chamomile works on the digestive and nervous systems like a biochemical pinwheel, creating wide-ranging positive effects on conditions ranging from indigestion, diarrhea, and flatulence to anxiety, depression, and restlessness. It is applied externally to ease discomfort from chicken pox, diaper rash, and even eye infections. 

Seeds are easy to sow—simply sprinkle them where you want them to grow, in a partially sunny spot and watch them thrive. The flowers will be ready by summer, but Chamomile dies back in the fall. It is technically an annual, but once established will re-sow itself and return for years to come.  

Strong, sinewy deep green stems are adorned with leaves resembling a furry critter tail. Lance-shaped leaflets appear to hold up an umbrella of tiny white flowers. Yarrow has a global presence and can be found glittering on the beach shores and mountain tops of North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. 

Yarrow is used medicinally as an emergency tonic to stimulate healing and combat wound infections. These uses are documented in texts from The Odyssey to ancient Chinese medicine to the oral traditions of Indigenous Americans. Evidence of its use has been found in Neanderthal caves dating back 60,000 years. Yarrow’s ability to speak to the human body is fascinating. Active components within the flowering tops can stop an open wound from bleeding, diminish bacterial infection, and cool inflammation. Taken internally, Yarrow stimulates the immune system, can break a fever and relieve aches and pains caused by cold and flu symptoms. 

Growing Yarrow is simple, as it prefers loosened rocky soils, but will gladly thrive in a well-drained ceramic pot. Nowadays, Yarrow comes in a variety of colors, but it is the heirloom white Yarrow that has medicinal value. It flowers from late spring to fall. It will be a spotlight in your summer garden that bees will love.

A sweet, juicy fruit bejeweled with seeds amid a deep green quilt of trifoliate leaves. Included in numerous Indigenous oral histories, Strawberry symbolizes love, happiness, and blessings. 

Strawberry is considered among the most generous of the Plant People, with berries that relieve stress, quench thirst, and comfort us internally. Rich in vitamins and minerals, strawberry leaf tea is a tonic for our cardiovascular system and can help to alleviate upset stomachs, nausea, bloating, and diarrhea. Internally, it cools us down and eases inflammation. It has similar qualities to its relative the Raspberry, as it is also great support to blood vessels associated with women’s health. 

Strawberries replicate efficiently and can be prolific in the garden or a container. They will enthusiastically take over anywhere you plant them. 

Throughout summer, buttery yellow blooms form on fuzzy stems. Over 30 species of Arnica have been identified and are indigenous to mostly mountainous regions across the globe. Just two of those are used widely for medicine. Arnica chamissonis is the species originating from North America; Arnica montana, with origins in Europe, is the easiest to cultivate. 

Ancient preparations seem to conclude that this gilded blossom is a paramedic arriving at the scene of bodily traumas from a bump on the head to an overstrained back. Arnica’s powerful anti-inflammatory properties trigger pain relieving processes as soon as its medicine is applied topically. Recently, Arnica creams have become popular for soothing strained muscles, healing bruises, and offering pain relief for conditions such as osteoarthritis and carpal tunnel. It can now be found in hundreds of commercial products. This has caused increased harvesting, decreasing the abundance of it in its natural habitats. 

Cultivating your own Arnica and developing your own topical remedy is a great way to honor this plant and ensure its continued existence. Arnica grows easily from seed in moist soil with good drainage. 

Violet arrives in many different outfits—indigo, yellow, ivory—delicate five-petaled flowers hinged above heart-shaped leaves. Violet’s sweet sacred fragrance has found its way to every continent with hundreds of varieties becoming the signatures of ancient cities and influential warriors. 

Its medicinal uses are documented everywhere it thrives and usually include soothing irritated tissue and easing inflammation. Violet’s leaves are a natural source of salicylic acid, the base ingredient for aspirin. And spring leaves are particularly high in vitamin C. Taken internally, Violet’s properties activate lymphatic fluids to disband stagnation and alleviate congested tissues. All parts of Violet are useful, flower to leaf to root, and can be eaten fresh or dried and made into tea or syrup. 

Blooms visit mid-spring to early summer. Violet loves a shady, partial-sun space in the garden or in containers and will easily self-sow, coming back each year.

NEXT ISSUE: “Wildflower Apothecary, Part 2: Fall” will describe how to prepare these seven medicines.

Our summer issue took on one of the most pervasive problems facing our planet today: plastic pollution. We uncovered what happens to exported U.S. plastic waste, how bans on single-use plastics impact working communities, and how the microplastics from our clothing, food, and household objects end up in the ocean. We named the major forces responsible for this problem, highlighted innovative re-uses for the plastic that’s already on the planet, and shared hopeful visions for a plastic-free future that keeps accessibility at the forefront of the conversation. 

There’s no question that systemic change is needed to put an end to plastic production and pollution, but tackling a challenge of this scale requires participation at all levels. So we’re thrilled that more than 900 readers joined the YES! team for July’s Plastic-Free EcoChallenge, cutting back on single-use plastic in their lives, cooking zero-waste meals, and taking action to help others understand plastic’s impact. Online, we asked readers to share the ways they’re fighting for change in their own communities—a��d heard from YES! readers across the globe. 

I started a citizen science project called Micro Investigators, where we take primary school kids out to their local rivers and take water samples for microplastics. We then work with high school students to extract the microplastics in the lab, and the results are posted on a citizen science data hub, raising awareness of microplastic pollution across all levels of education and in the community. (Kids are also great at sharing what they learned with their families.) We believe that the key to fighting microplastic pollution is making the invisible visible—because you can’t care about things you can’t see, and you can’t protect the things you don’t care about.—Christine L., Invercargill, New Zealand

We “consumers,” homemakers, and individuals are near the end of the plastic production, distribution, and use chain, and I believe the ultimate answer lies at the head of the line. So, I contact my elected officials with the message, “Support clean and sustainable energy, not oil and gas, keep fossil fuels in the ground. ������Ƶ and more of your constituents share my convictions.”&�Բ�����;But probably most importantly I contact manufacturers! I make telephone calls and send emails. My message is this: “I like your product, but your plastic packaging is a deal-breaker for me. And I know that I am not alone in my desire to unsnarl plastics from my life and from our planet. ������Ƶ and more buyers are rejecting plastic packaging.”&�Բ�����;I have also contacted packaging manufacturers associations with this message: “Use your energy and innovation to create packaging that is part of a closed-loop system, plastic-free, recyclable, returnable, compostable. ������Ƶ and more citizens want sustainable methods—get on board or be left holding the plastic bag.”

I believe that the most powerful leverage lies with the makers of products bought by members of the public. I refuse, re-use, and recycle too, of course, and I will keep up with those practices, but if the stuff keeps coming down the line, I end up feeling overwhelmed like Lucy and Ethel working on the candy conveyer belt. Hey, maybe packaging could be made of chocolate! —Kathleen W., Chardon, Ohio

I made reusable, washable fabric sandwich and snack bags for everyone attending our family reunion. My brother texted that he uses his to keep his cell phone dry when he’s out gardening on a wet day! —Beth S., Cincinnati, Ohio

Fall 2020: The Black Lives Issue

Hundreds of you ordered a box of our Black Lives issue to share in your communities, and even more joined YES! Presents for a virtual panel discussion with Zenobia Jeffries Warfield, Angela Bronner Helm, Michael Harriot, and Jamon Jordan. The impact was far-reaching:

When they say that one man’s trash is another’s treasure, believe it! Today during a walk with my children, I stumbled upon a community library and found the Fall 2020 issue of YES! Upon returning home and settling in, I began to scan the issue. I want to express my gratitude for the stories written in your most recent issue. From the beautiful cover art to the engaging pieces featured in the issue, I was quite simply in awe.

Not to be long-winded but the article on “Microaggressions? How to Do Microinterventions” added such perspective and guidance to something that I have dealt with for over 20 years as one of the only Black male English educators in the suburban high school where I am employed. Furthermore, the article, “Notes on the Inequality of Grief” gave such compassion and succinctness to the immense and constant grieving that BIPOC face when our own are murdered in the streets. I could go on and on about what this issue afforded. However, I just want to say thank you.

Victor Alcindor

South Orange, New Jersey

My biggest takeaway is that I still have a lot to learn, and I’m inspired to keep learning more on these topics. I really enjoyed hearing Michael Harriot speak at length on the topic of White theft as a basis for reparations. All panelists were knowledgeable, passionate, and compelling speakers. As for a future impact, the information and ideas discussed, as well as that printed in the current issue, have led me to new understanding and studies. Who knows where that will lead me, but I feel better equipped to step forward with such information.

Denver D. Robinson

Portland, Oregon

As a White person, I need to keep educating myself about how to be an effective ally. I’m sorry to say that I’ve been a passive participant in racism. This panel motivated me to continue to dig into how to do better, and I trust YES! to give me positive tools for change.

Ginger Danz

Roanoke, Virginia

Our fall issue tackled the existential question that undergirds so many of our current conversations, be they about wealth, food, health, justice, climate, or war and peace: How much is enough? Writers, thought-leaders, and organizers from across movements shared their visions for not only answering this question, but also for how to build a global community where everyone has enough. And we dove even deeper into this topic during a Sept. 9 online discussion with Brother Chân Pháp Dung, a Buddhist monk whose lectures on the beauty and joy of simplicity are world-renowned, and authors Stan Cox and Chuck Collins. Nearly 600 people joined. Here is a selection of attendee feedback:   

There’s a perception that living with less is sacrificial—many times associated with getting a reward in the afterlife. But another way to look at it is living with less is a better way to live now. Less stress. Less anxiety.—Glenn B., Duluth, Georgia

Capitalism is rooted in “free choice.” We need a global aspiration to use our free choice more wisely. We are in severe ecological overshoot, we cannot afford to continue destabilizing our ecology. We need to embrace minimalist consumption and expectations: Brother Chân Pháp Dung can teach us the way forward.—Barbara W., Oxfordshire, England

As a White person who was born, raised, and lives in a rural area, I am deeply questioning the practicality of living here. Although my grandfather was a farmer (and entrepreneur), I am not a farmer or someone who provides food (or other necessities) for our community or the larger citizenry. So I am beginning to feel that moving to a more urban area (not suburban) may help me walk my talk in a better way when it comes to living with “enough.” There is so much richness here in what we are all considering.—ayreÁnna a., Jamestown, California

I thoroughly enjoyed your magazine about “enough,” but I was struck how the magazine insists on electricity as the energy source, but at the same time, getting rid of fossil fuels. How do you think wind and solar are manufactured and transported? (All the components are mined or transported using fossil fuels, and they are mined or transported to the U.S. or Europe using fossil fuels.) Many of the corporations that function in energy supply now are switching to focusing their attention on solar panels/arrays or wind turbines, which are very energy intensive. We need to focus on local and regional products, seasonal produce, and on human population. And passive solar: buildings facing south, etc. Why aren’t these things part of the conversation?—Maureen D., Southbridge, Massachusetts   

Ideas on “The World We Want”��

Love the idea��behind this edition. Some of us have been using the word “enchantivism” to describe forms of storytelling that might start in breakdown, rupture, or injustice but that lead to more spacious possibilities. If we can’t imagine them, we can’t realize them.—c�󲹱���ܾ�����

The current issue is��so to the point that I want my friends to get it, especially because as a public school educator and public defense attorney articles in this issue directly speak to their concerns and work for social justice.—Larry��

This magazine came just��at a time when I needed it. Highlighting the stories and work of environmental activists of color, the articles are reimagining, with a radical visioning, the world we want…this edition was a joy to read and reminded me why I am committed to all the community organizing and activist work that I do! Even when it gets exhausting and overwhelming, we need this reminder of how we get from here to there, and it’s in community.��—Shirley Manken

This is what��I’ve been waiting for!A fantastic step toward creating and manifesting life-affirming future visions—“What We Want!” I believe we’re writing a new mythology that’s being shaped by uncommon times and the evolution of supernatural beings. I couldn’t feel more blessed and be more thrilled to be here now. To read this! The more the stories like this are conceived, refined, and told, the more power they gain. Thank you!—B�𳦴dz����Բ�

I was thinking one way��we could have a better world on the other side of this is if folk took some of this time to work on personal growth as well as growing community. Practice forgiveness and open the heart and we can see real change at a very local level. I have a feeling the universe is giving us an�� opportunity here!—J�Dz�

I like the focus��of the Spring issue. I would like to see more articles in that issue on what can be done or what is already being done to make the changes we need to make to get to that “world we want.” We all know where we are and how we got here, what we need to focus on now are the positive, uplifting movements to get us where we need to be.—J������������48

“Language of Antiracism” Is a Useful Guide

I have greatly appreciated��the articles focused on building bridges and supporting equity. To be completely honest, it is a subject that makes me sweat. I grew up around people of all colors, nationalities … but I have come to understand that even that situation whitewashed the diversity rather than really celebrating, honoring, or understanding it. It can feel so overwhelming to even broach the subject, and feels so much easier to ignore it and tell myself there’s nothing I can do about it. “The Language of Antiracism” brought some new ideas to light for me that were able to spawn some good conversations with my partner who has done a lot of participation in and training for DEI. Recently, this allowed me to step in during a group conversation and try to point out that there is no such thing as reverse racism. I was thankful to be able to reference the article, and the individual was open to finding new resources to look at on the matter. Usually I love YES! for inspiration, but I also love YES! for helping work on the difficult areas inside myself that I haven’t been able to yet. YES! approaches every subject thoroughly and with great heart and compassion. I so greatly appreciate this.—S.M., Oregon

Opening Up to Others’ Views

“Yes, You Can Change��Someone’s Mind” got me thinking about how difficult it is to see other peoples’ perspectives when you disagree, and that I have to put more energy and effort into bridging that gap.—Laura Myerson, New York

I need the reminder��that it’s not all about facts. My world view is very similar to that expressed in YES!, so it’s really helpful to me to see my beliefs and views expressed by others and to have my understanding of these things broadened by the very diverse perspectives brought by the writers and editors.—Becky P., California

Opportunities in a New Decade��

I would love to explore��how we can help to heal the divisive nature of our current economic and political cultures. Where people are respectful and listen to other points of view so that we can come together and work to create meaningful change. It’s time to end the debates, the bickering and stalemates. We need to start acting on the issues that are causing so much suffering.������ܲ�����

I have been asking people��what is your transition plan? And have you calculated your carbon footprint/personal consumption and consumption of resources on a finite planet? And, of course, can I help? Transportation and heating (I live in a northern climate) are the “low hanging fruit” and biggest energy hogs.��—Nancy Kellogg

How Is Your Community Responding to COVID-19?

We are��meeting the needs��of each other. We purchased dinners for truckers passing through our small town and delivered them safely. I heard that many of their favorite restaurants had closed. It didn’t take much to gather more support and healthy meals were provided for people who do a tough job and are often working double shifts.�����������Բ��ھ������ղ���

I live in a rural area��where the usual news of hot spots in dense urban areas doesn’t match the reality of our community. But we are staying in touch by phone, texts, and some visits where we practice at least 3 feet away. Local stores which are open have designated 6 foot distances, e.g. pharmacies, groceries and home improvement stores. I’m sure these are corporate decisions. I see my grandkids by meeting outside. Personally, I’m following Merlin’s advice to Arthur when you are depressed (now by social isolation) by learning something new. Something we can all do and I recommend.—m�������������

A neighbor friend and I,��with my family, have been spending every Sunday cleaning up the creek behind our community and have gathered over 12 garbage bags full of trash. My 4-year-old had such a great time. It was so good to see her spirit of adventure and independence return.—k��������1

Thanks much for this��article (“Community Solidarity Through Homemade Face Masks”)�� and particularly for articulating so clearly and poetically, “Wearing a mask when you need to be out of your house is an act of community solidarity, showing people around you that you care about protecting them as much as keeping yourself protected. And it’s an empowering chance to exercise creativity and personality during a time of uncertainty.” We’re sharing it (w/ credit, of course!) in our community service pitch to face-cover makers.—seladore

EXCERPTS FROM: 

Conversations in the YES! community.

Join the conversation about this issue at yesmagazine.org/summer2020

Or email us at letters@yesmagazine.org

Winter 2021: 

What the Rest of the World Knows

The Better Ideas issue sparked conversations about potential solutions to some of the ongoing challenges facing the United States, from our economy to our disconnected relationship with nature to long overdue calls for racial justice, truth, and reconciliation. Some readers rightly pointed out that there is no quick fix to many of these ills—a��d no single solution can be transferred wholesale from one unique country to another. Others found in our issue introductions to novel concepts and ways of being that yield vastly different results from what we have become accustomed to stateside. 

“Thanks for identifying these amazing places to invest our energy and attention for social change!” Wally Graeber wrote on Instagram, commenting on “11 Better Ideas for a Country in Need of Change.” 

On Facebook, Kelsie Pink found Mark P. Fancher’s article “Where Incarceration Isn’t the Answer” to be insightful. “Really good, in-depth article,” she wrote. “I was blown away by some of the stats and very interested in how other countries do approach this in a way that still treats people like humans. Especially the part about restorative justice!” 

While sharing our “11 Better Ideas” article on Facebook, Claudia Jimenez added some kind words: “One of my sources of hope these days is YES! Magazine. It reminds me that there are pockets of possibility all over the world. It takes work. I probably won’t see it in my lifetime. … And I am encouraged to know many people are working together to make it happen. Yes!”

As 2020 came to an end, YES! readers closed out a difficult year in truly inspiring fashion. Supporters not only helped us surpass our year-end fundraising goal, but also flooded our inboxes and mailboxes with heartfelt messages of appreciation for the labor of love that goes into each new issue, each article we publish, and each email we send or phone call we make. We’re fortunate to have such generous, dedicated readers, and we hope these messages spark hope for what’s to come in 2021, as they did for our staff.

“Thank you for your ongoing efforts to provide superb, inclusive reporting on topics of interest to so many, most definitely including me.”—Robin Woodward

“My experience of this year would be so totally different if I hadn’t found YES! and opened my mind to all the possibilities out there. I don’t always have the time to read the newsletter every day, but when I do it is so uplifting and stimulates the imagination. Tunes me toward how can I help instead of how helpless I feel.”&�Բ�����; —Carlotta Hayes

“The editorial staff seems to present a more diverse viewpoint, and the magazine seems more focused, rather than a simply feel-good read of stories that seem hard to envision as reality. Keep up the change, it’s so exciting! Thanks for your dedication and skill.”—Ellen Laverdure 

“I always read the headline, and start reading the article and think that I know exactly where it is going, and what they are going to say, and I’m always wrong and it is so surprising and refreshing!”—Katherine Madrone Moulton 

“The work that you do with YES! Magazine is incredibly timely, pertinent, and a source of fresh knowledge and perspective. … The combination of intellect and heart that goes into each and every issue is astounding to me. Please let everyone there know how much their work matters.”—Ellen R. 

MaryEllen Wilson

Kansas City, Missouri

What brought you to YES!?

I first found YES! Magazine in the break room at Kansas City Hospice where (until COVID-19) I volunteered. I read them cover to cover, then helped myself to the subscription page! I still read each issue cover to cover and learn so much I didn’t know. 

What are your passions?

Alongside my day job as an “office mommy” (my term for administrative assistant), I’ve long volunteered in community theater. I started at the Southern Renaissance Faire in San Bernardino, California, where I worked for a hat maker and eventually became booth manager. Since then I’ve done props and stage managing for different theater companies, and worked as a stitcher, a fitter, an “alterationer,” and a dresser to female leads. When I moved from California to Kansas City, I began volunteering with hospice to pay back the extraordinary care my sister and mother received at the end of their lives.

How does YES! support your values? 

I believe in the equality of all people. We are all one and if we don’t learn to live together, and value each other, and deal with the climate crisis, we will not have a planet to live on or communities to live in.  (And I don’t think most of us could afford Elon Musk’s space travel!) I have long been aware that the history we learned in school is not the real history of the world, and I appreciate that YES! speaks to those greater, deeper truths.

Why do you support YES! as a monthly donor?

I became a monthly donor because YES! does great work presenting the problems we need to face and offers information and solutions on how to deal with them. I want to support that work. I also knew that some of my friends would enjoy the magazine, and I wanted to use my free gift subscriptions to share it with them because I believe the ideas we read about in YES! need to spread. I love it when they tell me how much they appreciate it!

Kathleen Macferran

Menomonie, Wisconsin

What are your passions?

I’m passionate about helping organizations work collaboratively to create environments in which everyone thrives. I’m especially focused on the justice system and transforming conflict in ways that bring about reparation and restoration.

We need our prisons to be houses of healing, not places of punishment. We need a system in which people have the support they need at the first signs of conflict to restore relationships and meet people’s underlying needs. We can create this! Communities have generations of wisdom and skills from many traditions to reduce conflict and repair relationships when harm has been done. We can help communities engage compassionately with conflict and find justice through shared understanding and responsibility, and mutually agreed upon action.

What have you seen in your international work that the U.S. can learn from?

What I see in most countries I visit is the understanding that we are all interdependent, and that solutions that benefit the few also benefit the many. For example, if one person is sick, we are all potentially at risk. So developing health care systems where everyone has access to care benefits everyone. I hope the U.S. can move in that direction.

Why do you support YES! as a member of the Founders’ Circle?

YES! gives me practical ideas. It inspires me and gives me hope. It reframes what is possible. And it makes visible our interdependence, which is key to our survival. Honestly, supporting YES! is one of the most effective ways I can use my resources to promote the world I want.

I hope you’ll join me!

What are your passions?

I am a rabid locavore. I love feeding people and educating them about organic food and restorative/regenerative agriculture. These two essential practices help heal our bodies while returning our precious Gaia to a vibrant, constantly renewing state.

Why YES!?

Because as the world goes more mad, I feel it’s critical to support the real news—w�󾱳��� is that so much good is happening. YES! counters the toxicity and despair people suffer when they’re uninformed about the miraculous solutions that are unfolding.

I appreciate that YES! addresses tough issues that lesser publications shy away from. And I love learning about small organizations and individuals doing big work in their communities. It inspires me and gives me courage to press on!

Why do you belong to the Founders’ Circle?

If we want to transform the broken systems that cause so much ill in the world, we need to put our money where our mouths are. It is critical to support and empower REAL change. YES! stories show us that genuine, transformative change is possible, and that ordinary people can bring it about. My longing is to help get those stories to the world so this invaluable knowledge can spread.

And I super appreciate being liberated from pages of advertising!

Ravi Ravichandran was volunteering at a Mother Earth News Fair eight years ago when he noticed the YES! booth right across the way. After sampling a few stories, he became a subscriber. “I usually don’t subscribe to magazines,” he says, “but the content was so meaningful and compelling that I made an exception!”&�Բ�����;

What kind of work and/or volunteering do you do?

I started an orchard from bare land on Hawai‘i’s Big Island in 2017. After four years of hard work, we are supplying bananas to local grocery stores and farmers markets. We measure our success along three dimensions: community contributions, enhancing the environment, and being financially profitable. We’re still working on that third dimension!

To support my family and the farm I recently began a full-time job with the Hawai‘i Police Department managing information technology. Contributing my skills to help the men and women who put their lives on the line every day is another form of community service for me and is immensely satisfying. 

What are your passions?

I am someone who dives into something and gives it more than 100% attention until I become good at it. Competitive Scrabble, competitive bridge, mountaineering, flute playing, reading books, and exploring spirituality from all around the world are areas where I have done that. Now, in addition to my farm, music, meditation, and mentoring young people are important to me. 

How does YES! support your values and your work to build a better world?

������Ƶ, especially social media, is very good at getting us to react. Making us reflect and gain different perspectives is much harder. This is what YES! is good at. 

For me, caring for the environment, building resilient communities, and supporting my local economy are very important. YES! helps me reflect on the work I do and see how I can do it differently or better. 

Why do you support YES! at the Founders’ Circle level?

Longevity of this work is important to me, not just for my lifetime but for generations to come. And I know that supporting this work takes many hands.

If you believe in the longevity of the ideas expressed in YES! and you are capable of helping, inaction will be a wasted opportunity for everyone. Let us all make the necessary investment toward making this world fairer, more just, and a joyful place to live! Each of us can make a difference.

I feel so strongly about this that I will match the donations of 10 new Founders’ Circle members!

David Markham recently bought six boxes—300 copies—of YES! Magazine to give away. That caught our attention! What did he plan to do with so many copies? It turns out David’s been giving away YES! issues for years. When he learned he could buy whole boxes of back issues, he saw a chance to expand his “seeding” project.

Why do you give away YES! issues?

To spread good news! So much good is being done in the world but most of what we see in the media is negative. YES! is different and deserves broader exposure. 

I fancy myself the Johnny Appleseed of positive journalism.

What prompted that?

I am a psychiatric social worker in private practice. People come to see me who are anxious and depressed. Many have lost a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. When their symptoms start to lift, I ask if they’ve thought of volunteering. Most draw a blank. 

With YES! I can say, “Maybe you’d want to check out this magazine. There are a lot of good ideas in here about how we can make the world a better place by working together.” It allows me to move beyond pie-in-the-sky psychobabble and give them real-life examples of how people are finding meaning and purpose in their lives by working with others in practical and concrete ways. 

How will you distribute 300 copies? 

I’m leaving copies in my local coffee shop, putting them in Little Free Libraries, putting them in office waiting rooms, giving them to people who might be interested in the topic covered in that issue. I’m making it up as I go!

Why do you support YES! as a monthly donor?

I see YES! Magazine on the cutting edge of human evolution—facilitating the development of a more positive world through mutual problem solving and by lifting up great ideas at the local level. The world needs that work and that vision. I want to help however I can.   

You might even want to start “seeding” YES! Magazine throughout your world.

Who Will Carry on Your Values?

Throughout your life you’ve worked to make this world better—a world where all people live in dignity and Earth’s vitality is preserved for generations to come. That’s the world you want to leave for our children and grandchildren.

There’s much to be done to bring about that world. Who will carry your work into the future?

One of the best ways to make sure your work continues is to include YES! in your estate plan. By making a Legacy gift, you’ll ensure that YES! inspires people long into the future, and that others continue to build the world you’ve worked so hard to achieve.

You don’t need to be wealthy. You don’t need to write a check now. Just let me know that you’d like more information about joining our YES! Legacy Circle.

You can contact me at rsimons@yesmagazine.org or 206-842-0216 ext. 203, or go to yesmagazine.org/legacy.

Robin Simons, YES! Development Manager

What are your passions?

Connection, empathy, creativity.

I’ve especially been finding joy in community organizing with people younger than me. The Jewish concept of the longed-for “world to come” can actually be translated from the Hebrew as “the world that is coming”— present tense, continuous. What that means to me is that the heart-opening relationships that we cultivate in the process of doing the work of justice are a real experience in the present of the world we are striving for in the future.

Why do you belong to the Founders’ Circle?

YES! is like a battery recharge for the soul.

I love hearing from fresh, creative voices about local work that is really making a difference. I love the photos of all the beautiful people in and behind the stories. And I love sharing extra copies of YES! with my young activist friends. We have gotten ideas, inspiration, and connections through YES! and its amazing editorial staff.

It is so vital to support the work of YES! right now, and to find ways to amplify its voice. I consider it an investment with benefits that ripple out in all directions.

Download a printable version of the page here.

I’m filled with many emotions as I write the letter for this issue, as it is my last to you. By the time you read it, I’ll no longer be at YES! The decision to leave was not an easy one to make, but all things considered, it was the best decision for the journey I have ahead. What that is exactly, I don’t know. However, I’m making myself available to the unfolding. 

It’s apropos then that this issue is “The Personal Journeys Issue.” It’s been a long time coming. 

As you know, YES! just , reporting on communities organizing to solve problems created by the extractive and exploitative systems and institutions that govern us. And as you have been inspired by many of these stories, for years, many of you have responded to them with questions of “Yes! But how do I … ?” Or “What can I do about … ?”&�Բ�����;

This issue doesn’t answer those questions exactly, meaning the stories don’t tell you what to do or how you can do it. They do, however, share the personal journeys of others, which include the challenges and obstacles they’ve faced, the mistakes they’ve made, and sometimes the harm they’ve caused or harm that has been done to them on their journeys to becoming. 

One of the things you’ll learn through their stories is that your work starts with you. 

In this issue you’ll read work by authors who are modeling change to shift global consciousness, rediscovering themselves in nature, writing prison reform legislation while still incarcerated, and those who grew from rage to mindfulness and learned about building community from bees. You’ll also learn about the four pivots to social change, healing generational trauma, and how vulnerability creates change. 

Since I’ve been leading YES! Magazine, we’ve included a Reflection Page for you to jot down your takeaways from the issue: what gives you hope, what you’re inspired by, good ideas you can use, and what you can do based on that inspiration and those ideas. I hope that, at least for this issue, you begin your reflecting on this page and continue beyond it, to guide yourself into your next steps on your own personal journey.

Your change is imperative to how we move forward together toward transforming this world into one where we see each other and respect each other, so that we can work together collectively toward building a more equitable, compassionate world. 

Peace, 

Zenobia Jeffries Warfield, YES! executive editor

Feature photo: Tanya Taylor, the producer of the documentary Black in Mayberry, stands tall on the roof of the El Segundo Museum of Art, where her film, which documents the stories of Black Lives Matter protesters in her small California town, premiered in May 2021. The week before the show, Taylor received an anonymous bomb threat. The FBI opened an investigation and local police provided plainclothes officers for additional security. The museum went on with the show. Read more about Taylor and others who found their role in movements by witnessing them in the article “When Witnessing Becomes Activism” by Kelly Clancy at . Photo by Lee Tonks.

Some of those voices and stories are also in the pages of this 100th issue of YES! Magazine you’re holding in your hands—a for-sure keepsake! The development of the issue’s theme, “A New Social Justice,” was inspired by the political earthquake of 2020, when we witnessed a paradigm shift toward racial equity and transformative justice on a massive and collaborative scale unlike anything we’ve seen in recent history. Movement spaces, grassroots organizations, activists, and non-activists—particularly those in historically excluded communities—a��d even governments, corporations, and philanthropic spaces all responded to the needs of the people during a global pandemic in which systemic inequities were laid bare.

Then in the spring of 2021, during our YES! Presents event “An Ecological Civilization: The Path We’re On,” panelist and Soul Fire Farm co-founder and farmer Leah Penniman inspired our cover for this issue when she likened movement collaboration to a butterfly’s wings. 

Drawing from Grassroots Economic Organizing’s butterfly model of transformative social justice, Penniman described the four wings: Resisters: the people in the blockades, the protests, the work stoppages; Reformers: the folks trying to make change from within systems, including schoolteachers and elected officials, like those getting into the prosecutor’s office and working to get sentences lowered; Builders: those who create alternative institutions such as freedom schools, farms, and health clinics; and Healers: the conflict mediators, the therapists, the preachers, the singers, the dancers, the artists—“all the folks that are gonna make us well,” she said.

This image aligned so well with YES!’s foundational belief that resistance alone is a losing strategy that we felt it was perfect to depict the cross-pollination happening now. You’ll read about The Third Reconstruction resolution and movement led by the Poor People’s Campaign to address poverty and its root causes—among them systemic racism and ecological devastation; the Wiyot Tribe’s LandBack movement and how to create just, Indigenous-led futures; what grassroots reparations can look like; wealth redistribution to Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities; decolonizing philanthropy; as well as the environmental justice at the heart of climate activism. 

We hope this issue will inspire you, and we look forward to having you along with us for another 25-plus years of YES!

Peace,

Zenobia Jeffries Warfield, YES! executive editor

Sonali Kolhatkar, YES! racial justice editor

Featured photo: “Everything is related. I am related to the trees, to the oceans, to any other living being, regardless of race, class, gender,” Alexis Saenz says, so “one of the things that we say as youth is that we are the land defending itself.”&�Բ�����;

Why? Because recycling was created as a way for corporations to shirk responsibility for the full lifecycle of their petrochemical products. That’s right: Oil companies knew they were selling us a bill of goods. Not only that, but they’ve convinced us it’s our fault. 

Well, it’s not. The plastic problem goes well beyond the mass production of single-use convenience items like shopping bags, water bottles, packaging, and straws—whether or not we recycle them. Plastic particles are everywhere now, including, for many of us, in the air we breathe and the water we drink. We’re not calling for the elimination of all plastics—durable plastics serve many critical functions in our lives. But the toxins from plastic production and disposal are harming the most vulnerable populations of our communities on a global scale. 

The simple solution is to drastically scale back on single-use plastic. But that’s going to be a heavy lift since oil companies are investing big in petrochemical plants. And even if we were to stop the flow of petrochemical products, what do we do with the billions of tons of plastic waste already here? 

It’s going to take multiple solutions on many levels, especially as we work to build an ecological civilization as described in our spring issue, “What an Ecological Civilization Looks Like.”&�Բ�����;

In this issue we explore the history of plastic, its global impacts, and some of the most inspiring solutions we’ve come across. You’ll read about why plastic-shaming doesn’t work and where the zero-waste lifestyle falls short; who gets left behind when we try to go plastic-free and how to keep equity at the forefront of our movements as we propose and advocate for solutions. There is a takedown of the carbon footprint in infographic form and a guide to choosing what to wear. Plus, we feature a roundup of three communities around the world that have come up with creative ways to repurpose the plastic waste around them. 

Together, we can shape the future of plastic to be more just, judicious, equitable, and sustainable! 

Peace, 

Zenobia Jeffries Warfield, YES! executive editor

Breanna Draxler, YES! environmental editor

The pandemic has brought home some undeniable truths about the way our country is run, and specifically, how it stacks up against the rest of the world.  

We watched as other countries confidently and compassionately took care of people—putting their lives, their needs first. Their response to the pandemic demonstrated the exact function of social safety nets. Some Nordic countries were able to shut down and still support their residents. If we’d simply even had an honest federal response, we could have acted sooner with testing and contact tracing, protecting more people and limiting the economic damage.

Our editorial team noticed that while so many in the United States were suffering, governments in Asia, Africa, and Europe were putting their people first. We kept seeing helpful policies that we wished we had here, and wanted to know how we could get them.

In the face of increasing climate catastrophe as well as pandemics, the “Better Ideas” issue explores the structures and systems in other countries that not only save lives during chaos, but also provide a better quality of life.  

Did you know there’s a 25% tipping point to creating social change? We didn’t either.

In this issue, social scientist Damon Centola’s new research reveals how social change happens—how long it takes for an idea to catch on. According to Centola, for beliefs and behaviors held by a few to become dominant we just need to convince 25% of the population to embrace a new idea.  

Here are some of the better ideas you’ll also read about: Places that decided rehabilitation is a better answer than incarceration. Norway’s economy that prioritizes people. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation process. Eleven examples of inspired policies and practices around the globe. And, we’ll give you a peek into what an ecological civilization can look like through the lens of an Indigenous community in Ecuador’s Cotacachi highlands who practice the philosophy Buen Vivir, the Good Life.

As media report the threat of another COVID-19 surge and uncertain impacts from the election, we can find inspiration in this issue. There are real solutions to our problems in the U.S., and we might find them by learning from the rest of the world.

Peace, 

Zenobia Jeffries Warfield, YES! executive editor

The fact is, death is a universal certainty. Yet most Americans’ interactions with it are limited to times of crisis. In a culture that’s obsessed with prolonging life, death is seen as a failure—dark and depressing, macabre and morose. Death is the stuff of thrillers and sad poems. 

This issue disrupts the silence around the D-word. It invites us to explore “a good death”—how to prepare ourselves and heal loved ones while we are still in the living world, how to die with grace and dignity, and how to make plans for the disposition of our bodies in a way that underscores our place in the ecosystem and nurtures the planet.

Since working on this issue, I’ve learned that being open about death can actually calm our fears. For the first time, I’ve talked to my parents and dear friends (even Generation Z’ers!) about their own plans. I, for one, would like to be turned into fertilizer for a tree under which people can read and picnic. That sounds pretty darned wonderful to me.

With these pages, our hope is that you might think differently not only about dying, but also about living. As I settle into my role at YES!, I’d like to learn about your hopes and dreams for the magazine and, well, the world. Perhaps there’s no better way to kick off that conversation than with the topic of death. Send your thoughts to laurenb@yesmagazine.org or post about your #GoodDeath on social. 

Happy reading and living/dying, all! 

With gratitude,

Lauren Bohn

That was then. Now Donald Trump is in the White House, and the leaders from the fossil fuel industry pepper his team of advisers and Cabinet. The White House website’s “Climate Change” page has been replaced with an “America First Energy Plan” page. Trump has frozen grants and contracts at the EPA. There are gag orders and media blackouts.

After the election, researchers at the University of Toronto and University of Pennsylvania coordinated a guerrilla archiving event to migrate public data stored only on Environmental Protection Agency computers to storage in Canada so that access would not be cut off by an administration hostile to climate research. Those scientists are scared for their careers and for their data, and so are we.

Climate science is looking like the front line of a war, and scientists have become freedom fighters.

Researchers, who usually communicate through scholarly journal articles, are grabbing megaphones. In December, during the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, hundreds of climate scientists put down their research papers to march in the streets, a truly unprecedented sight at a major academic conference. Scientists have even formed a PAC, 314 Action, to get into politics.

Climate science is looking like the front line of a war.

When scientists are willing to risk their professional reputations and futures to speak up for people and planet—a��d truth—we’d better listen up and meet their courage with our own. That requires participation.

We all can dive into observing our world, gathering information, and insisting that decisions at every level of government be based on our best understanding of scientific fact. That’s where the democracy comes in. We the People need to demand truth and then ensure that government and industry use such fundamental research for the common good.

Whether you’re someone who reads scientific journals in your spare time or has trouble recalling the chemical formula for carbon dioxide, you can help. Count the birds in your backyard, test your own water, join a citizen science group, hug a scientist. Whether we think of ourselves as words people or numbers people, it’s a great big data-filled world that desperately needs us all to deeply understand things like parts per billion. We are all scientists now.

For years, I.F. Stone was America’s premier independent journalist, bringing down on his head the sustained wrath of the high and mighty for publishing in his little four-page I.F. Stone’s Weekly the government’s lies and contradictions culled from the government’s own official documents. No matter how much they pummeled him, Izzy Stone said: “I have so much fun I ought to be arrested.”

That’s how I felt 25 years ago when my colleague Sherry Jones and I produced the first documentary ever about the purchase of government favors by political action committees. When we unfurled across the Capitol grounds yard after yard of computer printouts listing campaign contributions to every member of Congress, there was a loud outcry, including from several politicians who had been allies just a few years earlier when I worked at the White House.

I loved it, too, when Sherry and I connected the dots behind the Iran-Contra scandal. That documentary sent the right-wing posse in Washington running indignantly to congressional supporters of public television who accused PBS of committing—horrors!—journalism right on the air.

 While everyone else was all over the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio, Sherry and I took after the unbridled and illegal fundraising by Democrats in the campaign of 1996. This time it was Democrats who wanted me arrested.

But taking on political scandal is nothing compared to what can happen if you raise questions about corporate power in Washington.

When my colleagues and I started looking into the subject of pesticides and food for a Frontline documentary, my producer Marty Koughan learned that industry was attempting, behind closed doors, to dilute the findings of a National Academy of Sciences study on the effects of pesticide residues on children. Before we finished the documentary, the industry somehow purloined a copy of our draft script and mounted a sophisticated and expensive campaign to discredit our broadcast before it aired.

Television reviewers and editorial page editors were flooded in advance with pro-industry propaganda. There was a whispering campaign. A Washington Post columnist took a dig at the broadcast on the morning of the day it aired—without even having seen it—a��d later confessed to me that the dirt had been supplied by a top lobbyist for the chemical industry. Some public television managers across the country were so unnerved by the blitz of dis-information they received from the industry that before the documentary had even aired, they protested to PBS with letters prepared by the industry.

Others used the American Cancer Society’s good name in efforts to tarnish the journalism before it aired; including right-wing front groups who railed against what they called “junk science on PBS” and demanded Congress pull the plug on public television. PBS stood firm. The documentary aired, the journalism held up, and the National Academy of Sciences felt liberated to release the study that the industry had tried to demean.

They never give up. Sherry and I spent more than a year working on another documentary called Trade Secrets, based on revelations—found in the industry’s archives—that big chemical companies had deliberately withheld from workers and consumers damaging information about toxic chemicals in their products.

Hoping to keep us from airing those secrets, the industry hired a public relations firm in Washington noted for using private detectives and former CIA, FBI, and drug enforcement officers to conduct investigations for corporations. Not only was a vicious campaign directed at me personally, but once again pressure was brought to bear on PBS through industry allies in Congress. PBS stood firm, the documentary aired, and a year later the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded Trade Secrets an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism.

Covering chaos

Journalism has never been easy, and it’s getting harder, for more reasons than you can shake a stick at.

One is the sheer magnitude of the issues we need to report and analyze. My friend Bill McKibben enjoys a conspicuous place in my pantheon of journalistic heroes for his writing about the environment. Recently in Mother Jones, Bill described how the problems we cover—conventional, manageable problems, like budget shortfalls, pollution, crime—may be about to convert to chaotic, unpredictable situations. He puts it this way: If you don’t have a job, “that’s a problem, and unemployment is a problem, and they can both be managed: You learn a new skill, the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates to spur the economy. But millions of skilled, well-paying jobs disappearing to Bangalore is a situation; it’s not clear what, if anything, the system can do to turn it around.”

Perhaps the most unmanageable of all problems, Bill McKibben writes, is the accelerating deterioration of the environment. While the present administration has committed a thousand acts of vandalism against our air, water, forests, and deserts, were we to change managers, Bill argues, some of that damage would abate. What won’t go away, he continues, are the perils with huge momentum—the greenhouse effect, for instance. Scientists have been warning us about it since the 1980s. But now the melt of the Arctic seems to be releasing so much freshwater into the North Atlantic that even the Pentagon is alarmed that a weakening Gulf Stream could yield abrupt changes, the kind of climate change that threatens civilization. How do we journalists get a handle on something of that enormity?

Another reason journalism is getting harder is ideology. One of the biggest changes in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. How do we fathom the mindset of extremists who blow to smithereens hundreds of children and teachers of Middle School Number One in Beslan, Russia? Or the radical utopianism of martyrs who crash hijacked planes into the World Trade Center? How do we explain the possibility that the election in November may have turned on several million good and decent citizens who believe in the Rapture Index? That’s what I said—the Rapture Index; Google it and you will understand why the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the “Left Behind” series. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative millions of people believe to be literally true.

According to this narrative, Jesus will return to Earth only when certain conditions are met: when Israel has been established as a state; when Israel then occupies the rest of its “biblical lands;” when the third temple has been rebuilt on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosques; and, then, when legions of the Antichrist attack Israel. This will trigger a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon during which all the Jews who have not converted will be burned. Then the Messiah returns to earth. The Rapture occurs once the big battle begins. True believers “will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation which follow.”

I’m not making this up. We’ve reported on these people for our weekly broadcast on PBS, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you that they feel called to help bring the Rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That’s why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It’s why they have staged confrontations at the old temple site in Jerusalem. It’s why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the ninth chapter of the Book of Revelations.

One estimate puts these people at about 15 percent of the electorate. Most are part of the core of George W. Bush’s base support. He knows who they are and what they want.

Ideology and secrecy

Journalists who try to tell these stories, connect these dots, and examine these links are demeaned, disparaged, and dismissed.

For one thing, you’ll get in trouble with the public. The Chicago Tribune

recently conducted a national poll in which about half of those surveyed said there should be some kind of restraint on reporting about the prison abuse scandal in Iraq; I suggest those people don’t want the facts to disturb their belief system about American exceptionalism.

The poll also found that five or six of every 10 Americans “would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, especially if it is found unpatriotic.” No wonder scoundrels find refuge in patriotism; it offers them immunity from criticism.

If raging ideologies are difficult to penetrate, so is secrecy. Secrecy is hardly new. But never has there been an administration like the one in power today—so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and, in defiance of the Constitution, from their representatives in Congress. The litany is long:

• The president’s chief of staff orders a review that leads to at least 6,000 documents being pulled from government websites.
• The Defense Department bans photos of military caskets being returned to the U.S.
• To hide the influence of Kenneth Lay, Enron, and other energy moguls, the vice president stonewalls his energy task force records.
• The CIA adds a new question to its standard employee polygraph exam, asking, “Do you have friends in the media?”
• There have been more than 1,200 presumably terrorist-related arrests and 750 people deported, and no one outside the government knows their names, or how many court docket entries have been erased or never entered.
• Secret federal court hearings are held with no public record of when or where or who is being tried.

Secrecy is contagious. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has announced that “certain security information included in the reactor oversight process” will no longer be publicly available. New controls are being imposed on space surveillance data once found on NASA’s web site.

Secrecy is contagious—a��d scandalous. The Washington Post reports that nearly 600 times in recent years, a judicial committee has stripped information from reports intended to alert the public to conflicts of interest involving federal judges.

This “zeal for secrecy” I am talking about—a��d I have barely touched the surface—adds up to a victory for the terrorists. When they plunged those hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, they were out to hijack our Gross National Psychology.

By pillaging and plundering our peace of mind they could panic us into abandoning those unique freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of the press—that constitute the ability of democracy to self-correct and turn the ship of state before it hits the iceberg.

As deplorable as was the betrayal of their craft by Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and Jim Kelly, the greater offense was the seduction of mainstream media into helping the government dupe the public to support a war to disarm a dictator who was already disarmed. Now we are buying into the very paradigm of a “war on terror” that our government—with staggering banality, soaring hubris, and stunning bravado—employs to elicit public acquiescence while offering no criterion of success or failure, no knowledge of the cost, and no measure of democratic accountability.

I am reminded of the answer the veteran journalist Richard Reeves gave when asked by a college student to define “real news.” “Real news,” said Richard Reeves “is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms.” I am reminded of the line from the news photographer in Tom Stoppard’s play “Night and Day:” “People do terrible things to each other, but it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.”

I have become a nuisance on this issue—if not a fanatic—because I grew up in the South, where, for so long, truthtellers were driven from the pulpit, the classroom, and the newsroom; it took a bloody civil war to drive home the truth of slavery, and still it took another 100 years of cruel segregation and oppression before the people freed by that war finally achieved equal rights under the law.

Not only did I grow up in the South, which paid such a high price for denial, but I served in the Johnson White House during the early escalation of the Vietnam War. We circled the wagons and grew intolerant of news that did not conform to the official view of reality, with tragic consequences for America and Vietnam.

Few days pass now that I do not remind myself that the greatest moments in press history came not when journalists made common cause with the state, but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.

������Ƶ monopoly

 That’s why I have also become a nuisance, if not a fanatic, on the perils of media consolidation. My eyes were opened by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which led to my first documentary on the subject, called Free Speech for Sale. On our weekly broadcast we’ve returned to the subject more than 30 times. I was astonished when the coupling of Time Warner and AOL—the biggest corporate merger of all time—brought an avalanche of gee-whiz coverage from a media intoxicated by uncritical enthusiasm. Not many people heard the quiet voice of the cultural critic Todd Gitlin pointing out that the merger was not motivated by any impulse to improve news reporting, magazine journalism, or the quality of public discourse. Its purpose was to boost the customer base, the shareholders’ stock, and the personal wealth of top executives.

Not only was this brave new combination, in Gitlin’s words, “unlikely to arrest the slickening of news coverage, its pulverization into ever more streamlined and simple-minded snippets, its love affair with celebrities and show business,” the deal is likely to accelerate those trends, since the bottom line “usually abhors whatever is more demanding and complex, slower, more prone to ideas, more challenging to complacency.”

Sure enough, as merger has followed merger, journalism has been directed to other priorities than “the news we need to know to keep our freedoms.”

According to the non-partisan Project for Excellence in Journalism, newspapers have 2,200 fewer employees than in 1990. The number of full-time radio news employees dropped by 44 percent between 1994 and 2000. And the number of television network foreign bureaus is down by half.

Journalism professor Ed Wasserman, among others, has looked closely at the impact on journalism of this growing conglomeration of ownership. Wasserman acknowledges, as I do, that there is some world-class journalism being done today, but he speaks of “a palpable sense of decline, of rot, of a loss of spine, determination, gutlessness” that pervades our craft.

Journalism and the news business, he concludes, aren’t playing well together. ������Ƶ owners have businesses to run, and “these media-owning corporations have enormous interests of their own that impinge on an ever-widening swath of public policy”—hugely important things, ranging from campaign finance reform (who ends up with those millions of dollars spent on advertising?) to broadcast deregulation and antitrust policy, to virtually everything related to the Internet, intellectual property, globalization and free trade, even to minimum wage, affirmative action and environmental policy.

A profound transformation is happening. The framers of our nation never imagined what could happen if big government, big publishing, and big broadcasters ever saw eye-to-eye in putting the public’s need for news second to their own interests—a��d to the ideology of free-market economics.

Nor could they have foreseen the rise of a quasi-official partisan press serving as a mighty megaphone for the regime in power. Stretching from think tanks funded by corporations to the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s far-flung empire of tabloid journalism to the nattering know-nothings of talk radio, a ceaseless conveyor belt—often taking its cues from daily talking points supplied by the Republican National Committee—moves mountains of the official party line into the public discourse.

Citizen journalists

I’ve just read We the ������Ƶ, by Dan Gillmor, a national columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. Gillmor argues persuasively that Big ������Ƶ are losing their monopoly on the news, thanks to the Internet—that “citizen journalists” of all stripes, in their independent, unfiltered reports, are transforming the news from a lecture to a conversation. He’s on to something.

In one sense we are discovering all over again the feisty spirit of our earliest days as a nation when the republic and a free press were growing up together. It took just a few hundred dollars to start a paper then. There were well over 1,000 of them by 1840. They were passionate, pugnacious and often deeply prejudiced; some spoke for Indian-haters, immigrant-bashers, bigots, jingoes, and land-grabbers.

But some called to the better angels of our nature—Tom Paine, for one, the penniless immigrant from England, who, in 1776, just before joining Washington’s army, published the hard-hitting pamphlet Common Sense, with its uncompromising case for American independence. It became our first best-seller because Paine was determined to reach ordinary people—to “put into language as plain as the alphabet” the idea that they mattered and could stand up for their rights.

I look up at the pictures of my grandchildren above my desk: Henry, age 12; of Thomas, age 10; of Nancy, 7; Jassie, 3; Sara Jane, nine months. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, “Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do.” And then I am stopped short by the thought: “That’s not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world.”

I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don’t care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice? What has happened to our moral imagination?

The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free—not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk.

This article was adapted and updated from a presentation by Bill Moyers to a Society of Professional Journalists conference on Sept. 11, 2004.
Bill Moyers retired at the end of 2004 as host of the PBS program NOW With Bill Moyers.

Mirembe Kawomera coffee delivers a double jolt.

First, there’s the caffeine, but right behind that tang comes the jolt of learning that the arabica beans were sold by an alliance of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Ugandan farmers.

This unique cooperative in the Mbale region of Uganda is Mirembe Kawomera—Delicious Peace. Their coffee comes to market fairly traded, distributed by Thanksgiving Coffee, a Fort Bragg, California, company specializing in organic and fair trade produce.

By banding together and by establishing a fair trade relationship, the farmers now realize enough profits from sales to meet their families’ basic need?s—a sharp contrast to the hardship of trying to sell as individuals to large corporate buyers in a glutted world market. Better circumstances have, in turn, sweetened relations between the unique Mbale Jewish community and their more numerous Muslim and Christian neighbors.

The notion of forming a coffee cooperative was first conceived by Jewish community leader J.J. Keki as an economic survival tactic. In 1999, a worldwide coffee crisis developed as overproduction in new Brazilian and Vietnamese markets sent prices plummeting. The Mbale farmers were among the many growers who were hurt. Coffee farmers were forced to curtail children’s education so that the youngsters could go to work, or to sell off land their families had cultivated for generations.

In 2004, Keki went door-to-door, encouraging farmers of all faiths to band together. The alliance would be a first; interfaith relations had been strained since the establishment of the Ugandan Jewish community in 1919, when charismatic general Semei Kakungulu and followers converted to Judaism, rather than embrace the Christianity proffered by the British.

“The most serious problem for us is religious prejudice,” Keki said. “In Uganda, a Jew is referred to as a ‘Christ killer.’ Sometimes we have failed job interviews just because we are Jews.” And Muslim Ugandans, says Keki, believe that the Jews have been abandoned by God.

Keki can also recall how his father, during Idi Amin’s rule in the 1970s, narrowly missed punishment when he was caught studying the forbidden Torah. Fortunately, Keki says, the authorities were willing to accept a bribe of five goats in exchange for his father’s life.

But the history of prejudice would have to become less important than present concerns if the Mbale farmers were to survive in 2004. Keki, who had been supported by Muslims and Christians, as well as Jews, in a successful 2002 bid for a Namanyonyi Sub-County council seat, was widely considered a credible leader. Now, 400 farmers of all three faiths joined to form the coffee cooperative.

“We brainstormed,” Keki said, “and through participatory discussions we came up with the Mirembe Kawomera Cooperative.”

The diverse religious groups came together, Keki says, by focusing on what united them.

We looked to common things that were reflected in the holy books,” Keki said. “For example, we all acknowledge that we greet with the word of ‘peace’: shalom, salaam, mirembe.”

The next step was finding a market. Mirembe Kawomera got a break when American vocalist Laura Wetzler intervened. Wetzler learned about the Ugandan jews in the mid-1990s when she heard their Hebrew-African music on public radio.

Wetzler said. “I wrote away and got the tape. I learned all the songs, and I started telling the Abayu?daya’s stories in my concert work.” As coordinator of Kulanu, a Jewish nonprofit organizing community-development projects, Wexler had a mandate to help Mirembe Kawomera find a coffee market. She made 40 phone calls before Thanksgiving Coffee’s CEO, Paul Katzeff, agreed to buy the beans.

Next, Wetzler found a cooperative near Mbale that had already obtained the expensive Fair Trade certification the coffee would need to be sold through Thanksgiving. The Mirembe Kawomera Cooperative would buy farmers’ produce, which would then be processed through the nearby co-op and shipped to California.

Katzeff guarantees the farmers 20 to 40 cents per pound higher return than conventionally traded coffee. That makes their produce dependably lucrative for the farmers. There are other fair trade benefits, as well. Mirembe Kawomera can count on Katzeff’s commitment to an ongoing trade relationship, rather than having to cope with the insecurity of looking for a market each season. And Thanksgiving, like other fair trade buyers, contributes regularly to community development projects in Mbale. Thanksgiving’s contribution of one dollar for every package sold recently helped open and support a school there. The fair trade co-op has been so successful, Keki wants to see it duplicated.

“We hope to make the cooperative a model of championing development in communities,” he said. “We also hope that other cooperatives will emulate the principles of Mirembe and bring about peaceful coexistence. We get along very much

better. You can’t believe the peace and harmony that this community has enjoyed since the cooperative society was formed.”

Dee Axelrod is senior editor at YES!

The best qualities and the worst features of U.S. society were on full display in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And today we are still witnessing a frenzied tug-of-war between opposing aspects of the American character — with the final fate of New Orleans hanging in the balance.

This dynamic will continue throughout the long years of recovery, reconstruction, and renewal in the Gulf Coast region. The outcome is uncertain. But we can do a lot to help tip the scales.

Looking Back: Days Of Heartbreak and Horror
The winds of Katrina blew back the curtain on some of the worst features of U.S. politics, culture, and society. No one can forget the heartbreaking images of our most vulnerable citizens abandoned to a horrific fate, trying to survive in a city underwater. Nor can we erase the image of a fly-over U.S. president, indifferent and detached during an unprecedented national catastrophe.

The misplaced priorities of the Bush White House were made clear when the president announced a policy of “zero tolerance for looting” — but never declared “zero tolerance” for starvation, dehydration, drowning, or medical neglect. So for five days, live television showed thousands of Americans struggling to survive a disaster — without one scrap of food, or a single bottle of water, from the richest and most powerful government on Earth.

And the disappointments were not limited to official Washington. We learned — to our horror — that local officials had offered no help to those who were too poor or too feeble to flee. And for days, media coverage served up racial stereotypes, simultaneously promoting sympathy for the white “survivors” and fear of the black “looters.”

The president’s “property-over-people” ethic, the media’s chronic racial bias, and the nation’s knee-jerk disdain for the poor are negative aspects of the American character. And they all came to the fore during the crisis.

Looking Back: Days Of Hope, Renewed
But the better side of America also came into view. As the days wore on, reporters, editors, and news producers finally recovered some of the backbone they lost after 9/11. They started challenging the White House’s preposterous spin that evacuation efforts were going along fine. (Let’s hope this spirit extends into, and improves, mainstream coverage of the disaster in Iraq.)

The fundamental decency of the American people expressed itself in widespread disgust and shame at the government’s bungled, slow-motion response. Bush’s poll numbers plummeted as (even) conservatives turned their backs on him – appalled by the spectacle of a U.S. president happily attending fund-raisers while a major American city drowned.

By the end of the week, the humanity and the suffering of New Orleans’ impoverished and abandoned African-Americans touched the nation.

Ordinary people of all classes and colors opened their hearts, homes, and wallets to the displaced families of the Gulf Coast. And progressives were at the forefront of the charitable response. For instance, Moveon.org and other progressive groups established HurricaneHousing.org – our very own “underground railroad” that helped tens of thousands of evacuees find new homes.

Celebrities and other notables did fund-raising concerts and telethons. In the spirit of the brash, young Muhammad Ali, rapper Kanye West courageously accused Bush of not caring about black people.

His controversial words struck a chord. Because for the first time in more than a generation, caring deeply about the fate of the black poor seemed – at least for a moment – like the American thing to do.

Tens of millions of U.S. citizens and residents acted from a place of renewed compassion and concern for the poor. And that fact gives us something hopeful upon which to build as we face the challenges of reconstructing the Gulf Coast.

And those challenges are monumental. One million displaced people have been evacuated into more than 30 states. A major production center — for both oil and culture — has been destroyed. And the emotional trauma suffered by the direct victims (let alone the millions of TV witnesses) may take years and decades to fully heal.

Worse, the same slowpoke forces that botched the evacuation are now moving at lightning-speed to profiteer on the region’s reconstruction. Bush’s administration has suspended environmental safeguards for fuel production. He has canceled affirmative action and living wage protections for workers who will rebuild the region. The White House has also passed out no-bid contracts to the likes of Halliburton and Bechtel, creating a multi-billion dollar bonanza for corporate giants – who now have no obligation to employ local workers or pay anyone a decent wage.

And then, to add greater insult to unspeakable injury, Republicans plan to pay for this boondoggle not by reversing tax breaks for the rich, but by slashing social services to the poor. If the GOP has its way, it will be people like the ones we saw suffering on TV who will wind up footing the bill to rebuild New Orleans.

Worse still, New Orleans ultimately could re-emerge as a cartoon version of itself: the Big McEasy, a corporate-controlled Disney Land for yuppies, with no room for the original population to return – ever. The region’s African-descended people, with their unique cultural heritage and deep roots in the area, would become a new black diaspora, scattered to the winds. New buildings might rise from the rubble, but the spirit of New Orleans would be forever lost. The damage to those displaced peoples—a��d to the worlds of music, art and culture —would be incalculable.

Averting A Second Catastrophe: No Big Mc-Easy
Fortunately, the better parts of America are already rallying to avert what would be a second catastrophe in the Gulf Coast region.

Many organizations and funds have sprung up (or re-oriented themselves) in the past month, trying to make the very best of a bad situation.

It would be impossible to list all of the efforts, but some key groupings stand out. Community Labor United (CLU), a New Orleans coalition of over 40 grassroots organizations working for justice, has emerged as a central player. CLU quickly established the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition to “(meet) the needs of those impacted by Katrina and (insure) that there is local, grass-roots leadership in the relief, return and reconstruction process in New Orleans.”

National organizations of progressives, including the Vanguard Foundation and True Majority, support CLU as a major activist voice on the ground.

Across the country, folks took up the challenge of supporting survivors and pressing for a just reconstruction. The Web came alive with new sites and portals, including: , , and (which I helped to launch). posted a list of vetted charities and political responses, including efforts to save the culture of New Orleans.

Defend Evacuee Rights: To Survive, Thrive, and Return
The main pivot of this activism is the fight to protect the evacuees’ three most fundamental rights: namely, to survive, to thrive and to return to their homes. In the short term, evacuees should not be crowded into sub-standard housing or FEMA camps, nor strangled in red tape, while they await their return.

At the local level, schools need to provide emotional support services. Evacuees should get free or reduced-fare access to public transportation. Some landlord/tenant laws should be relaxed, so that friends and relatives can take in evacuees without risking eviction.

But the big fight is to ensure that evacuees are able to participate fully in decision-making about who rebuilds the region and how they do it. Congress should ensure that community organizations have a role in planning, where federal dollars are in play. And governments and charities must ensure that all evacuees maintain an effective right to vote in the Gulf Coast until they can return.

Rebuilding New Orleans As Model “Green” City

These will be tough battles, requiring coordination and determination. But already, some passionate visionaries are looking beyond mere survival or a seat at the table.

They want to set a bold agenda for reconstruction, ensuring that the new New Orleans is resurrected, not as a corporate theme park but as a thriving eco-city — designed in accordance with the best ecological thinking and built largely by local labor.

As utopian as the idea may sound, such an outcome is still possible. In her book, The Limits of Power, Christine Rosen explores the way that three cities — Chicago, Boston, and Baltimore — responded to devastating fires. Chicago and Boston rebuilt the way they had been, recreating all the old structural and political dysfunctions.

But Baltimore rebuilt on new principles because the city had already been working on a positive vision of what it could become. Guess what? So was New Orleans. Enlightened business and community leaders had been laying plans for a green urban revitalization years before this disaster struck. They already have a compelling, eco-friendly roadmap.

One of the long-standing proponents of a green renewal of New Orleans is Alan AtKisson. In his well-reasoned and comprehensive essay entitled “Dreaming Of A New New Orleans,”” he lays out a powerful, workable vision for an ecologically sound, people-friendly, and prosperous city.

His ideas, posted at , are simple and straightforward

1. Work with nature, and technology, to protect the city from future worst-case scenarios.
2. Use rebuilding to lift the poor to safer economic and social ground.
3. Create an economy of creativity.
4. Become a clean, green showcase.

The underlying ideas were gaining support in parts of New Orleans before the catastrophe struck. They should not be trampled underfoot by Halliburton-style profiteers now.

AtKisson’s group is not alone. is working with to build 10,000 green homes in the region. has elaborated a set of principles that could make New Orleans the greenest city on Earth. And a new organization, New Orleans Rebuild Green, has emerged, giving these ideas grassroots legs and credibility. Rebuild Green is led by long-time Black activist, Malik Rahim.�� (You can support these efforts at .)

A Better City – And A Better World – Are Possible
Environmental justice luminary Carl Anthony is right when he says that activists must rapidly make the transition to thinking proactively about a positive vision, not just reacting to all the horrors. People of conscience must move beyond charitable aid — beyond even just opposing the corporate carpet-baggers — and into a position of vision-driven leadership.

If we meet this challenge, progressives will help rebuild an American city in a way that reflects our deepest social and ecological values.

During the high point of anti-globalization protest, we used to shout proudly: “A better world is possible!”

And it is. Let’s work together to build a better New Orleans — and show the world what we mean.

Van Jones

In tiny crowded trailers on the edges of fields, in lonely bars and shops selling plantains and phone cards, over car radios and cheap receivers, a crowd of voices spilled through the warm tropical air of rural southwest Florida. “Coalition? Presente! Coalition? Presente! Coalition? Presente!” The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) was presente—definitely here.

For a minute, you could hear dead air­—then the rustling of people moving behind the microphone. A new deejay’s voice came on—a woman who apologized, in Spanish, for the rough transition. But, as she introduced a rousing Mexican folk song in her strong voice, the crowd witnessing the birth of Radio Consciencia cheered. Coalition member after Coalition member took a turn at the microphone, greeting fellow workers all across the city in Spanish and a variety of indigenous Mexican and Guatemalan languages. This was the first broadcast of a new low-power radio station, a tool that the Coalition would use to fight for workers’ rights in the tomato fields of southwest Florida and around the world.

The CIW began in 1993 as a small group of farmworkers who met weekly in a local church to discuss how to improve their community and their lives. The CIW’s members, who today number about 2,500, spread throughout Florida, are largely Latinos, Haitians, and Mayan Indians. Most speak little or no English. They are isolated from friends and family. Most U.S. labor laws—including the 40-hour work week, the right to collectively organize, child labor protection, and unemployment insurance—don’t apply to them, and even when they do, any worker who complains risks deportation.

As Luisa Fernandez, one Coalition member, explained to an Oxfam investigator, the tomato farmers even control the farmworkers’ daily movements: “It is compulsory. Once you are in the field, you can’t get back to your house. The boss is the one who takes you to the field and brings you back home.”

They live eight, 10, 12 to a trailer, and pay exorbitant rent for the homes they use only when they are not picking tomatoes, from four in the morning until dark falls again. The farmworkers are paid 45 cents for each bucket of tomatoes they pick, averaging about $50 for their dawn-to-dusk labor—about the same as they made in 1980. It is thanks to the CIW that tomato pickers earn that much; before the CIW began organizing, wages had fallen even lower.

As they fight for un centavo más—one penny more per bucket of tomatoes they pick—the Coalition counts the voices of the workers themselves as the most effective tools.

“When I first arrived, I was brought to South Carolina, where I was told I’d work in the fields picking cucumbers. What they didn’t tell me was that I had just consented, without knowing, to being a prisoner and slave. I was yelled at daily, wasn’t allowed to leave the premises and had guns pointed at me and others all the time,” says Julia Gabriel, a petite 29-year-old Guatemalan Mayan farmworker. Gabriel first came to the U.S. in 1992 and found herself in debt bondage to the employer who had arranged for her to come. She was held captive among 70 undocumented workers in a South Carolina labor compound for three months. After escaping, she became a key witness in the U.S. v. Flores case, which led to the federal Worker Exploitation Task Force in 1998 and Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act in 2000. Ten years later, she shares her story at rallies and interviews, and now over Radio Consciencia’s airwaves, to dispel the myth that slavery is dead in America. This was one of five modern-day slavery operations the CIW helped bring to justice, resulting in freedom for over 500 workers from debt bondage.

In Spanish, Haitian Creole, and native Mexican and Guatemalan languages like Quanjobal, Zapotec, and Quiche, the Coalition’s members go door-to-door during the busy winter harvest season explaining the Coalition’s efforts to win higher wages and better working conditions. The turnover is heavy—a new wave of migrant workers arrives every winter—a��d each new face in a trailer is a fresh challenge—but is also another potential partner in the Coalition’s struggle for fair pay and decent treatment in the fields.

When CIW reaches workers, they have won impressive victories, including, in 1998, 13 to 25 percent raises for tomato pickers, and, in 2002, convictions of three crewleaders for forcing 700 workers into slavery in Florida citrus groves. But they needed another way to contact those workers they weren’t reaching on foot.

That’s where Prometheus was able to help. The Prometheus Radio Project, for which I’m an organizer, is a non-profit organization that fights for a more democratic radio dial. Founded in 1998 by veterans of the pirate radio movement, we were at the forefront of the grassroots struggle that led the FCC to create new low-power radio licenses to serve community needs that weren’t being met by the big broadcasters. Now, we travel all over the country building these low-power, community radio stations for groups who need them.

Prometheus has done six of these building projects, called “Radio Barnraisings,” in the spirit of neighbors coming together to build a barn. Prometheus folks work intimately with the nascent station founders, and help them find and build the necessary equipment cheaply and sustainably, so a team of volunteers with few resources besides a lot of heart can keep a station on the air permanently, for a community that really needs it.

The FCC finally issued the Coalition a permit for a station in 2003. Previous barnraisings with an anti-sprawl and environmental organization on the Chesapeake Bay, and a 25-year-old civil rights foundation in Opelousas, Louisiana, prepared Prometheus for the technical challenges we’d meet. Yet our goal in Florida was not just to raise the Coalition’s tower, wire their audio console, and test out equipment, but to gather hundreds of existing and potential radio pioneers from all across the southeast and around the world, and, together, give birth to this new station. All in the course of one long weekend.

In December 2003, members of Prometheus arrived in Immokalee and began holding workshops on radio transmissions, radio receivers, ground interrupters, fuses, and how to be a deejay. Meanwhile, CIW members taught us about their organizing strategies and successes. They described three general strikes, a 30-day hunger strike to protest their low pay, and a 230-mile march from Immokalee to Miami and back, before the Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting last year, to publicize the plight of farmworkers around the world.

“Prometheus began to understand our struggle, and the workers learned which buttons to push to make our words take flight,” said Gerardo Reyes Chaves, a Coalition staffer.

The radio activists and the farmworkers strategized for the larger media democracy movement by breaking into small groups and hashing out the problems in our local communities. One conversation on the most creative ways to challenge the licenses of local Clear Channel stations, conducted by a Montessori teacher from Puerto Rico, a gardener just released from jail for protesting the Free Trade Area of the Americas pact, and a local ham radio enthusiast, went on late into the night, in the back room of the empty office building we used as our conference center. The barnraising was building not only a local community, but a national community as well.

Meanwhile, a horde of volunteers was working on the mast that would hold the antenna and setting the cable that would link the studio, the transmitter, and the donated console. As the Sunday night deadline for the birth of the station approached, volunteers were still recording one last public service announcement and soldering one last cable. Somehow it all came together. The first broadcast of Radio Consciencia began.

The station quickly proved its importance during last year’s hurricane season. A company called Balance hired over 600 people to work with cleanup and reconstruction in areas of Florida most affected by Hurricane Charley. One day, four of these workers stopped by the Coalition office and explained that they had not been paid, nor had another 300 workers. Radio Consciencia issued an on-air invitation to the people who had not received their checks to register at the Coalition and demand payment from the company.

“We put the announcement on-air at 5:00 pm and expected, at most, 30 to 40 people to respond that night. Two hours later, nearly 300 workers had arrived at our office,” explained Chaves. Those 300, along with CIW organizers, confronted Balance management at its offices. The workers were promptly paid $57,000 in back wages.

Regular CIW meetings that used to draw 40 workers now routinely draw hundreds.

The radio became a fundamental tool in the Coalition’s Taco Bell boycott. YUM! Brands owns some of the world’s biggest fast food franchises, including Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), Long John Silver, A&W, and Taco Bell. YUM! is the largest buyer of the tomatoes that the farmworkers of Immokalee pick. Because of its huge buying power, the company is able to demand low-priced tomatoes, which pushes wages down and increases pressure for poor working conditions.

In 2001, the CIW approached YUM! and asked for guarantees against forced labor and for a one-cent-per-pound wage increase for tomato pickers—to no avail. So the boycott began.

Radio Consciencia aired shows explaining the relation between Taco Bell’s profits and the hardships of the workers who pick the tomatoes the company buys. The station also aired announcements about national tours to publicize the boycott and invited workers to participate in planning them.

Chaves, Luisa Fernandez, Julia Gabriel, and dozens of other Coalition leaders have spoken to groups of students from Monterey to Michigan to Maine asking them to work to ban Taco Bell franchises on their college campuses. Twenty-one campuses have bowed to the student pressure so far, banning Taco Bell or preventing Taco Bell franchises from opening, and students at more than 350 universities are organizing to “Boot the Bell.”

As Prometheus fights to expand low-power FM radio, we depend on the Coaltion’s trust-building, storytelling methods to reach new media activists. The time is now to fight to expand this service to reach the communities that need it most, so we can tell our stories over our own airwaves.

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President Bush’s plans to partially privatize Social Security have blanketed the media in recent months. A top headline on NPR’s Morning Edition, for example, on December 16, was “Bush’s plan to reform Social Security.” The show aired a clip of Bush claiming that Social Security is in crisis and that our record budget deficits are caused by shortfalls in the program. Cut to next story—we heard no follow-up, no checking on whether there’s any truth to the claim (in fact, the reverse is true—the Social Security trust fund is subsidizing the rest of the federal budget). It’s as if there are no facts beyond what the president says. You’d never know by listening to Morning Edition’s segment that there is a controversy over whether Social Security is really in crisis.

Contrast that with the December 15 radio and television broadcast of the independent news program Democracy Now! After listening to guests debating the merits of privatizing Social Security, the host, Amy Goodman, asks a question that shows she’s done her homework:

“… Every leading Republican proposal acknowledges that private accounts by themselves do little to solve the system’s projected shortfall … Instead, these proposals rely on deep cuts in benefits to future retirees. … The controller general of the Government Accountability Office … said that the creation of private accounts for Social Security will not deal with the solvency and sustainability of the Social Security fund. Your response to that?”

It’s a straightforward question, but it’s the kind that sets Goodman’s work apart day after day. It assumes there’s a world of facts that listeners have a right to know and that her guests need to respond to. Spotlighting competitive spins on a controversial issue does not constitute good journalism. Facts coupled with a wide range of perspectives on those facts does. This simple journalistic premise underlies all of Goodman’s work and has made her both the darling of the alternative media world and a recipient of mainstream journalism’s highest honors, including the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, the George Polk Award, and the Alfred duPont-Columbia Journalism Award.

Democracy Now! is now billing itself as the largest public media collaboration in the country. It is broadcast on 300 stations—a��d growing—a��d three years ago branched out into television, through both the DISH TV and Direct TV satellite television networks.

CAROLYN:

Over the years, you’ve broken many stories that other journalists failed to investigate. For example, when most media were reporting that Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the president of Haiti, had fled his country in February 2004, you broke the news that he had been forced to leave. How did you do that?

AMY:

We covered the U.S.-backed coup in Haiti as soon as it began. Aristide was sent into exile in the Central African Republic on a U.S. plane. The U.S. government said he had chosen to leave the country. But when Aristide got to the Central African Republic, a remote part of Africa, we spoke with him and he said that he was a victim of a modern kidnapping in the service of a coup d’etat backed by the United States. We broadcast that telephone call. Network reporters asked Rumsfeld, “Is it true what Democracy Now! is reporting?” and Rumsfeld had to respond. He said something like “That’s ridiculous,” but I’ve learned in my years as a journalist that when a politician says “That’s ridiculous” you’re probably on the right track.

Two weeks later, I went on a small plane with a delegation led by U.S. Representative Maxine Waters to return Aristide to this hemisphere. Democracy Now! aired the exclusive broadcast of this journey. When we returned from Africa with Aristide to Jamaica, where the Aristides had been invited by the prime minister, CNN called me on the tarmac to give a report. The Associated Press published our reports throughout the trip.

When network reporters use our stories to challenge Rumsfeld, when AP publishes our reports, and CNN broadcasts my report from Jamaica, that’s what I call trickle-up journalism. Independent media can go to where the silence is and break the sound barrier, doing what the corporate networks refuse to do.

Democracy Now! continues to cover the invasion and occupation of Iraq with reports from unembedded journalists. We are called continually by mainstream journalists, both international press and press here, asking for our sources so they can follow up and take our stories.

Democracy Now! is not letting the Iraq war go from the foreground to the background, as many media are. Ultimately, what’s important about our coverage is not whether we cover any individual story. It’s really about drumbeat coverage and who gets interviewed regularly. It’s not about the occasional exception. If I mention any story we covered, you might say, “Oh, I once saw that in The New York Times.” You might well have, but that’s not what sinks into people’s consciousness. It’s what’s on the front page day after day and who is interviewed—who is framing the story. That’s what we do so differently.

CAROLYN:

It seems that one of the things that can keep a story going is connections among independent media. You’ve been lauded for helping support other independent media.

AMY:

I deeply believe that none of us can do it alone. In conjunction with the publication of Exception to the Rulers, the book I wrote with my brother David, we’ve been on a 100-city tour. Every step of the way we have supported independent media. We work with independent bookstores, local radio and television. For example, on Columbus Day—or Indigenous People’s Day—weekend, we went up to WOJB, an Ojibwe reservation radio station in northern Wisconsin, to do a fundraiser. In Tampa, we helped WMNF, a community radio station, and Speak Up Tampa Bay, a public access television station, do a joint fundraiser. In northern California, when we did a sellout fundraiser at the Eureka municipal building, we worked with four stations—KIDE Native Radio; KHSU, Humboldt State University’s NPR station; KMUD community radio; and Humboldt Community TV, the public access cable station—a��d an independent bookstore. I don’t think they’d ever done an event together. It was an incredible moment of people feeling the power of independent media joining together.

CAROLYN:

Do you see the launching of Air America as competition?

AMY:

Oh no. The people at Air America are proud partisans, which is very different from what we do. But it’s absolutely critical in this age of the greatest media consolidation our country has ever seen to have different voices out there.

I use the analogy of the Italian restaurants on my corner in New York City. When I first lived there, there was one Italian restaurant on the corner. Then across the street another Italian restaurant opened. The first Italian restaurant was terrified that they would lose business. But the business only grew. And then across the street another Italian restaurant opened. It only brought more people to that corner, because they knew it as an area to get Italian food, and it helped all the restaurants. Helping build diverse media outlets is about shoring up a democratic society.

CAROLYN:

What inspires you to do the work you do?

AMY:

My family inspires me. Both my parents were peace activists. My father deeply believed in community service. He worked to integrate the schools in New York. I would go with him at night to auditoriums, to meetings over busing and integration, where people would be screaming at each other. I watched him help guide the community to a less polarized position. My 107-year old grandmother inspires me to just keep going. The rest of my family, many of whom perished in the Holocaust, while others fled Europe before the Holocaust, inspire me with their belief that there could be a better world. Journalism is the avenue I chose to pursue that belief.

CAROLYN:

The corporate media give you a measure of notice and grudging respect, but in the middle of a generally admiring Washington Post profile you’re described as “beaming from some alternative left galaxy.” How far out of the margins do you think your work reaches?

AMY:

I think that we’re reaching mainstream America. People across the political spectrum respond to our work. In Tampa, when we did the event there, 2,500 people packed the performing arts center. Tampa Bay is the home of Centcom, the U.S. military’s central command, and of McDill Airbase. Soldiers come out to our talks. In fact, I just had to take a call from a soldier as I was talking to you. Soldiers, military families, people in intelligence, government employees who are tired of information being manipulated and misrepresented, conservative Republicans who deeply care about issues of privacy and corporate control and an out-of-control war budget, all respond to our work. We’re reaching out way beyond any easily categorized population. I don’t think the lines are as easy to draw any more, as the growth of Democracy Now! shows.

CAROLYN:

American journalists typically define their role in terms of objectivity. How do you define the proper role of journalism?

AMY:

The corporate media are the furthest thing I know from objective. They beat the drums for war. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) did a study of coverage the week before and after Colin Powell gave his pitch for war at the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. Of the 393 interviews about the coming war on the four major nightly newscasts—NBC, ABC, CBS, and the PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer—in this critical period right before invasion, only three interviews were with anti-war representatives. That is not mainstream media. That didn’t represent mainstream America, when most people were in favor of pursuing diplomacy and inspections rather than going to war. That’s extreme media.

The media in this country reflect the spectrum of opinion between the Democrats and the Republicans. That’s as far as it goes. The Democrats joined the Republicans in authorizing the invasion of Iraq, and so on that issue there was no diversity of opinion among people in power. Then, during the election campaign, media coverage of the war showed more debate on this issue. That was only because the Democrats had to distinguish themselves from the Republicans so they opened up the debate a bit. But now it closes down again.

Once the Democrats conceded the election, the media shut down on voting issues. They said, if Kerry conceded, what’s to look at here? There’s a great deal to look at. These are not Bush’s or Kerry’s votes to give up. They’re the American people’s votes, and they deserve all of their votes to be counted. But in the absence of dissent from people in power, the media would not stake out their own territory and do their own investigation of the election.

Journalism is the only profession explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution, because journalists are supposed to be the check and balance on government. We’re supposed to be holding those in power accountable. We’re not supposed to be their megaphone. That’s what the corporate media have become.

When those in power—both Democrats and Republicans—continually alleged that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Democracy Now! was reporting on all the voices that said there were no such weapons.

When I’ve been on shows like Hardball and Scarborough Country, representatives of the corporate media have said to me, “How were we supposed to know those claims were false, since the administration officials said they were true?” But it’s not journalism’s role to pass on opinions. It’s journalism’s role to get to the truth. Those in power are an increasingly small elite. That elite doesn’t represent the mainstream view of people in this country or the world. Even if all those in power are in agreement, reporters should ask, is this true what they’re saying?

CAROLYN:

Do you think your work is going to need to change as a result of the elections?

AMY:

No, I think we will continue to provide a forum for all different voices, paying particular attention to those who have been iced out of the media. I think the media should be a sanctuary for dissent. That’s what makes this country healthy.

I think the media can build bridges in society between cultures and communities. But we need to hear people speaking for themselves. That breaks down bigotry and the stereotypes that fuel hatred. If you don’t hear the voices of certain people, and you see them being demonized, it becomes easier to treat them as subhuman.

I think that the whole Abu Ghraib prison scandal began long before the first low-level soldier laid a finger on the Iraqi prisoners. I think it started here at home with an administration that demonizes whole populations. African Americans have always been targeted, and now Arab Americans, Muslims, people of South Asian descent are being targeted as well. The media rarely give voice to those populations. Instead, they bring us the small circle of pundits who know so little about so much, explaining the world to us.

I think what makes Democracy Now! special is that we are a daily, global, grassroots, unembedded news hour committed to airing the voices of people all over the world.

For more information on where you can listen to Democracy Now! or for transcripts of its programs, go to .

Rob & Chelsea McFarland: Welcoming bees��to the city

Rob and Chelsea McFarland didn’t choose the bees; the bees chose them. “One day, we were out in the garden and a swarm showed up,” they say. Years later, the founders of the Los Angeles nonprofit HoneyLove are dedicated to training urban beekeepers and raising awareness of bees in cities.

“Our bees are actually healthier in the city.”

Lori Ann Burd:��Taking the fight��to Washington, D.C.

In the battle for conservation, it’s nice to have someone like Lori Ann Burd on your side. Burd is the environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a veteran activist turned seasoned lawyer.

“It’s hard to overestimate the importance of pollinators.”

“It’s hard to overestimate the importance of pollinators,” Burd says. “One out of three bites of food that we take requires pollination. What I’m trying to do is help people understand that the fate of humans is intertwined with the fate of all species.” And when asked what keeps her going in the face of constant challenge, she replies, “Winning.”

Sarah Hatton:��Activist’s message beautifully written in dead bees

Sometimes you can’t understand the battle until you see the bodies. Quebec-based artist and beekeeper Sarah Hatton’s mathematical arrangements of dead honeybees are an entrancing and sobering reminder that human activity, like the use of neonicotinoid pesticides, is responsible for the death of bees on a mass scale. After losing two of her own beehives, Hatton coped by transforming her dead bees into art. As the project gained attention, she saw the opportunity to raise awareness and help people understand the implications of bee colony collapse. Now other beekeepers donate their own casualties to her work.

For more information about emerging pollinator issues, listen to Lori Ann Burd and other beekeepers .

In June of 1942, when I was 12 years old, the Nazis ordered my family to leave our home in the village of Bielanka in southern Poland, and move to the ghetto in the town of Bobowa. They gave us 72 hours. So we left behind all our worldly possessions except for what we could carry, mostly bedding and utensils, and rode the 10 miles to Bobowa in a horse-drawn wagon driven by a kind Catholic Pole.

In my immediate family, there were five of us. My biological mother had died of tuberculosis when I was seven, and my father had married a woman named Esther, with whom he had two more children, a girl and a boy, Shayia and Jaffa. In the Bobowa ghetto, we lived in a room 20 feet by 20 feet, along with my grandfather Herman, his wife, and two other families—a total of at least 20 people. We slept on straw covered with some sheets we had brought. It was a world of total misery and hunger.

From time to time, I would sneak away from the ghetto to nearby villages and try to get some food from the peasants—trading needles, watches, pens, and other items that these farmers needed in exchange for potatoes, fruit, eggs, bread, and other edible items. At night, I would sneak back into the ghetto. Then we had food to eat. Sometimes we would cover up the windows when we were eating because beggars would come by and knock on the window. Although we didn’t have enough food to share, if they saw us, we would give them some slices of bread and potatoes.

Life continued like this for two months.

Then, early on the morning of August 14, Nazi soldiers surrounded the ghetto. The Einsatzgruppen, made up of Germans and Ukrainians serving under the Nazis, went from house to house banging on doors and yelling, “Alle Juden ‘raus! ‘Raus!” They drove us out of our dwellings into military trucks waiting in the middle of Bobowa’s town plaza.

Terrified and still in pajamas, I climbed onto the roof. I saw a soldier throw a small child out of an upper window of a tall house nearby. Another had grabbed a girl by the arm. She was fighting back, begging him to leave her alone.

When I came back down off the roof, my father was gone. Esther was holding Shayia tight, rocking back and forth. She understood that something bad was going to happen to the Jewish people of the Bobowa Ghetto. She stared at me sadly for just a moment and then pleaded, “Anloif mein kind und du vest bleiben beim leben.” (Run away, my child, so that you will live.)

I did not know what to do or where to go. But she had told me to go. With tears in my eyes, I ran and hid in the attic.

After several hours, which seemed like a lifetime, I escaped from the ghetto. Peasants along the way told me what had happened. The trucks had taken the others, including my family, to a forest. There the Einsatzgruppen forced them to undress in the most vile and humiliating way and made them walk about 60 feet across huge planks laid across a mass grave. Then they shot them and watched them fall into the grave. Some were only wounded, but as the bodies piled up on top of each other, those who were still alive were trapped under the dead.

There was absolute chaotic madness in the forest of Garbacz that day, the peasants said. Such fear and screaming! It took 18 hours to kill a thousand people and bury them with a thin coat of soil. I heard later that a Jewish man I knew had crawled out from under the layer of soil and escaped. But his mind had totally snapped, and while he was wandering from place to place, the Gestapo caught him and executed him.

In just two days that August, my whole family was murdered.

I could not believe that such cruelty and evil was possible. What did the soldiers feel as they were killing innocent men, women, and children, I wondered. Were they able to love their wives and children?

After that, I wandered around the countryside for three days, dazed and in disbelief. I slept in barns or in fields and ate food off the land—carrots, apples, and pears. I thought hard about what to do next, and I decided to go across the hills to the village of Bystra, where a woman named Balwina Piecuch lived with her husband Jacek and their children, Staszek and Zosia. Balwina knew my family from before the war and had gone to school with my father, Aaron, in the local village of Mszanka.

When I knocked on her door one night, Balwina immediately recognized me. She knew what had happened at Garbacz. She saw how scared and disheveled I was, took me in, and comforted me—hugged me, fed me, and offered to let me sleep in the attic. As I climbed the stairs, Balwina said, crying, “You poor boy. I will help. You must live.”

To make it less likely that I would be betrayed and caught, Balwina decided I must become a Catholic boy and look for work. She taught me the catechism, and I learned the Lord’s Prayer … “Our father who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name ….” I memorized it well. She changed my name from Samuel Oliner to Juzek Polewski and showed me how to pretend I was Catholic by genuflecting and making the sign of the cross when I walked by the numerous Catholic shrines.

I invented a story about myself—that I was 15 years old instead of my real age of 12, that my very poor mother and brother couldn’t keep me around the house, so my mother had asked me to find a job as a cowhand or stable boy.

When I left Balwina’s house to look for work in a village across the hills, she hugged me and insisted that I let her know where I was.

Ironically, I found a job at a Jewish farm in the nearby village of Biesnik. The Jews who owned it had been exterminated, and the farm was rented to a childless non-Jewish couple. When I told them my story they hired me, but insisted on meeting my mother to negotiate my wages. I kept making excuses about why my mother couldn’t come any time soon. During my first Christmas with them, they sent me back to visit my “mother,” so I sneaked back over the hills, through the snow, and ended up at Balwina’s house. There I was received with love, assurances that the war would come to an end soon, and encouragement to have hope so that I might survive to tell the world what had happened to my family and to me. Staszek, who pretended to be my brother, would come from time to time to warn me that the Gestapo was searching for Jews or to pass on encouraging information from Balwina.

After liberation by the Soviet army in March 1945, I left the childless couple for whom I worked, and who never knew I was Jewish, and I went back to Balwina’s house.

Balwina Piecuch’s act of kindness and caring not only saved my life, it formed my life. I emigrated to the United States, became a sociologist, and spent my career working to understand what motivates altruists like Balwina and the hundreds of thousands of other people who put the welfare of others alongside their own.

Understanding heroic kindness
Over the past 20 years I and my associates have interviewed 1,500 people who have helped others—non-Jewish and Jewish rescuers of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, heroes—both military and civilian, hospice volunteers, moral exemplars (people who make a difference in their community), and philanthropists. Our purpose was not only to begin to understand their motivation, but also to identify the
characteristics that distinguish them.

Altruism simply means devotion to the welfare of others, based on selflessness. Specifically, I have characterized altruism as a behavior that is directed towards helping another; that involves some effort, energy, and sacrifice to the actor; that is accompanied by no external reward; and that is voluntary. I divide altruism into two categories: conventional and heroic. Conventional altruism differs from heroic only in that it does not usually entail risk to the life of the helper.

Who are these people who put the welfare of others alongside their own?

They are deeply empathetic. We found a clear correlation between empathy and altruistic behavior—helpers simply could not stand by and see others
suffer. We also found that altruists, unlike bystanders, had internalized the ethic of caring and social responsibility they learned from their parents and significant others. As children, they were likely to have been disciplined by reasoning and taught to consider the consequences of their misbehavior. The capacity for love and compassion was yet another important characteristic, as well as a sense of self-esteem and efficacy (a sense of self that tells them that they can succeed at some task, even dangerous ones). Ecumenically inclusive religious or spiritual beliefs, such as regarding all people as children of the same God, worthy of protection and love, are other important factors associated with helping. We found that among certain rescuers, such as those in Holland, religious factors were more important than for those in Poland, where compassion for the victim was of greater significance in rescue.

When we interviewed rescuers in their homes and in their own languages—French, German, Italian, Polish, and Norwegian—these qualities were evident in their descriptions of their motivation:
“Our religion says we are our brother’s keeper.”
“We had to help these people in order to save them, not because they were Jews, but because they were persecuted human beings who needed help.”
“I sensed I had in front of me human beings that were hunted down like wild animals. This aroused a feeling of brotherhood and a desire to help.”
“I was always filled with love for everyone, for every creature, for things. I am fused into every object. For me everything is alive.”
“They taught me to respect all human beings.”
“My parents taught me discipline, tolerance, and service of other people when they needed something.”

Not everyone loves a hero
Some people believe there’s no such thing as heroism, and that helping others is a matter of self-aggrandizement. The media often belittle helpers, labeling them “do-gooders” and “busybodies,”and explaining away their actions as “glory seeking.”

Some behavior experts claim that altruism has negative consequences for the recipient of help, creating a sense of helplessness and disempowerment. Other scholars, such as Ayn Rand, proponent of the philosophy of objectivism, also reject altruism. Rand defines altruism as the principle “that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue, and value.” Altruism, she argues, is a sort of pathology that leads to suffering and “unearned guilt on a personal level.” Self-interest, she claims, should be the primary code of ethics, and no person should sacrifice themselves for others.

According to these views, the 70-80 million Americans who volunteer in hospices, prisons, homeless shelters; the thousands of Carnegie heroes (individuals who risked their lives to save strangers and were recognized for their heroism by Carnegie Hero Commission); rescuers of Jews during World War II who endangered their lives and those of their families; the military heroes who receive the Congressional Medal of Honor or the Victorian Cross; and moral exemplars such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, are simply selfish “do-gooders.”

Decades of research by psychologists and over a thousand interviews by the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Institute have shown that altruism exists in the psychologically healthiest of individuals and is not only of incalculable benefit to the community and society in general, but it is also essential for the survival of the planet.

Teaching selflessness
If we want to teach our children altruism, we must reconstruct our school curriculum so that our children learn not only reading, writing, math, science, and computers, but also the consequences of indifference to our fellow humans.

First, we must recognize that we cannot build bonds among people by intellect alone—that is, through thought and contemplation. Our religious and other institutions must appeal not only to the intellect but to our emotions and to group norms. Compassion and empathy, as several studies have shown, are most
effectively taught through stories.

Second, we must build bonds through the experience of caring, not only among members of our own community but also with people outside our community. Our institutions must do more than talk about caring; they must also model it, giving, receiving, and expecting caring from all participants. School staff, faculty, and administrators, family members, priests, ministers, rabbis, and mullahs must forgo empty platitudes and model caring behavior on a daily basis.

Moral behavior is the consequence of empathy, caring for others, a strong attachment to the moral community, and an ethical obligation to all life. Reaching out to others at considerable personal risk, as Balwina Piecuch did, and as many, many others have done, has been the force behind much that is good in the world. It has saved innumerable lives and inspired new acts of generosity and heroism.

Selflessness is as old as war and, I believe, more deeply human. In a poem written 700 years ago, Poland’s Queen Jadwiga captured the essence of altruism. She called it love.

Nor can that endure
Which has not its foundations upon love,
For love alone diminishes not, but shines with its own light,
Makes an end of discord, softens the fires of hate,
Restores peace in the world,
Brings together the sundered, redresses wrong,
Aids all and injures none.
And who so invokes its aid will find peace and safety,
And have no fear of future ill.

Dr. Samuel P. Oliner is emeritus professor of sociology at Humboldt State University and founder/director of the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Institute. He is also author and co-author of numerous articles on the Holocaust, altruism, prosocial behavior, and national and international race relations.

Spirituality plays a very important role in the work our network does in environmental protection. It frames who we are. I believe that as Native people, we are the land and the land is us. Those of us in the environmental justice movement have started to educate the larger environmental movement that our work protecting the environment is spiritual work.

When we talk about the environment, very often we are talking about sacred elements. We’re talking about air, which is a gift from the Creator. From the day that we’re born, we take that first gasp of air and that’s the life giver. Someday that breath of life is going to leave our body, thus completing its cycle.

Water is a sacred element. From the time the unborn is swimming around in the womb of its mother, we need water to sustain us. Throughout our lifetime, that water that flows through the veins of our Mother Earth remains connected to all life throughout the world.

The soil, the earth itself, that skin of Mother Earth is also one of the sacred elements.

And we have the sun that comes up in the morning every day that gives us warmth, that gives us the understanding. That’s the fire, and fire is very sacred.

Some of the prophecies of our various tribes talk about a time when technology and development will be so far out of balance that it may affect the future of our planet. The Six Nations in the eastern Great Lakes area have prophecies about the time when the trees will start dying from the top down, and I understand that’s happening. We’ve got glaciers in the Andes that are receding. We’ve got thinning ice in Alaska that is affecting the subsistence culture of the Alaska Natives. I hear that aquifers are starting to dry out. Climate change and global warming are impacting our people.

Our elders talk about the spiritual battle that’s been going on for a long time. Industrialization has always wanted to control the land, control the people. That’s going on today. I believe that globalization is part of that. Globalization places no value in people, no value in religious and spiritual principles, no value in the protection of the commons. Spiritual values tie us to the importance of protecting the Mother Earth, the plants, all animate and inanimate things. When we lose that understanding, industry, development, and globalization can do what they want to do, because there are no values behind their structures. Globalization has created a system of corporate ownership above the importance of plants, living things, and humans.

Back in the Old World—Europe—there were Crusades and Inquisitions, which did away with Earth-based religions. This practice rewrote history. Industrialization further killed off the Old-World tribes, their identification, their traditional form of governance and replaced them with kingdoms and peasants. They’ve lost their connections to the land and who they are.

That’s why I’ve always believed it’s very important to carry on our traditions and our culture as Native peoples, to make sure our children know who they are and have that identification with the sacredness of our Mother Earth. Native peoples, especially those who are trying to practice ways that have been given to them since time immemorial, are an endangered species. Acculturation and assimilation—w�󾱳��� are products of colonization—have been very effective. As Native peoples, we’re still trying to hang on to what little we have left, our language, so we can practice our ceremonies, and our sacred areas. Western forms of development have gradually destroyed many of those sacred places.

The elders tell us that we’re a tribal society of givers living in a society of takers. They say, “Go and do what you can to talk to people, try and educate them about these things.” In the Native way, we respect people’s own spirits. They have to come through their own self-realization to take responsibility for their actions.

A meeting of the tribes

Unfortunately, non-Native peoples no longer have traditional tribal systems, so we can’t meet with them tribe to tribe. That was how we used to meet to deal with these kind of issues. There were always ceremonial leaders, woman leaders, mechanisms for approaching these things. But that’s not there anymore. Tribalism has been killed off.

As a practitioner of our traditional ways, I’ve been taught to put prayer first, to put the sacred Pipe first. These teachings provide me with the discipline to put the Creator first in everything I do. When I don’t put the Creator first, then I start getting into trouble. I was taught that we’re given a mind and a heart, and when we start to use the mind too much we get out of balance. We have to maintain a balance. Anytime I put prayer aside and try to do paperwork or do politics too much, I get myself in trouble.

In our traditional societies, we had political leaders, but political leaders maintained a balance with the spiritual leadership in the village. Various tribes had clan mothers or matrilineal clan systems that kept the menfolk in check. Our connection to the sacredness of the female creative principle of Mother Earth really means a lot, and that’s something a lot of people don’t understand. We always say that Mother Earth is sacred. She’s the creative principle that allows life to go on, and that’s why in our traditional values as Native peoples we have the most respect and reverence for the female. We’re taught to take care of the Mother Earth and to take care of our women, our mothers, our aunts, our grandmothers, our sisters, our daughters in the same way we take care of the Earth.

I need to say that there are many different tribes and many different ways, but there are many similarities when I talk about the sacredness of Mother Earth and our relationship to the woman. Any time we start to lose that understanding, that’s when we start getting into trouble as men.

Men have big egos. Men can easily lead religions and societies into warfare. That’s why we always have to take direction from our women, from our matrilineal clan systems, because they understand the importance of that relationship. That was always the balance.

The men’s role is also very important. The man is the protector of our villages and our women. I think that the men’s and women’s roles are out of balance in the same way that life is out of balance right now. I believe that men have to somehow find out what our role is in the modern world. The woman still carries forth the children, still understands that creative principle, still has that connection to the Earth and the powers of the moon. Their role is more easily defined. But I find a lot of brothers, no matter what race, are out of balance, searching to find out who they are as a man. We must not forget that Father Sky and Mother Earth need one another as part of the creative principle.

That goes back to the work that we do with the environment. When I talk to white environmentalists about the importance of the spiritual aspects of their work, they have no understanding of that— especially the men. The women seem to have a better understanding. Very often, the closest the non-Natives can understand about the sacredness of the Earth is the concept of stewardship—w�󾱳��� is good but still has ownership attached to it. But we can work with stewardship as a beginning.

Sharing ceremonies

A lot of the prophecies of the various tribes have said the time will come when the younger brother and the younger sister who have come from across the ocean will start to look towards the Native peoples for direction. But in my younger years, I was very resistant to the New Agers coming into our lands and into our ceremonies.

My youth led me into Native activism—what we called Red Power. I was one of those foot soldiers demanding the recognition of our treaty rights with my fists in the air, demanding justice. I talked to my grandmother once, and she said, “You’ve got a lot of anger in you. What’s wrong?” So I started talking about what was going on, about people being killed. She said, “You need to go into ceremony. You’ve got a lot of anger.”

As the years went on, I started to see more non-Native people, basically white people, coming to our ceremonies looking for answers, and I struggled with that. It seemed to me they were continuing the same old practice of taking things away from us without giving back. Now it was our ceremony and knowledge.

An uncle on the Dakota Reservation in Prairie Island, Minnesota, asked me to help him in the sweat lodge in the mid-1980s. He had a dream that the four colors of man would be coming to his ceremonies. Sure enough, soon people started coming down from the Twin Cities on Friday nights, carloads of them, and there I was helping him with all these people. I wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t asked. But he needed help; he was getting tired. I really had to work this out for myself, because I couldn’t take my anger into the sweat lodge. I started to learn about compassion.

I feel people in this country as well as in Europe are searching. I’ve been to a German sweat lodge, which was given to them by a full-blood Cherokee man in the ‘70s. In 2000 in Germany I was sitting in the sweat lodge with these German people. They said they had lost their ways from the Crusades a long time ago, and this Native sweat lodge was all they had to help them make their way back to who they were. I saw they had respect and humility about these spiritual ways. They demonstrated compassion for each other, love, and faith in the Higher Power—they have everything that we need to live and survive. Who’s to say that what they’re doing is wrong? I started to see that this spiritual understanding is to be shared with all people, regardless of race.

Back in the 1980s, I met some people with the Rainbow tribe. The Rainbow tribe is mostly white folks, but there are some black people, Latinos, and Asians. I had my own stereotypes about the Rainbow tribe—basically hippie-type folks who smoked marijuana, partied, and tried to have a connection with the Earth. I thought there was something out of balance, and I usually stayed away from the Rainbow gatherings. But I met some elders who came to the ceremonies that my uncle was running at the Prairie Island Dakota reservation. I sat down and talked with them. I learned they didn’t want to be disrespectful to Native peoples or our ways. I talked about the importance of keeping things in context and not mixing things up. They understood. They said there was no structure in the Rainbow tribe to address this. They do the best they can—basically they allow different people to do what they want to do.

I started to pray about that. An understanding came to me that God is very compassionate and loving to everyone. When people come together searching for answers for themselves, like the Rainbow tribe, if they are sincere and have patience, a way will come to them that is for them. It may not be Native as we define it, but it is something that comes in a sacred manner and it will be for them. That is the power of this Creation working through all people of all races and all tribes.

It is my prayer that when all humans go through this transformation, it will help them to re-identify their relationship to the sacredness of the land, Mother Earth. When this comes, we will have peace and a clean and safe future for our future generations.