Logos* vs Leaves

UnKnowing, ReLearning, Remembering

(adapted from an essay published by Nature Evolutionaries in February 2021)

photos ©nadine canter photography

It’s no simple task to explain the work I find myself folding and unfolding with. Moving between theory and practice in my professional life for more decades than I care to admit with a focus on environmental communications and public affairs, two ideas motivate me to continue to show up: The Lorax and their declaration of care (“Unless”); and, the realization that because of our dominant capitalist narratives we recognize more corporate logos than leaves. As I say on repeat, the human species has created a super-organism: Capitalism, and it is destroying us. As a mother, partner, sister, daughter, friend, niece, cousin, teacher, collaborator, and student, I continue to find it impossible to stand by and watch this happen.

When I first began teaching as an adjunct/visiting professor at Middlebury College in 2004, the first thing I did each semester with my students was project a powerpoint of leaves and logos to see who could identify each. You can guess the outcome. We then went on to read excerpts of Naomi Klein’s first book “No Logo” and settled in for a 4-week semester to consider what we didn’t know about Nature and what we did know about capitalism. There were many sobering conversations. We explored assumptions and conditioning as well as how we could use the tools of impact, cause, social marketing within the information-sphere to change the human’s relationship to Nature. Social Marketing and Environmental Affairs was the title of this winter term course I taught in 2004, 2005, and 2006. It was my good fortune to discuss my first course syllabus with Bill McKibben who had just joined Middlebury as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies.

As I have gotten deeper into my work and practices I have evolved as an independent scholar, pattern hunter, and explorer at the intersection of Nature, the individual human, and the collective of all beings. In the decades I worked in the system I hoped to effect change, but realized along the way that the change I was trained in grad school to create was not going to work. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” I abide by these words from Buckminster Fuller. So while I have: authored white papers, multi-national market research studies, newsletters, op-eds, and strategic communications plans; designed award-winning urban and rural scaled social marketing campaigns; produced stakeholder processes, conferences, and workshops; and built networks at many scales including state-wide coalitions, I burnt out. I had done all of this work in the name of helping us humans live in “right relationship” with Nature.

I’ve come to re-learn over and over that these “wicked” human problems created in the name of civilization through our extractive economies and structural racism won’t be solved with our heads. Living in our heads is most of the problem. Our connection and awareness of our own consciousness is both a superpower and kryptonite. To recover from total fatigue after many years in these trenches where I: consulted for governments; worked in non-profit management; and did both paid and volunteer grass roots work, I committed to a personal heart-centered practice of Tai Chi Chuan and Daoist contemplative studies.

In the middle of all these decades I had the opportunity to teach the Senior Community-Engaged Practicum in Middlebury College’s Environmental Studies Program in 2006 and 2007. I fell even more in love with teaching and by 2016 my personal practices drew me back into higher education after nearly ten years in nonprofit management working on climate change. I could again sow these seeds of transformation and share them in a number of different programs and classrooms at Middlebury College. This included an invitation in 2018 that validated all of the patterns I had uncovered as both participant and observer while inside the system. I joined an experiment rooted in the work of philosopher-seed geneticist Wes Jackson and imagined by philosopher scholar Bill Vitek and scholar Aubrey Streit Krug called New Perennials. That was an invitation I’ll never regret answering with a yes; I had found my people.

New Perennials links education, research, and analysis of agricultural and civilization transformation with community initiatives that work to grow, shape, and share the expressions of perennial thought and action. Operating from the premise that agriculture’s 10,000+ year history has generated ecologically unsustainable practices and culturally corrosive hierarchies that must change, the project draws inspiration for radical change from the work of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. The Land Institute, founded by Wes Jackson, develops perennial grain crops and polyculture farming solutions. Since 2018, Middlebury College and The Land Institute serve as educational and research hubs of New Perennials.

Through network building with practitioners in Education, Sacred Practices, Creative Arts, Healing Arts, and Food and Ag in the Champlain Valley of Vermont we integrated these threshold walkers into a community-connected learning course at Middlebury called The Perennial Turn. The course considers: “the work of repairing Earth—response-ably attending to life-nourishing human and more-than-human interrelationships—starting at scales of self and community.” I was a co-instructor in the class for five years.

We designed the course around the exploration of the ways human and planetary ecosystems changed when our ancestors began annually disrupting soil ecosystems and storing surplus food. The course explores notions of perennial thinking and action through readings, direct experience, and work with local partners at the forefront of a perennial turn. Student interns over the years designed and piloted K-12 Perennial Workshops and outreach tools, considered agro-forestry, and studied and practiced ways of inter-being. At one time there were nearly 50 community partners in network forming the New Perennials Champlain Valley Hub. The course continues to explore power dynamics and new ways of knowing to consider what it is to live in harmony with Nature and her cycles, and the inquiries continue to evolve as my dear colleague Marc Lapin leads the way.

Simultaneously I had designed another course as Professor of the Practice at Middlebury called “Approaching Sustainability from the Roots” which I taught in 2019, 2020, and 2021. (You can check out my teaching philosophy and see course syllabi on my website). In all of my community engagement work large or small, as well my teaching, I have come to know that it’s about relationships. It’s about conversations and deep listening, as well as us humans “knowing” or re-learning our true natures through embodied work in safe spaces. This work continues to require new languages and new ways of being—rooted in both science and traditional ecological knowledge, as well as eastern and western ways of thinking.

A personal mentor of mine and a post-modern activist, Bayo Akomolafe famously says “times are urgent, let us slow down.” If we quiet and still ourselves in this time of ongoing crisis, if we re-learn to dance with the mountains, the grasslands, and the streams, we can begin to use all of our senses to know climate work can’t happen without justice work, and justice work can’t happen without climate work. Only then can we make sanctuary and a pledge to re-design and make a perennial turn towards the “right” path many of our indigenous sisters and brothers on this continent prophesied in the Seventh Fire. Only then can we make space for our species, all living beings, and our planet to mutually flourish. Let us remember together what capitalism and authoritarianism wants us to forget.

Explore New Perennials and New Perennials Publishing.

Discover Nature Evolutionaries and watch the webinar I gave for them on this topic in March of 2021.

Watch and Read the documentary Sugarcane and the book “We Survived the Night” by Julian Brave NoiseCat. These offerings are fundamental heartbreaking truths that must be seen and metabolized as we redesign civilization. He also seems to be a very cool human I’d want to hang out with!

Listen to Mavis Staples cover of Leonard Cohen’s Anthem. It broke me right open. The whole of her new album is amazing.

* While logo is a “graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition”, its plural logos has a number of meanings in both sacred Christian texts as well as the sacred work of Carl Jung. In Jungian psychology logos is considered the principle of reason and judgment, associated with the animus, which is embedded within my work.