Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

Growing Growers and Seeding Leaders for a Real Food Future What happens when green turns to grey? Fewer than 5 percent of 2 million American farmers are under 45 years old. Bucking that trend is the next generation of unstoppable young farmers Severine von Tscharner Fleming, Tyler Webb, and Sarita Role Schaffer, along with renowned urban food innovator Nikki Henderson and real food advocate Amin S...

Power Over or Power To? The future belongs to women. Around the world, women are inspiring each other to envision a world where women lead, but quite differently. Women are spontaneously redefining power and shaping it in novel ways. According to social justice advocate Gloria Feldt and community advocate Reinette Senum, leadership begins inside with power to rather than power over. How is the lea...

Treehuggers, Earth Acupuncture and Community Forests. Los Angeles as a lighthouse of environmental restoration? You bet. After 40 years of increasingly connected neighborhood actions restoring the landscape of the City of Angels, Andy Lipkis and TreePeople, the legendary group he founded, are ready to scale up. After catalyzing the first major urban Department of the Watershed, TreePeople and frie...

The Migration of Grassroots Solutions. Innovations usually arise locally. If conditions are right, they spread globally. That story is playing out around the world today. In India, human rights activist Mallika Dutt designed an elegant media campaign that successfully interrupts domestic violence live in real time. High school science educator Jay Vavra helped his San Diego students save endangere...

Corporate Power and the Sliming of American Democracy. Some say the modern environmental movement was born in an oil spill in April 1970. Enraged by the first television images of the massive crude oil spill off the pristine Santa Barbara coast, 20 million Americans took to the streets chanting with one voice: Protect Mother Earth. Constitutional attorneys Jeff Clements and John Bonifaz join with...

The Clean Energy Climate ChallengeThe climate crisis is a crisis of governance and leadership. Will we move rapidly enough to realign our policies, politics and economy to stabilize the climate? Creative and innovative people from all walks of life are stepping forward to address the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. Community organizers Susan Marshall and John Fogarty are taking power l...

What Would Healing Look Like? Whats it like to be in someone elses skin? What if the color of the skin is different say, black and white? What might happen when the descendants of a white slave trader and of black people who were enslaved meet? That is the brave and wrenching journey embraced by Thomas DeWolf, whose white ancestors were once the nations biggest slave traders, and Belvie Rooks and...

Reinventing Everything. Perhaps the single greatest systems error of human civilization is the illusion that people are somehow separate from nature not subject to the ground rules for the rest of the web of life. As a result, were getting an environmental education the hard way -- because when you fight nature, you lose. Join ecoliteracy leaders David Orr and Dr. Anthony Cortese and young educati...

Hello, My Other Self. In todays radically shifting world, the name of the game is resilience - the capacity of both human and ecological systems to absorb disturbance, roll with the punches and come up standing. Resilience arises from building community - enduring relationships and networks that hold cultural memory in the same way seeds regenerate a forest after a fire. Indigenous leaders Ilarion...

Time Poverty, Super-Wealth and the Politics of Happiness. At the same time the Great Recession has inflicted enormous pain and suffering, it has also caused people to take a deeper look at whats really important in our lives. Many are finding that time is not money time is far more valuable. The acclaimed filmmakers and social entrepreneurs Annie Leonard (The Story of Stuff) and John de Graaf (Sea...

Poetry and Justice for All. Shailja Patels unique artistry is a provocative global mash-up of genres. Shes a slam poetry champion and star of her award-winning, one-woman play Migritude about the intricate webs of global migration and cultural identity. As an acclaimed poet of South Asian and Kenyan ancestry, through her fearless art she embodies the authentic voices of women, South Asians and Afr...

From Hippie to Hip to Scale. Though still small in the big picture, organic food has come all the way -- from hippie to hip to mainstream since the Sixties. But can organic food and fair food ever feed seven billion people? How can the entire food chain become sustainable? And does sustainability stack up to profitability? Visionary food entrepreneur Gary Hirshberg answers those questions with a r...

Good Chemistry with Natures Green Chemistry. Did you ever ask yourself who in their right mind would invent a convenience to keep food fresh that would one day litter the landscape, wash up on every beach around the world and release toxic substances into the web of life and your body long after its short disposable life? Master green chemists and educators John Warner and Amy Cannon say all that...

Our misbegotten industrial food system is one of our greatest vulnerabilities. Its 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, sustainability, diversity and equity. Join author Michael Pollan, F...

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...

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...

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have long been held as the inalienable rights of the American people. Then why is it that corporate personhood consistently overrides the legal rights of citizens? And what about the rights of nature? Do rivers, mountains, whales or ecosystems - have inalienable rights that guarantee their interests? Join innovative environmental attorneys Thomas Linzey...

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...

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...

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...

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. Shes betting that the burgeoning global environmental human rights movement will free us from our deadly dependency. She believes our grandchildren will l...

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...

Somewhere in a typical American city, a woman wakes up to the noxious odors of a nearby sewage treatment plant. Her daughter carries a rescue inhaler to school. Like hundreds of her neighbors, this woman is sick and tired of being sick and tired. Women and men from vulnerable communities everywhere are rising up to gain equal access to clean water and air, equal environmental enforcement and prote...

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.