A celebration of the genius of nature and human ingenuity, Bioneers connects people with solutions and each other. From the Bioneers Website.

Michele and I went to the Bioneers Conference last weekend at the Marin Civic Center. It is held here every year not just because, in many ways, Marin County is the epicenter of the kind of ethos that Bioneers is based on, but also because the Civic Center and its attached Conference Center is such a great location. The Civic Center was one of the last designs designed by Frank Llyod Wright and it is stunning.

As an aside, when I was in my early twenties, my dad and I toured the Civic Center twice, once when it was under construction and once when it was finished but not fully occupied. I was not very impressed and looking at the buildings now, I’m not sure why. As I recall, both tours were by Warren Calister, a local architect who was terrific in his own right and part of the conversation was about details that were eliminated or changed because of cost, a much easier task because Wright had died before the start of construction. Wright was a Victorian architect, he started his career in the late 1880s, and he was a master of fussy little special details based on some local idiosyncrasy but he was also a master of space. One space I particularly liked was the then-new County Library. It is under the dome that connects the two wings and is a gentle dome; I can still remember the surprise of wonder when we first walked in. Today, the details do not seem as important and the flow of the facade and play of space are enough to wow me. End aside.

“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people, but it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.” David Orr

Michele has been going to Bioneers for years but this was the first time she has brought me along so everything was new to me. And, I think, a little new for Michele also because this year, everything was about Climate Change. Roughly, the Conference is organized around a series of morning inspirational talks in the main auditorium – again by Wright – and small discussion groups in the afternoon. I enjoyed the discussion groups much more than the larger morning sessions. The morning sessions were entertaining and inspirational but I was a little disappointed. I think it is because I’ve been watching the Democratic Debates and they are filled with “I will do XXXX when I’m president” and these speakers, who have no aspiration to be President and will never be in a position to set policy, spent their time talking about the problem, the urgency of the problem. Some in very inspirational ways, one woman, who had just gone through the pain of childbirth, suggesting “What if the darkness in our world right now is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb. What if American is not dead but a country waiting to be born?”, and another woman, currently battling cancer, compared Trump to chemo in cancer treatment, toxic but needed to cure the body politic. It did not surprise me that this was an anti-Trump crowd, but what did surprise me is that every speaker, referred to the government as an oligarchy. Here the government is an oligarchy is a given and that is a little worrying.

The afternoon sessions were more about solutions than problems, or, more accurately, what various people are doing in response to Global Climate Change. One afternoon I listened to a round table that included several farmers, I expected to hear different ideas for dealing with Climate Change but the farmers are pragmatic, they are reacting to reality. One was a citrus farmer from the Los Angeles basin and she said that, as someone who wanted to keep farming, she was mulling over the choice of changing her plants to the kind of crops that used to be grown in Syria and Eygpt or move a couple of hundred miles north. She figured that she had about a decade to make the change. Another farmer said that, in twenty years, the Napa Valley will only be good for Madeira and Tequila, if you want to grow Pinot Noir grapes, you’ll have to move to Oregon or Washington.

As an aside, the pragmatism of the farmer reminded me of the pragmatism of Exxon in the late 1970s. When Exxon senior scientist James Black confirmed that the science of Global Climate Change is real and burning fossil fuels causes it, Exxon did two things. The first is that they started a massive disinformation campaign to hide their scientific information while trying to debunk other evidence that verified the science. The second is that they started raising their offshore oil-drilling platforms to compensate for the expected rise in sea level.

By far, the most feel-good, optimistic and hopeful, program I saw at Bioneers was a session on The California Education and the Environment Initiative. It turns out that, in 2016, the same year Donald Trump was elected President, California passed a law requiring schools to teach the curriculum through the prism of what they call the deep relationship between humans and the natural world. Apparently, in 2016 I wasn’t paying attention to much of anything other than Trump and missed this completely. Bioneers had a panel of a guidance counselor from Rialto, a chemistry teacher from Cupertino – both exuding a sense of deep service, for lack of a better way to say it – and a senior from a nearby school tell us how they changed and are changing their curriculum and it was inspiring. Rialto and Cupertino are at the extreme ends of the California educational spectrum, as well as the extremes of the financial and cultural spectrums and Marin is, well, Marin.

Rialto is in Southern California, in the subset known as the Inland Empire, it is about 60 miles east of Los Angeles and 60 miles west of Palm Springs and qualifies as drive-through, if not flyover, country. The guidance counselor, Juanita Chan – what a great California name BTW- said that the school district is heavily Hispanic and black. And poor, the area never really recovered from the shuttering of the nearby Kaiser steel mill and most of the other heavy manufacturing facilities in the area. About 96% of the students are considered minorities, over 80% qualify for the free breakfast and lunch program and only about 7.7% go on to graduate from a four-year college (as opposed to about 20% statewide). Ms. Chan is in charge of STEM and college prep programs and she talked about how running the STEM courses through the lens of the environment has made the students more interested in college prep as well as science.

Kavita Gupta, a National Geographic Grosvenor Teacher Fellow, is the chemistry teacher from Cupertino, in Silicon Valley, and she said that she had the exact opposite problem from Rialto, her students spend too much time on schoolwork and not enough on life (over 77% graduate from a four year college and less than 2% qualify for the free lunch program). Cupertino is also a minority-majority city but, in this case, it is about 67% Asian and 26% white. Gupta, who is from India and speaks with a slight Indian accent, says that a trip to the Galapagos changed her life and she wants to pass that on to her students. She does that through the framework of the environment and our deep connection to nature.

Strangely enough, sort of, this new way of organizing everything from Chemistry to History was developed by CalRecycle’s Office of Education and the Environment (and who even knew there is such a thing as a CalRecycle, let alone that they have an Office of Education and The Environment?). They start with five basic principals like People Depend on Natural Systems and detail those principals with concepts like Methods used to extract, harvest, transport, and consume natural resources influence the geographic extent, composition, biological diversity, and viability of natural systems. The Principles and Concepts are then interwoven with the curriculum. The Dollars and Sense of Food Production is a suggested book for Second Grade and a highschool senior recommendation is Agricultural and Industrial Development in the United States (1877-1914).

The last speaker was Caleb Jordan-McDaniels, a senior at Redwood High School. He looked and talked like he had been sent over by Central Casting and I mean that in the best possible way. Caleb told us about his senior project that was exploring ways to generate electricity through tidal action. He thinks that the most efficient solution seems to be an underwater kite with the kite itself based on the wings that an African tree grows to disburse seed pods.

Just sitting there, listening to him, made me feel more hopeful about the world.