O Bioneers!
Photo by Martha Ture
Last week the Bioneers Conference showed a newer, stronger face to the world. What started out in San Rafael, California in 1990 as a seed exchange and philosophical, often wishful -thinkers conference about a better relationship between humans and the world has become a dead-level serious conference on the UC Berkeley campus (and other Berkeley sites), bringing speakers and presenters from around the world.
From March 27 to 29, the preposterous notion that we could learn earth-salving, interesting, academic and popular mechanics from one another while the counter-revolutionaries plunder the world and destroy the world order was on full display.
As it happens, hopeful, interesting, intriguing, or entertaining information strengthens the spirit.
Strong spirits are definitely called for, in the foreseeable future.
My personal favorite presentations, in no order, came from:
Rising Appalachia, a popular folk-music trio bringing back the songs I first heard on Folkways albums and at old time music events in the 1960’s, and their own material.
Baratunde Thurston’s thoughts about interdependence. Imagine that, recognizing interdependence at any level in the United States today.
César Rodriguez-Garavito, NYU School of Law Chairman, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. His More Than Human (MOTH) video the “Song of the Cedars” presents the living, breathing entity Los Cedros, a cloud forest in Ecuador that has been recognized as one of the co-authors of the song.
High School student Asa Miller’s talk on sprouting coral buds for Cuba’s dying coral reefs. Miller has just learned that he’s been accepted to UC Berkeley.
Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s poems, storytelling, and sly wit. I particularly enjoyed her anecdote of a rainbow telling her “I’ll see you again, and I’ll bring a friend,” followed some hours later by her seeing a double rainbow.
The Woman’s Earth Alliance presentation, from origins to present.
As we navigate the bad water we’re in, it’s good to have people with the audacity to inspire. Bioneers turns out to be a gathering for meeting and hearing from people one would otherwise never hear about, not in the mainstream media nor in the alternative media. This is us. We belong here.