| This three-day event is a hub of practical solutions for restoring the Earth — and people. Find out for yourself why more than 10,000 people attended Bioneers national and local conferences across the country last year!
On October 20-22, Bioneers
2006 gathers at the Marin Center in San Rafael,
Calif., and offers 18 live satellite conferences across
the country, including many in the West. At the main
California gathering, a vibrant network of more than
160 presenters and upwards of 3,200 attendees will celebrate
inspiring ideas, models, tools and resources —
and make worthwhile connections. The satellite conferences
beam in by satellite three half days of plenary talks
from California, and then offer locally selected programming
customized to local issues, featuring many local presenters.
Bioneers are "biological pioneers,"
visionary innovators who look to nature for solutions
to some of the world's greatest problems. They
have peered deep into the heart of living systems to
devise strategies for restoration based on nature's
own operating instructions. The bioneers map the connections
among economics, jobs, ecologies, cultures and communities
and seek to advance economic models founded in social
justice and environmental health.
Bioneers 2006 incorporates 15 stellar
plenary speakers, five per morning. The event features
charismatic mycologist Paul Stamets,
who has demonstrated how mushrooms remediate diesel
oil spills and Sarin VX nerve gas, and destroy E. coli
bacteria; New York Times writer and best-selling author
Michael Pollan, whose newest title
is The Omnivore's Dilemma; renowned Jungian
scholar James Hillman; Lois
Gibbs, known for her courageous grassroots
environmental justice organizing beginning with Love
Canal; Turtle Island Native Clayton Thomas-Müller
of the Indigenous Environmental Network on his work
in Indian country to stem the industry of unsustainable
resource extraction throughout North America; Tzeporah
Berman of ForestEthics who helped lead the
successful campaign to preserve the Great Bear Wilderness
in BC, four million acres of the last great Boreal forest;
Maria Elena Durazo on labor and immigration
issues; and Spencer Beebe of Ecotrust
on greening large-scale regional economies.
The International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers will link to the main conference live from Dharamsala, India by a two-way interactive satellite “spacebridge.” The grandmothers represent a global alliance of prayer, education and healing for the Earth, and are committed to the ancestral teachings in protecting diverse cultures, lands, medicines and ceremonial ways for children and Earth's inhabitants for seven generations to come.
Bioneers 2006 in California offers more than 60 panels and workshops. Presenters share strategies, successes and discourse on a diversity of topics — from sessions on women farmers, youth leadership and eco-art activism to green building, local self-governance, defending the commons, and municipal sustainability.
Several innovators from the West will present in workshops in San Rafael. Courtney White (who writes a column for Headwaters News) of the Quivira Coalition will discuss restoration ecology and citizen diplomacy with wildlife biologist Peter Warshall and ForestEthics program director Tzeporah Berman.
Taos educator Miguel Santistevan of the New Mexico Acequia Association will join Lani Malmberg, a former rancher who employs 1,200 grazing goats for ecological restoration in ten Western states. Paula Garcia of the New Mexico Acequia Association will present on multi-cultural food ways with the Cultural Conservancy's Melissa Nelson and David Roach, founder and president of Mo'Better Food, which connects African American Farmers with inner-city communities.
Bioneers celebrates its third Moving Image Festival at the conference. A special program on Democracy in Crisis will premiere several films documenting election fraud, including “Hacking Democracy” which will air on HBO on November 2nd. An interactive workshop called “From the Silver Screen to the Mean Streets: How to Leave the Theater and Hit the Ground Running”will be led by Robert West of Working Films and Free Speech TV, to explore ways in which educators and activists can strategically use film to transform audiences into activists.
The Bioneers Youth Program rocks. One workshop will address youth leadership with Brooklyn-based filmmaker and educator Shalini Kantayya, 28; Adrienne Maree Brown, 27, executive director of the Ruckus Society; and Evon Peter, 29, the youngest-ever Chief of the Neetsail Gwich'in in his village in northeastern Alaska, and co-founder and chair of Native Movement, an indigenous nonprofit.
More than 11,000 people attended last year's 17 satellite sites. We hope you'll join us this year.
Marita Prandoni grew up in Montana and
New Mexico and has worked for the Bioneers for more
than two years. She resides in Santa Fe, N.M. |
This
year's sites include: