Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

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 ScaleFire and Water: Land and Watershed Management in the Age of Climate ChangeBrock Dolman – Basins of Relations: A Reverential Rehydration RevolutionFrom Kingdom to Kin-dom: Acting As If We Have Relatives Brock Dolman, Paul Stamets and Brian Thomas SwimmeThe WATER Institute’s Beaver in California readerDeep Dive: Intelligence in NatureEarthlings: 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 PurposeA 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.