Sustainability and the Sacred Youth Summit:
This Summer at the BDC

Our ancestors would be laughing if we tried to say that we’ve come up with the latest and greatest green approach to sustainability – the sacred! Sacred isn’t the new sustainability, but rather the oldest and most effective approach to living in balance with all things. As humans, we come from ancestors who lived with this awareness, and whose cultures lived sustainably on the earth for thousands of years.

But how can this be? When we look around us, consult the media, and listen to environmental experts, we are continually reminded of the erosion of our natural world. Most of us were born into Western society, which formed out of the fragmentation of people from their original places. Without relationship to their original traditions and relationships to the natural world, the people and leaders of this society based their worldview on isolation and greed. We can see this being played out in our consumer culture where the world seems only to exist as a running list of commodities to be bought and sold. Within this paradigm, the earth is simply organized into things that are quickly removed from their context, and packaged as “new” products, absent of history, place or meaning.

However, the illusion of buying our fulfillment only leads us into greater environmental and spiritual despair. As the world crumbles around us, we have become the insatiable hungry people of limitless desires and ambitions. Consequently, as life promotes life, the unwinding of exhausted political and social structures provides fertile ground for new beginnings guided by ancestral wisdom.

How can we, as young people called to the issues of sustainability, enact transformation? What sacred really means is exploring our relationship to the world, a relationship very different than commodification. Our ancestors were well aware that the key ingredient to any healthy, long-lasting relationship is reciprocity or exchange. And what our contemporary wisdom-keepers, or elders, want to share with us is that reciprocity is the timeless ingredient essential to sustainability.

What can that approach look like? Eliot Cowan, Tsaurirrikame, initiated healer and ritual leader in the Huichol tradition, describes our necessary perception as

“recognizing that the world is alive, that the plants, and the animals, the rocks, the rain, the rivers, the wind, the sun, all of it, are our brothers and sisters. We’re designed to get along with the world, and the world is designed to give us what we need so long as we do our part. It’s important that we take just what we need. And, when we take something, that we offer back what the world wants from us – not necessarily what we want to give – and that we appreciate that the world is alive and aware and has feelings.”  
(Sacred fire Magazine, Issue 10, p.42)

If you believe that Global Climate Change is real, and want to do something about it, join us at this summit directed at 18-20somethings. If we want to effect change, then we need to change the models we have been following of late. Leave politics behind for the moment. Come rediscover the old form of sustainability – the sacred.

We have designed a program aimed at youth to inspire, illuminate, educate and empower you to look at an aspect of sustainability that is so new that it is old. Come and sit by the fire, play music, dance, and listen to the stories of the ways that people lived gently in the world for many generations. Explore the old technology.

Eliot Cowan, quoted above, is one of our speakers. Joanne Shenandoah is another. She is an Iroquois who had once enjoyed the finest trappings of our modern society. She left behind the “good life” to return to her roots. Formerly a computer programmer, she is a Grammy award-winning singer. She speaks to each person’s gift and living the life you were born to live. "Healing through Music"…Joanne Shenandoah is working toward making a better planet for seven generations into the future. Ms. Shenandoah’s music reflects the indigenous philosophy and culture, which continues to have a profound effect on the world today.

Doug George, Joanne’s husband, speaks to the indigenous ways from the standpoint of scholar and journalist. As a member of the board of Parliament of Religions, and an author who champions justice, Doug George will address environmental justice as a sacred path. Together they will engage your heart and your mind.

A permaculturist, Ethan Roland, rounds out our speakers. He will invite us to explore relationships with plants, the earth, the sun, and rain from the more tangible arena.

Please join us July 30, 31 and August first for a weekend of warmth, relationship, and celebration of the many gifts this earth has to offer us. You do not need to be of any particular tradition. Open your hearts to the new sustainability – you are all welcome. To register for the Youth Summit, click here.

The Sacred Fire Community is seeking sponsors for this year's Youth Summit, please click here for more information on how you can support this program.