Inner Climate Academy

Inner Climate Academy (ICA) and Kincentric Leadership are partnering to deliver a 7 day residential retreat in Auroville, South India. Leading from Within the Wider Web of Life Residential retreat from: 8 - 14th Dec 2023 Auroville, India

We want to lay the foundations for a new paradigm of leadership and polycrisis mitigation, grounded in kincentric ecology.

Kincentric ecology is rooted in a deep sense of our belonging with all life. It places humans as part of a wider web of life and recognizes the more than human world as bestowed with intelligence, sensibilities, subjecthood, and intentionality. This requires a deep acknowledgment of our interbeing - for us to act as kin.

We want to ensure that leaders, from all walks of life, know in their bones that we are part of an intelligent, living Earth and have the ability to build kinship with all life into our responses to the polycrisis. We want to tackle root causes, to embed a kincentric approach into strategy, impact measurement, and ways of working.

We will weave together groundbreaking science into the intelligence, consciousness and agency of the more than human world with indigenous worldviews and practices to push the boundaries of what we think is possible as leaders and human beings facing crisis.

80 fully funded participants from around the world will journey together, supported by teachers, wisdom holders, facilitators and mentors from many backgrounds and fields. 20 participants, from the Global South, will be selected to attend the Auroville retreat, the fourth and last in the series.

For more information go to Kincentric Leaderships event page linked in our bio.

Inner Climate Academy (ICA) and are partnering to deliver a 7 day residential retreat in Auroville, South India.

Leading from Within the Wider Web of Life
Residential retreat from: 8 - 14th Dec 2023
Auroville, India
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We want to lay the foundations for a new paradigm of leadership and polycrisis mitigation, grounded in kincentric ecology.

Kincentric ecology is rooted in a deep sense of our belonging with all life. It places humans as part of a wider web of life and recognizes the more than human world as bestowed with intelligence, sensibilities, subjecthood, and intentionality. This requires a deep acknowledgment of our interbeing - for us to act as kin.

We want to ensure that leaders, from all walks of life, know in their bones that we are part of an intelligent, living Earth and have the ability to build kinship with all life into our responses to the polycrisis. We want to tackle root causes, to embed a kincentric approach into strategy, impact measurement, and ways of working.

We will weave together groundbreaking science into the intelligence, consciousness and agency of the more than human world with indigenous worldviews and practices to push the boundaries of what we think is possible as leaders and human beings facing crisis.

80 fully funded participants from around the world will journey together, supported by teachers, wisdom holders, facilitators and mentors from many backgrounds and fields. 20 participants, from the Global South, will be selected to attend the Auroville retreat, the fourth and last in the series.

For more information go to Kincentric Leaderships event page: https://www.kincentricleadership.org/events/india
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Julia, Lakshmi, Deethi, Rukmini, and Ruhie from the Inner Climate Academy team are extremely excited to be taking part in "To Vunja! We Will Dance with Mountains," an exploration of Dr. Báyò Ákómoláfé's post-activism as a pragmatic politics of rethinking accountability, social justice, and responsivity in the ruins of modernity.

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**We Will Dance with Mountains is a carnivalesque course in postactivism, a matter of fissures, fault lines, cracks, openings, seismic shifts, endings, and fugitive marronage. The course is about recuperating our connections with a ‘world’ that can no longer be seen as dormant, mute and passive. It is about coming to new senses, and co-generating new practices of place-making in partnership with the more-than-human world.**

**This shimmering-becoming is an attempt to make sanctuary for the fugitive unseen, to create an unprecedented animist festival at the edges of safety, a queering of our dreams for troubling times. It is exploration of liminal terrain and permission to fail. WWDWM is about deepening with community in a practice of with-nessing together, about "unlearning what we do when hope gets in the way, when forward movement no longer leads to interesting places, when justice obstructs transformation, and when victory keeps us tethered in carceral dynamics."**

**The online course/festival will include talks led by Dr. Báyò Ákómoláfé, teachings by revered guest teachers, dancing and cooking together, eating together, playing with children, making sanctuary, exercises, one-on-one encounters, regional meetups and local gatherings of practice, musical and theatrical performances, weaving rituals, gathering and creating new assemblages of power together.**

**WWDWM: Vunja! runs from Sep. 3 - Dec. 17, 2023, every other Sunday for nine weeks. Learn more at : www.dancingwithmountains.com &

🌍✨ Documentaries are like windows to another world, revealing events and people from different angles. They have the power to leave an indelible impact on us, inspiring us to take action and make a change within our communities. 🎬🔥

That's why we've assembled a powerful lineup of the most impactful environmental documentaries. 🎥💚 We understand that thinking about climate change and our planet's mounting environmental challenges can feel overwhelming, but these eye-opening films are here to guide us. They paint a vivid picture of our world's current state and serve as an unwavering reminder that the fight against climate change is one we must never give up on. 💪🌎❤️

Are you ready to dive into these environmental journeys? Share with us which documentary has inspired you the most and why! Let's engage in a conversation that sparks change! ✨🗣️
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In April, Lakshmi Venugopal and Julia Pullen from ICA attended Nature in Art festival at the Htnha Kalimpong
Lakshmi held a session on Climate Grief and Pathways to Emotional Resilience. Here are some highlights from the event.
In 2003, Hemlata Pradhan initiated the Himalayan Trust of Natural History Art (HTNHA) in Darjeeling where she dreams of combining art, education and conservation at the grassroots. As a part of the Natural History Art course at HTNHA, children are taught how to observe and explore nature through the medium of painting, ceramics, sculpture, textile design and jewellery design, natural history illustration and ecological studies, including dance and music, thus serving to bridge the gap between art and science.
The students attend regular school during the day. then the art school in the evenings, at weekends and holidays. The classes give them a new sense of awareness and the tendency to observe more closely, the plants and insects they already knew existed.

📸 Hrishav Chongder

Globalisation, explained by .

Floods in Pakistan: An uneven climate crisis and the case for reparations 🚨

Pakistan, a country that contributes as little as 0.8% to global greenhouse gasses, is currently experiencing its worst and most destructive monsoon season yet, likely the result of climate change itself.

Described as biblical in proportion, the current Pakistan monsoon season has caused an incomprehensible amount of destruction, leaving over one-third of its land underwater and almost 1,700 people killed. The loss of two million homes, thousands of kilometres of roads, and hundreds of vital bridges mark the beginning of what will likely be an extremely difficult time for the 33 million displaced individuals who are still trying to survive, stay positive, and call Pakistan home.

During times such as these, information is an absolute necessity, and if you are looking to assist, you are probably wondering the same thing we are: What’s behind the catastrophic floods in Pakistan, what exactly is happening on the ground, and what can I do to help?

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Join us for a Creative Exploration
Anthropocene - From despair to active hope

This 5 weeks journey will be a combination of online gatherings, workshops, talks, social media and email engagements that take us into the depth of the challenges that the Anthropocene brings to our lives, and collectively find our way through by providing spaces for creative self-expression and sharing.

Visit the link in the bio for more details.

Sources:

https://earth.org/floods-in-pakistan/

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/pakistans-biblical-floods-and-the-case-for-climate-reparations

"Summertime" - Reflections on a vanishing future with Danielle Celermajer 📢
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Danielle Celermajer is a Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney, Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute and lead of the Multispecies Justice project.
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Join us for a Creative Exploration
Anthropocene - From despair to active hope

This 5 weeks journey will be a combination of online gatherings, workshops, talks, social media and email engagements that take us into the depth of the challenges that the Anthropocene brings to our lives, and collectively find our way through by providing spaces for creative self-expression and sharing.
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When:
Saturday, 10th December 2022
10:00 AM to 11:30 AM IST

Visit https://bit.ly/3DO56JQ for more details.

Creative Self-Expression with Meena Subramaniam 📢
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Meena Subramaniam is a nature and conservation artist who lives near
Periyar Tiger Reserve. Her work has been featured in several
magazines, including Sanctuary Asia, The Indian Quarterly, with
ecologist and writer, Suprabha Seshan in The Dark Mountain and the
Marg issue, Ars Botanica. She is also the recipient of the 2018 T N
Khoshoo Memorial Award for pioneering work in ecological art, in 2018.
She has recently made a small contribution of illustrations for the tome,
Trees of Arunachal Pradesh, NCF ad a poster for CF on fruit dispersal
by frugivorous birds of Pakke forest, Arunachal Pradesh. Her preferred
medium is Acrylic on canvas and occasionally water colours.
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Join us for a Creative Exploration
Anthropocene - From despair to active hope

This 5 weeks journey will be a combination of online gatherings, workshops, talks, social media and email engagements that take us into the depth of the challenges that the Anthropocene brings to our lives, and collectively find our way through by providing spaces for creative self-expression and sharing.
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When:
Saturday, 3rd December 2022
3:00 PM to 4:30 PM IST

Visit the link in the bio for more details.

It was an honour to be part of this ..

Worldviews Sangam | 6-8th November'22 | at Timbaktu Collective

🌐The Indigenous and Community Worldviews Vikalp Sangam (Alternatives Confluence) was a gathering of Adivasi, pastoral, farmer and other communities, and civil society organisations on 6-8 November 2022. This gathering was organized by Kalpavriksh, Inner Climate Academy Inner Climate Academy and other groups, and hosted by Timbaktu Collective, an initiative promoting transformations towards equity and sustainability in over 300 villages in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

✳It was an attempt to highlight diverse ways of being and living and knowing of such communities across India, and to enable greater understanding and collaboration amongst them. The 30-odd participants included members of Adivasi or Indigenous communities like Warli, Mishmi, Dimasa, Gond, Soliga, Chakhesang, Oraon, Meena, and Lepcha, pastoral Maldhari and Van Gujjar communities, and Dalit women farmers from Telangana.

👀Watch this space for more!

Photo courtesy: Urvi Shah & Ashish Kothari

Reimagining Interdependence & honouring Remembrance - A Story-Telling session with Alyen Foning and Minket Lepcha 📢

Alyen Foning and Minket Lepcha belong to the Lepcha community of Eastern Himalaya. They belong to an indigenous community who regard Mountain Kongchen Chu (Kanchenjunga) and River Teesta as sacred. They will take you through their personal journeys through storytelling to reconnect with Mother Earth and her kingdom. Through the realm of imagination and unseen beings, we will remember our relationship and interdependence to nature and reimagine our co-existence with many beings.

When:
Thursday, 1st December 2022
6 PM to 8 PM IST

Visit http://bit.ly/3ijgLYZ to register

Creative Self-Expression with Sukrit Sen & Wangũi wa Kamonji 📢
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Sukrit is a Heritage and Disaster Management professional during the day and a musician by night
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Wangũi wa Kamonji is a regeneration practitioner who researches and translates indigenous Afrikan knowledges into experiential processes, art and honey.
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Join us for a Creative Exploration
Anthropocene - From despair to active hope

This 5 weeks journey will be a combination of online gatherings, workshops, talks, social media and email engagements that take us into the depth of the challenges that the Anthropocene brings to our lives, and collectively find our way through by providing spaces for creative self-expression and sharing.
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When:
Saturday, 26th November 2022
3:00 PM to 5:30 PM IST

Visit the link in the bio for more details.

This week, join Lakshmi Venugopal, founder, at Flourishing Diversity]'s event!

During this online storytelling session, Lakshmi will share how she re-directed her frustration and outrage at the world’s injustices into passionate action. Sharing her own intimate journey, encompassing the unpredictable twists and turns that turned out to be the biggest lessons, Lakshmi’s story is one that will leave you feeling inspired and hopeful.

Listen with us online on November 23rd at 1pm GMT.

Follow the link in Flourishing Diversity]'s bio to reserve your free space.

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Creative Self-Expression with Poorva Goel 📢
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Poorva is a cartoonist and graphic storyteller who has been working on themes of social and ecological justice and is interested in documenting people, places and paradigms.
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Join us for a Creative Exploration
Anthropocene - From despair to active hope

This 5 weeks journey will be a combination of online gatherings, workshops, talks, social media and email engagements that take us into the depth of the challenges that the Anthropocene brings to our lives, and collectively find our way through by providing spaces for creative self-expression and sharing.
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When:
Wednesday, 23th November 2022
3:00 PM to 4:30 PM IST

Visit the link in the bio for more details.

Emotional Resilience as a Community Practice - An Online workshop by Shayontoni Ghosh & Lakshmi Venugopal ⏰
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Shayontoni Rhea Ghosh creates art and holds space for self-reflection and healing. She is a writer, a theatre-artiste and a facilitator, and is building a creative healing studio called DOT.
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Lakshmi Venugopal brings her diverse international experience in the environment field spanning two decades, from activist to project manager to researcher to facilitator. She believes that the ecological and climate emergency that we face at this moment in history, is an opportunity for human beings, as a species, to transform ourselves into an ecological civilisation that honours the Earth and all living beings (including fellow humans).

She is an experienced facilitator of Deep Ecology and the Work That Reconnects.
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When:
Saturday, 19th November 2022
3:00 PM to 5:30 PM IST

Visit the link in the bio for more details.

Rainforest Etiquette In A World Gone Mad - An Online talk by Suprabha
Seshan ⏰
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Suprabha Seshan is a conservationist and environmental educator committed to the rewilding of habitat and human beings. She lives and works at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary (GBS) in the Western Ghat Mountains in India.
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The current state of the world presents us with unprecedented dilemmas. With every passing day, it overwhelms us with its unending complexity, ever-unfolding challenges, and unfathomable injustice and suffering, demanding multi-scale, multi-sector solutions and actions with ever increasing urgency.

As individuals, we oscillate between strong emotions (such as despair, guilt, hope fear, anxiety, empowerment, anger, sadness) and not feeling anything at all (numbness/ frozen).

This is natural, given the complexity and enormity of the challenges that we are facing- when our actions seem futile, when solutions turn in to problems within a short time, when it is so hard to fully comprehend the state of the world and our place in it, when the monstrous storm of poly-crises is raging its head, taking every bit of certainty with it.

Perhaps, through navigating the inner landscape of our embodied selves, we could find pathways to courageous imaginations for our outer worlds.

Perhaps, slowing down together, engaging in creative expressions of our selves, and witnessing each other, could help us co-create new ways to be human, one that emerges from active hope, a hope that is based on our own active participation in transformation of the world.
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When:
Saturday, 12th November 2022
3:00 PM to 4:30 PM IST

Visit the link in the bio for more details.

What is Climate anxiety? Let's talk about it.

Join us for a Creative Exploration | Anthropocene - From despair to active hope.

This 5 weeks journey will be a combination of online gatherings, workshops, talks, social media and email engagements that take us into the depth of the challenges that the Anthropocene brings to our lives, and collectively find our way through by providing spaces for creative self-expression and sharing.

sources:
https://earth.org/what-is-climate-anxiety/
https://www.realsimple.com/health/mind-mood/climate-anxiety

mama

What Is the Anthropocene and Are We in It?
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We are living in a time many people refer to as the Anthropocene. Humans have become the single most influential species on the planet, causing significant global warming and other changes to land, environment, water, organisms and the atmosphere.

Although there have been mass extinction events in Earth's history where vast swathes of life have been wiped out, until now they have all been triggered by natural causes like asteroids and volcanic eruptions. This is the first time a single species has caused such destructive effects on the natural world and had an awareness of doing so.

Furthermore, this mass extinction is happening frighteningly quickly: species are becoming extinct at a significantly faster rate than they have for millions of years before.

Some people think of this human impact largely with regard to climate change - the warming of our atmosphere, air and oceans caused by using fossil fuels. But the age of humans is about more than just climate change.

Our awareness of both the current state of the planet and the effects of our actions is a key factor in the Anthropocene.

Source: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-the-anthropocene.html
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Join us for a Creative Exploration | Anthropocene - From despair to active hope.

This 5 weeks journey will be a combination of online gatherings, workshops, talks, social media and email engagements that take us into the depth of the challenges that the Anthropocene brings to our lives, and collectively find our way through by providing spaces for creative self-expression and sharing.

More details linked in our bio.

An inside-out approach to the climate crisis- A embodied sense-making workshop 🔔
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The climate crisis presents humanity with unprecedented dilemma. With every passing day, it overwhelms us with its unending complexity, ever-unfolding challenges, and unfathomable injustice and suffering, demanding multi-scale, multi-sector solutions and actions with ever increasing urgency.

As individuals, we oscillate between strong emotions (such as despair, guilt, hope fear, anxiety, empowerment, anger, sadness) and not feeling anything at all (numbness/ frozen).

This is natural, given the complexity and enormity of the challenges that we are facing- when our actions seem futile, when solutions turn in to problems within a short time, when it is so hard to fully comprehend the state of the world and our place in it, when the monstrous storm of poly-crises is raging its head, taking every bit of certainty with it.

This workshop is an invitation to sense-making, starting from within. To explore our ‘inner-climate’, and our embodied understanding of the world, through our relationships with the more-than human, other humans and most importantly, ourselves.

Perhaps, through navigating the inner landscape of our embodied selves, we could find pathways to courageous imaginations for our outer worlds.
Perhaps, slowing down together, and witnessing each other this way, could help us co-create new ways to be human, one that might lead to thriving regenerative cultures in a multi-species world.

The workshop will including guided visualisations, interpersonal processes, movement, journaling and art, focussing on the inner dimensions of the climate crisis.
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Register now:

https://forms.gle/1RyTHicto1Fe4bbd9

Nilgiri tahr's habitat may be threatened by climate change. 🐐🚨
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The Western Ghats, a stretch of mountains running parallel to the western Indian coast, is a biodiversity hotspot, home to countless species that are unique to the region — known as endemics. One of these is the Nilgiri tahr (Nilgiritragus hylocrius), an endangered hoofed mammal that is related to wild goats.

While a warming climate is expected to affect the distribution of wildlife inhabiting the Western Ghats, the impacts on Nilgiri tahr have so far been unknown. Now, a new study using ecological niche models paints a precarious picture of the future of the species in response to climate change. Extreme global warming could make an alarming 60 percent of their current suitable habitats unsuitable. As a result, the researchers call for greater monitoring of the habitats and populations that have been identified as most-at-risk.
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During the last week of February, ICA has been engaging with children at the Endangered Crafts Mela and spreading awareness about the Lion-tailed macaques and several other endangered species from Tamil Nadu in
creative ways.
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Check out the amazing work our friends & are doing in the Nilgiris.
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Source: https://india.mongabay.com/2018/08/climate-change-could-threaten-the-habitat-of-the-endangered-nilgiri-tahr/
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In order to experience this, we have to walk the land. At a certain time for everybody, the land will take over. The land will take that person. You think you‘re following something, but the land is actually pulling you. When the land start pulling you, you’re not even aware you’re walking—you’re off, you’re gone. When you experience this, it’s like a shift of your reality. You start seeing things you never seen before. [...]

and before you know it there’s a path created that is connected to you. It belongs to you, and that is the way you start to communicate with the land, through your path experiences. And that path brings you right back to yourself. You become very aware about yourself. You start to tune finer and
finer. Then you become aware that when you’re walking the path, it’s coming out of you—you are connected to it. See, you are that land, and the land is you. There’s no difference. It’s hard to see the difference between nature and yourself. We have separated from it because we are told it is separate. We made a division between the garden and people. We put people on top. We have people and then everything else. So people got separated from nature and don’t see themselves as a part of nature anymore. But we are part of it.

Source: Frans Hoogland in "Listen to the People, LIsten to the Land" by Jim Sinatra and Phin Murphy

A conversation with Janakabai 🌎📢

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Janakabai is an adivasi leader from the Gond tribe. She is from Umravan village in Bador panchayat of Panna district, Madhya Pradesh. She has been standing up to protect their village from eviction for the Panna Tiger Reserve. Seeing her conviction, 11 other families also refused to leave despite persistent pressure from the forest authorities who let loose elephants in their village, disconnected the electricity lines and influenced the other departments not to provide even basic facilities like roads, drinking water or employment schemes for these tribal families.

She has been a strong advocate of Adivasi women's rights and is actively vigilant on issues of violence against women.

Janakabai is now mobilising the women to take up restoration of their water bodies and to regenerate their forests which are their life source of incomes, cultural engagement and wild food. She has been representing the demand for Adivasi right to Co-Existence with the wildlife and biodiversity and that it is mining and irresponsible tourism which are a threat to wildlife and not the local Adivasi people.

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The talk will be followed by a short Q&A session.

This talk is part of ICA’s Emerging Leaders Forum on Eco-centric perspectives. We invite thought leaders to speak to our Forum members every month. We make these talks available to a wider audience through this talk series as we believe these are invaluable resources to anyone interested in Ecocentric perspectives.

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When:

Saturday, 2nd April 2022

9:00 AM to 10:00 AM IST

02:30 PM to 03:30 PM AEDT

Stream Link (YouTube) :

https://bit.ly/3GJL9mB

Read the full post on the blog
https://innerclimateacademy.org/2022/03/15/a-week-with-endangered-species/

A week with Endangered Species It has become a thing, in Auroville, every year, for one week the Endangered Craft Mela is organized by a group of volunteers. Many of the traditional Indian crafts are endangered by current indust…

Meet ICA's Emerging Leaders, Andres, Dave, Deepak, Hannah and Janet. 📢🌎

ICA's Emerging Leaders forum started in December 2021. We have selected 24 participants for this programme, most of them are living in India and Australia. They are involved in different projects related to the environment, ecology, sustainability, resilience, etc.

Through the forum, they are engaged in a process of self-inquiry, exploring the integration of different aspects of ecocentrism in their projects, lives and work, and deeply engaging with the questions that this process brings up..

Today we are introducing five of them, Andres, Dave, Deepak, Hannah and Janet, the other will follow soon. You can also check ICA's website to learn more about them and their projects. Link in bio.
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