Nature Evolutionaries

Join Unangan Elder, Ilarion Merculieff, as he invites you to explore a new way of living, guided by our hearts, with each and every unique heart beating together in the great song of creation.

Over ten thousand years ago, Elders at that time knew that a great imbalance was coming, so the original instructions of how to live in harmony as one Earth family were partially hidden by a wave of forgetting to keep them safe. Each group of people had enough wisdom to survive and continue on, but no one people had all of the knowledge once available to them.

It is time NOW, many Elders from around the world agree, to reweave the original instructions by coming together and sharing their unique cultural ways that are each a piece in the puzzle with much overlapping wisdom. With Earth's living systems being stressed and dishonored in new extremes, we must come together to weave a new story and new awakened presence as one Earth family in harmony with all of our relations if human beings are to continue on this Earth.

About Ilarion

Ilarion (Larry) ‘Kuuyux’ Merculieff has decades of experience serving his people, the Unangan (Aleuts) of the Pribilof Islands and other indigenous peoples in a number of capacities—locally, statewide, nationally and internationally. For his entire career, Merculieff has been a passionate advocate for indigenous rights/wisdom, and harmonious relationship with the Earth Mother. His reach has been broad and varied.

Close to Merculieff’s heart are issues related to cultural and community wellness, traditional ways of living, Elder wisdom, climate change and the environment. Having had a traditional upbringing, Merculieff has been, and continues to be, a strong voice and activist calling for the meaningful application of traditional knowledge and wisdom obtained from Elders in Alaska and throughout the world in dealing with modern day challenges. He founded and currently heads the Global Center for Indigenous Leadership and Lifeways, and is a chief consultant and member in several other board councils. His present work revolves much around the council of Elders he co-founded, called the Wisdom Weavers of the World,  to bring the messages of Elders from throughout the world to global attention.  

With a solid background as a community, business and environmental leader, Ilarion’s later years reflect both this lifelong career path as well as the fulfilment of his cultural role as Kuuyux, or traditional messenger for the Unangan people.

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“Remember, you are not alone as you gather herbs. Birds, butterflies, insects, other animals, and elemental beings may be nearby, sometimes visible and sometimes not.”— DEB SOULE

In this webinar, Deb Soule shares her journey following the southern migration of the ruby-throated hummingbird, and what inspired her. 

Deb and Pam will also discuss how herbal gardens offer sanctuary for pollinators. Flowering plants and trees, hedgerows and pathways, arbors and benches, altars and bells add magical dimensions into a healing garden. A diversity of plants, blooming throughout the gardening season encourages a diversity of pollinators and birds.. The biodynamic approach that Deb uses at Avena Botanical gardens helps create a sacred environment for all beings that enter the gardens. 

Deb Soule is an herbalist, gardener, teacher, and author of The Woman’s Handbook of Healing Herbs, How to Move Like a Gardener and The Healing Garden. Deb began organic gardening and studying the medicinal uses of herbs at age 16. Her faith in the healing qualities of plants includes a desire to make organic herbs easily accessible to women and families living in rural areas. In the fall of 1985, with her first mail-order catalog and a small selection of herbal extracts and teas, Deb launched Avena Botanicals, an apothecary that now serves thousands of customers. Deb has a special connection to the hummingbirds and has traveled part of the migratory path.


Pam Montgomery has been investigating plants and their intelligent spiritual nature for more than three decades. As an author, teacher, and practitioner she has passionately embraced her role as a spokesperson for the plants who are guiding us in our spiritual evolution. She is the author of Partner Earth; A Spiritual Ecology and the best-selling Plant Spirit Healing; A Guide to Working with Plant Consciousness. She teaches internationally on plant spirit healing, spiritual ecology, and people as Nature Evolutionaries. Her latest research is on the light and sound of plants which are foundational means of communication in the biological world. Pam is the founder of ONE.  She has dedicated herself to co-creative partnership with all of life and feels the Organization of Nature Evolutionaries is a way to make this partnership manifest.

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Join Syren Nagakyrie, founder of Disabled Hikers, in a discussion about their experience in navigating the natural world through the lens of disability. They have found both exclusion and comfort in outdoor spaces, noting that even though “the outdoors has been a place that I can retreat to,” there are many barriers for disabled folks in getting outside. Access issues, lack of reliable information, and gatekeeping are all consistent problems.

Disabled Hikers is an entirely Disabled-led organization. They celebrate disabled people’s experiences in the outdoors and help facilitate those experiences with information, resources, and events, including trail guides and group hikes.  They are also committed advocates for justice, access, and inclusion and work with parks, organizations, brands, and more. Disabled Hikers challenge the dominant narrative of who is considered to be valid and which experiences matter in the outdoors.

Syren (they/them) is an activist, writer, community organizer and outdoor enthusiast. They have become a leading advocate and expert voice in making the outdoors more inclusive and accessible for the disabled community and others that are underrepresented. Syren grew up with multiple disabilities and chronic illnesses, including Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. They also live with depression, anxiety, and CPTSD. In their mid-twenties, when Syren started hiking and exploring what their body could and couldn’t do in the outdoors, they found a lack of infrastructure, support, and resources for the disabled community. It’s not enough to know whether or not a trail is wheelchair/ADA accessible. How exposed is it? What’s the grade? Are there crossings? How slick is it? Is there cell service in case of emergency?

Syren founded Disabled Hikers in 2018 with four main goals: organizing group hikes, celebrating disabled people’s experiences, facilitating those experiences by making specific information available, and advocating for change in the outdoors. Syren is now working on hiking guidebooks for disabled hikers with Falcon Guides, a leading publisher of guidebooks.

For more information and links visit:
https://www.natureevolutionaries.com/teleseminars-1/2023/syren-nagakyrie

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Join us in discussion with renowned teacher and author, Sharifa Oppenheimer about the reflection of Sacred Earth and Sacred Self, mirroring our inner and outer worlds. We will explore this connection especially in deepening our kinship with Nature.

“Come close ~ lie down in the generous arms of the wild. She is exhilarating, nurturing, dangerous, essential. She is life. She is calling you:

Come to love.
Come fall awake.
Come hold all of my cascading beauty
my aching fragility.”

-Sharifa Oppenheimer from a Litany of Wild Graces:  Meditations on Sacred Ecology 

If it’s possible for you, please have paper and a pencil, crayons, or markers present during the webinar. 

Sharifa Oppenheimer was the founding teacher of the Charlottesville Waldorf School and is the author of the best-selling book Heaven on Earth: A Handbook for Parents of Young Children and its companion workbook How To Create The Star of your Family Culture. She recently wrote With Stars in Their Eyes: Brain Science and Your Child’s Journey Toward the Self.

After writing extensively from her experience, wisdom, and love of young children, she has turned her hand toward writing about other aspects of profound connection. She has been a student of Sufism for many decades and has deep respect for other indigenous wisdom traditions which point humanity toward the sacred nature of the living earth. She offers Sacred Earth ~ Sacred Self gatherings that explore humanity’s biological and spiritual inter-being with our other-than-human relations. Her new book A Litany of Wild Graces: Meditations on Sacred Ecology (Red Elixir Press, April 2022) explores these themes through essays, poetry, and litany. The mother of three grown sons and grandmother to many grandchildren, she lives with her husband in an enchanted forest in Virginia.

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Are we stuck in an archaic view of an ecosystem that keeps people and Nature separate?  How do we foster ecosystem repair AND community healing?  

This month’s featured webinar guest, Layel Camargo, has deeply explored these topics and will share their experience as a person dedicated to restoring our diverse relationship with Nature.

Over the last few years, Layel has been involved in stewarding an organization called Shelterwood, a 900-acre forest and former church camp right above what’s called the Russian River in Sonoma County, California, on Unceded Kashaya and Southern Pomo territory. 

 Shelterwood is a Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ-led community forest and retreat center, healing people and ecosystems through active stewardship and community engagement. As a collective of land and community protectors, they model how ecosystem health can only be achieved by communities who are in deep relationship with the Earth and with one another. 

They are dedicated to enriching the waterways, filling the food baskets, quickening the forests, rematriating laughter, painting the future, rewilding hearts, and healing people.

Layel Camargo (they/them)  is an indigenous descendant of the Yaqui and Mayo tribes of the Sonoran Desert and is an advocate for the better health of the planet and its people. Layel is a transgender and gender non-conforming person. They graduated from UC Santa Cruz with dual degrees in Feminist Studies and Legal Studies. Layel is an organizer with the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective and is also the founder of ‘Woke n Wasteless‘ an online platform on waste reduction and people of color issues. Layel is a builder & a novice carpenter by way of taking classes in the Carpentry department at Laney Community College and has worked on building tiny homes for homeless people in the bay area, CA. Layel is also a big advocate of spreading the Just Transition Framework in the arts and an advocate of both low waste/low impact lifestyles. Most recently, Layel was named on the Grist 2020 Fixers List. Layel is also a staff member at Movement Generation’s Justice and Ecology Project

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Join us for a discussion about cultivating resilience and liberation with Nina Simons, Bioneers’ Co-Founder and author of Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership.

Nina shares her personal learning and extensive experience with women’s leadership development and its importance in reconnecting and defending people, Nature, and the land, both practically and spiritually.

From shedding self-limiting beliefs to leading from the heart, Nina offers inspiration for anyone who aspires to grow into their own unique form of leadership with joy and connection to the natural world.   

About Nina

Nina Simons is the co-founder and Chief Relationship Officer at Bioneers, and leads its Everywoman’s Leadership program. Bioneers is a nonprofit that uses media, convening, and connecting to lift up visionary and practical solutions for many of our most pressing social and ecological challenges, revealing a regenerative and equitable future that’s within our reach today. 

Nina is a social entrepreneur who is passionate about reinventing leadership, restoring the feminine, and co-creating a healthy, peaceful, and equitable world for all. She speaks and teaches internationally and co-facilitates transformative workshops and retreats for women who share practices for regenerative leadership through reclaiming wholeness and relational mindfulness. 

Throughout her career spanning the nonprofit, social entrepreneurship, corporate, and philanthropic sectors, Nina has worked with nearly a thousand diverse women leaders across disciplines, race, class, age, orientation, and more to create conditions for mutual learning and leadership development. She produces and speaks at large-scale events to work intimately to help small, diverse groups of women leaders knit together to strengthen each other’s work pursuing intersectional healing and ecological justice.

Visit our website for the video recording.  To learn more about Nina’s work, visit her website or Bioneers.

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Most humans alive today have been taught that we live on the Earth. This form of positionality relative to Mother Earth is a corruption of our actual relationship that has occluded our sense of interrelatedness, interconnectedness and interdependence within the web of life.

The dominant and pervasive human consciousness operative is abnormal when a view of Earth, including her body and life forms, is seen as property and assets for one's full use and enjoyment without impunity.

And yet, Nature’s embrace is fulsome and surprisingly resilient.

We do not live on the Earth - we live embedded within a nourishing mantle of gases, light and biota calibrated to flourish as a living planetary Being. We are being deeply called to recognize that the debris field of a dissolving paradigm that can no longer be sustained and maintained is evidence of emergence and that which brings forth true reparations that enables the blossoming of humanity.

Walk with Myra as she shares a few field notes on the invitation before us all to RISE whole.

About Myra

Earth Elder, Myra L. Jackson has held a diverse array of hefty careers in engineering, holographic organizational development and academia. While those experiences might seem divergent from her deep mystical roots, she found that her early training in electrical theory, physics and music informed her inner and outer life. Today, that training provides useful metaphorical language in discussing the physics of now that points to our intrinsic bond with Nature.

Today, Myra carries the title of Diplomat of the Biosphere with a primary focus on transforming our societal relationship with Nature through public policy approaches that recognize Nature's intrinsic rights to exist whole along with all Her lifeforms. In listening to the Earth, Myra strives to fully realize the aspirational premise of the luminous thread she carries.

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There is a strong relationship between the land and our interior landscapes. When we are connected to the land, we’re connected to ourselves, and one another.

Hillary will share how art can be a bridge helping us to reconnect with land, ourselves, and our Ancestral lineages, ultimately helping to re-weave ourselves into the web of life. She will discuss her own creations which bring together materials and processes that express the union of humanity and the physical world. 

Hillary states, “Stitching, like agriculture, can be functional-- a technical solution to join materials/a means of survival-- or, both can be done purely in service of the soul, lifting the spirit through beauty and wonder.”

Hillary Waters Fayle is an Artist and Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she directs the fiber/textile program. She has previously taught at the Appalachian Center for Craft (TN), Penland School of Craft (NC), the Mediterranean Art & Design Program (Italy) and Yasar University (Turkey) and was recently awarded residencies at Oak Spring Garden Foundation (VA) and Bazart Textile (France). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY, United States Embassy to Sri Lanka, Colombo, the Kalmthout Arboretum & Botanical Gardens in Belgium and the US Embassy in Tangiers, Algeria. Recent professional projects include collaborations with Grace Farms Foundation (Ct), Thoreau Farms Trust (Ma), Domestika (Spain), L'Occitane en Provence (Switzerland), Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (France), and the New York Botanical Garden. A public installation in collaboration with the AKG Museum can be seen year round in Buffalo, NY.

More information and images of Hillary's work can be found here on ONE's website. 

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Mitakuye Oyasin is a Lakota philosophy that roughly translates to "we are all related" or "all my relations." It recognizes one's relationship and responsibility to all living things and reminds us to always consider how our behaviors and actions impact the life around us. 

Unsurprisingly, this philosophy is at odds with colonialism and the capitalist notions of "me" over "we." This discussion will review the universal and practical applications of Mitakuye Oyasin and how humans can cultivate kinship with the life, space, and time around them in ways that reject Western bootstrap/individualistic theories and acknowledge and affirm Indigenous people, values, and practices. 

Taté Walker is a Lakota citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota. They are an award-winning Two Spirit storyteller for outlets like "The Nation," "Everyday Feminism," "Native Peoples," "Indian Country Today," "Apartment Therapy," and "ANMLY." They are also featured in several anthologies, including "FIERCE: Essays by and about Dauntless Women," "South Dakota in Poems," W.W. Norton's "Everyone's an Author," and "The Languages of Our Love: An Indigenous Love and Sex Anthology" (forthcoming Summer 2022). Taté recently released their first full-length, illustrated poetry book, "The Trickster Riots" (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022). Learn more at jtatewalker.com.

Taté and ONE have also collaborated to get "The Trickster Riots" out to Lakota youth through The Cheyenne River Youth Project.  You can contribute here through October 30th.  Link: https://www.pledge.to/getting-the-trickster-riots-out-to-lakota-youth-9078 or Text TRICKSTER to 707070 to donate

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