Congratulations Dan Siegal, Immortal Earthkeeper!
Dr. Dan Siegal became the 2025 recipient of Pando’s Immortal Earthkeeper Award for Lifetime Achievement, with the award made at The 2025 Pando Sustainability Awards, held on the campus of Caltech.
Dan is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute, and New York Times best-selling author of “Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence,” “Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain,” and “Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human.”
Pando’s Lifetime Achievement award states:
In honor of a lifetime of achievement nurturing the emotional, psychological, and philosophical foundations needed to create a more sustainable and equitable Los Angeles.
Previous recipients include Los Angeles City Councilmember Emeritus Paul Koretz, and Fr. Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries.
Dan will soon join the Pando community for the inaugural launch of the Pando Salon and Podcast, focused on intellectual conversations focused on pressing themes.
Prior to receiving the award, we spoke with Dan about his work and his concept of mwe, a neologism he coined to emphasize the radical interconnectedness of “me” and “we” — suggesting a very Pando worldview. As the Award was made in absentia, Dan recorded a short acceptance speech for the event, which includes the following:
What I’ll have you consider is that the word “self”, as the Pando forest teaches us, is maybe not as simple as a synonym for “individual.” In the Pando forest, there are 48,000 quaking aspen trunks. Perhaps you consider the trunk the totality of the identity of a given tree. But, imagine that you yourself, in the body you are in, has an identity lens that can actually be widened or narrowed.
So, we can narrow that lens to focus on a center of experience we call a “self”, or SPA (subjectivity, perspective, agency). But, is the SPA of the forest a single trunk? Actually, when you look six inches beneath the soil, you discover a common rootball. You find out that there is an SPA from the common rootball, and that those 48,000 trunks are just manifestations of one essence, one tree.
In a similar way, we have these bodies, and we get the illusion that tells you that who you are is just this individual body; that you’re Ed or Dan or Joanna, whatever your name was given. And even in attachment terms, sometimes our parents reinforce that. Schools do. You get out in the workforce, you get a social security number, and other ways of identifying you as just your body.
But with Pando, we’re invited to widen our identity lens, and this message is exactly the message we need in modern times – to have this, what Joanna Macy called, a quantum change in our consciousness. She suggests a turning away from this individual limited view of self and coming to realize that we are in fact the greater whole. We have an individuality, sure – there are individual trunks of Pando. And yet, we are also the rootball.
And if we could start living that way – as a me in the body and a we – then one way of integrating that, to differentiate them and link them, is this, with this funny word mwe.
Watch for the new Pando Salon and Podcast series in 2026 that expands on these ideas.
CONGRATULATIONS, Dan!