Our Exploration
“Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
What is the intent of this work?
The work on Ecological Belonging is about remembering, exploring, renewing, and reweaving our naturally-rooted stories, rituals, and wisdom into our daily lives. Doing so will re-center relationships – with communities, the land, and the planet - as core to a hopeful future.
This work aims to contemplate the question of “How do we live?”
Throughout the multiple tracks, we begin by considering the following building-block questions:
What stories and narratives do we tell ourselves?
What practices and rituals have we developed over time?
What are the ways in which we come to know and share knowledge?
What has been passed down, and what do we pass forward?
By embracing ecological belonging, individuals and communities can work towards creating a harmonious future, where humans coexist with nature in a symbiotic way.
Why are we doing this?
We are in a moment that is being described as one of crisis or polycrisis that will require many responses. But all of those responses will be limited and inadequate without a shift in how we live in relation to the rest of the natural world and to each other. A sustainable human future depends on changing our orientation.
In the last three to five hundred years the world has in many places (but not all!) lost the invisible architecture, either entirely or in ways that have largely emptied it of meaning. Our great societal challenges are a direct outgrowth of this loss. The need for renewing ecological belonging, meaning, and purpose, has never been clearer.
The Ecological Belonging initiative encompasses several interwoven tracks of work, unfolding in parallel. The aim is to create a tapestry of knowledge and foster new grounds for exploration and collective sense-making. Because this work is inherently collaborative and participatory, we invite you to get involved and participate, too!
Together, these tracks intend to build and embrace a hopeful ecological narrative.