At This Gathering, the Only Alternative Is to Be Alternative

SAN RAFAEL, Calif., Oct. 21 — Along with Santa Ana winds and ripe persimmons, fall here brings with it a migratory phenomenon known as the Bioneers, a three-day pep rally for environmentalists, lefty political activists and young people with “Renewable Energy Is Homeland Security” bumper stickers that transforms the Marin Civic Center into something of a megachurch for the Prius set.

For some 3,200 true believers, and about 10,000 others who were beamed in by satellite from simultaneous conferences in Logan, Utah; Honolulu; and other far-flung places, the Bioneers is part tribal gathering and part support group, encouraging adherents to connect with their inner Al Gore. (The name is a play on biodiversity and pioneers.)

Students, organic farmers, architects, advocates for Pacific dolphins and a growing number of entrepreneurs looking to invest in green technology come to hear the latest thinking on global warming (code word: Katrina) and how to keep the food supply safe (buzzword: spinach). Alternative energy, Bioremediation and environmental justice, once-fringy issues, have over the course of the conference’s 17-year history become part of the national dialogue.

“It’s biology as a metaphor for social change,” said Paul Hawken, an author and a founder of Smith & Hawken, the outdoor supply company. Mr. Hawken double-dipped, speaking at a satellite conference in Marion, Mass., then flying back to Marin. “It’s a parallel universe,” he said.

It’s a universe unto its own, all right. Paul E. Stamets, a mycologist and the founder of Fungi Perfecti, a mail-order mushroom business, lectured on “myco-remediation,” or using fungi to restore toxic waste sites. Mr. Stamets also announced a patent for a household pesticide that uses the mold state of the Cordyceps mushroom to kill 100,000 to 200,000 species of insects — a new eco-spin on the old Roach Motel.

Mr. Stamets shared the stage with Jay Harman, a naturalist who is now the chief executive of Pax Scientific, an engineering company rooted in “biomimicry,” a fledgling science that takes its inspiration from nature’s designs and processes.

Mr. Harman showed a small device capable of circulating five million gallons of water, using only a light bulb’s worth of electricity. “It’s all about flow,” he said, adding that the technology could be applied to aircraft, fans, pumps and water circulators for reservoirs.

Activists talking about the environmental exploitation of native lands for oil and gas development — or what Clayton Thomas-Muller, a Canadian organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network, called “energy genocide” — communed with vendors from the Elixir Café who were doling out $2 hits of Lavender Bliss, a viscous purple liquid billed as a decongestant for “blocked energy.”

The conference is the brainchild of Kenny Ausubel, a 57-year-old writer and filmmaker who was co-founder of the organic seed company Seeds of Change, and Nina Simons, the former president of the company and a former marketing director for Odwalla. Since 1990, they have operated from an old schoolhouse in Lamy, N.M., outside Santa Fe. They credit their experience with Seeds of Change, since sold, with convincing them that a fledgling political movement could be forged from issues like sustainable agriculture and green technology — fields, Mr. Ausubel said, “that in 1990 were like talking about U.F.O.’s.”

Since then, the culture has in some ways caught up. For instance, Mr. Ausubel has been an adviser to the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, whose coming feature-length documentary on global warming, “The 11th Hour,” was filmed extensively at last year’s Bioneers conference.

“The issues they were raising a decade ago, from local food to rooftop power, have moved into the mainstream,” said Bill McKibben, a writer who spoke at last year’s conference. “The Bioneers has been consistently ahead of the curve. It began as a gathering place for a fairly small number of like-minded people but is now a hatchery for the next wave of important ideas that five years hence people will be talking about in Rotary Clubs.”

The ground troops of the environmental movement, Mr. Harman said, “are not business-savvy — they want to make a difference but don’t know how to do it.”

So they came to learn sophisticated tactics from people like Tzeporah Berman, the program director of ForestEthics, a nonprofit organization founded in 1994 to protect endangered forests. It successfully pressured Office Depot and Staples to phase out supply paper made from endangered old-growth forests and persuaded Ikea not to use wood from the temperate rain forest now known as Great Bear, in British Columbia.

John Maus, a 67-year-old contractor from Littleton, Colo., who builds Starbucks stores — which he defended as “meeting places” — came to the conference for the latest intelligence on green building. “The industry is slow to change and uses huge amounts of natural resources,” Mr. Maus said. “We need to develop a conscience.”

Despite its mantra of biodiversity, the conclave can sometimes feel a bit like a monoculture, a love-fest between graying activists and youthful idealists with blond dreadlocks and veggie-fueled cars, most of them Caucasian. “It’s a conference of privilege,” said Brennan Manoakeesick, 28, an Oji-cree from Winnipeg who is working with low-income neighborhoods. “We’re here to provide a context, to give face to the faceless.”

William Casey, an eye surgeon and olive grower from St. Helena in the Napa Valley, stood out in a button-down shirt. He came with his wife, Rachel, to keep tabs on the latest trends in integrative pest management. Inspired by last year’s Bioneers, they put up songbird houses and added carnivorous plants to their olive groves to control the olive fruit fly. South African guinea fowl now roam the premises destroying larvae.

“We get tremendous energy from it,” Mr. Casey said of the gathering. “It’s like the Big Bang.”