Conqueror or kin?
What story do we tell ourselves about our relationship to the natural world?
Sister Earth shows individuals committed to the bonds of kinship with all living things. Each is driven by an urgent sense of interconnectedness – in their workplace, local community, global classroom and international policy-making.
A ten-year career and reputation were at risk the first time agronomist Pascal Fafard taught a grower to use intuition instead of pesticides. Pascal’s clients started to embrace his unconventional approach – to quiet the mind and stand quietly in the field observing. Six years later storm-ravaged crops, failing farmland and overworked soil produce…and flourish. Now he’s on a one-man crusade to teach farmers to stop attacking nature and start listening.
Beth Grossman organized her first environmental protest in the 4th grade, determined to stop a highway from cutting through her front yard. Her ten-year-old self spoke out and the Minneapolis City Hall listened: the highway never got built. Now a socio-political artist armed with quill pen and seed bags, she’s focusing on nature again, this time using her art to influence California city councils to adopt a proclamation for a bill of rights for seeds.
United Nations Representative Lisinka Ulatowska was on a mission to include the voice of nature into the UN Sustainability Development Goals. On her 75th birthday she boarded a plane in Amsterdam to find out if Arizonan animal communicator Maia Kincaid could teach her to talk to nature. After 12 days communicating to trees, snakes, wolves and cacti she was convinced that she and Maia could translate nature’s voice into UN policy. Now Maia leads monthly global UN nature communication classes while Lisinka tests her decades-long involvement and hard-won credibility at the UN sharing Nature’s perspective. They have no idea if anyone is listening but Lisinka hasn’t been laughed out of the room yet.
In 2014 half-a million people in Toledo, Ohio couldn’t use the tap water – Lake Erie was choked with toxic algae bloom. The government wasn’t doing enough to protect the lake. In a local pub over beers a small group wondered if the lake could protect itself. In 2019, these citizen activists brought a controversial referendum to the people of Toledo. Despite powerful backlash from agribusiness, BP America and local politicians, 61% of voters gave Lake Erie the legal right of personhood. Not the Ohio House of Representatives - who now prohibit enforcement of this law. But this David and Goliath battle wages on. As organizer Markie Miller says, “We don’t lose unless we quit and we’ll never give up on Mother Earth.”