Join us as we:

• Tap into the power and richness of Metro Detroit’s diversity
• Come together and commit to new ways of living, acting and thinking to build a sustainable community
• Work to create together a synergistic space in which to network and connect for the sake of the common good
• Collaborate with local Detroit schools, colleges and organizations to promote Bioneers’ vision and values
• Nurture a deeper understanding of a ‘sense of place’ and foster a new awareness of our essential interconnectedness, bio-regionally, state and planet
• Work together to shift our perspectives to see advocacy for the environment and advocacy for social justice as one movement.

JOHN FRANCIS
"Redefining Environment"
In the early 1970s John Francis gave up using motorized vehicles after witnessing the devastating effects of an oil spill in San Francisco Bay. Then he took an even more radical step: a vow of silence that lasted 17 years, during which he undertook a pilgrimage by foot across America on behalf of the environment and world peace, and earned a Ph.D. in environmental studies. He has since served as a goodwill ambassador for the UN Environmental Program, contributed to the U.S. Coast Guard’s Oil Pollution Act of 1990, and founded Planetwalk, an environmental education nonprofit. Author of Planetwalker, John will explore the environmental crisis as a reflection of worldwide social and economic inequity.

JESSY TOLKAN
"Achieving a Clean and Just Energy Future"
A dynamic youth climate action movement has spread across campuses and communities. As the former Executive Director of the Energy Action Coalition, the nation’s largest campus-based clean energy group, Jessy Tolkan is among the nation’s most effective youth activists. In 2006, she was named one of the REAL HOT 100 Women in America for her work registering 130,000 young voters. Today she serves as Political Director of Green For All, seeking climate justice and green jobs for low-income communities and communities of color. She will outline what’s required to get us to a clean energy future that’s green for all.

MALLIKA DUTT
"Changing the Frame "
To realize our full potential and co-create new directions for our planet, we need to change the frame. Media, arts and culture provide powerful tools for public dialogue. Mallika Dutt is founder and Executive Director of Breakthrough, an innovative international human rights organization using the power of popular culture, media and community education to transform public attitudes and advance equality, justice, and dignity. She has conceived and led Breakthrough’s award-winning campaigns on violence against women and immigration reform that have reached millions. She’ll share this organization’s journey of transforming hearts and minds to build cultures that respect dignity for all.

PETER WARSHALL
"Dreaming New Mexico: An Age of Local Foodsheds and a Fair Trade State"
Peter Warshall, Co-Director of Dreaming New Mexico (DNM) and a world-renowned water steward, maniacal naturalist, research scientist and former public official, portrays this inspiring systemic model of place-based restoration. DNM (a Bioneers project) produced a statewide vision of all aspects of a region’s food system. From farm to plate - locavore to trade - healthy food to saving farms and finding new farmers - commercial crops and meats to special crops of cultural importance -artificial state boundaries to agro-ecoregions - DNM provides a “globalocalized” model for envisioning and implementing do-able dreams to leverage the way we produce, market and eat food.

        
Hansen Photo via Flckr
DR. JAMES HANSEN
As Bobby Kennedy Jr. said, “Dr. James Hansen is Paul Revere to the foreboding tyranny of climate chaos - a modern-day hero who has braved criticism and censure and put his career and fortune at stake to issue the call to arms against the apocalyptic forces of ignorance and greed.” Among the world’s top climate scientists, Dr. James Hansen describes the dire urgency for dramatic global climate action, including the immediate end to new coal plants. Since 1981 he has served as head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. He will share his personal odyssey into climate action, including civil disobedience.

SATURDAY
October 16, 2010 – 1:30 to 6:30

ELIZABETH K. LINDSEY
"Navigating An Ancient Future: The Compass of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)" Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey, Ph.D. is an award-winning filmmaker and anthropologist committed to ethnographic rescue and the conservation of vanishing indigenous knowledge and tradition. Indigenous science and TEK have a key role to play in planetary restoration. The first female National Geographic Fellow and a descendant of Hawaiian chiefs, English seafarers and Chinese merchants, she was raised by Hawaiian elders who prophesied her role as a steward of ancestral wisdom. She will describe her 2010 186-day expedition by amphibian seaplane to access some of the world’s most fragile environmental and cultural regions, and present her findings about the interrelatedness of poverty, education, cultural survival, biodiversity and health.

ANDY LIPKIS
"Engaging Nature and Community to Protect and Heal"
The founder of TreePeople in 1973 when he was just 17, Andy Lipkis is one of the nation’s great leaders of community-based urban environmental initiatives. For the past decade, he has led a highly successful and visionary integrated watershed management process in Los Angeles that resulted in the first major urban Department of the Watershed. Andy will share cutting-edge efforts in cities that integrate urban forests and natural ecosystems with wise human engineering to reverse climate damage and make communities stronger, healthier, happier and wealthier. Andy says it also takes a change of heart, and we all have a unique role to play.

MARY GONZALES
"The Environment and Its Relationship to Equity and the Economy"
“Environmentalists are tree huggers and people concerned with the extinction of birds. We are not trees or birds.” Mary Gonzales, a Mexican-American Chicago native, says this statement might be heard from people of color, poor or working class people, young people or immigrants, yet their immediate life experience and the issues they’re confronting have everything to do with the environment: transportation, housing, jobs, and education, to name a few. How do we connect? Mary is a legendary community organizer and California Director for Gamaliel Foundation, an international institute building faith-based organizing (and which trained Barack Obama as a community organizer).

GARY HIRSHBERG
"Win7 Economics: Restoring Natural Order As If People and the Planet Really Mattered"
If we can make radical changes in how we think about our relationship to nature and economic growth, we will see restored, vibrant ecosystems and healthy, prosperous farmers, cows, consumers, employees, investors and future children. So says the iconic food entrepreneur Gary Hirshberg, CEO of Stonyfield Farm, the world’s largest organic yogurt company that he helped start 27 years ago. In 2005, he was named managing director of Stonyfield Europe, a joint venture with Groupe Danone (France). He’s also Chairman and co-founder of O’Naturals, a chain of natural fast-food restaurants. A visionary sustainability activist for over 33 years, Gary is working with large companies to reduce their health-care costs by motivating employees to adopt self-care practices.

JOHN WARNER
"Intellectual Ecology: Green Chemistry and Biomimicry"
Nature teaches us that no system is truly isolated and positive synergies are often at work. Yet the isolation of the various technological disciplines in our educational and industrial institutions has limited synergy in the human-built world. These walls are starting to break down. A seminal founder of Green Chemistry, Dr. John Warner will explore the opportunities to learn from nature about materials and the very process of innovation and creativity. He co-founded the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry, and was formerly a professor of Community Health and Sustainability and of Plastics Engineering at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Author of over 100 patents, papers and books including Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice, he serves on the board of the Green Chemistry Institute in Washington DC.