Letter From The Founder, Birdie
I founded EcoTheos™ LLC from a conviction that has grown stronger throughout my life and work: how we care for the natural world is inseparable from how we care for one another—and from how we understand our place within creation.
Long before sustainability became my profession, nature shaped the way I understood the world. I grew up with
I founded EcoTheos™ LLC from a conviction that has grown stronger throughout my life and work: how we care for the natural world is inseparable from how we care for one another—and from how we understand our place within creation.
Long before sustainability became my profession, nature shaped the way I understood the world. I grew up with the woods and waters of Northern Michigan and spent childhood summers on my grandparents’ Registered Quarter Horse farm, Joshua String Horse Farm in Ohio, learning to ride, feed, water, bale hay, and participate in the everyday rhythms of caring for animals and land. Those experiences taught me something I have continued to encounter throughout my life: when we care well for living systems, they care for us in return.
Over more than twenty years, my professional and academic work has taken me across cultures, disciplines, and institutions—from sustainability and environmental governance to cultural heritage, conflict resolution, ethics, and theology. I have lived and worked across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and the Caribbean, including formative work with UNESCO in Paris.
Across these very different places and experiences, I kept returning to one question:
What does it mean to live well—and responsibly—within a world that we did not create, but have been entrusted to inhabit and care for?
EcoTheos™ grew from that question.
The name brings together oikos—the Greek root associated with home and the living world—and Theos, God. At its heart, EcoTheos explores our relationship with our common home: the land, water, animals, ecosystems, communities, traditions, and places that sustain us.
Our work brings ecology, ethics, culture, and theology into conversation. It is informed by Christian thought and the tradition of creation care, while also drawing from integral ecology, environmental ethics, cultural knowledge, systems thinking, and the wisdom that emerges through direct relationship with the natural world.
Increasingly, I believe we need to move beyond thinking about environmental responsibility only in terms of problems to solve.
We also need to ask what becomes possible when we restore relationship.
Caring for land can restore ecosystems. Healthy land supports animals. Animals—particularly horses—can reconnect human beings with presence, trust, movement, attentiveness, and wellbeing. Communities develop meaning around landscapes. Stewardship carries those landscapes forward to future generations.
The relationship is reciprocal and circular.
This is the territory EcoTheos is here to explore.
Through research, education, stewardship initiatives, advisory work, and immersive experiences, EcoTheos helps individuals and organizations consider the natural world not simply as a collection of resources, but as a living system of relationships carrying ecological, cultural, ethical, and spiritual value.
My approach is grounded in curiosity rather than fear, stewardship rather than extraction, relationship rather than separation, and hope rather than despair.
I do not believe we need more guilt about the condition of the world. I believe we need deeper attention to it.
To the soil beneath us.
To the animals beside us.
To the water that sustains us.
To the places that shape us.
And to the responsibility—and privilege—of caring for what has been entrusted to us.
EcoTheos is an invitation to rediscover that relationship.
And perhaps, in caring more deeply for the living world, to discover something about ourselves as well.
Stay in wonder,
Heidi “Birdie” Karlsson, M.A.
Founder & CEO EcoTheos™ LLC