A Prisoner of Hope

[Remarks delivered at the 29th Annual Bioneers Conference, October 21, 2018. You can view the full video here.]

Hello Bioneers! How are you feeling? What a couple of days so far, huh? Did everyone see Edna Chavez speak? Or Jacqueline Garcel from the Latino Community Foundation?

I have to admit I had to trash many versions of this talk. Every time I thought I had formulated a coherent presentation, another dramatic shift, another revelation in one the countless mind-boggling scandals we are currently enduring, another assault on decency somewhere in the world, another challenge to my previous notions of reality, would force me to reevaluate what I thought and what I should say.

I know I am not the only one during this very dark time in U.S. and global politics to experience disorientation and to start to question so much of what I had taken for granted and thought I understood. I have to admit I have been experiencing many moments of gloom and despair.

But as I was getting ready to come to Bioneers — an experience I always find rejuvenating -, I began to look around for guidance to help me build up my resilience, find a bit more clarity, and reconnect with a sense of purpose. I looked in both predictable and unexpected places: Conversations with family members, my own experiences and memories, in my observations of the natural world, in the words of leaders and thinkers I respect, both contemporary and from generations past, quite a few of whom have been here at Bioneers over the decades.

I can’t say I found any simple answers, but the exposure to all that wisdom helped. Then I read something that once again blew my mind and sent me into another tailspin. An investigative piece in WIRED magazine revealed that Russian trolls had been behind efforts to create dissent among STAR WARS fans, folks for whom those films serve as empowering metaphors for their own heroic journeys through life. How amazingly clever and how diabolical! This was an attempt to penetrate people’s myths and divide and demoralize them in their psychic core. This is akin to an enemy attacking not your land or infrastructure, or even just your elections, but your very dreams. (Cue Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page and the cast of Inception to get to the bottom of this.)

It reminded me of a speech George Lucas (the creator of Star Wars of course) gave in which he outlined Star Wars’ key moral theme: The contrast between light and dark. “There are two kinds of people in the world” he said, “compassionate people and selfish people…If you go to the side of the light, you will be happy because compassion, helping other people, not thinking about yourself, thinking about others, that gives you a joy that you can’t get any other way” while “Being selfish, just following your pleasures…you’re always going to be unhappy. You’ll never get to the point … You’ll get this little instant shot of pleasure, but it goes away and then you’re stuck where you were before. The more you do it, the worse it gets. You finally get everything you want and you’re miserable because there’s nothing at the end of that road, whereas if you are compassionate and you get to the end of the road, you’ve helped so many people.”

Now, granted, this is an over-simplified teaching geared to big budget movie morality tales, and all of us contain light and dark potential, but it still contains some core truths. And thinking about Lucas’s words, the sheer amount of darkness we’re currently seeing in the world made me begin to wonder if the dark side just has too many advantages, whether The Force really isn’t with us. I began to doubt the words of Martin Luther King which I had long wholeheartedly subscribed to, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I had just been seeing so much more injustice than justice lately, and in so many parts of the world at once.

But ultimately two wise voices got me back on track. The first was, ironically, the late Joseph Campbell — who advised Lucas on Star Wars’ mythology. I came across a quote of his: “As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don’t bother to brush it off. Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you.” And that hit me like a ton of bricks. Yes, the Age of Trump had been making me lose my sense of humor. If I can’t laugh, above all at myself, the bastards will really have won, so thanks, Joseph. Step number one, accomplished: I turned the laugh track back on.

And that reawakened humor triggered a familial memory, an anecdote about my father, a world-renowned researcher on non-human primates. When he was a young professor he had been working with a group of chimps to whom he was teaching sign language. He was out with a young male chimpanzee named Booee and a group of human graduate students. In those days, the chimps were unfortunately required to wear a sort of leash around their necks, called a “lead” as they are much stronger than humans — 8 times stronger, pound for pound, in fact and therefore perceived as being quite dangerous.

At the end of the lesson my dad told Booee that it was time to go back into the chimp compound, an unpleasant collection of rusty cages that no human would want to live in, so why would a chimp? Booee protested by promptly climbing up a tree, but my dad, the young alpha male professor, was not about to be humiliated in front of his students by a chimp, so he thought he’d show Booee who was boss by wrapping the lead around his wrist so that Booee had no room for movement, getting very close to the tree and angrily demanding that Booee come down. In response, Booee, calmly, with one arm, reached down, grabbed the lead and lifted my 200-pound father off the ground swinging from the lead.

My dad, in what I can only infer was a moment of ego free clarity, quickly changed the subject: He looked up at Booee and signed, “I forgive you.” Delighted, Booee leapt out of the tree into his arms and off they went. So not only might birds shit on us, but non-human animals and the rest of nature will surely show us who is really in control, bringing us back into line if we don’t learn respect, compassion, forgiveness and empathy — for all beings, not just humans.

The second voice that helped me regain my bearings was an essay from Rebecca Solnit that really gave me a much-needed historical perspective. It drove home how many things really have dramatically changed for the better. She wrote: “Thirty years ago Ronald Reagan was president, the threat of an apocalyptic nuclear war seemed very real, a large swathe of the earth lived under the totalitarianism that got called Communism, which seemed like it might last centuries rather than another year…Anita Hill had yet to speak up and almost no one addressed sexual harassment…Same-sex marriage was virtually inconceivable to most people; the Lawrence vs. Texas ruling decriminalizing gay sex nationwide was fifteen years away; First peoples had been almost entirely erased in public discourse … and we got most of our energy from coal.” Aha, thanks Rebecca. Step 2, check: Don’t lose sight of the long game because of all the distractions of this current surrealistic nightmare.

I remembered that Archbishop Desmond Tutu had once said, “I am not an optimist. I am a prisoner of hope.” I think hope is what brings so many of us back here to Bioneers each year. And this weekend has really helped reboot my hope. Hearing about all the inspired, courageous work and all the innovative projects so many of you are involved in has dispelled much of the darkness I was wallowing in. Hearing from so many youth from such diverse backgrounds, identities and ethnicities who are here participating in our Youth Leadership Program on scholarships, which all of you make possible — thank you! — has given me enormous faith in the future. Theirs is a generation so far ahead of us from the get-go: allergic to racism and injustice in their very core, totally comfortable with the authentic expression of gender identity, unwilling to tolerate continued gun violence.

My son, August, who is 17, is here today. He has grown up as part of this more expansive generation. His acceptance and openness to people from all walks of life inspires me. It is what he knows is right in his bones. In many ways he has become a teacher to me. And you heard yesterday from the extraordinary Edna Chavez whose strength and resiliency exemplify the unstoppable momentum of these young leaders. This generation will not go back in time. I now see I was wrong to doubt MLK’s wisdom. I am convinced that today’s emerging leaders will ultimately succeed in ushering in far more enlightened times. And it’s important to note that much of the progress we have made in the past few decades is still in place — even though we still face many challenges.

So, that has been some of my inner journey this past year. I can’t promise I won’t have moments of doubt and fear, but one thing my quest for guidance and this incredibly uplifting weekend have reinforced for me is that no matter how infuriating the daily headlines might be, I will do my utmost to keep at it, to work for the world we want to see, and to choose hope, empathy, and compassion. But I will also do my best to remember not to take myself too seriously, lest the birds and chimps and the entire natural world decide to set me straight.

[Cross-posted from Bioneers. My remarks delivered on October 20, 2017 at the 28th Annual Bioneers Summit. You can view the original video here. ]

I am thankful to have the opportunity to return to you again now in my fourth year as forever new Executive Director of Bioneers, but like so many of us here, I come to you this morning with a heavy heart.

Bioneers have been gathering for 28 years now, ever since Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simons launched this remarkable event, this “movement of movements” and “network of networks,” and the guiding principle was to reveal to world the most promising solutions to humanity’s most pressing crises and to help propel those solutions forward.

We are here to continue that noble work, but sometimes those crises, which frequently cause such devastation in many parts of the world, hit very close to home, or in this case, just about a direct hit, since quite a few of our staff and presenters and attendees and allies and my family have been directly impacted by the fires that have raged these past weeks just north of here.

In fact until a few days ago the Exhibit Hall was housing several hundred evacuees.

Let me, therefore, before proceeding any further, offer my deepest condolences to all those who have lost loved ones and/or their homes. We will hold you in our hearts this weekend, and we dedicate this gathering to you in the hope that some of the ideas and approaches highlighted and explored here will turn out to be useful in helping you rebuild a more resilient, greener region, one less likely to suffer this sort of apocalyptic event.

We don’t yet know the immediate cause of the fires, but we do know that climate disruptions and our land use patterns are contributing to making wildfires and flooding and storm events far more destructive, something we have been witnessing these past few months.

Some of what we will discuss here in the coming days is how we as a species can use the best tools of science and innovative, nature-honoring design in combination with the profound ecological wisdom of the original inhabitants of this land, to build a more resilient, restorative relationship to our land and waters.

There is, for example, much we can learn about living in a fire-prone landscape from the original inhabitants of this land, who had highly sophisticated fire management techniques, something that will surely be discussed here in the days ahead.

But we kick-off this 28th year of Bioneers against the backdrop of a great deal of uncertainty and upheaval all around us, marked not only by ever more unprecedented climatic events but by more global political turbulence than we have seen in generations.

But let us not lose sight of the fact that the potential for deep positive transformation, for a new era based on clean energy, social justice and awakened compassion, is ready to be born out of this seeming chaos.

In that light, I want to share a story with you about how my contact with some Native American people recently provided me with some much needed perspective.

A few weeks ago I had the great honor of being hosted by several members of the Navajo and Hopi Nations on the rim of the Grand Canyon in the Four Corners region.

The trip was part of a larger Bioneers partnership with the Colorado Plateau Intertribal Conversations Group. CPIC is a groundbreaking initiative that for the past eight years has convened regional First Nations in dialogues and collaborations to both resist the ongoing destruction by extractive industries and to create a self-directed landscape and green economy.

We spent some time in deep dialogue about a current collaboration between Bioneers and CPIC. We’re partnering with our esteemed colleagues Tom Linzey and Mari Margil of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund to offer Rights of Nature legal trainings in the region and beyond. Under our current system, nature is property.

It has no rights.

We need to change the paradigm to one where nature has the intrinsic right to exist, persist, evolve and flourish — where people can stand legally on behalf of critters and rivers and ecosystems.

This is something First Peoples consider painfully obvious, but the rest of us have a lot of catching up to do on the philosophical level.

I have spent time with Native Amazonian peoples in Brazil including the Ashaninka thanks to an Invoking the Pause grant, but my trip to the Navajo Nation was the first time in my adult life that I had been welcomed onto a First Nation’s homeland in North America.

During the trip I asked several of our hosts what they thought of the tensions many people in the U.S. were feeling about the Trump Administration. To my consternation most of those with whom I spoke didn’t seem terribly upset by Trump. “Kit Carson,” one person told me, “Now he was a real challenge.” Carson you’ll recall was New Mexican mountain man and army officer noted for his savage campaigns in the 1800s to force the relocation of Navajos and Apaches to reservations.

“Columbus,” another person echoed, ”now he was super problematic.” Trump, they offered, was really just more of the same. These folks understood full well what a setback for most Native Americans and Americans in general this regime represents, but they really know how to take the long view .

Then again. Columbus didn’t have nukes.

One highlight of our trip was a visit to the farm of Rosemary Williams, a Diné grandmother. Rosemary has a multi-acre farm of corn, squash, and pumpkins situated in a small dusty valley near Tuba City, Arizona (known as Tó Naneesdizíin).

Amazingly, Rosemary only has access to one irrigation flood per season. The rest of the season her crops in this very arid land are fed from whatever scant rain passes her way and some strategically placed water bottles.

At one point we noticed some dark monsoon season clouds gathered in the distance and assumed they were headed our way. Rosemary told us not to worry. She told us that the rain usually passes over her valley. But still her crops were lush and full.

As she talked about her caretaking of her plot of land, she added that she uses no pesticides or fertilizers and is vehemently opposed to non-reproducing GMO seeds that are being shopped to some of her neighbors.

She shared a harrowing story I would hear repeated by many Native Americans of a certain age on this trip. When she was a little girl the US Bureau of Indian Affairs came to her house and told her parents they were taking her away. For the dozen or so years following, Rosemary spent 9 months or so each year away from her family living with a non-Native foster family outside of Los Angeles. Rosemary tells the story quite sanguinely. I found it shocking to imagine that Native American children as late as the 1960s were still effectively being forcibly removed from their families and placed in the homes of strangers.

And, yet, for Rosemary, it had all been a part of her journey.

Where she found real delight was in the summers when she would return from her foster care and work the farm with her grandfather. Her grandfather taught her how to talk to the plants for best results. To treat them with respect. To weed them with vigor and to run, run, run to the next assignment.

In these front line communities that have often born the brunt of the worst racism and injustice our society could throw at them, there is, at least among the elders I met, an inner core of extraordinary calm, centered resilience.

Their people survived an attempted genocide and have lived under brutal oppression for hundreds of years, and they have, as a result, developed a very long, broad view of the sweep of history.

And the psychic anchor their long-lived traditions and highly sophisticated worldview provides them with makes them totally confident in their ability to outlast their oppressors and survive cataclysms.

I’m not saying there is never a time to be in a hurry or to demand immediate change, because many of our challenges do require rapid responses, and much of what we will be discussing this weekend will be about mobilizing our resources and efforts to push forward here and now, but one of the main lessons I brought back from this journey is that these battles we are currently engaged in for healthy lands and waters and greater inclusivity and justice are struggles many Indigenous peoples have been waging for generations.

We have to understand that in quite a few cases this will be long-term, multi-generational endeavor.

So, yes, we must all work for a better world today, and rebuild after disasters and help those who need our help immediately, but also understand that we’re in it for the long haul.

Meanwhile, these people made it clear to me by their living example that we must never forget to love the Earth, the land and its bounty, and the glorious magic of life as often as we can even in the midst of crisis.

They showed me that if we can cultivate a resilient sense of joy, we will be much happier, and we will increase our odds of winning the struggles we must wage. So, I thank you, Diné and Hopi elders and especially Deon Ben, Rosemary Williams and Tony Skrelunas, for your presence and your teachings.

And thank you Bioneers. I wish you all as productive, inspiring and joyous a weekend as humanly possible.

“What’s the appropriate term for referencing the broader community of people who are disabled in one way or another?” my colleague asked me the other day. “Seems like ‘disabled community’ is not quite right.”

How would you have answered this question? Have you thought about what our relationship is with the word “disabled” and all of the values, implicit and explicit, that accompany it?

Fortunately, I knew *the* person to go to with this question (and you will too when you see him speak at Bioneers this October). I asked my old friend and colleague James Thurston who will be introducing his collaborator and Bioneers plenary keynote speaker accessibility rights activist Victor Piñeda at Bioneers on October 20–22.

“What’s the appropriate term for referencing the broader community of people who are disabled in one way or another?” my colleague asked me the other day. “Seems like ‘disabled community’ is not quite right.”

James is the Vice President, Global Strategy and Development at G3ict, the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies an NGO that works to facilitate and support the implementation of the dispositions of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) related to the accessibility of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) and assistive technologies.

Victor Piñeda is the President of World Enabled and of The Global Alliance on Accessible Technologies and Environments (GAATES), the leading international organization dedicated to the promotion of accessibility of the built and virtual environments.

In distilled terms, they are accessibility evangelists.

James and Victor travel around the world with their joint initiative, Smart Cities for All, meeting with municipal and civic leaders about digital inclusivity for all city residents, citizens and visitors. Together they have met with mayors and chief technology officers in Mexico, Brasil, Israel, India, Japan, and throughout the United States.

Their work is helping to raise the awareness of the importance of digital accessibility and inclusivity for all.

Possibly more significantly, they are working to change the narrative around the term and meaning of “disability”, which has become such a disempowering and polemic word in our society, often associated with other or less than.

Victor and James like to quote the words of Ambassador Luis Gallegos of Ecuador known to many as the “father of UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.”

“Ambassador Gallegos often says that being a person with a disability is the one minority group that we will all, if we live long enough, become a member of at some point in our life,” James told me. ”Either from aging (we all pick up impairments as we age and those affect how we use technology) or accidents, illnesses, wars, crime, etc.”

And that number is growing. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) approximately 15% of people on earth are people with a disability. Some quick math: that’s around one billion people.

There is still much work to be done to make the world aware of this issue. One of the points of entry is the workplace. James and his organization, G3ict, have launched a new campaign and web portal with a toolbox to help organizations, cities and countries incorporate accessibility and digital inclusivity policies and tools. It’s called BuyICT4all and includes resources in both Spanish and English. The portal includes a specific pathway to support people wanting to be evangelists in their own organizations.

So, what’s the appropriate term for referencing the broader community of people who are disabled in one way or another?

The answer was one that hit me viscerally and poignantly: “It’s persons with disabilities,” James told me. “Persons with disabilities are defined by their personhood, not their disability.”

That was enough to make me an accessibility evangelist.

I hope you’ll join Victor, James and the entire Bioneers community on October 20–22 at the 28th Bioneers and become part of the movement that we should all be championing: Accessibility for all.

Until then you can follow the work of James and Victor on Twitter. And use their tag #SmartCities4All

See you in October!

Bioneers is upon us!

My Commitment to Becoming an Accessibility Evangelist was originally published in Bioneers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.