The EUO was deeply inspired by the work Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, and Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim from the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University. These seminal thinkers have endeavored to lead us to a new understanding of the place of humans in the Universe.
Alanis Obomsawin is a member of the Abenaki Nation and one of Canada's foremost activist documentary filmmakers. Obomsawin began her artistic life as a singer-songwriter in the 1960s, as indigenous artists from across North America were rallying in new assertions of cultural identity, consciousness, and political rights, calling for reckonings with oppressive colonial history.