Inspiration

Willow weaving is in the air at Groundwork! With our upcoming class The Story of Willow getting ready for production (pre-register here), we’ve been thinking about stepping out of the immediate moment and engaging in practices like willow weaving and wild willow tending that are multi-year processes, moving at the Earth’s pace rather than the pace of a society scarce on attention. Our instructor Kelly Moody, who teaches our ecology classes and is slated to help create and teach our upcoming online willow cast, also runs a […]

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Groundwork has always focused on the relationship between culture and environment. This newsletter, we offer you an episode of one of our favorite podcasts: Outside/In from New Hampshire Public Radio. The episode focuses on what happens when you take a species (that’s us) that has a keen sense of direction and sense of place, and replace nearly all their navigation through the world with GPS in the span of just a few years. As you might suspect, our relationship with the world, both built and […]

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Throughout the Groundwork food systems fellowship, we meet for weekly seminars on alternatives to the mainstream culture that relies on destruction to produce economic growth. We study the cultural, political, and economic movements that are imagining and trying to bring into reality a more livable future. Degrowth is one of our favorite movements. As a movement, degrowth is based primarily in the global north, focusing on how the wealthy societies of the world can craft a path forward that focuses on real measures of well-being […]

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This conversation from the podcast “The Way Out Is In” is about applying mindfulness and wisdom in environmental and social movements. This week, our world had the two hottest days ever recorded. In the middle of the summer heat, it’s easy to feel overheated and overwhelmed as both heat and news cycles tax us and our communities. We chose this piece for this newsletter’s inspiration because it feels like a soothing balm for people who are working for a better future in any setting, whether it be as […]

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Listen to a conversation between Groundwork’s director Jeff Wagner and Kelly Moody, an incredible botanist, teacher about people’s relationship with land, and instructor for Groundwork’s field programs. Kelly interviewed Jeff for her Ground Shots Podcast. The conversation focuses on the Colorado River, industrial food production, and how the Colorado River is a microcosm of the U.S. relationship with the natural world. Listen Now

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How can we create a sustainable relationship with the land? Nikki Hill and Kelly Moody are both teachers for Groundwork’s field courses studying ecology, botany, and human-landscape relationships in Colorado. Kelly is also the force behind the Ground Shots Podcast, interviewing all kinds of people who work with plants and ecosystems. The core question this conversation orbits around is this: how can we build a sustainable relationship with the Earth, rather than substituting one kind of over-consumptive culture for another? This interview with Nikki comes from […]

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Listen Now In several conversations recently, this interview has come up as a foundational piece of inspiration for activists, educators,. So this month, we’re featuring Joanna Macy’s first appearance on the On Being podcast: “A Wild Love For The World“. Joanna Macy has lived a varied life: she is a translator of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, worked for the CIA and the Peace Corps, worked alongside the Dalai Lama when he was first exiled to India, and was a foundational force for the environmental […]

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This new section of our newsletter (and blog!) will include the books, podcasts, and people that keep us inspired to continue our environmental work in the face of all the challenges facing our world. We see burnout, overwhelm, and hopelessness as some of the largest obstacles to climate and ecological action, so this is where we share tools to maintain a sense of stability in rough seas. Hooray! This month: an incredible interview with Christiana Figueres, one of the guiding figures for the UN’s work […]

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