Eco Challenge: Find Your Mandalas

We began working on the Find Your Mandalas Eco Challenge after attending the Ecological Society of America annual conference in Baltimore in 2025. We saw a poster presentation with a shortened version of this exercise that had been conducted as part of an undergraduate course at a college in the midwest. This inspired us to read Hakell’s book and work out a longer version of this project as an Eco Challenge. We hope you enjoy this experience as much as we do.

Access the PDF version of this Eco Challenge.

Mandalas: The Forest Unseen

This concept is derived from David Haskell’s The Forest Unseen, where he chronicles a year of mandala observation in an old growth forest near Sewanee, Tennessee. He opens the book discussing a group of undergraduate students observing Tibetan monks as they make a traditional colored sand mandala on top of a table. Haskell describes the scene:

“A group of North American undergraduates jostle behind a rope nearby, extending their necks like herons as they watch the mandala’s birth. They are uncharacteristically quiet, perhaps caught up in the work or stilled by the otherness of the monks’ lives. The students are visiting the mandala at the beginning of their first laboratory class in ecology. The class will continue in a nearby forest, where the students will create their own mandala by throwing a hoop onto the ground. They will study their circle of land for the rest of the afternoon, observing the workings of the forest community. One translation of the Sanskrit mandala is “community,” so the monks and the students are engaged in the same work: contemplating a mandala and refining their minds. The parallel runs deeper than this congruence of language and symbolism. I believe that the forest’s ecological stories are all present in a mandala-sized area. Indeed, the truth of the forest may be more clearly and vividly revealed by the contemplation of a small area than it could be by donning ten-league boots, covering a continent but uncovering little.”
David Haskell, The Forest Unseen (p. xi-xii)

Haskell continues, explaining why he embarked on his own mandala project, and why he wrote The Forest Unseen:

“This book is a biologist’s response to the challenge of the Tibetan mandala, of Blake’s poems, of Lady Julian’s hazelnut. Can the whole forest be seen through a small contemplative window of leaves, rocks, and water? I have tried to find the answer to this question, or the start of an answer, in a mandala made of old-growth forest in the hills of Tennessee. The forest mandala is a circle a little over a meter across, the same size as the mandala that was created and swept away by the monks. I chose the mandala’s location by walking haphazardly through the forest and stopping when I found a suitable rock on which to sit. The area in front of the rock became the mandala, a place that I had never seen before, its promise mostly hidden by winter’s austere garb.
The mandala sits on a forested slope in southeastern Tennessee. One hundred meters upslope, a high sandstone bluff marks the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau. The ground falls away from this bluff in steps, alternating level benches with sharp inclines, descending one thousand feet in elevation to the valley floor. The mandala nestles between boulders on the highest bench. The slope is entirely forested with a diverse collection of mature deciduous trees: oaks, maples, basswoods, hickories, tuliptrees, and a dozen more species. The forest floor is ankle-twistingly strewn with jumbled rock from the eroding bluff, and in many places there is no even ground, just heaved, fissured stone overlain with leaf mulch.”
David Haskell, The Forest Unseen (p. xii-xiii)

Our Eco Challenge is intended to help you find and observe your own mandala(s).

The Ground Rules

Based on the way Haskell describes his approach and self-imposed ground rules for his study, we’ve adopted our own set of ground rules to guide this Eco Challenge. As you find your mandalas:

Visit often.
Watch a year circle past.
Be quiet.
Keep disturbances to a minimum.
No killing.
No removal of creatures.
No digging in the soil.
No crawling over the mandala…stay on the periphery.

As an additional caveat, we think it is a good idea to minimize your distractions. We’d suggest that whenever you visit your mandala, any of your networked digital devices (smartphones, tablets, watches, etc.) should be put into “anti-distraction” mode:

Turn off all notifications
Place the devices in airplane mode
Place the devices in do-not-disturb mode
Place the devices in silenced mode
Power off the devices
Leave the devices at home

Why Mandalas? The Basic Overview

The purpose of the Find Your Mandala(s) Eco Challenge is to help you practice experiential, observational learning in outdoor environments. There are six basic steps to this learning process:

Make observations and collect evidence at the mandala.
Reflect on your observations.
Do follow-up research.
Connect with subject matter experts.
Ask the experts specific questions.
Repeat.

Complete the Challenge

To participate in this challenge, please access the PDF version of the challenge, and print it or view it on your device of choice.

When you’re done with the challenge, you will have the option to submit your work, as outlined in the PDF document.

Ready to participate in this Eco Challenge?

Please send an email to ecochallenges@uppernew.org to let us know you’re beginning! In the body of the email, please consider including the following information so that we can keep track of where our Eco Challenge participants are engaging with us:

The title of the Eco Challenge you’re starting
Your name (First and Last, or just your First if that’s preferred)
Your basic location (City, State/Province, Country)

Over time, we’re hoping to build an interactive map showing the spread of our Eco Challenges throughout the biosphere.

Thanks for participating!

Mandalas Challenge: Useful Links

Here, we provide a running list of all the links that are implemented into the PDF, in case you’re working with a printed version of the PDF, or the links in the PDF do not function correctly.

Practicalities of observation

To better prepare for how to observe the natural world, there are lots of good resources available online. The Naples Garden provides a great brief overview, as does the Kona Cloud Forest, with a little more focus on deeper understanding. John Muir Laws, a proponent of nature journaling, provides a succinct blog post on three prompts for deeper nature observation. A resource that is a bit more in depth and intensive is the Princeton Outdoor Action Guide.

Another interesting alternative is the iNat forum (a community of iNaturalist users): this forum post discusses increasing species counts, or “how to find new things”, and it contains links to several other relevant forum topics.

Using a Model

If you’re struggling with how to start (or finish) your reflection, there are several interesting models or frameworks for reflection that are worth exploring, such as Jasper’s ERA, Kolb’s Cycle, or Gibbs’ Cycle, which includes the following steps: Description, Feelings, Evaluation, Analysis, Conclusion, and Action Plan.

Here are two additional library resources for exploring these (and other) models: the University of Cambridge and the University of Westminster.

Research

The Encyclopedia of Life

Research Methods

Taking a step back: when beginning research in a field or topic that you’re not really familiar with, it’s useful to begin with exploratory research, which focuses on grasping core concepts, key terms, and foundational questions rather than proving a specific theory.

This is how you can establish a framework or mental model before diving into deeper, more specialized material on the topic. Boston Research provides a good introduction to different research methods.

One strategy is to skim abstracts of academic, scholarly, and professional papers and articles. An easy way to do this is to use Google Scholar to search for topics using terminology you’ve already learned from initial exploratory research.

In addition to creating a more traditional literature review (or something like an annotated bibliography) to track what you’ve learned so far, new digital technologies have made it easier to generate literature maps, helping you to visually track how key ideas and research on your topic connect to one another. Examples of these tools, all of which have a version that can be used for free, include: Litmaps, Connected Papers, and Open Knowledge Maps.

According to Wikipedia, mind mapping is “a visual thinking technique used to organize ideas, brainstorm, and structure information. By placing a central concept in the middle of a page and branching out into related keywords, images, and sub-topics, it mirrors how the brain naturally works through association rather than rigid linear lists.”

There are way too many mind mapping tools available across the internet. And most any graphics tool can be used to create mind maps (such as Canva), and many have free versions available with limited toolsets. Two mind mapping tools that look highly specialized, and integrate somewhat with cloud platforms like Google Drive) are MindMeister and MindMup.

There are many methods for active knowledge construction, but one we really like is called the Feynman Technique. Fairmont State University provides another overview. Essentially, the purpose of the Feynman Technique, for the sake of your own learning about a new concept, is to try to explain that new concept in plain, simple language, as if you were teaching it to a beginner.

Named after Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, this technique operates on a simple premise: if you cannot explain a concept simply to a beginner, you do not truly understand it. It forces active learning by deconstructing and rebuilding information.

Connect and Ask

You can look for local (or statewide) naturalist groups and see if you can join for free and start asking questions. You can also do an internet search for “{XYZ} discussion forum” and see if any good-looking sources come up. For example, herpetology is the study of amphibians and reptiles. There are several forums that come up in a search, such as Field Herp Forum. Another is the herpetology forum on Reddit. Reddit can be a good place to post pictures (or scans of your sketches) to “crowdsource” your identifications of species, and it can also be a good place to work with others to form more well-structured questions.

Share Your Results

So, if this seems like a good option for you, then, visit our submissions page and send in your work to our call for submissions about Bioregionalism.

So, please do consider sending us your work using this form. We won’t share anything about your work publicly unless we have your written permission beforehand.