Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

In this episode, Indigenous scholar and organizer Nick Estes explores how Indigenous land-based and Earth-centered societies are advancing regenerative solutions and campaigns to transform capitalism. “Eco-nomics” puts Indigenous leadership at the forefront of assuring a habitable planet. Nick Estes, Ph. D. (Kul Wicasa/Lower Brule Sioux), is a Professor at the University of Minnesota and a member...

Human activity has disrupted the innate capacity of Earth’s natural systems to create a stable, healthy climate and atmosphere. The solutions are hiding in plain sight, inherent in the web of biological diversity that creates the conditions conducive to life. In this episode from our Nature’s Genius Series, Wade Crowfoot, California Secretary for Natural Resources, describes how the world’s fourth...

Although they receive less than 1% of climate funding, women-led climate justice grassroots projects are generating cascading benefits, from greater gender and economic equity and less gender violence to improved biodiversity and ecosystems’ health. Simultaneously, the centrality to many Indigenous peoples’ cultures of traditional relationships to place and to honoring all of life as sacred are a...

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...

As we hurtle into the Sixth Age of Extinctions, we face the cataclysmic loss of half the world’s biological diversity. 80% of the remaining biodiversity is on Indigenous lands. Ethnobotanist and Indigenous rights advocate Mark Plotkin of the Amazon Conservation Team tells us how scientists are helping protect the people who will protect the land, and the age-old wisdom that’s imperative for our fu...

At the core of our civilizational breakdown is an extractive economy that wastes both nature and people, at the same time it is Hoovering extreme wealth up to the billionaire class. But with breakdown comes breakthrough. Professor Manuel Pastor believes we’re living through a moment of profound transformation. It will come down to what we do – or don’t do – at this moment of radical change. In thi...

In the late 20th century, a handful of scientists proved that aquatic mammals have advanced communication capabilities and a consciousness strikingly similar to humans. Author and adventurer James Nestor leads us on a deep dive into the mystery of marine mammal consciousness, and the story of how a small band of freedivers, pushing the limits of human endurance, is finding that saving the whales m...

Humans have harnessed many plants, fungi, and even animals, for our medicines. But we aren’t the only species that can do this. From chimpanzees to dolphins to geese, a striking range of animals use remedies that grow naturally in their environments. We meet primatologist Elodie Freymann, whose work in the forests of Uganda and Peru has given us new insights into how animals self-medicate.

To transform our culture from its focus on dominance and hierarchy to one of connection, empathy and collaboration, it’s vital that we re-envision the essential (or archetypal) masculine, which changes everything. This rarely tackled topic is the subject of a deeply authentic dialogue among Playwright and activist V, formerly Eve Ensler and and four men working to transform our collective story ar...

Labor organizer Saru Jayaraman makes a clarion call to action: support workers across the United States who are saying there’s always been an affordability crisis and are asking politicians what has democracy done for me lately? Addressing inequality worse than the infamous Gilded Age requires ensuring living wages for all.  Featuring Saru Jayaraman (JD, Yale, MPP Harvard), an academic a...

What will it take to begin to heal the deep wounds between women and men? What is the role of men in this transformation? Cynthia Brix and Will Keepin from ⁠Gender Reconciliation International⁠ say that only by bringing these wounds into the light can we heal them. Patriarchy destroys men’s souls, too, so a revolution in gender relations can liberate women and men. The Gender Equity and Reconcilia...

Contemporary Western fire science is integrating what Indigenous Peoples discovered over thousands of years of observation, and trial and error: fire is key to optimizing forest vitality and biodiversity. The merging of these two ways of knowing could signal the end to our misguided policy of fire suppression at all costs, and the beginning of an era of building fire-resilient communities with a n...

What if there are ways to sustainably harvest protein and nutritious vegetables from the seas in ways that restore coastlines, local economies, produces abundant food, and sequesters vast amounts of carbon dioxide? Pathfinding ocean farmer Bren Smith has cultivated a breakthrough method of near-shore aquaculture called 3-D Ocean Farming, which has the potential to transform our relationship with t...

Sociologist, storyteller, and best-selling author Anna Malaika Tubbs calls for dismantling the key system that has determined who actually gets to be considered human in the United States: The American patriarchy. She says that transforming the forefathers' vision of a republic of men requires deep change at the personal, community, and national levels. Featuring Anna Malaika Tubbs, Ph. D. is a be...

When Donald Trump rode a wave of white anxiety into the White House, it was part of a backlash to the Obama presidency, one that revealed an increasingly explicit white nationalism and revived an overtly exclusionary agenda: roll back rights and protections for people of color, immigrants, Muslims, women, and gay and transgender people. Then came the backlash to the backlash: a rapidly spreading a...

How does a virtue become a vice? How does a basic building block of life turn into a threat to life? And how do you turn that vice back into a virtue? In this half-hour we visit with two unlikely pathfinders who are helping to revolutionize farming. Calla Rose Ostrander and John Wick of the Marin Carbon Project are taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it back where it belongs: in the so...

Calling someone an “animal” means they’re less than human – not worthy of respect, rights, or even of life itself. But in truth — and in biological fact — human beings ARE animals. Scientists continue to find that intelligence and what we call “consciousness” appear to saturate all of nature. Clearly it’s high time to think differently about just what it means to be an animal. Can we know what it’...

Native American students face racism throughout their education, from racist mascots to the historical erasure of the American genocide from textbooks. In this passionate conversation, Indigenous Rights Activists Dahkota Brown, Chiitaanibah Johnson, Jayden Lim, and Naelyn Pike share stories of their own experiences and how they are working to abolish racism in schools. 

The infinitely curious author and science writer Michael Pollan embraces the mystery at the heart of the great mystery of life: What is the nature of consciousness? And how can we understand consciousness when our only tool is our own consciousness? Joined by interviewer and UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Dacher Keltner.

Visionary clean energy entrepreneur Danny Kennedy explores the promise and challenges of the epic civilizational transition to renewable energy. Without doubt, the shift has hit the fan, but will we make the transition in time to avert complete climate breakdown? Danny Kennedy says we can – and the real heroes will be millions of clean energy entrepreneurs and startups, in partnership with the det...

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. From the historic Indigenous occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969 to the fossil fuel fights throughout Canada and the U.S. today, Indigenous resistance illuminates an activism founded in a spiritual connection with the web of life and the human community – with Julian Brave NoiseCat, Dr. LaNada War Jack and Clayton Thomas-Müller. Featuring ⁠⁠Julian Br...

In this program, powerful Native women leaders reveal the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and describe how they are taking action and building growing movements, including with non-Native allies.  These stories are shocking, harrowing and heartbreaking. But then again, when your heart breaks, the cracks are where the light shines through. Featuring Morning Star Gali, Ozawa Bineshi...

By around 2044, the U.S. will become a majority-minority nation. This seismic demographic shift has triggered a cultural earthquake, provoking a radical spike in hate crimes. In times of massive disruption and economic stress, what Carl Jung called the “shadow side of the psyche” comes into play: the pronounced psychological tendency in the collective psyche is to project these shadow qualities wi...

Terry Tempest Williams is one of the most celebrated and revered American nature writers. She integrates the musicality of a poet with the passion and purpose of an activist. Terry is also an award-winning conservationist, a fierce defender of her beloved Southwestern desert landscapes.  She has authored over 20 books that are translated worldwide. Her most recent book is The Glorians: Visitations...

Small farmers around the world are building an agro-ecological revolution based on self-sufficiency, food security, and freedom from fossil fuels and corporate control. In this program, we hear from two visionary agroecology innovators. Miguel Altieri is an agroecologist and entomologist at UC Berkeley who’s showing how farmers who embrace agroecology are building a movement based on self-sufficie...