There is so much concentrated hope in one weekend at Bioneers, it can get a person like me and thousands of other “reverent, sane people” (a.k.a. environmentalists – Caroline Casey) through the rest of the year. Here are just a smattering of the amazing things I learned about this weekend:
- restoration on the Loess Plateau in China (John Liu)
- the ways Google Earth is being used to protect coral reefs and indigenous Amazonian lands (Rebecca Moore)
- the design of churches as a metaphoric representation of birth, but administered and controlled by men (Gloria Steinem)
- the Wampanoag had a prophecy, now being realized, that invaders would take their language from them but then help restore their language to them much later (Nitana Hicks)
- fungus is smarter than us, and can do almost anything, from cleaning oil spills to designing transit systems to curing cancer (Paul Stamets)
- slavery is the basis for the modern food production mindset; the first national Food Day is this October 24th (Anim Steel)
- sometimes the best way to solve problems is to make them bigger – expand the parameters; solar PV on just 3% of existing buildings in the US would replace all the energy we now get from coal (Amory Lovins)
- we need to think about intergenerational justice: fairness in the ways that living generations interact with those that will follow us (David Orr)
- almost all of the commercially raised bees in the US meet and mingle in California’s central valley during the couple of weeks that the almond orchards are blooming (the film Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?)
restoring the Traditional Ecological Knowledge of old-growth cultures, and this amazing image (Melissa K. Nelson)- if the history of life on Earth were one calendar year, there wasn’t any sex until September 17th, and fungi got to land a week before plants did in mid-November (Dayna Baumeister)
- a democratically-elected Women’s Parliament was convened in 2009 in India, the world’s largest democracy (Pam Rajput)
- “Co-operators are standing by!” (Caroline Casey)
There was so much else, in the plenary sessions, in the afternoon workshops, and else-when. I was on a panel called “Education in Action: Leveraging Higher Education for Sustainability,” moderated by Anthony Cortese of Second Nature. In case you missed it, Bioneers sends this:
If you weren’t able to join us in California this past weekend, or catch the live webcast of the conference, check out archived videos of all three days by clicking here. You can also watch Kenny’s Bioneers 3.0 presentation referenced in the video above by clicking here.
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There is as much cause for hope as for horror. As David Orr said, “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.”
Ponderings of a Perplexed Primate 