Description
Chris Lopez is a father, educator, practitioner of “old way” skills, and contributing faculty member at Regenesis. Chris caught the wildlife tracking and original skills bug early in life; as an adult, these passions led down two different tracks. One led to the field of psychology and education, where he worked as an educator for both typically developing and neurodiverse youth for over a decade. The other track led to the field of ecological design and research, where he worked as a permaculture designer, water harvester, restoration artist, and educator on watershed literacy. After another decade in the field attempting to address environmental issues at the level of design, Chris realized that the issues he was attempting to address were not truly issues of design, but a broken and fragmented understanding of the living world; that “nature” is seen and experienced by many as “other” and as an abstractified concept.
Chris has since returned to the field of education, and his work today is sourced by the premise that when humans lose conscious connectivity and visceral intimacy with their places, “right relationship” with that context becomes compromised and all suffer. Chris helps his students lend the world their admiration by reconnecting with place viscerally through various “old way” and applied naturalist skills. He is always humbled when he watches students learn just as much about themselves, standing in their own tracks, as they do those they learn to follow across the landscape.
