The Eco-Conscious Movement and the Role of Forest Therapy Guides

To work on behalf of the wild is to restore culture. —Gary Snyder

The swell that is rising is too great to ignore. Scientists believe that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction event, losing 150-200 species a day. What can we do?

As forest therapy guides, we can make a difference in not only reconnecting humans to nature and themselves, but also be a part of a unified effort across multiple disciplines that are inviting humans to live more consciously for a sustainable and regenerative future. This is the eco-conscious movement. 

When it comes to our way forward as an Earth community, it is true that we cannot use the same thinking that created this ecological crisis to solve it. The ecological crisis is a moral and ethical dilemma that some call a crisis of consciousness, or a crisis of relationships, or even a spiritual crisis. However it is named, it is at the center of the eco-social issues of our time, for people and the planet. It’s time for a new approach. Perhaps, love can guide the way. 

As a heart-centered practice, forest therapy plays a role in helping humans wake up from a culturally rooted sense of separation from nature to a holistically rooted sense of interconnectedness. This reconnection will ultimately see us move from dominance over nature to kinship with nature, from a consumer species that takes, to a restorative species that gives. This is our task in the 21st century. We join the many who are stepping up to rewild, reforest, and restore through education, community outreach, non-profit programming, public sector initiatives and policies, the arts, and more. 

As forest therapy guides, we uniquely offer the direct experiential opportunity to mindfully connect with nature or, as Jane Goodall says, “…to come back into conscious engagement with life,” to shift from a cognitive experience to a sensory, embodied one that awakens the heart and widens the circles of compassion. In other words, to fall in love with life again. 

To quote Baba Dioum, "In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught." 

Western culture and its ideals are so far afield from our primal, ancestral knowledge and wisdom that we are unmoored and restless as a society. As guides, we re-teach, or rather invite, reconnection. We lead by example and model that connection authentically. We embody it in all parts of the walk sequence and carry it off the trail and into our daily lives. Based on the values of love, gratitude, and reciprocity with our natural world, forest therapy has the power to affect the social fabric of our lives. Imagine the ripples across the globe as 3,000+ forest therapy guides share in this work together.   

As Joanna Macy says, “The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we've actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.” 

Heal the human, heal the planet.   

As forest therapy guides, we are profoundly positioned to speak for and with the Earth, to rekindle a connection to our universal belonging, to wake up to the nature that we are, and to come into right relationship with the Earth and each other. 

We are living in an unprecedented age of change for our species and planet. To show up as a forest therapy guide, as an agent of change, is an act of love, courage, and hope. We are a small, but growing community of humans, of planet people who believe in the good of our species. We believe that, with an awakened heart, we can move from an ego-self to an eco-self, and from nature as resource to nature as home. We believe that we can all become stewards of a sustainable and regenerative Earth. 

Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have. – Margaret Mead

Each of you will walk away from this training and back into your lives. We can hope that this program planted a seed in your heart and made at least a small shift in your perspective of an ecological consciousness. Never underestimate the power of one person armed with a love for all beings.  

Together, we can do our part to raise ecological consciousness and restore well-being to ourselves, our communities, and our home planet, Earth. In just one word: 

Invite.