Our Mission
To inspire individuals to utilize natural systems in developing and restoring our communities.
Archive
...of past conferences
Plenary Speakers
Here's the line-up of inspiring speakers scheduled to present at the Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California, October 16-18, 2009. These plenaries will be shown via DVD at the Northland Bioneers Conference on Oct 24 and 25:
Brock Dolman- Basins of Relations: A Reverential Rehydration Revolution
Permaculturist and watershed wizard Brock Dolman shows how the future lifeboat we'll need is shaped exactly like our local watershed. He wields his dazzling poetics to tell us how we can engage with the spirit of Planet Water, create water-literate human settlement patterns, and regenerate ecological integrity and social resiliency to prepare for the climate changes ahead.
Kari Fulton- Youth Redefining Environmentalism, Reclaiming our Futures
This inspiring Brower Youth Award winner and national campus campaign coordinator for the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative describes how the Youth Climate Movement is working to create a more unified and inclusive environmental movement for the 21st century.
Jack Hidary - From Small Steps to the Energy Revolution
How do we move rapidly from 1% solar and wind energy in the U.S. to 50%? To 100%? Is this just a fantasy? One of the nation's leading technology entrepreneurs, co-founder of SmartTransportation.org and chairman of AmericansforCleanEnergy.org, explains what we have to do politically, economically and socially to realize that necessary revolution.
Sarah James - Indigenous Peoples and Climate Change: Report from the Arctic
The revered Gwich'in Elder from Alaska, who has won many awards for her work to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) from oil drilling, depicts how her people are being severely impacted on the front lines of rapid climate change, and how her people are responding.
Michael Pollan - In Defense of Food: The Omnivore's Solution
The leading American thinker about our relationship to food, author of such seminal classics as In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, explores what the industrialization of food and agriculture has meant for our health and happiness as eaters. He surveys the landscape of the growing national movement to redesign the food system.
Jason Mclennan - Living Buildings-The Future of Architecture
This leading figure in the global green architecture movement challenges us to imagine and demand buildings that operate as elegantly and efficiently as the living structures nature creates. As CEO of Cascadia Green Building Council, author of the Living Building Challenge and co-creator of Pharos (the most advanced building material rating system in North America), he shows breathtaking examples from the worldwide Challenge underway to design buildings that meet or exceed nature's ecosystem services.
Lily Yeh - The Rwanda Healing Project: Bringing Hope through Art and Creative Action
This internationally celebrated artist works to bring the transformative power of art to impoverished and war-torn communities around the world to foster community empowerment, improve the physical environment, promote economic development and preserve indigenous art and culture. She portrays a heartbreakingly beautiful project (described in Terry Tempest Williams' latest book Finding Beauty in a Broken World) exemplifying how art can begin to heal the environment as well as the hearts and minds of traumatized people.
Jensine Larsen - The Electric Pulse of Women Transforming Our World
Across the Earth courageous women leaders from rural villages to corporate suites are connecting to solve global problems. The visionary founder of World Pulse, a global media source covering world issues through women's eyes, shares her journey building an interactive global media enterprise to unleash the power of women's voices, and shows how we can participate in this ongoing revolution.
Arturo Sandoval - Changing the Axis: Drawing from Mexican and Latin American Cultures to Create a Sustainable Future
The Euro-American ethic which has dominated the cultural and economic landscape of the Americas for hundreds of years has had some positive effects on the Western hemisphere, but its total domination of the commons has also stifled equally valuable ethics that existed prior to the emergence of the U.S. One of New Mexico's most prominent civic leaders explores how can we find a balance between these older and newer attitudes to the land and life in order to create a viable future for us all.
Dr. Andrew Weil - Environmental Health, Environmental Medicine
Human health and environmental health are inextricably interconnected, yet the education and training of doctors and health professionals largely ignore the subject. America's most prominent "integrative" MD and medical reformer says in his new book on reforming the American health care system that it's imperative to mobilize the health-care community as an ally in the environmental movement. The alliance could overcome the influence of vested interests that still block the legislative and policy changes we need to protect the health of people and planet.
Joanna Macy - The Hidden Promise of Our Dark Age: Discovering Our Wisdom, Strength & Beauty in the Midst of Crisis
If we can free ourselves from the delusions and dependencies bred by the "industrial growth society," something wonderful can happen. One of the great activists and spiritual teachers of our era brings a hopeful message: If we manage to steer clear of panic, we may well find at last the wild power of our creativity and solidarity.
Mari Margil - Who speaks for the Trees? Driving Nature's Rights into Law
The associate director of the Community Environmental Defense Fund (CELDF) describes the inspiring, groundbreaking work she and CELDF are involved in to recognize Rights of Nature in law in both the U.S. and in Ecuador, which recently became the world's first nation to enshrine such rights in its constitution.
Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui - Biocultural Conservation in the Amazon: How an Amazon Tribe Has Combined Traditional Knowledge With Science and Technology to Save Its Rainforests and Its People
Chief Almir, 32, a tribal chief, environmentalist and political activist, portrays his and his people's struggles to survive by protecting their culture and rainforest since they made First Contact with the Western world in 1969. He surveys the history of the Amazon, its situation today and the unusual partnership he forged with Google to use Google Earth's high-tech tools to help his Surui people tell their story and protect their forests and culture.
Jerome Ringo - The Color Of Green: The Next Inconvenient Truth
Nearly $116 billion will be spent over the next two years developing clean fuels, modernizing rail transit, pursuing energy efficiency and developing electric vehicles. One of the nation's foremost environmental leaders says we must ensure that the jobs created in that effort are good jobs available to all Americans. His perspective comes from originally working as a petrochemical worker in Louisiana's "cancer alley" for 20 years, to becoming chairman of the National Wildlife Federation (the first African-American to head a major conservation organization), and now president of the groundbreaking Apollo Alliance.
Annie Leonard - The Story of Stuff
The key part of the American dream is centered on accumulating ever more, and better, stuff. Yet all the stuff in our lives is taking an enormous toll on the environment, public health, equity, personal happiness and even our sense of citizenship and democracy. Acclaimed filmmaker and Internet phenomenon Annie Leonard exposes the often hidden costs and provides a hopeful vision for moving beyond the age of Stuff.