A century after Gandhi’s original Khadi Movement helped Indians to attain economic self-sufficiency and ultimately independence from Great Britain, the movement is having an unlikely revival in indigenous Zapotec communities in rural Mexico. “Khadi” means handspun cloth, and like its original Indian counterpart, Khadi Oaxaca has re-established a farm-to-garment ethic that restores dignity to its […]

Last year’s Nobel Peace Prize nomination seemed like the moment Susana Valadez had worked for her whole life. The founder of the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival had spent the past four decades weaving together with painstaking care the components of an organization that provided the Wixárika people with culturally relevant employment and training, a […]

The Backstory Ten years ago in the Maya Mountains of Belize I attended a permaculture design course with author, public speaker and self-described “Emergency Planetary Technician” Albert Bates and an impressive young colleague, María Ros. María, I learned, is a permaculture designer with a whole other profession: she’s a psychotherapist, and her passion for the […]

Feed what you want to grow — not what you want to go away.

We’ve been fighting the deadliest virus of all for a decade now: the epidemic of fear. Join us on Earth Day as we take our regenerative journalism to the next level.

Editor’s Note: Standing Rock movement founder LaDonna Allard left this life on April 10, 2021, after a battle with brain cancer at the age of 64. Mourners from around the world joined hearts on social media for days afterwards. Here we share a telephone interview with LaDonna from August of 2019. When LaDonna Brave Bull […]

As I write, the church bells across the plaza are clanging a noisy celebration of the rising sun; another day has begun here in Mexico, with the same alegría, the same joy as any other dawn. It’s equinox, and I’m reflecting on equilibrium. That quality that allows us to hold fast onto the delight in […]

MATAMOROS, Mexico — On the morning of New Year’s Eve, a woman named Angela stood ankle-deep in the Rio Grande, washing clothes — or as they call it on this side of the border, the Rio Bravo. Bravo means fierce in this context: A few paces from where Angela, a Salvadoran asylum seeker, was doing […]

In the absence of big NGOs, volunteers regularly cross into one of Mexico’s most dangerous cartel zones to support asylum seekers stranded there by U.S. policy.

Our Top 10 stories of 2019 reflect the hunger for fresh ideas and different voices — people who are tackling the issues of climate change, environmental destruction, mass migration, food security, femicide and human rights — especially indigenous rights. The popularity of these stories also show that people are ready for younger and alternative visions — and those, as you may have noticed, are our specialty.

Don Manuel García Pacheco stands at the edge of the field he has known since his birth more than six decades ago, when the land was plowed by oxen. He smiles broadly as he surveys the industrious crew that has come from all over the world to work in his cornfield. “Estoy feliz como un lombriz,” he declares in typical campesino parlance – I’m happy as an earthworm.

This remote Mexican pueblo 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 Renovating Native Foodways as a Path to Sovereignty

Here in the darkness of the temazcal, sweat, steam and mud become one with the throbbing beat of Teresa’s drum. The heat bears down, melting away the boundaries between us. Rhythms from her Mayan heritage rise in the air with the incense-like scent of copal, her voice carrying us to a place beyond time. She […]

As the founder of the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival and a lifelong advocate for their cause, Susana Valadez was chosen by an Amsterdam-based nonprofit, the Drugs Peace Institute, to represent the indigenous Wixárika (Huichol) people, whom the group nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for “their efforts in favor of a sociable, ecologically friendly and peace-promoting use of mind-altering substances.”

For Sicangu Lakota water protector Cheryl Angel, Standing Rock helped her define what she stands against: an economy rooted in extraction of resources and exploitation of people and planet. It wasn’t until she’d had some distance that the vision of what she stands for came into focus. “Now I understand that sustainable sovereign economies are needed to […]

In the harrowing days of the Standing Rock resistance to the Black Snake, LaDonna Brave Bull Allard — Tamakawastewin, or Good Earth Woman — became an icon, though she’s quick to step away from such titles with her self-deprecating humor. The Lakota historian’s fight to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline from plowing past her son’s […]

Over the past 150 years, poor land management practices, driven by industrial agriculture, has resulted in the loss of half of the earth’s topsoil. Soil is becoming so degraded that some scientists are predicting that in some parts of the world, such as the UK, we only have 60 harvests left. More carbon has been […]

Editor’s note: One of my most inspiring assignments so far this year brought together two important movements for the healing of the Earth: the first Ecosystem Restoration Camp in the Americas, and Vía Orgánica, the host organization. I went on to write about them both for Mongabay Latin America and the brand-new issue of Permaculture […]

Lakota Spiritual Activist Cheryl Angel believes in listening to her dreams – the ones that come to her at night as she sleeps, and the ones that arrive as messengers from the road as she travels the globe. She has been traveling extensively over the past two years, connecting with indigenous and non-indigenous women and […]

The third anniversary of the Water Protectors movement at Standing Rock passed by quietly earlier this month. With the pipeline construction industry booming across the U.S. and Canada, Donald Trump seeking to bulldoze the cancelled Keystone XL Pipeline through more than 800 miles of unceded Lakota treaty territory, and at least nine state governments working […]

Call it democratization of the media, call it citizen journalism, or simply call it frontline storytelling – The Esperanza Project is empowering the voices of people on the flashpoints of movements for social and environmental justice from Argentina to Ecuador, Panama to Mexico, and of course back at our home base in the U.S. of […]

At the dawn of 2019, thousands of Latin American asylum seekers huddle in tent cities along our southern borders, having risked their lives for the hope of a better future for their families. Thousands of children languish in concentration camps and detention centers scattered around the country, their parents unable to claim them. Americans wonder […]

TORNILLO, TEXAS –  Juan Ortiz is putting the last touches on the Christmas tree he is constructing from the plastic water jugs left for thirsty migrants in the desert. The jugs were a donation from No More Deaths, a volunteer organization that faces trial for assisting the migrants – one of whom is facing up […]