Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts

Friday, February 17, 2017

Fresh Publication: The New 3 Rs in an Age of Climate Change:

The Journal of Sustainability Education has published a fresh article regarding regenerative approaches partnered with reclamation and resilience as strategies for climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education (CRESE) (Hauk, 2017).

The new “Three Rs” in an Age of Climate Change: Reclamation, Resilience, and Regeneration as Possible Approaches for Climate-Responsive Environmental and Sustainability Education

By Marna Hauk, PhD
Cornwall Labyrinth Public Domain https://pixabay.com/en/maze-labyrinth-glendurgan-garden-511153/
Cornwall Labyrinth, Public Domain

Abstract: This thought piece proposes the adoption of a new “3 Rs” to inform a climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education (CRESE): reclamation, resilience, and regeneration. As a changing climate becomes the larger campus of our learning, denial and top-down emergency preparedness both prove to be insufficient. We are invited into a deeper approach. Reclamation and resilience fold in (1) the saving of enduring biocultural lifeways and patterns and (2) the dynamic flux-states of panarchic socioecological resilience models. These two partner with (3) regeneration: context-responsive social collaborations; eco-socially-embedded capacity building systems; and the promise of regenerative design. These three approaches allow us to re-envision educational systems and encounters that are proactive rather than only reactive or responsive in metabolizing persistent climatic volatility. These three approaches – reclamation, resilience, and regeneration – echo the three approaches to climate change that Pelling has suggested (2009) – mitigation, adaptation, and transformation. Note, however, unlike Pelling’s model, these approaches are conceived as simultaneously requisite literacies and movements rather than as competing. Reclamation, resilience, and regeneration represent ever-more-complex types of capacities and support capacity building aimed together toward life-supportive, dynamic, complex systems transformations. Environmental and sustainability education that fosters skills of reclamation includes preservation, conservation, recording, and the establishment of libraries and sanctuaries of exemplar systems. Environmental and sustainability education (ESE) for resilience includes network extension and adaptive capacity building. ESE for regeneration nurtures emergent complex systems metacognitions, creativities, and transformative, transgressive social approaches that are connective, disruptive, and innovative and model and embody complex emergence. Regenerative ESE fosters skills to facilitate catalysis of emergent regeneration, self-organization, and transformation into more complex living systems. All of these position embedded learners in pro-active, systems-intensive embodiments of the types of living networks that foster survival, flexibility, thriving, and phase-change during our entry into a time of consistent climate turbulence.

Keywords: environmental and sustainability education, climate change education, reclamation, resilience, regeneration, regenerative education, regenerative creativity



http://www.jsedimensions.org/wordpress/content/the-new-three-rs-in-an-age-of-climate-change-reclamation-resilience-and-regeneration-as-possible-approaches-for-climate-responsive-environmental-and-sustainability-education_2017_02/

What the cross-scale parallelisms and values of resilience—psychological, socioecological, educational, and societal—reveal is that climate change realities are the larger, ongoing campus of our educational design and praxis. Rather than continuing to think of disaster against a background of normative business/weather-as-usual to which we can return, and education as happening in formal schooling, we are being invited into a more dynamic time where “the long emergency” (Kunstler, 2005) involves new levels of stamina, systems thinking, and dynamism in order to avoid mitigation-only, denial-informed attempts to “manage” climate change within normative regimes which arguably were never viable to begin with and which certainly are now being continuously disturbed.

Education must move beyond reactive modes reinforcing existing structures, including injustices (as the experience with Katrina so heavily demonstrated – Bullard & Wright, 2009). And it must move beyond militarized control strategies for emergency preparedness (Kagawa, 2010). Moving towards integrated understandings of socioecological system embedment and real-time responsiveness as well as long-term capacity building are critical.
We are invited to design education and educational systems that (1) reclaim or repair whenever possible intact or existing systems of health, connection, and vibrancy across scales (Bowers, 2009), (2) to increase resilience via networks of adaptive capacity (Folke, Hahn, Olsson, & Norberg, 2005; Goldstein, Hazy, & Lichtenstein, 2010; Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wyche, & Pfefferbaum, 2008), and (3) to increase emergent co-evolutionary and socio-ecological system self-generativity, also known in complexity as autopoiesis, or more generally as regenerativity (Hauk, 2014a). Environmental and sustainability education (ESE) is particularly poised to be effective in this domain because of ESE’s role in helping learners metacognize their embedment within co-constituting systems and due to ESE’s capability of connecting learners with sources of ecopsychological strength and resilience (Ingulli & Lindbloom, 2013).

Climate Responsive Environmental and Sustainability Education (CRESE) for Reclamation, Resilience, and Regeneration (3 Rs)

This paper suggests the adoption of a new “3 Rs” to inform a climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education (CRESE): reclamation, resilience, and regeneration. These three Rs fold in (1) the saving of enduring biocultural lifeways and (2) the dynamic flux-states of panarchic socioecological resilience models. These two partner with (3) regeneration: context-responsive social collaborations; eco-socially-embedded capacity building systems; and the promise of regenerative design. These three approaches allow us to re-envision educational systems and encounters that are proactive rather than only reactive or responsive in metabolizing persistent climatic volatility. These three approaches – reclamation, resilience, and regeneration – echo the three approaches to climate change that Pelling has suggested (2011) – mitigation, adaptation, and transformation. Note, however, unlike Pelling’s model, these approaches are conceived as simultaneously requisite literacies and movements rather than as competing.

Reclamation would be the more valuable concept in which mitigation fits – designing systems to reclaim previous capabilities and constituencies. Reclamation can involve the ark-like preservation via enclaves, sanctuaries, weather-proof libraries, living libraries, seed banks of existing materials, relationships, and systems, including of cultural lifeways via preservation or recording. Reclamation will not be possible in many cases. Reclamation represents a conserving impulse, and can also involve the restoration of the commons and commonist thinking (Kenrick, 2009). It is often helpful to reframe reclamation as distinct from the restoration of industrial approaches such as mining and extraction. Rather, reclamation signifies reclaiming more intact living systems approaches, including as those memorialized by and vibrantly alive within many living indigenous ecological knowledge systems (IEK or TEK, for example in Bowers, 2013; Cajete, 2000, 2008). Some of the emergent reclamations are sourced in innovative technologies informed by deep biomimicry (Benyus, 2002, 2014: Mathews, 2011), Zeri approaches that involve designing for multiple embedded loops emulating ecosystem dynamics (Capra, 2002; ZERI, 2015), as well as reclaiming older lifeways that are demonstrably more sustainable (Lansing, 2007). This ecoliteracy involves restoring networks, neighborhoods, and actual and adopted families of connection and care. Reclaiming carbon “energy descent” cultures of moderation and anti-consumption cultures of contraction are also relevant here (Heinberg, Sachs, & Shiva, 2008; Kagawa & Selby, 2010). The ethic of care drives reclamation. Reclamation of embeddedness within co-evolving multi-scale systems and networks helps create the foundation for the second R of Resilience.

Resilience. Resilience involves increasing adaptive capacity, and networks and scales of adaptive capacity, to increase the flexibility of the living socio-ecological systems within changing contexts. Resilient educational systems are responsive educational systems focused on capacity building and network extension (Krasny, Lundholm, and Plummer, 2010). Resilience is the second R.

Panarchy is a multi-phase cyclic model for resilience that has proliferated in successfully understanding the complex adaptive cycles of exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization in interlinked social and ecological systems (Berkes, Golding, & Folke, 2003). The foundations of this approach come from ecology, applying nonlinear dynamics in complex systems (Gunderson & Allen, 2010). “Resilience is described here as the property that allows the fundamental functions of an ecosystem to persist in the face of extremes of disturbance” (Allen, Gunderson, & Holling, 2010, p. 4). Holling, Peterson, and Allen (2008) clarified that “panarchies are hierarchically arranged, mutually reinforcing sets of processes that operate at different spatial and temporal scales, with all levels subject to an adaptive cycle of collapse and renewal, and with levels separated by discontinuities in key variables” (p. 3). In education, resilience theories tend to study and get applied in the study of persistent, flexible continuity across a variety of conditions, including the ability to maintain coherence when shocked. Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wyche, and Pfefferbaum (2008) have synthesized twenty sources of models, theories, capacities, strategies, descriptions, and definitions of the application of resilience across several scales, including the individual, psychological, community, city, social, ecological systemic, and physical (p. 129), in order to understand how communities might best prepare for disaster readiness. Their synthesis had compelling implications for education, and suggested that “Community resilience is a process linking a network of adaptive capacities (resources with dynamic attributes) to adaptation after a disturbance or adversity” (p. 121). They went on to emphasize how

Community resilience emerges from four primary sets of adaptive capacities—Economic Development, Social Capital, Information and Communication, and Community Competence—that together provide a strategy for disaster readiness. To build collective resilience, communities must reduce risk and resource inequities, engage local people in mitigation, create organizational linkages, boost and protect social supports, and plan for not having a plan, which requires flexibility, decision-making skills, and trusted sources of information that function in the face of unknowns. (p. 121)

Along with these systemic and community scale applications of imagining resilience in a time of climate flux, resilience has also been applied in environmental and sustainability education in resonant ways. Sterling (2010) described a reconciliation of instrumentalist and intrinsic views of resilience in sustainability education, a way that education can simultaneously cultivate personal and social resilience in learners while teaching content and process about resilience in social-ecological systems (SES). Krasny, Tidball, and Sriskandarajah (2009) looked at social learning, resilience, and civic ecologies, how education for resilience is “learning is situated in real-world practice, and occurs through recursive interactions between individual learners and their social and biophysical environment” (p. 37). They studied how climate responsive environmental and sustainability education can itself be a constituent social catalyst for social-ecological adaptive systems capacity, whether through lake restoration, mosaicked gardens, or urban civic ecology service learning projects. As Krasny, Lindholm, and Plummer (2010) articulated:

Environmental education strategies consistent with managing for change include social learning, multiple-loop learning, reflexivity, allowing for self-organisation and other forms of participation, attention to multiple forms of knowledge and governance, and the incorporation of feedbacks or information from the social and ecological components of a system. (p. 463)

Thus, resilience as the second “R” in climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education builds emotional and psychological resilience while engaging with content and topics of resilience and while leveraging communities of embedded educators and learners in emotionally, socially, and ecologically intelligent collaborations (Goleman, Bennett, & Barlow, 2012) that build and reinforce larger networks of adaptive capacity to reduce inequities, engage communities, and enhance flexibility.
So whereas reclamation offers a way of “reading” the world and storing patterns and knowledge systems, resilience offers a way of “writing” and wiring our connective and adaptive capacity networks. Regeneration, discussed in the next section, moves beyond the keeping of reclamation and bouncing of resilience and prepares us for something we can “count” on needing: a change-philic strategy avid about transformation as the entangled social and ecological systems within which we are situated undergo massive climate shocks.

Regeneration is the third “R” of climate responsive education and can involve readying for new regimes, regenerating living capacities even if the systems themselves continue to evolve via regenerative evolution. The emphasis in regeneration has more to do with the viability and capacity of living systems even if they must flip out of their current parameters of resilience. Regenerative sustainability education leads to reconnective, multi-scale modeling and embodiment of biomimetic transformative systems (Hauk, 2011, 2014a). Thrivable or regenerative education builds skills for emergence, creativity, zooming, context, multiple perspectives, temporal dimensionality, and compassion (Hauk, 2014a, 2016; Macy & Brown, 2014 on deep time; Russell, 2013, pp. 41-51). Multiple simultaneous perspective metacognition, or polyperspectivality, is what complexity educators have termed level jumping (Davis & Sumara, 2008) and what I have elsewhere detailed as scale-slithering (Hauk, 2014a, 2016), which involves cultivating the capacity to perceive multiscales and their mutual co-generation, thus to perceive the phenomenon and also its context of arising and change, within which the learner is also embedded and with/in which the learner is also transformed and transforming:
The emergent realm of complexity thinking answers that, to make sense of the sorts of transphenomena mentioned above, one must “level-jump”—that is, simultaneously examine the phenomenon in its own right (for its particular coherence and its specific rules of behavior) and pay attention to the conditions of its emergence (e.g., the agents that come together, the contexts of their co-activity, etc.). (Davis & Sumara, 2008, p. 34)
Holonic, holographic, living classroom, and field-, paradigm- and pattern-sensing capacities come alive in regenerative, emergent teaching and learning (Bache, 2008; Crowell & Reid-Marr, 2013; Hauk, 2014a; Macy & Johnstone, 2012; Taylor, 2011; Wood, 2013). Regenerative, collaborative creativity (Hauk, 2014a) as a form of transdisciplinary, multi-scale, bioculturally embedded, complex collaborative emergence (Hauk, 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2015, 2016) is a critical dimension of the third “R” of regeneration. These kinds of regenerative creativities constitute and further catalyze geometries of liberation, including the use of complex biomimetic and systems-scale ecofractals to catalyze collaborative creativity, which was shown to nurture anti-domination, ecojustice, and ethic of care orientations in learners while catalyzing collective intelligence and more regenerative designs (Hauk, 2013, 2014a, 2015). These multiscale polyperspectivalities and affiliated creativities can source regenerative designs, creations, and learning/cultures that respond with rather than deny climate change. Regenerative perception and understandings are powerful acts of imaginative transdisciplinary inquiry, capable of navigating the kinds of complex, multiplex, and “wicked” challenges encountered in climate shocking environmental and sustainability education (Brown, Dean, Harris, & Russell, 2010, p. 12).

Williams and Brown emphasized the role of environmental and sustainability education to fundamentally regenerate the root metaphors and mindscapes of learning toward living systems (2012, pp. 42-44). These regenerative approaches are supported by a pedagogy of transformative, transgressive learning, which can generate justice-seeking, lively, conflict-assertive praxis in reflexive social learning and capabilities, critical phenomenology, cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), and de-/postcolonization theories (Lotz-Sisitka, Wals, Kronlid, & McGary, 2015). This transformative, transgressive approach distinguishes itself from resilience-based pedagogies and directly “critiques the current tendency in sustainability science and learning to rely on resilience and adaptive capacity building and argues that in order to break with maladaptive resilience of unsustainable systems it is essential to strengthen transgressive learning and disruptive capacity-building” (Lotz-Sisitka, Wals, Kronlid, & McGary, 2015, p. 73). Keating framed these as transformative, post-oppositional pedagogies of invitation (2013).

The Transition Movement as well as permaculture and regenerative design indicate both that the solution is in the problem (as in Holmgren, 2002) and that our responses and approaches must model the solutions we imagine (Kagawa, 2010). One of the key characteristics of regenerative systems, often viewed as more “thrivable” than sustainability constructions (Edwards, 2010; Hauk, 2014a; Russell, 2013), is the presence of disruptive, multiple and multi-scale feedback mechanisms in complex networks of emergence. These responsive, regenerative systems are beyond survival, sustainable, or resilient approaches: they are thrivable, meaning “‘anti-fragile’ and get better when disturbed” (Russell, 2010, column 4). Regeneration kicks capacity up out of flexible persistence into dynamism-proaction.

Regenerative climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education (R-CRESE) involves embodying these change-active flows of neighborly social capital, school-community partnerships, citizen science and empowerment, urban food justice and food systems storage and capacity building, commonist knowledge-sharing networks, and water catchment (to name a few) in ways that not only proactively prepare and gird human-ecological networks but while doing so also further disrupt power differentials and (re)generate in amplifying feedback systems capacities that are thereby re-weaving living systems. This is exemplified by community upsurge of those traditionally marginalized, strengthening networks and community while also deepening social and political processes in contexts of scaling up community climate change organizing (Soltesova, Brown, Dayal, & Dodman, 2014, pp. 223-224). Radical regenerative approaches could include dissolution of the public school system in its current form and its regeneration in climate responsive, ecojustice-activist, community-embedded, arts-making, campusless action nodes that would regeneratively and intergenerationally design systems, build solar panels, feed and clothe communities from food forests, energize culture campaigns, provide intergenerational care, and build small-scale carbon-descent interdependence and biocultural thriving (or perhaps something even more radical that I do not have the capacity to imagine). Regeneration continuously generates, innovates, and reweaves, strengthened instead of tilted by shocks and disturbances.
Figure 1. Reclamation, Resilience, and Regeneration as Simultaneous Approaches for Climate-Responsive Environmental and Sustainability Education (own research)
Figure 1. Reclamation, Resilience, and Regeneration as Simultaneous Approaches for Climate-Responsive Environmental and Sustainability Education (own research)

Conclusion

Unlike other models in which components or approaches are competitive, all three Rs are requisite for our multi-system embedded survival and thrivability. As Figure 1 depicts, all three, reclamation, resilience, and regeneration, are ever-more-complex types of capacities and support capacity building aimed together toward life-supportive, dynamic, complex systems transformation. Environmental and sustainability education that fosters skills of reclamation includes preservation, conservation, recording, and the establishment of libraries and sanctuaries of exemplar systems. Environmental and sustainability education for resilience includes network extension and adaptive capacity building. ESE for regeneration nurtures emergent complex systems metacognitions, creativities, and transformative, transgressive social approaches that are connective, disruptive, and innovative and model and embody complex emergence. Regenerative ESE fosters skills to facilitate catalysis of emergent regeneration, self-organization, and transformation into more complex living systems. All of these position embedded learners in pro-active, systems-intensive embodiments of the types of living networks that foster survival, flexibility, and phase-change during our entry into a time of consistent climate turbulence. I would be interested to hear what these three Rs spark in your own educational praxis and action; please share your ideas and comments on the JSE Facebook Page or contact me directly. In order for environmental and sustainability education to scale to increasingly complex systems, the literacies of reclamation, resilience, and regeneration can help build regenerative urban areas as “cities self-organize…where we are our most creative, collaborative, visionary, artistic, and productive” (Hemenway, 2015, p. 240) and where we can support the emergent self-organization of socio-ecological networks of thriving strengthened by the challenges ahead.

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Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Spectrum of Inclusive Resilience: Designing and Assessing Climate Justice Education

In 2014, I took a course on "Measuring Environmental Education Outcomes" with Marianne Krasny and Alex Kudryavtsev, through EE Capacity, NAAEE, and Cornell University Civic Ecology Lab. For this course, I developed a three-tiered spectrum instrument that faculty and teachers could use to assess the level of inclusion of climate justice considerations in their curriculum. The intention was this would support teachers in designing for deeper integration of climate justice education in their courses.

In October 2014 I developed a visualization for this instrument and presented it as one of the Community Climate Change Fellows of NAAEE in Ottawa, Canada. In the following year, I refined the instrument, inspired by my experiences teaching doctoral students climate change education and mentoring graduate students in environmental justice and just sustainabilities. In October of 2015, I revised the instrument and was selected to present it at the Research Symposium of the North American Association for Environmental Educators. Now available are a companion briefing about the instrument as well as an informational poster. I am still in the process of further refining and articulating this work for academic publication.


Figure 1. Snapshot, Spectrum of Inclusive Resilience Poster (Hauk, (c) 2015)

Title: Spectrum of Inclusive Resilience: Designing and Assessing Climate Justice Education 

Abstract: Developed by meta-synthesis and refined by multi-case application, this research offers a three-tier spectrum to assess and design for depth of implementation of transformative climate justice approaches in curricula and projects, to avoid greenwashing and move more deeply towards social transformation, community-based action, inclusion, and resilience in environmental education.

Marna Hauk, Ph.D. – NAAEE – Research Symposium – October, 2015 in San Diego, California

Here's the handout I shared with visitors during the discussion.
Here's the poster I developed to share this instrument - more refined than the 2014 one, and still in formation.

Hope you find it of interest, and please let me know what you see missing or would suggest augmenting or changing. I have subsequently encountered the work of the Hackman Consulting Group on designing climate justice education, whose insights I hope to include in the next iteration of this spectrum model.

Thank you.

Friday, July 17, 2015

Women Empowering Climate Action Network - July 23rd Information Night and Watch "Arise the Movie" - Portland Oregon

We will share information for interested women for the WE-CAN Women Empowering Climate Action Network (www.earthregenerative.org/wecan/) upcoming year-long mentored support certificate program and social incubator for women's community climate action projects. We are currently accepting applications. 

Prospective participants, mentors, and community supporters are invited. We will watch "Arise: The Movie" which features example grassroots projects in ecofeminism action from around the world, including inspiring words from Vandana Shiva and Winona LaDuke. 

We will discuss these inspiring examples, the nature of the upcoming program, how to apply and get involved, opportunities to mentor, and inspire women's projects in community climate action. Open Q & A format too. Meet women committed to innovating projects for climate resilience and earth connection. Herbal tea will be served. All women are welcome.

More information on our Facebook event page:  https://www.facebook.com/events/477995702360970/

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Portland Program WECAN - Women Empowering Climate Action Network - Fall 2015 Applications Launched

decorative swirl pattern graphic
WECAN - Women Empowered for Climate Action Network, a project of the Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies, has just made available a briefing sheet and the participant application form for the Fall 2015 program start. Priority will be given to applications that are received by June 22, 2015. 

Information sessions are planned for May and June.


Program Information
The Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies is a local graduate institute and adult learning center based in northeast Portland offering stellar programs at the convergence of creativity, eco-restoration, and the living wisdom traditions. One project of the Institute is WE-CAN, Women Empowering Climate Action Network, which is a year-long mentored learning and action cohort to support women and queer women in incubating community-based climate change, climate action, and climate justice projects. Our circle of 8-12 visionary-activists will meet 1-2 times per month, meet once monthly with a program mentor with relevant experience, and mentors and visionary activists will all also co-learn once a month in a larger circle. Visionary-activists, who may be sparked by background or interests in an arts-based, permaculture/ gardening/ nature-loving, or ecopreneurial approach will cross-pollinate and learn more about climate justice and Gaian resilience while nurturing their visionary projects. Encounters will include a combination of project activation training, collaborative creativity engagements, climate change learning, community organizing, ecopreneurship skill-building, and the development of a plan for launching your project.

We are recruiting women visionary-activists to participate in our maiden cohort!
The cost for participating is a sliding scale from $10 to $270/month, with many partial and full scholarships available. A wide range of proposed projects will be considered, for example projects in food justice community gardening, climate murals, appropriate technology eco-businesses, women’s empowerment projects, rural-urban partnerships for permaculture resilience, etc. Use your creative powers to dream Earth’s next chapters…


Application Form for WE-CAN
Our application process allows you to gather your materials and email us your application. The types of questions include describing your project idea, providing some background information on successful projects or activities in the past, and two letters of support.

Timelines
Applications are accepted on a rolling basis with priority given if sent by June 22, 2015
Notifications will be rolling and will start being sent by August 1, 2015
The program runs from September 2015 through May 2016

We look forward to learning more about your ideas!
www.earthregenerative.org/wecan/

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Climate Change Cohort Kicking Off, Slated for Fall 2015 Launch

The Institute will soon begin accepting applications for the WE-CAN program in Gaian Leadership and Climate Resilience. Please contact the Institute for application materials.

The Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies develops programs at the convergence of creativity, cultural and ecological restoration, and the living wisdom traditions. We are dedicated to nurturing women as leaders, facilitators, and healers through embodied, integrated action. WE-CAN is a project of the Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies. Supported by a training fellowship from the EE Capacity, Civic Ecology Lab, the North American Association of Environmental Education, and the EPA, we are designing and unfolding the first year-long program in community climate resilience.

The WE-CAN Program year offers a dynamic, interactive learning and action context for community-based climate change resilience projects. Whether you are interested in increasing community-based organic gardening or food forests, want to bootstrap a public-benefit enterprise in transition skills, or want to increase community involvement through large puppetry or murals, We nurture Gaian thriving, in learners' growing vision, along multi-disciplinary dimensions. Our mentor match program is excellent. 

Circles of Mentors and Acceleration

  • Meet regularly with the cohort with guest presenters and demonstrations
  • Meet monthly with your project mentor
  • Meet monthly with the entire circle of action learners and mentors
  • Custom design your project inside a circle of support
  • Field trips and site visits as well as intensives for immersive learning
Mentoring one-on-one and the Mentor learning circle bridges generations of successive waves of contribution, talent, and creativity. All this with the intention of creating planetary thrivability.

More information is available at the WE-CAN website. Application materials will be published later in March and will be due by May 15, 2015. 

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Climate Change Action - Catalyzing Community Engagement: We Can with the WE-CAN Program

Inspired by the idea that our communities are already well-resourced with brilliance, determination, and creativity, the Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies is innovating a certificate program to catalyze community-based climate resilience. The first cohort, targeted for a Fall 2015 start, will bring together a dozen women, including queer women, in an activist, experiential learning cohort to engage in mentored projects for climate change, climate action, and climate justice. The program is envisioned as a cross-collaboration of arts-based activists, ecopreneurs, and permaculture - regenerative designers. 

The program in Women Empowering Climate Action Network (or WE-CAN) will feature research-based and culturally responsive vibrant practices for learning and collaboration, including regenerative creativity inspired by biomimicry and fractal patterns from nature and bioculture as well as sustainability education, complex living systems, and ecoliteracy combined with approaches for environmental justice. Cohort members will also study and practice agile project management and collaborative leadership. The project hopes to nurture each learner with a project mentor, internships, and accelerator-style resources and micro-investments in project start-up. The Pacific Northwest women's community will be an amazing hothouse of support and social incubation for these practical visionaries.


We are currently soliciting project mentors, potential partners, internship sites, investors, and supporters, as well as prospective cohort participants. This program has already been honored with a training fellowship in community climate change action from the Cornell University Civic Ecology Lab, EE Capacity, the North American Association of Environmental Education, and the EPA.

The Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies is a learning organization for Gaian thriving at the intersection of creativity, ecological restoration, and the living wisdom traditions in the Pacific Cascadia bioregion. The living Earth system is our first teacher.


We look forward to collaborating with you to bring this and other amazing projects to life here in the heart of Cascadia.