Eric Garza, Scholar, Hunter, Carpenter & Community Server: On Ways to Connect, Navigate and Integrate Plural Worlds

The Human Show: Innovation through Social Science

Eric Garza is the founder and primary instructor at Quillwood Academy, an online institution of higher learning dedicated to helping people throughout the English-speaking world learn to navigate the changing world in which we all live. His background is diverse, spanning ecology and evolution, environmental science and policy, ecological economics, and systems thinking. Eric has also invested years learning and practicing place-based living skills, and mentors people in subsistence skills such as bow and arrow making, hunting and fishing, and gathering a wide array of edible and medicinal plants. He also teaches part-time in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Vermont.

Today’s episode is about opening to the world and to the self and attempting to connect the two in the pursuit of a meaningful life. In sharing his story, Eric takes us along in a reflection on how to be vulnerable and to dig deep in the pursuit of oneself.

• How to be equally a scholar, hunter, carpenter, community server and more?
• How does he find the balance between service for others and care for the self?
• How has he integrated his part-time academic self to his other selves and how does he monitor his own biases within his academic endeavours?
• Listen to the episode to hear more about it.

(PLEASE NOTE: This conversation touches on trauma, including intergenerational trauma, suicide, and mental health).

Mentioned in Podcast:

Quillwood Academy

Quillwood Podcast

We will dance with mountains, course by Bayo Akomolafe

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Eric’s bio