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Bioneers Gathers the Eco-Tribe
Gregory Dicum, SF Gate
“This is the biggest movement in the history of the world,” says Kenny Ausubel in a voice soft yet urgent. “It’s very diverse, with two broad streams — environment and justice — but it has no name or leader, so it’s been somewhat invisible.” The amorphous giant he’s describing sounds mysterious — but if you were in Marin last weekend, you could have seen it in all its multifaceted glory.
In 1990, Ausubel first brought together a group of people he calls Bioneers: “biological pioneers who have peered into the heart of living systems to understand nature’s operating instructions.” Sixteen years later, the Bioneers Conference has become an annual glimpse into a world of very big thinking, indeed.
It’s a forum where the idea that “it’s all connected” — a truism that can all too easily become a platitude — is vividly illustrated. The three-day schedule was filled with scientists, thinkers, activists and spiritual leaders whose collective accomplishments are breathtaking. Somehow, this group manages to relate electoral politics to enlightenment, choreography to solar panels, Zapatistas to constitutional law, the South Bronx to recycled paper and global warming to beauty.
“It’s about positive solutions,” says Kari Hammershlag, a Berkeley-based consultant who works on sustainable food systems and was attending for her third time. “It’s about bringing all these different movements together and strengthening the overall movement by creating more understanding of what all these interrelated groups are doing. It’s really putting it all together and making it all make sense — it’s powerful.”
…The Bioneers Conference has grown to 3,000 people onsite at the Marin Center, with 6,000 more connected by satellite feed at 17 locations around the country — from Anchorage, Alaska, to Washington, D.C. It has quietly become a forum for some of the most provocative ideas in the world today.
“There is nothing like Bioneers in any other country,” says Jeremy Narby, a Swiss anthropologist and author who spoke before the assembled clan on Saturday.
(19 October 2005)
Energy Bulletin had our own correspondent at Bioneers, Shepherd Bliss, who posted this report: Bioneers offer eco-education to thousands.
Ecotopia at 30
Gregory Dicum, SF Gate
… In 1973, Callenbach was a 44-year-old film critic, a writer and editor working for the University of California. Disgusted by the heedless waste that seemed to be inextricable from the culture around him, Callenbach imagined a place he called Ecotopia — a land where everything people did was imbued with ecological wisdom, a sustainable civilization. “We weren’t doing it right, so I thought it was time to invent a country that does,” he told me, “and I realized right away that any people who are smart enough to do that would do a lot of other things differently, too.”
Decades before Sim City, Callenbach developed his ecological society by writing descriptions as a visitor might. He shared these fantasies with friends, and one, Jerry Mander, encouraged him to add life to that backdrop with characters and a plot. “I’m not a writer,” he recalls telling Mander. “I’m a film critic.” But he did it anyway.
The result is Ecotopia, a seminal novel that articulated a vision for modern environmentalism. Heyday Books has just released a 30th anniversary edition of Callenbach’s utopian tale.
…Surprising everyone, including Callenbach, who thought of the book as “just a love story with a happy ending,” Ecotopia went on to sell nearly a million copies and was translated into nine languages. Its German edition, in particular, was very popular and influenced many of the founders of the German Green Party, now the most successful national Green Party on the planet.
(19 January 2005)
Just ran across this article by Gregory Dicum, who wrote the previous report on Bioneers. -BA
Drive 55, save gas — get flipped off
Michael Cabanatuan, SF Chronicle
Trip shows slowing down boosts mileage but can make you unpopular on the road
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With gas prices hovering around $3 a gallon, a lot of people say they’re making big sacrifices so they can afford to fill their gas tanks. They’re cutting back on travel, curtailing shopping expeditions, going out less often.
But hardly anyone is talking about — or practicing — a surefire way to save on gas: Slow down. Drive 55.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” said Tim Castleman, a Sacramento Web site developer who runs the Drive 55 Conservation Project. “People just don’t want to do it. It’s hard.”
How hard? The drawbacks aren’t measured just in terms of minutes lost. There’s the feeling of inadequacy that comes from being flipped off by a 12-year-old boy in another car. From being tailgated by little old ladies and pickup trucks piled high with furniture. From being passed by 830 vehicles, including an AC Transit bus, on a drive from the Bay Area to deep into the San Joaquin Valley. “Is that all?” said Officer Mike Panelli of the California Highway Patrol. “It must have been a slow-traffic day.”
(19 October 2005)
