Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

In this age of global weirding where climate disruption has tumbled the Goldilocks effect into unruly surges of too much and too little water, the restoration of beavers offers ancient nature-based solutions to the tangle of challenges bedeviling human civilization. Droughts, floods, soil erosion, climate change, biodiversity loss – you name it, and beaver is on it. In this episode, Kate Lundquist...

Corrina Gould is a celebrated activist of the First Peoples of the Bay Area and a leader in the LandBack Movement. She has helped forge a model for returning stolen land to Native American Tribes and restoring sacred sites in a defiant act of remembrance and resistance against cultural erasure.  Featuring Corrina Gould, born and raised in the village of Huchiun (now known as Berkeley CA), is the T...

When members of Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) witnessed the birth of a sperm whale, they observed a breathtaking scene of cooperation and communication that few humans on earth have ever seen. The extraordinary experience was both a scientific milestone as well as one more strand in the web of sperm whale culture that this innovative project is studying. The Project CETI team...

Mother Nature is the ultimate designer. After all, since life first emerged on Earth, she’s had 3.8 billion years of evolutionary R&D to get it right. Biomimicry is the art and science of learning from this ineffable genius: tapping into the patterns of nature to live harmoniously with life’s principles. We meet Janine Benyus, known as the “godmother of modern biomimicry”. This is an episode of Na...

Yurok Attorney Amy Cordalis is one of many Indigenous leaders who have fought for the un-damming and healing of the majestic Klamath River Basin, spanning Oregon and California. She tells the story of the decades-long struggle to remove dams that have choked the life flow of the river and severed salmon migratory routes, and how a combination of traditional ecological knowledge, environmental law,...

Visionary agricultural innovator Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin unearths a startling natural-world template for building a global movement that puts the chicken at the heart of bioregional food systems. These Poultry-Centered Regenerative Agroforestry farms can both renew the land and ultimately support the hundreds of millions of small farmers who produce 70% of the world’s food.

Scientific evidence is increasingly supporting the theory that the Earth is alive and replete with intelligence. In fact, the wild diversity of earthly organisms exhibits the characteristics that human beings attribute to personhood. How is it then, by the law, that a corporation is a person, but nature is not? What if we expand the anthropocentric boundaries of our systems of laws, rights and res...

Plants make up over 80% of life on earth. No animal would exist without plants’ ultimate magic trick of turning sunlight into food. Today, scientists are unearthing a wild, weird world of vegetal genius. But how can we truly understand beings so radically different from ourselves? We consider the emerging science of plants from the vantage points of philosophy and ethics, with Harvard scholar Rach...

The influences of Africans and Black Americans on food and agriculture is rooted in ancestral African knowledge and traditions of shared labor, worker co-ops and botanical polycultures.  In this episode, we hear from Karen Washington and Bryant Terry on how Black Food culture is weaving the threads of a rich African agricultural heritage with the liberation of economics from an extractive corporat...

We are told that our personal health is our individual responsibility based on our own choices. Yet, the biological truth is that human health is dependent upon the health of nature’s ecosystems and our social structures. Decisions that negatively affect these larger systems and eventually affect us are made without our consent as citizens and, often, without our knowledge. Dr. Rupa Marya, former...

With climate-driven disasters becoming the new normal, building resilience is the grail. Communities around the world are developing models created out of practical necessity. We hear on-the-ground stories from two different communities building resilience in the wake of serial disasters. Estrella Santiago Perez and her innovative community rights organization ENLACE have helped organize a collect...

After World War II, the U.S. government worked with industry to create a single-use, disposable consumer culture as a way to ensure ongoing market prosperity.  Who benefited? Consumer product companies like Coca-Cola, and the fossil fuel industry, whose petrochemicals are at the source. The result? Plastic pollution is now found in virtually every living organism – including humans – and is one of...

Erosion and evolution. Shadow and light. Death and rebirth. These are some of the strands that the acclaimed author, naturalist and activist Terry Tempest Williams weaves together in the face of today’s broken world. Standing in the lineage of the greatest nature writers, she links her deepest inner experiences with the state of the web of life. In this program, Williams asks: How do we find the s...

Over 7,000 languages are spoken around the world. Each one reflects a rich ecosystem of ideas - seeds that grow into a multitude of worldviews. Today, many of these immeasurably precious knowledge systems are endangered - often spoken by just a handful of people. We hear from two Indigenous language champions, Jeannette Armstrong and Rowen White. They reflect on the words, stories, songs and ideas...

After accomplished stints as a journalist, author and diplomat, and studying theology at Yale Divinity School, Krista Tippett was struck by a significant gap in the media landscape—a lack of deep, intelligent conversations to explore the spiritual, ethical and moral aspects of human life. What began as a national public radio show in 2003 evolved into the multiple award-winning podcast “⁠On Being⁠...

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant shares her personal odyssey as a wildlife ecologist, conservation biologist and co-host of the famed TV nature show “Wild Kingdom.” As a scientist dedicated to protecting and conserving the diversity of the web of life, she reminds us that, as human beings, we are part of nature. It’s all connected, and it’s high time to bring about peaceful coexistence, not only with nature, bu...

The late world-renowned primatologist Professor Frans de Waal (1948-2024) explores the nature of sex and gender among our cousins the apes, and how gender diversity is a common and pervasive potential on nature’s masculine-feminine continuum. In the quest to overcome human gender inequality, he suggests that our focus needs to be on the inequality. Featuring The late Frans B. M. de Waal, Ph. D., w...

In a world that’s unraveling from climate disruption and gaping inequality, another climate crisis confronts us: the climate of hate and othering. Award-winning scholar and educator Valarie Kaur says to overcome racism and nationalism, we must not succumb to rage and grief. As someone who has spent much of her life challenging horrific injustices and intolerance, Kaur learned the lesson that histo...

They say love means never having to say you’re sorry. But what if that popular aphorism from the 1960’s is wrong and that love precisely means having to say you’re sorry? Can an apology release the trauma, grief, rage and disfigurement arising from past abuse? But what if the perpetrator does not apologize? Can you still resolve or reconcile the trauma and hurt? How? These are some of the agonizin...

Today, there’s a renaissance of independent journalism dedicated to holding power accountable. Political pressures are mounting to break up media monopolies and provide access to more voices. Independent and investigative media outlets are proliferating, often as nonprofits funded from the bottom up. In this program, we hear from two veteran journalists who lead two of the most courageous and succ...

In this time of radical upheaval and change, fulfilling the promise of a “more perfect union” in the United States means building a multi-racial democracy through transformative solidarity. As the Founder-in-Residence at Policy Link, Professor Angela Glover Blackwell has spent decades advancing racial and economic equity at the national and local levels. She says the fate of the wealthiest nation...

What would it feel like to live in a world where our built environment was as elegant as nature's designs? What if our living and working spaces nurtured our human communities and quality of life? Architect and designer Jason F. McLennan takes the revolution from the heart of nature and the human heart into our built environment. He is shifting the fateful civilizational inflection point we face -...

The profit-hungry agribusiness empire of the 20th century institutionalized farming practices that continue to degrade soils across the U.S. and globally. We face a fork in the road: collapse or regeneration? The good news is that we know what we need to begin an agricultural and ecological renaissance – a literal rebirth.  Biologist Anne Biklé and geologist David Montgomery share one of the good...

In this program, we drop in on a remarkable conversation between two world-renowned Native American women artists. National Poet Laureate and musician Joy Harjo riffs with distinguished photographer Cara Romero. They discuss how life is art, and how they make their art to reflect the lived truths of their cultures and people. This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature...

National Poet Laureate and musician Joy Harjo shares her artistic journey as a Native American woman into what she calls the “story field.” She says that in these times of radical disruption, chaos and disturbance, great creativity also pours forth… and we all play a part in which way the story will go. Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Nation. She serve...