The Revolution, according to Kenny Ausubel, co-founder of Bioneers — whose name is descriptive of its mission — is inevitable and well under way.

"The thing that is really different for us these days is that we are just finding that there is such a heightened sensitivity in the world," said Ausubel, who with his wife, Nina Simons, created the Santa Fe-based, Mother-Nature-knows-best organization in 1990.

Its ubiquitous mission: To encourage and enable "nature's operating instructions" to serve humanity in multiple disciplines "without harming the web of life."

"Things are breaking down around us in greater and greater chunks now, and we are not going back to business as usual. It's not going to work," said Ausubel, 62.

"It's also a time for novelty and reinvention."

Ausubel and his Bioneers argue that overcentralization in areas such as food and energy systems have resulted in things going from bad to worse to intolerable, making change inevitable.

"Systems that we're vulnerable to are too big not to fail, so wouldn't we be better off with more localized energy and food systems?"

He cited scenarios in which three states lose power because a tree falls on a line in Ohio, or one rifleman takes out the entire Trans-Alaska oil pipeline with a single bullet or how 76 million Americans get food poisoning every year from a centralized, chemically driven food production and distribution system.

"These are not accidents," Ausubel said. "They are predictable occurrences that will continue to happen."

Bioneers' visionary world, based in great part on copying nature to solve the planet's stickiest social and environmental problems, is still somewhat of an imaginary place — a place where mushrooms restore plundered ecosystems, where storytellers build love- and tolerance-based communities and Google Earth maps alternative futures for the planet's inhabitants.

Ausubel says Bioneers has evolved — through its conferences, radio network and educational and practical applications — as a platform for dozens of innovative social, scientific and artistic voices drawn from "the entire arc of human endeavor."

In a Bioneers world, disparate voices connect across time, space and political consciousness: Rachel Carson discusses environmental degradation with Steven Hawking. Leon Panetta questions Gloria Steinem about women's leadership roles and Deepak Chopra explains Yogi Berra.

"If you really take seriously the idea of interdependence," Ausubel says, then you have to listen to voices and ideas from every corner of the human scientific and social spectrum.

"Ardent, lucid voices, like Bioneers, have generated a wealth of great ideas, propelling them successfully into action," Ausubel says.

During Bioneers' 20 years, Ausubel cited the explosion of farmers markets, the creation of bioremediation projects (and not having to always explain what "bioremediation" is), a Rhode Island sewage-treatment plant that mimics various microecologies, and fungi reappropriated as eco-restorers.

Bioneers is currently gearing up for its 22nd annual conference in San Rafael, Calif., from October 14 to 16. (The first three were held in Santa Fe, but the event quickly outgrew the accommodations.) Areas to be addressed in dozens of speeches, panel discussions, presentations and films include biomimicry, indigenous rights, energy sustainabilty as national defense, and the exploration of masculine and feminine principles and their influence on our lives.

Basically, if you can think of a subject, a Bioneer will be talking about it, demonstrating it or singing about it to an expected 3,000 or so like-minded souls all trying to tap into their inner Al Gore.

"It's kind of like preaching to the choir," conceded John de Graaf, co-director of the Seattle-based Happiness Initiative, who has been a conference speaker for several years. "But sometimes the choir needs to learn to sing better."