Looking to nature for innovative solutions
Founders of Santa Fe-based nonprofit Bioneers receive international recognition for work
The husband-and-wife combination of Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simons found themselves onstage at Nikkei Hall in Tokyo, accepting the 2017 Goi Peace Award. The setting was a comfortable place for Simons — when she was younger, she dreamed of a career in theater. Ausubel was less at home: “My interest with these [awards],” he said, “is always to further the work.”
The work is called Bioneers, and it has brought Ausubel and Simons, both of Santa Fe, a variety of adventures — and honors, such as the Goi Peace Award.
Ausubel describes Bioneers as “a community of leadership in a time when we are all called upon to be leaders.”
Nevertheless, it’s hard to describe the nonprofit organization because its “products” are the visions, knowledge, practices and “breakthrough solutions” of people from around the world. The group includes artists, ecologists, authors, musicians and
CEOs who, Ausubel said, “look to nature — not as a resource, but as teacher, mentor and model” to help solve the world’s most pressing environmental and social problems.
In July, the Goi Peace Foundation in Tokyo sent Simons and Ausubel an email, telling them they’d been chosen to receive the award “for their pioneering work to promote nature-inspired innovations for restoring the Earth and our human community.”
The foundation has been giving these awards since 2000, and past winners have included Deepak Chopra, Bill Gates and Mikhail Gorbachev, among others.
“We both first wondered if it was real or a joke,” Simons said from the Bioneers offices on the second floor of the Farmer’s Market Pavilion in the Railyard. The couple have no idea — and still don’t — how they were chosen.
“We kind of looked at each other [and said], ‘Really?’ ”
The Goi award is named after the late Japanese teacher and poet Masahisa Goi, who witnessed the destruction of Hiroshima after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the city near the end of World War II.
That led Goi to start a world peace movement, “to unite the hearts of humanity, transcending all boundaries of culture, religion and politics.” Ausubel and Simons are part of that movement.
Simons, a native New Yorker, was a theater major in college and is the daughter of local KSFR Living Juicy talk show host Rhea Goodman. It was during a trip to Santa Fe in the 1980s to visit her mom that she decided the city was paradise and she wanted to live here. She gave up on her dream and held various jobs to support herself here.
Simons connected with Ausubel, a journalist and filmmaker, in 1987, when they were both having dinner at a mutual friend’s home. It was a fix-up gone right. Recalls Simons: “[Kenny] was just finishing a feature film about alternative cancer therapies. As I got to know him, and became familiar with his project, my own idealism got rekindled.”
Simons helped Ausubel finish and distribute his film. And since then, she has been Ausubel’s partner in love and work.
Bioneers, Ausubel says, began in a hot tub in 1990 at Santa Fe’s Ten Thousand Waves mountain resort.
“I was sitting in a hot tub with a friend and investor in Seeds of Change, the organic seed company I had just started,” Ausubel said. “[Seeds of Change’s] mission was to help revive agricultural biodiversity, because diversity is the very fabric of nature. It is nature’s failsafe mechanism against extinctions; its source of innovation and regeneration.”
With Ausubel’s background in journalism and film, Simons’ background in theater and the friend’s offer of a $10,000 investment, the couple started planning their first Bioneers conference in Santa Fe.
Ausubel and Simons knew they needed to engage hearts and minds. They also knew they needed a “set” — a touch of theater — to provide context and an experience if they were going to have a truly transformative impact on the attendees; 250 people showed up.
Fast-forward to 2017, and the Bioneers’ annual conference audience has grown to over 3,000. It’s now called a summit, has relocated to the Bay Area in Northern California and attracts artists, authors, intellectuals, musicians and scientists — movers and shakers — from all over the world.
In November, Ausubel and Simons packed their bags and headed to Tokyo to accept their award. Hundreds of people were in attendance, mostly Japanese business and social leaders, diplomats and youth.
On stage, the couple were given a proclamation, a “big heavy medal which they hung around Kenny’s neck,” and a monetary prize. Simons wore the pearls she had been given by the foundation the evening before.
“I, who have never worn pearls a day in my life, had a rope of three strands of pearls around my neck,” she said.
“Today’s ‘wicked problems,’ ” Ausubel told the audience in his acceptance speech, “are far too big and complex for any one person to solve. In this time, leadership arises in and from community. As it is in nature, there may be dazzling soloists, but in the end, it’s all about the symphony.”
He shared with them Bioneers’ beginnings and a few inspirational stories. Then Simons spoke about her journey through those same 28 years.
“It is an enormous validation that you … who have done so much to promote world peace, and are based halfway around the globe from the U.S., have heard of Bioneers and perceive value in our work,” she said.
The couple returned home to Santa Fe after the ceremony, but the high of their Tokyo experience was replaced by “an annual cycle of year-end fundraising, like every nonprofit in the world,” Simons said.
In addition to the Bioneers’ conferences, programs, a radio series and a website in the process of being revamped, Simons is writing her second book, Integral Leadership: One Woman’s Journey. Ausubel is working on a new film, Changing of the Gods, about “the cycles of revolution and transformation across human history,” due to be released next year.
“We should be angry,” said Simons, given the current state of the world. “But we have also inherited some twisted definitions around anger and gender, as well as leadership. We’re in a massive redefinition — for me the trick to living now is about staying present [to] my grief, anger, despair and my hope, all at the same time. “
One Bioneers participant, John Densmore, the former drummer for The Doors, said he was deeply affected by a Bioneers summit. “When I first heard of Bioneers, I thought, ‘What the hell is that? Pioneers? Engineers? Biologists? Sounds like hodgepodge,” he wrote in the group’s 25th anniversary yearbook.
“Some kinda artificial glue job,” he added. “… I finally experienced one [conference] myself, and frankly, came home high. Not from the herb. From the content. And the love vibe.
“But this wasn’t just a bunch of new age fantasizers,” Densmore said. “These were serious thinkers from all kinds of different, very respectable, professions. Up until then, I’d become rather pessimistic about the future. Ever since then, I’ve felt, due to the brilliance of the presenters at Bioneers, that we have a chance.”
Ausubel told the Goi Peace Award audience that the world needs “all hands on deck. It comes down to growing the national and global movement of movements that are working for 100 percent clean energy, ecological agriculture, green design, biomimicry, watershed restoration, social and economic justice, racial and gender justice and democratic governance …
“To succeed, we’re called upon to cooperate on a grand scale. It requires the equivalent of a wartime mobilization, yet its purpose is precisely the opposite: to create peace — with the land, each other and ourselves.”
Contact Jan Schlain at 505-986-3063 or jschlain@sfnewmexican.com.