Earth Lodge Core Values

Past and current lodgers got together to try to elucidate what makes the Earth Lodge so special. The following is a set of core values that lodgers identified.

Diversity of thought
• we celebrate free thinking and creativity
• we are accepting of all points of view and strive to understand other peoples’ perspectives

Learning about self and others by exploring the natural world
• We cultivate respect and appreciation for nature though outdoor activities
• We develop self-knowledge through both adventure and reflection
• we explore the connections between ourselves and the natural world by learning basic wilderness and naturalist skills

Imaginative edupunk
• “edupunk: a style of hands-on self-education that benefits the student without concern for the curriculums or the interests of schools, corporations or governments. In other words, an autodidactic approach that spurns commercialism, mass-market approaches and top-down goal setting” (Jim Groom)
• we encourage an inquisitive and relaxed atmosphere of collaboration, equality and honest communication
• we believe that people learn best through experiential and multi-sensory education
• we value close teacher-student relationships

Forming a supportive and open-minded family
• we foster an environment of genuine and honest communication
• we develop relationships based on respect, love and acceptance
• we create a supportive environment for exploring questions of meaning and purpose
• we value reliability and dependability
• the teacher is part of the family

Spontaneity
• we let curiosity and passion guide us
• we love to play, relax, and of course, drink tea!
• we celebrate life and share the feeling of hope

Quotes from Lodgers:

“Earth Lodge provided me with an amazing community of friends, all from different backgrounds, majors, and interests, and with freedom of thought. The program combines an amazingly thought-provoking class with solace of nature. It is truly an experience unlike any other offered at Richmond and made me so much happier and content as a student here.”

“The close community of individuals within the Lodge, with a common respect for each other's different backgrounds and thoughts, provides an atmosphere that is fluid.”

“Lodgers are spontaneous, inquisitive, and creative. They aren't afraid to take risks academically, and are more focused on learning both in and outside of the classroom than getting perfect grades.”

“Because all of the Lodgers are open-minded and inclusive, I think that participants feel free and comfortable to share their thoughts and feelings. Thus, we were able to consider things we wouldn't by ourselves and gained unique and important perspectives about our surroundings and our coursework.”

“Earth lodge completely changed my experience at UR. It is the single greatest thing I have done in college. I became a part of an extremely strong community full of intelligence, love, new ideas, honesty, determination, and motivation. It has shaped me to become who I am, and urged me to become a better, more involved, more thoughtful person.”

Reality Check

The "pale blue dot" is our EARTH as seen from Voyager I at 3.7 billion miles away

*click image for documentary
*thanks to Laura Barry for sharing Sagan's text 

In a market-driven, media-saturated, celebrity-lusting culture where the assembly line never stops and competition for attention or title often trumps the less flashy but more crucial work of compassionate community building, it can be instructive and inspiring to put ourselves in perspective with some basic, essential and absolute facts about human life on Earth. Carl Sagan, the brilliant Cornell astronomer provides a necessary and increasingly relevant re-orientation of our perspective in his famous work Pale Blue Dot:A Vision of the Human Future in Space.

Excerpt from Carl Sagan’s  Pale Blue Dot

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.