What it Means to Pay-It-Forward

You’ll notice a registration option this year called “Pay-It-Forward.” That 3-day ticket costs $795, about double what some of our Early Bird discounts costs for the same pass.

Why on earth would you pay more, you ask? It’s simple: to make sure everyone who is an active and engaged member of our community is not left out for lack of ability to pay.

The $795 cost is the actual amount it costs us per attendee to put on the conference each year. By choosing this ticket, you are helping us cover costs and enabling us to make lower-cost tickets available to an entire class of engaged and active citizens whose voices and perspectives are crucially important.

Bioneers is fundamentally a populist enterprise. Our vision is one of equity and respect for all. Bioneers began 27 years ago as a grassroots idea, little more than a room full of brilliant folks from numerous fields who we believed should know more about each others’ work and projects. That inclusive spirit remains as true today as it was two decades ago. We strive to make sure that the right people are in the room, regardless of ability to pay.

The value and quality of the Bioneers Conference is greater than that of events that charge double or triple what we do. For example, the Living Futures UnConference is $1,000, Social Capital Markets (SOCAP) is $1500, TED is upwards of $10,000 and invite-only. From a business perspective, this makes sense — high-quality events are expensive. But from a community, equity and activism perspective, it’s a dead end.

When you choose Pay-It-Forward, you allow us to shift resources to our large youth scholarship program (400+ annually), our work/trade program and our deeply subsidized Student, Educator and Low-Income Senior scholarship rates, not to mention the 200+ speakers to whom we provide no cost registration each year (the least we can do for them).

In keeping with the egalitarian and generous spirit that runs throughout our event, we are straightforwardly asking those who have the means to pay a higher rate (which is still a very good deal!).

When we launched this ticket category as an experiment in 2015, we had no idea what would happen. We were overjoyed to see how many people opted to Pay-It-Forward — foundations and businesses with event budgets sending employees, donors maintaining their support and many whom we met for the first time last year who simply saw the opportunity to engage at a level that they were comfortable with. We remain incredibly grateful for your support.

We hope that if you are willing and able, you’ll consider joining us to Pay-It-Forward in 2016.

Bioneers Youth: An Unstoppable Force

Leading youth activist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez facilitating a national organizing session at Bioneers 2015. Photo by Michelle Grambeau.

To us, the excitement among youth for Bioneers is perhaps the single biggest signal of health of our work and the organization. The 2015 Bioneers conference was a landmark for our Youth Leadership Program. Over 500 youth participated, about 20% of all participants. It marked a watershed moment.

In the early years after the program’s founding in 2001, we had to beg young people to come. Now we literally cannot keep up with the demand (sadly we had to turn away 300 more applicants last year). We deeply thank each of you who have helped make this momentous youth participation happen. Let’s make sure we don’t have to turn away so many more young people in 2016! What more important investment can we make?

As one example, take the story of Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, who first participated in Bioneers in 2014 and again in 2015, and has since become recognized as a global youth leader. Just in the past year, he has been at the forefront of a youth-led lawsuit against the federal government over climate change, which has repeatedly been upheld in federal and state courts, keynoted at the UN with Robert Redford, founded Rising Youth for a Sustainable Earth (RYSE), and the song he and fellow Earth Guardians wrote and performed was selected as the winner at the Paris Climate Summit!

Xiuhtezcatl not only performed and spoke at Bioneers – he offered to take a lead role in the Youth Tent where for two years he has inspired and supported hundreds of other youth to follow their activist paths. But what I did not know was the path that led him to this work.

When I interviewed Xiuhtezcatl last fall for the movie I’m making (Changing of the Gods: Planetary and Human Revolutions), he told the surprising story that you can hear in his own voice. When he was six years old, he saw Leonardo DiCaprio’s feature documentary The 11th Hour, for which I helped supply 30 bioneers as interview subjects who appear in the movie (I’m in it too.) The movie sparked an awakening that set him on his brilliant path as a change-maker and artist.

We often speak of Bioneers as broadcasting seeds, and you just never know where those seeds will land and find fertile ground. Our youth are the seeds of our future, and, as Xiuhtezcatl puts it, “I say, what better time to be alive than now because our generation gets to rewrite history. We get to change everything that we thought we knew about ourselves as people on this Earth. We get to change everything. And my generation gets to be at the forefront.”

We’re honored that Xiuhtezcatl will do a keynote at Bioneers 2016, as well as perform with his brother Izcuauhtli of Earth Guardians. We’re also thrilled that the 2015 “Youth Solutionaries” radio show (which features Xiuhtezcatl and other youth) won the Award of Excellence for radio in the global Communicator awards from over 6,000 entries!

What’s most unique about the Youth Leadership Program is its intergenerational mutual mentoring. After all, Bioneers is by its nature a community of mentors. The young people formally interact with wise, experienced visionary leaders, and the elders say they get even more than they give.

Let’s grow the 2016 Bioneers Youth Leadership Program into an unstoppable force in this world that so desperately needs the vision, voices and inspired leadership of our young people in an intergenerational partnership. Thank you!

Invest in Bioneers youth with a gift to the scholarship fund »

4 Ways We’re Focusing on Systems Change at Bioneers 2016

“Climate change is real, it is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating. We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people out there who would be most affected by this. For our children’s children, and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed.”

— Leonardo DiCaprio accepting 2016 Academy Award for Best Actor in The Revenant

This is a transformative moment in the history of Bioneers, and you — our community — are leading the revolution. In this moment of epic change, the time is now to amplify and extend our influence, to take our movement of movements and convert that energy into structural, systemic change.

For the 2016 conference, we’ve created four “meta-programs” that use the powerful conference platform and our related media to throw the high beams on priority areas and goals – and move the needle for real systemic change. As the sun in our Bioneers solar system, the conference both educates people and connects diverse issues and communities in catalytic ways that generate very wide ripples.

Read on for more about each of the four meta-programs and featured highlights.

Biomimicry & Biodiversity Conservation

One of the thrilling plans for the 2016 conference will be a focus on biomimicry and biodiversity conservation. Along with a keynote by Janine Benyus, the globally renowned biologist, author and co-founder of Biomimicry Institute and Biomimicry 3.8 consultancy, we’re deeply honored to host a very special event in partnership with the Biomimicry Institute and Ray C. Anderson Foundation: the inaugural “Ray of Hope” Biomimicry Global Design Challenge. The $100,000 prize will be given live on the main stage, and it’s for biomimicry food systems! The eight finalist competing teams will be present.

Biomimicry is about far more than clever inventions. It causes a fundamental shift in our worldview to see nature not as a physical “resource,” but as a teacher, model, metric and partnership in which we’re the junior partner. Our goal is to see biomimicry become the default position for design, industry, economy and culture by 2020.

We’ll also be doing leading-edge programs on conserving biodiversity in this mortifying Sixth Age of Extinctions. One crucial paradigm shift includes creating legal rights for nature, and Tom Linzey and Mari Margil will share their powerful work supporting local communities to do just that, while also revoking corporate rights. The globally acclaimed ethnobotanist, author and neotropical rainforest conservation advocate Mark Plotkin will illuminate the work of the  Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), which he co-founded in 1995 to protect the Amazonian rainforest in partnership with local Indigenous peoples. ACT has worked with 32 tribes throughout Amazonia, and helped conserve millions of acres of the “lungs of the planet” and its biocultural diversity.

Climate Leadership

As climate disruption escalates, climate leadership is paramount. We need to move to 100 percent renewables and put environmental justice at the center. We need to begin to draw carbon out of the atmosphere back down to 350ppm. We need to challenge and remake the corporate systems that are driving and sustaining the fossil fuel industry and overpowering democracy at every turn.

Our 2016 climate leadership meta-program will feature four diverse keynotes. Bill McKibben, perhaps the greatest activist on the planet today, will shed light on where the climate movement needs to go post-Paris. Solar entrepreneur extraordinaire Danny Kennedy, a founder of Sungevity, will interpret the economics of renewables and how to use business, policy and social movements to power the transformation. Vien Truong, executive director of Green For All, will share the groundbreaking California model that puts environmental justice at the center of policy to bring climate justice and a green economy to underserved communities and communities of color. The electrifying youth climate activist and eco hip-hop artist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez of Earth Guardians will bring to life the mushrooming youth climate movements sweeping the world today.

Gender Equity & Reconciliation

Another meta-program will highlight the leadership of women, gender equity and gender reconciliation as fundamental to all movements. We’ll focus intensively in coming years on both the vision and the practical applications for system change.

This year, Eve Ensler will do a performance as a keynote: one act from her new three-act play, “The Fruit Trilogy.” It’s spine-tingling! Iroquois leader Katsi Cook will speak to the feminine from an Indigenous perspective and as a midwife and network organizer. Will Keepin and Cynthia Brix from Gender Reconciliation International will share their breakthrough work which has reached the national level in South Africa, which engages men as well as women to deconstruct the patriarchy. The powerhouse poet-performers-activists of Climbing PoeTree, Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman, will bring alive their transformational work with women of color and marginalized communities.

We’re producing a suite of related programs that highlight critical policy initiatives including finally passing the Equal Rights Amendment and achieving pay equity for women.

Arts & Culture

Arts and culture are central to transformational change. Along with Eve Ensler’s performance, Xiuhtezcatl and his brother Itzcuauhtli Roske-Martinez will again rock the house, as well as Climbing PoeTree. London-based artist Louis Masai, who uses his work to highlight biodiversity challenges, will join us to do art live on the grounds with Bioneers youth leaders.

Erik Ohlsen: Money, Native Plants & Other Earth Repair Challenges

This is the fourth post in a Q&A series with longtime Bioneers community member Erik Ohlsen. To learn more about Erik’s work and approach to permaculture and activism, check out the links to other posts in the series below.   

David Holmgren said, “The philosophy behind permaculture is one with working with rather than against nature, of looking at systems in all their functions rather than just asking one yield of them, and allowing systems to demonstrate their own evolution.”  What does that mean to you?

It’s really important for humans to step back and allow the patterns of nature to unfold. Nature has a set of processes and systems already in place to do amazing things: provide clean air, clean water, shelter, structure and habitat, and manage climate. These are all major services that natural systems are already providing. Humans benefit incredibly by these natural processes.

Rather than intervening and disrupting those processes for short-term human gain, which is what the last few hundred years of the industrial revolution has been about, we’re taking an opportunity to really understand a particular system. And it’s really important to know that it’s different everywhere.

In Northern California, the way that our forests and meadows function, the way that our watersheds function is going to be very different than in the Southwest or very different than in Alaska or the Amazon. Because we can’t import the processes and functions of one ecosystem into another, it really calls us to step back and take the time to understand.

We’re never going to understand completely because nature is so complex and there are many patterns that won’t emerge for decades in a mature system.

It even relates somewhat to the whole debate around invasive plants versus native plants. That conversation only makes sense when you decide when we are. If we want to work with an ecology that’s moving towards some sort of historical native balance, at what point in time are we looking at? 100 years ago? 1,000 years ago? 10,000 years ago? Because systems are always changing and evolving.

What’s beautiful about looking at and understanding natural processes is that we get to see how some of the most important work on the planet gets done. How does carbon get sequestered in a pastoral system? How does water get filtered and cleaned in a coastal woodlands system? As we’re able to allow for these patterns to play out and for these ecological systems to evolve, that informs us as to how we relate to those systems and harness those powers.

Often we’re recreating systems that nature’s already doing for us for free, yet we’re recreating them through a degenerative process, using a lot of money and fossil fuel energy and exploitative labor practices, and all for a short period of time. Rather than separating the human construct of settlement from nature, Holmgren says we need to remember that we are nature, and that as we align with our regional-based ecosystems and we understand the processes and successions that are taking place there, we can fit ourselves back into the ecology in such a way where we can have abundance and resiliency without all the destruction that most human settlement creates.

This Bill Mollison quote is right in line with your work: “There is one and only one solution and we have almost no time to try it. We must turn all our resources to repairing the natural world and train all our young people to help. They want to. We need to give them the last chance to create forests, soils, clean waters, clean energies, secure communities, stable regions, and to know how to do it from hands-on experience.”

That’s what the Permaculture Skill Center is all about. I think that quote needs to land on our website. That is a great description of what we’re trying to do.

The beautiful thing is that all the technology to do that already exists. We know how to regenerate forests. We know how to regenerate pasture. We know how to create water resiliency and grow food locally and build shelters that are aligned with the energetic needs of the environment. We do have an amazing opportunity in the youth who are coming up who are vastly more advanced in their thinking around these things than even my generation was and many of the older generations.

So we have all of this opportunity, all of this technology, and all of this knowledge to implement that vision that Bill is laying out. And it’s absolutely vital. What’s missing? Why is it so difficult to get this vision implemented and to get these systems in place?

I’ll go back to my friend and mentor Brock Dolman and what he calls the “ego system,” what’s going on between our two ears. We’re not going to get there by just focusing on how to regenerate the forests or how to have water resiliency. We have all that technology and that’s great, but we’re only going to get there at the scale we need if we start applying the principles of permaculture and systems design to our social and economic systems. We need to change the ego system. We need to transform and compost the degenerative aspects of our economy.

That’s easy to say, and you can get very overwhelmed looking at the fossil fuel industry or the pharmaceutical industry, the military-industrial complex, and these large massive destructive forces on the planet. It can be very easy to feel a lot of grief and feel it’s not possible to make this vision come true, but I think that all those things are already in their collapse, and they’re already just hanging on by a thread.

I really believe in youth. The young generations are the ones who will be implementing the regenerative economy and will be inheriting a desolate, climate-changed planet. If we can focus on programs and opportunities to create pathways for them to learn the skills – because we already have the technology – and to engage in our communities, to know how to organize people and talk to decision makers and elected officials and staffers and corporations.

Sometimes our approach in activism — where we point to all the people doing the bad things and we tell them how bad and horrible they are — that can shoot us in the foot. We need to build relationships with people in power who are making decisions that affect so many people and landscapes on the planet. We’re not going to do that by yelling and screaming at them with hate, anger and grief. That’s not to say that these institutions aren’t to be held accountable, but as a movement our approach to implementing this needs to be filled with love and a sense of relationship and understanding.

We’re at the right time in our culture where we can compost the mistakes of the past and plant a new path forward that leads us to a repaired Earth.

Money is one language that will get us there. It’s so hard for me to say that because I spent so many years as an anti-capitalist in the global justice movement. To bring money into the conversation is always a little awkward for me, but there’s a lot of financial efficiency to be gained by repairing the planetary ecological systems. So I think this is how we get decision makers and people in positions in power on board. If we say, “Look, if you implement ecological efficiency models and you work in a reparative and regenerative rather than a degenerative way, you’re actually going to save money on some of your manufacturing and where you source material, and some of your hauling, and it becomes more energy efficient.” That all has a bottom line, so I actually think money is part of it.

Also, we still live in this money system, so it’s great and all to say, Let’s empower the youth to do these things, but they’re not going to get a lot done if they don’t have a warm place to go to bed at night; they’re not going to get a lot done if they can’t get healthy meals and have what they need to stay healthy and safe. So I really think it’s time to look at this from a socioeconomic point of view as the missing piece to a larger design for Earth repair.

How are we going to develop social and economic systems that empower the ecological regeneration that is so needed? It’s a design challenge that I put out there to the world and the community, how we organize ourselves in our economy to align with Earth repair.

Read the Full Series with Permaculturist Erik Ohlsen

Erik Ohlsen: California’s Drought as Permaculture Opportunity

The Ohlsen homestead features over 100 food and medicinal plants, and captures hundreds of thousands of gallons of water.

This is the third in a Q&A series with longtime Bioneers community member Erik Ohlsen. To learn more about Erik’s work and approach to permaculture and activism, check out the links to other posts in the series below.   

One of the main principles of permaculture is that the problem is the solution. Can you cite an example of how you use that principle in your personal or professional life?

In the landscape we do it every day. For instance, you have a lot of people out there, folks who have money, who want to put in landscapes.  They want beauty and aesthetic, and to walk around their home and landscape and be in awe. One of the ways we’ve leveraged that aesthetic need is by developing a design service through Permaculture Artisans that meets the aesthetic needs of clients while at the same time almost seamlessly and unnoticed, if necessary, developing massive water harvesting systems, carbon sequestering plant soil-building systems, and sustainable forestry systems for clients with a forest landscape.

Last year the market for landscaping was $72 billion in the United States, much of which is lawns and high-end landscapes. We identify the land-use problem — the way people design and build landscapes in a non-ecological way — and turn that into a land-use opportunity. We are seeing a change in a trend in the way people are looking at landscape, especially as the effects of climate change hit hard in California and other places. Often people think, “Well, I guess I just need to have nothing; I need to have xeriscaping or all drought-tolerant plants,” and while these could be great ways to save water, you can also have a bigger impact by not only having water conservation, but also actually harvesting the water that does come and being able to create abundance from that.

This is part of how we educate our clientele and our market by changing the frame of how we look at some of the issues facing California. I like to tell people that

while we are in a drought, we need to frame it a bit differently and understand that one of the things we really have is a runoff crisis, and that’s something that we have the ability to do something about.

If we adjust our view of the drought in California, we can see a lot of opportunity to start developing real water resiliency in our communities, and in our landscapes.

That leads to people calling us because their wells run dry and they need a rainwater catchment system. They don’t have any knowledge of permaculture, they’re not necessarily ecologically minded, but their well has run dry. That’s what gets them started. Once they go down that road and we start designing and installing water harvesting systems, then we say, by the way, if you plant these plants, you will be harvesting lemons every day, you’ll have Monarch butterflies visit you. So we can start turning people on to biodiversity and local food production. That really came out of this crisis moment.

“The problem is the solution” is almost like an aikido approach that will really help move the needle from degenerative consumption and degenerative land use towards locally-based production and consumption.

When you go to a site, how do you read the landscape to understand what that land wants and what’s possible there?

The first thing that I do is try to erase any knowledge I have of anything. I don’t believe all permaculturalists do this, and it’s something that’s sort of a quality approach that some of us are working on. When we go to a new site, we don’t want to walk in there and impose our idea of what it should be. I want to be as open and curious as possible as to the patterns I see on the landscape, the natural history we might tune into, and looking at things like topography, plant species, density of trees, and where structures are placed. Those are all landscape elements that we want to be open to, just observing the patterns.

In a usual consultation, the first hour that I’m there, I’m not trying to provide any suggestions, unless I see something that is just glaring. I’ve saved clients tens of thousands of dollars just in the first hour on a site because they were doing something so degenerative that it was pretty obvious to see that a catastrophe was upon us. But more often I try to just listen for the first hour.

Not only do I assess the landscape, but I’m also really assessing the client, because ultimately if a client is going to invest in some sort of intervention on their landscape or they’re going to install something or do something there, we really need to understand where it’s coming from, what their goals are, and what they need. We really want to start at the high level in terms of how the landscape can really meet their lifestyle and help accomplish the dreams they have for themselves and the space.

Then once we gather enough information, both from a physical and social point of view, we can start to make some suggestions. Sometimes you have clients who are not necessarily into doing a full-on ecological-food forest-landscape-permaculture-type thing; they just want to have something beautiful and they need water in order to do that. So we look for the entry point, the main goal that the client’s going for, and then we leverage that to support some of the more ecological solutions.

I honestly believe that in this work and in my company it’s more important to focus on relationship than it is to focus on the final product. I’ve built both of my companies on this principle. At times, I’ll have clients who have no ecological literacy whatsoever, but because I treat them with such love and respect, they consider me like family. When you can build a relationship with somebody where it feels like family, you’ve built up a kind of trust where they have an openness to learning a little bit more, getting more ecological literacy, and then they want to do the right thing. Sometimes I feel like part of my job is just to build relationships with folks and start to support them in what their needs are so that they have openness to the kinds of ecological solutions that we’re providing.

Read the Full Series with Permaculturist Erik Ohlsen

Join Erik at the 2016 National Bioneers Conference

Join us for an afternoon session on “Permaculture and Green Jobs” with Erik at the 2016 National Bioneers Conference, Friday, October 21 from 4:30-6pm in San Rafael, CA.

He will explain how he is successfully using Permaculture as a framework to generate green jobs by creating ecologically regenerative, socially just, and economically viable businesses. Come discover how Permaculture design skills can be directly applied in building, landscaping, urban planning, land use, agriculture, forestry and many other enterprises.

View the conference schedule and register here »

Bioneers Radio Series XV Wins 8 Communicator Awards

We’re happy to share with you that our 2015 annual radio series, “The Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature,” has won awards for eight shows in the international Communicators Awards contest. There were over 6,000 entries.

Two shows won gold (Award of Excellence), and six shows won silver (Award of Distinction), out of 12 submitted. A pretty good batting average! I want to honor and thank my teammates Neil Harvey and Stephanie Welch who co-create the series with me – and of course all the amazing bioneers speakers who are at the heart of the shows.

What is especially gratifying is that the two gold winners are truly important shows you just would not otherwise hear on the airwaves. “Just Say No: Planet Hackers, Resistance Movements and Climate Justice,” which features Naomi Klein and Clayton Thomas Mueller, is a clear-eyed critique of the capitalist roots of the climate crisis, and an uplifting look inside the growing climate justice movement and global Indigenous uprisings.

The other gold winner, “Youth Solutionaries: Future Present,” featuring Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, hip-hop artist and Youth Director of Earth Guardians, De’Anthony Jones, former President of the Environmental Students Organization at Sacramento State, and Chloe Maxmin, co-founder of Divest Harvard, is a deeply inspiring window into the rising youth climate movement. It is so rare and SO important to have our youth’s voices heard!

Getting the voices of the Bioneers out there widely is more important than ever, and honestly, where else you hear these visionary voices? We are so deeply grateful to all of you who support the series and support Bioneers at large to produce it.

The radio series is still our biggest outreach tool, and we’re now poised to get it heard much more widely, with your support. As you may know, we had the great good fortune to hire Brooke Shelby Biggs earlier this year as our Communications Director. Brooke has a perfectly fitted track record of media-savvy skill, and she’s a true bioneer at heart.

We want to get the series on many more stations and into some important and large markets. With the explosion of podcasting now, we’re poised to go after wide digital distribution through numerous strategic digital platforms and channels.

We really hope you take a moment to listen to a few of the half-hour shows. You’ll see why they win so many awards every year, but what’s really important is spreading the word. Thank you for joining with us to make it happen. We can help you spread the series! If you want a flash drive, or a CD set that you can give to allies and other important folks, let us know.

By the way, we’re in the thick of producing the 2016 series that will go live July 6th, and it’s breathtaking. And wish us luck in the imminent New York Festivals competition that’s even more competitive – the “Oscars” of radio! We’ll keep you posted.

Bioneers Radio Series XV Award Winners

The continued success of our radio series would not be possible without the committed support of our incredible 2015 radio series sponsors, Organic Valley and Mary’s Gone Crackers, and all of you – thank you!

Use the links below to listen to the award-winning episodes, and be sure to share your favorites with your community.

Like what you hear? Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher to get the latest episodes directly. Be sure to sign up before July, when the 2016 Radio Series will be released.

Not an online listener? Find a radio station where you can listen or encourage your local radio station to air the series.

Please share this post with your networks and spread the word!

Mother Wisdom from the Bioneers Archives

How do we celebrate and lift the voices of all the mothers in our lives? As we gear up for Mother’s Day this weekend, we find ourselves remembering and reciting the wisdom of these mothers and those impacted by them throughout our history. Here are a few from our archives to share:

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins

The former CEO of Green For All shares her deeply personal journey of the experience of becoming a mother and her renewed urgency to create a healthier and more just planet. She speaks on race, class, and motherhood, explaining how the intersections have stretched and transformed her approach to leadership.

Being a mother changes the way you think about change and time. Real change is how we relate to one another.

Erin Konsmo, Esther Lucero and Katsi Cook

In this powerful panel at the Indigenous Forum, Konsmo (Metis-Cree), Esther Lucero (Diné-Latina), and Katsi Cook (Akwesasne-Mohawk) speak on the issues affecting indigenous women, mothers, and children today. They discuss the high rates of sexual violence that correlates with fracking and drilling, holding health systems accountable, environmental pollution and trans-generational metabolic/reproductive diseases, and building a network of Native healers.

The notion of woman as the first environment isn’t just about the womb, it’s the

transgenerational lineage to the creator women: mitochondrial DNA.

Nikki Silvestri (Henderson)

Nikki Henderson begins her deeply personal story by sharing the inspiration of her forefathers and foremothers. Sharing her truths on People’s Grocery in Oakland, Food Justice, and Family Activism, she reveals her use of food as a catalyst for environmental and social justice.

Part of my activism now is Family Activism: using the dinner table and family gatherings as spaces to test and practice my ability to love.

Sandra Steingraber

The brilliant health researcher, cancer survivor, bestselling author of Living Downstream, and the most articulate advocate for a toxic-free environment since Rachel Carson, describes her health battles, motherhood and activism. She shows the environmental links to many cancers (including hers) that the medical establishment refuses to look at. She focuses on the effects even tiny amounts of chemicals can have on the fetus and small children, and challenges our collective failure to address our global ecological unraveling or control toxic chemicals.

Any chemical with the power to extinguish a human pregnancy has no rightful place in our economy.

Miguel Santistevan

An ethnobiologist and farmer from Taos, New Mexico, Miguel sees farming as a homecoming. Witnessing the passing of the seasons alongside a powerful community, he discusses his deep connection with Mother Earth.

I measure my success by how many different living things are benefiting from what I am doing.

Alice Walker, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Nina Simons, Sarah Crowell, Joanna Macy and Akaya Windwood

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. This conversation 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.

We have within us everything we need.

Rha Goddess

Young women are rising up to take their power, and in doing so they are re-weaving a web of relationship that promises to rock the world. Performing artist, activist and hip-hop entrepreneur Rha Goddess explores how this generation’s daughters are branding their own movement of love, power and freedom.

We cannot demand rights that we believe deep down inside we are entitled to and expect to receive them.

For more brilliance, check out our Women’s Leadership and Everywoman’s Leadership playlists, and send a beautiful Mama’s Day Card made possible by CultureStrike (founded by Bioneer Favianna Rodriguez).

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Erik Ohlsen: A Life in Permaculture, Rooted in Bioneers

This is the first installment of Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Director Arty Mangan’s Q&A with longtime Bioneers community member Erik Ohlsen. To learn more about Erik’s work and approach to permaculture and activism, check out the links to other posts in the series below.

What was your first encounter with Bioneers?

When I was 20, I went to Bioneers for my first time. It was a new experience for me being around so many change-makers operating at such a powerful and high level. I already had a couple years of doing activist work and building community gardens and seed saving programs in my own community, and I was just starting to learn about what was going on in the world, where the challenge is for the health of the planet and communities, and in many ways feeling a lot of grief around what I started to understand were the evolving catastrophes on the planet. When I went to Bioneers that first time, it was a huge ray of hope to listen to speakers who not only were intelligent and thought-provoking and had done amazing stuff, but the scale at which they were working with government and corporations and communities that were the hardest hit and having success. I wanted to be like them. I want to aspire to work like that because that gives me hope and that’s the work in the world that’s going to make a difference.

I was also struck by the quality of the participants, not just the speakers. It felt like at every turn I was meeting somebody, even young people, who were engaged in their college campuses or in their communities, and it felt like almost everyone that I met was part of this community of Earth healers and activators, and I just felt so honored to be in their presence, so much so that I committed myself to going to Bioneers every year after that.

Each time I went, it was this moment of the year where I could share what I was working on and get feedback. Every time, and still today, I open myself up to the kind of mentors or collaborators I may meet there. Some of the relationships have been absolutely amazing.

I remember one talk that John Todd gave that has stuck with me forever. He described a multi-stacked enterprise model. I don’t remember all the details, but it was like the waste from a restaurant or brewery going to a permaculture system in turn that was selling compost to a farm that in turn was growing food that provided produce for restaurants. I was looking at these close-looped systems between diverse sets of communities and businesses. It really excited me to see how we could create economies that are regionally based and put together in relationship to each other in a symbiotic way, like how we design our garden to create jobs and provide this amazing regenerative work on the planet.

At your first Bioneers you met Julia Butterfly Hill, the heroic activist who spent over two years in the canopy of an ancient redwood tree protesting the logging of old growth forests.

Being a young activist, a lot of things come up — sometimes feeling a little alone, like we’re not acknowledged. You want to be in a relationship with folks who are doing these amazing things, but you don’t know how to access them. Often there’s a feeling of ageism, like people don’t take you seriously as a young activist, and that can be a real challenge for gaining momentum.

When Julia Butterfly helped launch the Youth Bioneers movement, I felt acknowledged as a young activist, that we do have something to offer, that we have the potential to create change. I was so honored by Julia because my entrance into activism and regenerative stewardship of the planet actually started with the Headwaters Forest battle. That was the first organized protest I ever went to, and that was the beginning of my opening into what was happening on the planet.

I’d often hear Julia’s voice when I’d go to a festival or on the radio, and I felt so inspired by the work she was doing, the message that she had, which ultimately was a message of love. Being able to engage with her at Bioneers, I was just so inspired by her work and turned on by what she was doing and the fact that she was looking to the youth as the up-and-coming generation to take on these endeavors. I felt really honored to be in that circle and to feel like youth activists have a role to play. We don’t always have to fight for or beg to be acknowledged and invited. It really felt like an invitation and an affirmation for me that I was on a good path for myself, a path that would lead somewhere, and that folks would take notice of the work we were doing.

Are there any other influences on your work?

Listening to Catherine Sneed speak off the plenary stage one year was in some ways a life-changing moment for me. She was talking about creating gardens in prisons in the Bay Area, and not only the therapy and rehabilitation benefits that had for incarcerated folks, but also that they were gaining access to quality food and learning a skill that they could use when they got out of prison to develop a career path for themselves, to connect to the Earth.

After hearing that talk I was in tears. It helped bridge two worlds for me that I was always as a young activist trying to bridge. For a while there I didn’t feel like there were enough folks talking about the need to bridge social justice movements with ecological regeneration movements.

In my early 20s, I really saw these two worlds operating parallel to each other and not integrating and weaving and creating a more holistic view the world, which includes social justice and battles for equality, along with regenerating the planet. So when Catherine shared the work she was doing in prisons, it was like, “Yes! This is what I feel in my heart needs to happen.” Finally, people were starting to have that conversation. They had already created programs and implemented them with success. So that really opened me up.

That’s something that Bioneers does so well that I don’t find in other conferences and events — the honoring of the need to care for people and communities, and the need to care for the planet, and how those two really can’t be separated. It really helped shape my view of the world and my view of solutions that are available to us right now that we can implement.

Read the Full Series with Permaculturist Erik Ohlsen

Erik Ohlsen: Permaculture for a Regenerative Economy

This is the second installment of Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Director Arty Mangan’s Q&A with longtime Bioneers community member Erik Ohlsen. To learn more about Erik’s work and approach to permaculture and activism, check out the links to other posts in the series below.

What have you been up to recently?

I have been working in permaculture and activism for almost 20 years, and I find myself running two companies. One is Permaculture Artisans, a landscape contracting company which has about 20 employees. We design and build ecological landscapes all over Northern California. We also work with schools, cities, counties and resource conservation districts to develop these kinds of systems for communities.

One of the things that’s beautiful about this contracting company is it really focuses on our people, how we care for our staff and generate opportunities for people to get paid a just livelihood. That’s a core tenet of the work that we do.

What I’ve discovered in my experience with Permaculture Artisans is that we can actually create businesses that not only provide the vital and necessary services to regenerate the planet, but also create a job market to bring a diverse set of people into a healthy work environment, a safe work environment, where they can get paid fairly, where they can get trained in how to regenerate ecological landscapes, and really be in a place of community.

We’ve been operating this organization for the past 10 years and I’ve had some amazing discoveries, like our ability to plant trees and harvest water, which has been much more potent through our business model than in the nonprofit sector where I worked for many years prior to starting my business. While I love what a lot of amazing nonprofits are doing on the planet, I’m also concerned that building a regenerative movement solely on nonprofit organizations is inherently unsustainable because there’s so much effort to fundraise and get donations and such. The financial stability seems tenuous.

So creating a business model that has a clear fee-for-service type structure where it can generate its own financial stability while regenerating the planet has been an amazing experience in seeing what’s possible. We’ve been able to plant more trees, harvest more water, build more soil, hire more people and give them a living wage than in any nonprofit organization I worked with in the past.

That was such an exciting model that we decided to launch our new company, the Permaculture Skill Center. It is a vocational training hub that focuses on advanced-level training for people who want to create careers in regenerative design, landscaping, community organizing, farming, and related industries and businesses.

Part of what I’ve noticed over the years is that, especially youth and a lot of folks coming out of permaculture design courses, or people who go through natural resource management programs at universities, they’re passionate and they’re committed, but they can’t find a job anywhere where they can implement their passion and commitment. I have noticed that a lot of folks who are getting into this work are doing it as a hobby and then having to wait tables or work office jobs or whatever they can get to pay for their rent and put food on the table.

We saw that there was something missing in the education structure for permaculture and regenerative agriculture, and that was real, advanced career training, and not only training people in the how-to, for instance, how to install and design a rainwater harvesting system. People are actually putting the parts together, placing the tank and plumbing it, and hooking up the distribution system and such. That kind of education is important and necessary.

We created the Permaculture Skill Center specifically for those individuals who want advanced training to develop career paths in these fields, and have business and personal development mentorship so that they can work on whatever personal obstacles they have to being successful and learn the organizational needs, structures, and operations to be successful in starting their own endeavors.

I believe that we live on a planet that is so quickly degenerating, and we have so many millions of acres of landscape that have been destroyed, and so many billions of people who live in poverty, the work we should be doing to pay for our own basic needs, to pay for our rent, or mortgage, or car, or our food, or to send our kids to school could be in the regenerative economy. That work could be healing the planet, supporting communities, bringing people together. If everyone who works a 40-hour week were actively on a career path that had these regenerative qualities, I think we would see a rapid transformation of our economy.

The Permaculture Skill Center is creating a family of businesses that of go back to the John Todd model that I originally got inspired by at the Bioneers conference; not only does the family of businesses support each other, but we’re creating more and more career pathways for people to enter into the regenerative economy that we’re building.

Read the Full Series with Permaculturist Erik Ohlsen

 

Biomimicry 101: 5 Names You Should Know

Biomimicry 101

New to Biomimicry? Don’t worry, we’ll help you cover the basics with the help of these five brilliant Bioneers.

Janine Benyus

Headshot of the Biomimicry Institute's Janine Benyus at the Bioneers 2013

Blessing the Bioneers Conference not once, but THREE times – the acclaimed biologist, innovation consultant and author Janine Benyus illuminates how the biomimicry community can collaborate with nature on a hot list of challenges that just can’t wait. Engage with her over What Life Knows, Emulating Life’s Genius and Grace, and the Biomimicry Network Effect: diving deeper into the endlessly beautiful world seen through her eyes. For more information, check out her Biomimicry Institute.

“Take heart, we’re surrounded by genius.”

 

Dayna Baumeister

The Biomimicry Institute's Dayna Baumeister speaking at the 2011 Bioneers Conference

Envision what our world would and could look like if we actually started reading and following the directions contained in “Life’s Operating Manual.” Co-founder of the Biomimicry Guild and Biomimicry Institute, Dayna Baumeister provides an eagle’s-eye view of biomimicry breakthroughs using ecological design and nature-inspired technologies that emulate nature’s profound design sophistication. She has worked in the field of biomimicry with Janine Benyus since 1998 and designed and teaches the world’s first Biomimicry Professional Certification Program.

“We can create conditions conducive to life. When we do that, we’ve figured out the magic key.”

 

Greg Watson

Biomimicry Enthusiast Greg Watson speaking at the 2015 Bioneers Conference

Growing up in Cleveland, Watson would notice black ash from the smoldering river raining down on him as he waited for the bus. Industry and government’s failure to address the pollution crisis followed him into his adult life when he learned about Buckminster Fuller’s idea of using nature’s design strategies to leverage energy and create significant positive effects. In state government and the private sector, Watson’s leadership has since manifested in urban planning, wind energy development, and launching community gardens and farmers markets. Watch him speak on the Twelve Degrees of Freedom at the 2008 Bioneers Conference.

“Pollution in most cases are valuable resources in the wrong place. Symbiotic relationships are there to be made in almost all the systems we create.”

 

Jay Harman

Biomimicry Enthusiast Jay Harman at the 2013 Bioneers Conference

Gracing our Conference stage TWICE, President-CEO of PAX Scientific, Jay Harman reveals in The Nature of Innovation how scientists and designers are taking cues from nature to find breakthrough solutions. Take sunscreen modeled on hippo sweat. How might we borrow the recipe? It’s time for a fresh look at technology and design, with nature as our mentor. See his previous keynote on Designing the Future here.

“Nature has already solved every problem facing humanity.”

 

Jason McLennan

Jason McLennan at Bioneers 2013 speaking on the Living Building Challenge.

The visionary founder of the Living Building Challenge illuminates the game-changing impacts of the world’s most advanced and provocative green building certification program. He chronicles its core principles, its global influence on designers, builders, communities and educational systems, and its manifest progress transforming the interface between human habitats and the natural world into a virtuous cycle.

“Instead of designing whatever we want and then having impacts downstream and upstream, we need to understand the notion of limits and work within what we have.”

Ready to move onto Biomimicry 201? Be sure to check out our Ecological Design Playlist and the Global Biomimicry Design Challenge (which will have its first ever awards ceremony at Bioneers 2016!).

Bioneers to host the first Biomimicry Global Design Challenge “Ray of Hope” Prize awards event

The 2016 National Bioneers Conference will host the first-ever awards ceremony for the world’s premiere biomimicry design prize, the $100,000 Ray C. Anderson Foundation “Ray of Hope” Prize. The prize will be awarded to one of seven finalist teams in the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge, a worldwide design competition that crowdsources nature-inspired solutions to climate change issues, like food systems, water management, and alternative energy.

“Ray Anderson believed wholeheartedly in nature as a model and a mentor, so it is incredibly fitting that this prize, which is intended to accelerate marketable solutions, be given in his honor,” said John A. Lanier, executive director of the Ray C. Anderson Foundation.

The National Bioneers Conference, to be held this year from October 21-23, 2016, is a yearly gathering of dynamic changemakers dedicated to solving our world’s most pressing environmental and social challenges. This year, in addition to the Ray of Hope Prize award event, the conference will feature biomimicry pioneer and visionary Janine Benyus as a keynote speaker. There will also be biomimicry workshops and panels throughout the 3-day conference that will explore how nature-inspired design approaches can profoundly shift how we restore and rebuild our world.

“With climate disruption upon us, and a swelling population, transforming our food and water systems is paramount,” said Kenny Ausubel, co-founder and CEO of Bioneers. “But success will require more than just technical solutions. It necessitates a shift in our worldview, and a change of heart. We are so deeply honored to host this landmark event, and to continue our long partnership to make biomimicry the default position for design, industry, economy, and culture by 2020.”

“Bioneers is one of the only conferences where an 18-year-old activist will be sitting next to a 67-year-old one, both wanting exactly the same thing,” said Biomimicry Institute Executive Director Beth Rattner. “Attendees completely resonate with biomimicry, and their cheers will give the Design Challenge teams the encouragement they need to take their inventions to the next level.”

For the 2015-16 cycle, the Biomimicry Institute’s Biomimicry Global Design Challenge asked participants to tackle any aspect of the food system that could be improved by looking to nature for design guidance. Submissions cover a wide range of related issues, like waste, packaging, agricultural pest management, food distribution, energy use, and other solutions.

The finalist teams vying for the Ray of Hope Prize were chosen to enter the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge Accelerator program in October 2015. They are spending this year testing and prototyping their design concepts with the help of biomimicry experts and business mentors in order to create viable, market-ready solutions. The winner must have not only a functioning prototype, but a tested business model and in-the-field proof points. A full list of the finalists’ submissions can be found here.

A new round of the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge is currently open, which is another opportunity for teams to join and compete for the $100,000 “Ray of Hope” Prize. Individuals and teams can learn more about the Challenge at challenge.biomimicry.org.

About Bioneers
Bioneers is an innovative nonprofit educational organization that highlights breakthrough solutions for restoring people and planet. Founded in 1990 in Santa Fe, New Mexico by social entrepreneurs Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simons, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world’s most pressing environmental and social challenges.

About the Biomimicry Institute
The Biomimicry Institute is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization that empowers people to seek nature-inspired solutions for a healthy planet.
http://www.biomimicry.org

About the Ray C. Anderson Foundation
The Ray C. Anderson Foundation is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization that seeks to promote a sustainable society by supporting and funding educational and project-based initiatives that advance knowledge and innovation in sustainability.
http://www.raycandersonfoundation.org/rayofhopeprize

World Water Day: 5 Visionaries You Should Know

Water is life. With communities worldwide facing drought, pollution, and more, these five visionaries outline what we can do to protect, restore, and cherish one of nature’s most precious gifts.

Maude Barlow

Maude Barlow speaking at the Bioneers Conference in 2003.

The world is running out of fresh water, and there is no environmental crisis as great as the commodification of the world’s water supply by giant corporations. Maude Barlow, national chairperson of The Council of Canadians, and author of Blue Gold, describes the movement to guarantee a water-secure future based on conservation, equity and the public good:

“Water is the sacred life blood of the earth, no one has the right to take it for profit. Until we collectively understand that, expect more resistance, expect violence, expect the resistance to get stronger, expect it to get global, expect the rise of a powerful civil society movement to challenge the lords of water. No one gave them the world’s water: people and nature will take it back.”

 

Kandi Mossett

Kandi Mossett

In the Bakken Formation of North Dakota the oil industry’s frantic extraction has violently exploited nature and people – especially on the Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation in what has become a drilling/fracking sacrifice zone. For Mossett (Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara) of the Indigenous Environmental Network, this violence has come at a personal cost. Several acquaintances, as well as her dear friend Cassi, lost their lives to reckless transport truck drivers, poisoned water, soil and air, and rampant drug abuse and crime. There’s little or no accountability, leaving many residents no other option than to relocate. “So…do I stop breathing? What am I supposed to do?” Mosset is fighting back, from the local to the United Nations, garnering social, political and legal momentum, and winning victories for hers and future generations:

“We come to fight back, to gather, to take back the power in our communities – because no one else is going to do it for us.”

 

Henk Ovink

Henk Ovink speaking at the Bioneers 2015 Conference.
Photo Credit: Nikki Richter

One of the world’s leading experts on sustainable, resilient coastal infrastructure, Henk Ovink served as a Senior Advisor to the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force and is a leading figure in the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment. He shares his vision of how we must change our entire culture to put water back into the center of our hearts and minds if we are to cope effectively with climate change, water crises, biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, extreme weather events, and myriad environmental/economic/sociopolitical crises:

“Infrastructure can make a better community and environment, only if you are willing and able to do it right.”

 

Wallace J. Nichols

Wallace J. Nichols speaking at Bioneers 2014

The cognitive and emotional benefits of healthy oceans and waterways have been celebrated through art, song, romance and poetry throughout human history. Marine biologist, activist, community organizer and author Wallace J. Nichols dives deeper and explores our blue minds through the dual lenses of evolutionary biology and cognitive science, reminding us that we are water:

“Water connects us, changing our brain in the best possible way. Water gives us a Blue Mind.”

 

Alexandra Cousteau

Alexandra Cousteau speaking at Bioneers 2008

As a member of the legendary Cousteau family, Alexandra Cousteau grew up traveling the globe, and learning firsthand the value of conserving the natural world. An Emerging Explorer with National Geographic, Alexandra discusses what we must do to preserve the integrity of our planet’s waters; shares stories from her most recent adventures around the world; and speaks about her latest initiative, which seeks to inspire and empower individuals to protect not only the oceans and its inhabitants, but also the human communities that rely on the purity of our freshwater resources:

“We must shift our current perception that water exists in fragment stasis, towards a more accurate understanding of water as a system in which we are all downstream from one another.”

 

Learn more about World Water Day here, and follow along with Bioneers as we dive deeper into this revolution with our March newsletter, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.