Who is Daniel Hansson?

Daniel Hansson is an internationally active freelance educator, award-winning filmmaker, reconnection activist, sustainability consultant and media producer.

His own education from universities in the United States, Canada, and Sweden has spanned a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy of science, classical and eastern philosophy, comparative religious studies and the history of ideas, environmental science, chemistry and ecological agriculture.

Through his project Terra Religata, Daniel wants to make way for deep reconnection among individuals, and between mankind and nature, by artfully creative communication, design, transformative encounters, cultural reflection and applied systems thinking. Daniel’s goal is to help people to collaboratively make way for lasting ecological balance, social justice and sustainable development from local to global levels.

As part of his Terra Religata project, Daniel has recorded and produced Drum Songs for the Earth – a full-length album of traditional Powwow music with an intertribal American Indian drum group in Idaho. In 2014, his film ”Come, This is the Way” won the Indigenous Peoples Short Film Award. He has also directed a reconnection-themed rock video, and is presently producing his own experimental documentary film Terra Religata, filmed in the wilderness of Idaho on the theme of “one man’s search for reconnection”.

You can read more about these projects and watch films on Daniel’s blog The Relentless Wave.

True to his holistic and boundary-transcending passion, Daniel has been an appreciated lecturer on a wide range of scientific, philosophical and cultural subjects. These include the philosophy of music, microbial ecology, self-regulation in complex systems, Spinoza’s ethics and cognitive theory, climate adaptation, the disasters of reductionism with systems thinking as an alternative, professional communication, existential issues, Gaia theory and global ecology, transformative pedagogy, and transdisciplinary curriculum design and research methodology.

The central theme of Daniel’s message

is how our relationship to our fellow human beings and to nature has been severed, what consequences this has had, and how we can find our way back to wholeness.

As a freelance lecturer, Daniel fuses his exceptional ability to inspire and to motivate constructive change with his international experience as a researcher of sustainability adaptation, as a project manager in business, and as a curriculum designer and lecturer in sustainable system design at the University of Idaho in the United States; where Daniel also taught courses in ethics, international environmental issues, holistic research methodology, and sustainable management of natural systems.

Daniel has also advised curriculum design and instructed course modules and seminars at Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEMUS), Uppsala University, and for Folkuniversitetet in Sweden; as well as at Schumacher College in England.

As a research scientist with University of Idaho’s Sustainability Center and Office of Community Partnerships, Daniel led, organized and participated in studies of a broad spectrum of environmental and sustainability-related topics, including biofuels, regional economic development based on community capitals, small-scale agricultural cooperation, entrepreneurship among minorities and women in the rural Pacific Northwest, climate-related risk assessment, and attitudes and values in relation to climate change.

For two years, Daniel conducted the University of Idaho’s greenhouse-gas inventory and emission analysis with subsequent reporting. He also authored chapters about climate change, biofuels and global aviation in a report comissioned by Boeing to inform the company’s global climate strategy.

Daniel has also advised Masters- and doctoral students in reserach and design projects, as well as designed, implemented and published field- and laboratory studies of the chemistry of ecological agriculture, and ecological control of weeds and insects.

As a consultant in the United States, Daniel led a workshop on sustainable community re-visioning for county-level officials to bridge their value-based political divisions.

Daniel has also studied the philosophy of Spinoza, and how the relationship between the self and its total relational environment has been explained in Indo-Tibetan systems philosophy by the manadala as a visual model for the path back to wholeness.

Daniel has been a scientific peer-reviewer for the online open-source Journal of Sustainability Education.

His research of Spinoza’s contributions to ecological systems thinking is quoted in The Routledge Handbook of Global Environmental Politics (2014).

After having lived for almost nine years in the United States, Daniel today resides in the historical town of Strängnäs by lake Mälaren in Sweden.

During his stay in North America, Daniel learned a lot about sustainable development by witnessing its total opposite manifested on all levels in the form of the socioeconomic system of the United States, including extreme systematized injustice and relentless ravaging of the Earth’s resources. For this reason, Daniel is today determined to do his part in stopping the process that now with accelerating pace drives his own country down the same crash course.

This is one of the core motivations behind Daniel’s blog The Relentless Wave.

Daniel is also very frustrated with academia’s moumental failure to lead the world out of our present global crisis.

He today primarily works as an activist, freelance lecturer and consultant in Sweden and Europe, and directs his message to an interested general audience as well as to companies, schools and organizations.

In his lectures, Daniel Hansson brings together his experience and ideas in a colorful, thought-provoking and deeply inspiring whole – and this in a language that everyone can understand.

A timely message

Read more about Daniel Hansson’s lectures and workshops here!

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Put the pieces in place

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