The Town That Refuses to Drown
By Tracy L. Barnett, Earth Island Journal
In recent years, this remote pueblo of 400 full-time inhabitants in Jalisco, about two hours from Guadalajara, has stepped into the national spotlight, standing up to a total of eight governors in two different states over the years and taking their fight all the way to Los Pinos, the Mexican White House. If the townsfolk get their way, it will probably be the first time that a mega-dam will be dismantled before it is ever used.
Lyla June on The Truth of Thanksgiving
By Tracy L. Barnett, Esperanza Project
I am here at the Plimoth Plantation colony where the separatists, as we now call them Pilgrims, first made their landing, and where they set up their settlement. And so we’re here today and we’re wanting to talk about the truth of Thanksgiving because we believe that truth is what’s going to set this country free. It’s really hard to look at the truth of this country, but I want to invite you to be brave right now.
Lyla June on the Forest as Farm
By Tracy L. Barnett, Esperanza Project
What we’re finding, and what European scientists are finally figuring out, is that human beings are meant to be a keystone species. And a keystone species is a species that if you take it out, the whole thing unravels.
Kelp Gardens, Piñon Forests
By Tracy L. Barnett, Esperanza Project
It’s not as hard as you might think. If you have the right action for a couple of seasons — the Earth actually wants to be full of life. That’s it’s nature. We actually have to work to get it to not do that. So if we just get behind her and breathe life into what she’s already doing, it can change pretty fast. But we need the tools and we need the skills and we need the knowledge and most of all the wisdom that supports all of these things.
Native Flower Rebellion in Argentina
By Tracy L. Barnett, Esperanza Project
We indigenous women from different territories in conflict, belonging to various indigenous nations of Argentina, come to bring the thought, the word, the proposal, which has emerged from the heart of the Earth that beats beneath our feet. This heart is constituted by the whole spiritual world that sustains life on Earth, which we name in different ways, according to the voices of our peoples, reaffirming the territorial plurinationality that we have always formed. We call ourselves to come because government officials have an obligation to listen to us.
From Sunset Strip to the Sierra Madre to a Nobel Nomination
By Tracy L. Barnett, Esperanza Project
Susan Eger was more adventurous than your average UCLA anthropology student in 1975 – even for a psychedelic-savvy follower of Carlos Castañeda. But a chance meeting with a fellow adventurer would set her life course in ways she could never have imagined. Nearly half a century later, with three grown indigenous children, a Mexican nonprofit that’s become a living institution and a Nobel nomination to contend with, Susana Valadez, as she is now known, is on fire with the certainty of one who is living her destiny.
From Encampment to Ecovillage at Standing Rock
By Tracy L. Barnett, Esperanza Project
When LaDonna Brave Bull Allard speaks these days, it’s a wake-up call to a lost nation. The founder of the first resistance camp at Standing Rock, which was Sacred Stone, she challenges us to step up to the work of transforming our culture of death.
Women of Standing Rock: LaDonna Brave Bull Allard
By Tracy L. Barnett, Esperanza Project
All of a sudden, we’ve given our power over to an entity that doesn’t deserve our power. We must take back that empowerment of self. We must take back our own health care. We must take back our own food. We must take back our families. We must take back our environment.