Joshua Fouts – A Prisoner of Hope

Bioneers Executive Director Joshua Fouts describes in this heartfelt but humor-filled talk how the dire global political situation had been plunging him into despair and how he started to find some solace in such disparate sources as Star Wars, teachings from Joseph Campbell, Rebecca Solnit’s sense of historical perspective, and humiliations the natural world inflicts on us when we persist in arrogance. Ultimately he shares how the shining examples of current youth activism and the observation of his own teenage son and his son’s peer group’s far more enlightened attitudes than previous generations’, brought him back to trusting that indeed “the arc of the moral universe does bend toward justice.”

This speech was given at the 2018 National Bioneers Conference. Read the full text version.

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Kenny Ausubel – Dung Beetle Medicine

Bioneers CEO, Co-founder, filmmaker and author Kenny Ausubel delivers one of the best of his inimitable tour-de-force talks that veer from dark humor to gleaming inspiration, as he plumbs the depth of our current political nightmare and ecological crisis but then shares his certainty that with the emerging resistance of unstoppable women and youth-led movements, a new era built around a “Green New Deal” will pave the way to a truly pluralistic commonwealth and an “Earth Community”… but only if we turn to nature for guidance-in this instance emulating surprisingly skillful dung beetles, who really know how to navigate their way through crap.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. Read the full text version.

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Thus Spoke the Plant: Plant Cognition, Communication and Imagination

Monica Gagliano is studying plant cognition. Her scientific colleagues aren’t all supportive.

In her 2018 Bioneers presentation, Gagliano talks about the reactions she received from the scientific community when she began exploring how plants think, feel, and even imagine. Though her work was often perceived as pseudo science or even science fiction, she persisted.

In her 2018 “phytobiography,” Thus Spoke the Plant, Gagliano reveals the dynamic role plants play in genuine first-hand accounts from her research into plant communication and cognition. By transcending the view of plants as the objects of scientific materialism, Gagliano encourages us to rethink plants as people: beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and volition, and hence having the capacity for their own perspectives and voices. The book draws on up-close-and-personal encounters with the plants themselves, as well as plant shamans, indigenous elders, and mystics from around the world and integrates these experiences with an incredible research journey and the groundbreaking scientific discoveries that emerged from it.

Following are two excerpts from Thus Spoke the Plant.

Explore more Bioneers media on Intelligence in Nature here.

This book is about plants, and by plants. It is a phytobiography—a collection of stories, each written together with and on behalf of a plant person. These stories are told through the narrative voice of both the human and the plant person, through the language of plants and my language for them. But let me be clear on this most delicate subject. There is no attempt at, or need for, ventriloquizing by “assigning” voice to plants, speaking for them or in their place to render these stories intelligible to our human mind. Here, the human is not an interpreter who translates a mental representation in her head as if it was plant- speak, and then puts it into words we can comprehend or scribbles it on a page we know how to read. Rather, the human is a listener who filters out personal noise to hear plants speak and engage in active dialog with these nonhuman intelligences that are far more real than our current scientific constructs allow us to contend with. Here, the human acts as a co-author who physically delivers those conversations to the page. As such, these stories emerge out of a human-plant collaborative endeavour and a mixed writing style, which I think we can fittingly call Plant-writing.

Through Plant-writing, this book transcends the view of plants as the objects of scientific materialism and empowers a new and yet timeless vision of the world, where we encounter plants as the persons and companions they are and bring kind- heartedness to each encounter. By weaving these plant-human stories together into a magical journey of discovery and interconnectedness, this book reaffirms the precious gift our partnership with plants has always been throughout the evolutionary history of our species and our search for under- standing who we are and what are we here for. On these regard, I suspect that anyone who dares embarking on such a search will eventually find these answers. The stories of how each one of us may find them will differ widely, each story being marvelously tailor- made to suit our individual taste. However, the actual answers probably won’t. So while these are my stories tracking what happened to me in my life as a professional scientist in search for my answers on what is the essence of our human experience, this book is about me as much as anyone and these stories belong to me as much as all of us. These are our stories of what it takes to stay aligned with a greater vision and go though the process of bringing it to life in the world. These stories belong to the heart of our humanity, encoded with the memories of our species and all the life forms we descended from. Like in a magnificent orchestral symphony, each story is notated separately for individual plants; and still, all stories are sounding together to remind us of our deep history of connection to and interdependence with all others (humans and non- humans) and reconnect our magnificent minds with our precious hearts so we dare to dream a truly inspiring future for the whole.

. . .

In the midst of the rich symphony of Nature, plants appear utterly silent. Designed to believe our own perceptions, our human experience of their silence is so obvious and undeniable that we forget to question whether plants truly are as voiceless as we perceive them. Admittedly without offering some proof of plant voice—assuming we agreed on the definition of the term ‘voice’—we may rightly deem the question itself to be nonsense. However to forget to ask the question, in effect, dismisses any chance for the proof to emerge. As a matter of fact, this is exactly what colonial ideologies of domination and manipulation have succeeded at; by scorning traditional knowledge as unsubstantiated and fanciful and erasing our ancestral memories that spoke of other possibilities, humanity has found itself locked inside the experimental box of a restraining socio- cultural view. Like the plants in my experimental Matryoshka boxes, we are besieged by a barrier of emptiness designed to block any possibility of communication—from this viewpoint, of course, plants do not speak! The good news is that by simply asking the question regarding vegetal speech, we are free to move away from the self- righteous slumber we have intoxicated our mind with. By merely asking the question about plant voice, we set ourselves free from the preconceived notion that construes plants as inevitably voiceless, and we open to observe plants as they behave and truly discover the reality we share. That’s right, because voice is an inter-subjective affair. Voice exists in the place of relation, the space between the self and the other, and it is what we bring to our encounters with plants that defines the quality of our communicative rendezvous—who we allow to speak (or silence).

If there truly is a plant voice, how does it speak and how can we hear it? The voice of the vegetal other is revealed in a place of reciprocity. At this point, some would argue that our dialogue with plants lacks reciprocity as it would seem that for plants to do the talking we are required merely to be the listeners (never, the speakers). The argument would be based on the recognition that dialogue entails a mutual exchange, where the one who speaks must be also able to hear, and the one who hears is also capable of speaking. Accordingly, it would be concluded that there is no dialogue at all between plants and us because we are supposed to give them our full attention, but they never engage with and respond to us. This perception was about to be, if not completely debunked, severely altered by a new scientific truth.

As in all conversations, the relationship between how information is packaged (encoding) and the content translated (decoding) determines the outcome of the exchange and interaction. The experimental findings from my Matryoshka boxes had provided no mechanistic explanation of how the chilli seedlings exchanged information with the other plants, but had signposted the way. It was clear that some of the underlying conditions required for such conversation to occur included the emission of a signal that not only propagated rapidly to convey real- time information about neighbouring plants but also could be anaThus Spiolysed quickly by the receiving seedlings. And what better way to have a chat than thru sound? After all, the ability to sense sound and vibrations is an ancient sensory modality behind the behavioural organization of all living organisms and their relationship with their environment. It was in late 2011 that bright yellow kernels of maize decided to break the silence with their vibratory signals. They sprouted the conversation open inside a university laboratory at the heart of one of the leading global colonial powers and for the first time, their loud and chirpy vegetal clicks were heard by our ears and recorded by our sensitive scientific laser instruments in Bristol, England. And it was official—plants emit sounds and they hear them too, and on the basis of what they hear they modify their behavior.

Emerging at the interface between two bodies of knowledge, the truth was that this research was successfully substantiating the ‘beliefs’ of traditional knowledge through the application of the Western scientific model. Did it succeed in changing the notion of ownership to one of custodianship? By raising her voice, Maize had done something more, and different. Beautifully unexpected like a rare flower blossoming out of season, her voice had brought into awareness a new perceptual field extending beyond ownership and custodianship, a vision of non- hierarchical co- participation. By revealing the vegetal voice, Maze had come to ask that we recognise our attempts at silencing plants; because humans have something of a historical track record for silencing those whose voice they do not want to hear. We do this by unconsciously ignoring them or deliberately stripping them away and of itself, this is an injurious act because it violates the very thing that makes dialogue possible—the recognition of the other as an equal.

From this perspective, both ownership and custodianship break down the foundation of a true dialogue with the vegetal. Although the two attitudes are very different, both are validated by the apparent ‘inability’ of plants to express themselves and thus, the justification for objectifying them. Denying the morally relevant value of the interaction, ownership is designed to override the subjectivity of plants in order to control and abuse with no restrain. On the other hand, custodianship inadvertently patronises them by treating them with a kind- ness that gives away our feeling of superiority. This attitude is most obviously observed (although, rarely understood for what it truly accomplishes) when we overwrite plants with the sounds that are familiar to us by ventriloquizing them through the approximation of human speech or the transposition of musical scales and various instruments onto them. Because in dialogue with the plant world, we are asked to relinquish these in-built ideas that make our perspective better than, wiser than and superior over the other, all these attitudes bring us to the same ethical and moral cul-de-sac. And with a few chirpy sounds, Maize had effortlessly brought it all to the surface for us to honestly view it, if willing. Personally, I had always considered myself as a ‘custodian’ of the vegetal world and more generally, Nature; but seeing myself as a steward above and separate from the rest was a position no longer tenable. In opening the conversation, Maze had come to deliver a most transformative message—plants and Nature can be heard. They are no property to be owned. They need no custodianship, but commitment to a non- hierarchical respect, a space of communion where we come to understand the world and take the pathway towards understanding each other.

And this was only the beginning.

Excerpted with permission from Thus Spoke the Plant (North Atlantic Books, 2018) by Monica Gagliano.

Plant Intelligence and Why Imagination Is the Key to Understanding the Natural World

Monica Gagliano believes she was born to be a scientist. She grew up in the city with parents who thought nature was something to be kept outside. But, Gagliano thought otherwise. She started a journal tracking the growth of her bean plant, and created her first data set at age nine.

Now, Gagliano is a research associate professor in evolutionary ecology at the University of Western Australia, and is a research affiliate at the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. Though she began her career by studying animal behavior, she quickly turned her attention to plant behavior. In recent years, Gagliano has blazed the trail for a brand new field called plant bioacoustics, showing that plants do make sounds. Her studies have led her to author numerous groundbreaking scientific articles and to co-edit The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World, and The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, and Literature.

Underlying all of her accomplishments and studies is Gagliano’s effort to illuminate the forefront of a new scientific paradigm that dissolves the false separation between people and the natural world. In her new book, Thus Spoke the Plant — which she calls a “phyto-biography,” or a collection of stories written with and on behalf of the plants themselves — she describes her experiments that opened the space to begin to understand how to make contact with this other-than-human intelligence. (Read an excerpt from the book here.)

Following is a transcript of Gagliano’s Bioneers 2018 keynote address on incorporating imagination into science. View the full keynote video here.

View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

Monica Gagliano:

A couple of weeks ago while I was in Brazil at a conference on plant physiology, one of my colleagues, a philosopher, asked a very simple question to a group of us: What killed the dinosaurs?

I’m sure that the first thing that comes to your mind, which is the same thing that comes to everyone’s mind, is the asteroid. Right? We know very well that 65 million years ago, an asteroid collapsed onto our planet, put up this big dust of sand and dirt which covered the sun. And then it got really cold and all the dinosaurs died. That’s how the story goes. In fact, we also know that at that particular time it seems that many species disappeared. So it kind of corroborated the idea that there was one single cataclysmic event that kind of wiped everyone out — the asteroid. Then in 1978, in the Yucatan peninsula, we found this huge crater that was dated back 65 million years. That was the cherry on top of the cake. You say, well, that’s the asteroid.

Now, I’m not here to debate whether the asteroid that was charged with the killing of the dinosaurs did a good job, did the job at all, or not. The reason for asking this question, which was the same reason my colleague asked it at the conference in Brazil, is that when we’re asked to think of an alternative explanation that is not the story of the asteroid, we find it really hard to think of something else. It’s just: But it is the asteroid. What else could it be?

The Role of Imagination In Science

The point of this is that by the time that you go to school, by the time you turn seven or thereabout, your imagination has already been stifled, and your actual ability to think of alternative possibilities is reduced dramatically. I’m going to talk about the role of imagination in the context of science, but it’s just an example of what it really means in the wider picture that we are experiencing right now.

Imagination, from the root of the word, basically means “creates images of something, or representing something, representing the world.” We all know our imagination touches and deeply moves us, especially when it’s expressed through creative approaches that artists and musicians, for example, are really good at. What I find intriguing is that imagination is the creative ability of our mind to literally dream the world and worlds. So it’s a bit surprising that such a critical creative endeavor would be kind of dismissed when we talk about science.

When we talk about science and about imagination in science, the word takes a totally different meaning. Suddenly you’re talking about fanciful speculations and empty assumptions. Basically they’re telling you, “What are you talking about? There is no such thing.” There is either a tendency to downplay the role of imagination in science, or to completely dismiss it from the important role that it has in the construction of knowledge through science.

I’m not here to lay judgment on science, but it is true that our modern techno-scientific world has subscribed to an arid version of imagination, and it’s very different and very far away from what we know imagination is when we think about it as the creative beings that we are, because we are all artists, we are all musicians in some ways.

What I am interested in is when science, which is a strong voice in our culture, describes a world that is deprived of imagination, then it is describing humans and the rest of nature as a system of cog wheels. And suddenly those parts are easily to dispose of. They are replaceable.In the worst cases, and we see this all the time, they become worthless. Again, I’m not here to pass judgment on science. I’m a scientist and I love science. I think science is yet another amazing creative endeavor of the human experience.

What I’m interested in is how we actually got to stand in front of this door to imagination, and why we are so scared, especially in science, to open it.

For me, the idea of the imagination brings up this feeling of unruliness and lack of control. In a world where we feel increasingly unsafe (and we feel like we need to control as a result) the more we control perhaps gives us the illusion that we will feel a little safer. But maybe it doesn’t work that way, and maybe we are standing in front of this door, and we are so concerned that if we open it, we are going to unleash chaos. But in fact perhaps imagination can release those solutions that we are so desperately looking for, and we can’t see them, just as we couldn’t see an alternative to the asteroid for the dinosaurs. Because we’ve been trained and conditioned to think that there’s going to be chaos if we open the door.

One of the most impressive scientists in history is of course Charles Darwin, who has guided a revolution of his own. He recognized the role of imagination. Actually many scientists wouldn’t be able to do their job without it, whether they like it or not. Darwin recognized imagination as a prerogative of the human. It’s a faculty that allows us to actually create the brilliant and novel results or opportunities that we are all looking for.

Why is imagination so important? Because it represents a reservoir of meaning. This is a meaning that is embodied. It’s in our flesh. It’s in our blood. It’s in our roots. It’s made of a pre-linguistic system, so we don’t even need to talk. We can feel it through our emotional system. It’s kind of like a birthright. How lucky is that? We’re so desperate for a solution and the solution is right here, inscribed in the system itself.

From a Darwinian perspective or from an evolutionary perspective, the reason this information is so important is because it guides action and adaptive behavior. These are the type of solutions that we want because another way to say this would be that these are the solutions to the eco-cultural and political issues that we are having at this moment.

All I can offer is my experience as a scientist and my own personal journey, when I chose to open that door for myself, and what it means when you extrapolate from the smaller story of the individual to a bigger picture of a collective.

When I opened the door, I found two things. I found plants and Indigenous Knowledge. When I started my research career, I was studying animal behavior and then I decided to switch to plants. When I started looking at plants, I looked at plants from the context of plants in relation to sound. That was totally inspired by my own experiences in the realm of Indigenous Knowledge where this story has been recurrent everywhere.

Can Plants Think? Do They Have Imagination?

My role, I felt, was to see whether science could actually test it. Isn’t that what science does? It tests ideas. And of course that in itself was scary enough. I had a couple of colleagues in my own department who couldn’t bear saying hello to me for two years. That is just a small example of how scary it is to actually open that door. But what do we do? We open it anyway, right? Then you get really good at it, and there’s a little bit of audacity that kicks in.

So I moved from just the communication of plants to something that was perceived even more threatening. That is the entire area of the cognitive abilities of plants, and learning and memory are under that umbrella.

Research on learning and memory comes from the domain of psychology, from the study of the human cognition. Several decades later we managed to move beyond humans and include some animals — and more recently, even machines. But one thing that this entire field has been insisting on is the fact that neurons and brains are the key. If you don’t have them, you are automatically a priori excluded. When you actually explore this assumption, you realize that that’s not true.

The first plant that I worked with is Mimosa pudica, also known as “the sensitive plant” because it moves really fast. You probably have learned about it from a beautiful article that Michael Pollan wrote a few years ago for the New Yorker. He did a really good job of describing one of the experiments that I did with these plants, which included dropping the plant to see whether the plants could learn to ignore me, basically. And they do. They learned really fast, and they remember for a very long time.

I’d like to spend some time talking about a kind of higher level of learning, which is from a pea. The nice, humble, green garden pea.

To understand what I did with the peas, we need to go back to the animal kingdom. I’m sure that many of you are familiar with the Pavlovian study of the dog. What is interesting about this experiment is the fact that, first of all, the dog is evaluating what is going on in his environment and he’s got his own value system. He’s deciding what he wants, what is worthwhile, what is going to help him to get there.

The next thing is that, of course, not all dogs are the same, so this value system is very subjective. There is a subject in there that is making these decisions. The decisions are made based on feelings, depending on how the dog feels about having that dinner and about this bell.

Now the really interesting thing about this experiment, from my perspective, is that in a way, by salivating to the sound of a bell that has been previously always rung to announce the arrival of dinner, what the dog is showing us is that he is actually extending the amount of information that is in the environment. He’s extending the information to something that is not in the environment, because dinner is actually not there. So food, or dinner in this case, is just a concept in the dog’s mind. In other words, the dog is imagining dinner.

Now, take this and apply it to a plant. Exactly the same strategy. Dinner for the plant is blue light. In response the plants don’t salivate, but the blue light triggers a phototropic response, which means that the plants will bend towards it. That light is what the plants want just as much as the dog wanted dinner. Now I had to find something that would replace the bell, but would play the same role. What I came up with was this little tiny fan, which on its own doesn’t do anything to the plant. The plant actually doesn’t really care that it’s there, so it keeps growing straight, hoping for some light somewhere.

Now just as Pavlov did with the dog, if you present the fan, always anticipating the light, eventually the plants learn that, just by the presence of the fan, I can start preparing and turn towards it, because the fan tells me where the light is going to be. Just like for the dog, there is someone in there who is making the decision and it’s based on a value system. How much do you want that light? What does the fan mean? And just like for the dog, not all plants are the same, and also that subject in there is deciding and choosing based on how he feels about things, and the experience of those things. Just like for the dog, the plant is actually stretching the field of perception, because dinner — in this case the light — is actually not even there. Like the dog, the food is a concept, an idea in the plant’s mind. In other words, the plant is imagining the food arriving.

This was a great study because apart from the scientific results, it was able to disrupt that linear thinking that if you don’t have a brain and no neurons, you can’t have this ability. We had to relinquish that or at least expand it.

The other thing that was good for me personally was that basically it showed me that imagination is everywhere, no matter what kind of mind or what kind of form you are. It would be the same as saying that imagination is at the heart of nature, our own nature as the human form, and any other nature. It’s an equally important bridge between that heart and the mind that dreams the world into being, whether it’s the human mind or not.

We are stuck in front of this door, and we are so concerned that if we open it we are going to unleash chaos. But guess what? By staying behind this door, we are staying stuck inside our minds. I’m sure everyone has seen the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and it’s not exactly great news. But the good news is, it’s just as easy as opening the door. All we need to do is there.

When my mind and my heart were linked together through the bridge of imagination, I discovered a few things: First, it took me over those intellectual gaps that I was so afraid of. Second, it has integrated what would look like discrepancy between what I knew and what new was to come. Then it allowed for the emergence of this new insight, new understanding and inspiring ideas. It changed my life and my world as the individual, but it also showed me that it’s absolutely without a doubt possible. We can do it. We just need to dare.

Jacqueline Martinez Garcel – Latino Leadership & the Power of Love in Philanthropy

Social Justice warrior Jacqueline Martinez Garcel leads a foundation with the largest network of civically engaged Latino philanthropists.

On a mission to unleash the power of Latinos, the Latino Community Foundation  seeks to radically change the concept, purpose, and pathway to philanthropy by returning it to its core roots: love. At a critical moment in our nation’s history, the rising groups of Latino leaders are fighting the battles of racism and classism that are raging in our country by honing in the healing and redemptive power of love.

Driven by change and impact, not charity, Jacqueline shares how the work of the Latino Community Foundation is radicalizing the power dynamics that have crept into the field of philanthropy and have held the sector captive in an oppressive and counterintuitive cycle. The ultimate objective for Jacqueline is to liberate capital and invest in grassroots movements and leaders that will drive us closer to a more just and representative democracy.

Introduction by Daniel L. Skaff, MBA, co-founder and Managing Partner of Radicle Impact Partners.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. Read the full text version.

View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

What Are You Doing To Decolonize Thanksgiving This Year?

Here we go again! It’s time to Decolonize Thanksgiving.

I wrote this blog to update you on some of my thinking about Decolonizing Thanksgiving, and to shamelessly crowdsource some new ideas from you about how to begin to incorporate “new” traditions into one of America’s favorite holidays.

To begin with, here are 3 easy things you can do to Decolonize Thanksgiving:

Honor the Indigenous Peoples on whose land you live. If you don’t know, you can easily research this information at this website.

Eat food Indigenous to America. Really, they are our favorite foods anyway. They are corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, bell pepper, pumpkin, venison, turkey, fish — all the good stuff. Here are some amazing recipes from the former head chef of the Mitsitam Native Foods Cafe at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

Recognize and recap the real story of Thanksgiving to your friends and family.

There are many more things you can do to decolonize Thanksgiving. Over the past two years, I have been Decolonizing Thanksgiving by bringing people around the table to honor and recognize the truth of the holiday. I first wrote about how to do it in the 2016 blog, 3 ways to Decolonize Thanksgiving. Last year, I co-hosted a Decolonize Thanksgiving meal made with ingredients native to Central Coast California where I live, that you can read about in the 2017 post, How to Indigenize Thanksgiving.

And, there are so many other things you can do, such as:

  • Educate your family members about colonization in America. Here’s a great lecture you can watch or listen to by Michael Yellowbird.
  • Stand up to teachers indoctrinating young minds with racist activities, like dressing up as Indians and making feather headdresses. Here’s a great resource teachers can use to teach about Thanksgiving from the National Museum of the American Indian.

HOW TO MAKE A NEW TRADITION

Finally, this year I want to address the people in your life who might question your goal to Decolonize Thanksgiving. First of all, Thanksgiving doesn’t lie on hollowed ground. It is a relatively new holiday, proclaimed a day of “thanksgiving and peace” by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 as a way to bring together Americans divided by the Civil War. Here’s a great story about the origins of the holiday.

In America today, some would argue that we need more holidays where we can stop to reflect on what brings us together as a country. During my fascinating discussion about Thanksgiving with Native educator, Chris Newell, I learned that the actual feasting aspect of Thanksgiving is deeply rooted in Indigenous traditions.

So, let’s keep feasting. But, we can also take time with our families and friends to recognize our deep divides, the ongoing racism against people of color, the ongoing erasure of Indigenous Peoples, and patent denial that the wealth of this country was (and still is) based on stolen land and slave labor that divides us by class, race, region, and culture.

It’s hard to change a holiday; I understand. You may encounter naysayers at the table, people who will accuse you of being strange, make fun of you for being woke, or call you an old hippy when you say: “Let’s take a moment to think about the real history of Thanksgiving, and why we have what we have to be thankful for.”

Social change isn’t made overnight. We are the beginning of a movement. And I am confident that most Americans will celebrate a Decolonized Thanksgiving within a generation or two. I’ll be proud to tell my grandkids someday that I was at the forefront of the movement.

Please share with us, what are you planning to do to Decolonize Thanksgiving this year?

Giving Thanks as the Tide Turns

Dear Bioneers:

It has been quite a dizzying two-step between the magic of the 2018 Bioneers conference at a nail-biting cusp of political uncertainty and the stunning turnaround of the blue wave election a few weeks later. On behalf of all of us here at Bioneers, I give thanks that the tide is turning and for all we’re doing as a community to help create that wave.

Yet at the same time, the cataclysmic California fires ravaging communities and landscapes just weeks after the conference underscore the state of permanent emergency that will now be our work for the rest of our lives. What we’re doing together could not be more important.

The conference once again affirmed that Bioneers is medicine. At a traumatic and precarious pre-election moment, I sure felt a whole lot better after Bioneers than I did coming into it. The overwhelming sense I got was how radically the work has matured and scaled. Yes, a new world really is emerging and it’s unstoppable

At nowhere but Bioneers do we get to see it all under one roof, to see the interconnections, to experience the blazing brilliance of vision in action. It has been our charge to make the impossible inevitable, and we may get there.

So we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for being part of all this. Many of our speakers say they give the best talks of their lives at Bioneers. The reason is you. You make that magic possible.

This is the time to change the systems, to flip the paradigms, and to make these changes lasting and real. The election was a profound affirmation that this movement of movements that Bioneers embodies also reflects the values and intentions of the large majority of the country. Unprecedented numbers of people are rising up to reclaim our citizenship, which is exactly what it’s going to take.

As Bioneers rolls into our 30th Anniversary (who knew?!), we’re gearing up to double down on what we’re doing and do a whole lot more. This is the time. We’re in the vortex of massive change. What we do now – and what we don’t do – will set the course for decades to come.

Because of your generous support, we’re actually going to be able to move forward with some strategic new projects that we believe are going to be game-changers. So, thank you, thank you!!! We deeply encourage your ongoing support with the financial mojo to power the mother ship of Bioneers.

COMMUNICATE – CONNECT – CATALYZE

In the early days of Bioneers, we used this meme: Communicate – Connect – Catalyze. After all these years, that sums it up pretty well.

Communicate

Rebecca Moore, Founder Google Earth Outreach
Changing the World by Changing the Story

Erica Persons has given me the honor of letting me present her personal map. Erica is Coastal Miwok and Blackfoot. She has been participating for several months in a project through the Bioneers Indigeneity Program, working with my Google Earth Outreach team to teach mapping skills to the Native youth. They decided they wanted to come up with a map of gentrification for Oakland.

A typical map is government data produced by people who don’t live in the area, and it’s based on the sale and pricing of housing and so on. It’s impersonal. What Erica led the group in doing is making what I would call a personal map from the inside of the experience of a person affected by gentrification — whose home was taken away, who became homeless and had to learn how to find resources in Oakland if you need food, if you need a shower, if you need a phone to reach people because you don’t have a phone anymore. How can you find these resources in your community, and how can you tell the story of what it feels like to go through that?

This map that Erica and her peers made is proactive. If you’re in this situation, here are resources that could help you. She also told the story of her own home. I’m going to try not to cry. After the neighborhood was gentrified, they were evicted.

This is where the heart and soul of mapping can come in, when we can empower, in this case the next generation, to tell these important stories, hold those in power accountable, and stop this kind of thing from keeping happening. So thank you, Erica, and thank you, Bioneers.

Communication is foundational, and most people today get their “environmental education” through media. Once people realize that real solutions exist, it radically leverages the pressure for change. So we’re ramping up our media production and outreach to spread breakthrough solutions much more widely.

At this historic turning point, there’s unprecedented receptivity for the kinds of breakthrough solutions Bioneers brings. We remain unique in advancing diverse solutions across virtually all arenas with a holistic “solve-the-whole-problem” approach that recognizes that it’s all connected and we’re all connected. Help us keep changing the story to change the world.

Connect

Michael Pollan
Bioneers Connected Me

This is my fourth or fifth time on this stage (since 2001), and one of the reasons I’m here is to express my gratitude to Kenny and Nina for all that this community has contributed to my work. It was through Kenny I met Joel Salatin, the farmer who’s at the center of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It was through Bioneers that I was first exposed to Paul Stamets, the visionary mycologist who’s very much a part of my new book How to Change Your Mind. Heritage Seeds was an idea that Kenny introduced me to when he was working on Seeds of Change [in the early 1990s]. Time after time, there have been key moments, and I have this sense my next book is somebody out here. I just have to find them.

Making connections among both issues and people is in Bioneers’ DNA. After three decades of connecting issues and people, we’ve created a trellis on which a remarkable community of leadership has grown and flowered. Endless connections and cross-pollinations occur at Bioneers that lead to game-changing new work, fertile collaborations, funding, media exposure and countless other benefits that advance our collective work and elevate the community. By connecting so many seemingly disparate issues, as a community we’re developing authentic solutions that solve for pattern. Thank you for helping us weave this return to wholeness.

Catalyze

May Boeve, Executive Director 350.org
The Bioneers Launch Pad

I realized that the main milestones of my life as a climate activist coincide with Bioneers. In 2004, while at Middlebury College in Vermont, I joined a veggie-oil road trip around the US called Project Bio-bus, giving presentations about climate change. Project Bio-bus made a stop at one of the Bioneers satellite conferences in Fairfield, Iowa. Everyone thought it was cool. But I was awe-struck. Here were my people. It planted the seed of 350.org, and that has been my life’s work ever since.

350.org launched here at Bioneers in many ways. In 2009, we set out to organize a global day of climate action. Bioneers helped inspire our recruitment strategy. I remember getting goose-bumps sitting in this very room when Paul Hawken’s slide show scrolled the thousands and thousands of names of social movement organizations worldwide through his Wiser Earth Project. We emailed every single one of them to recruit for 350’s first global day of action. Organizers held 5,200 events in 182 countries. A few years later, we were back at Bioneers, recruiting for another day of action, and next October, we will celebrate 10 years.

Just as Bioneers, through the leadership of people of color and Indigenous People, has centered people of color, women, and indigeneity, 350.org is attempting to learn this too. The climate movement is as well. Thank you for so many here who are and have already been centering equity. You have shown the way forward, and you have been generous with your wisdom.

We need massive movements, movements that win, and we must move with grace and patience with each other to build lasting relationships that truly build power. Thank you to every young person here for demanding we figure this out faster. Thank you to every movement elder who has been in this work and continues to show up and teach us. Thank you for those of you who are making sure that resources make it to the frontlines. And thank you to those of you who see the whole interconnected web of movement work, and help us build relationships with one another.

Through it all, I remain a very proud Bioneer, which I define as solutions-oriented, creative, and ever evolving. This room contains multitudes, and we’re all here because we are all Bioneers. May our gratitude for each other be the fuel that keeps us rising faster towards solutions.

The edges where ecosystems meet are the greatest sources of fertility, innovation, and evolutionary novelty. By bringing these fertile edges together, Bioneers has catalyzed countless breakthrough projects.

Many of the Bioneers community’s models are ready to scale, and we’re committed to making that happen by helping advance projects with high leverage, high impact and the potential to spread widely and quickly. Over the past several years, we’ve been partnering directly on several catalytic initiatives that that we believe are game-changers: our Rights of Nature law and governance initiative in Indian Country with the Colorado Plateau Intertribal Conversations Group, and our partnerships with Bren Smith’s 3-D Ocean Farming breakthrough as well as the Biomimicry Institute’s visionary venture to incorporate Biomimicry into California’s mandate of K-12 environmental literacy education. Thank you yet again for helping us make these kinds of proactive systemic changes possible.

IMAGINE…

So, as dire as the state of the world is today, and in spite of the trauma and suffering, we do not have the luxury of despair, which is also self-fulfilling. In this “fierce urgency of now,” we need to act ever more boldly and quickly. After 30 years of Bioneers, I am so unspeakably grateful we’ve been patiently doing the work together all these years. I cannot imagine where we’d be without this visionary community of leadership, but I can imagine the force we can be going forward at this epic step change in human evolution.

We love you and we give thanks to each and every one of you. As Sarah Crowell of Destiny Arts has said at Bioneers: “The way we’ll hold it together is to hold it – together.”

“Imagine”

Patrisse Cullors, Co-Founder Black Lives Matter


 

I am grateful to be here, to be present for this moment, for this community, to be in a community that is creating a world where we can imagine all of us thriving and living, not just surviving.

Part of our work, all of us in this room, is not just about tearing things down. We know that. But what are we building, and what are we building towards?

I want to ask the audience to humor me. Close your eyes and take a moment to imagine that we are living in a different time, to imagine we are living in a moment where all of our needs are met. Every single human being that we interact with is not suffering. Instead we are led with joy.

Take it a step further, imagine what you would want your community to look like, what it would sound like? Listen to those sounds. Honor them. And take it a step further and imagine what would be built around your community. Imagine that every single jail and prison no longer has a place there. Instead there are homes for everyone, community for everyone. Good, healthy food for everyone.

Take it a step further, and imagine that healthcare is no longer a big business. That we have now entered a world where we get our physical and emotional and spiritual needs met, that we, yes, can go to professionals, but we also have access to the parts of us that know how to heal ourselves.

And take it a step further, where women no longer have to fight for autonomy of our bodies, where folks who are trans survive past 35.

And just hold that right now, in this moment. Hold that feeling. Hold how special that vision is. As you slowly open your eyes, take the time, every single day, to remember that vision, to remember why we fight so hard. We’re not fighting so hard because we want to fight so hard. We’re fighting so hard because we have a vision. We have a vision for what we deserve, for what every single human being, animal being, plant being deserves.

When you think about Black Lives Matter, remember that our movement is about imagining, imagining a world where black folks are actually free. Imagining a world where the word poverty is a past tense, imagining a world where we don’t need handcuffs or shackles any longer, imagining a world that we all deserve to live in. Thank you so much, Bioneers.

Beyond the Headdress: Breaking Free from Native American Stereotypes and Misinformation

Jayden Lim (Pomo), a high school senior skilled in GIS software, business planning, and Pomo language documentation (and also a DJ since age 11), serves as a Tribal Youth Ambassador (TYA) for the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center. Lim spoke at the Obama White House ceremony honoring the TYA program and is currently working to make California switch Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day.

At Bioneers 2018, Lim illuminated the hidden history of California and how she has had to grapple with stereotypes and historical trauma to find her identity as a Native youth.

Following is a full-text version of Jayden Lim’s speech. Watch a video of her address here.

View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

Jayden Lim:

On Columbus Day of 2005, I raised my hand eagerly to claim my Native American heritage and protest the celebration of Columbus in my kindergarten classroom. I was immediately told by my teacher that I was not Native American because I was perceived as the Korean in the primarily white classroom.

In 2010, I was forced to stay behind in my fourth grade class while the rest of the kids were dismissed for their lunch in order to build a Styrofoam mission. The teacher instructed me to keep the project in class in hopes of my Pomo mother not finding out.

In 2012, my Spanish teacher claimed that Native Americans should not be considered First Peoples, as they crossed the Bering Strait and are actually of Asian origin.

In 2016, my high school dance department performed a mock Native American ceremony in attempt to resurrect their dead Indian princess in their Peter Pan-themed dance show. A few months later, I called out the performance on a national platform at the White House. I returned home to receive backlash, as the dance team felt targeted and hurt that I would point out their mistakes in front of Michelle Obama.

My experience with racism and stereotypes is just one of hundreds of thousands of Native American students in California. On behalf of those students, I’m demanding that we move beyond the headdress. And I’m not referring to the headdress that is meaningful to the Plains and other tribal communities. I’m talking about the white man’s interpretation of the headdress as a savage and uncivilized representation of Native Peoples.

While Native American symbols have been popularized in media and commercial markets, those symbols are appropriated and devalued of their meaning once they are stripped from their Native communities. The popularity of the symbol of the headdress is a symptom to a much larger problem, and the problem is dehumanizing and exploitation of Native Peoples and their ancestral lands. We need to move from symbolism to reality. In order to start this movement, we must acknowledge the past.

Spanish mission represent the first wave of genocide in California. Yet in elementary schools, we are taught that docile Indians flocked to the missions in search of water and civilization through Christianity. From this history, Native people are characterized as savage and in need of saving. And Europeans are painted as heroes and canonized as saints. If we are to acknowledge the past and move towards reality, we must expect that what we were taught was a romanticized false narrative. In actuality, children were thrown off cliffs, women were sexually assaulted, and men were mentally and physically abused.

During the American colonization of California, Native men were referred to as bucks while Native women were identified as squaws. Squaw’s a word meaning vagina, whereas buck equated Indian men to animals. These stereotypes facilitated a war of extermination on California Indigenous Peoples. The over-sexualization of Native American women supported human trafficking as primarily men came during the Gold Rush.

Today, pre-contact Native American women such as Disney’s Pocahontas are stereotyped and portrayed as tall brown women dressed in deer hide mini skirts and matching tops. This portrayal and over-sexualization has led to an epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and the government has no mechanism to track the severity of the problem.

During the American period, Indian female children were sold for $200 pursuant to state indenture laws, while Indian adults were hunted as bounties. The militias were paid 50 cents to $5 per scalp.

In 1860, the California government spent $1.6 million on the hunting of Native Peoples. This would equate to $46,400,000 today. When white men would bring in a scalp, it would drip with blood in order for them to trade for their money. Hence the term redskin, which is the name of Washington, DC’s football team. This term embodies genocide of Native American people, yet the capital city of our country wears it proudly.

The history of California is gruesome and cruel, yet Native American people were able to endure multiple waves of genocide while still cultivating their connection to culture. Native American Peoples’ existence today is resistance in itself.

We were not expected to survive 300 massacres in California and many more across the country. We were told to kill the Indian and save the man by suppressing our ceremonial practices, stories, and languages.

Today we stand stronger than ever as we initiate the movement from symbolism to reality. The history of my ancestors must be respected and learned, because in order to respect the Earth, we must respect Indigenous Peoples.

This history is not a plot for the next blockbuster movie. I am not a mascot. I am not a Halloween costume. I am not a hashtag, so don’t trend on me.

Kevin Powell – Re-defining Manhood: A Message to Men, to Boys, to Us All

In this brutally honest and provocative talk, Kevin Powell offers his own life journey to illustrate how we can transform our concepts of manhood. Raised by a single mother in the inner city, Kevin’s rites of passage were typical of many heterosexual males: sports, violence, and viewing women and girls as mother figures or sexual objects, and nothing more. This view of women and girls exploded when, in his early 20s, he pushed a girlfriend into a bathroom door during an argument. Decades later, thanks to years of therapy, study, healing, and a commitment to growth and change, Kevin has become a solution-oriented writer, activist and speaker seeking to re-define manhood around nonviolence, peace, love, healthy self-expression, and as an ally to women and people of all gender identities.

Introduction by Nina Simons, Bioneers Co-Founder and Chief Relationship Strategist.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. Read the full text version.

To find out more about Kevin Powell and his work, please visit his website.

View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

Rebecca Moore – Google Earth and Using Big Data to Map Solutions

Google Earth Outreach founder and visionary engineer Rebecca Moore says the signs are all around us, telling us that our life-support systems are in critical condition, and only recently has it become possible to monitor the health of Earth’s life-sustaining resources in a manner both globally consistent and locally relevant. She’s showing how satellite data, cutting-edge science and powerful cloud computing technology such as Google Earth Engine allow us to achieve an unprecedented understanding of our changing environment and put this data into the hands of those who can take action. Combined with Google Earth’s new narrative storytelling tool, grassroots activists, communities and other environmental change-makers can now vividly show what’s at stake, and envision solutions in ways that can change hearts and minds, while guiding wiser decision-making to protect and restore our vast, fragile planet.

Introduction by Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers CEO and Co-Founder.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. Read the full text version.

To learn more about Rebecca Moore and her work, visit Google Earth Outreach.

View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

Ashton Applewhite – We Are All Aging, So Let’s End Ageism

What’s a surefire way to make activism more effective? Make it intergenerational. What’s the biggest obstacle? An ageist culture that pits old against young and bombards us with messages that wrinkles are tragic and old people useless. Aging is not a problem to be “fixed” or a disease to be “cured.” It’s a natural lifelong process that unites us all, and a world that’s better to grow old in is better for everyone.

Debunking myth after myth about late life, author and activist Ashton Applewhite passionately urges us to come together at all ages – and dismantle ageism in the process.

Introduced by Nina Simons, Bioneers Co-Founder and Chief Relationship Strategist.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. To learn more about Ashton Applewhite and her work, visit This Chair Rocks.

View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

Michael Pollan – Psychedelics and How to Change Your Mind

Bestselling author of landmark books that have challenged our fundamental civilizational assumptions, such as “The Botany of Desire” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, Michael Pollan once again bravely ventures where angels fear to tread.

His new book “How To Change Your Mind” surveys the highly controversial terrain of the renaissance of both the science and popular usage of psychedelic substances. As one of our most brilliant and clear-eyed explorers of such topics as plant intelligence and how we feed ourselves, Michael will share his luminous insights from what began as investigative reportage and became a very personal interior journey into the mystery of consciousness and the nature of spirituality at this perilous moment when only a shift in human consciousness can alter the deadly trajectory of our societies.

Introduction by Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers CEO and Co-Founder.

This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

Explore our Visionary Plant Consciousness & Psychedelics media collection.