2021 Talks

As the IPCC reports, climate destabilization is happening far faster than even the most pessimistic scientists had anticipated. The chaotic results are now visible to everyone around the globe. The situation is urgent, and failure to take immediate large-scale action would be catastrophic, but extractive industries and corrupt governments are barreling ahead with business as usual, wreaking havoc on our planet’s water, air, lands and living creatures, including people. Women, BIPOC and youth leaders are taking many of the strongest stands and implementing innovative tactics in this, the most important, crucial, existential struggle in history. Join three visionary climate justice leaders as they share their strategic insights.

For all the ink and pixels spilled over the past year on political infighting about what qualifies as “infrastructure,” one of the most notable omissions has been any real mention of the natural world. The biosphere we all inhabit is, fundamentally, the infrastructure for life itself. As we know all too well, humanity has, for the most part, neglected, destroyed and actively pillaged many of the natural systems that support our continued existence by cooking the climate, unleashing a looming micro-plastic apocalypse, triggering a tragic global decline in all biodiversity benchmarks and more.

What will it take to turn our attention towards the rebuilding of our natural infrastructure, for the benefit of all life and human society? How can built infrastructure elegantly and respectfully engage with and support nature? The answers are not easy, and our understanding of these systems is only just scratching the surface of the evolutionary timescales that nature functions on. However, we know enough to get started – and, unsurprisingly, it often begins with letting nature lead. In this discussion, experts and leaders dive into what a more enlightened, effective, biophilic and biomimetic infrastructure conversation needs to look like.

To achieve the profound socio-economic, environmental and political changes we so desperately need, many of our societal systems will require intensive re-visioning. Key professions such as medicine, architecture/design, and the law (among many others) will need to embrace far more socially engaged worldviews and on-the-ground practices. In this dynamic dialogue, two leading figures who have been cutting-edge, exemplary models of how passion for social justice can inform professional life share their thoughts on what it will take to radically transform professional paradigms.

Trauma has perhaps never been more widely prevalent than it is now, nor more varied in its causes: personal stress, familial history, racial discrimination, poverty, oppression, climate disaster, etc. These times are really stretching our capacity to endure, so they require ever more effective healing and self-care modalities that include the taking of our personal inventory and adjusting our beliefs and lifestyles. In this panel, two master Somatics practitioners and teachers share insights and explain their methods.

Clayton Thomas-Muller and Julian Brave NoiseCat are nationally and internationally acclaimed Indigenous leaders in the fights against climate change and the accelerating, human-induced destruction of our ecosystems. When they aren’t on the front lines organizing movements to protect the planet, Clayton and Julian work as accomplished writers penning penetrating analyses of the connections between settler colonial capitalism, broken social and political systems, trauma, and environmental disaster. They also happen to have a deep friendship. In this intimate conversation, these two exemplary leaders share the story behind the story about how their lives intersect with their activism and discuss their new projects and their hopes for the future.

Indigenous Peoples already do “green jobs”—they integrate cultural values into business activities and protect 80% of the world’s biodiversity. In order to transform our economies through Indigenous-led solutions, we need to uplift movements and stories inspired by Indigenous resistance. To do this, we must change the culture of philanthropy and impact investing, which still largely circulates in privileged circles. In this panel, we explore how to transition from colonial-capitalism using Indigenous-led strategies that offer us pathways towards an equitable and regenerative future.

The psychedelic community owes enormous debts to the Indigenous cultures that, over millennia, developed the use of consciousness-modifying substances, which laid the basis for the now ever-expanding interest in and use of these medicines. Indigenous peoples are also very often the best protectors of what’s left of global biodiversity, so finding effective, concrete ways to help support these groups’ struggles to defend their lands and rights is of utmost importance to all of humanity. So far, though, while the psychedelic world is replete with romanticized language about Indigenous worldviews, it has done very little to offer genuine, large-scale tangible support that actually reaches frontline communities, and as enormous amounts of venture capital are now pouring into the psychedelic domain, this is the time to act. The Chacruna Institute’s Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative (IRI) was created to fill that void.

They say “laughter is the best medicine,” but the most powerful medicine of all might just be American Indian comedy. Native peoples on this continent developed rich and complex humor traditions in response to centuries of oppression and the intergenerational trauma of ongoing settler colonization. Jokes were and are used to reflect on life’s ironies, impart wisdom, build relationships, and help heal from pain. Comedy can be one of the most effective tools in the arsenal of Indigenous strategies of deep cultural resilience, and as we emerge from this global pandemic and continue to struggle with dire threats to our people and the planet, we need the healing medicine of laughter more than ever.

We humans tend to look mostly around, sometimes up, and occasionally down, but even then, only at the surface of things. It turns out, however, that all of life on Earth actually depends on the extraordinarily dynamic life hidden beneath our feet, in the incredibly complex interrelationships of plants, bacteria, fungi, insects and minerals that make our continued existence above ground possible. In this session three of the world’s leading specialists on different aspects of those underground ecosystems share their cutting-edge research.

As ecological destruction, climate destabilization, the global pandemic, and all forms of historical and current injustice are converging to initiate a near-death experience for our species, learn from a group of wise women as they discuss why the combination of honoring, respecting and learning from nature, being motivated by a deep quest for justice, and cultivating the leadership of women can provide a potent, three-pronged strategic path for getting us to a world we want.

The Brower Youth Awards, named after the late, legendary environmental giant, David Brower, are one of the most prestigious prizes for youth activists, and we at Bioneers are delighted to be able to highlight the work of this year’s cohort of winners, an exceptional array of young mobilizers, organizers and paradigm-shifting leaders, who discuss their activist trajectories, the challenges they face, and their aspirations for the future.

Many boys and men of color have to grapple with very potent intergenerational traumas deeply linked to the racism, oppression and systemic inequities their communities have had to endure for so long. The Covid Pandemic has unfortunately exacerbated many of these underlying dynamics, resulting in increased levels of domestic and community violence in many neighborhoods. This session, facilitated by internationally-recognized author, community leader and healing practitioner Jerry Tello, offers an intergenerational conversation among young men, elders, and middle-aged men of color. They explore the deep traumas they and their communities suffer from, and how to develop strategies of responsibility and accountability that face the truth, but also create conditions for deep healing and prevent these wounds from undermining our families, communities and selves.

Permaculture, based on the ethos of “earth care, people care and fair share,” has provided millions of people the principles and tools to live and work in right relationship to the earth and to produce and harvest abundance without degrading the environment. At a time when the world is desperate for a new approach to living on the planet, can permaculture scale-up to create the global ecological and social changes that are needed for human survival?

Solidarity Economics is an economic frame that recognizes that people are not just individuals, but also members of broader social groups and communities, that people are motivated not just by self-interest, but also by caring for others and a desire for belonging, and that we can and should build our economy not on an embrace of individuality and competition, but rather on a sense of commons and our shared destiny.

The drumbeats demanding that the fossil fuel giants be held accountable for sparking the climate crisis are getting louder. Here in the U.S., more cities, states, and counties keep filing lawsuits seeking compensation from the oil giants for climate-related damages and to fund adaptation projects. Last spring, a Dutch court found multinational Shell Oil guilty of violating human rights and ordered the company to slash its emissions, and many other international lawsuits against fossil fuel corporations are pending.