Connecting 2 Nature
The SC Iowa Initiative
C2N-IA is an emerging not-for-profit organization (in the process of registration). All opportunities are free of charge. C2N-IA serves to educate communities and aims to elicit positive social change.
Influenced by many disciplines, philosophies, and cultural perspectives, C2N strives to share the importance of being deeply connected to nature.
C2N facilitators educate individuals and communities about the multitude of benefits provided by having a stronger emotional, spiritual, and physical attachment to nature.
Using Deep Ecology, ecopsychology, and learned cultural perspectives from all over the world, C2N-IA intends to bring awareness of environmental concerns while empowering people to take fulfilling and meaningful action.
C2N will provide the experiences and resources necessary to increase sensory and ecological attunement, biophilic values, and ecoliteracy.
And finally, C2N seeks to make a positive impact on individuals and communities.
C2N’s Goals
Upcoming Events
Measure Your C2N
Measure Your C2N
How deep is your connection to nature?
Click the image and fill out a quick survey to find out. It takes around 5 minutes to complete. Your results will be calculated and returned within a week. You will receive a “C2N Score” that may be a useful starting point for your connection journey.
Thank you for your time! Your honest responses are critical.
Activities C2N equips help people realize their embeddedness within the natural environment and learn new ways of perceiving and relating to the more-than-human world.
Activities will be adapted to the seasons and the needs/interests of the community. Most can be easily adapted for all age groups.
Examples:
Guided hikes: sensory integration, kinship relating, birdwatching, foraging, “botanizing” and “biologizing”
Mindfulness: meditation, ecotherapy, ecophilosophy discussions (gleaning advice from the wisdom of nature).
Nature writing: journaling, poetry
Wildlife photography: birds, plants, landscapes, insects, macro, etc.
Nature-based art: sketching, painting, crafting
Do you have any preferences or ideas? You can let us know using the form below.
Activities
“If we want to continue to enjoy our rivers – to swim in them, walk beside them, even drink their water – we have to adopt the non-dual perspective. We have to meditate on being the river so that we can experience, within ourselves, the fears and hopes of the river. If we cannot feel the rivers, the mountains, the air, the animals, and other people from within their own perspective, the rivers will die and we will lose our chance for peace.”
Why C2N?
Many researchers, authors, and public speakers across multiple fields have now made it clear that the depth of C2N matters…a lot.
Having a strong bond with nature benefits our mental, physical, and spiritual health in many ways. When this bond is lost we face many consequences (implicit or explicit).
Our loss of interest and understanding of the natural world have been examples of the many root causes of our society’s estrangement from nature.
“Well really it’s fundamentally about our humanity. It’s in our own self-interest and it contributes in so many ways to our health and well-being. Many of our basic tendencies is our ability to reason, our ability to emotionally connect, to avoid things that are harmful to us, and in many other ways we’re deeply contingent on our relationship to the non-human environment.” - Steven Kellert, author of Biophilic Design
How does it all work?
C2N uses frameworks and ideas gathered and adapted from the following fields:
Ecopsychology, phenomenology, human ecology, psychology, neuroscience, environmental psychology, conservation psychology, and more.
And from the following religions/philosophies: Taoism, indigenous values, Buddhism, Christianity, Shinrin yoku (forest bathing), Deep Ecology, biophilia, Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, and more.
Video from the University of Derby
