How can higher education best address global environmental challenges?
How can we most meaningfully teach and research about environmental issues?
How can we cultivate our inner lives through active engagement with environmental challenges?
This workshop explores the contribution of contemplative practices to scholarly inquiry and teaching in environmental studies. Through discussions with distinguished scholars, focused conversations among colleagues, artistic exercises, and regular contemplative practice (meditation, yoga, journaling, and nature walks), participants will investigate ways to deepen their teaching, research, and lives at this historic moment of environmental intensification.
Part workshop and part retreat, this 6-day summer institute provides an opportunity to step back from the frenetic pace of our lives, and cultivate our inner resources and nurture the resiliency we need as teachers committed to education on a fragile and wild planet.
The Summer Institute is co-sponsored by the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society and is supported by the Global Environmental Politics (GEP) Program in the School of International Service at American University, Washington DC.
Setting
The Institute will take place at the Lama Foundation in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Lama is a beautiful, off-grid community committed to sustainable and mindful living. It sits on 100 acres surrounded by National Forest land and draws its power from the sun, water from a spring, and much of its food in the summer directly from the garden. Lama's funky, solar-powered, eco-laboratory has been a locus of inner and outer work since Ram Dass wrote Be Here Now under its tall ponderosa pines back in 1971. At 8500 feet, it provides an ideal setting for reflection and engagement with contemplative environmental issues.
Agenda
Each day will include sessions that explore the contemplative nature of environmental affairs, such as the role of compassion, silence, direct experience, and engaged social action in responding to environmental dangers. Each day will also include substantial contemplative practice time. As a group, we will engage in meditation, yoga, art exercises, journaling, nature walks, and community tuning. There will also be opportunities for participants to partake of other contemplative activities hosted by the Lama community, and to use free time to deepen one's personal practice (or simply relax). The Institute will weave these activities together through a focus on contemplative environmental pedagogy. It aims to cultivate ways of best educating college and university students in a time of monumental environmental intensification.
Faculty
Daniel Barbezat, Professor of Economics, Amherst College, and Director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.
Matthew Jelacic is an assistant professor of environmental design and adjunct assistant professor of engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. His work focuses on sustainable shelter and planning solutions for developing communities and emergency situations.
Michelle McCauley is Professor of Psychology at Middlebury College. Her work focuses on the relation between environmental action and psychological well-being.
Nicole Salimbene, visual artist whose work explores themes of sustainability, intimacy, political voice, and devotion, and leader of workshops that use art to deepen political and vocational engagement.
Paul Wapner, professor of Global Environmental Politics in the School of International Service at American University and author of Living Through the End of Nature and Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics.
Jeff Warren, meditation instructor, journalist, and author of The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness.
