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.
Aug 21, 2020•27 min
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 Jarayaman and Malkia Cyril.
Aug 14, 2020•28 min
In the face of global climate disruption, two billion people worldwide will be challenged by too much water, and nearly another two billion by not enough. When you fight nature, you lose, says Dutch water wizard and designer Henk Ovink. He’s dramatically demonstrating on large scales how to shift our relationship to nature and to culture - and climate-proof our cities and coasts.
Aug 05, 2020•28 min
Contemporary Western fire science is integrating what Indigenous Peoples discovered over thousands of years of observation, and trial and error: fire is key to optimizing forest vitality and biodiversity. The merging of these two ways of knowing could signal the end to our misguided policy of fire suppression, and the beginning of fire-resilient communities with a new relationship to one of nature’s most elemental and fearful forces. With fire ecologists Chad Hanson and Frank Kanawha Lake.
Jul 31, 2020•28 min
Today, there’s a renaissance of independent journalism dedicated to holding power accountable. Political pressures are mounting to break up media monopolies and provide access to more voices. Independent and investigative media outlets are proliferating, often as nonprofits funded from the bottom up. In this program, we hear from two veteran journalists who lead two of the most courageous and successful independent media outlets in the United States: Monika Bauerlein, the CEO of Mother Jones mag...
Jul 13, 2020•29 min
How does a virtue become a vice? How does a basic building block of life turn into a threat to life? And how do you turn that vice back into a virtue? In this half-hour we visit with two unlikely pathfinders who are helping to revolutionize farming. Calla Rose Ostrander and John Wick of the Marin Carbon Project are taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it back where it belongs: in the soil. In so doing, they’re also revitalizing the soil, conserving water, and building agricultural res...
Jul 13, 2020•28 min
They say love means never having to say you’re sorry. But what if that popular aphorism from the 1960’s is wrong and that love precisely means having to say you’re sorry? Can an apology release the trauma, grief, rage and disfigurement arising from past abuse? But what if the perpetrator does not apologize? Can you still resolve or reconcile the trauma and hurt? How? These are some of the agonizing questions that the artist, playwright, performer and activist Eve Ensler, now known as V chose to ...
Jul 08, 2020•28 min
It's obvious that we're not here for ourselves. That makes no evolutionary sense. There's something larger than us, and to the extent that we can live that and celebrate that, I think we're healthier, and then that's love. So I think if we think of love in this way, and a beloved community in this way, when we hold all this stuff together, together.
Jun 29, 2020•29 min
After World War II, the U.S. government worked with industry to create a single-use, disposable consumer culture as a way to ensure ongoing market prosperity. Who benefited? Consumer product companies like Coca-Cola, and the fossil fuel industry, whose petrochemicals are at the source. The result? Plastic pollution is now found in virtually every living organism – including humans - and is one of the worst threats to ocean ecosystems. Now, a global resistance movement is rising to abolish petroc...
Jun 22, 2020•28 min
When Donald Trump rode a wave of white anxiety into the White House, it was part of a backlash to the Obama presidency, one that revealed an increasingly explicit white nationalism and revived an overtly exclusionary agenda: roll back rights and protections for people of color, immigrants, Muslims, women, and gay and transgender people. Then came the backlash to the backlash: a rapidly spreading awakening that all these peoples, movements and struggles are actually connected in one story. Vision...
Jun 01, 2020•28 min
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.
May 25, 2020•28 min
The genius of nature’s design, recipes and principles is serving as the inspiration for redesigning human civilization. This Biomimicry revolution is spawning a next industrial revolution. Biomimicry masters Janine Benyus and Jay Harman illuminate the forefront of nature-inspired design, including human organization and the power of networks. For more information about this show visit: https://bioneers.org/sharkskin-hippo-sweat-and-the-wood-wide-web-from-flat-earth-to-whole-earth-thinking-janine...
May 18, 2020•28 min
In a world that’s unraveling from climate disruption and gaping inequality, another climate crisis confronts us: the climate of hate and othering. Award-winning scholar and educator Valarie Kaur says to overcome racism and nationalism, we must not succumb to rage and grief. As someone who has spent much of her life challenging horrific injustices and intolerance, Kaur learned the lesson that historical nonviolent change-makers understood: social movements must be grounded in an ethic of love. Sh...
May 04, 2020•29 min
A new wave of technologies designed to regenerate people, planet and democracy is emerging in ingenious ways. Designers are creating online software for democratic group decision-making that weaves diverse perspectives into a coherent whole. And citizen science is spreading low-tech, high-impact tools that empower communities to work directly with data and mapping that can save them from harm and hold perpetrators accountable. With: democracy technologist Ben Knight of Loomio, and citizen scient...
Apr 20, 2020•28 min
Erosion and evolution. Shadow and light. Death and rebirth. These are some of the strands that the acclaimed author, naturalist and activist Terry Tempest Williams weaves together in the face of today’s broken world. Standing in the lineage of the greatest nature writers, she links her deepest inner experiences with the state of the web of life. In this program, Williams asks: How do we find the strength to not look away at all that is breaking our hearts? Hands on the earth, we remember where t...
Apr 06, 2020•29 min
When a culture is disintegrating and the stories everybody believed in no longer fit, its time to rekindle our connection to ancient wisdom and universal truths. Mythologist, author and storyteller Michael Meade, founder of the Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, reminds us that the word apocalypse - which has come to mean the end of the world, actually means an unveiling. Once we penetrate that veil, its not the end - but the beginning of a new story the a new beginning to the old story.
Mar 30, 2020•29 min
Religion is the oldest, most compelling moral framework for social action. As director of World Wildlife Fund’s Sacred Earth Program, Buddhist Dekila Chungyalpa shows how religion and spiritual consciousness are emerging globally as powerful forces for restoring our relationship with nature and each other.
Mar 16, 2020•28 min
*** Note: this program was produced prior to the recent earthquake in Puerto Rico, and focuses on how communities are still recovering from Hurricane Maria. *** With climate-driven disasters becoming the new normal, building resilience is the grail. Communities around the world are developing models created out of practical necessity. We hear on-the-ground stories from two different communities building resilience in the wake of serial disasters. Estrella Santiago Perez and her innovative commun...
Feb 24, 2020•28 min
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? Perhap...
Feb 03, 2020•28 min
As the creation story of Judeo-Christian beliefs, the biblical recounting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden has long had profound influence around the world. So what’s it like to be named Eve? World-renowned playwright and activist Eve Ensler explores her own personal journey into her namesake. The provocative author of “The Vagina Monologues” and founder of V-Day to end violence against women suggests there’s another story beneath the traditional story. For her, it’s both very personal – an...
Jan 27, 2020•28 min
Why does “corporate personhood” consistently override the legal rights of citizens? And what about the rights of nature? Join innovative environmental attorneys Thomas Linzey and Mari Margil for breakthroughs on the ground of democracy.
Jan 20, 2020•29 min
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 ...
Jan 13, 2020•28 min
For millennia, prophets, mystics and poets have illuminated the oneness of all life. Today biology is confirming that we are genetic kin with the entire diversity of life. Episcopal Reverends Fletcher Harper and Sally Bingham and Baptist Church Administrator G.L. Hodge preach the gospel of Creation Care that more and more faith communities are embracing in a historic shift.
Dec 18, 2019•28 min
Growing Growers and Seeding Leaders for a Real Food Future What happens when green turns to grey? Fewer than 5 percent of 2 million American farmers are under 45 years old. Bucking that trend is the next generation of unstoppable young farmers Severine von Tscharner Fleming, Tyler Webb, and Sarita Role Schaffer, along with renowned urban food innovator Nikki Henderson and real food advocate Amin Steele. With dirt under their nails and laptops at their fingertips, theyre reinventing a radical pat...
Dec 09, 2019•28 min
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.
Nov 04, 2019•29 min
What might happen when the descendants of a white slave trader and of slaves meet? That is the brave and wrenching journey of Thomas DeWolf , whose white ancestors were once the nation’s biggest slave traders, and Belvie Rooks and Dedan Gills , descendants of enslaved African people.
Aug 19, 2019•28 min
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 ...
Aug 12, 2019•28 min
"What I’d like to do is to be able to bring the possibility for hope and healing to people everywhere who need it. And to engage people in helping and healing themselves and each other, and to create the opportunity for them to do that." Brain research is revealing astounding insights into the mechanisms of post-traumatic stress and neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to be rewired and re-trained. The world today is ravaged by traumas – from war, privation and economic crashes to natural disas...
Aug 05, 2019•29 min
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 Engine.
Jul 30, 2019•29 min
Queen of the forest canopy” Nalini Nadkarni is riding a new current of innovative scientists uncovering previously unexplored wonders in the forest canopy. Her imaginative passion supersedes the boundaries of science to inspire and enlist people from all walks of life, transforming the truth of trees into environmental and social healing.
Jul 17, 2019•28 min
