There's Enough for Everyone
Robin Greenfield on a Year of Living on 100% Foraged Food and Medicine—and Rediscovering Our Connection to the Earth.
Photo: Robin Greenfield offering a beverage at Foraging School in Florida as part of his year of foraging 100% of his food and medicine.
What does it mean to live simply in a culture built on excess? In this episode of Nonviolence Radio, we speak with environmental activist Robin Greenfield, whose latest experiment is to forage 100% of his food and medicine for a year while traveling the country to help people rediscover their relationship with the Earth. Together we explore simplicity as a practice of nonviolence, the illusion of separateness, and how reconnecting with nature, community, and ourselves can become a profound act of resistance. As Greenfield reflects, "Connection is at the root of the solution to all of our problems, and disconnection is at the core of our societal woes." Drawing on influences including Gandhi, Peace Pilgrim, Thich Nhat Hanh, Marshall Rosenberg, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, he shares how a life of voluntary simplicity has become not one of sacrifice, but of greater freedom, joy, and connection.
Next month for our program in Nonviolence Studies, we’re thinking critically about technology and nonviolence.
Our friend Martin sent us this TED talk by a seven year old, reinforcing how important presence is for children and shows the sad reality of how technologies like phones and computers, etc. can make a child feel ignored and inadequate. While we know it’s not just children who feel unseen and unheard when we’re staring at devices instead of engaging with those around us; for children, their brains are still forming. If we unwittingly teach them that they are less important than our phones or computers, we’re setting them up on a weak foundation for self-love and self-worth that will haunt them and inform their choices for years and years until they find healing for it, if they ever do. Sounds dramatic but it’s true, and urgent. It’s a simple practice to put our phones down more when we’re with other people, especially small children, but we really need to take these kinds of messages to heart and let them transform us if we want to build a more nonviolent world.
~Stephanie for the Metta Team