Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

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...

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