Bioneers

If you can’t afford to live, what does democracy actually offer you?

It’s a question sitting just beneath the surface of many political debates right now. For people struggling to get by, the idea of protecting democracy can feel abstract at best, disconnected at worst. And even in more progressive spaces where democracy is treated as urgent, it’s often framed as a parallel concern — something to defend alongside economic issues, rather than through them. As Raj Patel puts it, people are increasingly being asked to accept a kind of tradeoff: focus on affordability now, and worry about democracy later. If the system hasn’t delivered for working people, it’s not hard to see why some might question whether it’s worth defending at all.

At the Bioneers Conference 2026, labor organizer Saru Jayaraman, policy expert Angela Glover Blackwell, and journalist Raj Patel took that tension head-on — and flipped it.

This Isn’t What Democracy Is Supposed to Do

For decades, Angela Glover Blackwell has worked across issues such as housing, transportation, and environmental justice, but over time, she came to see a deeper pattern behind them all. “It is the failure to understand, to lean into, and to make real the promise of democracy that has kept us from solving these problems.” For Blackwell, democracy is not just a process of voting or representation — it has a stronger purpose. “It is co-governance for human flourishing,” she says. “That’s all it is.”

That definition reframes the entire conversation. If democracy exists to support human flourishing, then it cannot be separated from the conditions in which people live. As she puts it, “You can’t have human flourishing if the people aren’t putting in their two cents…if they’re not telling you what they need.” And yet, the version most people experience falls far short. “The reason that democracy has been so feeble,” she argues, “is because it has always tried…to function for a few, not for the all.”

That gap — between what democracy promises and what it delivers — doesn’t just shape outcomes. It shapes expectations. As Patel observes, participation often becomes “an exercise in which we are being trained to expect less.”

What It Feels Like When Democracy Fails

While Blackwell frames the broader vision, Jayaraman grounds it in day-to-day realities. “We’ve been fighting on affordability for decades,” she says, “and the response we’ve gotten…from people with power is: That’s cute. That’s sweet. But we are here to save democracy.” In her work organizing restaurant workers, she has seen how economic pressure reshapes who gets to participate — and how. “Democracy doesn’t work when the majority of people are unable or terrified to come speak up, and then a minority of people are paid to come speak for their bosses.”

She describes a dynamic in which workers are often pressured by employers to attend meetings and oppose wage increases, and in some cases show up to testify in legislative hearings as well. Meanwhile, those who actually need higher wages often can’t risk being visible. “They’re working three jobs and terrified…of showing up with their name and their face.”

In that context, calls to “protect democracy” can feel hollow. Even within the Democratic Party—where support for wage increases is often assumed—Jayaraman argues that meaningful progress is frequently blocked or diluted. “My experience of democracy,” she says, “is Democrats blocking wage increases…because we have not created the consequences for those Democrats.”

The Mistake We Keep Making About Affordability

What the panel makes clear is that affordability and democracy are not separate issues; they are the same fight. Blackwell is direct: “The affordability problem is that we, as a nation, have not invested in human flourishing.” Focusing only on prices — on eggs, gas, rent — misses the deeper issue. “If we think we can separate the absence of a vibrant democracy from the suffering that is happening in this country,” she says, “we don’t understand what democracy was for.”

Jayaraman pushes the same point from another angle, noting that even progressive conversations about affordability often avoid the most obvious lever. “Why are none of even the most progressive people talking about…raising wages?” she asks. “Life will never be affordable unless people have enough money in their pockets.” And beyond economics, she emphasizes what low wages actually do: “When they are paid as little as $2 or $3 or even $15… it devalues who they are. Every worker has value and skill…And everybody…wants to feel like they are contributing to meaning.”

Across both perspectives, the argument converges: Affordability is not just about costs. It’s about dignity, participation, and whether people have the capacity to engage in public life at all. That raises a deeper question: What do we actually mean when we say something is “affordable”? As Patel points out, “There’s a difference between cheap and affordable.” Cheap, he argues, is often “a way of displacing one cost onto someone else…usually the working class and the rest of the web of life.”

What a Real Democracy Would Require

If current systems fall short, what would it actually look like to get this right? Jayaraman’s answer is simple and concrete: “In a real democracy, workers would be able to have one job instead of three. They could show up…They could overpower any lies…And they would be listened to.” That vision ties material conditions directly to political power. Without time, stability, and security, participation becomes limited to those who can afford it.

Blackwell echoes this, emphasizing that democracy must be judged by how it works for those most impacted. “Democracy only functions when it can function for those who have been most marginalized in society,” she says. “That is the mark of a great democracy.” She points to a familiar example: curb cuts in sidewalks, originally designed for people with disabilities but now used by everyone. “When we solve problems with nuance and specificity…thinking about those who have been rendered most vulnerable…the benefits cascade out to everybody.” Building a democracy that works for the most vulnerable, in other words, isn’t a niche goal. It’s the foundation of one that works at all.

Raising Expectations Is the Strategy

So what does it take to move from theory to action? For Jayaraman, it starts with refusing to accept the limits of what feels politically possible. “For so long our side has settled,” she says. “We negotiate against ourselves before we even get in the room. We need to say…what we actually need. Nobody wants less than what they need.”

That’s the logic behind the Living Wage for All campaign she describes, which pushes for significantly higher minimum wages across cities and states. But the strategy is not just about policy — it’s about participation. “If we can give people some hope…they will show up, they will participate,” she says. “Maybe it will get them to one job, and then they can engage on all the issues we want them to engage on.”

Blackwell points to a broader shift that has to happen alongside it. “What we need is transformative solidarity.” Not a transactional version — “you sign my petition, I’ll show up for your march” — but something deeper. “Your issue is my issue,” she says, “because I can’t have the world that I want to live in if all of these things are not addressed.”

Participation Depends on Capacity

Throughout the conversation, there is a clear push to expand what counts as democratic participation. “I get so tired of democracy being either vote or run for office,” Jayaraman says. She points to how, in many places throughout the world, democratic participation extends well beyond voting alone. Ballot initiatives, organizing, public debate — these are all part of democratic life. But they depend on something more fundamental: people having the capacity to engage.

And that brings the conversation full circle. “The glimpse of what happened during the pandemic is the answer,” Jayaraman says — not as a model to replicate, but as a moment that revealed what becomes possible when people have more time, stability, and leverage. During that period, even amid widespread disruption and loss, millions of workers left their jobs, wages rose in some sectors, and many people had more space to organize and engage. “It gives us a glimpse of what could happen if Americans could have one job.”

The post What’s Standing in the Way of Civic Participation — and How to Change It appeared first on Bioneers.

Introduction by bryant terry, artist, chef, publisher and author.

The right to food and the right to land are fundamental to human freedom, dignity, and self-determination, but locally and globally, land and food have been leveraged as tools of oppression. Fortunately, they can also be portals for liberation. Renowned groundbreaking Black Kreyol farmer and food justice activist, Leah Penniman, founder of Soul Fire Farm and author of Farming While Black, offers us living proof that when Land is reunited with her people, mutual thriving can flourish in the form of solutions to climate chaos and food apartheid. Even in this era of intense state repression, community self-determination and solidarity can be foundational to building a powerful movement for land and food sovereignty.

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

Leah Penniman will be teaching a Bioneers Learning course in December 2026: Children of the Land: Soul Fire Farm’s Approach to Raising and Mentoring Young People. Learn more and register.

Leah Penniman, a Black Kreyol farmer, author, mother, and food justice activist who has been tending the soil and organizing for an anti-racist food system for 25 years, currently serves as founding Co-Executive Director of Farm Operations at Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, a Black & Brown-led project that works toward food and land justice. She is the author of: Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (2018) and Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists (2023).

EXPLORE MORE The Food Web Newsletter

Dive into the Food Web with Bioneers and learn more about how a transformed food system can be a source of community wealth, creative culture, and individual health, as well as a way to fulfill our sacred calling as humans for environmental stewardship.

‘The Seed Was Their Most Precious Legacy’: Why Black Land Matters

Leah Penniman tells how the ancestral grandmothers in the Dahomey region of West Africa braided seeds of okra, molokhia, and Levant cotton into their hair before being forced to board transatlantic slave ships. As expert agriculturalists, the seeds and the ecosystemic and cultural knowledge they represented were their most precious legacy

The post Leah Penniman – Free the People! Free the Land! appeared first on Bioneers.

Introduction by Cara Romero, Executive Director, Bioneers and Director, Indigeneity Program.

In many North and Central American Indigenous peoples’ oral traditions the “Trickster Coyote” is a crucially important mythic ancestor, and the stories surrounding him illuminate vital truths. Julian Brave NoiseCat, activist, journalist, champion powwow dancer, co-director of the award-winning film Sugarcane, author of We Survived the Night, and multi-hyphenate storyteller and artist from the Secwépemc and St’at’imc nations, dramatically makes the ancient but ever potent “Coyote Story” archetype, one of the most significant oral traditions in human history, come to vivid life to shed light on our current situation and possible paths forward in these trying times.

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

Julian Brave NoiseCat (member, Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen, and descendant, Lil’Wat Nation of Mount Currie), formerly a political strategist, policy analyst and cultural organizer who played a major role, in, among other achievements, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Alcatraz Occupation and getting Deb Haaland appointed Interior Secretary (the first Native American cabinet secretary in U.S. history), is a writer, journalist, and the first Indigenous North American filmmaker ever nominated for an Academy Award (for his co-direction of Sugarcane). NoiseCat’s journalism has appeared in dozens of leading national publications and has been recognized with many awards. His first book, We Survived the Night, was a national bestseller in Canada and an indie bestseller in the U.S., and Julian is also a champion powwow dancer who played hockey for three of the oldest teams in the game: Columbia University, the Oxford University Blues and the Alkali Lake Braves.

EXPLORE MORE “Remembering Who We Are and Our Relations” with Julian Brave NoiseCat

In this episode of the Indigeneity Conversations podcast series, Julian Brave NoiseCat explores the importance of connection and relationship, to family, to history, to place and to culture, threading his own story throughout a larger narrative about the deep trauma Indigenous people have experienced through colonization and the resilience and power that is emerging as individuals, tribes and nations work to reclaim their own stories and landscapes.

Indigenous Rising: From Alcatraz to Standing Rock

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. This podcast features Julian NoiseCat, Dr. LaNada War Jack and Clayton Thomas-Müller.

The post Julian Brave NoiseCat – The Epic Misadventures of the Trickster Coyote appeared first on Bioneers.

Kyle Trefny was 18 years old in 2020 when skies in the San Francisco Bay Area and much of the Pacific Coast turned orange with wildfire smoke. He shares how that moment led him to become a wildland firefighter and to join other youth in creating FireGeneration Collaborative (FireGen), dedicated to imagining and building a future beyond intense wildfires and their devastating health impacts, a future of healthy communities and livelihoods that recenters Indigenous leadership in land management. Kyle reflects upon the power of questions, of friendship, of breaking negative cycles, of art, of mentors and elders, and of taking leaps of faith in life.

This Young Leaders talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

Kyle Trefny is an organizer, artist, wildland firefighter, and co-founder of FireGeneration Collaborative (FireGen), which started out with a GoFundMe campaign and a petition and became a dynamic, influential youth-led organization that has helped bring about the historic involvement of firefighters and Indigenous fire management practitioners in governance processes and engaged hundreds of young people in fire research. A faculty research assistant at the University of Oregon’s Ecosystem Workforce Program, Kyle is also active in movements for Indigenous sovereignty, queer rights, and climate justice and was a recipient of a 2025 Brower Youth Award.

Learn more about FireGen.

EXPLORE MORE Putting the Land First: A Candid Conversation on Climate, Conservation, and California’s Future

Three changemakers working at the intersection of policy, land, and climate share their perspectives on what it takes to scale nature-based solutions. Together, they explore the progress being made, the roadblocks still ahead, and why putting land first is essential to securing a just, livable future.

Nature’s Phoenix: Fire As Medicine

In this podcast episode with fire ecologists Chad Hanson and Frank Kanawha Lake, we learn how contemporary Western fire science is integrating what Indigenous Peoples discovered over thousands of years of observation, and trial and error: fire is key to optimizing forest vitality and biodiversity.

The post Kyle Trefny – When Orange Skies Clear appeared first on Bioneers.

Introduction by Anna Lappé, Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

As we today once again face the aggression of authoritarian oligarchy, there is a great deal we can learn from how food workers confronted fascism a century ago. Socialist and anarchist movements around the world gave birth to innovative solidarity strategies that permitted them to survive a fascist onslaught, care for their communities, and put food on the table in times of disease and war. Raj Patel, one of the world’s leading experts on sustainable food systems and a tireless advocate for food justice, shares what his research about these inspiring movements tells us about how we too can draw on the best human impulses to build economic systems built on solidarity and mutual aid.

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

Raj Patel, an award-winning author, film-maker and academic, is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin who has worked for the World Bank and WTO but also protested against them around the world and testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US, UK and EU governments. A member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and of the council of Progressive International, he has written extensively for a range of scholarly journals in economics, philosophy, politics and public health and also contributes frequently to a range of other publications, including The Guardian, Financial Times, New York Times, and Scientific American. He is the author of: Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and The Value of Nothing, and co-author of: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things and (with Rupa Marya) of: Inflamed: Deep Medicine and The Anatomy of Injustice. His first film, co-directed with Zak Piper, is the award-winning documentary The Ants & The Grasshopper. He also co-hosted the food politics podcast The Secret Ingredient.

EXPLORE MORE The Food Web Newsletter

Dive into the Food Web with Bioneers and learn more about how a transformed food system can be a source of community wealth, creative culture, and individual health, as well as a way to fulfill our sacred calling as humans for environmental stewardship.

Young Leaders Champion Food Sovereignty and Economic Equity in BIPOC Communities

Explore how young leaders are driving food sovereignty and economic equity in BIPOC communities, transforming lives and inspiring change.

The post Raj Patel – Food Solidarity vs Fascism appeared first on Bioneers.

Introduction by Manuel Pastor, Director of the Equity Research Institute at USC.

With federal incursions tearing through communities from coast to coast and huge new detention centers coming online, it is understandable that many of us could feel overwhelmed and powerless in the light of such frightening, massive shows of force, but, as we’ve seen, some communities are courageously rising up to defend their neighbors. According to the nationally-recognized community organizer, bestselling author, Director of the Shared Future initiative, and co-founder of the national network of immigrant youth, United We Dream, Cristina Jiménez Moreta, this is a tipping point moment, and we need to draw from examples of historic change that started in the margins of society before conquering the mainstream to inspire us to join together and build a new consensus in our nation that celebrates immigrants’ enormous contributions and supports their rights.

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference. Read a transcript of this talk here.

Cristina Jiménez Moreta, who came to the U.S. from Ecuador in 1998 and grew up undocumented in Queens, New York, is an award-winning community organizer, bestselling author, and leading social justice activist. Co-founder and former Executive Director of  United We Dream (UWD), the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the country, she has led multiple national and local campaigns for immigrant justice, including playing a leadership role in the campaign to win and implement the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA). A distinguished lecturer at the City University of New York, Jiménez was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and named one of Time 100’s most influential people. She is the author of a bestselling debut memoir Dreaming of Home (2025).

EXPLORE MORE Bioneers Interview with Cristina Jiménez Moreta

Cristina Jiménez Moreta discusses her life and work with Anneke Campbell.

The post Cristina Jiménez Moreta – Mass Deportations: A Tipping Point Moment for All of Us appeared first on Bioneers.

Introduction by Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers Co-Founder and CEO.

Brett KenCairn, founding Director of the Center for Regenerative Solutions, an early leader in community-based living systems regeneration, challenges the conventional understandings of the causes and solutions of climate change and its fixation on carbon and technology. He illustrates through both recent science and our own direct experience that it is the degradation of the living world that is at the center of both how we have destabilized the climate, and how we can solve not only the climate crisis, but also reverse biodiversity loss and regenerate healthy human communities. He shows that we are living on a planet operating at half its photosynthetic capability—illustrating both the dire reality of our current situation but also the foundation of hope. 

Pointing to numerous examples of human communities reversing large scale landscape degradation—including the reversal of the Dust Bowl in the U.S. in the 1930s, the restoration of the Rhode Island-sized Loess Plateau in China in the 1990s, and examples of similar activities taking place around the world now—Brett points to our ability to build a global movement, community-by-community, to harness nature’s power to regenerate landscapes at a scale.  Through coordinated community-based action, these efforts can stabilize climate, generate hundreds of millions of jobs, generate trillions of dollars in economic opportunity, reverse biodiversity loss, and reboot the biosphere’s productive capabilities.

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference. Read a transcript of this talk here.

Brett KenCairn, founding Director of the Center for Regenerative Solutions and Senior Division Manager for Nature-based Climate Solutions for the City of Boulder’s Climate Initiatives Department, has throughout his career supported community-based initiatives across the western U.S., particularly in rural, Native American, and other marginalized communities. He also co-founded several organizations, including: the Rogue River Institute for Ecology and Economy; Indigenous Community Enterprises; Veterans Green Jobs; and Community Energy Systems.

EXPLORE MORE Urban Forests: A Nature-Based Solution to Climate Breakdown and Inequality

In this podcast episode with Brett KenCairn and Samira Malone, learn how urban forestry is a nature-based solution that simultaneously addresses the parallel crises of climate change and wealth inequality.

The Restorative Revolution: How Indigenous Leadership and Allyship Catalyzed the Biggest River Restoration in US History

In this podcast episode, Yurok fisherman and tribal leader Sammy Gensaw and environmental scientist-turned-activist Craig Tucker share the epic story of how Indigenous leadership and non-Indian allyship made the impossible inevitable: the biggest-ever dam removal and salmon restoration in history.

The post Brett KenCairn – Nature-based Climate Solutions—Centering Life to Heal the Planet appeared first on Bioneers.

Born of resistance, resilience, and ancestral strength, Indigenous women are rising, reclaiming leadership, re-aligning with nature, and challenging the imposed dysfunctions of colonial patriarchy. Jasmine Smith, 16, a citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee and founder and Chair of NAIWA Daughters, has lived this movement since birth, appearing before tribal and state legislatures all the way to the UN, embodying her refusal of the exclusion of Indigenous youth voices in the struggle for our collective future. She issues a bold call to restore Indigenous youth to their rightful place as valued leaders, knowledge-holders, and essential advocates for the living world.

This Young Leaders talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

Jasmine Smith, 16, a citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, is an internationally recognized Indigenous youth leader, poet, and Founder and Chair of NAIWA Daughters, a youth-led nonprofit advancing Indigenous young women’s leadership, advocacy, and civic power. Jasmine has delivered keynote addresses at the Model United Nations Conference, working with Italian ambassadors, spoken before the Tennessee State Senate, working with Knox County representatives, and introduced the nation’s first all-female, second youth-led Rights of Nature resolution. A two-time Tennessee Civic Essay Award winner, she is a guest lecturer at the University of Tennessee, United World College in Costa Rica, and other academic institutions. Through her work, Jasmine bridges Indigenous knowledge, youth leadership, and environmental justice.

EXPLORE MORE Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Pass Historic Youth-Led Rights of Nature Resolution

An Eastern Band of Cherokee Tribal Council resolution affirms the rights of the stream system in the Great Smoky Mountains. Young Cherokee women representing the NAIWA Daughters testified before the Council about the challenges of witnessing the simultaneous erosion of culture and the decimation of the natural world, and urged the Council to trust the youth, who understand what is at stake.

The Restorative Revolution: How Indigenous Leadership and Allyship Catalyzed the Biggest River Restoration in US History

In this podcast episode, Yurok fisherman and tribal leader Sammy Gensaw and environmental scientist-turned-activist Craig Tucker share the epic story of how Indigenous leadership and non-Indian allyship made the impossible inevitable: the biggest-ever dam removal and salmon restoration in history.

The post Jasmine Smith – Living Our Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams, While Being the Voice of the Voiceless appeared first on Bioneers.

Introduction by Suzanne Simard, the Project Lead for The Mother Tree Project and Program.

Western science has long resisted and even ridiculed the idea that our planet is alive, but many scientists now recognize that Earth and life continually coevolve and that, together, they form a single, interconnected, living system. Ferris Jabr, NYT bestselling author and one of our most celebrated scientific writers, explains how, over billions of years, microbes, plants, fungi, and animals radically altered the continents, oceans, and atmosphere, transforming what was once a lump of orbiting rock into our cosmic oasis. Life breathed oxygen into the atmosphere, dyed the sky blue, made fire possible, converted barren crust into fertile soil, and perhaps even helped construct the continents. Over time, life became critical to the planet’s capacity to regulate its climate and maintain balance. Life is Earth and Earth is life.

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

Ferris Jabr, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of the bestselling Becoming Earth, which reviewers have described as an “infectiously poetic” “masterwork” that “earns its place alongside the best of today’s essential popular science books.” Ferris has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Scientific American and has received fellowships and grants from Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, the Pulitzer Center, and the Whiting Foundation. His work has been anthologized in four editions of The Best American Science and Nature Writing series.

Learn more at ferrisjabr.com

EXPLORE MORE Nature’s Genius

A Bioneers podcast series exploring how the symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. We can learn from the time-tested principles, processes, and dynamics that have allowed living systems to flourish during 3.8 billion years of evolution. 

The post Ferris Jabr – Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life appeared first on Bioneers.

After the largest dam removal project in U.S. history in which four out of six dams were removed from the Klamath River, an intertribal cohort of Indigenous youth became the first people in over a century to descend a 310-mile stretch of the river. In this talk, Coley shares her personal story of participating in that journey as one of the paddlers from the Klamath Tribes, while also raising the alarm about the imminent environmental issues facing her community, animal relatives, and sacred waters.

This Young Leaders talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

Coley Kakols Miller, a citizen of the Klamath Tribes, is a Modoc and Klamath youth born and raised at the headwaters of the Klamath River watershed. A high school freshman living on her tribal territory in Southern Oregon and Northern California, Coley was among more than 30 young people who participated in the historic first descent of the Klamath River after the largest dam removal in history. She remains a passionate advocate for removing the last two dams on the Klamath River, working to ensure the Klamath Tribes’ treaty-protected resources are restored to provide for future generations.

EXPLORE MORE The Restorative Revolution: How Indigenous Leadership and Allyship Catalyzed the Biggest River Restoration in US History

In this podcast episode, Yurok fisherman and tribal leader Sammy Gensaw and environmental scientist-turned-activist Craig Tucker share the epic story of how Indigenous leadership and non-Indian allyship made the impossible inevitable: the biggest-ever dam removal and salmon restoration in history.

Amy Bowers Cordalis – The Water Remembers: Year Zero

Amy Bowers Cordalis highlights the Indigenous values and lessons from the Klamath dam removals, showcasing nature-based solutions that heal the land, waters, and people while benefiting the economy.

The post Coley Kakols Miller – Undam the Klamath: The Fight Isn’t Over Yet appeared first on Bioneers.

Introduction by Zephyr Teachout, Professor of Law at Fordham Law School.

Renowned science fiction author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” in 2022 to describe the degradation of online platforms. Drawing from his most recent nonfiction book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, he assures us that it’s not our imaginations: the internet does indeed suck now. And this isn’t the result of great historical forces or iron laws of economics: it’s caused by specific policy choices made in living memory by named individuals, but Cory argues that we aren’t helpless prisoners of the depraved foolishness of early 21st century policymakers. We can – and we must – break free of the prison they built for us, consigning their terrible ideas to the scrap-heap of history, so we can create a new, good internet that is fit to serve as the digital nervous system of this fraught young century.

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

Cory Doctorow, a renowned, award-winning science fiction author, activist, and journalist, is the author of dozens of books, most recently, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, (nonfiction); and the novels Picks and Shovels and The Bezzle. His other notable books include the “solar-punk” novels Walkaway and The Lost Cause, and the tech policy books The Internet Con and Chokepoint Capitalism. Cory also: maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net; works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation; and is: an AD White Professor at Cornell University; an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate; a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University; a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science; and a co-founder of the UK Open Rights Group.

EXPLORE MORE The Great Enshittening: How the Internet Got So Bad — and How We Can Fix It

Read an excerpt from Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

This Will All Be So Great If We Don’t Screw It Up

In this 2019 interview, Cory Doctorow dives deep into how monopoly power and deregulation paved the way for Big Tech’s dominance — and why restoring fairness and pluralism in technology begins with reclaiming public control.

The post Cory Doctorow – The “Enshittification” of Everything appeared first on Bioneers.

Introduction by Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers Co-founder and CEO.

John Warner, one of the co-founders of the entire field of “Green Chemistry” who co-authored its defining text and co-articulated its core principles, works to create commercial technologies inspired by nature. An inventor with over 300 patents who has received countless prestigious awards, he has also been, with his wife, Amy Cannon, a thought leader and prime mover of green chemistry education. In this talk, he shares his vision of how we can draw from the molecular design genius of nature, which has been running countless rigorous chemistry experiments for nearly 4 billion years, to create benign products and technologies that provide for human needs without contaminating the biosphere and endangering our health.

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

John Warner and Amy Cannon are teaching a Bioneers Learning course from May 5 – 26, 2026:
Green Chemistry: Nature’s Molecules, Materials and Methods. This course is for anyone curious about how the world works at a molecular level — no science background required. Registration will remain open through May 11. Learn more and register.

John Warner, Ph.D., one of the founders of the field of Green Chemistry who co-authored its defining text “Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice” (with Paul Anastas), is a chemistry inventor and entrepreneur who works to create commercial technologies inspired by nature consistent with the principles of green chemistry. He holds over 350 industrial chemistry patents, and his inventions have served as the basis for several new companies in photovoltaics, neurochemistry, construction materials, water harvesting, and cosmetics. John, who has received many prestigious awards from within the chemistry industry, government, academia and civil society organizations, has had a distinguished academic career, including as a tenured full-professor at UMASS Boston and Lowell. In 2007 he co-founded (with Amy Cannon) Beyond Benign, a non-profit dedicated to sustainability and green chemistry education. He holds academic appointments at Monash University in Australia, Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, Somaiya University in India, University of Birmingham in the UK, Rochester Institute of Technology in the US, and Technical University of Berlin in Germany where they have named the “John Warner Center for Start Ups in Green Chemistry.” John also currently serves as CEO and CTO of Technology Greenhouse.

EXPLORE MORE Nature’s Genius

A Bioneers podcast series exploring how the symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. We can learn from the time-tested principles, processes, and dynamics that have allowed living systems to flourish during 3.8 billion years of evolution.

Deep Dive: Biomimicry

Biomimicry celebrates our kinship with life, unearthing untold treasures from nature’s playbook that we can emulate for our technological and industrial recipe book. Explore our media collection of fascinating examples from leaders in the field.

The post John Warner – Biomimicry at the Molecular Level—Inventing a Sustainable Future appeared first on Bioneers.

Fear and division have become defining forces in the lives of many immigrant communities — but they are not the whole story. Cristina Jiménez Moreta has spent her life working to transform that reality, drawing on her own experience growing up undocumented and her years of organizing to build collective power.

A co-founder of United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the country, she has helped lead some of the most influential campaigns for immigrant justice in recent history. In this keynote, she reflects on the role of community, courage, and organizing in shaping a more inclusive future.

This is an edited transcript from Bioneers 2026.

Cristina Jiménez Moreta:

I am proud to be here as someone who was formerly undocumented. My parents, Fausto and Ligia, immigrated from Ecuador, fleeing poverty and political turmoil — like so many others in our country’s history — in search of a better life for our family. We settled in Queens, New York, in 1998. 

I’m a community organizer, and right now I lead Shared Future, a new initiative building a movement in support of immigrants and a shared vision of what unites us as Americans.

Before this, and before becoming a mom, I was a young organizer working alongside high school and college students to build the immigrant youth movement. Together, we helped grow United We Dream into a catalyst for one of the most powerful and inspiring movements of the past 20 years.

But even before I could build a movement, lead an organization, or call myself a community organizer, I’ll tell you the truth: I was a young undocumented person growing up in Queens, in a small studio apartment, living with the constant fear that one day my parents, my brother, or I could be taken by deportation agents and disappear.

Today, that same fear, uncertainty, and division are gripping millions of people across this country. What once felt normal has been turned upside down. And all around us, it can feel overwhelming — like it’s too much, and like there’s not much we can do about it.

I don’t need to remind you what’s happening. We’ve seen it on our phones, on TV, in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, and communities across the country. We’re seeing aggressive immigration enforcement, families living in fear, and people afraid to go to work or send their kids to school. At the same time, everyday Americans are making courageous choices to stand up for their neighbors.

This is a new level of fear spreading around us. But I invite you to be clear-eyed about it, because without facing the truth of what’s happening, we won’t be able to find a way forward together.

And I want to remind you of this: despite all the pain and all the harm we’ve witnessed, history — and my own experience organizing in communities across the country — shows that the way through is by building community and collective power. 

I’ll share why I believe this, because I grew up knowing what home felt like. Home was in Ecuador, with my abuela, making noodle soup in Quito on chilly evenings in the Andes.

But when I was 13, my family had to flee political turmoil. I left behind not just a place, but a sense of belonging. My parents didn’t have much, but they had love and courage. Guided by that, they did something incredibly hard: They left everything behind and came to this country in 1998.

Growing up in New York City, in a place where I didn’t know the language or the culture, I quickly learned to feel ashamed — ashamed of not speaking English, ashamed of being an immigrant, ashamed of my skin, my Indigenous features, ashamed of who I was.

I was undocumented, living in fear, and still trying to fulfill my parents’ dream that I would be the first in our family to go to college. I did everything I was told to do: worked hard in school, did community service, checked all the boxes.

Then 9/11 happened. And in that painful moment for our country, everything changed for families like mine, and for Muslim and immigrant communities across the country. Policies shifted. Immigrants were treated as threats to national security. In many places, including New York, undocumented students lost the ability to access higher education. People like my dad, who worked in construction, lost the right to drive.

One day, my dad was traveling between New York and New Jersey for work, crossing the George Washington Bridge. He was given the wrong change at the toll booth and tried to go back to fix it — an ordinary, honest mistake. But when you’re an immigrant, even something small can make you a target. As he turned back, a police car pulled him over. The officer asked for his license. My dad told him it was expired. That was enough. He was asked to step out of the car and taken to a local police station.

I got a call from him. He said, “I’m allowed one phone call. Mija, ayúdame.” Help me.

I told him to stay calm, to remember his rights — to remain silent, to not sign anything. Then I asked to speak to the officer and told him we knew my dad’s rights and that a lawyer was on the way. Right after that, I texted a network of organizers: “My dad needs help. This is where he is.” Within minutes, people responded. A lawyer was already on the way.

I share this story because I don’t know what happened to that police officer. What I do know is that he released my dad with a $150 ticket for driving without a license. And the only reason that happened is because we had a community behind us — people who had my back, who taught me my rights, and who gave me the courage to speak up in that moment.

That’s the kind of courage I want to share with you today. Because courage is a choice.

Undocumented people like me take real risks when we speak out and share our stories. So imagine what’s possible for those who aren’t in that same vulnerable position. Across the country, young people found courage in each other — fighting deportations, supporting one another through school, and committing to build something bigger than ourselves.

That’s how we built United We Dream. And that’s how I learned that in isolation, we lose. Alone, any one of us can be targeted, silenced, or pushed aside. But in community, we show up for each other. In community, no one has to face it alone.

I want to share this: The way we won DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) was by building community. We reminded each other we weren’t alone. We helped each other find our voices. And we took action together to fight for what was right.

I never imagined we would build a movement. I never imagined that years later we would be sitting across from policymakers and people in the White House, winning protections for more than 600,000 people. But we kept organizing.

I know that right now can feel uncertain. It can feel like we don’t know what comes next, or whether change is even possible. But I’m here to tell you that it is.

We’ve seen what’s possible in places like Minneapolis, where people believed in solidarity and built power together. We’re seeing it in Los Angeles and in communities across the country responding to increased immigration enforcement.

And there is a role for everyone here. This is not just about undocumented people or immigrants. All of us have a role, especially those of us with protections that others don’t have.

What’s inspiring is that people are already showing what that looks like. In some places, people are putting their bodies on the line. In others, they’re supporting neighbors in quieter but just as meaningful ways — buying groceries for families who are afraid to leave their homes, driving children to and from school, stepping in wherever help is needed.

In cities like New York and Chicago, people are building community defense networks through group chats, text chains, and rapid response systems. There are so many ways to show up.

There is a role for all of us.

I want you to see that our organizing isn’t just building hope, it’s also shifting public opinion. It’s making ICE and deportation deeply unpopular. Together, we built a mass movement that says no to ICE.

And I want to be clear: This administration wants us to believe they’re targeting people who pose a threat to our communities. But they are the ones creating fear in our communities. And people know that.

Look at what people are actually worried about: the cost of living, paying their bills, taking care of their families. Not these manufactured fears about immigrants. More and more, people are recognizing that the chaos we’re seeing is part of a strategy.

It’s a strategy to divide us. To use immigration as a scapegoat so we don’t pay attention to the real sources of harm: corporations exploiting workers and the planet, and an administration using immigrants to advance a more authoritarian vision of this country.

But people are waking up. They’re seeing through the lies. We know that lack of healthcare, underfunded schools, and economic struggle are not caused by immigrants. And even some who once supported this administration are starting to question what they’ve been told.

I’ll share one brief story. I’ve spoken with evangelical communities across the country who have told me, “We were raised conservative. We even supported this administration. But now we see what’s happening.” In fact, this week, many of them are launching a fast for immigrants and justice.

Across the country, communities — including U.S. citizens — are recognizing that this is not the future we want. And they’ve shared this message:

We are people connected by family, community, and faith. We refuse to turn away from injustice. We show up for one another. We organize with courage and compassion. And we turn our pain into power to build a future where dignity is the norm.

We won’t be divided. We have an opportunity to build a shared future — a multiracial democracy that includes all of us.

Sí se puede. Yes, we can.

The post From Fear to Power: Building a Movement for Immigrant Justice appeared first on Bioneers.

We often talk about climate change as a problem of carbon emissions rising and the technologies needed to bring them down. But that framing leaves out something fundamental.

Brett KenCairn, founding director of the Center for Regenerative Solutions and a longtime leader in community-based climate initiatives, has spent decades advancing nature-based solutions grounded in land restoration and local action. In his keynote at Bioneers 2026, he reframes the crisis as one rooted not only in emissions, but in the widespread degradation of living systems — and points toward restoration as a path forward.

This is an edited transcript of his talk.

Brett KenCairn: 

I come from Boulder, Colorado, a community with a unique relationship to climate change. We have 11 federal research labs, including the National Center for Atmospheric Research, established there in 1967. Our community takes climate science seriously, probably because around 3,000 climate scientists actually live there. There’s a bit of an inside joke in Boulder that we have more climate scientists than therapists and personal trainers.

Boulder was also one of the first communities in the world to step up when our federal government chose not to sign onto early international agreements to reduce emissions. We said we would. We committed to reducing emissions as a community, and then we started organizing — working with other cities across the country and helping build a broader global movement.

When I joined in 2013 to help shape the next generation of our climate action plans, I was given the opportunity to collaborate with teams all over the world: Helsinki, Stockholm, Rio, Sydney, New York, Seattle, Toronto. It was an exuberant time.

But many of those cities are now quietly stepping back from this work. There’s a real sense of despair and hopelessness among many of us who’ve been at it for years, because we can see that our strategy isn’t working.

What I’ve come to understand is that it was doomed from the beginning, built on a false premise and a half-truth. The premise was that this problem was purely about technology — about machines, about energy sources. That if we just changed those sources — built more wind farms, installed more solar, deployed more electric vehicles and heat pumps — we could solve it.

That’s the half-truth.

Climate Change Has Two Drivers

The other half is something we’ve known for more than 50 years. If you go back to the early days of global climate conversations in the 1970s, they all pointed to the same thing: Climate change has two legs. Yes, one of those legs is fossil fuel emissions. Nothing I’m saying diminishes the importance of reducing them. But even then, we knew there was a second leg: the degradation of land, the desecration of living systems.

Because the atmosphere isn’t just a geochemical machine governed by CO₂ in and CO₂ out. It’s a life-mediated system. Life created our atmosphere — for life. And the breakdown of these living systems is what’s been driving instability within them.

When the world came together in the 1990s at the Rio Earth Summit, we understood that there were three existential threats we needed to address. Climate was one, and we created the Convention on Climate Change — the IPCC we’ve heard so much about.

But there were two other conventions established at that summit. Biodiversity was one. The other was meant to be called the Convention on Land Degradation, but that didn’t sound compelling enough, so it became the Convention to Combat Desertification. Unfortunately, that framing led many of us to think, well, that’s a problem somewhere else; maybe Africa, but not here.

But I can show you places right outside Boulder that are desertifying right now. Because even then, we understood that this crisis was also about land degradation.

But then we started to forget. We need to understand why we made those choices. But what I will say is this: It’s time to change our strategy, because the one we’ve been using doesn’t offer much hope.

Let me summarize this in a way that might feel familiar.

If I asked many of you what’s causing climate change and how we solve it, you’d probably describe it something like this: Over the past few centuries, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have been rising. And as fossil fuel use has increased, emissions have risen right alongside it.

Those two trends line up so closely that it feels obvious, like clear cause and effect. It’s easy to say: There’s your answer. The smoking gun — or in this case, the smoking stack. 

When you understand climate change through that relationship, it naturally leads you to believe the solutions are technological. And if you’re a financier, if you like technology, that’s a very appealing frame to work within.

But we’re starting to learn that there’s another driver here. The science is finally beginning to catch up.

A 2017 report by Jonathan Sanderman and others looked at soil loss over the past 12,000 years. For most of that time, soil loss was minimal. But with the rise of early empires and the expansion of agriculture, you start to see it increase. And then, in the last century, it accelerates dramatically.

What Sanderman and his colleagues found is striking: Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the excess carbon in the atmosphere didn’t come from burning fossil fuels. It came from the loss of soil carbon — from degrading the land itself. And it’s not just about carbon. 

When we lose soil, we also lose the capacity of living systems to hold water. We’ve forgotten that the most abundant greenhouse gas driving warming isn’t CO₂. It’s water vapor. So as we degrade the land, we’re not only releasing carbon, we’re also releasing vast amounts of water that would otherwise be held in healthy ecosystems. And that, too, intensifies climate instability.

There’s another relationship here, too: how fossil fuels, used through machinery, have reshaped the land itself. You don’t have to look far to see it. Just look at our own backyards. Take the Great Plains, once one of the most extraordinary ecological systems on the planet. In the span of just 10 years, we plowed up 30 million acres. 

And it wasn’t just in the United States. This was happening all over the world. So while we’ve told ourselves the story that climate change is about industry and fossil fuel combustion, it’s also about the widespread degradation of the living world.

And the scale of it is immense.

The UN estimates that around 70% of the Earth’s terrestrial systems are degraded. A report last year suggested that roughly half of the planet’s biological capacity has already been compromised. 

We’re living on a planet operating at roughly half its basic photosynthetic capacity — what scientists call “net primary productivity.” We don’t even know what it feels like to live on a fully functioning planet anymore. Although we’ve heard the stories.

We’ve Recovered Before, and We Can Again

Remember the stories about the passenger pigeons? Wow, when they took flight, the sky would go dark? That the rivers were so full of salmon you could walk across them? That you could stand on the Plains, look in any direction for miles, and see the land moving with millions of buffalo?

That’s what this planet looked like when it was operating at its full capacity. And that’s what we have to bring back. It’s the only real hope we have to address the climate crisis.

Now, it can feel hopeless. But there have been other moments when it felt that way. If you haven’t watched documentaries about the Dust Bowl, you should. Try to imagine what it was like on the Great Plains after we plowed up 30 million acres and turned it into a monoculture of wheat, and then the dust storms began. At first, just a few each year. Then dozens. People describe walls of dust, miles high, rolling toward them — like hell itself descending. It must have felt hopeless.

But we lived in a time when we still believed we could do something about it. When we believed we could return to the land and repair what we had broken. Millions of people went back to work restoring it. We made a living putting the world back together. And we did it.

In the span of a decade, we stopped the destruction. Within another decade, we began to restore what had been lost.

What happened during the Dust Bowl affected nearly a third of this country, but it also showed what’s possible at scale. The work people did together was extraordinary. Billions of plants were put back into the ground. Thousands of miles of contouring and check dams were built. It was simple, practical work, but deeply impactful. And it’s exactly the kind of work we need to be doing again.

I recently heard a presentation from Elizabeth Heilman at Wichita State. She shared that in parts of Kansas, regenerative agriculture has now been adopted at a remarkable scale — something like 70% of a county has returned its land to living cover, to deep-rooted systems. Do you know what they’re seeing? They’re changing weather patterns. 

We can do this. We’ve done this. We are doing this right now.

The Real Shift: An Economy That Repairs the Planet

This won’t happen just because we shift consciousness, or do more education, or launch another communications campaign for the planet. It will happen because we change the economy. We have to make it possible to make a living repairing the planet.

There’s promising research showing that if we restored just a third of degraded land globally, we could stabilize the climate while also reversing biodiversity loss. And according to the World Economic Forum, that kind of effort could generate 190 million jobs and $3.5 trillion in economic activity.

That’s the future we need to demand. So where do we start?

• First, we have to prepare and plan, just like in the 1930s. When systems begin to unravel, it’s too late to start from scratch.
• Second, we need to test and prove what works. Pilot these approaches now. Get them underway.
• Third, we need partnerships at every level — across neighborhoods, jurisdictions, countries. And we have to learn quickly and scale what works.
• And finally, we have to remember: This is a political process. I know it’s more fun to talk about whales and growing things — I like that too — but this is political.

Yes, this is daunting. I know, especially for younger leaders, it can feel overwhelming. But you can start now.

In my own community, we’re starting with a simple idea: Remove the barriers to participation. We have to de-professionalize land stewardship. This isn’t complicated work. It’s something many of us can do. But when only professionals are allowed to participate, most people are left out.

First, we need to move beyond volunteerism. That was a 20th-century model. People’s time and knowledge deserve to be paid. Even modest support — 10 to 15 hours a month at a living wage — can sustain these systems. Water the trees, mulch, care for the plants. That’s enough to keep things going.

Second, we need the infrastructure to do this at scale. We’re training local contractors, especially small and minority-owned businesses, in things like wildfire-resilient landscaping, rain gardens, and biodiversity restoration. Then the public sector can seed that capacity through small contracts.

Third, we need to fund this work at scale. Through partnerships, we’ve seen how communities can generate tens of millions of dollars through local funding measures to invest in restoration.

That’s what we need to be doing everywhere. And we can. So join in.

Start by growing something. A flower, a medicinal plant, food. Then learn how it grows alongside other plants — what it needs, what it supports. And then start to see how that small system fits into something larger. Before long, you’ll find yourself part of a much bigger community — one that’s ready to welcome you and help you find your way.

The post Climate Change Has Two Drivers. We’ve Been Largely Ignoring One. appeared first on Bioneers.

What does it take for people to meaningfully participate in democracy? For millions of workers, the answer starts with something basic: being able to afford to live.

Saru Jayaraman, President of One Fair Wage, has spent decades organizing restaurant workers and advocating for fair wages across the country. In her keynote at Bioneers 2026, she made the case that economic justice is not separate from democracy or climate action, but foundational to both.

This is an edited transcript of her talk.

Saru Jayaraman: 

For 25 years, I’ve been organizing and representing workers in the restaurant industry. It employs 13.6 million people in the United States, many in the lowest-wage jobs in the country.

In past talks at Bioneers, I’ve shared that the subminimum wage for tipped workers was $2.13 an hour. Still today, in 2026, the largest employer of women, people of color, youth, immigrants, and really so many of us can legally pay just $2.13 an hour.

I’ve said again and again that when so much of America cannot afford to feed themselves or their families, they also cannot engage politically. There is no way people can take on issues like the climate crisis when they are working three jobs instead of one, and when those in power represent the opposite of what they need.

As I’ve continued to share this, I’ve faced a lot of pushback. In 2024, when we were raising money to put wage increases on the ballot in states like Arizona and Michigan, donors told me, “That’s cute. You’re trying to raise wages. We’re trying to save democracy.”

But raising wages is saving democracy.

Despite these repeated warnings, we’ve landed in a crisis that has been building for a long time. One clear example: Trump campaigned on and delivered “no tax on tips,” even though two-thirds of tipped workers don’t earn enough to pay federal income tax. But he at least recognized these workers as worth speaking to.

When that happened, I urged Kamala to engage this audience as well. The answer was no, again and again.

In the last election, many tipped workers either stayed home or shifted their support elsewhere. Not because they didn’t care, but because they felt unseen. We didn’t speak to them. We didn’t say, “Your lives matter.”

What the whole “no tax on tips” moment revealed is this: When you leave people out, you do it at your own peril. When large groups of people are excluded, they become vulnerable to being co-opted by the right.

In April of last year, a series of articles in USA Today documented a rumor spreading among MAGA voters that Trump had already raised the federal minimum wage to $25 an hour. The videos were widely shared and gained significant traction among right-wing audiences.

Now, we all know it’s a lie. That’s not the news. The news is that they didn’t claim he raised wages to $15, or $17, or even $20. They said $25 an hour: the minimum needed to live anywhere in the United States right now. They chose the number that reflects people’s lived reality, including their own base. And it resonated.

We have a five-alarm fire. The right is talking about $25 and energizing their base around it, while the left is stuck arguing for $17, or in some places, still $15. I’ll be blunt. This is why people are frustrated with us. They see us negotiating against ourselves before we even enter the room. They see us settling for half a loaf.

When we saw this, we organized an emergency convening in Los Angeles in June, bringing together 140 labor and community leaders from 15 states. The message was clear. It’s time to move beyond the Fight for $15. It’s time to demand a living wage for all, with a national floor of $25.

Since that gathering, we’ve launched campaigns, bills, and ballot measures in dozens of states calling for $25 across the board, and $30 in higher-cost areas. Several counties have already taken action.

Within our own movement, there was hesitation. “$25? That’s too high. $30? Impossible.” So we polled it across red, blue, and purple districts. The result was overwhelming support. And when we tested the opposition’s messaging, that this would raise prices, cost jobs, or hurt small businesses, support actually increased.

People are angry. If you tell them wages can’t go up because prices will rise, they respond, “What are you talking about? Prices have already gone up.”

The only thing that hasn’t increased is the value of human labor.

There’s so much talk about affordability, but most of it centers on bringing costs down. There is no world in which affordability comes from bringing costs down alone. Inflation over the last 75 years has never meaningfully reversed. The only way to make life more affordable for half of working Americans, and it is half who earn less than $25, is to increase wages.

This unprecedented affordability crisis is also a democracy crisis. And that makes this a moment of real consequence.

I know there’s a lot to be unhappy about. There’s a lot to defend. But if all we do is play defense, we will lose. We need a proactive vision that is bold, that shows people we are fighting. And it has to focus on the issue they keep telling us matters most, the cost of living.

We’re in a moment of real opportunity. The pendulum could swing toward a world where people work one job instead of three, where they can thrive instead of just survive, where they have time with their kids, and the capacity to engage with the issues they care about, including the climate crisis.

I believe we can achieve this because fair wages is one of the few issues working people across the political spectrum can agree on.

It’s time for our country to deliver.

The post Democracy Doesn’t Work Without a Living Wage appeared first on Bioneers.

Terry Tempest Williams, one of our nation’s living literary treasures and a guiding light for many of us regarding ethics and citizenship, shares how she emerged from a dream during the pandemic in 2020 with a renewed vow she had forgotten. In this time of political and climate chaos, as we seek beauty and cohesion wherever we can find its glimmer, Terry focused on “The Glorians,” the overlooked presences—animal, plant, memory, moment—that reveal our shared vulnerability and interconnectedness with the natural world and how they can inspire us to carry forward with grace. “The Glorians are reaching out to us,” she writes,” inviting us to dream a new world into being.”

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

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 including the environmental literature classic, Refuge – An Unnatural History of Family and Place, and: The Open Space of Democracy, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, When Women Were Birds, and Erosion – Essays of Undoing. Her most recent book is the The Glorians – Visitations from the Holy Ordinary (spring ’26). A Recipient of Guggenheim and Lannan literary fellowships, Ms. Williams’ work has appeared widely, including in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Progressive, and Orion, and has been translated worldwide. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is currently Writer-in-Residence at the Harvard Divinity School.

Learn more at terrytempestwilliams.com

EXPLORE MORE Terry Tempest Williams: Noticing the Glorians in a Fractured World

In a recent conversation with Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons, Terry Tempest Williams reflects more personally on the inner terrain behind her work — art, activism, spirituality, and the discipline of staying open. She speaks to grief as a form of love, to community as a site of imagination, and to the quiet but radical act of not looking away. As she describes it, “finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.”

Erosion and Evolution: Our Undoing is Our Becoming

In this podcast episode, Terry Tempest Williams asks: How do we find the strength to not look away at all that is breaking our hearts? Hands on the earth, we remember where the source of our authentic power comes from.

The post Terry Tempest Williams – The Glorians Are Among Us appeared first on Bioneers.

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

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): Standing in the lineage of the greatest nature writers, the acclaimed author, naturalist and activist Terry Tempest Williams links her deepest inner experiences with the state of the web of life. She plumbs connections: art and ecology – women and politics – democracy and social healing – wild lands and First Peoples – family and faith.

I’m Neil Harvey. This is “A Conversation with Terry Tempest Williams”

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. Her tender personal reflections and intimate insights as a naturalist braid together with her keen political and spiritual insight in a voice that feels most at home in the liminal – in the space between words.

Her work and her life encompass many dimensions beyond writing. As a socially and politically engaged artist, Terry is also an award-winning conservationist, a fierce defender of her beloved Southwestern desert landscapes. She’s done everything from civil disobedience to testifying before Congress on women’s health issues, to buying gas leases to prevent the desecration of pristine and sacred lands.

She has authored over 20 books that are translated worldwide, including the masterwork Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Her most recent book is The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary.

Terry has received numerous prestigious literary awards, and her long academic career recently included serving as writer- in-residence at Harvard Divinity School.

Terry Tempest Williams spoke at a recent Bioneers conference, where Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons, author of Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership, engaged with her in a free-range conversation between two old friends.

Nina began by asking Terry to describe the story from her book Finding Beauty in a Broken World chronicling her experience making social healing mosaics in Rwanda with the artist Lily Yeh.

Nina Simons (NS): In Finding Beauty in a Broken World, you share the story of Lily Yeh’s work with barefoot artists, helping create healing places in Rwanda and globally through engaged community art creation. And in both her work and your own, my sense is that you each elevate art to a place where its healing capacity for people, society and culture is amplified in community. You wrote that finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world you find. So now, when the need to transform our culture and society is at an all-time high, and since artists often foresee the future, I wonder if you have any thoughts about the role of artists in times like this, and what you might suggest to artists whose catalytic capacity is so vital, though so often undervalued in this society.

Terry Tempest Williams (TTW): How many of you know the work of Lily Yeh? She’s a phenomenal artist. She’s now 85, almost to be 86 years old, Asian, born in Taiwan, in China, her family. I met her in 2001, after I realized September 11th, my rhetoric had become as brittle as the opposition. And I had forgotten my poetry.

And I remember being in Maine. We were at a family place. And it was high tide. I went out to a rocky point and I said prayers. And basically said to the sea: Give me one wild word and I promise I will follow. And the word that came back to me after listening was mosaic. And I thought, oh no, my life is now going to be relegated to breaking my mother’s dishes and making bad picture frames. You know? I was—I did not understand mosaic. 

And I did some research, and Lily Yeh, her name came up. She started the Village of Arts and Humanities just outside Philly, in a very tough neighborhood. And I went on a pilgrimage to meet her. And she really changed my life and showed me the aisle of angels made of mosaics, the safehouses of mosaics, how…her colleague who was—had been a former drug dealer, became a master mosaicist. And they made these beautiful murals, and it—her work has been one of placemaking around the world. 

Lily Yeh. Photo: Daniel Traub / Wikimedia Commons

She later came to Salt Lake to do a mural in one of the poorer neighborhoods that had been invisible to the community. It became highly visible with the Latina and Latino communities. And then she said, “I need to talk to you.” And she said, “Will you come with me as a barefoot artist to Rwanda?” And I said no. My brother had just died a month earlier, and I said I cannot. I did not want to be in any more death. I cannot go. And Nina, she just stared at me. And then I heard myself, and I realized if I said no, I would be saying no to my spiritual life and growth, and I heard myself say yes. And another life-changing moment. 

And, I have to tell you, here’s another lesson I learned from her. Very conscientious, you know, if I’ve got a job, I will take it seriously. So knowing we were going to go to Rwanda, I got a map, looked where it was, what it was next to. I read over 60 books, everything I could get my hands on – novels, non-fiction, government reports – went to the Library of Congress, looked at all the maps – fire maps, water maps, war maps – just to get it in my mind. And she called me and she said, “I just want to know how you’re preparing.” And so I gave her this whole list, told her what I just told you. And I said but I just don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere, but I’ve got more books to read. And I said, ‘How are you preparing?’ And there’s this long silence, and she said, “I’m meditating.” And I quit reading. And just sat with that. So she’s a real teacher. 

And I think that’s what art does for us, it bypasses rhetoric and pierces the heart, and the heart is really, I think, where all change resides. 

And I saw…the power of art, to go into communities…numb with grief, dead with grief, the bones of these women’s children were buried under trees that were still there, that they were carrying in the folds of their skirts. But when Lily got the paint out and the children took over and painted their houses – turquoise, yellow, red, animals – something lifted. And what it led to was the creation of a genocide memorial, where these women – and most of them were women – could bury their beloveds in a place of dignity. And that was Lily. 

NS: You know that conversation about Rwanda leads me to ask you, as we are both women who are childless by choice, about your decision to adopt a son, and how that’s changing you.

TTW: My hair’s white. [LAUGHTER] Louis Gakumba is our son. He was our translator in Rwanda. And so, again, Lily. You know? 

I think being a mother at 50, as you say, childless by choice… it has brought me to my knees, and I mean in the most beautiful ways, for both Brooke and me. And Louis has been our teacher. It’s been hard. I knew nothing. I still know nothing. I am a grandmother. I have two grandchildren – we do – Malka who is 8, and Shayja who is 7. Shayja loves birds. I love him. He’s constantly calling about what he sees. 

Malka, I will share this with you, since you asked how’s it changing me… When she was 5, she said to me, “Do you think I’m too black?” And I said, ‘Malka, you are beautiful.’ And I said, ‘Why do you think that?’ And she gave me her reasons. And I said, ‘Let’s look at all the beautiful Black women.’ And we looked online, and she said, “She’s black like me. She’s black like me. She’s black like me.” And then she said, “Will you show me your body?” And I have to tell you, it was the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life, was take off my clothes in front of a 5-year old. And turn around. And then, as I am standing before my granddaughter, she says, “What color is your heart?” And I said, ‘The same color as yours.’ And we’ve never had that discussion again. 

And the other day, three years later, she said, “Te Te Terry, don’t you think I’m beautiful? And I just said, ‘You are so beautiful.’ And so I think it’s what we learn together. 

Terry Tempest Williams at Bioneers 2026. Photo: Boris Zharkov

Shayja, the other day, we were up in Shenandoah, and he’s staring at me. You know? And I think, okay, this’ll come out. And he goes, “If only you were a little tanner.” And I just—you know, so we are learning about interracial family together, and it’s a beautiful thing. And Louis just wrote his memoir. It’s tough, it’s beautiful, and he said I want my children to know where they come from. And I want them to know who my ancestors are and—so we’re learning. 

And my father, who would tell you in this audience, was a true racist. And he is now 92, and he and Louis are closer than I can ever tell you. And it was on a plane from Denver to Salt Lake, and Dad and Louis were sitting together on the exit row, and a flight attendant said, “Yes, yes, yes.” And when Louis said yes, she said, “Get out, you don’t speak English.” And my father stood up and said, “Apologize. He speaks six languages. He’s smarter than anyone on this plane.” And she said, “Get out.” And my father stood up and said, “This plane will not fly until you apologize.” 

And when dad came home, I called him to see if they’d gotten home, and the flight attendant let things go, apologized. When I called my father, he was crying. And he said Terry, “I knew racism from the inside out. I never knew racism from the outside in.” And that night, he had a stroke. And I think it was such a shock that he literally was rewired. And it was Louis who took him to the emergency room, sat with him all night, and held his hand. No one holds my father’s hand. So it’s those kinds of changes, Nina. Aside from love and joy and… I’m grateful. 

Host: When we return, Terry Tempest Williams and Nina Simons explore how to marry contradictions, being species-fluid, and feeding a spider.

I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Host: If you’d like to see and hear more from Terry Tempest Williams, you can visit bioneers.org

Let’s drop back into the kitchen table conversation with Terry Tempest Williams and Nina Simons.

NS: Well, years ago, we had a conversation where you spoke of feeling drawn to marrying apparent contradictions. And it landed in me in a big way. And—

TTW: In what way?

NS: Well, in that every time I found myself encountering an apparent contradiction, I thought of you, and I thought, Huh, what does it mean to try to marry these things that seem so polarized. And…it was long before there was so much interest in non-binary gendered identities, and I found it a useful practice, to see how I could imagine them dancing together. Do you still find that resonant for you?

TTW: Every day.

NS: Yeah. [LAUGHS]

TTW: You know, living around Great Salt Lake, and living long enough to have seen her in her historic high, and now at her historic low, in retreat – and I don’t see it as retreat in the military retreat. I see it as a retreat as one goes on retreat or retreat in meditation or retreat in reflection. And I feel she’s inviting us to do the same.

So here is a saline lake that theoretically is dying, and alongside her death will be the death of the Wasatch Front – 2.5 million people if we do nothing. Not to mention the livelihood of 12 million birds. Right now, I have never seen Great Salt Lake so vibrant. I have never seen the Salt Lake area more alive with concern, with creative thinking, with young people, with artists, the Mormon Church. Great Salt Lake now has a new ally – Donald Trump. I don’t know how to deal with that, the paradox, because if I’m saying all hands on deck, that means Donald Trump’s hands too. And then I think, are we losing the lake even as we’re trying to save the lake?

I watch people who are saying it’s not called Great Salt Lake anymore, it’s the Lake. There are those that are saying this is America’s lake… I see them neutering her. And the Native people have said our Sacred Mother Lake. This is how we know her, this is how we want her dressed. I see the tribes not being brought to the table as sovereign nations, as sovereign governments. So it’s this, that and all of it. 

And the Wilson’s phalarope, which is now an endangered species, we’ve filed a petition for that species protection. The scientists on one hand say we have five years, seven years. The percentage of a saline lake ever being saved is zero.

Great Salt Lake. Photo: Patrick Hendry / Unsplash

But now, the governor, who’s on board, saying the deadline is 2034, which is the Winter Olympics. So that’s not the lake’s deadline. That’s not the phalarope’s deadline. So how do we juggle all of these things? It’s a paradox that feels like a hologram. And, yet, Great Salt Lake is directing us. 

And I think, again, what we were talking about today. If we are present, we’ll know what to do. If we’re listening to the lake, we will hear what she has to say. And, again, the elders, the different tribes, are leading the way, in my mind, and with integrity and a spiritual depth that I’m not seeing elsewhere. 

NS: I feel a tremendous connection with you and your writing through the way that you speak to and embody a quality of the feminine in your work. And the “feminine” I want to say, with quotes, because it’s such a weird word, and it’s been so malformed in our culture. And I think of When Women Were Birds. And I’ve recently begun studying the Tao Te Ching, and especially Ursula Le Guin’s version of it.

TTW: I love that.

NS: Which is so wonderful. And it’s reminding me of a long fascination that I’ve had with this quality that’s beyond binary genderism that’s about how one way of seeing how we’ve gone so wrong is the imbalance of the yin and the yang in all of us – in our culture, in our—you know, economy, in our education, in everything. I find myself reaching to expand the gender dialogue to encompass everyone and everything, and the archetypal necessity of rebalancing our inner framework. I wonder if you have any thoughts about that.

TTW: Just for the record, I’m thinking do I dare say this. You know? [LAUGHTER] I won’t have the right language, and I’m sure I will say it wrong and offend someone. But there was a moment in one of my classes, and we were—you know, the students write essays and braided essays, and gender pronouns, all of that comes up, and it’s important, and we’re all learning. And we’ve had some really powerful conversations in terms of what stories do we tell, what’s private, what’s personal, what about families, all of those. And we had an incredible conversation about queerness. And I said, ‘I think I’m queer.’ And you could have heard a pin drop. You know? And they go, “What do you mean?” And I said, ‘Well, we’ve been talking about being gender fluid. I feel I’m species fluid.’ And they got so excited. [LAUGHTER] You know? But I feel that. You know?

And I remember in An Unspoken Hunger, I talked about pansexuality in The Yellowstone: An Erotics of Place, and mentioned bison. And, you know, I think we’re so limited in terms of what we are capable of, in terms of our understanding different genders, in terms of understanding different species, and yet, if we can open ourselves and really be present with whomever we’re with, I think there is a depth of reciprocity and responsibility and empathy that is transferred. And I feel that again and again and again in the natural world. Call it serendipitous, call it the erotics of place, call it species—being species fluid. 

Talking to a person on the phone about the Say’s phoebes, that they were so beautiful. And I said, ‘I just love them.’ And then one jumped on my head. You know? And you just think, they know, you know? We’ve all had this experience.

Say’s Phoebe. Photo: Chuck Abbe / Wikimedia Commons

And it seems to me that the ultimate act of anthropomorphism is to assume that other species don’t feel, don’t communicate, don’t live and love and grieve. The exceptionalism that we have, I think, is so limiting, whether it’s our own view of gender, whether it’s our own view of the natural world, whether it’s our own view of ourselves.

So how do we keep expanding? How do we live and love with our hearts wide open, even in brokenness?

Host: The deeper story where the sacred dwells, where anything is possible.

As one of our generation’s greatest storytellers, Terry Tempest Williams engages with the world around her by building bridges between the human and other-than-human worlds.

In an excerpt from her recent book, The Glorians, she returns to the landscape she calls home, the Red Rock desert of Utah. She writes about what she calls “visitations from the holy ordinary,” moments and experiences that draw her deeper into relationship with the pulsing, thriving life that surrounds us all.

TTW: This is from The Glorians.

“‘I came from a family of repairers,’ the artist Louise Bourgeois once said, ‘The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.’

When I think of black widows in the desert, I wonder if this is true. Their webs are messy and hidden, not at all elegant like the orb weavers’ circular webs that spiral outward in summer fields of goldenrod. Black widows offer a warning. When their web is touched, it crackles like a witch, inspiring panic. The chaotic nest is a morgue of tightly wrapped victims that have had their blood sucked out of them, heightening the red hourglass on the female’s shiny black body.

Here in the Red Rock desert, they are everywhere – in between rocks, nestled in cliffs, and inhabiting our homes. Best to check coat pockets, behind pillows, and inside shoes. We have learned to live with them.

One summer, we had a large female, her abdomen the size of a Costco blueberry.” I wish I’d used a different metaphor. [LAUGHTER] “The size of a Costco blueberry, who lived behind our armoire in our bedroom. Brooke was out of town and I was about to leave for a longer period of time, so I left him a yellow sticky note attached to the wall close to where she would often come out to feed, and wrote: Please take care of her. X X X, T.

When Brooke returned home, he saw the note, and instead of understanding my message to mean please take her outside, he took it to mean please feed her. Which is exactly what he did for weeks. When I returned home, her abdomen was the size of a grape. [LAUGHTER]

The summer progressed, and one night, I was home alone again. It was hot and I couldn’t sleep. Rather than fight it, I decided I would listen to a group of soundscapes a friend had recently sent me as a stay against loneliness and heat-induced insomnia. One recording was from the Arctic in Alaska, one was from the rainforest in Costa Rica, and one was from Arizona Sonoran Desert. I listened to the Arctic. I didn’t think there was anything on it. I turned on the bedroom light and listened more closely. If one can hear cold, it was a faint growl. I changed CDs.

This time, I sat up with a low-wattage lamp. The rain intensified, and without thought, I started having an anxiety attack thinking there might be another flash flood, until I realized that it sounded, to my desert ear, like exactly that, a flash flood. I was two for two with no relief for loneliness or hope of a lullaby.

The final recording was of the Sonoran Desert, with giant saguaros on the cover. I placed the CD in the machine and returned to my chair. It was perfect. The familiar sounds of crickets, bat wings, and the pinpoint peeps, a band of coyotes and some insects I did not recognize. Just then, a shadow appeared on the wall. [LAUGHTER] I turned to see the black widow drawn from her hiding place by sounds of the desert night she inhabits. I was not startled, but welcomed her presence.

I sat in my chair. She was poised on the edge of her web. Together in soft light, we listened to night sounds from the Sonoran, a woman and a spider, comfortable with each other’s company.”

Thank you. Thank you so much. And let’s thank Nina for everything. [APPLAUSE]

NS: Thank you, all. Thank you, Terry, so very much. [APPLAUSE]

Host: “A Conversation with Terry Tempest Williams.”

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