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Back to Earth supports young people from all walks of life to connect deeply with the natural world. Our programs empower youth to cultivate a curious and reverent relationship to nature as a vital source of joy and well being.
Since 2015 we have taken hundreds of teens and young adults on transformative adventures in wild places all over California. We teach skills that expand young people's knowledge base and ability to care for themselves and each other. Our guides offer skilled mentorship, helping young people navigate the transitions of adolescence towards lives of purpose and authenticity.
Back to Earth has been a labor of love from the beginning. The organization's founders, Eli Marienthal and Jesse Sachs, have been friends since they were students at Berkeley High, where they bonded over a shared love of wilderness and the arts. Reflecting on their own journeys through adolescence they began asking: “What did we need when we were teenagers? What kinds of relationships with peers and mentors did we long for, and where would we have found them?” From this inquiry, and with the guidance of their teachers and elders, Back to Earth has grown into
one of Northern California’s premier youth wilderness immersion and rites of passage organizations.
We are committed to expanding access to the wilderness. No teen will be turned away for lack of funds. Learn More links to Tuition Assistance section on WILD page]
We are committed to being a culturally relevant point of entry to the outdoors. We offer programming that is appropriate for youth of all backgrounds and levels of experience.
We are committed to uplifting our participant community by offering pathways for ongoing training and employment.
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We believe in the transformative power of spending time close to the earth. Our primary teaching tool, therefore, is simply to be in nature.
We take care of what we love, and we love what we know, so a core element of Back to Earth's approach is to develop what we call a close, personal relationship with the natural world. This kind of relationship is nourishing for us as humans, and ensures that we treat the world around us with love and respect.
"The wisdom and skill of those who studied the universe first hand, by direct knowledge and experience, for millennia, both inside and outside themselves, is what we might call the Old Ways." - Gary Snyder
We are also steeped in ways of seeing and relating to the natural world that might broadly be called "the Old Ways." Over the years, we have developed relationships with elders and mentors who have shared with us and trained us, whose teachings and ceremonies underlie much of what we do.
We are indebted to people of many indigenous cultures for sharing their ways. We endeavor to share what has been shared with us in a good way, acknowledging the origins when we can, as well as the complexities of these exchanges.
We teach that our original instructions as people are to honor with gratitude all elements of creation, remembering that our lives come from the earth, from the elements, and from our relationships to the natural world. Gratitude is the first step to finding ourselves and mending our world. From practices of thanksgiving, to gratitudes shared around a fire, to the spontaneous outbursts of thanks let loose as we navigate over mountains, building a culture where gratitude is flowing and explicit is at the heart of all we do.
We celebrate joy as an essential expression of our healthy humanity and one of the beautiful gifts we can offer ourselves our communities and our world. We teach that there is joy in exertion, in testing our limits, in wildness; in defamiliarizing the mundane and becoming familiar with the mysterious. In service of joy we sing, we dance, we play, we swim. Cultivating joy nourishes our life force and makes us capable of being truly of benefit to others.
We make meaning in our lives by taking time to pay attention, especially to what is happening internally. A rich interior life is a birthright of all people, though it is often squandered in the busy pursuit of external validation and immediate gratification. We teach that life is enhanced immeasurably by being both aware of our emotional landscapes and being able to navigate them with skill and purpose.
We cherish honesty in all of its many forms. Honesty with one's self is the root of personal accountability. Honesty with others is the foundation of healthy relationships. When we speak our truth it nourishes our own life force and give others permission to speak theirs.
