National Plenary Speakers

Bioneers’ Founders:

Kenny Ausubel, CEO & Founder of Bioneers, is an award-winning social entrepreneur, author, journalist and filmmaker. Bioneers is a nationally recognized nonprofit dedicated to disseminating practical and visionary solutions for restoring Earth’s imperiled ecosystems and healing our human communities. Kenny launched the annual Bioneers Conference in 1990 with his producing partner and wife, Nina Simons, Bioneers co-founder. The Bioneers Conference attracts more than 3,000 people each year to the national conference in San Rafael, California, and is beamed by satellite simulcast to close to 20 localized Bioneers conferences across the US and Canada to another 10,000 attendees.

Kenny serves as executive producer of the Bioneers plenary series airing on Free Speech TV and Link TV. He acted as a central advisor to Leonardo DiCaprio’s feature documentary The 11th Hour, and appears in the film.

Nina Simons, President & Co-Founder of Bioneers, is a social entrepreneur. Bioneers is a national nonprofit that helps highlight, gather and disseminate breakthrough solutions to the our most pressing environmental and social challenges. Nina's life and work are informed by her passion for the natural world, women’s leadership, systems thinking, and the arts’ capacity to shape culture and consciousness.

Throughout her career, Nina has pioneered innovative social marketing strategies for successful ventures that have worked to advance social and environmental change. Previously, she served as president of Seeds of Change and as director of strategic marketing for Odwalla. In each case, she was instrumental in the companies achieving rapid national prominence.

During her 20-year tenure as co-founder of Bioneers, Simons has developed successful programming, outreach and media strategies for disseminating the breakthrough solutions and stories of the Bioneers network of scientific and social innovators working for the common good. Since beginning Bioneers in 1990, she and partner and husband Kenny Ausubel have collaborated to grow the organization and its influence, which now reaches many millions through its annual conferences, satellite conference partners, award-winning radio series, broadcast and print media, interactive website and book series.

Nina also has an enduring interest in the leadership of women and restoring the "feminine" to a balanced place in our culture. In 2006, she began offering Cultivating Women’s Leadership, a five-day intensive for diverse women with the passion and capacity to effect change in their communities. The intensive offers tools and practices to strengthen women’s effectiveness. Working from the inside out, it focuses on bringing to awareness the stories women tell ourselves, and developing practices for strengthening vision and self-esteem and shedding self-limiting patterns. The intensive emphasizes skillful collaboration across differences, and the creation of relationships and networks to cultivate leadership, build alliances and encourage mutual support. The experiential training recognizes the unique capacities women may bring to leadership at this pivotal time.

2009 National Plenary Speakers

Basins of Relations - A Reverential Rehydration Revolution
by Brock Dolman

Permaculturist and watershed wizard Brock Dolman shows how the future lifeboat we’ll need is shaped exactly like our local watershed. He wields his dazzling poetics to tell us how we can engage with the spirit of Planet Water, create waterliterate human settlement patterns, and regenerate ecological integrity and social resiliency to prepare for the climate changes ahead.

Profile: Brock Dolman, a founding member and resident of the Sowing Circle LLC, an intentional community in the Sonoma County hamlet of Occidental, California, is the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center's (OAEC) WATER (Watershed Advocacy Training Education & Research) Institute director and co-directs OAEC's Permaculture Design and Wildlands Biodiversity programs. Brock’s extensive cross-disciplinary experience ranges from the study of wildlife biology, native California botany and watershed ecology to the practices of habitat restoration, community watershed education, and ecological literacy activism to engender societal transformation.

Youth Redefining Environmentalism - Reclaiming Our Futures
by Kari Fulton
Introduction by Liz Cunningham, Bioneers youth and conference project manager

This inspiring Brower Youth Award winner and national campus campaign coordinator for the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative describes how the Youth Climate Movement is creating a more unified and inclusive environmental movement for the 21st century.

Profile: Kari Fulton, the national campus campaign coordinator for the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative, has become a pioneer organizer working to mobilize youth of color around issues of campus sustainability and climate justice. She was a 2008 recipient of Earth Island Institute’s Brower Youth Award and the Damu Smith Power of One Young Professional Award (Deep South Center For Environmental Justice at Dillard University). A graduate of Howard University, Fulton acts as a mentor for other youth leaders and as a spokesperson for the Energy Action Coalition, and is currently a senior fellow with Young People For the American Way (YP4) and a member of the 2009 YP4 Leadership Academy.

From Small Steps to the Energy Revolution
by Jack Hidary

How do we move rapidly from 1% solar and wind energy in the U.S. to 50%? To 100%? Is this just a fantasy? One of the nation’s leading technology entrepreneurs, co-founder of SmartTransportation.org and chairman of Americans for CleanEnergy.org, explains what we have to do politically, economically and socially to realize that necessary revolution.

Profile: Jack D. Hidary, after studying philosophy and neuroscience at Columbia University, became a very successful entrepreneur in the finance and technology sectors, and later co-founded SmartTransportation.org, a nationwide organization dedicated to encouraging clean technology in the transportation sector, which has, among other achievements, led a coalition to establish thousands of hybrid taxis in New York and other cities. He also currently serves on the advisory board to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and is board chair of AmericansforCleanEnergy.org.

Indigenous Peoples and Climate Change - Report from the Arctic
by Sarah James
Introduction by Dune Lankard, Alaskan indigenous social entrepreneur and Bioneers board member

The revered Gwich’in Elder from Alaska, who has won many awards for her work to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling, including the Goldman Environmental Prize, depicts how her people are being severely impacted on the front lines of rapid climate change, and how they are responding.

Profile: Sarah James, a Gwich’in elder from Arctic Village, Alaska, is the board chair and a spokesperson for the Gwich’in Steering Committee, and has educated people around the world about the porcupine-caribou herd and the importance of protecting “the Sacred Place where Life Begins” (the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) from oil exploration and drilling. She has received many awards, including the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, the National Conservation Land Trust Award and the Ecotrust Award for Indigenous Leadership.

The Electric Pulse of Women - Transforming Our World
by Jensine Larsen

Across the Earth, courageous women leaders from rural villages to corporate suites are connecting to solve global problems. The visionary founder of World Pulse, a global media source covering world issues through women’s eyes, shares her journey building an interactive global media enterprise to unleash the power of women’s voices, and shows how we can participate in this ongoing revolution.

Profile: Jensine Larsen, formerly a freelance journalist covering indigenous movements in South America and Southeast Asia, is the founder of World Pulse Media, a global media source covering world issues through women's eyes, and its flagship, World Pulse magazine, as well as PulseWire.net, an interactive website that enables women worldwide to speak for themselves and to connect to solve global problems.

The Story of Stuff
by Annie Leonard

A key part of the American dream is centered on accumulating ever more, and better, stuff. Yet all the stuff in our lives is taking an enormous toll on the environment, public health, equity, personal happiness and even our sense of citizenship and democracy. Acclaimed filmmaker and Internet phenomenon Annie Leonard exposes the often hidden costs and provides a hopeful vision for moving beyond the age of Stuff.

Profile: Annie Leonard has worked on international environmental health and sustainability issues for more than two decades. Annie has also worked with GAIA, Health Care without Harm, Essential Action, and Greenpeace International; has traveled to over 30 countries to investigate the factories where our stuff is produced and the dumps where it is disposed; and is the writer and host of the internet film, The Story of Stuff, viewed by over 6 million people around the world since its launch in December 2007. Annie currently coordinates the non-profit Story of Stuff Project, based in Berkeley, and is working on additional films, organizing projects, and The Story of Stuff book to be published by Free Press of Simon and Schuster in March 2010.

The Hidden Promise of Our Dark Age - Discovering Our Wisdom, Strength and Beauty in the Midst of Crisis
by Joanna Macy

If we can free ourselves from the delusions and dependencies bred by the “industrial growth society,” something wonderful can happen. One of the great activists and spiritual teachers of our era brings a hopeful message: If we manage to steer clear of panic, we may well find at last the wild power of our creativity and solidarity.

Joanna Macy, a renowned Buddhist teacher, eco-philosopher, systems theorist, and scholar, is a longtime activist in the peace, justice, and ecology movements. Her wide-ranging work spans Eastern and Western thought and seeks to bring to human consciousness the perspectives of other life forms, as well as those of past and future generations. Joanna's experiential group work, known to activists around the world as The Work That Reconnects, seeks to convey the extraordinary opportunity of being alive now to serve the survival of life on Earth. Joanna’s many seminal books include: Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age; Dharma and Development; Thinking Like a Mountain; Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World; Widening Circles; and, most recently, World as Lover, World as Self.

Who Speaks for the Trees? - Driving Nature’s Rights into Law
by Mari Margil
Introduction by Thomas Linzey, executive director of the Community Environmental Defense Fund

The associate director of the Community Environmental Defense Fund (CELDF) describes the inspiring, groundbreaking work she and CELDF are doing to recognize Rights of Nature in law in both the U.S. and Ecuador, which recently became the world’s first nation to enshrine such rights in its constitution.

Profile: Mari Margil is the first associate director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). She opened CELDF’s West Coast office in Portland, Oregon, in 2007 and teaches Democracy Schools (weekend seminars which assist groups and communities challenge the ability of corporate “rights” to trump the rights of communities) across the country. Mari was also involved in CELDF’s groundbreaking work assisting Ecuador’s Constituent Assembly in its historic decision to place ecosystem rights (the “rights of nature”) directly into the new Ecuadorian constitution, a global first.

Living Buildings - The Future of Architecture
by Jason McLennan
Introduction by Bryony Schwan, executive director, Biomimicry Institute

This leading figure in the global green architecture movement challenges us to imagine and demand buildings that operate as elegantly and efficiently as the living structures nature creates. As CEO of Cascadia Green Building Council, author of the Living Building Challenge and co-creator of Pharos (the most advanced building material rating system in North America), he shows breathtaking examples from the worldwide Challenge underway to design buildings that meet or exceed nature’s ecosystem services.

Profile: Jason McLennan, CEO of the Cascadia Green Building Council, the Pacific Northwest's leading green building and sustainable development organization (a chapter of both the U.S. and Canadian Green Building Councils), is: the creator of the international green building program-the Living Building Challenge; co-creator of Pharos, the most advanced building material rating system in North America; and founder/CEO of Ecotone Publishing. He is the author of The Ecological Engineer and The Philosophy of Sustainable Design (currently used as a textbook in over 40 universities internationally), and is a former principal at BNIM Architects, one of the pioneering firms in the green design movement in the U.S.

In Defense of Food - The Omnivore’s Solution
by Michael Pollan

The leading American thinker about our relationship to food, Michael Pollan is the author of such seminal classics as In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire. He explores what the industrialization of food and agriculture has meant for our health and happiness as eaters. He surveys the landscape of the growing national movement to redesign the food system.

Profile: Michael Pollan, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and the recipient of numerous journalistic awards, served for many years as executive editor of Harper’s Magazine and is now a professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley. He is also the nation’s most influential and important thinker and writer on food and agriculture, the author of many seminal, award-winning, bestselling books, including, most recently In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, and previously: The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals; The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World; A Place of My Own; and Second Nature.

The Color of Green - The Next Inconvenient Truth
by Jerome Ringo
Introduction by Kate Gordon, co-director of the national Apollo Alliance

Nearly $116 billion will be spent over the next two years developing clean fuels, modernizing rail transit, pursuing energy efficiency and developing electric vehicles. One of the nation’s foremost environmental leaders says we must ensure that the jobs created in that effort are good jobs available to all Americans.

His perspective comes from originally working as a petrochemical worker in Louisiana’s “cancer alley” for 20 years, to becoming chairman of the National Wildlife Federation (the first African-American to head a major conservation organization), and now president of the groundbreaking Apollo Alliance.

Profile: Jerome Ringo is the president of the Apollo Alliance, the highly influential vanguard coalition of labor, business, environmental, and community leaders working to catalyze a clean energy revolution and put millions of Americans to work in high-quality, “green-collar” jobs. Ringo got firsthand experience of pollution working for more than 20 years in Louisiana’s petrochemical industry and seeing the impacts on his fellow workers and on adjoining (mostly poor and black) communities’ health. He became a union activist, an environmental justice advocate and eventually chair of the board of the National Wildlife Federation, the first African-American to head a major conservation organization. Jerome was also the U.S.’ only black delegate at the 1998 Global Warming Treaty Negotiations in Kyoto.

Changing the Axis - Drawing from Mexican and Latin American Cultures to Create a Sustainable Future
by Arturo Sandoval
Introduction by Kenny Ausubel

The Euro-American ethic which has dominated the cultural and economic landscape of the Americas for hundreds of years has had some positive effects on the Western hemisphere, but its total domination of the commons has also stifled equally valuable ethics that existed prior to the emergence of the U.S. One of New Mexico’s most prominent civic leaders explores how we can find a balance between these older and newer attitudes to land and life to create a viable future for us all.

Profile: Arturo Sandoval has been active in community, cultural, environmental and civil rights efforts in New Mexico and across the United States for nearly 40 years. Sandoval is president and founder of VOCES, Inc., a communications and organizational development firm with headquarters in Albuquerque and with offices in Chihuahua, México. He also founded the Center of Southwest Culture (CSC), Inc. in 1991 to help develop healthy indigenous and Latino communities through economic, educational and cultural work.

Biocultural Conservation in the Amazon - How an Amazon Tribe Has Combined Traditional Knowledge With Science and Technology to Save Its Rainforests and Its People
by Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui
Introduction by Rebecca Moore, founder of Google Earth Outreach

Chief Almir, 32, a tribal chief, environmentalist and political activist, portrays his and his people’s struggles to survive by protecting their culture and rainforest since they made First Contact with the Western world in 1969. He surveys the history of the Amazon, its situation today and the unusual partnership he forged with Google to use Google Earth’s high-tech tools to help his Surui people tell their story and protect their forests and culture.

Profile: Almir Narayamoga Surui, 32, an environmentalist, political activist and tribal chief, has been fighting to save both his Surui tribe and the Amazon rainforest for more than 15 years. His efforts are credited with almost single-handedly bringing his tribe back from the brink of extinction. His opposition to logging, mining, agricultural and other development interests in favor of more sustainable ventures in western Brazil has made him the target of death threats and violence.

Environmental Health, Environmental Medicine
by Dr. Andrew Weil
Introduction by Kenny Ausubel

Human health and environmental health are inextricably interconnected, yet the education and training of doctors and health professionals largely ignore the subject. America’s most prominent “Integrative” MD and medical reformer, Dr. Andrew Weil says in his new book on reinventing the American health care system that it’s imperative to mobilize the health-care community as an ally in the environmental movement. The alliance could overcome the influence of vested interests that still block the legislative and policy changes we need to protect the health of people and planet.

Profile: Andrew Weil, MD, the nation’s most renowned exponent of a more holistic approach to medicine, is director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona (the leading effort in the world to develop a comprehensive curriculum in integrative medicine), and is also a clinical professor of medicine and a professor of Public Health there.

He is the author of many scientific and popular articles and of 10 books, including: The Natural Mind; Health and Healing; Natural Health, Natural Medicine; the international bestsellers, Spontaneous Healing, and Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, and most recently, Eating Well for Optimum Health; and Healthy Aging. Dr. Weil also, among many other endeavors, appears on PBS specials, writes a monthly newsletter, maintains a popular website (www.drweil.com), and writes a syndicated newspaper column.

The Rwanda Healing Project - Bringing Hope through Art and Creative Action
by Lily Yeh
Introduction by Nina Simons

This internationally celebrated artist works to bring the transformative power of art to impoverished and war-torn communities around the world to foster community empowerment, improve the physical environment, promote economic development and preserve indigenous art and culture. She portrays a heartbreakingly beautiful project (described in Terry Tempest Williams’ latest book Finding Beauty in a Broken World) exemplifying how art can begin to heal the environment as well as the hearts and minds of traumatized people. Profile: Lily Yeh is an internationally celebrated artist whose work has taken her to communities throughout the world. As founder and executive director of the Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia from 1968 to 2004, she helped create a national model of community building through the arts. In 2004, Yeh pursued her work internationally, founding Barefoot Artists, Inc., to bring the transformative power of art to impoverished communities around the globe through participatory, multifaceted projects that foster community empowerment, improve the physical environment, promote economic development, and preserve indigenous art and culture.