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The Bioneers Conference has convened annually since 1990 to focus on practical solutions to our most pressing environmental and social challenges. Each October in San Rafael, CA, the Bioneers come together as a group of leading social and scientific innovators to share stories, present model solutions and network with each other. www.bioneers.org
To stimulate and enhance these efforts on a local level, Bioneers beams a simultaneous broadcast of the Conference plenary talks to some 15 sites around the country. Those local sites view the national speakers and produce their own workshops based on local issues and organizing needs.
Bioneers provides a gathering place for common ground ideas to be put into action, alliances to be built, new grassroots movements initiated, and innovative ideas brought to the table. The annual Bioneers Conference is a hub of practical solutions for restoring the Earth - and people. It's a thriving network of visionary innovators who are working with nature to heal nature. The bioneers draw from four billion years of evolutionary intelligence and apply nature's operating instructions in practical ways to serve human ends harmlessly. We herald a dawning age of interdependence founded in natural principles of diversity, kinship, community, cooperation and reciprocity.
Bioneers focuses on creative, social strategies that can help us realize solutions by restoring community, justice and democracy. Over and over, it's the story of how one individual can make a difference.
By providing a context for people to understand the interconnections between health, environmental and social issues, these satellite conferences serve as a platform to move forward core values of restoration and justice.
The Northern Rockies Bioneers Conference brings together progressive communities in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, provides resources, tools, and inspiration to build a sustainable, culturally-rich, active, and well-networked community. It is one of the largest conference sites outside of California, and certainly one of the most dynamic, drawing more than 1000 visitors and considering a vast array of solutions to local challenges.
NRBC encourages the value of networking, self-empowerment of local communities, the gathering and sharing of stories, and the involvement of decision-makers, policy makers, corporate leaders, community leaders, media, teachers, youth, and other community members.
As one recent speaker put it:
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"A local conference helps to strengthen the local and regional communities, by bringing people together who are working on similar issues. There is an intimacy and common purpose, as we focus on our own watersheds, neighborhoods, and bioregion. Participants discover projects and opportunities right in their own backyards that they weren't aware of." |
The good news is that for the most part the solutions to our problems are already present. The models percolate up from the deep wisdom of the natural world. Extraordinary human creativity focused on problem solving is exploding the mythology of despair. The bioneers focus equally on the creative social strategies that can help us realize these solutions by restoring community, justice and democracy. Over and over, it's the story of how one individual can make a difference.
The Northern Rockies Bioneers has a new home: the non-profit Bioregional OutReach Network (BORN). BORN promotes sustainable technologies and practices in the Northern Rocky Mountain region. To accomplish this, we:
- host conferences and events;
- facilitate community dialogue; and
- support citizen-initiated projects.
BORN (www.bornnetwork.org) connects people-to-people and people-to-place through education, activism, the arts, and conferences like Bioneers that celebrate community, peacefulness, and solutions.
BORN hosts several ongoing projects:
- Annual Bioneers Conference, October 19-21, 2007
- Weekly radio program, AirBORN, on Yellowstone Public Radio featuring the insights and visions of local and regional innovators.
- Local Agriculture: a grassroots effort to conserve local land for food production: LOCAL (Living On Community Agriculture & Lands). LOCAL facilitates local and regional production of healthy food, helps sustain local food production, and encourages the future of family farming in our area.
- ORN, in conjunction with other community partners (Gallatin Valley Land Trust, the Community Food Coop, and so on), seeks to identify land which is prime for growing food; open and available for agriculture; and close to where we live (defining close as <100 miles from Bozeman), and seeks to pair capable, eager young farmers with landowners to build a secure foundation for the production of local food. This addresses vital community issues as well as food-security issues.
- Library: BORN is teaming with the Bozeman Public Library to promote sustainable building practices (the Library is Gold-LEED certified) and to build a sustainability collection in the stacks, for public education of these issues.
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