Bioneers

The executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, Tom Goldtooth, invokes indigenous peoples asking the world to reevaluate our relationship to Mother Earth. We can turn away from destroying, privatizing and commodifying nature, and instead to “indigenuity” to fashion sustainable solutions by re-sacralizing our relationship with Mother Earth. 
 

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.

Ericka Huggins, the renowned former Black Panther, political prisoner, human rights activist — and educator, poet, and professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Merritt College in Oakland — has, for 35 years, advocated for "restorative justice" and the role of spiritual practice in sustaining activism and promoting social change. Grounded in her belief in the greatness of the human heart, Ericka says each one of us has the ability to look there for the answers to questions about the future of our world.

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 most influential climate activist of our era, Bill McKibben, a founder of the extraordinarily effective 350.org grassroots campaign, describes the immense groundswell of global citizen engagement rising to challenge the "dirty" energy industry. Find out where we are scientifically and politically in the transformation to end our reliance on fossil fuels, while lighting the pathways toward a clean-energy future.

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.

Mark Plotkin, groundbreaking ethnobotanist and author of seminal books including "Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice", works closely with Indigenous peoples and uncontacted tribes in the northwest Amazon. As co-founder of the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) in 1995, he depicts ACT's work partnering with over 30 South American tribes, including the Kogi, to map, manage and protect over 70 million acres of ancestral forests.

The “Queen of the forest canopy” epitomizes innovative scientists uncovering previously unexplored wonders in the forest canopy. Her imaginative passion inspires and enlists people from all walks of life, transforming the truth of trees into environmental and social healing.