Louise van der Stok

With a cum laude honours BSc degree in hand, I walked out of the Kromhout Barracks in Utrecht feeling empty, tired, and displaced. I knew nothing of the world, what non-studying people actually think, what animals do and which plants exist, or how I actually felt in my body and heart. From that moment, I began to seek connection.

I spent a year camping and working at permaculture sites and eventually came to Wageningen to study forest and nature conservation. After a year, I was once again freed from the subtle reins of society and embarked on a personal development process. For the first time in my life, I didn't have to do anything and spent a lot of time outdoors with the plants, trees, air, river, landscape, and all its spots and forces. I began to nourish myself with wild plants and the healing energy that nature always gives to everyone. For the first time, I experienced the landscape and myself as if I lived in it. I began to feel more and my thoughts no longer came from elsewhere but from within me.

After a few years, it was time to get back to work. I decided not to be tempted to leave nature and to see how I could fit my work and life into my nature instead of the other way around.

This has been the foundation for all the work I do now. Together with Lian Kasper, I started the iWEek in 2018: a journey from i to We, a course for young people about active hope and nature connection in these times of transition. This has grown into a course at Wageningen University.

I got involved in other courses where I was allowed to incorporate elements of nature connection. For my master's thesis, I redesigned the course Ecological design and Permaculture based on a North American Indigenous learning perspective.

I got involved with the Droevendaal food forest and founded the ReGeneratie foundation to work on knowledge development for complex agroforestry with and for the new generation. I also started working for the Forest Movement, an organization that offers courses on living with nature.

Since 2023, I have been working with this team on developing a teacher training for Nature-inclusive educational methods in higher education and am writing, on behalf of LNV, the initial note for the Agenda for Nature-inclusive Education.