We seek peace in our own lives through meditation and the study of the Dharma (the traditional Buddhist teachings). We contribute to peace in our communities through ecological restoration, as a remedy for some of the violence done by development.
At our Wild Plant Nursery and the field sites that it serves, we work to conserve the native plant communities of the greater Washington region, home to one of the richest floras in eastern North America. Our Tree Bank / Hispaniola is conserving the forests of central Hispaniola, the richest surviving remnant of the Caribbean forest biome, a global biodiversity hotspot.
We see ecological restoration as essential to conservation because many natural areas are now too small and isolated to persist over the long term in their current state. In the greater Washington region, we are reestablishing forests and meadows on degraded sites. In central Hispaniola, our Tree Bank farmers are replanting native forest on their lands.
Help our Tree Bank farmers expand their forest-friendly coffee! Our Rising Forests Coffee is conserving forest and improving small-farm incomes along the Dominican Republic – Haiti border. But to expand our brand, we need a storage facility. Help us build one! Learn more ...
The Earth Sangha is a nonprofit charity based in the Washington, DC, area and devoted to ecological restoration. We work in the spirit of Buddhist practice, but our members and volunteers come from a wide variety of religious and secular backgrounds.
In the Washington area, we operate an ecological restoration program to restore native forests and meadows, stabilize streams, and control invasive alien plants.
On the island of Hispaniola, along the Dominican Republic – Haiti border, we operate the Tree Bank, which helps impoverished farmers improve their incomes and restore native forest.
In addition to our environmental work, we host regular meditation sessions in the Washington area, along with discussions of the Dharma (the traditional Buddhist teachings). These sessions are free and open to all.
Our spring plant sale raised over $15,500, nearly all of it for restoration work on Fairfax County parkland. For details, see the News page entry for May 6.
Our Wild Seed Campaign was a big success! We raised about $14,000 and increased our wild native seed accessions more than ten-fold. (Posted on December 13.)
Our Rising Forests Coffee is featured in the Worldwatch Institute's "Nourishing the Planet" blog! (Posted on October 4.)
To learn more about the Earth Sangha's mission and how we are organized, look through the About Us page.
To see some results of our field work, run the Site Visit slide show.
If you are interested in the plight of tropical forests, take a look at our Tree Bank / Hispaniola page.
To get a sense for our restoration activities in the Washington, DC, region, read any of our DC-area field site pages, such as that for the Native Arboretum. You might also like to look at our Wild Plant Nursery page, since the nursery is the heart of our DC-area field work.
If you live in the Washington area and would like to participate in our field work, check out our Volunteer and Field Schedule pages.
If you would like to meditate with us, read the Meditation page.
To find out about our recent activities, check our News page, or join us on Face Book.
Volunteer! Help out at our DC-area nursery and field sites.
Check out our DC-area field schedule.
Meditate: Participate in our Alexandria sittings.
Join us! Become a member of the Sangha.
See what your donation will do: click the "What Your Donation Will Do" tab on the Join page.
Earth Sangha
10123 Commonwealth Blvd.
Fairfax, VA 22032-2707
Please note: this is our business address. It is not the address of the Wild Plant Nursery. Click here for driving directions to the nursery.
(703) 764-4830 (phone)
(703) 562-8388 (fax)
Visit us on Facebook.
Welcome to our new website! We hope you like it. It went live on August 27.
Our website is best viewed with the Firefox, Chrome, or Safari web browsers. It will also work with current versions of Internet Explorer. (It will not display properly with Internet Explorer version 6 or earlier.) Comments on the site may be sent to info@earthsangha.org.
Nearly all of the documents on this website are in pdf format. For the most recent version of the free Adobe pdf reader, click here.
The banner image (the image above the menu bar) is adapted from a photo taken in our Tree Bank / Hispaniola project area, on the Dominican side of the central-northern reach of the Dominican Republic – Haiti border. The photo shows a misty hillside in early morning. View the full photo.
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Wilma, a young Tree Bank colleague (Dominican Republic).
Restoring forest groundlayer (Virginia).
Building a stormwater checkdam at Meadowood (Virginia).
Tommy and Gaspar at our Tree Bank Nursery (Dominican Republic).
Matt installing an invasives-control test plot (Virginia).
Tending spicebush at our Wild Plant Nursery (Virginia).
A two-year-old Hispaniolan pine planting (Dominican Republic).
Restored habitat at our Native Arboretum project (Virginia).
Replanting riparian forest (Virginia).
Cosme in his riparian restoration zone (Dominican Republic).
A wet-meadow restoration project (Virginia).
Clearing alien paperbark mulberry (Virginia).
Seeds of an endangered mahogany (Dominican Republic).
Nikki pots “fernlets” at our greenhouse (Virginia).
Lisa collecting native grass seed (Virginia).
Polyculture on a Tree Bank farm (Dominican Republic).
Creating the River of Native Grass at Meadowood (Virginia).
A red maple emerges from its tree tube (Virginia).
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Above: Some scenes from our life and work.
Read the most recent issue of our newsletter, the Acorn. Click the Acorn cover to open a pdf file.
Join our mailing list and we'll send you our quarterly newsletter. Mail from us is infrequent but, we hope, informative. (We don't do high volume mailing—and we never share or sell addresses.) Click the photo to send us your information. (The photo shows volunteers distributing stock on a restoration site.)
Join Lisa's e-mail list. Once or twice a week, Lisa sends out notes on the Sangha's work and practice. Lisa is our Dharma Teacher and a Force of Nature in the field. (The latter term is not exactly a title but maybe it should be.) Click the photo for more information on Lisa's list. (The photo shows Lisa and students organizing a planting at our Native Arboretum.)
See some results! Click the photo to open a slide show of "before" and "after" shots documenting progress on our field sites. (The photo shows a four-year-old sweetgum planting.)
Volunteer with us in the field! Volunteering is a great way to meet people and to learn more about the natural areas of the greater DC region. Click the photo for more information. (The photo shows a stream-buffer planting event.)
Learn to meditate. Our weekly meditation sessions in Alexandria, Virginia, are free and open to all. Click the photo for more information. (The photo shows meditation mats set out for one of our sittings.)
The Earth Sangha has been recognized by the Catalogue for Philanthropy of Greater Washington as "one of the best small charities" in the Washington region. Click the logo to go to our Catalogue page.