Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

At the core of our civilizational breakdown is an extractive economy that wastes both nature and people, at the same time it is Hoovering extreme wealth up to the billionaire class. But with breakdown comes breakthrough. Professor Manuel Pastor believes we’re living through a moment of profound transformation. It will come down to what we do – or don’t do – at this moment of radical change. In this episode, we hear from Pastor on how shocks to the system are precipitating a great awakening and growing movements to transform the economy to our economy.

Manuel Pastor, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at USC and Director of its Equity Research Institute, has long been one of the most important scholars and activists working on the economic, environmental and social conditions facing low-income urban communities and the social movements seeking to change those realities. He has held many prominent academic posts, won countless prestigious awards and fellowships for his activism and scholarship, and is the author and co-author of many important, highly influential tomes.

Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter | 2021 Book by Manuel Pastor and Chris Benner

SolidarityEconomics.org | Joint Project of the Equity Research Center (ERI) at the University of Southern California and the Institute for Social Transformation at UC Santa Cruz

Manuel Pastor – Solidarity Economics: Mutuality, Movements and Momentum | 2021 Bioneers Keynote Address

Solidarity Economics: Our Economy, Our Planet, Our Movements | 2021 Bioneers Panel

Bioneers Reader: Our Economic Future | Free eBook

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

In this age of global weirding where climate disruption has tumbled the Goldilocks effect into unruly surges of too much and too little water, the restoration of beavers offers ancient nature-based solutions to the tangle of challenges bedeviling human civilization. Droughts, floods, soil erosion, climate change, biodiversity loss - you name it, and beaver is on it.

In this episode, Kate Lundquist and Brock Dolman of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center share their semi-aquatic journey to becoming Beaver Believers. They are part of a passionate global movement to bring back our rodent relatives who show us how to heal nature by working with nature.

For more information and transcript, visit: https://bioneers.org/beaver-believers-how-to-restore-planet-water/

Beaver Believer: How Massive Rodents Could Restore Landscapes and Ecosystems At Scale

Fire and Water: Land and Watershed Management in the Age of Climate Change

Brock Dolman – Basins of Relations: A Reverential Rehydration Revolution

From Kingdom to Kin-dom: Acting As If We Have Relatives Brock Dolman, Paul Stamets and Brian Thomas Swimme

The WATER Institute’s Beaver in California reader

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast. 

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 extractive industry is ravaging Native nations where oil and blood have long run together. Add to this a dysfunctional police and legal hierarchy that leaves Indigenous women and their families with little support during the first crucial hours when they go missing, and little recourse to prosecute predators for their crimes.

In this program, powerful Native women leaders reveal the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and describe how they are taking action and building growing movements, including with non-Native allies. Morning Star Gali, Ozawa Bineshi Albert, Simone Senogles, Kandi White, and Casey Camp Horinek.  

***These stories are shocking, harrowing and heartbreaking. But then again,  when your heart breaks, the cracks are where the light shines through.

The Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women

Sovereign Bodies Institute

MMIW USA

The Intercept: A New Film Examines Sexual Violence as a Feature of the Bakken Oil Boom

Restoring Justice for Indigenous Peoples: MMIW Initiative

The Mendocino Voice: Community groups begin painting mural honoring Khadijah Britton and highlighting MMIW in Ukiah

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

In this second of a two-part program, we plunge into the mind-bending proposition that we get a second chance to remake our broken food economy. Bren Smith, co-founder and co-Executive Director of GreenWave, has created a revolutionary polycultural farming model that has low upfront costs, is easily scalable, and can help mitigate climate change. It’s called regenerative ocean farming and aims to redesign the food economy away from destructive profit-driven practices and agribusiness monopolies in favor of democratizing the food economy.

In this moment of radical transformation, shifting the societal pronoun from “me, me, me” to “we” may be the single most transformational pivot we can make in order for anything else to work. Our destiny is ultimately collective.

How can we overcome corrosive divisions and separations that are tearing us apart and create a world where everyone belongs?

In this program, we dip into a deep conversation on this topic between Angela Glover Blackwell and john a. powell, two long-time friends and leaders in a quest toward building a multicultural democracy. 

Angela Glover Blackwell is Founder-in-Residence at PolicyLink, the organization she started in 1999 to advance racial and economic equity. One of the nation’s most prominent, award-winning social justice advocates, she serves on numerous boards and advisory councils, including the inaugural Community Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve and California’s Task Force on Business and Jobs Recovery.

john a. powell is the Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute and Professor of Law, African American, and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. A former National Legal Director of the ACLU, he co-founded the Poverty & Race Research Action Council and serves on the boards of several national and international organizations. His latest book is: Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society. 

From Othering to Belonging | Bioneers 2022 Panel Discussion with Angela Glover Blackwell and john a. powell

Angela Glover Blackwell - Transformative Solidarity for a Thriving Multiracial Democracy | Bioneers 2022 Keynote Address

john a. powell - Healing Across Divides: Building Bridges to Challenge Systemic Injustice | Bioneers 2020 Keynote Address

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by: Kenny Ausubel

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Producer: Teo Grossman

Production Assistance: Anna Rubanova and Monica Lopez

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast. 

Did you ever ask yourself who in their right mind would invent a convenience to keep food fresh that would one day litter the landscape, wash up on every beach around the world and release toxic substances into the web of life and your body long after its short disposable life? Master green chemists and educators John Warner and Amy Cannon say all that is changing -- by necessity and by design. The radical growth of green chemistry is showing we can have good chemistry with the Earth by emulating nature’s green chemistry and do good business at the same time.

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast

In Western civilization, human beings are considered the exceptional species and uniquely intelligent. Yet science is consistently revealing our intimate biological kinship with all species, especially the primates with whom we share 99% of our DNA. The breakthrough primatologist researchers Roger and Deborah Fouts take us on their amazing journey with chimpanzees that shows that, not only are people animals, but animals seem to be people too.

Roger and Deborah Fouts co-founded and directed the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute (CHCI) at Central Washington University. CHCI facilitated research on primate communication, advocated for chimpanzee conservation, and served as a sanctuary for chimpanzees from 1993-2013.

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

Music co-written by the Baka Forest People of Cameroon and Baka Beyond from the album East to West. All royalties from Baka compositions and performances go to Baka Forest People, through the charity Global Music Exchange. Find out more at globalmusicexchange.org.

Additional music was made available by Sounds True, at SoundsTrue.com.

The Rights of Nature movement launched internationally in 2006 and is growing fast. Driven primarily by tribes and citizen-led communities, more than three dozen cities, townships and counties across the U.S. have adopted such laws to create legally enforceable rights for ecosystems to exist, flourish, regenerate and evolve.

In this program, Native American attorneys, Frank Bibeau and Samantha Skenandore, and legal movement leader Thomas Linzey report from the front lines how they are honing their strategies to protect natural systems for future generations.

Featuring

Frank Bibeau, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, is an activist and tribal attorney who works extensively on Chippewa treaty and civil rights, sovereignty and water protection.

Thomas Linzey, Senior Legal Counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER), an organization committed to advancing the legal rights of nature and environmental rights globally.

Samantha Skenandore (Ho-Chunk/Oneida), Attorney/Of-Counsel at Quarles & Brady LLP, has vast knowledge and experience in working on matters involving on both federal Indian law and tribal law. 

Resources

Mari Margil and Thomas Linzey – Changing Everything: The Global Movement for the Rights of Nature

The Rights of Nature Movement in Indian Country and Beyond: From Grassroots to Mainstream

Bioneers Rights of Nature Deep Dive

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

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 is most widely known as one of the three original co-founders of Black Lives Matter and for her recent, best-selling book, “When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir.”

From local communities and states to federal policy, antitrust movements to dismantle monopolies are challenging the system that can be summed up as: Make Feudalism Great Again. Although breaking up is hard to do, we’ve broken up monopolies before. In this second of our two-part program, we join Thom Hartmann, Stacy Mitchell and Maurice B.P. Weeks to survey the landscape of rising antitrust movements to break the stranglehold of corporate power and level the playing field for a democratized economy.