Nested Intelligences: Plants Provide the Energy, Ingredients and Conditions for Life
What can we do to help? Sunday, April 26, 3-5 PM EDT
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Join us Sunday April 26th, at 3 PM EDT, See this in your time zone.
Sign up to attend live or get the recording.
Nested Intelligences:
Plants Provide the Energy, Ingredients, and Conditions for Life
What Can We Do to Help?
Duration: 2 Hours
Audience: Educators, farmers, policy makers, environmental advocates, community leaders, healthcare professionals, parents, systems thinkers, and anyone longing for a society with clearer thinking during these challenging times.
Based on the recent article series by Didi Pershouse
Workshop Overview
As a society, we struggle to think clearly—about each other, about living systems, about governance, capitalism, parenting, addiction, and the future of life on Earth. Yet we are not broken beyond repair. We can uplift our collective capacity for discernment, wisdom, and intelligent participation in (and with) life.
This two-hour mini workshop dives into ideas from the recent article series by Didi Pershouse: the idea that intelligence is layered throughout living systems. From semi-permeable cell membranes to soil microbiomes, from epigenetics to quorum sensing, from neural pruning to community decision-making—life is constantly discerning what to take in, what to release, when, in what order, and under what conditions.
This workshop will focus on the massive role that plants play in nested intelligences:
- How plants provide the energy, oxygen, nutrients, clouds/rain/water, and temperature regulation for life on Earth
- What happens when plants don't get what they need, and how it impacts brain development, neurological function, and other "intelligences" throughout the food web.
- How we can create a very different climate (socially, politically, ecologically, and planetary) through changing the conditions for plants.
When plants get just what they need, in the right amounts, at the right time, they can create and pass along all the things that allow clouds and rain to form, membranes to form, inner and outer signaling to happen, climate and metabolism and mood to be regulated, and individual and systemic intelligence to develop.
Humans have created conditions that make it hard or impossible for plants to do their work. And when plants don’t get what they need, many of the most basic layers of intelligence in life stop working correctly. Cell membranes lose the wisdom of knowing what to take in and what to leave out. Genetic patterns and memory go in strange directions. Community dynamics fail. Bees get confused. Frogs and calves are born with missing limbs. Minerals needed for oxygen in our blood switch forms, and babies turn blue. Fertility drops. Rain stops. Heat rises.
Come learn and discuss how we can quickly create conditions to provide plants with what they really need, so that all of life can benefit, (including our own ability to think clearly in these challenging times.)
The workshop will be recorded. Sign up now to attend live, or to get access to the recording, chat, and transcript files.
Your Instructor
Didi Pershouse is well known as an innovative international educator both in-person and online. She is the founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative. Her facilitator's guide Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function is used in over 90 countries.
She became deeply involved in the intersection of food systems and health systems while providing rural health care for two decades at The Center for Sustainable Medicine, and wrote The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities.
She has written a field training manual for the UN-FAO Farmer Field School Program and the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming Initiative in India, involving over 1,000,000 smallholder farmers. She was a contributing author to The Climate Emergency: How Africa Can Survive and Thrive; Climate Change and Creation Care; and Health in the Anthropocene. She was one of five speakers at the United Nations-FAO World Soil Day in 2017.
She serves on the Planning Commission for her town, is a board supervisor for the White River Natural Resources Conservation District, and is on the board of directors of Regenerate Earth, Soil Carbon Coalition and the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition. While serving on the state appointed Payment for Ecosystem Services and Soil Health Working Group, she helped to reorient the program back to its public roots. She led a successful effort to conserve the Zebedee Headwaters Wetland while serving as a Vermont Conservation Commissioner.
She is on the Vision Council of the Global Earth Repair Convergence, and a member of the Ecosystem Restoration Alliance. She is a lineage member of the Change Agent Development Community (stewarded by Carol Sanford), and is seeding new communities of practice in a Wisdom tradition that uses living systems thinking.