Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

There are two great Will Allens in organic agriculture. One is a 6’7” former professional basketball player and founder of Growing Power in Milwaukee, the renowned urban agriculture training center. The other Will Allen is an organic farming pioneer and activist who started out as a professor at UC Santa Barbara, but was fired and jailed for his anti-Vietnam war activism. No longer able to work in...

Psychoactive plants are at the heart of many traditional and Indigenous spiritual and religious traditions, yet many have been outlawed or severely restricted. How does society determine religious freedom? With: Jeremy Narby on Amazonian shamanic knowledge; and Jeffrey Bronfman, the U.S. legal and spiritual representative of Brazil's União do Vegetal (UDV) church, whose legal victories for its U.S...

Short excerpt from Matthew Dillon of Seed Matters at Bioneers 2012, on how grassroots seed saving is an important political act.

Does our very survival now depend on our ability to understand the facts of life - nature's operating instructions - and how to live by them? Join the Center for Ecoliteracy's Fritjof Capra, Zenobia Barlow and Esther Cook to learn how experiential, participatory education in the environment is revolutionizing education from kindergarten through high school through an education of the heart. (pic f...

Breakthrough food literacy initiatives are transforming communities, bringing people together in meaningful conversations. Learn how to design an effective food literacy program for your community, organization or school. With: Kirk Bergstrom, Executive Director, Nourish Initiative; Alyson Wylie, Health Education Specialist, Center for Nutrition and Activity Promotion, California State University,...

The 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 local. Youth advocate Alec Loorz is...

For thousands of years, First Peoples have successfully managed the complex reciprocal relationships between biological and human cultures using Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Yet no prior human civilization has ever faced the globalized ecological collapse occurring now. In the face of unprecedented pressures on their homelands and ways of life, indigenous leaders Enei Begaye, Dune Lanka...

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...

Shailja Patel's 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 Africans who are otherwise sel...

“And so, the idea was how do you harness this capitalist engine to create a more broadly shared prosperity? And once they decided to do that, then they said, well, what do we do with this wealth if we’re going to make it more broadly shared? Do we just have everyone make more income? And they said, no. It makes more sense; let’s think about what are the things that people need in their lives.” Des...

Did medicine's separation from nature propel our health care system into its current crisis? Join Dr. Andrew Weil and nurse and health activist Charlotte Brody as they describe how Ecological Medicine reunites the interdependence of medicine and nature, and restores the feminine principle in healing.

What would life be like if we could hear the land ask us to be a certain way, a way that leads us and the Earth back to wholeness and health? Native American activists, educators, and leaders Jeannette Armstrong,Leslie Gray, and Katsi Cook share an inspiring Earth-honoring vision of what it means to "re-indigenize" ourselves.

The seminal co-founder of Green Chemistry, John Warner, and his esteemed partner, green chemistry educator Amy Cannon, are co-founders of the groundbreaking green chemistry education non-profit Beyond Benign. They’ll show how the combination of green chemistry and biomimicry in the STEM curriculum provides a unique opportunity to inspire students to make connections with the natural world and to u...

It’s a fact of life that communities of color and low-income communities suffer the worst environmental damage. Urban planner Greg Watson, physician Martha Arguello, and activist and scholar Carl Anthony show how these communities have found practical ways to reclaim the health and wellbeing of both their places and their health.

“The future may depend on our remembering that everything has in it a dream of itself. That the seeds of wholeness and the seeds of needed change are already present in all events and all people and every one of us. That the wholeness of the world can only be restored one heart at a time.” So says doctor and healer Rachel Naomi Remen. She has cultivated a new generation of doctors practicing whole...

There is a fundamental need to restore a female perspective to the male-dominated world of science. Is it any accident that the first person to sound the alarm about chemical pollution was Rachel Carson, a woman? These dangerous chemicals are “feminizing” all us critters by disrupting our hormone balances. How did we get here? And what can we do about it? Environmental health advocate Charlotte Br...

Daphne Miller, MD, had long suspected that human wellbeing and how our food is produced are intimately linked. She visited and studied seven innovative family farms around the country on a quest to discover the hidden connections between how we grow our food and our health, and she published her findings in "Farmacology: Total Health from the Ground Up" (also the basis for the award-winning docume...

The Original Instructions represent the ancient empirical wisdom of Traditional Ecological Knowledge earned over generations and millennia by people living closely with the land and each other. They also comprise disarmingly simple counsel: be thankful, enjoy life and attend to the inner pollution that results in outer pollution. Indigenous leaders Winona LaDuke, John Trudell and Evon Peter voice...

At the same time the Great Recession has inflicted enormous pain and suffering, it has also caused people to take a deeper look at what's 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 (Seattle Area Happiness Initiative) pop the Big Question: Wh...

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.

What lies behind the fascination to tinker with the building blocks of life? Kenny Ausubel and Andrew Kimbrell shed light on the disturbing genetic engineering debate and activist Luke Anderson reports from the successful campaign that has derailed the spread of "biological pollution" in Great Britain and Europe.

A healthy environment is not just a biological issue, but also a fundamental human right. Acclaimed social entrepreneur and author Paul Hawken proposes that we need to go far beyond "sustainability" as a guiding principle and dare to create a restorative economic system founded in social equity and power for all.

Hosted by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). New research is providing a provocative look at the healing potential of certain psychedelic substances, possibly yielding a scientific foundation for re-evaluating public policies of prohibition and repression. With Ralph Metzner, consciousness explorer whose groundbreaking books include The Psychedelic Experience and Gre...

On his deathbed Henry David Thoreau said his only regret was being too well behaved. Julia Butterfly Hill, Diane Wilson and Terri Swearingen, three of the most imaginative, inspiring and courageous direct action heroines of our era share their experiences and show us how courage and commitment can stop mountains from being moved.

Climate change. Energy crisis. Economic collapse. We live in a time of unprecedented global crisis and opportunity. There's 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 gene...