Haley Mellin – Creativity, Courage and Conservation

Is biodiversity conservation a science, a form of stewardship, or perhaps an art? Artist and activist Haley Mellin shows how it can be all three. As the founder of Art into Acres, she uses her creative talents to support Indigenous and community-led efforts to protect wild places, weaving care into the tapestry of sustaining biodiversity. She brings her creativity from the canvas to the planet, generating a cultural tributary of philanthropy to land stewardship. In 2024 alone, this work helped preserve 6.45 million acres. Raised in Northern California surrounded by Blue Oaks, she shares how her passion inspires action and how we can all connect to the earth through the art of land preservation.

This talk was delivered at the 2025 Bioneers Conference.

Haley Mellin, PhD, is an artist focusing on painting and land conservation. In 2017, she founded Art into Acres, a non-profit supporting permanent land conservation on behalf of the arts. Indigenous-led and community-led protected areas are the focus, and the initiative has supported the designation of about 70 million acres of new protection. Haley initiated the first environmental council and carbon emissions calculations at U.S. art museums, and juried the inaugural National Endowment for the Humanities climate grants. She is the co-author of Conservation Imperatives published last year in Frontiers. Her painting is observational and done outdoors. Haley advocates for environmental justice for all life, and was mentored by Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, Chandra Pai and the South African artists rosenclaire.

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Engaged Arts

The key role of the arts in social movements is as true today as it’s ever been, and we at Bioneers have sought to feature the work of groundbreaking socially and eco-engaged artists from across different disciplines.

Restoring the Oaks and Our Connection to the Earth: An Interview with Jolie Elan

Learn how Jolie Elan, founding Director of the Go Wild Institute, is drawing from her background in ecology and ethnobotany to conserve the ancient Oak life system.

Amira Diamond, Melinda Kramer, Kahea Pacheco of Women’s Earth Alliance – Rising Together: Women’s Leadership for a Resilient Future

As co-leaders of a global alliance working at the intersection of gender justice and environmental resilience, award-winning, groundbreaking activists and visionaries Amira Diamond, Melinda Kramer and Kahea Pacheco explore the transformative power of grassroots women’s leadership in confronting our most pressing ecological challenges. By sharing stories from their global network, they illustrate how frontline women leaders are implementing community-based solutions that protect land, water, and biodiversity as well as advancing climate resilience across diverse regions. They also delve into WEA’s unique co-directorship model—a shared leadership structure that embodies collaboration, collective visioning, and sustained impact in alliance-building work.

This talk was delivered at the 2025 Bioneers Conference.

Amira Diamond, co-founder and Co-Executive Director of the Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA), where she collaborates with frontline communities, global NGOs, investors, and philanthropists to implement environmental programs focused on nature-based solutions, clean energy, advocacy campaigns, replicable models, resilient communities and justice across environmental, health, and LGBTQ rights, is a seasoned social entrepreneur with over two decades’ experience designing and leading rights-based programs at the intersection of climate solutions, gender equity, and economic development. Previously, she served as the West Coast Director of Democracy Matters and directed organizations such as Julia Butterfly Hill’s Circle of Life.

Melinda Kramer, co-founder (in 2006) and Co-Executive Director of the Women’s Earth Alliance (inspired by the resilience of women in impacted communities around the world and the desire to bridge the resource gap for these frontline women tackling urgent climate challenges), is a passionate advocate for social justice, the environment, and women’s rights. An environmentalist and cultural anthropologist, she has worked globally, learning from grassroots leaders on the frontlines of environmental crises. Her career has spanned sustainable agriculture work in Kenya with CARE International, capacity-building initiatives in the North Pacific Rim with Pacific Environment, and co-founding the Global Women’s Water Initiative.

Kahea Pacheco (Kanaka ’Ōiwi), Co-Executive Director of the Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA), is a passionate advocate for Indigenous people’s rights and climate justice that puts aloha ʻāina at the heart of solutions. She joined WEA in 2011 after receiving her law degree with a focus on Environmental and Federal Indian Law. With WEA, Kahea has facilitated legal advocacy partnerships for Indigenous women-led environmental campaigns and co-led the development of the “Violence on the Land, Violence on our Bodies” initiative. She also serves on the Advisory Councils for the World Economic Forum’s 1t.org and Daughters for Earth.

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Woven Liberation: How Women-Led Revolutions Will Shape Our Future

Read an edited and excerpted version of a panel discussion held at the 2023 Bioneers Conference with Azita Ardakani, Zainab Salbi, and Nina Simons.

Zainab Salbi – Daughters for Earth

In this Bioneers 2022 keynote address, Zainab Salbi, a co-founder of Daughters for Earth, explores the interconnection between our personal search for healing and how we face the challenges of climate change.

Wade Crowfoot – California’s Leadership in Nature-Based Solutions: Building Climate Resilience Through Ecosystem Restoration

California is harnessing the power of nature to tackle climate change and build resilience against wildfires, droughts, floods, and extreme heat. By restoring ecosystems and integrating natural infrastructure into climate policy, we are enhancing biodiversity, improving public health, and supporting sustainable communities. Secretary Crowfoot addresses California’s commitment to Nature-Based Solutions as a cornerstone of climate action, its influence on national and global initiatives, and the importance of continued investment and collaboration to protect people, economies, and ecosystems.

This talk was delivered at the 2025 Bioneers Conference.

Wade Crowfoot, on the frontlines of environmental leadership throughout his long career in the public and non-profit sectors, California’s Natural Resources Secretary since 2019, leads efforts to conserve California’s environment and natural resources, overseeing an agency of 25,000+ employees spread across 26 departments, commissions, and conservancies charged with stewarding the state’s forests, natural lands, rivers, water supplies, coasts, wildlife and biodiversity, as well as helping oversee its world-leading clean energy transition, including a commitment to conserve 30% of its land and coastal waters by 2030. Secretary Crowfoot has led efforts to navigate California’s record-breaking droughts, floods, and wildfires and has initiated a new era of partnerships with the state’s Native American tribes.

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Kate Lundquist and Brock Dolman: How We’re Winning the Campaign to Rehydrate the West

Great news about the Bring Back the Beaver campaign from the folks at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s Water Institute.

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

In this podcast episode, 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.

Thom Hartmann – Supreme Oligarchy at the Gates

As author, broadcaster and scholar Thom Hartmann sees it, the lines between corporate power, billionaire interests, government authority, public “knowledge,” and foreign influence have not just blurred — they’re vanishing. This is not just politics as usual; this is an emergency. When has any small group of private citizens held such sway over both domestic and foreign policy? The America we once knew — where elected officials were accountable to voters rather than billionaires — is slipping away. This erosion of democracy is largely due to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruling that political bribery equals “free speech,” allowing billionaires to flood our 2024 election with money. In truth, this long-developing alliance between American oligarchs and the Supreme Court marks a climactic corporate endgame to replace American democracy with plutocratic autocracy. Do we, the American people, still possess the power and will to challenge this oligarchic takeover? Yes, says Hartmann. This is a call to action.

This talk was delivered at the 2025 Bioneers Conference.

Thom Hartmann, a best-selling author of over 30 books in print and host of the #1 progressive talk show host in America for more than a decade, has co-written and been featured in 6 documentaries with Leonardo DiCaprio about climate change. A former psychotherapist, entrepreneur and refugee worker helping the worldwide Salem group start homes for abandoned and abused children all over the world, Thom and his wife Louise live in Portland, Oregon with a small menagerie of cats, dogs, ducks & geese.

To learn more about Thom Hartmann, visit his website.

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

In this podcast episode, the first part of a two-part program, we travel back and forth in time to explore the battle between democracy and plutocracy. In today’s new Gilded Age of rule by the wealthy, rising anti-trust movements are challenging the stranglehold of corporate monopoly.

Democracy Means Community Engagement, Every Day

We simultaneously face two related existential crises — climate breakdown and radical threats to democracy worldwide. Can democracy withstand climate chaos? Is a reformed and stronger democracy our best hope to make it through the long emergency ahead of us? What’s needed?

Colette Pichon Battle – The 20th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

The passionate, long-time, award-winning Environmental Justice litigator and activist from Bayou Liberty, Louisiana, reminds us of the powerful lessons Hurricane Katrina delivered by laying bare the nation’s racism, neglect of disenfranchised communities and environmental mismanagement. She also encourages us all to participate in whatever way we can in the major events commemorating Katrina’s 20th Anniversary this August to help mobilize and redouble our efforts for Climate Justice.

This talk was delivered at the 2025 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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From Scarcity to Abundance: How Collective Governance Can Transform the Climate Crisis

In this podcast episode, award-winning lawyer and climate justice organizer Colette Pichon Battle lays out a bold vision to transform the Gulf South and Appalachia away from the lethal matrix of fossil fuel extraction and extractive economics, and toward a regenerative future of clean energy democracy, and an equitable, inclusive economy.

Democracy Means Community Engagement, Every Day

We simultaneously face two related existential crises — climate breakdown and radical threats to democracy worldwide. Can democracy withstand climate chaos? Is a reformed and stronger democracy our best hope to make it through the long emergency ahead of us? What’s needed?

Ben Jealous – A Green Economy Lifts All Boats

The renowned civil rights and environmental leader Ben Jealous, former (youngest ever!) President of the NAACP and then of People for the American Way, and now, since 2022, Executive Director of the Sierra Club (founded in 1892, one of the very first large-scale environmental preservation organizations in the world) examines how the green economy is driving job creation and transforming industries, including renewable energy and electric vehicles. He debunks myths that the transition will lead to job losses or take too long, instead showcasing how innovation is fueling economic growth. Jealous also highlights the health benefits tied to cleaner air and reduced pollution, including lower rates of asthma and heart disease. He underscores how the green economy is reshaping industries, improving workforce opportunities, and enhancing public health outcomes.

This talk was delivered at the 2025 Bioneers Conference.

Ben Jealous, named the seventh Executive Director of the Sierra Club in 2022, has served in roles from organizer to investigative journalist to president of two of the nation’s most influential groups pursuing equity and justice and protecting democracy and the environment. From 2008 to 2013, he led the NAACP as the youngest-ever president and CEO of the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization and launched the NAACP’s Climate Justice Program. More recently Ben was President of People for the American Way (PFAW). Ben began his professional trajectory as a reporter and managing editor at the black-owned community newspaper, the Jackson Advocate, exposing “cancer clusters” in Mississippi’s rural communities caused by industrial pollution. He has also been a partner at one of the nation’s premier ESG venture capital firms, has won many awards, served on the boards of the Environmental Defense Fund, the Trust for Public Lands and the Wilderness Society, taught at Princeton (and currently at the University of Pennsylvania), and is a best-selling author, including most recently of: Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing.

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From Scarcity to Abundance: How Collective Governance Can Transform the Climate Crisis

In this podcast episode, award-winning lawyer and climate justice organizer Colette Pichon Battle lays out a bold vision to transform the Gulf South and Appalachia away from the lethal matrix of fossil fuel extraction and extractive economics, and toward a regenerative future of clean energy democracy, and an equitable, inclusive economy.

The Charging Twenties: Now is the Time to Build a Solar-Powered Civilization

In this podcast episode, visionary clean energy entrepreneur Danny Kennedy explores the promise and challenges of the epic civilizational transition to renewable energy.

César Rodríguez-Garavito – More-Than-Human Rights: Pushing the Boundaries of Legal Imagination to Re-Animate the World

César Rodríguez-Garavito, an Earth Rights scholar, lawyer, and founding Director of the MOTH (More-Than-Human) Rights Program at NYU School of Law, has advanced new ideas and legal actions worldwide on issues such as climate justice, Indigenous rights, and what he proposes to call “more-than-human rights,” which are as much a legal proposition as they are a story about our relationship with the more-than-human world. Drawing on his fieldwork and participation in legal actions advancing the rights of nature around the world, César tells a renewed story about the living world: one in which all of nature is alive; where human and nonhuman animals, plants, fungi, rivers, forests, oceans, and other ecosystems are all animate, subjects of moral and legal consideration, and entangled in the planetary web of life.

This talk was delivered at the 2025 Bioneers Conference.

César Rodríguez-Garavito, a Professor of Clinical Law, Chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, and founding Director of the More Than Human Life (MOTH) Program and the Earth Rights Advocacy Program (all based at NYU School of Law), is a human rights and environmental justice scholar and practitioner whose work and publications focus on climate change, Indigenous peoples’ rights, and the human rights movement. Editor-in-Chief of Open Global Rights, César has been an expert witness of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, an Adjunct Judge of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon, and a lead litigator in climate change, socio-economic and Indigenous rights cases. He has conducted field research and environmental and human rights investigations around the world.

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Rights of Nature Email Series

While the Rights of Nature movement has made incredible strides in recent years, obstacles loom large. Where is this movement headed, and how can you get involved? This email series offers an accessible crash course, featuring stories, interviews, and resources that provide context and real-world examples from this movement’s groundbreaking leaders..

Rights of Nature in Indian Country

Honoring the Rights of Nature has always been essential to the worldview and cultures of First Peoples. The Rights of Nature movement simply puts into law what has always been a part of traditional laws: that the natural world must thrive if our Peoples and cultures are to survive.

As a coalition of Native and Native-descended authors, the Bioneers Indigeneity Program team wrote a guide by and for American Indian/Alaska Native community members who are interested in learning about how the Rights of Nature can bring Tribal values into contemporary law.

Kenny Ausubel – Hostile Takeover

In his eagerly anticipated yearly inimitably biting yet droll take on the zeitgeist, Bioneers founder Kenny Ausubel dissects the madness or our current politics and the incredibly high stakes at play, while passionately reminding us that we have no choice but to fight for the survival of the biosphere, and that if we work with “Nature’s Operating Instructions” in mind, we will ultimately prevail.

This talk was delivered at the 2025 Bioneers Conference. Read a written version of this talk here.

Kenny Ausubel, CEO and founder of Bioneers, is an award-winning social entrepreneur, journalist, author and filmmaker. Co-founder and first CEO of the organic seed company, Seeds of Change, his film (and companion book) Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime helped influence national alternative medicine policy. He has edited several books and written four, including, most recently, Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature.

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Thom Hartmann – Supreme Oligarchy at the Gates

As Thom Hartmann sees it, the lines between corporate power, billionaire interests, government authority, public “knowledge,” and foreign influence have not just blurred — they’re vanishing. This is not just politics as usual; this is an emergency. Do we, the American people, still possess the power and will to challenge this oligarchic takeover? Yes, says Hartmann. This is a call to action.

The Power of Community: How Citizens Can Be the Change They Want to See in the World

Community action allows citizens from all walks of life to confront systemic challenges and build change through grassroots organizing. Across the country, activists are harnessing “We the People” power to make breakthrough systemic change at the intersection of climate, justice, and beyond. This article highlights just a few of these leaders and how they’re using equity-based community action to realize a better future for all.

Joy Harjo Keynote – Bioneers 2025

The world-renowned, multiple prestigious award-winning Muscogee poet, writer, and musician Joy Harjo, the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States, author of ten books of poetry as well as plays, memoirs, children’s books, non-fiction, and seven albums, shares stories, perspectives and select readings from powerfully relevant poems.

This talk was delivered at the 2025 Bioneers Conference.

Joy Harjo, the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate and member of the Muscogee Nation, is the author of ten books of poetry, several plays, children’s books, two memoirs, and seven music albums. Her honors include Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lily Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence for the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she lives.

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Robin Wall Kimmerer | Becoming Earth: Experimental Theology

In this moving personal essay, Robin Wall Kimmerer explores the rich afterlife of a fallen cedar, contemplating what its gradual return to the soil means for the forest and all who walk among the trees.

A Return to Wholeness: Storytelling as a Healing Art | Rachel Naomi Remen

This podcast episode features doctor and healer Rachel Naomi Remen, who has cultivated a new generation of doctors practicing whole-person medicine, with an unlikely message: Bless others out loud. The wholeness of the world is restored one heart at a time.

Bill McKibben – Back to the Wall, Face to the Sun

We’re at a dire point in the human story, with temperatures higher than they’ve been in 125,000 years, but we have one secret weapon: the sudden and rapid drop in the price of energy from the sun. Bill McKibben, one of the earliest to warn of the risks of climate change decades ago and in our view the most impactful climate activist of our era, explains that we have a fleeting chance for a truly transformative reorientation of the way our world works…but we will need everyone to make it happen.

This talk was delivered at the 2025 Bioneers Conference.

Bill McKibben, a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a co-founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 to work on climate and racial justice, founded the first global grassroots climate campaign, 350.org, and serves as the Schumann Distinguished Professor in Residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. In 2014 he was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel,’ in the Swedish Parliament and also won the Gandhi Peace Award as well as receiving honorary degrees from 19 colleges and universities. He has written 12+ books about the environment, including his first, one of the most prescient and important books of the last 100 years, 1989’s The End of Nature. His latest book is: The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.

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The Charging Twenties: Now is the Time to Build a Solar-Powered Civilization

In this podcast episode, visionary clean energy entrepreneur Danny Kennedy explores the promise and challenges of the epic civilizational transition to renewable energy.

From Scarcity to Abundance: How Collective Governance Can Transform the Climate Crisis

In this podcast episode, award-winning lawyer and climate justice organizer Colette Pichon Battle lays out a bold vision to transform the Gulf South and Appalachia away from the lethal matrix of fossil fuel extraction and extractive economics, and toward a regenerative future of clean energy democracy, and an equitable, inclusive economy.

Corrina Gould – Resilience and Rematriation

Corrina Gould, tribal spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan and Director of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, greets attendees to her ancestral homeland, the territory of Huchiun. In her opening welcome, Gould reminds us of the brutal history of genocide and cultural erasure faced by Indigenous Californians, but also shares their powerful resilience and the ongoing rematriation, cultural revitalization and land restoration efforts underway to heal and transform the legacies of colonization and to do the work our ancestors and future generations are calling us to do.

This talk was delivered at the 2025 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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Indigenous Forum – Rematriation: Indigenous Women’s Leadership

Corrina Gould, Caleen Sisk and Jessica Hutchings, three powerful Indigenous women, share “real-life” examples of rematriation, the ripple effects of these practices, and ways that we can all get involved to Indigenize the future.

California Genocide and Resilience with Corrina Gould

California Indians have survived some of the most extreme acts of genocide committed against Native Americans. In this episode of Indigeneity Conversations, 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.

Performance by Rising Appalachia

Rising Appalachia gave two performances at Bioneers 2025. Watch their second performance below.

Rising Appalachia, the brainchild of Atlanta-raised sisters Leah Song and Chloe Smith, rooted in the rich musical traditions of their family and region, is an internationally touring folk ensemble with a passionate global following. Eschewing industry norms, they have independently forged their own exemplary, deeply ethical, value-driven path for 16 years, producing seven albums and conducting tours around the world while simultaneously immersing themselves in community-building, cultural exchange programs, and music gathering and sharing everywhere they go. Their most recent album (their first of carefully curated cover songs) is: Folk & Anchor.

Learn more at risingappalachia.com.

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“Stand Like an Oak” by Rising Appalachia

A luminous example of socially engaged and visionary artistry, Rising Appalachia perform their song “Stand Like an Oak.”

Art That Responds to the Times: Wisdom from Rising Appalachia

Chloe Smith of Rising Appalachia discusses making art that brings people together and responds to the times we’re in with Bioneers Arts Coordinator, Polina Smith.