Göran Gennvi

I met Göran Gennvi in Stockholm through my Danish friend and futurist, Lene Rachel Andersen. Göran is a sustainability expert and management consultant who focuses on bringing leaders into nature to learn how to be more effective leaders. He is the founder of Nature Academy Learning Lab and he has devoted more than three decades to “Nature Quests” that blend ecology and executive leadership development. He describes himself as a young man having been “hot tempered” until a friend shared yoga fire breathing exercises that brought him to a transcendental place, experiencing the vastness of the universe and his place in it. He said that experience changed everything in his life from that point forward. This along with his strong connection to planet earth led to him specializing in taking CEO’s and other executives into nature to experience a different approach to their leadership. I love that he once had what he describes as a very famous CEO who upon lying back on a mountain looking up at the clouds exclaimed “This is the way I would like to feel when I make decisions.” Göran’s great wish is that we would all understand the sacredness of planet earth and to learn from nature how to exist in this world. 

Historically, my own spirituality was not tied to earth and the environment much. That changed as I spent more and more time for Portraits in Faith with indigenous and Aboriginal elders. They spoke to me about the rock as the uncle and the tree as the grandfather. They spoke to me about a sacred relationship with animals. I began to understand that all of God’s creation was on a journey together, not just all of humanity. Then I was fortunate to take the “Seminary of the Wild” workshop at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico led by Wild Church Network leader, Reverend Victor Loorz. We explored concepts of “Wild Self, Wild Earth, and Wild Christ” with the goal of returning to nature as spiritual practice. I see these very same ideas emerging in Rabbi Jamie Korngold’s Adventure Judaism in Boulder, Colorado. I have now come to see that we cannot divorce care for the earth from care for ourselves and each other. That there is no spirituality without treating the earth as sacred. I am grateful to Göran Gennvi for devoting his life to these concepts.