What does humanity need to survive and thrive for the next seven generations and beyond? We certainly need a different way of looking at the world than mainstream American society and education have offered us up until this point. We need to live in communities and societies which recognize that everything and everyone on earth is inextricably connected to everyone and everything else. We need social, economic, and political structures that are grown out of the understanding that the earth and all the community members of earth, including each of us, are sacred beings with inherent value. We need to live with the consciousness that all of our fates are linked, and with awareness of the effects of all of our choices and actions.
To bring such shifts about, we must start with ourselves and our children. We need new forms of education that will empower our children to live in and co-create such a reality from the outset. For ourselves as adults, we need to re-educate ourselves and heal our illusions of disconnection, and find new ways of sustaining ourselves and our loved ones that are in harmony with Earth and all our relations.
To live in this “more beautiful world our hearts know is possible” we must offer our children an education that is embedded in place and infused with love. Love for Earth, love for each other, love for life itself.
In other words, we need education that weaves us daily into the fabric of a living community that consists of humans, animals, plants, eco-systems, and Gaia herself. We need education that is based in gratitude for the gifts that Earth and all of our ancestors, human and non-human, have bestowed upon us.
Ecological knowledge and wisdom should not be a speciality field, and should not be offered as an “elective” course that can be taken for a semester somewhere along the way. Ecological wisdom needs to be at the center of everything we do and everything we teach—every skill, every ethic, every history, every philosophy, every art form. This is the fundamental reason for the existence of Earthwise Education.
With the help of: our own deep nature connection journeys; wisdom shared by generous indigenous teachers; protracted study of education, child development and human consciousness; ever-growing relationships with plants, animals, ancestors, and Earth; and the clarifying principles of permaculture, we are re-inventing and re-discovering education from the ground up. It is our intention to help children gain all the skills they need to survive and thrive into the future, at the developmentally-appropriate stages, while ensuring they remain connected to Earth, to their human and non-human community members, and to their own soft hearts the whole way. We want them to grow up without the emotional and spiritual traumas and mental damage that most of us adults have experienced in our own dis-connective upbringings. We aspire to educate children in a way that supports them arriving at adulthood with the wisdom to make kind, fair, and ecological choices while being empowered as creative, connective, empathetic, resilient beings. We also attempt to help adults re-imagine the world, and their own place in the world, by offering a healing, wholing lens to look through, and offering skills that will allow them to live in a regenerative way that is more connected, more joyful, and more meaningful.
Of course, we realize that these are no small aspirations. But the time we live in is calling all of us to aim for nothing less than our greatest hopes and our deepest dreams, and then put all of our energy toward making it so, day by day, step by step, humble and connected to Earth and to each other as we go. As Mother Teresa said, “There are no great deeds, only small deeds performed with great love.” A new day is dawning for humanity—we hope you will join us in lighting the way.
