The Gaia Foundation is a small, international organisation with 35 years’ experience accompanying partners, communities and movements around the world to revive and protect bio-cultural diversity. We take a holistic approach to regenerate healthy ecosystems and strengthen community self-governance. Both are critical as we face the grave reality of climate chaos, biodiversity collapse and social injustice.
Together with our partners from the Atlantic to the Arctic, Africa to the Amazon, we are reweaving the basket of life, revalorising the knowledge systems that enhance it, and restoring a respectful relationship with the Earth.
Paradigmatic
Paradigmatic vision oriented around moving towards more healthy human relationships with nature and earth: “The Gaia Foundation envisages a new era in which humans are living in a respectful, just and mutually enhancing relationship with the Earth, with all her life forms and with each other.”
They work with the principle of emergence: “This approach is a conscious antidote to the dominant assumptions of human supremacy, linear progress, hierarchy and endless growth. It challenges the hubristic idea that human’s reductive reasoning can find solutions to the multiple crises this logic has created. As we see it, this logic is precisely the one from which we need to liberate our thinking.”
They say they are committed to “Linking with social movements who together can challenge the industrial growth economy and promote pathways for systemic transformation.”
Integrated
Holistic approach: “Gaia’s holistic approach to our work is guided by understanding that we humans are an inextricable part of this dynamic web of life.”
They see themselves as having been “Upholding Indigenous Wisdom and Earth-Centred Perspectives for Over 35 Years”
They say they are committed to: “Reviving and protecting cultural and biological diversity in order to restore resilience for ecosystems and local communities, across connected landscapes. Enhancing traditional knowledge and practices for land, seed, food and water sovereignty, thereby enabling communities to determine their own locally and culturally appropriate pathways rooted in regenerative principles and practices. Speaking out for ‘Gaia’ – Mother Earth – and the rights of future generations of all species, yet to inhabit this planet. Restoring a respectful relationship with, and a holistic understanding of, our one planet Earth. Celebrating and re-weaving the web of Life, which sustains us all.” i.e. integrating indigenous cosmologies as part of holistic understanding of world and tending to the fabric of (human and other-than-human) relationships
Pragmatic
Practical activities they support include: “offering trainings in reviving indigenous seed diversity and knowledge, by facilitating immersive community processes such as dialogues, eco-cultural mapping and calendars, and through strategic advocacy collaboration, we support communities to regain confidence in their traditional knowledge and their indigenous seed varieties. We promote peer-to-peer, farmer-to-farmer exchanges, encouraging communities to link up with others doing the same.” and “Protecting Indigenous sacred natural sites and the rights of custodians, through policy making, inter-generational learning, wilderness experience and habitat restoration”
Key Publications
’- ‘Wh@t on Earth: How digital technology is disconnecting us from ourselves, each other and our living planet’ (2018), https://gaiafoundation.org/post-library/wht-on-earth-report/