Bioneers: Groundbreaking Ways to Repair the Earth

Human creativity focused on problem solving can explode the mythology of resignation and despair. It is this point of view that inspires the annual Bioneers conference that takes place each fall in the San Francisco Bay area, which now streams via satellite to 19 sites across the country. The conference (10/19-21 in San Rafael, Calif.) is a gathering of scientific and social innovators who are developing and implementing visionary and practical models for restoring community, justice and democracy, as well as the Earth itself.

Speakers this year include author, Alice Walker, inventor and entrepreneur; Jay Harmon, community arts pioneer; Judy Baca, environmental justice leader; Van Jones, Whole Earth Catalog founder; Stewart Brand; and Native American activist Winbona LaDuke.

In addition to founding and co-directing Bioneers, Kenny Ausubel is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, and social entrepreneur specializing in health and the environment. He co-founded Seeds of Change, a biodiversity organic seed company. He authored the books Seeds of Change, Restoring the Earth and When Healing Becomes a Crime; edited the first two titles in the Bioneers book series Ecological Medicine and Nature's Operating Instructions; and was a key advisor for the Leonardo DiCaprio documentary The 11th Hour.

Terrence McNally: I believe your founding of Bioneers grew out of personal experiences and personal trials in your life. Could you weave a bit of that story for us?

Kenny Ausubel: There were two primary experiences for me. First, I had a very severe health crisis when I was about 20 years old. Conventional medicine was not able to help me, and out of desperation, rather than any philosophical bias, I sort of fell through the rabbit hole into the world of alternative medicine. I began to learn a lot about natural medicine and, over a long period of time, began to recover. Second, in the midst of that, my father very unexpectedly got cancer and was dead six months later at the age of 55.

A couple of weeks after my father's death, I began to learn about alternative cancer therapies -- amazing stories of what Bernie Siegel calls "people who got well when they weren't supposed to." In the course of my research, I discovered that there was a deep philosophical conflict between the conventional medicine tradition and the natural medicine tradition. This was quite apart from the war over money and power that continues to this day.

Natural medicine holds that as a healer or a doctor, your job is to support the body to heal itself. Nature has an incredible capacity for self-repair that we barely understand. These experiences led to one of the founding principles of Bioneers: the idea of working with nature to help nature heal itself.

In the course of all that, I was asked to make a film about a very unusual garden on an Indian pueblo north of Santa Fe, N.M. Long story short, it was there that I met Gabriel Howard, a maniac seed collector and master organic gardener, who introduced me to biodiversity in the garden. In nature, diversity is the source of resilience. The only constant in nature is change. It's the only thing you can really count on. Nature is dynamic and ever-evolving, and diversity is your deck of adaptation options. Those who adapt are the ones who survive in the long haul.

The whole idea of resilience, diversity and what it takes to adapt to a changing world informed my thinking very profoundly. In 1990 I decided to pull together all these people that I had been finding one by one -- people who were looking to nature as teacher and mentor and model -- and then imitating how nature does it. That was the origin of Bioneers.

McNally: So personal crises with your own body and that of your father led you to a vision of the interdependence of nature around you.