What Mission Statement What We Do History Looking Forward Facilities Get Involved Employment Apprentices Contribute Teach Why Who Founders Stewards Fellows Advisory Board Supporters Honorary Members Faculty Heroes Where Programs Year at a Glance Calendar By Category By Instructor Past Programs When Year at a Glance Core Curriculum Seasonal Activities Register Register in Program Login to Account Gallery People Farm Woods River Lake Facilities Events News Store On Site On Line Links Contact		From Soil to Society: Celebrating the Essential Connections Between All Living Things             WHY               At the dawn of the new millennium we have somehow lost our way. We have even lost our ability to articulate that sense of loss, except in largely destructive and pathological ways. For the most part, we are not even fully conscious of the degree to which we have become abstracted from our true selves and alienated from the earth that has sustained us from the beginning of time, from the systems which produce the food we eat, the products we “consume”, or where they will end up once our interest in them wanes. Even the machines of war with which we assert our dominance and through which we declare our presence, however provisional, are less real to us than the video and computer games that distract us and entertain us. And we feel totally removed from the governments which declare our laws and command our allegiance. We - especially those of us in the affluent “West” - exist in electronic pseudo-communities in which all “communication” is mediated by automated voice prompters, web-masters, login protocols, security scanners and artificial personalities with whom we “interact” on-line. We do not grow the food we eat; we do not make the products we use or purchase; we do not have any active relationship with the institutions that determine and enforce the rules by which we claim to have agreed to abide. Someone else - someone far, far away with whom we have no bond and of whom we have no knowledge - grows our food, manufactures our goods and makes our laws.
		The alienation that has resulted from this way of being and of living is not or should not be terribly surprising to us. As we have become disconnected from the very systems that sustain, nourish, educate, govern and command us, we have become correspondingly disempowered, and commensurately disenchanted and disinterested. And with all of this disengagement, disempowerment and disinterest, has come a measure of disrespect and cynicism – disrespect for the earth that gives us life, cynicism about the capacity of our institutions to solve our most urgent social and economic challenges, and disregard for our neighbours – for one another.         We have lost our sense of the primordial connection between all things. In the process, we have lost touch with our own humanity, with our own creative faculties, with our potential to make, to do, to heal, to judge and to bond with others. We have, to varying degrees, abdicated our responsibility to think, to pronounce on what is just and to organize our affairs. We defer to “others” in all spheres of life. In part, this is a product of the commodification of all things including human activity, the emergence and rise of the cult of expertise in our society and the result of urbanization and of the sense of anonymity and irrelevance instilled by existence in the modern megatropolis.           Pollination Project is not “the answer” to the problem or to any of them. But, along with many other organizations, movements, social enterprises and mindful individuals around the world, Pollination Project is both a response to the phenomenon of alienation and its consequential disempowerment and is also an invitation to begin living mindfully, consciously, responsibly, generously and joyfully. It represents an effort to restore our sense of the primordial connection between all things.