About
About Belonging to Earth
Belonging to Earth is an educational project that supports all of us to heal our relationship to the earth—and by extension, our relationship to each other and ourselves—through an exploration of ecological design and spiritual ecology.
We publish periodic essays, videos, and photo essays.
About Daniel Lim
Hi, I'm Daniel Lim. I'm the founder of Belonging to Earth. I use he/him pronouns. I am based in Brooklyn, New York, which is located on the stolen and unceded land of the Canarsie band of the indigenous Lenape people—a region generally known as Lenapehoking.
I am an ecological designer, racial equity and organizational development consultant, spiritual naturalist, and forager. My calling in life is to support all of us living in colonial societies to heal our estrangement and alienation from the more-than-human, living world. I am committed to helping people unlearn supremacist and extractive thinking and practice kinship and reciprocity with all our relations. I do memory work with ecologically estranged people so that they can remember how to belong to the earth again and live in alignment with the organizing principles of life so that our collective relationship as a human species to the planet is once again a regenerative one.
I started Belonging to Earth to document my own journey of coming back home to the earth through ecological design and spiritual ecology practices and in the process teach others how to do the same.
I hope I inspire you to start your journey and that all of our collective journeys uplift each other.
More About Me (If You're Interested)
I am ethnically Han Chinese. My ancestors were indigenous to the Toisan region in Guangdong Province, China. My grandparents were war refugees who fled China to escape the Japanese invasion during World War II and settled in Burma. I was born in Yangon where my earliest childhood interactions with the more-than-human world involved foraging mangos, jackfruits, papayas, guavas, and jasmine flowers that grew in my family's yard and communing with the lizards, birds, dogs, and insects that called my home their home as well. My family and I moved to the United States when I was eight because my parents wanted to give me and my sisters a better life. I have been living in Brooklyn ever since. I speak Toisanese very well and Cantonese, Mandarin, Burmese, and Spanish very poorly. Being queer, immigrant, multilingual and multicultural, working class, and first-generation has profoundly shaped who I am as a person.
In addition to running Belonging to Earth, I run my own consulting company, Daniel Lim Consulting, through which I work with organizations to advance racial equity and build regenerative and liberatory cultures rooted in the wisdom of living systems. I serve on the boards of Leadership Learning Community and Fernland Studios. I am also an amateur photographer and love creating photos of landscapes and plants. I live in Brooklyn with my husband and our adorable and mischievous pitbull, She-Ra.
I studied ecology, ecological design and community development at the University of Vermont (B.S. Natural Resources) and community-based planning, environmental justice, and disaster planning at Pratt Institute (M.S. City and Regional Planning). I am aspiring to be a landscape architect. I am a McNair Scholar.
