Save the date. Registration coming soon…

April 15, 22, 29
4:00 – 5:30 p.m. PT / 5:00 – 6:30 p.m. MT / 6:00 – 7:30 p.m. CT / 7:00 – 8:30 p.m. ET

A Forest Stewards Guild 30th Anniversary Guild Gathering event!

Retreat facilitator: Jason Minton Brown, Guild member and Lecturer in the Department of Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University and founder of holyscapes.org.

Synopsis: In this 3-part online-based participatory retreat/workshop we will explore the deep connection human cultures have forged with trees and forests and how these ‘arboreal’ cultures are expressed today. We will investigate the evolutionary past of tree-beings and explore their importance to the world’s religious and mythological systems. We will track the history of the modernist camps of agricultural, conservation, wilderness and Indigenous approaches to forestry practice. And end the workshop with an imaginative exploration of the future of forests. Along the way we will ask participants to examine their own relationship to trees and ask how they understand the role of trees in a changing global civilization and climate.

Learning/Exploration Outcomes

• Explore the relationship between trees, forests and human societies.
• Learn about how trees and forests show up in the world’s religious and spiritual traditions.
• Understand the cultural history of forestry, natural resources and ecological sciences related to trees and forests.
• Deepen one’s personal relationship to trees and forest spaces.

Workshop Outline:
One-and-a-half-hour, weekly format with short slide presentation, group discussion and weekly field journal invitations:

• Week 1: The Primeval Forest: The role of trees and forests in religion and mythology.
• Week 2: The New Forest: The rise of conservation, wilderness and the new science of tree communication and ecology.
• Week 3: The Known Forest: The ways in which we relate to and understand trees and forests on a personal level.

Retreat facilitator bio:
Jason Brown was born and raised in Southern California and studied anthropology and international development as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University. He has lived in Vancouver, BC since 2013 and is a dual citizen of the US and Canada and is a proud Cascadian. He earned joint master’s degrees in forestry and theology from Yale. He completed his PhD in 2017 from the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) at the University of British Columbia where his dissertation explored the sense of place of contemporary Catholic monks in the American West. His book on the experience, Dwelling in the Wilderness: Modern Monks in the American West was published in 2024. As a Lecturer at Simon Fraser University Jason teaches courses in religious studies and ecological humanities for the department of Global Humanities. He teaches a course entitled Trees, Forests and the Human Imagination. He is also an un-ordained, non-aligned earth chaplaincy for Simon Fraser University. The program seeks to promote contemplative practice as a response to climate anxiety and grief. He writes at www.holyscapes.org.

You can hear more from Jason in his Contemplative Forestry podcast session and the recording of the Guild’s Communicating Forestry Webinar Series called “Give Me That Old Growth Religion.“