Pat Fleming grew up in England within a northern Irish family, and has dual nationality with Australia after working here in the eighties. She’s recently moved with her partner to live in northern Lutruwita (Tasmania) and loves being part of this country and finding community.
Over some 40 years she has been facilitating Deep Ecology and the Work that Reconnects workshops, and giving talks, trainings and webinars in a number of countries. She’s a plantswoman, musician, writer and poet, and her writing includes co-authoring ‘Thinking like A Mountain – towards a Council of All Beings’ with John Seed, Joanna Macy and Arne Naess, and contributing a chapter to the recent book ‘A Wild Love for the World – Joanna Macy and the Work of our Time’. She has been a student of zen Buddhism with Buddhist Peace Fellowship co-founder Robert Aitken Roshi.
Pat has worked in various roles through her life including as a mental health counsellor and therapy group leader in NHS Community Health Services in Sydney, as the creator and manager of a UK environmental charity ‘The ECO Trust’, as an upland organic farmer and grower, also as an occasional university lecturer and masters project supervisor. She’s also been a freelance researcher and fundraiser (UK Soil Association, Embercombe) and educator, including running programmes at the Eden Project in Cornwall for 10 years, a consultant advisor and national board member in organic and biodynamic horticulture in the UK, a conservation botanist with Dartmoor National Park and Paignton Zoological and Botanical Gardens. For seven years she taught deep ecology and mentored on the year-long ‘Call of the Wild’ course for nature connection leaders, when it was based at Schumacher College in Devon. She has a masters (MA) in Psychology from Edinburgh University, and an MSc in Botanical Conservation from Plymouth University.
She respects the traditional Pakana owners as the custodians of the northern lutruwita country where she lives, and also all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people across the whole nation. She recognises their continuing connection to this land, water systems and community, and acknowledges that sovereignty was never ceded.