Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings

My "aha!" moment in this short and not at all new book came when John Seed says that the refusal to change everything right now that we all have with the problems the planet faces is not from apathy but despair."Experience with group work has shown that this despair, greef and anger can be confronted, experienced and creatively channeled. Far from being crushed by it, new energy, creativity, and empowerment can be released."

This is a classic work pioneering advocacy for the natural world using a group experiential process. Each person becomes an aspect of the natural world and speaks for that living entity in council. How would your feelings and attitudes change if you spoke for the trees?

This is a wonderful and inspiring book that provided much needed encouragement for both my personal and broader engagement with Global Climate Change.

THE BEST "manual" for Deep Ecologists for use in ceremony!!

John Seed is awesome and so is this book!

I was gifted this book as a teenager nearly 20 years ago. It transformed my philosophical outlook and paved way to my adulthood, educational path, and ultimately career path. At risk of sounding cliche, it was a book that changed my life. I don't know if it would have been as transformative if I had read it at a different stage in life; however, I would still recommend the book. It's a quick and meditative read.

I did a workshop once years ago. This is a great book.

The book is a collection of unique essays, essays with a single aim in mind - to spark a radical expansion of human consciousness. With a lofty goal as this, how does it fair? How deep is deep ecology? How vital is it, given the current massive environmental decline? Should we be concerned with the earth? These are some of the questions that will be tackled in this volume. To begin with, let us look into the text itself. Midway into the text, the reader is intentionally awed by an imposition of a radically different view of himself: "What are you? What am I? Intersecting cycles of water, earth, air and fire, that's what I am, that's what you are" (John Seed 1988, 41). The best way to characterize the text in a couple of words is - meditations on the earth. However, saying these words invariably undercuts the intricacy of exquisite poetic alliterations, metaphoric presence and a penetrating gaze, that the authors invoke on each page. Their work began in Australia, as a small grass-roots circle that held environmental rituals. They traveled, published, inspired, protested, performed, they traveled again. A journey of commitment to something beyond individual goals, their personal stories and essays seem more unified than a story of one man's life. The resulting book is filled with a sense of unceasing directed education, education that transcends classrooms and all conversation - powerful, meaningful words, cerebrally integral to the human being, penetrate the reader, and it is impossible to remain indifferent to the message.