by Nina Simons

As a young woman right out of college, for some years I believed the “feminist movement” had accomplished its goals, and that I was stepping onto a level playing field.

That same naiveté, mixed with idealism and some cultural blindness, also had me imagining that the Civil Rights Movement had largely ended racial bias and injustice in this country.

It wasn’t until much later – after years of being the only woman in business settings, of negotiating biased gender dynamics personally, professionally and politically, that I began to realize how much gender roles and related power dynamics were impacting my experience – and how painful and damaging those impacts were.

And it wasn’t ‘till several years after that, when I began peeling back the layers of my own defensiveness and denial that I began to learn how racialized our society still is, and to discover my own personal and cultural complicity in it.

Gender and race are only two of the ways we rank and compete with each other – benefitting some, and harming others. In this society, we also do it about age, sexual orientation, body shape, class, education and abilities, to name just a few.

As I work to integrate and distill what I’ve been learning, an especially useful metaphor for me is the Tilted Room.

I found it in Melissa Harris Perry’s book Sister Citizen, about the stereotypes that Black women in America encounter as they work to establish a unique identity, and achieve agency and recognition.

She describes a cognitive psychology experiment in which people were placed in a crooked chair within a crooked room, and asked to align themselves vertically.

Researchers were surprised that – even in a room tilted as much as 35°– some people reported that they were perfectly straight, simply because they were in alignment with their surroundings.

Only a few managed to find uprightness. As Harris Perry notes, “It can be hard to stand up straight in a crooked room. 

We’re all products of a culture that’s filled with tilted rooms, spaces designed to get us to relate in ways that defy the natural instincts of our bodies, hearts and souls.

Though the room may be tipped according to differing sets of biases, it’s rarely level. Some benefit from a headwind, while many face persistent and systematized obstacles.

Our dysfunctional families, educational institutions, media, cities, food and health care, economic and political systems create and reinforce striated structures of race, class, gender and other “isms” that keep us apart.

Since these biases aren’t conducive to symbiosis, and we all contain both victim and perpetrator within us, we become stuck in win/lose, dualistic and polarizing dynamics.

Tilted rooms keep us divided – preventing collaboration, coalition and movement-building. And, though it may seem otherwise, they damage the ones who benefit from the tilt as much as those who are disadvantaged by it. They hurt us all.

How do we escape the tilted room?

It is no small feat. It requires practice to disengage from those prevalent, insidious beliefs within us that help keep it in place. It asks that we reorient ourselves toward reaching across these divisions of gender, race and class – and be willing to fail, for the sake of learning. It means strengthening that intrinsic relational intelligence that comes from our body’s wisdom, our heart’s guidance and our moral compass.

I believe we escape it by investing in our relational intelligence.

Being white, or male, or heterosexual, or middle class, or highly educated, or rich or successful makes

It particularly difficult to recognize that a tilt exists.

But if you’re on the losing end of the tilt, it’s hard to ever forget, or not feel, the injustice of it, every hour of the day.

One friend, a leader of mixed ethnicity told me she felt as if she is continually climbing uphill on her knees, with broken glass strewn across her path – while white folks have running shoes, a clear walkway, and the wind at their backs.

I realize I previously grappled with injustice principally through my rational analysis and intellect – and from a distance that my privilege afforded me.

But hearing the truth of others’ realities, and feeling how painful they’ve been, trying to listen at the deepest level, while loving and respecting the beauty and power I see in them has changed me.

For centuries throughout Western history, intellect has been lauded, while the value of emotional sensitivity, body awareness and intuition have been devalued or even scorned. They have been seen as indicators of inferiority and of vulnerability.

But I believe they are essential to our resilience, our leadership and our strength.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant,” Einstein noted. “We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

When I ask my physical body to tell me what it knows, when I listen to my gut, my body never lies.

When I ask my heart, it has far more strength than my mind, and it expands flexibly to embrace each newfound love.

My intuition, my instincts, and my ancestors – when I’m receiving them clearly – are the most powerful ways of knowing I can access.

Listening to them, I attune to whale song, elephants and the language of crows. To the wisdom of fungi and jungle vine. I gain access to myths, dreams and symbols that offer me guidance and meaning, nectar in this turbulent, transformative time.

As I practice getting better at appreciating these gifts, I recognize and encourage them more, both in myself and others.

I find this freeing me from tilted rooms, and increasing my toolkit toward co-creating the beloved community which is my heart’s deepest yearning.

We can cultivate relational intelligence, thankfully, by choosing it. By practicing it ourselves, and by being mentored by nature’s abundant examples.

In nature, no-one lives in isolation, and the sense of balanced partnership is palpable. In nature, diversity is much more than political correctness – it creates resilience in any thriving ecosystem.

We can opt to be mentored by the mastery (or mistressy?) of our mother, Earth – if we can quiet ourselves long enough to hear, smell, feel and learn from it.

I believe our survival, as well as our fulfillment and joy – may depend on our making this shift, cultivating relational intelligence to escape the tilted room.

by Nina Simons

 

As a child, though I grew up in a city, nature was the place I frequented for both play and sanctuary. When I was a girl about 6 years old, I had a collection of stuffed animals that lived on my bed.

One day, after our parents’ read us Charlotte’s Web, I piled them into shopping bags and took them to the park. There, I set each of them carefully into their own nook within a huge tree, returning them to nature, to be free among their own kind. I came home to an empty bed, happy with what I’d done.  

Reflecting upon my life now, I realize that in a way, my purpose is still to return my animals to the wild.

I understand purpose as what happens when my own particular loves, commitments and talents converge with a need for reinvention in the world.

My life has been a long and windy river, with many twists and turns, and it’s led me to fall in love with many of the issues and people and passions that bring us together through Bioneers.

I realize now that I have felt most fulfilled and effective when I have allowed myself to fall in love, letting my heart, mind and hands converge in commitment to a people, a creature, a place or a challenge.

We tend to think of love as a personal, intimate thing, but it can also be far more expansive. Cornel West said “justice is love made public.” For me, Earth and Justice have become twin loves, inter-related and entwined.

As the daughter of artists, at first I assumed that it was through collaborative art-making that I’d make my contribution to the world.

After college, I worked for a theater company, managed restaurants and studied with a school for consciousness called Arica.

When I met Kenny, my yearning for self-expression, for cultural healing and to contribute to the common good took a radical turn. He was finishing a film about the politics of cancer therapies. About an herbal treatment and two conflicting visions of medicine.

As I learned about the growing number of cancer patients, and their lack of access to good information or options, I became passionate about helping address that gap. I worked with him to complete and market the film. I discovered I was good at communicating to advance ideas I cared deeply about.

Then, my life’s current took another surprising turn in an organic, biodiverse garden in Southern New Mexico.

That abundant Eden was full of thousands of unusual kinds of food and herb plants growing in close relationship to each other, a dazzling spectrum of colors and forms, scents and flavors.

In that garden, my senses danced in exuberance at it’s beauty, deliciousness and sensual fertility.

That ecstatic experience became an irresistible call to work on behalf of nature and biodiversity.

I learned about the rapid and accelerating loss of thousands of heirloom and traditional varieties in our food system. I discovered the horrors of factory farming and the dangers of GMOs.

I was overjoyed to be able, in some small way, to serve the sacred diversity of life on Earth, joining the company that Kenny and Gabriel Howearth, the creator of that garden, founded – that became Seeds of Change.

Soon after, we started Bioneers, partly in response to James Hansen’s 1988 early warnings about global climate change.

I embarked on two steep learning curves – one about food and farming and being a social entrepreneur and the other – about leadership, Indigenous wisdom, and how to collaborate, design, invent, educate and organize on behalf of the sacred web of life on Earth.

In 1992, to recognize the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’ landing on Turtle Island, we assembled a group of indigenous leaders – people from New Mexico’s ‘legacy communities’ – to discuss what could be learned.

A man from Acoma Pueblo, named Petuuche Gilbert said “500 years ago you came, and we welcomed you with open arms. If you came again today, we would do exactly the same.”

I was humbled, awed and shaken by his words. I sensed how much wisdom his culture carried about forgiveness and patience and generosity, about how to be a good person.

And also about survival. Native growers knew about dryland agriculture, about seed breeding and nutrition. About how to live in kinship, reciprocal relationship, and relate to all life as sacred.

Indigenous Peoples’ capacity for cultural preservation, despite the ravages of colonization, their traditional ecological knowledge, and their ways of learning and practicing right relationship became touchstones of my worldview.

It wasn’t till I approached forty, fifteen years ago, that I began exploring my identity as a woman.

When I learned about the period in European history – between the 14^th and 17th centuries, a time some refer to as The Burning Times – a root cause of centuries of gender biases were illuminated in my mind’s eye.

I discovered that seven generations of children saw their mothers, grandmothers, aunties and sisters tortured and burned for the supposed crime of being witches. Seven generations of men lost their loved ones, daughters, healers and hospice workers.

During that time, the culture also sustained deep losses. The structural institutions of healing and spirituality were systematically shifted from the purview of women to the primary control and leadership of men. Land use transferred from a commons to a privatized, enclosure system, and a tremendous transfer of wealth occurred, from women to men.

I realized that what I came to call “The Hidden Holocaust of Women” lives on in my cellular memory and insidiously permeates our society, institutions and collective psyche.

At this point, all of the issues I’d become passionate about through Bioneers began to make sense within a single lens: the imbalance of ‘masculine’ values and a zero-sum relationship to competition, hierarchy and power over ‘feminine’ values and the equity of women.

Personally, I observed how long I’d held myself back, making myself small in response to unexplored fears and unconsciously-adopted stories.

Once I recognized the pervasive gender bias and disadvantage that I’ve experienced just from being born female, I wondered more deeply about racial injustice, especially for women of color.

What I learned about our racialized culture and the ways it impacts people I love shocked me.

What shocked me most was to begin to see my own prior ignorance, denial and complicity.

As I challenged myself to face the truth about my own life, and to begin to take risks in speaking out about what I saw, it triggered a well of fear so deep that it surprised me.

But a new dignity emerged from facing my own fears while co-facilitating our Cultivating Women’s Leadership intensives. I found friendships with women I admired, women of other origins, women I might have felt estranged and distant from before. I found a new ease of expression with them, and therefore with myself.

I’m still working to shed my ignorance, guilt and shame, and to recover more promptly when I do make mistakes or harbor false assumptions. I try to bring a yearning for connection, respect, and a desire and willingness to learn.

Now, a desire to integrate all of these passions has accelerated and converged into a waterfall within me.

Climate uncertainty has re-emerged as a context that engulfs all of my heart’s loves: 

art, healing, biodiversity, environmental justice, indigenous knowledge and legacy communities, women’s leadership and racial justice. Challenging our selves to courageously reveal our vulnerabilities. What doesn’t it touch?

But I find that feeling this much love also involves feeling a lot of pain.

Recently, I heard a song that was once my favorite one for skiing. I used to dance down mountains, gleefully, with headphones on, listening to The Talking Heads’ Burning Down the House, blaring. This time, noting the apparent obliviousness or intentional denial of so many among us, I didn’t know whether to burst out laughing in irony, or start sobbing, with grief that threatens to never end.

On a tiny plane flying into the Ecuadorian rain forest, I sensed how sacred that place’s wild existence is to us all, not only in terms of cultural and biological diversity, but also spiritually.

And I still feel outraged when I see the inhibiting impacts our masculinized culture has in keeping wise, strong and skillful women small, timid and quiet.

 A burning desire to serve the emergence of a new world that celebrates and engages with the mystery of life with humility, listening and grace, ignites me. My heart is calling me to find new ways to engage with transforming our ways of living and being, with story and climate and energy – in defense of all I hold so dear.

This is my prayer: May we remember ourselves as trees, elk, ocean, dolphin, winds and crow.

May we slow down enough to attend to the mystery, to hear with humility and receptivity

May we cultivate our relational intelligence and community resilience –

Listening deeply and collectively with hearts, bodies and spirits fully engaged to help us to reconnect and rebound after crisis through love and co-creativity.

I think the world my heart desires is emerging from the inside, out – it’s forming within the invisible darkness of our imaginal cells – growing from the dance of Gaia’s ancient wisdom with our collective dreams, so that the world that created us, and the world we create may come together as one.

Bioneers is a time for us to enter an eddy in the river, to imagine how to navigate the rapids ahead, and consider together how we might best proceed.

We can hold this daunting awareness of the disruptions to come and their cascading impacts

while maintaining a sense of joy in our connection and forward motion by taking one step at a time. By knowing we are heading for a changed world, and acting to head toward a future that’s also loving, peaceful and just. By encouraging and appreciating each person, place and creature’s beauty, mystery and inherent value.

I believe we’re all called to be mothers now, since we all have masculine and feminine within us. To be protectors, and nurturers, hospice workers and caregivers, and engaged activists.

In service to a love that’s simultaneously intimate and inclusive, in defense of our one and only shared home.

Thank you for being here.

The existential gauntlet is to make the shift fast enough to outrun global cataclysm. The next five or six years will be the once-in-a-civilization window to change course. We can move from breakdown to breakthrough.

The Mayan people call this the “Time of No Time.” From here on, we’re on Earth time. Mother Earth is shaking to her core. It’s a time of madness, disconnection, and hyper-individualism.

It’s also a time when new energies are coming into the world — when people are growing a new skin.

The Mayan vision says we in the West will find safe harbor only if we can journey past a wall of mirrors. The mirrors will drive us mad—unless we have a strong heart. Some mirrors delude us with an infinity of reflections of our vanity and shadows. Others paralyze us with our terror and rage, feeding an empire that manufactures our fear into resignation.

But the empire has no roots and it’s toppling all around us. In this time, everyone is called to take a stand. Everyone is called to be a leader.

To get beyond the wall of mirrors, the final challenge is to pass through a tiny door. To do this, we must make ourselves very, very small. To be very humble.

Then we must burrow down into the Earth, where indigenous consciousness lives. On the other side is a clear pond. There, for the first time, we’ll be able to see our true reflection.

In this Time of No Time, we can go in any direction we want—by dreaming it. Our dreaming can shift the course of the world.

Paradoxically, the crisis confronting us today is precisely the dream of our current civilization. That dream of endless growth, hyper-individualism and domination has turned into a nightmare. How do we dream our way out of a nightmare?

One way is to wake up. All over the world, people are awakening to a new dream.

We’re re-imagining a civilization in the Age of Nature that honors the web of life, each other and future generations. It’s a revolution from the heart of nature.

For decades, brilliant scientific and social innovators such as the bioneers have patiently been creating the shadow systems for how we live on Earth for the long haul. For the most part, the solutions are present, or we know what directions to head in.

It’s not that we need more solutions — we need to rapidly spread and scale what we’ve already got. We need to mobilize at the scale we’ve previously done in times of war.

It’s emergence in an emergency. As the Talking Heads sang, “This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around.”

In 2012, two rude awakenings are releasing the floodgates of transformation.

The first is the onset of conspicuous climate disruption. The second is the stranglehold of the greatest extremes of wealth ever seen in human civilization. They are not unrelated.

As Bill McKibben points out, scientists have underestimated the speed and scale of early climate disruption, at a rise of just .8 degrees Celsius. Even if we stopped pumping carbon right now, what we’ve already done will raise the temperature by another .8 degrees Celsius.

But we’re not stopping – we’re putting record amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. At this rate, in 16 years, the planet will become uninhabitable.

Meanwhile the major oil corporations hold reserves five times higher than the amounts of carbon we can burn to keep below the hopefully “safe” threshold of 2°Celsius of warming. They’re planning to burn it all.

As McKibben warns, rapid transformative change is the only way through – picture the civil rights movement in fast forward. The key is stopping the fossil fuel oligarchs before they poach the planet.

As the International Forum on Globalization observes in its report Outing the Oligarchy, “Today’s single biggest threat to our global climate commons is the group of billionaires who profit most from its pollution and, in turn, push government policies that promote more fossil fuels…

“Cooperative global action to address the most daunting challenge humanity has ever faced is being held hostage by a handful of profiteers who wield decisive power over our governments.”

Globalization has triggered a tectonic shift of financial wealth and political power upward to a group of multi-billionaires. According to Jeffrey Winters, the author of Oligarchy, wealth in the U.S. today is "two times as concentrated as imperial Rome, which was a slave-and-farmer society.”

Call it bottom down and top up – breadcrumbs and circuses. As Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz points out, more equal societies are better for everyone, including the wealthy.

Jeremy Grantham, the far-seeing Chairman of the $100 billion GMO Capital fund, asserts that global warming will be the most important investment issue for the foreseeable future, and advocates very large immediate investments in renewables and smart grids.

He says humanity’s vexed relationship with the planet is the great economic story of our time. He concludes that “If we maintain our desperate focus on growth, we will run out of everything and crash – Peak Everything Else.”

That’s the nub – Boom and Doom — the final throes of an oligarchic economic system bedeviled by its original sin of unlimited growth on a finite planet.

Nature does not favor centralization because one shock can crash the whole system all at once. Climate change compounded by the concentration of wealth and distribution of poverty is pushing natural and humans systems to a perfect storm of tipping points.

One key is to build resilience from the ground up through a radical decentralization of our infrastructure, energy and food systems.

It means a greater devolution of political power to local and regional levels. It means democratizing wealth and access to capital. It means democratizing democracy.

It’s do-able based largely on what we already know.

Using off-the-shelf clean technologies, we can radically increase energy conservation and rapidly ramp up distributed renewable energy. We know how to feed the world using ecological agriculture that sequesters carbon, restores natural capital and builds local economies. We have a good idea how to begin to restore ecosystems on a large scale – fairly quickly in some cases.

We’re rapidly learning how to deploy biomimicry to emulate nature’s designs and recipes with green chemistry, cradle-to-cradle industry, living buildings and smart growth. We can conserve and use water wisely. We’re reinventing finance as well as governance, instituting rights for nature and revoking corporate constitutional rights.

In this Age of Nature, we’re breaking through what author Richard Louv calls “nature-deficit disorder” with healthy doses of Vitamin N – the Nature Principle. We’re looking to nature as mentor and model, rather than physical resource.

The vanguard of the banking industry, including the Bank of England, is studying ecological networks and disease patterns to understand how nature avoids cataclysmic systemic shocks. One conclusion is simple: Too big to fail means too big. Break up the big banks, as the conservative Chicago School of Economics originally proposed.

In the wake of the banking crisis, millions of people have moved their money to smaller, local, values-driven banks, such as those that formed the Global Alliance for Banking on Values. It’s a new consortium of 19 of the world’s leading sustainable banks whose decisions are based first on the needs of people and the environment.

A 2012 study funded by the Rockefeller Foundation compared the performance of 17 values-based banks against 29 banks considered too big to fail. The study showed the values-based banks outperformed traditional mainstream banks in: return on assets, growth in loans and deposits, and capital strength. The smaller banks delivered better returns.

The report concludes their success is precisely their values, and they’re smaller.

The Global Alliance for Banking on Values has set the goal of financing sustainable businesses that will impact 1 billion people by 2020.

Twenty states are now studying how to create a state public bank based on the Bank of North Dakota, a major success story. This publicly owned bank receives all state revenues and promotes local commerce and industry, makes student loans and supports new farmers. It was largely unaffected by the banking crisis.

The big wheels are also turning at the Department of Defense. The DoD his embedding sustainability into its national security strategy. It’s moving away from fossil fuels and toward the national decentralization of energy and other vulnerable infrastructures.

Marine Colonel Mark Puck Mykleby, who just retired as Special Strategic Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, puts it this way: “The Grand Challenge is global unsustainability. National security and the bridge to resilience have just as much to do with food, water, the built environment, transportation, education, health care, and the physical solvency of our nation as some bad guy sitting in some dark corner plotting whatever deed he's going to do.”

Most importantly, the DoD is funding cutting-edge clean technology R&D. Just as it developed microprocessors, jet engines and computers, it’s using its market-making leverage to ramp up tomorrow’s clean tech industries.

Opinion research shows a shifting political landscape. Americans want action to address the threat of climate disruption, and strongly support clean energy. The Presidential Climate Action Project has just re-booted with an action plan recommending how the 45th President can address global warming even without Congress, by using executive authorities. Examples from prior PCAP recommendations include the recent upping of vehicle mileage standards and the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gases. 

Business also appears to be reaching a tipping point. Two thirds of companies are turning to sustainability for a competitive edge and higher profits.

For the first time in 2010, investment in renewables exceeded that in fossil fuels. According to McKinsey & Company, solar energy will come back strong after 2015, driven by the rapid spread of distributed energy with miniature community power stations and home solar. Google has capitalized two solar residential funds of $365 million apiece.

The Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign has succeeded in forcing the closing of 124 coal plants and prevented many others from being built. Its goal is to shutter a third of the nation’s coal plants by 2020.

Bill McKibben and 350.org are hitting the road in November to build the movement strong enough to take on the fossil fuel industry. They will mount a campaign like the anti-Apartheid campaign to cut off the industry’s financial and political support.

But our greatest resilience resides in community. Social ties literally save lives. In Japan, the government sponsors small local festivals for people just to meet each other because experience shows they’ll be better prepared to weather crises. San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Seattle are following suit.

The Department of Homeland Security funded a successful 3-year FEMA pilot project in 8 cities to create a Whole Community Resilience System for disaster prevention.

As Sarah Crowell said, “The way we’ll hold it together is to hold it – together.”

The hardest thing to change in a system is the paradigm, yet that’s exactly what we’re seeing.

Emergence in an emergency. Breakdowns to breakthroughs. 

Imagine catalyzing a massive shift to Los Angeles becoming a sustainable city by 2021. Imagine reworking the city as a functioning community forest model of an urban watershed. Imagine biomimicking the forest as the pathway to sustainability in water, energy, air, and transportation.

Imagine inspiring, engaging and supporting a million Angelenos and families in changing their homes and neighborhoods. Imagine everybody becoming a manager of the ecosystem. 

Imagine an integrated ecosystem management team, a Board of Chiefs among the infrastructure agencies, to create sustainability. Imagine there’s enough money by reallocating existing funds and it rebuilds the economy and jobs.

Imagine a community andmulti-agency collaboration, bottom-up and top-down, to rapidly adapt L.A. before the crash.

You don’t have to imagine it. Andy Lipkis and TreePeople are doing it.

Imagine a partnership between a college and its Ohio Rust Belt hometown to go carbon-neutral by 2020. Imagine an agro-forestry belt that can grow 70% of the community’s food locally. Imagine combining these with an emerald green arts downtown redevelopment that models an economic driver for the whole region.

Imagine leveraging this template of town-gown partnership to mobilize the nation’s 4,100 colleges and universities and their communities. 

You’re imagining David Orr’s Oberlin Project, and $60 million is making it real.

Imagine 142 communities comprising over 350,000 people adopting Corporate Rights Elimination Ordinances that give communities the right to refuse to recognize corporate constitutional rights at the municipal level. Imagine Pittsburgh becoming the first major municipality to adopt a Community Bill of Rights and enforce it by banning fracking and corporate rights within the city.

Imagine these same communities driving Rights for Nature into their ordinances. Imagine it spreading to Ecuador as the first country to recognize in its Constitution the rights of ecosystems to “exist, persist, regenerate and evolve.”

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund led by Tom Linzey and Mari Margil is doing it.

Imagine a new regional model of development such as an environmental bank that keeps your money in your region and gives loans to the people who grow your food.

Imagine a Forest Fund that manages forests for timber, jobs, conservation, and carbon sequestration. Imagine it makes a financially attractive return. Imagine buying industrial forestland and growing trees for their own sake because they provide habitat and carbon sequestration — and eventually bigger trees to sell in better markets. Imagine returns attractive to investors who see the value of storing wealth in natural capital, and want a return for their kids and grandkids.

You’re imagining EcoTrust and Spencer Beebe and Astrid Scholz in the Pacific Northwest.

Imagine disrupting our current institutions by giving people these better choices.

Imagine proliferating these kinds of winning institutional innovations rapidly around the world.

Imagine an infrastructure that shortcuts these innovations, and gets the world’s social entrepreneurs access to existing ideas and capital more quickly.

Imagine a global action network of resilient communities.

Imagine that.

As Naomi Klein wrote, “The real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system — one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate power.

“It demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal — and acutely sensitive to natural limits.” 

In this Time of No Time, what we don’t have is time. Can we dodge the point of no return by ramping up the emergent shadow civilization fast enough?

If you have a meaningful conversation with almost anyone these days, within minutes the tears start to flow. We’re all hurting badly. We’re scared. We’re suffering under chronic background levels of PTSD.

In this Time of No Time, what we need to get past the wall of mirrors is a strong heart. Andy Lipkis of TreePeople sees it this way.

“I believe every single one of us has a scanner on board that’s operating in our body that nature must have installed. It’s our heart, and it’s asking the question, ‘Where am I needed? How can I help?’

“When something hits your frequency, my frequency, it converts to adrenaline, a biochemical response. It might be a drip. It might be a shot.

“When we’re given a shot of adrenaline, like when we see a car accident, it gives us the power to go help lift a car off the injured person. It looks like a miracle, but it’s nature’s gift to us.

“When the ecosystem is hurting, we get the drip. We’re hardwired for this. The love that’s there can sustain us. It’s what really feeds us.

“I’ve come to believe nature has adapted us to be its healers. It has raised us from being infants that were helpless to brilliant, powerful, compassionate beings.

“We’ve got to take care of the mom, Earth, because she has given us everything to raise us to this point — not so we can kill ourselves.

“Where am I needed? How can I help? Your heart will answer. You’re big enough. We can do this.”

In this Time of No Time, at no time have we ever before faced what we face today.

We make the road by walking.

It’s an honor to walk this road with you.

The Presidential Climate Action Project was conceived by Bioneers Board member David Orr at a conference of sustainable development leaders in 2007. David's idea was to create an action plan for the 44th President to energetically address global warming during the first 100 days of his Administration. In the months and years that followed, PCAP grew into a four-year, $4 million policy initiative that the co-chairman of President-elect Obama's transition team called the "gold standard" of policy input to the new Administration.

Since 2007, PCAP has produced four detailed plans on how federal policies and programs could be modified or created to address global warming. Although these plans have included ideas for legislation, the principal focus has been on steps a President can take under existing executive authorities. PCAP's first major task was to commission a comprehensive legal analysis of the President's powers by the University of Colorado School of Law, along with a searchable database of relevant executive orders going back to the 1930s. That analysis has provided the foundation of PCAP's recommendations.

From its inception, PCAP has been a bipartisan project and it remains so today. During the 2008 presidential campaign, PCAP provided white papers and briefings to the policy staff of all the candidates in the field, including the Obama and McCain campaigns.

The first PCAP action plan was published in December 2007 before the 2008 primary season began. Its purpose was to encourage the candidates to address global warming by demonstrating the many things the next President could do to confront the issue.  

The second report was published in 2008, outlining more specific ideals for the next president, including steps he could take as president-elect. The third report was published in August 2010 following the failure of Congress to pass a cap-and-trade bill. The fourth report came out in January 2011 at the midpoint of President Obama's first term. It included an inventory of what the Obama Administration had done about climate change to that point. A crosscheck showed a close correlation between PCAP's recommendations and many of the Administration's actions to that point. 

In all, PCAP has produced more than 200 proposals for changes in federal policies and programs to mitigate climate change or to adapt to its impacts. The project has engaged more than 300 experts on topics ranging from fresh water resources, oceans, energy, national security, agriculture, transportation and international relations, to state and local leadership and job creation. PCAP has written and delivered to the White House a draft presidential address on the State of the Climate and the texts for several executive orders. 

PCAP was suspended after its January 2011 report. Now, it has been revived with a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to once again encourage the candidates to address global warming with specific ideas on what they would do once in office. Among other things, PCAP has shown repeatedly that while action by Congress is important, a President is far from powerless to lead the nation on climate mitigation and adaptation, with or without new legislation.

In October, PCAP will issue its fifth report, offering 10 steps the 45th President can take. It will note that the politics of climate change are rapidly changing today, with a majority of the American people now recognizing that it is real, already underway and affecting the United States, with a growing number of conservatives recognizing it is a problem that leaders at all level of society must address.

The world is calling for our engaged action, and action that is uninformed by some form of personal practice is likely less effective, or may even create more harm. As I see it, the call is to heal ourselves inwardly, while we simultaneously co-create and midwife in a new culture and civilization.

Among my personal passions in designing programs for the Bioneers conference is to bring together both the inner and outer dimensions of social transformation. Revealing the relationship between the two can lead to greater integration. That integration is essential for developing the leadership capacities in each of us, as I believe that this time on Earth asks us all to step forward with our own unique style of leadership.

In response to your feedback, and how apparent it’s become that we learn from our experience, we’ll have many more experiential and interactive sessions this year. On the inner plane, to advance learning about cultivating our own leadership by learning from nature’s model, I’m psyched for Leadership Lessons from the Living Earth. To develop greater inner awareness about cultural bias and a capacity to become a better white ally, check out Transforming our Relationship to White Privilege in Service to Beloved Community.

Another particular pleasure for me is assembling diverse viewpoints from people who are wise of heart, creative of hand and insightful of mind to explore a highly relevant topic in a way that brings differing modalities or disciplines together. To explore the positive benefits, outwardly, of acting on behalf of a racially healthy and equitable society, In Pursuit of Happiness: Becoming Beloved Community assembles just such an array of eloquent thinkers and doers. And, as last month’s e-letter noted, the Society and Inner Resilience emergent conversation also exemplifies that spectrum of diverse perspectives.

Perhaps the most important muscles we can develop, as leaders, involve our capacities to connect across differences and to unite apparent paradox. Now more than ever, we need to find our way through seemingly intractable dualities toward a future where we can appreciate our differences while joining together in unified values and action on behalf of the whole web of life.

And studies now show that the most critical factor in community resilience – whether or not communities pull through crises – is the strength of social ties. As Sarah Crowell of Destiny Arts puts it, “The way we’ll hold it together is to hold it – together.”

Multiple programs address each of these aspects of inner and outer resilience, and I’d like to share my perspective on a few.

To address reconciling apparent contradiction in the interest of full-spectrum leadership, the Council on Restoring and Honoring the Sacred Feminine and Sacred Masculine will be hosted by two facilitators who’ve bring real depth to this inquiry. The gender session on Moving Beyond Binaries and Polarity into Possibility and Wholeness may offer insights about how we all live somewhere on a continuum of feminine and masculine, and that our human wholeness requires the full engagement and complementarity of each within us. Regardless of gender, we’ve all been damaged by a culture that’s assigned strange definitions to each one, and these sessions may offer insights we need to reclaim human wholeness and dynamic equilibrium, inwardly.

Dr. Rangimarie Turuki Rose Pere, or Rose, a Maori elder and educator, says “Women will be the ones to lead in ending the destruction of Mother Earth because, as women, we have an invisible umbilical cord that connects us to her.” The truth of her statement still reverberates within my cells. Her bold and fierce declaration is a clarion call I’m hearing among many peoples, traditions and inquiries about how we may best, as a species, navigate this precipitous time.

The women’s track will bring together great women leaders across many differences, including age, ethnicity and discipline, to reveal what women may be uniquely contributing to the reinvention of leadership. The Cultivating Women’s Leadership session will gather Ai-Jen Poo, Sandra Steingraber, Nikki Henderson, Anisha Desai and Jess Rimington with Toby Herzlich to surface and articulate this fertile territory. Because gender difference and contributions are often among the last to be seen or acknowledged, and our existing economic system suffers in part from being quite so heavily masculinized, Feminomics will help make visible how women, a gender lens and living systems are reinventing an economy that works for all, while surfacing common, shared values that we can all bring home to further inform our work.

As we navigate the increasingly daunting challenges we face, now more than ever we need each other and our web of connection. Come and celebrate our collective co-creation, this new civilization that we’re all midwifing into being, while encouraging, inspiring and strengthening ourselves for the year ahead. I hope to see you there!

By Kenny Ausubel

The 2012 conference will feature world-class programs on Inner Resilience, exploring how we can all feed our hearts, our relationships and our spirits, while we also create community, functional resilience and social transformation.

NATURE, CULTURE & SPIRIT TRACK

Two plenaries and multiple panels will illuminate the growing edges of hope.

Tired of being told that trauma, disease and addiction are all your personal responsibility or fault? In a plenary titled “Toxic Culture: How Materialistic Society Makes Us Ill,” Gabor Maté — the groundbreaking Canadian physician and best-selling author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, and brilliantly original thinker — will probe addiction, trauma, parenting and the social context of human diseases and imbalances. He asserts that most human ailments are not individual problems, but reflections of a person's relationship with the physical, emotional and social environment, from conception to death. Mind and body are not separate in real life, and thus health and illness in a person reflect social and economic realities more than personal predispositions. In other words, personal responsibility cannot be separated from societal responsibility and changing the world.

Maté will join two other living lights in a dynamically spontaneous “emergent conversation” on Inner Resilience hosted by the master of the form, Akaya Windwood.

These three brilliant healers and thinkers on the social context of illness will explore how our society generates illness, and how, by understanding those processes, we can build up our resilience and achieve higher degrees of balance and wellness, skills we can pass on to our children. They will also look at what we can do to begin transforming our society into a source of solidarity, mutual aid and healing, rather than of disease, separation and fear. James Gordon, MD is the Founder and Director of The Center for Mind–Body Medicine, a professor at Georgetown Medical School and leading expert on treating PTSD who is bringing mindfulness practices to the most wounded and traumatized hot spots on the planet such as Haiti, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the U.S. armed forces, with breakthrough results. Staci Haines, a national leader in the field of Somatics, and a teacher, author and pathfinder in healing sexual traumas, will show how we can work with our bodies to release and heal trauma in ways that no other approaches can do.

And what about the role of faith, spirit and religion? In a plenary titled “Greening Our Faiths: From Belief into Action for the Environment and Environmental Justice,” the courageous Episcopal priest Fletcher Harper — Executive Director of the groundbreaking interfaith environmental coalition GreenFaith, award-winning spiritual writer and renowned preacher on the environment — will illustrate ways in which growing numbers of diverse faith-based groups are offering environmental leadership on issues ranging from renewable energy to environmental justice and reconnecting with the Earth. He’ll describe GreenFaith’s Certification Program for faith-based sites — a transformative 2-year process through which houses of worship become centers of environmental spirituality, stewardship and justice. Fletcher will restore your faith in faith and in the powerful role faith-based action can play.

“Worldviews create worlds,” and so we’re presenting “Cosmos and Psyche: The Great Transformation” with a dream team of visionaries creating a new cosmic narrative to guide us. From scientists to shamans, the global crisis is being recognized as a crisis of cosmology — of the guiding cultural narratives whose stories must also now transform. How can diverse cultures’ cosmologies illuminate these breakthroughs for a radical evolutionary transformation? Richard Tarnas, professor and author of Cosmos and Psyche and The Passion of the Western Mind, suggests that the “disenchanted objectivist world view of modernity that underlies the present crisis is in the process of transcending itself.” That paradigm is becoming a more inclusive cosmology that embraces the creative complexity, aliveness and “ensoulment” inherent in the web of life. Priestess Luisah Teish will share her Ifa-Orisha West African cosmology’s perspectives, including Oya, the Goddess of Catastrophe who shows how breakdown can lead to breakthrough by making basic structural changes. Iroquois elder Oren Lyons will share perspectives on the place of gratitude, ceremony, clear thinking and peacemaking from the Iroquois and other indigenous traditions. This luminous panel will be hosted by the renowned cosmologist Brian Swimme, author ofThe Universe Story (with Thomas Berry) and The Universe Is a Green Dragon.

Check out the Nature, Culture & Spirit track online to see the full suite of programs related to Inner Resilience. There are lots more powerful programs.

Interest is very high, so register early. We’ll see you there. Keep the faith.

When people ask me what the Bioneers Conference is, I say it’s a natural anti-depressant. As someone all too well informed about the magnitude of the destruction and intractable predicaments our world uniquely faces today, I’m grateful I also have the privilege of a job that amounts to a kind of “star search” for the greatest social and scientific innovators of our time. When you’re immersed in the inspiration of BioneersWorld and constantly learning about breakthrough solutions for people and planet, it’s simply impossible not to have hope.

Like just about everyone else at the conference, I become color-saturated with the dazzling brilliance, heart, courage and astonishing effectiveness of these truly amazing people and their over-the-leading-edge projects.

Having lived long enough, I know that magic happens – completely unexpected breakthroughs that even the wisest among us did not foresee. In that light, 2012 is certainly living up to its advance publicity as a turning point in human civilization. Whether you may have anticipated the end of the world, the birth of a new one, or another Y2K dud, by any standard truly momentous shifts are afoot.

The 2012 conference program could hardly be timelier, with major emphasis on climate action. Without doubt 2012 will mark the threshold when climate change became an inescapably up-close-and-personal reality across the world, including at last in the U.S. As the New York Times reported, a whopping 70 percent of the U.S. public now associates the extreme weather chaos with climate change. Take a moment to absorb that. This is a sea change that many believed would not occur for years to come.

It was only a matter of time before physical reality would override delusion, propaganda and belief systems. The ground is becoming conducive to major shifts. I encourage you to read our 2012 plenary speaker and world-renowned journalist and author Bill McKibben’s current piece in Rolling Stone, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” The 2012 conference will highlight some remarkable emergent strategies and successes.

When we programmed the 2012 Bioneers conference early this year, of course we could not have precisely predicted these subsequent developments, but we knew the trend lines and the urgent need to lay the groundwork for dramatic progress. We recognized the imperative both to begin helping more and more people become educated about breakthrough solutions and strategies, and to offer ways people can move that knowledge into action and get connected with each other to build traction.

Of course climate action and all of the other issues featured in Bioneers conference programs are connected, and we’ve created a complete program of Tracks that make it easy for you to see exactly the topics and meta-themes, and where you can engage.

After hurtling through the fast-forward, hyper-intense, wildly complex and at times mind-numbing process of designing the program, we go back through it to sort it by 12 Tracks of interest. Most people are passionately interested in one or two topics or issues. These become points of entry because the beauty of the conference is that then you find out how they’re connected to everything else. You discover wildly interesting new areas that become your learning edges – and perhaps your new passions or work.

I’ll be sharing more in future blog posts about some personal highlights of my own favorite Tracks and programs, though it’s a losing proposition like picking the favorite among your children. For now, just a couple of early tips. 

Building Resilient Communities

One clear through line is that we’re living in a house of cards of too-big-not-to-fail systems. There’s no question that we’re all going to be living closer to home with more localized and regionalized systems such as our foodsheds, watersheds and energysheds. Even the Department of Defense recognizes this reality. Decentralization and greater self-reliance are the future. So we’ve created a meta-theme around building Resilient Communities and a “Call to Action” full-day intensive to form a Resilient Communities Network to spread effective practices and innovations. It’s a Who’s Who of top innovators and breakthrough models, including a former top strategic advisor to the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it’s a theme throughout the whole conference. Check out the recent New York Times op-ed by one of our featured Resilient Communities intensive plenary speakers Gar Alperowitz, “Wall Street Is Too Big to Regulate.”

Eco-nomics

Another Track is “Eco-nomics.” After all, it’s generally economic motives driving the destruction, and it’s economic systems that now must drive the restoration. A crucial component is the decentralization of financial systems. That includes strengthening our local and regional living economies, and democratizing wealth. When the top 400 have more wealth than the “bottom” 180 million Americans, yes, Wall Street, we have a problem. We’re featuring some of the authentic living lights and breakthrough models in all these areas this year.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Bioneers Co-Founder Nina Simons and I will be sharing more insights and tips in future Founder’s Blog posts, so stay tuned. But for now check out all 12 Tracks of the 2012 Bioneers Conference program.

Then let’s conjure up some magic together at the conference and bring it into the world. Let’s make 2012 the year of Emergence when the world reached critical mass and moved from breakdown to breakthrough.

-Kenny Ausubel, Co-Founder & CEO of Bioneers