Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

Four extraordinary women leaders share their perspectives on how to break through the stalemates that impede progress to build a world in which we can all thrive. They work in different spaces – from challenging governments and corporations to defending Indigenous people’s rights, education reform, movement building and investing in green businesses.

With: Eriel Deranger, Communications Manager of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation; Adrianna Quintero, Senior Attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council and founder/Director of Voces Verdes; Annie Leonard, Executive Director of Greenpeace USA; Christiana Wyly, Executive Director of Food Choice Taskforce, Director of My Plate Planet initiative. Hosted by Osprey Orielle Lake, co-founder and Executive Director, Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN).

Could Los Angeles stop draining water from the Colorado River and the Sacramento Delta to become self-sufficient? That's a question that Andy Lipkis and his organization Tree People are tackling in an unprecedented alliance with public works agencies. Their work proves that the more we learn about how ecosystems operate, the more sustainably we can design our cities.

Black farmers have been leaving the land at three and a half times the rate of other farmers. It turns out that this loss of black farmers is due less to farming policies and practices than it is to generations of institutional racism. Civil Rights attorney J.L. Chestnut, in a brilliant and emotional speech, tells the story of the successful historic litigation against the USDA on behalf of these farmers.

Hosted by marine biologist Wallace “J.” Nichols, research associate, California Academy of Sciences; co-founder, OceanRevolution.org; author of Blue Mind. New ways of understanding our relationship with the world’s oceans and the ability of healthy waters to provide health, happiness and creativity will be considered by a panel of athletes, scientists, artists, and adventurers. With: Kevin Weiner, post-doctoral fellow, Stanford University and Director of Public Communication, Institute for Applied Neuroscience; Nik Sawe, doctoral candidate, Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, Stanford University; and Andi Wong, Teaching Artist, Rooftop Alternative K-8 School.

Recorded Sunday, October 19, 2014 at the National Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California.

For thousands of years, First Peoples have successfully managed the complex reciprocal relationships between biological and human cultures using Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Yet no prior human civilization has ever faced the globalized ecological collapse occurring now.

In the face of unprecedented pressures on their homelands and ways of life, indigenous leaders Enei Begaye, Dune Lankard, and Hawk Rosales are organizing in new ways to protect the environment--and spread their knowledge for the sake of all life on Earth and future generations.

Facing climate disruption, it’s imperative to fast-forward the transition to power civilization on clean energy. The growing global movement to transition off fossil fuels is challenging the fossil fuel industry and its political domination. Renowned author and activist Bill McKibben and award-winning biologist and author Sandra Steingraber illuminate the frontlines of these New Abolitionists.

Innovations usually arise locally. If conditions are right, they spread globally. That story is playing out around the world today. In India, human rights activist Mallika Dutt designed an elegant media campaign that successfully interrupts domestic violence live in real time. High school science educator Jay Vavra helped his San Diego students save endangered species in Africa by using simple genetic identification technologies in local African bush meat markets. Nonprofit leader Shannon Horst employs holistic rangeland management techniques to stop the spread of deserts in Africa, the U.S. and worldwide. What's spreading fastest is hope.

One person's trash is another person's treasure, as the saying goes. Entrepreneur and activist Omar Freilla and "deconstruction" business owner Justin Green are solving for pattern: By working to eliminate waste, they are creating green collar jobs and improving the environment in some of the nation's most underserved communities.

Activists, scientists and grassroots groups are leveraging new technology and collaborative networks to accurately monitor the quality of the environment, expose governmental and corporate abuses, and enable large-scale ecological research to understand the web of life in the age of climate disruption. Hosted by Teo Grossman, Bioneers Director of Strategic Network Initiatives. With: Severine v T Fleming, Farm Hack; Shannon Dosemagen, founder/President, New Orleans-based Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science; Brian Haggerty, co-designer, USA National Phenology Network, a multisectoral climate change research program using citizen scientists to monitor seasonal behavior of U.S. flora and fauna.

"A worldview that understands indigeneity is a paradigm of regeneration, a worldview rooted in enduring values in what we call our original instructions, common themes of reciprocity, of gratitude, of responsibility, of generosity, of forgiveness, of humility, of courage, of sacrifice, and of course love. But these values are not just words, we need to live them."

We’re all indigenous to planet Earth, but we’ve not been acting that way. Cultural ecologist, indigenous scholar and activist Dr. Melissa K. Nelson reminds native and non-native peoples alike that we all need to re-indigenize ourselves by learning and practicing nature’s operating instructions and the Original Instructions for how to be a human being. At this unprecedented moment of globalized environmental breakdown, it’s going to take the best of Western science and the indigenous science of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to navigate this evolutionary keyhole.