Founded in 1997, the Earth Sangha is a nonprofit public charity based in the Washington, DC, area and committed to practical environmental action as an expression of the Buddhist way of life. (“Sangha” is a Buddhist term for congregation or community.) A description of our commitment is available in our Vision Statement.

Our Work in the DC Area

The Earth Sangha operates a volunteer-based ecological restoration program for the greater DC area. We help stabilize streams, control invasive alien plants, and restore forests, meadows, and wetlands. We also work with local schools on environmental education and schoolyard greening projects.

At the heart of our DC-area restoration work is our Wild Plant Nursery, where we are growing over 200 species of native trees, shrubs, vines, and herbs (nonwoody plants), all from seeds and spores that we ourselves collect from local natural areas. (We collect only with permission.) Our nursery is by far the most comprehensive effort in the DC area to grow native plants from their local wild populations. The use of locally-derived stock is important in ecological restoration because that helps preserve genetic diversity and local adaptation in the species planted.

We work with a wide range of institutional and corporate partners, including government agencies, companies that provide volunteer opportunities for their employees, landscaping firms, other nonprofits, and schools. A list of our regular major partners is available below.

We also work with large numbers of volunteers—over 500 people per year. All of our field work is designed for public participation, as a venue for environmental education.

In addition to our ecological restoration work, we host weekly meditation sessions and discussions about what it means to live in a thoughtful way. Our practice derives from Zen Buddhism, but our sessions are nondenominational, informal, free, and open to anyone who wants to meditate. We do not proselytize; we think that meditation can help anyone, and we have no interest in converting people to Buddhism specifically.

The Tree Bank

In 2006, we founded the Tree Bank / Hispaniola, an agroforestry program focussed on a portion of the Dominican Republic – Haiti border. The Tree Bank is working to improve the incomes of local farmers, and to help restore the region’s native forests. We work on the Dominican side of the border but we hope that, eventually, our project will help both countries.

The Dominican Republic contains the Caribbean’s largest surviving forests; these forests are major components of the Caribbean global biodiversity hotspot. (Hotspots are endangered natural regions that contain very high species diversity.) Our project region along the border is an ecologically strategic place to work because it is on a deforestation front: its forests are unraveling but many valuable fragments remain. The Tree Bank is socially strategic as well: through agroforestry, financing, and marketing, we are helping impoverished small-holder farmers earn money by restoring forest. There are hundreds of millions of such small-holder farmers thoughout the rural tropics, and they control vast areas of forest, degraded forest, and formerly forested land.

Chris Bright is a co-founder of the Earth Sangha, its President, and a member of its board. Before taking a full-time position with the Sangha in 2004, Chris was a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, a research organization that tracks global environmental and social trends. Chris is the author of numerous articles and one book, Life Out of Bounds: Bioinvasion in a Borderless World, the first global, interdisciplinary study of biological invasion written for a general audience.

Lisa Bright is a co-founder of the Sangha, its Executive Director and Dharma Teacher, and a member of its board. Lisa has been recognized as a teacher by the Chogye Order of Zen Buddhism, the main Buddhist monastic order in Korea. She is a Fairfax County Certified Stream Monitor and a Master Watershed Steward. Lisa has been working with volunteers since 1994, first as Director of Operations for Community Lodgings, an affordable-housing nonprofit in Alexandria, Virginia, and now with the Sangha. She is our primary volunteer contact. Lisa has been studying and propagating the native plants of the mid-Atlantic since 2000.

Lauren Peery is the Sangha’s Office Manager. Lauren is a senior at George Mason University’s New Century College, where she is earning a BS in Integrative Studies with a concentration in Conservation Biology and a minor in Sustainability Studies. Lauren has worked on both terrestrial and aquatic field studies at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia. She is also an officer of Mason’s Environmental Action Group, and has won two grants for on-campus environmental initiatives. Lauren grew up on a thousand-acre family farm in southwestern Virginia, where she spent her summers selling local produce at the SWVA Farmers’ Market. She also helped develop the market’s Community-Supported Agriculture program. Lauren began working for the Sangha part-time in September 2011; she’ll come on board full-time after she graduates in May 2012.

Gaspar Pérez Aquino is the Tree Bank / Hispaniola Project Director. Gaspar is the President of our Tree Bank partner organization, the Asociación de Productores de Bosques, Los Cerezos (Los Cerezos Forest Producers Association). He holds a degree in Agronomy from the Escuela Superior Sudamérica in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and certificates in agroforestry, conservation, and rural development from several Dominican institutes, as well as Heifer International. Like all the other members of his association, Gaspar is a farmer; his work in agroforestry and nursery management dates from 1993.

The Directors of the Earth Sangha appear in our current Board List.

For our publications and tax filings, see our Library page.

The Sangha has about 230 paying members. If you like what you’re reading, we hope that you will become a member too. If you live in the DC area, we invite you to volunteer or meditate with us—or both.