The Original Bioneer: An Interview with Kenny Ausubel

Kenny Ausubel and his wife and partner Nina Simons founded the Bioneers Conference, which is held annually in San Rafael, CA and is beamed via satellite to locations across the continent – including Traverse City. The conference is a gathering of scientific and social innovators who have demonstrated visionary and practical models for restoring the Earth and its communities. Kenny is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, author, and environmental entrepreneur.

Thirdeye had the opportunity of asking him some questions about Bioneers and the current state of the world.

TE: Can you fill us in on the thought process that led to the creation of the Bioneers Conference in 1990?

KA: Well, where to begin… I had a personal health crisis when I was about 19 and it was unable to be helped with conventional medicine. So, out of desperation I turned to alternative healing methods and got some relief. As a result, I became very interested in alternative medicine, had a lot of benefit from using it over many years, and in the course of that I moved to a small farm in New Mexico and learned to grow my own food organically. In the midst of all of this, my father died from cancer at a very young age, and I ended up investigating alternative cancer therapies. I made a feature documentary released in 1987 called, Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime, about the politics of medicine. It focuses on the Hoxsey treatment, which is basically an herbal treatment that was once very famous in the U.S... What I learned from studying this big conflict between conventional medicine and natural medicine is that what Hoxsey and all the natural medicines were actually saying was: “It’s really nature that heals.” And that, to me, became the underlying philosophical principal for Bioneers, which is this idea of working with nature to heal nature. By imitating nature we can participate in that process and live much better on the planet then the ways that we are now.

Meanwhile, in the middle of doing Hoxsey, I was asked to make a film about a very unusual garden on an Indian pueblo north of Santa Fe, near where I lived. It was there I met Gabriel Howearth, a master gardener who had been traveling all over the Americas studying traditional indigenous farming practices. The peoples with whom he apprenticed gave him what, for them, was the most precious of gifts; the gift of seeds. So Gabriel had planted this incredible arc of biodiverse seeds at this garden in San Juan Pueblo, and although I’d been a little farmer and gardener and all that, I’d never seen anything like this. What I really learned, is that diversity really is the fabric of life. It is what nature uses as a failsafe mechanism against extinction and as a response to change. So Gabriel and I ended up getting together a couple of years later to co-found a company called Seeds of Change.

So here was this Hoxsey thing, and while it wasn’t a cure-all or magic bullet for cancer, it was certainly part of a solution, and then here’s this little company Seeds of Change trying to respond to the loss of diversity in our food system, and I realized there must be other people who have looked to nature as a teacher and mentor. And that was really the genesis of the Bioneers conference in 1990. I was actively seeking out what I came to call Bioneers – biological pioneers who were looking for nature’s operating instructions. And that was what the first conference was about; to bring all these people together and start to see what we were learning. From the very beginning my wife and partner Nina Simons co-produced the conference with me, and we’ve been doing it ever since.

TE: What made you decide to do it in California, and what made you feel that the conference type setting, with an array of speakers would best serve your purpose?

KA: Well, I had literally never been to a conference before I started Bioneers, and in a way that was an advantage because I didn’t know what you were supposed to do. So I just created something that was interesting to me, and brought together all these very fascinating and talented people. I liked to learn, so I learned everything I could about their work, and when I introduced them I would give some context about what they are working with or what the problem was that they were solving. So that evolved over many years into a format that’s pretty unusual in the sense that we present a lot of context for speakers, we don’t just throw them up on the stage. And so that has proven to be a good way of going about it. And the first three years of the conference we did hold it in Santa Fe, but each year it just kept growing, and after the third year it was just getting too big. There were no facilities in Santa Fe that could accommodate it, so we moved it to the Bay Area because that is the hotbed of innovative thinking and a lot of brilliant environmental work.

TE: In addition to the Hoxsey treatment and the work of Gabriel Howearth, what spurred you on the path toward advocating the type of change espoused by the Bioneers?

KA: One influence is John Todd who built what he calls living technologies, where he modeled how nature treats waste; because in nature the concept of waste doesn’t even exist. So John used living organisms, microbes and plants, and actually animals – fish and other mammals – to treat sewage, septage, oil waste, and all kinds of other nasty toxic materials. He was a deep, deep influence on me. Another trigger, was that in 1988 James Hansen from NASA testified before congress and talked about global warming. My brother Jesse had been working on global warming for National Academy of Sciences starting in 1976, so when we heard James Hansen’s testimony before congress, we knew. We knew it was coming and we knew it was very, very serious. So I realized we had to start looking for solutions, and that, from day-one, has always been the focus of Bioneers. One dimension of that approach is technological, but that’s not really ultimately going to solve things. My belief – which came to me through being exposed to Native American culture – is the understanding that we are the environment; there is no separation. It’s really about a change of heart on our part, of understanding ourselves as being a part of nature rather than being apart from it. The Biologist E.O. Wilson talks about a word that he came up with called “biophilia,” which is the idea that life has an affinity for life, and that by really appreciating what we love we’re going to save what we love. So a lot of this is about human beings as a species coming back to those original instructions that we’re part of all this. We didn’t invent nature, nature invented us.

TE: Did you ever imagine the conference would grow and evolve the way it has… spawning media outreach programs, a Moving Images Festival, 16 beaming Bioneers conferences around the nation, and a series of books?

KA: To be honest, from the very beginning I envisioned the whole media part of it – the radio series, the book series, reaching out to the press, getting the stuff into the mass media. But what was a complete surprise was the growth of the conference itself, I don’t think I ever imagined how big it would get. And I never ever foresaw the beaming Bioneers program. At the first conference there were all of 200 people – which seemed huge at that time – and I figured these people are all working along the same lines and they must know each other. What I discovered was that hardly anybody knew each other, even if they were working in the same field. And over time the conference became this huge networking event. A lot of interesting cross-pollination occurred and collaborations came from that. And so, I guess six or seven years ago, this person from Toronto came to us and said, “I want to bring this work back to Toronto, can you beam this up by satellite?” It took about a week for it to sink in, and then I said, “That’s a great idea!” Because the whole point to me was not to just keep building a bigger and bigger event, but to actually be like a seed-head and spread it. We all live in a place, and we need to take care of our place. So I loved the idea that we could beam in some of the plenary speakers, but then the people on the ground locally could then adapt it for their own needs.

TE: Was there anything seemingly providential about how all of this developed?

KA: There’s tremendous synchronicity, and if you’re paying attention things are revealing themselves to you right in front of your eyes. Fred Kirschenmann, who’s a very wonderful biodynamic farmer, gave a talk at Bioneers a number of years ago, and he said that farming was really like dancing – sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow. And that’s kind of how I approach the work that we do. Sometime we lead and we say we’re going to go in this direction, and sometimes we just wait to see what events are showing up. Sometimes the Universe speaks and says, “OK you need to go in this direction.” Like with the satellite thing.

TE: What do you feel sets the Bioneers apart from other environmental or social movements?

KA: Well a couple of things. I think number one: the focus on solutions. So much of the environmental movement has been focused on the problems. And that’s important, we’ve got to understand the problems. But at the end of the day, we have to move beyond the problems into solutions, and then we have to move beyond the solutions into action. And so I think that’s one element. To explain the other very fundamental thing about Bioneers, we use this term: “declaration of interdependence.” The understanding that we are a part of the web of life. And therefore, when you really grasp what that means from a biological point of view, what you also realize is that all the issues are connected. There really are not single or separate issues. If there are people who live on two dollars a day or less, we can’t solve the environmental crisis without addressing poverty and inequity in the world. So I think that’s partly what’s very different about Bioneers, is we’re bringing all the pieces together. It’s this fundamental idea that it’s all connected and that we’re all connected.

TE: For average people, especially young people, who want to make the world a better place, what is your advice on how to plug in without wasting energy on lost causes?

KA: Everyone needs to recognize that we are truly in a crisis. This is the first time in history that this has ever happened. We have the ability to destroy the conditions conducive to life on a global scale. I mean, it’s happened to at least five or six previous civilizations, but it was always localized. Basically, when people exceeded their ecological limits, their societies very quickly declined and often became extinct. But never before has it been globalized. This is the real deal, and we all have to get involved. So I think the first thing you need is a commitment to get involved, and from there it’s going to be very different for each person. My advice is basically to educate yourself, and in the process of educating yourself find out where your heart really resonates. Maybe you especially care about water or animals or social justice or health. Once you’ve zeroed in on what your real passion is, think about what your personal gifts are and then get connected. Find out who’s working in those fields, what cool groups or individuals are out there, and approach them and see if there’s a way you can get involved. Either in your community or on a national scale, or whatever is right for you. Perhaps it’s going to the Traverse City Bioneers and meeting someone there. I’ve heard stories of people who went to a Bioneers conference, got really lit up by it and met somebody, and now they’re working for that group or they’ve found their path. But once you set that intention, things will happen and you just have to have confidence in that. I think in the world right now we face attention deficit disorder, and we need to resolve that. We need to set a very strong intention that we’ve got to get together and solve these problems, and then things will take care of themselves.

TE: Can you elaborate on the concept of restoration as being the guiding principle of the Bioneers, versus sustainability?

KA: You bet, and I want to acknowledge Paul Hawken who is really the one who keyed into this about ten years ago or so. Sustainability is the midpoint between two eternal cycles in life – destruction and restoration. Things are always dying and things are always being born. If you are a gardener you understand that through the process of composting. Sustainability is really the midpoint between those two processes, and the real idea of it is simply that you leave the world a little better than you’ve found it. That you give back as much as you take. The problem is that as a species we’ve done so much damage that the world is radically degraded; ecosystems are breaking down. So it isn’t really enough to just sustain what we have right now, we actually need to give back more than we’re taking, because there’s a lot to restore before we can get back to that midpoint of sustainability.

TE: There has been much comparison with the Bioneers movement and a worldwide popular movement described by Paul Hawken in his forthcoming book, “Blessed Unrest.” What is this global movement and how do the Bioneers relate?

KA: What Paul has documented is literally the biggest movement in the history of the world. He’s done a whole web database search and come up with somewhere between one and two million groups worldwide like Bioneers, like what you guys are doing in Traverse City, everywhere. Most of it is coming through civil society, through the nonprofit sector. I witness more and more of it coming into local and regional governments. It’s cross-cultural, it’s every race and culture on the planet, and what it’s fundamentally about is taking care of our ecosystems and restoring our environment. It’s about justice. It’s about having equity in the world and a sense of reciprocity, and, as Paul describes it, it’s a movement of movements. So you can break it out into all these different categories, like the environmental movement, or the social justice movement, or the peace movement, but it’s bigger than any one of those and bigger than even all of those put together. And it’s very decentralized, it’s not hierarchical in the traditional sense – although there are many, many leaders. Biologists say that the surest way to heal an ecosystem is to connect it to more of itself. And that’s what we’ve been doing partly through Bioneers; not only putting out the solutions but helping people get connected. In a sense, Bioneers are a microcosm of this larger movement, because we represent all the different issues and many different points of view. We don’t say or believe that there’s one way to solve a problem; there are many, many approaches and we need all of them. What you understand when you look at ecology is it’s all made up of different little niches, and everything depends on everything else. So what we present at Bioneers is kind of a social ecology, of many different approaches, some of which sometimes even contradict one another.

TE: Up to now, Bioneers has been very comprehensive and worked very hard on forming connections between activists working on a myriad of issues. Are there any plans to zero in and focus on some more specific issues or areas of concern as things become more pressing, or are you going to maintain the same kind of holistic approach?

KA: Well I think that we’ll always maintain the holistic approach, and at the same time you have to stay open to whatever life may throw at you, so we don’t really know. But we’ve been in a process internally of just drilling down and going deeper and deeper into different areas – like water, like energy, like food and farming, like public health – and continuing to build these networks. And we’re trying to sort of bring together more and more coherence to those networks, and gather some of the key learnings from those different sectors. What we’re witnessing right now, the kind of thing that’s going on in Traverse City, is actually the most important direction that the work is taking, and that’s localizing the work. I believe that if we’re building a long-term movement that’s truly going to be sustainable, it must come from the ground up. And that’s not to negate leadership at a national level or anything of that nature, but if you build it from the ground up then it’s going to have strength and durability. And then what we also need to do at the same time is get connected horizontally, across all of our local communities, so we can share what we’re learning and share solutions and get to know each other as well. So I think that the localization is a major trend. We’re looking at doing some work in New Mexico, which is where our main face is – that’s where we all live and so forth – and so we’re very interested in getting more involved in our place and seeing how that goes.

TE: It seems in life it often takes catastrophe to catalyze individual growth. In the same way, do you feel the types of global catastrophes we’ve been discussing have the potential to force our species to enter a new period of worldwide Renaissance?

KA: I do. David Orr, who’s been the dean of environmental studies at Oberlin College, suggested there’s a global ecological enlightenment underway. In a sense, we’re getting an environmental education the hard way with Katrina, or the tsunami, or all these things that are happening. What’s becoming clear is that we can’t avoid these issues; I think there’s been a lot of denial that there’s a problem, and my own perception is that’s lifting pretty quickly. There’s a pretty big push to start changing how we do business and how we live on this Earth. Global warming is absolutely pushing that. It was very encouraging to me to see how many people have gone to see the new Al Gore movie. And there’s tremendous changes happening in industry as well. Green technology, green chemistry. There’s so many advantages for the companies in this regard, because 94% of our industrial system is waste. And if you look at that differently, there’s a huge business opportunity because waste is very costly, and there’s a lot of liability involved. So companies like DuPont and 3M, the big dogs, are very interested in green chemistry, which basically is harmless. That’s the whole point of it, that you don’t produce these toxins, that you don’t produce this waste in the first place. So I think that there will be an important drive coming from business over the next five or ten years and the world’s going to look very, very different. And we’ve obviously got to make the transition to renewable energy as quickly as we possibly can. It’s still stuck in a lot of politics, but I think it is shifting and it will continue to shift.

TE: Is there anything else you’d like to tell activists in the Great Lakes region?

KA: Well, I just want to thank all of you for your inspiration, for really taking care of your place, for taking care of each other, and for educating people. What you’re doing is so important, and we’ve got to take the long view here. So much work has already been done and it’s going to continue to accelerate. So I think there’s a tremendous amount of hope coming out of people exactly like you, and we are everywhere. It’s important that we keep on keeping on, get better connected with each other, and keep the faith.

Part of what I’ve seen in Bioneers is that the solutions residing in nature continually surpass our perception of what’s even possible. There’s great hope in the sense of how little we know at this point; we’re really just learning. And there’s great hope in the little that we do know; these solutions are incredibly powerful. We’re also witnessing what John Todd calls, “human ingenuity wedded to the wisdom of the wild.” That people are so brilliant and so creative, and so many people have so much courage and so much heart, so all over the world right now there are these explosions of creativity. People are coming together in community, and that’s really where our ultimate social security lies. What’s going on in Traverse City is one of the great models to me of just exactly where the hope is.

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