Bioneers Conference - ICIS Report

San Rafael, California, October 15-17, 2004
(part II)

Text and photographs by Henning Wettendorff

Part I

Silence and dynamics

Intense drumming called people to the huge auditorium of the Marin Civic Centre, just north of San Francisco where Bioneers held its 15th anniversary conference in mid-October. Drummers initiated the plenary talks, and the audience stormingly applaused high-profile speakers including Amy Goodman (Democracy Now), Rocky Mountains Institute director Amory Lovins, and Candace B. Pert of Georgetown University, DC, cheered for her work on developing inexpensive, non-toxic drugs in the battle against AIDS. But the uniting metaphor of this anniversary conference was - silence.
Not in the metaphorical sense, that the audience in any sense held its breath while awaiting the outcome of the November presidential election. But silence does have a special meaning in most parts of the US where the noise from fans, tv and radio stations seems inescapable.

Rather than maintaining and upholding silence, Goodman urged the US media and especially grassroots news networks representatives "to go where the silence is," and to break it. Jay Harman of California told of how his innovative work in 'biomimickry' - spending extended periods of time in nature, when he watches its mechanisms at work, and shared with the audience how he actually creates biomimicking designs based on observations and inner reflection during such stays. John Mohawk laid out pre-christian, Indian thought when he stated: "You don't have to be a believer, it's not about faith, but you have to be an appreciator - you have to be there."

Democracy and Environment

Environmental issues never went high on the US presidential election agenda in the Fall. But congressional and local elections brought the issue to attention regionally throughout in the country, and thousands of enthusiastic followers attended the 15th Bioneers conference in San Rafael, California.
Not that the conference was covered on national television or newspapers. But Bioneers this year arranged satellite transmissions of its four-hour morning sessions to 14 cities in the US, as well as to Vancouver, Canada, all hosting independent conferences on sustainability and the environment. Bioneers is based in New Mexico but organizes its annual conference in northern California where it sells out fairly quickly every year, and with large numbers of people interested in sustainability - and where the time zone is ideal for serving the rest of the continent through satellite-beamed transmissions. When it's morning in California, it's daytime in the rest of the country.

Kenny Ausubel, founder of Bioneers, opened a morning presentation with the remark that "information is the currency of democracy". The absence of information leaves big holes in the consciousness of decision-makers as well the wider population trying to understand the implications of such a thing as stem-cell research (which finally entered the political debates and showed democrats and republicans to agree and disagree on this subject across party-lines).
In the perhaps 'American' way, these morning plenaries took issue with the world's greatest problems, including AIDS in Africa, War on Terror, GMO and other agricultural techniques, and not least what the legendary Rocky Mountains Institute director Amory Lovins termed the Oil-end-game.
Typical of the talks offered, Lovins didn't just present the problems but offered a clear economic picture and an innovative technological perspective of dealing with the enormous problems the globe as well as our economies are facing, due to our continued reliance on fossil fuel burning. In an afternoon session with Jay Harman on biodesigned solutions to such problems, Lovins finally hinted that his Orangutang friends may be wiser than we are, in the end games - showing videos to the amusement and great surprise of an audience overwhelmed by the communication programs going on with Orangutangs and Bonopos.
Harman's 'biomimicking' impeller has already been proven to enhance the efficiency of such devices and could probably reduce the world's future energy spending by simply mimicking the spiral pattern of water in motion.
Something which even an ape could have thought of, one thinks after Lovins exemplified his communication with the Bonopos.
(www.iowagreatapes.org, www.biomimickry.org)

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