Kevin Powell – Re-defining Manhood: A Message to Men, to Boys, to Us All

In this brutally honest and provocative talk, Kevin Powell offers his own life journey to illustrate how we can transform our concepts of manhood. Raised by a single mother in the inner city, Kevin’s rites of passage were typical of many heterosexual males: sports, violence, and viewing women and girls as mother figures or sexual objects, and nothing more. This view of women and girls exploded when, in his early 20s, he pushed a girlfriend into a bathroom door during an argument. Decades later, thanks to years of therapy, study, healing, and a commitment to growth and change, Kevin has become a solution-oriented writer, activist and speaker seeking to re-define manhood around nonviolence, peace, love, healthy self-expression, and as an ally to women and people of all gender identities.

Introduction by Nina Simons, Bioneers Co-Founder and Chief Relationship Strategist.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. Read the full text version.

To find out more about Kevin Powell and his work, please visit his website.

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Rebecca Moore – Google Earth and Using Big Data to Map Solutions

Google Earth Outreach founder and visionary engineer Rebecca Moore says the signs are all around us, telling us that our life-support systems are in critical condition, and only recently has it become possible to monitor the health of Earth’s life-sustaining resources in a manner both globally consistent and locally relevant. She’s showing how satellite data, cutting-edge science and powerful cloud computing technology such as Google Earth Engine allow us to achieve an unprecedented understanding of our changing environment and put this data into the hands of those who can take action. Combined with Google Earth’s new narrative storytelling tool, grassroots activists, communities and other environmental change-makers can now vividly show what’s at stake, and envision solutions in ways that can change hearts and minds, while guiding wiser decision-making to protect and restore our vast, fragile planet.

Introduction by Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers CEO and Co-Founder.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. Read the full text version.

To learn more about Rebecca Moore and her work, visit Google Earth Outreach.

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Ashton Applewhite – We Are All Aging, So Let’s End Ageism

What’s a surefire way to make activism more effective? Make it intergenerational. What’s the biggest obstacle? An ageist culture that pits old against young and bombards us with messages that wrinkles are tragic and old people useless. Aging is not a problem to be “fixed” or a disease to be “cured.” It’s a natural lifelong process that unites us all, and a world that’s better to grow old in is better for everyone.

Debunking myth after myth about late life, author and activist Ashton Applewhite passionately urges us to come together at all ages – and dismantle ageism in the process.

Introduced by Nina Simons, Bioneers Co-Founder and Chief Relationship Strategist.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. To learn more about Ashton Applewhite and her work, visit This Chair Rocks.

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Michael Pollan – Psychedelics and How to Change Your Mind

Bestselling author of landmark books that have challenged our fundamental civilizational assumptions, such as “The Botany of Desire” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, Michael Pollan once again bravely ventures where angels fear to tread.

His new book “How To Change Your Mind” surveys the highly controversial terrain of the renaissance of both the science and popular usage of psychedelic substances. As one of our most brilliant and clear-eyed explorers of such topics as plant intelligence and how we feed ourselves, Michael will share his luminous insights from what began as investigative reportage and became a very personal interior journey into the mystery of consciousness and the nature of spirituality at this perilous moment when only a shift in human consciousness can alter the deadly trajectory of our societies.

Introduction by Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers CEO and Co-Founder.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

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Explore our Visionary Plant Consciousness & Psychedelics media collection.

Jayden Lim – My Culture Is Not a Costume

Award-winning young Pomo activist Jayden Lim of the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center’s Tribal Youth Ambassadors program illuminates the hidden history of California and how she has had to grapple with stereotypes and historical trauma to find her identity as a Native youth.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. Read the full text version.

To learn more about Jayden and her work, visit the The California Indian Museum and Cultural Center.

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Rupa Marya – Health and Justice: The Path of Liberation through Medicine

Health visionary Rupa Marya, Associate Professor of Medicine at UC San Francisco and Faculty Director of the Do No Harm Coalition, urges us to radically re-envision and expand our concept of medicine to encompass and address the health impacts of poverty, racism and environmental toxicity.

Dr. Marya has been working to make visible the health issues at the nexus of racism and state violence through: her medical work; The Justice Study (national research investigating the health effects of police violence on Black, Brown and other disenfranchised communities); helping set up a free community clinic for the practice of decolonized medicine under Lakota leadership at Standing Rock (the Mni Wiconi Health Clinic); and international outreach with her band, Rupa and the April Fishes.

Introduction by Cat Brooks, Co-Founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project and Executive Director of the Justice Teams Network.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. Read the full text version.

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Thanks to Rupa Marya for allowing the use of the performance at the end of this talk, a song from her forthcoming album. Keep up with Rupa and the April Fishes here.

Gar Alperovitz – Replacing Corporate Capitalism: Why We Need a Next System

As ecological and economic justice movements hit the same hard limits of possibility, being realistic in our time in history means getting serious about what might have formerly been seen as impossible: actually replacing our broken corporate capitalist system. Gar Alperovitz, co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative and co-chair of its Next System Project, shows how we can begin to build together for the systemic change we need to save both democracy and the planet. As a political economist, author, former legislative director in the House and Senate, nonprofit innovator and scholar, Gar shares breakthrough models for community-based political-economic development and new institutions of community wealth ownership. He highlights local, state and national policy approaches to community stability in the era of globalization that really work and can spread widely.

Introduction by Kenny Ausubel.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. Read the full text version.

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To learn more about the work of Gar Alperovitz, visit The Next System Project.

Visit the Bioneers Green New Deal Media Collection.

2018 Destiny Arts Youth Performance

A performance by Oakland’s own incomparably dynamic and uplifting Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. To learn more about the work of Destiny Arts, visit their website.

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Third Annual Biomimicry Global Design Challenge Ray of Hope Prize

This annual competition was founded by the Ray C. Anderson Foundation and the Biomimicry Institute to stimulate biomimetic solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges. The winner of the prize, focused this year on climate change solutions, was announced and awarded on Bioneers’ main stage.

Introduction by Joshua Fouts, Bioneers Executive Director.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. To learn more about the work of the Biomimicry Institute, visit their website.

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Lyla June – Nihimá Nahasdzáán: Healing Women and Nature Through a Diné (Navajo) Lens

Lyla June — poet, musician, anthropologist, educator, public speaker and community organizer of Diné, Cheyenne and European lineages — has inspired audiences around the world with a message of personal, collective and ecological healing. Drawing from her studies in Human Ecology and the traditional ancestral Diné worldview with which she grew up, she’s exploring the links between environmental destruction and “rape culture” and how we can heal and transform ourselves and our society. Lyla delves into how the healing of women can unleash the healing of men and how we have to heal humanity to heal the Earth. She shares paradigm-shifting techniques from the heart of the hogan that help mend the broken heart of the Western world.

Introduction by Nina Simons, Bioneers Co-Founder and Relationship Strategist.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. To learn more about the work of Lyla June, visit her online.

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Edna Chavez – We Are The Future: Youth Leadership & Community Activism

This inspiring 18-year old activist from South Central Los Angeles, who has lost many friends and family members to gun violence, was a key participant in the March for Our Lives event and has become a leading gun control advocate and voter registration organizer.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. Read the full text version.

Patrisse Cullors – Women of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

Patrisse Cullors, a performance artist and award-winning organizer from Los Angeles, 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 LA’s Sheriff’s Department, but is most widely known as one of the three original co-founders of Black Lives Matter and for her recent, best-selling book, “When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir.”

In this talk, she explores the contributions women have made to the movement for Black lives historically and in the present; the institutional racism that still permeates our society, causing mass incarceration and high rates of maternal mortality in African-American communities; and the diverse ways women have been criminalized and have fought back to change the course of history.

Introduction by Sonia Sanjeeta Balajee, Founder and Creative Director of Our Bodhi Project. (Patrisse Cullors presentation begins at 5:00 in the video)

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. Read the full text version.

To learn more about the work of Patrisse Cullors, visit Black Lives Matter.

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