Since time immemorial, storytellers have held an exalted role in human societies, because stories illustrate parables that help us make sense of the world and survive. In this episode, we hitch a ride with comedian, writer, futurist, technologist, and storyteller Baratunde Thurston. At this perilous existential threshold that will determine the fate of the human experiment, he knows that the story of the battle is equally the battle of the story.

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the ⁠radio and podcast homepage⁠ to learn more.

Featuring

Baratunde Thurston, a writer, communicator, and creator and host of the How To Citizen podcast, is also a founding partner and writer at Puck. His newest creation is Life With Machines, a YouTube podcast focusing on the human side of the A.I. revolution. Author of the bestselling comedic memoir, How To Be Black, Baratunde also serves on the boards of Civics Unplugged and the Brooklyn Public Library and lives in Southern California.

Credits:

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by: Kenny Ausubel

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Associate Producer: Emily Harris

Producer: Teo Grossman

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Graphic Design: Megan Howe

Resources

Baratunde Thurston – From Me to We, A Story of Interdependence | Bioneers 2025 Keynote

Baratunde Thurston Closes Out Bioneers 2025

The late world-renowned feminist, writer and change-maker Gloria Steinem connects the dots among disparate social movements to reveal the common patterns of oppression that underlie them all. From gender and race to democracy and universal spirituality, she applies her razor intellect, compassionate heart and nuanced eye to weave a unifying vision of a richly human and humane world where all people are valued for their uniqueness and full humanity – neither treated as property, nor defined by labels or stereotypes.

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the ⁠radio and podcast homepage⁠ to learn more.

Globally, women experience some of the harshest challenges in wartime and the climate crisis while simultaneously remaining caretakers to their families, communities, and the Earth. Zainab Salbi is a humanitarian, author and media host who has dedicated her life to empowering women on the frontlines in conflict zones and climate crisis zones. Her vision is that the fate of humanity depends on elevating feminine leadership that offers a model for a new way of being – for both women and men.

Featuring:

Zainab Salbi is a celebrated humanitarian, author, and journalist, co-founder of ⁠DaughtersforEarth.org⁠, “Chief Awareness Officer” at ⁠FindCenter.com⁠, host of the ⁠Redefined⁠ podcast, and founder of ⁠Women for Women International⁠. The author of several books, including the bestseller, ⁠Between Two Worlds⁠ and, most recently, ⁠Freedom Is an Inside Job⁠, she is also the creator and host of several TV shows, including ⁠#MeToo, Now What?⁠ on PBS.

Resources

⁠Zainab Salbi – Daughters for Earth⁠ (video) | Bioneers 2022 Keynote

⁠Daughters for Earth: Women and the Climate Change Movement⁠ (video) | Bioneers 2022 Panel

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. For more info on Zainab Salbi and show notes, ⁠please visit our radio page⁠.

We present a profound conversation on the Indigenous Roots of American Democracy that puts women at the center.

The vision for U.S. democracy drew largely from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the longest-standing democracy in world history. Women are central to the Great Law of Peace and Governance within the Haudenosaunee, whose federalist structure values peace, justice, and collective wellbeing. The Constitutional phrase “We the People” was drawn directly from Haudenosaunee philosophy. 

This conversation took place at the Indigenous Forum during the 2026 Bioneers Conference and features revered contemporary leaders, author-activists, elders, and clan mothers who speak to the themes of governance rooted in peace, matrilineal values, women's leadership, and wisdom from their own life's work and activism.

In this episode, Indigenous scholar and organizer Nick Estes explores how Indigenous land-based and Earth-centered societies are advancing regenerative solutions and campaigns to transform capitalism. “Eco-nomics” puts Indigenous leadership at the forefront of assuring a habitable planet.

Nick Estes, Ph.D. (Kul Wicasa/Lower Brule Sioux), is a Professor at the University of Minnesota and a member of the Oak Lake Writers Society, a group of Dakota, Nakota and Lakota writers. In 2014, he was a co-founder of The Red Nation in Albuquerque, NM, an organization dedicated to the liberation of Native people from capitalism and colonialism. He serves on its editorial collective and writes its bi-weekly newsletter. Nick Estes is also the author of: Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance.

Credits

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by: Kenny Ausubel

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

Producer: Teo Grossman

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Production Assistance: Anna Rubanova

Human activity has disrupted the innate capacity of Earth’s natural systems to create a stable, healthy climate and atmosphere. The solutions are hiding in plain sight, inherent in the web of biological diversity that creates the conditions conducive to life. In this episode from our Nature’s Genius Series, Wade Crowfoot, California Secretary for Natural Resources, describes how the world’s fourth largest economy is putting natural systems at the center of its bold policies and practices to help restore the biosphere and, in turn, sustain the long-term habitability of planet Earth for human civilization.

This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.

Although they receive less than 1% of climate funding, women-led climate justice grassroots projects are generating cascading benefits, from greater gender and economic equity and less gender violence to improved biodiversity and ecosystems’ health. Simultaneously, the centrality to many Indigenous peoples’ cultures of traditional relationships to place and to honoring all of life as sacred are a tremendous resource in strengthening efforts to protect and renew biodiversity and water resources. 

We invite you to listen to this excerpt of a panel conversation from the Bioneers 2026 Conference, which explores what these two vastly under-resourced constituencies have to offer in the quest to co-create regenerative landscapes and futures. With Dilafruz Khonikboyeva, Executive Director of Home Planet Fund; Osprey Orielle Lake, founder and Executive Director of Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN); and Zainab Salbi, co-founder of Daughters for Earth.

Scientific evidence is increasingly supporting the theory that the Earth is alive and replete with intelligence. In fact, the wild diversity of earthly organisms exhibits the characteristics that human beings attribute to personhood. How is it then, by the law, that a corporation is a person, but nature is not? What if we expand the anthropocentric boundaries of our systems of laws, rights and responsibilities to encompass ALL living beings? How would this new legal story affect our relationship with our vast other-than-human Earth family? In this episode, we imagine a planet with rights for all, with visionary lawyer César Rodríguez-Garavito.

This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. ⁠Visit the series page to learn more.⁠

César Rodríguez-Garavito, a Professor of Clinical Law, Chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, and founding ⁠Director of the More Than Human Life (MOTH) Program⁠ and the Earth Rights Advocacy Program (all based at NYU School of Law), is a human rights and environmental justice scholar and practitioner whose work and publications focus on climate change, Indigenous peoples’ rights, and the human rights movement.

Resources

⁠More-Than-Human-Life (MOTH)⁠

⁠Report Assessing the Implementation of the Los Cedros Ruling in Ecuador⁠ | MOTH

⁠César Rodríguez-Garavito – More-Than-Human Rights: Pushing the Boundaries of Legal Imagination to Re-Animate the World⁠ | Bioneers 2025 Keynote

⁠Deep Dive: Intelligence in Nature⁠

⁠Earthlings: Intelligence in Nature⁠ | Bioneers Newsletter

Credits

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by: Cathy Edwards and Kenny Ausubel

Producer: Cathy Edwards

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Producer: Teo Grossman

Associate Producer: Emily Harris

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Production Assistance: Mika Anami

Graphic Designer: Megan Howe

As we hurtle into the Sixth Age of Extinctions, we face the cataclysmic loss of half the world’s biological diversity. 80% of the remaining biodiversity is on Indigenous lands. Ethnobotanist and Indigenous rights advocate Mark Plotkin of the Amazon Conservation Team tells us how scientists are helping protect the people who will protect the land, and the age-old wisdom that’s imperative for our future.

At the core of our civilizational breakdown is an extractive economy that wastes both nature and people, at the same time it is Hoovering extreme wealth up to the billionaire class. But with breakdown comes breakthrough. Professor Manuel Pastor believes we’re living through a moment of profound transformation. It will come down to what we do – or don’t do – at this moment of radical change.

In this episode, we hear from Pastor on how shocks to the system are precipitating a great awakening and growing movements to transform the economy to our economy.

Featuring

Manuel Pastor, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at USC and Director of its ⁠Equity Research Institute⁠, has long been one of the most important scholars and activists working on the economic, environmental and social conditions facing low-income urban communities and the social movements seeking to change those realities. He has held many prominent academic posts, won countless prestigious awards and fellowships for his activism and scholarship, and is the author and co-author of many important, highly influential tomes.

Resources

⁠Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter⁠ | 2021 Book by Manuel Pastor and Chris Benner

⁠SolidarityEconomics.org⁠ | Joint Project of the Equity Research Center (ERI) at the University of Southern California and the Institute for Social Transformation at UC Santa Cruz

⁠Manuel Pastor – Solidarity Economics: Mutuality, Movements and Momentum⁠ | 2021 Bioneers Keynote Address

⁠Solidarity Economics: Our Economy, Our Planet, Our Movements⁠ | 2021 Bioneers Panel

⁠Bioneers Reader: Our Economic Future⁠ | Free eBook

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the ⁠radio and podcast homepage⁠ to learn more.

In the late 20th century, a handful of scientists proved that aquatic mammals have advanced communication capabilities and a consciousness strikingly similar to humans. Author and adventurer James Nestor leads us on a deep dive into the mystery of marine mammal consciousness, and the story of how a small band of freedivers, pushing the limits of human endurance, is finding that saving the whales may become the story of the whales saving us.

Additional Resources

James Nestor's Keynote at Bioneers

James Nestor's website

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the ⁠radio and podcast homepage⁠ to learn more.