Your NameHolger Hieronimi
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Cohort AssignmentAmericas with In-Person Intensive in Santa Fe, Summer 2023
1. What do you see as your primary work at this stage of your life?

teacher, consultant and co-designer of socio-ecological systems
my primary motto at this stage:
"developing myself and my capacity to support and inspire individuals, families, comunities, organizations
in developing capacity to consciously reconnect with, and regenerate, ourselves and the (social, economical, ecological) ecosystems we are part of"

2. What role do you see as yours to play?

I discover resources, nuturing and inspiration from a wide variety of fields-
I recognize a capacity of myself to capture, translate, comunicate many of those resources to students and clients, that inform, inspire & motivates their own developmental capacity - maybe my role is that of a bridge & comunicator of "transformative" information & practices ...

3. What goals or aims do you have in regard to the above?

I´d like to get more refined and per-/re-ceptive in my path of becoming a "student-elder", teacher, consultant & designer

4. Where do you feel your next arenas for personal growth are?

my process at the moment:
...deepening & unifying...
get my hands/ mind/ heart/ spirit more connected and working as a unity
growing my capacitty to stay present
and stay positive and happy
without ignoring the enormous challenges for myself, my species and the living world

5. And for professional growth?

get away from my still relatively "transferecial" way of sharing information, during my courses, workshops & consulting
I feel that I often talk to much - this is a capacity of mine, but I have to learn when to "shut up" and comunicate in a diferent way
growing my capacity to generate co-evolutionary processes wherever I live & work

6. What have you invested in to get you where you are?

At a young age, my investment was to get away from the privileges/ oportunities, but also a very structured way of making a career in my native Germany -
I left university early on, and lived for three years in en emerging ecovillage in the mountains of Spain (where I took my first permaculture course and learned many practical skills, from gardening to basic carpintery etc...)-
Living in Mexico in the nineties, I generated a social enterprise that gave me the resources to take many courses in Permaculture and related subjects
As a family father, I invested all available resources in building a permaculture-inspired mini farm and teaching site in Mexico, also still investing time and money in courses and mentoring processes (as I still do now)
Durng the last decade, with more and more people and organizations asking me for advice, I invested increasingly more time (and money) to grow my capacities in those fields of work.
In more recent years, I invested time and money into my "spiritual" growth: retreats (for example aplied buddism in the lineage of Thich Nath Hanh) & therapy

7. What fields of learning and which thinkers have been important in your life?

A selection:

Cosmovision & Systems Ecology:
Howard T. Odum ("Environment, Power & Society", „A Prosperous Way Down“- Principles and Policies ),
Lynn Margulis y Dorion Sagan ("What is Life")
Fritjof Capra ("The Web of Life", "The Systems View of Life" etc.),
Lance H. Gunderson & C.S. Holling ("Panarchy - Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems")
Brian Walker & David Salt (“Resilience Thinking – Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World»)
Gregory Bateson ("Mind and Nature", "Ecology of Mind")
Daniel Christian Wahl "(Designing regenerative Cultures")
Carol Sanford ("The Regenerative Business", "The Regenerative Life" and others)

Regenerative Land Management & Permaculture:
David Holmgren ("Permaculture - Principles & Pathways beyond Sustainability", "Future Scenarios"),
Bill Mollison ("Permaculture Designers Manual"),
Darren Doherty & colleges: The Regrarians Handbook
Peter Bane ("The Permaculture Handbook")
and many others

Design:
David Orr ("The Nature of Design")
Pamela Mang, Benn Haggard, Regenesis ("Regenerative Develpment and design)

Ecology:
Tao Orion ("Beyond the war on Invasive Species")
David I. Theodoropoulos („Invasion Biology“- Critique of a pseudoscience)
Marten Scheffer (“Critical Transitions In Nature And Society”)
and others
Ecological History:
Alfred William Crosby ("Environmenlal Imperialism", "The Colombian Exchange", “Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's Unappeasable Appetite for Energy”),
Jared Diamond ("Guns, Germs and Steel", "Collapse"),
J.R. McNeill („Something New Under the Sun“ - An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World),
Charles Mann ("!491")

Deep Ecology:
Thich Nhat Hanh ("Being Peace" "A Love Letter to Moter Earth", "The Heart of Buddhas Teachings" and others)
Joanna Macy & Molly Young Brown "Coming Back To Life –Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World)
Arnold Mindell

8. Can you frame your philosophy or cosmology of life? What role(s) do humans play in it?

Maybe my philosophy is "Gaian" -
I view the living earth as an organism of sophisticated intelligence shaped by thousants of millions years of evolution.
Simply trying to grasp the intelligence of how a spoonful of living soil works, with all millions of bacteria, fungi, micro- and macro-oganisms interacting and making the system work, fills me with wonder and enstrangement...
Finding the role that a mildly intelligent species (that calls itself "homo sapiens") has to play in this amazing concert of life, can be a life´s work and is actually part of my personal quest - definitely we are not the "crown of creation", even the role of "earth stewards" that sometimes we get asigned from green activists, seems to me filled with too much arrogance.
I see myself as a student of the earth - the landscape is the textbook -
We have the capacity to regenerate (as we have also the capacity to degenerate) - the scale of the destructive capacity right now expressed by the human species tells us also something about the scale of our regenerative potential
In the end, even a species like us is a product of Gaias intelligence - we are NOT an error of evolution....

Date CreatedJuly 6, 2023