Vision

gardem prison program

To restore stability to our planet we must restore its biodiversity. The very thing that we’ve removed. It’s the only way out of this crisis we’ve created. We must rewild the world. — David Attenborough

Re-humanizing the Planet

What happens when from the very inception, you grow a world that regenerates itself? A world where the soil heals the climate. And planted in that soil are gardens that heal the soil. And tending to those gardens are people who have been incarcerated behind cement walls. And those people, now in relationship to the earth, heal the bodies that had been polluted with industrial foods with now abundant real food. And those bodies put food from the farms on tables and now make available in food ghettos.

What happens when the intoxicants that made life tolerable are replaced with a sense of contribution that brings about a state of eudaimona: a sustainable happiness rooted in purpose. And what happens when the world’s darkest institutions, prisons, are transformed into beacons of light, into monasteries; where we exchange punishment for contemplation, mere recovery for discovery and economic black holes into contribution. 

And what if the disproportionate number of marginalized people who live in these institutions, the impoverished, people of color and poorly educated were to become integral to the healing of the world, become our most valuable resources. How then would this play out in terms of race, class and understanding of what it truly intelligent?

With the old “teach a man to fish” notion, what if we not only taught the people who had prior to been given hand-outs how to fish but how to become the providers of the world’s most precious resources? In other words, what if the greatest drain of resources became the greatest source? This is the question we asked in our vision of how to re-wild and how to re-humanize the planet.

How do we re-introduce the vital elements in a way that the mere re-introduction changes the world from the ground up? In nature, it is the keystone animal. In human nature, it is dignity. This is how we will change the world from the ground up.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.