Bioneers Radio and Podcasts

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Legalizing Nature’s Rights: How Tribal Nations are Leading the Fastest Growing Environmental Movement in History

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 their strategies to protect natural systems for future generations.

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The Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature is an award-winning, international radio and podcast series. Free to everyone, this series offers listeners and radio stations the opportunity to experience the conference year-round, and allows access to in-depth interviews with leading social and scientific innovators. It highlights diverse voices of grassroots leaders and voices that are often marginalized or excluded by corporate media. The programs cover a wide range of topics, including intelligence in nature, climate justice, food and farming, gender equity, Indigenous knowledge, reigning in corporate power, and youth activism.

The series is a valuable contribution to public and educational institutions. Program distribution reaches students, activists and educators in 160 communities, in the U.S. and internationally. The Series has won numerous awards, including the Silver, Bronze and Gold from the New York Festivals Radio Awards.

Follow the links above to subscribe or, if you’re not on your mobile device, just text “podcasts” to tel:855-762-0952 or scan the QR code below to be taken directly to a mobile sign-up page.

Recent Programs
 
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.

Toward a More Perfect Union: Unleashing the Promise in Us All with Angela Glover Blackwell

 
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…

“Remembering Who We Are and Our Relations” with Julian Brave NoiseCat

 
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.

Returning to What Was Lost and Stolen with Corrina Gould

 
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. “Eco-nomics” puts Indigenous leadership at the forefront of assuring a habitable planet.

Indigenous Eco-Nomics: Ancestors of the Future with Nick Estes

 
Globally, women experience some of the harshest challenges in wartime and the climate crisis while simultaneously remaining caretakers to their families, communities, and the Earth.

Taking Wing: Feminine Leadership from the Heartbeat of Earth with Zainab Salbi

 
World-renowned primatologist Professor Frans de Waal explores the nature of sex and gender among our cousins the apes, and how gender diversity is a common and pervasive potential on nature’s masculine-feminine continuum. In the quest to overcome human gender inequality, he suggests that our focus needs to be on the inequality.

Busting the Myth of Primate Patriarchy: The Nature of Sex and Gender in Our Ape Relatives

 
Award Winners & Specials         
 
In this program, powerful Native women leaders reveal the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and describe how they are taking action and building growing movements, including with non-Native allies.

No More Stolen Sisters: Stopping the Abuse and Murder of Native Women and Girls

 
In 2020, the Black Lives Matter Movement emerged as the biggest protest movement in American history, and resounded worldwide. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors tells the story of what activated this powerful movement for racial justice, and where it’s going.

Bending Toward Justice: The Arc of Black Lives Matter

 
How do we change the story of corrosive racial inequity? First, we have to understand the stories we tell ourselves. In this program, john a. powell and Heather McGhee show how empathy, honesty and the recognition of our common humanity can change the story to bridge the racial divides tearing humanity and the Earth apart.

Why Equity is Good for Everyone: Changing the Story, Changing the World

 
Author and adventurer James Nestor leads us on a deep dive into the mystery of marine mammal consciousness, and the story of how a small band of freedivers, pushing the limits of human endurance, is finding that saving the whales may become the story of the whales saving us.

Whale Whisperers: Making Deep Contact

 
To transform our culture to one of connection, empathy and collaboration, it’s vital that we re-envision the archetypal masculine. This is the subject of a dialogue among playwright and activist Eve Ensler, Tony Porter, A Call To Men; Dallas Goldtooth, Indigenous Environmental Network; George Lipsitz, African American Policy Forum.

Breaking the Male Code: The Tyranny of Masculinity

 
Calla Rose Ostrander and John Wick of the Marin Carbon Project are helping to revolutionize farming, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it back where it belongs: in the soil. Scaling up revolutionary regenerative methods like these can offset the climate destabilization, which that threatens to confound agriculture and endanger our food supply.

Vice to Virtue: From Carbon Crisis to Carbon Farming

 
In Western civilization, human beings are considered uniquely intelligent. Yet science is revealing our intimate biological kinship with all species, especially primates. Breakthrough researchers Roger and Deborah Fouts take us on their amazing journey with chimpanzees, showing that not only are people animals, but animals seem to be people too.

We’re All Chimps: Or Are Animals Persons Too?

 
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.

Real Change: The Political Gets Personal

 
The late Tom Hayden — activist, author, politician, and visionary — 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.

Spirit in the Air: Reform, Revolution and Regeneration

 
As we face the long climate emergency, fortunately, skillful pathfinders are banding together to transform our ways of living and bring resilience from the ground up into widespread practice. With Berkeley’s Chief Resilience Officer, Timothy Burroughs, Professor David W. Orr, and financial adviser Tom Van Dyck.

Cultural Mindshift: Full Spectrum Sustainability and Resilience

 
Are plants intelligent? If we knew their language what might they tell us? Potawatomi Indigenous ecologist and author Robin Kimmerer and evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano merge Traditional Ecological Knowledge with Western science for a surprising trip into the minds of mosses and chili seeds and the songs of corn.

Nature’s Intelligence: Interviewing the Vegetable Mind

 
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.

Sharkskin, Hippo Sweat and the Wood-Wide Web

 
Non-toxic 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, is showing how we can follow nature’s lead to create good chemistry with nature and our own health. The results are jaw dropping.

Good Chemistry: Survival of the Most Compatible

 
Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, hip-hop artist and Youth Director of Earth Guardians, De’Anthony Jones, a former President of the Environmental Students Organization at Sacramento State, and Chloe Maxmin, co-founder of Divest Harvard, say there’s no better time to be born than now because this generation gets to rewrite history.

Youth Solutionaries: Future Present

 
Renowned author and activist Naomi Klein says climate change demands that we challenge the dominant economic policies of deregulated capitalism and bottomless resource extraction. Canadian Indigenous leader Clayton Thomas-Muller of Idle No More reports from the front lines of the Native-led rights based movement to stop the drilling of the Canadian Tar Sands.

Just Say No: Planet Hackers Resistance Movements & Climate Justice

 
What will it take to begin to heal the deep wounds between women and men? What is the role of men in this transformation? Cynthia Brix and Will Keepin from Gender Reconciliation International say that only by bringing these wounds into the light can we heal them.

Patriarchy: Thousands of Years Old But Only a Few Days Deep

 
Pathfinding ocean farmer Bren Smith has cultivated a breakthrough method of near-shore aquaculture called 3-D Ocean Farming, which has the potential 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.

3-D Ocean Farming: Making a Living on a Living Planet

 
Can we know what it’s like to be other-than-human? How can we see into the minds of animals? Visionary naturalist, author and conservationist Carl Safina says that the first step is paying attention and observing. And, he suggests, if we had humility, we’d have everything.

Under the Skin We’re All Kin: Reading the Minds of Animals

 
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’re working to abolish racism in schools.

We’re a Culture, Not a Costume: Fighting Racism in Schools

 
In times of massive disruption and economic stress, the psychological tendency in the collective psyche is to project these shadow qualities onto whomever people see as “the other.” But is there also a deeper story? Heather McGhee of Demos sees a direct connection between today’s extreme inequality and this peak moment of racial panic and white anxiety.

Who Is an American? Is Our Democracy As Unequal As Our Economy?

 
Transformational women leaders are restoring societal balance by showing us how to reconnect relationships – not only among people – but between people and the natural world. Join Alice Walker, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Nina Simons, Sarah Crowell, Joanna Macy and Akaya Windwood to imagine a future where women, children, men and the planet can thrive.

They Don’t Call Her Mother Earth for Nothing: Women Re-imagining the World | One Hour Special

 
This special explores the time-tested processes, relationships and recipes that have allowed life to flourish during 3.8 billion years of evolution. Luminaries featured include David Suzuki, Paul Hawken, Janine Benyus, Amory Lovins, and Bill Mckibben. They say the solutions to our environmental challenges are largely present – if we just ask nature.

Natural Magic: The Earth Hospitality Enterprise | One Hour Special

 
What does it mean to bring the “feminine” forward in leadership from diverse cultural and ethnic perspectives? How might a spectrum of views help us to integrate relational intelligence into all our leadership? With: Noris Binet, Nikki Silvestri, and Pat McCabe, or Woman Stands Shining.

Leading From the Feminine: Keepers of the Cradle of Life | One Hour Special

 
Art                      

 
“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it,” as Bertolt Brecht said. Shoot the rapids of art and social change with talk and performance by visionary spoken word duo Climbing PoeTree, and John Densmore, drummer of the legendary Doors and longtime social change artist.

Art As Social Change: Birthing the Dawn Of A New Day

 
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 her canvases. People’s stories are the pigments. People’s talents and creativity are the tools. At the heart of her work is the transformation of human heart.

Where Angels Fear to Tread: Making Art that Heals the Broken Places

 
Award-winning painter Judy Baca describes how art can reconnect people to place, revive disappearing history, and repair cultural root systems. While working with at-risk youth to create The Great Wall of Los Angeles, the world’s longest mural, Baca realized that restoring a disappeared river also meant restoring disappeared cultures.

Tattooing the River: People, Place and the Art of Diversity

 
Eco-Nomics       

 

 
In this first part of a two-part program, we travel back and forth in time to explore the battle between democracy and plutocracy. In today’s new Gilded Age of rule by the wealthy, rising anti-trust movements are challenging the stranglehold of corporate monopoly.

Democracy v. Plutocracy: Behind Every Great Fortune Lies a Great Crime

 
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. Can this remedy meet the magnitude and urgency of this turning point in the human enterprise?

The Green New Deal: Launching the Great Transformation

 
Imagine every person in the economy walks by, in order of income from low to high, with heights proportional to what people make. You’d see mostly a parade of dwarves, with some unbelievable giants at the very end. Political economist Gar Alperovitz and social entrepreneur Ted Howard depict breakthrough models for breaking this vicious cycle by democratizing wealth, ownership and access to capital.

A Parade of Dwarves: Democratizing Wealth for a New Economy

 
Clean energy has reached the proverbial tipping point – and the smart money is hot on the trail of the clean energy revolution. Entrepreneur and visionary changemaker Danny Kennedy says clean energy not only makes dollars, it makes sense, and this literal power struggle that could take us from energy monopoly to energy democracy.

Power Struggle: The Unstoppable Rise of the Clean Energy Era

 
The late Ray Anderson, founder and CEO of Interface, the world’s largest modular carpet company, articulates his bold vision to operate the company to take from the Earth only that which the Earth can renew rapidly and naturally. His mission is a zero footprint by the year 2020. He calls on the entire industrial system to join him on the remarkable path to Mt. Sustainability.

Climbing Mt. Sustainability: Doing Well, Doing Good in the New Ecology of Business

 
Environmental justice and labor leaders Manuel Pastor, Maria Elena Durazo and Rev. Alexia Salvatierra show us that in a truly sustainable economy, everybody is an environmentalist—and a healthy environment depends on economic justice.

Green-Collar Jobs: Laboring into the Next Economy

 
As we navigate the onset of climate change, communities are moving toward a greater re-localization of such basics as food, energy, and water. Famed restaurateur and local food advocate Judy Wicks is at the forefront of the movement to re-define business practices, grow greater security and nourish sustainable communities.

Business for the Common Good: Building Living Local Economies in the Age of Climate Change

 
Using strategic alliances and smart policies, these climate leaders show how California is emerging as the potential gamechanger for global climate leadership: the late Tom Hayden, lifelong activist and former California State Senator; Vien Truong, Environmental Equity Director, Greenlining Institute; Wade Crowfoot, Senior Advisor to Gov. Jerry Brown.

Game-Changing Climate Leadership: What Happens In California Doesn’t Stay in California

 
Conspicuous climate disruption is here, while a global super-elite of fossil fuel mega-billionaires has a political stranglehold on American politics. How can these rogue financial titans be stopped? Activist Victor Menotti, legal scholar john a. powell, and author and political operative Steven Hill outline strategies for rapid transformative change.

One Percent Solutions: Climate Disruption, Fossil Billionaires and Democracy Deficits

 
The emerging green economy promises to provide large-scale job creation while healing the Earth and building the middle class. Roxanne Brown and Charlotte Brody discuss how.

Roxanne Brown and Charlotte Brody: Good Jobs, Clean Environment – Both or Neither

 
Ecological Design

 

 
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.

Welcome the Water: Climate-Proofing for Resilience

 
Two winners of the 2012 Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award-visionary architect Jason McLennan of the acclaimed Living Building Challenge and entrepreneur Cheryl Dahle of The Future of Fish-demonstrate breakthrough systems designs that can transform major industries, create a healthy sustainable environment and make life beautiful and fun.

Disruptive Design: What Good Looks Like

 
Elizabeth Thompson, executive director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI), brings to life Bucky’s vision, along with contemporary BFI Challenge Award recipients. Sheila Kennedy, Professor of Architecture at MIT, and John Edel, Director of the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center, whose imaginative design innovations “address humanity’s most pressing problems.”

A World That Works For All: Fireflies, Dumpsters, Soft Power and the Design Science Revolution

 
Join master permaculture designers Darren J. Doherty and Brock Dolman for both practical and poetic ways to re-educate earthlings in soil and water literacy.

Brock Dolman and Darren J. Doherty: Reinhabit, Rehydrate, Regenerate – Permaculture Designs for an Enduring Planet

 
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.

Sharkskin, Hippo Sweat and the Wood-Wide Web

 
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 with the radical growth of green chemistry.

Molecular Psychology: Good Chemistry with Nature’s Green Chemistry

 
Could Los Angeles stop draining water from the Colorado River and become self-sufficient? That’s a question that Andy Lipkis and his organization Tree People are tackling in an unprecedented alliance with public works agencies. Their work proves that the more we learn about how ecosystems operate, the more sustainably we can design our cities.

Connecting the Drops: Restoring Ecology and Social Ecology in Los Angeles

 
In a few decades, the U.S. can get completely off oil, as physicist Amory Lovins convincingly shows. Economist and anthropologist Jason Clay presents profitable examples of modeling nature’s economics, from clean shrimp farms in Asia to healthy potatoes in Wisconsin.

Aligning Business with Biology: Breakthrough Eco-nomics

 
John Todd, an ecological designer in the field of biomimicry, imitates nature’s evolutionary genius to serve human ends harmlessly, using nature’s processes as the design for buildings, technologies and practical solutions to environmental devastation. Educator David Orr suggests that true ecological design can take place only in a society willing to ask, “How would nature do it?”

Ecological Design: On the Ground and In the Water

 
Visionary architect Jason McLennan designed the Living Building Challenge 2.0 to raise the bar on green building: meet or exceed what nature provides. While the standards seem impossibly high, it may be simpler than we imagined.

Planting Buildings: The Living Building Challenge

 
Ecological Medicine

 

 
As we hurtle into the Sixth Age of Extinctions, we face the cataclysmic loss of half the world’s biological diversity. And 80% of the remaining biodiversity is on Indigenous lands. Ethnobotanist and Indigenous rights advocate Mark Plotkin of the Amazon Conservation Team tells us how scientists are helping protect the people who will protect the land, and the age-old wisdom that’s imperative for our future.

Shamans and Scientists: Changing the Landscape of Power

 
Climate disruption is harmful to your health. Dr. Linda Rudolph and Dr. Barbara Sattler are showing how our success or failure as a civilization may well hinge on how ingenious, nimble and socially just our public health systems can become in restoring the ecosystem health on which all health depends. And doing the right thing is good for our health.

Climate Health, Your Health: Prevention Is Protection

 
Our physical health is intimately tied to environmental health, as well as our emotional and spiritual ecology. Visionary physician Dr. Gabor Mate explores the psychological, emotional and social forces leading to our society’s poor health and unhappiness. He says we have the capacity to heal ourselves and the planet by reconnecting with our true nature as empathic, nurturing, social beings.

Inner Resilience: Back to Our True Nature

 
World-renowned psychiatrist Dr. James S. Gordon has trained thousands of teachers globally to advance ancient mind-body healing techniques of self-care to reconnect each individual with his or her own nature, with family and community, and with the natural world.

Taking a Breath: Healing the Inner Environment

 
Did medicine’s separation from nature propel our health care system into its current crisis? Join Dr. Andrew Weil and nurse and health activist Charlotte Brody as they describe how Ecological Medicine reunites the interdependence of medicine and nature, and restores the feminine principle in healing.

Ecological Medicine: Healing Health Care

 
Ecology is the superb art of interdependent relationships. Author and physicist Fritjof Capra, Native American educator Jeannette Armstrong, and medical researcher Jeanne Achterberg describe the complex and interconnected relationships inherent in living systems that can help heal our environment, our societies, and us.

The Art of Relationships: From Ecology to Healing

 
It’s a fact of life that communities of color and low-income communities suffer the worst environmental damage. Urban planner Greg Watson, physician Martha Arguello, and activist and scholar Carl Anthony show how these communities have found practical ways to reclaim the health and well-being of both their places and their health.

Race and Place: A Birthright to Creation

 
There is a fundamental need to restore a female perspective to the male-dominated world of science. Is it any accident that the first person to sound the alarm about chemical pollution was Rachel Carson? Environmental health advocate Charlotte Brody suggests that female scientists may lead us toward a new and healthy approach to the connections between human health and the health of the planet.

Just Like a Woman: Nature, Chemicals and the Feminization of Science

 
Ecologist, author and mother Sandra Steingraber is betting that the burgeoning global environmental human rights movement will free us from our deadly dependency on toxic chemicals. She believes our grandchildren will look back on us and marvel that our economy was once dependent on them – and they will think of it as unthinkable.

Becoming a Habitat: Motherhood, Faith and the Environmental Human Rights Movement

 
Environmental Education
 
Join ecoliteracy leaders David Orr and Dr. Anthony Cortese and young educational social entrepreneur Jess Rimington for an inspiring teach-in on how educators and students are creating a living curriculum for an engaged society that’s solving problems while studying them.

Education for Action: Reinventing Everything

 
Fritjof Capra, co-founder of the Center for Ecoliteracy, and leading environmental educators Cheryl Charles and David Orr explore what’s working for the A+ schools that are successfully integrating ecological awareness, understanding and practices through the curriculum and the community.

Eco Schools: Educating for Sustainable Communities

 
Does our very survival now depend on our ability to understand the facts of life – nature’s operating instructions – and how to live by them? Join the Center for Ecoliteracy’s Fritjof Capra, Zenobia Barlow and Esther Cook to learn how experiential, participatory education in the environment is revolutionizing education from kindergarten through high school through an education of the heart.

A Sense of Wonder: Ecological Literacy and the Facts of Life

 
Food and Farming

 

 
Small farmers around the world are building an agro-ecological revolution based on self-sufficiency, food security, and freedom from fossil fuels and corporate control. Featuring agroecologist and entomologist Miguel Altieri, and “Sistema Bio” founder Alex Eaton.

Tribe of the New Flame: The Agroecology Revolution

 
Pathfinding ocean farmer Bren Smith has cultivated a breakthrough method of near-shore aquaculture called 3-D Ocean Farming, which has the potential 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.

3-D Ocean Farming: Making a Living on a Living Planet

 
Calla Rose Ostrander and John Wick of the Marin Carbon Project are helping to revolutionize farming, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it back where it belongs: in the soil. Scaling up revolutionary regenerative methods like these can offset the climate destabilization, which that threatens to confound agriculture and endanger our food supply.

Vice to Virtue: From Carbon Crisis to Carbon Farming

 
Community activists Malik Kenyatta Yakini and Oran Hesterman are transforming Detroit through urban agriculture and helping low-income and working families access healthy food. Cathryn Couch works with young people to cook and deliver healthy meals to people who are ill and struggling to put food on the table with a model program using food as medicine.

Nourishing the Future: Creating a Just and Healthy Food System for All

 
In the next 20 years, farmland ownership in the U.S. will shift on a continental scale—400 million acres. Yet 70% of American farmland is owned by people 65 and older. How can we help young, motivated agrarians become successful farmers to whom retiring organic farmers can transmit their wisdom? Greenhorns founder Severine v T Fleming has some answers.

Next Gen Farmers: A Land-Loving Story

 
Our food and farming systems may top the list of the most destructive abuses of land in history. What needs to change? What models are there to guide us? Visionary organic farmer and award-winning writer/ photographer Michael Ableman reflects on what it will take to restore healthy thriving lands and a functional and equitable food system with access for all.

Passing Through: Farming Fields of Dreams

 
How can a grocery store lift a community out of poverty? The People’s Grocery provides creative solutions to community health problems that stem from a lack of access to and knowledge about healthy, fresh foods. Food justice leader Nikki Henderson brings heart, soul and love to community health and wealth for West Oakland, California.

Flavors of a Whole Community: Recipes for Food Justice

 
Urban food innovators are designing vibrant local food economies built on ecological integrity, sustainability, diversity and equity. Join author Michael Pollan, Fair Food Foundation CEO Oran Hesterman, faith-based change-maker James Ella James and student leader Victoria Carter for a smorgasbord of nourishing morsels from the locavore movement.

Going Locavore: Urban Food Innovation and Community Transformation

 
Join master permaculture designers Darren J. Doherty and Brock Dolman for both practical and poetic ways to re-educate earthlings in soil and water literacy.

Reinhabit, Rehydrate, Regenerate – Permaculture Designs for an Enduring Planet

 
Biotech companies are radically altering plants and releasing self-replicating genetic pollution into the natural world. Farmer Percy Schmeiser, technology expert Andrew Kimbrell, and Native American professor and farmer John Mohawk explore the implications of genetic engineering on the food we eat, the farmers who raise our food, the natural world and society.

The Trojan Gene: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Nature

 
Indigeneity       

 

 
In this program, powerful Native women leaders reveal the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and describe how they are taking action and building growing movements, including with non-Native allies.

No More Stolen Sisters: Stopping the Abuse and Murder of Native Women and Girls

 
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’re working to abolish racism in schools.

We’re a Culture, Not a Costume: Fighting Racism in Schools

 
A new generation of First Nations activists is working to 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 Romero, from the Mohave-based Chemehuevi Tribe.

The Path Home: Restoring Native Lands and Traditional Knowledge

 
From the Canadian tar sands to the oil and natural gas fields of North America and the Amazon jungle, Indigenous peoples of the North and South are converging in one struggle. With: Woman Stands Shining, Patricia Gualinga, Crystal Lameman, Eagle Woman, and Eriel Deranger.

Indigenous Women Rising: Upholding the Hoop of Life

 
Oren Lyons, Leslie Gray and John Mohawk remind us of the values that sustained people for thousands of years in a balance that supported the land.

Value Change for Survival – All My Relations

 
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. With fire ecologists Chad Hanson and Frank Kanawha Lake.

Nature’s Phoenix: Fire As Medicine

 
The way we see the world creates the world. If a new way of seeing is needed, what might that look like? Indigenous leaders Dakota-Dine Tom Goldtooth, Anishnabe Winona LaDuke, Aleut Ilarion Merculief and The White Buffalo Souldiers conjure a new paradigm that begins with a change of heart.

Mending the Earth: One Team and Everybody Wins

 
In the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, the Surui people elected Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui to ask for help to bring his people back from the brink of extinction and save their precious rainforest. A collaboration with Google Earth Outreach manager Rebecca Moore helped map a next world that marries the best of tradition and conservation with the best of high technology.

From Bows and Arrows to Laptops: Marrying Traditional Knowledge with Web Technology

 
In today’s radically shifting world, resilience arises from building community – enduring relationships and networks that hold cultural memory in the same way seeds regenerate a forest after a fire. Indigenous leaders Ilarion “Larry” Merculieff and Guadalupe Avila come from old-growth cultures that have sustained community over centuries and millennia.

Beloved Community: Hello, My Other Self

 
The Original Instructions represent the ancient empirical wisdom of Traditional Ecological Knowledge earned over generations and millennia by people living closely with the land and each other. Indigenous leaders Winona LaDuke, John Trudell and Evon Peter voice these ancient instructions, which hold the keys to our survival.

Becoming Fully Human: The Covenant of the Original Instructions

 
Justice            

 
Valarie Kaur says to overcome racism and nationalism, we must not succumb to rage and grief; Social movements must be grounded in an ethic of love.

Laboring For Justice: See No Stranger

 
The biological truth is that human health is dependent upon the health of nature’s ecosystems and our social structures. Social medicine dismantles harmful social structures and builds new ones that promote health and healing.

Social Medicine: Restoring Public Health by Changing Society | Dr. Rupa Marya

 
In times of massive disruption and economic stress, the “shadow side of the psyche” comes into play: the psychological tendency in the collective psyche is to project these shadow qualities onto whomever people see as “the other.” But is there also a deeper story? Heather McGhee of Demos sees a direct connection between today’s extreme inequality and this peak moment of racial panic and white anxiety.

Who Is an American? Is Our Democracy As Unequal As Our Economy?

 
Donald Trump’s exclusionary agenda has initiated an awakening that various social justice movements and struggles are actually connected in one story. Visionary law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw shows that it’s only at the crossroads of our many identities that we’ll find a story big enough to embrace the diversity and complexity of our globalized 21st century world.

Backlash Moment: Converging at the Crossroads of Identity and Justice

 
Today, 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.

Raced and Classed: The Journey From Diversity to Equity

 
When we allow our hearts to be broken open by hearing the stories of our fellow human beings, we build community and compassion. Sister Simone Campbell, one of the most renowned figures in contemporary faith-based progressive activism, is touring the country with other rebel Nuns on the Bus, bridging divides, transforming politics and keeping the faith.

Spirit in Action: Three Virtues for the 21st Century

 
From nature’s viewpoint, people are one species. Race, class, nation, religion and even many gender roles are human constructs. Yet the world is riven by exploitation and violence driven by these perceived divisions. john a. powell and Manuel Pastor show how to build effective movements to overcome these divisions.

Circles of Concern: The Secret Sauce of Social Movements

 
From oil refinery accidents in California to the aftermath of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf South, leaders Pennie Opal Plant and Colette Pichon Battle are on the frontlines, organizing their communities to stop the harms of the extraction economy and climate disruption. Activist-attorney Adrianna Quintero is making sure the voices of those most affected are heard helping awaken the “sleeping giant” of Latino voters.

Fire in the Belly: Women Leading Social Change

 
World-renowned feminist, writer and change-maker Gloria Steinem connects the dots among disparate social movements to reveal the common patterns of oppression that underlie them all. She weaves a unifying vision of a richly human and humane world where all people are valued for their uniqueness and full humanity.

Escaping Control: Linking Gender, Social Movements and Democracy

 
Roxanne Brown, Assistant Legislative Director for the United Steelworkers, and Charlotte Brody, BlueGreen Alliance Director of Chemicals, Public Health and Green Chemistry, portray the societal transformation underway as workers and environmentalists find common ground and acknowledge their differences.

Good Jobs, Clean Environment: Both or Neither

 
What’s it like to be in someone else’s skin? What might happen when the descendants of a white slave trader and of black people who were enslaved meet? That is the brave and wrenching journey embraced by Thomas DeWolf, whose white ancestors were once the nation’s biggest slave traders, and Belvie Rooks and Dedan Gills, descendants of African people who were enslaved.

From Slavery to Stardust: What Would Healing Look Like?

 
There is a growing movement to redefine manhood, and to address ways that violence is baked into our cultural expectations of masculinity. Activist, writer and public speaker Kevin Powell boldly and bravely discusses his experiences with toxic masculinity and his journey to redefine what it means to be a man.

Climbing Out Of The Man Box: What Does Healthy Manhood Look Like?

 
Media            

 
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 magazine, and Amy Goodman, host and executive producer of Democracy Now!

When Truth Is Dangerous: The Power of Independent Media

 
Women’s truths, perspectives and voices have been largely missing from the global conversation, but that is beginning to change as women awaken to their purposes and power. Journalist Rose Aguilar, biologist Sandra Steingraber, and reproductive justice advocates Vanessa Daniel and Eveline Shen – share their stories of how the leadership of women is changing the story and the world.

Women Changing the Story: Mother Bears, Polar Bears and Women’s Leadership

 
Digital and media entrepreneurs Jensine Larsen and William Ryerson effectively use innovative media for social change. Digital citizen diplomats Joshua S. Fouts and Rita J. King design virtual games that help foster vibrant community and culture in the physical world. They’re all demonstrating the game-changing power of technology to change the world for the better.

From Soap Operas to Avatars: Digital Diplomacy and Making Fiction into Fact

 
Journalist and radio broadcaster Thom Hartmann reminds us that until recently the media were part of the commons, protected by government for the public good. Executive producer and host of Democracy Now! Amy Goodman says that how the media uses the public airwaves is up to us.

Unembedding the Media: Going Where the Silence Is

 
How can we reclaim the voices of those who have been historically written out? Join media innovator Jensine Larsen and feminist historian Sally Roesch Wagner as they share the emerging landscape of an inclusive, sustainable and just society at whose heart is the leadership of women.

Sisters in Spirit: Women Transforming the World

 
A brave new wave of activists such as Brad Friedman, John Stauber and Joan Blades are using digital media to restore the democratic lifeblood of a people’s media. They’re giving voice to the voiceless, checking and balancing corruption, and providing liberty and access for all.

Digital Democracy: The Cyberworld of Citizen Activism

 
Nature, Culture and Spirit       

 

 
Suzanne Simard is a revolutionary researcher who is transforming the science of forest ecology and coming full circle to the wisdom held by First Peoples and traditional land-based cultures from time immemorial.

Forest Wisdom, Mother Trees and the Science of Community

 
They say love means never having to say you’re sorry. But what if 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?

The Apology: Love Means Having to Say You’re Sorry

 
Valarie Kaur says to overcome racism and nationalism, we must not succumb to rage and grief; Social movements must be grounded in an ethic of love.

Laboring For Justice: See No Stranger

 
Acclaimed author, naturalist and activist Terry Tempest 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 the source of our authentic power comes from.

Erosion and Evolution: Our Undoing is Our Becoming

 
In this program, acclaimed journalist Michael Pollan shares a travelogue of his reportorial and personal journey with psychedelics. He asks: could the transformational healing that psychedelics can bring on the personal ego level translate into cultural healing that could address the greatest issues of our time?

The Reluctant Psychonaut: How Psychedelics Changed Michael Pollan’s Mind

 
Can we know what it’s like to be other-than-human? How can we see into the minds of animals? Visionary naturalist, author and conservationist Carl Safina says that the first step is paying attention and observing. And, he suggests, if we had humility, we’d have everything.

Under the Skin We’re All Kin: Reading the Minds of Animals

 
Are plants intelligent? If we knew their language what might they tell us? Potawatomi Indigenous ecologist and author Robin Kimmerer and evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano merge Traditional Ecological Knowledge with Western science for a surprising trip into the minds of mosses and chili seeds and the songs of corn.

Nature’s Intelligence: Interviewing The Vegetable Mind

 
Writer, naturalist and activist Terry Tempest Williams asks “Can we love ourselves, each other and the Earth enough to change?” She invokes our deepest humanity to honor and protect the wilderness that’s the cauldron of evolution – and of our own imagination. “Our power lies in the love of our homelands,” she tells us in this eloquent, heartfelt tour-de-force.

A Love That Is Wild: Why Wilderness Matters in the 21st Century

 
“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do, then how would I be and what would I do?” asked visionary designer Buckminster Fuller. Buckminster Fuller Institute Board President David McConville says our view of the universe profoundly shapes our future as a species, and it’s changing radically.

Cosmomimicry: We’re The Universe Mattering

 
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.

Is Nothing Sacred? A Spiritual Response to the Ecological Crisis

 
As the naturalist Aldo Leopold observed, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” Either harden your shell, or be a doctor. Joanna Macy decided to be an Earth doctor. A systems theorist, author and lifelong activist, she describes how healing the world and healing your heart and soul go hand in hand.

Inalienable: Belonging to the Earth Community

 
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.

Church Without a Roof: Keeping the Faith with Creation Care

 
“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.

Hanging On: Treetop Truths in Disruptive Times

 
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.

Why the World Doesn’t End: Recreation Myths of Nature and Culture

 
Restoring Ecosystems       

 
Plastic pollution is now found in virtually every living organism – including humans – and is one of the worst threats to ocean ecosystems. A global resistance movement is rising to abolish petrochemical plastics and to shift to a zero-waste, circular economy.

Plastic Planet: Stopping Big Oil, Big Plastic, and Big Misdirection

 
With climate-driven disasters becoming the new normal, communities around the world are developing models of resilience out of practical necessity. Join Estrella Santiago Perez and Trathen Heckman for on-the-ground stories from two different communities building resilience in the wake of serial disasters.

Community Resilience: When the Love in the Air Is Thicker than the Smoke

 
Powerful analytical and mapping tools are transforming our understanding of the natural world – and with it, our ability to meaningfully conserve, protect and restore our collective home – the biosphere.

Radical Transparency: Mapping the Earth from the Ground to the Cloud

 
As lion populations crash in Africa, baboon numbers explode. Associate Professor of Ecology and Conservation Justin Brashares illuminates how to stem the cascading harms of nature out of balance. Visionary author Mary Ellen Hannibal recounts inspiring stories of citizen scientists restoring health to “the spine of the continent” from Alaska to Mexico by connecting nature back to itself.

Don’t Fence Me In: Linked Landscapes, Citizen Science and Wild Nature

 
Saving the Amazon Forest – the lungs of the planet – is crucial. Amazon Watch founder Atossa Soltani has supported local indigenous peoples to protect the rainforest and their lifeways. Legendary rainforest champion Marina Silva, Brazil’s past Minister of the Environment and Presidential candidate, offers deep wisdom and vision.

Amazon Visions: Saving the Heart of the Planet

 
As we hurtle into the Sixth Age of Extinctions, we face the cataclysmic loss of half the world’s biological diversity. And 80% of the remaining biodiversity is on Indigenous lands. Ethnobotanist and Indigenous rights advocate Mark Plotkin tells us how scientists are helping protect the people who will protect the land, and the age-old wisdom that’s imperative for our future.

Shamans and Scientists: Changing the Landscape of Power

 
Do rivers, mountains, whales – or ecosystems – have inalienable rights that guarantee their interests? Join innovative environmental attorneys Thomas Linzey and Mari Margil for breakthroughs on the ground that are redefining democracy. In the 21st century, is it time to move from a Declaration of Independence to a Declaration of Interdependence?

Earth Justice: Corporate Rights vs The Rights of Nature

 
A new generation of First Nations activists is working to 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 Romero, from the Mohave-based Chemehuevi Tribe.

The Path Home: Restoring Native Lands and Traditional Knowledge

 
Visionary primatologist and conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall revolutionized primatology and helped us realize how close our kinship is with the animal kin-dom. Her compelling vision in action to restore people, animals and planet is delivering real hope.

Tears in the Eyes, Rainbow in the Heart: Dr. Jane Goodall’s Reasons for Hope

 
Filmmaker-turned-ecological-restorer John Liu shifted from documenting China’s massive environmental and societal upheavals to filming a groundbreaking, large-scale ecosystem restoration. Prioritizing nature’s ecological functions above producing goods and services, the groundbreaking work is spreading to other nations.

Working With Nature to Heal Nature: Landscapes of Hope

 
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, students, businesses, artists and churches.

Ripples of Community Resilience: Small Acts, Big Change

 
Wilderness is always underfoot—the complex systems underlying life on Earth that we barely understand. It’s our guardianship to understand traditional and indigenous knowledge of Earth as a vast, cultivated landscape. Land managers such as Miguel Santistevan, Lani Malmberg and Peter Warshall celebrate the fact that we are all gardeners.

Jaguars, Goats and Acequias: Cultivating the Landscape of a Wild Earth

 
Women’s Leadership       

 

 
What does it mean to bring the “feminine” forward in leadership from diverse cultural and ethnic perspectives? With poet Noris Binet; Nikki Silvestri, former Executive Director of Green for All and The People’s Grocery; and Pat McCabe, or Woman Stands Shining, a Navajo teacher working on Indigenous frameworks for gender and all of life.

Leading From the Feminine: Keepers of the Cradle of Life

 
Today’s next wave of the women’s movement might finally make the Equal Rights Amendment a reality, which would drive total equality and justice for women into the U.S. Constitution. With: leading advocates Joan Blades (MomsRising co-founder), attorney Kimberle Crenshaw and Jessica Neuwirth (ERA Coalition President).

Equal Rights Amendment: Time’s Up

 
Women are coming together to heal in community, with hands in the soil, in one of the most broken places on the planet, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Playwright and feminist Eve Ensler and master permaculturist Brock Dolman tell the hopeful story of the Congo’s V-Day Farm.

City of Joy: From Pain to Power         

 
Through reframing classic mythologies, we explore the resurgence of the archetypal feminine and its relationship to nature through a multicultural lens, with Jean Shinoda Bolen, author and Jungian therapist; Luisah Teish, author and priestess in the Ifa Orisha tradition; Sri Swamini Svatmavidyananda, teacher of Hindu Vedanta philosophy.

Archetypes in Every Woman: Renaissance of the Feminine

 
How can we reclaim the voices of those who have been historically written out? Join media innovator Jensine Larsen and feminist historian Sally Roesch Wagner as they share the emerging landscape of an inclusive, sustainable and just society at whose heart is the leadership of women.

Sisters in Spirit: Women Transforming the World

 
From the Canadian tar sands to the oil and natural gas fields of North America and the Amazon jungle, Indigenous peoples of the North and South are converging in one struggle. Five Indigenous women of the North and South are showing us how to keep fossil fuels in the ground and uphold our part of the hoop of life.

Indigenous Women Rising: Upholding the Hoop of Life

 
What will it take to begin to heal the deep wounds between women and men? What is the role of men in this transformation? Cynthia Brix and Will Keepin from Gender Reconciliation International say that only by bringing these wounds into the light can we heal them. Patriarchy destroys men’s souls, too, so a revolution in gender relations can liberate women and men.

The Marriage of the Sun and Moon: The Truth and Reconciliation of Gender

 
From oil refinery accidents in California to the aftermath of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf South, leaders Pennie Opal Plant and Colette Pichon Battle are on the frontlines, organizing their communities to stop the harms of the extraction economy and climate disruption. Activist-attorney Adrianna Quintero is making sure the voices of those most affected are heard helping awaken the “sleeping giant” of Latino voters.

Fire in the Belly: Women Leading Social Change

 
This conversation among diverse women leaders provides a fascinating window into the soulful depths of what it means to restore the balance between our masculine and feminine selves to bring about wholeness, justice and true restoration of people and planet. Join Alice Walker, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Nina Simons, Sarah Crowell, Joanna Macy and Akaya Windwood.

They Don’t Call Her Mother Earth for Nothing: Women Reimagining the World

 
Youth             

 
Youth movements are rising to restore people and planet. Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, hip-hop artist and Youth Director of Earth Guardians, De’Anthony Jones, a former President of the Environmental Students Organization at Sacramento State, and Chloe Maxmin, co-founder of Divest Harvard, say there’s no better time to be born than now because this generation gets to rewrite history.

Youth Solutionaries: Future Present

 
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 Anim Steel. They’re reinventing a “radical patriotism” founded in a return to local agriculture and community.

Radical Patriotism: Growing Growers and Seeding Leaders for a Real Food Future

 
Oakland, California, has had the reputation of being one of the most dangerous cities in the country. Then the Restorative Justice movement started boldly showing how quickly that reputation can be turned around by arresting the cycle of youth violence and incarceration early: in schools and juvenile justice policies. With: Fania Davis and Cameron Simmons.

Restorative Justice: From Harm to Healing

 
Dynamic young people are surmounting social and economic obstacles by following their dreams to create a better world. Jessica Rimington, Rhummanee Hang, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Manuel Francisco, Caleb Ryen, Amalia Anderson, and Lily Dong are enlivening the horizon of positive possibilities with grace, courage and boundless creativity.

Making Tomorrow Today: The Power of Youth

 

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