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When we dig around the base of the word ecology, we eventually unearth two deep roots from the original ancient Greek: oikos and logos. Oikos translates literally as family, the family's home, or household, and logos as knowledge or understanding. These roots remind us that ecology's original meaning was less about observing our surroundings, or "environment", from a detached perspective, and more about coming to know our own family and the home in which we all dwell.
Natural scientists have long been studying and writing about our richly complex and evolving household of life, and yet we see now that information alone is not enough to create the conditions for living honourably here. Though flooded with data on increasingly minute and isolated aspects of our world, those of us raised within capitalist, materialist, industrialized cultures often struggle to perceive the wholeness, integrity and intrinsic value of the dynamic living systems from which we are woven. The ecological and social crises we see and experience in the world today are reflections of this essential disconnect. To access meaningful understanding – the kind that fosters a sense of belonging, of wonder and of kinship – we require new ways of seeing. In my experiential classes and workshops I aspire to foster these ways of seeing by combining the rigour and discipline of scientific observation with practices that develop our natural capacity for insight and empathy. This approach can give rise to transformative experiences of learning that expand our perceptions of self and gradually change the way we experience and live within the world. To read more about past and upcoming workshops, click here. |
Through the wider Self every living being is intimately connected, and from this intimacy flows the capacity of identification and, as a natural consequence, the practice of non-violence. No moralizing is needed, just as we don't need morals to make us breathe. |