Collective Learning

A section devoted to relevant books, films, podcasts, documentaries, reports, and other resources, recommended items that help make sense of our bioregion and the world. It’s stuff we like and hope you will, too.

Photography: Owen Perry

A book for the moment

Looking for clarity, ideas, comfort, hope? Read this one.

What If We Get It Right?

Visions of Climate Futures

By Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Sometimes the bravest thing we can do while facing an existential crisis is imagine life on the other side. This provocative and joyous book maps an inspiring landscape of possible climate futures.

With clear-eyed essays, vibrant interviews, data, poetry, and art, Ayana guides us through solutions and possibilities at the nexus of science, policy, culture, and justice.

Random House | 2024

ISBN: 9780593229361

Indigenous thinking = Creating a better world

Tyson Yunkaporta shows us that by emphasizing community and connection over individualism and fragmentation - and by cultivating respect for the land - we can address the urgent challenges we face.

Sand Talk

How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

By Tyson Yunkaporta

Harper One | 2020

ISBN: 9780062975621

A paradigm-shifting book in the vein of Sapiens that brings a crucial Indigenous perspective to historical and cultural issues of history, education, money, power, and sustainability—and offers a new template for living.

Required reading for all

“When we’re looking at things we cherish falling apart, when inequities and injustices are so apparent, people are looking for another way that we can be living. We need interdependence rather than independence, and Indigenous knowledge has a message of valuing connection, especially to the humble.” (RWK)

Braiding Sweetgrass

Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces Indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take “us on a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert). 

Drawing on her life as an Indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices.

Milkweed Editions | 2013

ISBN: 9781571313560

“Science is showing we’re heading towards unmanageable, potentially catastrophic risks. We also have more and more empirical evidence…that we have the solutions, they are scalable and the outcome in the end makes us all winners.” (JR)

Planetary Boundaries: Exceeding Earth’s Safe Limits

An interview with Dr. Johan Rockström

Host: Nate Hagens

THE GREAT SIMPLIFICATION

From The Great Simplification podcast series, host Nate Hagens speaks with Dr. Johan Rockström, joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (Germany), about the nine Planetary Boundaries. When we think of our warming planet, we think predominantly of climate change as the primary issue. But in this interview, Dr. Rockström discusses the nine interconnected systems that sustain all life on earth, of which climate is one factor. 

Dr. Rockström helps us understand the importance of the boundaries, the severity of the threats to all life on our planet, and suggests a more secure, peaceful, and equitable future is possible if we commit to taking action now.