Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

The way we see the world creates the world. If a new way of seeing is needed, what might that look like? Indigenous leaders Dakota-Dine Tom Goldtooth, Anishnabe Winona LaDuke, Aleut Ilarion Merculief and The White Buffalo Souldiers conjure a new paradigm that begins with a change of heart.

Reinventing Fire for the Clean Energy Era - The internationally acclaimed energy and design strategist Amory Lovins shows how by 2050 we can run our energy system with no oil, coal or nuclear power. He says we can achieve that vision with clean energy and energy conservation, led by business, without an act of Congress or any new inventions. By making this transition, we can save more than $5 trillion and double the size of the US economy.

How can we manifest the world we want, and who we want to be? Actor-activist Danny Glover and Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, former CEO of Green For All, show how one sure path to resilience is to build community and social movements. That requires learning how to reach out across our differences – and it gets really personal.

Contemporary Western fire science is integrating what Indigenous Peoples discovered over thousands of years of observation, and trial and error: fire is key to optimizing forest vitality and biodiversity. The merging of these two ways of knowing could signal the end to our misguided policy of fire suppression, and the beginning of fire-resilient communities with a new relationship to one of nature’s most elemental and fearful forces. With fire ecologists Chad Hanson and Frank Kanawha Lake.

In the face of global climate disruption, two billion people worldwide will be challenged by too much water, and nearly another two billion by not enough. When you fight nature, you lose, says Dutch water wizard and designer Henk Ovink. He’s dramatically demonstrating on large scales how to shift our relationship to nature and to culture - and climate-proof our cities and coasts.

Today in the fossil fuel-induced age of escalating climate disruption, the joker in the deck is the climate imperative to transition rapidly off fossil fuels worldwide. Clean energy has reached the proverbial tipping point - and the smart money is hot on the trail of the clean energy revolution. Entrepreneur and visionary change-maker Danny Kennedy says clean energy not only makes dollars, it makes sense, and this literal power struggle could take us from energy monopoly to energy democracy.

It's obvious that we're not here for ourselves. That makes no evolutionary sense. There's something larger than us, and to the extent that we can live that and celebrate that, I think we're healthier, and then that's love. So I think if we think of love in this way, and a beloved community in this way, when we hold all this stuff together, together.

Although colonial systems of oppression have radically damaged relationships between tribal communities and their traditional lands, a new generation of First Nations activists is working to restore those connections and safeguard Indigenous identity for future generations. They’re protecting traditional territories and sacred sites from harm, and renewing Indigenous land stewardship. With: Eriel Deranger of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Valentin Lopez, Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, and Cara Romero, from the Mohave-based Chemehuevi Tribe.

To transform our culture from its focus on dominance and hierarchy to one of connection, empathy and collaboration, it’s vital that we re-envision the essential (or archetypal) masculine, which changes everything. This rarely tackled topic is the subject of a deeply authentic dialogue among Playwright and activist Eve Ensler and three men working to change men and change the story: Tony Porter, co-founder, A Call To Men; Dallas Goldtooth, Indigenous activist, member of the 1491’s Native American comedy troupe; George Lipsitz, board president, African American Policy Forum.

Both or Neither - The emerging green economy promises to provide large-scale job creation while healing the Earth and building the middle class. Roxanne Brown, Assistant Legislative Director for the United Steelworkers and Steering Committee member of the BlueGreen Alliance, describes how this national partnership of major labor unions and environmental organizations is expanding the number and quality of jobs in the green economy. BlueGreen Alliance Director of Chemicals, Public Health and Green Chemistry Charlotte Brody portrays the real-time societal transformation underway when workers and environmentalists find common ground and also honestly acknowledge their differences.