Earthkeepers: A Circlewood Podcast on Creation Care and Spirituality · Forrest Inslee

Earthkeeping for Families: A Forest Restoration Story | Ep. 133

·49 min·3 clips

Mary describes resistance to opening Cheasty and the claim that humans should not be in the woods.

The episode revisits an archive conversation from Season 4 while the production team takes a break and recenters the DeYoung family's place-based ecological advocacy. It opens with the show's familiar invitation to people who want new and better ways to love and care for the Earth. The family describes choosing to take action together, turning ecological concern into a shared practice. Their story is framed as advocacy for the ecology of their place. The conversation keeps coming back to damaged or neglected spaces and the possibility of turning them into thriving ecologies. It links that work to community formation, since the project draws people together around meetings, shared labor, and common responsibility. One of the clearest moments comes when the children describe looking forward to community gatherings because they also meant time in the woods with friends and neighbors. That overlap between social trust and ecological repair gives the episode its shape. The hosts also push into the language people use when they talk about a forest having spirit or about an ecology being treated almost like a person with rights. Rather than flattening that idea, the conversation asks how carefully it has to be handled in different settings. The family explains that some contexts can hold that language more easily than others. Home meetings allow for a more relaxed shared vocabulary. Public spaces require more translation. The project has taken them into gymnasiums, town halls, and mayor's offices, so the vocabulary of care has to travel. That travel becomes part of the witness. The episode also keeps spiritual life in view, since for many listeners in this community Earth care is not separate from faith. Its tone stays warm and patient, with the emphasis on repair, kinship, and learning how to speak responsibly about place. The result is a story that treats family action as both practical and theological. It leaves the listener with a sense that restoration is not only about land, but about the people who learn to care together.

As heard by us

A grounded family story about place-based advocacy, where Earth care sits inside family and spiritual life.

Earthkeeping for Families keeps its focus on the DeYoung family as they try to act on behalf of the place they live in, and the ordinary scale of that effort is what makes it work.

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Why you'd press play

A family story about taking action for the ecology of their place, with care that reaches from home into public life.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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