Bioneers

Rinku Sen is one of the most dynamic and influential social, racial and gender justice activists of our time, among the nation’s most effective voices for inclusion and human rights. The executive director of Race Forward, she’s also a cutting-edge journalist, author and researcher. Sen shares her vision of how we must urgently learn to face and address our completely intertwined ecological and social justice crises, while we learn how to do it without losing our minds, our friends…or our fights. Introduction by Nina Simons, co-founder and president of Bioneers.

The cognitive and emotional benefits of healthy oceans and waterways have been celebrated through art, song, romance and poetry throughout human history. Marine biologist, activist, community organizer and author Wallace J. Nichols will dive deeper and explore our blue minds through the dual lenses of evolutionary biology and cognitive science, reminding us that we are water.

One of the most important thought leaders, activists and entrepreneurs of our era (as founder of Erewhon Trading Company and Smith & Hawken garden stores), Paul Hawken illuminates his groundbreaking new Project Drawdown. It’s the first systematic attempt to do the math on the most effective climate solutions and technologies that already exist, and the impact they would have if they scaled in a rigorous manner over the next 30 years.

What might a different kind of power look and feel like, and can power be redistributed equitably, even beyond our own species? Conservationist, activist, and one of the nation’s most beloved and acclaimed authors, Terry Tempest Williams has been called “a citizen writer” who speaks eloquently for an ethical stance toward life, showing how environmental issues are social issues that become matters of justice. A scholar at the University of Utah and Dartmouth, she has been equally at home camping in the wilderness and being arrested for civil disobedience.

As founder and President of L.A.’s legendary TreePeople, Andy Lipkis has brought visionary solutions to the once-poster child of municipal environmental dysfunction. Inventing the citizen forestry movement and engaging hundreds of thousands of Angeleños over decades he has systematically demonstrated how to repair and restore an urban watershed by integrating ecology, economy and justice. As L. A.’s eco-governance model starts to spread globally, he will report from the frontlines of the City of Angels and Australia, which has engaged the entire citizenry as watershed managers.

Facing rapidly changing demographics, growing inequality and increased political polarization in the U.S., movement builders are grappling with creating new cross-generational ties and a new understanding of the relationship between equity and economic growth. How do we build movements based on vision and values, not interests and transactions? Manuel Pastor is Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity at USC, and founding Director of the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community at UC Santa Cruz.

World Pulse founder Jensine Larsen illustrates how the global network is harnessing the power of digital communication into a force for change by connecting women from more than 190 countries—including those reaching out using Internet cafés and cell phones from remote rural areas and conflict zones. Larsen shares her personal journey building World Pulse from a vision into a network now impacting over two million lives. She is joined via skype by Sister Zeph, an award-winning Pakistani digital crusader for girls’ education.

As humanity faces global environmental and social collapse, our fear of the “Other” can be magnified by unstable contracting economies, radically shifting demographics, and new social norms. Can humanity overcome these divisions and come together to protect our common home? John A. Powell, a nationally respected voice on race and ethnicity, leads UC Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion, serves on the UC Berkeley School of Law faculty, and is author of Racing to Justice.

One of the great visionary science fiction writers of our era draws from his decades of work on our relationship to the Biosphere. He sketches a utopian but deeply informed and cogent scenario of a new economy for the coming century. To avoid endangering the integrity of the biosphere and risking the end of human civilization, Kim Stanley Robinson say it means reforming our economic system, which uses a market and trade system that systemically under-prices and degrades both people and the natural world. Robinson asks: How can we change that, and what would it look like if we did?