Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

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.

There is a growing movement to redefine manhood, and to address ways that violence is baked into our cultural expectations of masculinity. Courageous, visionary men are rising to the challenge. One of those men is activist, writer and public speaker Kevin Powell. In this half-hour, Powell boldly and bravely discusses his experiences with toxic masculinity and his journey to redefine what it means to be a man. 

Contemporary Western fire science is integrating what Indigenous Peoples discovered over thousands of years of observation, and trial and error: fire is key to optimizing forest vitality and biodiversity. The merging of these two ways of knowing could signal the end to our misguided policy of fire suppression, and the beginning of fire-resilient communities with a new relationship to one of nature’s most elemental and fearful forces. With fire ecologists Chad Hanson and Frank Kanawha Lake.

They say love means never having to say you’re sorry. But what if that popular aphorism from the 1960’s is wrong and that love precisely means having to say you’re sorry? Can an apology release the trauma, grief, rage and disfigurement arising from past abuse? But what if the perpetrator does not apologize? Can you still resolve or reconcile the trauma and hurt? How? These are some of the agonizing questions that the artist, playwright, performer and activist Eve Ensler, now known as V chose to face to resolve her own relationship with her abusive late father. She did it by writing a book, The Apology. In writing it, she tried to imagine being her father. Who was he? What allowed him to do such terrible harms? Could she free herself from this prison of the past? Could she free both of them?

By around 2044, the U.S. will become a majority-minority nation. This seismic demographic shift has triggered a cultural earthquake, provoking a radical spike in hate crimes. In times of massive disruption and economic stress, what Carl Jung called the “shadow side of the psyche” comes into play: the pronounced psychological tendency in the collective psyche is to project these shadow qualities with unusual potency onto whomever people see as “the other.” But is there also a deeper story? Perhaps the question to ask is: Who benefits? In this half hour, we hear from Heather McGhee of Demos. She sees a direct connection between today’s extreme inequality and this peak moment of racial panic and white anxiety. 

Calling someone an “animal” means they’re less than human – not worthy of respect, rights, or even of life itself. But in truth -- and in biological fact -- human beings ARE animals. Scientists continue to find that intelligence and what we call “consciousness” appear to saturate all of nature. Clearly it’s high time to think differently about just what it means to be an animal. Can we know what it’s like to be other-than-human? How can we see into the minds of animals? Visionary naturalist, author and conservationist Carl Safina says that the first step is paying attention and observing. And, he suggests, if we had humility, we’d have everything.

Small farmers around the world are building an agro-ecological revolution based on self-sufficiency, food security, and freedom from fossil fuels and corporate control. In this program, we hear from two visionary agroecology innovators. Miguel Altieri is an agroecologist and entomologist at U.C. Berkeley who’s showing how farmers who embrace agroecology are building a movement based on self-sufficiency, food security and freedom from fossil fuels and corporate control. Alex Eaton is the founder of “Sistema Bio”. This game-changing company helps farmers implement a simple technology that converts waste to energy, builds healthy soils, and holds the promise of massively reducing greenhouse gases and lifting people out of poverty.

As we hurtle into the Sixth Age of Extinctions, we face the cataclysmic loss of half the world’s biological diversity. 80% of the remaining biodiversity is on Indigenous lands. Ethnobotanist and Indigenous rights advocate Mark Plotkin of the Amazon Conservation Team tells us how scientists are helping protect the people who will protect the land, and the age-old wisdom that’s imperative for our future. 

When Donald Trump rode a wave of white anxiety into the White House, it was part of a backlash to the Obama presidency, one that revealed an increasingly explicit white nationalism and revived an overtly exclusionary agenda: roll back rights and protections for people of color, immigrants, Muslims, women, and gay and transgender people. Then came the backlash to the backlash: a rapidly spreading awakening that all these peoples, movements and struggles are actually connected in one story. Visionary law professor and change-maker Kimberlé Crenshaw shows that it’s only at the crossroads of our many identities that will we will find a story big enough to embrace the diversity and complexity of our globalized 21st century world.

Today, there’s a renaissance of independent journalism dedicated to holding power accountable. Political pressures are mounting to break up media monopolies and provide access to more voices. Independent and investigative media outlets are proliferating, often as nonprofits funded from the bottom up. In this program, we hear from two veteran journalists who lead two of the most courageous and successful independent media outlets in the United States: Monika Bauerlein, the CEO of Mother Jones magazine, and Amy Goodman, host and executive producer of Democracy Now!