Marc Lapin
Q: What is your role within New Perennials?
A: My role within New Perennials is to teach the Perennial Turn class. I’ve also worked with planning agroforestry projects on College lands. My role is primarily to educate but also to connect by suggesting partners and by thinking about who might be interested and would be good potential people to reach out to within our region.
I played a big role, and Bill is always very gracious about saying so, in bringing the project here. The premises of the project are things that I have thought about for a long time. Being able to help host New Perennials here has been really nourishing to me.
Q: What drew you to New Perennials? How did you first become involved?
A: I first became involved in ecosphere studies. Nan Jenks Jay, dean of Environmental Affairs at the time, knows me well and knows my interests. When Wes Jackson approached Middlebury College, neither Nan nor Helen Young, professor of plant biology, were able to go to this conference at The Land Institute. When Nan asked if I was interested in attending, it was an immediate yes. I read New Roots for Agriculture in the early eighties, and I’ve always wanted to meet Wes Jackson and see The Land Institute and learn more about what they’ve been doing.
The idea of transforming and growing environmental studies from what it traditionally has been, and still is, into something more integrated and holistic appeals to me. I don’t love the word “environmental.” I don’t consider myself an environmentalist, because etymologically and conceptually “environment” denotes an object (usually a human or group of humans) and separates it from the surroundings, from everything else. I don’t like that framing at all; we are all part of and radically interconnected with a living Earth, both the parts currently thought of as biotic and those considered non-alive, or abiotic. The idea of ecosphere studies and thinking about things from an eco-philosophical perspective really appeals to me as well. It was a pretty natural fit. I am a land-based person who does things on the land and with the land.
Once I got to the first ecosphere studies conference at The Land Institute and started hearing Wes and others talk, I realized our connectedness. There is a web and a lineage that appears. My mentor Burt Barnes and Wes Jackson were part of that lineage, which includes Stan Rowe, a Canadian forest landscape ecologist who influenced Wes, Burt, and by extension, me.
Q: What are some of the meaningful learnings, unlearnings, and relearnings you have explored as part of the NP team?
A: The biggest continual learning for me is the Buddhist concept of “no thinking.” I am thinking about how to be and get out of my head and become unattached to the specific concepts and ideas that I’ve learned through my many acculturations. I have been working to become open, accepting, and curious. I am trying to lead with curiosity.
The continual unlearning of leading with curiosity has been a big challenge. We just read Feibleman’s piece on culture and ontology in class, and I have been trying to unlearn my preconceptions about why any person might think the way they do about anything. I am curious about trying to understand where those ideas come from, what the many meanings and different interpretations and different responses (behaviors) might be in various personal, societal, and cultural contexts. I am trying to play into the diversity and emergence from different perspectives—and trying to envision trajectories for healing people and Earth.
I use the term “learning anew” in class because relearning can sound like you are doing something again—relearning something you forgot. Words and language can seem fraught and inadequate, so sometimes I ask: Do I want to use that specific term? I love the thinking that all the students, interns, Bill, Nadine, I, and now Lisa are doing on wording. How does what we are learning together reflect back? My favorite aspect of New Perennials is the imagining and the co-creating of what it could really be like if we had different ways of thinking, being, and doing that were not based on annual disturbance, surplus agriculture. There is no going back to hunting and gathering; we are in continual change, and not having surplus food now with our human population and complicated systems would be disastrous for people.
Together we ask and learn from each other: How can we learn from this history? How can we change in a context that’s respectful, reciprocal with Earth and all life, and nurturing and nourishing of ourselves and a diversity of communities? How can we blend knowings from contemporary Western science and the many other valid understandings and knowings that exist? It’s learning anew. It's co-creating based on all these diverse views, understandings, and cosmologies, and with these billions of people who now live and who have lived. It’s continually bringing learning anew to this question: What could our potential be? To use the terminology of Joanna Macy, it is important to have something that is life-sustaining and life-nourishing, and not detrimental to or causing extinctions of other species and functions in this Earth that we are all part of.
Q: What is one way that you go about seeking joy that might surprise someone who didn’t know you very well?
A: I love to walk in the fields or sit beside flowing or still water with one of my drums and start to drum, maybe chant, and express myself. That is one of my practices of reciprocity.
Marc Lapin is Associate Laboratory Professor of Environmental Studies at Middlebury College where his teaching focuses on socioecological systems, ecology, the Perennial Turn, and land conservation. Marc is also the Middlebury College Lands Conservationist, coordinating and overseeing stewardship of Middlebury’s 6,000 acres of forest, wetland, and agricultural land leased to local farmers. As a consulting ecologist for nearly three decades, he works with state and federal agencies, conservation organizations, and private landowners. Exploring multiple ways of knowing, traditional ecological knowledge, ecophilosophies and Earth-based sacred practices, Marc has emerged as a leader at Middlebury in both contemplative pedagogies and place-based learnings.