Seeds of the Future

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be goodfor us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it.

-- Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays

When Kenny Ausubel, founder of the Santa Fe-based Bioneers, talks about the future, he's optimistic in spite of all he knows about the environmental degradation of the Earth.

"Being immersed as I am in this world of solutions," said Ausubel in a recent interview, "it's not hard to be an optimist."

An author, filmmaker and social entrepreneur specializing in health and the environment, Ausubel traveled to San Juan Pueblo in New Mexico in 1984, ostensibly to make a film. But when he arrived, as he peered through the camera, he was struck by a handful of bright red corn in the hands of a Native American farmer.

The seeds, remembered by a few elders of the pueblo as sacred red corn, had been kept in a clay pot in the wall of the man's adobe home and had not been grown in 40 years.

"In these seeds," said Ausubel, in an article published in the September 1998 Yoga Journal, "lived not only the genetic legacy of countless generations of Pueblo farmers, but also the imprint of their hands. I thought I was at San Juan Pueblo to make a film, but it turned out I was there to start a seed company. I went on to found Seeds of Change, a company devoted to working with backyard gardeners to market -- and so conserve -- the world's ark of ancient seeds."

With his business partner, organic gardener Gabriel Howarth, Ausubel started Seeds of Change in 1989 and a year later, with his wife Nina Simons, started the Bioneers conference, a forum for like-minded biological pioneers to exchange ideas and to network. (Ausubel broke away from Seeds of Change in 1994, citing a "difference of vision" just before the company was acquired by M&M Mars.)

The Bioneers' first year, some 200 people attended the conference in a hotel ballroom in Santa Fe. In October of 2000, in Marin County, Calif., the conference was attended by 2,700 teachers, scientists, entrepreneurs, activists, farmers, business owners, journalists and interested observers.

To hear Ausubel tell it, the evolution of the Bioneers has been a natural outgrowth of the constant spawning and exchange of innovative ideas and environmental vision. And as the Bioneers conference has grown, so has the organization's range of interest expanded. Themes addressed by the Bioneers, in addition to organic food, farming and seeds, now run the gamut from green entrepreneurship to natural design to alternative medicine to environmental education -- all related parts of a holistic approach to restoring the Earth.

"After starting the Bioneers conference in 1990," said Ausubel, "I had begun to meet all these people, one by one, who seemed to have real practical solutions to the kinds of problems I was concerned with. "The purpose of the organization and the conference then became to bring together these innovators and to focus on environmental solutions."

The Food We Eat

Joel Salatin, a presenter at this year's conference, is a Virginia farmer who has developed a rotational grazing system that produces healthy herds of organic beef while building as much as an inch of topsoil a year. Ausubel sees Salatin's work and the work of other visionary agriculturalists as just one sign of progress -- pointing to the inevitability of change in farming techniques and, ultimately, in improving the food supply of the planet.

"Joel has a six-month waiting list for his organic beef," said Ausubel. "A couple months ago he was named Hero of the Week on an ABC News broadcast. He's one of the innovators who has shown that organic farming is not only ecologically sound but, at the same time, economically robust. Some people drive as far as 200 miles to get the food he produces."