The essential connection between humans and nature
My wife Lupa really liked this book and I was curious myself to see what it was about. Nature and the Human soul examines nature and how it informs and otherwise nourishes the human soul. The author breaks up the human life into eight stages and relates a concept of nature to each stage of human development. The author's argument is that we need to cultivate an ecocentric relationship with nature and each other as opposed to a selfish egocentric relationship.


After reading this book, I will say that I have a renewed appreciation of nature and why it's important to have activities in one's life that involves doing something to foster a relationship with nature. I'm not talking about a walk in the park or even a hike in a forest either...I'm talking more along the lines of actively being a steward of nature. In this book, the author argues that we need to bring nature back into our cultural practices so that we can build spiritual and community practices that focus on the well-being of all, as opposed to the material well-being of humans. The author uses different stages of human development to show what can be done during each stage of development to build such practices.


One thing which works against the efficacy of this book is the lack of exercises. While the author makes an excellent argument for integrating into a person's spiritual and community practices, he doesn't offer much in the way of practical exercises to show how this can be done. The theory is in place, but the practice also needs to be instituted to really make the concepts in this book workable.


Four out of Five stars.

Meaningful guidance from a learned soul scholar
Nature and the Human Soul reflects 25 years of Bill Plotkin's work, life, service, knowledge, experience, and imagination. In its pages I discovered what I'd been seeking for some time: meaningful guidance from a learned soul scholar, astute insights on how to integrate the paths of enlightenment and sustainability, and a depth brilliance all around. I went on to attend one of his workshops through the Animas Valley Institute and was mesmerized by his vision and model for recognizing and respecting souls in growth and community.

Lotus Guide Magazine Review
Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World
By Bill Plotkin

Going from being egocentric to ecocentric in today's world means that we need to evolve from being our traditionally aggressive, competitive consumer selves and to create a sustainable society by evolving into our authentic adult selves, who can live in harmony with the world around us. While reading Nature and the Soul, it's easy to see that we are first and foremost citizens of Earth; our global problems have no national boundaries or racial or religious differences. To every season there is a time, and our time to grow up as a global society is now...this is not a choice.

Rahasya Poe, Lotus Guide magazine ([...])

Essential reading for our time
In Nature and the Human Soul, Bill Plotkin has written an essential guide for conscious humans who care about the earth and the future of the earth at this time. It is a wonderful book that is inclusive for all cultures.
Not only has Plotkin mapped a clear path for people to follow, but he has done this with such articulate beauty that he inspire in me a passionate longing to fulfill my human potential. Nature and the Human Soul sings with beautiful quotes, honoring the earth and teaching us how we can make manifest a positive future for humans living in harmony with the earth. I found inspiration and hope on almost every page.
He writes" "Humans have received an inestimable gift. To be alive in this beautiful - self-organizing universe - to participate in the dance of life with senses to experience it.
The great open secret of gratitude is that it is not dependent on external circumstance. It is like a setting or channel that we can switch to at any moment, no matter what is going on around us. It helps us to connect to our basic right to be on this beautiful planet, like the breath does. It's a stance of the soul. Gratitude is the kernel that can flower into everything we need to know. Thankfulness loosens the grip of industrialized growth society by contradicting its predominant message: that we are insufficient and inadequate; that we need to be fearful. The forces of late capitalism continually tell us we need more - more stuff, more money, more approval, more comfort, more entertainment. The dissatisfaction it breeds is profound. It infects people with a compulsion to acquire that delivers humans into the cruel, humiliating bondage of debt. Gratitude is liberating. It is subversive. It helps us to realize that we are sufficient, and that realization frees us. Elders of indigenous cultures have retained this knowledge and we can learn from their practice".
Reading this book and living its lessons can start to heal the planet and change the world so that all of the earth's people can live in abundance, freedom and peace. If you read only one book this year, I recommend Bill Plotkin's Nature and the Human Soul.

Finding One's Ultimate Place in the World

Based on a small ad in the Omega Institute catalogue in late 1997, I called someone named Bill Plotkin (who at the time essentially was Animas Valley Institute), and quite as a surprise to me, applied and was accepted for the April 1998 "Spring Canyonlands Quest" in southeastern Utah, did several months of required prep work, and went. Based on that 10-day experience, I spent another 20+ days with Bill and others over the next five years, engaging dreams, Shadow, ceremony, wandering in nature, befriending the dark and other practices under his guidance. So, "caveat lector"--this review may be biased.

As a reader, I allowed myself to be vulnerable to the gentle, fierce guidance within these pages, and open to wild celebration, essential grief, the possibility of completing unfinished tasks, and a deeper understanding of my true place and trajectory on the planet during the time I have. In addition to his wonderful eloquence in the nuts and bolts of soulcentric development, Bill delivers the goods in a poetic prose that speaks to his intimacy with the languages of both nature and words.

The soul-and-nature-based focus of Nature and the Human Soul and the eco-soulcentric developmental wheel at its core are welcome, needed and timely complements to and commentaries on a wide range of what I find to be invaluable, valid and essential developmental models and practices, including Susanne Cook-Greuter's Leadership Maturity Framework (LMF, aka SCTi-MAP), Don Beck's ongoing research and activism with the late Clare Graves' research under the name of Spiral Dynamics Integral, Genpo Roshi's wonderfully blasphemous Big Mind process, and Ken Wilber's continually evolving AQAL framework and his commitment to recognizing and including all that belongs in this very, very big story.

What Bill has done here is remind us, in a very remarkable way, of the cycle of human life within the context of the natural world, of which much of industrial-information-age society has forgotten it is a part. His loving suggestions for parents and children in early (the Innocent in the Nest) and middle (the Explorer in the Garden) childhood alone make the book an essential read. His subsequent guidance through early and late adolescence, adulthood and elderhood, while soul-centered, comes from a generous and wise heart.