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.
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.