Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

Labor organizer and Founder of One Fair Wage, Saru Jayaraman, takes us inside one of the fiercest labor struggles to challenge a mighty oligarchy: The food, beverage and restaurant industry. Workers are walking off the job and refusing historically low wages. She says if “we the people” stand with workers as they face this powerful lobby, they can win.

Featuring

Saru Jayaraman, President of ⁠One Fair Wage⁠ and Director of the ⁠Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley⁠, co-founded (after 9/11) the ⁠Restaurant Opportunities Center⁠ (ROC), which grew into a national movement of restaurant workers, employers and consumers. Saru has won many prestigious awards for her advocacy and is the author of four books including: ⁠One Fair Wage: Ending All Subminimum Pay in America⁠ and ⁠Bite Back: People Taking on Corporate Food and Winning⁠.

Resources

⁠Saru Jayaraman – The Great Revolution: What A Worker Power Moment Can Mean for Climate Justice⁠ | Bioneers 2023 Keynote

⁠Saru Jayaraman – We the People: Workers Rising for Fair Wages⁠ | Bioneers 2017 Keynote

⁠Inside the Campaign to Abolish the Subminimum Wage in 25 States by 2026⁠ | Inequality.org

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

We plug into the real world Matrix – the digital Wild West of surveillance capitalism that dominates this Age of Information. Behind it is the unholy alliance between Big Tech and Big Brother. Privacy is the first casualty and democracy dies with it. Our guide is Cindy Cohn, director of Electronic Frontier Foundation, with her decades of experience challenging digital authoritarianism.

Featuring

Cindy Cohn, the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2015, served as EFF’s Legal Director as well as its General Counsel from 2000 to 2015. Among other honors, Ms. Cohn was named to The Non-Profit Times 2020 Power & Influence TOP 50 list, and in 2018, Forbes included Ms. Cohn as one of America’s Top 50 Women in Tech.

Resources

⁠Cindy Cohn – The Climate Fight is Digital⁠ | Bioneers 2024 Keynote

⁠Tools from Electronic Frontier Foundation⁠

Credits

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by: Kenny Ausubel

Additional production and writing: Leo Hornak

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

Producer: Teo Grossman

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.

Today, three to five giant corporations control up to 80% of almost every industry and marketplace. These monopolies depress wages, exploit workers, and decimate small businesses. Stacy Mitchell from the Institute for Local Self Reliance has been a leader in a growing anti-monopoly movement with a broad political base. Can this emerging movement – along with bold federal antitrust action –  create a force that can challenge corporate power for the first time in decades? 

Featuring

⁠Stacy Mitchell⁠, a Maine-based writer, strategist, and policy advocate whose work focuses on dismantling concentrated corporate power and building thriving communities and a healthy democracy, has played a leading role in today’s growing anti-monopoly movement. She is Co-Executive Director of the ⁠Institute for Local Self-Reliance⁠ (ILSR) and the author of ⁠Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses⁠, and co-author of the influential report: ⁠Amazon’s Stranglehold⁠.

Resources

⁠Stacy Mitchell – Democracy vs. Big Tech: How We Can Win the Fight Against Monopoly Power | Bioneers 2024 Keynote⁠

⁠Democracy v. Plutocracy: Behind Every Great Fortune Lies a Great Crime⁠

⁠Our Economic Future: Achieving a More Equitable Society by Radically Rethinking Our Guiding Economic Ideas | Bioneers Reade⁠

Credits

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

From local communities and states to federal policy, antitrust movements to dismantle monopolies are challenging the system that can be summed up as: Make Feudalism Great Again. Although breaking up is hard to do, we’ve broken up monopolies before.

In this second of our two-part program, we join Thom Hartmann, Stacy Mitchell and Maurice BP-Weeks to survey the landscape of rising antitrust movements to break the stranglehold of corporate power and level the playing field for a democratized economy.

Featuring

The Hidden History of Monopolies by Thom Hartmann

Fighting Monopoly Power | Institute for Local Self-Reliance

All Life Is Organized Around Democracy | Thom Hartmann’s keynote address to the Bioneers 2020 Conference

Democracy vs. Plutocracy panel discussion (video) | Bioneers 2020 Conference

Our Economic Future | Bioneers Reader eBook

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

In this first part of a two-part program, we travel back and forth in time to explore the battle between democracy and plutocracy that goes back to the very founding of the United States. 

The extreme concentration of corporate power and the prevalence of monopoly are indeed inarguable. If the solution is once again to throw the tea in the harbor, what does that look like in the 21st century?

In today’s new Gilded Age of rule by the wealthy, rising anti-trust movements are challenging the stranglehold of corporate monopoly.

Featuring

Resources

The Hidden History of Monopolies by Thom Hartmann

All Life Is Organized Around Democracy | Thom Hartmann’s keynote address to the Bioneers 2020 Conference

Democracy vs. Plutocracy panel discussion (video) | Bioneers 2020 Conference

Our Economic Future | Bioneers Reader eBook

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

By around 2044, the U.S. will become a majority-minority nation. This seismic demographic shift has triggered a cultural earthquake, provoking a radical spike in hate crimes. In times of massive disruption and economic stress, what Carl Jung called the “shadow side of the psyche” comes into play: the pronounced psychological tendency in the collective psyche is to project these shadow qualities with unusual potency onto whomever people see as “the other.” But is there also a deeper story? Perhaps the question to ask is: Who benefits? In this half hour, we hear from Heather McGhee of Demos. She sees a direct connection between today’s extreme inequality and this peak moment of racial panic and white anxiety.

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

Dive into a conversation between Bioneers senior producer J.P. Harpignies and David Rothenberg. David is a musician, composer, author, naturalist, philosopher, and an independent publisher. He’s been a unique and fascinating explorer of humanity’s connections to the natural world for more than four decades.

⁠Watch the video version of this conversation⁠

One of David’s unique forms of experimentation in his extensive travels has been not only his recordings of bird and whale and other animal songs, but his attempts to engage with other species in musical exchanges. Quite a few have been captured on film and discussed in his many books. David has released some 40 albums under his own name and collaborated with many prominent musicians. Someone recently said that David has “played with everyone from Peter Gabriel to Pauline Oliveros, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, cicadas, humpbacks, frogs, Estonian pond organisms” and many others. 

JP invited David to recount some of the key episodes in his career trajectory, unpack some of his guiding ideals and passions, and regale us with anecdotes from an extremely full life.

To learn more about the extraordinary intelligence of life inherent in fungi, plants and animals, check out Bioneers' Earthlings newsletter. Each issue delves into captivating stories and research that promise to reshape your perception of our fellow Earthlings – and point toward a profound shift in how we all inhabit this planet together. You can subscribe at bioneers.org/earthlings

The most critical feedback loop in a democracy is a free press and access to vital information. Yet decades of corporate consolidation allowed giant conglomerates to annihilate local news outlets and predatory hedge funds are leaving news deserts in their wake. In 2025, a fifth of people in the U.S. live with little or no access to local news and three quarters of newspaper jobs have been axed over the last 20 years. But new models are crystallizing to fill the void, thanks to innovating journalists and publishers.

Featuring

Larry Ryckman, co-founder and Editor of The Colorado Sun, was previously: Senior Editor at The Denver Post; Managing Editor at The Gazette in Colorado Springs; and City Editor at the Greeley Tribune. 

Madeleine Bair, founder of El Tímpano, an award-winning civic media organization designed with and for the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities. 

Jacob Simas, Oakland-based Community Journalism Director at Cityside Journalism Initiative. 

Credits

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by: Claire Reynolds & Kenny Ausubel

Producer: Claire Reynolds

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Associate Producer: Emily Harris

Producer: Teo Grossman

Interview Recording Engineer: Rod Akil at KPFA studios

Production Assistance: Kaleb Wentzel Fisher

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 for show notes and more.

What we do to each other, we do to the Earth. To protect our common home, we’re being called upon to bridge our differences to create beloved community and peaceful coexistence. A new generation of visionary change-makers is reframing the race conversation, and designing new tools to transform our unconscious biases and create justice. With: Racial justice pathfinders Rinku Sen, Saru Jayaraman and Malkia Cyril.

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

As a backlash against LGBTQ rights escalates into an authoritarian crusade, acclaimed author and queer activist Taylor Brorby asks how we can still be fighting this battle? As a writer addressing the fossil fuel industry’s acceleration in the midst of climate chaos, Taylor is forced to choose between the existential crises of the assaults on nature and on LGBTQ people. It’s all connected, he says, as he seeks to reconcile nature, culture, diversity and belonging.

Featuring

Taylor Brorby, a Fellow in Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah, is an award-winning, widely published writer and poet as well as a contributing editor at North American Review who also serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and Hub City Press. Taylor regularly speaks around the country on issues related to extractive economies, queerness, disability, and climate change, and is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing up gay in a fractured land; Crude: Poems; Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience; and co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America.

Resources

Video | Taylor Brorby – Raising Hell: Censorship, Carbon Capture, and Being Gay on the Great Plains

Learn more about Taylor Brorby at taylorbrorby.com

Credits

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by: Kenny Ausubel

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

Producer: Teo Grossman

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