The infinitely curious author and science writer Michael Pollan embraces the mystery at the heart of the great mystery of life: What is the nature of consciousness? And how can we understand consciousness when our only tool is our own consciousness? Joined by interviewer and UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Dacher Keltner.

Visionary clean energy entrepreneur Danny Kennedy explores the promise and challenges of the epic civilizational transition to renewable energy. Without doubt, the shift has hit the fan, but will we make the transition in time to avert complete climate breakdown? Danny Kennedy says we can – and the real heroes will be millions of clean energy entrepreneurs and startups, in partnership with the determined leadership of Indigenous Peoples arising worldwide.

Featuring

Danny Kennedy, with a long background in eco activism, has become one of the nation’s leading figures in clean-technology entrepreneurship and the capitalization of the transition to a “green” economy. Kennedy is currently CEO of ⁠New Energy Nexus⁠, a global nonprofit providing funds, accelerators, and networks to drive clean energy innovation and adoption.

Credits

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by: Kenny Ausubel

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

Producer: Teo Grossman

Resources

⁠Danny Kennedy – The Charging 20s | Bioneers 2023 Keynote⁠

⁠Danny Kennedy – Optimizing the Energy Transition | Bioneers 2016 Keynote⁠

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

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. From the historic Indigenous occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969 to the fossil fuel fights throughout Canada and the U.S. today, Indigenous resistance illuminates an activism founded in a spiritual connection with the web of life and the human community – with Julian Brave NoiseCat, Dr. LaNada War Jack and Clayton Thomas-Müller.

Featuring

• ⁠⁠Julian Brave NoiseCat⁠⁠ is a polymath whose work spans journalism, public policy, research, art, activism and advocacy. He serves as Director of Green Strategy at ⁠⁠Data for Progress⁠⁠, as well as “Narrative Change Director” for the ⁠⁠Natural History Museum⁠⁠ artist and activist collective.
• Dr. LaNada War Jack is an enrolled member of the ⁠⁠Shoshone Bannock Tribes⁠⁠ of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Idaho.
• Clayton Thomas-Müller is a member of the ⁠⁠Mathias Colomb Cree Nation⁠⁠, also known as Pukatawagan, in Northern Manitoba. He serves as the “Stop it at the Source” campaigner with ⁠⁠350.org⁠⁠.

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

In this program, powerful Native women leaders reveal the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and describe how they are taking action and building growing movements, including with non-Native allies. 

These stories are shocking, harrowing and heartbreaking. But then again, when your heart breaks, the cracks are where the light shines through.

Featuring

Morning Star Gali, Ozawa Bineshi Albert, the late Simone Senogles, Kandi White, and Casey Camp Horinek.

Resources

⁠The Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women⁠

The Intercept: ⁠A New Film Examines Sexual Violence as a Feature of the Bakken Oil Boom⁠

⁠Restoring Justice for Indigenous Peoples: MMIW Initiative⁠

The Mendocino Voice: ⁠Community groups begin painting mural honoring Khadijah Britton and highlighting MMIW in Ukiah⁠

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

By around 2044, the U.S. will become a majority-minority nation. This seismic demographic shift has triggered a cultural earthquake, provoking a radical spike in hate crimes. In times of massive disruption and economic stress, what Carl Jung called the “shadow side of the psyche” comes into play: the pronounced psychological tendency in the collective psyche is to project these shadow qualities with unusual potency onto whomever people see as “the other.” But is there also a deeper story? Perhaps the question to ask is: Who benefits? In this episode, we hear from Heather McGhee of Demos. She sees a direct connection between today’s extreme inequality and this peak moment of racial panic and white anxiety. And suggests how we might find ways to come together and to believe in a better future.

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

Terry Tempest Williams is one of the most celebrated and revered American nature writers. She integrates the musicality of a poet with the passion and purpose of an activist. Terry is also an award-winning conservationist, a fierce defender of her beloved Southwestern desert landscapes. 

She has authored over 20 books that are translated worldwide. Her most recent book is The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary. 

Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons, author of “Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership,” engaged with Terry at a Bioneers conference in a wide ranging conversation between two old friends.

Featuring

Terry Tempest Williams, a writer, educator, and environmental activist known for her lyrical and impassioned prose, is the author of over twenty creative nonfiction books. Her work has appeared widely, including in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Progressive, and Orion, and has been translated worldwide. Her most recent book is the The Glorians – Visitations from the Holy Ordinary (spring ’26).

Credits

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by: Kenny Ausubel

Producer: Teo Grossman

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Associate Producer and Show Engineer: Emily Harris

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Production Assistance: Mika Anami

Resources

TerryTempestWilliams.com

The Glorians – Visitations from the Holy Ordinary

Terry Tempest Williams: Noticing the Glorians in a Fractured World

Erosion and Evolution: Our Undoing is Our Becoming | Bioneers Podcast

Small farmers around the world are building an agro-ecological revolution based on self-sufficiency, food security, and freedom from fossil fuels and corporate control. In this program, we hear from two visionary agroecology innovators.

Miguel Altieri is an agroecologist and entomologist at UC Berkeley who’s showing how farmers who embrace agroecology are building a movement based on self-sufficiency, food security and freedom from fossil fuels and corporate control.

Alex Eaton is the founder of “Sistema Bio”. This game-changing company helps farmers implement a simple technology that converts waste to energy, builds healthy soils, and holds the promise of massively reducing greenhouse gases and lifting people out of poverty.

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

In this age of global weirding where climate disruption has tumbled the Goldilocks effect into unruly surges of too much and too little water, the restoration of beavers offers ancient nature-based solutions to the tangle of challenges bedeviling human civilization. Droughts, floods, soil erosion, climate change, biodiversity loss – you name it, and beaver is on it.

In this episode, Kate Lundquist and Brock Dolman of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center share their semi-aquatic journey to becoming Beaver Believers. They are part of a passionate global movement to bring back our rodent relatives who show us how to heal nature by working with nature.

Featuring

Kate Lundquist, co-director of the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s WATER Institute and the Bring Back the Beaver Campaign in Sonoma County, is a conservationist, educator and ecological artist who works with landowners, communities and resource agencies to uncover obstacles, identify strategic solutions, and generate restoration recommendations to assure healthy watersheds, water security, listed species recovery and climate change resiliency.

Brock Dolman, co-founded (in 1994) the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center where he co-directs the WATER Institute. A wildlife biologist and watershed ecologist, he has been actively promoting “Bringing Back Beaver in California” since the early 2000s. He was given the Salmonid Restoration Federation’s coveted Golden Pipe Award in 2012: “…for his leading role as a proponent of “working with beavers” to restore native habitat.

Resources

Beaver Believer: How Massive Rodents Could Restore Landscapes and Ecosystems At Scale
Fire and Water: Land and Watershed Management in the Age of Climate Change
Brock Dolman – Basins of Relations: A Reverential Rehydration Revolution
From Kingdom to Kin-dom: Acting As If We Have Relatives Brock Dolman, Paul Stamets and Brian Thomas Swimme
The WATER Institute’s Beaver in California reader
Deep Dive: Intelligence in Nature
Earthlings: Intelligence in Nature | Bioneers Newsletter

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.

Corrina Gould is a celebrated activist of the First Peoples of the Bay Area and a leader in the LandBack Movement. She has helped forge a model for returning stolen land to Native American Tribes and restoring sacred sites in a defiant act of remembrance and resistance against cultural erasure. 

Featuring

Corrina Gould, born and raised in the village of Huchiun (now known as Berkeley CA), is the Tribal Chair for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation and co-founded and is the Lead Organizer for Indian People Organizing for Change, a small Native-run organization; as well as of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an urban Indigenous women-led organization within her ancestral territory.

Resources

Sogorea Te’ Land Trust

Landback: Restoring People, Place and Purpose
A conversation with Cara Romero, Corrina Gould, PennElys Droz, and Kawenniiosta Jock

Corrina Gould – Resilience and Rematriation | Bioneers 2025

California Genocide and Resilience and Returning to What Was Lost and Stolen with Corrina Gould | Indigeneity Conversations Podcast Series

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

When members of Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) witnessed the birth of a sperm whale, they observed a breathtaking scene of cooperation and communication that few humans on earth have ever seen. The extraordinary experience was both a scientific milestone as well as one more strand in the web of sperm whale culture that this innovative project is studying. The Project CETI team leverages world-leading technology and science in a quest to understand nonhuman animal communication. At the same time, the scientists leading the project are keeping an ethical throughline, placing the health and well being of whales at the center of the effort. As we get tantalizingly closer to truly communicating with other species, the question becomes not only whether we can, but whether we should - and what the implications are if we do. 

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.

Featuring

David Gruber is the Founder & President of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), a nonprofit, interdisciplinary scientific and conservation initiative on a mission to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales. He is a Distinguished Professor of Biology and Environmental Sciences at the City University of New York, Baruch College & The CUNY Graduate Center.

Resources

Project CETI

DavidGruber.com

Earthlings Newsletter: Intelligence in Nature

Credits

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by: Cathy Edwards and Kenny Ausubel

Producer: Cathy Edwards

Producer: Teo Grossman

Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch

Associate Producer: Emily Harris

Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Production Assistance: Mika Anami

Interview Recording Engineers: Rod Akil at KPFA and Bill Siegmund, Digital Island Studios, LLC

Mother Nature is the ultimate designer. After all, since life first emerged on Earth, she’s had 3.8 billion years of evolutionary R&D to get it right. Biomimicry is the art and science of learning from this ineffable genius: tapping into the patterns of nature to live harmoniously with life’s principles.

We meet Janine Benyus, known as the “godmother of modern biomimicry”.

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.