Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

“The future may depend on our remembering that everything has in it a dream of itself. That the seeds of wholeness and the seeds of needed change are already present in all events and all people and every one of us. That the wholeness of the world can only be restored one heart at a time.” So says doctor and healer Rachel Naomi Remen. She has cultivated a new generation of doctors practicing whole-person medicine, with an unlikely message: Bless others out loud. The wholeness of the world is restored one heart at a time.

Find out more about Rachel Naomi Remen and how you can engage with her campaigns and efforts by visiting rachelremen.com

Daphne Miller, MD, had long suspected that human wellbeing and how our food is produced are intimately linked. She visited and studied seven innovative family farms around the country on a quest to discover the hidden connections between how we grow our food and our health, and she published her findings in "Farmacology: Total Health from the Ground Up" (also the basis for the award-winning documentary In Search of Balance). (Daphne begins speaking at 44:00.) Joining Daphne to discuss how farming techniques from seed choice to soil management have a direct impact on our health will be: Timothy J. LaSalle, Ph.D., co-founder and Co-Director of the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative at CSU Chico and first CEO of the Rodale Institute (Tim begins speaking at 3:50); and Josh Whiton, a highly successful eco-tech entrepreneur whose most recent project is MakeSoil.org (Josh begins speaking at 25:35). Hosted by Arty Mangan, Director of Bioneers’ Restorative Food Systems Program.

The Original Instructions represent the ancient empirical wisdom of Traditional Ecological Knowledge earned over generations and millennia by people living closely with the land and each other. They also comprise disarmingly simple counsel: be thankful, enjoy life and attend to the inner pollution that results in outer pollution. Indigenous leaders Winona LaDuke, John Trudell and Evon Peter voice these ancient instructions, which hold the keys to our survival as a species in the historic transition to a truly sustainable world.

As lion populations crash in Africa, baboon numbers explode. Associate Professor of Ecology and Conservation Justin Brashares illuminates how to stem the cascading harms of nature out of balance. Visionary author Mary Ellen Hannibal recounts inspiring stories of citizen scientists restoring health to “the spine of the continent” from Alaska to Mexico by connecting nature back to itself.

Hosted by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). New research is providing a provocative look at the healing potential of certain psychedelic substances, possibly yielding a scientific foundation for re-evaluating public policies of prohibition and repression. With Ralph Metzner, consciousness explorer whose groundbreaking books include The Psychedelic Experience and Green Psychology; Rick Doblin, MAPS founder/President; and Valerie Mojeiko, a MAPS analyst of the healing potentials of MDMA (Ecstasy), LSD, lbogaine and other psychedelics.

Climate change. Energy crisis. Economic collapse. We live in a time of unprecedented global crisis and opportunity. There's a monumental amount of work to be done to make the transition to a restored world, yet young people are unemployed at astonishingly high rates. How can we unlock the green economic opportunities that will open the door to doing well by doing good for generation green and generations to come? Join Apollo Alliance president Jerome Ringo and clean energy leader Billy Parish for a hopeful glimpse into the organizations and programs that will give our children the opportunity to make a living and make a better world.

To learn more about the work the guests in this podcast are doing, visit Jerome at Zoetic Global, and Billy Parish at Mosaic.

Environmental literacy and social justice are inextricably linked, and recent changes in California’s curricula fully encourage pedagogical exploration of this linkage. Three new academic content frameworks (in Science, History-Social Science, and Health) promote challenge-based learning, in which student inquiry leads to student action in local communities. Students are also discovering nature-inspired design, i.e. Biomimicry, as part of this process. In this session, a school district representative, a teacher, and a student, share their perspectives about this intersection of environmental literacy and social justice. The panel also leads hands-on immersion into the Biomimicry design process with a focus on ways to apply these methods in our own schools and communities.

With: Beth Rattner, Biomimicry Institute; Juanita Chan, Rialto Unified School District; Kavita Gupta, Freemont Union High School District. Moderated by Emily Schell, Executive Director, California Global Education Project; Caleb Jordan-McDaniels, Redwood High School.  

Sequestering soil carbon is a critically important way to mitigate climate change. Hosted by John Roulac, founder and CEO of the groundbreaking organic superfood company, Nutiva. With: rancher John Wick, co-founder of the exemplary Marin Carbon Project, developing ways to increase durable carbon on his grazed grassland while increasing biodiversity and soil fertility and capturing the scientific data.

Recorded Saturday, October 17, 2015 at the National Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California.

Climate change is showing us over and over again that nature bats last. The carbon sequestration potential of natural systems and managed agricultural landscapes is vast, representing nearly one third of the greenhouse gas emissions reductions we need to see. Transforming our food system represents another huge opportunity to reduce our overall greenhouse gas output. The real question is: how we can act on all this potential?

Featuring:

Greg Watson, Director of Policy and Systems Design, Schumacher Center for a New Economics

Renata Brillinger, Executive Director, California Climate and Agriculture Network

Ellie Cohen, Executive Director, Point Blue Conservation Science

Moderated by Teo Grossman, Senior Director of Programs & Research for Bioneers

Amy Emerson, Director of Clinical Research at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS); Martin Lee, Director of Project CBD; and Ralph Metzner, legendary psychedelic research pioneer, share their insights into the state of knowledge about the potential curative properties of psychedelic substances.