Dr. Vandana Shiva is an environmental leader, scientist, and activist. Author of over 20 books, she’s founder and leader of Navdanya, a non-governmental organization and movement that promotes biodiversity, organic farming, the rights of farmers, and seed saving. Her latest book is, Reclaiming the Commons: Biodiversity, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Rights of Mother Earth, published by Synergetic Press. She's delivering the keynote address at the Regenerate Conference.

Roberto Meza was a multi-media artist and MIT graduate student when he went encountered some health challenges. He found that eating healthy greens restored his health and spirit so powerfully that he started apprenticing with a farmer and then moved to Colorado to start Emerald Gardens, a greenhouse-based farm that delivers microgreens to customers in the Denver area—and which brings a focus to issues of food sovereignty, equity, and building a robust local food system.

A-Dae Romero Briones is director of the Native Agriculture and Food Systems initiative at First Nations Development Institute. We talk about programs across the country that are helping native people build healthier food systems and to strengthen the traditions that have kept these systems alive even during the most devastating periods of colonization.

Zach Ducheneaux is a third generation family rancher on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, and he’s Executive Director Intertribal Agriculture Council. We spend the hour talking about how the current financing system for agriculture doesn't work for the people growing the food—especially in Indian country, where discrimination is still the norm—and how innovative new financing structures can provide a real alternative. Zach will be be speaking at Regenerate 2020.

Judith Schwartz is the author of several books, including Cows Save the Planet and Water in Plain Sight. Her new book, The Reindeer Chronicles: And Other Inspiring Stories of Working with Nature to Heal the Earth, is a riveting series of reports from all over the globe about people who are restoring landscapes and dealing with deeply entrenched conflicts that are exacerbated by their degraded ecosystems. She takes us to China, the Middle East, New Mexico, Mali, Hawaii, Spain, Norway, and other places where people are working with each other and working with nature--rather than against it. The results are extraordinary: healthy land, clean water, economic prosperity, and even climate change mitigation.

The "Radical Center" concept says that food producers and conservationists have far more in common than not—and the Audubon Society's Conservation Ranching program is a prime example of this idea in action. Working in collaboration with prairie grassland ranchers, the Audubon Society is helping them to accommodate grassland birds, with the result that the land gets healthier, grazing animals benefit, and birds thrive. And they're driving "market-based conservation," in which consumers can choose certified bird-friendly meat. We talk to Marshall Johnson, Vice President of the National Audubon Society and Executive Director of Audubon Dakota and Audubon Conservation Ranching, who reminds us, "what's good for the bird is good for the herd." 

Vanessa García Polanco is from a farming family that emigrated to the US when she was a teenager. Now she works with the National Young Farmers Coalition advocating for policies that help young farmers, new farmers, and farmers of color--who are often ignored, as infrastructures tend to serve larger commodity producers--especially during the global pandemic.

Jason Baldes is Tribal Buffalo Coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation. An Eastern Shoshone native, his people called themselves gweechoon deka, the Buffalo Eaters. But when the buffalo were killed by the US government, their way of life was badly damaged. Now Baldes is helping to restore buffalo to native lands and public lands as wild animals, and in so doing engaging the people to restore their relationship to them--as food, cultural icon, and keystone species on the landscape.

When the "green revolution" offered the promise of better agriculture through chemical-intensive farming, J.I. Rodale was skeptical. He started an organic farm and then an institute to study how farming could improve the land and human health. Now the Rodale Institute is doing agriculture research not only in their home farm in Pennsylvania, but also at new research centers in Iowa, California, and Georgia. We talk to Rodale's Diana Martin about the past and future of their research, about the impact of Covid-19 on both consumers and farmers, and about the resources available to those wishing to transition to organic/regenerative farming and food.

Hopi farmers were practicing regenerative agriculture before it was named. Working with the soil, the weather, the water cycle, seeds, and cultural practices, they fed themselves in the dry land of northern Arizona for millennia. Now the industrial food system has challenged their way of living and farming. We talk to traditional Hopi farmer Dr. Michael Kotutwa Johnson; he's a research associate with the Native American Agriculture Fund and has a doctorate in natural resources management.