to their physical, mental, and emotional health. One study he cites found that the average American child spends less than seven minutes a day outdoors, but racks up more than seven hours per day staring at screens. Sampson says that children can recognize more than 10,000 corporate logos, but fewer than 10 plants native to their region. He argues this disconnect threatens our planet and the very future of humanity. “If sustainability depends on transforming the human relationship with nature,” he writes, “the present-day gap between kids and nature emerges as one of the greatest and most overlooked crises of our time.” Throughout his childhood, this forest beca... posted on Sep 3 2015 (17,608 reads)

Willows" (c.1944), by Arthur Garfield Dove. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. American painter Joan Brown (1938-1990) presents a thick, clotted mass of paint strokes at the center of her Abstract Expressionist painting "Brambles." There isn't even the slightest hint of representation, yet the feeling is one of an almost impenetrable mass, the way we encounter actual brambles. "Brambles" (1957), by Joan Brown. Oakland Museum of California. Around the world, nature is depicted with paint, wood, clay, fibers, metal, and more. The results might be stylized, traditionally indigenous, classical, avant-garde, particular to a place or era. "Autumn V... posted on Mar 4 2020 (4,592 reads)

“Moss-in-Prison” project helped me bring my love for trees and forest to men and women in the deepest windowless reaches of the prison system. “We learned that the inmates who viewed nature videos committed twenty-six percent fewer violent infractions than those who did not view them, a convincing result for the prison officers and administrators—and for ourselves.” Photo by Samuel Zeller/Unsplash When one is in love—especially with something as huge and beautiful and complex as trees—there is an urge to share this emotion with everyone, especially to those who have no opportunity to experience s... posted on Jul 2 2018 (11,459 reads)

that's sitting in your backyard or in a park near where you live. Or maybe, if you don't have any of that, just sitting by your window and looking out and getting into a meditative state, noticing movement. And then, as the days and the seasons go by, beginning to understand and notice the movement of our relatives out there, who are flying and walking and crawling, and getting to know them. And that's a practice that we call "sit spot." It's known throughout the nature connection community as the "sit spot practice" and there's many different nature meditations that you can weave in, so that you can start to bring the mindfulness practice into y... posted on Jan 14 2020 (8,443 reads)

Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65060962 Watching the sun rise over the wetlands, the mist fading, even here in the midst of nature there is the strange stillness of a world in lockdown — waiting, wondering, anxiety, and fear its companions. I am writing these words in the time of the great pandemic, when for a few brief months our world slowed down and almost stopped; when as the stillness grew around us there was a moment to hear another song, not one of cars and commerce, but belonging to the seed of a future our hearts need to hear. This song comes from a place where the angels are present, where light is born, where the fu... posted on Sep 20 2020 (7,210 reads)

of gravity even with all that moving. Mr. Hempton: Oh, there definitely is, and that is Hawaii. Ms. Tippett: OK. Mr. Hempton: Yeah, the place of Hawaii, a place that I've recorded many times in my life, is the first experience I had was when I was six weeks old and then we moved away when I was four years old and I did not revisit the location until 1990 when all of a sudden I discovered that I had all these primal impressions of what it's like to be home in nature. The smells of Hawaii, the sounds of the surf, of all the places that I've recorded in Hawaii, and I've recorded all the islands in Hawaii for an exhibit on endangered species for the S... posted on Oct 18 2013 (39,624 reads)

Hempton is an acoustic ecologist. He has traveled the globe three times recording the vanishing sounds and silences of nature—from the songbird chorus that greets the dawn to the crash of waves on a rocky shore; from the call of a whale in the ocean depths to the drip of rain on a forest floor. After 30 years recording the natural world, he reports that “There are fewer than a dozen quiet places left in the United States. Even in our wilderness areas and national parks, the average noise-free interval has shrunk to less than five minutes during daylight hours.” Hempton makes his home in Joyce, Washington, so as to be near Olympic National Park, the place he calls ... posted on Aug 12 2016 (18,129 reads)

sun in the Andes, Chile | photography ©Yuri Beletsky For at least 50,000 years, humanity has been on a journey of separation—pulling back from nature and becoming ever more differentiated, individuated, and empowered. In recent decades, we have become so dominant as a species that we are producing Earth-changing trends—global warming, species extinction, unsustainable population, massive famines, waves of migration, and more—that threaten humanity’s future. Now, with stunning abruptness, humanity is being challenged to turn from the familiar path of progressive separation to an unfamiliar path of global caring and cooperation. The transition from self-... posted on Apr 30 2018 (15,663 reads)

the Garden-Hacking Grandmas and Grandpas of South Korea Know. Gardening here is not a hobby. It comes from the realization within people that there is inherent value in tending a garden and taking time to be a part of nature. More than a century ago, urbanist Ebenezer Howard invented the concept of a “garden city”—a city with a bustling urban core, fanning out in to green neighborhoods, and then farther out into farmland, all of it theoretically connected in a semi-closed sustainable cycle. As a kid growing up in San Jose, California, I wondered why I’d never seen one of these cities, especially because the idea was so old. With its low-density swath... posted on Jun 28 2018 (6,480 reads)

in which the universe speaks to us, whether it be through lapping waves on a beach that sift slowly into our souls layer by layer, or through birdsong in the backyard at sunset calling to us like vespers bells.  When we experience the world as alive, we share an intimate connection with all that exists. We can see the world as being made of a life-giving language, and our awareness of this language goes deep into our psyches and deep into the cosmos.  By listening closely to nature, we can hear an organized energy of life, full of patterns and meaning, that speaks to us. According to scholar Elizabeth Sewell, we experience our environment as alive and speaking to us in a ... posted on Oct 26 2020 (6,116 reads)

pink shoots thrusting from bare soil. The fennel self-seeds; there is an abundance of cosmos out of nowhere. To bridge Laing’s two questions, one must somehow reconcile these two temporal models: linear time, which the Greek called chronos and along which we plot the vector of progress, and cyclical time, or kairos, which is the time of gardens and, Laing intimates, the time of societies. We long for the assurance of steady progression, yet all around us the rest of nature churns in cycles. How do the cicadas know when to awake from their seventeen-year slumbers and rise up by the billions to make new life that will in turn repeat the cycle? And the migratory bir... posted on Apr 24 2021 (6,235 reads)

leading to a choice of tactics. ** Mount a vigorous public crusade with greater signals of alarm. ** Rely on future technology to reverse the harm done to the atmosphere. ** Prepare for a future with a drastically different ecological balance. ** Do nothing, except perhaps pray. ** Temporize until the catastrophe cannot be ignored. Most people find themselves wavering among these options. If you decide that the real issue is not Nature but human nature, then only a few options are viable. Human nature has a track record. We know, for example, that past ecological disasters, such as turning the Sahara into a desert, denuding Spanish forests, a... posted on Aug 17 2012 (18,219 reads)

listening to every word. When she finished, several students asked how they could clean up their habitat. Wright-Albertini, who had anticipated the question, showed them footage of an actual cleanup—and, suddenly, they were propelled into action. Wearing gardening gloves, at one boy’s suggestion, they worked to clean up the habitat they had worked so hard to create. Later, they joined their teacher in a circle to discuss what they learned: why it was important to take care of nature, what they could do to help, and how the experience made them feel. “It broke my heart in two,” said one girl. Wright-Albertini felt the same way. “I could have cried,” ... posted on Sep 26 2013 (31,579 reads)

Elisabet Sahtouris is an internationally known evolution biologist, futurist, professor, author and consultant on Living Systems Design. She shows the relevance of biological systems to organizational design in business, government and globalisation. She is a Fellow of the World Business Academy, an advisor to EthicalMarkets.com and the Masters in Business program at Schumacher College, also affiliated with the Bainbridge Graduate Institute's MBA program for sustainable business.  Dr. Sahtouris has convened two International Symposia on the Foundations of Science and written about integral cosmologies. Her books include A Walk Through Time: from Stardust to Us and... posted on Aug 11 2017 (11,759 reads)

or, in affluent regions, on acquiring more goods. We need a serious wake-up call from our slumbers. But solutions must inspire participation and action rather than frighten or disempower people. The next generation is searching for ways to contribute to a positive future. Life in all its variety and beauty calls to us for a response — a new integrated under- standing of who we are as humans. This is not only about stewardship of the Earth, but about embracing our embeddedness in nature in radical, fresh, and enlivening ways. Humans, Earth and the rest of life are bound in a single story and destiny. It is no longer a question of “saving the environment” as if it w... posted on Dec 17 2018 (6,797 reads)

every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains — beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken. Later that summer, as he makes his way to Tuolumne Meadow in eastern Yosemite, Muir is reanimated with this awareness of the exquisite, poetic interconnectedness of nature, which transcends individual mortality. In a sentiment evocative of Rachel Carson’s lyrical assertion that “the lifespan of a particular plant or animal appears, not as drama c... posted on Jan 31 2019 (6,891 reads)

author, speaker, cinematographer, sound recordist, and photographer Lang Elliott of musicofnature.com, shares the arc of his experience recording the sublime sounds of nature. Here is one of his immersive binaural recordings from a remote canyon in Arizona that you might enjoy listening to while reading his essay. Dawn at Willow Narrows. Aravaipa Canyon in southeastern Arizona. May 1, 2017. © Lang Elliott. Please listen using headphones! I’ve been recording nature for nearly 30 years. Early in my career, my primary goal was to capture close and clean recordings of particular species with the help of highly directional microphones. The object was to extract a spec... posted on Mar 27 2019 (5,744 reads)

made that you think are the most important? NDK: It’s hard to know where to start. There are large things that I’ve discovered that are very important and which I wrote about in my second book, Hidden Gospel. For instance, that really the meaning of the word “good” in Aramaic really means “ripe.” That is, r-i-p-e, meaning “at the right time, at the right place.” It’s essentially a planting image and one that is drawn from nature. Conversely, you could say, the word for “evil” as it’s translated as evil in the Gospels, really means unripe. It’s the Aramaic bisha where as “ripe&... posted on Jul 28 2021 (8,466 reads)

12, 2023 In this talk given at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks about what it looks like to live in an unfolding apocalyptic reality and the creative possibilities that are waiting to be embodied. In this time of deep uncertainty, he reminds us of the ancient, primordial covenant of relationship with the living world that can give us a ground to stand on, and the sacred nature of creation that is always there, waiting for us to return to it. The theme of this evening’s talk is about this time we are in, living with the unknown. That is the theme of the latest print edition that Emergence has released. ... posted on Jun 1 2023 (3,484 reads)

is a miracle or everything is a miracle.”      I remember after a couple years of commercial river-running, I took inner city kids down the river and the river brought something out of their souls and being. Somehow the river and the canyon cleansed our souls. That’s when I started realizing people in the cities don’t smile like they do when their whole being is cleansed on the river. works:  What are some of the roots of your connections with nature? Mark:  My dad’s parents divorced when he was young. He went to seven different junior high schools. We used to visit my great-aunt in the hills and beautiful woods overlooking Po... posted on Feb 13 2017 (11,028 reads)