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.
“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
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
Yo-Yo joins environmentalist and drag performer Pattie Gonia and Ahtna Athabascan/Iñupiaq songwriter Quinn Christopherson in Alaska to perform “Won’t Give Up,” inspired by our melting glaciers.
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“Mammoth,” written by Teddy Abrams for Yo-Yo and the Louisville Orchestra, recounts more than five millennia of human history in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, one of the largest cave systems in the world.
Playing in a birch forest decimated by melting permafrost on Lower Dene lands in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Bach’s cello suites meet the music of Hawaiʻi in the shadow of Diamond Head on Oʻahu.
“When we are emotionally and empathetically tied to the natural world, we are reminded at a more profound, instinctive level of our interdependence with it. Culture has a vital role to play in this most existential moment in the history of our species, a responsibility to restore our connection. It reflects our care and our love for this world, a love that will lead to better health and more long-term, sustainable thinking. —Yo-Yo Ma from Music and Mind, edited by Renée Fleming
MoreLet 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.
