ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2002, I offered to facilitate a week-end residential retreat on Satyagraha for the Earth for teachers outside Edmonton, Alberta. “Truth insistence,” satyagraha in Sanskrit, was a key principle driving Mahatma Gandhi’s social action agenda: the need to speak the truth bravely. This message seemed to get to the heart of the ecological responsibility of teachers in our time, so, determined to offer an inspiration to teachers to recognize this responsibility, I designed a hybrid package of Gandhian, Western, and Buddhist practices and perspectives. To prepare, I decided to do a solitary ‘ecology’ reading and meditation retreat on Saltspring Island. Initially founded by a Tibetan Buddhist organization to house three-year retreats in the Americas, the retreat centre was perched on a mountaintop, removed from the development and holiday traffi c at lower elevations. Along with myself, local deer took refuge there, along with racoons and an array of fl uttering butterfl ies.
