Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

Labor organizer Saru Jayaraman makes a clarion call to action: support workers across the United States who are saying there’s always been an affordability crisis and are asking politicians what has democracy done for me lately? Addressing inequality worse than the infamous Gilded Age requires ensuring living wages for all. 

Featuring Saru Jayaraman (JD, Yale, MPP Harvard), an academic at UC Berkeley and a renowned labor activist, is President of One Fair Wage, which organizes to raise wages and end sub-minimum wages nationwide. She is author of: Behind the Kitchen Door; Forked: A New Standard for American Dining; and One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America.

Resources

Take This Job and Shove It: The Great Resignation or The Great Revolt?⁠ | Bioneers Podcast

⁠Saru Jayaraman – What has Democracy Done For Me Lately? Engaging Working People in the Fight to Save Democracy⁠ | Bioneers 2026 Keynote

⁠Living Wage for All⁠

Executive Producer & Writer: Kenny Ausubel

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Associate Producer & Program Engineer: Emily Harris

Host & Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Graphics: Megan Howe

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

What will it take to begin to heal the deep wounds between women and men? What is the role of men in this transformation? Cynthia Brix and Will Keepin from ⁠Gender Reconciliation International⁠ say that only by bringing these wounds into the light can we heal them. Patriarchy destroys men’s souls, too, so a revolution in gender relations can liberate women and men.

The Gender Equity and Reconciliation process seeks to heal the profound wounds around gender, sexuality, and relational intimacy. It brings together people of all sexual orientations and genders to jointly confront gender disharmony to reach healing reconciliation. Will and Cynthia have developed the method over 24 years, introducing the practices in nine countries. Gender reconciliation’s startling successes in South Africa have played a role in transforming that country’s AIDS and HIV policies, and exciting new academic research on the program is underway at two South African universities. Learn more about the work of Will Keepin and Cynthia Brix via their organization, ⁠Gender Reconciliation International⁠.

⁠Cynthia Brix and Will Keepin speaking at 2016 Bioneers Conference⁠

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

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 at all costs, and the beginning of an era of building fire-resilient communities with a new relationship to one of nature’s most elemental and fearful forces. With fire ecologists Chad Hanson and Frank Kanawha Lake.

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

What if there are ways to sustainably harvest protein and nutritious vegetables from the seas in ways that restore coastlines, local economies, produces abundant food, and sequesters vast amounts of carbon dioxide? Pathfinding ocean farmer Bren Smith has cultivated a breakthrough method of near-shore aquaculture called 3-D Ocean Farming, which has the potential to transform our relationship with the ocean, make room again for the flourishing wild diversity of ocean animals, and launch a novel, delicious and authentically sustainable cuisine along with way.

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

Sociologist, storyteller, and best-selling author Anna Malaika Tubbs calls for dismantling the key system that has determined who actually gets to be considered human in the United States: The American patriarchy. She says that transforming the forefathers' vision of a republic of men requires deep change at the personal, community, and national levels.

Featuring

Anna Malaika Tubbs, Ph.D. is a bestselling author and leading multidisciplinary expert on race, gender, and equity. Her most recent bestselling book is Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us (2025).

Lisa Rudman, Partnership Director at the San Francisco Public Press, a local investigative newsroom, is a lesbian feminist journalist, media professional and environmentalist.

Resources

AnnaMalaikaTubbs.com

Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by: Stephanie Welch and Emily Harris

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Producer: Teo Grossman

Associate Producer and Program Engineer: Emily Harris

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

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

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 awakening that all these peoples, movements and struggles are actually connected in one story.

Visionary law professor and change-maker Kimberlé Crenshaw shows that it’s only at the crossroads of our many identities that will we will find a story big enough to embrace the diversity and complexity of our globalized 21st century world.

Learn more about Kimberlé Crenshaw.

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

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 soil. In so doing, they’re also revitalizing the soil, conserving water, and building agricultural resilience. Scaling up these revolutionary regenerative methods can offset the climate destabilization, which that threatens to confound agriculture and endanger our food supply.

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

Calling someone an “animal” means they’re less than human – not worthy of respect, rights, or even of life itself. But in truth — and in biological fact — human beings ARE animals. Scientists continue to find that intelligence and what we call “consciousness” appear to saturate all of nature. Clearly it’s high time to think differently about just what it means to be an animal. Can we know what it’s like to be other-than-human? How can we see into the minds of animals? Visionary naturalist, author and conservationist Carl Safina says that the first step is paying attention and observing. And, he suggests, if we had humility, we’d have everything.

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

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. 

The infinitely curious author and science writer Michael Pollan embraces the mystery at the heart of the great mystery of life: What is the nature of consciousness? And how can we understand consciousness when our only tool is our own consciousness? Joined by interviewer and UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Dacher Keltner.