Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature Bioneers
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- Society & Culture
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The Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature is an award-winning series featuring breakthrough solutions for people and planet. The greatest social and scientific innovators of our time celebrate the genius of nature and human ingenuity. The kaleidoscopic scope covers biomimicry, ecological design, social and racial justice, women’s leadership, ecological medicine, indigenous knowledge, spirituality and psychology. It’s leading-edge, hopeful, charismatic, provocative, timely and timeless – like nothing you’ve heard before.
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Staying Alive: Reconciling Nature, Culture and Gay Rights
As a backlash against LGBTQ rights escalates into an authoritarian crusade, 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.
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Forest Wisdom, Mother Trees and the Science of Community | Suzanne Simard
Forests have long occupied a fertile landscape in the human imagination. Places of mystery and magic – of wildness and wisdom – of vision and dreaming. Yet beyond mythic realms of imagination, we’ve largely treated forests as inert physical resources to satisfy human needs and desires. The main operative science behind this commodification has been market science – how to extract maximum resources and profits.
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. The story Simard is uncovering can change our story for how we live on Earth and with each other – for the long haul.
Featuring
Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forestry at the University of British Columbia, is an expert in the synergies and complexities of forests and the development of sustainable forest stewardship practices. Her groundbreaking research centers on the relationships between plants, microbes, soils, carbon, nutrients and water that underlie the adaptability of ecosystems, especially the below-ground fungal networks that connect trees and facilitate interplant communication. Learn more about Suzanne Simard and her work at her website.
Explore More
Dispatches From the Mother Trees, Suzanne Simard’s keynote address to the 2021 Bioneers Conference, in which she discusses the dire global consequences of logging old-growth rainforests, and nature-based solutions that combine Western science and Indigenous knowledge for preserving and caring for these invaluable forest ecosystems for future generations.
Lessons from the Underground, a panel discussion from the 2021 Bioneers Conference featuring Suzanne Simard as well as Anne Biklé and David R. Montgomery, a wife and husband team of scientific researchers whose groundbreaking work on the microbial life of soil has revealed its crucial importance to human wellbeing and survival. Moderated by Bioneers’ Restorative Food Systems Director Arty Mangan.
Intelligence in Nature, a deep-dive resource featuring leading experts in this burgeoning field.
What We Owe Our Trees, an article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker.
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more. -
Radical Transparency: Mapping the Earth from the Ground to the Cloud | Rebecca Moore
New, democratized access to powerful analytical and mapping tools is transforming our understanding of the natural world – and with it, our ability to meaningfully conserve, protect and restore our collective home – the biosphere.
In this program, we explore the boundless possibilities of digital maps and platforms with Rebecca Moore, visionary founder of Google Earth Outreach and Google Earth Engine.
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more. -
Black Food: Liberation, Food Justice and Stewardship | Karen Washington & Bryant Terry
The influences of Africans and Black Americans on food and agriculture is rooted in ancestral African knowledge and traditions of shared labor, worker co-ops and botanical polycultures.
In this episode, we hear from Karen Washington and Bryant Terry on how Black Food culture is weaving the threads of a rich African agricultural heritage with the liberation of economics from an extractive corporate food oligarchy. The results can be health, conviviality, community wealth, and the power of self-determination. -
The Charging Twenties: Now is the Time to Build a Solar-Powered Civilization | Danny Kennedy
Visionary clean energy entrepreneur Danny Kennedy explores the promise and challenges of the epic civilizational transition to renewable energy. Without doubt, the shift has hit the fan, but will we make the transition in time to avert complete climate breakdown? Danny Kennedy says we can - and the real heroes and sheroes will be millions of clean energy entrepreneurs and startups, in partnership with the determined leadership of Indigenous Peoples arising worldwide.
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Cultural Mindshift: Full Spectrum Sustainability and Resilience
Climate is the trip wire for every other foundational ecological and biological system – as well as the basis for human civilization. As we face the long climate emergency, fortunately, skillful pathfinders are banding together to transform our ways of living and bring resilience from the ground up into widespread practice. With Berkeley’s Chief Resilience Officer, Timothy Burroughs, Professor David W. Orr, and financial adviser Tom Van Dyck.