Bioneers: Fertile Soil for Movement Building

Recent News from the Native Youth Ambassadors Program

Our most recent direct outcome from Bioneers’ Indigenous Rights of Nature catalytic initiative and Native Youth Ambassadors Program—which centers mentorship, collaborative long-term strategy, and direct action—is the youth-led passing of a Tribal resolution for the rights of the Great Smoky Mountains’ stream system, known as the Longperson, an initiative of the North American Indigenous Women’s Association (NAIWA) Junior Daughters.

→ ARTICLE: Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Pass Historic Youth-Led Rights of Nature Resolution
→ VIDEO: Eastern Band Cherokee Workshop Meeting with Junior NAIWA Daughters
→ VIDEO: Rights of Longperson council testimony and unanimous vote

Nature’s Genius Series – Season Two

In this enlightening series, we visit with scientists, ecologists, Indigenous practitioners of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, community organizers, and authors reporting from the frontlines of ecological restoration. They explore the intelligence inherent in nature and show us how to model human organization on living systems.

A Conversation with Terry Tempest Williams

Terry Tempest Williams is one of the most celebrated and revered American nature writers. She integrates the musicality of a poet with the passion and purpose of an activist. Terry is also an award-winning conservationist, a fierce defender of her beloved Southwestern desert landscapes. Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons, author of Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership, engaged with Terry at a Bioneers conference in a wide ranging conversation between two old friends.

The Native American LandBack Movement Reaches Urban America

Corrina Gould (Confederated Villages of Lisjan) is a celebrated activist and a leader of the LandBack Movement in the Bay Area. She has helped forge a model for returning stolen land to Native American Tribes and restoring sacred sites in a revolutionary act of remembrance and resistance against cultural erasure.

Paying Attention in a Fractured World

We’re living through a time that resists easy interpretation. Systems are shifting, familiar patterns are becoming less reliable, and many of us are sensing change without always having the language to describe it. Even in moments that appear stable on the surface, there’s an undercurrent of movement — a feeling that something is being rearranged.

Climate Risk Is Reshaping America

Across ecosystems, adaptation is a constant. Forests shift, rivers change course, species migrate in search of balance. Today, human systems are undergoing their own forms of adjustment. Insurance markets are recalibrating risk. Cities are rethinking infrastructure. Communities are restoring wetlands and floodplains to better live with water rather than fight against it.

A Flower that Tricks the Eye

We tend to think of a flower as a symbol of beauty — something to admire, something gentle. But beneath that surface, many flowers are engaged in far more complex exchanges shaped by millions of years of adaptation.

What Cows are Really Thinking

In our last Earthlings installment, neuroscientist Gregory Berns helped us peer inside the brains of animals, revealing emotional and cognitive lives that behavior alone can’t fully explain. Brain scans showed jealousy stirring in dogs’ amygdalas, motivation lighting up reward circuits, and affection that looks remarkably like love. 

Noticing the Glorians in a Fractured World

There are moments when language fails us — when the scale of ecological loss, political fracture, and cultural upheaval feels too vast to hold. And yet, there are also moments of quiet attention that bring us back into relationship with the living world and one another.

Writer and environmental activist Terry Tempest Williams has spent decades exploring that tension between grief and beauty. In a recent conversation with Bioneers Co-Founder Nina Simons, she reflects on art, democracy, ecological loss, and the sacred presences she calls the “Glorians”: the often-overlooked moments of connection that remind us we are part of a shared and living world.

Interview with Cristina Jiménez Moreta

We are thrilled to have had the opportunity to talk to Cristina Jiménez Moreta, Co-founder and former Executive Director of United We Dream (UWD), the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the country. Cristina came to the U.S. from Ecuador in 1998 when she was 5 years-old and grew up undocumented in Queens, New York. At seventeen, she became a youth organizer in the movement for immigrant/migrant rights. She is an award-winning community organizer, bestselling author, and leading social justice activist. She has led multiple national and local campaigns for immigrant justice, including playing a leadership role in the campaign to win and implement the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA). A distinguished lecturer at the City University of New York, Jiménez was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and named one of Time 100’s most influential people. She is the author of a bestselling debut memoir Dreaming of Home (2025).

Agriculture’s War on Nature: Are Toxic Pesticides Worth the Harm?

Does it make any sense to spray food with poison? And yet that is the prevailing method in which food is grown commercially with the exception of a small percentage of crops that are grown organically. Chemical pesticides (the suffix “cide” means killer) leave residues on foods that we consume daily. The USDA found that more than 75 percent of fruits and over 50 percent of vegetables contain pesticide residues.

Ecological Farming: Looking to Nature for the Answers

Ecological farming takes its cues, as the name implies, from natural ecosystems and how they function to build resilience, fertility and resistance to pests and disease. In a healthy ecosystem such as tropical rainforest, external inputs like fertilizers and pesticides are not needed for that system to produce enormous amounts of biomass and support diverse flora and fauna species for millions of years, year-after-year.