Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

How do we create peace? What can we learn from indigenous societies who have addressed this profound question over thousands of years? From North America to the Kalahari, Jeannette Armstrong, Marlowe Sam, Evan Pritchard, Kxao=Oma and Megan Biesele share powerful stories of how indigenous social technologies have succeeded in resolving conflict, and still are.

Communities around the country are working to create a new food future founded in health, justice and ecological wellbeing. Community activists Malik Kenyatta Yakini and Oran Hesterman are transforming Detroit through urban agriculture and helping low-income and working families access healthy food. Cathryn Couch works with young people to cook and deliver healthy meals to people who are ill and s...

How can we manifest the world we want, and who we want to be? Actor-activist Danny Glover and Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, former CEO of Green For All, show how one sure path to resilience is to build community and social movements. That requires learning how to reach out across our differences – and it gets really personal.

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.

Forests have long occupied a fertile landscape in the human imagination. Places of mystery and magic - of wildness and wisdom - of vision and dreaming. Yet beyond mythic realms of imagination, we’ve largely treated forests as inert physical resources to satisfy human needs and desires. The main operative science behind this commodification has been market science – how to extract maximum resources...

Oakland, California, has had the reputation of being one of the most dangerous cities in the country. Then the Restorative Justice movement started boldly showing how quickly that reputation can be turned around by arresting the cycle of youth violence and incarceration early: in schools and juvenile justice policies. With: Restorative Justice leaders Fania Davis and Cameron Simmons. Learn more at...

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 Eve Ensler and three men working to change men and change the story: Tony Porter, co...

Jessica Alva. Khadija Rose Britton. Hanna Harris. Anthonette Christine Cayedito. If you haven't heard of these women, it’s no surprise. They’re four of the untold number of Indigenous women and girls who have been murdered, kidnapped or gone mysteriously missing. A significant number of victims are from communities that are subjected to the harmful presence of fossil fuel and mining companies. The...

From the Canadian tar sands to the oil and natural gas fields of North America and the Amazon jungle, Indigenous peoples of the North and South are converging in one struggle. It is also the reconciliation of two different ways of knowing and being, between the head and heart, sometimes called The Eagle and The Condor. Five Indigenous women of the North and South are showing us how to keep fossil...

“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do, then how would I be and what would I do?” asked visionary designer Buckminster Fuller. Buckminster Fuller Institute Board President David McConville says our view of the universe profoundly shapes our future as a species, and it’s changing radically.

In times of massive social change, personal biography can coincide with historical epochs to produce leaders who embody the spirit of the times. Lifelong activist, author, politician, and visionary Tom Hayden shares the long view of social change movements. He traces the arc of struggle that has led to this epic moment when the climate crisis and the crisis of inequality are colliding with global...

What we do to each other, we do to the Earth. To protect our common home, we’re being called upon to bridge our differences to create beloved community and peaceful coexistence. A new generation of visionary change-makers is reframing the race conversation, and designing new tools to transform our unconscious biases and create justice. With: Racial justice pathfinders Rinku Sen, Saru Jarayaman and...

In the face of global climate disruption, two billion people worldwide will be challenged by too much water, and nearly another two billion by not enough. When you fight nature, you lose, says Dutch water wizard and designer Henk Ovink. He’s dramatically demonstrating on large scales how to shift our relationship to nature and to culture - and climate-proof our cities and coasts.

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, and the beginning of fire-resilient communities with a new relationship to one of nature...

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...

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...

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...

It's obvious that we're not here for ourselves. That makes no evolutionary sense. There's something larger than us, and to the extent that we can live that and celebrate that, I think we're healthier, and then that's love. So I think if we think of love in this way, and a beloved community in this way, when we hold all this stuff together, together.

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...

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 can we manifest the world we want, and who we want to be? Actor-activist Danny Glover and Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, former CEO of Green For All, show how one sure path to resilience is to build community and social movements. That requires learning how to reach out across our differences – and it gets really personal.

The genius of nature’s design, recipes and principles is serving as the inspiration for redesigning human civilization. This Biomimicry revolution is spawning a next industrial revolution. Biomimicry masters Janine Benyus and Jay Harman illuminate the forefront of nature-inspired design, including human organization and the power of networks. For more information about this show visit: https://bio...

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...

A new wave of technologies designed to regenerate people, planet and democracy is emerging in ingenious ways. Designers are creating online software for democratic group decision-making that weaves diverse perspectives into a coherent whole. And citizen science is spreading low-tech, high-impact tools that empower communities to work directly with data and mapping that can save them from harm and...

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...