Restoration of the land to ecological health requires many hands and many hearts.
As we face converging crises from climate chaos, to social unrest, to economic instability and food insecurity, it is clear a foundational reorganizing of our society towards whole-systems approaches is imperative. We understand this must happen literally from the ground, up.
RECIPROCITY
Our approach is founded in reciprocity: the commitment to honoring our entanglement with the natural world. It is the foundation for healthy relationships. When people engage in a process that heals the land, the people can be healed in the process. When the processes honor our interdependence with the more-than-human world, we reciprocate our interdependence through regeneration and restoration work. This commitment to reciprocity results in resilient systems for all.
Implementation through Education, or “Do By Learning”
Do By Learning means everyone who joins our educational center will be participating in the formation of the school itself. Not just learning by doing in a pure practice space, but implementing in real time the skills of resiliency and natural building. The school, in turn, supports more people having the skills to expand and scale for greater impact.
Local Reality
We are devoted to reversing the degradation of soils, water systems and habitat for native plants and animals on this land. Restoration requires that the way we house and feed people be part of that restoration toward wholeness.
Global Reality
Ongoing ecocide and climate chaos threaten all life while food insecurity and famine are rising. Conventional construction accounts for almost half of greenhouse gasses and most of the waste in landfills. We must demonstrate the success of regenerative systems and educate teams of new leaders in these fields.
Do By Learning
In an implementation through education model, students of ecosystem restoration learn about restoration as they implement our restoration plans. The buildings and systems the restoration teams rely on are built by students of natural building and regenerative agriculture.
Do By Learning means everyone who joins our educational center will be participating in the further formation of the school itself. Not just learning by doing in a pure practice space, but implementing in real time the skills of resiliency and natural building. The school, in turn, supports more people having the inner and outer skills to expand and scale collaboratively for greater impact throughout the world.
Building Capacity
We heal local ecosystems and demonstrate ecological village-making while building capacity in others to participate in the global effort towards restoration and resilience.
“Reciprocity—returning the gift—is not just good manners; it is how the biophysical world works.”
-Robin Wall Kimmerer
The ways that we eat, move, and dwell are situated within a relationship of either extraction or reciprocity — we either serve the land or mine the land.
Food, Flow, & Form are Reciprocity in Action.
Food
Regenerative agriculture is one of the key ways that we can regenerate harmed land: bringing biodiversity and healthy soil to degraded, depleted areas. This also gives us the meaningful opportunity to feed the small community of people living on site, and the larger communities of guests who will be living and learning with us for shorter periods of time.
One of our many gardens
Flow
What is the impact of people moving through the space? From composting toilets for a flushless future, to the material impacts of daily living, we operate with minimal environmental disruption and harm to the ecosystem.
Ecozoic Composting Toilets
Form
All that is situated on the land is integrated: natural building, all structures and systems are harm-reductive and gentle on the earth.
Cob Oven
