Indigenous Wisdom, Spiritual Ecology & Regenerative Agriculture Can Heal Our World

Seven years ago, I traveled with Native American Church leaders to visit leaders of the Wixarika in their sacred land of Wirikuta in Mexico, in support of their mission to conserve their sacred peyote medicine north and south of the border. In the context of that visit, I got to participate in my first sacred Indigenous ceremony, an all night Wixarica prayer for global unity. With the dawning of the sun, they sacrificed a bull, symbolizing death, rebirth, and renewal, which also happened to be my granddad Dr. Bronner’s death day and my kid Maya’s birthday, March 7^th. Dr. Bronner had also dedicated his life to the same all-one unity prayer.

As a vegan for over two decades, deep in the medicine, I contemplated the powerful sacrifice of this bull, and saw clearly how our colonial mindset, quick to dismiss such acts as barbaric, is profoundly ass backwards. The bull, like most animals in Indigenous lifeways, had lived free—unconfined, instinctually whole. Its life was honored, its death prayed over, its flesh consumed reverently. Contrast that with the 99% of animals in our modern food system, raised in factory farms, enduring lives of torture in cages and feedlots, fed from GMO monocultures that have turned over half of U.S. farmland into toxic wastelands. Our system floods the land with synthetic inputs that kill soil life, pollute ecosystems, and threaten our health—an ecological hellscape powered by fossil fuels, driving the sixth great extinction and our climate over the edge.