Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature | Bioneers Radio Series

In neighborhoods across the country, citizens are building community resilience – one shovelful and one backyard at a time. Visionary citizen restorationists Trathen Heckman of Daily Acts and Jessie Lerner of Sustain Dane show how seemingly small acts like catching rain and growing food forests are turning green visions into action, with the help of local governments, schoolkids, businesses, artists and churches.

In neighborhoods across the country, citizens are building community resilience – one shovelful and one backyard at a time. Visionary citizen restorationists Trathen Heckman of Daily Acts and Jessie Lerner of Sustain Dane show how seemingly small acts like catching rain and growing food forests are turning green visions into action, with the help of local governments, schoolkids, businesses, artists and churches.

Youth movements are rising to restore people and planet. De’Anthony Jones, a former President of the Environmental Students Organization at Sacramento State, Chloe Maxmin, co-founder of Divest Harvard, and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, hip-hop artist and Youth Director of Earth Guardians, say there’s no better time to be born than now because this generation gets to rewrite history. It could be known as the generation that brought forth a healthy, just, sustainable world for every generation to come.

Writer, naturalist and activist Terry Tempest Williams asks “Can we love ourselves, each other and the Earth enough to change?” She invokes our deepest humanity to honor and protect the wilderness that’s the cauldron of evolution – and of our own imagination. “Our power lies in the love of our homelands,” she tells us in this eloquent, heartfelt tour-de-force, and protecting the wild requires bringing democracy home.

Climate change is more than an “issue.” According to renowned author and activist Naomi Klein, “It’s a civilizational wake-up call delivered in the language of fires, floods, storms and droughts.” She says it demands that we challenge the dominant economic policies of deregulated capitalism and bottomless resource extraction. She describes the transnational Blockadia movement that’s opposing fossil fuels and warns about geo-engineering fantasies. Canadian Indigenous leader Clayton Thomas-Muller of Idle No More reports from the front lines of the Native-led rights based movement to stop the drilling of the Canadian Tar Sands.

In the next 20 years, farmland ownership in the U.S. will shift on a continental scale—400 million acres. Yet 70% of American farmland is owned by people 65 and older. How can we help young, motivated agrarians become successful farmers to whom retiring organic farmers can transmit their wisdom? How can we invest in the democratization of our land base? These questions drive Agrarian Trust, started by Greenhorns founder Severine v T Fleming, one of the most visionary leaders in the young farmers’ movement.

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 in the ground and uphold our part of the hoop of life. With: Woman Stands Shining, Patricia Gualinga, Crystal Lameman, Eagle Woman, and Eriel Deranger.

From nature’s viewpoint, people are one species. Categories such as race, class, nation, religion and even many gender roles are human constructs. Yet the world is riven by exploitation and violence driven by these perceived divisions at an epic moment of demographic change toward the U.S. becoming a majority minority nation. john a. powell, Director of U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, and Manuel Pastor, Director of the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at University of Southern California, show how to build effective movements to overcome these divisions and come together to solve the planetary emergency that threatens our common home.

Archetypal stories guide our lives in profound and largely unconscious ways. Through reframing classic mythologies, we explore the resurgence of the archetypal feminine and its relationship to nature through a multi-cultural lens, with Jean Shinoda Bolen, author and Jungian therapist; Luisah Teish, author and priestess in the Ifa Orisha tradition; Sri Swamini Svatmavidyananda, teacher of Hindu Vedanta philosophy.

Archetypal stories guide our lives in profound and largely unconscious ways. Through reframing classic mythologies, we explore the resurgence of the archetypal feminine and its relationship to nature through a multi-cultural lens, with Jean Shinoda Bolen, author and Jungian therapist; Luisah Teish, author and priestess in the Ifa Orisha tradition; Sri Swamini Svatmavidyananda, teacher of Hindu Vedanta philosophy.

Nontoxic hair color from the recipes of beetles, and a potential Alzheimer’s cure derived from applying nature’s operating instructions. The world-renowned “co-father of green chemistry,” John Warner, says: “We’re learning to do everything we want to do without poisoning people or planet.” He’s showing how we can follow nature’s lead to create good chemistry with nature and our own health. The results are jaw-dropping.

Nontoxic hair color from the recipes of beetles, and a potential Alzheimer’s cure derived from applying nature’s operating instructions. The world-renowned “co-father of green chemistry,” John Warner, says: “We’re learning to do everything we want to do without poisoning people or planet.” He’s showing how we can follow nature’s lead to create good chemistry with nature and our own health. The results are jaw-dropping.

Women are coming together to heal in community, with hands in the soil, in one of the most broken places on the planet, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Playwright and feminist Eve Ensler’s life-and-death struggle with cancer transformed her. At the heart of it was her reconnection with nature. She expanded her work to end violence against women and girls to include restoring nature and our relationship with nature. With master permaculturist Brock Dolman, she tells the hopeful story of the Congo’s V-Day Farm.

Women are coming together to heal in community, with hands in the soil, in one of the most broken places on the planet, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Playwright and feminist Eve Ensler’s life-and-death struggle with cancer transformed her. At the heart of it was her reconnection with nature. She expanded her work to end violence against women and girls to include restoring nature and our relationship with nature. With master permaculturist Brock Dolman, she tells the hopeful story of the Congo’s V-Day Farm.

Are plants intelligent? If we knew their language what might they tell us? Potawatomi Indigenous ecologist and author Robin Kimmerer and evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano merge Traditional Ecological Knowledge with Western science for a surprising trip into the minds of mosses and chili seeds and the songs of corn. They agree what we really need today is a revolution in values, an “Honorable Harvest” of gratitude and reciprocity with our plant kin.