So glad I streamed the Bioneers Conference, dearly missing being present at the new location, San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts. Bet I would have made a couple new friends and political allies, just felt the warmth of being surrounded by kind, smart people working toward Climate Justice and other high goals. Good thing we stayed home, though, since COVID overcame us and we would either have been spreaders or get reinfected. Yuck! Go away COVID!
Bioneers is a habit with me; I’ve attended maybe 20 times and my mentor of life, Henry Dakin, was a founder 33 years ago. For years, I’d blog on it, send that to them, get a free pass and still spend as much moola on books, swag and donations as I would have at the door.
Bioneers is always transformative. Ah ha moments are expected as in John Powell and Angela Glover Blackwell’s conversation on Othering vs. Belonging: So Simple! We are ALL one, so we must take care of living beings, whatever color, whatever species. Period. HOW can we overcome racism? It is obvious we must. White people will be the minority by or before 2030.
Bioneers always had its focus on Revolution from the Heart of Nature. The 2022 conference featured panels on the Rights of Nature, Indigenous rights and culture, saving the Amazon (there’s a looming September deadline to keep the government of Equador from selling drilling rights to the likes of Chevron and others!) I have to connect with others who work on this to see if there’s a way to prevent this from happening.
Nina and Helena Gualinga from Equador gave a stunning presentation about how fossil fuel companies, notably, Chevron, destroyed their land, threatened to rape children, tortured her uncle, offered $10 per person for their rights twenty years ago but it continues to happen today. Worth rewatching, and I will revisit the conference at https://e2kevents.swoogo.com/bioneersconference/2144893
And now, Equador tells the world it will turn over the rights to drill the entire country in September! This cannot be! Amazon Rainforest is our lungs. Our source for biodiversity
It must be protected and I am determined at least to reach 4 groups working on saving this rainforest and see if I can spot a way they can work more powerfully together. An angel to give money to the government.
In 2020, just as the pandemic hit Equador, a massive flood also hit, washing away food, chickens, everything. The people went hungry because of climate change, because of fossil fuel extraction. The people mobilized, the women aided suffering people, a terrible oil spill happened. A black cloud is seen pumped up into the bushes and, the residue making its way into the river, part of their home being completely destroyed.
On a sweeter side, the conference put me in touch with countless beings great and small who not only deserve our protection but are necesary for life as we know it to go on existing. Slime mold now used to plot freeway traffic; Bonobo Apes examples of peaceful communities, pigeons who can recognize human faces 40x better than people can. We need the whole panoply we are told, to sooth mother nature into fulfulling her job of taking care of us all.
We’ve come to realize for actual Regeneration/Saving the Planet, we’ll need to preserve 30% of it as wildlands by 2030, thus the 30X30 movement proposed by Joe Biden among others! Let’s give him support on that; whatever misgivings we may have about our POTUS, E.O. Wilson, biologist/author told us we need 50% of the planet left to the wild and many are thinking of that 50% of wildlands by 2050. 30×30 is already a mountain to climb.
People in other lands – and in the US – are building Living Buildings, Sponge Cities and other iterations of seemingly indestructable, self-powered regenerative structures! Loved the opening presentation by Jason McClennan, full of photos of Living Buildings designed by him, of a sports arena in Seattle called Climate Pledge Arena. Buckminster Fuller said the world is not run by logic, science is not enough. We actually have to focus on love. Only through the sustained opening of the human heart are we going to have a future. Only love can save us. If you begin to heal the ecosystem, you begin to heal yourself. Move toward love, regeneration or move toward degradation. Be in right relationship to all living things. Become a new kind of humans, homoregeneris. McClennan’s home is a Living Building run with 100% rainwater!
Kate Araonoff, The New Republic and her books, was another stunner. Her brilliant idea: nationalize the fossil fuel industry! She pointed out in WWII, the US nationalized about one factory a week. In one case, the CEO says “I’m not going” and the National Guard carried him out to the sidewalk on his chair! The entire Fossil Fuel industry, she points out, is about 5% of our economy – we CAN nationalize that to save our lives!
End of the conference, an indigenous panel agrees we need to move away from capitalism and find a way to move to a future which more resembles socialism, the common good the focus.
As a followup, I recommend purchase of Kenny Ansubel’s Changing of the Gods DVD series, trailer here: https://changingofthegodsseries.com/trailer. Crazy how astrology mirrors human behavior – and yet maybe it’s NOT crazy? If being one with nature means being one with the universe, well, don’t you want to know more about the universe?
Most warming, I thought, was the John Powell/Angela Glover Blackwell session on Othering vs. Belonging. Deep warmth from wonderful Black speakers causing me to challenge myself: do I STILL “other” people of color? Non-binary people? Certainly hope no, but want to check myself on that and my friends will correct me! So my mantra, WeAreOne, works for the most part. My parents tried to be kind, the first people to welcome a Black family to our totally White Maywood, Illinois, in the 1950’s. If you try, you can sort of feel the need to let the energy of life run through all people, as in the Buddhist Dedication of Merit we recite each week “May All Beings Be Happy; May All Beings be Well; May All Beings Enjoy Profound, Brilliant Glory.”