Paths of Song – Dr. Efrat Levi – Online Lecture

A special lecture in honor of the autumn Urban Nature Month celebrated by the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality, exclusively for members of the DigiTel Benefits Club.

A lecture by Dr. Efrat Levy.

For fifty thousand years, Aboriginal people maintained a culture of migration, hunting, and gathering on the Australian continent. They preserved this culture by passing it down orally, thousands of years after most of the world’s people had settled and adopted the permanence of the garden, farm, village, or city, successively undergoing the Agricultural Revolution—with the domestication of plants and animals and the invention of writing—and afterward the Industrial Revolution—with the invention of the engine, the capitalist economy, and the central presence of the clock and the printing press.

Groundbreaking studies reveal this culture’s impressive achievements: an exceptionally high quality of life, a diverse diet, supportive social connections, meaningful engagement with religious and spiritual experiences, and a religious and social system centered on cooperation, tolerance, and ecological responsibility. Researchers agree that all these derive from meticulous and intimate knowledge of the environment.

But what does this knowledge mean?

The lecture will explore the Aboriginal people’s complex and fascinating conception of the environment. We will discuss the following questions: How does one “read” a landscape? How does the land serve as a sacred book of sustainability? How does attentive awareness of mountains, streams, trees, and wetlands provide self-identity, ongoing development, and guidance for a meaningful life? How does walking carry with it active care for creation? How is the “law of living together” embedded in the contours of the landscape? How does land that is “sung to” teach tolerance and dialogue between different othernesses?

Dr. Efrat Levy

Lecturer in philosophy, deep ecology, the study of religions, environmental ethics, therapeutic gardening, and ecotherapy. She researches and develops “Ecosophy”: a transdisciplinary synthesis between revolutionary and groundbreaking scientific theories and ancient insights, as a foundation for seeking new practical ways to address educational, therapeutic, and social issues in contemporary reality.

She teaches ecosophy in the Environmental Education master’s degree track and the Therapeutic Gardening program at Kibbutzim College, in the Gardening and Open-Space Psychotherapy track at Oranim College, and provides training and consultation to educators and therapists in this field.

A Zoom link and reminder will be sent to registrants on the day of the lecture.

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