Kevin Stark August 31, 2017 In 2008, Ecuador's leadership rewrote its constitution to include the rights of nature, effectively awarding legal rights to the environment. This change was led by many grassroots environmental advocates, including Natalia Greene, an organizer and environmental activist who played a key role in the development of the constitutional changes. In a 2015 talk about her experience, Greene said the changes were very bold: "It is very important because this means we don't necessarily depend only on the state to guarantee the rights of nature. Anyone in Ecuador can guarantee these rights." Indigenous communities have recognized the r... posted on Jan 20 2018 (12,955 reads)

Angelou once asked us to be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud, but that’s harder than it looks. We’re all taught the importance of kindness when young but few manage to make it the focal point of our lives. As a result, kindness becomes a spice rather than the main course, something we try to rise to when the occasion presents itself. While some just talk the talk, however, others spend years driving a ten-ton bus covered in inspirational messages in an attempt to live that message. Bob Votruba’s home is a converted transit bus, the second he’s gone through over the past eight years. Saddened by the tragic Virginia Tech shootings of 2007, Bob searched fo... posted on Sep 29 2017 (14,159 reads)

digging time. The spring has been cold and wet, the soil is heavy and sodden. Still, it has to be turned. It’s slow work and just one narrow row of pushing and lifting the garden fork, dropping and loosening the hard lumps with strategic whacks, has me puffing and sweating. “Only one small row and I’m in this state?” I ask myself. “How will I ever get this whole garden dug?” I know the answer. One forkful at a time. If I were to use a mechanized tiller it would be faster and easier, and well-meaning friends often offer this advice every year. However, I’ve noticed that turning the soil forkful by forkful gives dirt that is laced with ... posted on Dec 2 2017 (11,296 reads)

left to metamorphose to stalks of delicate pale yellow flowers, enticing myriads of bees that hum in delight. Many of these I cut and toss over the fence for the deer that especially like these blooms. The blossoms left standing will continue to change until the tiny black bead-like seeds appear in what was the floret center. Like the bees and the deer, I delight too in this process, awed by it. I see how broccoli has so many ways of presenting itself in this world. Usually, the word conjures images of the bright green vegetable florets in a stir-fry, or crunchy nibbles on a veggie platter. Yet these small plants before me this day, with their tender heart-shaped leaves, are also broccoli.... posted on Dec 18 2017 (10,512 reads)

workshop sponsored by the the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley showcased the newest and hottest findings in the science and practice of gratitude. Impressive as the advances were, not one speaker (myself included) grappled with what may be the single biggest question that stands in the way of making the basic science useful for practical applications: What must be overcome as a culture or as individuals in order for gratitude flourish? We live in a nation where everyone is on the pursuit of happiness. Each individual has his or her own path this journey takes. For some, the search begins in books; for others it comes through service. But perhaps the most po... posted on Feb 7 2018 (17,206 reads)

about taking a backward step, which is not a very popular concept in our world, but also about coming to a place where the heart and mind are genuinely reflective, where we’re able to perceive reality in an unfiltered way. And you have this beautiful lake just to my right, and I imagine there are times when that lake is absolutely still, Lake Chautauqua is just completely still and reflects everything around it clearly. And there are times when the wind rustles the water, and the images in the lake become fractured, and you can’t see things so clearly. So the practice, in essence, is about creating an internal experience of stillness, where you’re able to perceive ... posted on Jan 23 2018 (16,647 reads)

these giant electromagnets got turned on in the ’60s, and they’ve been cranking up ever since, and anything that has the vaguest left-right charge gets pulled to one side. Everything gets purified. Psychologically, what we find empirically is that people who identify as conservative tend to like order and predictability, whereas people who identify as liberal, they like variety and diversity. I have one study where we have dots moving around on a screen. Conservatives like the images where the dots are moving around more in lockstep with each other. Liberals like it when it’s all chaotic and random. Krista Tippett, host: The surprising psychology behind morali... posted on Sep 21 2018 (17,763 reads)

day we witness the brutality of war and atrocity, and can feel hopeless or doubt that anything we do as an individual can have a positive impact. International Day of World Peace was celebrated recently so now might be a good time to reflect on how our own gratitude can make a difference. I love the Zen saying: If there is light in the soul, There is beauty in the person, If there is beauty in the person, There will be harmony in the house, If there is harmony in the house, There will be order in the nation, If there is order in the nation, There will be peace in the world. If we are to bring about world peace, we first need to ask ourselves if how we think and what... posted on Jan 9 2018 (15,019 reads)

is not like any other place that I have studied in,” says Pauline Steisel, a 23-year old post graduate student from Belgium, as she chops carrots in a steamy kitchen with several of her fellow students. “I did not expect to learn so much here about myself, about others, about sharing learning and working with others. It’s like learning about life,” she adds. Pauline has only been in Schumacher College for a few weeks but already the transformation has begun. Set in the grounds of the historic Dartington Hall in rural south west England, the college has gained an international reputation as much for its pioneering approach to student life as for its i... posted on Dec 11 2017 (9,373 reads)

Ellen in her rocking chair, photo by Annalise Hope Howard There is a defiance and a fragility about the small backyard garden that she leads us to.  We descend the three or four steps off of the rear of her beautiful row home in the museum district of the city, and we find a master’s work.  It is subtly inspiring.  Not powerful like a sweeping five-hundred page novel.  More like a beautiful haiku – one that makes you want to go home and write one yourself.  And because of its accessible holiness – you can. We sat in the backyard of the home of Mary Ellen Graham.  She is the founder and first executive director of My Pla... posted on Feb 12 2018 (12,325 reads)

Pearson founded Secret Kindness Agents to create and encourage kindness and compassion in our world. Pearson shares the Navajo story of a grandfather who tells his grandson about the wolves that live within his soul. There is a good wolf that is loving, kind, and compassionate. There is a bad wolf that is angry, hateful, and mean. His grandson asks him which wolf wins the internal struggle. The grandfather replies that the wolf you feed wins. We all have a choice as to which wolf to feed. We can all feed the kind wolf. In feeding the kind wolf, we are building ourselves, the person to whom we are kind, our community, and our world. Kindness reverberates and expands. In connecting Secr... posted on May 6 2018 (9,264 reads)

as needed, who are alert to changes in their environment, who are able to innovate strategically. It is possible to work with the innovative potential that exists in all of us, and to engage that potential to solve meaningful problems. We are gradually giving up the dominant paradigm of western culture and science for over 300 years-that of the world and humans as machines. Almost all approaches to management, organizational change, and human behavior have been based on mechanistic images. When we applied these mechanical images to us humans, we developed a strangely negative and unfamiliar view of ourselves. We viewed ourselves as passive, unemotional, fragmented, incapable of ... posted on Feb 26 2018 (12,392 reads)

that it really comes to home. It's like, ok, bam! Ruptured brain aneurysm. Within one hour, unresponsive. Has emergency surgery. Survives. But now is in a coma. What's next? There are no immediate answers forthcoming. In one dark situation we had a scan. It was an angiogram that she had had done, and we wanted to get a second opinion on it. So I called up a friend of mine who knew a very prominent interventional neuroradiologist in town. So we sent these films -- or these digitized images -- to him. We called him back in the afternoon, after he had looked at him. My brother was on the phone talking to him. I just hear my brother's side of that conversation. My brother's ... posted on May 16 2018 (6,936 reads)

is not an individual property, but is a property of an entire web of relationships. It is a community practice. This is the profound lesson we need to learn from nature. The way to sustain life is to build and nurture community. A sustainable human community interacts with other communities — human and nonhuman — in ways that enable them to live and develop according to their natures. Sustainability does not mean that things do not change. It is a dynamic process of coevolution rather than a static state. Because of the close connection between sustainability and community, basic principles of ecology can also be understood as principles of community. In part... posted on Feb 28 2018 (10,814 reads)

a mountain in Wales in the teeming rain, we sit in a yurt packed with people, the five of us, on hay bales, dressed in black suits and bowler hats. One of us has a pack of cards up his sleeve, another an African folktale, another a guitar and a song by Nick Drake from the 1970s. I have oak leaves in my hatband to signify an instruction circa 600 BC from the Sibyl who once guarded the door to the Underworld in the ‘Campi  Flegrei’ outside Naples. A link to the pre-patriarchal ‘uncivilised’ world, she guides a lineage of poets to the territory under the volcano where all deep transformations take place: Virgil,Dante, T.... posted on May 22 2018 (5,559 reads)

of Washington, Ricardo Martin Brualla and his colleagues have developed software tools that harvest countless digital snapshots that we post on the Internet and synthesize them into films that show the aggregate change in one place over time. For the first time in our history, broad access to these kinds of tools and imagery make visible, for anyone, the hidden dynamism of the planet—a dynamism that we spy occasionally, and only liminally, in our everyday life. These images reveal not only change, but also vast diversity. Look upon the Earth long enough, and you will find almost every adjective fulfilled, somewhere. The world is beautiful, of course. But... posted on Aug 5 2018 (10,773 reads)

was the event that kept happening that switched it to patriarchy? What happened all throughout history? First, women were revered, and then it was patriarchy, and all male gods. What he looked at throughout all of history was whenever literacy was introduced, that seemed to kind of rewire people's minds into sort of a left-brain—he knows that it's much more nuanced than left- and right-brain—but kind of rewiring society to be more patriarchal. Then, with the advent of images that we're seeing with electromagnetism, and with television, and film, and the internet, that women are rising once again. He wrote a New York Times bestselling book about it ... posted on Aug 11 2018 (6,284 reads)

the field who really believe that humans come in as little savages, and we have to spend all our time civilizing them. There's another school of thought that says we come in altruistic, compassionate, and honorable, and it's bad circumstances in life that turn some people into negative forces in the world. But our natural state is not that, so it's a huge difference of approach to who kids are. Our materials assume that kids are compassionate and altruistic. One of my personal images on that is a hospital nursery: When one newborn begins to cry, others will cry, and I hear them saying, "Somebody's in trouble here. Come help." There's a natural alliance in ... posted on May 10 2018 (12,061 reads)

the busy-ness of our contemporary life, we are drawn into ceaseless activity that often separates us from the deeper dimension of ourselves. With our smartphones and computer screens, we often remain caught on the surface of our lives amidst the noise and chatter that continually distract us, that stops us from being rooted in our true nature. Unaware we are drowned deeper and deeper in a culture of soulless materialism. At this time I find it more and more important to have outer activities that can connect us to what is more natural and help us live in relationship to the deep root of our being, and in an awareness of the moment which alone can give real meaning to our every... posted on Jul 5 2018 (19,658 reads)

In some of my earliest memories, I’m perched between two branches of a plum tree that grew in front of my house. To climb, I’d grip the lowest branches and stretch my foot as high as it would reach, pulling myself up to sit comfortably in my little throne of branches. There, I’d peer through the pale purple blossoms, across the sidewalk, admiring the tops of cars. I don’t remember any fear—just the scrape of callused feet on bark; the triumph of successfully hoisting my knee onto a branch; the comfort of my hands circling that final limb as I reached the perfect nestling spot. Growing up with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, I was anxious a lot. ... posted on Oct 7 2018 (10,621 reads)