In this age of global weirding where climate disruption has tumbled the Goldilocks effect into unruly surges of too much and too little water, the restoration of beavers offers ancient nature-based solutions to the tangle of challenges bedeviling human civilization. Droughts, floods, soil erosion, climate change, biodiversity loss - you name it, and beaver is on it. In this episode, Kate Lundquist and Brock Dolman of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center share their semi-aquatic journey to beco...
May 02, 2023•29 min•Ep. 260
Jessica Alva Khadija Rose Britton. Hanna Harris. Anthonette Christine Cayedito. If you haven't heard of these women, it’s no surprise. They’re four of the untold number of Indigenous women and girls who have been murdered, kidnapped or gone mysteriously missing. A significant number of victims are from communities that are subjected to the harmful presence of fossil fuel and mining companies. The extractive industry is ravaging Native nations where oil and blood have long run together. Add to th...
Apr 27, 2023•29 min
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 ...
Apr 17, 2023•29 min
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 lead...
Mar 29, 2023•32 min•Ep. 259
Did you ever ask yourself who in their right mind would invent a convenience to keep food fresh that would one day litter the landscape, wash up on every beach around the world and release toxic substances into the web of life and your body long after its short disposable life? Master green chemists and educators John Warner and Amy Cannon say all that is changing -- by necessity and by design. The radical growth of green chemistry is showing we can have good chemistry with the Earth by emulatin...
Mar 07, 2023•29 min
In Western civilization, human beings are considered the exceptional species and uniquely intelligent. Yet science is consistently revealing our intimate biological kinship with all species, especially the primates with whom we share 99% of our DNA. The breakthrough primatologist researchers Roger and Deborah Fouts take us on their amazing journey with chimpanzees that shows that, not only are people animals, but animals seem to be people too. Featuring Roger and Deborah Fouts co-founded and dir...
Feb 28, 2023•29 min
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 the...
Feb 14, 2023•29 min
In 2018, Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter shared a moving speech at a Bioneers Conference. Cullors is a performance artist and award-winning organizer from Los Angeles, and is one of the most effective and influential movement builders of our era. She was a key figure in the fight to force the creation of the first civilian oversight commission of the LA Sheriff’s Department, but is most widely known as one of the three original co-founders of Black Lives Matter and for her rec...
Jan 31, 2023•29 min
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 B.P. Weeks to survey the landscape of rising antitrust movements to break the stranglehold of corporate power and level the playing field for a democratized econ...
Jan 23, 2023•29 min
The influences of Africans and Black Americans on food and agriculture is rooted in ancestral African knowledge and traditions of shared labor, worker coops 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-det...
Jan 17, 2023•29 min•Ep. 257
The visionary primatologist and conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall revolutionized primatology by showing how close our kinship is with the animal kin-dom. “Dr. Jane” has inspired the world to save the rapidly dwindling chimpanzee populations and their habitats. Her compelling vision to restore people, animals and planet is delivering real hope.
Jan 10, 2023•28 min
As climate chaos and obscene inequality ravage people and planet, a new generation of visionaries is emerging to demand a bold solution: a Green New Deal. Is it a remedy that can actually meet the magnitude and urgency of this turning point in the human enterprise? With lifelong activist and politician Tom Hayden, and Demond Drummer of Policy Link. Featuring Tom Hayden (1939-2016) was one of the leading figures of the student, civil rights, anti-war and environmental movements of the 1960s, and ...
Jan 04, 2023•29 min
You do what you eat. Groundbreaking medical research now shows that what we eat is directly connected to how we behave. Maggie Adamek's research for The Sugar Project tracks how the changing American diet has made profound health impacts on behavior, especially among our children. Transforming how we feed ourselves is showing that food is medicine that can change negative behavior dramatically.
Dec 31, 2022•29 min
As author Michael Pollan observes: “The two biggest crises humanity faces today are tribalism and the environmental crisis. They both involve the objectifying of the other – whether that other is nature or other people.” How do we re-weave that web of relationships, and focus on our likenesses rather than our differences? In this program, racial justice advocates john a. powell, Eriel Deranger and Anita Sanchez explore how overcoming the illusion of separateness from nature and each other requir...
Dec 27, 2022•29 min
Renowned storyteller, performer, author, activist and scholar Michael Meade weaves threads of timeless wisdom traditions into myths for today’s global crisis. Meade says each of us is woven into the soul of the world, and we’re uniquely needed at this mythic moment to become active agents in the co-creation, re-creation and re-imagination of culture and nature. This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to ...
Dec 23, 2022•29 min
These days, scientists are starting to talk like shamans and shamans are starting to talk like scientists. So says anthropologist and author Jeremy Narby. And, he says, we need to talk about talking – because words matter. In this episode, Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies speaks with Jeremy Narby about how the very language and words we use reveal the topography and limits of our worldview, including Western culture’s adamant centuries-long but now increasingly discredited assumption tha...
Dec 13, 2022•29 min
How do we transform a vicious circle into a virtuous circle? How do we move from environmental degradation and the deterioration of human relations to restoration? From war to peace – from hatred to compassion – from isolation to community? How can one person make a crucial difference? Painter and professor Lily Yeh‘s approach to community healing takes that which is broken and creates something whole and wholly new and beautiful through public art. From Philadelphia to Rwanda, broken places are...
Dec 06, 2022•29 min
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, school kids, businesses, artists and churches. This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Vi...
Nov 28, 2022•29 min
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...
Nov 22, 2022•29 min
Our physical health is intimately tied to environmental health, and 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 the planet and ourselves by reconnecting with our true nature as empathic, nurturing social beings.
Nov 14, 2022•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 Henk Ovink, a designer, the Principal of Rebuild by Design, and the first ever Special Envoy for International Water Affairs for the Kingdom of the Netherlands. He’s dramatically demonstrating on large scales how to shift our relationship to nature and to culture – and climate-proof our cities and coasts. ...
Nov 08, 2022•29 min
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.
Oct 31, 2022•28 min
Native American students face racism throughout their education, from racist mascots to the historical erasure of the American genocide from textbooks. In this passionate conversation, Indigenous Rights Activists Dahkota Brown, Chiitaanibah Johnson, Jayden Lim, and Naelyn Pike share stories of their own experiences and how they are working to abolish racism in schools.
Oct 25, 2022•28 min
Women-led movements arising around the world herald a profound shift that changes everything. Visionary women leaders Osprey Orielle-Lake, Leila Salazar and Lynne Twist report on the women leading the clean energy revolution in Africa, defending the Amazonian rainforest, and making peace in Liberia.
Oct 17, 2022•28 min
In this time of radical upheaval and change, fulfilling the promise of a “more perfect union” in the United States means building a multi-racial democracy through transformative solidarity. As the Founder-in-Residence at Policy Link, Professor Angela Glover Blackwell has spent decades advancing racial and economic equity at the national and local levels. She says the fate of the wealthiest nation on Earth depends on what happens to the very people who’ve been left behind. Featuring Angela Glover...
Oct 11, 2022•29 min
In this episode, we speak with Julian Brave NoiseCat, an enrolled citizen of the Secwepemc, also known as Shuswap First Nation, in British Columbia. Julian Brave NoiseCat explores the importance of connection and relationship, to family, to history, to place and to culture, threading his own story throughout a larger narrative about the deep trauma Indigenous people have experienced through colonization and the resilience and power that is emerging as individuals, tribes and nations work to recl...
Sep 29, 2022•50 min
Defending land rights and preserving tribal culture is difficult for North American tribes, especially for those that do not have sovereign nation-to-nation status with the federal government. The lack of recognition of a tribe’s nationhood as a self-governing entity (as defined by the U.S. Constitution) has been explicitly used as a tool to continue to prevent Native peoples from living on the most desirable lands or protecting sacred lands that have been stolen. We talk about these issues with...
Sep 21, 2022•27 min
There is a growing movement to redefine manhood, and to address ways that violence is baked into our cultural expectations of masculinity. Courageous, visionary men are rising to the challenge. One of those men is activist, writer and public speaker Kevin Powell. In this half-hour, Powell boldly and bravely discusses his experiences with toxic masculinity and his journey to redefine what it means to be a man. This is “Climbing Out of the Man Box: What Does Healthy Manhood Look Like?” Featuring K...
Sep 20, 2022•29 min
In this episode, Indigenous scholar and organizer Nick Estes explores how Indigenous land-based and Earth-centered societies are advancing regenerative solutions and campaigns to transform capitalism. An ancient “eco-nomics” today puts Indigenous leadership at the forefront of assuring a habitable planet. Featuring Nick Estes, Ph.D. (Kul Wicasa/Lower Brule Sioux), is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and a member of the Oak Lake Writers Society, a group of D...
Sep 12, 2022•29 min
What if there are ways to sustainably harvest protein and nutritious vegetables from the seas in ways that restore coastlines, local economies, produces abundant food, and sequesters vast amounts of carbon dioxide? Pathfinding ocean farmer Bren Smith has cultivated a breakthrough method of near-shore aquaculture called 3-D Ocean Farming, which has the potential to transform our relationship with the ocean, make room again for the flourishing wild diversity of ocean animals, and launch a novel, d...
Aug 31, 2022•29 min
