What does life look like if we recognize Earth as our kin and Mountains as our ancestors?  

Join Dr. John Hausdoerffer as he shares his vision and experience of deep kinship with Nature and talks about how good life can be when we are in a meaningful relationship with our landscapes.  We will honor Mountains in our discussion as wise Elders who can help guide us in being the ancestors we want to see in the future.  

Being those ancestors is rooted in the here and now and calls us to enliven values that nourish life for the following generations.   As guardians of Earth, Mountains show us the way.

Dr. John Hausdoerffer is an environmental philosopher, teacher, organizational founder, and writer from Gunnison, Colo. He believes that peace between humans begins with a spiritual connection with a just distribution of the “ecosphere” that forms our local and global home. His books “Catlin’s Lament“; “Wildness“; and (forthcoming) “What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?” imagine how environmental health must come from and result in the healing of deep histories of social injustice and cultural trauma. “Dr. John” calls for a new ethic that views all places as part of our home, all generations of all beings as part of our scope of responsibility, and all actions as potential expressions of human care for the world. As he often says, “environmental ethics insists on humans as more than bodies that consume bodies in a global economy, insists that we are wholehearted beings capable of understanding and caring for the complex local and global systems that sustain us.”

Throughout his life, Dr. John’s dedication to peace has been driven by this question: What does the good life look like once we accept that all places are “here” and all eras are “now”? What does the good life look like if all peoples are considered as part of an equal humanity and if all species are considered as persons?

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