Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

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. Featuring Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forestry at the University of British Columbia, is an expert in the synergies and complexities of forests and the development of sustainable forest stewardship practices. Her groundbreaking research centers on the relationships between plants, microbes, soils, carbon, nutrients and water that underlie the adaptability of ecosystems, especially the below-ground fungal networks that connect trees and facilitate interplant communication. Learn more about Suzanne Simard and her work at her website. Explore More Dispatches From the Mother Trees, Suzanne Simard’s keynote address to the 2021 Bioneers Conference, in which she discusses the dire global consequences of logging old-growth rainforests, and nature-based solutions that combine Western science and Indigenous knowledge for preserving and caring for these invaluable forest ecosystems for future generations. Lessons from the Underground, a panel discussion from the 2021 Bioneers Conference featuring Suzanne Simard as well as Anne Biklé and David R. Montgomery, a wife and husband team of scientific researchers whose groundbreaking work on the microbial life of soil has revealed its crucial importance to human wellbeing and survival. Moderated by Bioneers’ Restorative Food Systems Director Arty Mangan.  Intelligence in Nature, a deep-dive resource featuring leading experts in this burgeoning field. What We Owe Our Trees, an article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker. This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

What will it take to begin to heal the deep wounds between women and men? What is the role of men in this transformation? Cynthia Brix and Will Keepin from Gender Reconciliation International say that only by bringing these wounds into the light can we heal them. Patriarchy destroys men’s souls, too, so a revolution in gender relations can liberate women and men.

Climate is the trip wire for every other foundational ecological and biological system – as well as the basis for human civilization. As we face the long climate emergency, fortunately, skillful pathfinders are banding together to transform our ways of living and bring resilience from the ground up into widespread practice. With Berkeley’s Chief Resilience Officer, Timothy Burroughs, Professor David W. Orr, and financial adviser Tom Van Dyck.

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.

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. Featuring Terry Tempest Williams, one of the greatest living authors from the American West, is also a longtime award-winning conservationist and activist, who has taken on, among other issues, nuclear testing, the Iraq War, the neglect of women’s health, and the destruction of nature, especially in her beloved “Red Rock” region of her native Utah and in Alaska. Find out more about Terry Tempest Williams and how you can engage with her campaigns and efforts by visiting her website. This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

What’s it like to be in someone else’s skin? What if the color of the skin is different – say, black and white? What might happen when the descendants of a white slave trader and of black people who were enslaved meet? That is the brave and wrenching journey embraced by Thomas DeWolf, whose white ancestors were once the nation’s biggest slave traders, and Belvie Rooks and Dedan Gills, descendants of African people who were enslaved. Together they depict their remarkable journey to discover what healing looks like. This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

How do we create peace? What can we learn from indigenous societies who have addressed this profound question over thousands of years? From North America to the Kalahari, Jeannette Armstrong, Marlowe Sam, Evan Pritchard, Kxao=Oma and Megan Biesele share powerful stories of how indigenous social technologies have succeeded in resolving conflict, and still are.

In this second of a two-part program, we plunge into the mind-bending proposition that we get a second chance to remake our broken food economy. Bren Smith, co-founder and co-Executive Director of GreenWave, has created a revolutionary polycultural farming model that has low upfront costs, is easily scalable, and can help mitigate climate change. It’s called regenerative ocean farming and aims to redesign the food economy away from destructive profit-driven practices and agribusiness monopolies in favor of democratizing the food economy.

Calling someone an “animal” means they’re less than human – not worthy of respect, rights, or even of life itself. But in truth -- and in biological fact -- human beings ARE animals. Scientists continue to find that intelligence and what we call “consciousness” appear to saturate all of nature. Clearly it’s high time to think differently about just what it means to be an animal. Can we know what it’s like to be other-than-human? How can we see into the minds of animals? Visionary naturalist, author and conservationist Carl Safina says that the first step is paying attention and observing. And, he suggests, if we had humility, we’d have everything.

In this moment of radical transformation, shifting the societal pronoun from “me, me, me” to “we” may be the single most transformational pivot we can make in order for anything else to work. Our destiny is ultimately collective. How can we overcome corrosive divisions and separations that are tearing us apart and create a world where everyone belongs? In this program, we dip into a deep conversation on this topic between Angela Glover Blackwell and john a. powell, two long-time friends and leaders in a quest toward building a multicultural democracy. Featuring Angela Glover Blackwell is Founder-in-Residence at PolicyLink, the organization she started in 1999 to advance racial and economic equity. One of the nation’s most prominent, award-winning social justice advocates, she serves on numerous boards and advisory councils, including the inaugural Community Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve and California’s Task Force on Business and Jobs Recovery. john a. powell is the Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute and Professor of Law, African American, and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. A former National Legal Director of the ACLU, he co-founded the Poverty & Race Research Action Council and serves on the boards of several national and international organizations. His latest book is: Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society. Resources From Othering to Belonging | Bioneers 2022 Panel Discussion with Angela Glover Blackwell and john a. powell Angela Glover Blackwell – Transformative Solidarity for a Thriving Multiracial Democracy | Bioneers 2022 Keynote Address john a. powell – Healing Across Divides: Building Bridges to Challenge Systemic Injustice | Bioneers 2020 Keynote Address This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

The Rights of Nature movement launched internationally in 2006 and is growing fast. Driven primarily by tribes and citizen-led communities, more than three dozen cities, townships and counties across the U.S. have adopted such laws to create legally enforceable rights for ecosystems to exist, flourish, regenerate and evolve. In this program, Native American attorneys, Frank Bibeau and Samantha Skenandore, and legal movement leader Thomas Linzey report from the front lines how they are honing their strategies to protect natural systems for future generations. Featuring Frank Bibeau, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, is an activist and tribal attorney who works extensively on Chippewa treaty and civil rights, sovereignty and water protection. Thomas Linzey, Senior Legal Counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER), an organization committed to advancing the legal rights of nature and environmental rights globally. Samantha Skenandore (Ho-Chunk/Oneida), Attorney/Of-Counsel at Quarles & Brady LLP, has vast knowledge and experience in working on matters involving on both federal Indian law and tribal law.  Resources Mari Margil and Thomas Linzey – Changing Everything: The Global Movement for the Rights of Nature The Rights of Nature Movement in Indian Country and Beyond: From Grassroots to Mainstream Bioneers Rights of Nature Deep Dive 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.

New, democratized access to powerful analytical and mapping tools is transforming our understanding of the natural world – and with it, our ability to meaningfully conserve, protect and restore our collective home – the biosphere. In this program, we explore the boundless possibilities of digital maps and platforms with Rebecca Moore, visionary founder of Google Earth Outreach and Google Earth Engine. This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

The influences of Africans and Black Americans on food and agriculture is rooted in ancestral African knowledge and traditions of shared labor, worker co-ops and botanical polycultures.  In this episode, we hear from Karen Washington and Bryant Terry on how Black Food culture is weaving the threads of a rich African agricultural heritage with the liberation of economics from an extractive corporate food oligarchy. The results can be health, conviviality, community wealth, and the power of self-determination.

Visionary clean energy entrepreneur Danny Kennedy explores the promise and challenges of the epic civilizational transition to renewable energy. Without doubt, the shift has hit the fan, but will we make the transition in time to avert complete climate breakdown? Danny Kennedy says we can - and the real heroes and sheroes will be millions of clean energy entrepreneurs and startups, in partnership with the determined leadership of Indigenous Peoples arising worldwide.

Our physical health is intimately tied to environmental health, as well as to our emotional and spiritual ecology. Visionary physician Dr. Gabor Maté explores the deepest psychological, emotional and social forces leading to our society’s poor health and unhappiness. He says we have the capacity to heal both ourselves and the planet by reconnecting with our true nature as empathic, nurturing, social beings. This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

What would it feel like to live in a world where our built environment was as elegant as nature's designs? What if our living and working spaces nurtured our human communities and quality of life? Architect and designer Jason F. McLennan takes the revolution from the heart of nature and the human heart into our built environment. He is shifting the fateful civilizational inflection point we face - from degradation to regeneration - from fear to love.  Featuring Jason F. McLennan, one of the world’s most influential visionaries in contemporary architecture and green building, is a highly sought-out designer, consultant and thought leader. A winner of Engineering News Record’s National Award of Excellence and of the prestigious Buckminster Fuller Prize (which was, during its 10-year trajectory, known as “the planet’s top prize for socially responsible design”), Jason has been showered with such accolades as “the ‘Wayne Gretzky’ of the green building industry and a “World Changer” (by GreenBiz magazine). Resources Jason McLennan Keynote Bioneers 2022 – From Reconciliation to Regeneration Deep Community Resilience: Preparing for the Coming Age, Place-By-Place | Jason F. McLennan Child-Centered Planning: A New Specialized Pattern Language Tool | Jason F. McLennan Visit the episode page for transcript and more information. This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

Although colonial systems of oppression have radically damaged relationships between tribal communities and their traditional lands, a new generation of First Nations activists is working to restore those connections and safeguard Indigenous identity for future generations. They’re protecting traditional territories and sacred sites from harm, and renewing Indigenous land stewardship. With: Eriel Deranger of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Valentin Lopez, Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, and Cara Romero, from the Mohave-based Chemehuevi Tribe.

Leseliey Welch and Indra Lusero, parents and birth justice advocates, are helping to lead a movement to create community birth centers across the nation. To help address the maternal and infant mortality crisis, they’re realizing a vision where midwives are the leaders in care in a reclamation of the normal physiologic process of birth. They say birth centers provide racially and culturally reverent care founded in safety, love and trust. Featuring Leseliey Welch, MPH, MBA, is Co-founder of Birth Detroit (Detroit's first freestanding birth center) and Birth Center Equity, a mom and a tireless advocate for work that makes communities stronger, healthier and more free. Indra Lusero is a Colorado licensed attorney, founder of Elephant Circle and the Birth Rights Bar Association, designed Colorado’s ambitious Birth Equity bill package. Resources Reclaiming Birth: The Movement for Safe, Reverent, and Equitable Maternity Care in America This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.