Heartwood Institute re-enchants love with nature through a cross-pollination of science, spirituality, climate and culture.
What do you do?
We deliver pioneering science, immersive experiences, award-winning storytelling, public art and support for front-line Indigenous land defenders.
Why?
Climate collapse is a crisis of relationship.
If we help people feel their kinship with the Earth — through research, education, storytelling, and supporting Indigenous-led protection efforts — then cultural narratives shift from dominion to belonging, and what we belong to, we protect.
We see a world of mutual flourishing.
Our Values
When we return to our bodies — to breath, sensation, and the felt sense of being alive — we remember the community of life we belong to. Joy is experienced in the landscape of sensation. Within our breathing bodies.
We are not separate from the teeming, living world. In remembering our belonging, we delight to "give back the gift." Reciprocity is an Indigenous system for living in harmony with all life.
We honor the aliveness and soul spark within the living world. Tree, stone, river, mountain, human alike. We remember that the Earth is alive, has agency, creativity and wisdom. We are the newly arrived.
Like the mycelial networks beneath our feet, we are most ourselves in entangled connection. Our wellbeing is not separate from the wellbeing of the forest, the river, or the soil. What harms one harms all. What heals one opens healing everywhere.
Trees measure their lives in centuries. We practice slowing to their tempo — releasing the urgency of capitalism, the news cycle and the algorithm in favor of deep time, patient growth, and the wisdom of long becoming.
"Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond."
