Bioneers

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.

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.

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?

The actor and activist shares the long view of how change happens, to reclaim our rights and responsibilities as citizens. From South Africa to Detroit and Birmingham, Glover scans the arc of justice and the convergence of the movements to restore nature, human dignity and a life lived artistically.