Presentation: I Sing to the Earth and She Sings Back

Thursday, April 16, 7:00 pm
Presentation: I Sing to the Earth and She Sings Back
Presenter: Kat Anderson
Location: This will be a virtual presentation and Kat is unable to attend in person. To register for Zoom, go to https://bit.ly/npsotalks.  For those without access to Zoom, we will also be hosting the presentation on the large screen at Southern Oregon University Science Building, Room 161, where we hold our monthly chapter meetings. Hope you can join us in-person or via Zoom.

In this talk, I will discuss my personal journey along different pathways to cultivate a deep sense of belonging to nature. These stories are based upon real-life encounters with animals and plants, but also from what I’ve learned from native elders, research on indigenous cultures of the world, and my attempts to learn more about my own heritage. As an individual in a society shaped by alienation from nature, I describe incidents of successful healing of that alienation. I explore bringing back the full spectrum of our humanity in relating to the earth – as students, singers, saunterers, gatherers, stewards, dancers, and kin. In deepening our connections with nature, in return we might be given instructions, messages, lessons, gifts, and synchronicities. In other words, nature sometimes responds by helping us gather knowledge about the earth and our place in it through other means than what we call “science.” These roles restore our humanness through developing our capacity for feeling and empathy for other life forms to the same degree that we have developed our facility of thought, counterbalancing mechanization of our society.

Kat Anderson is a Research Associate in the Department of Plant Sciences, UC Davis, and holds a Ph.D. in wildland resource science from UC Berkeley. She is the author of the book Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources. Kat has worked with Native Americans for many years, learning how indigenous people judiciously gather and steward native plants and ecosystems in the wild. In more recent years Kat is focusing on restoring our relationship to the earth through learning direct lessons from the land.