The Rainforest Information Centre presents DEEP ECOLOGY

with John Seed, Tema Milstein,Erika Aligno and Jim Lavranos

Details

At Narara Ecovillage https://nararaecovillage.com/
Tickets are sliding scale from $180-$800 ($180 for students or unemployed, $800 if you've got a great job or wealthy, or something in between)
Bring your own tent or campervan or
Ecovillage dorm or b&b or you can stay in your own home if you live nearby. (Dorm $20/night, b&b $60 to to $110/night extra)
Vegetarian meals will be provided, gluten-free and vegan options by request after booking.
25% of the proceeds will be donated to the Rainforest Information Centre.

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.

Tema Milstein has been intrigued by Deep Ecology since studying it as part of her PhD program in environmental communication, culture, and restorative change. When she shifted her family from the United States to Australia for the love of this country, she was happy to move closer to key thinkers like John Seed, and other leaders in related knowledge systems, including long-standing Indigenous knowledges in Australia, the ecofeminist movement, and permaculture. Tema, an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, is Professor of Environment & Society at UNSW. Her books are freely open access, including the Handbook of Ecocultural Identity and Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice. She's co-founder of (Daily) Delight~Disrupt, a global invitation to reconnect with planet and people and, for those wanting to nourish ecological identity in our everyday lives, a joyful followup practice to Deep Ecology workshops.

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.

Jim Lavranos accompanies others through loss, meaning-making and transition, nurturing relationality with being in all its forms. Shaped by Zen, ecocentric traditions and philosophical inquiry, he collaboratively coordinates spiritual care in palliative and aged care settings across Victoria and supports deep ecology in varying capacities..

For more information, contact Erika Aligno nserika.aligno@gmail.com

Contact the host of June 12-14 2026 | DEEP ECOLOGY | Narara Ecovillage | with John Seed and friends