This weekend was the Three River Bioneers Conference, a weekend dedicated to environmental health, community health and spiritual health. Bioneers is a non-profit organization based out of Marin County CA, with community chapters across the nation. Their mission at Bioneers is "...inspiring a shift to live on Earth in ways that honor the web of life, each other and future generations." They promote education and leadership in the realm of environmentalism, social justice, community empowerment and individual well being.
The main conference took place in San Rafael, but individual communities were invited to telecast the conference via satellite in their hometown and conduct workshops and keynote speakers at the local level. PASA had their very own, Greg Boulos (regional director) highlighted on Sunday at the Three Rivers conference put together by the Urban Ecology Project as he addressed conference goers about the importance of local economies and sustainable agriculture. Greg also assisted local permaculture enthusiast Jeff Newman with two workshops one on Transition Towns and the other on Urban Permaculture Design, both a huge successes at the conference.
The Transition movement essentially is "a twelve step program fro communities to get off oil" as Newman put it so gracefully. This workshop brought about a lively discussion about fears and worries about the state of the planet and humans dependency on oil, a source of energy that will not sustain us for much longer and continuosly cuases harmful effects to the environment and soical unrest amongst nations. Learn more about Transition Towns.
Permaculture design, is a model, philosophy, life system and practice I hold close to my heart. Essentially Permaculture is defined as a design system that incorporates human settings with agricultural ecology in efforts to build a system in which the environment and humans can live in harmonious relationship, sustaining each other. Learn more about Permaculture, Urban Permaculture and how you can become a Permaculture Activist.
The plenary speakers I watched on Sunday, Joanna Macy, Mari Margil and Almir Narayamoga Surui left me feeling really motivated and inspired about the work I'm doing and the work others are doing to make our food system socially just and environmentally sustainable. These speakers helped me understand individual activist roles in this transitioning planet and how important each cause we pursue is crucial to a larger shift. That collectively we could be working with different goals and agendas but using similar tactics and strategies to complete them.
Mari Margil, co-director to the environmental legal defense food spoke directly about triumphs in Western Pennsylvania to outlaw mountain top removal and coal mining in the local community, Blaine. She spoke about how rights of the environment are missing from constitutional law. Currently our environment is only protected in law under the condition that is owned by someone else, our environment has become the modern day slave. But individual communities are standing up and defending their local environments by writing into city charters that the environment has priority over the corporation. In Ecuador, they have even adopted individual rights of the environment and its well being into their nations constitution, making them the first in the world to do so.
Repeatedly the topic of mountain top removal and false claims to "clean coal"- a topic sensitive to most Pennsylvania and Appalachian natives- were mentioned during the workshops and outside discussions at the conference. Listening to personal understanding of the problem with coal mining and concern for the regions environment helped me realize how this problem may be "regionally specific" but people across the globe could identify with that feeling of helplessness when trying to defend the land they live on. Being a California native, we don't typically have mountain top removal at the heart of their passion for protecting the environment back home, but we have the same tone of passion when we discuss the rivers, ocean, salmon and pesticide drift. We, on the surface may have separate causes, but we have similar visions for solutions and can share our stories and efforts in support of that vision.
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