Nested Intelligences: Restoring Our Capacity to Think Clearly in a Living World
February 21, 3-5 PM EST
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Join us Saturday February 21, at 3 PM EST, See this in your time zone.
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Nested Intelligences:
Restoring Our Capacity to Think Clearly in a Living World
Duration: 2 Hours
Audience: Educators, community leaders, healthcare professionals, parents, farmers, policy makers, environmental advocates, systems thinkers, and anyone longing for a society with clearer thinking during these challenging times.
Based on the recent article 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 explores a powerful idea: intelligence is layered and nested throughout living systems. From semi-permeable cell membranes to soil microbiomes, from epigenetics to quorum sensing, from neural pruning during sleep to community decision-making—life is constantly discerning what to let in, what to release, when, in what order, and under what conditions.
Humans have interfered with these layers of intelligence. By understanding where things went wrong, we can adopt community practices, and systemic policies that restore them. In this two-hour workshop, we will explore how these layers influence each other, and how to create the conditions in which clearer thinking becomes possible—individually and collectively.
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Biological Discernment:
- Selective permeability in cells
- Mycorrhizal networks and soil intelligence
- Microbiomes and mucosal filtering
- Neural pruning and sleep
- Epigenetics and inherited memory
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Collective Intelligence:
- Quorum sensing in bacteria
- Coordinated action in flocks, herds, and forests
- Community discernment and intergenerational knowledge
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Where We’ve Interfered:
- Chemical disruption of living systems
- Isolation of parts from wholes
- Separation of education and environment
- Removal of spiritual practice from logic and science
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Why We Interfere:
- Attempts to control the uncontrollable
- The pursuit of power, security, and esteem
- What contemplative teacher Thomas Keating called our “emotional programs for happiness”
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Restoring Intelligence:
- Personal experience
- Community practice
- Re-designing systems
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.