Merlin Sheldrake – How Fungi Make our Worlds

Most fungi live out of sight, yet they make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that support and sustain nearly all living systems. The symbiotic mycorrhizal networks formed by plants and fungi comprise an ancient life-support system that easily qualifies as one of the wonders of the living world. Yet climate change strategies, conservation agendas and restoration efforts overlook fungi and focus overwhelmingly on animals and plants. This is a problem: the destruction of underground fungal networks accelerates both climate change and biodiversity loss and interrupts vital global nutrient cycles.

In this keynote address, Merlin Sheldrake, the biologist and bestselling author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our World, drives home just how critically important fungi are and discuss the visionary work of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) and its efforts to map and protect the mycorrhizal fungal communities of the planet. He also presents cutting-edge research into the flow dynamics of carbon and nutrients within mycorrhizal fungal networks.

This talk was delivered at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.

Merlin Sheldrake, Ph.D., a biologist and writer with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science, received his doctorate in tropical ecology from Cambridge for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He is currently a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), and sits on the advisory board of the Fungi Foundation. Merlin’s research ranges from fungal biology, to the history of Amazonian ethnobotany, to the relationship between sound and form in resonant systems. He is also a keen brewer and fermenter fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms, and a musician.

Learn more at merlinsheldrake.com

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Merlin Sheldrake, Author of Entangled Life speaks with J.P. Harpignies

Bioneers Senior Producer, J.P. Harpignies, interviews Merlin about his highly acclaimed first book, Entangled Life.

Earthlings Newsletter

Bioneers is pleased to present Earthlings, a biweekly newsletter exploring the extraordinary intelligence of life inherent in animals, plants, and fungi. In each issue, we delve into captivating stories and research that promise to reshape your perception of your fellow Earthlings – and point toward a profound shift in how we all might inhabit this planet together.

Deep Dive: Intelligence in Nature

Cutting edge research is increasingly rediscovering what our ancestors understood, that the animal, vegetal and fungal realms are teeming with organisms making conscious decisions, responding intelligently to their surroundings. Leading figures in this burgeoning field are transforming the way science understands intelligence in nature, using modern science to help restore the kinship with the web of life we so desperately need if we are to have any hope of addressing the civilizational crisis we face.

Claudia Peña – Abolition as Amends to Mother

Like so many of our other industries, the enormous mass incarceration system has wreaked havoc on our society. Our desire for punishment, and the profits made by the incarceration of millions of human beings, consequences be damned, lead to the destruction of the social fabric of countless communities in the short term, and contribute to the ravaging of the larger global environment in the longer term. Our only path forward is to make amends with the land, water and air, one harmful industry at a time, including abolition of the prison industrial complex as we know it.

This talk was delivered at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.

Claudia Peña, Executive Director of For Freedoms, an artist collective that centers art and creativity as a catalyst for transformative connection and collective liberation, serves on the faculty at UCLA School of Law and in that school’s Gender Studies Department. She is also the founding Co-Director of the Center for Justice at UCLA, home of the Prison Education Program, which creates innovative courses that enable faculty and students to learn from and alongside currently incarcerated participants. Claudia has devoted her life to justice work through community organizing, transformative and restorative justice, consciousness-raising across silos, coalition-building, teaching, advocacy through law and policy, and the arts.

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Fania Davis – Restorative Justice’s Promise

In this Bioneers 2015 keynote drawing on her lifetime of social justice activism, Fania Davis depicts the essence of Restorative Justice, an emerging approach that seeks to move us from an ethic of separation, domination and extreme individualism to one of collaboration, partnership and interrelatedness. Rooted in Indigenous views of justice and healing, this rapidly expanding global movement invites us to make a radical shift from either-or, right-wrong, and us-versus-them ways of thinking. It seeks to midwife an evolutionary shift beyond domination, discord and devastation toward healing, wholeness and holiness with one another and all creation.

Jerry Tello: Recovering Your Sacredness

In this Bioneers 2019 keynote, Jerry Tello, a celebrated leader in the field of the transformational healing of traumatized men and boys of color, shares his approach to generating the “medicine” necessary to shield ourselves from this toxic energy, and offers us pathways to discover, uncover and recover our sacredness and return to health and wellbeing.

Colette Pichon Battle – Expanding Our Movements for Climate Justice

One of the Southeast U.S.’ and Gulf South’s most renowned veterans of climate justice struggles as an activist, community organizer, coalition-builder, and award-winning litigating environmental and human rights attorney, Colette Pichon Battle, born and raised in Bayou Liberty, Louisiana, focuses on creating spaces for frontline communities to gather and advance climate strategies that help them steward their water, energy, and land responsibly. She draws from her decades of experience fighting for equitable climate resilience to unearth historic lessons and expose the root causes of the inequities and imbalances that characterize our relationships to the natural world and to each other. Colette argues that we must expand our understanding of what a genuine Climate Justice movement needs to encompass if we are to succeed in innovating a better future, and why such struggles as gender and migrant justice are inextricably connected to human rights for clean air, clean water, sovereign land, and community control of justly-sourced sustainable energy.

This talk was delivered at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.

Colette Pichon Battle, a generational native of Bayou Liberty, Louisiana, is an award-winning lawyer and prominent climate justice organizer. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when Black and Indigenous communities were largely left out of federal recovery systems, Colette led the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy (GCCLP) to provide relief and legal assistance to Gulf South communities of color. After 17 years at GCCLP’s helm, as frontline communities from the Gulf South to the Global South face ever more devastating storms, droughts, wildfires, heat, and land loss, she co-founded Taproot Earth to create connections and power across issues, movements, and geographies.

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Rebecca Solnit – Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

In this Bioneers 2023 keynote, Rebecca Solnit talks about the stories emerging from what science, Indigenous leadership, good organizing, and visionary thinkers are giving us. These stories offer the grounds for hope and the work hope does. What are the ways that what the climate requires of us could mean ushering in an age of abundance rather than austerity?

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

With climate-driven disasters becoming the new normal, building resilience is the grail. This podcast shows how communities around the world are developing models created out of practical necessity. We hear on-the-ground stories from two different communities building resilience in the wake of serial disasters.

Sammy Gensaw, III – The Restorative Revolution and a River of Reciprocity

Sammy Gensaw III, a dynamic young Yurok leader, shares some of his experiences working for ecological and cultural revival along the Klamath River, central to his people’s identity and livelihood. He discusses how the epic struggle to remove destructive dams required drawing deeply from ancestral wisdom, modern science, and cutting-edge activism, and how Indigenous leadership can play a central role in rekindling our connections to land and water and ushering in a restorative, resilient future for all of us. 

This talk was delivered at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.

Sammy Gensaw III is a leader in environmental and cultural preservation in his Yurok community. Director of the Ancestral Guard, a nonprofit focused on teaching traditional fishing and farming methods to Indigenous youth, his approach is deeply rooted in food sovereignty, cultural preservation, community resilience, and self-sufficiency. Gensaw’s activist journey began in his early teens with the Klamath Justice Coalition, the largest dam removal and river restoration project in history, and his contributions to restoring Native American foodways are featured in the documentary film, Gather.

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The Restorative Revolution: How Indigenous Leadership and Allyship Catalyzed the Biggest River Restoration in US History

In this podcast, Yurok fisherman and tribal leader Sammy Gensaw and environmental scientist-turned-activist Craig Tucker share the epic story of how Indigenous leadership and non-Indian allyship made the impossible inevitable: the biggest-ever dam removal and salmon restoration in history.

Indigenous Forum – Undam the Klamath! How Tribes Led the Largest River Restoration Project in US History

In this panel discussion, learn the story of this incredible achievement in tribal activism, groundbreaking tribal partnerships with state and federal governments, and culture-based methods for river restoration. Moderated by Cara Romero. With: Samuel Gensaw, Isaac Kinney and Craig Tucker.

Nick Estes – The Age of the Water Protector and Climate Chaos

In this Bioneers 2022 keynote, Nick Estes, Ph.D. (Kul Wicasa/Lower Brule Sioux) describes the outsized impact frontline Indigenous communities are having in fighting climate change and resisting extractive industries, the importance and effectiveness of Earth-centered approaches to fighting for Climate Justice, and the overarching goal of being “good ancestors of the future.”

Performance by MaMuse

This performance took place at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.

MaMuse, a long-lived musical duo composed of the highly accomplished multi-instrumentalists (including upright bass, guitar, mandolins, and flutes), powerful vocalists, and brilliant songwriters, Sorah Nutting and Karisha Longaker, is dedicated to playing uplifting, heart-opening music rooted in the folk and gospel traditions that embodies a love of all life, a cultivation of emotional intelligence, and a desire for a world in which all can thrive.

Learn more at mamuse.org

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“Waking Time” by MaMuse

A special performance of “Waking Time” by musical duo MaMuse at the 2021 Bioneers Conference.

Performance by The Local Honeys at Bioneers 2024

The Local Honeys (Montana Hobbs and Linda Jean Stokley) is a highly acclaimed musical duo from Kentucky that was formed a decade ago. Montana and Linda Jean are solidly anchored in the Appalachian culture and music they grew up in and deeply respectful of those roots, but their innovative songwriting, storytelling and musicianship are not constrained by tradition, as their music is very much of its time, elegantly and powerfully capturing the beauty, struggles and complexities of contemporary Appalachian life. Their most recent album is the eponymous, The Local Honeys, on La Honda Records.

Performance by Rising Appalachia at Bioneers 2023

Rising Appalachia is an internationally touring Appalachian and world folk ensemble founded by Atlanta-raised, New Orleans-based sisters Leah and Chloe Smith, whose soulful folk-roots sound traces back to their open-minded musician parents and to grassroots music communities in the hills and valleys of the Deep South as well as urban Atlanta.

Performance by Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company

This performance took place at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.

The Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company (DAYPC) is a diverse group of teens that collaborates with professional artists to create dynamic, original productions. Combining hip hop, modern and aerial dance, theater, song, and rap, company members take the stage to tell stories that stem from their lived experiences and express their visions for a world transformed. Since 1993, DAYPC has performed original work for up to 25,000 audience members annually, garnering critical acclaim and widespread community support for both their technical prowess and their commitment to advancing inclusivity, equity, and justice.

Learn more at destinyarts.org

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Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company | Bioneers 2019

A performance by Oakland’s own incomparably dynamic and uplifting Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company. DAYPC’s extraordinary energy, brilliant choreography and inspired lyrics have been rocking the house at Bioneers for many years.

Making the Revolution Irresistible: an interview with Sarah Crowell of Destiny Arts

Sarah Crowell is the Artistic Director Emeritus at Destiny Arts Center, which Sarah co-founded and where she has held a variety of leadership roles for the past 30 years.

Erica Gies – The Slow Water Movement: How to Thrive in an Age of Drought and Deluge

This widely-traveled independent journalist and National Geographic Explorer drew from her masterful book, Water Always Wins: Thriving in an age of drought and deluge, to share both ancient and cutting-edge approaches to and philosophies of water management being implemented in a number of locales around the world that offer far more effective strategies to ensure a healthy, productive human-water relationship than the massive, failed attempts to impose our will on an element we cannot defeat we have long pursued.

This talk was delivered at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.

Erica Gies is an independent journalist, National Geographic Explorer, and the author of Water Always Wins: Thriving in an age of drought and deluge, published in the U.S., U.K., and China. She covers water, climate change, plants and wildlife for Scientific American, The New York Times, bioGraphic, Nature, and other publications. The honors she has received include the Sierra Club’s Rachel Carson Award, Friends of the River’s California River Award, the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation’s Excellence in Journalism Award, and the Harvey Southam Lectureship at the University of Victoria.

Learn more at ericagies.com

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Embracing Slow Water: Rediscovering the True Nature of Earth’s Lifeline

In Water Always Wins, Erica Gies sheds light on the essential role of water in shaping our world and offers hope for a more harmonious relationship between humanity and the planet’s most vital resource. Read an excerpt from the book here.

Deep Dive: Where Water Flows, Life Thrives

In this multimedia series, we focus on the water scarcity facing arid regions, highlighting innovative designs and far-sighted strategies based on principles drawn from conservation hydrology, permaculture, regenerative agriculture, and keystone species restoration that demonstrate that there are existing strategies and practices we can implement to sustainably steward our most precious resource and ensure water security for all life.

Welcome the Water: Climate-Proofing for Resilience

This podcast features Henk Ovink, a designer, the Principal of Rebuild by Design, and the first ever Special Envoy for International Water Affairs for the Kingdom of the Netherlands. He’s dramatically demonstrating on large scales how to shift our relationship to nature and to culture – and climate-proof our cities and coasts.

Taylor Brorby – Raising Hell: Censorship, Carbon Capture, and Being Gay on the Great Plains

Taylor Brorby grew in the dynamic shortgrass prairie of western North Dakota, a youth that coincided with the brutal physical and psychic scarring of his surroundings by the coal and oil industry, a fate not made any easier by being a young gay boy enthralled by classical music, art, fishing, and poetry. From here, Taylor became a brilliant poet, writer and dedicated activist, one of the most eloquent and profound critics of the fossil fuel industry in the nation, penning, among other works, the extraordinary memoir: Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, the powerful essays in Civil Disobedience, and co-editing: Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. He shares some of his life story, seeking to inflame us with the passion we will need to stop the carbon-burning Leviathans from destroying the biosphere.

This talk was delivered at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.

Taylor Brorby is the author of: Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land; Crude: Poems; Coming Alive: Action; and Civil Disobedience; and is co-editor of: Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. Taylor’s work has appeared in many leading publications, including The NY Times, LitHub and Orion, and he has been supported by several prestigious fellowships, including from the MacDowell Colony and the National Book Critics Circle. He also serves on the editorial boards of Hub City Press and Terrain.org, is a contributing editor at North American Review, and teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Alabama.

Learn more at taylorbrorby.com

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Staying Alive: Reconciling Nature, Culture and Gay Rights

As a backlash against LGBTQ rights escalates into an authoritarian crusade, in this podcast episode acclaimed author and queer activist Taylor Brorby asks, how we can still be fighting this battle? As a writer addressing the fossil fuel industry’s acceleration in the midst of climate chaos, Taylor is forced to choose between the existential crises of the assaults on nature and on LGBTQ people. It’s all connected, he says, as he seeks to reconcile nature, culture, diversity and belonging.

Lessons of Resilience from Queer Movements for Liberation

Vanessa Raditz (they/them) is one of the guiding voices of Queer Ecojustice Project and the producer of the film Fire and Flood. In this conversation with Maya Carlson of Bioneers, they offer insights into the many forms of queer resilience as well as the importance of visibilizing the vulnerabilities queer and trans folks face while also uplifting the resistance, regeneration and power of LGBTQ+ people in movements for justice, care and liberation.

Corrina Gould – Rematriation: Indigenous Women’s Work to Recover, Remember and Heal

Returning to open the 2024 Bioneers conference, one of the leading figures in the East Bay Indigenous community and a longtime activist for First People’s rights and the protection of land and waters globally, Corrina Gould, focuses on the concept and practice of “Rematriation,” which involves reclaiming traditional land and sacred sites to help rebuild traditional cultures and heal the deep wounds inflicted by colonization and genocide and also prioritizes the unique role women play in that enormous undertaking. 

This talk was delivered at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.

Corrina Gould, born and raised in the village of Huichin (now known as Oakland CA), is the Tribal Chair for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation and co-founded and is the Lead Organizer for Indian People Organizing for Change, a small Native-run organization; as well as of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an urban Indigenous women-led organization within her ancestral territory. Through the practices of “rematriation,” cultural revitalization and land restoration, the Land Trust calls on Native and non-Native peoples to heal and transform legacies of colonization and genocide and to do the work our ancestors and future generations are calling us to do.

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Indigeneity Conversations: California Genocide and Resilience with Corrina Gould

California Indians have survived some of the most extreme acts of genocide committed against Native Americans. We discuss this brutal history and survivance with Corrina Gould, Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. We talk about the importance of addressing that historical trauma, which caused deep wounds that still affect Indigenous Peoples today.

Indigeneity Conversations: Returning to What Was Lost and Stolen with Corrina Gould

A riveting conversation about the challenges of defending land rights and preserving tribal culture with Corrina Gould, a celebrated leader and activist of the First Peoples of the Bay Area from the Lisjan/Ohlone tribe of Northern California.

Suzanne Simard – Dealing with Backlash Against Nature-Based Solutions to Climate Change

For decades, scientists have warned about the consequences of deforestation and fossil fuel burning that have led to today’s climate and biodiversity crises. They have also conducted careful research that has helped inform development of nature-based solutions. Despite the urgency of the interdependent crises and the agency we have in helping address them, there abound efforts to discredit peer-reviewed climate change science. Dr. Simard’s talk delves into recent backlash she has experienced over her science that informs climate solutions for the forests of western North America.

This talk was delivered at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.

Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia and author of the bestselling, Finding the Mother Tree, is a highly influential, researcher on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence, globally renowned for her work on how trees interact and communicate using below-ground fungal networks. Her work on forest resiliency, adaptability and recovery has far-reaching implications for how to manage and heal forests from human impacts, including climate change. Suzanne has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles, presented around the world and communicated her work to a wide audience through interviews, documentary films and online talks.

Learn more at suzannesimard.com

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Forest Wisdom, Mother Trees and the Science of Community

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. In this podcast, we learn how the story Simard is uncovering can change our story for how we live on Earth and with each other – for the long haul.

Earthlings Newsletter

Bioneers is pleased to present Earthlings, a biweekly newsletter exploring the extraordinary intelligence of life inherent in animals, plants, and fungi. In each issue, we delve into captivating stories and research that promise to reshape your perception of your fellow Earthlings – and point toward a profound shift in how we all might inhabit this planet together.

Deep Dive: Intelligence in Nature

Cutting edge research is increasingly rediscovering what our ancestors understood, that the animal, vegetal and fungal realms are teeming with organisms making conscious decisions, responding intelligently to their surroundings. Leading figures in this burgeoning field are transforming the way science understands intelligence in nature, using modern science to help restore the kinship with the web of life we so desperately need if we are to have any hope of addressing the civilizational crisis we face.

Stacy Mitchell – Democracy vs. Big Tech: How We Can Win the Fight Against Monopoly Power

Most of us would like to live in a society accountable to people and the planet, one in which we exercise genuine agency over our lives and have a real say in the decisions that affect our communities, but the dramatic increase in corporate domination, especially the rise of giant tech companies that wield unprecedented levels of surveillance and control, is radically undermining our democracy and concentrating wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands. Stacy Mitchell, who has long been at the forefront of the national movement to rein in excessive corporate power and reinvigorate local self-reliance, is here to tell us that, as powerful as these immense companies and their political allies may seem, they’ve finally met their match. A broad grassroots alliance, together with a new generation of creative government leaders, is bringing long-dormant anti-monopoly laws and strategies back to life. This promising turn of events, Stacy explains, offers hope for reclaiming our rights and assuring a far more equitable and greener future.

This talk was delivered at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.

Photo by Brian Fitzgerald

Stacy Mitchell, a Maine-based writer, strategist, and policy advocate whose work focuses on dismantling concentrated corporate power and building thriving communities and a healthy democracy, has played a leading role in today’s growing anti-monopoly movement. She is Co-Executive Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), a research and advocacy organization that for five decades has challenged the wisdom of neoliberalism and championed local, community-oriented models, from municipal broadband to distributed solar power, community banks, family farms, and local businesses. Stacy has written for The NY Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Washington Post, and many other outlets, and is the author of Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses, and co-author of the influential report: Amazon’s Stranglehold. She has helped build a number of coalitions and win campaigns for policies that dismantle corporate power, level the playing field for independent businesses, and strengthen communities.

Learn more at stacymitchell.com

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

In this first part of a two-part Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio program, we travel back and forth in time to explore the battle between democracy and plutocracy that goes back to the very founding of the United States. The extreme concentration of corporate power and the prevalence of monopoly are indeed inarguable. If the solution is once again to throw the tea in the harbor, what does that look like in the 21st century? 

In today’s new Gilded Age of rule by the wealthy, rising anti-trust movements are challenging the stranglehold of corporate monopoly. With: Thom Hartmann, Stacy Mitchell and Maurice BP-Weeks

Bioneers Reader: Our Economic Future

Achieving a More Equitable Society by Radically Rethinking Our Guiding Economic Ideas

This Bioneers Reader is a collection of pieces presenting wisdom from leading figures in progressive economic thought and action, all dealing with strategies to radically restructure our ever more inequitable, racist and environmentally devastating economic system.

Sage Lenier – Towards a Just Transition: Blueprint for a Green Economy

We spend a lot of time talking about the ecological crisis, and not nearly enough talking about real, workable solutions. If the ultimate goal is to keep fossil fuels in the ground, how must we transform our economy to make that possible? Award-winning activist and innovative educator, Sage Lenier, one of the most impressive young leaders to emerge in recent years, takes to the stage to shed light on what a realistic and just transition looks like, and the role we can each play in leading us towards a more circular and equitable economy.

This talk was delivered at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.

Sage Lenier is an activist working to build an education system that enables the next generation to become climate solutionists. She got her start teaching her own program at UC Berkeley, which broke records for largest-ever student-led class. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The World Economic Forum, and Teen Vogue, and has brought her to speak at public forums around the world. TIME Magazine named her a 2023 Next Generation Leader for her work with Sustainable & Just Future.

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Bioneers Reader: Our Economic Future

Achieving a More Equitable Society by Radically Rethinking Our Guiding Economic Ideas

This Bioneers Reader is a collection of pieces presenting wisdom from leading figures in progressive economic thought and action, all dealing with strategies to radically restructure our ever more inequitable, racist and environmentally devastating economic system.

Bioneers Youth Leadership and Education Program

Over the last 20 years, the Bioneers Youth Leadership and Education Program has served as an incubator for thousands of youth and educators to deepen their passion and power through self-expression, skills development, mentorship and deep relationship building within the broader community of Bioneers. The program has produced some of the most dynamic, engaging, and cutting edge programming within the Bioneers kaleidoscope and it continues to shape the work of youth movements, activism and education.