Paul Stamets: Solutions from the Underground

Bren Smith, founder of GreenWave and winner of the 2015 Buckminster Fuller Challenge award, tells his personal story of ecological redemption. He dropped out of high school and became a commercial fisherman at age 14, but witnessed the destruction of the ocean firsthand. In a quest for a better way, he pioneered a revolutionary new model of harvesting bounty from the seas. He describes his innovative, practical design and future vision for "restorative 3-D ocean farming".

Globally renowned playwright and activist Eve Ensler performs an act from her new "Fruit Trilogy," a mesmerizing and provocative edge-walking play that explores a woman's mystical journey into her body. Eve is the creator of "The Vagina Monologues," perhaps the most performed play in history, as well as the founder of the immensely impactful V-Day movement, which seeks to end violence against women and girls globally. As an author-artist-activist, she has fearlessly explored women's oppression, empowerment and emancipation with unparalleled intensity and influence.

As Executive Director of 350.org, the groundbreaking grassroots international climate change campaign, May Boeve shares her eagle’s-eye perspectives on the current state of the climate struggle. She illustrates 350.org’s learnings and strategies moving forward, including ways of learning about and incorporating justice and equity. She illuminates pathways our species must take to keep 80% of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground and radically accelerate the shift to 100% clean energy.

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.

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.

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.