Greetings, my name is Marguerite Uhlmann-Bower, I am co-founder of Plant Pioneers, a human-Plant relations movement and growing people collective who are interested in living rightly for Nature. As a Clinical Herbalist consultant and retired Registered Nurse, my Earthist values speak for and relate with the-Nature-that-surrounds-us. As co-creator of EarthSchool teachings at the Root Cellar, this is my life, not my job. I’ve always been in this place with Nature.
In my early childhood years, the landscape that informed me was the backyard garden in the city-scape of Manhattan, on the unceded Lenape territory known as Mana-Hatta – “Hilly Island”. I am deeply grateful and respectfully acknowledge indigenous teachings about Earth and Plants on what I know today, through my teachers who handed down this knowledge to me as well as viscerally receiving ancestral impressions from this city-scape backyard. I believe it is what informed my relationships I have today with Plants, Trees, Land and Nature and is why I ended up in the Catskills of New York with my family, for the last 45 years of my life.
I have to admit, there was a time when human exceptionalism attempted to divide and insulate me from my original teachers. Somehow, we kept a lifeline going. One that nourished and influenced me to keep remembering to be a voice for Plant and Tree realms. But also for human-to-human relationships as well. Because I know, as I listen to the voice of Nature I come to know this language is relational language. As I relate with them, Plants and Nature, my misguided trainings decolonize. As I wildcraft, I deconstruct, dismantle ideologies of superiority, privilege, extractive mind, human supremacy and exceptionalism and my own human to human separation.
As a radical wild-crafter and forager, I undo the ways I was taught to treat the Earth and Plants by colonial mind. Instead, I am on a relational path. What that means is not just a flaccid thank you when I’m gifted a wild-crafted Plant or Tree, but a commitment to bring them into my life, and to the decision making tables.
The main field of work we do at EarthSchool is to support humans in the resurrection of their innate sensory abilities for better inter-species dialoguing. And it is Cultivating Cognitive Agility with Our Plant, Tree and Nature Allies that will get you there.
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