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Rooted Action: Starhawk & Rae Abileah

Earth, Spirit, and Collective Empowerment

Recorded live at a SAND Gathering on September 13, 2026

In a time of profound ecological and social upheaval, we are invited to remember something ancient: we are not separate from the living world. The Earth is not a backdrop to our lives, but the ground from which we arise, and a source of wisdom for navigating profound change.

Author, activist, permaculture teacher, and elder wisdom keeper Starhawk joins Rae Abileah to explore how earth-based spirituality, ritual, imagination, and the wisdom of living systems can help us meet this moment.

Following each film in SAND's The Eternal Song series, we hear a recurring question, particularly from people of European descent: how do we reconnect with land, ancestry, and the sacred? How do we live in meaningful allyship with Indigenous peoples while recovering our own earth-based ways of knowing? Starhawk's life and work offer possibilities. Rooted in Pagan earth-based practice while honoring her Jewish ancestry, her journey has carried her from ritual circles and permaculture communities to accompaniment in Palestine and engagement with Indigenous land protection movements.

After more than five decades exploring spirituality, ecology, and social transformation, Starhawk is asking a new question: what would a regenerative movement look like? And how might we move beyond simply resisting what is broken to cultivating belonging, agency, resilience, joy, and new possibilities for life?

Together, Rae and Starhawk explore what living systems teach us about transformation, how spirituality and strategy can nourish one another, and how imagination helps us practice futures that do not yet exist. They consider how to keep ancestral and ecological intelligence alive amid the rise of artificial intelligence, and how to remain awake to profound injustice without surrendering our capacity for beauty, relationship, pleasure, and joy.

Topics

  • 00:00 Welcome, Rosh Hashanah, and 25 years since 9/11
  • 00:09 What renews her: a solidarity economy in Guinea
  • 00:14 Why Earth Activist Training brings permaculture and organizing together
  • 00:17 Spiritual practice as survival tool and political strategy
  • 00:21 What nature is telling her, and the fight over data centers
  • 00:24 Ancestral intelligence in an age of artificial intelligence
  • 00:25 Reading the Bible in its Mesopotamian context
  • 00:31 Reclaiming Judaism from nationalism
  • 00:39 Where to begin, and the fire ritual
  • 00:43 Cultural appropriation, and Standing Rock
  • 00:49 Composting the patriarchy
  • 00:53 The Movement We Need: safety, belonging, value, agency, meaning

Starhawk

Author, activist, permaculture designer and teacher, and one of the most influential voices in contemporary earth-based spirituality and ecofeminism. She is the author or co-author of thirteen books and a co-founder of Reclaiming. She directs Earth Activist Training, teaching permaculture design grounded in spirit with a focus on activism.

Books mentioned

  • The Spiral Dance
  • The Empowerment Manual
  • The Fifth Sacred Thing and its sequel City of Refuge
  • Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery
  • Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics

Rae Abileah

Social change strategist, Jewish faith leader, facilitator, and former co-director of CodePINK. She connects relational threads across the SAND team and helps create resources supporting The Eternal Song film series.

Also in the conversation

Standing Rock, 2016, and what Starhawk found at the gate: here you enter a place of prayer and ceremony.

The fire chant from her Sonoma County land: Sacred fire that shapes this land, summer teacher, winter friend, protect us as we learn anew, to work, to heal, to live with you.

The five core emotional needs she names as the foundation of movement building: safety, belonging, value, agency, and meaning.

The Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, referenced in the discussion of moving beyond call-out culture.

Penny Livingston, with whom Starhawk co-founded Earth Activist Training.

From SAND

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