|
|
|
|
|
Dear Bioneer,
Celebrate Bioneers’ 25th Birthday With Us!
Yes, 2014 marks our 25th Bioneers birthday! We honor and thank you for being part of this amazing journey.
As you might expect, we’re conjuring up some special magic to celebrate this milestone throughout the year and at the 25th Summit Conference October 17th-19th, 2014.
After a quarter-century, the Bioneers community of leadership has learned a thing or two about breakthrough solutions and what directions to head. Like a magnifying glass channeling sunlight, we’ll focalize this wealth of wisdom, skillfulness and vision into beams of action that can guide our shared work in these coming crucial years.
We’ll announce the full 25th Summit Conference Program around mid-May, but here’s a sneak preview of this year’s theme:
Growing the Movement
The World We Want
&
How To Get There
|
Share Your Vision
 What's the world you want?
How will you help the world get there?
These questions will be central to our 25th annual conference. Please respond in writing, or with video, audio, picture, or whatever works for you to info@bioneers.org. We'll be compiling your responses and publishing some on our website and elsewhere. Let's inspire each other!
Video: The Souls Are Coming Back
In honor of our 25th birthday, we’ll be highlighting some of our favorite Bioneers moments. Holly Near's parable and song is one of them. See for yourself and share your favorite moments at info@bioneers.org.
|
|
The reality today is that we’re barreling into a Great Commotion—the swirling vortex of breakdown and breakthrough. The world is changing radically and it’s going to morph in massive and unimaginable ways. Paradigms are dying and being born before our eyes. You can feel the baby kicking.
To move from breakdown to breakthrough, the next several years will be the most important in the history of human civilization.
The word “crisis” comes from the Greek word krino, meaning “to decide.” We need to decide what kind of world we want—and act on it. All the technical fixes in the world won’t solve this crisis, because it’s also about a change of heart.
These disruptive times belong to those who learn, innovate and adapt. It’s an era of creativity, freedom, transformation and the reinvention of everything.
The challenge is to alter the “mindscape” and quicken the transformation to a healthy, resilient, just and fulfilling civilization that restores nature and people. As Chief Oren Lyons challenged us at Bioneers, “How do you teach seven billion people to respect their relationship with the Earth—soon—now?”
A Bittersweet Cusp…and an Opportunity
Looking back over Bioneers’ 25 years, it’s a bittersweet cusp.
We began at a moment of great hope in 1990. There was a growing national consciousness and an ardent call for systemic solutions to the world’s mounting ecological and social crises. We still had time to avert them.
That ship has sunk. Climate change has crash-landed from the future into the present. The extreme concentration of wealth has captured our political systems, impoverishing humanity and the environment, running up an untenable democracy deficit. Some problems have turned into predicaments for which there is no good solution.
When you’re in an abusive relationship, the healthy course of action is to get out.
Fortunately, nature has a profound capacity for healing, and we can work with nature and our human communities for mutual healing. Even today’s science is now in line with this truth: the oneness and interconnection of everything are irreducible, dynamic, plastic.
Resilience is the goal—enhancing our ability to adapt to dramatic change and designing our ways of living for the long-term benefit of nature and each other. Life creates conditions conducive to life, and we are co-creators.
As Bioneers has long illustrated, in many cases the solutions are present, or we know what directions to head. The world we want is here now—in the models, practices and stories encoded in the Bioneers community of leadership.
To paraphrase Milton Friedman, in times of crisis, people grab for “the ideas that are lying around.”
The Bioneers community has a lot more than ideas. We’ve got to spread and scale the models and solutions we already have—fast. We’ve got to shortcut innovation. It’s bottom up and top down to generate the biggest, fastest economic, industrial and cultural transformation in history.
What we do not have is time. This shift needs to fast-forward if we have any chance of dodging runaway climate chaos, restoring vital ecological services, and upholding the social justice and human dignity necessary to sustain human civilization and the web of life.
Tell Us: How Do We Make the Impossible Inevitable?
Of course, windows of opportunity are finite and fleeting. What’s going to make a difference that really makes the difference? How do we make the impossible inevitable?
It comes down to growing the movement—the global movement of movements that Bioneers reflects and has helped to connect and shape. We are so grateful you exist, and that you’ve ensured Bioneers continues to be a vitalizing force-field for community leadership after 25 years. Now we need to spread much more widely.
Our metric is ROE—Return on Engagement. Together we’ve got to engage millions and billions more people to make this once-in-a-civilization leap across the abyss into the world we want—and the world the world wants.
How do we get there? Well, that’s what we’re inviting all our conference speakers to address this year. And we’re asking our whole amazing Bioneers community—you!
What’s the world you want? How are you going to help get there? Please share your response with us in writing, video, audio, photos or other formats at info@bioneers.org.
As bioneers, we’re creating conditions conducive to life, growing the imaginal cells of a wisdom culture. We make the road by walking. As Rosanne Cash sings in 50,000 Watts, “It’s a hard road, but it fits your shoes.” We offer a deep bow of gratitude and love to each of you, with whom we’ve had the honor and joy of walking this amazing road so far.
With our love, gratitude and respect,
Kenny Ausubel & Nina Simons, Founders
|
Connect with Bioneers
Our current programs focus on three areas:
- Changing the Mindscape: Public Education and Media Outreach
- Resilience From the Ground Up: The Bioneers Resilient Communities Network
- Community of Leadership: Women, First Peoples and Youth Mentorship
Today we offer more media channels than ever with innovators and leaders in these areas, including iTunes, SoundCloud, Roku, Link TV, Free Speech TV and our signature Media Collections.
How will you connect?
Bioneers Goes to Washington
 Bioneers is collaborating with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for the upcoming Summit on Climate Change Resilience: Governance & Reforms, taking place in Washington, D.C. June 5-6th. Bioneers board member David Orr and 2012 Bioneers presenter Gar Alperowitz are featured as "synthesizing" presenters, helping to outline the big picture from each day of events. Teo Grossman, our Director of Strategic Initiatives, worked with several AAAS Science & Technology Fellows to help develop the program. AAAS Fellows are some of the country's leading young scientists, and we are honored and delighted they reached out to Bioneers for innovative thinking around climate change and governance. The event is free and open to the public, but please RSVP here.
Radio Award Sweeps for Bioneers Series!
Our radio series, The Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature, just won 11 Communicator Awards. The Communicator Awards is one of the world's top awards program, "recognizing big ideas in marketing and communications." See what the excitement is about and listen to our radio series here.
Quote: Humanity's Initiatory Crisis
Author Richard Tarnas suggests the symptoms of the modern era resemble an initiatory crisis, much like what youths in indigenous societies experience in rites of passage to adulthood:
"The dark night of the soul––a deconstruction of the old identity––the crisis of meaning––the encounter with mortality on a planetary scale. In some sense, the universe may have been constellating, painstakingly and painfully, a partner to reconnect with the soul of the universe in a new way––to forge a new relationship to it that builds upon everything that has been learned in these thousands of years."
Farm Hack!
 Severine von Tscharner Fleming invited us to share with you her latest video from Greenhorns, called Farm Hack! It's all about appropriate technology for the growing movement of human-scale, sustainable farming.
Teaser Alert! Join us for Bioneers 2014 where you can hear Severine as one of our keynote speakers.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
