 Hey McBride, I'm the director of 350 Vermont and we are really delighted to have the opportunity to have Starhawk here with us tonight. Yes! There's a table downstairs in case you did get that information and someone will be here to collect those later. And then finally, I just wanted to say that we really hope that this event is something that will inspire you and connect you more to the climate movement here in Vermont and beyond. 350 Vermont is a network of people all across the state that are working together in many ways in this movement to try and reverse the crisis that are in. A couple things coming up is that we have our annual gathering, annual conversions, November 4th at Goddard, not too far from here. And also keep an eye out very soon for bank actions. We are going to be responding to a call from Indigenous leaders in the Pacific Northwest who are calling for an action against the banks that are funding the desecration of Mother Earth. And so we invite you to take part in that on October 23rd in many different locations in the state, I think. More on that soon. And without further ado, I'd like to bring up, ask Ruby to come up for an introduction. Starhawk. And what I have are three little snapshots. Don't worry. They're verbal snapshots, but I'm going to describe them for you. The first snapshot, in this picture you see Starhawk laboring up a steep wooded hillside. The trail is crisscrossed with roots. So hard to navigate, even if she were not unconscious when she is. She is leading a group of about 20 people who have come to the south of France to explore the paleolithic cave art deep inside the limestone hills that she is now climbing. Her attention is concentrated, focused on this task. Days before the start of this trip, there was plant a year before she broke her ankle. Is it too loud? What you can't see is that she came off the airplane in a wheelchair carrying a set of crutches that she had not yet learned to use. Another person might have canceled the trip, but Starhawk not only got on the plane as planned and learned how to use the crutches while leading a group, she also chose to descend this steep hill on crutches knowing that she would have to climb back up fully under her own power. I chose this picture because I think it says something about that power. It is not a picture of strength, though there is muscle power mostly in determination. It is certainly not a picture of process work ethic. It is about a fairing purpose and commitment over the long haul. This picture tells you something about a purposefulness that has come out of the body and a body way of being in the world that may be necessary to navigate a world that is a longer daily with each decision you make. Picture number two. Are you blushing here? No, good. This is a picture taken at a recent EAT, Earth Activist Training. It shows Starhawk and her teaching partner Charles, who is here, standing in front of a whiteboard with a scribble of notes and drawings about the role of mycelium in the biology of plants and the water flow patterns. People have come to this place in southern Illinois for a two-week intensive training to learn about permaculture, but they end up understanding the implications of loving Earth. They will leave inevitably with dirt under their fingernails. It is the end of the second day of the course, and what you can't tell in a photo is that it's raining very hard outside. It had started with the evening session and continued throughout the principles of permaculture. The sky had cleared in the night scene calm as the students left, anticipating an evening around the fire circle in the meadow where they had pitched their tents, their valuables, computers and cameras, etc., were locked in their cars parked nearby. What is outside the view of this picture is just now being discovered by the students is that a flash flood has arisen and water is now soaking their tents and bedding, inundating their cars halfway up the doors. Suddenly, everything has changed and the situation has its own demands, imperatives that won't be ignored. We could say that this is a picture about teachable moments or about the best laid plans gone awry, but really it is a picture of students staying steady when everything is in flux, of Starhawk and Charles holding the center in the rising pandemonium of climate change, about guiding the precarious work of caring for each other, collectivizing the losses, inventing keys and generally embracing whatever comes. It's really about trust, trusting ourselves and each other and ultimately our place in the world. The third picture is a picture of a spiral dance. It's an densely populated area. It could be anywhere, Seattle, a bridge in Quebec City, Washington Square, Grand Central Station, Lafayette Park, Genoa, Adelaide. Anywhere activists have come to their public spaces en masse. There are usually cops around in the area or they will arrive soon and flow right here. You cannot distinguish individual faces. You can only see a slowly revolving but disorderly crowd of people. Starhawk is in the center. She's playing a simple beat on a small dubeck. Her head lifted high, watching all around her. Walking in ancient patterns, step by steps, firing the chaos into order. This picture isn't about taking control, though sometimes it may seem that a strong voice or a clear vision is how to get a desperate group to cohere. This picture is about reaching into the chaos. Offering your hand to the unknown while walking deeply grounded and steadily on the earth. It is about the kind of power that has to do with being comfortable, with not knowing what the hell you're doing or where you're going at any given point while trusting the creative dynamics at work in our world. In fact, it is about holding power and embodying that power to do the work that needs done. So this is a little bit of an introduction to Starhawk, and I will let you reveal more. Let you reveal more. Thank you. Well, I think I was sure you were going to talk about the spiral dance in Quebec City protesting the FTAA of the Barricades where I caught your eye across the spiral as tear gas canisters were flying above us. There are many ways to do a spiral dance, and I'm going to say hello, everybody. It's really wonderful to be here. I'm really grateful to Jan and everyone from 350.org for inviting me. When Jan and I were talking about this, we were talking about doing an interactive workshop, and then I think more and more people started signing up for it. So we're still going to do an interactive workshop, but we are going to do an interactive workshop with a whole lot of people in a somewhat non-interactive space in a very short time. So here we go. We'll see what happens. I've done a lot of different things in my life, as Ruby's introduction might give you a hint of, from being an activist, to being a ritual maker, to being a permaculture designer and teacher, to being a writer and an author. And all of them, except sometimes being a writer, have involved collaboration with other people, working in groups with other people. I think our ability to work together effectively in groups is kind of like our big constraining factor when it comes to changing the world. You know how in ecology or ecological design, you're always looking at something and saying, well, what's the constraining factor here? Where I live, out of the West Coast, the constraining factor often is summertime water. Other places, it might be sunshine, or it might be soil, or it might be wintertime cold. But that's, you know, it's the most extreme thing that you have to take into account. And I think for a lot of our groups and our movements, our sheer ability to work together and get along and resolve conflict and deal with conflict is the limiting factor in what we can accomplish. So, a number of years ago, I ended up writing a book called The Empowerment Manual, a guide for Kolevinan groups, because I wanted to think better about how we can work together and I felt like if we can improve the effectiveness of the groups that we're in, we can improve the effectiveness of every single thing that we're doing to bring about change. So, I start out by recognizing that we stand here on land that is the traditional land, I believe, of the western Avanaki people. Do I have that right? And of other tribes, maybe going back further, whose names we may not know, and that our connection to this land really comes from the grace of those ancestors and those people. And to start with honoring that and with a moment of gratitude for all the work of all the people done through all the ages to protect and care for and honor the land. Hopefully as we do our work around climate change and around other issues, we can see ourselves as part of that long tradition of care and guardianship for the land and for the waters and for all those sacred elements that sustain our lives. We also, when we work together in groups, the unfortunate thing is we have to actually work with other people. And people are notoriously difficult to get along with because they don't all agree with me and they all have their own identities and their own goals and their own visions and their own ideas about how they do things. So I want to start by thinking a little bit about what our identities are, who we are. If we were a smaller group, I'd have us all introduce ourselves to each other. If we were to do that in this group, that would take the entire night. But I am going to have you introduce yourself to someone. And I also just to say because we're such a big group, we're not going to have a formal break in the middle of this because if we did, it would take 45 minutes to get back. But I will please, if you need to go to the bathroom, if you need to get water, if you need a bite to eat or whatever, feel free to wander around and take care of yourself. So a couple of years ago I was at a conference and I heard an Ohalone Indian man from California where I live speaking. His name is Greg Castro and he was talking about what it meant to be a California Indian and he said, if you're a California Indian your identity is your place. For most of us maybe our identity is maybe it is, you know, how many of you identify as Vermonters. We identify to admit more as California but I do see the appeal and the beauty of Vermont. It's a beautiful, beautiful state. But nonetheless, our identity isn't quite the same as it would be if that was where our ancestors had lived for 10,000 years. Maybe for some of you it is but probably for most of us our ancestors come from some other place. You know, many indigenous cultures your identity is your tribe or it might be your clan within that tribe. I think for a lot of us our identity is connected often to our work and what we do in the world or to what our role is in the family that we come from. A parent or a daughter or a son or a sister or a wife husband lover partner some sort. For some people it might be your gender identity or the pronoun that you choose to use to identify yourself. For some of us it might be a race or it might be an ethnicity. It might be for some people it might be the car that you drive. It might be whether you're a Mac or a PC user or the sports team you support. So what I'd like you to do is find someone here that you don't know yet and take a few minutes just about five minutes all together and share a little bit about how you think of your identity the various facets and aspects of groups often because I think we live in a world right now where there's this tremendous pressure constantly to identify ourselves. Some of it comes out of the necessity of identity politics you know when we live in a world where something like your racial identity can be a matter of life or death it's hard to escape those identities we're still in a world where your gender identity has a huge impact that goes beyond so many of the things that we would like it to go beyond but I think it's always important to remember when we get together in groups that identity is really a full and rich and a complex thing and I think one thing that is the mark of a healthy group is when we have an agreement that this is a place where we want everyone to be able to show up and be seen and appreciated in the fullness of who they are so that we don't erase anyone's identity but we also know you are not any one aspect of your identity you may be many many many different complex things and I think that's one of the ways we start to undo the stereotypes and the prejudices and one of the ways that we can begin to build rich and full human relationships across some of those barriers that can divide us Are you ready to play a game? Yeah So let's stand up for a moment so we space a little bit but the way this game works is it comes from the world of improvisation and if we're doing an improv if we're doing a scene improv I might kind of make a suggestion to somebody so I might do something like he takes my suggestion and builds on it it's like he's saying yes to it I don't know if you can see him but he took my imaginary apple and started to eat it so the way this works is anyone can make a suggestion anyone can say something like let's all pick apples and then everyone says yes let's all pick apples try that yes let's all pick apples and then we pick apples until the next person makes a suggestion so it's open now anyone can make suggestions let's all juggle apples yes let's polish our apples yes let's all kneel like the NFL yes let's all fan our neighbors yes let's all hug somebody oh I've got the good star hot car that game for a number of different reasons one is because I think it creates it's fun the other is because I think it creates kind of a model of the kind of energy that I feel like makes for an effective group you know when you're in a group where you feel like your suggestions can be heard where people are kind of cheering you on and willing to go with ideas and willing to have fun with them then I think that's a group that people want to be in and I think it's a group that works together more effectively of course when you're actually working on a project you're not necessarily always saying yes let's all to every suggestion but there's a way in which you can be energetically supporting people for their suggestions even if you might have questions or you might have other ideas but also even within that silly game I think things come up there are also models of what happens in groups so let me ask how many people made suggestions and that's not very many people compared to how many people are here in the group part of that was a factor of time but that factor of time always exists in groups that even though in some ways that game sets up an equal field for participation in reality the people who made suggestions were the people who jumped in early and made suggestions how does it feel to make a suggestion and have your suggestion taken up by the group anyone want to speak to that what? affirming what can you tell me more about the surprise I suggested having somebody and I was feeling a need to connect other than just talking anyone make a suggestion that the group didn't take up so again even though in some ways this was an equal field in reality it really helped to have a loud voice you had a softer voice you ran the risk that you wouldn't actually be heard um yeah so yeah so there was a kind of like unspoken bias toward people who were in the front of the room versus people who were in the back of the room how many people didn't make suggestions how does that feel anyone feel good about it I'm the kind of person that thinks for us anything and if you can't think so if you get people to reply to her the other person who's worked out gets their stuff out and we sit in her room and again I think that's also something that happens in groups often when we might say we want equal participation but some people might take longer to you know might need longer to think of something might need, might process at a different speed or even just talk at a different speed um and we had someone in our group who drove everyone crazy because she talked really slowly all the time she was originally from Texas we were all in California um you know one year we all went back to Texas to teach a workshop and suddenly we were in a place where everyone talked really slowly all the time and she fit and we seemed like we were just racing along like so uh sometimes being conscious what are some of these invisible barriers you know what are some of the things we might not even be aware of that are actually impacting participation so many who is maybe more sensitive or conscious about uh oh how is this going to impact other people might be more hesitant to put a suggestion in want to make a suggestion and not get to make it yeah you want to say what yours was let's say let's all take our our we know to like you said people are in front and people like that put a suggestion and then decide for yourself that you weren't going to make it for some reason yes you know many levels again which even in a field where it's open and supportive there might be reasons why people might censor themselves they might have their own fears going on I saw one hand back there also I think my my first reaction was let's throw our apples at Cheetah again I think I was concerned about peace police you know they got to be a violent act so sometimes we might censor ourselves out of fear of being judged sometimes we might censor ourselves you know some of us might have come up with ideas that leadingly cause your mind you kind of go that's not really appropriate maybe some of them might not have been appropriate I don't know one more hand here so she's going to ask for help so you know groups always work in multiple ways often times when groups work through rules through agreements through things that are over and explicit stand up there too long I'm starting to feel like a creature you know our agreement was anyone can make a suggestion and we'll all say yes let's all and we'll do but groups also have implicit biases and groups also work through norms and norms are things that are not explicitly agreed on and yet can be more powerful sometimes than those explicit rules the example I always think of is the time I went to the Anarchist Book Fair in San Francisco directly from our pagan spring equinox ritual and I forgot to change clothes so I arrived dressed all in beautiful flowing emerald green flowers and every single other person in that book fair was dressed in black there was not I mean there might have been a little red or a little gray but there was not another color anywhere and it was an amazingly uncomfortable experience I was tempted to run out and change and then I thought no this is like you know an unexpected psychological experiment I should stay there and then zoom you know I'll see that on me nobody was mean to me nobody sneered nobody came up and said Starhawk you just didn't get the message did you out the dress code but I felt so uncomfortable it was a great learning about how it must feel often to be like the one person of color in a white group or the one woman in a man's group the one man in a woman's group even if people are welcoming and friendly some little piece deep inside you says like this is actually not for people like me how come I didn't get the message and you know it's also interesting because wearing black you know that was a rule and they made a rule you know they sent out a directive and said anarchists you will not be admitted unless you wear black all the anarchists were the rebels right women marches and sit-ins with rainbow flags saying like don't take our colors but because it wasn't a rule it was just a norm every single other four or five hundred people there woke up that morning went going to the anarchist book fair but not black and somehow I did not get the message so what I'd like you to do is think a little bit about some of the groups that you've been in in your life and where have you been in groups that have norms or rules that explicitly invited participation brought you in and where have you experienced norms or rules that maybe excluded you or made you feel unwelcome someway consciously or unconsciously so you can find you know if you're here with people from the same group you might want to talk about your group and think about what some of your norms are if you're not you might pick some people again that you may or may not know but we'll have a few minutes maybe about five minutes to think about this yeah so groups of three or four anyone to get heard or get to make comments but I'd be interested to hear a few examples if people have norms that either included people brought them in or that maybe subtly excluded people kept them out for years and years and I've just said yes I'm going to provide you with that but they start every meeting with the vegetarians which I've not done since 7th grade I stand at attention but I've never suggested going to work to other groups to meet the vegetarians and they also psychophagy is a prayer and I'm a started on the opening and I was very lucky to have asked to do the prayer last week which I started with all of this cool meeting to us thank you there's one group that I've longed to that encourages everyone to take on leadership yet there is a leadership that is sort of designated who decides who's ready to take on leadership and on the one hand it has encouraged a lot more leadership and I usually think it would happen but there's still a little bit of a feeling that there's a lid on the pot and then another thought is that I have to work in the soil and the soil carbon movement and on the coast we make an assumption that anyone is interested in soil or in the environment is either a democrat or progressive or politically left and most of the people I work with in the middle of the country are not most but many at least half I would say are Republican Serb and Christians who are very, very progressive in their approach to environmental work and I feel like there's a funny norm here on the coast thank you food free, dairy free and soy free and egg free you know more and more people are doing that on some level we're talking about we have a group that we do and it's really helpful that everyone is set free and they're committed to being because also you know I think one thing that happens is when there is a norm that excludes you like if somebody is wearing their favorite perfume that might make it impossible for you to be there but if you're always the one that has to challenge that and bring that up that gets to be exhausting it gets to be a burden anyone up here so just kind of often in the only transgender individual in a group and so oftentimes walking into a space and being around people who have never had those kind of questions or concerns with their life and speaking of this exhaustion but then when someone says something and constantly having to be that person they're like hey actually that's not okay that's something to re-frain it and so that was the main issue that we brought in these norms the whole society and those norms of gender are extensive and deep and they often impact us in ways we're not even conscious of and I think when somebody threatens those norms just even by who they are and how they present it can make people deeply uncomfortable and it is exhausting to constantly be around people that are being made deeply uncomfortable so that's why we often say in the movement what things we can do to be helpful allies is not to leave it to the person who represents the oppressed group to be the one to think about those things but to bring them up and to name them and identify them but I will say this there's often a thing that we say that says women shouldn't have to educate men on these things black people shouldn't have to educate white people transgender people shouldn't have to educate cis people and I think it's true we shouldn't have to because of that exhaustion but on the other hand I feel like we're in a moment right now where we actually might want to because for one thing like if you don't you know they might just go scroll around the internet and goddess only knows what they're going to come up with you might want to at times we might want to think about our movements as educational fields and make sure that maybe if it's not, maybe you're not the one that has to do all that education but that we as a group hold the knowledge and the education so that we can do it so that when someone comes in they are educated in an enriching and a deep and a full way because I think a lot of what's happening now is people are getting educated by scrolling around Facebook and reading various things and often getting very badly educated by we have one more and while that's happening we might bring up the image there are two things that I'm experiencing in groups one is a group we're going to give them a talk about these we're going to check in where everybody helps on themselves and that's not even going to do something like a group, not a business this is without a person we need people to improve we need to get them active to appearing to everybody else and that's a very inclusive step not just the business the other is on the other side where some people I often say we'll only decide when there are groups this week we can talk about sort of like the royal we can just exclude it when somebody says we we need to get discussion thank you those are great examples and I love that tradition of the check in because it's a way of really demonstrating like we do care about you as a whole person not just as the person in charge of the food table and the event but we care about all those aspects of your life and it helps to build relationships that make groups stronger and more connected so up here I have something I came up with when I was thinking about what other patterns we can look at what how can we identify what makes a group functional and what makes a group dysfunctional and one of the patterns I like a lot is that pattern of the Mandala the magic circle the four elements and the four directions it's one we use a lot in my magical spiritual tradition it's one that's common to many many indigenous cultures and traditions I think because it's a pattern of wholeness and I like it also because it kind of gets us out of some of the binaries that we think of you know a lot of people will divide the world and talk about traits being masculine or feminine and there's just many many ways in which that can get problematic but I think if we think about traits as being fire or water or earth or air that gets us out of that binary and allows us to look at different and more complex ways of things to balance so this is a map it's not like a reality or a dogma but I think it can be a useful lens for seeing things and there's a friend of mine named Adam Wolpert who lives and works in a community called Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in California in Sonoma County and he was giving us a talk one day about intentional communities and he said he felt what made for a healthy community was a balance between power and responsibility so that when people gain power they did it by taking on responsibility anyone ever been in a group where people gain power in some other way how was that yeah yeah you know some of our groups people gain power by who they're friends with or because they have more money or you know for some extraneous reason and that's not helpful to a group the counter bounce to that is if people are given a responsibility the group empowers them the group gives them the power or the authority which is the license to use power to carry it out anyone ever been in a situation where you had a responsibility and you weren't given the power you needed to carry it out and how was that so what you can't read it what's on the oh on the axis I'll get to the axis okay so can you read the power and responsibility part okay on the top it says earth responsibility the bottom it says fire and power the right side says air which is accountability and communication and on the other side says water and trust and then the two axes in between it's like if you get power and responsibility right then you've kind of it's between them I think of as action you can take action and if you get trust and accountability and balance and communication then that balance is an axis of learning because I think our communication is clearest and best if we think about it in a context of learning rather than the context of winning and losing especially right now around power because I think that's where groups often run into trouble how many of you work in groups that consider themselves non-hierarchical in some way horizontal and flat a lot of you and how many of you work in groups that have some kind of hierarchy some kind of clear lines of command okay so it's about half and half it's how many of you work sometimes in both because we I think most of us in our work lives most of the institutions in our culture are set up on some kind of lines of power and authority and oftentimes most of our voluntary groups are set up often in lines of that are more horizontal and more collaborative or collective and I believe there is a place for hierarchy you know there are times when it really helps to have a clear chain of command do you want the fire department to pull up in front of your house when it's on fire sit down and have a consensus meeting about who gets to hold a hose today no I don't think so emergencies things that need quick directed clear action things that need training you know do you want the hospital in Montpelier to open its doors and say this is brain surgery skill share day you too can empower yourself no right there are things that we want people to be trained to do and people really do have different levels of skill how many of you are parents you know do you want to sit down with your two year old and say oh Jamie you know let us have a discussion about how I will not interfere with your inherent freedom when you want to run out to the middle of the freeway you know you want your two year old to survive to grow up and for that reason you know that power that we exert when one person exerts control over another or a situation or sets the terms or imposes constraints or punishments sometimes there is a very benevolent and positive uses for that but a lot of times what happens in our culture is that somebody who might have the training and the skill and all of that to be the brain surgeon that doesn't necessarily mean that she actually knows better than you do about what you should serve at your co-housing picnic you know we don't necessarily want that status that is important in one area to carry over into other areas in which it is important for people to have an equal say and an equal voice regardless of what their skill level might be in some other area you know when we don't allow people to when we won't you know when we don't empower people sometimes I have been in groups and they are so you know devoted to being egalitarian to anyone to exercise power you know I'm thinking about some of the moments any of you involved in the occupy movement you know there were moments where in San Francisco we had a media collective in our local occupy and the media collective was responsible for doing things like putting out press releases and talking to the media but the group insisted that every press release was run through the general assembly which the general assembly met at 6 o'clock every day and things happened at all different times and press releases needed to go out at all different times and half the time in the general assembly met the meetings were so long and ponderous they never got around to looking at so the media collective was like in tears you know how can I do my job if I'm not entrusted with the power to do it so in order to empower people we have to also be willing to invest some trust in them and in order to invest some trust we need some clear communication we need to be able to say to the media collective you know here's three core points we want you to make in every press release and here's some things we never want you to say in any press release and here's how we can hold you accountable for that and now you know what we've decided now you go and you're empowered to write those press releases and we're not going to sit there and micromanage every sentence in every paragraph is that making sense to people I also think communication you know a friend of mine talks about the difference between speaking and thinking and listening to someone in order to hear and to learn and to understand their perspective versus listening in order to reload to sort of work up your next little shot that you're going to send and I think if we think about communication often as learning you know my you and I are having a discussion about how we think the strategy should be for the climate movement we might or might not agree but if I can look at that and say okay I'm learning something about your perspective rather than I have to win here then we have a more effective communication so if we had much longer for this we would go deeply into all of these things but I do want to talk a little bit more about power because I think there are different kinds of power so we talk a little bit about power over but there's also if I were to say to you where do you feel power in your life just call some things out call them out loud you won't have to take the microphone it's a gardener what? second the gardener together choices art what? teaching cooking singing you know what? preaching connecting with nature puppets where I don't feel power I'm really deaf in one ear so it's hard to hear but what I'm hearing from everybody is closer to the root meaning of the word power which is literally the Latin root means ability to be able to do something and the kind of power I'm hearing if somebody feels power in cooking that doesn't take away my power to cook in fact that might nourish me that might give me a new recipe power over kind of goes one way if I have the power to hire you fire you you probably don't have the power to fire me but if I have the power to sing that doesn't take away any of your power to sing in fact we might sing together and have even more of a beautiful powerful experience so that kind of power from within I think is something we often try to nourish and nurture in our groups and to encourage in one another but there's also another kind of power and I think operates in all groups where human beings come together and then we often confuse with power over with decision making power and that is what I would call social power differential in how much your voice is heard in a group how much you get listened to no matter how equal we like to think we are there's generally always some people whose voices get heard more easily than others that might be because they're louder in this situation that might be because they've earned that power by carrying a track record of making good interventions in the group of contributing and bringing things into the group it's what we call eldership in traditional cultures but that power sometimes can also be unearned it might be because someone happens to be good looking or they happen to be the right skin color they're the right class background sometimes it can be a mix of both you might have be articulate and maybe you've got a lot of education and you had a lot of chance to develop that well maybe you got that education because you worked really hard to do it and you studied and you learned and you waited tables so you could put yourself through school or maybe maybe you got that education because your grandfather went to that college and your grandfather went to college and you were entered into it from birth and your parents paid for it and you skated your way through and barely passed all your tests it can be some of both so I think in healthy groups where people have an opportunity to fairly earn social power if we don't ever let people earn any social power or any decision making power in groups they actually become very unfair and disempowering and the people often who take on the most responsibility the most commitment burn out and leave but at the same time social power is distributed unfairly people get very frustrated and also leave and the group becomes less intelligent you know less resilient if that social power also is so sucked up by you know the person who's the founder of the group or the people who've been there forever and there's no room for any new people to gain any social power then the group kind of rigidifies and generally doesn't do very well so I'd like to give you some time maybe to get together again with two or three other people and think about some of the groups you're in and think about are there differences in social power and if so how do people gain social power in those groups is it a fair way or are there unfair ways because those unfair ways are what we call privilege and I think that's something we'd like to undo but those fair ways I think can be ways that groups can grow and become more resilient and stronger so think about a few more minutes five, ten minutes again take two or three other people there are ways that people earn social power there is a way to empower others and there's a great deal of power in empowering others thank you, that's beautiful maybe one more I spent time with this slightly older woman while all these young people were next to her writing the exact same indie media stories in the same language for the same consumers me and this woman were carrying boxes up and down the stairs and they were picking back the rubber trader she got a lot of credit respect and power I have unfairly gained social power we talked about both how people gain power but it's like shown up at the meetings which seems like a fair way of gaining power and it may have to work for a living it's a great example I know that a lot in Occupy that the people who gain social power in the groups or the people who could live there on the street and stay there which in some ways was very fair but what it also meant was again people who had other things in their lives that meant they couldn't just drop them and go live there on the street or who had disabilities or who had kids or sometimes who were the more experienced activists who were already so committed to things they were doing they couldn't just drop them all they lost that social power and they some of that experience and knowledge got lost from the group so how do we change it if we see that something's operating unfairly did you have an example too I see my hand up there no what can we do to shift that to change that yes I mean the first thing you can do is acknowledge it and talk about it and bring it out in the open because as soon as it's talked about in the open it no longer is covert it becomes overt and then you can actually make choices and decisions about it the other thing I think that's helpful is if you get a group agreement that we want to change this norm or we want to change this we want to change the way we allocate respect in this organization it's hard for one person alone to do that but I've seen it done effectively for example in a group where on their internet listserv there had become this norm of people like arguing and attacking each other and taking their personal issues and sort of trying to work them out on a listserv where there were a hundred people all over the country most of whom didn't know either of them and it was very ineffective and very destructive and what happened was the group sort of talked about it and got an agreement so that it wasn't just one person saying wait a minute this is not appropriate for the listserv it was one person another person and another person saying wait a minute this is not an appropriate use of this listserv the other part piece of that though is if something's going on there's some way people are unfairly gaining social power unfairly imposing something that is not working for the group maybe to take a step back and say is this telling us some information people are putting this out in a forum that's not appropriate because there actually is no appropriate place to air these grievances or work things out someone once said about one of our groups that they were like a body that lacked a liver you know a liver can move toxins out of the body and you know if you were in a hierarchy you're in a family and your brother are fighting monk and come in and say you two kids stop fighting or I'm going to separate you no ice cream if you don't but if you're in a non hierarchy where everyone has equal authority and two people are fighting there's no one who can come in and say hey you two you know you stop fighting or you know go outside and work out your issues and often those issues can bounce around and bounce around and ultimately break a group apart Diana leave Christian who wrote a book on intentional communities creating a life together says 90% of intentional communities fail which is a really tragic statistic but mostly because of conflict so I think it's important for us to learn these tools again we had a much much longer time we could go more into conflict resolution and all of those things but I think I want to offer just two things about it right now first is I think we get in the worst conflicts when we try to avoid conflict and if we can actually embrace conflict we understand conflict is drama conflict is what you know if you look at what's on TV hundreds and hundreds of hours of things that are on TV and Netflix and Hulu and in the movies and you know on Amazon Prime and all of those things all of them involve conflict because without conflict there's no drama there's no excitement there's nothing that keeps you interested so if we stop thinking of conflict as destructive start understanding you know in group there's conflict when there's passion again if we're planning our next action for 350.org and I want to blockade the bank and you want to blockade the gas station we tend to frame our conflicts as good versus evil but actually many of our conflicts are when I think of this good versus good there are two positive things or two things we might both hold the value in going and sort of targeting the financial institutions and we might both see the value in targeting the oil companies it might be just a matter of which value we hold more strongly or which one we think is more urgent and more effective at this moment so those conflicts can be about ideas or about priorities or about plans and not about personalities you know if I don't make you evil because you're on the oil company team then I think our conflicts can be productive and can be exciting see a hand yeah so validating what the other person is saying or is feeling or what the values that they hold then in a way what she said is we are opening the door for yourself so if we think about conflict and embrace it and if we think about conflict as is this good versus good not good versus evil then I think we don't have to be so conflict diverse and we can learn to do it effectively in our groups so the other thing that I think is important in our groups is thinking about values often times you know we in political organizations we tend to talk about strategy we tend to talk about plans we tend to talk about priorities we tend to assume a set of values but I think our groups are strongest when we can actually articulate what our deep values are and I think the right wing is actually better doing this often than the left they talk in terms of morality their morality might be very different saying than mine mine's less about what you do in bed with somebody or who you do it with and a lot more of how you treat the earth and how you treat other people but they talk in those terms they speak to people in terms of values and they're not afraid of that language I think the left has often inherited this thing from Marxism where we don't want to talk about the metaphysical or the religious or the spiritual or anything like that because that's the opiate of the people we want to appeal to people's reason and rationality but actually people are not that rational even we are not that rational I think to think we're somewhat rational but people are moved not so much by facts and statistics but by stories and emotions and metaphors so I don't know if any of you are familiar with the work of George Leipzig the linguist he's written a number of books he's written a book called Moral Politics and he's one written one called The Political Mind and I think he's also a great textbook on magic in psychology because he talks about how words and metaphors actually get embedded in our theological structures we live in a world that's full of overarching metaphors that reflect different values and we tend to frame the world in terms of some of these deep stories that we've grown up with so he talks about how to move people we can't just talk about statistics we can't just talk about policies we have to talk in ways that actually encourage people to come from their deepest values and there are different metaphorical structures we hold you know one of the reasons we have this divide in this country is we've got people who come from what he calls the strict father frame that's this frame of like sin and punishment and you know the world is tough and we need a strong father at the head of the family and the country is like a family and you gotta raise your kids with discipline and if they do wrong you gotta punish them and if you coddle them too much they'll be weak we all encounter that frame a lot right he talks about the other frame people come from a nurturing parent frame that nurturing isn't gender divided into male and female and that the country is like a family what a family is supposed to do is take care of each other and look out for each other and nurture each other and help each other fulfill themselves and reach their potential and he looks at our divides around many of the different issues and look at our divide around climate change and you can see how in that strict father frame it's really easy to blame the victim I mean you can see Trump doing that today he's had a bunch of tweets about Puerto Rico that basically we're implying like it's their fault that they're the mess it ignores the reality that misfortune comes to all of us in life at some point we all get sick and you don't necessarily deserve the disease we all can trip and fall and break a leg and that's not a punishment that's just an accident and again from the nurturing frame part of what we need to do is take care of one another and we need to spread it around when there's misfortune so if we forgot people right now in Puerto Rico and all over the Caribbean who are devastating from hurricanes and from what we see really is the result of climate change then it's all of our responsibility to try to respond and try to help mitigate that and not to blame the victim but like I've also said we all carry some of both of those frames whether we're aware of it or not the most die-hard Republicans somewhere deep inside after Hurricane Katrina a lot of people came down to volunteer in New Orleans and contributed and a lot of them were Republicans were not all like us nice progressive bleeding-hard liberal types um and even as nice progressives often carry some of that sin punishment you know how many times have you heard some lovely spiritual new age person say I know a few years ago when I broke my ankle and went on that trip how many people said to me that's the goddess's way of telling you to slow down and I finally started like yelling at her if the goddess were my boyfriend then she broke my ankle they'd tell me to slow down you'd be telling me to get out of that abusive relationship the goddess wants me to slow down she could just give me a million dollars and I wouldn't have to work anymore I think that frame creeps into the climate movement and the environmental movement you know that we are often in a subtle way telling a story that's actually a story about sin and punishment you know when we frame climate change as you know it is your fault for your consumerism it is your fault because you need to sacrifice you know you're wanting to actually read with electric light at midnight is part of the problem you know I think we actually unconsciously have fallen into that other frame and I don't think it actually serves us because I think climate change you know one of the reasons it's hard to deal with it is it runs counter to this other frame that we all carry which is the story of progress the story that we now have transcended nature's limits and there's you can look around and you can see so many ways in which we have I fly on an airplane through the air I don't fall down I can pull out my iPhone and talk to someone on the other side of the world it's amazing but that makes us think that we should be able to transcend all of nature's limits you know if we admit that we don't then in a very deep level we have to actually admit that we are each mortal and we are each subject to die if we admit that things happen to people that might not be their fault and that might not be a result of their actions but might be just sheer bad luck or cumulative destruction of the system that support us and that they might not deserve those fates that's terrifying because then it opens up for each one of us that we might find ourselves in a situation where we don't deserve our fate and we lose control so I think to deal with climate change we need to find the story that speaks to our deepest values we need to find a way to frame that ways that can hold and support people and actually acknowledging and coming to terms with nature's limitations and with the reality of death because the positive sign of doing that is again if we go back to Indigenous cultures if we go back to the old honest traditions from Europe and the Middle East we go back to cultures that live connected to the Earth when they talk about our stories of cycles and say death and regeneration go together death is part of life and death leads on to decay and there is no regeneration without death and decay so if we try to avoid that what we actually avoid doing is exactly what we need to do to renew the world so that's my rant for the night but what I'd like you to do is take a moment right now maybe just close your eyes and think about what is sacred to you the sense of what you most deeply care about and what's most important to you what is it you care about more than your own personal profit or convenience what is it you care enough about you might take a stand for it or take a risk for it what is it that actually nourishes you and sustains you what I'd like you to do is find someone you haven't spoken with yet and take a few minutes and try to imagine how you might speak in terms of that sacred value how would you speak about our political work about climate change about any of the work you're involved in how would you tell the story framed with your sacred value and its core one powerful example has been the way the elders from Standing Rock spoke so clearly about their movement not just about the pipeline but water is sacred water is life not just protestors we are water defenders water protectors so how might you frame your sacred value in those in terms that can convey that and evoke that in someone else so an example you'd like to share or came up with a framework you'd like to share Mary, but not just my grocery that's what came to me from the mind before me who was a bigger example was water the river was the most love and how that could be a way to relate to people the story is that everyone is brokenhearted all humans are brokenhearted and I feel like that brokenheartedness that sadness is a very genuine human feeling that perhaps a human story is a genuine premise thank you I'm so glad I heard that I really feel that that's very powerful to piggyback on that comment the broken heart is the open heart and we all have that so if you are brokenhearted we are going to share my core values of love, beauty and love, beauty, and joy and when I convey when I speak or communicate it's really full of my heart and what is that it's more generous and beautiful and I'm going to leave it to you really soon thank you the gentleman that I'm speaking about the point that if you don't have compassion when we are speaking to other people it's never going to get across for example we talk about full-liners who that's their livelihood and they seem antiquated and updated to us but to them if you're not having their basic needs met they can't think beyond that I'd just like to on the open heart broken heart piece I think one of the things that those that experience standing on experience was the idea of the story that helpers have vision they had to bring people together that had to be disenfranchised by leadership in the tribe they had to bring people back in from all walks from all trials I think this is really the key to what the woman was speaking earlier about healing the heart how do we get this movement to call us if people are stuck in their own pain or in their own angst and I know that there's a great effort by GEO to keep that angst out there and I think people have to work with the energy of people to that to operate in a compassionate way I saw law enforcement standing on for a while desecrating grades and I still like screaming at them they go hey what are you going to do stand on your grandparents' grade and he had an older group standing on my shoulder and said let's tell what we're here to do and I want you to come back to this place and sing a song that I want you to draw and I think that really was a process to recognize the implicit bias and it is open it has to be open and I think this movement will grow if people are able to reach out to each other we'll do the healing first we'll be on the side there's a hand behind you one of the reasons why indigenous people are well-sorting so much is because of their score the visual, verbal, connected image of those score values are committed and one of the powerful things about storytelling is that it has the ability to meet and liberate people like what we would have did with the storytelling or what Hitler did with the storytelling it implicitly will interfere so if we learn how to tell our stories in a way that brings forth the connected values that bind us together we will find our worship thank you I thought it was interesting that we could be together we all spoke a lot about the earth in our reference to the earth as our mother and just looking at your tells in the healthy room thinking about all these thousands of people who are fully attached to the effectiveness and someone else thinking about being in the heart and stuck in the heart that to me is a doubt of fire and oppression and is trapped with a lot of people because they can't move out of their own pain and he's thinking about the story which is the era and to me it seems like there's a lot of people who are stuck there's a wholeness to everyone's really caring about the earth as our mother and it's a matter of really difficult elements to find a connection through communication which is about water and trust and just to share a personal thought I had an acupuncture session today where the acupuncture person identified that I was very in my heart and did these things on my knees to move down into my kidneys so I could actually be not quite so stuck and be able to move again so I just I was reflecting on that a lot today and I was to hear all these people talking about elements and deciding that reminder up there it really is a great thing because those are such basic concepts that you would like to move with. Thank you. I have a quick thing I feel with the Academy I'm going to talk about there's a lot of disconnect between each other human to another animal species and the disconnect from the earth and how we're disconnected from the fact that we do something too that we're doing to ourselves and to people around the globe just to burn trash and make it go away so I feel like at this time it's really powerful and we can do whatever we can but it doesn't mimic capitalism we can cooperate with everything mimic natural systems that empower people to want to care about the earth because they don't want to do things like I think our leader wouldn't want to put a grab on it and now we put another grab on the other side of our arm if they care they think about something a different way to do it so I think those types of things will help us be more on one's relationship. Thank you and maybe we'll take one more I see one hand there. Thank you I think that's what we consider when I start thinking about our young children I think a lot of us have really been very lucky in where we've grown up that most of us do have access to fresh water fresh air and I think we are at the two important at this time of history when I see very high temperatures in Vermont in September these last few days we've had all summer and it's it's very strange you know to think we all know it's not and it's a very real possibility that our grandchildren and their children won't have the benefit of water coming and fresh air and fresh water and we can talk about conservation at the same time for example now we that the global population is growing and growing really fast and those people who are coming to work out they want that energy and they want the quality and they want the electricity and they want the internet and to play play us these things are wonderful and somehow somewhere what I hope is that we can find a balance but we can find a way to say these are the things that work that make our life better and to make the world better make the world sustainable I have in the southern end of the Oblations the southern end of the Oblations has been destroyed literally destroyed with Mount Top Island because people want coal and people want electricity and I understand the desire for those things and yet we've got to find a way and I don't know the answer is I hope that the government is supposed to commission a private change and they borrowed from their input so if you have any brilliant ideas feel free to touch on them and that is what I hope is that we can find a balance for all of us and for the people that we love and the people that we love so coming down towards the end of our time together I want to leave some time for people just to ask questions but I do want to say I think we are stronger when we speak in terms of our sacred values and when we tell a story you know oftentimes I feel like in the environmental movement we're telling people a story that basically goes things are worse than you thought and it's probably your fault and really the world would be better off without humans and that's not first of all that's not a story you can mobilize anyone around secondly I don't think it's true I don't think the world would be better off without humans I think that Mother Gaia went to a huge amount of trouble to evolve human consciousness over billions of years and it would be really a waste to throw it away right now that we're here for a reason and we have something we're supposed to be doing with this consciousness so I think we need to be telling people a different story we need to be telling people a story that this is the time of the great brokenness broken heartiness, broken systems on every, every level but that is a decay that calls us to the great regeneration and the great work of healing and that we are all here right now to do that work we each have our own unique gifts and talents and calling to our own unique part of that work and the wonderful thing about that work is if we frame climate change not just as carbon numbers but as massive environmental brokenness then the answer to it is massive environmental regeneration on a global scale and the good news is we know how to do that we actually have tremendous tools for doing that we can point out incidences there's a man named Tony Ronaldo who discovered how to regenerate forests in the Sahel and basically by looking at the ground and going oh, you know, he'd been working with an international organization to plant trees for 20 years that planted trees and planted trees and planted trees and they all died and then one day he was looking at the ground so discouraged he was ready to give up he looked around and he went oh, the trees are already here they're here in the form of these little bitten off shrubs that goats have been nibbling at then he shifted and started to teach people to prune those trees and fence those trees and suddenly they had trees and they had forests and they had firewood and they had mitigation and they have reforested tens of billions of hectares now in Niger and Mali and Ethiopia and in countries where instead of the desert increasing the desert is retreating I could give you 10 examples of that we have the tools for massive environmental regeneration and it comes down to working with nature regenerating soil which helps us regenerate the water cycles using plants using other nature's methods to take carbon out of the atmosphere and turn that carbon into humans and into soil fertility and into trees and into plant bodies and we need to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere but we don't have an energy crisis on this planet we have abundant energy on this planet we have more energy flowing into this planet every day from the sun and we could possibly use what we have is a crisis organization and management and what we have to sacrifice is not our ability to have a good life and not the ability of someone in the third world to eventually be able to enjoy some of the benefits that we have enjoyed what we have to sacrifice really is the ability of the oil companies and few others to make massive profits from destroying the earth and the rest of us to frame it in a way that invites people in that acknowledges again that we each do have a role to play you are an important part of making this transition and that role isn't going to be the same for each one of us changes an ecosystem that has a wide variety of niches and maybe someone's niche is going to be stopping that pipeline and standing in front of the riot cops and chaining themselves to the bulldozer not the only niche or the most important niche maybe your niche is writing your legislative or writing for office in your local town or teaching people the tools and the skills they need to respond to emergencies or teaching children about environmental education or making media that helps support all of this or helping to raise funds to provide for all of this if we think in those terms then we don't have to get into these stupid arguments about why aren't you doing my tactic instead what we can be doing is saying well how does your niche support my niche, how can we better integrate them and use them to create really powerful systems of change so when I just start with one little last story I was at Standing Rock just for a very short period of time and it was incredibly inspiring and it was also incredibly hard when Trump basically said put the pipeline through who cares but I was in Germany earlier this year and our translator was talking about how in her little community in Germany everybody had organized to do support for Standing Rock and then one day they looked around and they said well yes we're doing support for Standing Rock for the water protectors but maybe we should be water protectors too maybe we should be looking at our own rivers and saying if water is sacred our waters are sacred and they formed a group they called the river keepers and suddenly they had a group in their own area taking responsibility for cleaning up their rivers and caring for guarding their rivers and to me that's an example of the power of political change you don't always see it there's probably no headlines or no viral facebook posts about the river keepers in her little area but think of like if that's one story there's hundreds of those stories and if that action sparked that change think of the hundreds and thousands of people that have been changed again because that action spoke so powerfully in terms of those sacred values and that's how we begin to make change in the world so I want to we've got a little bit time I want to just open it up if people have questions or they have things you want to organize around maybe to let people know and just to ask please keep concise if you can thank you so much star I just wanted to let people know really briefly about something that's giving me a great deal of personal relief as an organizer the poor people's campaign which is a campaign that Martin Luther King started two weeks before he died in 1968 has been revived by Dr. William Barber and this is Theo Harris and by 30 on Saturday we're going to be doing our first active civil disobedience not civil disobedience just first of all it's exorcism at Montpelier coffee where we announced the type of this campaign in Berlin the next day on Sunday at 5.30 we're going to be getting together at the Vermont Workers' Center in Burlington at the very old labor hall and probably at the Root Center in Browber to discuss our plans for uniting so many of our efforts in an important campaign that's really going to launch in 40 days of civil disobedience at state capitals all over this country trying to confront systematic racism, systematic poverty we start this Sunday with the ecological demonstration agenda please kind of handle this at 5.30 at the very old labor hall I think that you might be able to do this idea and thank you so much for the time you spent thank you any questions or you're welcome I'm a member of the citizens' climate body and we have a growing contractor and we advocate for revenue neutral carbon tax and we have some fun doing and we're welcoming members to share I'll also just say while that microphone was going around being in southern Germany was very inspiring every old farmhouse had solar panels on it there were solar farms everywhere and wind farms everywhere and the reason is Germany has policies that support that and that pay people for that and they're making 30 to 50% or more of their energy from electricity right now and Germany isn't exactly like your sunniest country in the world so Denmark is moving toward 30% renewable energy France is phasing out fossil fuels you know other countries are far ahead of us on this and it can be done really there is no technological no scientific no constraint on making that shift and making that shift is only going to make the world cleaner and healthier in so many ways oh ok I wonder there is a formal course thank you so I appreciate you speaking to the sort of self-patriot that can be in the environment that can exist and reading can be right in the past because it really feels like that for me I'm after spending a lot of time staying here after this past year I'm really fired about the conversation and I have kind of a similar thing about that oh said that people should be going to go somewhere in America or should just go or should we go so I just wonder if you have any insights about how to re-composition work and really embracing other environments as well yeah I mean one of the messages I got at Standing Rock both first in prayer and then from an amazing woman named Lila June who met a women's sweat when I was there is that European people need to understand people have European heritage need to understand we also have indigenous roots they're just further back and there's a big barrier between us and connecting with them that is the witch persecutions and all the things that went on with the rise of capitalism that doesn't absolve us from dealing with the actual real privilege of having white skin but we can understand that this deep desire and urge to connect to the earth and link to the earth is something that's a human heritage that we all have I also think that you know so we need to kind of learn about those roots and also learn and if I have more time I go into the whole thing but it takes a little time to lay it all out I also think that we need to think about heritage in a slightly broader way you know I think there's a danger in defining heritage strictly as bloodline though it certainly doesn't mean you should be claiming heritage you don't actually have but who speaks a European language anyone for whom that's how you live and work and think has a European heritage anyone who lives and works in this culture you know has this culture as a heritage we can't avoid it it is part of what it shapes us makes us who we are which is not just your bloodline or your ancestors even you know Native Americans will say again no you can't just go set up a sweat lodge in a hotel somewhere and charge money for it and you want to be a spiritual teacher that's colonization that's appropriation but if you actually are called to the sweat lodge then what you do is you go to someone who can teach you and you offer service you give something back you do the training, you pay your dues and if that person is willing to teach you over time then you can learn that tradition and that's how you earn the right to practice that tradition I also, many years ago when we were talking about this and way back in the 90's in our community I sort of said okay I gotta go meditate on this I gotta go talk to the ancestors talk to the ancestors and say what do you think about all of this and what I heard from the ancestors was they said we don't actually care that much who your ancestors were what we care about is what you're doing for the children so for me I think about that if I have a commitment to the future of the people in some way if I have a commitment to their children to creating a world for their children then I actually have a responsibility to learn something and know something about their tradition and their heritage again that doesn't give me the right to set myself up as an authority on it unless I've gone through the training and learned that and gained that but it does give me the right to open to it and to learn from it and I think we have to be aware of the bloodline thing because it leads us into a world then in which like you might have to prove you're white to play the piano we don't want to go there or Italian you know we have really tried hard and we have thousands of years of heritage of people struggling against a world that says you should be limited by who your parents were your ancestors were and that should determine and limit what opportunities are we don't want to go there we want to go to a world where you have the opportunity to fairly earn the things that you are drawn to and that you are attracted to and you do that by giving back by committing to the reality of the people not just a romanticized mission of it and by offering service paying the dues I'm wondering if there are any songs or chance that they'll particularly any what songs songs do you like to sing one like this one very simple words it goes no army can hold back a thought no fence can chain the sea the earth cannot be sold or bought all life shall be free and it has a wordless chorus you can just hum along if you don't want the words it just goes hey we'll dance with somebody and maybe we can raise a little energy right now for this change and this transformation and all of you for grounding in spirit and focus on organizing and activism we've got a social permaculture course and a facilitators training coming up in the spring where we'll do like five days or extended to ten days of this stuff we've got a couple courses coming up in summer so you can find it all on my website which is starhawk.org or on our earthactivisttraining.org website I also have some books downstairs but we might have a few left for sale and there is some food down there the fifth statement thing which is my novel is now available as an audio book as well I can get that online and two copies of city of refuge which is the sequel so again thank you all for coming out it's probably going to be a TV series rather than a movie and that still remains to be seen so it's moving ahead but it isn't yet at the point where I can give you a date for it thank you all