Bioneers: Revolution From The Heart Of Nature | Bioneers Radio Series

Labor organizer and Founder of One Fair Wage, Saru Jayaraman, takes us inside one of the fiercest labor struggles to challenge a mighty oligarchy: The food, beverage and restaurant industry. Workers are walking off the job and refusing historically low wages. She says if “we the people” stand with workers as they face this powerful lobby, they can win. Featuring Saru Jayaraman, President of ⁠One Fair Wage⁠ and Director of the ⁠Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley⁠, co-founded (after 9/11) the ⁠Restaurant Opportunities Center⁠ (ROC), which grew into a national movement of restaurant workers, employers and consumers. Saru has won many prestigious awards for her advocacy and is the author of four books including: ⁠One Fair Wage: Ending All Subminimum Pay in America⁠ and ⁠Bite Back: People Taking on Corporate Food and Winning⁠. Resources ⁠Saru Jayaraman – The Great Revolution: What A Worker Power Moment Can Mean for Climate Justice⁠ | Bioneers 2023 Keynote ⁠Saru Jayaraman – We the People: Workers Ri

We plug into the real world Matrix – the digital Wild West of surveillance capitalism that dominates this Age of Information. Behind it is the unholy alliance between Big Tech and Big Brother. Privacy is the first casualty and democracy dies with it. Our guide is Cindy Cohn, director of Electronic Frontier Foundation, with her decades of experience challenging digital authoritarianism. Featuring Cindy Cohn, the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2015, served as EFF’s Legal Director as well as its General Counsel from 2000 to 2015. Among other honors, Ms. Cohn was named to The Non-Profit Times 2020 Power & Influence TOP 50 list, and in 2018, Forbes included Ms. Cohn as one of America’s Top 50 Women in Tech. Resources ⁠Cindy Cohn – The Climate Fight is Digital⁠ | Bioneers 2024 Keynote ⁠Tools from Electronic Frontier Foundation⁠ Credits Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel Written by: Kenny Ausubel Additional production and writing: Leo Hornak Senior Producer and Station

Today, three to five giant corporations control up to 80% of almost every industry and marketplace. These monopolies depress wages, exploit workers, and decimate small businesses. Stacy Mitchell from the Institute for Local Self Reliance has been a leader in a growing anti-monopoly movement with a broad political base. Can this emerging movement – along with bold federal antitrust action –  create a force that can challenge corporate power for the first time in decades?  Featuring ⁠Stacy Mitchell⁠, a Maine-based writer, strategist, and policy advocate whose work focuses on dismantling concentrated corporate power and building thriving communities and a healthy democracy, has played a leading role in today’s growing anti-monopoly movement. She is Co-Executive Director of the ⁠Institute for Local Self-Reliance⁠ (ILSR) and the author of ⁠Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses⁠, and co-author of the influential report: ⁠Amazon’s Stranglehold⁠. Reso

From local communities and states to federal policy, antitrust movements to dismantle monopolies are challenging the system that can be summed up as: Make Feudalism Great Again. Although breaking up is hard to do, we’ve broken up monopolies before. In this second of our two-part program, we join Thom Hartmann, Stacy Mitchell and Maurice BP-Weeks to survey the landscape of rising antitrust movements to break the stranglehold of corporate power and level the playing field for a democratized economy. Featuring Thom Hartmann, the top progressive talk show host in America for over a decade, a four-time Project Censored Award-winning journalist, and bestselling author. Learn more at his website. Stacy Mitchell, Co-Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which produces research and develops policy to counter corporate control and build thriving, equitable communities. Maurice BP-Weeks, Co-Executive Director of ACRE (Action Center on Race and the Economy) where he works on campaigns to cr

In this first part of a two-part program, we travel back and forth in time to explore the battle between democracy and plutocracy that goes back to the very founding of the United States.  The extreme concentration of corporate power and the prevalence of monopoly are indeed inarguable. If the solution is once again to throw the tea in the harbor, what does that look like in the 21st century? In today’s new Gilded Age of rule by the wealthy, rising anti-trust movements are challenging the stranglehold of corporate monopoly. Featuring Thom Hartmann, the top progressive talk show host in America for over a decade, a four-time Project Censored Award-winning journalist, and bestselling author. Learn more at his website. Stacy Mitchell, Co-Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which produces research and develops policy to counter corporate control and build thriving, equitable communities. Maurice BP-Weeks, Co-Executive Director of ACRE (Action Center on Race and the Economy) where h

By around 2044, the U.S. will become a majority-minority nation. This seismic demographic shift has triggered a cultural earthquake, provoking a radical spike in hate crimes. In times of massive disruption and economic stress, what Carl Jung called the “shadow side of the psyche” comes into play: the pronounced psychological tendency in the collective psyche is to project these shadow qualities with unusual potency onto whomever people see as “the other.” But is there also a deeper story? Perhaps the question to ask is: Who benefits? In this half hour, we hear from Heather McGhee of Demos. She sees a direct connection between today’s extreme inequality and this peak moment of racial panic and white anxiety. This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

Dive into a conversation between Bioneers senior producer J.P. Harpignies and David Rothenberg. David is a musician, composer, author, naturalist, philosopher, and an independent publisher. He’s been a unique and fascinating explorer of humanity’s connections to the natural world for more than four decades. ⁠Watch the video version of this conversation⁠ One of David’s unique forms of experimentation in his extensive travels has been not only his recordings of bird and whale and other animal songs, but his attempts to engage with other species in musical exchanges. Quite a few have been captured on film and discussed in his many books. David has released some 40 albums under his own name and collaborated with many prominent musicians. Someone recently said that David has “played with everyone from Peter Gabriel to Pauline Oliveros, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, cicadas, humpbacks, frogs, Estonian pond organisms” and many others.  JP invited David to recount some of the key episodes in his career trajectory, unpack

The most critical feedback loop in a democracy is a free press and access to vital information. Yet decades of corporate consolidation allowed giant conglomerates to annihilate local news outlets and predatory hedge funds are leaving news deserts in their wake. In 2025, a fifth of people in the U.S. live with little or no access to local news and three quarters of newspaper jobs have been axed over the last 20 years. But new models are crystallizing to fill the void, thanks to innovating journalists and publishers. Featuring Larry Ryckman, co-founder and Editor of The Colorado Sun, was previously: Senior Editor at The Denver Post; Managing Editor at The Gazette in Colorado Springs; and City Editor at the Greeley Tribune.  Madeleine Bair, founder of El Tímpano, an award-winning civic media organization designed with and for the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities.  Jacob Simas, Oakland-based Community Journalism Director at Cityside Journalism Initiative.  Credits Executive Producer: K

What we do to each other, we do to the Earth. To protect our common home, we’re being called upon to bridge our differences to create beloved community and peaceful coexistence. A new generation of visionary change-makers is reframing the race conversation, and designing new tools to transform our unconscious biases and create justice. With: Racial justice pathfinders Rinku Sen, Saru Jayaraman and Malkia Cyril. This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the ⁠radio and podcast homepage⁠ to learn more.

As a backlash against LGBTQ rights escalates into an authoritarian crusade, acclaimed author and queer activist Taylor Brorby asks how we can still be fighting this battle? As a writer addressing the fossil fuel industry’s acceleration in the midst of climate chaos, Taylor is forced to choose between the existential crises of the assaults on nature and on LGBTQ people. It’s all connected, he says, as he seeks to reconcile nature, culture, diversity and belonging. Featuring Taylor Brorby, a Fellow in Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah, is an award-winning, widely published writer and poet as well as a contributing editor at North American Review who also serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and Hub City Press. Taylor regularly speaks around the country on issues related to extractive economies, queerness, disability, and climate change, and is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing up gay in a fractured land; Crude: Poems; Comi

These days, scientists are starting to talk like shamans and shamans are starting to talk like scientists. So says anthropologist and author Jeremy Narby. And, he says, we need to talk about talking – because words matter. In this episode, Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies speaks with Narby about how the very language and words we use reveal the topography and limits of our worldview, including Western culture’s adamant centuries-long but now increasingly discredited assumption that intelligence is restricted only to human beings.

The Rights of Nature movement launched internationally in 2006 and is growing fast. Driven primarily by tribes and citizen-led communities, more than three dozen cities, townships and counties across the U.S. have adopted such laws to create legally enforceable rights for ecosystems to exist, flourish, regenerate and evolve. Native American attorneys, Frank Bibeau and Samantha Skenandore, and legal movement leader Thomas Linzey report from the front lines how they are honing their strategies to protect natural systems for future generations. Featuring Frank Bibeau, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, is an activist and tribal attorney who works extensively on Chippewa treaty and civil rights, sovereignty and water protection. Thomas Linzey, Senior Legal Counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER), an organization committed to advancing the legal rights of nature and environmental rights globally. Samantha Skenandore (Ho-Chunk/Oneida), Attorney/Of-Counsel at Qua

Since time immemorial, storytellers have held an exalted role in human societies, because stories illustrate parables that help us make sense of the world and survive. In this episode, we hitch a ride with comedian, writer, futurist, technologist, and storyteller Baratunde Thurston. At this perilous existential threshold that will determine the fate of the human experiment, he knows that the story of the battle is equally the battle of the story.  Featuring Baratunde Thurston, a writer, communicator, and creator and host of the How To Citizen podcast, is also a founding partner and writer at Puck. His newest creation is Life With Machines, a YouTube podcast focusing on the human side of the A.I. revolution. Author of the bestselling comedic memoir, How To Be Black, Baratunde also serves on the boards of Civics Unplugged and the Brooklyn Public Library and lives in Southern California. Credits Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel Written by: Kenny Ausubel Senior Producer and Station Relations: Step

How do we change the story of corrosive racial inequity? First, we have to understand the stories we tell ourselves. In this program, racial justice innovators john a. powell and Heather McGhee show how empathy, honesty and the recognition of our common humanity can change the story to bridge the racial divides tearing humanity and the Earth apart. john a. powell is the Director of the ⁠Othering and Belonging Institute⁠ and Professor of Law, African American, and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. His latest book is: ⁠Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society⁠. Watch his keynote from the 2017 Bioneers Conference: https://bioneers.org/john-a-powell-co-creating-alternative-spaces-to-heal-bioneers-2017/ Heather McGhee, distinguished senior fellow and former president of ⁠Demos⁠, is an award-winning thought leader on the national stage whose writing and research appear in numerous outlets, including The New York Times and The Nation. Her latest book is ⁠The

In this program, powerful Native women leaders reveal the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and describe how they are taking action and building growing movements, including with non-Native allies.  These stories are shocking, harrowing and heartbreaking. But then again, when your heart breaks, the cracks are where the light shines through. Featuring Morning Star Gali, Ozawa Bineshi Albert, Simone Senogles, Kandi White, and Casey Camp Horinek. Resources The Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women The Intercept: A New Film Examines Sexual Violence as a Feature of the Bakken Oil Boom Restoring Justice for Indigenous Peoples: MMIW Initiative The Mendocino Voice: Community groups begin painting mural honoring Khadijah Britton and highlighting MMIW in Ukiah This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

Visionary clean energy entrepreneur Danny Kennedy explores the promise and challenges of the epic civilizational transition to renewable energy. Without doubt, the shift has hit the fan, but will we make the transition in time to avert complete climate breakdown? Danny Kennedy says we can – and the real heroes will be millions of clean energy entrepreneurs and startups, in partnership with the determined leadership of Indigenous Peoples arising worldwide. Featuring Danny Kennedy, with a long background in eco activism, has become one of the nation’s leading figures in clean-technology entrepreneurship and the capitalization of the transition to a “green” economy. Kennedy is currently CEO of New Energy Nexus, a global nonprofit providing funds, accelerators, and networks to drive clean energy innovation and adoption. Credits 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 Su

We are sharing an episode from our friends at Future Ecologies. Future Ecologies is a podcast exploring our eco-social relationships through stories, science, music, and soundscapes. Every episode is an invitation to see the world in a new light — weaving together narrative and interviews with expert knowledge holders. We will be back next week with an episode of the Bioneers. Here is more about the episode we are featuring: Food security, climate adaptation, and vibrant biodiversity all in one place — welcome to the ancient and diverse technologies of Sea Gardening.   These widespread (but often overlooked) monumental rock features are proof positive of thriving Indigenous maricultural systems all around the Pacific Rim, since time immemorial.   These spaces are not only simply stunningly beautiful spots to hang out, they're also a powerful symbol of eco-cultural restoration; of Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and internationalism; of relationship building; and of the kind of future that is poss

New, democratized access to powerful analytical and mapping tools is transforming our understanding of the natural world – and with it, our ability to meaningfully conserve, protect and restore our collective home – the biosphere. In this program, we explore the boundless possibilities of digital maps and platforms with Rebecca Moore, visionary founder of Google Earth Outreach and Google Earth Engine. This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

Visionary urban planners and community organizers recognize that effectively addressing the climate crisis requires drawing down carbon out of the atmosphere and sequestering it back where it belongs in natural systems. Urban forestry is a nature-based solution that simultaneously addresses the parallel crises of climate change and wealth inequality. With Brett KenCairn, Boulder city Senior Advisor and Samira Malone, Urban Forestry Program Manager at the Urban Sustainability Directors Network. 

Over 7,000 languages are spoken around the world. Each one reflects a rich ecosystem of ideas - seeds that grow into a multitude of worldviews. Today, many of these immeasurably precious knowledge systems are endangered - often spoken by just a handful of people. We hear from two Indigenous language champions, Jeannette Armstrong and Rowen White. They reflect on the words, stories, songs and ideas that influence our very conception of nature, and our place within it. 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 Jeannette Armstrong, Ph.D., (Okanagan) is an Indigenous author, teacher, ecologist, and a culture bearer for her Native language. She is also Co-founder of the En'owkin Centre. Rowen White (Mohawk) is a seed keeper and farmer, and part of the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network. She operates a living seed bank calle