Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

Communities around the country are working to create a new food future founded in health, justice and ecological wellbeing. Community activists Malik Kenyatta Yakini and Oran Hesterman are transforming Detroit through urban agriculture and helping low-income and working families access healthy food. Cathryn Couch works with young people to cook and deliver healthy meals to people who are ill and struggling to put food on the table with a model program using food as medicine.

How can we manifest the world we want, and who we want to be? Actor-activist Danny Glover and Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, former CEO of Green For All, show how one sure path to resilience is to build community and social movements. That requires learning how to reach out across our differences – and it gets really personal.

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.

Forests have long occupied a fertile landscape in the human imagination. Places of mystery and magic - of wildness and wisdom - of vision and dreaming. Yet beyond mythic realms of imagination, we’ve largely treated forests as inert physical resources to satisfy human needs and desires. The main operative science behind this commodification has been market science – how to extract maximum resources and profits.

Suzanne Simard is a revolutionary researcher who is transforming the science of forest ecology and coming full circle to the wisdom held by First Peoples and traditional land-based cultures from time immemorial. The story Simard is uncovering can change our story for how we live on Earth and with each other – for the long haul.

Oakland, California, has had the reputation of being one of the most dangerous cities in the country. Then the Restorative Justice movement started boldly showing how quickly that reputation can be turned around by arresting the cycle of youth violence and incarceration early: in schools and juvenile justice policies. With: Restorative Justice leaders Fania Davis and Cameron Simmons.

Learn more at Bioneers.org

To transform our culture from its focus on dominance and hierarchy to one of connection, empathy and collaboration, it’s vital that we re-envision the essential (or archetypal) masculine, which changes everything. This rarely tackled topic is the subject of a deeply authentic dialogue among Playwright and activist Eve Ensler and three men working to change men and change the story: Tony Porter, co-founder, A Call To Men; Dallas Goldtooth, Indigenous activist, member of the 1491’s Native American comedy troupe; George Lipsitz, board president, African American Policy Forum.

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.

From the Canadian tar sands to the oil and natural gas fields of North America and the Amazon jungle, Indigenous peoples of the North and South are converging in one struggle. It is also the reconciliation of two different ways of knowing and being, between the head and heart, sometimes called The Eagle and The Condor. Five Indigenous women of the North and South are showing us how to keep fossil fuels on the ground and uphold our part of the hoop of life. With: Woman Stands Shining, Patricia Gualinga, Crystal Lameman, Eagle Woman, and Eriel Deranger.

“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do, then how would I be and what would I do?” asked visionary designer Buckminster Fuller. Buckminster Fuller Institute Board President David McConville says our view of the universe profoundly shapes our future as a species, and it’s changing radically.

In times of massive social change, personal biography can coincide with historical epochs to produce leaders who embody the spirit of the times. Lifelong activist, author, politician, and visionary Tom Hayden shares the long view of social change movements. He traces the arc of struggle that has led to this epic moment when the climate crisis and the crisis of inequality are colliding with global civilization and survival is the mother of invention.