A Mexican Entrepreneur With a Painful Past Is Finding New Purpose With a Recycling Startup
By Maya Piedra, Global Press Mexico. Eleno Ulloa endured ridicule, rejection, drug and alcohol addiction, and two deportations from the United States. Today, he is his family’s breadwinner and, with his recycling business, a sign of hope for many in Nayarit. PASO DE LAS PALMAS, MEXICO — Eleno Ulloa inherited his interest in recycling from […]
Permaculture for Climate Change Resilience in Mexico
Tikkun Eco Center works with Mexican villages to solve water crisis
“Embrace of the Amate” generates hope, healing and action
In a green valley of Central Mexico, below the distinctive humpbacked mountains that stand like guardians over the itinerant ecovillage that was taking form in the forest near Tepoztlan, the resonant call of the caracol, or conch shell, rang out from the sacred fire before sunrise: It was time to begin the activities of the […]
Retrotopia Emerging: An EcoSapien Interview with Liora Adler
Liora Adler is a visionary social actionist, educator, facilitator, mentor, event organizer and dancer. Raised during the ’60s social movements in the US, she came to understand that protest alone was inadequate for making substantive societal changes. Consequently, throughout the ’70’s and ’80s she explored supportive community building that provided both for physical needs and the basic human need for belonging.
The Rainbow Path of the Coyote: EcoSapien Interview with Alberto Ruz
One of the principal founders of the Vision Council – Guardians of the Earth is also an icon for the World Rainbow Community since the seventies. “Coyote” Alberto Ruz Buenfil is a visionary revolutionary who has been planting seeds of change in every step of his way. Alberto, a native of Mexico born in 1945, […]
Call of the Turtle Mini Vision Council at a Glance
For those of you who joined us this weekend for the epic Call of the Turtle Mini Vision Council, and indeed for any of the brilliant EcoSapiens who shared their stories and insights with us during the monthlong Restoring Sacred Culture in the Americas Convergence, we are so grateful to you. You, in fact, are […]
LIVE TODAY at 11 am CDT: Gaia University founder Liora Adler on 'Retrotopia'
Since the turn of the century humans have been building communities structured on technological and industrial practices that are steadily destroying the ecosystems that support life on this planet. “Retrotopia”** is an alternative vision that supports the re-emergence of sustainable community living focused on ecosystem regeneration and restoration. Register HERE to join us for this weekend’s lineup […]
Call of the Turtle: LIVE Mini-Vision Council on Sunday
The Call of the Turtle, a Mini Vision Council Sun. Aug 7, gives a small taste of this south-of-the-border phenomenon that has transformed lives and communities throughout the continent.
Ecovillage Expert Diana Leafe Christian on Finding Community
Today’s guest on the EcoSapien Speaker Series: Diana Leafe Christian, author of Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities, and Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community. She speaks at ecovillage and cohousing conferences, offers consultations, and leads workshops and online internationally.
EcoSapien Speaker Series + 'Call of the Turtle' Mini Vision Council
This monumental monthlong convergence features conversations with indigenous visionaries and activists, eco-elders in the fields of bioregionalism, ecovillage design, permaculture, earth-regeneration and humans we see as helping us connect to our animist roots while restoring elements of sacred culture.
Chimalapas: Building community to save a forest
Their footprints mark the trails beneath the pines, oaks and oyamels. Once a week, 10 men walk through here with machetes on their shoulders, flashlights and jute bags of food, to defend a piece of the 594,000-hectare communal forest that makes up the Chimalapas. They are young people who inherited the management of this woodland, […]
Discovering the Ecobarrios of Latin America
The book Ecobarrios en América Latina: Alternativas comunitarias para la transición hacia la sustentabilidad urbana (Ecobarrios in Latin America: Community Alternatives for the Transition to Urban Sustainability) is an exploration of the committed and valuable work of a movement of people throughout the continent. One of the most outstanding has been the co-editor of the […]
The promise of restoration lives within us
“Today let’s start a new decade, one in which we finally make peace with nature and secure a better future for all,” declared António Gutterres, the UN Secretary General, during the virtual opening event of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration in June. With environmental degradation already affecting almost half of humanity, and with every […]
Ecobarrios Program changes lives while changing neighborhoods
Antonio Sánchez Gramiño was always one of those who would shake is head and laugh when he heard people talk about changing the world. It’s not that he didn’t care; he’s always been ecologically minded. It bothered him to see people wasting water and creating trash. It’s just that he thought it was a lost cause.
“I used to call them pendejos (fools),” he told me with a laugh. “Now, I’m one of those pendejos.”
Love & Waste Aboard a Bus Called Home
In reference to the Vietnam War and President Nixon’s “Pentagon Papers,” whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, decried: “They hear it, they learn from it, they understand it, and they proceed to ignore it.” Both my personal and professional lives focus on how we can re-interpret “information” in order to embody our interdependencies. How can we learn to […]
The Parable of the Three Burglars
Erik Assadourian is a writer who describes himself as a “sustainability researcher, ecophilosopher, servant of Gaia, and father of one.” A characteristically zen description for someone who, as a Senior Fellow at the now-dormant Worldwatch Institute and founder of The Gaian Way, has been trying to come to terms with the collapse that is unfolding […]
Exploring Sovereignty with the Women of Standing Rock
We are inviting all women-folk/femme-folk to join some panels and talking circles by sisters, aunties and grandmas of all nations as we discuss the meaning and practice of sovereignty.
A Little Bit of Gandhi in Oaxaca
A century after Gandhi’s original Khadi Movement helped Indians to attain economic self-sufficiency and ultimately independence from Great Britain, the movement is having an unlikely revival in indigenous Zapotec communities in rural Mexico. “Khadi” means handspun cloth, and like its original Indian counterpart, Khadi Oaxaca has re-established a farm-to-garment ethic that restores dignity to its […]
Inner Ecology Video & Invitation: Saturday June 13
UPDATE: María Ros’ Inner Ecology Master Class was an intimate look at an innovative, earth-based approach to self care. We share the video below, and invite you to join us for our weekly series. The next class is Saturday, June 13, at 11 am PDT/1 pm CDT/2pm EDT. Maria, who is a permaculture designer as […]
Personal Permaculture: Toward an Inner Ecology
The Backstory Ten years ago in the Maya Mountains of Belize I attended a permaculture design course with author, public speaker and self-described “Emergency Planetary Technician” Albert Bates and an impressive young colleague, María Ros. María, I learned, is a permaculture designer with a whole other profession: she’s a psychotherapist, and her passion for the […]
Uncertainty, crisis, collapse: The (necessary) bardo into a new life
Overnight, the daily life of the majority of the inhabitants of this beautiful Earth-home has vanished, leaving us in a kind of transitory reality between the old and known and the new unknown. After I asked someone how she was doing a couple of weeks ago, she replied: “Mmm, not very well. The most serious […]
The Search For A New Community
Every intellectual had a “draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson We have reached a new epoch in our planet’s history. Few can look at the increasingly authoritarian tendencies across the globe, the mass stress-fueled migrations, the degradation of the environment, the increasingly chaotic climate, and the fragility of […]
From Encampment to Ecovillage at Standing Rock
Editor’s Note: Standing Rock movement founder LaDonna Allard left this life on April 10, 2021, after a battle with brain cancer at the age of 64. Mourners from around the world joined hearts on social media for days afterwards. Here we share a telephone interview with LaDonna from August of 2019. When LaDonna Brave Bull […]
Breathing in the Time of Corona
As I write, the church bells across the plaza are clanging a noisy celebration of the rising sun; another day has begun here in Mexico, with the same alegría, the same joy as any other dawn. It’s equinox, and I’m reflecting on equilibrium. That quality that allows us to hold fast onto the delight in […]
Thanks to the coronavirus, we as humanity are currently learning something very precious. We’re learning how powerful and efficient something incredibly tiny can be when it resonates with a latent field. This tiny thing, in this case, is a virus. The latent field is fear – an immense, collective fear of the future: an ingredient […]
The Yupaichani Network: Regenerative Practices in Action
Hamstrung by the bureaucracy in their hometown of Boulder, Colo., permaculture designer Zia Parker and biodynamic agriculture teacher Roshni McEldowney headed south to Vilcabamba, Ecuador, where a culture respecting the Rights of Mother Earth is flourishing.
A Different Kind of COP25 in Santiago de Chile
Coyote Alberto Ruz Reports from People’s Summit, Peace Village and International Rights of Nature Tribunal
From Sunset Strip to the Sierra Madre to a Nobel nomination
As the founder of the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival and a lifelong advocate for their cause, Susana Valadez was chosen by an Amsterdam-based nonprofit, the Drugs Peace Institute, to represent the indigenous Wixárika (Huichol) people, whom the group nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for “their efforts in favor of a sociable, ecologically friendly and peace-promoting use of mind-altering substances.”
How the Women of Standing Rock Are Building Sovereign Economies
For Sicangu Lakota water protector Cheryl Angel, Standing Rock helped her define what she stands against: an economy rooted in extraction of resources and exploitation of people and planet. It wasn’t until she’d had some distance that the vision of what she stands for came into focus. “Now I understand that sustainable sovereign economies are needed to […]
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