The Active Earth Network
Mont Blanc to Mont Cinto is raising awareness for the Active Earth Global Network of Projects
ActiveEarth is a network of highly motivated and experienced business leaders, psychologists, educators and outdoor professionals from throughout the world. We have come together to provide powerful programs for transformational change towards a socially fair and sustainable future.
Faced with an increasingly complex mix of economic, social and ecological challenges, many people are waking up to the need for a shift in how we perceive ourselves in relation to the world we live in. However, the human ability to learn and adapt to social and ecological challenges is often inhibited by ingrained patterns of behaviour and cultural conventions.
Our approach to overcome these psychological barriers is both inspiring and simple: We engage people with the dynamics of natural systems. They hold the ultimate strategy for adaptability, change-management, leadership and resilience.
The ActiveEarth Network promotes and connects innovative brands and proactive projects:
ActiveEarth Training
offers innovative management training to senior management (Leading CSR), middle management groups (CSR Team Training) and graduates (Graduate Training). The courses balance adventure and nature experiences with intellectual inspiration to positively transform the way people think and feel about themselves, others, and our natural environment.
Footprint Consulting
is a partner organisation offering strategic consultancy and workplace mentoring for corporate clients. Footprints approach is dynamic, reflexive and inclusive and leads to a robust, resilient and down-to-earth strategy that everyone is motivated to engage with.
EasyDay
is the adventure eco-education branch of ActiveEarth. It is a powerful approach to education for sustainable development that complements academic courses and professional practice. The programs empower participants to build healthy relationships with others and the Earth in both their personal lives, and present or future careers.
TerraPi
is a pioneering land-rehabilitation project in South Africa. Integrating environmental restoration, with permaculture, local community empowerment, education and spiritual development the Terra Pi project will serve as a model for future projects in Europe.
Events & Activities
is an organisation committed to raising funds for charity by running challenging outdoor events for people who wish to enhance their experience of wild places.
The ActiveEarth Club
is a web-based community tool promoting a lifestyle that can heal our alienation from nature in both our personal and professional lives. Community building is key to sparking a collective awakening of ecological consciousness. Community can connect across boundaries, provide belonging, meaning and - through diversity - supports the emergence of our creative potential.
The Middle East is a beautiful area, rich in history and culture, populated with resourceful people. The region has been de-stabilised by persistent religious tension and conflict. The situation has deteriorated severely in the last few years partly due to the western invention in Iraq and Afghanistan. This sad reality is acutely visible in Lebanon where the reinforcement of religious differences has led to a political crisis that is paralysing the country and raising the spectre of another civil war.
The Active Earth Foundation, a planned newly formed charitable association mandated to promote sustainability and social justice through actively supporting and financing personal, social and environmental change projects, will work with local partner Mercy Corps on a range of youth programs ulitmately focusing on creating a culture of peace and reconciliation in this troubled region.
The programs will be based on ground-breaking techniques developed over many years and successfully employed by both Mercy Corps and Active Earth Training facilitators on hundreds of young people.
Experiential education in beautiful, wild places provides space for fresh ways of thinking. Nature creates a subtle opening to broader perspectives while adventure sharpens concentration. Metaphorically speaking, adventure takes the lid off the container our everyday lives are in. It lets new things come in and lets old things come out and be seen.
Adventure experiences engage people. Outdoor-based experiential education provides a wealth of opportunities to facilitate personal development in a highly efficient way such as, emotional development or essential techniques for non-violent communication and conflict resolution.
Another important aspect of outdoor adventure is that it’s fun and revitalises our connection to the Earth.
E. Educational Framework
The courses draw upon a proactive blend of natural sciences, ecopsychology, eco-therapy and relational philosophy.
Courses are grounded in a transformative educational paradigm that aims to shift participants towards relational thinking, from which an understanding of social justice and sustainable behaviour follow. Steven Sterling adviser to the British Government on sustainability education, conceptually identified three interrelated ‘dimensions’ and their ‘key qualities’ that would lead to such shift:
1. The perceptual dimension – the need to widen and deepen our boundaries of concern and recognise broader contexts in time and space (extension). The key quality here is ‘empathy’.
2. The conceptual dimension – the disposition and ability to recognize and understand links and patterns of influence between often seemingly disparate factors in all areas of life, to recognize systemic consequences of actions and to value different insights and ways of knowing (connection). The key quality here is ‘understanding’.
3. Practice dimension – a purposeful disposition and capability to seek healthy relationships recognising that the whole is often greater than the sum of the parts; to seek positive synergies and anticipate the systemic consequences of actions (integration). The key quality here is ‘wisdom’.
Mindfulness Practice
At the core of life and work in the Peace Centre is the practice of mindfulness. Ideally this is applied throughout the whole educational process, engaging both educators and participants during cognitive elements (discussions or readings), practical activities (outdoor adventure activities) and at rest.
The idea being that mindfulness (or awareness) can be an efficient agent to uncover the interplay between body, mind and environment (social-, physical- and biophysical environment).
Emotional intelligence researchers Ciarrochi and Blackledge state that mindfulness would essentially, help people to look at their private experience rather than through it, and to see their moment-to-moment experience as it is, and not as it seems to be when seen through language or intense emotion. In this way mindfulness practices aim to increase both an ecological understanding of phenomena and boost the ability to meet learning opportunities that lay within experiences.
Because the mind is the base of all actions, it is therefore very important to be mindful. Mindfulness is the best state of being for the mind. With mindfulness, our thinking and our bodily and verbal actions will go in the direction of healing and transforming.
F. Staff
Staff will be carefully selected and trained to ensure that participants’ healing and transformation are possible. The role of staff at the centre will facilitate the residential parts of a program. Their role is to cultivate a strong spiritual practice that makes it easy for participants to practice non-violence and mindfulness. Their role is to provide a structure of daily residential activities that support participants in building healthy relationships, for example meditation, breakfast, food preparation, daily work such as gardening and cleaning, group therapy sessions.
In our opinion the project will need a strong spiritual guidance. This will come by having the residential aspects facilitated by young monks and nuns trained at the practice centre in Plumvillage, France.
Guides who facilitate the outdoor programs will hold the trust, respect and emotional safety of the group. They create a positive atmosphere for participants to engage openly in the program’s content. Guides will be carefully selected and trained.
G. Patron
World-renowned peace activist, poet, and spiritual leader Thich Nhat Hanh should oversee the Peace Building Project.
Peace through Adventure
Proposal to establish a Foundation
Project: Lebanon Peace Practice Centre
Prepared by: Korbinian Hort, ActiveEarth Training Limited
A. The Ecology of Peace
Ecologically sustainable development and peace building are two sides of the same coin. Ecological sustainability is entirely depended on upon social sustainability and vice versa.
War uses up natural resources and inflicts unspeakable violence on people and other beings. Lacking peace of mind and a deeper understanding of the interrelated nature of phenomena is often the cause for harmful action, such as psychological and physical violence.
Jonathon Porritt a leading adviser to business and government on sustainability states in his book “Capitalism as if the World Matters” that: Regardless of where an individual organization places the primary focus of interest in the sustainability debate – on the social or the ecological side – it should be emphasized that the social questions are the key leverage points for stopping these undesirable feedback loops. It is human behaviour and the resulting social dynamics that lie at the heart of today’s social and ecological problems.
In order to live within earth’s ecological limits we must provide our children with the understanding necessary to live happy and fulfilled lives. Relative peace is a prerequisite for this.
The Foundation understands that peace development starts at the level of the individual. For example, if one is not capable of connecting with one’s own emotions, how can one reach out and feel concern for others? Caring for others requires caring for oneself. From the individual person, peace and understanding will spread out into family, community and the world.
We have resourceful people at hand to provide for the many aspects that are needed to launch and develop this peace-building project successfully.
B. Why Lebanon?
The skills to build healthy relationships are needed all over the world. Therefore it would make sense to start with ourselves and at our own doorstep.
So why Lebanon? The Foundation has a strong relationship to people in Lebanon. To the present day the Middle East is tormented by conflict, inflicting collective pain upon all sides. The situation has deteriorated severely in the last few years partly due to the western intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. This sad reality is acutely visible in Lebanon where the reinforcement of religious differences has led to a political crisis that is paralysing the country and raising the spectre of another civil war. It is an area in need of peace and reconciliation.
The project brings various aspects that make it ideal to launch the Foundation:
- It meets an obvious need
- It has a clear purpose
- It carries a strong sense of meaning
- Together we share the means, contacts and know-how to make it happen
C. The Natural Environment as Platform for Conflict Resolution
People tend to build their identity around belief systems such as nationality, religion, ethnicity, colour, political ideology etc., enhancing their feeling of belonging, community, self-confidence or security. Usually people are born into their cultural roles, often taking on huge amounts of collective psychological baggage.
A young Lebanese woman I used to know always melted into tears as soon as the conversation went to the Palestine – Israel conflict. She was overwhelmed by the accumulated hate and suffering that came up inside her.
As people from different conflicting backgrounds meet on levels of society such as ethnicity or religion, tension can rise very quickly to the point where communication gets impossible. We need to enable people to meet on a different level.
The level of the biosphere is the encompassing system in which the smaller systems of society, religion, economy etc. nest. If people meet on this bigger level, by caring for the natural environment for example, then a lot of tension is ‘kept aside’. This creates the space for people to engage with each other on a personal level and develop a sense of sister/brotherhood much easier.
Peace and reconciliation projects in both Northern Ireland and South Africa have adopted this approach very successfully. Facilitators working on these courses repeatedly report on nature’s power to release tension within and between people. In regard to containing tension within a group, there is a huge difference between working in a seminar room or outdoors.
D. What is the role of Adventure?
Facilitated intelligently, inspirational nature experiences have the power to transform the way we think and feel. Over many years innovative outdoor based programmes were developed that grow participant’s understanding and compassion enabling peace and reconciliation on intra- and interpersonal levels.
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