DEEP ECOLOGY - New York - with John Seed, Erika Aligno and friends, New York, September 26 2026

About Erika Aligno, click here. You can read her full bio here and John Seed's introduction of Erika here.

With co-facilitators Laurie Seeman & Alan Levin (co-facilitator bios below)

--

The Rainforest Information Centre and the Institute for Deep Ecology presents DEEP ECOLOGY with John Seed, Erika Aligno, Laurie Seeman, and Alan Levin.

--

Details:

Tickets are sliding scale from $70-$400 - $70 student or unemployed, $400 well off, or somewhere in between. 25% of the proceeds will be donated to the Rainforest Information Centre.

Vegetarian lunch will be provided, gluten-free and vegan options by request after booking.

FROM JOHN SEED

I am no longer flying to workshops.

“In the flesh” facilitation will be by trusted colleagues with whom I have cofacilitated for years,  I  zoom in.

This will be the 8th such workshop and reviews from the previous 7 indicate that absolutely nothing is lost except the carbon footprint 😊

I have worked for worldwide rainforests since 1979. Although many of our efforts succeeded, for every forest saved 100 have disappeared. Clearly, you can’t save the planet one forest at a time. It's one green Earth or a bowl of dust. Without a profound change of consciousness, we can kiss the forests goodbye, the ones we’ve "saved" alongside the rest.

Deep ecology is key to the change we need. To deep ecology, underlying all the symptoms of the environmental crisis lies a psychological or spiritual root – the illusion of separation from the rest of the natural world which stems from anthropocentrism or human-centeredness.

Conditioned since the Old Testament to “subdue and dominate” nature, the modern psyche is radically alienated from the air, water and soil which underpin life and this is reflected in the rapid shredding of all-natural systems in the name of economic development. Deep ecology reminds us that the world is not a pyramid with humans on top, but a web. We, humans, are but one strand in that web and as we destroy this web, we destroy the foundations for all complex life including our own.

While we maintain a self-image created in the matrix of anthropocentric culture, a shrunken and illusory sense of self that doesn't include the air and water and soil, we will experience nature as "outside" our self and fail to recognise that nature "out there" and nature "in here" are one and the same.

Many people INTELLECTUALLY realise that we are inseparable from Nature and that the sense of separation that we feel is socially conditioned and illusory.

But as the late Arne Naess, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Oslo University, the man who coined the term "Deep Ecology" wrote: "it is not enough to have ecological ideas, we have to have an ecological identity, ecological self".

But how can we nourish our ecological identity? In answer to such questions,  Joanna Macy and I developed a series of experiential deep ecology rituals and in 1986, with Arne Naess and Pat Flemming,  wrote a book called Thinking Like A Mountain - Towards a Council of All Beings (which has been translated into 12 languages). Along with others, we have been facilitating these workshops around the world since then.

What the workshop will cover

Experiential Deep Ecology, The Work That Reconnects, follows a spiral which begins and ends with Gratitude. In between are 3 stations: Honoring our Pain for the World, Seeing with New Eyes and Going Forth.

Honoring our Pain for the World, we grieve for all that is being torn asunder, the species lost, the landscapes destroyed. Only if we can allow ourselves to feel the pain of the Earth, can we be effective in Her healing. This is why the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, has said that in order to heal the Earth,  "the most important thing that we can do is to hear, inside ourselves,  the sounds of the Earth crying". 

With New and Ancient Eyes Ceremonies that allow us to remember our rootedness in nature, recapitulate our evolutionary journey and experience the fact that every cell in our body is descended in an unbroken chain 4 billion years old, through fish that learned to walk the land, reptiles whose scales turned to fur and became mammals, evolving through to the present. Ecological ideas transform into ecological identity.

Going Forth, this workshop enables us to end  the illusion of separation and experience our rootedness in the living Earth. As many participants in  this  work have  discovered, alignment with our larger  identity  clarifies, dignifies and heals our personal conflicts. We see that the  pain of the Earth is our own pain and the fate of the Earth is our own fate.  This work empowers us to act on behalf  of  Earth and gives us clarity and direction for this work.

Questions? Contact: john@johnseed.net.au

Lead facilitator:

Erika Aligno is a veteran of community legal centres, where she advocated for social justice, supporting people navigating systems not built for them. Over time, she has expanded her energy toward environmental justice. Her work in the environment sector and her studies in Environmental Management at UNSW led her to Deep Ecology, and in 2023 she began working closely with John Seed, the ‘Australian Father’ of Deep Ecology. Erika now serves as a Director of the Institute for Deep Ecology, contributing to the organisation’s mission to advance ecological consciousness, community practice, and transformative education. As a facilitator, Erika has co-led more than a dozen Deep Ecology workshops in Sydney, Hobart, Perth, and the USA, supporting participants to (re)connect with Earth, each other, and their own ecological identity. 

https://www.erikaaligno.com/

Co-facilitators:

Laurie Seeman is a long-time resident of the Hudson River Valley and a regional environmental leader. Through education, art, citizen science, and advocacy she has led a generation of change-making, from youth to state governments. She began studying with Joanna Macy in 2013 and is a member of the Work That Reconnects Network. Deep ecology principles are central to her work and teachings. In 2002, Laurie founded Strawtown Art & Garden Studio, now the Hudson Valley's longest-running nature, art, and science discovery program, and in 2010, the Sparkill Creek Watershed Alliance. She co-leads the Rockland Water Coalition, which successfully defended the prime nursery of the Hudson River from an unnecessary desalination plant, earning the U.S. EPA Environmental Champion Award. She also acts as a nuclear guardian, monitoring the decommissioning of Indian Point. Laurie leads with curiosity and creativity in community building, making space for emergence and creating new systems.

laurie@strawtownstudio.org

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/laurie-seeman-2658a818/

Strawtown Art & Garden Studio: www.strawtownstudio.org

Sparkill Creek Watershed Alliance: www.sparkillcreek.org

Alan Levin has for over fifty years been a part of the movements for peace, justice and ecological sanity. In 1985, in California, he founded Holos Institute, an ecopsychology therapy and training center. He was the director of Holos for 20 years and worked there as a psychotherapist, supervisor  of interns, and guide for Vision Quest experiences. In 2004 he moved to New York where he and his wife established Sacred River Healing to practice holistically oriented therapy and healing. He is an author and meditation teacher through which he integrates mindfulness practice with shamanism and life-energy focused Agni Yoga. 

alevin@sacredriverhealing.org

Crossing the Boundary: www.crossingtheboundary.org

Substack: https://substack.com/@alanlevin420965