At this critical moment in human history, a new paper on multilevel cultural evolution shows how looking to our cultural evolutionary origins might help us improve society at many levels.

Ours is a critical time in the cultural evolution of humanity that is likely to shape our long-term future, or lack thereof. As a species, we have been on a self-destructive trajectory that has led us to our current polycrisis of unlivable economic conditions, worsening climate disasters, and the potential of an unspeakably devastating war, as the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023 puts it. The changes we all need to make, if we want subsequent generations to enjoy life, will most likely require big shifts toward improving connections with each other and the planet, and away from extraction and individualism.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The good news is that humans evolved often as cooperative and “prosocial” beings, so looking to the past and better understanding our cultural evolution as a species might help illuminate the best ways forward across the board. This is the basis of a paper published in April 2023 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled, “Multilevel Cultural Evolution: From New Theory to Practical Applications.” Rather than focusing on the genetic code and physical evolution of humans, the paper explores the advanced and groundbreaking—but seldom discussed—field of cultural evolution.

The paper’s senior author David Sloan Wilson, a distinguished professor emeritus of biological sciences at Binghamton University, New York, and the founder of the school’s Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) program, told the Independent Media Institute in May 2023 that the authors of the article wrote it “to show that a synthesis, which has already taken place for the study of biological evolution, is now in progress for the study of human cultural evolution, with wide-ranging practical applications.”

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Looking at humanity through a lens of cultural evolution shows that “we are neither cooperative nor selfish,” Wilson says. “We are capable of both—so becoming cooperative requires providing the right environmental conditions. Also, cultural evolution helps us to recognize the common denominators that apply across all contexts of our lives—our families, neighborhoods, schools, businesses, and so on, and at all scales, from small groups to the planet. This is very empowering.”

He shared the example of a program for at-risk high school students that he helped to design in 2010 at Regents Academy in Binghamton, New York.

“By providing the right social environment, kids who flunked three or more of their classes during the previous year [2010] performed as well as the average high school student in the district [in 2011],” he says.

Wilson explained in an article published on the Binghamton University website in April 2023 that evolutionary science is made up of a triad: variation, selection, and replication—and that triad is also visible in the evolution of culture, “from economics and business, to engineering and the arts, and the functioning of society at all levels.” He added that “knowing how cultural evolution happens also means we can harness it for the larger good, creating a more just and sustainable world.”

While evolution has been at the core of biological sciences over the last century, evolutionary science is rarely part of the conversation when it comes to understanding culture and the modern-day problems of society.

As Steven C. Hayes, co-author of the paper, psychologist, and professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Reno, told the Independent Media Institute in May 2023, multidimensional and multilevel evolutionary theory “is now at a level of knowledge and sophistication where it’s ready to step forward and be part of that broader cultural conversation.”

However, he says that if you pick almost any area that might be important in our society, “from immigration to climate change, or economic justice, or the opiate crisis, or the impacts of the pandemic, or suicide in young people—and on and on it goes—” seldom will behavioral sciences and the behavioral aspects of the evolutionary sciences even be mentioned. The authors of the paper on multicultural cultural evolution sought to remedy this.

Hayes says that while he acknowledges the real atrocities humans have committed (like slavery, climate destruction, and much else), it’s imperative that people are able to see that humans have also done better, and are capable of doing better, going forward.

“It strikes me in doing this work that the narratives we tell ourselves about our history as a species are powerful in shaping the future,” he says. “We’ve created an economic system that is destroying the Earth. Think seriously about what we’ve supported just over the last 50 to 100 years, and how hard it is for us to step up to the challenges of just climate change, never mind economic disparities—we can do better.”

Hayes says as a species it is time for us to choose to “evolve on purpose,” and he believes “we can use the tools of evolutionary science to do that.”

Humans Evolved as Prosocial—Not Individualistic

One key point the paper makes is that humans evolved most often through cooperation and we are, at our foundations, prosocial—meaning that we’ve evolved to care about the welfare of others and behave in ways that support the greater good.

The paper explores in detail three hallmarks of cultural evolution that include: 1) prosociality, 2) social control that enforces prosocial behavior, and 3) symbolic thought, which includes an adaptable catalog of symbols with shared meaning.

Hayes, who is also president of the Institute for Better Health, has worked for four decades on developing a new behavioral science approach called Contextual Behavioral Science and studying how to ease human suffering by empowering them to live values-based lives.

“We did not evolve as selfish primates,” Hayes says. “We evolved as social primates, we reined in selfishness, we fostered community, and we made sure that every voice matters.”

He notes that from his perspective, having researched cognitive functioning and psychology there is an “alternative view of human functioning that will foster human beings who are whole and free.”

From a psychological perspective, which evolutionary science supports and the paper details, individualism is simply not good for us.

“Thriving… almost always means collaborating with others,” Hayes says, noting that one point that should give people hope is that when one moves in an individualistic way, toward selfishness and narcissism, they move toward unhappiness.

“Narcissists are not happy,” he says. “People who lie, cheat, and steal are not happy. There’s a deep-down yearning for love, connection, and belonging that is there at birth.”

Hayes sees the cultural biological evolution toward traits that benefit the common good over individual gain show up not just in human history, but in today’s world, by way of his work as a clinical psychologist. The afflictions that are most prominent today of narcissism, loneliness, and actions that harm others, and how they are intertwined with negative impacts of social media, for one example, all could be said to varying degrees to have a solution to focus more on building interpersonal relationships and communities. And individuals who partake in this positive socialization often have better mental health as a benefit.

“It’s time for us as mental health professionals and scientists to speak about the importance of relationships and of empowering our young people to learn how to have relationships that matter.”

An Alternative to the “Greed Is Good” Paradigm

The “Economics and Business” section of the paper is focused on the ways multilevel cultural evolutionary theory can provide an alternative to the “greed is good” economic narrative. It expands upon the Nobel Prize-winning work of political scientist Elinor Ostrom, which proved that groups can effectively self-manage common-pool resources like “forests, pastures, fisheries, and the groundwater,” without falling into self-serving behaviors when they follow a specific set of design principles she puts forth. Ostrom’s work disproved the well-known economic myth of the “tragedy of the commons” that insists privatization and top-down regulation are necessary to manage resources.

The paper proposes that Ostrom’s concepts have the potential to be effective across “contexts and scales” rather than being confined to the discipline of economics. And the paper predicts that by using cultural evolutionary theory, “[v]irtually all functionally oriented groups can benefit” from implementing the principles Ostrom laid out for economics.

Expanding the Conversation

Hayes says that if readers were to take one thing away from the paper, he would want it to be an understanding that modern evolutionary science is not just what you learned about in high school.

“My message to people would be: When you know how to evolve on purpose, who knows what your ceiling may be? You as an individual, you as a couple, you as a family, you as a company, you as a community, us as a world.”

While individualism and “survival of the fittest” were the takeaways from the study of evolution that were widely upheld in modern culture, Hayes notes that Charles Darwin was among the first to talk about the role of multilevel selection and cooperation in evolution.

“There are economic and social forces that took advantage of the competitive view, and it started very early on in the field [of evolution],” he says. And Hayes says that it wasn’t long after Darwin shared his theory of evolution, along with other prominent thinkers at the time, that corporations began to take hold of the narrative.

Hayes says he thinks society has been slow to adopt a more realistic understanding of human evolution because doing so would not appeal to certain economic and social interests. The paper on multilevel cultural evolution offers that alternative perspective, Hayes says.

“This paper says, modern, multidimensional, multilevel evolutionary science is ready to step forward as both a basic and applied field. It has a number of successes it can point to right now,” he says. “It is on sound ground that we can begin to think about how to evolve on purpose… in the real way that culture, companies, individuals, couples, communities, neighborhoods, and fields of study have always done: through healthy variation that’s selected, retained, and fitted to context in a multidimensional and multilevel way.”

Hayes notes that a principled alternative way of culture is “one in which we begin to see that it’s our obligation as citizens, as family members to create a context in which trust sharing and cooperation can grow,” he says. “That isn’t namby-pamby, it’s not weak, it’s not Pollyanna, it’s not anything goes. It’s the salve on the wounds that are created by selfishness, and a vision that we can live out.”

We humans do our best, he notes, when relationships, families, businesses, and groups cooperate.

“Why wouldn’t you want to scale that? Why wouldn’t you want a model for how to do that? The problem is that our models have been mostly part of [colloquial] wisdom and spiritual traditions, and they’ve been sliced and diced by the modern world,” Hayes says. “People with narrow interests have stepped forward and have sold humanity a bill of goods that is false.”

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

Many people are already investing themselves in the local peace economy as they divest from the economy of war.

War is not innate to humanity; it is learned culturally, and intentional systems of peace can prevent it from happening, according to anthropological research. We are living at a critical time in the history of humanity in which preventing and divesting from war are essential to our future existence—especially given the realities of the global climate crisis and the fact that the U.S. military is the worst single polluter that exists (and not even mentioning the unspeakable potential for destruction that nuclear weapons pose). If war is cultural, then we can prevent it by intentionally moving ourselves into a culture of peace. How do we do this? We begin with ourselves. We begin to break our war economy habits, and actively divest ourselves, wherever possible, from the ways in which the war economy takes hold in our lives. And we purposefully invest ourselves at the local level in what is often called the peace economy—the caring, sharing, supportive economies that already exist all around us.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The economy of war thrives on extraction and materialism, so it has—for thousands of years, and by no accident—made trite (or violently stifled) the things that are most valuable and important about living: caring; nurturing; love; art; peace; expression; and connection with nature, our bodies, and each other. The war economy, which is the overarching economic system of our times, promotes a culture that actively devalues play and community, and overly values hard work and individualism—to the grave detriment of mental and physical health. It uplifts money hoarding, competition, and the flaunting of one’s material wealth over generosity, sharing, collaboration, and appreciation. It stifles grief and asks us to harden ourselves against the expression of feeling rather than inviting us into depths of emotion where we can realize the gift of being alive in this world, together, for just a brief time.

The results of this unsustainable and unnatural lifestyle are ugly: Clear-cut, monocropped tree farms where once thrived biodiverse FernGully-esque old grove forests in the Pacific Northwest, the Amazon, and around the world; endless mining and building projects that plunder habitats, natural wonders, and Indigenous communities; worsening mental health afflictions, an opioid addiction epidemic, and soaring suicide rates; toxic chemicals and microplastics in our soils, oceans, streams, and bloodstreams that are causing irreparable damage to the planet and our bodies; people treated like criminals for experiencing homelessness, even amidst a devastating cost of living crisis; racist, militarized police murdering people in broad daylight, and often walking free even when they’re caught on camera; hustle and greed culture and the agony that comes with living a daily grind; so much unnecessary loneliness and stress… and this list could go on and on.

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But a movement is building from the commons to break with these war economy ways and replenish ways of being that are actually livable. Around the world, there are projects, people, and organizations creating solutions to the problems of our times. They are actively helping in divesting from the war economy in powerful ways. These examples of the local peace economy in action demonstrate that it is possible to create systems in which wealth and worth are rooted in equitable, community-centered care practices like health care for all, farming and feeding each other, parenting and education that are entrenched in love and engagement, and a culture that uplifts us and inspires interconnection.

The peace economy is built brick by brick, through the commitments of individual people and communities. What follows are some examples (of many more that exist worldwide) showing how people and communities are divesting from the war economy and investing in a future centered in peace, love, and aliveness:

Our globalized, Big Ag, monoculture food systems—which are monopolized by a handful of megacorporations owned by billionaires responsible for the war economy—are unraveling. The COVID-19 pandemic cast a bright light on the fragility of those systems. But the issues the pandemic exposed were present prior to 2020, and they promise to continue into the future. People in communities around the world are relocalizing food supply chains to create food sovereignty and reclaim culture in these times of fraying global food systems:

• Communities in the Pacific Northwest have been working to regionalize food supply chains through relocalized flour mills, sustainable livestock ranches, a creative chicken farming model, and community garden programs. These efforts have paid off in creating food security for communities while also leading to greater job opportunities and a thriving ecosystem.
• Palestinian farmers have been rekindling connections with Indigenous farming practices and creating community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs to resist Israeli colonialism. This has helped Palestinians to reconnect with their land and economically support locally grown food.
• Black, formerly incarcerated people in Chicago are challenging the megacorporations that tend to dominate food contracting with schools and other large facilities in America by prepping locally sourced meals for schools, nursing homes, and transitional housing. The Chicago worker cooperative ChiFresh Kitchen is 100 percent employee-owned and provides nutritious and culturally appropriate food to these institutions and facilities.
• There are many networks of Indigenous seed savers and others keeping and propagating seeds in community gardens and cooperative programs in the U.S. and around the world. Indigenous-led communities like Seeding Sovereignty and many others are keeping their spiritual connections and cultural practices alive through their connections with seeds, and seed savers are challenging the monocrop-based Big Ag industry that is responsible for so much deforestation and other climate destruction. These networks have also helped bring back “Indigenous foodways that were lost during genocide and forced relocation” inflicted by European colonizers.
• The Deep Medicine Circle in the San Francisco Bay Area, a women of color-led, worker-directed 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is one group that is rethinking health care at its roots, and healing the ways U.S. colonial extraction is making people sick. Local community members who make up Deep Medicine Circle are creating systems of health and care, through the lens of community food justice. They’re planting community gardens and thinking up long-term models of localized food and community engagement that uplift Indigenous practices, provide access to healthy foods in poor urban neighborhoods, and dismantle colonialist ways of thinking and being in the world.
• Neighbors are voluntarily keeping free-food fridges stocked in cities around the world, in a mutual aid movement that gained speed in response to the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. People have fed and cared for each other through the pandemic and beyond, creating a free-fridge movement that has raised awareness about racial inequity in food systems.
• Sallie Calhoun’s Paicines Ranch in California is working to bring agricultural business and investment up to date with our times and closer to nature by prioritizing ecosystem health, habitat, and the sequestration of carbon through soil practices. The project was founded with the aim of working with the dynamic natural world to explore ways of building healthy ecosystems while growing crops and supporting community through food. Paicines Ranch is intentionally creating a model of doing business that is focused on managing complexities rather than solving problems, and is centered on adding true value over profits.

Outside of the food system, examples of other applications of mutual aid, social justice, creative arts, community resilience, and activism for human rights and the environment that all embrace the peace economy include:

• People are reimagining safety through alternatives to policing. Safety in the peace economy comes from the engagement of community and the reallocation of resources and funding into programs of care—not militarized police forces and punitive systems of justice. While many alternatives to policing already exist, recent initiatives after the murder of George Floyd by police in May 2020 have introduced changes, both big and small, across the U.S., and the global uprisings against systemic racism have led to these issues being part of the mainstream conversation.
• Creative cooperatives are reclaiming real estate and bringing access to art, living spaces, and community spaces back to marginalized Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in Oakland and elsewhere who have played an integral part in shaping the culture of cities across the U.S.
• Fire recovery efforts in Oregon, California, and elsewhere have depended on people-led mutual aid projects and local volunteer networks. Devastating fires, worsened by climate change and the criminal negligence of public utilities like Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), have been increasing in recent years, some of them incinerating entire towns. Fire recovery efforts in Oregon and California have largely been community-led, and networks have formed among neighbors to create resilience and support—including grief spaces like those created in Ashland, Oregon, which provide a space for people to share their experiences of loss.
• People are fighting the fossil fuel industry while building community spaces and support for people who are homeless in New Mexico. The grassroots project is part of a larger project in New Mexico. SOL for All has brought solar power to various locations across the state in an effort to support alternative energy solutions, which are necessary to combat climate change.
• The largest dam removal in history started in 2023 in southern Oregon and Northern California, thanks to years of Indigenous-led community activism. The Karuk, Yurok, and other Native American groups for whom the Klamath River Basin is their ancestral home since time immemorial have been organizing against the dams since they were proposed in the 1910s—which have had disastrous results for people, salmon, and other wildlife—for decades. After multigenerational efforts, the massive dam removal project is expected to be completed by 2024.
• Many people are also building a peace economy through creative sharing efforts and alternatives to money-based exchanges. This includes community gardens, mutual aid groups, and participation in the solidarity economy, and just transition efforts like those of Americans with jobs sharing their stimulus checks with those in need in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. People are also creating skill share networks like Kola Nut Collaborative and others, and millions of people daily are sharing tools and operating in a moneyless economy via “free” signs on street corners, Craigslist’s “free stuff” page, Freecycle, and other creative routes.

The above are just some of the countless examples of the peace economy in action—and most of these efforts were started by just one or two people deciding to do something about the problems they saw happening in their local community.

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

How Paicines Ranch in California works to bring business and investment up to date with our times and closer to nature—prioritizing ecosystem health, habitat, and the sequestration of carbon through soil practices.

At first the ground squirrels felt like the enemy—a problem to be solved. They were causing major issues for the 25 acres of vineyard at Paicines Ranch in San Benito County, California, with their burrows and mounds, and their taste for fine grapes.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

“We were like, these squirrels are terrible, we must get rid of them—or at least keep them out of the vineyard,” recalls Esther Park, CEO of Cienega Capital. While Park doesn’t work directly on the vineyard, she collaborates with the team that does via the No Regrets Initiative, which is the financial and investment arm of Paicines Ranch that Cienega Capital funds.

The vineyard crew came up with a number of schemes to solve the problem of those pesky ground squirrels. That is, until they met with ecologists and learned about the many essential roles the squirrels, and the underground burrows they create, play in the ecosystem.

“While they might be annoying to us as humans, they’re actually pretty key to providing habitat to many different species,” said Avery Sponholtz, who is on the No Regrets Initiative team and director of philanthropy for the Globetrotter Foundation. (Both are interconnected with the ranch as both were created by Sallie Calhoun and work in tandem with one another.)

It’s not every vineyard that would deem the ecological role of ground squirrels as equal in value to high crop yields. But instead of looking at challenges like that of the ground squirrels as problems to be solved—which is the predominant mode of operating just about everywhere you look in today’s largely extractivist, capitalist world—Paicines Ranch is intentionally working to operate under a different mentality: They’ve taken on an intentional mindset of managing complexities rather than solving problems.

In the example of the ground squirrels, the complexity lies in the fact that support for regenerative ecosystems is a core value of Paicines Ranch’s mission. The project was founded with the aim of working with the dynamic natural world to explore ways of building healthy ecosystems while growing crops and supporting community through food. Its 7,600 acres double as wildlife habitat for “animals, birds, insects, trees, plants, grasses, springs, rivers, and much more,” notes its website.

“We realized if we’re going to hold diversity of species up as an outcome that we want to achieve, those ground squirrels are actually pretty important,” says Park.

Now, instead of trying to solve the problem of the ground squirrels, the team has shifted toward “managing the complexity of [the] ecosystem,” adds Park.

“The squirrels are not necessarily helping us achieve some of the outcomes that we want, and yet they are helping us to achieve some of the other outcomes we want. And we’re getting comfortable with not having the answers, and just doing what we can to manage the complexity of that.”

Park shared another example of how to shift into managing complexities rather than solving problems, from the investment world.

“We deal a lot with grass-fed and pastured livestock operations, and one of the things that most producers point to as being a problem for them is access to [meat] processing [facilities],” she says.

Park says the problem the livestock operations often bring up is that they need more meat processing facilities, and while there have been many efforts to try to address the problem, “most of them have failed.” Parks says this boils down to the fact that the challenge is significantly more complex than just a need for more processing.

“It’s not just that you need a processor… There are all these other factors in the ecosystem that are affecting your whole supply chain,” she says. “It’s better to think about ways to manage all of the moving parts in a way that will serve each individual business, but also to get to know the processor and their business, and also the consumers and all of the other folks who are involved.”

She shares that she helped organize an online workshop for the purpose of connecting all of the different stakeholders along the meat production and processing supply chain. Among the speakers was an experienced and successful meat processor who spoke about the real constraints they face as a business, and the conversation began “helping people get their heads around the complexity of the nature of what they’re facing, versus thinking, ‘This is the answer to solve my problem,’ because oftentimes it’s actually not.”

Holistic Management

Managing complexities—rather than solving problems—has become a theme of the work Calhoun, who owns and manages Paicines Ranch and works with Park and Sponholtz, puts into the world. In addition to her work with the ranch, Calhoun is an activist, impact investor, and philanthropic funder in regenerative agriculture who founded the No Regrets Initiative, which seeks to use a wide variety of forms of capital—human, natural, investment, and philanthropic—to effect change in the agricultural system. She says all that she does aims to improve the health of ecosystems and the communities living in them. Calhoun’s efforts are often aimed in particular at agricultural soil health and sequestering carbon in soil to mitigate climate change.

Calhoun says she was introduced to the idea of running a business centered on managing complexities via Allan Savory, a livestock farmer and president and co-founder of the Savory Institute, who came up with something called holistic management. Managing complexities is one of the key premises of holistic management.

“It was created to help land stewards—because if you are a land steward, you are inherently managing complexity, right?” says Calhoun. “[Allan Savory] makes the distinction that the systems that we create, like computers and the internet, are complicated, but we understand them. Whereas there’s a whole set of natural living systems, which are complex—and complexity means that we can’t actually understand them. If we poke them, we don’t know what’s going to happen, and so we need to respond accordingly.”

Another main point of holistic management Calhoun points to is that so many systems we operate under are focused on preventing unwanted problems, rather than managing for the wanted outcomes.

“We literally declare war on drugs, and war on terror, and war on poverty—thereby guaranteeing the continuation of all of those things, because it’s this mentality of fighting against a problem rather than thinking about what you want to create,” she says. “My ideas really started over 20 years ago from the work of [Savory], and now we’ve been able to carry that and figure out what it means in other parts of our work.”

Managing the Complexities of Our Changing World

The realities of our changing planet call for different ways of doing business, relating to success, and, generally, being in the world. We were warned that climate disasters and their strange weather would come, and now they’re upon us, causing immense collateral damage to humans and other feeling beings on this special planet of water and life. The compound horrors we’ve collectively contributed to as a species are spiraling to a scale that can feel almost as hard to wrap our minds around as the vastness of the stars, time, and the universe. Tensions and talk of war are on the rise globally, and people in the wealthiest nations on the planet are contending with cost-of-living crises, worsened in the wake of the economic fallout of an ongoing global pandemic. And things do not promise to improve anytime soon—especially not by way of business as usual. Creative, collaborative, care-based ways of relating will be necessary to weather the coming storms—literally and figuratively.

There is an opportunity in the midst of the polycrisis (as the World Economic Forum has dubbed it) to reframe the challenges ahead as “complexities to manage” rather than “problems to solve.” This reframing can save us from becoming overwhelmed and has the potential to guide people toward more realistic ways of being and expectations. Because that’s what life is, ultimately: a series of complexities, as notes Jodie Evans, co-founder of CODEPINK.

Evans hosted a conversation with Calhoun, Park, and Sponholtz in March 2023 as part of an upcoming webinar series, and their conversation focused on just that: managing complexities in business and life.

During the conversation, Calhoun shared that the work their team does operates under two sets of guiding principles: one for soil, another for relationships.

Soil health principles, Calhoun says, include keeping the soil covered; keeping green, growing roots in the ground as much of the year as you can; having a diversity of plants; minimizing disturbance—which includes both tillage and also synthetic chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; and, where possible, integrating animals.

Calhoun says the first five soil health principles, listed above, are derived from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and are noncontroversial. She and her team also added a sixth, which is to integrate creative humans who are passionate about the regeneration of the landscape.

The relationship principles, she says, tend to be a little murkier.

“We spend a lot of time talking about the soil health principles and the ways that we keep soil healthy, and we’re thinking now amongst our team about relationship health principles and how to bring those into our work in a more explicit way and be able to share for those funders and investors… [to provide more] articulation of the way that we try to operate in relationship,” says Calhoun.

Sponholtz shared the first draft of relational principles from her notebook:

1. We believe that we must have bidirectional trust in our relationships.
2. We believe that we are interdependent and that our fates are tied to each other.
3. We believe that there is magic, and not everything is knowable with the senses that we have available to us in this moment.
4. We believe that love is necessary, and the response to beauty is love.
5. We believe belonging is necessary.
6. We believe that complexity is critical.

On Magic and Remembering We Are Nature

Park elaborated on the third principle about magic, which draws from a rich and long historical foundation of human intuition and spirituality that crosses cultures.

“We’ve been fixated on this kind of one-dimensional way of knowing something is true, which is data, and yet, historically, we had wisdom that comes from places other than data, or even our brains,” she says. “We relied on our senses, and our senses expand to the relationships that we have and the vibrations that we feel from… nature, and from each other. Those are real ways of knowing things, but we’ve put them to the side as being woo-woo or being something irrational or unreliable. And yet these are things that are super important to informing how we work.”

Park notes that Indigenous cultures around the world have always valued ways of knowing beyond data, and that it’s vital to center those Indigenous, more natural technologies, systems, and ways of being as paths to the future.

“As a team, we really embrace these, what we call, ‘original ways of knowing,’” she says. “We’ll have discussions like: ‘There’s something in my gut that doesn’t feel right about this.’ And we’ll all be like, ‘Okay, we’re not doing it.’ That weighs equally, and in fact sometimes more, to us than what we might see or read on paper. That’s an important part of the way that we work that is different.”

Park says one of the root causes of the situation we find ourselves in today as humans is disconnection from ourselves, from each other, and from the natural world.

“It’s those disconnects that allow us to do the really harmful things that we do to each other and to the land,” she says. “If we’re so disconnected, then we have to reconnect… And particularly when it comes to the natural world, part of that reconnection is acknowledging that we are part of it.”

She says often some of the efforts to solve the problems we are facing neglect to see humans as a part of nature and Earth. For example, land conservation often frames the ideal as being for humans to remove themselves from nature.

“The idea is to just get the people off the land and let nature do its thing,” she says. “But we’re part of nature too. Here in North America, the Indigenous folks actively managed the land. It didn’t just sort of become that way on its own. They actively managed it. We’re a part of this story too.”

And, she notes that humans have a lot to learn from the rest of the planet.

“We need to approach things with humility, knowing that as a species we are the babies; trees and plants were here way before we were. They’re our ancestors and they’re our elders, and we have to respect our position in the ecological sphere.”

Part of doing that is to return to taking an approach closer to that of nature, rather than top-down approaches that seek to control and compartmentalize—in other words, making the shift into managing complexities.

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

The Boston Ujima Project’s assembly All About Love: Community Care Systems asks: What would it take to love and care for the most marginalized people in the city?

“[O]ne of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone,” wrote bell hooks in the 1994 book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

While her work builds on that of Black feminist scholars before her—like Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison—hooks’s “legacy is singular in the way she [centers the fight] against structural and institutional oppression” in the importance of community care, as notes Juliette Fekkar in a 2022 article published in Varsity, the independent student newspaper for the University of Cambridge.

All About Love

What would it take to love and care for the most marginalized people in a given community?

This is the question the Boston Ujima Project is asking. The group works to build cooperative economic infrastructure and return wealth to working-class communities of color.

Inspired by bell hooks’s work on “the power of love to reshape systems for the better,” as notes Paige Curtis, culture and communications manager for the Ujima Project, the member-run organization is hosting an assembly called “All About Love: Community Care Systems.” The event, taking place throughout April 2023, draws its name from hooks’s groundbreaking, iconic book.

“Bell hooks understood that care is just one component of love,” says Curtis. “In her words, ‘Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.’”

In Boston, as in cities across the U.S. and the world, there is a lack of overarching care for the most marginalized residents. Housing shortages, food insecurity, and the cost-of-living crisis were already significant issues prior to 2020, and many of those issues worsened with the COVID-19 pandemic. The need for better systems of care is likely to deepen in the next decade with the impacts of climate change. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023 assessed a set of serious risks to humans now, as well as risks projected 10 years into the future. It found the most urgent current risk to be the cost-of-living crisis, and the most urgent in 10 years to be the climate crisis.

Curtis says while COVID-19 has exposed the financial hardships of residents and businesses in the city, even before the pandemic, the Ujima Project’s members and supporters put together a mutual aid fund to offer support to those in need, “governed by mutual respect for our collective well-being.”

What Does Care Look Like?

Community care systems can take many forms. They “might look like a time bank that allows people to value the resources they already have in their neighborhoods. Or a community-owned grocery store that caters to specific needs of its residents. Ujima’s own work culture is an act of community care. Everyone has a different definition of community care,” Curtis says.

The architects of the All About Love assembly—James Vamboi, Ujima’s chief of staff, community, and culture, and Cierra Peters, director of communications, culture, and enfranchisement—created the event to highlight community-led care systems through curated workshops, lectures, and discussions. The organization hosts two assemblies annually, and in April 2023 they chose to explore community care, “since it’s so central to our vision of a solidarity economy,” notes Curtis.

The assembly delves into a variety of ways care takes place in communities.

“Through the workshops, we touch on topics like queer joy, caring systems for emergency response, life and death, as well as how to support birthing people,” notes Curtis. “These are all important components of an inclusive care system.”

The assembly also looks into ways of caring for survivors of homicide, and building thriving queer communities. A discussion titled “Men’s Work: Practicing Communal Care” looks at ways men are working to dismantle sexism and gendered oppression.

“When we think about our personal lives and in the public realm, that caretaking often falls on women and femme-bodied people,” Curtis says. “But everyone has a role to play in community care. Men’s work can look like men loving and learning how to love themselves, despite deep-seated violence embedded into society and into masculinity itself. It can look like expressing emotions more freely, practicing consistency and accountability, being attuned with their bodies, men loving other men, and so much more.”

She notes that Ujima is producing a short film highlighting the role men have to play in community care that will screen later in 2023.

“It will feature a candid conversation between several extraordinary men leaders in Boston, each practicing communal care for the people in their lives,” she says.

Several existing projects in Boston are centered around men doing feminist work to undo systems of oppression, two of which include the Black Men’s Collective and the Black Men’s Engagement Network, Curtis points out.

Cultivating Community Care

If you’re interested in supporting care in your community, Curtis says the first step is to “ask others what they need.”

“Too often outside actors come into communities of color to offer resources without asking them what they actually need and creating the space for communities to lead caring interventions themselves,” she says. “Don’t make assumptions. Be curious about how to care for each other.”

She says it’s inspiring to remember that community care has always been embedded in Black communities.

“Oftentimes our contributions to the history of philanthropy, mutual aid, medicine, and care work are left out of our nation’s grand narrative,” she says. “Care shows up in the long tradition of Black philanthropy in the U.S. Care shows up in the Black economic cooperative movement of the late 1960s and work done by the Black Panthers to offer public services to youth and those who need it. It’s inspiring to know that Black communities have always taken care of their own.”

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

When the way things are isn’t working, we can build something better if we draw from our collective power and focus on care and interconnection.

We are alive in a unique time of challenges that arrive not one by one, but all at once, and on a global scale. Each enormous risk we (and not just “we” humans but “we” collective life-forms of planet Earth) currently face is entwined with a set of several other enormous risks, creating a monstrous cluster that can seem impossible even to trace, much less untangle. In other words, we are on the verge of “polycrisis,” as the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023 puts it.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The report assessed a set of serious risks to humans now, as well as risks projected 10 years into the future, finding the most urgent current risk to be the cost-of-living crisis, and the most urgent in 10 years to be the climate crisis (and its myriad implications—from superstorms and forced migrations, to environmental degradation, and plummeting biodiversity). Together, the report predicts, the many risks converging on us now promise to “shape a unique, uncertain and turbulent decade to come.”

Without a culture rooted in care and support, existing in these times can mean an endless process of dodging feeling overwhelmed and panicked. Anxiety and depression are on the rise globally—which is an understandable response to the very real horrors that materialize each time we scroll through social media, open our inboxes, or dare to read the news. But panic tends to beget panic. The changing state of the world, with all of its risks, makes this a vital time for us each to remember our agency as part of a powerful cooperative of living beings. Now is the time to root into what actually matters, to reclaim ways of life that are interconnected with the planet and community, and to protect what is actually valuable about living.

A Polycrisis of the War Economy

Jodie Evans, co-founder of the feminist anti-war organization CODEPINK: Women for Peace, tells me that the polycrisis we collectively face is a result of the war economy—the “extractive, destructive, oppressive economy that is killing you, your community, and the planet.”

“Yes, we all want to be able to put our hand on a lever of change and address the atrocities we are watching,” she says. “Unfortunately, fewer and fewer of us have our hands on those levers. Power is becoming monopolized not by the people but by the rich.”

She notes that many of the places we think hold the power to pull these levers, such as Congress or the White House, are not accurate. It’s the billionaires—who are also the war economy.

“And those levers [the billionaires] are pulling globally are destroying the planet, taking down ecosystems, disrupting biodiversity,” she says.

The war economy, she says, is also “at the root” of the shrinking of social justice and “responsible for the decay of our commons—our capacity to be in relationship with each other.” And, of course, it’s responsible for war itself, which exponentially contributes to climate and social crises that cause enormous suffering.

“The bombs may be dropping in Ukraine and in Yemen, but the patterns are playing themselves out in our streets,” Evans says.

Time to Cultivate Local Peace Economy

How do we move away from the war economy? Cultivate what is known as the “local peace economy.”

Evans says the local peace economy is “the giving, thriving, sharing economy without which none of us would be alive.”

“Without the love and care of your parents, the love and care of your friends, without the nourishment of what it is to be in community, life is pretty dark,” she points out.

Participating in the local peace economy means that, rather than throw up our hands and do nothing out of exasperation over the long list of levers we can’t control, we start living into the better world we want to see. When we engage locally, even in small ways that might at first seem insignificant, there is a cumulative effect.

“We say ‘local’ peace economy because at CODEPINK we work globally, but what we can each affect is what is closest to us,” Evans says. “When you start local, the big is in the small. Some of the global patterns reveal themselves very quickly” by looking locally. She also recommends getting “your news from your community because it comes more readily—as a question, a concern, something you can engage with—rather than staggering, horrible facts that excite the brain and crush the heart.”

Evans has supported people who cultivate local peace economies since having an epiphany during Barack Obama’s presidency (a time when she says the peace movement was “shriveled to near-nothing,” as U.S. drone strikes raged on). “We are not going to end war until we end the war economy,” she realized.

Evans likens the polycrisis we currently face to the enormous floods featured in legends from many ancient civilizations around the world. She says that facing the polycrisis feels like watching an impending tsunami, which can create an overwhelming feeling of helplessness against the wave.

“We need an ark to get through the flood,” she tells me, and she sees the peace economy as that ark—a concept she detailed in a video shared on YouTube in November 2022.

She tells me there is no Armageddon. “There’s just the question of what we can do in the face of these patterns that are out there… And what we can do with ourselves is cultivate the peace economy.”

She says when we are feeling overwhelmed by bad news from around the world and are frustrated by our helplessness to change things on our own—when we experience “heartbreak” and “desperation” over the tsunami waves that have already hit elsewhere and those that we feel will inevitably break closer to home—rather than giving up and preparing to drown, we can instead use that moment to pivot into cultivating a more beautiful future, starting locally.

“We can look at what is happening in the world, and I call it the folly of fretting,” she says. “The fretting does nothing; what we need to move that fretting into is the creating. Yes, it’s overwhelming. Yes, it takes us into grief. Yes, it breaks our hearts daily. What I know from grieving, which I’ve had a lot of experience with, is that serving others is the best way to heal a heart and the best way to weave back the worn fabric of the commons.” And in that way, she says, we can better live together “in respect and with dignity for others and for ourselves.”

Out of the Comfort Zone and Into Something New

Evans says the process of moving from a war economy to a peace economy will not necessarily be comfortable.

“What we know is not working,” Evans says. “The things that capture us and lock us into these bad habits have failed. Our psyches and hearts know that.”

The culture we know is a culture of incessant productivity, greed, and violence that would gladly suck us dry of our visions for a better world, and swallow us down into the gaping void of a war economy whose priorities hinge on empty accumulation and consumerism to satiate endless war. Evans points out that this is actually where many of us feel comfortable—even safe—because it is what we are used to.

But if the current ways persist, given the risks we face, we will all actually die.

“Some examples [of the war economy’s influence] are that we’ve become transactional instead of relational, we think we live in scarcity instead of abundance, we relate as an ‘us versus them’ mentality instead of a ‘we’ mindset,” Evans says. “We have to exist as a ‘we’ on this planet. If we don’t move in that direction, we’ll destroy ourselves. And we’re pretty close to that with the war in Ukraine and the coming U.S. war in China, and a cavalier attitude toward playing with nuclear weapons.”

The reality is we’ve collectively pulled the tower card from the tarot deck; the structures that have upheld the extractive, oppressive, and violent ways of being in the world are crumbling all around us. We have the collective power to reshape everything. It comes down to a simple choice: Succumb to feeling overwhelmed—an option that promises more death and destruction—or resist it by creating the conditions of care we want and need to survive.

Evans says a local peace economy already exists, everywhere. To begin to find it, she recommends figuring out “where the war economy has had the most dire effects in your community, and go there.”

“Be part of the community that is trying to meet the needs that the state should be meeting but isn’t, and engage with it,” she says. She says that getting involved and offering “the love and care” that are needed but are not available will help to sow the seeds for the world we wish we lived in. And, she says, learn how to listen. “One of the things the war economy takes away from us is our capacity to really listen. When you listen, you can see the patterns of oppression, obstruction, and distraction right in front of your face… There are people in your community who are cultivating care. There always are. There is always a peace economy.”

Lessons From Local Peace Economies During the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic proved that to move through challenging times, we must rely on our communities—rather than on top-down systems of aid—for essential care, support, and survival. When the economic realities of the COVID-19 crisis devastated livelihoods and interrupted food and other essential supply chains, it was localized networks of support and mutual aid across the U.S. and the world that got people through.

Free food fridges popped up en masse on city streets, neighbors organized grocery delivery efforts, support for local CSAs and community-grown food programs increased, people reallocated food that would be wasted, localized food supply chains expanded, people who still had jobs shared their government stimulus checks with those out of work, neighbors developed emergency action plans to check in on one another, and marginalized communities brought about breakthrough housing and property reallocation initiatives in many cities.

This was the local peace economy in action.

“COVID taught us a lot about what is really essential and valuable, and what nourishes life, us, and our communities,” Evans says. “Mutual aid organizations that had grown up around climate crises [like worsening wildfires] were very necessary and needed during… [the pandemic], and now we have communities across the country seeing the value of them.”

The better way of living that is our birthright begins right where we live, in our daily interactions. Despair thrives in narratives of separation, and it dissipates when we remember how interconnected we actually are, and empower ourselves from within our communities. At the crux of the impending “polycrisis,” the crumbling of toxic infrastructures and outmoded ideals, there is an opportunity to spark new ways of being in and living in this world. These are ways centered in localized systems of support, cooperation, and commons.

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

Lying on the smooth rocks that sit in the middle of the Yuba River, water streaming around her body, Renée Wilson’s eyes are closed. She nestles into the bed of boulders, serene. At first, the rush of the water is the only sound; then her voice begins to narrate over the imagery:

“I am a woman, a vessel. The Great Mother pours life into me, and I am here to do her will. Reborn, alive, here. I am a lover, an artist, a sister, a friend.”

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The footage cuts to Wilson’s hand holding onto the fungi-laden bark of a tree beneath a green forest canopy.

“She holds my hand through it all as I revel in her light,” she says, as the scene cuts back to the river where now Wilson is smiling. “She washes me clean. Joy is here for us all, and I am grateful, every day.”

A large dragonfly passes over the spot where she lies.

This is the opening of the short art film “Ode to Joy,” which Wilson wrote, directed, and starred in. She said serendipitous moments, like the dragonfly’s cameo, happened often during the making of the film. “Ode to Joy” won the 2022 audience choice award for the category of “stunning short film” in the 2022 Maui Film Festival, earned third place for best short film in the Peachtree Village International Film Festival, and was a Jaro Shorts Competition finalist.

The film takes viewers through an experience of nature, poetry, and song. The narrative of the film is flowing rather than top-down. It winds open gently, much like the swirling pools of water or sea waves that make up many of its scenes. Wilson narrates via original poetry and creative prose, following broad themes of nature, life, the empowerment of women, and healing ways of being in the world.

“For a very long time now, the sacred feminine, divine feminine, the Great Mother, the Mother energy—however you want to name it—has been and continues to be on the back burner, repressed, shunned, and vilified,” she said during an interview with the Independent Media Institute. “We’re in a very patriarchal society with lots of misogyny, and many things that are damaging to us as humans. I personally believe we need a balance of healthy masculine, healthy feminine—and if you want to take all the labels off, just healthy people and healthy energy.”

This film, she said, intends to offer a counterbalance to the overtly masculine ways of being that prevail in a patriarchal society.

“This piece is about womanhood and femininity and whoever relates to that,” she said. “That’s not just women, but whoever can relate to the nurturing energy, the destroyer energy, the creator energy, the healing energy, the power of femininity. The fact of the matter is: no one would literally be alive on this planet without the body of a woman. To me, that is sacred and needs to be respected. I wanted to put my voice in the room.”

She said she also wanted to uplift a different creation story.

“I’m just not into the stories that keep getting shoved down our throats, whether that’s the Christian narrative or any other popular narrative that is not honoring the feminine.”

She said, to her, the feminine represents raw wisdom and power, like that of nature, when it’s allowed to be fully expressed.

Intermittently, while immersed in these wild and beautiful spaces in her film, Wilson sings slow and soulful a cappella covers of a range of well-known songs.

Songs she covers include John Newton’s “Amazing Grace,” John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and “Bird on the Wire,” and Mickey Ioane’s “Hawai’i ’78.”

Wilson said she chose the songs she sang more or less on the spot, her choices informed by the energy of each location while shooting. Her cover of
“Hallelujah,” for example, moves to the flow of ocean waves crashing behind a rocky backdrop.

Creating Joy in Lockdown

Initially, the film was sparked during the days of COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, when Wilson, her family, and a couple of close friends would venture into beloved natural spaces—including the Yuba River near Nevada City, California. The rest of the film’s scenes were shot in various locations across the Hawaiian island of Kauai. The project became a portal for Wilson’s personal creative expression during the height of the pandemic. Only after she had captured various scenes with the inkling to share them as separate snapshots on YouTube did she decide to make the project into a more cohesive film.

“[At the start of the project] I was in Nevada City and just really vibing with the trees and the water and Goddess nature, and wanted to create something around that. So the first part of the film is shot in Nevada City, really around just being with nature. And then it evolved over time,” she said. “I left there and went to Kauai and I knew I wanted to continue this idea of honoring Mother Nature and our connections, and the feminine aspects of that… I also knew I wanted to add music. And then it evolved into becoming a fuller story. It felt like it needed more space and more room.”

Until the end of the project in December 2021, the film had no title. After watching an early screening of the film during postproduction, one of Wilson’s friends—who is credited as the inspirational muse for the film—called it an “ode to joy,” which was so befitting it stuck.

“I just think that being joyful is where it’s at, even in the hard times,” she said. “If you can still find something that’s deeper than what’s happening externally—the deeper current—then you can handle anything. It doesn’t matter what’s happening. Someone can die, and yes, it’s hard and I’m grieving and I’m sad, but I still have a deeper current that is connected to the universal wholeness of things.”

Wilson said initially her inspiration was simply to create a cathartic project that encompassed that vibe of joy for herself—especially through the difficult year that was 2020—but also for others who may be going through challenging times and may need a reminder “of where they came from, or who they are, or nature itself, whatever that means for them.”

“The idea was just to feel a deep reflection of love and joy—I feel like you can handle your life when coming from that expression,” she said. “[The project] didn’t start off as an ‘ode to joy.’ It was a very organic process. We’d say, ‘Okay, the weather’s amazing today—let’s go shoot at such and such place.’ And we really just went with the vibe and the momentum of the piece.”

‘We Deserve to Exist Here’

She said though it was not at the forefront of the film’s conceptualization, racism played a part in the making of the film.

“[Racism] wasn’t at the forefront of my mind in the film’s creation process, but definitely was present in the process because of everything happening with the [presidential] election, Black Lives Matter, killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, many named and unnamed Black women, and more,” Wilson said. “But inherent in the film is a Black woman in serene settings. These are settings we do not often see ourselves in—resting in, luxuriating in, feeling in, connecting in, etc.—and yet we do. In real life we do exist here, and we deserve to exist here, and in any space in the world we feel like we want to be in.”

She pointed out that the media does not often amplify this narrative for women of color, but instead “does quite the opposite.”

“The narrative we’re fed wants us to work our asses off until we die,” she said. “So yes, a Black woman/woman of color/spirit represented by me in the film gives an inspirational and visual representation of us all, but in particular—and very specifically—a visual representation to those of us who are Black and Brown in the United States and beyond. Rest into that. We’re here, and we will not be pushed out of our divine birthright to enjoy life.”

Inspiration to Enjoy Life

Wilson has an extensive background as a singer, actor, model, and filmmaker, and is perhaps best known for playing Raelette Pat Lyle in the Academy Award-winning film “Ray.” Originally from New Orleans, Wilson made the documentary “Crepe Covered Sidewalks,” which captured the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in her hometown.

She said that while growing up in New Orleans, she was “always surrounded by music, culture, and art,” which influenced her life path, exploring the arts across different mediums.

She said she hopes everyone who watches “Ode to Joy” comes away with their own inspiration. For her, she said, the process of making the film was always centered around the empowerment of women, healing, joy, and simply being and existing in the world.

If “Ode to Joy” were to leave viewers with one takeaway, Wilson said, it would be to enjoy yourself.

“Here we are on this Earth,” she said. “We get to live here, and breathe, and enjoy life, and be around people we care about, and love ourselves. From there, you can come from that place of helping other people and loving other people, and healing yourself if that’s what you need. Don’t be greedy and stingy, share your wealth, share your knowledge, embrace people, be compassionate, be kind. And I would say for the film, just allow it in, and see for yourself what resonates.”

Author Bio: April M. Short is an editor, journalist, and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California’s weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon, and many others.

The public sector in the U.S. has been shrinking rapidly since the 1990s as a deluge of privatization has, to various degrees, overtaken many so-called public services and institutions. Public education, for example, has been increasingly privatized by way of racist school voucher programs, and the expansion of for-profit charter schools and for-profit education management organizations (EMOs). Private organizations own and operate the nation’s homeless shelters and food banks, and oversee many welfare programs including Head Start programs and child welfare assistance. Medicare and Medicaid systems include government payouts to private managed care organizations (MCOs), process reimbursement claims through private intermediaries, and commonly delegate medical care to private care facilities, private doctors, and private hospitals. Not to mention the nightmare that is America’s private, for-profit prison system.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Public libraries may be the last truly public institution. Linda Stack-Nelson’s essay “The Last Free Space,” published in 2018 by World Literature Today, is a “love letter to public libraries” that details the reasons these uniquely public entities are essential. In it, she salutes the fact that public libraries offer much more than free books, noting the classes, workshops, internet access, resume and tax help, community gathering events, and so forth that libraries provide. However, she argues, this “plethora of resources and opportunities for community” that libraries provide is not the sole reason they are important.

“Libraries are the last place in every town and city that people can simply exist,” Stack-Nelson writes. “Every building one enters today comes with some expectation of spending money.”

She continues:

In a library, no one is asked to pay anything simply to sit. For those with few resources besides time, this is a godsend. Libraries are unofficial playgrounds for low-income families on rainy days, homeless shelters in cold months, reprieves from broken homes for grade-school-age children. They are the last bastions of quiet and calm where nothing is asked of one but to exist. Many arguments have been made about how the library is an outdated institution offering outdated services—that in the 21st century, how-to books on building sheds and daily newspaper copies are obsolete and the funding used for libraries ought to be reallocated to other programs. I can only assume that those who make such arguments are people who have always been comfortable with the expenditures it takes to move through the world, whose presence has never been questioned. For those people, libraries can be about books. But not everyone has the luxury of seeing past the space.

The very existence of public libraries, from this perspective, can be seen as an emblem for the people. American Library Association (ALA) President Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada said in November 2022, in an interview with Independent Media Institute, that the public library has been an “enduring symbol of democracy.”

“Democracy is listed as one of ALA’s Core Values of Librarianship,” she said. “Regarding this core value, the ALA Council notes that ‘The publicly supported library provides free and equal access to information for all people of the community the library serves.’ The ALA Council also previously stated that libraries are an ‘American Value’; they are at the heart of the community—a resource for people of any age to find what they need to help improve their quality of life.”

As American generations go, millennials love the public library most of all. A Pew Research Center analysis released in 2017 showed millennials use public libraries more than other age groups.

Pelayo-Lozada said this love affair is likely due to the fact that millennials as a generation were entering adulthood “during a recession and through multiple life-changing world events.”

“Millennials understand the importance of free and equitable access to information as well as the need to support those institutions that provide it,” she said. “From a practical standpoint, as pay increases do not match living expense increases, access to the public library allows millennials to enjoy culture and participate in education and learning at no cost, helping to alleviate some of the financial pressures they may be experiencing.”

While the public library system has remained steadfast in what many Americans would agree is its traditional function—the ALA’s first-listed core value is to be a space that offers access to information—Pelayo-Lozada pointed out that it has evolved significantly over time. In recent years, for instance, many libraries across the U.S. have been doing away with late fees. Studies by various library systems showed late fees primarily impacted people living in poor neighborhoods where the residents are more likely communities of people of color.

“The mission of the library has always been about access to information, literacy, learning, and culture,” Pelayo-Lozada said. “Public libraries have evolved from spaces that included membership fees and practiced exclusion based on class and race to spaces that are open for all. The ability of the public library to reimagine itself to the needs of society has been an ongoing significant achievement.”

The ALA released a Resolution on Monetary Library Fines as a Form of Social Inequity in 2019 that details its decision to support eliminating late fees charged by public libraries.

She notes that because libraries are “hyperlocal institutions,” they have been able to translate the overarching mission of the public library in a range of ways over time, as needs and challenges have arisen.

“As the world navigated the [COVID-19] pandemic, many libraries expanded the range of support they offer for workforce and small business development—including formal coworking spaces, networking events, and programs to assist with the development of business plans or market research,” she said. “As the needs of our communities change, so do the services and resources available through our libraries, from a Library of Things, to mobile technology labs, to vibrant maker spaces.”

She said in recent years the library system added sustainability as a core value of librarianship, and ALA works to support libraries in the development of sustainable models.

“Libraries play an important and unique role in promoting community awareness about resilience, climate change, and a sustainable future,” she said.

Historically, the development of the public library system in the U.S. has in many ways pushed the edges of the concept of public institutions. The small Peterborough Town Library in New Hampshire, established in 1833, was the first documented free, public library in the world. In the period between 1870 and 1930, local public libraries emerged as a widespread institution of community life.

Pelayo-Lozada said in comparison to public libraries from around the world, “American libraries often set the standard for the type of experiences and materials offered to patrons.”

“International counterparts have said that the advocacy work we do for all communities such as emerging ethnic communities and services to the incarcerated support their mission to bring these types of demographic-focused services to their own libraries when administrators may interpret more homogenous communities,” she said.

“Because libraries have the ability to serve as innovative and creative spaces, there are opportunities to pilot, test, and launch various types of programming, which can be case-studied, replicated, and adapted to fit the needs of libraries in their respective communities.”

One example of this, she said, is ALA’s Libraries Build Business initiative. For the initiative, 13 libraries received grants to start or grow small business programming, in an effort to provide support, advice, and networking opportunities around small businesses and entrepreneurship. The cohort collaborated to answer questions, pilot projects, develop resources, and share what they learned with the wider library community.

While the international community may look to America’s libraries as exemplary, support for public libraries in the U.S. has been a mixed bag. In the sociopolitical climate in the U.S., especially following four years of divisive Trump administration rhetoric, there has been an increased politicization of information and data. Some states and cities have been in the process of defunding public libraries. There has been a movement by the far right to censor books in schools and efforts to ban some books entirely.

“Public libraries serve everyone in the community, and library collections, by necessity, must reflect the diversity of thought and values that exist in every community,” said Pelayo-Lozada. “Public libraries are the bastions of democracy, access, and critical thinking and are at the forefront of protecting our freedom to read and our freedom to information.”

She said efforts by governments and cities across the nation to defund the public library indicate “a threat and a misunderstanding of the essential role that libraries play in our society and our democracy.”

“By breaking down institutions that support the public good, those who are threatening to decrease funding are breaking down the very fabric of our society and our right to information,” she said.

She said in an increasingly divided world, many people use information and access to information to disenfranchised communities from being full participants in society.

“Libraries and library workers are attacked as a tool of a minority of voices seeking to silence diverse ideas and abolish free and equitable access to information, eroding this country’s commitment to freedom of expression,” she said. “Operating in this world, public libraries are essential public goods that allow individuals to bring these ideas together and learn from each other, at no cost to the individual. As a true public benefit, public libraries are essential to creating an inclusive society where everyone is able to fully participate.”

Author Bio: April M. Short is an editor, journalist, and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California’s weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon, and many others.

Ever since Colorado and Washington made the unprecedented move to legalize recreational pot, excitement and stories of unfettered success have billowed into the air. Colorado's marijuana tax revenue far exceeded expectations, bringing a whopping $185 million to the state, and tourists are lining up to taste the budding culture (pun intended). Several other states are now looking to follow suit and legalize.

But the ramifications of this momentous shift are left unaddressed. When you flick on the TV to a segment about the flowering pot market in Colorado, you'll find that the faces of the movement are primarily white and male. Meanwhile, many of the more than 210,000 people who were arrested for marijuana possession in Colorado between 1986 and 2010 according to a report from the Marijuana Arrest Research Project, remain behind bars. Thousands of black men and boys still sit in prisons for possession of the very plant that's making those white guys on TV rich.

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“In many ways the imagery doesn't sit right,” said Michelle Alexander, associate professor of law at Ohio State University and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in a public conversation on March 6 with Asha Bandele of the Drug Policy Alliance. “Here are white men poised to run big marijuana businesses, dreaming of cashing in big—big money, big businesses selling weed—after 40 years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures destroyed. Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing?”

Alexander said she is “thrilled” that Colorado and Washington have legalized pot and that Washington D.C. decriminalized possession of small amounts earlier this month. But she said she’s noticed "warning signs" of a troubling trend emerging in the pot legalization movement: Whites—men in particular—are the face of the movement, and the emerging pot industry. (A recent In These Times article titled “The Unbearable Whiteness of Marijuana Legalization,” summarize this trend.)

Alexander said for 40 years poor communities of color have experienced the wrath of the war on drugs.

“Black men and boys” have been the target of the war on drugs’ racist policies—stopped, frisked and disturbed—“often before they’re old enough to vote,” she said. Those youths are arrested most often for nonviolent first offenses that would go ignored in middle-class white neighborhoods.

“We arrest these kids at young ages, saddle them with criminal records, throw them in cages, and then release them into a parallel social universe in which the very civil and human rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights movement no longer apply to them for the rest of their lives,” she said. “They can be discriminated against [when it comes to] employment, housing, access to education, public benefits. They're locked into a permanent second-class status for life. And we’ve done this in precisely the communities that were most in need of our support.”

As Asha Bandele of DPA pointed out during the conversation, the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. Today, 2.2 million people are in prison or jail and 7.7 million are under the control of the criminal justice system, with African American boys and men—and now women—making up a disproportionate number of those imprisoned.

Alexander’s book was published four years ago and spent 75 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, helping to bring mass incarceration to the forefront of the national discussion.

Alexander said over the last four years, as she’s been traveling from state to state speaking to audiences from prisons to universities about her book, she’s witnessed an “awakening.” More and more people are talking about mass incarceration, racism and the war on drugs.

Often when people talk about the reasons certain communities are impoverished or lack education they blame the personal choices or moral shortcomings of the people in those communities, but that way of looking at things has got it backwards, she said.

“That these communities are poor and have failing schools and have broken rules is not because of their personal failings but because we’ve declared war on them,” she said. “We’ve spent billions of dollars building prisons and allowing schools to fail. We’ve decimated these communities by shuttling young people from their underfunded schools to these brand new, high tech prisons. We’ve begun targeting children in these communities at young ages.”

Alexander cautioned that drug policy activists need to keep this disparity in mind and cultivate a conversation about repairing the damages done by the systemic racism of the war on drugs, before cashing in on legalization.

“After waging a brutal war on poor communities of color, a drug war that has decimated families, spread despair and hopelessness through entire communities, and a war that has fanned the flames of the very violence it was supposedly intended to address and control; after pouring billions of dollars into prisons and allowing schools to fail; we’re gonna simply say, we’re done now?” Alexander said. “I think we have to be willing, as we’re talking about legalization, to also start talking about reparations for the war on drugs, how to repair the harm caused.”

Alexander used the example of post-apartheid reparations in South Africa to point out the way a society can and should own up to its past mistakes. After apartheid ended, the nation passed a law called the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995. Under the new law, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed to "elicit truth" about the human rights violations that had occurred. The commission recorded the statements of witnesses who endured "gross human rights violations" and facilitated public hearings. Those who had committed violence could request amnesty from civil and criminal prosecution in order to share testimony about what they'd done with the commission.

“At the end of apartheid in South Africa there was an understanding that there could be no healing, no progress, no reconciliation without truth,” she said. “You can’t just destroy a people and then say ‘It’s over, we’re stopping now.’ You have to be willing to deal with the truth, deal with the history openly and honestly.”

Alexander pointed to America’s tendency to shove its racist legacies under the rug rather than own up to them. When the civil war ended, slaves were free on paper but they were left with nothing—“no 40 acres and a mule, nothing,” Alexander said. The only option was to work low-paying contract jobs for the same slave owners who had previously brutalized them.

“And after a brief period of reconstruction a new caste system was imposed—Jim Crow—and another extraordinary movement arose and brought the old Jim Crow to its knees,” she said. “Americans said, OK, we’ll stop now. We’ll take down the whites-only signs, we’ll stop doing that. But there were not reparations for slavery, not for Jim Crow, and scarcely an acknowledgement of the harm done except for Martin Luther King Day, one day out of the year. And I feel like, here we go again.”

Last week, Obama pushed out an initiative called My Brother’s Keeper, focused on helping black boys who have fallen down the social ladder. Alexander said she’s glad Obama is shining a spotlight on the crisis facing black communities. However, she said Obama has perpetuated the backward way of framing the situation when he talks about the issues facing those communities.

"I am worried that much of the initiative is more based in rhetoric than in meaningful commitment to address the structures and institutions that have created the conditions in these communities," she said.

Asked about the unlikely relationship forming between U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Kentucky’s Tea Party senator Rand Paul, both of whom are standing together to end mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders, Alexander responded she is wary of whether these politicians are making the right decisions for the wrong reasons.

She cautioned that politicians across the political spectrum are “highly motivated” to downsize prisons because the U.S. can no longer afford to maintain a massive prison state without raising taxes “on the predominantly white middle class.” That shortsighted way of thinking fails to recognize the larger societal patterns that keep the U.S. cycling through various “caste-like” systems.

“If we're going to downsize these prisons and change marijuana laws and all that, in order to save some cash, but in that process to change these laws, we haven't woken up to the magnitude of the harm that we have done,” she said. “Ultimately, at least from my perspective, this movement to end mass incarceration and this movement to end the drug war is about breaking our nation’s habit of creating caste-like systems in America,” she said. She added that regardless of whether they’re struggling with addiction and drug abuse or have a felony on their record, people deserve to be treated with basic human rights.

“How were we able to permanently lock out of mainstream society tens of millions of people, destroy families?” she said. “If we’re not going to have a real conversation about that and ultimately be willing to care for ‘them,’ the ‘others,’ those ‘ghetto dwellers’ who’ve been demonized in this rush to declare war, we’re going to find ourselves years from now either still having a slightly downsized system of mass incarceration that continues to hum along very well, or we will have managed to downsize our prisons but some new system of racial and social control will have emerged again because we have not yet learned the core lesson that our racial history has been trying to teach us.”

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Listen to the complete talk here.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade hurdles our society back into a dark age that disrespects the sovereignty of women, and all people.

A shared ache radiates this summer across the collective of those of us born with breasts, wombs, and pussies. It is the ache of a too-familiar grief held in subjugated bodies. It is the ache that comes from tearing open the sutures we’ve sown, and resown, over an unhealed trauma that stretches back millennia. It’s the ache for freedom from the ancient, decaying cycle of oppression called patriarchy. The ache of hard-won freedoms pilfered once again by a group of old men, appointed by other old men, to positions of inordinate power. It’s the ache for bodily autonomy that is our inherent birthright. It’s an ache for respect and a basic sense of safety in our own bodies; the ache for human rights.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Ignoring half a century of precedent and the fact that 60% of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a U.S. Supreme Court stacked with far-right extremists overruled Roe v. Wade (and Planned Parenthood v. Casey) on June 24, 2022. While this decision is no surprise if you’ve been paying attention recently, it still emits a forceful shockwave, hurdling our society back into a dark age that disrespects the sovereignty of women, and all people.

Protests erupted worldwide. Patients across the U.S., terrified and in tears, have been begging clinic staff for help, as abortion clinics started to shut down (as is expected to happen in at least 26 U.S. states). More than half of those patients have likely been victims of abuse—and many of them likely became pregnant as a result of rape. Regardless of their circumstances or the reasons that led them to this deeply personal decision to terminate their own pregnancies, none of them want to carry them to term. And now they may be forced to.

Several Supreme Court justices issued a dissent to the court’s decision on June 24, stating that one result of the “decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.”

The justices wrote:

“Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that in the first stages of pregnancy, the government could not make that choice for women. The government could not control a woman’s body or the course of a woman’s life: It could not determine what the woman’s future would be. Respecting a woman as an autonomous being, and granting her full equality, meant giving her substantial choice over this most personal and most consequential of all life decisions….Today, the Court discards that balance. It says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs.”

On May 5, after a draft of the supreme court’s intention to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked on May 4, @DianaMiller5 wrote on Twitter about being 8 years old “pre-Roe” and watching doctors debate over whether to perform a life-saving abortion on her mother, who was “lying in a puddle of blood” due to an incomplete miscarriage. She recalled how her father got down on his knees and begged the doctors to save her mother’s life by removing the embryo, and how the doctors debated for 48 hours over whether to carry out the abortion while her mother bled.

“My father was required to bring my little sister and I to the hospital boardroom to prove to the board there were children to consider. I will never forget standing there, watching my father get on his knees and beg the board to save my mother. The embryo was not viable, and yet, it was killing my mom. I stood in that boardroom for hours, listening to a group of old men argue about saving a woman by removing an embryo. I didn’t understand what they were saying except that my mom was going to die if they voted against an abortion…When Roe v Wade was decided I felt such a relief that no family member would ever have to go through the grief…”

She is one of countless people with horror stories like this to share, and while her mother’s life was ultimately saved, the lives of countless women were not. Now, many more women’s lives will be permanently disturbed by the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and maternal mortality rates are sure to rise due to unsafe pregnancies. This was recently detailed in a 2021 study by researchers at CU Boulder which showed that banning abortion nationwide would lead to a 21% increase in the number of pregnancy-related deaths overall and a 33% increase among Black women.

Restricting access to abortion will also have serious implications for the mental health of people with unwanted pregnancies—and research has shown that being denied access to an abortion has worse mental health implications than having an abortion. Suicidality could also rise. In 2014 Reuters reported that in El Salvador each year hundreds of women who became pregnant through rape attempt to commit suicide. Not to mention the physical, emotional, financial and economic distress of caring for an unwanted baby, in a world where we already have a serious overpopulation problem and worsening climate crises.

In addition to the serious risks to health and well-being a national abortion ban poses, the Supreme Court’s decision demonstrates a frightening reality: human rights can evaporate in an instant. It shows us that in this country, people can fight for years for basic protections and rights, and win—only to have those rights swept away again by a few in power. And this court is not stopping at abortions. They will likely come after gay marriage and contraception rulings. They have already weakened Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Maybe most twisted of all is the fact that just before the court banned legal abortions they further loosened restrictions on guns, even though just weeks prior easy-access to AR rifles made possible the massacre of 19 school children and their teachers in Uvalde, Texas (while police officers equipped with weapons to storm the building and stop the shooter stood there like cowards because they were afraid they’d be shot at).

The Supreme Court is basically saying it is fine for the government to force you to give birth, whether you want to or not. But once that child is born, the government will do everything in its power to increase the odds that they are one day shot to death in school—or at the movies, a concert, the grocery store, a yoga class, really anywhere in public.

There is plenty of proof from other countries that limiting access to guns works extremely well to prevent mass shootings, but instead the Supreme Court and the right-wing is making every possible effort to loosen gun restrictions. Even when mass shootings have on average occurred more than twice a day in this country so far in 2022.

For those in power who would ban legal access to abortion, it has never been about protecting life or caring about babies or families. That could not be more obvious than it is right now.

Women have always aborted unwanted pregnancies, since time immemorial. Following the Supreme Court decision, the demand for herbal abortion remedies is on the rise. Self-medicating with herbs to produce an abortion is extremely unsafe, and can result in serious injuries and death in some cases. That said, herbal abortion can be effective for some, and has been practiced for millennia, under the guidance of trained herbalists. For some women it is a conscious choice, similar to home birth, as Gabby Bess details in an article in Vice.

In the article, Bess also notes that “unfortunately, stories about self-induced abortion are rarely not stories about desperation in a political climate where women’s reproductive rights are far from guaranteed.”

Herbal abortion harbors many unknowns, and lacks assurance by scientific study compared with the pharmaceutical pill options. This is likely because serious assessment in western science of the safety and efficacy of herbal healing is meager at best, and paired with the equally meager scientific data on female reproductive health the data is basically nonexistent.

Bess reported that when she contacted the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a representative from the organization “told me that ‘ACOG does not consider herbal abortion as an appropriate way to end a pregnancy. A doctor would never recommend it.’ She then pointed me to some grim statistics about women driven to unsafe, illegal abortions. They result in 50,000 deaths annually.”

For many people experiencing unwanted pregnancy in the U.S., however, there are still options. Many states will keep the doors of their abortion clinics open, and underground mutual aid networks of support abound, to help safely connect people in red states with clinics in blue states where abortion remains protected. Another option is for women to order abortion pills from overseas, or to set up a mail forwarding address in another state—though all options carry with them some potential legal risk. Not everybody will be lucky enough to access the resources that do exist. For some, it will be too late. For others, these options will not be accessible. Women who are abused are more likely to have unwanted pregnancies and oftentimes women living in abusive situations don’t feel safe or have the means to leave town.

Author Bio: April M. Short is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California’s weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon and many others.

A widespread culture of isolation and disconnection from our bodies, each other and the planet is negatively impacting the mental and physical health of people in America and beyond—and this was true long before the pandemic. Our relatively new human social structure that is work-obsessed and separated from nature and each other leaves us scant time to connect and relate to each other, and is not aligned with our natural rhythms. This way of living has grave impacts on people’s overall health, as well as the health of the planet.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Research professor and author Brené Brown wrote about a “crisis of disconnection” in the U.S., in a 2017 article in Fast Company. That same year, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who also held this position under the Obama administration, referred to the problem of loneliness as an “epidemic.” In a 2021 article, psychotherapist Colette Shade detailed the isolating effects of the life structures of capitalism, and researchers have been tracking the health impacts of isolation for decades. Recent studies have found that the health effects of loneliness rival obesity and smoking.

Loneliness is a symptom of our greater culture of disconnect, and toxic American individualism. And, as with many problems (like food and housing insecurity), the pandemic has exacerbated the preexisting issues of disconnect in our society.

The edges of culture, science and medicine are circling back to the roots to prove the overarching understandings Indigenous societies have long held about human health: the mind and the body do not function separately, and humans do not function separately from the planet. All are interconnected, and our overall well-being depends on this connection.

The impacts of the global climate crisis on our mental and physical health, and on planetary health, are a reflection of how intricately connected our personal wellness is with the wellness of the planet. Psychotherapists are overwhelmed with patients experiencing eco-anxiety relating to ecological collapse, fears due to extreme weather and planetary grief. Even the COVID-19 pandemic likely stems from human destruction of wild spaces and a loss of biodiversity, driven by unchecked capitalism. As detailed in a Nature article in 2020, deforestation, rapidly dwindling biodiversity and decline in wildlife increase the risk of disease pandemics such as COVID-19.

Rupa Marya, MD, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), whose research investigates the intersections of social structures and illness, says these issues of disconnect stem from the culture of colonialism. Indigenous knowledge and understandings of ourselves as part of the web of life have been co-opted by social structures built on domination, extraction and destruction of nature for profit, she says.

With New York Times bestselling author Raj Patel, Marya coauthored a new book, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, published in 2021 through Macmillan. The book explores connections between health and structural injustices prevalent in society. Inflamed also delves into the idea of “deep medicine,” which Marya says is a way of “…understanding how social structures are making us sick and working to redesign those structures—as opposed to shallow medicine, which is to always point at the cause and the locus of suffering inside one person or one individual.”

Marya says that the book was an opportunity for her and coauthor Raj Patel “to bring our minds together around food systems and land use, medicine and biology, and histories and cosmologies. Both of us work very closely with many different communities,” she says, and “those communities really informed the story that we told, which is that our bodies, our societies and our planet are being damaged through the same cosmology that has severed our relationships with each other and to the web of life that keeps us healthy.”

Marya is also the faculty director of the Do No Harm Coalition, “a group of more than 450 UCSF health workers and students dedicated to ending racism and state violence,” and her work has explored how social factors like racism and misogyny can predispose various groups to medical conditions. She serves on the board of directors at the Mni Wiconi Clinic and Farm at Standing Rock, situated at the South Dakota-North Dakota border, and works with health leaders from the Lakota and Dakota Indigenous tribes to create a space to practice decolonized medicine. Marya also serves on the board of Seeding Sovereignty, an international entity promoting Indigenous autonomy in the context of climate change.

In addition to her work in health care, Marya is a world-touring musician—the composer and frontwoman of the Oakland, California-based group Rupa and the April Fishes. She says that traveling the world for decades and getting to know various cultures through the lens of music have broadened her understanding of health and society. She has come to realize that healing is not about fixing one problem or another, but requires a more holistic approach of re-engaging with our bodies and each other, within the context of nature.

Her primary focus now is on the work she does with the Deep Medicine Circle, a women of color-led, worker-directed 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on decolonizing farming and restoring relationships with nature through food. The Deep Medicine Circle is “a collective of farmers, physicians, healers, herbalists, lawyers, ecological designers, scholars, political ecologists, educators, storytellers and artists” in the San Francisco Bay Area. The collective is “dedicated to repairing critical relationships that have been fractured through colonialism,” as stated on the website, and formed around an understanding “of climate change as the end-stage of colonial capitalist destruction.”

April M. Short of the Independent Media Institute spoke with Marya about Deep Medicine Circle, the book Inflamed, her research and how healing our relationships with food, community and the planet can heal our bodies and minds.

April M. Short:

How has touring the world as a professional musician influenced your outlooks on health care and overall wellness in society?

Rupa Marya: It’s everything. I’ve always worked in medicine, and right now I work as an associate professor of medicine at UCSF, but I’ve always made sure to work in the medical environment no more than 60 percent of my time. I used to call myself the best-paid musician and the worst-paid doctor in San Francisco. The rest of my time, especially before I had children, I would tour with the band, and we would play these big concerts and festivals around the world.… For me, music has always been a form of social investigation, a way to look at, learn from and interact with different cultures around the world. It’s a way to learn about how people are engaging in what Raj Patel and I call “deep medicine.”

Deep medicine really shows how we’re interrelated and how our health cannot be viewed through the lens of individuality, but must be understood as a system level-phenomenon that emerges when systems are interacting well together. This does not just refer to body systems, but social systems and ecological systems. The ways in which history and lines of power and dynamics interact with those [social and ecological] systems will shape a positive outcome or a terrible one. And what we’re living with after 600 years of colonial capitalism around the world is the suffering health of our bodies, our societies and our planet.

The band allowed me to see these things clearly, in ways that I couldn’t see by just being a doctor in a hospital. Being a doctor in a hospital, you’re on the bleeding edge of society. You see who’s getting sick, how people are getting sick and where the sickness is registering in the bodies. You see children of farmworkers from the Central Valley coming [into the hospital] with really bizarre cancers—young people getting sick, increasingly every year. You see that people are coming in with more advanced colon cancers, are younger every year, and are dying from them. You start to see these patterns over the years. But when you travel with music, people mix you into their homes. It’s a very different dynamic from if I were to show up with a stethoscope and a clipboard.

Doctors, historically, have also been part of that same legacy of colonial violence. Lands around the world were colonized by missionaries, medics and militaries, and the work of colonial medicine wasn’t really to keep those communities that were being conquered healthy. It was to keep the conquerors healthy enough to do the job of conquest, and to extract the wealth and the resources, subjugate the labor and steal the land. When we understand that, we understand the way in which we’re trained as doctors to see, understand and learn about patterns of diseases. What you see from that perspective on health is going to be very different from what you see if you go with an artist, or an engaged community member, and meet with people eye to eye as fellow humans, engaged in this desire to see a better world, not only for ourselves, but for our children and our great-grandchildren.

Touring 29 different countries over many years, going to different communities, I started to notice the emergence of patterns around who’s getting sick and how people are getting sick. That experience really led to the work that Raj [Patel] and I did in our book Inflamed, which looks at how history and power and all these exposures to worlds designed through colonial capitalism are making us sick.

AMS:

Would you share a little on your book—how it came about and how you came to the conclusions inside it?

RM:

The book came about because of these insights I had while traveling with my band. I would start to notice all these different groups who were marginalized or socially oppressed—or from communities that had been colonized through Western colonization—and were suffering. People in different places were suffering in very similar ways. I started to call it a “colonized syndrome.” That was 17 or 18 years ago, and now we know that all of those diseases that I was seeing, from autoimmune disease to inflammatory bowel disease to cardiovascular disease to cancer to Alzheimer’s to substance use disorders to depression and suicide—these are all diseases that include chronic inflammation as part of their origination.

I was giving a talk at UT Austin on Standing Rock and my work there, when I was invited out there to do a medic response in the face of increasing law enforcement violence toward the pipeline resistors [at Standing Rock], the Water Protectors. I also was doing work in the naming of racist police violence as a public health threat. Raj Patel, my great friend for many years, found me and invited me to write a book with him. It was such a great honor to bring our minds together around food systems and land use, medicine and biology, and histories and cosmologies.

Both of us work very closely with many different communities. Those communities really informed the story that we told, which is that our bodies, our societies and our planet are being damaged through the same cosmology that has severed our relationships with each other and to the web of life that keeps us healthy.

How can we resist those cosmologies and insist upon ones that are from our own traditions and from the traditions of the people whose land we occupy here in Turtle Island? Many of the Indigenous communities are working to reawaken their own remembering about those systems of knowledge and ways of living that were purposefully subverted and silenced through colonialism.

What we saw and cover in our book is that colonialism, and colonial capitalism specifically, is truly a system that has caused fractures and damages to critical relationships that keep us healthy, in the express interest of concentrating wealth in increasingly fewer hands, and extracting and exploiting the land and the people. To heal from that, we must repair those relationships and repair those ways of knowing that have been purposely silenced, which means bringing back languages, bringing back songs, bringing back ceremonies and bringing back cosmologies that actually allowed humans to live well together on land.

AMS:

Would you share about Deep Medicine Circle (DMC) and the work you’re doing there?

RM:

As Raj [Patel] and I were finishing up the book, and I was watching people get really sick from COVID, I felt like I couldn’t continue working in the same way, understanding now what I did about health—after reading thousands of papers, stories and accounts, and piecing them together in the way that we have [in the book]. I ended up creating Deep Medicine Circle with several close friends, and then bringing in a team of people who could help bring this work forward.

Our work through the Deep Medicine Circle is to heal the wounds of colonialism, specifically through food medicine, restoration, stories and learning. And the learning is an unlearning. We got ourselves started [in 2021] and we are in full-running mode, because it’s time.

Our farming as medicine work was the cornerstone of DMC’s first year, which is really reframing what farming is. Farming has been a very damaging practice, as practiced through a Western lens, and through extractive lenses. We are advancing systems of Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge and agroecology together, to heal not only the people but also the Earth.

That work has four components. The first one is giving land back to Indigenous people and asserting their sovereignty in their own homeland, and partnering with them to generate food for the people.

The second part is to assert that farmers are the stewards of our health, both in terms of how they steward the soil (which is the ecological engine of life) and water, and how they grow nutrient-dense food. We need to pay our farmers like we pay our doctors and lawyers.

The third part is decommodifying food. All the food we grow is liberated from the market system and given to the people who need that kind of food the most. For example, right now, organic, healthy food that won’t shatter your gut microbiome but will instead nurture it is only available to people who are wealthy. And those people tend to be predominantly white and South Asian in this [American] society.

The last thing we do is insist upon reawakening the way in which food and medicine have been co-extensive throughout our history. All people have food as medicine. It’s storied, it’s relational, it’s deep. It’s not just simply, “Oh, I have diabetes, let me eat this red carrot.” It’s not a prescription. It’s not a pharmaceutical intervention. It’s a real awakening of our relationships to these beautiful beings [plants] that have accompanied humanity for hundreds of thousands of years now.

We are on a 38-acre farm in Ramaytush Ohlone territory [in the San Francisco Bay Area]. We are working to move that land back to a Ramaytush Ohlone Indigenous land trust that’s also women-run, and that work is part of the medicine circle now. It’s called the Land Back Solidarity Program, and it’s run by our operations director, Hasmik Geghamyan, who also happens to be a lawyer who just wants to give land back. She’s been helping several California groups get their land back, and she wanted to internalize that into DMC and make it a core part of our work. She is helping to set up the land trust.

Land back efforts aren’t just reparations for what has happened here in California with the genocide of the Indigenous people, but it is also about how we get back into better ecological balance. We know that Indigenous groups who steward land around the world do better than private or public entities in nurturing biodiversity. That is because of their cosmologies, their relation and their moralities around the personhood of all entities that support life. So, the understanding that the water is a person, the soil is a person, the rocks are people, the animals are people.

The work of dismantling our care for one another came through the colonial capitalist cosmology of separation. When you think of the intellectual tools that were needed to justify murdering everybody and taking their land… that mentality required that those people didn’t have personhood, that they weren’t actually real people, or they weren’t sentient beings. Some of them were “three-fifths” of a human being legally, here in the United States. The violence that has been done to people of color around the world came with a set of intellectual tools employed by colonizers that have permeated every aspect of every social structure that has been made ever since.

So when we say “land back,” we’re saying: let’s bring that other system of cosmologies and understandings and relationships back into our consciousness as settlers, because we know that that will give us different outcomes. When we are honoring each other, honoring the water, honoring the soil, honoring the web of life and understanding how we are a part of all of it, then we get different outcomes, even as guests on somebody else’s land.

That work also then resituates the power dynamic of the farmers and the workers who are settlers, so that we are working under the Indigenous people of the land and working together with them. We are working with the understanding that their sovereignty is critical in the work that we’re doing. It has to start there, because the soil is alive. If we understand that the soil is made of the bodies and the beings that have been here for tens of thousands of years, which includes the Indigenous people, we understand that the soil knows what happened here. The soil is missing the language and the songs and the way in which it was honored. That is part of the musical work that we are doing. This is where being an artist is actually really critical, because what we’re doing isn’t simply looking at data points; it’s reawakening our relationships. Those relationships, to me, are very musical.

AMS:

Could you expand a little on how the Indigenous way of relationship between humans and the Earth can extend to address the wider issues of societal health and the climate crisis?

RM:

If we moved all the land back to Indigenous people and they could assert their sovereignty over all the land, just in the United States, we would probably have much more rapid action on climate change than we have right now. We definitely would. Indigenous grandmothers running pipeline resistance have cut greenhouse gases by 25 percent—which is way more than anything that any policy that has come out of the United States or Canada.

This is not to say that there are not problematic dynamics among different Indigenous groups or with specific people, but it’s to understand the systems of knowledge, which are primarily carried by women. This is why the work of rematriation is so important, which is reasserting the women’s places of authority in tending land, tending food, tending soil, tending water and caring for these things. Because these entities are critical for everybody’s health. When we tend to do something that’s good for everybody, good health emerges as a phenomenon. It is an emergent phenomenon. It’s not a characteristic of one person or one thing. It’s an emergent property of systems working well together. We know that especially in this land, it’s the Indigenous women who are really carrying that work forward.

AMS:

You mentioned that DMC started last year in 2021. How did the pandemic affect or intersect with the beginnings of the work you’re doing there?

RM:

For probably eight or nine years, these ideas have been sitting in me as something I knew we should do… and then with the pandemic it was like, “We need to do this right now. We absolutely need to do this.”

Sixty-seven percent of people who were coming into the ICU with severe COVID were malnourished when they hit the door. When we look at the injustices of who’s getting sick and how people are getting sick, we know that it’s Black and brown people. We know that it’s people who are suffering under the brunt of social oppression from colonial structures.

How can we create spaces where those structures are dissolved, dismantled and rearranged? That’s the work that we are doing with the Deep Medicine Circle.

AMS:

I am curious to hear a little bit about your work as a co-investigator on the Justice Study, looking at the links between police violence and health outcomes, especially in Black and brown and Indigenous communities, as well as your other medical research looking into how social structures influence health.

RM:

Well, first, racist police violence is an urgent public health crisis. When there is no justice for that violence, the community’s health suffers exponentially. That wasn’t a surprise. The surprise for me was that everyone is being traumatized by racist police violence. Whether you’re white, Black, brown or Asian, everyone was experiencing trauma through seeing these videos of state execution happening in the streets. It amounts to extrajudicial execution.

The police are causing widespread trauma. When you look at that, you think—what is a society that has chosen to prioritize private property? Say someone was stealing a car, or we thought they were going to steal something or do something illegal. There is an insistence on policing instead of providing mental health support and the resources people need to succeed and to thrive.

And it’s not just policing that’s the problem. If you look at Oakland right now, the school district board is trying to shut down eight schools and merge several more, and they’re predominantly Black and brown schools. These are the people who have been most impacted by COVID. These are the children who are missing their family members from COVID. These are the children of essential workers, who’ve been sickened and lost income from COVID. Those are the schools we’re going to close? Really? That’s the kind of ongoing racist violence that’s the problem. The lack of justice through all of these government and social institutions, created through colonial capitalism, is part of the same injury structure affecting people of color.

And it is not just people of color, but also poor white people—I say that, because the Black Panthers were wise enough to work together with poor white people, and to really identify the problem. The problem isn’t one person; the problem isn’t even a group of people. The problem is the racist and classist structures that were and are created to keep property in the hands of some people, and to withhold the rights of other people. That has been made no more obvious than during the COVID pandemic when the rhetoric is like, “Get yourselves back to work, get your kids back in school—and there are no masks and no air filtration.” We’ve seen who has gotten sick [and the racial disparities relating to access to social benefits and health care during COVID].

Unfortunately, it’s going to take us years to understand COVID. It is not an upper respiratory virus. It is a cardiovascular virus. It has affected the pancreas. It has affected the brain. It will take us years to understand what the exact impact of these infections is, especially on people who are already crippled through chronic social oppression in the United States.

This work is intersectional. It’s along all of these axes and requires understanding the roots of policing: the slave patrols, returning runaway slaves and keeping the natives under wraps. These are the roots of policing in the United States. Should we be shocked that we’re seeing disproportionate killing of Black and Indigenous people by the police? No, this is what they were designed to do.

Why do we tolerate it? That’s the question. Why do we accept that, rather than insist upon the Black New Deal, the Red Deal or the Green New Deal—which are frameworks of justice and reparations? They are frameworks of advancing an economy of care for one another and for the Earth. That’s really where we’re at right now. We won’t actually have peace until we all collectively demand it, until that’s where we want to go.

AMS:

You’ve spoken about decolonizing food and wellness and our relationships with each other and the Earth. Could you expand a bit on your work around decolonizing medicine, and specifically your work with the Dakota and Lakota tribes at Standing Rock?

RM:

When we understand that medicine was a part of the trifecta of colonization (as I mentioned: militaries, medics and missionaries), we have to understand that medicine itself is infected with the same racial and sexist craziness as the rest of our world.

There was a recent study that showed that women who were operated on by male surgeons were 32 percent more likely to die than women who had female surgeons. But when female surgeons operated on men or women, there was no difference in outcome based on the patient’s gender. Another way of framing this is: neglect on the part of male doctors is leading to the death of women, and not men. But no one is really talking about this or changing it.

It’s the same with Black women dying of perinatal complications. Black mothers giving birth in New York are 12 times more likely to die than their white counterparts. That’s not an error, that’s not a mistake. That is built and baked into the system.

If we want a medicine that is just, if we want a medicine that upholds our values and perspectives and traditions and is understanding of who we are and why we are sick, then we must decolonize the very structures of medicine. That work is happening in front-line communities, in the pipeline resistance camp with our Indigenous community members. It is also happening in farmworker communities. It’s happening in freedom clinics. It’s happening in many different spaces where the relationships that modern medicine has created are being put on trial and obliterated. This is because they’re not serving the people who are suffering the most under the violence that modern medicine has brought, which is colonialism.

AMS:

Circling back to the Deep Medicine Circle: how can people support this work, and how might other communities use this example to launch similar work in their own regions?

RM:

What we’re doing over the next three years is creating a toolkit. We’re identifying groups around the country and around the planet who could partner in the ways that we have with landowners, Indigenous people, farmers and municipalities to redefine the food system locally. We would like to convene those groups in 2025 down at our farm and do a sharing of this toolkit. It will include everything from policy, to training, to sharing how we overcame certain obstacles and hurdles and how this work has been growing.

Our hope is that this toolkit can spread like seeds. We don’t have any interest in being the organization that coordinates with people and organizations all across the country. We don’t want to colonize through this model. We want to share it as an example and have people locally adopt it and run with it.

In every urban and peri-urban environment around the country, this work can secure our climate and food systems. It can make seeds resilient to climate change. It can increase the sovereignty of food systems in those peri-urban and urban environments. It can bridge the urban-rural divide. It can get land access secured for Black, Indigenous and brown people who have historically been pushed off land and are limited in their access to it.

It can also reframe farming as an act of care, which would automatically make the fossil fuel-based input that conventional agriculture relies upon obsolete. We don’t need them. We don’t use them. It would give average, everyday people the experience of zero-barrier access to the most beautiful, healthy, organic food you could imagine. That medicine is something that’s available to all.

We’re definitely fundraising right now. We’re also looking and tapping into the policy work around how to get this funded, the way that our streetlights are funded, the way that our Muni drivers are funded, so that this becomes an expectation of civil society.

I think it starts with support from philanthropists, and we’ve been very grateful for the generous support we’ve received. We are continuing to raise funds for the work we do in DMC. When we get the toolkits out, then we start to really help people tap into those spaces of funding from a policy perspective. That will keep this work growing in scale. Not scale in terms of getting larger in scale, but in terms of staying small and replicating, which is what ecological farmers do around the world.

Author Bio: April M. Short is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California’s weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon and many others.

Steven Stroud says when he was released from prison in 2020, where he’d wound up due to becoming addicted to doctor-prescribed opioids and eventually heroin, the Portland, Oregon, streets where he grew up had changed. The pandemic had shut down most of the already sparse jobs he would have potentially been able to pursue, and he ended up without work or a place to live.

Stroud spoke in an interview with Greg Bennick posted on SoundCloud in November 2021 about how people living on the streets in Portland now had to contend with a near-constant militarized police presence, which developed in response to the city’s Black Lives Matter protests (Note: the interview also details Stroud’s youth as a skinhead, and how he eventually left this hate-filled existence behind and spent a period of time speaking out and educating people against white supremacist groups). Stroud shares in the interview that he met Bennick when a few people walking past noticed him and handed him a sandwich. These were volunteers with the Portland Mutual Aid Network (PMAN), which was formed in 2020 by a group of friends who noticed the impact of police on houseless residents of the city while participating in the Black Lives Matter protests.

Stroud’s progression toward experiencing homelessness is sadly not all too unique in the U.S. Homelessness was already a serious issue, and increasing in many places across the U.S. prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The economic and physical stresses of the pandemic particularly in 2020 compounded many of the issues that typically lead to homelessness, including unemployment and strain on access to basic resources.

The risks and stresses to people experiencing homelessness during the pandemic increase during winter, particularly in damp, cold areas like the Pacific Northwest. Exposure to the elements can mean hypothermia and sometimes death for people experiencing homelessness.

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In response to this reality, PMAN is collaborating with a number of other community volunteers and mutual aid groups on a winter drive effort to collect tents, sleeping bags and other gear to support neighbors experiencing homelessness. Several Portland businesses have signed onto the effort as drop-off locations.

One such business is the sandwich restaurant and pub Bunk Bar, where Kelsey Anderson, a kitchen manager, says she feels fortunate to work with people who share her interest in supporting underserved communities via mutual aid efforts. She notes that everything brought into any of the drop-off sites “is sorted and distributed directly into the hands and homes of people who have a need for it by other working-class people, almost immediately.”

“We believe caring for each other and supporting people while in a system that pits us against each other is an inherently important and radical act,” she says. “This is particularly clear in the cold months and whilst still in the throes of a pandemic. I want people to understand their contributions to this drive can save a life. Every winter, humans in Portland and all over the country are abandoned outside, and there is absolutely no—absolutely no—justification for that.”

She notes that many mutual aid groups and organizers have collaborated on winter drive efforts recently to support and work with neighbors living outdoors.

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“I hope more people will begin to see people who live outdoors as their neighbors, and as people that have just as much value as anyone else in their lives, instead of possibly someone they think they can’t relate to,” she says. “I’d like to encourage people to try and meet their outdoor neighbors, to do their own clothes drives, to feel free and emboldened to work in their communities with people that live in them. ‘Social solidarity not charity’ is a commonly used phrase when discussing mutual aid. We are caring for each other as an equal community, instead of relying on top-down organized philanthropy that can tend to ostracize.”

A volunteer with PMAN who has participated in mutual aid efforts for 30 years and asked to remain anonymous said they do so because the official systems in place to support people are inadequate.

“We need to be organizing as community members to [support] ourselves,” they said. “[PMAN] started in early June of 2020 in order to support downtown Portland houseless people who were being assaulted by police response to protesters. We had been going downtown participating in the protests and one night handed two men on the street a banana and a bottle of water while we were retreating from a tear gas attack. We stopped and talked to them, and heard what they were facing nightly, and asked what they needed.”

The interaction, they say, caused a shift in the focus of their activism, from primarily participating in the protests to taking direct action on the behalf of those in need. That day, a regular mission to support people living on the streets started, and it has stayed consistent each week since, the volunteer said.

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“The city government in Portland pays good lip service to supporting houseless initiatives, but realistically what they support is sweeping people off the streets and making sure that they are not seen, heard, or endured,” the volunteer said.

“It would be an exaggeration to suggest that there are no services available, but it would be entirely accurate that these services are the pieces and scraps left behind after a system rooted in profit and advancement has had their fill at the table.”

The volunteer said this is part of why mutual aid is not only helpful but necessary.

“Mutual aid is inherently political, and inherently socially driven,” they said. “If we wait for protection from the police, we won’t get it. If we wait for salvation from the government, we won’t get it. And if we wait for solutions from the failed system in place, we won’t get it.… Think of mutual aid as action plus solidarity-based support networks which are community-driven. The core tenet is of uniting with, supporting, and upholding those who otherwise would have to fend for themselves, and instead doing it together, on the terms of those who are oppressed.”

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They note that in preparation for winter, Portland’s many mutual aid groups are actively gathering hats, gloves, hand warmers, sleeping bags, blankets, coats, tents and scarves. If someone wants to get involved in their local mutual aid efforts, the volunteer says the best thing to do is to look up the mutual aid groups nearby, and assess “which speaks to them in terms of the work they are doing and how people want to get involved.”

“Ours is a small but very consistent group,” the volunteer said. “Other groups are larger and more thorough in their areas of focus. If people want to support what we are doing, they can read more about mutual aid and about us at our Instagram @portlandmutualaid or via the web at portlandmutualaidnetwork.com. We can direct people to other groups if they are interested in aspects of community work where we aren’t currently focused.”

If someone wanted to start a mutual aid group, the volunteer says step one would be to assess need around them.

“Step two is to further determine the people you will work for and why, and the people you will work with,” they said. “Step three is to strategize on the terms of the people you are working for. You are not doing charity. You are trying to rebuild and build alternatives to the systems in place which are failing otherwise.… Let others—specifically those you work for—speak and be heard. We can easily fall into an unfortunate narrative rooted in comfort and privilege when we stop listening… Mutual aid is constantly in flux and flow, but directed toward cooperation. Charity is one-way. Mutual aid is an experience of solidarity.”

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April M. Short is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California’s weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon and many others.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

For more than 100 years, public library systems throughout the U.S. have charged late fees for books and other materials returned past their due dates. This policy primarily impacts the disenfranchised, low-income communities that the modern public library system is intended to serve in the first place—and most often affects people of color, according to an article published by the Urban Libraries Council. The article, written by Katherine Carter and Denise Belser of the National League of Cities, notes:

"Research shows that communities of color are more likely to be impacted by unpaid library fees and are grappling with a higher percentage of suspended library cards."

In response to the inequalities created by the late fee policy, a Fine Free movement has been gaining traction, and libraries across the U.S. have been eliminating the late fee policy over the last few years, as detailed by Deborah Fallows in the Atlantic in 2020.

Now, the largest public library system in the country has followed suit. As of October 5, all three public library systems in New York City—Brooklyn Public Library, New York Public Library and Queens Public Library—eliminated "late fines on books and other circulating materials." The New York libraries' decision comes in the wake of other major cities that have gone fine-free, including San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami-Dade, Seattle and Dallas. "New York City's [library] systems represent the largest municipality to eliminate fines," according to a press release by the Brooklyn Public Library.

Under the new system, a replacement fee will still apply to lost items. According to the press release, an item will be considered "lost after being overdue for about one month. If materials are returned, however, no fees will apply." Under the former system, any library-goer with more than $15 in late fines would have their library card blocked. This is no longer the case.

As of October 5 (the date of the NYC libraries' joint announcement), the library systems estimated 400,000 New Yorkers had blocked library cards—and more than half of those with blocked cards live in high-need communities, according to statistics gathered by the libraries and shared in the press release.

Nick Higgins, the chief librarian for the Brooklyn Public Library system, says the decision to end late fines was a long time coming. He says the conversation was brewing for several years before the three large and complex library systems in New York City were able to come together in unison around the decision.

"The conversation around [being a] fine-free [city] has been bubbling up for a long time, always couched in this idea of equity and access for people," Higgins says. "It just took a little while to build the case. It's a really complex system [and] one library system couldn't really go out on their own. We wanted it to be a fine-free city for people who were accessing libraries across the five boroughs."

The revenue brought in by late fees is not insignificant. The Brooklyn Public Library alone has typically accrued anywhere between $600,000 and $800,000 annually in late fees, Higgins says.

"It's a form of revenue that a lot of public libraries have depended on since their beginnings, but it isn't a great [form of revenue]," he says. "That's why we changed it. We shouldn't be getting revenue from folks who need our resources just by virtue of their lives being complicated or difficult… we shouldn't be deriving revenue from them. But there is a tangible loss, so it has to be made up somewhere."

Higgins says that for the Brooklyn Public Library, the challenge now is to adjust fundraising efforts so that it is focused on maintaining or expanding their collections of books and other materials.

"The revenue that we get from late fines was going right back into supporting the collections, so if our collection budget is, say, $10 million a year, and we are losing $600,00 to $800,000 of that because of canceling fines, we're going to take a hit. Our eyes are wide open on this… but we'll just get creative in figuring out ways to generate some fundraising around it to make up for that loss."

Higgins notes that in 2020, during the onset of the ongoing pandemic, the library systems in New York already temporarily canceled late fines, "because obviously it was just the right thing to do. People were losing their homes and dealing with all sorts of things, and the library fines should be the last thing on their minds."

He says in some way the emergency of the pandemic, as well as the Black Lives Matter movement—and all that rose to the surface throughout 2020 in society—brought to light underlying and preexisting realities and challenges many library-goers (and people in general) have long faced.

"I think we came to the decision to eliminate late fines possibly faster because of [the pandemic and the events of 2020], although we did have people who have been building the case for a few years now," Higgins says. "Perhaps the pandemic—and more and more people waking up to the systemic racism that has been around for a long time (and that a lot of people already knew about and lived with, but [which] many people just woke up to)—maybe that all accelerated the process for us going fine-free, and helped some of the stakeholders understand that the equity argument for going fine-free was a good one."

He notes that the libraries were able to gather statistics about who was most impacted by late fines, based on addresses collected with library registration information. Based on the collection of this data, libraries were able to calculate that most of the people who were shouldering late fines throughout New York City, lived in neighborhoods that have historically had double-digit unemployment rates, and also were people who belonged to communities where primarily people of color live.

These statistics based on address information reveal some stark inequities. They show that branches of the New York Public Library in high-needs communities with a median household income below $50,000 "accounted for six times the number of blocked patrons as others," said the press release from the Brooklyn Public Library.

The press release further noted that "[t]he 10 branches with the highest percentage of blocked cards are all in high needs communities, and each have one in five cardholders blocked. In the Queens Public Library system, the communities with the highest number of blocked cards—Corona, Jamaica, Far Rockaway, and Elmhurst—all have median incomes well below the borough average."

Similar statistics were reported for the Brooklyn Public Library, where library branches "with the highest percentage of blocked cards [were] in neighborhoods where more than 20 percent of households live below the poverty level."

Across the board, the trend was exaggerated for youth. Children and teens 17 and under made up 30 percent of blocked library accounts in Brooklyn, and in Queens, 65 percent of blocked accounts belonged to kids of the same age group.

A citywide assessment of blocked cards completed in 2017 found that 80 percent of blocked youth cards were located in low-income communities, as reported in the press release.

"I'm hopeful that us going fine-free fundamentally changes our relationships with the public, in a way that I hope signals that we're here for everyone, and that people don't have to be afraid to come into the library and belong to the library community because of that 50 cent charge on the Stephen King book that they took out when they were in fourth grade," Higgins says.

Higgins says going fine-free is aligned with the kinds of institutions libraries set out to be in the first place.

"We talk about ourselves as the most democratic, accessible, inclusive institutions in the city or anywhere, and we pride ourselves on being an anchor of community problem-solving, community engagement, places where people can come in from all different backgrounds and experiences and build relationships, and just access all of these shared resources for free," he says. "Having a penalty system folded into that experience is antithetical to our values and our principles—for both access and inclusion—and being free and accessible to everyone in our communities."

April M. Short is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California's weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon and many others.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

As the human-caused planetary destruction and resulting climate crisis worsens, resources like drinking water dwindle and unsustainable modes of life—like our giant food systems—fray and weaken, the ongoing pandemic has further exasperated and exemplified these environmental and social destructions. The many oppressive and racist systems, preconceived notions held about how our society sustains itself, continue to crumble.

In this moment of upheaval, so much is murky, but what is clear is this: our ways of living must change. Local, self-regenerative and community-oriented economies are lighting the way to a more practical, feasible and sustainable future.

"Never before has the question, 'What comes next?' been asked so urgently," states a narrator, as images of families protesting salmon farms, people wearing face masks, and devastating wildfires all flash across the screen. These images are part of a video announcing the second annual Festival of What Works—a free access ($0-$100 sliding scale) online event dedicated to locally based solutions to global problems, organized by the eco-trust network Salmon Nation based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

In the bioregion that stretches from Northern California to the North Slope of Alaska, known by many Indigenous groups as "Salmon Nation," there is an upswell of creative solutions to heal many of the problems facing humanity today.

The eco-trust Salmon Nation, which has adopted this name, works with forward-thinking Indigenous leaders, activists, scientists, healers and artists to highlight some of the innovations in sustainability, collaboration and alternative methods of doing business that are happening in the region. Particularly, they look for models and examples that might be replicated and expanded upon around the world.

The second annual Festival of What Works from November 2-7 comes with a deep awareness of the dire state of global realities and the need for locally oriented solutions that are required to address them. The festival, which includes online panel discussions, workshops and film screening, aims to provide replicable models that can be adopted universally, not only in the bioregion but also in other regions, with the potential to help tackle global issues.

In an interview with the Independent Media Institute's April M. Short, Salmon Nation's co-creator Ian Gill and Festival of What Works director, or 'festivator,' Kel Moody shared insights and inspirations behind the Festival of What Works, and the project of finding replicable, local solutions to global problems that is Salmon Nation.

April M. Short: How did the concept for a "Festival of What Works," which is focused on replicable ideas for living in-place, first emerge, and how has it evolved to respond to the current historical moment (with the ongoing pandemic, the current climate realities, and so on)?

Ian Gill: Almost exactly two years ago, about 40 people from the Salmon Nation bioregion got together in Sitka, Alaska, to kick around the idea of a new initiative to really accelerate the movement toward more regenerative ways of living and being in the world. Basically, we wanted to float the idea of a nature state that ignores administrative boundaries and actually encourages new forms of social, cultural and economic development that follow nature's lead.

Our initial motivation was the threat of climate change, and the idea that on-the-ground responses to the effects of climate change were going to happen where [these] effects are being felt the most.

That national or state or provincial governments weren't going to solve problems at the community level. So [the people who had gathered in Sitka] assembled some doers and shakers from California to Alaska and each person said yes, we need to collaborate and share success stories and figure this out for ourselves, and we need a lot more people to join us. Then, we'd barely said goodbye to each other and the pandemic hit—which made the work seem so much more urgent.

We had always intended to reconvene after Sitka, and to invite more people to join us. Reconvening in person proved impossible, obviously, but gathering online—and focusing on what works—actually enabled us to expand the conversation well beyond what a physical convening would have allowed. We were thrilled that thousands of people answered the call.

Kel Moody: We've found that people are very interested in talking about what works in a world dominated by doom and gloom. They're not only interested in sharing their stories but also in connecting with other people across the bioregion working in many different ways toward the goal of finding ways to live well in-place.

There are a seemingly endless amount of stories about people with replicable models that can be tailored to many different communities. The power comes from sharing those models, building relationships and empowering people to take action in their own communities.

AS: What is different about this year's Festival of What Works compared to the inaugural event in 2020?

KM: This year we are diving deeper into some topics from [2020], introducing some new topics and bringing in more focus on the audience integrating what we are sharing with them. It is one thing to hear a bunch of amazing stories and get excited by all the good work happening in our bioregion. It is another thing to integrate what you have learned and take some action in your community.

We are hosting daily sessions called Patterns and Possibilities to encourage just that. We will be hosting this year's festival directly on the website, which should make it easier for people to find all the sessions and watch them even after they have [been] aired live. Plus, we will have some on-demand content that people can watch on their own time.

AS: Do you anticipate people from around the world in regions beyond Salmon Nation to attend and/or be inspired by the projects and people featured in this festival?

IG: In 2020, we had folks from all over the world tune in to different events at the festival. We hope that will happen again this year. We know there are aligned communities in places as diverse as Kenya, Hungary, Costa Rica, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, the United Kingdom, Australia… and in different regions in the U.S. We all have a lot to learn from each other, and it is our hope that what we learn in Salmon Nation is shareable, through the festival, and also across networks worldwide that are looking to each other for solutions to what are, after all, problems we all share.

AS: Are there particular projects or individuals that you found to be especially inspiring this year, and if so will you elaborate on this a bit?

KM: Gosh, it is hard to choose as they are all so inspiring. One [story] that has really stood out to me is the story of Paradise, California. They suffered a near-complete loss of their town to a wildfire in 2018, something that much of [the Salmon Nation] bioregion is dealing with at an increasingly alarming rate. Instead of giving up on the community, [the residents of Paradise] decided to take the opportunity to rebuild with intention. One of their community members who is leading the redevelopment is hosting a workshop on how to approach disaster preparedness and response as a community.

IG: It is increasingly obvious that communities want a lot more control over their governance. Part of this is the movement toward decolonization, which is long overdue. But also it's because large institutions—government, commercial, legal, philanthropic, you name it—are so unresponsive to calls for change. So efforts like those of the Haida and Haíɫzaqv nations on the British Columbia coast to write and implement their own constitutions [are] hugely inspiring and replicable.

AS: Would you speak about why the festival highlights healers, artists and culture-bearers, in addition to activists, Indigenous leaders, scientists and other professionals?

IG: We focus on what we call "edge" communities. So much innovation and inspiration emerges from the work of artists and people who are used to making do with little access to financial capital, but [have] a lot of access to natural capital and to knowledge that comes from the lands and waters upon which we all depend. And when it comes to repairing the harm we have done to our natural systems, Indigenous people in particular have long, hard-earned experiences about being in good relationships with nature. Climate change, the pandemic—these are just newer expressions of trauma that we are all experiencing. Healers can help us to see that and to see ways through it.

AS: What have been the greatest challenges as far as organizing the festival, or more generally for Salmon Nation?

KM: Through the festival, we are trying to create a space for everyone in the bioregion (and beyond). That includes people with sometimes opposing views and beliefs, which is a precarious place to be if not done thoughtfully. We want to unite people around their shared sense of place, while honoring their unique identities. That is a big challenge, but when we focus on solutions and recognize that there is a lot of heart in this work, it tends to reduce tensions that may have been present otherwise.

We also have community guidelines for festival speakers and attendees as well as a PIER (process, integrate, express, reconnect) Support Team for people to connect with if something comes up during the festival that they need to discuss with someone.

This ensures we have some agreements to point to for how we are asking people to show up in the space and provides a pathway for accountability.

Another balance we try to strike is that we want to support the speakers [during Festival of What Works] and offer them a beneficial experience, while also not asking too much of these incredibly busy people. They are all giving everything they have to their communities, so we have to make sure this is going to be additive for them and not extractive.

In addition to the honorarium that each speaker is paid, we try to make sure there are also non-monetary benefits they receive from their participation in the festival, which might be connections, community-building, or other resources.

AS: What are some of the results or actions that came out of the last festival in 2020, and anything else you want to share about Salmon Nation's prior work?

IG: We were beyond thrilled that so many people turned up at the festival last year, but it's not really about numbers. It's about having found a willingness, indeed, almost a hunger to share ideas that you pretty much won't see in mainstream media because the world is mostly in thrall to a narrative of dysfunction and despair.

That might serve the interests of politicians and big business, but it doesn't do much for people trying to make sense of their world and to contribute to a better one. What we have discovered is that solutions are out there—it's just that someone needs to ask the W questions: who, what, where, why, when? And then share like crazy.

KM: There were a surprising number of connections that people built out of the festival. I personally made a lot of friends, both in speakers and the audience, but there were more than friendships formed. There were a few partnerships that came out of the festival and I still hear about people's connections they made leading them in directions that could have only been possible because of the festival. These things are hard to measure and capture, but they are definitely happening.

AS: Why is it important to you to highlight the kind of work that is featured in the festival, especially right now?

IG: Two reasons, both to do with time. One is immediate: we need to answer urgent questions about how to get failing institutions [in the bioregion and beyond] to take climate change as seriously as they need to.

For now at least, we are stuck in systems and we need to disrupt them enough to get proper attention paid to what a friend of ours calls the fierce urgency of now.

Longer-term, as in several generations out, humanity will need a very different relationship between people and the planet. So we need to lay the foundations for that right away, to give those who come after us something to build on and to leave a legacy of recognition that current generations got a lot of things wrong, and had the courage to do their part to start on a different path.

AS: If people could walk away from the festival with one single understanding, what would that ideally be?

IG: That a nature state is not only possible, it already exists. People just need to stop attacking the planet and to allow the planet to provide for their needs.

KM: That each one of us has the ability to make a positive contribution to the place we love. And the impact of each person's contributions, when looked at as a whole, is greater than the sum of its parts.

AS: What are Salmon Nation's future plans, goals and main objectives for projects going into 2022 and beyond?

IG: The festival is a production of the Magic Canoe, which is our storytelling vehicle at Salmon Nation. We want more paddlers in the Magic Canoe, more people inspired to do the work to leave our part of the world better than we found it.

So we need to share a lot more stories from the edge, and inspire a movement toward the creation of nature states here and around the world. Practically, we want to tell more stories, get capital to edge entrepreneurs and commercial expressions of regenerative practices that provide essential human services that can be accessed by everyone in Salmon Nation. And, if the pandemic truly loosens its grip, we want to get out there again, to have lots of festivals in lots of places where we can celebrate what's good out there.

AS: Anything else you'd like to share about the festival, Salmon Nation or otherwise?

KM: We worked with an incredible planning committee of people from across the bioregion to source these ideas. These are not just our ideas, they are ideas from people out there doing the actual work. Although it would be nearly impossible for our program to be a comprehensive look at the bioregion, we challenged ourselves to select a diverse representation of ideas, people and methods to show what it looks like to live well in-place.

April M. Short is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California's weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon and many others.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

In any given U.S. city, on any given night, chances are that dumpsters are sitting full of perfectly good food discarded by grocery stores, hotels and restaurants—while people just a few miles away struggle to get enough food on their plates. Even though there is plenty of food in the U.S., many Americans still continue to go hungry.

Between 30 and 40 percent of the food supply in the U.S. is wasted, according to estimates from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service. Food deserts exist within the nation's urban centers, and according to the USDA's latest Household Food Security in the United States report published in September 2020, more than 35 million people in the United States experienced hunger in 2019. Households with children were significantly more likely to experience food insecurity, and even before the coronavirus pandemic, more than 10 million children lived in food-insecure households according to the report.

Hunger was already a serious issue in the U.S. prior to COVID-19, and the situation has gotten worse due to the economic impacts of the pandemic. Many businesses have been forced to shut down since March 2020 as a result of these ongoing economic impacts, which has displaced millions of workers. The U.S. unemployment rates have skyrocketed in comparison to the figures before the pandemic.

While many of the numbers are still being tallied, the nonprofit Feeding America estimated that 45 million people "may have experienced food insecurity in 2020" because of the coronavirus pandemic. Volunteers in cities around the country have been implementing emergency food drives, free grocery deliveries and mutual aid projects like community free-food fridges to feed their neighbors since early 2020. Notably, it is individual community members, not the government nor large institutions, who are at the forefront of the effort to help people who are facing food insecurity.

In Los Angeles, a series of projects powered primarily by volunteers have been working to connect hungry people with excess food that would otherwise be wasted—an effort that has doubled down since the beginning of the pandemic.

Genevieve Riutort, deputy director of LA's Westside Food Bank, says the need for food assistance doubled in 2008 and had just begun to return to pre-recession levels when COVID-19 hit.

"The biggest change now is that in addition to low-income families already needing food assistance, so many local people who had never before needed help—parents and children, homebound seniors, people working in the entertainment industry, gig workers, housekeepers and custodians, restaurant workers, college students and veterans—now rely on the food assistance network to feed their families," she says. "Some of our member agencies, those that were run mainly by older volunteers, had to close [due to the pandemic], and many of the new programs are staffed by new volunteers who are now starting to return to their jobs. Some are operating out of sites that may no longer be available as businesses reopen."

In addition to working with member agencies, the food bank has also been supporting local community-led programs in an effort to mitigate the increased need for food assistance and provides food to more than 60 local food programs. Among them is a volunteer-based community food distribution program, Nourish LA, which was founded by Natalie Flores of West Los Angeles to meet the stark increase in food insecurity due to the outbreak of the pandemic. Nourish LA connects people in need of food with establishments that have excess food to offer. They collect donations from farms, community trees and gardens, and they intercept food from supermarkets that would have otherwise been thrown out. She says the need to connect hungry people with food, which LA has in excess, remains critical even after more than a year since the pandemic began in March 2020.

"It's still an urgent need," Flores says. "Just because one parent has gone back to work doesn't mean it's enough because our cost of living is so high. People are trying to cut costs however they can… We're actually finding that we're busier now [as] more people have access to us [Nourish LA]."

The organization gets the word out about what they're offering through case managers and local schools, as well as area flyers and online outreach.

"We really try to put the word out to make sure that people who are really in need can come and get some food," she says.

The idea to start Nourish LA was sparked by a moms group Flores was part of on Facebook.

"I'm a mom of a three-year-old… and I was just seeing so many mothers [in the Facebook group forum] asking for help, whether it was help buying their family a pizza or buying groceries, and I just thought it was absurd," she says. "My background is in urban farming and waste management, so I had already come to find that there's a ton of food waste going on in the city and it's not being mitigated or shared properly with the people who need it. For example, every major grocery store generates an insane amount of food waste."

According to the USDA's Economic Research Service, food waste equated to about "133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food in 2010." That estimated 30-40 percent of the food in America that gets wasted, the USDA points out, negatively impacts society. The USDA website states:

"Wholesome food that could have helped feed families in need is sent to landfills. Land, water, labor, energy and other inputs are used in producing, processing, transporting, preparing, storing, and disposing of discarded food."

The issue of hunger in America is not one of food scarcity, but of distribution and access. The challenge comes in connecting people who need food with the excess food that exists—and is likely to be wasted.

Because of her background, Flores says she knew that the systems required to redistribute the wasted food in her area to the people who could use it were not in place. So, she began partnering with various organizations in her area—from restaurants and farms to nonprofits, to the local Westside Food Bank.

Riutort of the Westside Food Bank says the need for food assistance reached a record high level when the pandemic began.

"[The pandemic] created food insecurity for tens of thousands of additional households in our service practically overnight," she says. "To help meet this unprecedented surge in need, several grassroots food distribution [programs] like Nourish LA sprung up, and agencies that previously did not have food programs, like YMCAs, also began distributing food."

The Westside Food Bank supports these new distribution programs by providing them with free, nutritious food from their warehouse each week. Riutort says beginning in March 2020, the Westside Food Bank doubled its wholesale food purchases and increased the amount of food it distributed to member agencies as well as new community partners.

"Programs like Nourish LA are reaching people who need food assistance for the first time because of the pandemic, and truly focus on a neighbor helping neighbor model that reduces stigma, encourages participation among immigrant communities, and focuses on providing nutritious and culturally appropriate foods," she says.

Riutort notes that for many, the impacts of the pandemic will be long-term when it comes to food insecurity. While a small number of people who lost their jobs and sought food assistance for the first time will be back on their feet soon, she says many thousands of local households will face up to a decade of food insecurity after having depleted their savings, accumulated debt and cashed out retirement plans. With the rent relief and eviction moratoriums put into place in response to the pandemic likely to expire soon, "many face the imminent threat of becoming homeless," Riutort says.

"The pandemic has changed the face of food assistance for years to come," she says. "We are concerned that as the health crisis eases, we may see a reduction in community support for food programs. We are working to keep people informed about the ongoing need to support local food assistance programs. We also intend to maintain our higher level of food purchasing and distribution for the next several years to better meet the local needs. We tailor our food purchasing based on the best available wholesale prices and the specific nutritional and cultural needs of our community."

Starting a Local Food Assistance Program

Many people who live in urban centers may not realize that there are urban food deserts in their area, or that the need for community donations and food distribution is widespread in most U.S. cities. Riutort says Westside Food Bank's service area, for example, which encompasses about one-tenth of Los Angeles County and houses "well over a million residents, has a reputation of being a wealthy area. However, [many households can barely afford] the cost of living in the area, which is particularly high."

"The rate of food insecurity in our area matches the national average with one in six households with children lacking enough food on a regular basis," Riutort says. "That figure is even higher among Black and Latino households… Prior to COVID-19, our food was reaching about 110,000 people annually; now we are nourishing more than 200,000 local people, nearly half of whom are children."

Flores says if someone wants to start something similar to Nourish LA in their own area, partnering with local churches is the easiest route.

"This is because you need refrigeration, and a parking lot—and you need space," she says. The other reason, she says, is that churches already have their own nonprofit number, and having nonprofit status is key to collecting food donations and giving food away. The "Good Samaritan Act provides liability protection for food donations," according to a blog on the USDA website, and requires a third-party nonprofit in order to establish this protection. This protection incentivizes businesses like restaurants and grocery stores to donate their excess food.

"Often businesses will be concerned with, 'What if somebody gets sick [after consuming the food]?' and the nonprofit status [entity] acts as a third party so that stores aren't liable for the food anymore," she explains. "Once food is given off to a third party, stores [or individuals or other businesses] don't have liability relating to this food."

"I began by casting a big net," Flores says, noting that she had recently learned about FoodCycle LA, which works to prevent food from major grocery stores from going to the landfill.

Nourish LA now partners with FoodCycle LA in addition to a number of other local programs. Additionally, Flores had already worked with the Westside Food Bank and Food Forward, which focuses on gleaning surplus fruit and veggies.

"I called on my network and I told people, 'I want to create a food drive to help people in need gain access to healthy food,'" she says. The groups she contacted were immediately on board.

Flores made a flyer for an event and got friends and neighbors together for the effort. They recycled the plastic and paper bags that had been sitting in their pantries and used them to pack up healthy food products, fruits and veggies that were donated, to distribute to neighbors. In their first event, they helped 60 families and ran out of food in an hour. Next, she called up a friend who owns the local restaurant the Wood Cafe and asked to host an event there. Being a restaurant, the Wood Cafe was able to get a hold of a significant amount of food donations. Even so, the event ran out of food in 20 minutes.

"I knew that we had to expand, and we had to reach more people," she says, because "I knew there was more food" being needlessly wasted.

Nourish LA and its partners put the call out to people to glean the fruits from their trees—all the grapefruits, lemons, avocados and oranges (which are ample in LA most of the year)—and donate them.

"Sometimes there are elders who own parcels of land that have fruit trees, and they don't have the energy or the capacity to harvest them, but we'll harvest them. We'll go there and talk to them, and they almost always say yes. I always tell people, please do not sit on that fruit. It's not good for your trees, and you can feed people [with the fruit]."

In addition to the fruit, donations from restaurants, grocery stores and other businesses, Nourish LA also began to receive canned foods, dry goods and other donations from local households. They expanded the call for volunteers and eventually gained traction.

"First we were reaching 70 people, then 100, then 1,000," says Flores.

Now, they reach about 3,000 people every weekend. They serve West Los Angeles but also deliver to people in Inglewood, Culver City, Mar Vista, Venice and Santa Monica.

"What's great is that it's not garbage food, it's really healthy food. It's fresh baked bread, vegetables, eggs and organic milk," she says.

Nourish LA has 50 regular volunteers that help throughout the week with everything from picking up and transporting food to setting up and breaking down their events.

Nancy Beyda, executive director of FoodCycle LA, says there are "major issues in the food distribution system in the U.S., and these barriers are mirrored in the system for recovering excess food." FoodCycle LA approaches food waste as a systemic issue that contributes to hunger as well as the climate crisis. She says organizations collaborating and partnering when possible is key to creating large-scale change.

"We're focused on creating systemic change, and in order to do that we want to create a network that is large enough to have a big impact," Beyda says. "Our current food system is deeply broken—moving away from ideas of scarcity and competition for resources toward values like sharing and collaboration is a necessary part of the shift in consciousness that we need in order to truly fix the system, and save the planet."

Beyda says their organization's food distributions grew more than 1,000 percent during 2020, made possible by community collaborations.

"Creating these partnerships with local organizations allowed us to expand dramatically in response to the pandemic," she says. "We currently work with almost 330 different community-based organizations that are serving food-insecure populations."

Since 2019, FoodCycle LA has been implementing Hack for LA's online database Food Oasis, which collects up-to-date information about all the organizations in Los Angeles helping to feed people and maps them out. They also use the ChowMatch app to help people connect with food resources.

Unlike many community food distribution programs, FoodCycle LA accepts perishable foods, because they have the systems in place to get them to people before they go bad.

"We understood that in order to best direct resources and make sure that donated food is used, rather than wasted, it was important to know exactly where to send it," Beyda says. "The food that we receive is perishable and is often near the end of its shelf life, so it needs to be used immediately. We have to know where they can distribute it as soon as possible, so that it doesn't end up spoiling and getting thrown away later. We also believe that it is important to help community-based organizations where neighbors are helping neighbors."

Beyda says one challenge in the food recovery space is that many of the food recovery processes in place were not set up to pay attention to the environmental impacts of recovering and transporting food, or whether that food was being used once an agency received it.

"I discovered this personally when I spent weekends getting farmers market donations for a homeless organization that ended up tossing much of it later in the week as it went unused," she says. "These donations were being tracked as diverted from the landfill but were actually being ultimately thrown away. Part of this problem can be solved by technology and better matching donations where they are truly needed. At the onset of the pandemic, we worked to move food around from some of the large food pantries that were going to throw away excess donations and distributing it to smaller organizations that actually had a need for more food. We also have incorporated electric vehicles in order to offset the environmental impact of transporting recovered food. Looking at the systemic issues that exist and incorporating technology to address them has helped us to do a better job of recovering food and making sure it gets to the people who really need it."

Beyda says 2020 demonstrated the new system of community-based food distribution "really works."

"We can have an amazing impact and help many, many people by taking a step back and looking at ways to do things more consciously and also by collaborating and working with other like-minded folks," she says. "One of the unexpected blessings last year was being introduced to so many amazing individuals like Natalie [Flores] and seeing how much we could do when we joined hands and supported each other."

There is increasing pressure on grocery stores and restaurants not to waste their perishable foods. Flores notes that grocery stores and other establishments in California in particular face this pressure as the state has adopted the first mandatory organic recycling bill, AB 1826, which went into effect in 2019 and 2020, making it mandatory for businesses that create more than 2 cubic yards of solid waste to compost.

"[Businesses] are looking to get rid of their excess food as easily as possible, so now there's even more of an incentive for stores to give out their food to people like us," she says.

In addition to distributing food to people in need, Nourish LA offers accessible gardening education, through a partnership with Shemesh Farms in which they collect the farm's leftover seeds and seedlings to give away to people who want to plant vegetable gardens. They gather with master gardeners to answer people's questions and provide education around planting and care.

Flores says a project like Nourish LA is replicable almost anywhere, and all that it requires is people who are willing to organize and take action to get it off the ground.

"I want to encourage people to get up and do something," she says. "If you're tired of the way things look and you're tired of the way things are, then what are you really doing about it? We actually have a lot of power."

April M. Short is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California's weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon and many others.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The summer of 2020 was a time of fire and devastation for much of the Western U.S. The combination of human-caused climate change and pervasive forestry mismanagement created the conditions for August 2020's thunderstorms to cause record-breaking wildfires across California, Oregon, and Washington (as well as additional fires all across the Western states into September). Because of the many factors—torrential winds, hot and dry terrains following drought and logging practices like clear-cutting, worsening storms due to climate change—the situation quickly grew into a disaster as individual forest fires connected and turned into megafires and scorched more than 10.2 million acres of land, destroyed more than 10,000 buildings and took at least 37 people's lives. In the midst of a global pandemic, people were forced to evacuate to crowded public spaces, as toxic chemical smoke made the air unbreathable and entire cities were advised not to open any windows or go outdoors, for weeks on end.

The Bike Brigade and Mutual Aid

Those who were not impacted by fires might not realize how long it takes to recover from them. In Southern Oregon's Rogue Valley communities of Talent and Phoenix, just north of Ashland, many remain homeless after being displaced by the fires. The area, home to about 80,000 people, remains in full swing fire recovery mode eight months after the destructive Almeda Fire incinerated entire neighborhoods in early September 2020.

The fire particularly impacted low-income communities, burning up entire mobile home parks, which accounted for three-quarters of residences lost in the Almeda Fire. Many of the people most affected by the fires are Latinx immigrants—many of whom are farmworkers—and their families, who are unable to qualify for basic safety nets like bank accounts, housing insurance and recovery loans. In addition to their homes, these people lost their life's savings, their jobs and any semblance of stability they'd had before the fire.

Dani Leonardo, a longtime Ashland resident who works with the nonprofit Post Growth Institute and volunteers with the local foundation Mi Valle Mi Hogar / My Valley My Home (which supports Latinx communities in Ashland and the surrounding region) points out that the Rogue Valley already had an affordable housing shortage prior to the fire. Following the fire, this shortage turned into crises for low-income immigrant communities.

"Affordable housing, in particular, has increasingly been hard to find here in the Valley," says Leonardo. "More than 2,000 homes burned, and so many of those homes were the only affordable housing options in the Rogue Valley. So many of the folks that have been impacted by this fire are from the Latinx community; they're working families and farmworkers. These communities that were already at a disadvantage and among the most marginalized people in this valley are now facing a really painful nightmare situation."

Laura Loescher, an Ashland resident who works as a philanthropic adviser and leadership coach, notes that while Ashland is a more affluent community, the communities that were most devastated by the Almeda Fire were more lower-income, worker-based communities living in mobile homes and other small neighborhoods.

"It was so heartbreaking that the economic divide and injustice and inequality that was already present was furthered [by the fire]," she says. "Many people were aware of that divide, and in a couple of days right after the fire, there was no sense of what the official response would be or what the [relief] agencies were doing. There was no sense that anyone was coordinating anything. And so, regular people just started jumping in and offering things."

Directly following the fire, the towns of Phoenix and Talent were inaccessible by car and people were living without access to power, water and basic supplies. Leonardo was among a group of volunteers from Ashland who organized a mutual aid effort on bicycle called the Ashland Bike Brigade directly following the fire. They loaded up their bicycles with basic supplies like water and toilet paper and rode through smoke and heat to offer aid.

"It was a unique, feel-good thing that came together in the first days after the fire," Leonardo says. "There were people who were literally just stranded out there without drinking water. A few people here in Ashland learned about this—and one person, in particular, Donnie Maclurcan, who I work with at the Post Growth Institute—and rallied a small group of us."

The first day following the fire, a small crew loaded up as much bottled water as they could carry, biked to Talent from Ashland and handed out water to anyone around, amid the still-smoldering ashes.

"It was both devastating and beautiful and I feel privileged to have been a part of that," Leonardo says.

The initial bike brigade group, on the first day following the fire, was made up of just about eight people. The next day, 100-plus people from Ashland showed up for the effort.

"It was just this epic response from the community," Leonardo says.

Over the next week or so, the Ashland Bike Brigade morphed into a larger mutual aid effort. People began to donate additional supplies—like toilet paper, hand sanitizer, face masks, food and clothing—as well as other forms of immediate relief. Many of the people who had taken an interest in the bike brigade began to help with things like coordinating volunteers, directing supplies to the correct places, and so on. The Rogue Volunteer Initiative, whose headquarters happened to be directly next door to where the bike brigade organizers were meeting, joined forces with the project. The efforts merged, and the Rogue Volunteer Initiative became a volunteer coordination and mutual aid organization hub, which at its peak encompassed 10 different distribution locations for supplies and resources around the Rogue Valley, all operated by local volunteers. The Rogue Volunteer Initiative also became a community Facebook group, which Leonardo says jumped from zero to 2,000 members in just over a week. The online group provided a space for people to match offers with needs organically.

"The positive impact and support that the volunteer initiative effort, including the Ashland Bike Brigade, was able to make is really immeasurable," Leonardo says.

After the initial community rallying response began to slow down a bit, Leonardo says, the local foundation My Valley My Home became a sort of umbrella for the efforts of the Rogue Volunteer Initiative and the bike brigade. As of December 2020, there was just one community volunteer distribution site still in operation in Phoenix, but the Rogue Volunteer Initiative Facebook group remains active. Community members continue to use the group to connect people with supplies; some people post offerings of furniture they have to give or share information about local events related to fire recovery and response.

Long-Term Recovery, Listening Circles and Earth Altars

While larger aid programs like the American Red Cross and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) did show up to aid with fire recovery efforts in Phoenix and Talent, they only participated in the immediate emergency response, Loescher notes. After the early relief stage of recovery concluded, those groups, for the most part, left. Long-term fire recovery has fallen to the generosity of community members, via donations, home-sharing, and mutual aid organizing.

In addition to on-the-ground mutual aid volunteer work, a significant influx of money donations—including some creative fundraising initiatives—has helped to sustain the community fire relief efforts. Loescher says she was heartened by the many donation stations that cropped up around the community—including one at the local Shakespeare Festival theater, which closed to the public because of COVID-19.

"It was absolutely stunning to me [to see] the generosity of everyone wanting to help and do something [and] the level of coordinated action that began to happen among people who don't know each other," she says, noting that social media was a key tool to organize people. While she says goods donations were essential, she realized early on that the community would need an influx of money.

"There were a lot of donations pouring into nonprofits, but that wasn't going to help a lot of the people who had lost their homes, who might've been undocumented or otherwise unable to access certain agency funding—plus, agency funding is limited in what it can be used for," Loescher says.

So, being a philanthropic adviser, she reached out to her clients and connections.

"I just sent out a letter to a bunch of my clients and friends and family members and started raising money from outside of the community that I could then give directly to people as cash," she says. Because she doesn't speak Spanish, she contacted the people she knew who were connected with the local Latinx community and invited them to be the flow funders.

She called the effort the Community Resilience Flow Fund. At first, she raised money in large chunks from clients and friends, and then as word spread, money started coming in from the grassroots.

"I just started getting $50 and $100 sent to me on Venmo, [which I used to withdraw] cash," she says. She then gave the money to four volunteers she had operating as flow funders in the community. "I would just give them cash and they would [distribute] it directly to families [in need]."

Flow fund donations continued to trickle in over the months, and by January 2021 Loescher had raised and given out about $120,000 in cash directly to families, in addition to other funds she raised for relief organizations.

In addition to working as an adviser and coach, Loescher is an artist, and as a way to contend with the grief of 2020 on a personal level, with the pandemic, racial justice upheavals and the enormity of the climate crisis, she began to create Earth Altar art pieces in 2020.

Her Earth Altars pieces are "impermanent art co-created with nature," according to the website, and are made with material found in nature that is arranged in mandala-like circling patterns and shapes. They are circles of deep green fern leaves interspersed with orange trumpet flowers; spirals of bright blue chicory arranged with petals and acorns. They are eye-catching patterns of grasses, ferns, sticks, seeds and nuts and flower petals, leaves and rocks arranged in "beautiful ways." If it is something that can be found walking around outdoors in Ashland, chances are good it will appear in an Earth Altar. After she arranges the altars, she photographs them, and the effect is a striking contrast of bright, circling color against a dark backdrop.

Loescher started out creating Earth Altars, one each day, for herself as a personal practice that helped her feel grounded and connected with the planet. Eventually, she began to share her art with the community and was offered an art show where she could display the altars via wall-hanging canvases and greeting cards. After the devastation caused by the fire, she had the idea to turn them into part of the relief effort.

"[After the fire] I immediately decided that that art show was going to be a fundraiser for this flow fund," she says. All proceeds from the art show went directly into the flow fund toward fire relief, and then she donated art to families and local businesses impacted by the fires.

She also worked with local filmmaker Katie Teague to organize an event for families who had been impacted by the fire as well as those working on the front lines of disaster relief. They gathered people to create a Community Resilience Earth Altar as a healing ceremony, in a field near the location where the fire started in Ashland.

"We got a bunch of donated flowers from local farms and pulled together a group of people to create this giant altar," she says. "It had a tree of life in the center, [four smaller circles] representing the four directions [and the four triangular sections coming out of the main central circle] representing each of the communities that were impacted."

Loescher says that fire recovery in the Rogue Valley is far from over. Because there is a serious housing shortage, there are still many people without homes, people living in trailers, and families sharing space with generous neighbors or living in hotels and motels.

"One of the biggest challenges is that people are having to move out of the area, and [they are] the workforce and the backbone of the local economy," she says. "[Having to leave] has a negative impact on them personally and on their families, and then also on the local economy here… families have broken up as marriages have ended out of the stress of dealing with [the aftermath of the fire], so now there are a lot of single moms with their kids, trying to make their way through this situation. What I'm focused on right now in particular [with the flow fund] is helping these single-mom families."

Leonardo says in addition to the initial triage of the fire's damages, My Valley My Home has begun to focus on what recovery really means, into the long term.

"[My Valley My Home is] looking at how to help ensure equity and inclusion in the long term, as we rebuild," she says. "There are two catchphrases I've been thinking about in the last few months. One is 'it's a marathon and not a sprint,' and another is 'we're building the plane and flying it at the same time.' There's something unique about the challenges of such an immediate and dire crisis that also has these long-term consequences. We need to create and build mechanisms that will carry and get us all the way through the marathon, but can also respond to that immediate need."

My Valley My Home offers mentorship and support groups and held weekly listening circles and storytelling events in various places around the Rogue Valley, for individuals hit hard by the fires to share their stories with each other and be listened to.

"It's also about having a place to put their grief," Leonardo says. "One of the things I think that we are collectively aspiring toward [via My Valley My Home] is to create a model [for future aid and support] that can be replicated." And, she says in order for the response to be worthy of replication, all of the elements involved in true recovery and creating a healthy community must be present in the effort: grief-tending and well-being, mutual aid and people-care, sustainability and environmental justice.

April M. Short is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California's weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon and many others.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

We live in a time in which we face many global challenges, including the climate disaster, dwindling biodiversity (due to international industrial practices), polluted oceans, nuclear proliferation and a worldwide pandemic, just for starters. Realistic solutions to the hurdles humanity faces will require international cooperation—which will require the adoption of viable alternatives to the predominant systems of conflict and war.

While conflict and war have written much of modern human history, they offer an incomplete narrative. Anthropological evidence suggests war is not innate to humanity, as detailed in a recent Independent Media Institute (IMI) article on the topic. Further, war can be successfully stopped and can be prevented in the future when societies shift their cultures and values and adopt intentional systems of peace, or what are now called peace systems, due in large part to the work of anthropologist Douglas P. Fry. Fry, a professor and chair of the department of peace and conflict studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has studied existing clusters of neighboring societies that do not make war with each other, and how they operate, for years. These peace systems exist both in smaller, Indigenous groups like Brazil's Upper Xingu River Basin tribes and Aboriginal Australians, as well as in larger societies, the most obvious modern example being the European Union (EU)—a peace system which would have been assumed impossible, even ridiculous, just decades prior to its adoption.

Fry says peace systems like the EU demonstrate the ability for peace to eclipse systems of war.

"Today, the idea of the European nations waging war with each other is absurd," he says. Fry notes that humans are flexible, and sweeping changes in the way we operate are the rule, rather than the exception.

Fry was one of the leading authors of an article published on January 18, 2021, in the scientific journal Nature titled "Societies Within Peace Systems Avoid War and Build Positive Intergroup Relationships." It offers a comparative anthropological perspective to demonstrate not only that some human societies avoid war but also that peaceful social systems exist—and they work.

The article's abstract states:

"The mere existence of peace systems is important because it demonstrates that creating peaceful intergroup relationships is possible whether the social units are tribal societies, nations, or actors within a regional system. Peace systems have received scant scientific attention despite holding potentially useful knowledge and principles about how to successfully cooperate to keep the peace. Thus, the mechanisms through which peace systems maintain peaceful relationships are largely unknown."

The study's authors hypothesized that there are certain factors known to contribute to intergroup peace and demonstrated that those factors are more developed within peace systems than elsewhere. These factors include:

• Overarching common identity
• Positive social interconnectedness
• Interdependence
• Non-warring values and norms
• Non-warring myths, rituals, and symbols
• Peace leadership

The study explains that "a machine learning analysis found non-warring norms, rituals, and values to have the greatest relative importance for a peace system outcome." The findings of the analysis of peace systems also show that they may have policy implications regarding "how to promote and sustain peace, cohesion, and cooperation among neighbouring societies in various social contexts, including among nations. For example, the purposeful promotion of peace system features may facilitate the international cooperation necessary to address interwoven global challenges such as global pandemics, oceanic pollution, loss of biodiversity, nuclear proliferation, and climate change," the study abstract states.

April M. Short, reporting for IMI, recently interviewed Doug P. Fry about his work studying peace systems and their potentially global implications.

April M. Short: How did you first come to study alternatives to war, and what made you begin to question the predominant narratives around humans and war (which have typically assumed war is a given)?

Douglas P. Fry: This goes way back for me. I was a teenager toward the end of the Vietnam War, and in that time period I certainly picked up on the movements against the Vietnam War. Unlike more recent wars, there were, on the nightly news, pictures of bodies, Vietcong bodies, civilian bodies and American troops who'd been killed in combat. War was really ugly, and it came onto our TV sets. As a young person, I realized that I was going to turn 18 in a couple of years, and that really pushed me to a personal set of reflections. "Would I really engage in a war that I felt was wrong?" That was one. Then, much more philosophically, or deeply, I asked myself, "Could I really find it within myself to kill another human being?"

I went through exploration by reading and talking to a few friends, and talking to my father, who was very supportive, and reached the decision that I should apply for a conscientious objector status (and the military ultimately classified me as 1-H; H is for holding. It was like I was in limbo, and if they needed more troops, they would call me up, but they never did). At about the same time, I started university at UCLA and I discovered anthropology, and it has been a love affair ever since. I think anthropology is just a wonderful field… it takes into consideration all the world's cultures and what it means to be human. It asks, where did we come from in the past, and what's our nature, and so forth. For me, in particular, the guiding question was, at first, to understand human aggressiveness and the violence of war, and then I morphed over the decades to try to understand how we can get rid of war. What actions can we take as alternatives? How can we promote peace? How can we promote nonviolent forms of conflict resolution to deal with our differences without war?

AMS: How did you eventually come to study systems of peace and intergroup cooperation, or peace systems?

DPF: Around 2000, I realized that in anthropology there were not really any central books that dealt in a holistic or complete way with peace. So, I formulated a scheme to study peace (and eventually systems of peace). I was living in Finland at the time and working part-time. I thought, "I've got the ideas, I've got the time, this is an opportunity." I started working on a book that eventually became The Human Potential for Peace. For that book, I was reading avidly about internally peaceful societies and conflict resolution across cultures. I was thinking about archaeology and delving into the question of, "How old is war?" I was also looking at evolutionary theory and doing a bit of a critique of some of the primatological work that Brian Ferguson mentions in your recent interview.

Out of this exploration, I came across the work of Thomas Gregor, who is one of many anthropologists who had worked with societies in Brazil's Upper Xingu River Basin. What Gregor nicely summed up was that there are about 10 tribes there that have four different language groups represented, and that they are a peace system. He used that term, "peace system," and I just thought that was very cool. In chapter two of The Human Potential for Peace I gave a pretty thorough review of all of Gregor's work, as well as other anthropologists who had studied the region—and I mention this because it's rather unusual when you find a rich description from different people and they all pretty much correspond with each other over decades and over sources. These Upper Xingu River Basin societies really do not engage in warfare with each other.

They don't like violence. They perceive themselves as civilized, and morally superior to neighboring Indigenous groups that do engage in warfare because they don't believe in killing people. Now, they will engage in warfare to protect themselves, so they're not total pacifists, but they are non-warring among themselves. And that's the key way to define peace systems, or at least that's the way I've done it across a series of articles: clusters of societies that don't make war with each other. Sometimes they don't make war at all, but sometimes they do make war outside the system.

I enjoyed reading everything I could find on these societies and writing it up for chapter two, and that's how I discovered peace systems. Since that time, I've made many personal moves between different countries, different jobs, and focuses for my work, but I always somehow come back to peace systems. It happened that in 2014, I was invited by a colleague, Peter Coleman, who's an eminent peace psychologist and social psychologist at Columbia University, to be part of a project he was launching on mapping sustainable peace, now called the Sustaining Peace Project. I was a core member there, and my wife, Geneviève Souillac, is involved with the project as well. Early in 2014, I was considering how I could really contribute to this as an anthropologist. I went home after the first day of meeting for the project and woke up thinking: "Peace systems, of course!"

That was really the birth of the article in Nature. You'll notice there's a whole team that worked on that article, including my former students who collected a lot of the data and coded it. My wife, Geneviève Souillac, and I have been talking about, and thinking and writing on, this subject since we've known each other… Peter generated and pushed the button to start the whole thing by starting up this sustaining peace project and including us. It was very labor-intensive to find all these societies and code all this data. Here we are literally six years later, and it has finally come out in print.

AMS: In the article, it is noted that not only do some human societies not engage in war, but peaceful social systems or peace systems exist. Will you clarify the difference between simply an absence of war between groups and societies that actively engage in peace?

DPF: This is an interesting point. In peace studies, we sometimes talk about negative peace and positive peace. Negative peace is simply the absence of violence or the absence of war, and, therefore, there's peace. Sort of what the person on the street tends to think is, "Oh, we're at peace for now," or, "War is coming; we're now at war." That's a negative definition of peace, in peace studies.

Then there are all sorts of variations on what we call positive peace. These would include the positive elements, so not simply the opposites of violence. These are things such as people having equal rights or access to resources; being part of decision-making for the group (and democracy would be one model for this; another might be nomadic foragers who were egalitarian and made decisions out of discussion and consensus). Having your basic needs taken care of is generally thought to be positive peace, so things like safe drinking water, enough to eat, and access to health care. In a way, if you start ticking the boxes for what is a good life, in terms of having your needs taken care of and living safely and happily, that's where a whole variety of different positive peace elements come in.

For this article in Nature, I remember my wife and I were talking and discussing peace systems a year ago. She was telling me, "We've got to make really clear this distinction between positive and negative peace. The definition that you started with is a negative definition of these clusters."

She was absolutely right, and I hadn't thought of it that way. My next thought was that what we are actually looking at are the conditions and features that lead to a peace system.

There are some societies where it has just been noted in the literature that they don't engage in warfare, and there are different ways to look at this. There's been a big presumption on the part of anthropologists and others, as part of the traditional view, that, of course, everybody engages in warfare.

One interesting reflection of this, historically, is this monumental work done during World War II, by political scientist Quincy Wright and a whole team of scholars. When they looked at ethnographic data from many different angles that they pursued in the study of war, they only used four classifications for the different types of societies, for almost 600 societies. They said a society could either engage in warfare because it was a social phenomenon or economic phenomenon or political phenomenon, or defensive, and they classified it as defensive for only about 5 percent of those societies. In their descriptions, they said these people are not particularly warlike, but if they had encountered a fighting force, no doubt, they would have used their simple tools and their digging sticks to fight back and defend themselves. Hence, the label they put on these societies: defensive war.

I went through some of these "defensive war" societies. I looked at enough of them to realize that some and maybe all of them really were non-warring societies. And there had been a misclassification because of the starting presumption that all societies make war. There was no category called non-warring societies. That was one thing that I just found psychologically and historically pretty interesting as an apparent bias. And it was, otherwise, a very carefully done, and monumental, study of war.

What I did in writing The Human Potential for Peace is I started collecting a list of non-warring societies. And to classify them as such, it had to be very clear that they did not engage in warfare—the ethnographers or the historians had to really spell this out, I wasn't just taking vague statements like "these were peace-loving people." I came up with 74 examples, across different types of social organizations, of non-warring societies. So, most societies do partake in some sort of collective, violent engagement with other societies, but some do not. The difference there is that peace systems really are clusters. They could be as few as say three societies, or they could be 27, as with the European Union. They are a given number of clusters of neighboring societies that don't engage in war with each other.

Many of the non-warring societies might exist as members of a peace system, or they might be somewhat isolated in some cases, or it could be ethnographically or historically unclear as to how many societies they were in contact with. There is a wealth of further studies that need to be done, and could be done, on non-warring societies and peace systems. We're just touching the tip of the iceberg with our 16 examples of peace systems that we talk about in the recent article. What we have is a relatively small, well-described number of peace systems. Then we've got a larger number of societies that are just being reported by historians or anthropologists as non-warring. They sort of overlap, but that would be the distinction or the difference.

AMS: In the article, you hypothesize a list of features present in societies that contribute to peace systems. One of these is "overarching common identity." Would you explain that a bit further?

DPF: In working on the Nature article, these different features that would promote peace came to mind as hypotheses, based on the social science literature as well as our studies of existing peace systems. These include things such as having an overarching identity, not just a parochial identity. Rather than just identifying, for example, as, "I'm a Finn," it's, "I'm a Finn, and I'm a European." And that is happening in the EU as we speak. The idea is, there's this overall identity where people perceive themselves as Europeans.

Another example of a peace system is the United States (which is in some ways sort of a problematic one, because we did have a civil war in the middle of the country's history, among other issues)… but what's really telling to me is that when we were still 13 colonies and fighting that Revolutionary War and then grappling with what the way forward would be, people's identities were connected with that of the former colonies. People identified with their states. People from Virginia were Virginians and people from Georgia were Georgians, and that was their primary identity. At some point, this all shifted to include this higher level of identity of being American.

Overarching identity is just one of the features of positive peace, and it's a really important factor that promotes positive peace and a peace system. As you know from the article, there are others that we discuss as potential factors, and we could probably come up with a few other ones in addition to them.

AMS: I read the chapter you co-authored with your wife, Geneviève Souillac, for Ronald Edsforth's A Cultural History of Peace in the Modern Age (1920-present), which was titled "Human Nature, Peace, and War in the Modern Era Since 1920." In the chapter, you break down and confront the classic narrative of human history that says war is basically human nature and explain that this is a perspective that is at least as old as Greek civilization. What made you think to challenge the common assumptions around war and human nature?

DPF: I tend to take a very holistic view, as does my wife, meaning we look at information interdisciplinarily as much as we can. Now, the common theme for that particular chapter is on history, but there is also the thesis that we could take a totally new perspective. The dominant perspective is just steeped in Western tradition and it's basically not supported by evidence. That leads to the question, "What evidence are you talking about?" In the chapter you mention, we thought it would be good to just give a rather brief and understandable sampling of the various types of evidence that you can find across sub-disciplines, and across the disciplines that really support a totally new way of looking at humanity that's not in accordance with the traditional view. We look at evidence for nomadic foragers and ask whether or not they are warlike, and to what degree, and what sort of violence they practice. The reason anthropologists look at nomadic foragers is because we as a human species have lived as nomadic foragers for almost our entire existence.

In getting at human nature questions, there's going to be a mix of genes and environment, or nature and nurture and so forth to consider. We acknowledge epigenetics—the term used to consider gene-environment interaction—and in this case it plays into the way we live, the types of societies we lived in and the physical environments along with the social environments (both of which are important to take into consideration). So we consider, "How are we in the so-called state of nature?" The answer, shortly put, is that nomadic foragers are not particularly warlike. They're very egalitarian. They have a lot of space and low population density, and because they move around, they don't have material possessions. They don't really have much to fight over.

Then, of course, another line to look at is archaeology. In the traditional view, they usually acknowledge, somewhat begrudgingly, that there's no real evidence of warfare back beyond roughly 10,000 years ago, which is about the time agriculture started to come in. If you look at archaeology, the evidence really isn't there for war forever backward, as Brian Ferguson likes to put it.

What some of the proponents of the traditional view say is that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and I recall that was in the [IMI article with Brian Ferguson] and Ferguson explained that that's not a scientific claim because you can't disprove it, which I thought was a lovely point. There are also multiple sequences around the planet that show the origins of war, so if you think about it, the evidence sort of undermines this whole idea that war is ancient. If it had evolved long ago and always been with us, then why do we find archaeological sequences from Oaxaca, for example, in Mexico, or from several parts of the Northwest coast of America, or from the Kodiak Island area in Alaska and so on that show that there's a long period of nomadic foraging and no evidence of warfare; then people start settling down and they tend to settle down in specific places where there are resources? They develop surpluses, and this leads to social hierarchy, which is what I'm calling complexity or the complexity complex.

Complexity is new. It has occurred, generally speaking, within the last 12,000 to 13,000 years, at different times and at different places. And it's often much more recent than that. There may be a few cases that are older than that, but the pattern, which we've documented recently, is that when you have nomadic foragers that have become complex and settled down, you're much more likely to have war there. We can see these origins of war archaeologically, and they are recent, which is a whole other line of evidence in this chapter we wrote ["Human Nature, Peace, and War in the Modern Era Since 1920"].

Then, we can start looking at some other things, like what military science suggests. And there has not been a lot of research in this area, but there have been a few key studies that really are showing how humans and modern military or historical military situations are not really inclined to be so gung-ho for war. It's not the Hollywood movie that we've all been brainwashed with. On the contrary, if you start looking at the evidence during whatever war you pick—let's take World War II, for instance, there are numerous situations where German troops and U.S. troops understood that the enemy was right nearby, and decided, "We're not going to shoot at you. You don't shoot at us. You go your way. We'll go our way." There are many of these types of anecdotes, and there is also some more systematic evidence.

In one case that I like, somebody got the idea to examine all of the muskets collected off of the Gettysburg battlefield. I think they collected around 27,000 or so muskets. Many of the muskets were loaded twice, some were loaded thrice and a few were loaded 21 times or something absolutely crazy. Overall, 90 percent of all 27,000 muskets were loaded one or more times. If you work out the statistics around how long it takes to load a musket, and all the time there was a battle going, then if people are loading their musket and firing, you'd expect only about 5 percent to have been loaded. Of course, we don't have videotapes of what was going on, exactly, but it points to the idea that there was a whole lot of reluctance to actually be shooting at the enemy. Now, that's just one case from our own U.S. history, and there are others. There is a wonderful, descriptive book written by a military man and historian who served in the U.S. army [during WWII and the Korean War] named S.L.A. Marshall called Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (published in 1947). He did a series of interviews and found out that a vast majority of the combat troops were not firing at the enemy. Some were firing into the air. Some were firing into the bushes. Some were firing over the heads of the enemy. Many weren't firing at all.

Most scientists are specialists who take on something specific and they try to research it carefully, and that's valuable. However, when you have larger questions around… human nature and whether or not we are warlike, what makes sense is to draw from all types of information that you can find, from history and prehistory, to social organization and, in this case, military science. What we're arguing in that chapter you mentioned is these multiple lines of evidence are all pointing in the same direction, and we are arguing that they demonstrate a new paradigm, or at least a new perspective, for looking at war, peace and human nature. Of course, we're capable as a species of engaging in warfare, that's obvious—we're not making some crazy argument that humans don't war, as we sometimes have been misunderstood as arguing, intentionally or not. That's silly. We're just saying that we're not necessarily inclined toward war, and especially across huge spans of our evolutionary history, there is an absence of war. Therefore, there's not something built into us, or hardwired into our genes evolutionarily, that pushes us toward warfare.

The application here is: If war is related to social organization, or socializing culture in a broader sense—and other circumstances, like economic factors coming in and complexity, as I was just discussing—then you can design systems where you don't have warfare. So, here we look back to peace systems once again.

AMS: In looking at peace systems that already exist, you've factored in smaller-scale tribal societies such as Brazil's Indigenous tribes and Aboriginal people in Australia. Then, you also look at broader peace systems like the EU. I find that to be significant, that non-warring systems can and do apply on a larger scale to developed-world nations and "aren't just curiosities of the ethnographic world," as you put it in your 2009 paper, "Anthropological Insights for Creating Non-Warring Social Systems." Would you expand a bit on the peace system that is the EU?

DPF: Historically, following World War II, people had just been through absolute hell. Just about every European had lost family, friends, colleagues, villagers. Even in small villages in rural France—almost all of them have a monument to those killed in World War I and killed in World War II—there's a list of names, and sometimes you can tell from the surname, they were probably brothers who lost their lives. Everybody was touched by this. Right after World War II in Europe, food shortages and infrastructure—bridges, railroad lines, and everything—had been destroyed. France was on the verge of starvation, at one point and the Dutch went through a starving winter. For five or six years, in some way or another, everybody had suffered the horrors of war, close up and personal.

You had a public who just recently had gone through this catastrophe of a huge magnitude and understood the horrors of war, but they were not really catalyzed to do something creative until Jean Monnet, one of the founding fathers of the EU, came in with his message, sharing it with anybody who would listen. He was an influential and very clever man. He talked to people incessantly, he organized a think tank and he lobbied for a unified Europe. He was very explicit about why he was doing this: he was doing it to bring peace and prosperity. And the peace was the first part, after the horrible war. The prosperity was just something that would make sense, and it was easily sellable that you could have a much stronger economic basis and support people better through economic collaboration and cooperation. And all of this has proven to be true in the recent decades, since World War II.

The key idea that Monnet had early on was that we could make a supra-national organization that would be in charge of coal and steel, which were not only the foundational ingredients to warfare but also to a peaceful economy. He realized that across history, France and Germany, in particular, were often at the roots of wars in Europe and that they had access, literally along their border, to steel production and coal mining and so forth. He pulled this off through his magic of convincing, and also due to a willingness of people to try something new.

The first six countries that joined were the Benelux countries, along with France, Germany, and Italy, which was a good, solid core. The Brits were reluctant—and of course, they're the ones that have just exited [the EU]. When they tried to get the Brits into the union, they wanted special consideration. This might sound familiar after Brexit. Monnet conferred with the others and they said no, no special consideration for the Brits. It's, "we're all in, we're all equal." Long story short, as this evolved into the common market, the Brits wanted in, and the EU founders had predicted that would happen.

As I look at the European Union, I see it as a huge success story. I'm putting that label of peace system on it as I don't know of anybody else who has called it a peace system, but it absolutely is. It's a cluster of neighboring societies that don't make war with each other (ever since World War II, that's been the case). And, like some other peace systems—not all, but some—they have engaged in military expeditions elsewhere (the French going into Mali a few years ago and contributing some troops and forces in Afghanistan and so forth). I'm not making an argument that this is a peace system that is totally pacifist. They have their security forces and different countries, to different degrees, do engage in military expeditions elsewhere. But the key factor is they've set up certain structures of economic interdependence, beginning with the coal and steel community and evolving to the Commonwealth, the economic unification of Europe, and then ultimately the European Union. And they are a strong economy. They're giving the United States and other countries that are strong a real run for their money, economically. It's a peace economy, in a way. You could look at it that way.

Another great example that overlaps with the European Union is the Nordic countries that are sometimes called Norden. I was reading recently about the first Nordic non-war story where, in 1905, Norway declared its independence from Sweden. Troops lined up on both sides of the border and it looked like Sweden was going to go to war with Norway to keep it as part of Sweden, but that didn't happen. This became the first Nordic non-war. This whole region, which somewhat overlaps with the EU (but not totally, not all nations are members of the EU), has been at peace for over 200 years now. There have been no wars within this little sub-peace system. And there have been conflicts, but they have evolved a different way of dealing with conflicts. The idea that there would be warfare within the Nordic countries now is basically considered absurd, just as the idea that there would be war in the European Union is considered absurd (Europe is the most peaceful region on the planet, as is thoroughly documented).

In the case of Norden, the peace system doesn't have a lot of political bite. It is structured, it exists, there are agreements made in order to be part of it, there are ministers from all countries represented. But it's more of an agreement to cooperate because that's the right thing to do. There is a document that's available to download, from another entity that is supra-international, called the Nordic Council of Ministers, titled "New Nordic Peace: Nordic Peace and Conflict Resolution Efforts." This document blew me away, in a sense, because it basically argues that there is a "Nordic Peace brand," internally and externally. It's pretty cool.

AMS: You mentioned peaceful societies, and systems of peace, have typically received scant attention from historians, scientists and the academic world. Why do you think this is? Why has the traditional view been so self-assured that war is always the go-to in human societies?

DPF: I think, in part, it is that if you're so enthralled with looking at conflict, war, aggression and so forth, you don't look for peace, so you don't really recognize it. This has been reflected in the records. One of my colleagues in anthropology, Leslie Sponsel at the University of Hawaii, crunched the numbers. He looked at given examples. He did things like, "Let's look at all these journals and see how many articles are actually on conflict and how many are on peace." He found that these are really lopsided numbers, like 95 percent on conflict and 5 percent on peace. There are very few articles, relatively speaking, that deal with peace or nonviolence compared to all the ones on genocide and war and abuse and everything else. There's this academic bias.

I think there is also a person on the street type of bias. Hollywood, of course, has come up with the formula that violence sells, and to my thinking, some of this is because our culture is accustomed to violence. If you have a culture that's so steeped in violence then, yeah, it sells. You create a self-fulfilling prophecy, generation after generation, by promoting violence as something that's interesting. I'll share two things that I think illustrate this idea. First: in one of his popular books, the very famous primatologist Frans de Waal (who is from the Netherlands originally, but he's lived most of his life in the United States, working as a professor) said that in the Netherlands, people like breasts but are afraid of guns; in the U.S. people are afraid of breasts but love guns. He was comparing the converse values, as a cultural outsider commenting on America.

The second thing I'll share is about one of the non-warring and extremely internally peaceful societies, the Ifaluk of Micronesia. They are out in the Pacific with a low population density, living on this atoll and having some interaction with neighboring islands. They are extremely peaceful, according to various anthropologists who have described them. Catherine Lutz is the most recent anthropologist that I know of to observe them. When she did her fieldwork there, people told her how the United States Navy came by on goodwill visits and anchored their ship off the atoll. They brought projectors onto the beach and set up a screen, and they showed the people these lethal Westerns and other movies that were popular at the time—I think we're talking 1950s, 1960s.

Catherine Lutz discovered, when she did her fieldwork in the '80s, that people were traumatized by the films. It literally gave them trauma. Some of them said that they ran away in fear for their life. They refused to watch the movies after they saw what was going on. It led them to ask her questions like, "So in your country, people really do kill each other?" To which, of course, she answered yes. And they were just astounded at this. Three anthropologists that I've read, all on this same Ifaluk culture from different time periods, say that they could find no evidence of any rapes or murders. The most serious aggression they saw was when one time a guy was really agitated and put his hand on the shoulder of another guy, which was considered most inappropriate. This non-warring, peaceful Ifaluk culture was traumatized when they saw our Westerns, with people having fistfights and shooting each other with guns (I guess they didn't quite know what a gun was but they could see the person fall over and the ketchup come out, Hollywood style). I think an extreme case like this just gives us some perspective to reflect back on our own society.

Why have peace systems not been studied? There have been different people who have used the term peace system, but they've used it in different ways… When I became really interested in peace systems, I looped in some colleagues, and, hence, we started to approach it systematically for the first time. In 2009, I wrote an article that started by laying out just three of the factors of peace systems in a descriptive way, with no statistics. Then I was invited by Science to write an article called "Life Without War" in 2012. And when one of the reviewers wrote back and said, "This is a science journal, shouldn't these be hypotheses?" I thought, that's brilliant. Of course, they should be hypotheses. So, all of a sudden it turned into, at that point, six different hypotheses as to what could contribute to a peace system. That led to the first step toward [the] study published in Nature in 2021.

So, why are people not interested in peace? My hope, to be honest, is that this online publication in Nature, which is open access, will stir up a lot more interest in peace systems—whether the historical examples or the ethnographic examples. What's unique about this approach that we're taking is that people tend not to look at what the similarities are across all types of different cultures, from nomadic bands to modern states or regional entities like the European Union. Instead, people tend to look more locally, either with one pet theory or one model or in some sort of geographical regional context. We've really bitten off a huge chunk and tried to look across time and across culture and compare peace systems with non-peace systems, to really try to find out what are the special things that are going on with positive peace and peace systems. Why has somebody not done this before? Fundamentally, I don't know. But I think it is an area that shows real potential.

AMS: In the Nature study, you discuss the idea that the purposeful promotion of peace system features may facilitate international cooperation necessary to address interwoven global challenges such as global pandemics and ocean pollution. Do you think that now is the time when people are ready to look to peace systems and more global, widespread cooperation—because we need these new ways of thinking and looking at solutions to our global catastrophes?

DPF: Right. Here we are at this point in history—we're facing global warming, just to take one example. … I thought it was very interesting, or almost ironic, the number of the peace systems that seem to come into being due to an external military threat of some sort. So, that's one ingredient here. Perhaps, some groups hang together because then there will be more of them and they'll be able to put up a common defense. Many times, it's an external threat that causes people to adopt a peace system… Global warming is an example of a real, external threat. The classic example is, of course, the idea that Martians will invade and all of Earth will come together and defend ourselves against the Martians, creating global cooperation. No, the Martian is us, actually, manifested through various things like the pandemics and not being able to deal with them effectively; or pollution of our oceans, this lifeblood; species lost. We're going to be in really bad shape if we have an equal ecosystem collapse regionally bit by bit, or more globally. These are all really, really serious threats. If we can only adjust our mentality a bit to redefine things to understand that, really, the only way forward for humanity is going to be to pull together and address these common threats to our species survival, or else the future is not looking good.

But one thing about the peace system model is it shows time and time again that across history, in different cultures and space, humans do realize the necessity of cooperating when faced with an external threat. So again, if we can just do a little bit of reframing the narrative, the external threat is not necessarily the Russians or whatever. No, it's the conditions we've made and the conditions we face. So, we really have to pull together as a peace system.

AMS: Is there hope and potential, do you think, for global peace systems to become the more dominant model?

DPF: Yeah, of course, there is. You have to have some hope. In this case given our common, global threats, maybe we'll develop a global peace system. I don't know, but I hope so, or something similar to it. As we just talked about, I think it's really necessary to have much greater international cooperation. We would solve so many problems if we could develop that expanded level of identification all the way up to humanity, all the way up to the planet level, and basically think about the Earth also, and all the creatures on it, as being part of the same bio life system. We need to get this, as in Buckminster Fuller's book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. We're all on the same spaceship, so we can't be fouling our nest with pollution and so forth. It's just foolish to be fighting among ourselves, or as the old saying goes, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We need to actually be steering the ship away from icebergs. There is hope.

Another way to approach this, and I've done this in some of my writings, is to understand just how flexible we humans really are and how huge changes really are the rule, not the exception. Things that people thought just never would change, have. If you're talking about the fall of the Soviet Union into pieces, the breaking down of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany, in some way these are sort of child's play compared to the larger magnitude of changes between our lives today and all of us running around as nomadic foragers for millennia upon millennia. Now here we find ourselves with mobile phones and everything else. The immensity of the changes that have occurred and can take place in the human future is huge.

As I see it, if you're going to put forth the pessimistic view that we've always been this way and always will be, that we've always made war—well, first of all, that's totally wrong. That's just nearsightedness. And then if you follow that with a pessimistic view to the effect that this is just a mess we're in and there's nothing we can do about it, well, that's wrong, too. People all the time have been making huge social movements and improvements. I also like to look at social improvements such as reducing the chance of war or successfully tackling climate change as two steps forward and one step back. You just have to maintain some optimism. Sometimes it's two steps forward and four steps back. Okay. That's a real bummer. Don't get too depressed. Just work on going forward again.

April M. Short is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California's weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon and many others.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Homelessness in the U.S., which was already on the rise prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, increased in 2020, exacerbated by the economic realities of the pandemic. Austin, Texas, is no exception, with an estimated 11 percent increase in homeless people counted in the city and Travis County between 2019 and 2020, according to the point-in-time (PIT) count reported in the Austin American-Statesman. Of Austin's population of roughly 1 million, an estimated 2,500 people experience homelessness on any given night, according to the 2020 PIT count. Austin City Council member Gregorio Casar says this is a number "a community of [more than] a million folks should be able to care [for]."

In an effort to do so, the city of Austin has been purchasing underutilized hotels and transforming them into housing and services for people experiencing homelessness. In a February 4 meeting, the Austin City Council approved the purchase of a fourth hotel—which will provide 150 new homes to the homeless population in the city. Casar says the city plans to move forward on purchasing a fifth and a sixth hotel in the future.

"We have found sufficient resources in the city budget to acquire more hotels because we really believe that it's a strategy for significantly reducing homelessness in the city," he says.

In addition to providing long-term and transitional housing to people experiencing homelessness, the hotels purchased by the city will also provide supportive services, including mental health services, trauma services and job services.

"We are working with trusted community groups and nonprofit organizations to provide services at the hotels because we know that there are lots of folks who have experienced real trauma while living on the street and who need support so that their homelessness can permanently end," Casar says. "And then there are lots of other folks who just need a connection to a job and a stable address for a while so that they can get back on their feet."

According to Tara Pohlmeyer, communications director for Council Member Casar, Integral Care and Caritas of Austin have submitted letters of interest in operating the hotels and providing services, and the Homeless Services Division (HSD) anticipates negotiating a contract with a service provider/operator for each hotel in April.

He says while shelters provide an important service, oftentimes, they're just temporarily addressing the issue. The plan for the converted hotels is for them to serve as a more permanent housing solution, to address the real needs of each person they house.

"That's the way that we can reduce the amount of homelessness in the city, instead of just sort of hiding it, or moving [the homeless population] around while the numbers grow," Casar says.

To pay for these supportive services, the city will reallocate dollars originally assigned to the police budget, as part of its project to reimagine safety, in response to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and public demand. Funding for operations and services of the hotels will come from Austin Public Health, using a portion of the additional $6.5 million added to the Fiscal Year 2021 budget to address homelessness during the city council's efforts to reimagine public safety.

"We have never had so many people engage in local government before [the BLM movement]," he says. "There were tens of thousands of people that contacted my office alone. In the weeks of protest over the summer [in 2020], we had hundreds of people testifying at city council meetings, for hours, about the changes that they were calling on us to make. I think that was really important. It shifted all of our perspectives. The community here in Austin is calling on us to be real leaders for our community and for people across the state and across the country. Austin, I think, actually responded to the call to transform police budgets in a way that very few cities across the country did."

Casar says while cities often have the dollars to make the capital investment in property to house the homeless, the long-term funding for operating those buildings and providing supportive services tends to be the challenge. He says prior to last summer's BLM movement, which pressured cities across the nation to reallocate police funds into supportive services, one of Austin's greatest challenges regarding homelessness was related to finding that long-term funding.

"The dollars from the police budget are going to provide the services and operate the hotels," he says. "No matter how many changes I and some others have tried to make to the budget in years past, we've, oftentimes, struggled to make really transformative change because so many dollars get wrapped up in the police budget. This last year, there was finally an opportunity for us to rethink that budget and recognize that we were spending so many dollars on jailing folks experiencing homelessness and policing people experiencing homelessness—but that actually doesn't reduce homelessness."

Between the four hotels the city has purchased, there are about 300 rooms, some of which might be able to house a couple of people, and many of them just a single person. The plan is for the city to continue to purchase additional hotels and expand the programs offered, Casar says.

"We have to pull hundreds of people off the streets this year," Casar says. "I think that would make a really significant difference."

The extreme winter weather experienced in Texas through February and March makes the need to provide safe shelter and supportive services for people living on the streets all the more urgent.

"In a city as prosperous as Austin, no one should have to live on the streets, period. That became even more clear as we saw folks still sleeping out under bridges when we knew that zero-degree temperatures were coming—and sometimes there were hotels or lit-up buildings right across the streets where they could have safely stayed," Casar says. "It's clearly already so dangerous to live outdoors and without a home, and these extreme weather events make it even more clear why we can and should reorganize our resources and our priorities to make sure that everybody has a place to lay their head at night that is safe."

April M. Short is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California's weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon and many others.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

War and all of its brutality is attention-grabbing and memorable. Recollections of war and conquests tend to stick around and take up the spotlight in historical records. However, a war-centered narrative paints an incomplete picture of human history—and human nature. While there is a popular opinion in the anthropological community that war is an evolutionary, inborn tendency of humans, there is also pushback to that theory. There is a growing argument for a human history that predates war altogether and further points out that war is not innate to human nature, but instead, is a social and cultural development that begins at certain points around the globe.

However, once war takes place, it tends to spread, explains historical anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, who has spent more than 40 years researching the origins of war. Ferguson, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, notes that war is not the same thing as interpersonal violence or homicide. War implies organized, armed conflict and killing sanctioned by society and carried out by members of one group against members of another group. Ferguson argues that current evidence suggests that war was not always present but began as a result of societal changes—with evidence of war's origins appearing at widely varying timestamps in different locations around the world. He estimates that the earliest signs of war appear between 10,000 B.C., or 12,000 years ago.

"But in some areas of the world you don't see any signs of war develop until much more recently," he says, noting that in both the U.S. Southwest and Great Plains there is no evidence of war until around 2,000 years ago.

Ferguson wrote an article in the Scientific American in 2018 titled, "War Is Not Part of Human Nature," in which he details his take on war. In the article, he summarizes the viewpoints of two anthropological camps, dubbed hawks and doves by late anthropologist Keith Otterbein. The hawks argue that war is an evolved predisposition in humans dating back to when they had a common ancestor with chimpanzees. Doves, meanwhile, argue that war has only emerged in recent millennia, motivated by changing social conditions. In the article Ferguson writes:

"Humans, they argue [doves], have an obvious capacity to engage in warfare, but their brains are not hardwired to identify and kill outsiders involved in collective conflicts. Lethal group attacks, according to these arguments, emerged only when hunter-gatherer societies grew in size and complexity and later with the birth of agriculture. Archaeology, supplemented by observations of contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures, allows us to identify the times and, to some degree, the social circumstances that led to the origins and intensification of warfare."

Ferguson has studied the anthropological and archeological records throughout ancient, and sometimes into more modern, human history. He says there is a lack of evidence of war or large-scale violence, in many places around the world throughout various periods of history. He has spent four decades researching and historically contextualizing the various origin points of war around the world. He has also contextualized incidents of group violence in humanity's closest ape cousins, chimpanzees. He argues that war is not innate, evolutionary nor inevitable behavior for humans.

Ferguson spoke with Local Peace Economy correspondent April M. Short about his findings and theories surrounding war and human history.

April M. Short: The big questions are: have humans always gone to war, or is there a point of origin for war? And, is war innate to the human species (or maybe just men)? Is there an evolved predisposition to war or is it a social, learned behavior that emerged with particular organizations in societies?

Brian Ferguson: There is a great deal of interest regarding this in anthropology in particular, and in archeology, and political science as well. It's been a very active field and they are many different issues that are involved [here] that are connected to each other.

To mention one issue about whether war has always been with us, there is the related question of how war was affected by the expansion of colonial systems. In particular, related to Western Europe, but other [colonial systems] as well. I maintain that colonial expansion generally led to more intensive warfare than a lot of the fighting that we've seen around the world in the past few hundred years, from the Age of Exploration onward. This is not a reflection of human nature but a reflection of circumstances, or the contextual situation.

But, even before the beginnings of colonialism, war was quite common around the world. War leaves a number of different signs, which is indicative of violence in the archeological records, the most important of which are skeletal trauma and settlement data of different sorts. There are other indicators as well, but if you have a lot of information on those two things, then if war is present, it will show up.

AMS: Another, related question is whether there is evidence of a clear starting point for war?

BF: Everybody wants to know when war began. It's difficult to give an answer that will satisfy people because you have to ask where you're talking about. Evidence for war appears at different times in different locations. And, once war began, sometimes it went away for a while, though that was not the case most times. Oftentimes war would spread, and it would change over time as political systems changed. It's a very complicated field.

But the question people really want to know the answer to is [whether] war [is] human nature? And in one sense, the answer is definitely yes, because humans make war, we're capable of making war, it's one of the things humans do. But I think the more meaningful question that people are trying to get at is: is there something that has evolved in human beings, or maybe just in men, that makes them inclined to try to kill—or at least to act with extreme fear to—people outside their own group. Is it a natural human tendency or predisposition to kill outsiders? That is what has been argued by a lot of people. [cognitive psychologist and science author] Steven Pinker is one, there are many others.

Other people have argued something a little different than that, which is: maybe there isn't any inborn tendency to want to kill outsiders, but war will happen naturally unless you have some kind of system in place to stop it. That's sort of what Thomas Hobbes was talking about in Leviathan, right? He didn't know about genes and this was before [Charles Darwin's theory of evolution]. He wasn't saying people had an "evolved" predisposition to kill outsiders. He just said that people pursuing their own interests, without some kind of larger civil society, will naturally turn to violence to further their own interests, and that will lead to war. And what that means is war is a natural condition of human society. So, is [war] part of human nature or is it the nature of humans in society?

The bottom line is, in one view, humans have always made war since they've been humans. But what I have been arguing for some time now is that if you look around the world, in the archeological records, the earlier remains don't have evidence of war.

Now, when we go very far back—say 30,000 years or more—there is almost nothing to indicate the humans were even there. Maybe you have a stone tool or something, but you can't say based on evidence whether there was war or not. But, when you come closer to the present and you look at the material evidence, you do not find evidence of war for some time.

What you find is a global pattern. At different times in different places around the world, if you go from the earliest archeological evidence [and move] forward, there will come a time when evidence of war will start to appear. Those changes occur without a dramatic increase in archeological recovery. It's not like we're starting to get good [evidence in] archeology, [or] good data, and only now are we starting to see [signs of] war. We had all of it but there weren't any signs of war. Then signs of war started to appear.

A colleague of mine, Doug Fry, works in this area and has been making a bigger point about this, and it's a very good point. We've been accumulating a number of cases from the archeologists who work in particular areas, and archeologists themselves aren't interested in the question of when war began, they're just digging their own digs. They're generally not interested in making global comparisons like I am. But we find that when archeologists provide summaries of the evidence of interpersonal violence of a deadly nature, more and more of them are showing that war has a starting point.

AMS: You mentioned this is the pattern everywhere you look, is it the global pattern?

BF: In the Americas alone, which I've been working on lately, [the pattern of evidence of war emerging during a given time in the records] includes the Andean region, it includes the Oaxaca region in Mexico, it includes the Pacific Northwest coast of Canada, Northwest Alaska, the Eastern Woodlands, the Great Plains. I'm not sure whether you can say the same for Western California, because Western California is unusual for having a lot of violence that goes back very far, so I'm not sure whether you can say there's clearly a time before you have evidence of war there. But it's the case in all these other places. I also looked at the patterns in Europe and the Near East where you see the same thing: you don't have any evidence of war, and then war shows up.

One more note on this: it's often said that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so if you don't find evidence of war, that doesn't mean war [didn't happen] there. For any particular case, any particular [archaeological] dig, that is absolutely true. But if you are talking about a larger region with multiple excavations, that is not a scientific statement, because it cannot be challenged, it cannot be falsified. If you're saying: "Even if you don't find evidence of war, war probably [still happened] there," how do you disprove that? But if I'm saying that in these different areas you're not going to find any evidence of war before certain periods of time, because no war took place there, that's easy to disprove. You just find the evidence.

It's a little tiring to me to have the phrase repeated, "just because you don't find the evidence doesn't mean it isn't there," because the pattern of seeing [war] start-up is so clear in so many places. It's time to consider the possibility that, really, war wasn't there at all before a certain point.

AMS: Why do you think the popular theory has been that war is innate to humans, or we've always had war?

BF: That's a great question, and it's a difficult question to answer. If I'm talking about whether there are signs of war in Europe in a particular year, I can talk about that in terms of evidence. But when you get to the question of why people tend [to lean] toward either the theory that "people are innately belligerent" or "people are innately good," (which is often suggested to be the Rousseau versus Hobbes point of view), some of it is individual variation in opinions. But I also think when you look at the prevalence of these ideas, they're time specific.

Back in the late 19th-century when Darwin's work was new, there was a real emphasis on this struggle for survival. There was a racial part to it too, which was the idea that some races are superior to others, and the struggle and fight [between the races leads to] the superior ones conquering the inferior ones. That whole Social Darwinist ideology was very common, and it fed into other theories back then, which were a bleak view of humanity. Freud was very bleak. Early psychologists were very bleak and would talk about humans having instincts, and one of the big instincts was the instinct of pugnacity. Pugnacity is a word we don't use much anymore, but pugnacity was said to be the instinct in which people just wanted to fight. So, if you wanted to know why wars exist, it was because we had the instinct for pugnacity.

World War I provoked a kind of revulsion against war. There was a change in how people looked at things. There was a 1915 study that was really revelatory, titled, "The Material Culture and Social Institutions of the Simpler Peoples: An Essay in Correlation." It looked at a number of different societies around the world (in what today would be a very crude method). It said that the simplest societies may have some war, but they had less war than more developed societies. It began to seem like war wasn't part of human nature, it was part of developing larger-scale, hierarchical societies. It came with that political evolution.

Time went on and in the 1960s there developed a very strong intellectual argument for war being innate. There were several writers who were key in [the development of] this [argument]. One was an Austrian ethologist (ethologists are people who study animal behavior) named Konrad Lorenz. He was on the German side during World War II. He was of the view that if you play a martial tune, men will drop everything and go off to war. He wrote the book On Aggression that was very influential.

Then there was Raymond Dart, an Australian paleobiologist (though they didn't use that word at the time) who found early skulls and remains, and was convinced that in every skull he found he saw evidence of a violent death and cannibalism. Dart's work was picked up by a very gifted writer, Robert Ardrey, who wrote several books, including African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative, which were part of his Nature of a Man series. That was the basis for Stanley Kubrick's movie "2001: A Space Odyssey." If you've ever seen the beginning of that film, these proto-apes had something changed in their minds by black obelisks from outer space, and they start killing each other, and that's the beginning of human creativity. That's what Ardrey basically believed to be the truth about humans, and he popularized it.

And then, there was the famous book, Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Golding came up with this idea that people were just real pieces of work. All of these concepts were part of the popular culture in the 1960s, and it was very influential. It became the accepted wisdom that that's the way people are.

The Vietnam War made a big difference. Anthropologists had not really been interested much in the study of war before Vietnam. The Vietnam War went on for a long time, and demonstrations against it were very big on college campuses, which is where anthropologists are. I was a draft-age student back then and that's really when the anthropology of war as a field first developed. It grew from there and different perspectives developed. Some of them held that war has always been with us, some said it was a biological instinct, some argued that war was a cultural product, and a relatively late development. Margaret Mead [cultural anthropologist] was one of those, who said "Warfare is Only an Invention, Not a Biological Necessity." And I think she was right. Since then, this argument has continued on in a more scholarly way, with people producing evidence. Now we've been doing that for a couple of decades and we've got a lot of evidence.

AMS: You mention in your Scientific American article that the people who argue that war is innate often use the example of chimpanzees being warlike. They point to the common ancestor shared between chimpanzees and humans to argue humans are innately warlike. You have spent two decades analyzing all of the recorded incidents of violence relating to chimps, and you have written a book on the topic, which is soon to be published. In your book, you theorize that chimpanzees are not, in fact, warlike but that their incidents of violence can be attributed to cultural and social contexts, largely involving human interference. Can you share a bit about your work on chimpanzees?

BF: I'm not a primatologist. I've never worked with chimpanzees. I'm a historical researcher, so I read the observations by other scholars, and I contextualize those observations. I did that with war, and I've done it with chimpanzees.

Back in 1996, a book came out called Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. It painted a really grim view of human nature, as evolved to kill strangers. And the argument was that chimpanzees do this… not because they're hungry or they're in some kind of immediate contest over resources. It's just: they're programmed biologically, by evolution, to do it. And the argument was that, then, so are humans because chimpanzees and humans got it from their common ancestors anywhere from six to 13 million years ago.

I started [going through all the literature] in the late 1990s, and now the book is finished. I've called it Chimpanzees,"War,"and History. And you'll note I put quotes around "war." For the book, I went through every site [where chimpanzee group violence took place]. What I found was that while people would say their [warlike] behavior of looking for outsiders or strangers and killing them is normal chimpanzee behavior, it's really rare. If you talk about a war as being sequential killings of members of another group, then there are only two chimpanzee wars that take place in a span of about nine years. I mention this in the Scientific American article:

"My work disputes the claim that chimpanzee males have an innate tendency to kill outsiders, arguing instead that their most extreme violence can be tied to specific circumstances that result from disruption of their lives by contact with humans. Making that case has required my going through every reported chimpanzee killing. From this, a simple point can be made. Critical examination of a recent compilation of killings from 18 chimpanzee research sites—together amounting to 426 years of field observations—reveals that of 27 observed or inferred intergroup killings of adults and adolescents, 15 come from just two highly conflicted situations, which occurred at two sites in 1974–1977 and 2002–2006, respectively.
The two situations amount to nine years of observation, tallying a kill rate of 1.67 annually for those years. The remaining 417 years of observation average just 0.03 annually. The question is whether the outlier cases are better explained as evolved, adaptive behavior or as a result of human disruption. And whereas some evolutionary biologists propose that killings are explained as attempts to diminish the number of males in rival groups, those same data show that subtracting internal from external killings of males produces a reduction of outside males of only one every 47 years, fewer than once in a chimpanzee's lifetime."

The gist of my argument is that evidence shows deadly intergroup violence is not a normal, evolved behavior pattern of chimpanzees, but a situational response to a local history of human disturbance. That is what the book demonstrates.

AMS: I've read that bonobos share just as much DNA with humans as chimpanzees and are not warlike or violent—in fact, they're practically nonviolent. Do you look at bonobos in your book?

BF: Yes. My book has 10 parts and part eight [is about] bonobos. Bonobos are a fascinating comparison. They're as related to humans as chimpanzees are. We have, however, never seen a bonobo kill another bonobo (although one killing of an infant is suspected, but very possibly didn't happen). Another thing that's different about bonobos is that they have on occasion accepted outside adult males into their groups. Now, chimpanzees have accepted adolescent males to their groups, and they've also temporarily tolerated stranger adult males in their groups, so it's kind of a fine point, but it is a qualitative distinction between [chimps and bonobos].

The saying was chimps are from Mars and bonobos are from Venus. Chimpanzees are partial to violence, aggressive and totally male-dominated; and bonobos are, as the story goes, female-dominated and not as hostile, not as aggressive… I wouldn't say bonobos are matriarchal, instead, I would say their society is gender-balanced—which is very different from chimpanzees.

And this takes us back to the question of inborn predispositions because if chimpanzees are born to kill, and if the bonobos don't kill, is that because somehow [bonobos] evolved out of the killing mode? Are they biologically evolved so that they don't kill?

Other than the two extreme behaviors I mentioned, accepting outside males into their groups and killing, almost everything a chimpanzee has been seen doing, a bonobo has been seen doing. There's a lot of overlap in what they do. It's kind of a difference in frequencies rather than cut and dry differences.

… Bonobos don't have the things that I think make chimpanzees fight, which is a scarcity of resources connected to human impact. Bonobos haven't had that. And at the same time, they have something that goes against fighting, which is a social organization that's very different from chimpanzees. I don't think this is a result of instincts or inborn predisposition.

I spend a lot of time in the book laying out the fact that a young male chimpanzee grows up in an adult world where males dominate females, and females don't spend a lot of time with other females. Males spend a lot of time hanging out with other males, so they've got a sort of boy club there, and this leads them to engage in status competition that's male-on-male. Very often a group of two or three males together will kind of rise in the social hierarchy by hanging together and attacking any other males as a duo or trio, and that's how they beat the alpha. And [being an] alpha has a lot of advantages.

For chimpanzees but not bonobos, the second hypothesis in my book is that the unusually aggressive, high-status males may, in some circumstances, engage in what I call 'display killing' of helpless individuals, even infants within their own group, in order to intimidate status adversaries.

But bonobos have a tendency of females to bond (which may have to do with the genito-genital rubbing that females engage in, although that's not entirely clear), and they will attack a male who is too aggressive. If a male wants to rise up in the status hierarchy of bonobos [they need to be less aggressive]… because the society structure is [based on] a bisexual ladder. For a male to rise in the status hierarchy, what they do is they stick close to their mothers. The best ally for a bonobo male in getting access to feeding, getting access to mating and going up in the status hierarchy means being close to a high-status female. The status game is played with mothers, not brothers. That's how a bonobo male takes care of his own business. It means that they're attached to females and very often not attached at all to other males.

AMS: For me, just as a layperson coming into this, learning that we are just as related to bonobos as chimps undermines the idea that human warlike tendency is due to the common ancestor with chimpanzees. It's interesting to consider how much social structures may be influencing behaviors, for humans as well as other apes.

BF: It's a big area of research now, and field research has changed for a number of different reasons. One thing that's happened in primate field research, and in laboratories too, is that work in non-intrusive studies that look at hormone levels and genetics has expanded. [Researchers] can get their samples by placing tarps under trees and waiting for chimpanzees to pee in the morning. And then they can collect data on the hormone levels and genes.

There is interest right now in the biology of these primates, and the argument in biology has been that chimpanzees and bonobos really are biologically different— genetically, hormonally and behaviorally. It's a really interesting area that I find complicated because of the nature of these biological studies and the nature-nurture interaction. The idea that biology and environment combine and influence the development of any organism and these changes may be epigenetic and may have to do with the birth environment. The main action of epigenetics, [the study of heritable changes in gene expression] is based on what happens in early life, though epigenetics works throughout life and may be transmitted through generations, too.

The way I put my argument at one point [in my book] is: what if they were switched at birth? If an infant chimpanzee was put in with bonobos and vice versa, what would they grow up to be like? Would a chimpanzee raised among bonobos grow up to act like a chimpanzee with all the aggressive notions, male bonding and all that stuff? I argue that they would follow the local customs [of the bonobos], they would do what they saw others around them doing. Then along came epigenetics, and as it was applied to chimpanzees, it seemed to fit perfectly that the early childhood and the social experience of a chimpanzee and a bonobo at birth is very different.

AMS: To bring it back full circle to humans, how do you argue this idea of nature vs. nurture, epigenetics and socialization, might come into play anthropologically, and in relation to war?

BF: The implication, or lesson here, for humans is that humans are flexible. I think chimpanzees are very flexible, I don't think that they have innate patterns to do things like fight with each other. I think it's acquired in chimpanzees and bonobos. And I think that that goes for human beings too. And humans go a lot farther than that in the complexity of culture.

A lot of people will say that chimpanzees and bonobos also have cultures, they will use the word culture for these great apes. I think what chimpanzees and bonobos have is clearly learned traditions. They learn things to do, things that others in their group do. I don't think that's the same thing as culture, because culture involves a symbolic and linguistic medium to exist. And that culture exists in our thoughts and our language and our speech. That's how you learn it. That's how you communicate it. That's how it's passed on.

Human culture has cumulative development—and it needs language and symbols for this. You learn what one generation did, then you can do something on top of that. Everything we have in this world goes back to thousands and thousands of innovations, all of which have been based on the innovations that came before. Chimpanzees do not have cumulative innovations.

For war, I think the difference plays out in that humans do not have inborn predispositions. Some anthropologists will argue that humans have an inborn predisposition to not kill other human beings, that they're born against doing that, and they have to unlearn that [in order to be violent]. That's an optimistic way of thinking about human beings, and it certainly goes against the idea that people are natural-born killers. I hope it's true, but I'm not convinced. I think that could just as easily be a result of the way that we're socialized in our own societies.

What I'm saying is that, at a minimum, we don't have a predisposition either way. We're certainly not predisposed to kill. We're not predisposed to be xenophobic. Ethnocentric is a little different because ethnocentric simply means at the basic level, that the way you were brought up is the way you think things should be done. Every culture teaches every new infant. Everybody thinks: "My way is the right way to do things." But going beyond that, to the concepts that other people are inferior, or dangerous enough to be killed—that's certainly not part of human nature. When we look at tribal people, when the Europeans first showed up, the initial response typically was to look at these strange people with curiosity. It's not a natural reaction of fear, not this kind of tribal hostility that everybody always talks about, which is a lot of bunk.

The lesson is that humans have a great deal of plasticity. And we can be molded in different ways. We can be molded to be Nazis, or we can be molded to be passivists. Thinking that it is something that comes from the genes, that it's evolved and that's the way we are, is not going to help you understand what's going on, and it's going to confuse you.

At the end of my book, I summarize all the work I've done over the years on war. For the past few years, I've been talking about human nature and war. Before that, the big question for me was not, "Is it human nature to make war?" but, "How do you explain the wars that actually happened in tribal societies, and in modern society?" The book isn't just about debunking theories about chimpanzees, it's about: If you have this idea of culture that I just described, it leads you to ask a lot of other questions that are a lot more interesting, and probably more meaningful in terms of understanding why real wars happened and why people really get killed.

There's an article I wrote in 2006 called Tribal, Ethnic and Global Wars, where I summarize my approach to wars that are going on around the world, based on what I know about tribal warfare. In it, I try to show how it is that wars have happened, and the relationship between practical self-interest and the symbolic values people have in a society. That, to me, is where the action is, and it explains what the cause of war is: it's practical, and it's also symbolic.

AMS: In this current moment in human history, where we have much more globalized and ongoing warfare than our ancient ancestors—and a more globalized world culture in general, is there hope for a future that's not so war-inclined?

BF: Is there hope? Yes, absolutely. If you look at the long history of the world as I do as an anthropologist, you see that we've gone from having thousands of independent societies on this planet, which at first I don't think were making war. Over time war developed in more places around the world and spread. Since then, over time we've had a consolidation of societies. There are fewer independent societies in the world today—and you've got to be independent to go off and make war. I've been using Europe as an example now for over 20 years. You would have never expected Europe to come together into the community that it is now [looking at where it] was heading toward [in the past]. The war between Germany and France and England and other parts of Europe was world history for quite a long time. Europe is just one thread, but it's a strong example of how things have changed.

I wrote an article in 1988 called How Can Anthropologists Promote Peace?, and one of the things I said was that as an anthropologist, you can say that there are other possible worlds out there. The things that we can't imagine to be possible now could become true. And in this article that came out in '88, I said that one thing we can say with certainty is that at some point the militarized East-West frontier in Europe will cease to exist. It was hard to imagine that happening then. But the next year [after the article], it went away. So, we don't know. There's no general direction toward peace, but I think an important part of it is for people to mobilize themselves, for people to promote peace, for peace to be of value.

It's important for people to see that a world without war is a realistic possibility. Maybe not now, but a world without war is something we can aspire to realistically, and work toward. If you think that's something that can never happen, well that fatalism is one of the main props that is keeping war going. It's good to break out of that mindset.

April M. Short is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California's weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon and many others.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.