Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

Our physical health is intimately tied to environmental health, and to our emotional and spiritual ecology. Visionary physician Dr. Gabor Maté explores the deepest psychological, emotional and social forces leading to our society’s poor health and unhappiness. He says we have the capacity to heal the planet and ourselves by reconnecting with our true nature as empathic, nurturing social beings.

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 Henk Ovink, a designer, the Principal of Rebuild by Design, and the first ever Special Envoy for International Water Affairs for the Kingdom of the Netherlands. He’s dramatically demonstrating on large scales how to shift our relationship to nature and to culture – and climate-proof our cities and coasts.

Featuring, Henk Ovink, the first Special Envoy for International Water Affairs for the Kingdom of the Netherlands. “Worldwide, water is the connecting issue, the number one global risk and the opportunity for comprehensive cultural change.” Ovink is Principal of Rebuild by Design and was Senior Advisor to the former US Presidential Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task. He was both Acting Director General of Spatial Planning and Water Affairs and Director National Spatial Planning for the Netherlands.

Learn more about Henk Ovink and his work by visiting Rebuild by Design.

Watch the Bioneers Conference talk from which some of the content in this episode was taken from.

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.

Nontoxic hair color from the recipes of beetles, and a potential Alzheimer’s cure derived from applying nature’s operating instructions. The world-renowned “co-father of green chemistry,” John Warner, says: “We’re learning to do everything we want to do without poisoning people or planet.” He’s showing how we can follow nature’s lead to create good chemistry with nature and our own health. The results are jaw-dropping.

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.

Women-led movements arising around the world herald a profound shift that changes everything. Visionary women leaders Osprey Orielle-Lake, Leila Salazar and Lynne Twist report on the women leading the clean energy revolution in Africa, defending the Amazonian rainforest, and making peace in Liberia.

In this time of radical upheaval and change, fulfilling the promise of a “more perfect union” in the United States means building a multi-racial democracy through transformative solidarity. As the Founder-in-Residence at Policy Link, Professor Angela Glover Blackwell has spent decades advancing racial and economic equity at the national and local levels. She says the fate of the wealthiest nation on Earth depends on what happens to the very people who’ve been left behind.

Angela Glover Blackwell, one of the nation’s most prominent, award-winning social justice advocates, is “Founder-in-Residence” at PolicyLink, the organization she started in 1999 to advance racial and economic equity that has long been a leading force in improving access and opportunity in such areas as health, housing, transportation, and infrastructure. The host of the “Radical Imagination” podcast and a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, Angela, before PolicyLink, served as Senior Vice President at The Rockefeller Foundation and founded the Urban Strategies Council. 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.

From Othering to Belonging with Angela Glover Blackwell and john a. powell

Transformative Solidarity for a Thriving Multiracial Democracy with Angela Glover Blackwell

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 episode, we speak with Julian Brave NoiseCat, an enrolled citizen of the Secwepemc, also known as Shuswap First Nation, in British Columbia.

Julian Brave NoiseCat explores the importance of connection and relationship, to family, to history, to place and to culture, threading his own story throughout a larger narrative about the deep trauma Indigenous people have experienced through colonization and the resilience and power that is emerging as individuals, tribes and nations work to reclaim their own stories and landscapes.

Julian is a fellow of New America and the Type Media Center, Vice President of Policy & Strategy at Data for Progress as well as one of the first visiting fellows of the Center for Racial Justice at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy. In 2021, NoiseCat was named on the Time 100 list of emerging leaders.

This episode’s artwork features photography by Dauwila Harrison. Mer Young creates the series collage artwork.

Featuring

A prolific, widely published Indigenous journalist, writer, activist and policy analyst, Julian Brave NoiseCat has become a highly influential figure in the coverage and analysis of Environmental Justice and Indigenous issues as well as of national and global political and economic trends and policies.

Raised in Oakland, California, in a single-mother household, Julian is a proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen and a descendant of the Lil'Wat Nation of Mount Currie. You can follow Julian on Twitter @jnoisecat.

Video of Julian Brave NoiseCat's Keynote speech at Bioneers 2021– Apocalypse Then & Now

Video of Indigenous Activism NOW: Talking Story With Clayton Thomas-Muller and Julian NoiseCat

Video of Julian's Keynote speech at Bioneers 219 The Indigenous Renaissance | Julian Brave NoiseCat

This is an episode of Indigeneity Conversations, a podcast series that features deep and engaging conversations with Native culture bearers, scholars, movement leaders, and non-Native allies on the most important issues and solutions in Indian Country. Bringing Indigenous voices to global conversations. Visit the Indigeneity Conversations homepage to learn more.  

Defending land rights and preserving tribal culture is difficult for North American tribes, especially for those that do not have sovereign nation-to-nation status with the federal government. The lack of recognition of a tribe’s nationhood as a self-governing entity (as defined by the U.S. Constitution) has been explicitly used as a tool to continue to prevent Native peoples from living on the most desirable lands or protecting sacred lands that have been stolen. 

We talk about these issues with Corrina Gould, a celebrated leader and activist of the First Peoples of the Bay Area from the Lisjan/Ohlone tribe of Northern California. She also co-founded the grassroots organization “Indian People Organizing for Change”, which works to defend and preserve sacred Ohlone shell mounds formed over generations.

Featuring

Corrina Gould (Lisjan/Ohlone) is the chair and spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, as well as the Co-Director for The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, a women-led organization within the urban setting of her ancestral territory of the Bay Area that works to return Indigenous land to Indigenous people. Born and raised in her ancestral homeland, the territory of Huchiun, she is the mother of three and grandmother of four. Corrina has worked on preserving and protecting the sacred burial sites of her ancestors throughout the Bay Area for decades. 

California Indian Genocide and Resilience | 2017 Bioneers panel in which four California Indian leaders share the stories of kidnappings, mass murders, and slavery that took place under Spanish, Mexican and American colonizations — and how today’s generation is dealing with the contemporary implications. 

This is an episode of Indigeneity Conversations, a podcast series that features deep and engaging conversations with Native culture bearers, scholars, movement leaders, and non-Native allies on the most important issues and solutions in Indian Country. Bringing Indigenous voices to global conversations. Visit the Indigeneity Conversations homepage to learn more.  

There is a growing movement to redefine manhood, and to address ways that violence is baked into our cultural expectations of masculinity. Courageous, visionary men are rising to the challenge. One of those men is activist, writer and public speaker Kevin Powell. In this half-hour, Powell boldly and bravely discusses his experiences with toxic masculinity and his journey to redefine what it means to be a man. This is “Climbing Out of the Man Box: What Does Healthy Manhood Look Like?”

Kevin Powell, a leading figure in the movement to redefine manhood and in contemporary American political, cultural and literary life as well as in the hip-hop arena, is the product of a single mother, absent father and severe poverty in his youth. In spite of those challenges he has become an acclaimed, prolific writer, authoring 13 books, including his autobiography, The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy's Journey into Manhood.

Watch the full keynote and learn more about Kevin Powell and his work | Bioneers 2018 Keynote

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 episode, Indigenous scholar and organizer Nick Estes explores how Indigenous land-based and Earth-centered societies are advancing regenerative solutions and campaigns to transform capitalism. An ancient “eco-nomics” today puts Indigenous leadership at the forefront of assuring a habitable planet.

Featuring

Nick Estes, Ph.D. (Kul Wicasa/Lower Brule Sioux), is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and a member of the Oak Lake Writers Society, a group of Dakota, Nakota and Lakota writers. In 2014, he was a co-founder of The Red Nation in Albuquerque, NM, an organization dedicated to the liberation of Native people from capitalism and colonialism. He serves on its editorial collective and writes its bi-weekly newsletter. Nick Estes is also the author of: Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance.

Nick Estes – The Age of the Water Protector and Climate Chaos (video) | Bioneers 2022 Keynote

Indigenous Pathways to a Regenerative Future (video) | Bioneers 2021 Panel

The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth | The Red Nation

For more info on Nick Estes and show notes, please visit our radio page. 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.