 I don't have any big agenda for what I wanted to bring here. I was really trying to think of what I could offer that would be useful both to this emergent community and the beautiful space that Oroha is cultivating and also in anticipation of heading into some days that are going to be very, very rich, I think with knowledge and information and insight and perspectives. I'm so thankful to actually get to talk after you, Josh, because I feel as though I have been blessed with the opportunity to serve Bioneers for 25 years and it's been my graduate school. And one of the things that I have learned from it and has been reinforced for me over and over again is that I seem to be here as an advocate for a relationship and because the more that I learned about the troubles and the challenges we faced and the amazing plethora of solutions that people were coming up with, the more I saw that we're living in a time where what we're facing can be seen as a crisis of relationship. A relationship within ourselves, with each other and with the earth and that as social creatures, you know, more than anything else we need to reweave the web of connection that is what makes us whole and what grows us and what nourishes us on a level that nothing of the material world can do. So thank you for that, Josh. That was just so beautiful. And so I thought what I would offer to share with you is a story because one of the things that I've learned from Bioneers is that I've always been really fascinated with what can help transform people's consciousness because I think, again, we know that, you know, part of the challenge right now is how do we wake up millions or billions of people and invite them into the reinvention in a way that is appealing and exciting and real and grounded in truth and in respectful relationship. And so as someone who really has been a student for many years of what helps change people, what I've seen is that story is one of our tremendously underutilized tools and that just honoring our capacity to transform each other's awareness with story is something that may help as we continue to imagine into what will help animate the Aroha vision in the most beautiful way. So I thought I'd offer a story and there's an author, N. Scott Mamaday, who's a Native American author, and he says we live in a house made of stories. And many of you have probably heard of, there's a guy in the U.S. named George Lakoff and he calls himself a cognitive linguist, you know, and he studies story and he says basically that as human beings, we're designed for story. We're hardwired for story and that once our minds and hearts have wrapped around a story, no amount of facts that contradict to that story will get us to release the story. The only thing that can help us change the story is a more appealing story, right? So hence the existence of climate deniers, right? Like how can those people, it seems so incongruous, but there it is. So we're designed for story and one of the inquiries of my life has been around the question of leadership because I believe we live in a time when we're all called to be leaders now and when we're all collectively reinventing what leadership is and what it looks like, right? So that, what was his name, Josh? Jean Valier modeled an extraordinary leadership in what he did, you know, just as Mother Teresa did. And, you know, while we all have an unconsciously inherited definition of leadership that tends to look like the charismatic person in the front of the room who's telling a more compelling story and often leading because someone has given them a title or authority or resources or a graduate degree, I believe that right now is a time when leadership in its newest form is coming from the inside out instead of from the outside in. You know, that we all are co-creating and co-midwifing, if you will, a kind of leadership that's informed by what we care about most deeply and what we're most passionate about protecting or defending or giving birth to. And that leadership, the leadership that we're all wanting to live into is a collaborative leadership. It's not a singular model. Hopefully because it's collaborative and cooperative it's less sacrificial, you know. It can be, we can take turns and say, you know, I can't take this one, will you take it? And pass the baton to each other in a relay. And so I actually think that part of the gift of story is that the boldness and creativity and scope of the leadership that we allow ourselves to bring to the world is directly related to the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and whether we matter and whether the gifts we have to bring are of value. So I think it's an extraordinary tool in this larger quest for how do we help everyone feel valued and heard. And I've done, you know, in my work with women and leadership what I keep finding is we have the capacity as Jess has been modeling all afternoon to hear and see each other into fuller flourishing. Right? Just by witnessing each other's gifts and that's so much of what's happening here and what we are co-creating as the field for all the new folks to join tomorrow. Is a space where everyone's gifts are valued and seen. So I thought the story I would offer to share with you is the story of how I came to serve the natural world because it seems like a really beautiful segue into building an earth mandala together and into the recognition that all of the concerns that we all share around equity and justice and love are intimately intertwined and interdependent with our relationship with the natural world. So does that sound okay? Okay. I was a very unlikely person for this assignment, I thought. I grew up in New York City. I was the daughter of two artists and because I grew up in that environment I just assumed that arts was going to be how I was going to make my way in the world and what I found I first got captivated by was something that I called transformational theater which was the capacity that we have when we are face to face, you know, in real time with each other to transform each other and to open up and cause us to question unrecognized belief systems that we all carry and that transformational theater was the way I thought, okay, this is how we're going to transform consciousness on a mass scale and so after college I left to do transformational theater and discovered very quickly how hard it might be to earn a living at transformational theater. Got kind of pissed off about it, you know, went to do work with a mystical school for many years and managed restaurants and eventually found my way to Santa Fe, New Mexico because I visited my mother there and the land spoke to me so loudly that I just thought, oh my God, the people who live here are the luckiest people I've ever seen and I was really ready to leave New York and I thought, okay, in spite of the fact that my mother's there, I'm going to move there and then very quickly realized that it would give me an opportunity to heal my relationship with my mom which was really necessary and so the next 10 years was about that and in the course of that I met this amazing man, my partner and beloved husband, Kenny and at the time he was finishing a film, a documentary film about the politics of medicine and specifically about alternative cancer therapies and I knew nothing about that when we first started spending time together and very quickly as I learned from him that there was a story in the U.S. and throughout much of the world of a divided legacy of medicine and that many ways of healing had basically been outlawed during the McCarthy era and kicked out of the country systematically sort of persecuted and banished and so, and Kenny had been working on that film for years and people would call up at every hour of the day and night because the word had gone out like through the underground pipeline that they would call up and say I've just been diagnosed with cancer and I'm really scared and I've heard that you know something about alternative therapies, will you help me? And so I learned from Kenny very quickly what we could and couldn't say and we partnered together to help finish the film and then distribute it and then that was an amazing journey and more on that if you're interested but soon after that we were invited to visit a biodiversity garden in southern New Mexico and I'm going to conflate the story a little I know you won't mind but southern New Mexico we went to visit this garden that was being tended by a master gardener named Gabriel Howarth and we drove about five hours into the Gila Wilderness and I really thought I was going for a weekend in the country I was still working for arts organizations we got out of the car after this long road trip and Gabriel took us for a tour of his garden and it was unlike anything I had ever seen so we started to walk through the garden and there was this wild array of colors and textures and smells that were more beautiful than any garden I'd ever seen there were literally hundreds and hundreds of very biodiverse food plants and flowers and herbs growing in very close proximity and there were amazing things that I'd never seen before there were sunflowers that were literally eight or nine feet tall with heads 18 inches across that felt like they were watching us as we walked through the garden and Gabriel invited us to taste things and there were whole societies of tomatoes there were every shape and color and size and they were baking in the New Mexico sun and so they were all warm and you could pluck one and the taste was just amazing and the smell of them was totally intoxicating and there were birds and butterflies and bees hovering over this whole thing and there was quinoa which is the high protein grain everyone knows it now but this was like 1989 very few people had ever heard of quinoa and quinoa when it grows is so beautiful it's these golden braids that look like dreadlocks they're tiny and exquisitely formed the texture is so beautiful and there were these heirloom rare varieties of amaranth and even again no one knew amaranth back then but there was a kind of amaranth called elephant head amaranth and it was literally shaped like an elephant rearing its head with its trunk up in the air these purple plumes that were just unbelievable that were six or seven feet tall with these glistening deep red seeds and I realized that my senses were dancing I was in this state of being just transported with ecstasy and as we walked through the garden and were tasting things and there were herbs I'd never heard of you know there was lemon licorice mint and chocolate basil and so we're tasting these things and smelling the scents and Gabriel would introduce us to each plant as we walked through the garden and he would tell us its common name and its Latin name and then he would explain how it was related to all the plants around it and I realized that this man knew this garden many than better than many people know their own families and that it was this amazing garden of relationship that he was tending and as we and I remember thinking to myself maybe the garden of Eden was written about a garden like this because I'd never seen anything like it and as I was walking out of the garden I felt like the spirit of the natural world tapped me on the shoulder and said you're working for me now and I was like what? I don't know anything about this stuff I can't do that I'm a city kid I've never gardened a day in my life I didn't know anything about farming but it was as if I heard it in my inner ear and it was really unmistakable it was really strong and really clear and then Gabriel started to tell us about the crisis of biodiversity in the food system and why he was doing this work and about all the mom and pop seed companies that were gobbled up by big corporations and about all the varieties that were being lost as these companies were gobbled up and they went out of circulation and he explained that biodiversity is nature's fail safe against extinction like when there was the Irish potato famine the way that they actually got through it was to go back to the home source of the potato in South America and to find the tiny little purple potatoes that were the grandparent species and breed resistance back into the crops that were actually feeding the people and so I began to understand that this wasn't just a beautiful garden this was actually about preserving a viable future for our food system and that tap on the shoulder that I had experienced like deepened into my belly and so I wound up going home to Santa Fe and quitting my job at the chamber music festival and going to work for the entrepreneurial start up that Kenny started with Gabriel called Seeds of Change which became a biodiversity seed company and it was an amazing chapter in my life it was the steepest learning curve I had ever experienced and I felt like I was serving the resilience of the natural world and I was tireless and completely in love and felt like one of the luckiest people on earth and it was actually about a year later I think that Kenny came to me because Kenny is a researcher and journalist and had been learning all about biodiversity and also about bioremediation which is the use of natural systems to detoxify air and soil and water and he had been on this journey of discovery about amazing people who were basically mimicking nature's systems in order to heal our relationship with nature and I think perhaps because we lived in the American Southwest we both had a really strong affinity for indigenous culture and perhaps just because it was all around us as a very powerful model of people living in right relationship or people who knew how to live many in right relationship to the natural world Bioneers was born as a way to feature and connect people who had innovative solutions for our most pressing environmental and social challenges that were often inspired by nature's brilliance and nature's four billion years of R&D because nature knows how to build for the long term and that we embarked on Bioneers first in 1990 Kenny came to me and said will you help me produce a conference and the name Bioneers he came up with by putting together biological and pioneers as being how do we reinvent human civilization based on nature's brilliance and I remember sitting there at my first conference just with my mouth hanging open hearing the stories and seeing the model examples of people who had so much humility and so much love and such incredible light in their eyes about the capacity of nature's brilliance to help heal everything that we're experiencing that I remember thinking well this is the community of leaders that I want to serve with my communication skills and I can offer just a few examples you want to hear of like the kind of people we're talking about well many of you are probably already familiar with Paul Stamets Paul Stamets is an amazing mycologist he basically studies and serves the fungus among us and he taught me very early on that there aren't most of us think there are three kingdoms of life and what I learned from him is no there are four and we like to call them kingdoms because in nature there are no kings there are many cultures around the world that have used mushrooms for thousands of years as medicine for the human body what if mushrooms are also medicine for the earth how might they be and so he's been exploring that for a long time and he's come up with some amazing examples there was a diesel oil spill near his home in Olympia, Washington and they called in a number of different companies to demonstrate their techniques for cleaning up the diesel because basically where the diesel had spilled was black and putrid and was killing all of life right there so each company got a little 10 by 10 plot and several other companies came in and they sprayed chemicals and they dusted powdered chemicals and they did different they used their approaches and then Paul Stamets came in and he inoculated his patch of ground with the spore of oyster mushrooms and the spore are like the seeds of a mushroom so he inoculated the earth with oyster mushroom spores and he covered it up with a tarp and came back like three weeks later and three weeks later everyone's gathered again to see the results of each of the plots and one by one they rip the tarps off of their plots of land and you know there are modest improvements with some, some of them look just the same and they get to Paul's plot and he pulls off the tarp and it's blanketed with oyster mushrooms some of them 12 inches across completely covered and they test the oyster mushrooms and there's virtually no trace of the diesel oil in the bodies of the mushrooms that actually transformed the biodiesel into something else and but then Paul likes to say then the real magic happened right, like that sounds good already now then the real magic happened they went away and the mushrooms started to decompose and as the mushrooms decomposed insects came and laid larva in the decomposing mushrooms birds came and ate the larva out of the mushrooms and birds often carry seeds on their feathers so the birds dropped seeds into the decomposing mushrooms which helped fertilize the seeds and when they came back a few weeks later you know what had been completely desolate putrid black decimated soil had become a fertile oasis of life so that's what nature can do that's what we got going for us and I love that story and when I get depressed or concerned about what's happening in the world I remember we've got the greatest ally we could possibly imagine we've got a teacher who is our mother surrounding and holding and loving on us and showing us what regenerative capacity is all about and then just another quick example in 1992 we had a panel of native leaders from the southwest to talk about commemorating the 500 year anniversary of Christopher Columbus you know and there was a man there named Petush Gilbert and some of what the Pueblo people in the southwest experienced was particularly violent and particularly brutal when it came his turn to speak he said 500 years ago you came and we welcomed you with open arms and if you came again today we would do the same thing and again I just went oh there is so much for me to learn here you know so that's kind of a quick snapshot example of the kinds of you know there are and scores of pioneers who have spoken over the years it's been an amazing honor to constolate a community that comes from every walk of life that's addressing every issue that we are facing because really what I've come to understand is you know part of the root problem is that we have a society that's built on a sense of false separation and that bringing people together in a way that honors each person's uniqueness and the full value of our human diversity and at the same time recognizes our commonality is one of the most powerful and sacred things we could be doing and deep bow to you two and everyone in the room for helping co-create a space that's happening as well it's extraordinary work and and I think there I want to kind of open it up to a conversation and happy to answer questions I'll just drop in to echo first of all to introduce myself I haven't met some of you today my name is Joshua Fouts I have the I'm sort of weighing the equilibrium and the honor that I feel both in in being invited but to join you all here Matthew and Brian it's really it is a deep and profound honor and I hope to be able to convey that authenticity and that feeling to you all for the time that I'm here and on the other hand just to qualify but I have not been a part of Bioneers for 25 years Bioneer for more than 25 years but I've been with the organization for about 15 months now and if I could just share one anecdote about Bioneers and just to reflect a bit of what you shared Matthew and I think this also this will maybe work toward answering some of the questions that you've asked is Bioneers has fundamentally changed my life and I have in the 15 months that I've been a part of Bioneers met more people like me every day who have these stories about how they entered into it Bioneers was a juncture point at which their life shifted in a more authentic direction for those who are open to synchronicity which I'm very sensitive and open to and order in the cosmos stepping into my moment with Bioneers was really as I look back on the really it began in 2009 and sometimes one could even argue for earlier than that but 2009 was when I first met Kenny and Nina and looking back on it I didn't really see the order but now I look back and it's like I described them as landing lights of synchronicity that were leading me to this moment with you all here now but one of the things I often said one of the metaphors I play with is I describe Kenny and Nina as sort of modern day Johnny Apple seeds and I listened to just the words that Nina shared with you today and you'll get to hear Kenny as well for those who haven't and the two of them really throw out ideas of inspiration seeds of inspiration and some of them blossom and take root and others don't and I viscerally feel that I was one of the that one of the seeds that they cast out germinated in me and completely corrected my life so which was already in a perfectly fine path but it steered in a way that was more meaningful so just that really just that that I feel full of gratitude to be sharing this time with you all but also to get to be in service of the of this vision that Kenny and Nina have cultivated so so honestly the level of dedication that the two of them have demonstrated few other human beings I think could do I mean they have been while we get to kind of dine on the icing on the cake of the sweetness of pioneers it should never be undervalued the amount of blood sweat and tears literally that the two of them have put into keeping just bringing breathing life into this organization and oftentimes it was your own your own energy that sustained it and the labor of stories but I think you all get the gist and it's just one of deep gratitude to the both of you so thanks for the opportunity to share that Josh is very modest but his parents led the way well they taught chimpanzees American Sign Language which essentially proved animal intelligence beyond what anyone was thinking at that time their colleague was Jane Goodall in Africa and there was parallel work going on in that world so Josh grew up with five chimps his aunties and uncles so he was a true binary you can't manufacture that stuff you know but just to add a couple of perspectives just very briefly I know it's people want to go make art but so the film that Nina mentioned it's called Hoxie how healing becomes a crime and it's based on one story of this guy Harry Hoxie who inherited his family's herbal cancer treatment in the 1920s and waged a 35 year battle with organized medicine to get a fair scientific test of the herbs which by the way I did all the research on it when we did the film they'd never been investigated but all of them are anti cancer herbs and or immune boosting herbs that have now been proven in the laboratory to have value the formula was actually discovered by a horse literally so you can imagine how organized medicine went for that and it's in development as a Hollywood film now hopefully we'll see if it ever happens but anyway I went very deep into the medical side of things in the course of the research and there are two branches of medicine what we call allopathic conventional medicine today and then what's loosely called natural medicine so the allopathic tradition came from something called heroic medicine and the basic belief system belief system aka BS is that the body has no ability to heal and the physician needs to intervene very aggressively often with very dangerous or toxic methods to you know kill the disease before without killing the patient basically and this is when they used to give mercury for syphilis and I mean surgery without anesthesia or asepsis I mean really really dangerous stuff they were doing so Hoxie in the empiric school as it was called the belief was that the body has a profound capacity for self repair for healing that we do not understand it in fact we perhaps cannot understand it what we can understand is outcomes this happens right a very empirical approach essentially and so that really gave me the underlying concept for what became by nearest which is this idea of working with nature to heal nature or to help nature heal itself and nature has a profound capacity for healing and self repair and we really don't understand it and it's a disarmingly simple question but how does nature heal I mean this is not what our quote healthcare system is built on it's a disease care model so anyway that was really the underlying principle that inspired what ultimately became by nearest and Matthew would you ask what you can do I think we certainly need money and resources and support and all that but by nearest is above all a community and it began in a very organic manner that was really about providing a platform for these brilliant visionary innovators who were visionary but they had both feet on the ground they were actually manifesting very real models so we're literally facing our mortality on a collective scale right that's actually what's happening and as Rick says there are no fake near death experiences this is the real deal this game is being played for keeps so that's the depth of what transformation means now this is not a light thing at all there's going to be and there already is huge suffering going on dislocation I mean things are going to get a whole lot worse no matter what we do because of what we already set in motion and when you try to trace back where this all came from what Nina started with was that if you look at the western mind going all the way back the single most fundamental characteristic is separation thinking that we are separate from nature separate from the cosmos separate from each other I mean this is really the big fallacy this is the big fundamental systems error right and I would just want to add one thing to that because this is also very much the work that Nina does so it's healing that crisis of relationship that's where this begins also we have a partnership with nature and we should always remember we're the junior partner right so that's kind of where that's at but the other part of that now is that if you also look at the arc of western civilization perhaps the other single greatest hallmark you look at the pantheon of all the so called thinkers and doers it's almost 100% masculine you hardly see a feminine face and it's what Carl Jung archetypally referred to as the sacred marriage it's bringing back the feminine it's bringing back the balance of the masculine and feminine and so that's something that has become you know Nina has been on to this for a long time and I've been grateful to learn about it it took a white male intellectual to convince me of this fully but I got there that's the point so I wouldn't underestimate that and there's data across the board but particularly in relation to women now that when you have 30% women in any given context be it business, economics political leadership justice issues that is the critical mass and at that point the value shift the priority shift there is a long term view there's a view toward relationship there's a view toward the community toward community well being not just individual pursuits etc etc so that's truly one of the game changers right now and as a so called quote we don't necessarily call ourselves an environmental organization although in many ways that's the root of it but we're prepared now to put this front and center that this is what this changes everything this is the absolute game changer and we've been steadily kind of moving in that direction but we're prepared now to just put it absolutely front and center unequivocally and so when you ask what people can do this is the old inside outside inside job as you sometimes say that's one of the crucial shifts right now that really has to occur and I think as we really truly face our mortality you look what happened in New York with 9-1-1 and George Bush told everybody that in order to heal they should go shopping seriously that's what he literally said go to Macy's or whatever and what people wanted to do was to go build shrines and altars and to speak to each other and look at each other's eyes and grieve there is so much grieving that has to be done right now just to get to square one to acknowledge the incredible pain and suffering that's out there so this is a shamanic enterprise at that level that's what we're all in training to do I thought we should form an institution called Shaman U so I'll close there I just wanted to say real quick because I've been to conferences I live in San Francisco and the first one I went to I was like what is this all about it's environment, indigenous women social justice, prison, hip hop music what is this and then after this year I realized that all of those things are connected it really brought it home because between each speaker and the way you guys set it up and you just organically made all the connections and I'll never miss another one as long as I'm able to go to one I'll just say I know we're probably don't have a lot of time but I just want to acknowledge like you are just the real deal to me the way that you just hit the things you hit on it's like any pieces that may have been missed just got like to me got hit on like I feel like you too are really truly our epic mentors and role models in so many ways and I'm just so grateful that you exist and so thank you for just giving us a north star and making yourselves also personally available because I do feel like there's some just a room full of game changers that all will take the wisdom and implement it and I'm just so appreciative for you being here and having an embodied model of holistic change. Yeah. People ask a lot about how you bring this stuff to scale and that's a critically important question because our whole MO has been showing these models that really work. So why doesn't this spread? Well it spreads through stories as Neu was saying that's when we do a lot of communications and just getting the stories out and that leverages change actually pretty quickly in many cases and then the question is how do we move this to scale and this is a very interesting place from what I understand New Zealand for many reasons where people could be elevating models that are going to spread globally and we're working now we moved our headquarters and even I live in Santa Fe and my nurse has been based there but we decided to move to California to move the organization there because that's really the home of it and California is obviously a game changer globally so we're very involved with all that but I think that this kind of model of what could occur in New Zealand where there's quite a bit of openness that's why I'm here partly I'm very interested to see that happen and very admiring of what you're trying to do here so these models then take off and before you know it it's replicating or migrating all over the place.