No Longer Fringe

I had a schedule conflict with our planned group activity on Wednesday evening, so for the second field experience, I did an independent field exercise. On Saturday, October 22 I attended the morning session of “Burque Bioneers 2011” at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, along with approximately 125 other people.

The husband and wife team of Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simons, Santa Feans who co-founded Bioneers in the early 1990’s, according to their website, began the organization, to foster an emerging culture by connecting networks of “social and scientific innovators from all walks of life and disciplines who have peered deep into the heart of living systems to understand how nature operates, and to ‘mimic nature’s operating instructions’ to serve human ends without harming the web of life. Nature’s principles—kinship, cooperation, diversity, symbiosis and cycles of continuous creation absent of waste—can also serve as metaphoric guideposts for organizing an equitable, compassionate, and democratic society.”

The Albuquerque conference, held both Friday and Saturday, is part of Bioneer’s “Beaming Bioneers” effort to connect their national efforts to local communities and for community conferences to address the needs of each locality. Highlights from the Friday program featured a discussion by the UNM Summer Foodshed Field School: “Learning from our Agricultural Mentors”; a panel discussion: “To Drive or Not to Drive?”; a presentation on the partnership between Cycles of Life and the Querencia Institute: “Summer of Sustainability, Culture, and Bicycling”; a presentation by Vital Roads: “Community Homesteading on the Urban Edge”; and a panel discussion, “Accounting for Water in the Middle Rio Grande,” moderated by Michael Jensen of Amigos Bravos, featuring John Fleck, Western water policy expert, Elaine Hebard, Middle Rio Grande regional water planner, and Kathy Verhage, Albuquerque Stormwater Management.

Saturday’s schedule was equally diverse. The first hour was a conversation with Bioneer founders Ausubel and Simons. Ausubel reviewed the main purpose of Bioneers, which is to work toward putting solutions front and center by identifying people who are doing amazing and worthwhile things for the betterment of society and the environment, using the organization as a network to connect people in these endeavors. Simons added that if people knew about solutions, they would be inspired to change their personal habits toward more ecologically sound practices, emphasizing that our culture of competition is in opposition to a culture of connection. Connections and solutions, she believes, lie in strengthening communities and valuing families. To that end, Bioneers has a six-fold strategy: a public education program, a formal education program for schools and universities, a localization program (New Mexico is a pilot project), a women’s leadership program, an indigeneity program that educates people about traditional knowledge, and an international networking program to connect social and scientific innovators. The last two hours of the morning session featured screenings from the Bioneers National Conference held last week in San Rafael, CA: a talk by Gloria Steinem: “When Women are People…and Corporations are Not,” and “The Power of Story,” by Mary Evelyn Tucker, Ph.D., Yale University professor of Religion and Ecology.

John Dewey, in “The Ethics of Democracy,” also placed value on the importance of cultivating community and family: “we mean that the family is an ethical community, and that life in the family conforms to its idea only when the individual realizes oneness of interest and purpose with it” (Pragmatism, 202-3). In Dewey’s highly idealistic idea of democracy, connections between people should take precedence over industrial concerns and issues. In Dewey’s time, as in ours, uncontrollable forces generated by the wealth-power dynamic have again imposed and magnified their oppression and control on the average person. Like Dewey, the Bioneer organization, the 99%, and all manner of Occupy groups operate in the space between the world that no longer works for the majority and the world that has potential to evolve, recognizing that this is the space where pragmatic actions flourish and the energy to get things done lies. On grassroots levels, people are venturing out to assert their citizenship and to exchange their “truths.” As resources become scarce, people and businesses that learn how to participate in effectively functioning communities and engage in ethical democratic practices no longer are on the fringe, but on the forefront.

Some links: http://www.bioneers.org/ Bioneer site

http://bbabq.wordpress.com/ Albuquerque Bioneer site

http://www.google.com/green/ Google’s green initiative