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Bioneers Conference Report

Several of us from the Sufi community and Kinship attended the Bioneers conference that took place all online this year from 11-13 November. It was an absolutely inspiring and hopeful compilation of messages, music, panel discussions, and projects designed to rebirth our world and our culture. They sent out a daily list of resources and summaries of the event that I want to share with all of you here. Please use this as a resource for inspiration and continuation of the great work you are all doing.

DAY ONE – LOOKING BENEATH THE SURFACE

  • “When people understand that real solutions do exist it leverages the potential for change.” -Kenny Ausubel & Nina Simons; Co-Founders | Bioneers
  • “There are some basic things that we need to create for healing. We have to create environments that are deeply embedded and connected to nature — that can moderate our fight, flight, and freeze responses. Spaces for refuge, that we can cool off in and leave. Spaces where we can break bread, embedding objects of comfort, light, sound, texture, and materials that are good for our senses. Integrating art into our space so that people can see themselves. These are the kinds of spaces for justice that we can begin to make.” -Deanna Van Buren; Executive Director | Designing Justice + Designing Spaces
  • “A message to the western world: I would like to tell them not to continue consuming gasoline and plastics that are not good for our health and the environment. I would like modern people to know where their oil comes from. It comes from the Amazon so they can have a good life in the city. It pollutes our water, our animals, and our land.” -Nemonte Nenquimo; Co-Founder | Ceibo Alliance and Amazon Frontlines
  • “I firmly believe that farming practices can deliver health. We need to lay down the weapons, back off of the toxins, and support biological bazaars. And that’s how we’re going to get to this. That is how we’re going to turn this trend around. When soil health gets better, crops and animals get better. Those become the animals and plant foods in the human diet, and it’s immensely helpful to us.” -Anne Biklé; Biologist, Avid Gardener, and Author
  • “When we look at climate justice, we have to look at the intersections of our relationships not just with each other but with the land. We have to look at the root causes of the systems that have brought us to this place. The beauty we are witnessing in this crisis is the power of community and the power of Indigenous Peoples.” -Eriel Deranger; Co-Founder and Executive Director | Indigenous Climate Action

Campaigns to Follow and Support

  • Join Designing Justice + Designing Spaces in unbuilding racism by investing more thoughtfully, igniting radical imagination, and closing jails. (Mentioned in Deanna Van Buren’s keynote address: Achieving Equity in the Built Environment.)
  • Sign this letter from Indigenous Peoples to Ecuador’s Constitutional Court to support their right to make decisions about what happens to their home in the Amazon. (Mentioned by Nemonte Nenquimo in her keynote address: Indigenous Guardianship is Key to Halt the Climate Crisis.)
  • Read more about how to bring our planet’s soils back to life in Growing a Revolution by David Montgomery. (Mentioned in his keynote presentation with Anne Biklé: You Are What Your Food Ate.)
  • Tell UBS and JPMorgan Chase to exit Amazon oil and gas with Amazon Watch. (Mentioned by Leila Salazar-Lopez in the panel Averting a Hot, Toxic Endgame: Strategizing & Mobilizing for Crime Justice.)
  • Attend an Embodied Leadership for Funders & Donors course in January, an 8-week introductory embodied leadership program for leaders in the funding world who are committed to redistributing wealth. (Mentioned by Staci Haines in the panel Embodied Healing Approaches to Personal, Generational, and Socio-Political Trauma.)
  • Connect with women interested in climate action worldwide by joining the WECAN Network. (Mentioned by Osprey Orielle Lake in the panel Averting a Hot, Toxic Endgame: Strategizing & Mobilizing for Crime Justice.)

DAY TWO – FINDING BALANCE

NINA SIMONS: From Discipline to Discipleship: Cultivating Love, Collaboration & Imagination

The full text of Bioneers Co-Founder Nina Simons’ keynote address from this morning is now available to read online. You can find it here.

  • “Colonial capitalist cosmology is driving damage around the globe in ways that are making a healthy life for humans impossible, and that damage will continue until the cosmology and the systems it imagines into reality are abolished and replaced with ones that recognize our interconnectedness and ones that center care.” -Rupa Marya; Faculty Director | Do No Harm Coalition + Founder | The Deep Medicine Circle
  • “Those of us who want to help make positive change in the world have got to grapple with the vast imbalance of the power differentials we face. Our class and racial inequities are so systemic and so ingrained that no matter how hard I try, I continue to discover my own blind spots and embedded patterns of white supremacy and privilege. It’s excavation work we’ve got to be willing to undertake, no matter how uncomfortable it is, as the need is so urgent and great.” -Nina Simons; Co-Founder | Bioneers
  • “There might be ways that our humanity and our collective future can be brightened if you have it in your heart to believe that the civilizing mission was wrong, that the St. Joseph’s missions of the worlds had it all backwards, that in fact, in the long run, it’s all of you who have something to learn from all of us; that maybe America, Canada and the so-called ‘civilized’ world should become just a little bit more indigenous rather than the other way around.” -Julian Brave NoiseCat; Director of Green New Deal Strategy | Data for Progress
  • “It’s going to take young people recognizing our power, getting the resources and the skills that we need to harness that power, and then ultimately creating the change that we deem necessary in our local communities. There has never been a large successful movement for change without young people.” -Alexandria Gordon; Student Organizer | Florida PIRG Students 
  • “It is not okay to assign saving the world to 17-year-olds as if it’s some kind of homework problem. They cannot do it themselves. They need the rest of us backing them up, and in particular, I think, they need those of us in the baby boomer and silent generations, those of us above the age of 60.” -Bill McKibben | 350.org + Third Act
  • “I think we have to uplift the complexities of our people and realize that they’re not just one thing. That person selling drugs has a story. We have to uplift that story and not just condemn people.” -Jason Seals; Professor of African American Studies and Chair of Ethnic Studies | Merritt College
  • “People who have been oppressed have had to struggle to survive, and that struggle has also informed us as women as to what the imbalances are. Where the challenge is. It is time to hear and learn from all the unseen and unspoken and unheard. That includes the voice of Mother Earth and nature. It is the time of women rising.” -Osprey Orielle Lake; Founder and Executive Director | Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International

Campaigns to Follow and Support

  • Support The Deep Medicine Circle, a WOC-led, worker-directed nonprofit organization dedicated to repairing critical relationships that have been fractured through colonialism. (Mentioned by Rupa Marya in her keynote address.)
  • Ban fossil fuel advertising and sponsorships by signing this Greenpeace petition, which has almost reached its goal. (Mentioned by Michelle Jonker-Argueta in the panel Tell it to the Judge, Big Oil.)
  • Download the Student PIRGs activist toolkit, which provides the basic tools to run strong campaigns and win victories for students and the public interest. (Mentioned by Alexandria Gordon in her keynote address.)
  • Get involved with Third Act, a new campaign that invites people over 60 to harness their collective power to impact major movements. (Mentioned by Bill McKibben in his keynote address.)
  • Read this 2021 report that details the gendered and racial impacts of the fossil fuel industry in North America and complicit financial institutions. (Mentioned by Osprey Orielle Lak in the panel Nature + Justice + Women’s Leadership: A Strategic Trio for Effective Change.)
  • Support Data for Progress, a multidisciplinary group of experts using state-of-the-art techniques in data science to support progressive activists and causes. (Mentioned by Julian Brave NoiseCat in his keynote address.)
  • Hold big oil accountable for decades of deception by signing this Center for International Environmental Law petition. (Mentioned by Carroll Muffett in the panel Tell it to the Judge, Big Oil.)

DAY THREE – HONORING OUR CONNECTIONS

KENNY AUSUBEL – The Sting: The Role of Fraud in Nature

Bioneers Co-Founder Kenny Ausubel’s address is a highlight of every Bioneers Conference. The full text of his talk from today is now available to read online. You can find it here.

  • “First, we need to center the struggle for racial equity and against racism. Second, we need to craft a new economic story that can become common sense, a new economic story that recognizes our mutuality, a new economic story that motivates us for social change. And third, we’re only really going to get there if we commit to social movements for change.” -Manuel Pastor; Director | Equity Research Institute, USC + Solidarity Economics
  • “Nature is sending us extravagant distress signals these days. Earth is a hot mess. From COVID to climate catastrophe to fascism, the perils of disinformation are a matter of life and death. … We’d better get really good, really fast at reading Nature’s mind. The stakes are too high to keep drinking the collective Kool-Aid.” -Kenny Ausubel; Co-Founder | Bioneers
  • “Forests are so important globally because even though they only cover one-third of our land area, they store between 70 and 80% of the carbon in the terrestrial systems. They’re home to 80% of the species. They provide 80% of our clean water. They provide the oxygen we breathe. They are absolutely fundamental to our life support systems. And so saving these old-growth forests now is the number one thing that we need to do.” -Suzanne Simard; Professor of Forest Ecology | University of British Columbia
  • “Social justice is climate justice because the root cause is the same. If we don’t center social justice in the fight for climate justice, we won’t get anywhere.” -Alexia Leclercq; Co-Founder | Start: Empowerment
  • “Being wealthy within some of our nations meant that the more you gave the wealthier you were. I think that confuses people sometimes. It’s foreign to settler mentality. We need to build an Indigenous-led regenerative economy built on compassion.” -Sikowis Nobiss; Founder | Great Plains Action Society
  • “We need to prioritize nature-based solutions instead of grey infrastructure. It’s integrating community at every level and it also starts with looking at solutions that center restoration and regeneration first before we build a bunch of stuff on top of it.” -Ariel Whitson; Director of Education and Community | TreePeople
  • “The first time I spoke before my City Council about climate change, I told them I was scared. Then others started coming up to me and saying they were scared, too. I realized we’re not alone facing systemic injustice, and that’s what gives me hope.” -Artemisio Romero y Carver; Co-Founder | Youth United for Climate Crisis Action (YUCCA)

Campaigns to Follow and Support

  • Support Start:Empowerment, a BIPOC-led social and environmental justice education non-profit working with schools, teachers, community organizations and leaders to implement justice-focused curriculum and programming. (Mentioned by Alexia Leclercq in her keynote address.)
  • Learn more about the importance of mother trees for forest and environmental preservation with The Mother Tree Project. (Mentioned by Suzanne Simard in her keynote address.)
  • Take an interactive tour through LA’s urban oil drilling sites and their impact on the children, families, and Angelenos who live near them. (Mentioned by Nalleli Cobo in her keynote address.)
  • Become a community forester with TreePeople and create your own tree-planting events. (Mentioned by Ariel Lew Ai Le Whitson in the panel Biophilic Infrastructure: Letting Nature Lead the Way)
  • Find action tools to help make sure your campus is herbicide-free. (Mentioned by Mackenzie Feldmanin the panel Our Power: Exemplary Young Activists—the 2021 Brower Youth Awards Winners.)

Support Climate Resolve, which is tackling climate change, creating a thriving California and inspiring others to act. (Mentioned by Natalie Hernandez in the panel Solidarity Economics: Our Economy, Our Planet, Our Movements.)