DEEP ECOLOGY with John Seed, Erika Aligno, Lydia Violet and Emily Plec, October 1-4 2026, Monmouth Oregon

The Rainforest Information Centre presents DEEP ECOLOGY 

with John Seed, Erika Aligno, and Emily Plec

Details

• At West Oregon University

• Tickets are sliding scale from $100-$600 ($100 for students or unemployed, $600 if you've got a great job or wealthy, or something in between) 

• All proceeds from tickets will be donated to Rainforest Information Centre. Your registration fee covers location costs and all meals  

• List of accommodation options below (your own costs). There are three provided below

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

What the workshop will cover

What we call experiential Deep Ecology in Australia is the same as what is called The Work That Reconnects in the United States. In this workshop, we follow the spiral that follows The Work that Reconnects, starting and ending with Gratitude, with these three stations in between:

• Honour Our Pain for the World

• Seeing with New Eyes

• Going Forth

FROM JOHN SEED

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 called the “Council of All Beings” 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.

In this workshop we 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.

We further extend our sense of identity in the Council of All Beings itself where we find an ally in the natural world, make a mask to represent that ally, and allow the animals and plants and landscapes to speak through us. We are shocked at the very different view of the world that emerges from their dialogue. Creative suggestions for human actions emerge and we invoke the powers and knowledge of these other life-forms to empower us in our lives.

One of the rituals we will share is honouring our pain for the world: we grieve for all that is being torn from our world, 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". 

This workshop enables us to find an end to the illusion of separation and experience our rootedness in the living Earth.

Erika Aligno (full bio here) is a veteran of community legal centres, where she worked as a lawyer advocating 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. They are both honored to help steward this gathering alongside John Seed, whose work has profoundly shaped their own paths.

Prof. Emily Plec is a Professor of Communication at Western Oregon University and a Conversation Facilitator with Oregon Humanities. Editor of Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication (Routledge, 2013), she advocates for a Communication discipline that considers meaningful interaction to be a more-than-human enterprise. Re-integrating her background in Religious and Peace Studies, including prior retreat experiences at New Mexico's Bodhi Manda Zen Center and Lama Foundation, Emily is honored to join in the work that reconnects with Erika and John.

Lydia Violet A longtime student and colleague of Joanna Macy, Lydia spent more than seventeen years studying and teaching the Work That Reconnects, bringing it to thousands of participants through retreats, trainings, universities, climate organizations, and community gatherings around the world. As founder of School for The Great Turning, she is known for creating spaces where ecological grief, beauty, music, and deep inquiry become sources of resilience, belonging, and meaningful action.

For more information, contact Emily on plece@mail.wou.edu

Accommodation options and how to get there

For those coming from beyond a commuter distance, we invite you to choose from the following 3 options, prioritized from closest to the event venue (Western Oregon University) to furthest away: 

1. Ma Mere's Bed & Breakfast: single or shared rooms in a quaint, restored boarding house roughly 3 blocks from the workshop location. Request the WOU rate. 

https://mameresguesthouse.com/willamette-valley-bandb/. 

2.  College Inn: single or shared rooms in a clean, affordable motel approximately 1/2 mile from the event venue and close to restaurants, bars, and several parks. Call to request Manager’s Discount for Deep Ecology workshop: +1 (503) 838-4438. https://www.hotelcollegeinn.com/

Free trolley service runs along main street to the edge of campus (stops about 3 blocks from workshop location).

3. Independence Hotel: Use code WOUCORP for a discounted rate. https://theindependencehotel.com/ 

Free trolley service runs from downtown independence to the edge of campus  

The nearest airports are: Portland (PDX) and Eugene (EUG) - both are approximately 1 hour, 15 minutes from Monmouth. 

Airport Transfer: PDX or EUG to Salem (Holiday Inn, Market St.) on Groome Transportation ($50-60 each way). Salem - Monmouth transportation available through local bus service (https://www.cherriots.org/route/40X/), taxi, Uber/Lyft, or through local host (Emily) with advance notice.