“You’ll learn how to be a good ancestor. The answer is in the land, in the mountains, which are the sources of life”
The Live webinar is 12:00 PDT/3:00 EDT on Tuesday, September 12th
What does life look like if we recognize Earth as our kin and Mountains as our ancestors?
Join Dr. John Hausdoerffer as he shares his vision and experience of deep kinship with Nature and talks about how good life can be when we are in a meaningful relationship with our landscapes. We will honor Mountains in our discussion as wise Elders who can help guide us in being the ancestors we want to see in the future.
Being those ancestors is rooted in the here and now and calls us to enliven values that nourish life for the following generations. As guardians of Earth, Mountains show us the way.
Dr. John Hausdoerffer is an environmental philosopher, teacher, organizational founder, and writer from Gunnison, Colo. He believes that peace between humans begins with a spiritual connection with a just distribution of the “ecosphere” that forms our local and global home. His books “Catlin’s Lament“; “Wildness“; and (forthcoming) “What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?” imagine how environmental health must come from and result in the healing of deep histories of social injustice and cultural trauma. “Dr. John” calls for a new ethic that views all places as part of our home, all generations of all beings as part of our scope of responsibility, and all actions as potential expressions of human care for the world. As he often says, “environmental ethics insists on humans as more than bodies that consume bodies in a global economy, insists that we are wholehearted beings capable of understanding and caring for the complex local and global systems that sustain us.”
Dr. John is the founding Dean of the Clark Family School of Environment & Sustainability and Director of the Master in Environmental Management (MEM) program at Western Colorado University. His MEM Program requires students to build resilient, and thus peaceful, communities around the world.
Finally, Dr. John believes that peace emerges not just from individual actions, books, or academic programs; he believes that peace emerges from systems of change. To this end, he has co-founded numerous organizations dedicated to more resilient community systems. He co-founded the Coldharbour Institute with Butch Clark on 350 acres of land east of Gunnison, Colo., to exemplify sustainable mountain living in the Rockies. He co-founded the Resilience Studies Consortium to unite environmental programs from small, liberal arts colleges to provide what he calls “multi-place, place-based education” for students who use the diversely unique regions of the U.S. as hands-on, interdisciplinary “learning laboratories.” He co-founded the Mountain Resilience Coalition, merging Aspen International Mountain Foundation, Telluride Institute, and Western’s Clark Family School of Environment & Sustainability as the facilitators of the United Nations Mountain Partnership’s North America, Central America, and Caribbean region. Finally, Dr. John co-founded Gunnison’s “Sister City International” partnership with the Himalayan community of Majkhali, India in order to find shared climate change solutions between two “Headwaters Communities” on two opposing sides of this great planet.
Throughout his life, Dr. John’s dedication to peace has been driven by this question: what does the good life look like once we accept that all places are “here” and all eras are “now”? What does the good life look like if all peoples are considered as part of an equal humanity and if all species are considered as persons? To learn more visit his website.