Bioneers 2019: Seeding the Field, Growing Transformative Solutions
As Bioneers rolls into our 30th Anniversary Conference, it’s a bittersweet moment. On the one hand, we’re so grateful Bioneers exists to meet this fateful moment of peril and promise. Bioneers arose to become a unique communications and media platform for diverse voices with a grounded vision for creating a restored and just world.
Bioneers has also served as a trellis on which this visionary movement of movements has grown and grown together around authentic “solve-the-whole problem” solutions. Bioneers remains singular by exemplifying the true interdependence of people and nature, while reflecting the innumerable facets of the jewel of restoration and human ingenuity.
Today there’s a genuine awakening worldwide that reflects the values, principles and practices the Bioneers community has been evolving for three decades and more. Receptivity has never been higher. Everything’s going to change, and the only question is how. Bioneers is well positioned to influence consciousness and the course of events.
On the other hand, 30 years out from 1990, the world is going off a cliff. At the core is a crisis of democracy: the radical disconnect between the world the vast majority of peoples want and the world corporations and their captured governments have hijacked. We know the climate crisis and the crisis of inequality are the same crisis. We know the crisis of our separation from nature and our separation from each other are the same crisis.
Worldviews create worlds, and we know a crisis of consciousness underlies the civilizational crisis. Changing the story changes the world. And today, changing the story also means changing the archaic, unjust and just plain dumb systems themselves.
For our 30th Anniversary Conference, “Seeding the Field: Growing Transformative Movements,” we’re assembling a visionary program reflecting the decades of transformative solutions and trail-blazing pathways the Bioneers have so brilliantly developed to actually perform the extreme makeover that’s both possible and imperative at this civilizational crossroads.
You can learn more about the Conference and register here.
Never has our shared work been more important. Never has it been more vital that we come together around the council fire to share what we know, link arms, fill our hearts and vision, and align ourselves to grow these transformative movements and change the game. As Sarah Crowell says, “The way we’ll hold it together is to hold it — together.
An idea whose time has come is unstoppable. Please join with us to help realize 30 years of transformative solutions and make the Revolution from the Heart of Nature and the Human Heart. As David Orr says, “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.”
With Love and Gratitude
Kenny Ausubel & Nina Simons, Co-Founders
Who You’ll See at Bioneers 2019
We’re still confirming keynote speakers and have many many more afternoon sessions to announce! Among a growing lineup of visionaries who will join us in October are:
Eve Ensler
Tony Award-winning playwright, performer, and one of the world’s most important activists on behalf of women’s rights, Eve Ensler 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.
Varshini Prakash
For the last three years, Varshini Prakash has coordinated fossil fuel divestment campaigns with the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network at a regional and national level, and most recently was a key figure in creating the Sunrise Movement, dedicated to mobilizing an army of young people to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process. She is currently Sunrise’s Lead Spokeswoman and Communications Director.
Paul Hawken
One of the most important environmental authors, activists, thinkers and entrepreneurs of our era, Paul Hawken has dedicated his life to sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. His many bestselling books include such massively influential texts as: The Next Economy; The Ecology of Commerce; Blessed Unrest; and most recently, Drawdown, The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming.
Valarie Kaur
Born into a family of Sikh farmers who settled in California in 1913, Valarie Kaur 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. She has worked extensively on hate crimes, racial profiling, immigration detention, solitary confinement, mass shootings, marriage equality, and Internet freedom and founded the Groundswell Movement, “America’s largest multi-faith online organizing network.”
And many more. See our regularly updated lineup of presenters and performers here.
