Meet Richard Klein

I have always found myself drawn to nature. As a kid, I remember summer-long camping trips across North America. As an adult, I’ve often preferred exploring trailless routes up a valley rather than following a well-marked path. On a number of occasions, I’ve travelled alone into mountain wilderness on multi-day journeys, learning to trust, to observe, and to experience myself as part of the living world—not separate from it.

I believe that we have entered a new period of transition and ferment. Ecologies are under increased pressure from rising temperatures and new cycles of drought and flood. Disruptions buffet a global economy conditioned by 250 years of fossil fuels to expect continued exponential growth. We have attempted to wallpaper over economic disruption with expanding debt.

It is as if we are walking a precarious ridgeline through thick fog, the way ahead unclear. A kind of societal rite of passage is leading us away from what we have come to know and into a new territory, where our narratives and habitual ways of doing things no longer take us where we wish to go. In the pages that follow, I begin to fill in a new map of the terrain in which we find ourselves. My job as a guide is to clear a path through the fog so that we may see more clearly where we are. This map starts from the ground up—with the nervous system—and it upends conventional truths about who we are.

Like any good guide, I seek to lead this journey one purposeful step at a time, weaving information into a new pattern that speaks to our cognitive intelligence, and yet also lands in a new way in our bodies and distributed nervous systems.

I do not have academic credentials. Instead, I’ve assembled my own PhD in life. I became an expert generalist by following my passions and interests where they led. I was a suburban kid who grew up in Montreal and moved to the mountains of British Columbia in my late teens. While at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, I worked for Adrian Carr and her husband, Paul George. Adrian later became the leader of the Canadian Green Party. Our work involved building trails into remote wilderness areas in an attempt to preserve these places from industrial logging.

At twenty-one, I was homesteading on a remote acreage in the East Kootenays not far from Banff. Coming out of university, it felt important to learn how to do real things: grow food, build shelter, fix what was broken. I had picked up a book called How to Build a Timber Frame House, and with a small group of close friends, I learned to chisel mortise and tenon joints and carve knee braces secured in place by wooden dowels. That first home took me five years to complete, paid for by planting trees from mid-February through to early July in the logged-off cut blocks of British Columbia.

I started a family with my first wife, Alison. At twenty-six, I discovered a passion for gardening and tried my hand at farming with the purchase of 55 sheep. By thirty-one, I was running my own tree-planting company with over fifty employees, planting millions of seedlings per year across BC. By the time I hit thirty, I had three kids.

A PhD in life means learning from failures along with successes—each one a feedback loop offering us information about ourselves and the world. At thirty-three, my first marriage ended, and I was a single parent with three young boys under the age of six. Inexplicably, the difficult emotions that were stirred up brought me into a new relationship with my feeling world and the history I carried from my family. I saw that what was unconscious—whether in myself or others—could break things apart, no matter how much we wanted it to be otherwise. I followed a growing interest in understanding the hidden inner world we each carry, and began a four-year period of study in body-centered psychotherapy.

After the breakup, I moved to Nelson from the East Kootenays and, three years later, met the love of my life, Yogita Bouchard. She was a single parent with two young kids, and we jumped into a new life together as parents and stepparents of five children—what I called at the time “the full meal deal.” Together, we built a wellness centre in a renovated Victorian home near downtown, which included an indoor aquatic therapy pool for a specialty treatment called Watsu. Yogita ran the wellness spa, and we both worked in the warm water as aquatic therapists.

We later became part of a unique 151-acre land project, two kilometers from Nelson but surrounded on three sides by a provincial wilderness park. Thirty years later, eleven families collectively steward this land in one of the world’s few non-coastal rainforests.

We’ve had to learn to work together, honour differences, and repair disagreements. Our land community has grown stronger as a result.

On this land, I constructed a large lodge made of two joined circular domes, which became Mountain Waters Retreat Centre. While not large or prominent, the centre hosted gifted teachers like Gabor Maté, Eckhart Tolle, and Stephen Harrod Buhner. We offered programs on addiction, yoga, meditation, permaculture, and trauma-informed therapies. People came to reconnect with themselves and others. I was privileged to witness many who showed up with courage and vulnerability, intending to make peace with the past and move forward in new ways.

I learned to trust the beauty of working with nature—expanding gardens, caring for the forest, and placing structures on the land in ways that enhanced the feeling of interconnectedness rather than imposing upon it. Some guests began calling the retreat centre “The Shire.” Over fifteen years, I wore many hats: teacher, gardener, carpenter, host, parking attendant, and fill-in chef.

But between those early years and the time the pandemic shut the centre down, the very nature that nourished us began to shift. Increasing summer temperatures and erratic rainfall brought dense smoke-filled skies as BC recorded record fire seasons in 2017, again in 2018, and once more in 2023.

Sometimes you couldn’t even see Elephant Mountain across the valley. The acrid smoke made it difficult for some guests to breathe comfortably. At those times, the whole city of Nelson felt on edge.

I began working as a therapeutic counsellor in private practice. I enjoyed working one-on-one, forming a deeper kind of relationship than I had with retreat guests who came and went. In this setting, I focused on trauma held in the body—experiences that trigger deep-seated survival responses. The somatic therapy I practiced didn’t exclude the thinking mind but emphasized the older subcortical parts of the brain that connect us to the body, to emotion, and to the felt sense of safety that healing requires. As I immersed myself in this work, I became increasingly curious about how these same survival patterns were playing out in society at large. The somatic map I used with clients helped explain much of the anxiety and inertia I saw in our collective response to the worsening climate crisis.

As our kids grew, Yogita and I became grandparents—nine times. Now, at age 65, I can see how all the tributaries of our lives flow into one river. The experiences we go through—some welcome, some not—all shape who we are. For me, those tributaries include a deep belief in nature-based learning, a commitment to helping others build capacity through difficulty, and a gnawing concern that the optimism of the early environmental movement has given way to collective sleepwalking as we drift toward climate destabilization.

In the spring of 2020, when COVID shut down the retreat centre, my old friend John Cathro and I launched the Youth Climate Corps (YCC). We had first discussed the idea three years earlier while ski-touring to a backcountry cabin. We imagined the YCC as a climate leadership incubator—offering young people wages and hands-on experience doing local climate mitigation and adaptation work. The goal was to develop leadership, agency, and capacity through real-world action.

Four years in, the YCC has become a province-wide youth climate leadership organization. This book began as a training manual for YCC participants. But as I wrote, I realized it needed to speak more broadly. In natural ecologies, everything is connected to everything else, whether we can see it or not. I discovered this is true in human culture, too.

The scope of what I wished to offer expanded. The connective tissue between culture and nature, healthy and unhealthy, grew clearer. This book presents a new map of where we find ourselves, inside and out. It’s an invitation to connect the dots in ways that offer deeper self-understanding and help us navigate toward the uncertain future that lies ahead.