Earth Stories

Earth Day Miyawaki 2024 - Journeying into Miyawaki Forests - Blog Post 7

sean@seedlingsforesteducation.ca (Sean Steele) — Fri, 10 May 2024 23:42:58 GMT

A new Earth Stories Blog exploring Miyawaki Forests

Blog Post #7 with Outdoor Educator Sean Steele

Recently I was invited by the Green Party of Canada (Saanich-Gulf Islands) to present on the Miyawaki method. The event took place on April 21 ^st at the Star Cinema in Sidney, BC. I was joined by Bruno Vernier, a permaculturalist who has done formal training in the Miyawaki method and is director of the Garden City Conservation Society in Richmond, BC. As part of Earth Day events, our presentation was focused on informing the public about the Miyawaki method and giving Bruno the opportunity to talk about the mini-forests he has helped plant. Elizabeth May, the Leader of the Green Party of Canada, and Adam Olsen, Green Party MLA and former interim Leader of the Green Party of BC, also spoke at the event.

The event was organized by Green Party member Debra Kelly who also served as the MC. She set things in motion by playing Shubhendu Sharma’s excellent TED Talk on Miyawaki forests – the very same TED Talk that first got me interested in this approach. After watching this great introduction to the Miyawaki method, Bruno and I gave our presentation.

In the image above, Bruno and I can be seen presenting on the right, and the topics we discussed can be seen on the screen. We provided some background of who Akira Miyawaki was, how he developed his method of planting, and shared some benefits of planting mini-forests in urban areas. I then talked briefly about tree equity and the ways Miyawaki forests can contribute to creating green spaces in lower-income neighbourhoods in cities.

Bruno then took the lead and guided the audience through a series of photographs of the four Miyawaki forests he has helped plant in Richmond (two examples are provided below). In the final portion, Bruno and I shared a few locations where audience members can buy the native species of trees and shrubs needed to plant a Miyawaki forest. We then talked briefly about the recent free Miyawaki method training course now offered through Green Communities Canada. We ended our talk with a question and answer period.

After our presentation, Bruno led a small group of participants to a patch of grass in front of City Hall in Sidney to share more of his knowledge about how to survey a potential plot of land suitable for a Miyawaki forest. Together, we chatted about different areas around us that might serve and discussed various issues we might meet when digging in a particular area. This gave people, including me, a realistic idea of the challenges that people can face when planning a site. Preparing the soil for a Miyawaki forest means digging down 1 metre (3 feet), which is deep enough to come across pipes or electrical wires. These practical matters need to be taken into consideration, especially in the kinds of urban environments where I hope to see new Miyawaki forests.

Here is a photo of us (Bruno on the right and me on the left) in front of City Hall standing on one of the patches of grass that served as a potential planting site we used to focus the conversation.

Overall, the event was a success. It was attended by approximately 80 people, and members of the audience seemed engaged. Several people asked questions during our presentation which spurned good discussions, and I hope that people left both informed and inspired.

For me, the event was a success because I got to learn more about Bruno’s Miyawaki forests. As previously covered in an Earth Literacies blog post by Elaine Decker , the first Miyawaki forest in BC was planted with Bruno’s help at Richmond Secondary School. Two more were then planted on grounds within Terra Nova Rural Park. Most recently, the Garden City Conservation Society and a team of volunteers planted a Miyawaki forest in Garden City Park.

This image shows the different species spaced out on the planting site. Bruno can be seen checking that everything is in place.

This image shows the group of volunteers who came to help transfer those potted trees into the ground and create the fourth Miyawaki forest in Richmond.

I was inspired by Bruno’s practical approach, and our talk benefitted greatly from his hands-on experience. I want to follow in Bruno’s footsteps and one day start to gain some hands-on experience as part of a team of volunteers. I am excited to hear about more Miyawaki forests being planted in cities across Canada and can only hope that our talk will motivate people to start thinking about ways to create their own mini-forest.

For the latest blog submissions to Earth Stories from Sean, as he documents his Miyawaki Forest Journey (and how you might do the same in your 'backyard'), check our Earth Stories Blog every couple weeks and / or subscribe to the Programs in Earth Literacies Newsletter where new articles will be posted and delivered via email.

Canadian Geographic - Journeying into Miyawaki Forests - Blog Post 6

sean@seedlingsforesteducation.ca (Sean Steele) — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:27:01 GMT

A new Earth Stories Blog exploring Miyawaki Forests

Blog Post #6 with Outdoor Educator Sean Steele

On January 3rd of this year, Canadian Geographic published a short article about a series of mini-forests that were planted across the country in 2023. These projects are part of a national pilot project, organized by Green Communities Canada , to plant mini-forests in and around Canadian cities. The mini-forests on this map are part of a series of ongoing and future projects eligible for funding through the Living Cities Canada Fund Demonstration Steam to design, plan, plant, and nurture new urban green spaces.

The article features a map that points out where each of these forests are located, with additional information and photographs taken at each of the respective planting day events. As the article states, “Six new mini forests were planted in cities across Canada in 2023 as part of a national pilot project to combat biodiversity loss and create new green spaces in urban areas — and the work is just beginning” ( Canadian Geographic ). Here’s an image of the interactive map, which visually highlights how these projects represent the tip of the iceberg:

Five of the six mini-forests have been planted in Southern Ontario, and one in Richmond, BC. I wanted to focus on this map (see image above), and the ongoing work of Green Communities Canada, because I find these projects inspiring. As a staunch optimist, I see this largely blank map in a positive light – as a space of pure potential. I envision yellow markers popping up in and around every urban environment in Canada from St. John’s to Whitehorse. My optimism is buoyed by the fact that these are far from the only mini-forests that have been planted across Canada in the past several years. These are just the ones funded by this national pilot project.

The sole mini-forest outside Ontario was planted in Terra Nova Rural Park in Richmond, the same Lower Mainland city where members of Earth Literacies volunteered to help plant a Miyawaki forest on the grounds of Richmond Secondary School . The result is that two mini-forests have sprung up 6 kilometres from each other.

To me, this signals the beginning of an ever-growing network of green spaces created by teams of organizers, community workers, and volunteers. Eventually, I envision this map populated with markers that not only indicate new mini-forests but also advertise upcoming projects in need of volunteers. By gathering information and sharing resources, teams of dedicated people can help each other secure funding, successfully navigate roadblocks, issues, and complications, troubleshoot common problems, and share pictures of the urban forests they help create.

Each of the six mini-forests marked on the Canadian Geographic map include images of the planting events that helped create them. Here is a photo from the mini-forest planted in Terra Nova Rural Park in Richmond, BC in April 2023.

In a previous post, I talked about IVN Nature Education, a Dutch organization that guides schoolchildren through the process of planting and caring for a Miyawaki forest. The photo above offers a similar opportunity for young people to become invested in the stewardship of a green space in the community where they live. Located near a playground in the same park, this new Miyawaki forest offers fresh opportunities for children and their families to watch as the integrated network of densely planted trees and shrubs burst into life. In a matter of years, this small plot of city park will be transformed into something that can stand tall as a living example of a community that came together to positively contribute to their environment. To use another example, check out these images from the planting day for the first Pocket Tiny Forest in Toronto:

A collaboration between the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority’s (TRCA) Sustainable Neighbourhood Action Program (SNAP), the City of Toronto, the Pocket Community Association (PCA), and the Network of Nature, the Pocket Tiny Forest brought children and their families together to plant the first pocket forest in the city. As the name suggests, a pocket forest takes the same approach as a Miyawaki forest but on an even smaller, more compact scale.

These two examples offer snapshots of the kind of grounded, small-scale community projects that can gradually grow across Canada. In years to come, I hope to see the map created by Canadian Geographic populated with dozens of new urban mini-forests, including new images showing people of all ages coming together to help create healthy green spaces where they live.

Land-Based Learning & Nature Education - Journeying into Miyawaki Forests - Blog Post 5

sean@seedlingsforesteducation.ca (Sean Steele) — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 01:06:36 GMT

Above: Children helping to plant a Miyawaki forest as part of an IVN Nature Education program - Image source

A new Earth Stories Blog exploring Miyawaki Forests

Blog Post #5 with Outdoor Educator Sean Steele

In my last post, I talked about the organization Boomforest and their ongoing efforts to transform small urban spaces throughout France into Miyawaki forests. Boomforest is an organization committed to making positive changes in their communities so that future generations can have opportunities to interact with wild spaces in their everyday environments. Closely aligned with Boomforest’s mission, IVN Nature Education is a Dutch organization that works directly with these future generations.

Led by Daan Bleichrodt, IVN Nature Education collaborates with schools and community organizations to guide children to prepare, plant, and care for Miyawaki forests. Inspired by the creation of soccer fields and other recreational green spaces around schools in the Netherlands, Bleichrodt wondered what other kinds of green spaces could be created for children, parents, and educators. Like me, Bleichrodt stumbled across Shubhendu Sharma’s TED talk about Miyawaki forests. Interested in Sharma’s talk, he learned more about this approach to planting mini-forests. He then started gathering a group of like-minded people and, in May 2015, planted Holland’s first Miyawaki forest in the city of Haarlem. Since then, IVN Nature Educator has planted dozens of Miyawaki forests throughout the Netherlands.

I learned about Bleichrodt’s work with IVN Nature Education in Hannah Lewis’ recent book on Miyawaki forests, where I also learned about Boomforest. In a video chat with Lewis, Bleichrodt said:

“So many kids grow up without nature. That’s scary to me because we have all these big challenges—like climate change, loss of biodiversity, and the plastic soup. Will you protect nature as an adult if you didn’t grow up with it? In 2050, today’s kids will be at least thirty years old, and we need to be carbon neutral by then. So there’s a great urgency to connect kids to nature” (Lewis, 2022, p. 61).

I agree with Bleichrodt’s sentiment. Children today who grow up in urban environments may not be connecting with natural, wild spaces, simply because they do not have access to them. By giving children access to wild spaces, we can open the possibility that they will form a deep and lasting connection to the natural world.

When I was working as an outdoor educator, my goal was to help foster these kinds of connections between children and nature. In the fall we collected leaves on a scavenger hunt of colour. In the winter we built fires to stay warm. In the spring we watched the flowers bloom and created art inspired by these bright colours. These simple activities were in service of having children spend time learning and growing together in a natural environment.

Before I had learned about the approach IVN Nature Education was taking, I was already motivated by the same idea that, as Bleichrodt says, “we know from experience and from research if you manage to forge a connection with nature before the age of twelve years, you will be connected for life” (Lewis, 2022, p. 65). These life-long connections foster an ecological mindset that offer new ways of listening, learning, and growing.

Children helping to plant a Miyawaki forest as part of an IVN Nature Education program - Image source

Last week I attended a virtual conference on Communication Ethics. Facilitated by Royal Roads University in Victoria, the event focused on different ways of listening, communicating, and learning. The final conversation of the conference, titled “Professional Communication in Indigenous Contexts,” brought together Indigenous scholars, journalists, and educators. Their conversation was far-reaching, but at several points it touched on the concept of land-based education. After doing a bit of research, I realized that this was another way to help children foster a life-long connection with their natural environment.

Inspired by IVN Nature Education’s efforts, and encouraged by my experiences spending time in nature with children, I began to explore other ways that I can encourage future generations to feel connected to nature.

Land-based learning is an approach to education rooted in place and focused on traditional methods of understanding our relationship to the land. As defined in a publication by the Samuel Centre for Social Connectedness, a Canadian “think-and-do-tank” founded in 2017, “Land-based learning typically uses an Indigenized and environmentally-focused approach to education by first recognizing the deep, physical, mental, and spiritual connection to the land that is a part of Indigenous cultures.” The Samuel Centre adds that “Each land-based learning program is unique, and therefore some may use different titles, or may not focus on Indigenous knowledge at all.” One of the guiding ideas behind land-based learning is that “learning in an outdoor environment has mental health benefits, improves understanding for active learners, and can help students to develop environmental awareness and a connection to the land.”

This closely parallels my approach as an outdoor educator. It also aligns with the approach taken by IVN Nature Education. Miyawaki forest projects involving children, their families, teachers, and community volunteers offer one small way of activating such land-based learning. Although I have much to learn about this approach, and am still in the early stages of exploring the rich cultural history of many Indigenous groups in Western Canada, I am inspired by helping to create new expressions of land-based learning so that future generations can feel connected to nature. It is this sense of deep connection and communication between people and the land that can foster a sense of stewardship in those who will one day grow up to become leaders and educators themselves.

Resources

Lewis, Hannah. (2022). Mini-Forest Revolution: Using the Miyawaki Method to Rapidly Rewild the World.

White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

Lyon Mini Forest - Journeying into Miyawaki Forests - Blog Post 4

sean@seedlingsforesteducation.ca (Sean Steele) — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 08:20:07 GMT

A new Earth Stories Blog exploring Miyawaki Forests

Blog Post #4 with Outdoor Educator Sean Steele

I recently attended a meeting with a small group of people with a shared interest in the Miyawaki method. We met to share ideas about how to get the word out about both ongoing and potential mini-forest projects. The meeting aligned with my recent reflections on utopia and how to work toward creating the kind of world I want to live in. Our chat also inspired me to imagine small ways I can spread the word about mini-forests.

In 2022, Hannah Lewis published Mini-Forest Revolution: Using the Miyawaki Method to Rapidly Rewild the World. Besides providing an excellent description of the Miyawaki method, Lewis’ book chronicles several ongoing mini-forest projects happening across the planet. Lewis’ globe-trotting quest to see mini-forests spring up all over the world is inspiring, but does not seem lofty or unattainable. Instead, many of the chapters in the book are grounded in real-world examples that, despite their small size, offer snapshots of the way such forest-planting projects bring communities together and help activate the type of utopian thinking I had spent the holidays thinking about.

One of the mini-forest projects Lewis writes about occurred in tiny green spaces in the city of Paris, France. The project was led by Boomforest, a non-profit organization facilitating participatory community initiatives to reform urban green spaces. Enrico Fusto, a member of Boomforest, wanted to help plant trees in greenbelts around the city. These greenbelts were spaces of grass or dirt beside highways or adjacent to apartment buildings. Part of the motivation behind planting trees in these greenbelts was to help mitigate recent heatwaves that have been occurring across Europe.

Speaking about his admiration for the Miyawaki method, Fusto remarked to Lewis that ““What I liked was the accessibility of the method. It seemed simple enough to be implemented by regular people, and effective for restoring biodiversity in urban lots of any size—even very small lots” (2022: 59). Beginning in 2016, Fusto worked with municipal leaders in the city to seek approval and plant a series of mini-forests in these greenbelts. Finally, in 2018, as Lewis records, “On a cool March morning … forty volunteers planted 1,200 saplings into 400 m2 of soil beside one of Europe’s busiest freeways, at the Porte de Montreuil” (2022: 59) in Paris.

Since then, Boomforest has led several other planting projects. Another project transformed a small plot of land next to an apartment complex in the city of Lyon. As the before and after images posted on the Boomforest website show, which I’ve included below, the Miyawki method can transform small areas into wild and healthy little ecosystems. These photos offer a glimpse of the density of plants placed together in a Miyawaki forest. Also, the more in-depth photo gallery included on the project website shows volunteers working together to transform this small area of the city.

*** See photos at bottom of page for the Lyon mini-forest before planting and 1 year after planting - © Boomforest ***

These projects offer real-world examples of people coming together to create small wild spaces within urban environments. I am inspired by Boomforest’s efforts which have rippled out from that first planting project. Their website lists 21 similarly sized urban mini-forests that have been planted in cities in France between 2018 and 2023.

Another inspiring aspect of Boomforest’s efforts is the time it took Fusto and his team to move from their initial idea to actually planting. Fusto started planning and organizing in 2016, and it took until 2018 for the trees to be put in the ground. It then took another year for a small team of volunteers to take the time to weed and water the mini-forest. That means it took three years of work to get from idea to reality – three years of work to transform a rectangular plot of grass to a healthy urban mini-forest.

The important thing is to keep moving forward, stay positive, and be patient. Good things take time, so it may be some time yet before I’m involved in a project that is immanently about to plant trees. For now, I can keep learning and connecting with people who want to see urban spaces full of trees.

Resources

Lewis, Hannah. (2022). Mini-Forest Revolution: Using the Miyawaki Method to Rapidly Rewild the World.

White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

Utopia - Journeying into Miyawaki Forests - Blog Post 3 - Growing up Together

sean@seedlingsforesteducation.ca (Sean Steele) — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 07:16:39 GMT

Earth Literacies presents a new Earth Stories (blog) series exploring Miyawaki Forests

Miyawaki Forest Blog Post #3

with Outdoor Educator - Sean Steele

For the past few months, I’ve found myself thinking about ways to contribute to positive changes to help combat the negative effects of climate change on our planet. I have been thinking and dreaming of small-scale projects that might create a kind of ripple effect, inspiring others to plant gardens and tiny forests where they live. I see Miyawaki forests as small spaces that spark the imagination. Although I have little practical experience at this point, I understand the importance of dreaming and imagining alternatives as methods that can orient energy and prioritize actions.

Over the holidays, I was fortunate to have a little time to step away from routines and plans. After the shift from one potential mini-forest project to another one, and the holiday break putting a pause on developments at the new site, I decided to spend time reading and thinking about how my desire to help plant a Miyawaki forest fits into my broader hope for the future.

To help me in my thinking and dreaming of imaginary alternatives, I returned to a literary source and read Thomas More’s 1516 novel Utopia for the second time. The first time I read it, I was in my early twenties – a good age to dream about other places that looked and felt different than the one I had grown up in.

Now, all these years later, I returned to More’s book with a different mindset. This time, I was interested in reflecting on the kind of utopia I might create if I were to sit down and write it out. What elements of an ideal society might I include? What elements would be carried over from the world I inhabit, and what would I leave out?

In Utopia, More’s narrator describes the various aspects of an ideal society that reflects the historical and cultural era in which the story was written. More’s choice of Utopia as the name for his fictional kingdom is apt. The word contains two simultaneous meanings, which offer a clue to the satirical intent of the author. A eutopia refers to an ideally perfect place, a space of perfected social relations. A utopia, on the other hand, refers to a non-place, or a non-existent place. What More describes in his book, written many centuries ago, is an ideal society that can only exist in the mind.

As I re-read Utopia, I reflected on how More’s description of an ideal society is a way to implicitly criticize the society in which he lived. This got me thinking about what aspects of society I would criticize. One of the first things that came to mind was the erroneous separation of humans from nature. Or, worse still, the idea that humans are not only separate from, but in control of nature.

We live in the Anthropocene, the era of history in which our actions, as a species, have global effects on plants, animals, and the whole of humanity. We have the power to wipe out entire species and destroy entire ecosystems. Our actions already have. But in my utopia, the idea that humans are somehow separate from the natural world would be absent. In my utopia, ecology would inform decisions. My utopia would be based on the importance of understanding what is required to reach and sustain a balance between people and their surrounding environment.

A Miyawaki forest planted in a small corner of a park or school may seem like a little project, which indeed it is, but it offers a starting place to strive toward an ecological awareness of how cultivating a few dozen trees is, in fact, also cultivating inner growth in those who care for the trees. The trees, shrubs, grasses, and micro-organisms that thrive in a healthy Miyawaki forest are not the only thing to grow. The people who help with the planning and the planting, as well as those who may one day walk past the little forest, are given the opportunity to grow as well. If we can learn to care for the world around us, we can help make the world more like the utopia I thought about over the holidays.

I want to dream big, but start small. At this point, I’m not sure when I’ll have the opportunity to plant a seed, but I’m always ready to dream, and never ready to lose hope...

How about you?

Journeying into Miyawaki Forests - Blog Post 2 - Growing up Together

sean@seedlingsforesteducation.ca (Sean Steele) — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 05:48:13 GMT

Earth Literacies presents a new Earth Stories (blog) series exploring Miyawaki Forests

Journeying into Miyawaki Forests - Growing up Together | Blog Post #2

with Outdoor Educator Sean Steele

December 27, 2023

READ & WATCH BLOG POST #1 (if you haven't already)

When I found out that the organization I was helping to support didn’t get the grant to fund a Miyawaki forest on a small plot of land adjacent to a city park, I initially felt somewhat discouraged. But, almost immediately, I realized that this kind of news wasn’t about to take the wind out of my sails. The wind was just blowing in a different direction. Without the funding, the initial project I was hoping to get started was no longer possible. Intuitively, I knew that the time wasn’t right. There was too much to do within the timeframe to realistically see the project through over the next year. This initial project was not abandoned; it was just put on hold for the upcoming year.

Creating a new Miyawaki forest has, from the beginning, felt like a dream. All dreams, however, are grounded in reality. Dreams grow from the soil of what is happening and what is possible. When we dream, we project a possible future out into the world to see how it feels and to imagine how we might feel working to inhabit that world. There is, however, a balance between dreaming up what may be possible and practically working toward realizing the actual spaces that will make up the dream.

Helping to organize and plant a mini-forest on a tiny plot of land is hardly a possible future, but it points toward the kind of city I want to live in. It’s a step in a direction I find both exciting and accessible. It’s a direction toward the type of city interested in taking advantage of green spaces and preserving new spaces where wild things can grow. Spaces where children can feel the soil, observe and nurture new growth, and feel more connected to the places they live. Although I knew that the original vision of the Miyawaki forest was temporarily on hold, I still wanted to be part of a group of people taking a step toward helping to create, and live in, this kind of city.

For several weeks I had been in touch with a group of teachers and parents at a local school who were similarly interested in mapping out a project plan to plant a Miyawaki forest. We had shared a few resources via email, and the people I communicated with seemed similarly excited by Akira Miyawaki’s sensible approach to densely planting trees and shrubs which become self-sustaining forests within a few years. With the wind blowing in a new direction now that the initial plan was on hold, I realized that the best course of action was to join this group of teachers and parents.

I sent them an email explaining my situation. The response was quick and enthusiastic. The wind has carried me from one project plan to another. I will now be helping this group in their efforts, working as a volunteer in whatever capacity might be needed. I’m not easily discouraged, so we will find out what the new future of my involvement in the creation of a Miyawaki forest will look like. For now, I continue to dream of living in a city where there are wild places growing everywhere.

Journeying into Miyawaki Forests - Blog Post 1 - Growing up Together with Outdoor Educator Sean Steele

sean@seedlingsforesteducation.ca (Sean Steele) — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 18:03:25 GMT

Earth Literacies presents a new Earth Stories (blog) series exploring Miyawaki Forests.

"It all started with a blank slate. Or, in this case, an empty patch of soil beside a park. As a research lead with Seedlings Forest Education, an organization in Victoria, BC that facilitates nature-based learning for children, it was my job to help the leadership team think about what they could do with a new parcel of land."

Journeying into Miyawaki Forests - Growing up Together | Blog Post #1

with Outdoor Educator - Sean Steele

Dec. 13, 2023

It all started with a blank slate. Or, in this case, an empty patch of soil beside a park. As a research lead with Seedlings Forest Education, an organization in Victoria, BC that facilitates nature-based learning for children, it was my job to help the leadership team think about what they could do with a new parcel of land. The team at Seedlings had been granted access to a piece of land, around 100 square metres, which was adjacent to a park where an ongoing after-school outdoor program was being run.

From the beginning, the idea was to approach the land as a learning opportunity. Seedlings Forest Education wants to encourage children to form a positive and respectful relationship with the natural world. To help support them, my task was to explore different ways this piece of land could be used to educate and inspire children who live in the area.

In other words, it was my job to research different approaches the team might take in designing, planting, and caring for this new space. Many ideas immediately came to mind. A community garden, a pollinator garden, a stand of trees with a path running through it. But in order to get anywhere, I needed to do some research. Whatever the plan, I had to help Seedlings map out a pathway from vision to reality.

My research quickly led me to the Miyawaki forest method. Named after Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, this method takes an innovative approach to densely planting trees in small areas. Born in 1928, Miyawaki studied botany and had a particular interest in plant ecology. During his research, Miyawaki became increasingly interested in forests that grew in and around temples, shrines, and grave sites throughout Japan. Because these were sacred sites, the forests around them had taken on a sacred character.

Miyawaki realized that the success of these ancient forests lies in the interrelation between the different canopy layers. What Miyawaki learned was that several native species of trees and shrubs always grew together in close proximity. These relationships between the larger trees, smaller trees, and underly brush allowed all the plants to thrive while also supporting each other. By bringing an ecological understanding to some of Japan’s sacred forests, Miyawaki took the first step toward creating his own approach to planting small-scale forests.

Watch a short video on Akira Miyawaki’s life and work here .

My research into the Miyawaki method quickly led me to the Afforestt organization. Run by Shubhendu Sharma and based in India, Afforestt is on a mission to spread the Miyawaki method across the globe. Sharma and his team want to see Miyawaki forests springing up all over the world. To do this, they have created a video series that offers an overview of the Miyawaki method. Spread out over 11 videos, the Afforestt guide was my perfect entryway into a basic understanding of the method and the steps required to plant a Miyawaki forest.

Here is the initial video of the series, which offers an excellent broad picture of the Miyawaki method.

As Sharma explains, there are 6 steps involved in creating a Miywaki forest . First, seeds and saplings that are native to the region need to be selected. This step is usually done with multiple visits to the site where planting will eventually occur and either documenting the species that grow in the area or actually collecting seeds from nearby trees and shrubs.

The second step is to organize the seeds you have collected so that you understand which of the four layers each belongs to. Sharma explains how the four layers of a forest work. The canopy layer is composed of climax vegetation – trees that grow tall and have thick trunks and broad root systems. Below that, the tree layer is made up of smaller tree species. The sub-tree layer under that contains small trees and larger bushes which require less natural light. Finally, the shrub layer is composed of small shrubs and bushes that live along the forest floor.

In the third and fourth steps, the site is prepared for planting. This step involves first removing any weeds and rocks before starting to dig. To plant a successful Miyawaki forest, the soil needs to be dug down 1 metre (a little more than 3 feet) and biomass such as compost needs to be mixed in. Once mixed, the soil should be left loose. This loose, nutrient-rich soil is ready for planting.

The fifth step is when the planting happens. With a team of volunteers, the trees are planted close together in the prepared soil. Planting four trees per square metre will establish a healthy competition where each of the layers of this new forest will grow rapidly, in concert, to establish their desired level of sunlight. Also, the loose soil means that the root systems are able to penetrate quickly and effectively into the earth. The final stage of the planting day is to pile 5 to 7 inches of mulch overtop of the soil and water it extensively. The idea is to absolutely soak the mulch material, such as straw, so that the roots can branch out as quickly as possible.

The sixth and final step involves regularly watering the site and monitoring early growth by supporting thin trunks and stems with natural materials like thin sticks and twine. After a few years of monitoring growth, watering the site, and replacing the mulch when needed, a Miyawaki forest will become fully self-sustainable.

The Miyawaki method is a holistic approach, which means the health of the soil is just as important as the health of the trees and shrubs. Biodegradable materials are added to the soil, and mulch is placed on top of the soil, so that micro-organisms and fungi – which play a fundamental role in the healthy lifecycle of a forest – can thrive.

By the time I finished the series, I was eager to learn more. The next step for me was to read Hannah Lewis’ 2019 book Mini-Forest Revolution: Using the Miyawaki Method to Rapidly Rewild the World . Not only was Lewis’ book a great companion to Sharma’s video series, but it also offered several examples of successful planting projects from all over the world.

Afforrest’s video series and Lewis’ book made sense to me. There is an elegant simplicity to the Miyawaki method. Despite not having a green thumb, and not having a wealth of experience planting trees, this approach seemed realistic, grounded, and doable. I could imagine moving through the steps: doing a series of site walks, gathering and germinating native seeds and saplings, preparing the soil, hosting a planting day, and being part of a crew of volunteers to water the forest and help it on the road to self-sufficiency.

I now had a basic understanding of the method and how to go about it. My next question was: has this method been tried anywhere near where I live?

Lucky for me, a second round of research brought me to an article on the Earth Literacies website that offered an example of a Miyawaki forest that had been planted in nearby Richmond, BC. Here was a team of volunteers working together to create a Miyawaki forest in the same climate region where I was hoping to create one. Not only that, but they had also planted it in collaboration with Richmond Secondary School.

Through the Earth Literacies article, I contacted two volunteers who had been involved in planting the Richmond Secondary School Miyawaki forest. We met on a virtual call and I was able to ask some questions and hear their positive experience. By the end the call, I felt that the Miyawaki method was the right approach for the type of accessible, self-sustainable planting project I wanted to help create.

The next step in my journey was to seek the funding necessary to begin moving from vision to reality. A quick search led me to a suitable grant available for such a project, and with the assistance of the team at Seedlings, we submitted an application. I was taking my first step toward helping to plant a new mini-forest in Victoria.

Webb Telescope captures image of Stardust Emergence

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 19:47:42 GMT

CLICK THE VIDEO ABOVE TO PLAY

I am sure you have all heard that we are made from stardust. The calcium in our bones and the iron in our blood was created in the dust of an exploding star. Over time the dust cools and gathers itself into planets on which life can emerge. You’ve seen images of enduring stars, you’ve seen images of exploding stars (supernovae), and you’ve seen images of steadfast planets. But have you ever seen virgin dust gushing out of a star getting ready to explode? The James Webb Space Telescope just obliged us with such an image (see image above) and it’s an amazing vista to behold!

In this first-of-a-kind image, shimmering purple eddies of dust are being cast off in all directions by a very bright star (WR 124) at the center. This swirling dust holds the potential to become the rocks on a planet’s surface, the water in its oceans and the air in its atmosphere. Given enough time, it can become the flesh, bones, and blood of a living organism. With yet more time the organism can develop sentience to build telescopes powerful enough to catch stardust in the act of its cosmic emergence.

What we are witnessing is the ultimate generosity of a star that through its last few laboured breaths is scattering the seeds of life into the fecund emptiness of its mother’s womb. These cosmic seeds, forged out of the fire in its core and nurtured for millions of years in its belly, are ready to put down roots in other parts of the galactic expanse. Together with the gas in which they swirl, these proliferous seeds will grow into families of planets and stars, ready to evoke the sacred process of life if conditions permit. Such is the bequest of the stars to the story of cosmogenesis, a glorious pilgrimage our universe is in the midst of undertaking.

Sarbmeet Kanwal, PhD

Click Here to view our next Earth Literacies program

Quantum Wisdom: Second Pillar of the New Cosmology

with Sarbmeet Kanwal, Ph.D

British Columbia's First Miyawaki Forest

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 09:48:06 GMT

Programs in Earth Literacies team member, Parker Cook, captured the excitement of a 10-hour day of forest planting and community building in a delightful 1-minute timelapse video. You’ll want to watch it over and over – seeing different things each time.

Below is a quick guide with 5 scenes to help you track the range of people and chores that resulted in this bioregion specific community of plants that will grow 10 times faster, with 20 times more diversity into a 30 times denser than typical multi-strata breathing machine!

Scene 1 (below)

You’re looking North, with the L-shaped school on the Eastern side. Three ‘sections’ of the forest bed have been prepared with a meter deep mix of soil and humus and a topping of straw. At the top of the pic there are two red tents. In front of them are 400 plants identified by species and arranged in tree/shrub/ground cover categories.

Scene 2 (below)
Permaculturalist Bruno Vernier and Green Team Sponsor Eugene Harrison are offering a planting lesson for the first group of volunteers.

Scene 3 (below)

Two or three-person teams have chosen their plants – one tree, one shrub, one ground cover. They have checked in with ‘command central’ to ascertain their planting location, identified by a number on one of the yellow flags dotted across the planting beds. They have fancy vests, garden gloves, trowels, enthusiasm and ready assistance from other workers. Teams tuck their plants into the ground – with love – a process that continues all day, with breaks for breakfast, lunch, music, comedy and a divine sense of purpose.

Scene 4 (below)
As the planting is completed, the fencing crew moves in to protect the new inhabitants from their typical Richmond neighbours – rabbits.

Scene 5 (below)
Bruno, Eugene and the team might be feeling a moment of satisfaction – after 2 years of careful planning, learning, organizing, and connecting with others who share their sense of stewardship for Planet Earth.

MIYAWAKI TIMELAPSE

TO UNMUTE THE VOLUME, click the speaker icon in the lower right corner of the video below. TO PLAY / PAUSE THE VIDEO, click the video below. TO CHANGE THE PLAYBACK SPEED, click the 3 'dots' in the lower right of the video and select.

What is a Green Team and Why Should we Support Their Work?

Sat, 16 Apr 2022 19:11:58 GMT

Meet today’s – and tomorrow’s – earth protectors

Richmond School District (in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada adjacent to Vancouver) established an Environmental Stewardship Policy in 1998 which states:

“As a result of our shared guardianship of this planet, implementation of this policy shall be the joint responsibility of the Board, students and staff in collaboration with parents and our community.”

The Green Team at Richmond Secondary School has wasted no time taking up their part in this work.

In 2020, RSS was one of 10 schools nation-wide to win $20,000 from Staples in the “Superpower Your School” contest which invited students to address environmental challenges with new technologies. The Richmond team’s project was the installation of solar panels at the school, producing electricity that is added to the school’s power grid making its carbon footprint lower than other schools. A TV located in the foyer details the daily energy consumption so that all students can see their impact.

The Green Team photo above documents the students completing an outdoor cleanup project.

They continue to support the David Suzuki Butterflyway Garden and are working to end single-use plastic utensils in the school cafeteria.

Members of the Green team say they joined “because we are passionate about taking meaningful environmental action. We want to foster sustainable habits and educate our community inside and outside of school.”

The RSS Green Team participates in the Richmond Green Ambassadors program, coordinated by the City of Richmond and the School District, providing networking and volunteer opportunities for youth about environmental concerns.

This season’s focus is a collaboration with the Garden City Conservation Society and Programs in Earth Literacies to plant a Miyawaki Tiny Forest on the school property. See the video for a brief explanation of the Miyawaki Method for urban reforestation: Click here to play video (turn up your volume and unmute volume if you are not hearing sound from the video).

All are welcome to celebrate this landmark action on Earth Day, April 22, 2022, and to meet today’s – and tomorrow’s – earth protectors.

Learn more and Register for the Earth Day 2022 Celebration - Click Here

The Powers of the Universe as seen through the eyes of Betsey Crawford

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 01:33:55 GMT

The Powers of the Universe as seen through the eyes of Betsey Crawford

The Soul of the Earth Website: https://thesouloftheearth.com/powers-of-the-universe/

Betsey Crawford, a colleague of Gertie’s (yes, our Gertie Jocksch who leads the Earth Literacies Team) from The Deeptime Network, is an artist, photographer, seeker and storyteller. On her inspiring website, she shares her exploration of the world identifying and understanding the powers of the universe that are at work in all she experiences.

This is a rich resource for understanding the epic beginnings of the universe, our origins, and our possible futures. It’s a great companion to the deep study of the individual powers of the Universe as explained by Brian Swimme, and explored in the ongoing Programs in Earth Literacies sessions with Bernice Vetter and Margie Gillis, Wednesday from Feb 2 to 16, 2022. Click here to learn more.

Becoming Spiritual Earthlings: Caring for our home and kin

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 20:33:58 GMT

It seems pretty obvious that we love and care for the members of our family. Many of us hold extended family and neighbours in our circles of care and concern. We include our geographical location in our sense of identity – “I’m from Saskatoon”, or “I was born in Montreal”. And recently, we have made beginning efforts to acknowledge and respect the original families on the land that we currently call our home.

In his January, 2022 webinar, “The Call to Become Spiritual Earthlings”, Diarmuid O’Murchu directed our attention to our place in the history of the cosmos, to our location in/of the earth, and to the acknowledgement of the kin with whom we share our home.

O’Murchu expanded on the concept of a bioregion as “a natural ecological community with characteristic flora, fauna and environmental conditions.” He distinguished between this naturally bounded place and the artificial construct of the nation state. If we are to live as responsible spiritual earthlings, we need to meet and care for the other members of our local, natural communities – our kin.

Bringing it home!

In June, 2020, The Nature Conservancy of Canada published Ours to Save, a catalogue of 308 different plant and animal species that live in Canada and nowhere else on Earth. Many of these elements of the evolutionary cosmos are threatened with extinction, and it is our neighbourly responsibility to protect them. Check out your Canadian bioregion and your kin at natureconservancy.ca/ourstosave .

Study your home.

Here are two bioregion audits you can use to check how well you know your kin, and your neighbourhood. The first was written by Leonard Charles, Jim Dodge, Lynn Milliman and Victoria Stockley for the Coevolution Quarterly, Winter, 1981.

https://dces.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/128/2013/08/Where-You-At-Quiz.pdf

The second is Tina Fields’ expansion on the 1981 list of questions, divided into categories to allow for deeper inquiry.

https://indigenize.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/bioregional-quiz/

Ecolibrium3, an organization committed to building resilient communities in the Duluth, Minnesota area, give us many examples of actions directed at living well within a bioregion.

https://www.ecolibrium3.org/duluthclimateaction/communityinitiatives/

Share your ideas

Explore your bioregion. Who are your neighbours? Your kin? Who is healthy and thriving? Who needs care? What action have you taken/could you take to live as a spiritual earthling?

Tell your neighbours … send suggestions to Programs In Earth Literacies in the comments below!

Evolutionary Ritual to commemorate the Day of Remembrance for Lost Species

cassandra.wells@gmail.com (Sandy Wells) — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 21:49:57 GMT

On this Day of Remembrance for Lost Species, we grieve for the great loss of life brought on by human activity, and dream into being a new interconnected future.

Today, November 30, is the international Day of Remembrance for Lost Species. Please join Programs In Earth Literacies and the Rev. Dr. Carol Kilby for a grounding and inspiring evolutionary ritual to grieve the loss of nearly 70% of the world's animal populations since 1970, to thank them for their contribution to the web of life, and to recommit ourselves to honouring the web and our place within it.

5pm PST/8:00pm EST. JOIN HERE

With Sandy Wells, Programs In Earth Literacy, and Carol Kilby, author of Evolutionary Dance - Out, In, and On the Fringe of the Church.

Stepping Up to the Tipping Point

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 18:31:32 GMT

COP 26 - A tipping point? Only time will tell. It is, however, a summons to check in with myself. Do I feel optimistic, pessimistic, powerless or inspired? Will I join the climate-actions, sing, march, or pray over the next two weeks? Do I know my own power?

COP 26 - A tipping point? Only time will tell. It is, however, a summons to check in with myself. Do I feel optimistic, pessimistic, powerless or inspired? Will I join the climate-actions, sing, march, or pray over the next two weeks? Do I know my own power?

“Compassion – it’s where faith and the new science come together. While I’d always thought of it as a way of being to which I could only aspire, or the gaze with which God looked down upon me, now I know it’s an energy in and around me, an electromagnetic field I can create.” Compassion, Science has helped me understand, as my power.

The intentional direction of compassionate energy I now call prayer. Compassion, I believe, isn’t an inert emotion but a vibration dancing in and through and around us pulling us into the fullness of our potential.” [1]

So this morning to mark the beginning of a two-week international meeting that may add homo sapiens sapiens to the list of lost species and shape the planet for centuries, I exercised my powers of compassion. I joined, virtually, with a community called Ruah. The intention – to connect with those at the Conference in Glasgow, Scotland and to support the emergence of a new planet-centric culture.

You’re welcome to join us, from wherever you are, in creating a resonant field each day until November 10th at 9 a.m.

No training, masks, or credentials necessary. Only a few minutes of quiet breathing to move out of a culture of pollution into a culture of human-earth mutuality, out of the myth of separation into the Earth–community, out of powerlessness to power full compassion,

And belief, belief that we can move beyond powerlessness to powerful compassion is needed. A candle helps. It makes visible the invisible flame of potentiality within us. To fuel the flame our group recited these words:

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save, so much has been destroyed. I must cast my lot with those, who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”[2]

Then, owning that power, we moved with conviction to state our intention: “We send compassion for the future of our Earth community, commitment to eco-centric governance, and courage to all delegates to make change now."

Is Cop 26 a tipping point time for our species? I like to think of it more personally, as an invitation to take a step on the evolutionary staircase. More importantly, it challenges me: “Don’t make your practice of compassion too small. Let it be the source of the life you desire.”[3]

PLEASE LEAVE COMMENTS, LIKES, ETC. HOW ARE YOU RESPONDING TO COP 26?

[1] Carol Kilby, Evolutionary Dancer, Out, In, and On the Fringe of the Church, p.45.

[2] Adrienne Rich, Dreams of a Common Language, p. 67.

[3] Carol Kilby, Evolutionary Dancer, Out, In, and On the Fringe of the Church, p. 45

---

The Power of Story

cassandra.wells@gmail.com (Sandy Wells) — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 12:14:43 GMT

In this eighth edition of the Climate Chronicles, Mike Bell discusses how to tell a new story about humanity's place in creation, and how learning communities can help us remember it, seek it out, and make it real.

Stories have power. They can transform our whole way of thinking and they can help us create a future in the changing world we are now experiencing. Some years ago the poet Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.” She wasn’t against science. But, in my view it is only when we turn science into practical stories that we can deal with the radical changes in our world. They give us a sense of who we are. At present we are in deep trouble. A few days ago I came across a new story. It was a doozy—a scientific one from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is a story about how climate change is affecting our world and is threatening our continued existence. It was followed a day or so later by a climate change article indicating that, for the first time in recorded history, rain was falling on the mountains of Greenland. How do we deal with these new realities? In this chronicle I will suggest that we need to make some significant changes in our lives. This chronicle has three parts.

Part One is about how stories have helped humans establish a relationship with the living Earth over millennia. The focus will be on my experience with stories from working in indigenous communities in the Canadian Arctic.

Part Two is the story about the impact of the current Western culture and our need to rethink everything. We are moving into a very different kind of climate changing world and we must learn—and learn quickly—how to deal with it.

Part Three is the story about how we can begin to create a new relationship with Earth. It provides some suggestions on how we might proceed. Some of the following are stories I heard in my almost three decades of work in Indigenous communities. But they have become “my stories” in the same way that a cook might say, “I got my recipe for chocolate cake from my mother.” They are adopted stories. I’ll begin with one of my favorites.

PART ONE: OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH EARTH

In the mid-fifties or sixties a small group of Canadian Government officials traveled from Ottawa to a community in the Northwest Territories to begin negotiations with elders about land claims. Early on in the meeting things seemed to be moving along. But at one point one of the civil servants looked across the table and said, “I hope you realize that the land we are talking about belongs to the Government of Canada”. There was a shocked silence. Finally, one of the elders spoke up. He asked in amazement, “If this is your land, where are your stories?” For the elders, stories were essential. Often in the summer they would take young people on canoe trips to learn about their traditional culture.

Each site they visited had a particular name and story that emerged from experiences of their ancestors.... encounters with animals, plants, or other beings. When I first began working in indigenous communities I thought of land just like the civil servant did—as real estate. It took me a while to adopt a
different perspective and see the land as a relationship, as the result of many encounters and exchanges between beings considered to be equals.

PART TWO: THE ANTHROPOCENE

Scientists are telling us that we have been quickly moving into a different time frame. The one we are leaving is called the Cenozoic Era. It has existed since the death of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago. Most scientists call the new era, the “Anthropocene.” The term means a man-made era. There are some disagreements on the starting date of this new reality. Its dominant characteristic is that we humans have taken over from Earth the process of evolution. We are changing everything: the Earth’s species, systems, rivers, environments, atmospheres and so forth. And the most
dramatic stories about this transition are those that show how the forces of nature are responding to the changes: floods, tornadoes, droughts, famines, forest fires, heat waves, poisoned oceans, rising waters, etc. To make matters worse we are in the midst of a pandemic which is possibly also the result of cumulative man-made changes to our world.

PART THREE: CREATING A NEW STORY FOR A NEW WORLD

As I’ve mentioned many times in these chronicles we need a new story for the new world. How can we do this? We begin by recognizing the need for a new story—a new way of thinking and living in the new Anthropocene Era. The first thing we need is awareness that we are indeed living in a different world. It comes about in different ways for different people. Here is my story. When I first went to Baffin Island in the 1980s to become the superintendent of social services I couldn’t understand the Inuit language. I needed interpreters. As I flew around a two thousand mile area scattered with thirteen small communities (there are no roads), I would hold meetings to tell residents about our services and get feedback. I knew that we needed a management context and so I had a list of management theories—Management by Objectives, Zero-based Budgeting, Performance Measurement and so forth. But I was bombing. In the meetings the elders would get up and repeat their mantra “Learn from the land.” I thought this was quaint but useless. I was ready to quit. At about the same time I took some trips to North Carolina to visit Thomas Berry. He was a priest and cultural historian. I knew him when I lived with him in a Passionist monastic community. I told him about my problems with elders and the need for a context. Then I asked him if he had ever written about Earth as a source of spirituality. He told me he hadn’t. I was surprised. Then he said to me, “I have written something on the spirituality of Earth which you may find interesting.” His point –spirituality is not something outside of you. We are earthlings. It is something within you. You have come from Earth and the universe. At that point I finally understood what the elders had been saying. This was the bridge between the Indigenous insights and the earth-based insights of Thomas Berry and the New Cosmologists. Berry also noted that we are in between stories. The old stories about our superiority over other beings were never true...and now those stories have led us to this difficult place. The world is changing. To live in our changing world Berry noted that we need “new stories and shared dream experiences”. So how do we proceed? To move forward we must start with some kind of vision.

Creating Visions

In countries and communities around the world people who realize how climate change is affecting their world are creating their own visions. I am attracted to the vision of Thomas Berry and Brian Thomas Swimme....that of creating “A mutually enhancing relationship between our species and Earth.” The vision is very clear. It spells out a different kind of relationship. As much as possible whatever we do must benefit Earth, its species and ourselves. The challenge here is evident: our neo-liberal culture and its institutions will fight against this vision. So what else is needed?

Creating Learning Communities

So how do we start implementing this vision? We can’t do it as individuals alone. We need to share our vision and join with others who have similar visions. We must develop Learning Communities. All of this doesn’t come easily.

The Anthropocene is creating a new world. We can’t deal with it by using old approaches and systems. Here’s an example. The major problems we are facing in our new Anthropocene climate changing world are hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, forest fires, extreme heat events, rising oceans and so forth. Which political parties are best able to deal with these problems? The question doesn’t make sense. Why? Because political parties are not specifically designed to plan for future generations—especially in a rapidly changing world. On the contrary, many political parties with their dependence on corporate funding are contributing to the problems. We can’t allow this to continue. Beginning at the community level we have to learn to develop new political systems.

Resilience

Accepting this challenge to create new stories in our changing world we must expect successes and failures. There will be strong opposition from many of those in power who want things to remain the way they are. When some of our attempts fail we will grieve along with our communities. And when our successes come we will celebrate them together. There will be plenty of both. Ultimately each one of us involved in this struggle must have some kind of personal commitment to ourselves, to our communities and to others who are suffering from the ravages of climate change. As individuals and groups we will need some kind of inner strength or personal spirituality. We can’t survive without it. It is going to be quite a struggle.

Conclusion

To summarize, we have come a long way from: stories about Indigenous cultures and relationships; to the challenge of our new Anthropocene world; to the need to create stories in our learning communities, to new visions and new strength to deal with our changing world. If we accept this mission we will be guided by our own spirituality and the support and spirit of others in our learning communities. And perhaps that spirituality will provide the light that the Canadian singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen talked about...

“Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

Mike Bell, www.comoxvalleyclimatechangenetwork.ca

From, Of, and With the Earth - Cultivating a Sense of Place with Dr. Doug Christie

cassandra.wells@gmail.com (Sandy Wells) — Fri, 03 Sep 2021 19:58:15 GMT

Douglas Christie teaches that the places we inhabit comes to inhabit us. What do our places create in us, in the era of global ecological degradation?

If you understand – or, like me, strongly intimate – the degree of loss implicated in the current climate disaster, you may, like me, might struggle to fathom it. I recently spoke with Dr. Douglas Christie about responding to such ecological loss, about the importance of place to human identity and development, and about how cultivating a deeper, more integral, relationship with the places we inhabit can help to renew our commitment to caring for them. He is the author of The Word in The Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford), and The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology (Oxford), and beginning on Sept 8, he will be with Programs in Earth Literacies offering a 4-week workshop called, “ Cultivating a Sense of Place: Contemplative Ecology in a Time of Loss ” (Wednesdays in September, 10am-12pm PST).

To speak with Douglas Christie is to speak to a guide with a spacious and compassionate approach to questions of ecological loss. We spoke in the midst of a global pandemic (COVID) and the multiple, nested pandemics that covid has illuminated and worsened ¹ , when time seems frenzied and old reassurances seem shaky. A time when it becomes difficult to imagine a way to stop and assess the losses, because they just keep piling up. Modern life, he points out, my life, maybe your life too at some points, is nomadic and the pace is fast. Our schedules fill with places to go, things to do, and people to meet, and the places we inhabit fade into our background of our ‘real’ lives. But, the places in which we live become absorbed into us, into our consciousness. We imbibe the rhythms and pace and agendas of a city, or a suburb, and they become a part of us. But Dr. Christie reminded me that this modern way of life cuts us off from a sense of being native to a place. For one thing, the constant movement and the pace of social and cultural life interrupts the time and attention needed to establish a sense of place. For another, people are almost endlessly adaptable, so that if a subdivision is built in a greenbelt, it will not take long for us to forget it was ever a natural space. The loss of the greenbelt will not be consciously noticed or felt by people even one generation later. We will not miss what we do not remember. We moderns are also zealous optimists, who are addicted to momentum. The question of loss can be easily elided in the quest to put a positive spin on a dire situation. “Look,” someone might say after the subdivision is built, “what a nice neighbourhood with so many friendly people.” The loss cannot be noted, cannot be assessed, cannot be accounted for.

Through a contemplative lens, and against these prevailing tendencies of our times, Douglas Christie asks us to look at the places we inhabit, to look at our degrading Earth, and to consider our place in this movement, to consider what it is we lose when our Earth home is degraded. A guide in this exploration is useful, because the questions are big. Who are we, and what can we become in a world of massive ecological loss? What meanings can be made of our lives in an era of mass extinction and global ecological degradation?

Dr. Christie offers his biologically, historically, and spiritually informed approach to finding and cultivating a sense of place in a fracturing world, two hours at a time, each Wednesday in September. Spaces are still available for this timely and transformative workshop. And, to ensure these ideas find a larger audience, registered participants are invited to bring a friend for free (who is new to Programs in Earth Literacies) to Cultivating a Sense of Place: Contemplative Ecology in a Time of Loss . We hope to see you next Wednesday!

¹ Such as; conditions in long term care facilities, increases in mental health issues caused by stress and isolation, social and economic insecurity, systemic racism (in the form of the unequal distribution of the harms of covid among people and communities of colour), a retreat of women from the workforce and public life, to name some.

Earth Jurisprudence, with Mike Bell

cassandra.wells@gmail.com (Sandy Wells) — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 16:22:43 GMT

Why We Need An Earth Jurisprudence

By Mike Bell

Today’s post comes to us from Mike Bell, a skilled and compassionate facilitator, with whom Programs in Earth Literacies has been grateful to partner on several workshops. He writes, "In the past, we moderns were not concerned about survival. But today, with serious scientists talking about the climate changing world as a potential “Sixth Extinction” we are, or should be, deeply concerned." More than a vague concern for "the environment", Bell insists it is, in fact, about our own life and death. "We need to find a way of dealing with our own survival. It could be that Earth Jurisprudence is precisely what we need. This could become the basis for our survival story."

Mike Bell worked for several years as management consultant specializing in communications, group animation, and community and organizational development. He has served as Superintendent of Social Service in Baffin, as well as in senior management positions in Yellowknife with the territorial government. He has worked on a wide variety of projects in the areas of community justice, health care and addictions, education, political and economic development and community planning. Much of his work focused on the development of aboriginal self-government.

Mike has a special interest in helping to build a conceptual bridge that links the traditional teachings of aboriginal elders with the insights of the new science and cosmology . These insights are leading to a growing awareness that organizations and communities are organisms, are part of a living universe, have a self-organizing capability and are guided by the same developmental principles that guide the development of the earth itself. His current work focuses on helping to develop a community climate change culture.

He lives in Comox, BC, with his wife, Arlene, where he volunteers in a number of community efforts opposing coalmines and pipelines.

The term Earth Jurisprudence means Earth laws. When most of us think about laws we tend to think about human laws. But human laws do not recognize Earth as having its own laws. Our environmental laws for the most part are designed to determine and perhaps limit the amount of damage we can do to Earth or to the environment.

I discovered Earth Law when in 1980 our family moved to Baffin Island in the high Arctic. I was hired as superintendent of social services for the Baffin region. When I first got there I thought of land as “real estate”. But later when I flew around to the thirteen communities (there are no roads) to discuss our services, I learned something else.

I would be in community meetings and, with the help of an Inuktitut interpreter, trying to get feedback on our services. Inevitably the elders would get up and say, “Learn from the land.” In every community they would repeat their mantra. I realized they weren’t talking about real estate. They were talking about something else, something that was living.

A few years later I left government and our family moved to the Northwest Territories in the western Arctic. I opened my consulting firm. On one occasion I was asked to help a Dene (First Nation) community develop their own land claim. Southern corporations were trying to move in and access their carbon resources.

I met with the group. The first morning we had a discussion about how they wanted to protect and organize their land. The discussion was getting nowhere. At one point during the coffee break an elder came to me and said, “Mike, sorry about the confusion. This discussion about organizing the land was difficult for us. In our culture we don’t organize the land. The land organizes us.”

In the 1990s in the run-up to the creation of Nunavut, the Inuit homeland in the high Arctic, there was a great deal of discussion about laws. Here is a comment from Inuit elder Mariano Aupilaarjuk.

"We are told today that Inuit never had laws or maligait ("things that have to be followed"). Why? Because they are not written on paper. When I think of paper I think you can tear it up and the laws are gone. The maligait of the Inuit are not on paper. They are inside peoples' heads and they will not disappear or be torn to pieces. Even if a person dies, the maligait will not disappear. It is part of a person. It is what makes a person strong .”

We might reflect upon these stories and say to ourselves, “These are nice stories about other peoples’ cultures. But what do they have to do with our culture? Is Mike Bell asking us to adopt Inuit or Dene cultures?" No, I’m not. The key to understand the significance of these stories is to recognize that they are about survival. The Inuit have somehow managed to survive for several thousand years in the harshest climate on Earth. In the past we moderns were not concerned about survival. But today, with serious scientists talking about the climate changing world as a potential “Sixth Extinction” we are, or should be, deeply concerned. We need to find a way of dealing with our own survival. It could be that Earth Jurisprudence is precisely what we need. This could become the basis for our survival story.

Earth Jurisprudence —The Origin

The first time I heard the term “Earth Jurisprudence” was in 2000. I got a call from The Gaia Foundation in London, England. This organization works with Indigenous groups around the world. They were inviting me, at the request of Thomas Berry, to attend an Earth Jurisprudence workshop in Virginia. They were inviting a dozen or so participants from various countries, half of them lawyers working on the environment and the other half, like me, were consultants working in Indigenous communities around the world. The conference opened with Thomas Berry outlining the basic principles of an Earth Jurisprudence. They were the agenda for the four-day conference. Here they are. (Some months after the conference with assistance from Thomas Berry I wrote an article about the conference. I’ve taken some steps to simplify the language. The article can be found here .)

THE NATURE OF RIGHTS

The planet Earth is a single Earth community. Earth, the human species and the other-than-human species have certain rights.
Rights originate from where existence origina tes. The fact that something comes into existence gives it the right to exist.
The natural world and its species get their rights from the same place humans get their rights—from the universe that brought them into existence.
The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. As subjects (having some form of what we call consciousness and a self-organizing capacity) the members of the Earth community are capable of having rights.
Every component of the Earth community has three rights: 1) the right to exist, 2) the right to habitat, and 3) the right to fulfill its role in the ever-renewing process of the Earth community.
All rights are species specific and limited. Rivers have river rights. Birds have bird rights. Insects have insect rights. Humans have human rights.
Rights must be seen within the context of the laws guiding the natural world and the Earth community. Every member of the community is dependent upon every other member for what it needs for its own survival and nourishment. This mutual nourishment includes the law of predator-prey relationships.
Human rights do not cancel out the rights of other species or components of the Earth. Human property rights are not absolute. They are simply a special relationship between a particular human steward and a particular piece of “property” for the benefit of both.
Human rights and laws flow from the rights of Earth and its laws. Humans do not give rights to Earth. Earth gives rights to us humans through the universe by bringing us into existence.
In a special manner, humans have a right to have the natural world provide the wonder we need for human intelligence, the beauty we need for human imagination, and the intimacy we need for human emotions.

A Sense of Direction

There is an old story about a young couple out for a drive who got lost. They stop in a gas station to ask for directions. The attendant comes out, they tell him where they want to go and ask him for directions. He pauses for a moment, looks down the road and says, “You can’t get there from here.” Getting to an Earth jurisprudence is much like that. You can’t simply decide to take the usual route—using our human jurisprudence systems and laws in the hope that they will lead us to an Earth Jurisprudence system. As the man said you can’t get there from here. There are some temporary fixes—recycling, reducing carbon-based systems, switching to electric vehicles, adopting the Green New Deal or the Doughnut Economy. These are all good efforts but they only partly address the problem. We have to turn things around. We have to reframe.

On one visit to Thomas Berry in the early 90s I went down from the Arctic to his home in North Carolina. I said to him, “Tom, some of my friends in the Arctic use the beauty of the natural environment to inspire their meditations. Have you ever written something on the beauty of the Earth to help with personal meditation?” He paused and then said, “No, I haven’t.” I was surprised. Then he said, “But I have written something on an Earth Spirituality.”

His point…Earth is not something “out there”. It is something within us. We are earthlings. We must accept this reality. This is precisely why Indigenous people often say, “To all my relations”. In like manner we must realize that human laws cannot develop an Earth Jurisprudence. It is the Earth Jurisprudence that must govern the creation of a Human Jurisprudence system.

The Way Forward

Scientists tell us that the Universe began some fifteen billion years ago. Earth came into existence about four billion years ago. From the creation of Earth down to our own time the living Earth has created us and other species. We have all depended upon Earth for our continued existence through the process of evolution. Beginning at the end of the 18th Century with the Industrial Revolution we humans have gradually taken over the process of evolution. More recently with the development of neoliberal systems we have begun to determine which species and resources will exist and which we can do without.

Today, climate change is threatening our continued existence. Many of our human laws are complicit in this situation. It is imperative that we stop doing to Earth what we are doing and instead introduce laws that develop and sustain a mutually enhancing relationship between ourselves and Earth. We do need to adapt some of our current systems for the short term. But we must also introduce Earth Laws. They are the laws of nature—laws of an Earth Jurisprudence. Does this sound possible? It is possible . Communities all over the world are engaged in this Earth Jurisprudence effort. But it is always a difficult struggle, a life and death struggle. We find ourselves existing between two worlds.

Recently I came across a comment from a man who found himself in the middle of such a life and death struggle. He explained the challenge this way:

“ Between the stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lie our growth and our freedom (Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. P. 65-67).

Canada Day ReBoot

cassandra.wells@gmail.com (Sandy Wells) — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 13:58:50 GMT

Rather than "cancelling" Canada Day, July 1 can be a moment to embrace the challenge of change - to reboot Canada.

Does anyone feel like celebrating Canada Day anymore? As Canadians, the gruesome and ongoing discoveries of hundreds of unmarked graves at the sites of former institutional Indian Residential “Schools” – where, for decades, approximately 150,000 children of First Nations families were forcibly sent by government and church officials and those working on their behalf -- must surely give us pause. After all, the celebration of Canada Day is based on the belief in the good of our country, of our communities, and of our history. How insincere would such a celebration be now, given the failure of Canada and Canadians to reckon with the genocide of all First Nation peoples, which paved the way for settlers to overtake the territories that they renamed “Canada”? How repulsive to sing the praises of, to stand on guard for, a state whose official policy was to “kill the Indian in the child”, who believed that destroying families and cultures by stealing and abusing children would constitute progress for the state? The remains of children, some as young as three years old, in unmarked graves are speaking to us now, more loudly it seems than the testimony of thousands of survivors and their relations, who have been telling for decades about friends, siblings, cousins, who never made it home to their families again. As more sites surrounding former residential “schools” are searched, the chorus of those stolen, abused, neglected, and murdered children will only grow louder.

Will we hear them this time? Around the world, Canada enjoys a reputation as a peace-loving, tolerant, multicultural country. Canadians brag (and complain) about the public (though certainly not perfect) health care system, about our peaceful democracy, and our politeness. We feel blessed by the abundance of nature here; by the fresh water, by the fish and animals and trees, and by the growth and death and rebirth that attends the changing of the seasons and offers us all the gift of renewal. However true or mythical are these joys of Canadian life, it must be recognized now that we have not been worthy of them. Beneath the cascading landscapes, behind the peaceful transitions of political power, and across the whole continent, a quiet terror has thrummed, reverberating to the energy of violence and destruction wrought by colonial conquests for the land and its riches. I can imagine it easily: ships filled with tall, straight, strong trees felled from sprawling forests, heading back to Europe’s growing manufacturing operations, trees that would become the masts of still more sea-worthy ships which would in turn sail back to Turtle Island with goods to trade for more lumber, or furs, or tobacco. And then later, the ships would bring settlers, some with a seemingly insatiable appetite for destruction, who would build cities and mines and quarries and hydroelectric dams and industrial agriculture, eventually creating the systems of exploitation, extraction and consumption of the gifts of the earth that ripped apart social and cultural life along with the earth itself.

The people of the land, too, would vibrate to this energy. The First Peoples -- those nations who encountered the European newcomers as they landed, settled, and spread out over Turtle Island, calling it by the name they invented: the New World – had their own social, cultural, and political systems that were interconnected with the land and rhythms of life. But these were violently overridden by the newcomers worldview, which was, most simply put, White Supremacist. The idea that Western Europeans had/have dominion over the earth and its creatures was/is the seed of the genocide that Canada has been perpetuating on Turtle Island since contact, and around the world through its mining interests in Africa, for example, or it’s subsidization of planet killing fossil fuel industries through LNG, pipelines, and tar sands development. The doctrine of separation, in which White Canadians and our society are understood to be distinct from and superior to all other cultural expressions, all other social formations, all other species on the planet, created these violent vibrations. The supremacist fantasies of the settler state and churches only work to separate, to divide and order along a continuum of value. The Residential “School” system punished children for not being White, for not being Western, for failing to be separate from nature. The schools could never “make” a child who was embedded in their community White, but it could make them separate, make them inferior, make them disappear on the edges of White society, either through death or cultural genocide.

But you might have known already. Did you know? Did you know before now (June 2021) that thousands of children were stolen from their homes, families, and communities by Canadians? That they were given to residential schools where they were less students than inmates, hair cut short, names removed, languages forbidden, love and affection denied? Not only this, but many were horribly abused physically and emotionally from very young ages. Many of the children, so many of the children, were abused sexually, as well, and the repercussions of all this abuse have been dizzyingly complex, even if they are perfectly understandable. The intergenerational harms of the “schools” and other forms of settler violence (including the oppressive imposition of Western systems of thought and government) are increasingly evident to contemporary Canadians, though not because of our own efforts to understand. After all, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) reported on all of these issues when their worked wrapped up in 2014, and published 94 different Calls to Action for Canadians and governments to pursue as the work of reconciliation. Since 2014, progress on these Calls has been glacial, even as the voices of Indigenous communities have been rising to break through our complacency – rising about the lack of clean drinking water in First Nations Communities, about mental health support and suicide prevention for youth , about racist violence in Canadian cities and institutions , and about finding and honouring their relatives who died or were killed while at residential schools. Of the 94 Calls to Action in the TRC report, numbers 71 to 76 deal specifically with “Missing Children and Burial Information” from the Residential School system. Call to Action #75 asks that:

“the federal government to work with provincial, territorial, and municipal governments, churches, Aboriginal communities, former residential school [survivors], and current landowners to develop and implement strategies and procedures for the ongoing identification, documentation, maintenance, commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries or other sites at which residential school children were buried.”

Perhaps now, 7 years following the TRC, this Call to Action is receiving the critical mass of attention, cooperation, and funding it requires. I don’t know if any representatives of Canadian governments, churches, or landowners were involved with the plan to search the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential “school” for buried remains of missing children, but I do know that it was the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc First Nation in Kamloops, BC, who hired a ground penetrating radar service to do that work. And it was a grant from the Archdiocese of Regina that enabled the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan to perform a search of the Marieval Indian Residential School site using the same technology. A group of academics and professional researchers based at Simon Fraser University, the University of Brandon, and the University of Windsor, led by the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation, received funding in April 2019 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to pursue a collaborative investigation into unmarked graves associated with former the Brandon Indian Residential "School", but the project has been interrupted by the pandemic. It is likely that their work will not only be amplified when it resumes, but it will accelerate. More remains of children will be found all over this land.

After the TRC, we cannot say we did not know and yet the discoveries in Kamloops, in Regina, and all future discoveries from the decommissioned sites of residential schools across Turtle Island, will shock us and shame us and hopefully transform our ignorance into something like action. What can this action look like now, as Canada Day looms? I am moved by the On Canada Project, which encourages Canadians to change the way we commemorate Canada’s founding and history, and to do so publicly so that our elected officials know that their actions - and not their words of support or sympathy - are what is required. What have we been waiting for? It is us, me and you dear reader, who can change the systems of separation, exploitation, and commercialization of the past for the future. The founding gesture of Canada was the removal of all that came before the colonial systems, and it is therefore a full systems reboot that is called for. We must reboot Canada. Shut down the separatist, supremacist, extractive, consummerist Canada and reboot it with systems embedded in the totality of nature, with humility for the humanity's place in the cosmos, and with the aim of regenerating, not consuming, the future. Who will do this work if not us, now? As the On Canada Project reminds us, We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

It is time to change. Let us support our First Nations neighbours, our brothers and sisters on Turtle Island, who are defending the land, the water, and their stolen ancestors with more than greif and shame. Let us support each other as settlers to be brave enough to become accomplices in the necessary work to oppose and transform the colonial systems that make these defenses so essential. Let us strive, this Canada Day, to live up to our own aspirations of “Peace, Order, and Good Government”.

A great resource to begin with comes from the On Canada project website:

https://oncanadaproject.ca/settlerstakeaction

For Indigenous folks, there are resources to support you during this heavy time. Some are listed here:

The Indian Residential School Survivors Society is available at 1-800-721-0066 along with a 24-hour crisis line at 1-866-925-4419 for those who need immediate support.
The KUU-US Crisis Line Society provides an Indigenous-specific crisis line available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's toll-free and can be reached at 1-800-588-8717
The First Nations Health Authority offer s support specifically for survivors and families who have been directly impacted by the Indian Residential School system.

Land Acknowledgments - An Unsettling Experience

cassandra.wells@gmail.com (Sandy Wells) — Sun, 07 Mar 2021 19:11:15 GMT

Land Acknowledgments offer a chance to tell a new story

Who are you? Why are you here?

It’s Thursday night, and once again I’m in a Zoom break-out room with about 6 strangers, staring at a document, a land acknowledgment template, that is prompting me to acknowledge the territory I have arrived at and settled on by filling in its sections, one at a time. It’s both so simple, and so difficult. Who are you? Place yourself on the land, your roots, your privilege, etc. What do you do? And why are you doing this right now? This is the second time I’ve attended this land acknowledgment workshop, both times as a volunteer facilitator for Myseum Toronto , and the difficulty of answering the ‘simple’ prompts got me again. The task was clear enough: demonstrate respect for the land we inhabit by, first, acknowledging the transition we’ve made from being elsewhere to being here, wherever that is. And begin at the beginning. Who are you?

I’m Sandy. I live in Toronto. I am here to learn, though this niche of the student is one that I inhabit perhaps too easily. In 2014, I was moved by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) report about Canada’s history of genocide and assimilation of First Nations peoples. I participated in some events in Vancouver back then, and together with friends and family members, responded to the TRC’s call-to-action for Canadians by sending a copy of Thomas King’s book, The Inconvenient Indian t o every sitting parliamentarian with an inscription urging them to read, integrate, and spread the word that Canadians are ready for reconciliation. Despite my (our) good intentions, I realize now that King’s main lesson from the book – that access to more land is the reason for the colonizer’s actions – hadn’t really penetrated my life until this land acknowledgement workshop. Despite my concern about colonial violence, I hadn’t come any closer to knowing the land I reside on now any better than I knew the land in Vancouver I lived on when I first made a commitment to reconciliation. Except, of course, if you count real estate.

About six years ago, my partner and I bought a house, and at that time became intimately concerned by the land: its location, size, and proximity to city resources; the size and condition of the home that sits on it; and its value, meaning how much it would cost to buy. This is how the land appears in my story: as a place to live, as an investment, as property. That said, we do our best to care for it. We turned over the lawn and planted trees, bushes, flowers, and vegetables. We installed a rain-water barrel. We think it’s a privilege to get to live here, to plant a little garden, and shovel the snow off the sidewalk in winter. But it was the two workshop facilitators, artists and founders of cultural outreach organization INDIGENizeU S, Lindy Kinoshameg and Leslie McCue, that helped me to bring the land back into the spotlight of my reconciliation journey with their instructions, centre the land, centre the people . As I looked for a place to begin, I began to see how I see the land and people to begin with.

I admit that I don’t know a lot about beginnings, my own or that of the place where I live, but there are some facts that have grounded me enough that I have been able to move around the world with some security. I was born at St. Mike’s hospital in Toronto to a mother and a father and a set of relations that is both large and loosely connected. My family did not have a lot of money, but I grew up on a residential street with schools and playgrounds and laneways and sports fields all around, and wading pools made of concrete, which, in the summer, were filled with water that seemed like it had been chilling in the depths of Lake Ontario since the last ice age. I walked home from school for lunch each day, sometimes picking up a chestnut burr from the ground around the giant tree standing straight and massive in the yard of the big brick house on Wayland, and then walked back to school after I ate my grilled cheese sandwich and watched a Flintstone’s cartoon. I learned to skate, swim, and play tennis in city programs in city facilities that were everywhere around me. Everything in my neighbourhood – the track and tennis courts at the high school across from my house, the ravine that dipped down below street level hiding a small forest and creek, the dusty dirt laneway that linked up the 10 or so properties on my street, some of which were owned, some rented – it all seemed to belong to me, or I to it. I didn’t know I was poor for a long time. We stayed there on Malvern Avenue in a rented house down the block from the one my mother and most of her 15 brothers and sisters grew up in until the trifecta of increasing rent, stagnating wages, and the unreliability of certain race horses forced us out of that place and into Scarborough, on the eastern edge of the city I claimed and which seemed to claim me back.

After a while, I struck out in this world on my own, and I’ve moved many more times, across this city and to other places in the world, but I always return. I believe I always will because this is where my story begins. Like others whose ancestors came to the Americas from Europe since colonization began, my life has been transient, and the roots of my existence on this land obscured by time and the kind of purposeful forgetting that attends people fleeing misery. Malvern Avenue in the east end of Toronto may not be the beginning of my relationship to the land I now inhabit, but it is a beginning. It is a beginning of a story of movement and return, of a life becoming intertwined with the place where it lives, even when that life is mostly unaware of the depth of its relations.

It wasn’t just me who had trouble acknowledging the history of the land and our relationship with it. I don’t know how much my facilitation skills were to blame, but I found solace in the fact that other groups were similarly stumbling. Someone said, “I don’t have a relationship to the land…I live in a noisy, dirty part of the city”. Many nods and chat room affirmations followed. “I have no idea where I came from before I was here, in Canada”, said someone else. While others had a much fuller knowledge about their personal histories, particularly first-generation Canadians, I related to this experience of thinking, if I’m not from here, then where? I know so little about my family’s trajectory that I have been content to let “Canada” be my “home and native land” in my personal story, as much as in the official anthem (though the version sung in our family now includes the misheard-but-totally-apt lyrical change made by our kindergartner, “Oh, Canada, our home on Native land”).

Beginning at the beginning, it turns out, can be hard for us settlers! Attending these workshops made visible to me how far our Western, settler, consumer culture has led me (us?) from thinking about this idea of indigeneity, of belonging to the Earth, of being connected to it so intimately that we could, without embarrassment, call it “Mother”. Instead, when I think about my relationship to the land, I am fluent in the language of “the environment”, “property value”, or “natural resources”, but not in thinking about the land as the source of my life and all the others that have ever lived. How else to explain that my partner and I (but really the bank) “own” a house and the land it is on? Why else would I fret and moan about the climate emergency, but couldn’t name most of the plants I see growing everywhere around me, even in the sidewalk. These disjunctions are increasingly unsettling for me. I have found myself thinking more about the land I occupy and inhabit, the ways in which the settler system thinks about it, how words like “property”, “natural resources” or “the environment” don’t quite capture the reality of the land as a home, as a creature, as creator, as Mother, as the condition for all of this confusing, furious, contradictory, heartbreakingly human experience. That is, I am beginning to see the gap between where I come from, and where I actually exist.

But again, this is just the beginning. The template then guided us to say something more about where you are. Why are you thankful for being on this land, in this moment? How are you thankful for the plants, animals, trees, insects, animals, fish, and water that sustain all life? This again was a stumbling block for many of the people in my group. We can be thankful in a general way for the systems that support all life on Earth, we explained to each other, but drilling down to a personal sense of gratitude for things like animals, soil, plants, insects….well, the realities of a mid-winter Canadian city with its smog-coloured snowbanks and plastic bags blowing in the bare branches of the trees planted in the sidewalk may have been too present for us to feel the gifts of the Earth as we Zoomed from our private, climate-controlled, indoor spaces. The tone was yearnful, bordering on pessimistic. If even we who are motivated to be agents of reconciliation can’t muster some authentic appreciation for the gifts of the Earth, what hope can there be? We worked on ways we could verbalize this perceived lack of connection with the land in our acknowledgment, but in the end we didn’t commit anything to the template.

Can you acknowledge the history of the people? Can you acknowledge the agreements of the land you stand on? What do they mean to you? Can you name the nations (and pronounce them) that cared for and lived on these lands? What do those named nations mean to you? Many of us in these workshops had fractured and piecemeal understandings of the First Nations peoples whose ancestors occupied and inhabited the lands where most of us sat in Toronto and the region. Many of us had heard the names of some nations from other land acknowledgements we’d listened to, but we had trouble expressing what they meant to us. And the agreements? The treaties, the wampum belts, the rules for communal living, for shared responsibility for preserving the lands we now “own”, occupy, and inhabit? Comparing what knowledge we brought with us to the workshop, many of us realized how little we knew about the agreements regarding the land that pre-date the Canadian political and legal systems. What do you know about Treaty 13? The Dish With One Spoon Wampum? The Toronto Purchase? Most of us were not as informed as we wanted to be about the treaty agreements and ways of life of the peoples who originally and continuously occupied and inhabited the lands we now call Canada, an ignorance which was felt especially by those of us also committed to social justice for people we might call “newcomers” or “immigrants” to Canada. On top of this irony, it only took a little Googling (about 10 minutes worth) to return enough information that, when shared with others and mixed with what each of us was able to find out independently, helped us develop a pretty good understanding of Treaty 13, or the Dish with One Spoon wampum (the respective topics of my two group discussions during the workshops I attended). Suddenly, we had new information which could be integrated into our acknowledgement of the land. At last, something to add to the template! Progress! But also a stark realization that this information was always available to us, and relatively easily obtained. How is it that we never thought about it? How can this history of settler and First Nations relations not be known, not learned, not disseminated? An erasure of what was here already, added to the erasure of my origin story. It is no wonder I’ve been so ignorant, living in the empty spaces where these two interrelated, invisible histories overlap.

Slowly, the template was revealing ourselves to us, the gaps and blank spots even more revealing than the sections we could fill in. No one used the term, but the process we went through with Lindy and Leslie was a decolonizing process, that is, an exercise that made visible the ideological and cultural water in which we settlers swim while learning to become aware of and to appreciate the ideological and cultural traditions of the Nations whose lands “Canada” now occupies. We were learning to tell a new story of life in Canada, not the one centred on the outcome of colonial conquest (as if the land or people were “conquered” by Canada or its colonizers), nor our government’s system of management (land zoning laws, private property, so-called “resource” industries, the indescribably horrible reservation and residential school systems), but a story of humanity’s – of our – interrelatedness, and of our integration within the bigger story of all life, and the source of life, our Earth. And however hesitant and self-conscious we were with our statements at first, when each of the small break-out groups shared their learnings through their land acknowledgments, a new picture of interconnectedness to the Earth emerged again. Each person’s individual revelations/insights blended with those of their groups as we worked through the template prompts, and when shared, they helped to crack open the habitual story of our disconnection from Earth, even for those of us who careen over pot-holed concrete in buses and cars, or commute in underground subways for years, decades, whole lifetimes! Acknowledging the land involves a recognition of our responsibility to this connection, even if it is a responsibility currently unmet by the Canadian culture and systems that help to shape our daily lives.

In these circumstances of erasure of the past combined with an attitude of extractive, destructive, control over nature, it is hard to remember that we are all indigenous to somewhere on this Earth, we are all dependent upon it, we all arise and struggle and prosper here. As a Canadian, however, I claim no indigeneity, on Turtle Island or abroad. I am in a line including the settlers, the people “like me and mine” as writer Rebecca Solnit put it recently , “the uprooted, displaced, ungrounded, and lost”. It may sound bleak, but noticing this has been key reshaping my story. I can learn to centre the land in a new way, I can learn about the treaties, and about my responsibilities to them, since I am in a territory that has one (perhaps the first democratic process ever). I can learn about the people, their Nations, and their ways of living in this territory that now includes St. Mike’s Hospital (where I was born), Malvern Avenue (where I spent my childhood), and Little Jamaica (where I live now). I can do this – notice the land, the people, and the other creatures, notice myself and my ways of living, and the ways these two worlds affect each other – forever. And in so doing, hopefully become more and more deeply bound up in the land, its rhythms, its creatures, and its future.

Although it rarely rises up to my conscious awareness, the tradition in which I was raised, aside from the influence of the Canadian culture in general, included the belief that people are molded from the clay of the Earth, and that we all eventually return to the Earth, will become the clay again. Among the many new things I learned from the workshop leaders is that Anishinaabe tradition teaches that their ancestors descended to Earth from the sky, that Anishinabeg – the word referring to the people as a collective – translates to “from whence lowered”. These stories of beginnings are different, and that is part of the point, I think. Before respecting differences, there is the noticing. Noticing not only the difference in origin stories, but also differences in what my tradition teaches – people exist as part of a living Earth – and how I live it out. The cultures that gave rise to colonization, and the societies that developed out of them, has buried the link that connects us to the Earth underneath the pavement of our cities, or has relegated it to the Old World, that abstract and faraway place now lost to time. In place of connection, I live out a relationship of entitlement to the land – we put a road here, a mall there; we dig out the minerals and clear-cut a forest; tunnel a pipeline through it all. If I can reach back beyond the socioeconomic analysis of my relationship to the land – do I own property? What kind? How much? – and back through time, intergenerationally, my story brings me back to the land (though not necessarily this land, on Turtle Island), back to the clay. But the difficulty of bringing this relationship into words was, is, significant for a modern, developed mind.

Still, I am heartened that we Canadians, who apparently have believed that we ‘settled’ this land and its peoples, can re-think our place in this place, especially with regard to the First Nations who have occupied and shared these lands continuously before and after colonization. But also, and crucially, with the land and water, the animals and fish and insects, the stars and moons and the whole universe, because there is no difference between nature and humanity. The trees are our lungs, the water flows in our veins, the clay forms us, and one day this will be all that is left of us.

I encourage everyone to try creating a land acknowledgement that brings them into deeper relationship with their place in the world, and the land that sustains them. For details about the workshop I attended, please see Myseum Toronto or INDIGENizeUS . For a copy of the land acknowledgement template that you can use to contemplate and draft your own land acknowledgement, please email me at stories@earthliteracies.org . To hear/see my own land acknowledgment, stay tuned to this space!

For anyone looking to begin, deepen, or broaden their own decolonizing journey, please join the Programs in Earth Literacies upcoming workshop, Decolonizing Water: An Introduction to Indigenous Water Laws , with writer, educator, and activist, Denise Nadeau . In this four-session interactive workshop we will explore what decolonizing our relationship with water can mean for our communities, our natural world, and ourselves. We will examine our own embodied connection to watersheds and bodies of water, and begin to explore water teachings from Anishinaabe, Okanagan/Syilx, and Heiltsuk peoples. We will relate the Indigenous principle of reciprocity to non - Indigenous gift traditions, and discuss the implications for human relationships with water. The workshop will include guest speakers, body exercises, short videos and on-line resources, as well as readings from her book Unsettling Spirit: A Journey into Decolonization (MQUP, 2020).

Follow the Money...to the New Story!

cassandra.wells@gmail.com (Sandy Wells) — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 20:28:27 GMT

The NEW STORY of our Earth home doesn't include funding fossil fuels.

Dear Friends,

Our Programs in Earth Literacies are about igniting our connection with the living Earth and the profound connection of all life that emerges on it. But did you know that our work promoting Earth Literacies goes beyond our workshops?

Increasingly, we are joining our voice to others who are finding ways to productively and collectively resist the exploitation and destruction of our earth home. Our friends at the Climate Pledge Collecti ve and the young leaders in @ Climate Strike Canada have been drawing attention to the fact that the money we put into Canada’s Big 5 Banks is being used to fund the climate-destroying fossil fuel projects we so urgently need to end. While each of us can find ways to consume less or to better account for our carbon footprints, these individual actions are meaningless if we don’t also realize that our banks are funding the climate crisis by financing the exploration and development of NEW oil and gas deposits.

According to this 2020 report from the Rainforest Action Group, developed fossil fuel reserves already exceed our carbon budget for keeping our future global temperature increase under 1.5C – not a safe level, but one that might be achievable and might avoid the worst of the worst future climate scenarios. Even if we left the rest in the ground, just developing proven fossil fuel reserves will guarantee a disastrous future.

On January 29, Canada’s Big 5 Banks were put on notice: Divest from Fossil Fuel Projects or the People will move their money. If you missed the action on January 29, and would like to participate, it’s not too late to learn more about fossil fuel financing and the BankSwitch campaign. To watch the BankSwitch webinar hosted by the Climate Pledge Collective, please click here . After you watch, be sure to do something: talk to someone about what you learned (even if it's uncomfortable); address a letter to your bank; plan a switch, if necessary. The movement to divest from fossil fuels will not be lead by the banks, but by millions of people demanding ethical, sustainable, energy development.

As the deadline for divestment nears (April 22, 2021, International Mother Earth Day), let’s keep in our hearts and minds the actions big and small, individual and collective, that honour the gifts of our Earth home and our obligation to sustain it into the future.

More info: https://climatepledgecollective.org/bankswitch/

Banking on Climate Change Report: https://www.ran.org/bankingonclimatechange2020

How to Switch: https://www.sustainableeconomist.com/how_to_fire_your_bank

4% FTW!

cassandra.wells@gmail.com (Sandy Wells) — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 17:18:48 GMT

If less than 4% of an active population can drive governmental and societal change, Peter Topolewski writes, then Gen Z, who comprise 25% of the global population and own 100% of the future, have the critical mass and reason enough to get that change underway. In his latest book, Dr. Reece Halter gives us all reasons to get behind the climate and justice leadership of "Generation Z". So, as we welcome a new calendar year and the opportunity for renewal - in all of its senses - let's find ways to choose that change in 2021, by amplifying and embodying the efforts of youth all over the world. As this book review concludes, the solutions for saving a dying planet - that is, realizing there is enough for everyone, consuming less, shutting down harmful industries - can no longer seem outlandish. In fact, the adaptability that is now called for is exactly what we are demonstrating through the current COVID-19 pandemic. Onward, friends, with courage, adaptability, and love. HNE!

By Peter Topolewski

Dr. Reese Halter, a champion on behalf of nature, has put in time during this hellish Covid-19 pandemic to do us a favor. He’s published a new book, Gen Z Emergency , to again highlight the danger our natural world is in and, perhaps most importantly, show us some of the now massive steps required to ensure nature’s – and our – survival.

Reese frames Gen Z Emergency around a simple event: he, a veteran educator and scientist, takes a hike in Colorado with three progressives from Generation Z, loosely defined as those born between 1995 and 2012. The hike begins with snippets of conversation about some of the natural phenomenon they see along the trail in the Rockies, with Reese imparting his knowledge to his young friends. But the hike, and the dialogue that winds through the book, is a framing mechanism for Reese to make his main points about the current state of the world:

every element of the life on this planet is wondrous and connected
all life on Earth is in grave peril, because of us
we still have a slim hope of saving it, but it falls on Gen Z to lead the charge to some drastic changes

These are not sections of the book but themes that emerge from a catalog of examples. As in much of his writing, the core of this book is Reese’s detailed descriptions of what are – in the scheme of things – just a few of nature’s wide range of wonders. But the breadth is as usual for Reese vast, as he moves from trees in the North American West that sustain 65 million people to insects that pollinate 350,000 kinds of flowering plants. It’s difficult to overstate how important these are, precisely because there’s less of nature for us to experience, and fewer of us have the chance or take the time to make that connection. Reese makes the time and pursues that connection with nature, relentlessly. And he does us a service by bringing that nature to us, explaining how so many examples of life on Earth actually work – and how they make our life on Earth work.

The range of life forms and processes Reese covers reminded me of something Brian Swimme said in an interview with Adrian David Nelson on the Waking Cosmos . They were discussing scientific materialism and consciousness, when Swimme summed up the wonder of the natural world that centuries of scientific inquiry had brought to human understanding: “How fantastic that scientists that had utterly no sense of what they were going to discover ended up with a story that has greater spiritual significance than any of the traditional religious stories.”

Reese has helped guide those discoveries in his field, and he’s helped teach us non-scientific folk about them. It’s clear that Reese is in awe of life’s diversity, engineering, and efficiency, and through his writing he helps us feel some of that awe ourselves. Yet Reese’s catalog of the wonder of nature is also akin to Joel Sartore’s Photo Ark : He’s keeping a record of things we’re losing or could lose.

In neither way is his writing a substitute for being in nature, but it’s an inspiration for learning about it, getting out there, and saving it. This is especially important because our species is continuing to pillage nature while the super wealthy among us, like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, see “salvation” billions of dollars away on the barren planet Mars. ( They also count among the biggest climate grifters around .) What they don’t get – what people like Reese are trying to make clear – was laid out beautifully by Elizabeth Kolbert in the October 2019 issue of National Geographic: “One way to think of a species, be it of ape or of ant, is as an answer to a puzzle: how to live on planet Earth. A species’ genome is a sort of manual; when the species perishes, that manual is lost. We are, in this sense, plundering a library – the library of life.“

Reese takes the need to save our disappearing natural world a step further. Throughout Gen Z Emergency, he attaches a key point to descriptions of life on Earth: Not only are each of these instances of life amazing, they’re connected. We’re all connected.

It’s not a new message but it is one you see more and more these days. It has popped up in the NY Times story of the Suzanne Simard , the woman who discovered the community that exists among trees in a forest. And in the documentary My Octopus Teacher , where Craig Foster, the human subject of the film, learns that we are not visitors here, but that we’re part of nature. It’s a message that’s needed, and Reese brings the point home. Again and again, he concludes a description of tree species or fungi or a sea creature with a simple logic: if no X, then no Y.

No eucalypt forests. No koalas
No insects. No freshwater life.
No earthworms. No soil life. No food.
No sea ice. No ice seals. No polar bears.
No mangroves. No fisheries
No trees. No life.
No corals. No fish. No life.

It is exactly because of this fundamental connection we have that we need to care about this beetle or that mushroom.

For those who do, the payoff is clear. Reese gives examples large and small of how both animals and people benefit when we recognize and act on our place in nature. That can be helping a single wounded sea critter or fighting back against waves of poachers and polluters. Not surprisingly, scientists are finding that the benefits of environmental regulation have been underestimated. Over the last four decades, efforts to reduce air pollution in the U.S. to protect human health have, it’s been discovered, saved 1.5 billion birds .

Unfortunately, none of this has been enough, and in his own voice and through the voice of his three Gen Z companions Reese rages against the forces actively destroying nature. The anger is easy to understand. It comes from his love of nature and the brutal fact that all of it is on death’s door. As much as Gen Z Emergency is a catalog of Earth’s wonders, it’s also a catalog of nature’s ailments, most of them a result of our crimes against it.

The list of the woes is a horror show. The biggest, most daunting problem is climate change, mainly because it touches all parts of the Earth. As Reese says:

The biodiversity on this planet is mesmerizing! There are about two million different forms of life and possibly 10 times that yet to be found. What we see today in nature is the result of 1.2 billion years of reproductive evolution. Every single organism is wonderful, time-tested, sculpted by the environment and perfected. All life exists within a habitable range of temperatures. Migrating animals time their reproduction to a temperature cue. In turn, they depend upon a plentiful food source of prey, greened-up vegetation, insect blooms or aquatic life-forms for their offspring. When temperature spikes or habitats are destroyed or poisoned, life ceases.

It’s clear, then, why climate change is an existential threat. But nature’s diagnosis – which Reese backs with pages of references – is terrible everywhere you look. A sample:

Indonesia has 131 threatened bird species, second only to Brazil, with 164.
Humans devour an estimated 70 billion land animals annually.
African elephant numbers have collapsed from an estimated population of 26 million in 1800 to about 310,000 today, and we are losing ~17,000 elephants annually.
In the past 20 years, two billion sharks have been de-finned alive.
Since 1970, the global population of large freshwater creatures like stingrays, catfish, turtles, and salamanders has crashed 88%.
40% of all insects are in decline.
Over 80 % of Canadian wetlands are soaking in toxins that drain off the oil seed crops.
Nearly 85% of all wild mammals (6,400 species) and 80% of marine mammals have been wiped out by mankind.
1,500 drinking water systems, supplying 110 million citizens across the United States are laced with nonstick “forever chemicals” like perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid.
There is a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico more than 17 times the size of the Greater Los Angeles Area.
Each year, 5.3 to 15 megatons of plastic pollution flush into the oceans. The largest, in the Pacific Ocean, could weigh the same as about 43,000 automobiles.

It’s staggeringly sad and ironic that we humans are the most intelligent creatures in the world, and yet we have worked without letup for our own destruction. While the natural world around us operates in exquisite balance, we take every opportunity to destroy the system. We are not stewards of the Earth, we’re exploiters.

Reese correctly aims his anger at the major culprits in this: big business, poachers, and criminal organizations, but none of us gets off without blame. Here a tough question about humanity remains unspoken but there for us to ask ourselves: why are we ruled by greed? It drives so much of business and crime, but also our consumerism, our sense of superiority, our sense of entitlement. It warps our judgement and our idea of what’s right and what are our rights. It’s what makes us beholden to the dollar and the free market system, even though most of the destruction on Earth is wrought, hypocritically, by industries like energy, fishing, and mining that are annually subsidized with the trillions of government dollars. Some free market.

Amazingly, in spite of what we’ve done so far it’s in our humanity that Reese sees some hope. It’s in Gen Z, whose members he hopes are less taken by consumerism, are less inclined to eat meat or need a huge house or a gas guzzling car. He’s not naïve to think that consumer choices alone will move the needle enough or fast enough to make a difference. He understands that it takes governments to guide widespread changes in habits. But he points to research by Harvard University professor Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan of the United States Institute of Peace to explain that less than 4% of an active population can drive governments and societal change. Gen Z is 25% of the global population, and it “claims, and rightfully so, that they own 100 percent of the future.” There are more than enough of them, and they have reason enough, to get that change underway.

By no means is it a given. You can see how uphill the battle is from the preposterously inept effort Baby Boomers and Gen Xers have made over the last thirty years, in spite of ample warnings that we’re headed for – and now halfway over – a cliff. Incredibly there’s still no shortage of climate change deniers, who share a mental derangement with deep-state-fearing lunatics. Still, they’re grossly outnumbered by those of us who, though living in a world crafted over billions of years, can’t bear the thought of altering their lifestyles or changing jobs any time soon to save what precious little of nature we have left.

The prescription is bold. And in the face of such complacency and ignorance, the challenge is all the greater. Reese calls for, among other things, permanently setting aside tracks of wilderness, in line with E.O. Wilson’s Half-Earth Project . Ending fisheries completely to allow marine life decades to heal. The immediate protection for all old-growth forests. An end to subsidies for energy, plastics, and fishing industries. These and other changes Reese proposes would give our natural world time to heal, something it has shown repeatedly it can do if given the chance.

All by themselves, Reese’s to-do list appears to have as much chance of getting done as a wish list made in fantasy land. But that’s one of the great feats of this book. After reading Reese’s descriptions of nature, understanding the deep connections of the web of life, feeling just a sliver of the awe he feels, after having your eyes open to the scale of our destruction, the solutions for nature’s salvation don’t sound outlandish – or out of reach.

Originally published 10 Dec 2020 at darwinsgongshow.com and is reproduced here with permission.

Intergenerational story-telling keeps us connected

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 22:14:02 GMT

Intergenerational story-telling keeps us connected

How are you connecting with loved ones these days? Over Zoom or Skype? On Instagram or Facebook? Through a WhatsApp group, or your Strava feed, or some of the hundreds of other social media or 'connecting' platforms enabled by our phones and computers? We certainly are. When Bubbe cancelled her long-planned visit from Vancouver to our house in Toronto last March, at the beginning of the pandemic, we marvelled at the miracle of Zoom to help us bridge the distance. But just sitting and chatting is not something 3- and 5-year olds have a lot of time for. So, we turned to the age-old tradition of telling stories, or more accurately in our case, reading stories.

We can all enjoy a good tale well told, and whether you are looking for new ways to connect with your grandchildren or other littles in your life, or could use a reassuring story of love and connection yourself, here are a few suggestions for ignighting that sense of connection through reading together. It works best when both Bubbe and littles have the same book, but it can be just as charming to simply listen to a good book. So try to read one of these heart-ful tales with the littles in your life, and see if the feeling of connection is because we have Zoom, or because we have stories.

Little Gorilla

Wirtten and illustrated by Ruth Bornstein

The unfathomable change from infant to grown up is what Little Gorilla faces in this nourishing story for very young children. As soon he’s born, “everyone in the great green jungle loves Little Gorilla”. Not only does his extended gorilla family – parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles - love him; even the other beasts and critters in the jungle love Little Gorilla. But gorillas don’t stay little for long – what happens when Little Gorilla gets BIG? As every parent knows, babies grow fast: mine went from uncoordinated needs-machines to walking, talking needs-machines in only two years! In the process, they changed in almost every way. As humbling as this experience is for a care-giver of babies and young ones, this book helped me to see the experience of becoming a ‘big kid’ from the other side, from a perspective that wonders what might be lost when one stops being “Little”.

With an abundance of warmth and gentle suspense, Ruth Bornstein’s narrative places the listener in the heart of a diverse and loving family, as the centre of a kind world, where they are safe and proud to notice and experience themselves growing and changing. My children light up while reading this book, taking obvious joy from the scenes of intergenerational (“grandma and grandpa loved Little Gorilla”) and interspecies connection (“pink butterfly, fluttering through the forest, loved Little Gorilla….Even big boa constrictor thought Little Gorilla was nice.”). When it is revealed that – big or little – everyone still loves the eponymous gorilla, readers and listeners are always reassured. This book encourages conversations about growth and change, as well as love and nature.

The Digger and the Flower

Written and illustrated by Joseph Kuefler

The Dozer, the Crane and the Digger spent each day moving the earth to build skyscrapers, roads and bridges. One day, Digger found a tiny, beautiful flower in the rubble. He watered it, protected it from the wind, and sang a bedtime story for the flower when the day’s work was done.

Crane marked a new spot for building to continue, and Dozer cut the flower down before Digger could stop him. … But Digger was able to rescue the seeds, and the story takes a different direction.

From this story we can learn about choices, about reasons from the heart, about courage and imagination and about friendship and care.

Kuefler is also author of Rulers of the Playground, described by him as a “cautionary and satirical tale about power”, and Beyond the Pond, a “celebration of imagination and its power to transform and expand our world.” Find them at www.josephkeufler.com

A Conversation with Gertie Jocksch

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 19:35:03 GMT

From there to here, and how the New Cosmology changes everything.

In this first in a series of interviews, Sandy Wells speaks with Gertie Jocksch about her education and life path that led her to embrace the New Cosmology.

Do you really KNOW where you live?

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 01:22:15 GMT

Do you really KNOW where you live?

In his November 2020 PIEL webinar, “No Justice – No Peace”, Diarmuid O’Murchu directed our attention to our place in the cosmos, by urging us to become acquainted with the bioregion in which we live.

* Pacific Stellar Jay Image from Nature Conservancy of Canada and NatureServe Canada | 2020

Defining bioregion as “a natural ecological community with characteristic flora, fauna and environmental conditions and bounded by natural rather than artificial borders”, O’Murchu suggested that becoming familiar with the other occupants – flora and fauna – and the environmental conditions of our bioregion may help us to live responsibly as members of our local, natural communities.

Here are two bioregion audits you can use to check how well you know your neighbours, and your neighbourhood. The first was written by Leonard Charles, Jim Dodge, Lynn Milliman and Victoria Stockley for the Coevolution Quarterly, Winter, 1981.

https://dces.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/128/2013/08/Where-You-At-Quiz.pdf

The second in Tina Fields’ expansion on the 1981 list of questions, divided into categories to allow for deeper inquiry.

https://indigenize.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/bioregional-quiz/

Ecolibrium3, an organization committed to building resilient communities in the Duluth, Minnesota area, give us many examples of actions directed at living well within a bioregion.

https://www.ecolibrium3.org/duluthclimateaction/communityinitiatives/

Bringing it home!

In June, 2020, The Nature Conservancy of Canada published Ours to Save, a catalogue of 308 different plant and animal species that live in Canada and nowhere else on Earth. Many of these species are threatened with extinction, and it is our neighbourly responsibility to protect them. Check out your Canadian bioregion and your neighbours at natureconservancy.ca/ourstosave .

What action could you take to stem further global diversity loss?

A Win BY Youth, FOR Everyone

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 07:46:53 GMT

Mathur et. al. v. Her Majesty in Right in Ontario

A landmark climate lawsuit

A year ago, Ontario Premier Doug Ford weakened Ontario’s climate targets.

Seven courageous young people – Sophia, Zoe, Shaelyn, Alex, Shelby, Madi and Beze , aided by a legal team from Ecojustice, Canada’s largest environmental law charity, sued the Ford government, claiming that these weakened climate regulations threatened their Charter Rights to life, liberty, and security of the person .

The Ford government made several procedural arguments to have the case dismissed namely that the courts aren’t the right forum to discuss climate change, that climate impacts are too far in the future to understand now, that climate change is so big that Ontario’s regulations won’t make much difference, and that the young people can’t represent the interests of other generations.

Last week, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled, agreeing to hear the case, saying “This case is of public interest, in that it transcends the interest of all Ontario residents, not just the Applicants’ generation or the ones that follow.”

The seven applicants will have their day in court, and we will all have public and legal attention focussed on the implications of climate change for our heath and our future.

What can YOU do?

1) Meet the seven applicants: https://ecojustice.ca/case/

2) Watch for the court case itself

3) Talk with your own network of climate activists about the importance of strong legal boundaries and enforcement

4) Support Ecojustice: https://ecojustice.ca/

THEN ... tell us about it, in the comments below - we would love to hear from you!

* photo credit to Emily Chan

A Study of Rocks - A Short Film by Ethan Cook & Logan Jones

parkervancouver@gmail.com (Parker Cook) — Sat, 07 Nov 2020 02:15:59 GMT

A meditation of hope, simplicity, and the beauty of the natural world we often fail to look at closely. From the shores of Jericho Beach, Point Grey, near the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. A film by Ethan Cook from Ethan Cook Productions and Logan Jones from Dunbar Underground Studios.