I had the opportunity to attend Great Lakes Bioneers in Detroit, October 14-15, 2011.  It was a real pleasure to experience Bioneers without having any responsibilities, and especially enjoyable to connect with people we’ve worked with through the Great Lakes Bioneers network.  Cleveland and Detroit share so many similarities; it was great to see how much they care about their city and how proud they are of strides forward.  One highlight was seeing the new “Green Garage,” a beautiful restoration of a Model T showroom that had fallen into disrepair.  The restoration has been done to make it into a zero energy and zero waste building with lots of insulation and some solar water heating.  Wood and brick were reused to great effect, and a formerly derelict alley has been transformed into a garden-like atmosphere.  Even more exciting, the building is being used as a green business incubator using an innovative “One Earth Patterns” concepts, promoting good design that is attuned to our relationship with the earth, minimizing our impact. Check out: http://greengaragedetroit.com.

The other impressive part of the conference was the involvement of 100 middle and high school students in a full day of tours and special workshops.  Their energy and interest was rewarding to see.

Nancy King Smith

Watch the 2011 National Bioneers Speakers at http://www.bioneerslive.org/vod.html

Sue Blouch’s incredible drawing capturing the live presentations of the seven Fast Track Project ideas presented the opening morning of the Bioneers Cleveland 2010 Conference.

Elizabeth K. Lindsey & john a. powell: The Challenge is Great! from Bioneers on Vimeo.

Hear Elizabeth K. Lindsey and john a. powell share their inspiring wisdom about the challenges that we all face.

2010 National Bioneers Conference

Alec Loorz: iMatter

Alec Loorz: iMatter from Bioneers on Vimeo.

The now 16 founder of Kids vs Global Warming calls upon the “ruling generation” to consider the needs of his and future generations in their actions, urges youth to lead the way to a sustainable, just society, and tells us about the “million kid march” on Mother’s Day, 2011.

2010 Bioneers National Plenary

Elizabeth Lindsey: Navigating an Ancient Future

Elizabeth Lindsey: Navigating An Ancient Future from Bioneers on Vimeo.

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.

Carolyn Hart is going to be giving an introduction of sorts (“a teaser,” she says) to an Awakening the Dreamer Symposium on Saturday afternoon at the Conference. She and I spoke on the phone , while outside, here in Cleveland, the strong winds swirled and pulled the leaves from the trees. Evidently, it was windy in Boulder as well.” Very rare,” Carolyn said,” that we have the same weather.”

I wanted to speak with Carolyn because she represents organizations – maybe a better word might be movements – that I’d only vaguely heard of. So, for anyone who might be feeling similarly, here they are, along with the mission statements on their extensive websites:

The Pachamama Alliance

The two-fold mission of the Pachamama Alliance is to preserve the Earth’s tropical rainforests by empowering the indigenous people who are its natural custodians and to contribute to the creation of a new global vision of equity and sustainability for all.

AwakeningTheDreamer.org

Their mission is bringing forth an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just presence on Planet Earth.

FourYearsGo.org

Four Years. Go. is a campaign to catalyze and empower a fundamental shift in the direction of humanity, inspiring collaborative action, connecting individuals and organizations, and amplifying best practices and successes.

How did Carolyn, a Clevelander of 54 years, end up in Boulder on such a windy afternoon? She retired as a special education teacher, then sold her home and most everything in it. Freed, she set out to travel and experience the world. One year of travel would turn into four, “because it was so sweet.” It was at Esalen that she met a woman who was going to travel into the Amazon on a Pachamama Alliance voyage. As she says, “Up for any adventure,” Carolyn went along. As it turned out, she voyaged with people who were deeply involved with sustainability and awakening others to the possibility of a better life for all. So inspired by the Achuar way of life, and the deep experience the Pachamama Alliance provided on the trip, Carolyn became grounded in what was hers to do in this time of the Great Turning.
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On a beautiful, sunny afternoon, I found Kim Foreman in her Environmental Health Watch office on Lorain. She graciously shared information about her project in progress, Neighborhood Leadership for Environmental Health. NLEH is about involving four inner city neighborhoods in sustainability education and action. As Kim says. “Sustainability means different things depending on where you live.”

I came away from our time together instructed and moved by all she and her partners are achieving. There is a wonderful quality to their actions.

Here’s  some of our conversation:

Q  You are giving, along with George “Keemah” Durden III, a workshop at the Conference. In reading the information about the workshop, I was struck by the kind of quality of action that it involves.

I met with Dorothy Salem, a Professor of History at Tri-C to talk about her workshop about women of color in the environmental movement. She mentioned that Sonia Syler had given an Earth Day speech at Tri-C on environmental racism. And one of the things that Dorothy Salem was talking about in our interview was that people who are impacted  by environmental racism have so many different things to contend with, other than what their water’s made of.

A. Exactly

Q.  So, what struck me about your workshop was that you are talking about action, and the empowerment of action.

A.  Right. I have a panel set up. The workshop title is Neighborhood Leadership for Environmental Health. That title is also the title of an actual project that Environmental Health Watch, the Neighborhood Leadership Institute, Earth-Day Coalition and the Greater Cleveland Clean Air  Campaign is working on in four urban Eastside neighborhoods in the city of Cleveland. We’re working in Mt. Pleasant, Buckeye-Woodland, Central and Fairfax. Rid-All Green Partnership is one of our key project partners. I also called on Vicki Trotter from Trotter’s Cleaners because she has an incubator, working with youth on entrepreneurial initiatives. Trotter’s Cleaners is one of the first Green cleaners in Ohio. I think people just don’t know about it. Continue Reading…

I met with Dr. Dorothy Salem, professor of History at Tri-C, in her office with an open door the other morning. We spoke amidst a ringing phone and her colleagues and students stopping by to say a few words or to ask for some time.

Dr. Salem is going to be giving a workshop at the Conference that is titled, ‘Women of Color: Invisible in the Green Movement?’. The large aim of her work, she says, is to make visible those who are invisible.

She finds that, especially in the Green Movement, women of color who are involved in a cause are more likely to be invisible as they are less likely to be outspoken about their efforts.  They are, she says, more concerned with keeping their eyes on the goals of their efforts, and simply going about the work needed.

Wangari Maathai

In the workshop, Dr. Salem is planning on providing a number of exemplars of involved women of color. Internationally, there is the (now more visible) Nobel Prize winner from Kenya, Wangari Maathai. Nationally there is a group of women from Mossville, Louisiana who have been fighting the Lake Area Industry Alliance (representing 14 companies polluting the community) in the midst of death threats. Then there are the female Native American representatives of those who have most often worked together invisibly.

And locally? Well, here is some of our conversation:
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