Welcome to EarthNest Institute

To awaken and nurture ecological intelligence and wisdom through explorations in nature, science, spirit, and systems thinking and to enable our transition toward a humane, diverse, and sustainable society.

Our Projects - Sustaining the Web of Nature, Science, & Spirit

EarthNest Institute has chosen award-winning filmmaker Karuna Eberl, Director/Producer of Wandering Dog Films, to spend the next 18 months documenting these stories, producing feature length DVDs for schools and public information, and culminating in five feature length HD-TV episodes, distributed to millions of households nationwide.

Join us! We need to raise $500,000!

EarthNest Institute is a 501(c)(3) non-profit business. Your donation is tax deductible.

 

• Join us on the Rio Grande as we produce this valuable documentary mini-series, tracing the stories of the Rio Bravo del Norte from its headwaters in the snowy peaks of the San Juan Mountains to the New Mexico border – a spectacular 175 miles of wild river, wildlife, restoration, and adventure.
   
  
• Join us on the Conejos as we follow the stories of six generations, diverse in language and tradition and drawn together by irrigation and land use patterns established by Spanish and Mexican land grant settlers, as they created Colorado’s first water laws.
   
  
• Join us along the Alamosa to understand the devastating effects of cyanide and heavy metals from the EPA Superfund site of Summitville Mine, and how the trout came back to Terrace Reservoir.
   
  

These are the lessons of Planet Earth, lived out in the microcosm of Colorado’s Rio Grande Basin.

We are proud to have been selected by the Environmental and Conservation Education Council (ECEC) to serve as its nonprofit fiscal umbrella. For more than 20 years, ECEC has enabled teachers and students throughout the San Luis Valley to explore and learn in nature's outdoor classroom.

About Us - A Note From Our Founder

Like you, I am mostly made of Water
Born more than 7 decades ago in the Tahitian village of Faaa
I swam before I learned to walk
Like some sort of Polynesian salt water pollywog, naked, wide-eyed,
I could not resist the Pacific Ocean.
As a child growing up in Mexico I played and splashed in the purple water hyacinths
And galloped bareback on the beaches of Lake Chapala
Where eventually all the water lilies went away
And the Pescado Blanco, staple fish for the people of Ajijic, dried up and died
So that folks far away in Mexico City could drink and water their lawns.
Today I live and work with words,
Turning ideas about Water into money for Water projects
My home, powered by the sun and the wind
Is in this ancien semi arid region called the San Luis Valley
A vast high near-desert plain a mile and a half above the sea level of my birth
A dry place of sage and piñon pine cupped between the Sangre de Cristo
And the San Juan ranges of the Rockies
Far from my tropical birthplace of Faaa,
I live today on the eastern rim of the upper Rio Grande Basin.
I drink clean good water pumped from the well I made, almost 300 feet deep
This is a place which struggles to keep its Water
Where wars over diminishing supplies of Water are waged in Denver court rooms
Between those who first claimed its use,
Forming Colorado’s water laws of prior appropriation
And those whose deep wells and hard work turned a desert into circles of plenty
Cornucopias of alfalfa, potato, barley, spinach, and wheat
Whose watery dominion has only now, in reluctant recognition, been curtailed
Allowing us to give a little of what’s due back to the deep aquifers underground
Beneath the ancient drinking places of elk, coyote, eagle
Beginning the long process of re-wetting the ancient wetlands of today’s Trinchera
Beginning the long process of re-greening the thirsty springtime sage and piñon
Beginning the long process of re-flowing the Culebra village acequias
Anticipating ag-transfers and trans-basin exports to metropolitan Front Range cities
Anticipating drought, global climate change, and the fallowing of irrigated lands
Anticipating the long process of consideration,
pause
and
thought
About water...
Agua.

Dedicated, in preparation, to the Year 2012, The Year of Water