Ma'ikwe Ludwig, director of Ecovillage Education U.S., will present Carleton’s convocation address on Friday, January 22 from 10:50 to 11:50 a.m. in the Skinner Memorial Chapel. Carleton convocations are free and open to the public. The presentations are recorded and archived for online viewing at go.carleton.edu/convo/.
Ludwig is based at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage (www.dancingrabbit.org), a 70-member intentional community set amidst the rolling hills of northeastern Missouri. Since its founding in 1994, Dancing Rabbit has grown into a vibrant demonstration project by opening its doors to the world, showing how humans can simultaneously improve their quality of life while lessening their footprint on the planet. As a destination for sustainability education, Dancing Rabbit provides an immersive experience for students to see the curriculum come alive in the daily patterns of life in an ecovillage.
Ludwig is the author of Passion as Big as a Planet, bringing together her main passions: sustainability, spirituality and personal growth, and community. Ludwig’s life is about healing the divides our culture creates: between beauty and practicality, spirituality and action, service and love of life, reverence and humor, and hard work and healthy boundaries.
The EDE curriculum has been a powerful tool for her to refine her thinking on sustainability and begin sharing a deeper understanding with others. Since her first involvement with teaching the course in 2007 in New Mexico, it has been a main passion of hers to make the course widely available in North America.
Ludwig began teaching sustainability courses in 1991 while on the staff of Project Grow Community Gardens in Ann Arbor, MI. Since then, she has worked for a half dozen non-profit organizations doing outreach and creating educational programs for a wide range of ages. In 1996, she joined her first Intentional Community and has lived in and developed communities ever since. She currently lives at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage with her 16-year-old son, where she built her own strawbale home, helps create new social systems and serves as the executive director of Dancing Rabbit’s nonprofit arm.
Ludwig’s work with communities has led her to the understanding that we can’t create real sustainability without the ability to cooperate well and a willingness to become different beings. Out of this lesson, Ludwig teaches consensus, facilitation and cooperative group dynamics. Her early activism work focused mainly on trying to get others to change; now she focuses more on personal growth as a key piece in embodying the change we want to see in the world, both individually and collectively.
This event is sponsored by Carleton College Convocations. For more information, including disability accommodations, call (507) 222-4308. The Skinner Memorial Chapel is located at the corner of College and First Streets in Northfield.
