A flowering welcome!

While many environmental studies programs focus on the symptoms of what is wrong with the planet and what threatens our very existence at this moment in human history, as an environmental educator (Hilary Leighton), I remain keen to find deeply imaginative ways to get to the heart of things – how memories, beliefs, identity, and values help cultivate individual and collective behaviours that may also allow us to thrive.

Next week, we warmly welcome a new cohort of first year MAEEC students onto this extraordinarily beautiful campus and while it is their ultimate mastery (of self) and degree fulfillment through education we are concerned with, it is also their sanity and health, their humanity and wholeness, their ability to feel as well as think, and their capacity to thrive amidst the changes that are occurring at a rapid rate to our earthly home. And we are also concerned about their children and their ancestors too. In our time together, we will convene spaces that will interrupt the familiar, disrupt old narratives and storylines, make room for reflective practices, regenerative (im)possibilities and wildly creative responses, mitigation and deep adaptation, thoughts and feelings, radical collaboration, active hope, and positive emergence. And not least of all, we will take time to literally stop and smell the roses in their fleeting beauty, and try to catch a whiff of the fragrance of what it means to be alive as we walk garden and forest trails…reminded with every step that it is also in our nature to flourish and blossom too.