In a world that’s unraveling from climate disruption and gaping inequality, another climate crisis confronts us: the climate of hate and othering. Award-winning scholar and educator Valarie Kaur says to overcome racism and nationalism, we must not succumb to rage and grief. As someone who has spent much of her life challenging horrific injustices and intolerance, Kaur learned the lesson that historical nonviolent change-makers understood: social movements must be grounded in an ethic of love. She founded the Revolutionary Love Project, and has emerged as one of the most important voices of the American Sikh community, and a highly influential faith leader on the national stage.

Featuring

Valarie Kaur, born into a family of Sikh farmers who settled in California in 1913, is a seasoned civil rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, lawyer, faith leader, and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, which seeks to champion love as a public ethic and wellspring for social action.

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by: Monica Lopez and Kenny Ausubel

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Producer: Teo Grossman

Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

Production Assistance: Claire Reynolds

Music includes pieces by:

• Edamame, EdamameBeats.com

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the ⁠radio and podcast homepage⁠ to learn more.

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?

Featuring

• V (formerly Eve Ensler), Tony Award-winning playwright, performer, and one of the world’s most important activists on behalf of women’s rights, is the author of many plays, including, most famously the extraordinarily influential and impactful The Vagina Monologues, which has been performed all over the globe in 50 or so languages.

Credits

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by: Kenny Ausubel

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Producer: Teo Grossman

Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

Additional music was made available by:

• Ketsa at ⁠FreeMusicArchive.org⁠
• Gigi Masin at ⁠MusicFromMemory.com⁠

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the ⁠radio and podcast homepage⁠ to learn more.

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!⁠

Resources

⁠Video of Monika Bauerlein's Keynote speech at Bioneers 2019⁠

⁠Video of Amy Goodman's speech at Bioneers 2017⁠

Visit the ⁠radio and podcast homepage⁠ to find out more.

In this time of radical upheaval and change, fulfilling the promise of a “more perfect union” in the United States means building a multi-racial democracy through transformative solidarity. As the Founder-in-Residence at Policy Link, Professor Angela Glover Blackwell has spent decades advancing racial and economic equity at the national and local levels. She says the fate of the wealthiest nation on Earth depends on what happens to the very people who’ve been left behind.

Angela Glover Blackwell, one of the nation’s most prominent, award-winning social justice advocates, is “Founder-in-Residence” at PolicyLink, the organization she started in 1999 to advance racial and economic equity that has long been a leading force in improving access and opportunity in such areas as health, housing, transportation, and infrastructure. The host of the “Radical Imagination” podcast and a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, Angela, before PolicyLink, served as Senior Vice President at The Rockefeller Foundation and founded the Urban Strategies Council. She serves on numerous boards and advisory councils, including the inaugural Community Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve and California’s Task Force on Business and Jobs Recovery.

Resources

From Othering to Belonging with Angela Glover Blackwell and john a. powell

Transformative Solidarity for a Thriving Multiracial Democracy with Angela Glover Blackwell

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

What would it feel like to live in a world where our built environment was as elegant as nature's designs? What if our living and working spaces nurtured our human communities and quality of life? Architect and designer Jason F. McLennan takes the revolution from the heart of nature and the human heart into our built environment. He is shifting the fateful civilizational inflection point we face - from degradation to regeneration - from fear to love. 

Featuring Jason F. McLennan, one of the world’s most influential visionaries in contemporary architecture and green building, is a highly sought-out designer, consultant and thought leader. A winner of Engineering News Record’s National Award of Excellence and of the prestigious Buckminster Fuller Prize (which was, during its 10-year trajectory, known as “the planet’s top prize for socially responsible design”), Jason has been showered with such accolades as “the ‘Wayne Gretzky’ of the green building industry and a “World Changer” (by GreenBiz magazine).

Resources

Jason McLennan Keynote Bioneers 2022 – From Reconciliation to Regeneration

Deep Community Resilience: Preparing for the Coming Age, Place-By-Place | Jason F. McLennan

Child-Centered Planning: A New Specialized Pattern Language Tool | Jason F. McLennan

Visit the episode page for transcript and more information.

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

The profit-hungry agribusiness empire of the 20th century institutionalized farming practices that continue to degrade soils across the U.S. and globally. We face a fork in the road: collapse or regeneration? The good news is that we know what we need to begin an agricultural and ecological renaissance – a literal rebirth. 

Biologist Anne Biklé and geologist David Montgomery share one of the good news stories that show how the solutions residing in nature surpass our conception of what’s even possible.

In this program, we drop in on a remarkable conversation between two world-renowned Native American women artists. National Poet Laureate and musician Joy Harjo riffs with distinguished photographer Cara Romero. They discuss how life is art, and how they make their art to reflect the lived truths of their cultures and people.

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

National Poet Laureate and musician Joy Harjo shares her artistic journey as a Native American woman into what she calls the “story field.” She says that in these times of radical disruption, chaos and disturbance, great creativity also pours forth… and we all play a part in which way the story will go.

Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022 and is winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2024 Frost Medal, Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and was recently honored with a National Humanities Medal. 

Credits

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by: Kenny Ausubel

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Associate Producer: Emily Harris

Producer: Teo Grossman

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Production Assistance: Mika Anami

This program features music by Joy Harjo and from Nagamo Publishing, the Indigenous-created music library.

Watch Joy Harjo's Keynote – Bioneers 2025

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

We trek into the ancient old-growth forest where the trees reveal an ecological parable: A forest is a mightily interwoven community of diverse life that runs on symbiosis. With: Doctors Suzanne Simard and Teresa Ryan, ecologists whose work has helped reveal an elaborate tapestry of kinship, cooperation and mutual aid.

This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. ⁠Visit the series page to learn more.⁠

Featuring

Dr. Sm’hayetsk Teresa Ryan is Gitlan, Tsm’syen. Indigenous Knowledge and Natural Science Lecturer at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Forestry, Forest & Conservation Sciences. As a fisheries/aquatic/forest ecologist, she is currently investigating relationships between salmon and healthy forests.

Dr. Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia and author of the bestselling, Finding the Mother Tree, is a highly influential, researcher on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence.

Resources

⁠Forest Wisdom, Mother Trees and the Science of Community⁠ | Bioneers Podcast

⁠Suzanne Simard – Dispatches From the Mother Trees⁠ | Bioneers 2021 Keynote

⁠Suzanne Simard – Dealing with Backlash Against Nature-Based Solutions to Climate Change⁠ | Bioneers 2024 Keynote

⁠The Wood Wide Web: The Intelligent Underground Mycelial Network ⁠| Bioneers interview with Suzanne Simard

⁠Unraveling the Secrets of Salmon: An Indigenous Exploration of Forest Ecology and Nature’s Intelligence⁠ | Bioneers interview with Teresa Ryan

⁠Teresa Ryan: How Trees Communicate⁠ | Bioneers 2017 Keynote

⁠Deep Dive: Intelligence in Nature⁠

⁠Earthlings: Intelligence in Nature⁠ | Bioneers Newsletter

Credits

• Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
• Written by: Cathy Edwards and Kenny Ausubel
• Produced by: Cathy Edwards
• Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
• Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
• Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
• Producer: Teo Grossman
• Graphic Designer: Megan Howe

The late visionary primatologist and conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall revolutionized primatology and helped us realize how close our kinship is with the animal kin-dom. Dr. Jane, as she’s affectionately known, began her intensive solitary studies of chimp behavior in Africa’s Gombe National Forest. She inspired the world to save the rapidly dwindling populations and their habitats. Her compelling vision lives on to inspire hope.

Yurok fisherman and tribal leader Sammy Gensaw and environmental scientist-turned-activist Craig Tucker share the epic story of how Indigenous leadership and non-Indian allyship made the impossible inevitable: the biggest-ever dam removal and salmon restoration in history. It represented a literal watershed moment; unprecedented co-equal decision-making between the tribes and their historical nemesis – the US government.

Once complete in 2024, the project will liberate the Klamath river and several tributaries to once again run free across 400-miles from Oregon through California and into the Pacific Ocean.

Featuring

Sammy Gensaw (Yurok) is the Founding Director of the Ancestral Guard, Artist, Yurok Language Speaker, Singer, Writer, Cultural/Political/Environmental Activist, Regalia Maker, Mediator, Youth Leader & Fisherman.

Craig Tucker has 20+ years of advocacy and activism experience, especially working with tribal members, fishermen and farmers in the Klamath Basin on dam removal, traditional fire management, gold mining, and water policy, and is the founder and Principal of Suits and Signs Consulting.

Indigenous Forum – Undam the Klamath! How Tribes Led the Largest River Restoration Project in US History | Bioneers 2023

The river that came back to life: a journey down the reborn Klamath | The Guardian

• Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
• Written by: Kenny Ausubel
• Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
• Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
• Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
• Producer: Teo Grossman