Who We Are
One Earth Sangha was founded in 2013 by Kristin Barker and Lou Leonard. We’re a small organization with dedicated team members and guiding teachers from across the United States and Canada. One Earth Sangha’s mission is to bring Buddhist wisdom and practice to the collective work of healing humanity’s relationship with the Earth.
Where We Come From
One Earth Sangha, as all things do, exists in a web of relationships. The EcoDharma offered by One Earth Sangha arises out of collaboration across race, gender identity, nationality, and traditions. With our contributors, we’re actively co-creating the field of EcoDharma.
We emerged from the Insight Community of Washington, and our early partners included Natural Dharma Fellowship, the Buddhist Climate Action Network, and Dharma Action Network for Climate Engagement (DANCE).
One Earth Sangha is indebted to our organizational ancestors. To those who have dedicated their lives to holding, understanding, and transmitting the Dharma, we honor you. To those who dedicated their lives to advocating for the well-being, dignity, and social equity of all human beings, we honor you. To those who dedicated their lives to the protection of Earth’s lands, waters, and ecological kin, we honor you. To the Earth itself, that of which we all are, we honor you.
The Predicament (as we see it)
We, along with all life on Earth, are entering a period of profound change. In particular, ten thousand years of relative climate stability is coming to an end. That shift is of our own collective making.
Ecological crisis is one of many crises that grow from a common human pattern: when suffering, loss, or uncertainty become hard to bear, we tend to turn away… if we can. Hierarchies of wealth and power, and of humans over the rest of life, decide who is inclined to take, to harm, and to let the costs land elsewhere.
Turning away takes three main forms, and each offers something that can keep us there. Where we have the means, we are likely to take far more than we truly need: why hold back when no one else will, we’re all doomed anyway, so we may as well enjoy what we can, and the pleasure keeps us coming back. Where we lack the means, the same conviction that nothing we do matters can easily become despair and withdrawal, which strangely bring their own relief by at least resolving the question. When we’re moved to protect or repair, we often buckle under the weight of too much responsibility, allowing our understandable fear and anger to harden into outrage, blame, shame, purity, and superiority. Leading with judgment burns us out and drives away the very people we hope to reach. Because moral superiority is another way of being on top, it rebuilds the structure we set out to undo.
None of us lives in only one of these. Which form we take depends largely on where we stand, the conditions that shape us, and the support around us. None of us is better or worse. We take these routes when we lack a compelling alternative and the conditions to pursue it.
The Response (we aspire to support)
We are not stuck. The story is far from over. The Earth is always teaching, and the Buddhist wisdom tradition trains us to listen. They point to a way forward.
The Way begins with recognition. Each route we take makes sense, and each offers real relief. When we can see them, and see them with compassion, they can begin to loosen their hold. Understanding what drives them, and noticing where our longing for change has hardened into a desperate need for things to be other than they are. That need tends to leave us two familiar options, in some way giving in or burning out. Seeing our desperate strategies to escape first hand, in our own experience, this opens a third.
That third way is a home in uncertainty: a Middle Way born of insight. We start to come home to ourselves, recognizing that certainty is a fantasy. The strategies lose their appeal and compassion starts to come naturally. Gratitude and awe become more compelling than any hope that hangs on everything turning out okay. We might find we can stay present to loss, harm, and limits without looking away or flaring into judgment because judgment doesn’t make sense anymore. And then to act from there. We recognize that our power is partial, uneven, but real nonetheless. We can use it fully without needing to control any outcome.
And something more fundamental can change. Nothing less than the way we orient to every experience can change, not just our response to eco-social crises. What we’ve been trying to escape becomes the Way. We might even come to know this changing Earth as a profound and beloved teacher.
From that ground, ethics shift. Since living involves some harm, purity is out of reach and beside the point. What remains is repair, reciprocity, and restoration, offered with humility about our place within systems of domination and with deep respect for all of life. None of us does this alone. What we face is collective, and so is the capacity to meet it, in the company of new and old friends … of many species. We can act with full force while refusing the logic of domination, including the domination hidden in moral superiority.
When we can stay, see clearly, and act from love, we discover what the escape routes never give: the relief of being aligned, of offering what the moment asks, even if our efforts fall short and come what may. In that alignment, we begin to hear what the Earth has always been teaching: natural, effortless, endless generosity.
What We Do
The founding premise of One Earth Sangha is that the Buddhist tradition offers significant, largely untapped resources that can support us in bringing wisdom, compassion, courage, creativity, flexibility, and a steady resolve to our inter-related ecological and social crises. The Dharma’s transformative insights help us understand the root causes of our challenge, how we can remain steady as it unfolds, and how we might skillfully respond. We’re dedicated to cultivating the middle way through the polycrisis, between and beyond the delusions of technological optimism and doomsday pessimism.
This is the space of what we call EcoDharma, we are here to cultivate the potential of EcoDharma, and by EcoDharma we mean the broader understanding of eco, as in ecosystem. We see the ecosystem as a field of structures, flows, and histories that include climate crisis and colonialism, racial supremacy, patriarchy, exploitive capitalism, and the constructed separations between humans and the more-than-human world. The Dharma roots us in the profound insights and practices of our tradition, and very practically, it allows us to surface the patterns of confusion that shape experience and block liberation. EcoDharma is a dance between the intimate and collective, the Dharmic and structural. EcoDharma as learning from the innate intelligence of Earth’s ecosystems.
One Earth Sangha is an EcoDharma network and virtual center, a place to practice. We are a place to inquire into the unanswerable and make a home in the uncertainty. We invite you to check-out our programs and practice with us.