Bioneers: Environmental Justice

The Canadian physician and best-selling author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts is a brilliantly original thinker on addiction, trauma, parenting and the social context of human diseases and imbalances. Contrary to the assumptions of mainstream medicine, he asserts that most human ailments are not individual problems, but reflections of a person's relationship with the physical, emotional and social environment, from conception to death. Mind and body are not separate in real life, and thus health and illness in a person reflect social and economic realities more than personal predispositions. In other words, personal responsibility cannot be separated from societal responsibility and changing the world.

This speech was presented at the 2012 Bioneers National Conference.

Since 1990, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges.

To experience talks like this, please join us at the Bioneers National Conference each October, and regional Bioneers Resilient Community Network gatherings held nationwide throughout the year.

For more information on Bioneers, please visit http://www.bioneers.org and stay in touch via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Bioneers.org) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/bioneers).

Erica Fernandez, a remarkable eighteen-year-old environmental justice activist and Brower Youth Award winner, helped mobilize her diverse community in Oxnard, California to defeat the placement of a liquefied natural gas facility just offshore.

This speech was given at the 2008 Bioneers National Conference.

Since 1990, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges.

To experience talks like this, please join us at the Bioneers National Conference each October, and regional Bioneers Resilient Community Network gatherings held nationwide throughout the year.

For more information on Bioneers, please visit http://www.bioneers.org and stay in touch via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Bioneers.org) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/bioneers).

"Environmentalists are tree huggers and people concerned with the extinction of birds. We are not trees or birds." Mary Gonzales, a Mexican-American Chicago native, says this statement might be heard from people of color, poor or working class people, young people or immigrants, yet their immediate life experience and issues they're confronting have everything to do with the environment: transportation, housing, jobs, and education, to name a few. How do we connect? Mary is a legendary community organizer and California Director for Gamaliel Foundation, an international institute building faith-based organizing (and which trained Barack Obama as a community organizer).

This speech was given at the 2010 Bioneers National Conference.

Since 1990, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges.

To experience talks like this, please join us at the Bioneers National Conference each October, and regional Bioneers Resilient Community Network gatherings held nationwide throughout the year.

For more information on Bioneers, please visit http://www.bioneers.org and stay in touch via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Bioneers.org) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/bioneers).

Lois Gibbs, the legendary grassroots champion of environmental justice, describes how society is moving away from counting the bodies resulting from bad industrial and pollution policies to prevention, precaution and other winning strategies for a healthy, safe and economically sound future.

This speech was given at the 2006 Bioneers National Conference.

Since 1990, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges.

To experience talks like this, please join us at the Bioneers National Conference each October, and regional Bioneers Resilient Community Network gatherings held nationwide throughout the year.

For more information on Bioneers, please visit http://www.bioneers.org and stay in touch via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Bioneers.org) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/bioneers).

The brilliant health researcher, cancer survivor, bestselling author of Living Downstream, and the most articulate advocate for a toxic-free environment since Rachel Carson, describes her health battles, motherhood and activism. She shows the environmental links to many cancers (including hers) that the medical establishment refuses to look at. She focuses on the effects even tiny amounts of chemicals can have on the fetus and small children, and challenges our collective failure to address our global ecological unraveling or control toxic chemicals. She has faith that an environmental human rights movement will emerge to usher in a far more conscious era.

This talk was given at the 2008 Bioneers Annual Conference and is part of the Everywoman's Leadership, Vol. 1 and Ecological Medicine, Vol. 1 Collections.

Since 1990, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges.

To experience talks like this, please join us at the Bioneers National Conference each October, and regional Bioneers Resilient Community Network gatherings held nationwide throughout the year.

For more information on Bioneers, please visit http://www.bioneers.org and stay in touch via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Bioneers.org) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/bioneers).

The American Dream has come to mean accumulating more and more stuff – and it has been exported worldwide. Yet all the stuff in our lives is taking an enormous toll on the environment, public health, equity, personal happiness and even our sense of citizenship and democracy. Filmmaker-activist Annie Leonard exposes the often hidden costs and provides a hopeful vision for moving beyond the age of stuff. She reframes consumerism and hyper-materialism by encouraging people to jettison their shopping bags without regret, and instead embrace the creation of a livable, joyous, equitable and life-centered world.

This speech was given at the 2009 Bioneers National Conference and is part of the Environmental Justice Vol. 1 Collection.

Since 1990, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges.

To experience talks like this, please join us at the Bioneers National Conference each October, and regional Bioneers Resilient Community Network gatherings held nationwide throughout the year.

For more information on Bioneers, please visit http://www.bioneers.org and stay in touch via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Bioneers.org) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/bioneers).

This award-winning author, biologist and environmental health researcher explores the threats to climate and public health from extreme energy extraction including hydraulic fracturing (fracking). From strip-mining of frack sand in Wisconsin that releases carcinogenic silica dust to the deep-well injection of fracking waste in Ohio, which has been linked to earthquakes – these new methods of extracting hydrocarbons are shock-and-awe operations. Of particular interest are the living organisms that inhabit Earth’s deep geological strata. Far from being inert, our nation’s bedrock is an underground “coral reef” of microbes, another invisible ecosystem that’s linked to life in ways not yet fully understood here on the sunlit surface of our planet.

This speech was given at the 2012 Bioneers National Conference and is featured on the Environmental Justice Vol. 1 Collection.

Since 1990, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges.

To experience talks like this, please join us at the Bioneers National Conference each October, and regional Bioneers Resilient Community Network gatherings held nationwide throughout the year.

For more information on Bioneers, please visit http://www.bioneers.org and stay in touch via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Bioneers.org) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/bioneers).

Health-care visionary and Commonweal founder Michael Lerner connects the dots between the condition of human health and the drivers of extinction: toxic habitat, invasive species, declining biodiversity and climate change. He looks at the inseparability of the planetary ecological and socio-political crisis and our personal health, and what we must do to address both.

This speech was given at the 2004 Bioneers National Conference and is featured on the Ecological Medicine, Vol. 1 and Environmental Justice, Vol. 1 Collections.

Since 1990, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges.

To experience talks like this, please join us at the Bioneers National Conference each October, and regional Bioneers Resilient Community Network gatherings held nationwide throughout the year.

For more information on Bioneers, please visit http://www.bioneers.org and stay in touch via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Bioneers.org) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/bioneers).

Environmental lawyer and executive director of the Science Environmental Health Network Carolyn Raffensperger lays out the history of the Precautionary Principle and portrays how it can be used as an effective tool in policymaking to protect the public health, environment and future generations. She maintains that it is “the beginning of an essential transformation in the way we relate both to the Earth and to the things we invent.”

This speech was given at the 2001 Bioneers National Conference and is featured on the Ecological Medicine, Vol. 1 and Environmental Justice, Vol. 1 Collections.

Since 1990, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges.

To experience talks like this, please join us at the Bioneers National Conference each October, and regional Bioneers Resilient Community Network gatherings held nationwide throughout the year.

For more information on Bioneers, please visit http://www.bioneers.org and stay in touch via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Bioneers.org) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/bioneers).

This passionate organizer for Physicians for Social Responsibility in Southern California recounts how an environmental justice coalition came together in some of Los Angeles’ poorest neighborhoods to force California’s EPA to use precaution as an organizing principle. She shows how communities resist being forced to make the false choice between health and jobs, and are demanding healthier models of development. She describes the inspiring battle spearheaded by one remarkable activist mom in the L.A. Unified School District to stop using toxic pesticides. It led to one of the best nontoxic integrated pest management school policies in the country.

This speech was given at the 2004 Bioneers National Conference and is featured on the Ecological Medicine Vol. 1 and Environmental Justice Vol. 1 Collections.

Since 1990, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges.

To experience talks like this, please join us at the Bioneers National Conference each October, and regional Bioneers Resilient Community Network gatherings held nationwide throughout the year.

For more information on Bioneers, please visit http://www.bioneers.org and stay in touch via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Bioneers.org) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/bioneers).