Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

As lion populations crash in Africa, baboon numbers explode. Associate Professor of Ecology and Conservation Justin Brashares illuminates how to stem the cascading harms of nature out of balance. Visionary author Mary Ellen Hannibal recounts inspiring stories of citizen scientists restoring health to “the spine of the continent” from Alaska to Mexico by connecting nature back to itself.

Women-led movements arising around the world herald a profound shift that changes everything. Visionary women leaders Osprey Orielle-Lake, Leila Salazar and Lynne Twist report on the women leading the clean energy revolution in Africa, defending the Amazonian rainforest, and making peace in Liberia.

Governments and businesses are recognizing climate chaos as the threat multiplier from hell. The answer is not business as usual. How about crowdfunding and democratizing investment in clean energy? Young change-maker turned clean energy entrepreneur Billy Parish, founder of Mosaic, and banker Marco Krapels, co-founder of The Solutions Project, say 100% renewable energy is both possible and impera...

How can we manifest the world we want, and who we want to be? Actor-activist Danny Glover and Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, former CEO of Green For All, show how one sure path to resilience is to build community and social movements. That requires learning how to reach out across our differences – and it gets really personal.

How do we transform a vicious circle into a virtuous circle? How do we move from environmental degradation and the deterioration of human relations to restoration? From war to peace - from hatred to compassion - from isolation to community? How can one person make a crucial difference? Painter and professor Lily Yehs approach to community healing takes that which is broken and creates something wh...

Forty years ago when a logging road was blasted deep into the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, the outside world discovered the Surui people. Contact with the Western world led to their decimation by disease, warfare and illegal logging and mining. The Surui organized to save themselves and their homeland by electing a young leader to tell their story to the world. Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui trave...

Ethan Nadelmann, founder/director of the Drug Policy Alliance, the nation’s leading drug policy reform organization, traces the hidden history of drugs laws, which are intimately connected with racism and the political exploitation of people’s fears. He offers a set of practical and effective policy reforms that are now being advocated by a rising tide of former drug warriors.

A popular character on a Spanish-language soap opera resonates so deeply with viewers that they become empowered and educated about reproductive health. Avatars in the virtual world called Second Life enable people of all faiths to better understand and respect Islamic culture. A global communications network crosses the digital divide to help women around the world share solutions for improving e...

Half of Americans cannot name one component of the water cycle upon which all life depends. Yet water is at the root of every human endeavor - from manufacturing to agriculture, energy production and waste management. No water, no life. Join master permaculture designers Darren J. Doherty and Brock Dolman for both practical and poetic ways to re-educate earthlings in soil and water literacy. Their...

A living building is like a flower, planted and rooted to its place. It collects its energy from the sun. It harvests its water from the rain. This building does not pollute. It engages actively with the environmental around it. And its beautiful and inspiring. This is natures blueprint for building a better world, says visionary architect Jason McLennan. He designed the Living Building Challenge...

Climate change. Energy crisis. Economic collapse. We live in a time of unprecedented global crisisand opportunity. Theres a monumental amount of work to be done to make the transition to a restored world, yet young people are unemployed at astonishingly high rates. How can we unlock the green economic opportunities that will open the door to doing well by doing good for generation green and genera...

Why does “corporate personhood” consistently override the legal rights of citizens? And what about the rights of nature? Join innovative environmental attorneys Thomas Linzey and Mari Margil for breakthroughs on the ground of democracy.

History is a tale told by the winners. How then can we reclaim the voices of those who have been historically written out - silenced through the ages? Perhaps as women write herstory into history, well see clearly the eternal power, brilliance and unique value of womens contributions. Join media innovator Jensine Larsen and feminist historian Sally Roesch Wagner as they share the emerging landscap...

When a culture is disintegrating and the stories everybody believed in no longer fit, its time to rekindle our connection to ancient wisdom and universal truths. Mythologist, author and storyteller Michael Meade, founder of the Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, reminds us that the word apocalypse - which has come to mean the end of the world, actually means an unveiling. Once we penetrate that veil...

We live in a society dependent on toxic chemicals. Today about 287 such chemicals trespass inside the blood of newborns and inside all of us without our consent. Despite the odds, ecologist, author and mother Sandra Steingraber is an optimist. She’s betting that the burgeoning global environmental human rights movement will free us from our deadly dependency. She believes our grandchildren will lo...

Our misbegotten industrial food system is one of our greatest vulnerabilities. It's dangerously fossil-fueled, toxic, monocultural and centralized. The real cost of cheap food is very high to both people and planet. Urban food innovators are designing vibrant new local food economies built on environmental and ecological integrity, sustalnability, diversity and equity. Join author Michael Pollan,...

As the creation story of Judeo-Christian beliefs, the biblical recounting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden has long had profound influence around the world. So what’s it like to be named Eve? World-renowned playwright and activist Eve Ensler explores her own personal journey into her namesake. The provocative author of “The Vagina Monologues” and founder of V-Day to end violence against women...

In neighborhoods across the country, citizens are building community resilience – one shovelful and one backyard at a time. Visionary citizen restorationists Trathen Heckman of Daily Acts and Jessie Lerner of Sustain Dane show how seemingly small acts like catching rain and growing food forests are turning green visions into action, with the help of local governments, schoolkids, businesses, artis...

Youth movements are rising to restore people and planet. De’Anthony Jones, a former President of the Environmental Students Organization at Sacramento State, Chloe Maxmin, co-founder of Divest Harvard, and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, hip-hop artist and Youth Director of Earth Guardians, say there’s no better time to be born than now because this generation gets to rewrite history. It could be known as t...

Writer, naturalist and activist Terry Tempest Williams asks “Can we love ourselves, each other and the Earth enough to change?” She invokes our deepest humanity to honor and protect the wilderness that’s the cauldron of evolution – and of our own imagination. “Our power lies in the love of our homelands,” she tells us in this eloquent, heartfelt tour-de-force, and protecting the wild requires brin...

Climate change is more than an “issue.” According to renowned author and activist Naomi Klein, “It’s a civilizational wake-up call delivered in the language of fires, floods, storms and droughts.” She says it demands that we challenge the dominant economic policies of deregulated capitalism and bottomless resource extraction. She describes the transnational Blockadia movement that’s opposing fossi...

In the next 20 years, farmland ownership in the U.S. will shift on a continental scale—400 million acres. Yet 70% of American farmland is owned by people 65 and older. How can we help young, motivated agrarians become successful farmers to whom retiring organic farmers can transmit their wisdom? How can we invest in the democratization of our land base? These questions drive Agrarian Trust, starte...

From the Canadian tar sands to the oil and natural gas fields of North America and the Amazon jungle, Indigenous peoples of the North and South are converging in one struggle. It is also the reconciliation of two different ways of knowing and being, between the head and heart, sometimes called The Eagle and The Condor. Five Indigenous women of the North and South are showing us how to keep fossil...

From nature’s viewpoint, people are one species. Categories such as race, class, nation, religion and even many gender roles are human constructs. Yet the world is riven by exploitation and violence driven by these perceived divisions at an epic moment of demographic change toward the U.S. becoming a majority minority nation. john a. powell, Director of U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair an...

Archetypal stories guide our lives in profound and largely unconscious ways. Through reframing classic mythologies, we explore the resurgence of the archetypal feminine and its relationship to nature through a multi-cultural lens, with Jean Shinoda Bolen, author and Jungian therapist; Luisah Teish, author and priestess in the Ifa Orisha tradition; Sri Swamini Svatmavidyananda, teacher of Hindu Ved...