Intersectional Environmentalism
and Regenerative Farming & Gardening

Wayfinder.
Rememberer.
Biodiversity cultivator.

Pictured here is a chagrined looking me next to Vandana Shiva, the founder of Navdanya International, at one of her talks here in Santa Barbara. Vandana Shiva is a rockstar of the environmental movement and I am looking chagrined because I am flabbergasted to be so close to one of my biggest heroines and inspirations on the path. I began reading her books and listening to her speak almost 20 years ago and her work changed the course of my life. In large part because of her I became a seed keeper, a biodiversity cultivator, and an ongoing proponent of whole foods and seed sovereignty.

I began cultivating remembering first through my studies and practice of yoga and meditation 30 years ago. Later I reclaimed birth as a right of passage with two natural homebirths of my lovely children, Heron and Rowan. I nursed for more than 5 collective years and brought both of my kids up with bare feet, whole foods, and tons of time in nature. Reclaiming the power of natural childbirth and the value of breastfeeding was a path of deep remembering and feminine empowerment.

My kids were blessed to attend preschool at Esalen’s Gazebo Park School and Wild Roots Forest Kindergarten. After that, I homeschooled my daughter up until the 5 th grade. I spent summers while homeschooling reading John Taylor Gatto’s books and a stack of others a few feet high on unschooling and alternatives in education to the soul crushing one size fits all (not!) academic focused reality of the public school system. Since then public school has gotten even worse with the implementation of Common Core and has become heavily focused on tech and screen time even for very young children. A mainstay of our homeschool education was Wilderness Youth Project and visits out to Quail Springs Permaculture Farm.

Nature deficit disorder, a term coined by Richard Louv in his groundbreaking book Last Child in the Woods, is something that a majority of modern children suffer from, even more so in the course of the pandemic.

In 5th grade for my daughter and 1st grade for my son we entered The Waldorf School of Santa Barbara. WSSB is a screen free school that focuses on educating the whole child—head, hands, heart. This means art, woodwork, music, singing, handwork, gardening, class plays, and time in nature, in addition to introducing academics in an age-appropriate way. Being a part of the WSSB community for over 9 years has been a huge part of my remembering.

After Waldorf, when my daughter went to a local boarding school with a strong environmental bent for high school, the incomparable Midland School, one of her teachers said ‘you should be teaching this class on native plants and local birds!’, which in my mind was a testament to the efficacy of her early education.

In a world where words like ‘heron’ are being left out of the Junior Oxford English Dictionary in favor of tech words like ‘text’ and ‘chatroom’, focusing on the natural world as an integral part of my children’s education was and is a radical and revolutionary form of remembering.

I continue to cultivate remembering our true nature through helping people touch into their deep intuitive selves and innate medicine nature and healing capacities through therapeutic bodywork, yoga and meditation instruction, herbalism, whole foods nutrition, and the Ayurvedic wisdom stream in my healing ministry, Anahata Healing Arts. I also run and teach the farm and garden program at the Waldorf School of Santa Barbara. At WSSB I teach grades 1-8 about permaculture, herbalism, farm to table cooking, regenerative agriculture, vermiculture, composting, and much more. If you would like to support the ongoing farm and garden program at WSSB and my work there, please follow this link to make a donation.

My latest evolution in pathfinding, remembering, and cultivating diversity is to dive deeper into Intersectional Environmentalism, a term coined by the amazing Leah Thomas, which includes acknowledging environmental racism and injustice, amplifying marginalized and unheard voices, unlearning limited ways of knowing and learning ways of seeing and knowing that offers me more diverse, complex, and nature connected ways of understanding than the Cartesian, European, heteronormative, ‘white’, scientific perspective.

This work acknowledges that it is often those who have already been oppressed through colonialism and racism that suffer the most from climate change, food deserts, lack of health care, etc. This work also acknowledges the rights of the earth, our mother, Pachamama, and our sacred duty of reciprocity, or Ayni, with all our relations, both human and nonhuman.

All the work that I do in my life cultivates biodiversity. In the bodies of my family and clients I help to support a diverse and healthy microbiome in the gut, the foundation of our immune system. In the farm and garden I work to support biodiversity (the opposite of petro-chemical based monocultures) in the plants we grow, encouraging pollinators like bees, butterflies, and birds. Also in the soil I tend we encourage a healthy microbiome through compost, cover crops, vermiculture, and Biodynamic preparations. And lastly, in my own and my clients minds I help to cultivate a biodiverse and self-organizing environment with the practices of meditation, yoga, inquiry, and plant medicines that encourage multiphasic instead of monophasic consciousness. In a biodiverse mind we can know through rational ways of cognition as well as nonrational (not irrational) methods.

For more on nonrational ways of knowing and presence in the heart, see Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception and into the Dreaming of the Earth, by Stephen Harrod Buhner, another of my most profound teachers on the path of plant spirit medicine and herbal intelligence.

As Vandana Shiva says “Uniformity is not nature’s way; diversity is nature’s way.”

Thank you for being here, caring about my journey, and cocreating with me. I am grateful for the threads of the web we weave which holds us together. In harmony may we all walk the highest, finest path to be walked in this life, and in so doing, give others permission to do the same, because the light is catching (and, there are jewels to bring back from the darkness).