Adult Education Classes

Chicago Regional Forum on Ethics and Sustainability
Lifeways and Greenways: Social and Ecological Connectivity

A Janet Meakin Poor Research Symposium

PHOTO: Peter Forbes

PHOTO:bee Peter founded the Center for Whole Communities to do what he could to strengthen and connect movements for social and environmental change by looking deeply at the issues that divide us from one another and from the land.

At the core of this work are tools such as inquiry, story, deep listening, transformational leadership, and relationship-building across lines of race, class, and ideology.

Peter Forbes

A student of the relationship between land and people, Peter Forbes has worked throughout the world to record and protect our human relationships with the land.

Peter's lifelong pursuit is to be a witness and storyteller of the bond between people and the land, and to translate what he has learned into a new form of leadership. Peter co-founded Center for Whole Communities after 18 years leading conservation projects for the Trust for Public Land. Peter helped to protect threatened portions of Thoreau's Walden Woods; he launched a program to protect and revitalize urban gardens and farms across New England; he helped to add 20,000 acres of wild lands to New Hampshire's White Mountain National Forest, and he created the Good Life Center in Harborside, Maine, to promote the lifeways of renowned land and social activists Helen and Scott Nearing.

Through the success of more than a hundred conservation projects, Peter earned a national reputation as being a champion of a new brand of community-based conservation where the health of the people and the health of the land are viewed as equal.

Peter’s photography and essays have appeared in many books and journals. Others have written of Peter's thinking and storytelling that he is "a national treasure whose groundbreaking work is a stunning reminder of why land conservation is still so important." He is the editor of Our Land, Ourselves: Readings on People and Place and he is the author of The Great Remembering: Further Thoughts on Land, Soul and Society (TPL/Chelsea Green, 2001). His essays have also appeared in Coming to Land in a Troubled World (Center for Land and People/Chelsea Green) His photographs of homesteader and social activist Bill Coperthwaite are published in A Handmade Life, which won first prize in 2003 from the Independent Bookseller's Association for most inspiring story.

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Lifeways & Greenways Symposium

Adult Education Classes