Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

Bioneers
  • 4.7 (255)
  • SOCIETY & CULTURE
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

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.

  1. Beaver Believers: How to Restore Planet Water

    1H AGO

    Beaver Believers: How to Restore Planet Water

    In this age of global weirding where climate disruption has tumbled the Goldilocks effect into unruly surges of too much and too little water, the restoration of beavers offers ancient nature-based solutions to the tangle of challenges bedeviling human civilization. Droughts, floods, soil erosion, climate change, biodiversity loss – you name it, and beaver is on it. In this episode, Kate Lundquist and Brock Dolman of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center share their semi-aquatic journey to becoming Beaver Believers. They are part of a passionate global movement to bring back our rodent relatives who show us how to heal nature by working with nature. Featuring Kate Lundquist, co-director of the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s WATER Institute and the Bring Back the Beaver Campaign in Sonoma County, is a conservationist, educator and ecological artist who works with landowners, communities and resource agencies to uncover obstacles, identify strategic solutions, and generate restoration recommendations to assure healthy watersheds, water security, listed species recovery and climate change resiliency. Brock Dolman, co-founded (in 1994) the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center where he co-directs the WATER Institute. A wildlife biologist and watershed ecologist, he has been actively promoting “Bringing Back Beaver in California” since the early 2000s. He was given the Salmonid Restoration Federation’s coveted Golden Pipe Award in 2012: “…for his leading role as a proponent of “working with beavers” to restore native habitat. Resources Beaver Believer: How Massive Rodents Could Restore Landscapes and Ecosystems At ScaleFire and Water: Land and Watershed Management in the Age of Climate ChangeBrock Dolman – Basins of Relations: A Reverential Rehydration RevolutionFrom Kingdom to Kin-dom: Acting As If We Have Relatives Brock Dolman, Paul Stamets and Brian Thomas SwimmeThe WATER Institute’s Beaver in California readerDeep Dive: Intelligence in NatureEarthlings: Intelligence in Nature | Bioneers Newsletter This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.

    29 min
  2. The Native American LandBack Movement Reaches Urban America

    APR 1

    The Native American LandBack Movement Reaches Urban America

    Corrina Gould is a celebrated activist of the First Peoples of the Bay Area and a leader in the LandBack Movement. She has helped forge a model for returning stolen land to Native American Tribes and restoring sacred sites in a defiant act of remembrance and resistance against cultural erasure.  Featuring Corrina Gould, born and raised in the village of Huchiun (now known as Berkeley 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. Resources Sogorea Te’ Land Trust Landback: Restoring People, Place and PurposeA conversation with Cara Romero, Corrina Gould, PennElys Droz, and Kawenniiosta Jock Corrina Gould – Resilience and Rematriation | Bioneers 2025 California Genocide and Resilience and Returning to What Was Lost and Stolen with Corrina Gould | Indigeneity Conversations Podcast Series This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

    30 min
  3. The Quest to Decode Whale-speak

    MAR 26

    The Quest to Decode Whale-speak

    When members of Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) witnessed the birth of a sperm whale, they observed a breathtaking scene of cooperation and communication that few humans on earth have ever seen. The extraordinary experience was both a scientific milestone as well as one more strand in the web of sperm whale culture that this innovative project is studying. The Project CETI team leverages world-leading technology and science in a quest to understand nonhuman animal communication. At the same time, the scientists leading the project are keeping an ethical throughline, placing the health and well being of whales at the center of the effort. As we get tantalizingly closer to truly communicating with other species, the question becomes not only whether we can, but whether we should - and what the implications are if we do.  This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more. Featuring David Gruber is the Founder & President of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), a nonprofit, interdisciplinary scientific and conservation initiative on a mission to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales. He is a Distinguished Professor of Biology and Environmental Sciences at the City University of New York, Baruch College & The CUNY Graduate Center. Resources Project CETI DavidGruber.com Earthlings Newsletter: Intelligence in Nature Credits Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel Written by: Cathy Edwards and Kenny Ausubel Producer: Cathy Edwards Producer: Teo Grossman Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch Associate Producer: Emily Harris Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey Production Assistance: Mika Anami Interview Recording Engineers: Rod Akil at KPFA and Bill Siegmund, Digital Island Studios, LLC

    33 min
  4. How Would Nature Do It?

    MAR 18

    How Would Nature Do It?

    Mother Nature is the ultimate designer. After all, since life first emerged on Earth, she’s had 3.8 billion years of evolutionary R&D to get it right. Biomimicry is the art and science of learning from this ineffable genius: tapping into the patterns of nature to live harmoniously with life’s principles. We meet Janine Benyus, known as the “godmother of modern biomimicry”. This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.

    28 min
  5. Reconnecting the River

    MAR 11

    Reconnecting the River

    Yurok Attorney Amy Cordalis is one of many Indigenous leaders who have fought for the un-damming and healing of the majestic Klamath River Basin, spanning Oregon and California. She tells the story of the decades-long struggle to remove dams that have choked the life flow of the river and severed salmon migratory routes, and how a combination of traditional ecological knowledge, environmental law, and old-fashioned diplomacy helped remove 4 of 6 dams and ushered in a $515 million settlement agreement to restore the river and riparian lands. This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more. Featuring Amy Cordalis (Yurok Tribe member whose ceremony family is from Rek-woi at the mouth of the Klamath River), a devoted advocate for Indigenous rights and environmental restoration as well as a fisherwoman, attorney, and mother deeply rooted in the traditions of her people, is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Ridges to Riffles Indigenous Conservation Group and leads efforts to support tribes in protecting their sovereignty, lands, and waters, including the historic Klamath Dam Removal project. Credits Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel Written by: Cathy Edwards and Kenny Ausubel Producer: Cathy Edwards Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch Producer: Teo Grossman Associate Producer: Emily Harris Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey Production Assistance: Mika Anami

    30 min
  6. How the Chicken Crossed the Road To Build a Regenerative Food System

    MAR 11

    How the Chicken Crossed the Road To Build a Regenerative Food System

    Visionary agricultural innovator Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin unearths a startling natural-world template for building a global movement that puts the chicken at the heart of bioregional food systems. These Poultry-Centered Regenerative Agroforestry farms can both renew the land and ultimately support the hundreds of millions of small farmers who produce 70% of the world’s food.

    32 min
  7. More than Human Life: Advancing Rights for The Natural World

    FEB 25

    More than Human Life: Advancing Rights for The Natural World

    Scientific evidence is increasingly supporting the theory that the Earth is alive and replete with intelligence. In fact, the wild diversity of earthly organisms exhibits the characteristics that human beings attribute to personhood. How is it then, by the law, that a corporation is a person, but nature is not? What if we expand the anthropocentric boundaries of our systems of laws, rights and responsibilities to encompass ALL living beings? How would this new legal story affect our relationship with our vast other-than-human Earth family? In this episode, we imagine a planet with rights for all, with visionary lawyer César Rodríguez-Garavito. This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more. 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. Resources More-Than-Human-Life (MOTH) Report Assessing the Implementation of the Los Cedros Ruling in Ecuador | MOTH César Rodríguez-Garavito – More-Than-Human Rights: Pushing the Boundaries of Legal Imagination to Re-Animate the World | Bioneers 2025 Keynote Deep Dive: Intelligence in Nature Earthlings: Intelligence in Nature | Bioneers Newsletter Credits Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel Written by: Cathy Edwards and Kenny Ausubel Producer: Cathy Edwards Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch Producer: Teo Grossman Associate Producer: Emily Harris Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey Production Assistance: Mika Anami Graphic Designer: Megan Howe

    29 min
  8. What if Plants are Conscious?

    FEB 24

    What if Plants are Conscious?

    Plants make up over 80% of life on earth. No animal would exist without plants’ ultimate magic trick of turning sunlight into food. Today, scientists are unearthing a wild, weird world of vegetal genius. But how can we truly understand beings so radically different from ourselves? We consider the emerging science of plants from the vantage points of philosophy and ethics, with Harvard scholar Rachael Petersen.

    28 min
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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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