Join Point Reyes National Seashore Association, Point Reyes Books, and M. Kat Anderson for a conversation about her new book I Sing to the Earth and She Sings Back. A donation of $10-$25 is encouraged for entry, which will support PRNSA’s conservation, education, and community builiding work. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Books will be available for purchase at the event.

About the Book

People are hungry for authentic connection with the natural world. Distracted by social media, made anxious by political turmoil and environmental crisis, obsessed with self and success, we are increasingly estranged from nature even as we recognize its potential for healing. Reconnecting with nature is not simply a matter of spending more time outdoors. Western consumer culture encourages us to view nature through a lens of separation. Whether inside or out, we direct our precious attention to concerns that often leave us more alienated from both the natural world and ourselves. We’ve lost contact with traditional, earth-based wisdom that can guide us back. This wisdom lives on in Indigenous cultures that pre-date colonialism and industrialization-and it lives on in our own bodies, which know, deep down, how to connect.

I Sing to the Earth and She Sings Back provides readers with practical, grounded tools for reclaiming earth-based wisdom. Each chapter explores a distinct pathway to intimacy with nature: slowing down to reimagine time; reawakening childlike wonder; seeing the sentience of other life forms; practicing reciprocity and partnership; attuning to seasonal and lunar cycles; and more. Throughout, M. Kat Anderson shares deep personal stories of her own quest to heal a sense of disconnection from the earth. As a non-Native author who has collaborated with California Indigenous elders for decades, she offers a perspective shaped by humility, curiosity, and a commitment to respectful engagement. In a voice both scholarly and soulful, she opens a door for non-Native readers seeking authentic belonging to nature without cultural appropriation.

About M. Kat Anderson

M. Kat Anderson is an ethnoecologist, writer, gardener, and gatherer dedicated to restoring relationships between people and native ecosystems. With a Ph.D. in Wildland Resource Science from UC Berkeley, she has spent over 25 years learning from Native American communities, integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with Western science. As the author of Tending the Wild, she highlights Indigenous stewardship practices essential for biodiversity, climate resilience, and cultural restoration. Her latest work, I Sing to the Earth and She Sings Back, explores how we can reimagine time, embrace reciprocity, and cultivate deep, healing relationships with the natural world through essays that examine the cyclical rhythms of life, the intelligence of other beings, and the wisdom of holistic perception.

Kat has co-edited two other books: Before the Wilderness and Forgotten Fires: Native Americans and the Transient Wilderness. Given ongoing biodiversity loss, climate change, and the escalating threat of wildfire in California and the West, the issues explored in these books are as important and relevant as ever. Kat’s writings have appeared in Wilderness Magazine, News from Native California, United Plant Savers Journal of Medicinal Plant Conservation, and numerous scientific journals and books.

Kat is currently focusing on restoring human relationships to the earth and its living things. This entails honoring and reviving the gathering and tending practices, ethical stances, and ways of being of pre-industrial cultures from around the world. Of particular importance to Kat are the practices of the Indigenous people of California and the Old Ways of her European cultural heritage. She is on the Board of Directors of Fibershed https://fibershed.org/, which works to unite farmers, ranchers, artisans, scientists, and others in textile programs which create community and are kind to the earth.

Kat lives in Redbud House, in Davis, California, where she is bringing wildness back to her garden and tending the plants native to the Central Valley and her other motherlands.

Accessibility Information – The Red Barn Classroom

This event is hosted at the Red Barn Classroom at Point Reyes National Seashore. The Red Barn Classroom is wheelchair accessible. There is accessible free parking and a ramp from the gravel lot to the classroom. There is an accessible restroom. Moderately cushioned chairs with arm rests will be arranged in either a circle or rows, depending on group size. They will be placed no closer than 6in to each other. All doors and windows at the Red Barn will be left open. A large HEPA air purifier will be left on. This event will not be offered on Zoom and at this time, we are not able to offer closed captioning.

Please email questions to Ashley Hebert at ashleyh@ptreyes.org.