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earth spirituality

ALTERNATIVES

Economy and ecology are now in conflict; it’s time to integrate them with wisdom

27th March 2020

“We have now reached a new tipping point where enmities are more expensive in all respects than friendly collaboration; where planetary limits of exploiting nature have been reached. It is high time for us to cross this new tipping point into our global communal maturity — to evolve an ecosophy.” says evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris….

ALTERNATIVES

How psychedelics helped to shape Extinction Rebellion

23rd January 2020

From Emerge: Gail Bradbrook, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, writes about her experiences with psychedelic plants, which she says altered her worldview so radically as to set her on her current path to initiate social change. Bradbrook helped found, and continues to play a key role in this global movement for systemic change….

ALTERNATIVES

Daniel Christian Wahl: We are a young species growing up

2nd January 2020

Humanity is facing the terminal crisis of an outdated worldview. From a long-term perspective, as a relatively young species on this planet we are collectively undergoing a maturation process which requires us to redefine how we understand our relationship to the rest of life on Earth— facing the choices of either collapse or profound transformation….

ALTERNATIVES

How the land cured my daughter’s eczema

30th September 2019

We’re mindful of what we provide for her. She has a relationship to the Land in a way that most Indigenous children do. She’s untangling the idea of growing food, of what it means to eat the food that we grow, and how to give thanks to the Land for growing the foods she eats….

ALTERNATIVES

Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World

31st July 2019

In Richard Louv’s words: “Glenn Albrecht is among the most important eco-philosophers today. He is also a map-maker: he names the roads ahead, the dead-ends, the detours, and potential destinations. And, unlike so many scientists, he does so with a new language of emotions―those now emerging from the tragedy and the possibility of the Earth.”…

ALTERNATIVES

Caretaking: A conversation

29th April 2019

Wendell Berry and Helena Norberg-Hodge discuss human nature, experiential knowledge, technology, happiness, wildness, and local food systems — topics which they have always commented on, but which have taken on a new urgency. They offer a critique of our economic system and show how the caretaking of the natural world and local communities are one and the same….

ALTERNATIVES

Arturo Escobar: Farewell to Development

8th March 2019

Over the years, ‘development’ has undergone multiple modifications, such as sustainable development, participatory development, development with gender equity, integrated rural development, and so forth. All these approaches stay within the conventional understanding of development: they don’t constitute a radical departure from the prevailing paradigm. What we need to do is get rid of ‘development’ itself…

ALTERNATIVES

Our new, happy life? The ideology of development, by Charles Eisenstein

5th February 2019

People in older cultures, connected to community and place, held close in a lineage of ancestors, woven into a web of personal and cultural stories, radiate a kind of solidity and presence that I rarely find in any modern person. Whatever the measurable gains of the Ascent of Humanity, we have lost something immeasurably precious….

Bookshelf

Charles Eisenstein: Initiation into a living planet

14th October 2018

Most people have passed through some kind of initiation; a crisis that defies what you knew and what you were. Societies can also pass through a similar initiation. That is what climate change poses to the present global civilization. A key element of this transformation is from a geomechanical worldview to a Living Planet worldview….

ALTERNATIVES

Film: Schooling the World – The White Man’s Last Burden

13th March 2018

If you wanted to change a culture, how would you do it? You would change the way it educates its children. ‘Schooling The World,’ a film by Carol Black, takes a challenging, sometimes funny, ultimately deeply troubling look at the role played by modern education in the destruction of the world’s last sustainable land based cultures….

Atulya Bingham

ALTERNATIVES

Atulya Bingham: The forest man

1st February 2018

Ludwig Appeltans is an experienced permaculture teacher who has lived in the forest for four years. He runs the Earth Ways permaculture project, aiming to reconnect people, land and nature. Here, he is in conversation with Atulya Bingham, an earth building practitioner who has lived close to nature for many years in her native Turkey….

ALTERNATIVES

On the wildness of children

12th January 2018

Carol Black writes: Some of our children, it turns out, are more like pigeons and squirrels, and some are more like bears. Some of them adapt to the institutional walls we put around them, some pace till their paws bleed. The bleeding of these children, if we listen, can tell us many stories about ourselves….

ALTERNATIVES

To embrace the transition, we must go beyond ‘environmentalism’

29th December 2017

Erik Lindberg writes: In contrast to a conflictual and adversarial approach to activism, which aims at victory over those who stand in the way of progress, the Transition model and the community spaces it creates, open doors for the sort of narrative whereby we accept responsibility and move forward with recognition of our collective errors….

ALTERNATIVES

Learning to see in the dark: An interview with deep ecologist Joanna Macy

24th November 2017

Joanna Macy, an eco-philosopher and a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory and deep ecology, coined the phrase “The Great Turning” to describe “the essential adventure of our time”: the shift from what she calls the “industrial growth society” that is consuming the planet to a life-sustaining civilization. Here’s Macy’s interview with Truthout.org’s Dahr Jamail….

ALTERNATIVES

Sulak Sivaraksa on the structural violence of the global economy

13th November 2017

Sulak Sivaraksa, the 85-year-old Thai Buddhist monk, thinker and peace activist, is currently facing the prospect of a fifteen-year jail sentence, for criticising his country’s royal family and military junta. Here, he speaks on the global economy’s built-in inequities and biases. Also included is ‘Heavenly Messengers,’ an excerpt from his book, ‘The Wisdom of Sustainability.’…

ALTERNATIVES

7 Days of Rest: A global event for healing the planet and its inhabitants

9th November 2017

7 Days of Rest, 1 – 7 January 2018, is a global unifying event, dedicating 2018 and beyond to the healing and replenishment of the planet and its inhabitants. It seeks to initiate coordinated, unified global action to catalyse mass awareness about the earth’s looming ecological and civilisational crises, in an immediate and effective way….

Sarus Cranes in Etah, Uttar Pradesh

Gopi Sundar

Culture/Cognition

Being human, in a more-than-human world

22nd October 2017

David Abram writes: I am dazzled, yes, by the creativity of the human mind, but I’m also struck dumb by the ability of various aspen groves to maintain and replenish themselves, through their common root system, for eighty thousand years and more. Are we humans unique? Sure we are. But then, so is everyone else around here….

ALTERNATIVES

A manifesto for the green mind

31st August 2017

We consume more, we fill the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. We have more stuff, our lives are more convenient, yet we’re not happier. Prof. Jules Pretty sets out a plan to engage people with Nature and create more sustainable and enjoyable living for everyone. The first call to action is: “Every child outdoors every day”….

Paintings by Meenakshi Subramaniam

Culture/Cognition

Suprabha Seshan: The music of everything

15th August 2017

I’m no elephant whisperer, nor do I claim to have complex exchanges with them by moonlight, but the reverse is true: when they come by, I’m whispered out of my den by their calls and cries, by their trumpets, rumbles and whooshing sighs. When elephants arrive in the valley, I scoot out of my sheets….

Culture/Cognition

Art Eco 1: The ethereal beauty of ‘Bioluminescent Forest’

7th August 2017

Nature has always inspired art, but in our own age of ecological crisis, it’s taking on a special significance for many contemporary artists. This series looks at path-breaking artists and works that reflect this growing awareness. Here, watch artist-filmmakers Friedrich van Schoor and Tarek Mawad turn trees, mushrooms, and even toads into pulsing, projection-mapped creatures….