Paul Stamets: Solutions from the Underground

According to journalist, blogger, “creative commons” advocate, Electronic Frontier Foundation Fellow, and award-winning science fiction author Cory Doctorow, the fight for a free, fair and open Internet isn’t the most important fight on the planet, but you can t win any of the other major battles without it.

World Pulse founder Jensine Larsen illustrates how the global network is harnessing the power of digital communication into a force for change by connecting women from more than 190 countries—including those reaching out using Internet cafés and cell phones from remote rural areas and conflict zones. Larsen shares her personal journey building World Pulse from a vision into a network now impacting over two million lives. She is joined via skype by Sister Zeph, an award-winning Pakistani digital crusader for girls’ education.

The renowned “anthropologist under Amazonian influence” and indigenous rights activist Jeremy Narby, author of such classics as The Cosmic Serpent and Intelligence in Nature, considers the intelligence of living beings and wrestles with his own culture’s anthropocentric concepts. In his view, constantly affirming the centrality of humans gets in the way of respectful living in the biosphere.

One of the great visionary science fiction writers of our era draws from his decades of work on our relationship to the Biosphere. He sketches a utopian but deeply informed and cogent scenario of a new economy for the coming century. To avoid endangering the integrity of the biosphere and risking the end of human civilization, Kim Stanley Robinson say it means reforming our economic system, which uses a market and trade system that systemically under-prices and degrades both people and the natural world. Robinson asks: How can we change that, and what would it look like if we did?

Before the election, workers were already rising up all over the country and have continued to do so even more now, joining the campaign for “One Fair Wage,” demanding higher wages and the elimination of lower wages for tipped workers. The movement helped torpedo Trump’s first Secretary of Labor nominee and is ramping up the fight for a $15/hour national minimum wage. Innovative, award-winning labor leader Saru Jayaraman says that, if we join together, we can end economic inequality in America.

The actor and activist shares the long view of how change happens, to reclaim our rights and responsibilities as citizens. From South Africa to Detroit and Birmingham, Glover scans the arc of justice and the convergence of the movements to restore nature, human dignity and a life lived artistically.

Bioneers Co-Founder Nina Simons and her keynote address at the 2017 Bioneers Conference.

The “Queen of the forest canopy” epitomizes innovative scientists uncovering previously unexplored wonders in the forest canopy. Her imaginative passion inspires and enlists people from all walks of life, transforming the truth of trees into environmental and social healing.

Kandi Mossett (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara), Native Energy and Climate Campaign Organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), has emerged as a leading voice in the fight against environmental racism at Standing Rock and beyond. Kandi will share the powerful story of how her community drew on its cultural resilience to resist fracking in North Dakota, and how the re-assertion of tribal sovereignty, revitalization of language and restoration of traditional foodways can point the way to a just transition to a clean energy future for all of us.