A handful of global business leaders are blazing trails to a biologically based “eco-nomics.” They are fundamentally recalculating core assumptions to allow business to make a fine living without killing the planet. Ray Anderson, leading-edge 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.
Game-Changing Climate Leadership: What Happens In California Doesn’t Stay in California
As one of the world’s ten largest economies, California is emerging as the potential game-changer for global climate leadership. Using strategic alliances and smart policies that integrate ecology, economy and justice, these climate leaders show how: Tom Hayden, lifelong activist and former California State Senator; Vien Truong, Environmental Equity Director, Greenlining Institute; Wade Crowfoot, Former Senior Advisor to Gov. Jerry Brown.
Find out more about the campaigns that Vien Troung and the Greenlining Institute are waging.
Nature’s Intelligence: Interviewing the Vegetable Mind | Robin Kimmerer and Monica Gagliano
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. They agree what we really need today is a revolution in values, an “Honorable Harvest” of gratitude and reciprocity with our plant kin.
Find out more about Robin Kimmerer and how you can engage with her campaigns and efforts by visiting her page on the College of Environmental and Forest Biology.
Find out more about Monica Gagliano and how you can engage with her campaigns and efforts by visiting her website.
City of Joy: From Pain to Power | Eve Ensler and Brock Dolman
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’s life-and-death struggle with cancer transformed her. At the heart of it was her reconnection with nature. She expanded her work to end violence against women and girls to include restoring nature and our relationship with nature. With master permaculturist Brock Dolman, she tells the hopeful story of the Congo’s V-Day Farm.
Find out more about Eve Ensler and how you can engage with her work by visiting her website.
Find out more about Brock Dolman and how you can engage with his campaigns and efforts by visiting Occidental Arts & Ecology Center.
Good Chemistry: Survival of the Most Compatible | John Warner
Nontoxic 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, says: “We’re learning to do everything we want to do without poisoning people or planet.” He’s showing how we can follow nature’s lead to create good chemistry with nature and our own health. The results are jaw-dropping.
Find out more about John Warner and how you can engage with his campaigns and efforts by visiting the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry.
Archetypes in Every Woman: Renaissance of the Feminine | Jean Shinoda Bolen, Luisah Teish, Sri Swamini Svatmavidyananda
Archetypal stories guide our lives in profound and largely unconscious ways. Through reframing classic mythologies, we explore the resurgence of the archetypal feminine and its relationship to nature through a multi-cultural 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.
Circles of Concern: The Secret Sauce of Social Movements | john a. powell and Manuel Pastor
From nature’s viewpoint, people are one species. Categories such as 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 at an epic moment of demographic change toward the U.S. becoming a majority minority nation. john a. powell, Director of U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, and Manuel Pastor, Director of the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at University of Southern California, show how to build effective movements to overcome these divisions and come together to solve the planetary emergency that threatens our common home.
Find out more about john a. powell and how you can engage with his campaigns and efforts by visiting the Berkeley Haas Institute.
Find out more about Manuel Pastor and how you can engage with his campaigns and efforts by visiting the USC Dornslife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Indigenous Women Rising: Upholding the Hoop of Life | Woman Stands Shining, Patricia Gualinga, Crystal Lameman, Eagle Woman, and Eriel Deranger
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. It is also the reconciliation of two different ways of knowing and being, between the head and heart, sometimes called The Eagle and The Condor. Five Indigenous women of the North and South are showing us how to keep fossil fuels on the ground and uphold our part of the hoop of life. With: Woman Stands Shining, Patricia Gualinga, Crystal Lameman, Eagle Woman, and Eriel Deranger.
See more from our Indigeneity Program >>
Next Gen Farmers: A Land-Loving Story | Severine v T Fleming
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? How can we invest in the democratization of our land base? These questions drive Agrarian Trust, started by Greenhorns founder Severine v T Fleming, one of the most visionary leaders in the young farmers movement.
Just Say No: Planet Hackers, Resistance Movements & Climate Justice | Naomi Klein & Clayton Thomas-Muller
Climate change is more than an “issue.” According to renowned author and activist Naomi Klein, “It’s a civilizational wake-up call delivered in the language of fires, floods, storms and droughts.” She says it demands that we challenge the dominant economic policies of deregulated capitalism and bottomless resource extraction. She describes the transnational Blockadia movement that’s opposing fossil fuels and warns about geo-engineering fantasies. 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.
Find out more about Naomi Klein and how you can engage with her campaigns and efforts by visiting her website.
Find out more about Clayton Thomas-Muller and how you can engage with his campaigns and efforts by visiting the Global Justice Ecology Project.
A Love That Is Wild: Why Wilderness Matters in the 21st Century | Terry Tempest Williams
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, and protecting the wild requires bringing democracy home.
Find out more about Terry Tempest Williams and how you can engage with her campaigns and efforts by visiting her website.
Youth Solutionaries: Future Present | De’Anthony Jones, Chloe Maxmin and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez
Youth movements are rising to restore people and planet. De’Anthony Jones, a former President of the Environmental Students Organization at Sacramento State, Chloe Maxmin, co-founder of Divest Harvard, and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, hip-hop artist and Youth Director of Earth Guardians, say there’s no better time to be born than now because this generation gets to rewrite history. It could be known as the generation that brought forth a healthy, just, sustainable world for every generation to come.