Guardians of the Forest
A transformational journey in somatic, spiritual, and practical approaches to forest care with practitioners from 30 nations across the world. This course has a simple objective: to transform the way you live with trees.
hosted by Nicolas Salazar Sutil
Action researcher, community builder, and transformational leader. Nicolas works in the areas of ecology, human rights and nature rights.
Module 1Introduction
We ask "why and how do we transform the way we live with trees?" Learn what forests have to teach us about alternative systems that foster planetary health, why a connection to place and memory is vital in the global movement for land and climate justice, and the role that Indigenous Peoples play in knowin...
Module 2Embodying the Forest
We examine who plants and trees are from embodied perspectives. We focus on building personal relationships with plants, drawing on somatic and spiritual approaches (Qi Gong), and exploring the potential held in animal-human relationships. We also explore the medicinal properties held in forests, their pro...
Module 3Plant and Tree Wisdom
We focus primarily on Gaelic knowledge of plants, herbs and soil, and the importance of knowing your land and forests. The module builds on the preceding learning to focus on well-being and medicinal connections between humans and plants, and the importance of trees and soil in the affirmation of a sense o...
Module 4Ancestral Futures
Ancestral forests and traditions are essential to re-imagining a future where humans and trees can cohabit harmoniously. In what ways does ancestral knowledge inform the way future treescapes are being imagined, specifically in relation to iconic forests such as the great Siberian Forest and the Boreal For...
Module 5Forest Culture
Cultural practices affirm ethical and ecological relations to land and forest. Song, story, dance and other cultural and creative practices are vital to an experiential and lived-in understanding of how we can care for trees, and how forests transform human society.
Module 7Land Justice
How do communities work together to manage and protect soils, plants and forests? How are human-tree relations held together and how does justice guide the process? What can forest carers learn from Indigenous Wisdom grounded on biocentric values? We will explore Indigenous struggles for land justice in Pe...
Module 8Community Organising
In this module, we explore the power of community and group participation in developing advocacy and conservation work. We build on what we have learnt about the power of community action and the importance of traditional ecological knowledge as a way of developing conservation work with the aim to achieve...
hosted by Vandana Shiva
World renowned intellectual and advocate for the preservation and celebration of biodiversity against genetic engineering and the negative impact of globalisation. She is an important voice in favour of people-centered, participatory processes; support to grassroots networks; women rights and ecology. Time Magazine identified Dr. Shiva as an “environmental hero” in 2003, and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators of Asia.
hosted by Daiara Tukano
Daiara Tukano, of the Tukano indigenous nation of the Upper Rio Negro, is an indigenous activist and artist. With a Masters Degree in human rights at the University of Brasilia, she is a researcher on the right to memory and truth of indigenous peoples. She is an independent communicator and coordinator of Radio Yandê, the first indigenous web-radio in Brazil. In her line of work, Daiara has surveyed the current indigenous panorama to build alliances to encourage the creation of strategies that can contribute to the protection of mother nature, cultural diversity and human rights across the vast region of the Amazonas.
hosted by Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim
Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim is an environmental activist and geographer. She is the Coordinator of the Association of Peul Women and Autochthonous Peoples of Chad (AFPAT) and served as the co-director of the pavilion of the World Indigenous Peoples’ Initiative and Pavilion at COP21, COP22 and COP23.
hosted by Chaz Doherty
Chaz ‘Te Puehu’ Doherty is of the Tūhoe tribe. The Tūhoe have lived in Te Urewera, the largest Indigenous Forest in The Fish of Māui (Te ika a Māui) also known as the North Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand. The Tuhoe have lived here since the Mist Mother clothed the forest valleys. As a teacher, Chaz works with other Tūhoe people to rekindle and restore connections and return to a complete family with Nature (whānau).
hosted by Nicolas Salazar Sutil
Action researcher, community builder, and transformational leader. Nicolas works in the areas of ecology, human rights and nature rights.
hosted by Swati Foster
Swati Foster is one of India’s best known environment journalists and director at Sea Change Project. Her solo outing as a filmmaker led to her making The Animal Communicator which has had over 6 million views on YouTube. Swati spends her time between India and South Africa and authored a book Born Wild: Journeys into the heart of India and Africa.
hosted by Eline Kieft
In her work, Eline combines her passion for anthropology, health, spirituality, and her intimate knowledge of the dancer’s body. She studied contemporary dance at CODARTS, Rotterdam, and also qualified as a teacher in Movement Medicine. This is an improvisation-based, meditative dance practice with roots in a shamanic paradigm.
hosted by Tawanã Cruz
Tawana is the cultural and spiritual leader of the Kariri-Xoco Fulkaxo, a group of three tribes of the Fulnio trunk based on the banks of the river Opara.
hosted by Yanda Twaru
Yanda is a community leader in her Sapara Nation in the area of communication and economy, and in the field of indigenous media communication.
hosted by Haru Kuntanawa
Haru is a Leader of the Kuntanawa Nation and recognized by many indigenous people of Brazil as one of the most influential young leaders of his time.
hosted by James Canton
James Canton’s writing has been mainly concerned with the ties between nature, literature and the environment.
hosted by Charlotte Pulver
Charlotte Pulver has a background in natural healthcare, studying and practising various medical systems of healing for 20+ years specialising in women’s healthcare and mental health. Her love is rooted in making medicines for people which she sells through ‘Pulver’s Apothecary’.
hosted by Glennie Kindred
Glennie Kindred is the author of twelve books on Earth wisdom, creating ceremony, native plants and trees and celebrating the Earth’s cycles.
hosted by Angharad Wynne
A published author and poet, Angharad is also a storyteller who uses story as the starting point for deep enquiry and a source of timeless wisdom and healing.
hosted by Sioned Jones
Sioned is a renowned environmental activist and guerrilla rewilder based in Bantry, West Cork (Ireland).
hosted by Julia Adzuki
Julia Adzuki works with transformative processes across the fields of visual, relational, performance and sound art. Her embodied enquiry explores underlying frictions of the human-environmental crisis through the sensuous relation of inner and outer landscapes.
hosted by Andrey Laletin
Andrey is a leading Russian ecologist and environmental scientist based in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. He obtained a degree in Biology from Krasnoyarsk State University (KSU) and then a PhD in Ecology from the Sukachev Forest Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (FIRAS).
hosted by David Abram
David is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. Described as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by the journal Science, David’s work has helped catalyze the emergence of several new disciplines, including the burgeoning field of ecopsychology.
hosted by Natasha Myers
Natasha is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, convener of the Politics of Evidence Working Group, co-founder of Toronto’s Technoscience Salon, and the Write2Know Project.
hosted by Alex Melinir
Quinquen is a renowned community of indigenous Pewenche people— literally, the people of the pewen tree or araucaria.
hosted by Dinnawhan White
"I acknowledge and pay respect to every animal that lives deep in the ground, on the ground, in the air, in the trees, in the waterways, and those that are residing in all our human bodies" Dinnawhan White
hosted by Rosemary Dillon
Rosemary is a highly skilled and passionate leader with over 25 years of experience in local government - delivering significant results in service delivery, strategic financial and asset management, city, community and corporate planning, governance and risk, safety and asbestos management.
hosted by Juan Francisco Salazar
Juan Francisco Salazar is an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker with a PhD in Communication and Media from Western Sydney University.
hosted by Alfred Brownell
Alfred Brownell is a Liberian environmental activist and lawyer. He has advocated for more than two decades to protect native forests and human rights in West Africa. Alfred founded Liberia’s first environmental law non-governmental organization, called Green Advocates International (GAI).
hosted by Radiatu Haja Sheriff-Kahnplaye
Radiatu Haja Sheriff-Kahnplaye is a Liberian environmentalist. She works as Policy Advisor for the Natural Resources Women Platform and as Treasurer of Green Advocates International (GAI).
hosted by Daniel Kobei
Daniel Kobei is the Founder and Executive Director of Ogiek Peoples’ Development Program (OPDP), a Kenyan-based NGO working to secure human and land rights of the indigenous Ogiek community and other Indigenous Peoples (IPs) across Kenya and Africa.
hosted by Janet Maro
Janet Maro is a leading Tanzanian social entrepreneur and agroecologist.
hosted by Flay Guajajara
Flay is a filmmaker and photographer of the Guajajara people in Maranhão, Brazil. He acts as Communications Coordinator for the Araribóia Indigenous Land.
hosted by Vanessa Hasson
Vanessa is a leading environmental lawyer and advocator based in São Paulo, Brazil.
hosted by Aldo Benitez
Aldo is an environmental journalist from Asunción, Paraguay. He has been working in the field of environmental communication for more than a decade, having conducted major research and journalistic reports on socio-environmental issues in his country. He is a member of Connectas, a network of investigative journalists operating throughout Latin America that promotes the production, exchange, training, and free dissemination of information.
hosted by Ketty Marcelo
Ketty Marcelo is a renowned Asháninka leader, former president of the National Organization of Andean and Amazonian Women of Peru (ONAMIAP).
hosted by Eliana Champutiz
Eliana has founded several collective spaces for audiovisual work for and by Indigenous Peoples such as the Corporation of Audiovisual Producers, the Association of Audiovisual Creators of Indigenous Nations and Peoples, ACAPANA and CORPANP respectively. At the international level, she is a member of the Latin American Coordinator of Cinema and Communication of Indigenous Peoples.
hosted by Yesica Patiachi
Yesica Patiachi was born in San José de Karene in the Madre de Dios district, Peruvian Amazon.
hosted by Robertho Paredes
Robertho is an award winning Peruvian photographer based in Puerto Maldonado, Peruvian Amazon. He is the recipient of the XXVIII Award for Jovenes Creadores of the Madrid City Council for his photographic work "He sentido el clima herido y tengo idea de que no aprendemos", based on "Madre Selva" by Alfredo Perez Alencart.
hosted by Boro Baski
Boro Baski is an educator and community leader from West Benghal, India. Boro Baski is an educator and community leader from West Benghal, India. Born in a Santhal family of agricultural labourers, Boro Baski was the first in his village to obtain a masters and doctoral degree. Along with Sona Murmu and Martin Kampchen, he established an NGO named Ghosaldanga Adibasi Seva Sangha (GASS) to take forward the initiative to provide education to Adivasi communities in West Bengal.
hosted by Amal Dissanayaka
Amal Dissanayaka is an action researcher from Colombo, Sri Lanka. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the University of Ruhuna and a Certificate in Anthropology from the University of Queensland Australia, as well as an MA in Sociology from the University of Colombo. Currently, he is a Researcher at the Hector Kobbekaduwa Agrarian Research and Training Institute (HARTI), based in Colombo.
hosted by Alastair McIntosh
Alastair is one of the world’s leading environmental campaigners, distinguished in his ability to join together the outer and inner life. His book Spiritual Activism explores such paths of reconnection of the inner and outer worlds, which he argues is nothing less than learning how to sustain the flow of life. If we don’t do this, he states, “then our work will fall on stony ground, we’ll burn out or we’ll sell out.”
Introduction
Ecological knowledge is placed at the heart and learnings are embedded in ancient traditions of forest wisdom, which can enrich human life in times of ecological and personal crisis.
Our approach to guardianship is grounded on affective ecology, traditional knowledge and spiritual activism. Drawing on these perspectives, as well as an experiential understanding of treescapes across bioregions, you will learn how to develop collective action for green justice.
The work of our world-renowned forest guardians will inspire your everyday and professional lives. Whether you are interested in environmental journalism, communication, activism, eco-art, research, environmental law, advocacy, or simply looking for inspiration, this course is designed to change the way we understand our human relation to forests in an age of ecological crisis.
Why this course?
In this course, we ask: Is there a society where humans and trees can live together in harmony? We believe that there is. It is called “forest”. Forests are where humans and trees live together. Every member of that society must take on a responsibility for maintaining that shared and common interest, which is forest life.
Over the course of this journey, we learn what it takes to be a forest guardian. We will learn what it means to take responsibility, to care, to act and to devote yourself to that society we call forest.
Structure of the course
The course has been curated as a journey into the world of forests. We will start from a bodily perspective; that is, we will seek to base our learnings on what the body senses, feels, intuits. Trees are connected to the human body. We share many common physical properties—energy conservation mechanisms, common DNA, similar patterns of sexualisation (think of the use of tree perfumes, flowers, etc). We also share “dendritism” or the branched pattern of life forms, such as the branches of your veins or your brain and nerve system, which are structurally speaking, self-similar to the veins of trees. That is because we evolved from a common ancestor (the protist). Based on this embodied understanding of trees, we will be exploring somatic approaches— i.e. moving, breathing, eating, even swimming with forests (kelp).
From there onwards, we will focus on plant and tree wisdom—we will home in on specific trees such as oaks and yews, and we will learn how to read and recognise their particular characters and signatures, deepening our spiritual and cultural connection with particular trees. We will explore activities like walking with trees, tree-spotting, and thinking with trees.
Following on, we will focus on the idea of temporality, or how ancient trees teach us about the past and the future; how ancestral perspectives are vital to preserving the well-being of forests in years to come, and how we can honour this through ancestral wisdoms.
Forest Culture will be the next step in our journey. We will explore the importance of embedding forest guardian values in cultural practices and also artistic and creative work. We will focus on the work of indigenous peoples in Chile and New Zealand, who will share their traditional forest craft and culture with us. We will then travel to the Blue Mountains in Australia, where we will learn how forests are changing political culture in the Blue Mountains community. We will explore how trees can change the way we understand the culture of power and politics.
The next step in the journey is Forest Action. We will travel to Liberia, Kenya, Chad and Tanzania, to learn from leading lawyers, agroecologists, action researchers and academics, on specific forms of forest action. We will focus on two concrete forms of forest action: i) legal, we will be exploring how forest guardians can help protect forest and forests peoples by law, and ii) sustainable agricultural action.
In the next module in this course, entitled Land Justice, we will travel to the tropical forests of South America, where we will deepen our understanding of forest justice, and where we will explore some of the major threats and violations to forest life currently occurring in some of the world’s most iconic forests. We will learn from leading exponents of the rights of nature movement, as well as major indigenous leaders in Brazil, Peru, Colombia and Ecuador, on the demands of forest guardians, and the major struggles to fight for forest justice.
In the final module of this course, you will learn how to develop groups and community work as part of your forest guardianship learning process. We will travel to South East Asia, where we will learn about forest community building among indigenous communities in West Bengal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.
