John Seed is an Australian environmentalist and director of the Rainforest Information Centre, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the protection of the Earth's remaining rainforests in partnership with the indigenous people and local communities who depend on them.. He is also a prominent figure in the deep ecology movement and co-creator, with Joanna Macy, of the Council of All Beings, and other re-earthing processes.

I highly recommend his Book, Thinking Like a Mountain, published in 1988, which is now available online. You can download a free pdf copy from his website https://www.rainforestinformationcentre.org/john_seed_articles_essays which contains other writings and talks by John. It will take you deeper into the experiential awareness of our inter-connectedness with nature.

In our conversation, John shares the influences of his parents and the shifts in consciousness that brought him to his deep ecological awareness. Starting with lsd and the counter-culture, he found himself in a direct engagement with the voice of the forest that took him onto his path of partnership with Mother Earth in saving the rainforests and more.

“The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth,”

–African proverb

Sia Henry is an attorney, a racial justice activist, and abolitionist who has spent a decade engaging in criminal legal system reform work. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Duke University. She is also an advocate for bringing the healing potential of psychedelics to communities of color.

Sia serves on the Board of Directors for Mount Tamalpais College (formerly the Prison University Project) at San Quentin State Prison. That is the country’s first, tuition-free and independently accredited college situated inside a prison. She also founded the Hood Exchange to introduce formerly incarcerated Black individuals to international travel throughout the African diaspora.
In addition, Sia currently works with MAPS (the Multi-disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) with the goal of ensuring Black, indigenous, and other communities of color have meaningful access to transformative healing opportunities.

My recent conversation with Dr. David Ragland, writer, scholar and activist, couldn't be more timely in the midst of the current relentless roll-back, under the Trump Administration, of policies and programs that were aimed at racial healing. David is a co-founder, along with Congresswoman Cori Bush, of the Truth Telling Project, where he serves as director for Culture, Organizing and Reparations. He is a passionate advocate for the healing of America through programs that expose and acknowledge the history and present experiences of racism, promote reparations for the injustices, and educate so as there will be no repeat of the abuses.

David was moved to create the Truth Telling Project after the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, where he witnessed the exclusion of the voices of the victims from public discourse. Yet, while far from a fan of Trump, David sees the problems we face in America as bi-partisan and present throughout the history of our country, with police abuse and mass incarceration being essentially an extension of slavery.

I think most people are very naive about the idea of reparations, seeing it merely as giving money to Black Americans who are the descendants of slaves. David sheds light for us around reparations as a multi-dimensional, educational, healing and spiritual initiative, as well as having grounded economic aspects.

In our conversation, David talks about the influence of his family on his own development. His father was a sharecropper who had to escape from Tennessee under the threat of forced labor. His mother’s lineage includes ancestors from Cameroon who had a warrior tradition that resisted colonization. He describes his mother as a continuing inspiration, among other things having maintained a garden in Missouri that supplied food for her own family and other folks in the community . Now, in addition to his work with the Truth Telling Project, David is a founder and member of a the Kibilio community in Massachusetts, a Queer, Black-Led Intentional community focused on healing, reparations and regenerative farming.

I hope you get as much from hearing David as I did in my conversation with him. If you find it of value, please subscribe to my YouTube channel and check out some of the other podcasts. And please take some time to explore the Truth Telling Project and David’s work through the links below.

Watch our conversation on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/daHgj8h7c88

The Truth Telling Project: https://thetruthtellingproject.org/

Kibilio (Refuge) Community and Farm: https://kibilio.org