Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

Through colonization, hyper capitalism, and unaddressed trauma, many of us have forgotten how to play our part in the orchestra of the natural world. Join a conversation between two remarkable activists and legal practitioners from different continents, working in different communities, but who happen to share a belief in the power of creative expression help us reconnect to the entire web of life. They discuss interdependence, forgotten ways of relating to each other and all species, and how well-harmonized songs can bring delight and balance to the human spirit, to trees and plants and to our fellow fauna.

Resources

Video of this conversation from the 2024 Bioneers Conference

Featuring

Erin Matariki Carr, of Ngāi Tūhoe and Ngāti Awa descent, lives in her traditional homelands in Aotearoa/New Zealand and works in law and policy, with a focus on the interface between Indigenous and Western legal systems and methodologies. She previously worked as Manager of Planning & Design to create and implement policies under the world-first legislation conferring legal personhood to the Te Urewera rainforest. Matariki is currently a project lead at RIVER, where she focuses on the constitutional transformation movement in Aotearoa with a number of other teams, including Tūmanako Consultants and Te Kuaka NZA.

Learn more at weareriver.earth

Claudia Peña, Executive Director of For Freedoms, an artist collective that centers art and creativity as a catalyst for transformative connection and collective liberation, serves on the faculty at UCLA School of Law and in that school’s Gender Studies Department. She is also the founding Co-Director of the Center for Justice at UCLA, home of the Prison Education Program, which creates innovative courses that enable faculty and students to learn from and alongside currently incarcerated participants. Claudia has devoted her life to justice work through community organizing, transformative and restorative justice, consciousness-raising across silos, coalition-building, teaching, advocacy through law and policy, and the arts.

Learn more at forfreedoms.com

This is an excerpt from a conversation recorded at a Bioneers conference. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

When we allow our hearts to be broken open by hearing the stories of our fellow human beings, we build community and compassion. That is the passionate message of Sister Simone Campbell, one of the most renowned figures in contemporary faith-based progressive activism. She and the other rebel Nuns on the Bus are touring the country, bridging divides, transforming politics and keeping the faith.

Featuring

Sister Simone Campbell is a poet, social justice attorney and one of the nation’s most influential faith-based progressive activists. She led the famous 2012 “Nuns on the Bus” tour to challenge Congressional budget proposals that radically slashed programs for the poor. She shares her vision of how we can heal our divisions and differences, create a renewed sense of community, and build a far more just, peaceful, verdant and compassionate world. Introduction by Reverend Sally Bingham, Interfaith Power and Light.

Resources

Sister Simone Campbell speaking at Bioneers 2015

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

Dr. Shane Gero, a visionary marine biologist, is angling to crack the code of sperm whale communication. His mind-bending research is transforming what we thought we knew about these ancient leviathans. It’s calling on us to embrace the reality that perhaps we’ve long suspected: Sperm whales are living meaningful, intelligent and complex lives whose cultures suggest that whales are people too. What can whale culture teach us, and can deep listening help us learn to coexist respectfully in kinship with these guardians of the deep?

Shane Gero, Ph.D., is a Canadian whale biologist, Scientist-in-Residence at Ottawa’s Carleton University, and a National Geographic Explorer. He is the founder of The Dominica Sperm Whale Project and the Biology Lead for Project CETI. His science appears in numerous magazines, books, and television; and most recently was the basis for the Emmy Award winning series, Secrets of the Whales. Learn more at shanegero.com.

Shane Gero – Preserving Animal Cultures: Lessons from Whale Wisdom | Bioneers 2023 Keynote

Deep Dive: Intelligence in Nature

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by: Teo Grossman and Kenny Ausubel

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

Special Engineering Support: Eddie Haehl at KZYX

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.

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

These days, scientists are starting to talk like shamans and shamans are starting to talk like scientists. So says anthropologist and author Jeremy Narby. And, he says, we need to talk about talking – because words matter. In this episode, Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies speaks with Narby about how the very language and words we use reveal the topography and limits of our worldview, including Western culture’s adamant centuries-long but now increasingly discredited assumption that intelligence is restricted only to human beings.



Yurok fisherman and tribal leader Sammy Gensaw and environmental scientist-turned-activist Craig Tucker share the epic story of how Indigenous leadership and non-Indian allyship made the impossible inevitable: the biggest-ever dam removal and salmon restoration in history. It represented a literal watershed moment; unprecedented co-equal decision-making between the tribes and their historical nemesis – the US government.

Once complete in 2024, the project will liberate the Klamath river and several tributaries to once again run free across 400-miles from Oregon through California and into the Pacific Ocean.

Sammy Gensaw (Yurok) is the Founding Director of the Ancestral Guard, Artist, Yurok Language Speaker, Singer, Writer, Cultural/Political/Environmental Activist, Regalia Maker, Mediator, Youth Leader & Fisherman.

Craig Tucker has 20+ years of advocacy and activism experience, especially working with tribal members, fishermen and farmers in the Klamath Basin on dam removal, traditional fire management, gold mining, and water policy, and is the founder and Principal of Suits and Signs Consulting.

Indigenous Forum – Undam the Klamath! How Tribes Led the Largest River Restoration Project in US History | Bioneers 2023

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

In this episode, award-winning lawyer and climate justice organizer Colette Pichon-Battle lays out a bold vision for a new organizing project designed to model bioregional democratic climate action. The aim is to transform the Gulf South and Appalachia away from the lethal matrix of fossil fuel extraction and extractive economics. Instead, the regional vision is for a regenerative future of clean energy democracy, and an equitable, inclusive economy.

Colette Pichon Battle, a generational native of Bayou Liberty, Louisiana, is an award-winning lawyer and prominent climate justice organizer. After 17 years leading the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy, she co-founded Taproot Earth to create connections and power across issues, movements, and geographies.

Colette Pichon Battle – Expanding Our Movements for Climate Justice | Bioneers 2024 Keynote

Taproot Earth

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by: Kenny Ausubel

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

Producer: Teo Grossman

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Songs in this Episode: 'Good Morning New Orleans' by Kermit Ruffins; 'What Goes Around Comes Around' by Rebirth Brass Band, provided by Basin Street Records in New Orleans, Louisiana

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

Housing is a human right, or so says the International Declaration of Human Rights. But could we organize our economies with that in mind? Across the country, communities have land and properties and people who need homes. What’s stopping us bringing them together in a way that increases community wealth and wellbeing for everyone? That’s the question we explore in this episode of our special series on community wealth building, produced in collaboration with the radio and tv show, Laura Flanders & Friends. Featuring Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Writer; Saoirse Gowan, Policy Associate with the Democracy Collaborative; Noni D. Session, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative.

This episode is part 1 of a 4-part series exploring how communities are working to transform their local economies by harnessing their assets, anchoring capital and resources locally to directly invest in that place and its people – from land to money and finance. Explore the full series here.

Democracy Collaborative

East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

Our Economic Future: Achieving a More Equitable Society by Radically Rethinking Our Guiding Economic Ideas | Bioneers Reader

Guest Host

Laura Flanders is the host and executive producer of Laura Flanders & Friends, which airs on PBS stations nationwide. She is an Izzy-Award winning independent journalist, a New York Times bestselling author and the recipient of the Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Media Center.

Credits

This series is co-produced by Bioneers and Laura Flanders & Friends

Laura Flanders & Friends Producers: Laura Flanders and Abigail Handel

Production Assistance: Jeannie Hopper and David Neumann

Bioneers Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Senior Producer: Stephanie Welch

Producer: Teo Grossman

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

In this episode on community wealth building, we look at how communities are working to transform their local economies by harnessing the assets that exist in their place. It’s the Kryptonite to the corporate model that extracts wealth from communities. Instead, they’re anchoring capital and resources locally to directly invest in that place and its people - from land to money and finance.

We hear from Nicole Ndumele from the Center for American Progress; Mike Strode, from The Kola Nut Collaborative; and Deyanira del Río of the New Economy Project.

Center for American Progress

New Economy Project

Open Collective Foundation

The Kola Nut Collaborative

Our Economic Future: Achieving a More Equitable Society by Radically Rethinking Our Guiding Economic Ideas | Bioneers Reader

This episode is part 1 of a 4-part series exploring how communities are working to transform their local economies by harnessing their assets, anchoring capital and resources locally to directly invest in that place and its people – from land to money and finance. Explore the full series here.

Guest Host

Laura Flanders is the host and executive producer of Laura Flanders & Friends, which airs on PBS stations nationwide. She is an Izzy-Award winning independent journalist, a New York Times bestselling author and the recipient of the Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Media Center.

Credits

This series is co-produced by Bioneers and Laura Flanders & Friends

Laura Flanders & Friends Producers: Laura Flanders and Abigail Handel

Production Assistance: Jeannie Hopper and David Neumann

Bioneers Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Senior Producer: Stephanie Welch

Producer: Teo Grossman

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

Today’s corporate, capitalist economy is radically unequal, ecologically unsustainable, and embedded in recurring boom-and-bust cycles of crisis. Not surprisingly, people are looking for alternatives. What if, instead of tweaking the system to reduce the damage, we reorganized entirely so that both local and national economies produced better outcomes for people, communities and the planet in the first place? 

That’s the essence of community wealth building, the focus of this episode with guest host Laura Flanders, featuring Democracy Collaborative Distinguished Senior Fellow, Marjorie Kelly; Preston City Council Member, Matthew Brown in the UK; and community wealth building adviser to the Scottish Government, Neil McInroy.

This episode is part 2 of a 4-part series exploring how communities are working to transform their local economies by harnessing their assets, anchoring capital and resources locally to directly invest in that place and its people – from land to money and finance. Explore the full series here.

Democracy Collaborative

Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and The Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today's Crises

Action Guide for Advancing Community Wealth Building in the United States | Democracy Collaborative

Gar Alperovitz – Replacing Corporate Capitalism: Why We Need a Next System | Bioneers 2018 Keynote

Our Economic Future: Achieving a More Equitable Society by Radically Rethinking Our Guiding Economic Ideas | Bioneers Reader

Guest Host

Laura Flanders is the host and executive producer of Laura Flanders & Friends, which airs on PBS stations nationwide. She is an Izzy-Award winning independent journalist, a New York Times bestselling author and the recipient of the Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Media Center.

Credits

This series is co-produced by Bioneers and Laura Flanders & Friends

Laura Flanders & Friends Producers: Laura Flanders and Abigail Handel

Production Assistance: Jeannie Hopper and David Neumann

Bioneers Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Senior Producer: Stephanie Welch

Producer: Teo Grossman

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris