Turning Season: Conversations with Changemakers in Our Adventure Toward a Life-Sustaining Society

What a joy to introduce you to We Are the Great Turning, a new podcast series featuring kitchen-table conversations between Joanna Macy, in her 95th year of life, and her friend and student, activist Jess Serrante.

Click Play to hear a brief visit between me and Jess about what's on her mind now that this extraordinary project has come out into the world, and then you'll hear the beautiful first episode of We Are the Great Turning, called Love and Loss.

About We Are the Great Turning:

We welcome you to the kitchen table of the legendary eco-spiritual teacher Joanna Macy, where we’ll dive into what it takes to live with our hearts and integrity intact in this time of global crisis. You’ll be guided into these conversations by Jess Serrante, a longtime activist and student of Joanna’s. Together, we’ll discover abiding wisdom that can help us stay joyful and energized as we work toward a more just and life-sustaining world.

Episode 1 - Love and Loss:

As Joanna Macy approaches the end of a long life dedicated to healing our imperiled planet, she begins the conversation with Jessica Serrante, her student and dear friend, “standing afresh with what it’s like to live on Earth at this moment.” As we look into the face of the climate crisis, injustice, and war, difficult feelings arise; all are welcomed.

You are invited to join them at Joanna’s kitchen table, and invited into a deeper sense of your belonging and love for our world.

In this episode:

• How to connect with the great possibilities that still exist for us even in these precarious times
• Joanna reflects on her awakening of environmental consciousness
• Jess reflects on how meeting Joanna changed her life
• Love, laughter, heartbreak, and the Work That Reconnects

Bonus Exercise: “Open Sentences”—a practice for partners

We recommend starting a podcast club with friends or family to do these practices together. Links and assets to help prompt reflection and build community can be found with every episode on WeAreTheGreatTurning.com

Turning Season Podcast brings you heartening doses of Active Hope in this Great Turning toward life-honoring, life-sustaining ways of being human. Each episode, get to know the how, the why, and the heart of someone who is participating in the Great Turning in their own unique way. This show is for you if you're aware of our multiple crises, feel your love for life on earth, and care about cultivating ways of life we can believe in, making a life-honoring present, even in the face of an uncertain future. Hosted by Leilani Navar, facilitator of the Work that Reconnects, acupuncturist, herbalist and dreamworker.

turningseason.com

How to become an Earth Caretaker? One good starting place is to "get off your butt and get out in the woods," as Tim Corcoran has been known to say, and his young students love to quote. Hear about many other good starting places and ways to walk the path in this conversation.

It's a fun and rich one, including Tim's own fascinating life story of connecting with nature and with Earth Caretaking people, closeness with animals, and 30 years of running Headwaters Outdoor School, where Tim teaches nature connection, wilderness skills, and earth philosophy.

You'll hear about:

• The Earth Caretaker Way, a life-changing, wise, comprehensive new book written by Tim Corcoran and Julie Boettler
• Tim's story of finding the land that would become Headwaters Outdoor School (it's truly multidimensional)
• the diverse groups of young people who've come to Headwaters
• Tim's take on ancestors of place, and our biological ancestors who were Earth Caretakers
• why he believes humans are supposed to be here, and why he has hope right now.

Turning Season Podcast brings you heartening doses of Active Hope in this Great Turning toward life-honoring, life-sustaining ways of being human. Each episode invites you into conversation with someone who is participating in the Great Turning in their own unique way. You'll hear about what they do, why they do it, and how they're relating to these times we're in. This show is for you if you're aware of our multiple crises, feel your love for life on earth, and care about cultivating ways of life we can believe in, making a life-honoring present, even in the face of an uncertain future. Hosted by Leilani Navar, facilitator of the Work that Reconnects, acupuncturist, herbalist and dreamworker.

Today's conversation is with Tim Corcoran, who runs Headwaters Outdoor School in Mt. Shasta, California. Tim has been helping transform lives for 30 years, by bringing children and adults to the camp there, teaching nature awareness, wilderness skills, and earth philosophy. He's written a new book called The Earth Caretaker Way, co-written with Julie Boettler.

Tim traces his own connection to Earth peoples philosophy to his Irish heritage, as taught to him by his uncle and grandfather. He knew at 6 years old that the woods were his home, and at seventeen he spent four months alone in the Canadian Wilderness practicing Earth living skills. Tim began a career teaching wildlife conservation in 1974. During this time, he learned how to communicate with the spirits of the animals he worked with, enhancing his abilities to connect on an intimate level with them.

He has worked at the Alberta Game Farm in Alberta, Canada as an animal caretaker, the Crandon Park Zoo in Miami Florida as an animal relocation director, and Marine World Africa U.S.A. as a chimpanzee and elephant trainer. (You may have glimpsed Tim and his elephant in Star Wars, where he was a Tuskan raider on the back of his elephant, costumed as a bantha.) Tim co-founded the Native Animal Rescue in Santa Cruz, California, rescuing and releasing injured wildlife. He created Headwaters Outdoor School in Mount Shasta, California in 1992, to realize his lifelong vision of sharing what he has learned from nature, and to inspire people to discover their own personal relationship with nature. Tim teaches outdoor living skills, and Earth Philosophy to kids and adults.

Tim is also an accomplished professional nature photographer and has published a series of nature photography books highlighting sacred places in nature. Tim has recently founded The Earth Caretaker Way Movement LLC, with the intention of uniting a global community of Earth Caretakers to save wild spaces, and create wildlife refuge within every environment, including urban settings. Tim lives with his wife, Jean, and their pack of dogs on an amazing refuge of wooded land in Mount Shasta, California where he runs Headwaters Outdoor School and The Earth Caretaker Way Movement.

Show notes: turningseason.com/episode39

"I bow to Osprey in deepest respect and gratitude for her years of inspired activism and this brilliant book." - Joanna Macy

Once again, I agree wholeheartedly with Joanna Macy, this time about Osprey Orielle Lake and her new book, The Story is in Our Bones: How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis. The book is packed with so much to learn from - stories, insights, strategies - and so is the conversation Osprey and I had.

Click Play to hear us dive into:

• Osprey's experience working with indigenous communities, global leaders, systems thinkers, and climate justice activists
• the importance of nonviolent direct action, and the ways it is becoming increasingly dangerous - specifically for land defenders in Latin America
• the "time riddle" we're in: how do we change things as fast as possible, AND slow down enough to make the changes deep and lasting?
• the worldviews that need to be dismantled, and the worldviews that we need to revive and strengthen, if we're to have a life-enhancing society
• the Kawsak Sacha, or Living Forest Declaration, a vision, a worldview, a strategy, a demand, by the Kichwa people of Sarayaku, in the Ecuadorian Amazon
• the loss of identity and belonging we experience when we don't have a healthy connection to long-ago ancestors, who were in right relationship with the land and within the web of life

plus more - and even then, just beginning to explore what Osprey shares in her book.

Listen in, let me know what you think, and get a copy of The Story is in Our Bones for yourself and for someone else you know whose heart is with us in the Great Turning.

Osprey Orielle Lake is the founder and executive director of the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN), where she works internationally with grassroots, BIPOC and Indigenous leaders, policymakers, and diverse coalitions to build climate justice, resilient communities, and a just transition to a decentralized, democratized clean-energy future. She sits on the executive committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature and on the steering committee for the Fossil Free Non-ProliferationTreaty. Osprey’s writing about climate justice, relationships with nature, women in leadership, and other topics has been featured in The Guardian, Earth Island Journal, The Ecologist, Ms. Magazine and many other publications. Osprey holds an MA in Culture and Environmental Studies from Holy Names University in Oakland and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area on Coast Miwok lands.

Learn more:

• Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN International)
• the Women Speak section of the WECAN website
• Kawsak Sacha: The Living Forest Declaration
• Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
• Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature

Show notes: turningseason.com/episode38.

Alpha Lo caught my attention when I heard him say, "All we have to do is…" and then lay out a sweeping plan for how California can effectively restore rain, prevent both wildfires and floods, and regenerate the water cycle. He explained how we could reverse the negative effects on the water cycle caused by how we've built our cities, treated our forests, and run our agriculture.

This plan clearly would take many years, and plenty of political will and resources, but he said, "All we have to do…"

I loved that, because he helped me see that it's all possible. As he described it, I could see it happening.

With a background in physics, and experience working in different permaculture farms and eco-restoration projects, Alpha is now in the water restoration field. He's been researching the connection of climate, water and ecology, and publishes the Climate Water Project newsletter and podcast. He co-founded a network of water land managers, watershed restorers, and people interested in understanding the connection of water, climate and ecology. He is the co-author and editor of the "Open Collaboration Encyclopedia," and has utilized those collaborative skillsets in emerging a water network.

Alpha has opened my eyes to how crucial the way we handle water is to addressing our ecological and climate emergencies. It's at least as important as carbon - but, as he explains in this conversation, water is getting less attention because the science on water hasn't been made as clear to the public as the science on carbon. So, I hope that after you listen you'll join us in spreading the word, and bringing water into your conversations about climate.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• how pavement, channelization of rivers, and cutting down trees lead to less rain, and more vulnerability to drought and fire
• how improving soil and vegetation help prevent floods, with examples from California and Australia
• how animals are key players in the "water web" - from wildebeest to dung beetles to wolves
• the role regenerative water practices play (or might play) in local and global cooling
• practical changes we can make in small homes and gardens, and on large areas of land - like permeable pavement, curb cuts, swales, terraces, greywater systems, and (of course!) bringing back beavers
• why there are hundreds of climate scientists working on the "small water cycle," but there's very little public awareness and policy discussion around it
• the idea of international collaboration in "precipitation recycling watershed networks," because rivers and rain cross all political borders
• and one of my topics of greatest fascination: the insights we can get from seeing the Earth as a body, and our bodies as landscapes

This episode is rich with information and I'm excited to hear what sparks your curiosity, your hands-on actions, your conversations.

Visit the shownotes at turningseason.com/episode37 for links to:

• Alpha Lo's newsletter, podcast, and network
• the work of the scientists he mentions
• and to contact me or subscribe to email updates on new Turning Season episodes.

Thanks for being here, and for all the ways you play your part in the Great Turning.

Show notes: turningseason.com/episode37

Music by East Forest

Our bodies are just like the rest of the living world: coursing with healing, life-affirming intelligence and capacity; and suffering the effects of being out of balance. The body is one setting for what Joanna Macy called "the three stories of our time": Business as Usual, the Great Unraveling, and the Great Turning. We've explored these stories many times on this podcast. In this episode, I talk with Lydia Violet Harutoonian about how I see all three stories playing out in the landscape of the human body, and in the field of medicine.

Lydia is the founder and director of School for the Great Turning, a music maker, and a longtime, dedicated student and friend of Joanna Macy. She's a friend, comrade, and inspiration to me. You'll get to hear some of her potent way of articulating things during this conversation - but in this episode, I'm the guest, and she's the interviewer. We talk about The Great Turning in relation to illness and healing, through my explorations as a Chinese Medicine practitioner and a lover of Deep Ecology.

Click Play now to hear us get into:

• how Deep Ecology and Traditional Chinese Medicine are natural companions that help us understand human beings, and the system of Life on Earth
• emotions as key to both personal health and collective well-being
• the energy it takes to repress emotions about what's going on the world, the toll that takes on our health, and the energy that's liberated when we acknowledge the truth about our experience
• how Qi flows through the landscape of the body like water in rivers
• what happens when we relate to our bodies with a Business as Usual mindset, how illness is like a Great Unraveling, and how the body is always moving toward a Great Turning
• the life-honoring changes happening in medicine today
• thinking about medical treatment holistically, and seeking gentler, more life-honoring choices
• plus a few approaches to well-being that are part of the Great Turning, like acupuncture, self-massage with acupressure, therapeutic movement, and caring for our microbiomes

… and have a good time talking about it all!

I love hanging out with Lydia, I love talking about this stuff, and I hope you'll have fun listening to this one. I'd love to hear what you think, too! Please share your reflections with me by commenting on social media, or replying to my emails (you can subscribe to my twice-a-month-or-so emails at turningseason.com).

This conversation was part of The Great Turning Summit, held online on June 17, 2023. It was such a heartening day, full of learning and music from a diverse range of activists, visionaries, artists, and elders. You can purchase access to the recordings of this event through the link in the show notes, at turningseason.com/episode36.

You'll also find links to:

• Rupa Marya and Raj Patel's book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice
• the online program I host called Healing Season, which is all about you understanding and taking care of yourself, especially the connections between your physical and emotional health, and being able to express your love and care for our world, guided by the wisdom of Chinese Medicine and deep ecology
• and a video showing the self-acupressure point Large Intestine 4, which I demonstrated during this conversation (originally broadcast with video at the Great Turning Summit) 

About the guest:

It's me this time! Your usual host, Leilani Wong Navar. I have a clinical practice where I offer acupuncture and herbal medicine, functional medicine, and dreamwork. With groups, I facilitate the Work that Reconnects and teach practical wisdom from Chinese Medicine. Lydia and I work together at School for the Great Turning, where I serve as Assistant Director. I attended Evergreen State College, where I earned a BA with a focus on Political Economy and Holistic Health. My formal Chinese Medicine training was through the National University of Natural Medicine, where I graduated with a Masters of Science in Oriental Medicine. I was born into Chinese and Jewish families, and see myself as carrying on my Chinese ancestors' holistic, poetic medical science, and my Jewish ancestors' dedication to asking big questions. I'm a mom of two, and as my kids grow up, I'm excited to be getting to support their emergence into their own ideas and passions, and start to see the ways the Great Turning moves through them too.

Show notes: turningseason.com/episode36

Ready for a dose of Active Hope? Listen to Gloire Mudekuza, a young refugee, a social entrepreneur, a climate activist and a mentor in Uganda, making an impact in the refugee community. He is passionate about regenerative agriculture, climate action, and entrepreneurship. He is the founder and director of Plethora Social Initiative, a refugee-led organization that works to develop the inner potential and capacities of refugees in Nakivale Refugee settlement and their host community, developing a regenerative culture and building a resilient local community.

This conversation with Gloire was part of the Great Turning Summit, a daylong online event that we at School for the Great Turning hosted a couple weeks ago, on June 17. We got to hear from a diverse range of activists, visionaries, artists, and elders speaking about how they're participating in the movement for life on this planet. We talked about how we're collectively making a pivot toward a livable future, in collaboration with millions of people and the more-than-human world, all vying for life.

As part of the Summit, I had the opportunity to speak about The Great Turning in the intimate landscapes - the ecosystems - of our own bodies, and what Chinese Medicine and Deep Ecology teach us about illness and healing. I also hosted a panel on parenting during the Great Turning, and this conversation with Gloire Mudekuza. 

Click Play now to hear about:

• Gloire's arrival in Nakivale Refugee Settlement 6 years ago, having fled from his original home in the Democratic Republic of Congo
• his choice to focus on helping his community, and the shift from identifying as a victim to identifying as a survivor
• local farming, impacts of climate change, and the value of learning permaculture
• participating in the Gigaton Challenge to reduce carbon emissions and create green jobs for youth in Nakivale Refugee Settlement and the host communities
• how he sees the Great Turning happening now, particularly in terms of leadership - and what the Great Turning means to him

plus more!

This conversation was powerful for me, and for many who attended the Summit. I hope you too enjoy it, learn from it, and feel inspired in your own way.

Turning Season Podcast is dedicated to offering regular doses of Active Hope in this Great Turning toward life-honoring, life-sustaining ways of being human, bringing you deep conversations with people who are rising to their own unique roles in this worldwide movement.  This show is for every one of you who's awake to our multiple crises, feels your love for life on earth, and is finding your way to participate in cultivating ways of life we can believe in, making a life honoring present, even in the face of an uncertain future.

Learn more about and support Plethora Social Initiative and sign up for email updates here: turningseason.com/episode35

In this planet-wide, diverse movement we can call The Great Turning, one of the threads I'm personally following is medicine. I'm all in for the shift to a life-honoring, life-sustaining approach to understanding illness, treating disease, and promoting health and healing. 

Ruby Daniels is part of this shift, too, growing medicinal herbs and making botanical medicines at her home in West Virginia.

I connected with Ruby because she's on the board of United Plant Savers. I heard her talking about protecting wild ginseng, and about her mission to change the narrative of African American relationships to woodland botanicals, and educate about the herbal traditions of African Americans, which have been practiced since the time of slavery.

Ruby is the founder of Creasy Jane's Herbal Remedies. She comes from a creative and inventive family who were enslaved in Virginia and moved to the Southern coalfields of West Virginia to build a new life after emancipation. Ruby refers to her heritage as “Afro-lachian.” She spent many childhood summers in the mountains of Raleigh County, West Virginia, with her great aunt, Ruby, her grandmother, and other wise women of the community, learning about herbal traditions, God, and the plants of the mountains. After earning her Master’s of Science in Herbal Therapeutics, she returned to West Virginia, where she runs Creasy Jane's, named after her great-grandmother, Creasy Jane Pack. Creasy Jane’s offers custom-made herbal teas and tinctures, herbal soaps, and other topical herbal remedies. All her herbal products are formulated with a combination of Appalachian herbal traditional remedies, science and research and spirit.

Listen in to our conversation to hear about:

• Ruby's research into how slaves in the region used herbal medicine
• her experiences as a Black woman in her master's degree program and in the business of herbal medicine
• Ruby's family's history and "permaculture" lifestyle after emancipation
• her town's history, and herbal medicines for today's coal mining-related illnesses
• protecting wild ginseng
• the forest and garden botanicals she works with

and more.

I'm so grateful for the chance to hear from Ruby, to learn from her and to get these glimpses of how the Great Turning is moving through her in multiple ways, from making sure history is remembered to helping local coal miners with their lung health, from bringing her perspective into academic and workplace conversations to cultivating garden food and herbs. 

Enjoy this conversation with Ruby, and be sure to check out Creasy Jane's online shop, the research Ruby talks about, and historical photos of Ruby's family and recent photos from her garden. Links and photos are in the show notes: https://turningseason.com/episode34

Register for the (free!) Great Turning Summit: https://programs.schoolforthegreatturning.com/gtsummit

How about these goals: 

• Avoid human extinction
• Cultivate healthy economies of living systems at local landscape, continental and planetary scales
• Emerge into these systems on the other side of whatever crises and collapse(s) are ahead

What would that take?

Joe Brewer has dedicated his life to this question, and to a "living laboratory" of bioregional regeneration and community collaboration. He is the founder of Earth Regenerators and co-founder of the newly established Design School for Regenerating Earth.

I have learned so much from Joe. He's been a source of information, inspiration, techniques and strategies, and also the reason I've found many other people I'm now so grateful to be connected with (including Charles Upton, whom you heard from in Episode 21). 

Joe gave me a big grin and two thumbs up when I said that I frame these conversations in the language of Joanna Macy, so we have that in common. His roots of study spread wide in many other directions, though: He's a complexity researcher and transdisciplinary scholar who has studied cultural evolution, physics, atmospheric sciences, and cognitive linguistics, among other things. Joe is also a father, and someone who is trying to embody the pathway to Earth Regeneration. I know through community photos and stories that he's out there digging swales and planting trees, and participating actively in all the realities of community cooperation.

I've been looking forward to having a conversation with Joe Brewer for a long time, and I'm excited to share it with you now.

Click Play now to dive into:

• working for regeneration on the scale of larger landscapes, even if we live in cities (how did water move through this bioregion before these cities existed?)
• in thinking about sustainability, how much depends on the regenerative capacity of the land
• having children, being with children, and being there for children, in these times (I loved this: "children are such a profound source of human emotional regeneration")
• the tapestry of local projects being woven together in the High Andes Tropical Dry Forest ecosystem of Barichara, Colombia - a living laboratory for a bioregional-scale regenerative economy 
• the human species being in ecological overshoot, what that probably means about the future, and what Joe is "actively hopeful" for, in light of that
• how to have effective, cooperative groups - both the knowledge about how to do that, and the actual practice of doing it
• and Joe's words of advice on following your heart, and being ready for people to be confused

I continue to learn so much from Joe and the Earth Regenerators community. Maybe for some of you listening this will also be a doorway into what's next for you, in your journey toward embodying life-sustaining, life-honoring, regenerative ways to live in the web of Life.

Come to the show notes for links to connect with Joe Brewer, check out the Design School for Regenerating Earth, and learn about other topics we touched on: turningseason.com/episode33

"Somehow, we were only touching the symptoms, whether it's poaching, whether it's the destruction of forests, or unsustainable development." So said Radhika Bhagat about her 12+ years of conservation work with leading organizations in India, as she explained to me why she founded the Sacred Earth Trust. Radhika now focuses on reviving spiritual connection to the Earth, as well as scientific research and education, in her work to protect India's thousands of Sacred Groves.

This conversation was wide-reaching, and once again I am so heartened and inspired to connect with someone who's reflecting deeply on how to relate to both the Great Unraveling and the Great Turning – and who is enacting her Active Hope every day. 

I feel an especially strong resonance with Radhika and what she's doing for Life on Earth, and I'm looking forward to hearing what comes up for you as you listen.

Click Play now to hear us explore:

• sitting with our pain as a teacher, and letting it move us to change the things we cannot accept
• Radhika's experience working for a leading conservation NGO in India, and why she changed focus to reviving spiritual connection with the Earth
• what Sacred Groves are
• how Sacred Earth Trust has approached learning about Sacred Groves
• and why it's so important to protect both these groves, AND the belief systems that have kept them alive until now
• how Radhika has seen culture change in India since her teenage years, and what might revive a perspective that all life is sacred, in a modern context
• why a two-pronged approach, speaking to both science and spirituality, is essential
• and stories: change on the "mythic" level of human society's sense of itself; stories from indigenous protectors of sacred groves in India; and Radhika's reflections on the Three Stories of Our Time (Business as Usual, The Great Unraveling, and The Great Turning)

plus redefining "development" to include a more comprehensive experience of life, and more.

Enjoy, please share what you think about all this, and if you know anyone else who would appreciate this conversation with Radhika, please send them the link.

Show notes: turningseason.com/episode32

Music by East Forest

This Full Moon, a new deep conversation with someone rising to her own unique role in The Great Turning - the role only she can play, coming about through what she loves, what breaks her heart, her gifts, her circumstances, her stories. Today, meet Fernanda Lenz, an educator, facilitator, and visual documentarian in São Paolo, Brazil.

Listen in to see what resonates with you about how she's relating to this time of ecological and humanitarian crises, influenced by her longtime immersion in Tibetan Buddhism and Deep Ecology. You might be inspired, or hear something that helps you recognize what's true for you, helps you find your role in these times, or helps you keep going in the role you're already playing. Or maybe you'll find yourself sitting with a really good new question.

Click Play to hear us talk about:

• the inner world, and the subtle part of us that carries on beyond our lifetimes in these bodies
• taking the small actions that can be felt more deeply than seemingly bigger, more showy actions
• facilitating the Work that Reconnects with humanitarian aid volunteers and with refugees
• what Fernanda did when she encountered a beach covered for miles with trash carried downriver
• and the worldview of "interdependence."

Fernanda teaches classes in Deep Ecology that weave her Tibetan Buddhist philosophy heritage into Joanna Macy's Work that Reconnects. She brings an embodied learning approach that emphasizes empathic connection to our living Earth, transforming apathy and grief into collaborative action.

She started her career as a photographer, after graduating from the International Center of Photography in New York City in 2013. She has produced documentary work with indigenous peoples in Brazil, documented elephants in Tanzania, and made pilgrimages with her brother Lama Michel Rinpoche and Guru Lama Gangchen Rinpoche to Nepal, Tibet and Indonesia. Coming eye to eye with all of these beings and life forms, she aims to communicate our intrinsic connection with our planetary family, portraying both its strength and fragility.

Connect with Fernanda, learn more about the practice of Tonglen, check out Joanna Macy's book World as Lover, World as Self, and subscribe to our newsletter at: turningseason.com/episode31