well we at bioneers have worked long and hard to cover many of the critically important issues of our time as possible, and to be as inclusive of as many of the groups working for justice, peace, and a healthy planet as we can. we ve always included presenters from a wide range of backgrounds, working in a broad spectrum of domains. indigenous voices have been central to bioneers since we started, and early on we saw the critical importance of the environmental justice movement and sought to highlight leaders whose message was that social justice,

human rights, and environmental health were inseparable, all one system. many years back, julia butterfly hill challenged us to broaden our audience by including more youth, and she helped us to create a youth program that has grown each year, and that we re really proud of. that addressed part of a blind spot we had. this year, awakened by the work of our next speaker, we realized we had one more blindspot. there s one very important kind of discrimination that we haven t focused on nearly enough. and this is ironic, in that quite a few of us who've been working on this conference the longest, and many of you in our audience, are members of a particular demographic cohort, one i have sometimes heard referred to as the chronologically gifted. [laughter] and of course only the unluckiest among us won't eventually become part of that group.

so we re very grateful to ashton applewhite for illuminating in a brilliant, eloquent and strategic way this gap in our programming. upon reflection, it s blindingly apparent that our society is profoundly ageist, and unless we begin to shift our attitudes and the social policies that discriminate against those of us who have the most extensive life experience, we will all lose out. that s especially true, because the number of americans over 65 is projected to more than double from 46 million today to over 98 million by 2060, and the 85 and older age group is the fastest growing of all. meanwhile, more and more senior citizens are in vigorous health and living far longer than previous generations.

i am fortunate to have two remarkable such role models and sheroes in my life kenny s mother, anne ausubel, who is now 98 years old and living independently in her new york apartment to this day, with a mind that zips through the new york times crossword puzzle faster than any person i ve ever seen, and a memory that dwarfs an elephant's; and my mother, who s here, rhea goodman, whose lifelong learning and indomitable creativity manifests in her radio show and podcast series, living juicy. [laughter] unless we create conditions [applause] yeah. that s how i feel. unless we create conditions conducive to tapping the wisdom and know-how of this rapidly expanding group, our entire society will suffer dire economic, cultural and social repercussions.

also, as we face the rise of authoritarian regimes, along with climate change, it s going to take the concerted efforts of the two groups most affected by ageism the youngers and the elders, or olders, as ashton calls them, as well as people of all colors, classes, genders and backgrounds working together in solidarity and mutual mentorship to help us pull through. ashton herself is a living example of what those of us who are no longer young can aspire to become, someone whose life experience has only ever made her ever more dynamic, influential, effective, and compassionate. she is a widely admired tireless activist and communicator, possessing a penetratingly incisive intellect, and someone who has never lost her notoriously sharp sense of humor. she s written many highly impactful articles, blogs, and a number of seminal books,

including just so you have a sense of her range years back, several best sellers about tasteless jokes, written under a pseudonym. but then she wrote why women who end their marriages do so well, which earned her a place on phyllis schlafly s enemies list. [laughter] yeah. and more importantly and most recently, this chair rocks: a manifesto against ageism, truly the most important work on ageism ever yet penned. please join me in welcoming the most important spokesperson for the movement to mobilize against discrimination on the basis of age in our era, ashton applewhite. [applause] hello, brave sunday bioneers. i guess you have to be a certain age to get the phyllis schlafly reference.

she was not our friend. [laughter] so let s start with the scary stuff. how does that word make you feel? [laughter] i used to feel the same way, and what was my darkest fear? ending up drooling under a bad botanical print in some grim institutional hallway. and then i learned that the percentage of americans over 65 in nursing homes is two-and-a-half percent, and it s dropping. even for people over 85, it s only 9%. what else was i worried about? dementia. but if you substitute that two-and-a-half percent in nursing homes, 90% of the remainder is cognitively fit. alzheimer s is a terrible disease, but it is not a typical part of aging. even as the population ages, dementia rates are falling significantly. there s more cases of alzheimer s because the number of older people in the population is growing, but the odds of anyone in this room getting dementia have dropped significantly, and we re getting diagnosed at later ages.

the real epidemic is anxiety over memory loss. [laughter] i also assumed that old people were depressed because they were old, and they were going to die soon. [laughter] but it turns out that people are happiest at the beginnings and the ends of our lives. it s called the u-curve of happiness. [laughter] science... and it has been borne out by dozens of studies around the world, and you don't have to be a buddhist or a billionaire to feel this way. the curve [laughter] the curve is a function of the way aging itself affects the brain. so slowly, skeptically, i can't tell you how skeptical i was at the beginning. i realized that old age was almost certainly going to be different and way better than the grim slide into depression, dementia, and puffy white shoes of my nightmares. [laughter] although... i mean that s scarier than the

and that s before i started having to see a podiatrist. that s true. [laughter] so i started feeling a lot better about the years ahead, and i started obsessing about why so few of us know these things. because these facts are readily available. why are we so afraid of aging? the reason is ageism. we experience it anytime someone assumes we re too old for something, instead of finding out who we are and what we re capable of and interested in. or too young. ageism cuts both ways, and young people experience a lot of it too. it is any judgment about a person or group of people based on how old we think they are. all prejudice ageism, sexism, racism they re all socially constructed ideas, which is just a fancy way of saying we make them up, and they change over time, and they serve a social and economic purpose. they re not about how we look. they re about how people in power assign meaning to how we look. and stereotyping underlies all prejudice,

the assumption that all members of a group are alike, and it s always wrong, of course. but it s especially wrong- headed when it comes to aging, because the longer we live, the more different from one another we become. and yet we tend to think of everyone in a retirement home as the same age that would be old. [laughter] when they can span four decades. just think for a minute about whether any of us would think that way about a group of people between age 10 and age 50, who are actually far more homogenous. pitting young against old, like pitting groups of low-wage workers against each other or the interests of stay-at-home moms against moms who were in the paid workforce is a time-honored tactic used to divide groups who might otherwise join forces to challenge the status quo. this us-or-them logic always pops up around healthcare rationing. listen for it. why should we spend money on old people when we could spend it on kids? it is not ethical or legal to allocate resources by race or by sex, and weighing the needs of the old against the young is equally unacceptable. period.

[applause] so next time someone brings that up, just point that out. i hope you will. old vs. young thinking also fails the common sense test. communities that are good to grow old in they have public transport and parks and social services are good for everyone else too. they re good for commuters and families and kids. they are all age friendly. nobody s born ageist, but it starts in early childhood at the same time that attitudes towards race and gender start to form, because negative messages about life bombard us from early childhood on, starting with cartoons and children s books. wrinkles are ugly. old people are incompetent. it s sad to be old, unless we challenge the underlying message that to age is to lose value as a human being. it s that basic and that ugly. it becomes part of our identity, and that is internalize ageism. i had to acknowledge my own prejudices and stop colluding.

senior moment quips, for example, i used to think they were self-deprecatingly cute until it finally dawned on me that when i lost the car keys in high school, i didn t call it a junior moment. [laughter] kids forget things all the time too. like i stopped blaming my sore knee on being 66. my other knee feels fine and it s just as old. [laughter] [applause] what was the hardest prejudice to let go of? the one against myself, my own future older self. all prejudice relies on othering. right? i feel like everyone in this room knows what that is, seeing a group of people as other than ourselves other color, other nationality. the weird thing about ageism is that that other is our own selves. it s us. ageism feeds on denial, our reluctance to admit that we will age, that we might even be old. it s denial when we try to pass for younger or believe in anti-aging products,

or get offended when someone politely offers us a seat on the bus. age denial blinds us to our bias, and it perpetuates it in 1,000 ways. it is not having a vagina that makes life harder for women. it s sexism. it s not loving a man. that makes life harder for gay guys. it s homophobia. and it is not the passage of time that makes getting older so much harder than it has to be. it is ageism. when labels are hard to read or there s no hand rail, or we can't open the damn jar, we blame ourselves. we think i should be stronger or better prepared. we fault ourselves instead of the ageism that makes those natural transitions shameful, and the discrimination that makes those barriers acceptable. when we dye our hair just to cover the gray or conceal our age, or leave early accomplishments off our resumes, we reinforce age shame. those are really successful strategies. i completely understand why so many of us engage in them. no judgment, i swear.

but they re like a gay person trying to pass for straight, or a person of color trying to pass for white. they re not good for us, because they re based in shame about something that shouldn t be shameful, and they give a pass to the underlying discrimination that makes these behaviors necessary. for those of us who face other kinds of discrimination, like lesbians and women of color, the costs are even higher. aging is not a problem to be fixed or a disease to be cured, it is a natural, powerful, lifelong process that unites us all. [applause] right? you can't make money off satisfaction, but shame and fear create markets, and capitalism always needs new markets. who says wrinkles are ugly? the multi-billion dollar anti-aging skin care industry, just anti-aging products. who says perimenopause and low t and mild cognitive impairment are medical conditions? the trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry. the more clearly we see these forces at work,

the easier it is to come up with alternative, more positive, and more accurate narratives. and the longer we wait to do that, the more damage it does to ourselves, and to our place in the world. longer lives require working longer and saving more, and yet two-thirds of americans report encountering discrimination at work. engineers in silicon valley are getting botox and hairplugged before key interviews, and these are skilled white men in their 30s, so imagine the effects further down the food chain. the personal and economic consequences are devastating. not one negative stereotype about older workers holds up under scrutiny. experience is an asset, not a liability. i mean, it s kind of nutty to even have to say that out loud. right? we know that diverse workplaces aren t just better places to work, they work better, especially in creative fields. and just like race and gender, age is a criterion for diversity. again, obviously.

push back against age discrimination and again workers of all ages benefit. older workers need flexibility and accessibility, and so do students and people with disabilities, and caregivers, and anyone trying to make a living in the heartless gig economy. right? again, these are all age-friendly workplaces. ageism in medicine often means less treatment, worse treatment, and sometimes no treatment at all. why should we accept a different standard of care for older people? that is institutionalized ageism at work. and internalized ageism matters a lot too. a growing body of really fascinating research shows that attitudes towards aging affect how our minds and bodies function at the cellular level. people with more positive feelings walk faster, heal quicker, and live longer, a lot seven-and-a-half years longer, on average. they are also this is a new study this spring less likely to develop dementia, even if they have the gene that predisposes them toward the disease.

the positive beliefs, the thinking goes, help buffer the effects of stress and prejudice, which of course are a result of living in an ageist world. that s why the world health organization is developing a global anti-ageism campaign to extend not just life span but health span. and there s two other global anti-ageism programs that launched just this month women face the double whammy of ageism and sexism, so we experience aging differently. women are less likely to be able to afford a decent old age because we earn less than men, we re penalized for time spent out of the workforce, typically on unpaid caregiving, and we live longer. there s a double standard at work here shocker. the notion that aging enhances men and devalues women. we women reinforce this double standard when we compete to stay young. you don't need a phd in women s studies to know this is not good for us. it reinforces ageism, sexism, lookism the idea that, of course, the most important thing about us is how we look and patriarchy.

it sets us up to fail. it pits us against each other. it affects our income, health, and well-being, and the effects are compounded by race and class, which is why everywhere in the world, the poorest of the poor and sickest of the sick are old women of color. [applause] disability and aging are different, but they also overlap in important ways that we really tend not only to overlook, but to brush under the rug. both olders and people with disabilities encounter discrimination and prejudice on a massive scale. cognitive impairment is even more stigmatized, and yet we act as though people with disabilities never grow old, and olders never become differently abled. prejudice frames the other group as alien and lesser that othering thing again even though people with disabilities come in all ages, obviously, and most of us, if we live long enough, we ll encounter some kind of impairment. this reinforces stigma both ways. many olders refuse to use walkers or wheelchairs,

even when it means never leaving home because the stigma is so great. and it makes our activism less effective when we ignore this overlap. in the 70s and 80s, disability right activists freeframed the way we see disability. they changed it from an individual medical problem into a social problem. bingo. right? and then they demanded integration, access, and equal rights. our goal is the same. a culture that rejects narrow definitions of productivity and attractiveness finds meaning within limitations and takes a realistic and inclusive view of what it means to be human. [applause] feeling alienated from and apprehensive at becoming like older people is not natural. it is not inevitable. it is the result of social forces ageism, sexism, capitalism. age segregation cuts us off from most of humanity. that s how it impoverishes us,

especially in the us where remarkably few people have older or younger friends. i mean, it s really rare to see a group with all different ages in it, as we see, which is so wonderful looking around this room. exchanging skills and stories across generations is the natural order of things, something indigenous peoples never lost sight of. [applause] an intergenerational world, the world we see at bioneers, is straight up a better world. so where do we go from here? tap into what we know. aging enriches us. again, as when it comes to environmental stewardship, this means tapping into what indigenous people have always known growing older isn t just different from what most of us have been brainwashed to believe, it is way better. it s not that the losses aren t real. i am not a pollyanna about this, about aging, but aging brings authenticity, confidence, perspective, self-awareness. and my mother said her legs got better. [laughter] priorities i m looking forward to that. priorities are clearer.

we care less about what people think, which is really liberating, especially for women. and that s why i ve never met anyone who actually wants to go back to their youth. no swapping out just the battered bits, because we know that our years are what make us us. look more generously at each other and ourselves. entire industries, billion dollar industries are built on convincing you that my 66-year-old face and body are hideous, and old equals ugly, especially for women. a system designed to exploit our insecurities can only do so if we consent to it. [applause] yeah. instead of muttering what the hell happened at the face in the mirror, which we all do, how about taking a moment to recall some of the things that did happen, and how amazing some of them were. listen to ad man chuck myron on older women s bodies, which offer contours aplenty, shapes galore, curves, mounds, crannies;

afterwards you think about what you didn t get to yet. why does that seem so damn radical? why didn t we think of that? [laughter] let s not delude ourselves. this is the work of a lifetime. we need to embark on it at all ages, and with each other. but remember none of the stigma is natural and none of it is fixed. we can insist on being seen and on being valued as our full, rich, lumpy, complicated selves, and take that out into the world. [audience responds] ask for help. in india, where the vast majority of olders live with their families, lifelong, there is notng demeaning about receiving care and support of all kinds, including with toileting. imagine that. the terms and power dynamics are going to shift. we ve got time to practice. the goal is to give and receive with grace. no one is truly independent ever. i d like to just draw a line through every all this independent living, whatever, and swap it out, of course, for interdependence. [applause] autonomy yes!

autonomy requires collaborators. these are two-way, mutually gratifying transactions. let s acknowledge the need for helping hands and reach for them gratefully and without shame, and practice. do it now. do it all the time. make friends of all ages. the most important aspect of a good old age, when i started out, i'm sure it was health, and then when i learned about the u-curve, i thought, well that must be fine if you re rich or if you have a mate or whatever. it s not health. it s not wealth. it is having a solid social network. if you don't know people much older or younger than you, seek them out. think of something you like to do listening to music or playing poker, or organizing and find a mixed age group to do it with. don't stay home just because you ll stick out. that s how desegregation happens. people with the most at stake, which is we olders in this case, step up and step out. we stop conforming. and i feel like this is a group for which that s not a tough sell, but it usually is.

the open-minded welcome us, and incremental social change takes place. youngers benefit too. otherwise each generation has to figure out on its own how dumb and destructive it is to fear growing older, and how much of our youth we squander on worrying about it. dismantling ageism will require nothing less than a mass movement, like the one that in the 20th century that catalyzed this mass shift of consciousness for women around the world. and what happened is, of course, as many of you know, that women came together, and we shared stories, and we realized that what we had been thinking of as personal problems, like not getting hired or heard or respected, were actually widely shared, collective problems that required political action. there s a term for that shift in awareness cognitive liberation, which i love because it speaks to the geek in me and the activist in me. as we become aware of discrimination, stop accepting second- class status as just the way it is,

and realize that we can come together and do something about it. cognitive liberation is a fantastic feeling, and it is the linchpin of movement building. we have an incredible opportunity. for the first time, those of us with access to healthcare and education, four, even five living generations are becoming commonplace. we re going to have more time to figure out what we want to do with our lives, and more time to accomplish it and share it, and more time to wind down with the people we love. the roles and institutions around us were created when lives were shorter, and they have yet to evolve. this stuff takes time. this gives us a critical window of opportunity to shape a world that supports people of all ages. to take advantage of this so-called longevity dividend, we need to quit the reflexive hand-wringing, challenge the ageist assumptions that underlie it, and think realistically and imaginatively about how to shape the multi-generational society that we all hope to live long enough to inhabit.

it s going to take all hands on deck and all ages. changing the culture is a tall order, but culture is fluid. look at me too, right? and look at how far the gay rights movement has come in just a few decades. look at gender, which until really recently, and according to today s headlines i don't know if anyone saw that; they re trying to roll back trans rights but we used to think of it pretty widely as a rigid binary, and now we understand that it is a spectrum. if we can change our thinking about gender, why not obviously about age? it is high time to let go of this old/young binary. there s no line in the sand between old and young, after which it s all downhill. and that imaginary threshold segregates us and fills us with needless dread. everyone, all races, all genders, all nationalities is old or future old. and until we put a stop to it, ageism will oppress us all. that makes it a perfect target for collective advocacy and a unifying cause.

why add another ism to the list when so many racism in particular call out for action? here s the thing: we don't have to choose. when we make the world a better place to grow old in, we make it a better place in which to be from somewhere else, to be a woman, to have a disability, to be queer, to be non-white, to be non-rich. and when we show up at all ages, for whatever cause matters to us save the whales, the clinic, the democracy, there s plenty to choose from we not only make that effort more effective, we dismantle ageism organically in the process, right, just by coming together at all ages. [applause] in dark times we look for scapegoats, especially these days old white men, which describes most political leaders in america today. it s tempting. i can't believe i m spending five seconds defending them, but most old white men are not politicians or neo-fascist, just as most millennials are not entitled twits. class...[laughter]

gender and race are far better predictors of voting behavior than age. there s so much now stuff out there anti-olders, anti-boomers invective around politics. blaming problems on another generation ignores class differences and the racism and sexism that also oppress us. we need a radical age movement now, to add ageism to that sorry list, to mobilize against it, and to make common cause against the forces that oppress us all. as the wonder in the words of poet audre lorde, there s no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we don't lead single-issue lives. [applause] and last thought: this is my dream. this is like my dream, my fantasy, but if anyone can help me make it happen, it is you in this room. if we can come together against ageism, the prejudice we will all encounter, it just might be the root to solidarity around others forms of oppression. that s what i m working on, and i hope you will join me. thank you. [applause]

■x■xñcñcñcñcw lara: this is “focus on europe.” i'm lara babalola. welcome to the program. we begin our show today in ukraine, where there is no letup in the fighting. bombs, injuries, and death have become a part of everyday life. and the brutality is especially felt in the port city of mariupol. the azov steel plant has been almost completely destroyed by putin's troops. residential neighborhoods are in ruins. the landscape is apocalyptic.