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TAHOE EARTH INSTITUTE
Advancing environmental solutions in Tahoe and beyond
OUR APPROACH
WE PLANT SEEDS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SOLUTIONS THROUGH INNOVATIVE FORUMS AND NARRATIVE MEDIA.
We focus on solutions to the deeper structural and cultural challenges that underlie environmental threats.
In other words, we see climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, pollution, and other environmental stressors united by common threads: cultural paradigms that prioritize individual ambitions, legal frameworks that fail to account for the more-than-human world, economic frameworks that preference shorter-term gains, and societal structures that disconnect humans from their environments and from one another.
Today's planetary crisis has been framed as a "challenge of imagination." That's where we come in: creating spaces for thought leaders, community members, and the broader public to think expansively, question deeply, and reimagine new approaches for a better future
We focus on both large-scale, global challenges and on local projects based in Tahoe—pilots for strategies that can be replicated elsewhere.
THEMES
ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP
There is growing consensus that we need to develop new models of stewardship, to learn how to take better care of the world around us, to restore a sense of balance between human communities and the ecosystems on which we ultimately depend. The question is: how? From addressing spiritual and cultural connections to the environment to ideating innovative land use agreements that incentivize regenerative caretaking, we’re interested in identifying community-based strategies to safeguard environmental wellbeing.
ENVIRONMENTAL CAPITAL
Are environmental challenges fundamentally market failures? What would it take to better account for the true values of environmental resources—and the true costs of planetary degradation? From crafting innovative opportunities to marry financial returns with environmental protection and restoration to considering broader economic models that integrate planetary and social boundaries, we’re interested in big ideas that cultivate private sector action and systems-level changes.
ENVIRONMENTAL LITIGATION
Do we have a right to health? Can we employ self-defense arguments to justify environmental action? What are opportunities to think beyond human communities and bestow rights upon natural entities—saying that a river, for example, has a right to be clean? Our legal systems define what is right, what is wrong, and what is allowable under the law. We’re interested in exploring what it takes to advance action through law—and whether our legal frameworks can evolve quickly enough to forestall the fundamental alteration of the planet as we know it.
ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES
Understanding how we arrived at today’s environmental crisis is critical to both making sense of our current reality and charting a path forward. Leveraging scholarship in history, anthropology, philosophy, ethics, and psychology, our questions include: How have understandings of human-nature relationships shifted across history? How does psychology help us understand environmental destruction and apathy—as well as connection and action? What social and cultural institutions support pro-environmental behaviors and community resilience—and what does it take to instate them in different settings?
FEATURED PROJECT
FILM: WÁŠÍ∙ŠIW ʔITDÉʔ
Through immersive audio, artistic visuals, and piercing head-on interviews with Wá∙šiw leaders and tribal members, this Tahoe-based documentary film engages viewers in an exploration of traditional Wá∙šiw lands (“Wáší∙šiw ʔitdéʔ”), relationships, and traditions.
In this film, as the Wá∙šiw recount their history and their ongoing efforts to revitalize cultural practices, land relationships, and ways of life today, we are brought on a visceral journey of place, identity, and community – and left with a deep sense of how listening, humility, respect, and reciprocity are central to protecting the places we love, and our planet at large, for generations to come.
Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth invisible.
RICHARD POWERS
Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.
WENDELL BERRY
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