Ideas for Further Learning

Read Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return. 

Check out YMCA Europe's Roots for Peace Project

The Roots has developed human and resource mobilization capacities, effective methodology and best practice programme delivery tools that can be easily multiplied to new circumstances and dimensions. It has developed its identical safe space methodology, based on Do No Harm approach. It has elaborated number of best practice conflict transformation schemes, such as the Peace Work Institute (including Guidebook) or the Local Capacities for Peace components.