Branham Leads Deep Ecology Writing Workshop at Aspen's Toklat

Aspen —The air inside the Catto Centre at Toklat holds a specific kind of stillness, one that feels less like silence and more like held breath. It is a space where the boundary between the interior and the wild beyond thins, allowing the scent of pine and damp earth to bleed through the windows. For those who have spent years navigating the busy corridors of Aspen’s cultural scene, this location offers a rare pause — a place to sit with a notebook and the feeling that something important is being written, not just on paper, but in the soil itself.

This Aug. 29-30, that pause becomes a practice. The Aspen Centre for Environmental Studies (ACES) is hosting a Deep Ecology Writing Workshop led by Branham, an author who argues that writing is not merely an act of recording thoughts, but a potent spiritual and ecological practice. Branham did not arrive at this conclusion lightly; she wrote her book to save her own life, driven by a sickness in her body and a grief over the changing climate. "I had no choice but to express what I had to about trees, sickness and our entwined futures," she wrote in her Aspen Times column. "I was at the mercy of a sacred obsession."

If you look closely at the history of environmental thought here on the Western Slope, you see a shift from anger to love. In 1973, the ecophilosopher Arne Naess published a landmark essay titled "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement" in the journal Inquiry. Naess differentiated between a "shallow" movement, focused on fighting pollution and resource depletion, and a "deep" ecology that values a profound respect for the biospherical net of intrinsic relations. He felt we needed to root activism in love, not just anger.

Branham builds on this foundation, drawing heavily from the work of Joanna Macy, a Buddhist scholar and anti-nuclear war activist. Macy framed the ecological crisis as one of consciousness — a separation between humans and the living world, and offered the antidote: remembering our sacred belonging with nature. Branham tested this hypothesis during her doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, discovering that an embodied, intimate relationship with nature motivates reciprocal care. It is not knowledge or facts alone that drive this change, but a felt connection.

There’s a warmth to the idea of writing "with" nature rather than just about it. It suggests that when we sit in the tangle of our own lives pressing against the world, like a deep-sea diver descending to find pearls, we are participating in something larger than ourselves. T.S. Eliot once wrote to a young writer, "But nobody can tell you how to start writing. The only good reason for writing is that one has to write." For Branham, that impulse led her straight into a profound relationship with the living world.

The workshop at Toklat provides a remarkable window into this wilderness, inviting participants to fall into the arms of nature and practice writing right from that encounter. It is an invitation to slow down, to listen to the wind not as background noise but as a co-author. As Branham notes, she writes from inside her love for and grief over a changing planet, taking inspiration directly from the trees around her.

For locals who have watched the seasons turn faster than usual, or who feel that familiar ache of climate anxiety, this approach offers more than just a creative outlet. It offers a way to ground that feeling in something tangible, something rooted. The Catto Centre stands as a quiet testament to the idea that we are interconnected in an ever-evolving web, and that picking up a pen can be an act of care for the earth itself.

Outside, the light begins to fade over the Rockies, casting long shadows across the floor of the center. A single leaf drifts against the glass, waiting to be noticed, waiting to be written about.