“There is a pathway to the kind of future we all want to live in.
What is needed is the political will to make it happen.”
Photo: Scott Hess/Bioneers 2002
“There is a pathway to the kind of future we all want to live in.
What is needed is the political will to make it happen.”
Photo: Scott Hess/Bioneers 2002
Nina Simons is best known for her involvement with the annual Bioneers Conference held in Marin County every fall, which her husband, Kenny Ausubel, started in 1990. After working together on the organic seed company, Seeds of Change (Ausubel was one its co-founders), they realized that it was time for those dedicated to environmental awareness, social justice, feminism and political action to finally meet each other and brainstorm about how to restore the earth.
Utne Reader named Nina Simons as a Visionary of the Year in 1996 for her innovative work on community-based communications. She also helped improve and expand Odwalla’s marketing campaigns in 1996 and 1997. Nina is a professional when it comes to promoting a worthy venture. She has applied those skills to everything she does in life, especially Bioneers, which is now seen and heard around the world. An award-winning radio series, Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature, is now heard on 120 public radio stations in the US and 500 more globally. Though the following interview, you will discover a most remarkable woman.
CG: Please tell the story of how the first Bioneers conference came into being.
NS: I’ll tell this story through my own lens. First, you have to understand that I was a person who grew up hating science and loving the earth. When I was younger, I was really focused on a life goal of producing transformational theater, the kind of live theater that makes people question their suppositions and their values — and gives people an opportunity to change.
Then in 1989, my partner, Kenny Ausubel, co-founded a company called Seeds of Change, a biodiversity organic seed company. Soon after that, I had a profound experience when I walked through a biodiversity garden. I was so deeply affected by the magnificence, the beauty, the smells, the diversity — the sacred nature of what I saw there — that I had a strange transformational experience of my own. I felt as though the spirit of the natural world was tapping me on the shoulder and saying, “You’re working for me now.”
So I quit my job working for the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and went to work for Seeds of Change. I had grown up in New York City and didn’t know anything about gardening or farming. And I didn’t really know all that much about growing a business, except that I had good instincts. I sort of stepped into Seeds of Change sideways.
Kenny and I both started learning very quickly about biodiversity issues, which we began to see as one of the most compelling stories on the planet — and one that urgently needed to be told. As a journalist, Kenny started discovering all these remarkable innovators working to conserve biodiversity as well as working on bio-remediation (the use of natural systems to detoxify the environment). He realized that there were all these brilliant people out there who no one had ever heard of — and that they had never heard of each other. He was bemoaning this to a friend one day who turned to him and said, “Why don’t you have a conference? I’ll fund it.”
And that was the beginning of Bioneers, in 1990. Although it was a heavy on the science for me, I realized it was something that really needed to happen, so I agreed to help him produce it. But after listening to people like John Todd and Paul Stamets at the first Bioneers conference, all my preconceptions about science were turned upside-down. With the wide-eyed wonder of a five-year-old child, I was totally turned on to the magic of learning about the natural world. Year by year, I got more involved in designing the program as the conference became increasingly broad in scope.
CG: How has the annual Bioneers conference evolved over the years, and how do you see it changing in the future?
NS: The first conference had several hundred people and was held in Santa Fe. By the third year, we had outgrown all the local venues, so we moved it to the San Francisco Bay Area, which has turned out to be the perfect home for Bioneers.
Bioneers has evolved very dramatically, especially over the past six years. Back in 1997, it had a near-death experience. We had held the conference in the Presidio and discovered on Sunday that due to a competing event, we didn’t have the attendance we had anticipated. We suddenly found ourselves $10,000 in the hole. For the first seven or eight years, Kenny and I had produced the conference in our spare time, on a shoestring budget. So this was a disastrous discovery, which really made us question whether we should go on.
Kenny was having a meeting with a friend who stopped in the middle of dinner and said, “This is the most important work I know of, so I want to give you a five-year grant for $1 million.” That was the beginning of a whole new chapter for Bioneers.
Since then, we have birthed a radio series, which started with New Dimensions in San Francisco. Each year, we use the content from the conference mixed with interviews for the radio series, which is now heard in over 120 cities in this country and in over 500 cities internationally. This makes it possible for us to reach a greater number of people throughout the world. In addition to that, we’ve been simulcasting the Bioneers conference via satellite for the past few years. This past fall, we had 12 other cities producing congruent conferences, and next year there will probably be 20. We also do media outreach in print (11 million readers in the past year) and television (85 million viewers), so we are progressively realizing our ultimate goal of transforming our culture with this information. Once people know how many solutions already exist, it increases the pressure to effect change.
Starting next year, we will be releasing a series of books. The first will be titled Ecological Medicine: Healing the Planet, Healing Ourselves and will come out in Spring 2004. The second one, due out in Fall 2004, is called The True Biotechnologies, and will be published by the Sierra Club and University of California Press.
Another exciting plan for the future of Bioneers is doing more international work. In 2005 we will bring Bioneers to Brazil. And we want to expand our “Beaming Bioneers” satellite conferences all over the world. We are also producing our own radio series via public radio, and it’s offered for free. People can find out about it through our Web site.
CG: What is the single most important goal of Bioneers?
NS: Bioneers is about helping people understand the commonality of our shared values so that we can work together to affect the common good. What we’re seeking to do is to strengthen and coalesce a movement that unites environmental and social justice — and health — to improve the world. By helping to shift the values in our culture, we have the best chance of changing the world.
As M. Scott Momaday said, “We live in a house made of stories.” If you think about it, very few of us have been able to retain the stories that our ancestors passed down. Instead, we have artificial stories that have been created by Disney, the advertising industry and the mainstream media. Bioneers is about spreading the real-life stories that teach us how to find our place in the natural world. Once we have a new framework, it’s easier to see our part in it. Bioneers is the only place I know where people can see the interconnectedness of all the issues that affect our life on earth. The spiritual issues, the sociological issues and the ecological issues are all inextricably interconnected. I think of Bioneers as “grounded optimism.” It’s a powerful antidote to listening to the news.
CG: Can you describe some of your efforts to get young people involved in your work?
NS: The youth program has expanded each year since we launched the Initiative in 2000. We use every opportunity we have to remind the Bioneers community that youth are central to the work we are all doing and that this program is vital to the conference. Specifically we have been building relationships to reach more urban youth, native youth, and youth of color. It is a grassroots program that has developed in response to what young people have told us they want and have to offer.
We offer a youth scholarship program funded by contributions from individuals and foundations, and we have awarded close to 300 full scholarships to young people (age 13 23) to attend the conference over the last three years. In addition, we have a work exchange program that many youth participate in, and also a reduced registration rate for students and activists. Each year, hundreds of young people come to the conference through these various options. They have the opportunity to present their work at the Bioneers Conference at our onsite youth tent, which houses the youth program. It gives conference attendees the chance to hear from young leaders in ecological restoration, social justice, and the arts. It’s impossible to miss the vitality and inspiration young people have brought to the Bioneers community.
Another hallmark of success at the 2003 conference was an increase in the diversity of attendees overall, which was facilitated by a visionary funder who, seeking to support Bioneers’ goal of helping to coalesce the social justice and environment movements, offered scholarships to over 200 activists of color from around the nation.
CG: How can the feminine dynamic restore balance in our world?
NS: In the mid-1990s, I was introduced to a film called The Burning Times, all about the mass extermination of women in the Middle Ages. This holocaust was commonly known as “witch burning” and accounted for the deaths of around 6 to 9 million women. It is a great hidden history of our culture. The more I began to learn about this persecution of women — and the ideas and practices of healing that women had carried — the more it radically affected my view of the world.
I began to see that all the problems that we are facing in the world suffer from this fundamental imbalance between the masculine and the feminine, the yin and the yang. Now is a time that has long been prophesied by many of the world’s religions as a return of the feminine. It’s called the Kali Yuga. The same healing and restoration that the whole Bioneers community speaks to can also be articulated through the imbalance of the masculine and the feminine.
CG: Please tell us who the “UnReasonable Women for the Earth” are.
NS: In 2001, there was a speaker at Bioneers named Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation fisherwoman from the Texas Gulf who discovered that her county was the most toxic in the country. She started educating herself and doing direct action. Through her activist work, she was able to get two zero-discharge agreements signed by multinational chemical companies.
When Diane spoke at Bioneers, she closed her remarks by paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw: “A reasonable woman adapts to the world. And an unreasonable woman makes the world adapt to her. So, I encourage you all to be unreasonable, because the world really needs us.” At that, she got a huge standing ovation. All weekend long, women came up to her with tears in their eyes thanking her for what she had said.
A few weeks later, she called us to tell us about a vision she had to create an unreasonable women’s movement. As a result, I merged my own interest in women’s movements with hers and decided to hold a retreat called “UnReasonable Women for the Earth,” a group of 34 women from various backgrounds, who gathered to determine how to best coalesce women to take a stand for the Earth. Our first spontaneous mission was to support Diane in a hunger strike in solidarity with the victims of Bhopal, India, against Dow Chemical, who had acquired Union Carbide, the company responsible for the chemical disaster. Eventually, a collective hunger strike coordinated with actions in cities around the world had a profound impact on how the Indian government decided to deal with the charges against Dow.
CG: What is “Code Pink”? How has their Pink Slip campaign gone?
NS: Two of Code Pink’s co-founders, Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, met each other through the UnReasonable Women organization and went on to develop Code Pink Women for Peace. Essentially, it is an activist network that grew from UnReasonable Women for the Earth, and it organizes demonstrations and direct action.
Code Pink is a reaction to the Bush Administration’s color-coded alerts. It was created as an alternative to Code Orange. Another part of the idea behind Code Pink is to embody the feminine qualities of grace, beauty, humor and fun in political action. The Pink Slip campaign grew out of that idea. They hang huge pink slips that look like lingerie from hotel windows with slogans like, “Bush, you lied. You’re fired.” He literally got a Pink Slip.
CG: In your opinion, what is the greatest flaw in our democratic government as it exists today?
NS: We have a government right now that is being driven by greed. Between corporate agendas and short-term financial gain, the common good is being steamrollered by special interests.
I see the world we live in changing by the week, by the month. There are so many species dying so quickly, the very fertility that sustains life on earth is being affected day by day. In a few years, what will be safe to eat and drink? As an organization, Bioneers is responding with great urgency to the need to shift the values in our culture. We need to awaken people to the solutions that already exist. There is a pathway to the kind of future we all want to live in. What is needed is the political will to make it happen. Just as people have created these problems, people can fix them.
CG: In your opinion, what is the most crucial issue facing our world today?
NS: It’s hard to focus on just one thing, because in my awareness these issues are all so interconnected. Global warming is huge. The unfettered power of corporations is immense. The tyranny of governments-run-amok is enormous. And the environmental health implications are almost beyond imagining. We live under a misconception that the government is looking out for our best interests. I realized some time ago that is just a fallacy.
CG: What can an individual person do?
NS: That is a really important question. And there are as many answers as there are people. Everyone has a unique response to this moment in time. What’s right for you may not be what’s right for me. There are so many ways to make a difference. We are facing choices every day about how to be human in a time of so much change. Every day, we choose how to vote with our lives.
CG: How has your husband, Kenny Ausubel, influenced your life?
NS: Kenny has been a source of immense inspiration and great learning for me. When I first met him, I was fairly disillusioned, but he rekindled my idealism. I began working with him almost immediately. There are ways in which we are very different, yet very complementary. He once said, “We came together like peanut butter and jelly.” Our relationship has profoundly impacted our work. In many ways Bioneers is our 14-year-old child.
As I continue to learn more about the emerging voice of the feminine, we play it out in our personal lives. We are becoming better partners and more mindfully respectful of one another. In many ways, Bioneers is a reflection of our growth as a couple.
CG: Why do you live in the West?
NS: Although I initially came to visit my mother, I’ve now lived in New Mexico for about 20 years. I feel that I have found my correct place. I have a quality of resonance and love for this land that I have never experienced anywhere else in my life. A connection to place is so important.
CG: Where do you see yourself in ten years?
NS: Ten years is a pretty long way to look, but I anticipate doing a lot more writing and public speaking. And I see that Bioneers will become a far greater force for change in the world. And I hope it will happen far sooner than that.
CG: If you had five minutes to deliver a message that would be heard all over the world, what would you say?
NS: It is so important for us to recognize the impact of the choices we make every day. Every intention and every action matters. Restoring our own lives to a place of balance, health, joy and grace can only happen when we restore the larger life around us. This is one of the greatest messages of the Bioneers.
Our inner world and our outer world are inextricably woven. We are a part of the natural world, not apart from it. And it can teach us how to survive. But we need to learn those lessons as quickly as possible.
For information about Bioneers go to: www.bioneers.org. And you can find out more about Code Pink at www.codepink4peace.org.
Virginia Lee has been a regular interviewer for Common Ground since 1992. She lives in the redwoods of Bonny Doon in Santa Cruz County and also works for the Psychology Department at University of California at Santa Cruz.