Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

All too often, there’s a disconnect between how women are portrayed in popular culture and the media, and how women see and portray themselves. Sarah Crowell, Joanna Macy, Susan Griffin, Sofia Quintero and Akaya Windwood take apart gender politics and put them back together with an emotional intelligence that is shifting the definition of power and fostering new models of women’s leadership.

Renowned storyteller, performer, author, activist and scholar Michael Meade weaves threads of timeless wisdom traditions into myths for today’s global crisis. Meade says each of us is woven into the soul of the world, and we’re uniquely needed at this mythic moment to become active agents in the co-creation, re-creation and re-imagination of culture and nature.

Cuba developed, out of necessity, the most organic, sustainable agricultural system of any country. Is that model replicable in other parts of the world, or is it now likely to be overrun by industrial farming as ironically the easing of tensions with the U.S. opens the island up to the influx of capital and multinational corporate plutocrats? What can we learn from Cuba’s food system, and what ar...

In this fascinating conversation, author and anthropologist Wade Davis and ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison delve into the fascinating human relationship to consciousness altering plants, delving into the use of coffee, cacao, peyote, ayahuasca, and psilocybin by ancient and contemporary peoples, and the relevance these relationships may have for current human predicaments.

Just like our bodies, nature has a profound capacity for healing and self-repair. Filmmaker-turned-ecological-restorer John Liu shifted from documenting China's massive environmental and societal upheavals to filming a groundbreaking, large-scale ecosystem restoration cum local economic renewal. Prioritizing nature's ecological functions above producing goods and services, the groundbreaking work...

Environmental literacy and social justice are inextricably linked, and recent changes in California’s curricula fully encourage pedagogical exploration of this linkage. Three new academic content frameworks (in Science, History-Social Science, and Health) promote challenge-based learning, in which student inquiry leads to student action in local communities. Students are also discovering nature-in...

In times of strife, how can art serve as a healthy catalyst for positive transformation? Join San Francisco City Art Commissioner Dorka Keehn in a conversation about the frontlines of cultural revolution. With: Favianna Rodriguez, a renowned transnational interdisciplinary artist and cultural organizer focused on social change. Recorded at the 2015 National Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, Calif...

Climate change is showing us over and over again that nature bats last. The carbon sequestration potential of natural systems and managed agricultural landscapes is vast, representing nearly one third of the greenhouse gas emissions reductions we need to see. Transforming our food system represents another huge opportunity to reduce our overall greenhouse gas output. The real question is: how we c...

Connect with kindred educators in an emerging community of practice in this participatory session offering frameworks and tools for designing an effective Education for Sustainability (EfS) initiative in your community and/or school. Hosted by Kirk Bergstrom, filmmaker, educator, social entrepreneur, founder and Executive Director of WorldLink. With: Jaimie Cloud, President, Cloud Institute for Su...

Bioneers are successfully employing the economics of nature to demonstrate how we can solve two of our most intractable environmental challenges: energy and agriculture. In a few decades, the U.S. can get completely off oil, as physicist Amory Lovins convincingly shows. Economist and anthropologist Jason Clay presents profitable examples of modeling nature's economics, from clean shrimp farms in A...

Although powerful global corporations and their allies are trying to undermine progress toward sustainable and just food systems, unexpected collaborations among labor, women’s rights activists, family farmers and environmentalists are innovating strategies and alliances to assure a new course for our food systems. Hosted by Joann Lo, Executive Director, Food Chain Workers Alliance. With: Saru Jay...

An Oil Spill Runs Through It: Corporate Power and the Sliming of American Democracy | Jeff Clements, John Bonifaz, and Dr. Riki Ott

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...

How can investment choices and strategies truly move the needle on large-scale change? Four leading entrepreneur/investors working to reinvent and re-imagine impact investing share strategies and projects. Hosted by Darian Rodriguez Heyman, former Craigslist Foundation Executive Director and SF Environment Commissioner. With: Silda Wall Spitzer, New World Capital, which invests primarily in green...

LaDonna Redmond and Wil Bullock live in communities where 12-year-olds suffer heart attacks, and where it's easier to buy a semi-automatic weapon than an organic tomato. But they are changing that reality, providing access to fresh, healthy foods, and re-establishing the connections between food and community.

Garbage in, garbage out, as the early computer innovators remarked about information. A vital free press is the single most important feedback loop in a democracy. New media including especially the Internet have challenged the supremacy of corporate media concentration and junk news. A brave new wave of activists such as Brad Friedman, John Stauber and Joan Blades are using digital media to resto...

"There is an environmental movement and there is a social justice movement. If they could truly become one movement the transformation would be unimaginable. When a black child in Oakland winces at the thought of an ancient tree being cut down in northern California, and when an ex logger in northern California winces at the thought of a teenager, a black teenager in Oakland, being cut down on tho...

From the microbes to the mammals, all life shares far more in common than what makes us different. In other words, it’s all relatives. If we knew that literally we are water, that we are mushrooms, that we are stardust—instead of shredding the web of life, might we start acting as if we have relatives? Bioneers Brock Dolman, Paul Stamets and Brian Thomas Swimme reveal inspiring reflections in the...

In 2018, Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter shared a moving speech at a Bioneers Conference. Cullors is a performance artist and award-winning organizer from Los Angeles, and is one of the most effective and influential movement builders of our era. She was a key figure in the fight to force the creation of the first civilian oversight commission of the LA Sheriff’s Department, but...

A movement of rural communities in El Salvador called La Coordinadora has led the way in community-based disaster preparedness, building a grassroots democracy movement, and influencing national policy. It’s featured in the new film and book This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis. Hosted by Mariel Nanasi, Executive Director/President, New Energy Economy. With: Estela Hernández, El Sa...

What do octopuses, bees, plants and slime molds have in common with human beings? For one thing, they exhibit the ability to solve problems and make decisions. Author and anthropologist Jeremy Narby reveals his astonishing research on the profound intelligence active throughout nature. After all, how could people be intelligent if the nature that created us were not even more intelligent?

Ecology is the superb art of interdependent relationships. Author and physicist Fritjof Capra, Native American educator Jeannette Armstrong, and medical researcher Jeanne Achterberg describe the complex and interconnected relationships inherent in living systems that can help heal our environment, our societies, and us.

If people are to find creative ways of living together and healing both culture and nature, the awakening of individual genius may be the deepest and most imaginative way to approach the seemingly impossible tasks that face contemporary cultures. With: Michael Meade and John Densmore.

The brilliant, award-winning contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Journalism professor and best-selling writer Michael Pollan, author most recently (May 2018) of How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, had a fascinating conversation back in 2001 with renowned anthropologist and ethnobotani...

First Peoples have long used key sacred plants as powerful healing tools and to communicate with the "mind of nature." In this truly unique session Bioneers associate producer and editor of Visionary Plant Consciousness J.P. Harpignies and ethnobotanist/artist Kat Harrison hosted deeply experienced practitioners of sacred plant traditions from the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmother...