October 15, 2012
Contact: Mark Westlund (415) 977-1719
Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune to Address Bioneers Conference
Sierra Club Books to Release Bioneers Book Series in E-Book Format
Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, will be a keynote speaker on opening day of the 23rd annual National Bioneers Conference, to be held from October 19 through 21 at Marin Center in San Rafael, California. The Bioneers Book Series, published by Sierra Club Books, will be rolled out in e-book format in conjunction with the conference. "We are delighted to have Michael Brune as one of our keynote speakers this year," said Kenny Ausubel, co-CEO and co-founder of the Bioneers. "We are honored to continue our joint efforts with the Sierra Club to inform and effect change in people, policies, and the planet."
In 1990 Ausubel coined the term Bioneers to describe a network of "biological pioneers" that he and cofounder Nina Simons helped to catalyze. Through the Bioneers' projects and programs, social and scientific innovators bring nature-inspired approaches to the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges. The annual National Bioneers Conference has become a leading-edge knowledge forum where thousands of engaged leaders and citizens from diverse cultures and disciplines connect to share solutions for restoring natural systems and human communities. Veteran Bioneer and author Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) says that the Bioneers conference "has had a significant impact on my work. . . . Every time I go, I learn something."
Brune's talk will focus on how we are actually further along in the fight against climate disruption than we might expect, due in part to the success of grassroots coalition efforts like the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. A charismatic speaker, he will make the case for the nation's inevitable progress towards a clean energy future based on solar and wind. Brune is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and Daily Kos and author of Coming Clean: Breaking America's Addiction to Oil and Coal, also published by Sierra Club Books. "The Bioneers conference brings together some of our best minds to develop nature-inspired solutions to the world's environmental and social challenges," Brune observed.
The books in the Bioneers Series feature writings by many of the distinguished participants in the history of the National Bioneers Conference. In Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, the first of the series, leading health visionaries show how human health is inescapably dependent on the health of our environment. Its contributors, who include Drs. Andrew Weil, Jeanne Achtenberg, Samuel Epstein, and Anthony Cortese, emphasize public health measures that also protect the environment, and embrace an integrative medicine that uses the best of all approaches to healing.
Nature's Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies, goes to the heart of the Bioneers' mission, describing strategies grounded in the innate wisdom and engineering prowess of natural ecosystems -- strategies that can transform the industrial economy by "wedding human ingenuity with the wisdom of the wild," as contributor John Todd puts it. The book also features essays by Paul Hawken, David Suzuki, Michael Pollan, Terry Tempest Williams, Janine Benyus, Amory and Hunter Lovins, and David Orr. The San Francisco Chronicle called it "an array of imaginative and practical solutions for some of the most perplexing environmental challenges of our time."
Third in the series is Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World. Created by Berkeley's influential Center for Ecological Literacy, it gathers some of the best thinking about a natural systems model for learning and stories of how it has been successfully applied. Contributors to this volume include Wendell Berry, Ernest Callenbach, Fritjof Capra, Robert Hass, and Alice Waters. Michael Pollan called it "the best book of its kind...a critical contribution to rethinking how we teach our children about their place in nature."
Throughout its 50-year history, Sierra Club Books has always sought to publish the work of leading environmental thinkers and writers, among them Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, David Brower, David James Duncan, Susan Griffin, Jerry Mander, and Paul Shepard. "With so much innovation in this field coming out of the Bioneers community, collaborating with them on a book series was a natural for us" notes Sierra Club Books publisher Helen Sweetland. "The books have inspired readers around the world, and we wanted to expand their impact even further. Given that the Bioneers have been so forward-looking in their communications -- live-streaming their presentations and creating their own online forum -- it seems very fitting that the Bioneers Series will now reach a much wider readership in e-book format."
Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves
Edited by Kenny Ausubel with J. P. Harpignies
Foreword by Andrew Weil, M.D.
Paperback ISBN 978-1-57805-098-7
E-Book ISBN 978-1-57805-196-0
Nature's Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies
Edited by Kenny Ausubel with J. P. Harpignies
Foreword by Paul Hawken
Paperback ISBN 978-1-57805-099-4
E-Book ISBN 978-1-57805-197-7
Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World
Edited by Michael K. Stone and Zenobia Barlow
Preface by Fritjof Capra
Paperback ISBN 978-1-57805-153-3
E-Book ISBN 978-1-57805-198-4
Published by Sierra Club Books
For a complete list of titles and authors, please visit www.SierraClubBooks.org