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Emerge Values Podcast — Episode Summary
This episode features a conversation between host Burt Dallas and two guests — Doug Ross, a longtime educator and environmental advocate, and Lee Hall — exploring the values behind the Emerge framework (Empathy, Mindfulness, Ecological Integrity, Right action, Growth, Resilience and Endurance).
Key themes and stories:
- Community living at Folkways — Doug shares how downsizing to a continuing care community transformed his appreciation for community, mortality, and interconnection.
- Ecological stewardship — Doug describes building a native plant garden with neighbors, planting white oaks and river birch, creating a model forest connected through mycorrhizae, and attracting toads, bluebirds, and pollinators.
- The toad as a meditation — Lee recounts an Emerge/Quaker Earthcare Witness meditation centered on the American toad as a symbol of endurance, linking humans to 300 million years of amphibian life.
- Teaching environmental science — Doug reflects on decades of service-learning at Friends Central and inner-city schools, empowering students to tackle real issues like mercury labeling, stream health, and monarch butterfly habitats.
- The Hunger Project — Doug advocates for the organization’s sustainable, community-led approach to ending hunger, including a transformative trip to Malawi where a woman used a $60 microloan to build a business, house her family, and adopt five AIDS orphans.
- A Well Fed World — Lee introduces this plant-based hunger solution organization (awellfedworld.org) as a potential partner for The Hunger Project.
- Political engagement — Doug stresses the importance of staying politically active while practicing empathy, sharing a story of de-escalating a heated family argument about the 2020 election through love rather than confrontation.
- Benjamin Lay — Lee draws inspiration from this 18th-century Quaker abolitionist who lived sustainably in a cave, grew his own food, and embodied the Emerge values centuries before the framework existed.
Core message: All the Emerge values — empathy, mindfulness, ecological integrity, right action, resilience, and endurance — are interconnected and rooted in love. Whether through native gardens, classrooms, politics, or global hunger work, small consistent actions matter, and change comes by bringing people along rather than leaving them behind.