Throughout the year, we are frequently reminded that inspiration can come from myriad places: a childhood spent in nature, proximity to a community in need, and phenomenal mentors, to name just a few. Once each year, at the annual Bioneers Conference, a few thousand of us are inspired by the luminous thinkers, doers and creators who share their visions for a brighter future. It’s a heart-healing reminder that we aren’t alone and that we can do incredibly hard things if we work together.

On the heels of Bioneers 2024, we look forward to sharing video recordings of all of our keynote speakers, giving you a chance to be inspired anew (or for the first time!) and share that inspiration with your communities. Today, in our first step toward that full release, we’re proud to share videos of four incredible Bioneers talks. Enjoy, learn, and pass them on.

Want more news like this? Sign up for the Bioneers Pulse to receive the latest news from the Bioneers community straight to your inbox.

Claudia Peña – Abolition as Amends to Mother

“This nation has suffered mass alienation from the colonizers to the genocides to the kidnappings in Africa and the slave trade. Many of us walking these lands were cut off from our roots, and healing requires reconnection to those roots.”

In her Bioneers keynote, Claudia Peña, Executive Director of the artist collective For Freedoms and founding Co-Director of the Center for Justice at UCLA, discusses her multifaceted restorative justice work. Like so many other industries, our enormous mass incarceration system has wreaked havoc on society. Peña argues our desire for punishment and the profits made by the incarceration of millions of human beings, consequences be damned, lead to the destruction of the social fabric of countless communities in the short term and contribute to the ravaging of the larger global environment in the long term. Our only path forward is to address each harmful industry — including the abolition of the prison industrial complex as we know it — and make amends with land, water and air.  

Watch now

Merlin Sheldrake – How Fungi Make Our Worlds

“Mycorrhizal fungi are based in rich fields of sensory information. They must determine when, where, and how to move resources across their networks. They must integrate myriad data streams across billions of nodes in their networks. These are complex information processing systems solving non-trivial problems on a moment-to-moment basis, and we have no idea how they can do what they do to achieve these astonishing feats.”

Most fungi live out of sight, yet they make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that support and sustain nearly all living systems. The symbiotic mycorrhizal networks formed by plants and fungi comprise an ancient life-support system that easily qualifies as one of the wonders of the living world. Yet climate change strategies, conservation agendas and restoration efforts overlook fungi and focus overwhelmingly on animals and plants. This is a problem: the destruction of underground fungal networks accelerates both climate change and biodiversity loss and interrupts vital global nutrient cycles. In this keynote, bestselling author, biologist and expert on fungal life, Merlin Sheldrake discusses the critical importance of fungi and the visionary work of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN). 

Watch now

Sammy Gensaw III – The Restorative Revolution and a River of Reciprocity

“I’ve dedicated my life to the culture because of a small sentence that my grandmother always told me growing up: ‘One day, they will need people like us.'”

In his Bioneers keynote, dynamic young Yurok leader Sammy Gensaw III shares some of his experiences working for ecological and cultural revival along the Klamath River. The river is central to the Yurok people’s identity and livelihood, and they led an epic struggle to remove destructive dams that required drawing deeply from ancestral wisdom, modern science and cutting-edge activism. Hear Gensaw discuss how Indigenous leadership can play a central role in rekindling our connections to land and water and ushering in a restorative, resilient future for all of us.

Watch now

Colette Pichon Battle – Expanding Our Movements for Climate Justice

“We have devoted our prayers to a ridiculous religion of capitalism, and we are now caught in this rapture of extraction. We have to be willing to change not only what we believe but how we move in this world.”

Colette Pichon Battle, climate justice activist and award-winning environmental and human rights attorney, discusses how to expand the movement in her Bioneers keynote. Pichon Battle, who was born and raised in Bayou Liberty, Louisiana, focuses on creating spaces for frontline communities to gather and advance climate strategies that help them steward their water, energy, and land responsibly. Drawing from decades of experience fighting for equitable climate resilience, she unearths historic lessons and exposes the root causes of the inequities and imbalances that characterize our relationships to the natural world and to each other. 

Watch now

Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses 

Through engaging courses led by some of the world’s foremost movement leaders, Bioneers Learning equips engaged citizens and professionals like you with the knowledge, tools, resources, and networks to initiate or deepen your engagement, leading to real change in your life and community.

Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses:

• Attuning to, Aligning with & Serving the Flow of Universal Evolution | Next session June 21 | Wake up to a radical reality and discover as a species who we really and truly are and who we can evolve to become.
• Being a Good Relative: Allyship with Indigenous Peoples | Starting April 24 | Understand and come to embody what it means to be a good ally through interactive teachings, discussions, and hands-on activities.
• The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times | Self-Paced | Discover how the Four Sacred Gifts of forgiving the unforgivable, unity, healing, and hope in action provide us with a path to our most grounded, loving, healed, and generous selves.
• Regenerative Agriculture: Nourishing the Soil, Healing the Planet | Self-Paced | Be enlightened on the practical applications and impressive potential that regenerative agriculture has to revive healthy landscapes; contribute to human and animal health; create an equitable food system; and help heal the climate.