Bioneers

I listened to many of the Bioneers speakers Saturday and Sunday that were broadcast by Satellite to places around the country including Bloomingon, Indiana (through The Center For Sustainable Living) and Vernal, Utah. I've been to Vernal - I have ancestors from there - it's quite the small town. I was surprised it was one on the 16 places on the Bioneers circuit.

I think the first speaker I heard, TZEPORAH BERMAN, "Corporate Campaigns and the New Environmentalism: Places, People and the Fate of our Last Great Forests" may have been the most inspring. I was impressed with the efforts she described - working with the group, Forest Ethics, to save 5 million acres of Forest from logging in British Columbia along the coast. And her willingness and ability to "turn our corporate adversaries into allies".

One of the Forest Ethics campaigns is against turning the Boreal (and other) Forests into mail order catalogs (and newspapers) in general and against Victoria's Secret's 365 million catalogs they send out in particular. For the people on the mailing list - what people can do is to send back the mail order form with the note to be taken off of their mailing list. Get on their email list if you want to know what a company is selling.

We used to get dozens of mail-order catalogs at Christmastime, esp. Not so much, anymore, since we moved. Besides the catalogs - there is a massive amount of waste associated with the Sunday paper ads. Ads that I rarely look at, anyway. One of these days - I may go to just getting the local paper online, as I get the rest of my news. To save paper, trees and all.

Another esp. intereting speaker was, THOMAS LINZEY "Turning Defense into Offense: Challenging Corporations and Creating Self-Governance".