Our Common Nature is a cultural journey, a celebration of the ways nature can reinvigorate the human experiment, reuniting us in pursuit of a common future.
Our Common Nature is a cultural journey, a celebration of the ways nature can reinvigorate the human experiment, reuniting us in pursuit of a common future.
Culture makes us human. It is how we create trust, wonder, faith, belonging. Culture helps us care for one another and for the world we share. It reminds us that nature is part of our humanity and that it contains an imagination greater than our own.
Nipmuck musician Hawk Henries plays in the Moneskatik (Maine) dawn.
Bryan Sutton, Yo-Yo Ma, and Edgar Meyer in the Smoky Mountains, hills where countless cultural traditions have met for centuries.
Students from the Step by Step program in West Virginia join Yo-Yo and local cultural leaders to experience their home river in new ways.
Zuni farmer Jim Enote and Diné Navajo archaeologist Jason Nez use art and poetry to process their connection to land and time.
Yo-Yo and West Virginian country/folk artist Kathy Mattea perform for retired miners at Nuttallburg, a historic coal-mining complex.
Sharing Appalachian foodways in West Virginia
Bach’s cello suites meet the music of Hawaiʻi in the shadow of Diamond Head on Oʻahu.
“The audience, so casually assembled, didn’t know that it was taking part in Ma’s latest project, Our Common Nature, an intentionally broad and searching initiative that explores ways in which we can heal, and enrich, our relationship with the world around us.” —Joshua Barone, The New York Times
Let us use culture to remember that we are part of nature; that the survival of the earth cannot be separated from the health of society; and that to love each other is to love our planet.
Photos © Austin Mann
