The Evolution of Environmental Activism

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted October 13, 2005.

News flash: Reality is not dead, mechanical, or separate; it is alive, evolving and composed of interdependent systems.

This worldview -- shared by indigenous peoples for millennia, revealed by science since early in the 20th century, and obvious every time we walk outside or look into the eyes of another living creature -- is disavowed in practice by almost every powerful institution in American society. It thrives, however, at the annual Bioneers conference, held each fall in the San Francisco Bay area.

In addition to founding and co-directing Bioneers, Kenny Ausubel co-founded the organic seed company Seeds of Change. He is the author of Seeds of Change; Restoring the Earth and When Healing Becomes a Crime. His wife, Nina Simons, is co-executive director of Bioneers and co-producer of the Bioneers Conference since 1990. In 2002, she produced a retreat called UnReasonable Women for the Earth, out of which grew the women's activist group, CodePink.

AlterNet spoke to the two just in advance of this year's Bioneers conference.

What is a Bioneer? You coined the term, what does it mean?

Kenny Ausubel: I came up with the word Bioneer while working on the very first conference in 1990. It grew out of other work that I was doing. I was meeting a lot of people who were looking into how nature operates and then emulating how life does what it does. After all, we have 3.8 billion years of successful evolution -- there are no recalls in nature -- yet we haven't paid attention to nature's own operating instructions. There's a whole field of science now called biomimicry that looks at how nature does things. By imitating nature, we can actually live quite harmoniously with a higher quality of life than we have now. Those realizations were a lot of the inspiration for the concept.

It's expanded a great deal since then. As we know, how humans relate to each other is also how we relate to the land. It's really one enterprise at the end of the day. Bioneers is not just concerned with restoring our relationships with the natural world but also our relationships with each other.

One of the key things that I noticed at my first Bioneers conference: it's a place where environmentalists, political activists, labor leaders, racial justice folks and spiritual people all come together. They have their laughter and they have their anger. It's quite a mix. Did that evolution happen over time?

Nina Simons: I think that was always in the design. Kenny's initial vision recognized the false separations that divide us because of our tendency to have a mechanized world view. We saw the need for people to recognize the unifying factors among ourselves, and to begin to see that we actually are all potentially part of one movement -- a movement of people who care about restoring the health and vitality of the living world. There's actually a great deal more that unites us than that which divides us. For me, one of the most exciting things is how we draw together all of these different constituencies, you know, doctors and nurses and healers and nuns. It's a fascinating mix of people.

There's also an interesting age variation. There are elders and young folks as well as folks in the middle.

NS: We started a youth program about five years ago and it's been taking off like gangbusters. We have between four and five hundred young people there who are incredibly inspiring. They participate in the main program and also in a separate youth program, which, of course, also is open to anyone of any age.

When it began to sell out every year in San Rafael, you resisted what would have been an obvious bottom-line decision to move to a larger venue, where you could have packed in more people and made more money. How are you handling the growing interest?

KA: You probably remember Tip O'Neill, the Democratic politician, said that all politics is local. Well, all ecology is local too.

Someone from Canada came to us and asked if we could beam up part of the conference by satellite so they could download it in Toronto, and then build a conference around that. We thought that was kind of a perfect, elegant solution. There will be 17 of these "beaming Bioneers" satellite conferences in local communities across the country this year, 16 in the U.S. and one in Canada. People beam in the three mornings of plenary talks, and then for the rest of each day and night, they organize their own conferences with local speakers, local issues, and local events and parties. So this really supports local people to do the work in their own 'hood.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org), where he interviews people he believes can help create 'a world that just might work.'

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