Marc Angelo Coppola

The dinner plate-sized mushroom encircles its host tree like a bloated tumor. I’m about to snap a photo of the beast when something flickers in the corner of my eye. Faint, smoky wisps give off the impression of smoldering coals. At this very instant, the fungus is releasing billions of microscopic spores.

I feel as though I’m witnessing one of nature’s secret acts, something an urbanite like me was only supposed to see on National Geographic. With a lush green canopy overhead, the hum of insects and warbles of tropical birds filling my ears, the moment would be Avatar­-worthy, save one jarring detail: The air reeks of petroleum.

That’s because I’m standing over a patch of blackened, crude-soaked ground. I’m here in the Sucumbíos province of northeast Ecuador with Donald Moncayo, a community organizer with the Amazon Defense Coalition. This spot, Moncayo says, holds a special significance. It’s the first in a series of nearly a thousand toxic waste pits that litter this remote part of the Ecuadorian Amazon, festering like open sores under the fierce equatorial sun.

“All the pools are in direct contact with the water and the soil,” said Moncayo, who has been taking visitors on his so-called ‘toxic tours’ since the early 2000s. “There are no membranes, no barriers, nothing. All of this was intentional.”

These toxic waste pools-locals call them ‘piscinas’-are the legacy of Texaco’s twenty six-year stint extracting oil from Sucumbíos. (Texaco has since become a subsidiary of Chevron.) The spills have been poisoning the soil, water, vegetation and people of the region for over twenty years.

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Credit: Amazon Mycorenewal Project

Not ten meters away, one of the most amazing mushrooms I’d ever laid eyes on-and, after years as a microbial ecologist, I’ve seen my fair share-is breathing new life into the forest. To me there’s something serendipitous about this, because I’ve traveled to Sucumbíos to meet a group of scientists and activists who hold the radical notion that fungi are the key to empowering the victims of a horrific environmental disaster to clean up their land.

“Oil companies don’t teach people the solutions to their problems, because that would be an admission of their own wrongdoing.” Lexie Gropper, the program coordinator for the Sucumbíos Alliance of Bioremediation and Sustainability (ABSS), told me. “They prefer people who lack the power to make a change.”

But Gropper believes that change is coming. In less than a year, the exuberant, Spanish-speaking 24-year-old from Atlanta, Georgia has rolled together enough local and international resources to lay the groundwork for an organization dedicated to improving the health of humans and the soiled Amazonian environment through fungi. A collaboration between the US-nonprofit the Amazon Mycorenewal Project, and the Instituto Superior Tecnológico Crecermas (ISTEC), Sucumbíos’s only higher education institute, ABSS aspires, over the coming years, to transform a humble agricultural university into Ecuador’s primary hub for mushroom cultivation, distribution, and education.

The project’s aim? Nothing short of cleaning up the one of the world’s largest oil disasters -using giant, petroleum-gobbling fungi.

Credit: Amazon Mycorenewal Project

There are an estimated 1.5 to 5 million species of fungi: Yeasts and molds along with mushroom-producing macrofungi. It’s a clan of bizarre creatures that spend most of their lives unseen, sweating out a plethora of digestive enzymes that decompose the dead and recycle elements for the living. Some fungi use threadlike mycelia to worm their way into the soil’s smallest cracks and crevices, unlocking nutrients which they trade plants for carbon. When crusading mycologist Paul Stamets waxes poetic about fungi, he calls them “the neurological network of nature,” for their ability to knit together the lives of plants, animals, and the Earth itself. He’s right.

When it comes to mopping up our nastiest environmental messes, fungi may be one of the best hopes we’ve got. Certain species, including the oyster mushroom, produce enzymes that break down the tough, aromatic hydrocarbons found in petroleum, in addition to soaking up heavy metals like mercury. Deep in the Amazon, scientists uncovered a fungus that eats polyurethane plastic. Stamets, meanwhile, is involved in an effort to clean up the nuclear wasteland around Japan’s Fukushima reactor using radiation-loving mushrooms. And these are just the highlights; most experts will agree that we’ve barely scratched the surface of Kingdom Fungi’s potential.

“At this point, there’s simply no concept of how many fungal remediators are out there,” said Tradd Cotter, whose South Carolina-based company, Mushroom Mountain, is positioned to become the world’s largest hub for mycoremediation-the process of using fungi to clean up the environment. “All fungi can exude extracellular metabolites.” (Those are the enzymes, antibiotics, and other biological factors that actually do the remediation.) “When you consider 1.5 million fungi on the planet, all you can say is there are an unlimited number of possibilities.”

And there few places on Earth that match Sucumbíos’s desperate need for environmental remediation. According to Amazon Watch, from 1964 to 1990, the oil company Texaco (now Chevron) drilled 350 petroleum wells across a massive swath of previously untouched wilderness, all the while dumping some 18 billion gallons of toxic formation waters (a byproduct of oil extraction) directly into rivers and streams that the region’s tens of thousands of indigenous Ecuadorians depended on for drinking, cooking, bathing, and fishing. When Texaco left in 1992, it poured the rest of its waste-crude and toxic sludge-into the unlined death pits I found myself wading through.

Credit: Lexie Gropper

If people outside of South America know anything about northeastern Ecuador’s politics, it’s likely of the multibillion-dollar class action lawsuit that ensued after Chevron proclaimed it would not compensate the local victims exposed to the toxic blight, and would instead ” fight until hell freezes over.”

For over two decades, the oil giant has done just that, spending billions of dollars on thousands of lawyers to deny and delay legal proceedings. When I contacted Chevron for comment, a company spokesperson denied the existence of the toxic waste pits, claiming they were part of a “decade long disinformation campaign in support of judicial fraud in Ecuador by plaintiff’s lawyers trying to extort money from Chevron.”

This stance speaks to Chevron’s recent counteroffensive in the legal battle, the basis of which is to paint the plaintiffs-30,000 homesteading farmers and tribespeople-as a group of scheming mafiosos.

“Chevron’s strategy has been total-scorched-Earth,” Kevin Koenig of Amazon Watch told me. “They subpoena people, they drag them into court, they scare the living shit out of them. And they have all the time and money in the world.”

The same cannot be said for the thousands of men, women and children who, every day, are forced to drink water fit for a hazardous waste facility. These include the family of Marlene Cabrera, who lives next to an oil well outside the sprawling oil-boomtown of Lago Agrio. When we visited, Cabrera recalled how she never used to salt her food, because the river water she cooked with was brackish from toxic waste. Her sixteen-year-old son has been ill with a rare disease, which doctors believe is related to oil contamination, since he was nine. She has seen several family members, with no history of drinking or smoking to excess, die young of cancer. Countless families throughout the province echo her story.

As the beleaguered legal battle moves into its twenty-second year, indigenous communities, aided by a handful of dedicated international groups, have begun taking matters into their own hands. The most prominent example is ClearWater, an organization whose mission is right in its name. In 2011, co-founder Mitch Anderson organized a team comprised of men and women from the region’s five indigenous tribes. Thanks to a major grant from Trudie Styler’s Rainforest Fund and other celebrity contributions, ClearWater has furnished over a thousand indigenous families with sophisticated rainwater catchment systems that remove bacteria while soaking up heavy metals and petroleum hydrocarbons.

“ClearWater is about provisioning the basic necessities of life to the people who have called these forests home for thousands of years,” Anderson said when I called him from Quito.

Credit: Amazon Mycorenewal Project

Gropper, who assumed the project coordinator role for the Amazon Mycorenewal Project in early 2014, tells me how ClearWater’s grassroots, community-oriented vision has been a source of inspiration. Founded in 2007 by an international cohort of bioremediators, mycologists and environmental scientists, the Amazon Mycorenewal Project has, over the years, generated excitement by demonstrating the potential for fungi to detoxify the putrid soils and rivers of Sucumbíos. But until very recently, the organization lacked the local infrastructure needed to conduct long-term studies and create a lasting impact.

“As international volunteers, we come and we leave,” said Gropper. “We like to tell locals how they can fix their problems, without really thinking about their needs. But until we’ve shown that we can make this work for the people of Sucumbíos, we haven’t accomplished anything.”

Through its integration with ISTEC, Gropper believes the Amazon Mycorenewal Project is now positioned to build permanent ties with the local communities.

“Our alliance with an Ecuadorian agriculture institute provides so many opportunities to grow,” Gropper said. “It’s everything the Amazon Mycorenewal Project ever dreamed of.”

For its part, ISTEC has made it clear that their new, fungally-minded partners are a priority. The university has furnished the fledgling organization with on-campus housing, in addition to five laboratories to be used for soil and water testing, microbiology, mushroom cultivation, and eventually, large-scale spawn production. When I visited, international volunteers were hard at work converting the empty labs into sophisticated research facilities. They’re also teaching themselves mushroom cultivation techniques and conducting the first pilot studies that, eventually, will lead to a library of petrophilic fungi-those with a knack for growing on toxic waste.

When Norwegian volunteer Gudny Flatabø arranged a series of Petri dishes on the lab bench, several were an inky black, instead of the usual tawny hue. Mycelia-the branching, filamentous part of fungi that colonize vast surfaces-gobbled the contaminated agar, unperturbed by the toxicity of their food. Over time fungi that tolerate the spectrum of toxins found in petroleum waste-benzene, toluene, chromium and mercury, to name but a few-can be bred to handle higher and higher concentrations.

Credit: Amazon Mycorenewal Project

“You need to do this basic science first, prove that it works, prove why it works,” Cotter, who is also overseeing mycoremediation projects in Haiti and the Alberta tar sands, in addition to advising the Ecuadorian initiative, told me.

According to Cotter, there are a hundred things to test and tweak before a fungal remediator is ready for prime time, including physical properties like its tensile strength and ecological properties, including how the fungus interacts with and shapes the native microbial community.There’s also the matter of finding local remediators-fungi that grow naturally near the disaster site. Once their sterile cultivation facilities are ready, Gropper plans to isolate native fungi that already thrive in local contaminated sites.

“We want to figure out what the best local remediators are and what are the best conditions to grow them,” said Gropper. “Then we can scale up production, and create a spawn distribution system that’s sustainable long after volunteers are gone.”

Large-scale fungal remediation is a long-term goal, and Gropper is cognizant that locals will need strong incentives to buy in. She is hopeful that, through cultivation workshops and classes, her organization will get Ecuadorians excited about the myriad possibilities mushrooms offer.

“I think nutritional and medicinal aspects of mushrooms are what’s really going to get people interested,” Gropper told me.

The nutritious turkey tail mushroom, for instance, helps our immune system fight off cancer. The reishi mushroom, which grows naturally in Sucumbíos, has well-documented antibacterial properties.

“They’ve lived with the contamination for over forty years,” Gropper continued. “They’re not happy about it, but they’re used to it.”

That fact was sadly clear by the end of my toxic tour. In addition to visiting gaping waste pools and drilling sites, Moncayo brought us to see a “remediated” pit. Chevron claims that Texaco conducted a successful remediation of 162 pits in the mid-1990’s. Others call this cleanup a sham. It only took a few inches of digging in the blistering jungle heat for Moncayo, wearing white surgical gloves, to unearth a fistful of tar-colored mud. He dropped a chunk of the stuff in a water bottle, shook it up, and we looked on as oily crude floated to the surface, gleaming blue and orange in the sunlight.

Not far off, a cacao tree was laden with nearly-ripe pods. Moncayo pointed to it. “Cacao grown here, grown across contaminated sites, is taken to markets in Lago,” he said. “It’s mixed with cacao from all over Ecuador. It’s exported to the United States, Canada, Europe-everywhere.”

Also close by, two local men were laboring to dig a new well under the searing mid-afternoon sun. The well, Moncayo said, would probably be used for drinking water.

Credit: Amazon Mycorenewal Project

As I stood, dizzy from dehydration and petroleum fumes, next to the last toxic sludge pool of the day, Moncayo told me how everything I’d seen was but a drop in the bucket. “When we talk about thirty thousand people affected, we’re only talking about those right next door to a drill site,” he said. “When we consider those indirectly affected, we’re talking about the entire population of Brazil. That’s where this water goes.”

It’s an almost inconceivably vast problem. But the people I found living here haven’t given up on this land. Gropper, for one, sees mushroom cultivation taking off all over Sucumbíos and beyond, providing the Amazon and its people with a host of benefits. Just maybe, a myco-topia isn’t so crazy, after all.

“Justice isn’t something that the government has in its pocket or Chevron has in its bank account,” Anderson said. “It’s something that communities build.”

Koenig agrees. “What’s amazing about the grassroots efforts we’re now seeing is that they’re turning people who have always been victims into a force and a solution.”

The fungi, for their part, aren’t going anywhere. They’ll continue to creep and grow, dancing in and out of sight, threading hungry mycelia into the fetid soil. Earth’s decomposers will remain here, long after people have decided whether or not to forsake the poisoned land. Perhaps, with their help, we won’t have to.

Credit: Nicola Peel and Danny Neuman ​

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” A Documentary About China’s Smog Is Going Viral, And It’s Not Being Censored“

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CREDIT: YouTube.com/screenshot

Over the weekend in China, 175 million people – more than the entire population of Bangladesh – watched a newly released in-depth and well-produced documentary about the country’s debilitation smog problem. Produced by former Chinese news anchor and environmental reporter, Chai Jing, the 104-minute “Under the Dome” has caught the Chinese public at a moment of intense focus on the wide-ranging impacts of air pollution from coal-fired power plants and vehicle emissions.

In a country known for spiking any media that paints the government in a bad light, the documentary has not been firewalled. China’s new environment minister, Chen Jining, even praised it on Sunday, saying it reflected “growing public concern over environmental protection and threats to human health.” He also compared it to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which is often credited with inciting the environmental movement in the U.S., especially when it comes to the use of pesticides.

While some are also comparing the lecture-style film, which is replete with charts and visual aids, to Al Gore’s 2006 “An Inconvenient Truth,” Chai’s original motivation for making the self-sponsored film was deeply personal. She used to pay little attention to the smog engulfing her home city of Beijing, but that was before she found out she was pregnant in 2013. Shortly thereafter, she discovered in a sonogram that her child had a benign tumor.

“I’d never felt afraid of pollution before, and never wore a mask no matter where,” Chai, 39, says in the video. “But when you carry a life in you, what she breathes, eats and drinks are all your responsibility, and then you feel the fear.”

Chai told the People’s Daily that she reconciled herself to the fact that her daughter, who survived after surgery, would be a major part of the video. “If I had not had this kind of emotional impetus, I would have found it very difficult to spend such a long time completing this,” she said.

Chai herself is obviously the standout subject of the film, and there have been some criticisms. Chai and her husband have enough money to give birth in the U.S, causing some to posit hypocrisy. There has also been pushback against the suggestion that pollution was the cause of her child’s tumor.

Tumor-causing or not in this specific instance, the degree of environmental pollution in China requires few additional stark reminders. China has 1.35 billion residents, and some 600 million of them are being affected by the pollution according to “Under the Dome.” A recent analysis by the Health Effects Institute estimated that the country’s smog was responsible for some 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010 alone.

According to the World Health Organization, in 2012 around seven million people died from exposure to air pollution, with outdoor air pollution (ambient air pollution) responsible for just over half of these deaths. A majority of these outdoor air pollution-related deaths occurred in South Asia and East Asia. Especially hazardous is PM 2.5, a form of particulate matter air pollution that is 2.5 micrometers in diameter or less, about 1/30th the diameter of a human hair. When inhaled these tiny particles can pass through the respiratory tract all the way into the lungs. On top of asthma, studies have linked extended exposure to PM 2.5 to heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune disease, lupus, and other ailments.

Last year, the northeastern Chinese capital city of Harbin saw its PM 2.5 index reach 1,000 – far above the 300 which is considered hazardous and the WHO-recommended daily level of no more than 20. One study found that this severe pollution has slashed an average of five-and-a-half years from the life expectancy in northern China as toxic air has led to higher rates of stroke, heart disease, and cancer.

Chai’s film cuts from TED Talk-inspired scenes before a studio audience to interviews and visits to sites in China and also abroad. In a particularly harrowing scene, a doctor removes a filthy and blackened lymph node from a female cancer patient in her 50s – the woman had never been a smoker.

The film doesn’t let government officials off the hook, either, and there are sections criticizing the lax approach to regulation enforcement. For example, when it comes to vehicle emissions standards enforcement, Chai finds that trucks sporting the claim they meet the “China IV” emissions standards actually fall far short. She then determines that no cars have been recalled since emissions standards were passed in 2004 enforcing the regulations.

One of China’s most prominent environmentalists, Ma Jun, told the Guardian that this $160,000 documentary has become “one of the most important pieces of public awareness of all time by the Chinese media.”

“It is powerful because it is motivated by a personal story and has got the feelings that people can relate to. It also hold [sic] to the standards of investigative journalism, it is properly vetted on the scientific and technology side, it is a powerful combination,” said Ma.

As China pivots away from dirty energy sources, the country stands to gain both locally as well to contribute to the global effort to mitigate greenhouse gases. With the Paris climate summit approaching at the end of the year, where leaders hope to reach a new GHG-cutting accord, China and the U.S. made a powerful joint pledge last October during Obama’s visit to the Chinese capital. In the pledge, the U.S. committed to cut its emissions 26 to 28 percent below their 2005 levels by 2025 and China agreed to get 20 percent of its energy from non-fossil-fuel sources by 2030 and to peak greenhouse gas emissions that same year.

“Under the Dome” is currently being translated to English on YouTube via crowd-sourcing. It can be viewed here.

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” Texas Bill Bans Sustainability Program Based On A Fringe Conspiracy Theory“

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Two Texas lawmakers have proposed a pair of bills that would prevent the state from funding programs which attempt to implement the ideas of Agenda 21, a non-binding and voluntary United Nations plan for sustainable development signed by the United States and 178 other governments in 1992.

According to the Texas Tribune, the bills proposed by Republican state lawmakers Rep. Molly White and Sen. Bob Hall would prohibit funds from states, counties, and public universities from going to organizations “accredited by the United Nations to implement a policy that originated in the Agenda 21 plan.” The Agenda 21 plan – signed by President George H. W. Bush – includes recommendations to conserve public lands, rein in air pollution, build more sustainable cities, combat poverty, and strengthen the voices of women, indigenous groups, and farmers.

Because all those recommendations come in the form of a voluntary and non-binding resolution, they might seem pretty harmless. But according to a growing group of mostly conservative and Tea Party-affiliated people across the country, Agenda 21 is just the opposite. To this growing group, Agenda 21 represents a ” dangerous threat to American sovereignty” dictated by the United Nations – an attempt to get Americans to lock away usable land that could be developed and compact people into cramped cities. This idea was popularized by Glenn Beck, who wrote a book about the plan in 2012.

Beck’s idea that Agenda 21 is a far-reaching conspiracy for a “one-world order” under the United Nations seems to be catching on. The second result when you search the term on Google is “Agenda 21 conspiracy.” Littered in the results are articles claiming the U.N. is attempting to ” seize” the United States by rounding up rural populations and sticking them in “beehive-like” apartments in big cities. One website calls it a plan to “control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all energy, all education, all information, and all human beings in the world.” The Daily Beast has a very comprehensive look at the conspiracy-ridden opposition to Agenda 21 here.

In Texas, one of the groups that is consulting with the U.N. is the nonprofit Save the Children, which the Tribune says “consults regularly with the U.N. and promotes the health of children.” Promoting the health of children is part of the Agenda 21 program, so the Tribune noted that it’s unclear if the state or its universities will be able to give any funding to the organization. When asked by the Tribune whether the state could fund Save the Children, White said “[t]hey can use federal funds to operate.”

The Tribune also noted that the bill is unclear as to whether the state, cities, or public universities would be allowed to give grants to nonprofits for programs that “strengthen the role of business and industry” or protect freshwater resources, since both of those things are recommended Agenda 21. The lawmakers did not return the Tribune’s requests for comment on those matters.

Either way, if the bill goes through, it wouldn’t be the first time a state has advanced legislation to stop Agenda 21. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), at least three states have considered laws to halt the voluntary and non-binding U.N. program. Nationally, the idea even more mainstream among Republicans. In 2012, the Republican National Committee adopted a resolution deeming Agenda 21 to be a plan of “extreme environmentalism, social engineering, and global political control” which would be “accomplished by socialist/communist redistribution of wealth.”

The motto of Dauphin, Manitoba, a small farming town in the middle of Canada, is “everything you deserve.” What a citizen deserves, and what effects those deserts have, was a question at the heart of a 40-year-old experiment that has lately become a focal point in a debate over social welfare that’s raging from Switzerland to Silicon Valley.

Between 1974 and 1979, the Canadian government tested the idea of a basic income guarantee (BIG) across an entire town, giving people enough money to survive in a way that no other place in North America has before or since. For those four years-until the project was cancelled and its findings packed away-the town’s poorest residents were given monthly checks that supplemented what modest earnings they had and rewarded them for working more. And for that time, it seemed that the effects of poverty began to melt away. Doctor and hospital visits declined, mental health appeared to improve, and more teenagers completed high school.

“Do we have to behave in particular ways to justify compassion and support?” Evelyn Forget, a Canadian social scientist who unearthed ​some of the findings of the Dauphin experiment, asked me rhetorically when I reached her by phone. “Or is simply human dignity enough?”

Critics of basic income guarantees have insisted that giving the poor money would disincentivize them to work, and point to studies that show ​a drop in peoples’ willingness to work under pilot programs. But in Dauphin-thought to be the largest such experiment conducted in North America-the experimenters found that the primary breadwinner in the families who received stipends were in fact not less motivated to work than before. Though there was some reduction in work effort from mothers of young children and teenagers still in high school-mothers wanted to stay at home longer with their newborns and teenagers weren’t under as much pressure to support their families-the reduction was not anywhere close to disastrous, as skeptics had predicted.

“People work hard and it’s still not enough,” Doreen Henderson, who is now 70 and was a participant in the experiment, told the ​Wi​nnipeg Free Pres​s​ in 2009. Her husband Hugh, now 73, worked as a janitor while she stayed at home with their two kids. Together they raised chickens and grew a lot of their own food. “They should have kept it,” she said of the minimum income program. “It made a real difference.”

The recovered data from “Mincome,” as the Dauphin experiment was known, has given more impetus to a growing call for some sort of guaranteed income. This year, the Swis​s Parliament will vote on whether to extend a monthly stipend to all residents, and the Indian government has already begun replacing aid programs with direct cash transfers. Former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich has called a BIG “alm​ost inevitable.” In the US, Canada, and much of Western Europe, where the conversation around radically adapting social security remains mostly hypothetical, the lessons of Dauphin might be especially relevant in helping these ideas materialize sooner rather than later.

There are other compelling arguments for a guaranteed income now. Despite record corporate earnings, most people are not benefitting. Wages are stagnant, unemployment is high, ​student debt and health care costs are soaring, and the job market is not rewarding those who are already employed with enough money for a decent way of life. The so-called ​Uberization of the workforce, in which workers are paid by the task rather than on a salary or under an established hourly rate-is increasing the precariousness of work. (And that’s not to mention ​robots and artificial intelligence taking away jobs.) As the concept of universal healthcare spreads and minimum wage is debated, conversations around reconsidering or expanding social security are growing.

“Originally the interest was primarily prompted by the concern that the welfare system was discouraging people from working,” Ron Hikel, who coordinated the Mincome program, ​told Dutch television last y​ear. Today, he says, the motivation for guaranteed income is an increase in inequality. “At some point, the income inequality begins to interfere with people’s ability to have education, and also to take care of their own health. To the extent that that effects the relations in society, it begins to accentuate divisions and differences, and you get an increase in social pathologies, alcohol addiction, the use of drugs, an increase in mental illness, a decrease in provision of educational courses and an increase in the crime rate.”

In the US, support for basic income has come not just from the left but, perhaps surprisingly, from the right, and ​especially from libertarians.

“There has always been some support for [a BIG] from the political right because the scheme is less intrusive than most ways of delivering social programs,” explained Forget (pronounced for-zhay). Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King, Jr. called for something like a basic income, but so too did ​the seminal libertarian economists F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman ​(Friedman called it a “negative income tax”). Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan has proposed combining various forms of federal anti-poverty assistance into a single funding stream, acknowledging that the effects of the rich getting richer are getting harder to ignore.

Dauphin in the early 1980s. Image: ​Lisa N. Daniel/Fac​ebook

Forget documented a decline in doctor visits, an 8.5 percent reduction in the hospitalization rate, and more adolescents continuing into grade 12

Advocates have argued that a single coordinated program providing a base income is more efficient than the current panoply of welfare and social security programs and the bureaucracy required to maintain them (in the U.S. there are currently 79 means-tested social welfare programs, not including Medicare or Medicaid). “Existing social assistance programs were riddled with overlaps and gaps that allowed some families to qualify under two or more programs while others fell between programs,” says Forget.

When Mincome was first conceived, in the early ’70s heyday of social welfare reform, some thought the experiment in Dauphin could be the prelude to a program that could be introduced across Canada. South of the border, there was widespread support for minimum income as well. A 1969 Harris poll for Life Magazine found that 79 percent of respondents supported a federal program President Nixon had proposed called the Family Assi​stance Plan that guaranteed a family of four an annual income of $1,600, or about $10,000 today. Nixon’s FAP plan (it wasn’t guaranteed income, he insisted, but it was) made it through the House before it was killed in the Senate, voted down by Democrats. Still, there remained a sense of experimentation in the air. Four minimum income trials occurred in the US between 1968 and 1975, which appeared to show that the work hours of basic income recipients fell more sharply than expected.

But these experiments were done with small sample sizes; the experiment in Dauphin was unusual in that in encompassed a whole town. Forget, now a community health professor at the University of Manitoba who studies a range of social welfare programs, saw in the Mincome data a rare chance to examine the effects of BIG on a wider scale.

An undergrad in Toronto at the time the experiment was first being conducted, she remembers hearing about it in class. “My professor would tell us about this wonderful and important experiment taking place ‘out west’ that would revolutionize the way we delivered social programs.”

Years later, when she ended up “out west” herself, she began piecing together what information she could find about Dauphin. After a five-year struggle, Forget secured access to the experiment’s data-all 1,800 cubic feet of it-which had been all but lost inside a warehouse belonging to the provincial government archives in Winnipeg. Since 2005, she’s been thoroughly analyzing it, carefully comparing surveys of Dauphin residents with those collected in neighboring towns at the time.

Forget’s analysis of the data reveals that providing minimum income can have a substantial positive impact on a community beyond reducing poverty alone. “Participant contacts with physicians declined, especially for mental health, and more adolescents continued into grade 12,” she concludes in her paper, “The Town with No ​Poverty,” published in Canadian Public Policy in 2011. Forget also documented an 8.5 percent reduction in the hospitalization rate for participants as well, suggesting a minimum income could save health care costs. (Her research was unable to substantiate claims from US researchers that showed increases in fertility rates, improved neonatal outcomes or increased family dissolution rates for recipients of guaranteed incomes.)

Grade 12 enrollment in Dauphin and nearby localities as a percentage of previous year’s enrollment. Image: ​Evelyn Forget

The Dauphin experiment was born out of a particularly left-leaning moment in Canadian politics, as the progressive and provincial New Democratic Party (NDP) swept into office, and Pierre Trudeau was elected as prime minister. The plan, drawn up in 1973, called for two-thirds of the $17 million program to be paid by the federal government and the rest by the province.

Any person or family who fell into the lowest income bracket was eligible to participate, with the amount varying by family size, year, and other income sources. Families of two parents and two children that earned more than $13,000 were not eligible. By 1978, according to Forget, families that received no income from any other source would have received between $3,800 and $5,800 Canadian dollars per year; those with income from other sources would receive less, sometimes as little as $100 a month.

The feared labor market fallout-that people would stop working-didn’t materialize. Part of this was by design, says Forget. “Mincome was designed in such a way that there is always an incentive to work more hours rather than less,” because every dollar received from other sources would reduce benefits by only fifty cents, whereas typical welfare programs provide no extra benefits when recipients earn money from other sources. “If you work another hour, you get to keep 50 percent of the benefit you would have gotten anyway, so you are better off working than not.”

Some recipients used the money to pay for essentials; others used it as supplementary income to purchase things that could help them increase their earning potential, like new vehicles. One major benefit of the program was a sense of security, potentially counteracting the sort of worrying that can ​weigh heavily on the minds ​of the poor.

“Most important for an agriculturally dependent town with a lot of self-employment,” writes Forget ​in her pap​er, “MINCOME offered stability and predictability; families knew they could count on at least some support, no matter what happened to agricultural prices or the weather. They knew that sudden illness, disability or unpredictable economic events would not be financially devastating.”

While every family in Dauphin was eligible to participate in the experiment, only about a third had incomes low enough to qualify. In some cases, the effects on the town seemed to extend beyond the third who were participating. When looking at graduation rates, for example, Forget notes that there was likely a “social multiplier” effect at work. One student might have been afforded the ability to continue in school because of the minimum income, and then his or her friends whose family were not participating in the program might be influenced to stay in school themselves.

“We cannot separate out the direct effects from the indirect effects that might operate through social networks or other market or nonmarket mechanisms,” explains Forget in her paper. “Ironically, the inability to randomize in a saturation site, far from being a liability, may have generated a response that would be invisible in a classic randomized experimental site.”

Dauphin’s hasn’t been the only minimum income experiment in North America-in the 1960s, studies were conducted in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Seattle and Denver-but Mincome was unique in that it was the only experiment to make guaranteed income available to a whole town rather than just a randomly selected sample of the population. This was a way, Forget writes, “to answer questions about administrative and community issues in a less artificial environment.”

Midway through, though, the project ran into financial problems. The economy across North America drastically changed, and a recession, stagf​lation and higher-than-anticipated unemployment made the project more expensive than its budget could accommodate. Two years in, a decision was made to keep archiving data, even though the researchers no longer had the budget to pay for its analysis.

By the end of the four years, new economic realities like the oil shocks had altered the political climate; new parties were voted into power, with ideological outlooks that rejected the idea of a minimum income. While Mincome was initially a pilot project for a national universal program, the new government had more urgent concerns and abandoned the idea. The experiments’ findings were filed away.

Footage of Dauphin in the ’70s. Video: Leo Bunyak

A lot of our social services were based on the notion that there are a lot of 40 hour-per-week jobs out there, full-time jobs, and it was just a matter of connecting people to those jobs and everything will be fine.

In 2005, after Forget discovered the 1,800 boxes of Mincome records, she tried to fill in the blanks by talking to families that had actually participated in the program. To avoid breaking ethics rules that forebade her from contacting any of them directly, Forget planted stories in the local press and on the radio, inviting participants to call her. Many did.

“They thought that it was a very positive thing and thought that were it to be reintroduced they thought it would be a very positive thing. They found it useful, and said that it certainly improved quality of life,” said Forget. “On the other hand,” she added, “it was hardly a random sample. If people had negative memories they probably wouldn’t have called me.”

Forget’s methodical research, however, gives more substantial proof than these memories and anecdotes. “I’m a social scientist, so I always have great hope that people will pay attention to evidence,” she said. “There’s always a fear that if you introduce a program like this people will stop working. We’ve got a fair amount of evidence that that is not the case, but people still worry about that. So I think it takes, sometimes, more than evidence to change public opinion.”

Dauphin in the snow. Image: Dauphin Economic Developme​nt

James Manzi, a ​senior fellow at the Manhatta​n Institute, believes that making minimum income a reality would be “a pretty tough hill to climb.” Typically some sort of guaranteed income or negative tax has been proposed as replacing all or part of the current welfare system, and while libertarians are in favor of that idea because it means less government bureaucracy, Manzi noted that special interest groups would be negatively impacted.

“Provider organizations for the entire welfare program are going to resist it because you are essentially describing eliminating all their jobs,” he said. He also noted that the cost of the program would be another challenge to overcome. “Any serious budget analysis that I’ve seen says it’s going to require a net increase in tax payments,” he said. “Even if it were free, could you get the electorate to support this idea? Then, it’s not free. The median voter’s tax bill is going to go up.”

Manzi also noted that in the ’90s, when welfare reform was being debated, the electorate was in favor of more work requirements, not fewer. “The primary distinguishing characteristic of TANF [Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, introduced in 1997] as compared to AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which ran from 1935 to 1996] is the introduction of a work requirement,” he says.

Despite the Dauphin data, the effects-negative and positive-on people’s willingness to work and other aspects of their lives under BIG and similar programs remains unresolved. Even studies that appeared to show a drop in work incentives in guaranteed income pilots may have overstated the case. As Dylan Matthews points out on Vox, evidence shows that full withdrawal from the labor force was a relative rarity. Instead, workers spent longer periods of time searching for better jobs. Others may have spent more time in school. Forget saw this effect in Dauphin, and experimenters in the New Jersey and Seattle-Denver trials showed ​increases in teenagers completing high school, of 25-30 percent and 11 percent, respectively.

When Forget looks at politics and culture and the economy now, she sees forces converging to create a more hospitable climate for minimum income experiments on a grander scale than before.

“This is an interesting time,” she said. “A lot of our social services were based on the notion that there are a lot of 40 hour-per-week jobs out there, full-time jobs, and it was just a matter of connecting people to those jobs and everything will be fine. Of course, one of the things we know is that’s certainly not the case, particularly for young people who often find themselves working in precarious jobs, working in contracts for long periods of time without the benefits and long-term support that those of us who have been around longer take for granted.”

In the Canadian context, at least, she said, “I’m optimistic enough to believe that at some point we are going to end up with a guaranteed income.”

Part 1: The Spectrum of a Movement (Part 2)

The environment movement has, of late, become all but subsumed by the climate movement. I point this out not because climate doesn’t matter, but because it’s not the only thing that does.

I fear that many important challenges are going unaddressed due to lack of attention. And I fear that our tactics are narrowing in scope, shunning direct action and favouring populism. The aim to attract more mainstream attention and support means vanilla tactics dominate while striking at the core of issues is viewed as too radical for popular appeal.

The emerging trend of the environment movement is toward the centre of the bell curve, both in terms of issues addressed, and the means by which they are addressed.

As the movement pulls resources toward the organizations and agendas at the centre of the bell curve the extremities get frozen out, and alternative perspectives get lost. More radical perspectives, once commonplace in the environment movement are now greeted with disdain, and the worldviews underpinning them are not given serious consideration – instead they are often denigrated as extremist. We have become a movement of eco-pragmatists, a position far removed from our roots in ecocentrism, where nature was regarded first and foremost.

This transition has much to do with the emerging pattern of differing shades of green in the environment movement as it grows, lending nuance to the approaches of the various different groups, organizations and initiatives that have emerged to combat ecological crises. Green is no longer unified, if it ever really was. Bright Green, Lite Green, Deep Green and Dark Green tribes form around divergent worldviews, theories of change, and an accepted range of tactics. Each tribe vies for attention to its message in a world of time-constrained news cycles and manufactured consumerism, and competes for the resources – in a finite pool of funding and volunteers – required to make good on its mission statements.

With such intense competition for such limited resources, brand image and recruitment become powerful means for amplifying a perspective, and the movement collapses toward the populist centre, where most of the funding is applied. Current funding favours Bright Green and Lite Green approaches, for obvious reasons: they don’t challenge the received wisdom of the economic growth imperative or anthropocentric delusion, and they don’t challenge existing power structures. It is no surprise, then, that the environment movement has, to a large extent, been declawed by its own mainstream success.

A closer look at the various shades of Green present in today’s environment movement is needed if we are to identify points of common ground upon which to unite and collaborate, and cracks that lead to ruptures if left unaddressed.

The Bright Green tribe dominates the environment movement today, and, as such, it is Bright Green solutioneering that dominates public and political discourse. Bright Green techno-optimists present the promise of a bright future based on human ingenuity and our ability to harness technology, policy and market forces to solve any environmental problem and meet our every economic need.

Big Green Tech and carbon pricing mechanisms are the mainstays of Bright green advocacy, with the overwhelming majority of Bright Green groups, such as 350, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club spruiking support for large-scale energy infrastructure projects such as solar and wind farms and the magic of the invisible hand of the carbon market – in some cases while playing the stock market or engaging in market speculation (and not always winning). Petitions, protests, divestment actions, and media-friendly PR stunts are the modus operandi, with occasional forays into political advocacy.

The Lite Green tribe has seen a slow and steady increase in membership with its embrace of ‘green consumerism’, an appealing new brand for cashing in on a niche market. Once the business world got wind of the potential of the eco-dollar, the eco-friendly alternatives rolled in. Lite Greens believe in voting with their dollars, that their own ethical consumption adds a drop to the bucket of overall change, and that is noble in and of itself.

These are the Prius drivers, folks with solar panels on the roofs of their energy-intensive-by-global-standards suburban homes, folks who delight in organic everything and eschew single-use plastic. Lite Green is a shade that needs no organizing to shine, but is amplified by light-hearted symbolic events, such as Earth Hour, and consumer-based challenges, such as Plastic Free July.

Deep Greens have earned themselves a reputation for being the new radicals of the environment movement for their commitment to deep ecological sustainability and pulling our destructive system up at the roots. For Deep Greens, the environment is the bottom line, and resistance is protection. Think Deep Green Resistance, Earth First or Generation Alpha at the systemic challenge-to-civilization end of the pool, and Sea Shepherd, at the resistor-come-protector end.

Although the current corporate media-induced panic over Deep Green tactics is relatively new, Deep is not a new shade of Green. Deep Green tactics such as monkeywrenching and blockading are frontline norms, and have saved many a natural wonder that petitions and placards have merely bounced off. Deep Greens don’t aim to tweak at the system; they aim to undermine it, disrupt it, and facilitate its eventual transformation.

The Dark Green tribe is a relative newcomer to the shades of Green, and is most strongly associated with initiatives such as the Dark Mountain Project and Transition Towns network. Dark Greens base their approach to the environment movement on the realities of limits to growth, and, in some cases, the prediction of civilizational collapse. Issues such as peak oil, population growth, industrial agriculture, and a perpetual-growth economy, underpin Dark Green theory and practice.

Seeking to remove their tacit compliance with the systems that perpetuate our predicament, Dark Greens are generally downshifters who have escaped the treadmill to the extent possible, moved their lives off-grid to the extent possible, and are working to build resilience and upskill themselves in preparation for the limits-to-growth predicated shocks to our energy supply, the economy, and the environment.

I’ll pre-empt premature suspicions of pigeon-holing here with the disclaimer that no one individual, group, organization or initiative is likely to fall squarely in one box. One can adopt a Lite Green lifestyle while advocating Bright Green solutions; one can engage in Deep Green direct action while embracing Dark Green downshifting; one can advocate for Bright Green solutions using Deep Green tactics; one can downshift to a Dark Green footprint via a Lite Green gearshift. And few individuals remain in one category throughout their activism, with many Dark Greens being jaded former Deep Greens, and many Deep Greens being radicalized Bright Greens, and many Bright Greens being mobilized Lite Greens.

My own haphazard journey through the various shades of Green has covered them all. I suppose I was raised Deep Green in all honesty, with the worldview instilled in me that we are but one strand in the web of life and that we must tread lightly upon the earth. My family ensured I was well-versed in the Lite Green rituals of recycling, water conservation and energy saving, and now I’m an ardent plasticphobe who showers with a bucket and goes around switching off appliances at the wall. I briefly trotted out the politically appealing mantras of the Bright Green techno-optimists – that we can have our cake and eat it; and then I learned about peak oil and carrying capacity, and limits to growth – things that should have been intuitive, but required a deconstruction of cultural indoctrination to comprehend.

Now I find myself with a foot in each of the Deep Green and Dark Green camps with the occasional Lite Green flicker of indulgence. That means my activism is Deep Green, my lifestyle is as Dark Green as I’m able to shade it, and Lite Green slips through the cracks in my plans. Please forgive me my biases – I’ve been there, done that, and worn out the t-shirts.

Despite the differences between the various shades of Green, there are areas of common ground shared between the tribes.

Bright Greens and Light Greens favour populist approaches that have the potential to generate mass-uptake, while Deep Greens and Dark Greens push the envelope in order for the environment movement to progress. While Bright Green and Light Green initiatives are strong on populist messaging for their causes, thus sacrificing depth and breadth, the more holistic messages of the Deep Greens and Dark Greens have narrower appeal.

Where Bright Greens and Deep Greens share common ground is their reliance on collective action, while many Lite Green and Dark Green actions can be carried out by individuals acting alone – it is their collective impact that achieves the desired results. Bright Green activists also take part in some traditionally Deep Green direct actions such as blockades, lending a greater degree of support to the movement’s goals.

Deep Green activists are often critical of the Lite Green approach to the environment movement, however. The notion that shortening our showers and changing our lightbulbs brings about incremental change has worn thin for Deep Greens, and the all-too-frequent response is a failure to reach out to potential allies from the Lite Green camp – who are usually starting out on their environmentalist journey and could use experienced, empathic guidance, not the cold shoulder of know-it-alls.

Dark Green downshifters, likewise, tend to be critical of Bright Green activism, questioning the value of their work in light of the limits to growth constraints and unintended consequences that render many Bright Green solutions moot. While the Dark Greens most definitely have a point, it is a mistake to sacrifice Bright Green relationships – it is only by connecting and communicating across the network that realities such as limits to growth can permeate the movement and couch its strategies in a more realistic framework.

Despite the obvious differences at the surface, many Dark Green downshifters began their journey as Lite Green conscious consumers. Lite Green consumer choices can light the path toward one-planet living that leads one to further questions regarding what mode of living is genuinely sustainable. The rabbithole goes as far as any individual is prepared to go when it comes to downshifting, and a Lite Green thinker can transition fairly rapidly into a Dark Green downshifter given the advantages of a critical mind and access to information.

Bright Green activists aren’t a one-size-fits-all phenomenon, despite frequent public appearances in matching t-shirts. Many Bright Greens stand with a foot inside the Deep Green camp, and seek to ramp up Bright Green action in order to be more effective. Many, however, are critical of the radicalism of Deep Greens, and are wary of the lengths some are prepared to go to in order to achieve their goals, while Deep Greens are often harshly critical of the parameters of professionalized activists’ campaign remits, suggesting these limit the movement’s capacity to effect change. The distrust of one another that this criticism engenders bubbles up from time to time, and has the potential to fragment the movement in the absence of communication across the borderlands between the shades, and genuine intention to understand the other’s perspective.

And everyone is a hypocrite hunter when it comes to Bright Greens or Deep Greens who don’t curb their consumption while waiting for technological or political salvation, or the collapse of industrial civilization; or when it comes to Lite Greens or Dark Greens who live cocooned by privilege while ignoring their responsibility toward their broader Earth community.

Once the various shades of Green within the environment movement are recognized it then becomes possible to find areas of common ground to work from and develop. A danger with any movement is its potential to fragment into factions once it reaches a certain size – with the various factions competing instead of collaborating – and the potential emergence of a dominant faction that drowns out competing worldviews, theories of change, and tactics. Through this tangled web of worldview, theory and practice there is a need to locate strands of commonalities that can be woven together in a comprehensive strategy. Our collective power is surely much greater than the sum of all our parts.

Read Part 2.Kari McGregor is based on the Sunshine Coast, in Australia and blogs as The Overthinker. She is a full-time downshifter after walking out on the employment paradigm, turning her back on non-profit management and mainstream ‘education’. These days she spends far more time working pro-bono forSustainability Showcase than generating dollars from her small non-profit sector consulting business. Just how she likes it!