BEING NATURE
“Body is our first environment.. It’s the medium through which we know the earth.”
OVERVIEW
This collection of projects encompasses my long-term inquiry into the intersections of nature connection, embodiment, presence, activism and deep ecology. It includes:
Radical Ecological Pedagogies // From the Roots Up trainings and camps with Ulex and Re-Wild Everything
Feral Kitchen // Acornucopia
What happens if we approach diversity and difference, ecological and climate concerns, power and belonging, with a deeper and embodied sense of how these play out in nature, including our own species, our own bodies? What new knowings might emerge for us individually and collectively?
RADICAL ECOLOGICAL PEDAGOGIES
EXPLORING THE POWER OF RADICAL NATURE CONNECTION FOR COLLECTIVE ACTION
An online curriculum developed with ULEX and others inquiring into how nature connection, eco-psychology, and ecological education can empower collective action for socio-ecological transformation.
How do current activism and nature-based education perpetuate or repeat patterns of extraction, separation, power over and human centricity?
How can we learn from nature – and as nature – in ways that can empower our movement building and our practice?
How does an ecological way of thinking and experiencing the world shift how we understand change, power and culture?
TEACHING WITH WILDWISE
Since 2013 I have been working with WildWise delivering trainings, facilitation and mentoring as part of their professional training offerings.
Tutor and Mentor
a year long foundation in outdoor education leadership
Facilitation
1 day event - body, awareness, ecology
5 day retreat - finding our way home through body, awareness, ecology and community
Facilitation
how do we enable connection with nature from a deep understanding that we too are part of nature? How does this change how we work with groups?
Facilitation
an opportunity to deepen in to this beautiful and practical skill whilst opening up ways to engage with others around creative and challenging themes.
Facilitation
exploring roots, responsibility and reciprocity in our work
see events page for details about upcoming workshops, trainings and courses
THE FERAL KITCHEN
It's an awkward thing to try and return to the wild in ourselves when we still live in houses, do stuff on computers, communicate through phones and do things with our time to pay for our rent. The word feral expresses something of the escape from modernity, a re-turning of an urban human, finding our way home to the wild.
Welcome to the feral kitchen. Happenings and practices including Acornucopia, Eat the hedgerow at Embercombe, a pop-up restaurant, wild salons, ‘foraging further’.
There is something beautiful in this practice of re-finding the movements involved in being a two-legged animal finding food. Reaching for a branch, bending for a root, pounding acorn for flour, shaking pollen, adapting vision to detect food in the landscape, noticing green berries turn to red… Revealing an embodiment practice that emerges if we slow down enough, an experience of deep ecology and sensuality as touch, smell, heart, soul, taste and a sense of reciprocal relationship becomes part of foraging for dinner.
“…If we were to do a time and motion study of my foraging fetish, what would we find? If we were to note down the income and outgoings of a life made a little more wild, a little more mundane, what would the numbers sing to us?
What gorgeous anomalies would emerge from a day without pay, spent picking up acorns?…” (From poem Luxury By Other Means, in Bones and Honey)
ACORNUCOPIA
A project I began many years ago within a 7yr personal apprenticeship to oak ecologies. I began to research and experiment with ideas for the kit needed to integrate acorns in to a UK community scale food system. I have years of knowledge and ideas from books and videos: from hours of experimenting and cooking in my kitchen; from visiting and learning from Miwok, Paiute, Mono and other acorn cultures in so-called California, Korean, Lithuanian, English and Greek fellow acorn geeks; from testing ideas in local buildings and community conversations. It’s on hold - waiting for the right people to pass it on to!
