Be a catalyst for positive social and environmental change in your community by providing support for the Central Coat Bioneers Conference.   Funding is available on many levels, from underwriting  a campaign, such as Food and Farming, Dreaming the Salinas, Eco-Preneurial/Locanomics, or Community Activism, or sponsoring a workshop, field trip or film, or providing scholarships for high school or college age youth or low-income adults.   Please send us an e-mail at info@centralcoastbioneers or call us at 805.548.0597 for more information or to find a workshop that matches your business or interests.  In-kind sponsorships are also welcome.  Ecologistics, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) corporation and all donations are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law.

Thank you to our 2012 sponsors:

Conference Underwriter Level – Athena Zaentz, Portland, OR

Wind Wolves Field Trip Underwriter – E: Monitor, LLC, Santa Barbara

Friday:

Greg Sarris, PhD, Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria  will address on his people’s commitment to position themselves “keepers of the land” once again.

Gretchen Daily, Director of Stanford University’s Center for Conservation Biology – an economist and ecologist, Dr. Daily has created a method of recognizing and quantifying ecosystems as natural capital assets.

Carol Jenkins, Founder of the Women’s Media Center  will explore how to regenerate the public information commons in this polarized age.

Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club  will bring us up to date on the Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign

Saturday:

Bill McKibben, Founder of 350.org will survey the landscape of climate action

Dr. Gabor Mate, physician and expert on addictions and mind-body wellness asserts that most human ailments are not individual problems, but reflections of a person’s relationship with the physical, emotional and social environment, from conception to death

Marina Silva, former Environmental Minister of Brazil, winner of the “Champion of the Earth” award by the UN Environmental Program and considered one of the most important environmental leaders on the planet today will depict how we can balance protecting the Amazon and other vital ecosystems with sane development that brings people out of poverty without destroying the environment

Rev. Fletcher Harper, Executive Director of GreenFaith – will speak about his national interfaith environmental coalition

Sunday:

Sandra Steingraber, PhD – biologist, author and 2011 recipient of a Heinz Award for her research and writing on environmental health.  She was featured in the film Living Downstream, which was shown at the 2011 CCBioneers Conference.

Ai-jen Poo, Co-Director of Caring Across Generations will speak on labor and social justice

Ethan Nadelmann, Founder and Director of the Drug Policy Alliance will ask us to imagine a world in which criminal laws and institutions play little role in drug control policy

Nikki Henderson, Executive Director of The People’s Grocery
in Oakland . This nationally recognized young leader of the food justice movement will explore how we can all support the development of healthy communities and combat childhood malnutrition, diet-related diseases and food injustice

Paul Hawken, Founder of the Natural Capital Institute will wrap up the 2012 plenary lectures.

• We will have an alternative energy track, featuring information on California’s Community Choice Aggregation law and how we can implement it in our local communities.   We will have the inventors of Solar Roadways here about their patented solar panels to imbed in our nation’s highways and parking lots.
• Our eco-preneurial and locanomics track will provide information on the new benefit corporation and flexible purpose corporation models and how your company can make a strong statement that although it makes a profit, it is still a socially and environmental responsible enterprise.  The Slow Money Alliance will be here to unveil their new Permaculture Credit Union – way to invest in local sustainable agriculture.  And we will have the creators of the Central Coast Hour Exchange to talk about the benefits of time banking.
• Our food and farming track will feature a screening of the hilarious and creative film “Truck Farm” and we will hold a Green Chef competition presented by Cal Poly’s Real Food Collaborative.  We will screen the award-winning film “Nothing Like Chocolate” by UCSB Sociology Professor Kum-Kum Bhavnani which addresses ways to end the use of child slave labor at cacao plantations.
• Our featured pre-conference field trip will travel to Wind Wolves Preserve for a look at one of the largest private preserves on the West Coast.  Field trips during the conference will take us on a tour of organic farms, a tour of green homes, and to the Kennedy Library archive collections of our local environmental heroes.
• And much more:  Green Schools, Human Health and the Built Environment, The Work that Reconnects, Living in a Nuclear Evacuation Zone, a Youth Activism Panel and an experiential workshop on Boys’ and Men’s Rights of Passage.

You won’t want to miss a single day, so block out the entire weekend right now and get immersed in the exciting and hopeful world of the Bioneers.

Imagine a community with prolific, thriving, family farms that supply the local schools, hospitals, restaurants, grocery stores and even prisons with nourishing, locally produced food. SLO County is capable of becoming such a community, and the Central Coast Ag Network (CCAN) is working hand-in-hand with many others to bring this vision to fruition.

CCAN will be using a portion of the funding recently awarded by the California Department of Food and Agriculture to provide the community with a clearer picture of our county’s capacity for agricultural production through a Food System Assessment. This research will build upon data and resources that have already been gathered by affiliate organizations such as the SLO County Foodbank Coalition’s Hunger Free Communities Study and the Center for Sustainability’s Central Coast Foodshed Guide .

CCAN’s Food System Assessment will help us to strengthen our local food system by seeking community input and involving a variety of stakeholders from all levels of our local food supply chain, that is to say ‘from seed to table, and everyone in between.’ Increasing institutional buying of local produce by improving farm to school programs is one goal of this endeavor, but in order to fully shape the scope of the study, more community input is needed. The Assessment is expected to be completed in the Spring of 2013.

–Courtney Melblom

Outside Now teachers and students used to travel to Marin every year to attend the Bioneers Conference.  In 2010, they were thrilled to find a conference in their own backyards!   Anyone who attended the 2010 CCBioneers conference at Cal Poly saw the students hard at work doing indigenous fire-starting demonstrations during the lunch breaks each day.  At the 2011 conference, they sold hot coffee and tea and muffins from their booth at the entrance of the Vet’s Hall.

Outside Now is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to reconnecting people to the wonders of the natural world. Whether you simply want to get off your couch for an hour or your desire is to foster a deep nature connection, Outside Now has vibrant programs for people of all ages.  For more information about the academy and its programs, go to www.outsidenow.org.

We began the walking tour with a dynamic presentation/conversation by/with Regina Hirsch, Sierra Watershed Progressive about “Planting Water”, why we should care about water conservation and described a few different techniques of harvesting or planting water. From there we took a walking tour to the site of the CCC Native Plant Propagation Nursery where the CCC has installed a 47,000 gallon tank that stores water captured off the roof top of the storage tank and the 4000 sf rooftop of the CCC Warehouse.  This water is distributed to the greenhouse, compost bin and outside plants via a solar pump and is expected to take care of the water needs for the propagation nursery year round.

The Greywater Project was our next stop where Americorps Watershed Stewards Project member, Wendy Laumer demonstrated the Greywater reuse project located at the CCC laundry facility. Greywater from five industrial washing machines, that service 80 residential corpsmembers, is filtered through an Aqua2use filtration system, then pumped to a 550 gallon tank that expels its contents twice within a 24 hour period to an irrigation system that waters ten apple trees and the rest of the Greywater is meant to infiltrate into the 10,000 square feet of land to make its way through the soil to recharge the groundwater table.

In addition, we talked about the future Low Impact Development (LID) project due to be implemented in Spring 2012 on one of the CCC Crew Dorms.  This project will passively capture rainwater in the earth by modifying the topography and planting appropriate native plants around the building by constructing infiltration basins to encourage the water to soak into the ground. This technique of “planting water” will discourage accumulating rain to runoff the landscape during storm events and discharging into our creeks at a faster than normal rate which will contribute to a skewed hydrograph that can lead to incision and erosion in our creeks and reduce the amount of rainfall sinking into the ground to recharge our groundwater.

We look forward with great anticipation to the 2012 Bioneers Conference.  Keep up the good work!!

—Meredith Hardy