According to journalist, blogger, creative commons advocate, Electronic Frontier Foundation Fellow, and award-winning science fiction author Cory Doctorow, the fight for a free, fair and open Internet isn’t the most important fight on the planet, but you can’t win any of the other major battles without it. Although the internet is the nervous system of the 21st century, so far we have misunderstood and mismanaged it and made it susceptible to capture by the powerful and corrupt. Cory will share his strategies to reclaim the global lifeline that should belong to all of us.
Introduction by Joshua Fouts, Bioneers Executive Director.
This speech was given at the 2017 National Bioneers Conference.
This luminous 17-year-old Chiricahua Apache changemaker from San Carlos, AZ, co-leads the Apache Stronghold group to defend her people’s sacred sites, tribal sovereignty, culture and language.
Introduction by Alexis Bunten, Bioneers Indigeneity Program Manager.
This speech was given at the 2017 National Bioneers Conference.
Cultural Resilience to Strengthen Our Communities and Defend the Earth
Kandi Mossett (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara), Native Energy and Climate Campaign Organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), has emerged as a leading voice in the fight against environmental racism at Standing Rock and beyond. Kandi shares the powerful story of how her community drew on its cultural resilience to resist fracking in North Dakota, and how the re-assertion of tribal sovereignty, revitalization of language and restoration of traditional foodways can point the way to a just transition to a clean energy future for all of us.
Introduction by Cara Romero, Bioneers Indigeneity Program Director.
This speech was given at the 2017 Bioneers Conference.
Racialized violence injuries all of us – not just those who are being “othered” but also those who perpetuate that “othering.” These painful injuries happen on many levels, including on the individual, structural, and societal spheres, so healing must also happen on many levels, but we can’t truly heal these deep wounds while the injuries are still being perpetuated. Professor john a. powell, one of the world’s most important thinkers and scholars on civil and human rights, Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at U.C. Berkeley, explores how we can better understand the spaces we currently inhabit and strategize to co-create alternative spaces where real healing can truly begin. Introduction by Nina Simons, Bioneers co-founder.
This speech was given at the 2017 National Bioneers Conference.
As a primary architect of the globally significant 2016 Great Bear Rainforest Agreement, Jody dedicated 20+ years of her life to the insanely challenging, complex and ultimately successful struggle to protect the largest expanse of old-growth temperate rainforest in the world. This historic agreement formalizes a large-scale model for First Nations reconciliation and shared decision-making, ecologically responsible forestry, and absolute protection of 85% of the forest. Jody will explore how we can find durable solutions to our most “wicked” problems by examining the dynamics of power, gender, science and culture and by using tools drawn from whole systems thinking, innovative conflict resolution techniques and consensus decision-making.
Introduction by J.P. Harpignies, Bioneers Associate Producer. This speech was given at the 2017 National Bioneers Conference.
The stunningly beautiful Great Bear ecosystem, the largest coastal temperate rainforest on Earth (representing a quarter of all such remaining forest on the planet!), stretches along British Columbia’s coast north of Vancouver Island. The traditional territory of many First Nations who have lived there thousands of years, it has been called ‘Canada’s Amazon’ for its biodiversity and ancient trees. It teems with salmon, grizzly bears, wolves, and its totemic, rare white ‘spirit’ bear.
An epic decades-long struggle between Indigenous people, environmentalists and eco-conscious citizens on one side and the logging industry and its allies on the other included years of dramatic protests and civil disobedience and creative activism that included very savvy media campaigns and the strategic boycotting and picketing of retailers and companies in the U.S. using Canadian lumber. Those heroic struggles yielded results when all the stakeholders finally realized they had to come to the table. It took many more years of tough negotiating to hammer out a definitive, final agreement, but in the end the recently finalized historic deal marks an extraordinary moment in the annals of land preservation and offers an inspiring model for the entire planet.
A coalition of environmental organizations, First Nations communities, logging companies and the British Columbia Government were able to put aside their differences and listen to each other. They came to a very long-term, multi-generational agreement, based on groundbreaking “Ecosystem-based Management” principles that, among other stipulations, protects 85% of the 15-million acre forest, guarantees Indigenous peoples’ shared decision-making, and mandates ecologically responsible forestry.
Ecologist and Tsimshian native, Dr. Teresa Ryan shares from her training in Western scientific observation, insight into the relationships between tree roots and mycorrhizal fungi and marine-derived nitrogen that came from the bodies of spawned-out salmon that were defecated out by bears and eagles and otters, and even some people who eat that flesh of the fish in the forest, and fertilize the trees of the system to create and ingrain the webs of life below the deep green Pacific Northwest temperate rainforest.
Introduction by Brock Dolman, Director of Occidental Arts & Ecology Center WATER Institute.
This speech was given at the 2017 National Bioneers Conference.
When Donald Trump rode a wave of white anxiety into the White House, it was part of a backlash to the Obama presidency, one that revealed an increasingly explicit white nationalism and revived an overtly exclusionary agenda: roll back rights and protections for people of color, immigrants, Muslims, women, and gay and transgender people. Then came the backlash to the backlash: a rapidly spreading awakening that all these peoples, movements and struggles are actually connected in one story.
Visionary law professor and change-maker Kimberlé Crenshaw shows that it’s only at the crossroads of our many identities that will we will find a story big enough to embrace the diversity and complexity of our globalized 21st century world.
By developing vast, interconnected networks of great leaders and innovators year after year, Bioneers co-founders Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simons have tweaked the old adage, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” As the Bioneers community has proven time and again, it’s both what you know and who you know that matters.
Paul Stamets, world-renowned mycologist, author and founder of retailer Fungi Perfecti, credits Bioneers with growing his web of life-changing connections. And it is connections, both human and subterranean, that have formed the foundation of Stamets’ career.
A Biological Network
One of the world’s foremost fungi experts, Stamets has spent more than 40 years studying mushrooms and the intricate underground fungal networks called mycelium. Mycelium play an indispensable role in Earth ecosystems—supporting above-ground fungi but also decomposing organic matter, helping plants absorb nutrients and enabling trees in forests to communicate and share resources. Stamets’ research has enhanced our understanding of these networks, which he refers to as “Earth’s natural internet,” and he sees parallels between this work and the interconnected Bioneers community. He was first introduced to Bioneers in the ’90s when Simons and Ausubel discovered his research and invited him to his first Bioneers conference; a few years later, Stamets received the 1998 Bioneers Award from the Collective Heritage Institute.
“The Bioneers community is great at calling out leaders in their respective fields, many of whom are working independently and unaware of each other,” Stamets says. “By knitting us together as a community, Bioneers does something quite remarkable…Bioneers is creating this biological network of like-minded individuals with very different skillsets. The skillsets are highly complementary. It’s created a symbiosis that I think is leading to some paradigm-shifting changes for the good at a time when we desperately need big solutions.”
The Magic of Mushrooms
In Bioneers, Stamets found an ideal outlet through which to share his findings and connect with people who have inspired him in his work. These connections have helped him spread the word about his research and some of the truly magical and restorative capabilities of fungi.
Take, for example, Stamets’ experimentation with oyster mushrooms. Most home chefs are familiar with these mushrooms’ culinary value. But in the late 1990s, Stamets was able to show that they had incredible chemical-digesting capabilities, too. Recruited by a national laboratory searching for innovative ways to clean up environmentally devastating oil spills, Stamets covered chemical-laden soil with myceliated wood chips. Within weeks, oyster mushrooms coated the soil, which had returned to its normal color and odor and become a haven for birds and plants. Studies showed the soil had been largely decontaminated.
Stamets has also found some mushrooms to be a promising defense against smallpox and the flu and also effective in certain types of pest control. One of Stamets’ most promising projects is related to colony collapse disorder: the widespread death of honeybee colonies in recent years. Stamets’ research has found that feeding specific mushroom extracts to mite-infected honeybees reduced viruses and increased the bees’ lifespans. The USDA is reviewing commercial use of the extracts.
“Having this community of voices that are multicultural, multigenerational, it speaks to why the biodiversity of our cultures is so important,” Stamets says. “It’s really refreshing to meet so many people from different ethnic backgrounds and see that we have a lot more in common than our differences.”
The beloved actor and progressive elder shares the long view of how change happens, and how we’re called upon today as never before to reclaim our rights and responsibilities as citizens. From South Africa to Detroit and Birmingham, he scans the arc of justice and the convergence of the movements to restore nature, human dignity and a life lived artistically.
This speech was given at the 2013 Bioneers National Conference.
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