Hi, I’m Rachel Lantz, founder of Radicle Earth.

The thread I followed to create Radicle Earth stemmed from the desire to understand social sustainability. Starting with a BA in Sustainability Education. I noticed a deficit in social sustainability content being delivered. Following that thread, I pursued an MS in Clinical Counseling with a focus in Ecopsychology. Again, witnessing deficits, I completed my degree by applying my studies into an interdisciplinary degree where I examined the intersections of into Corporate Social Responsibility.

My work bridges sustainability, systems thinking, stakeholder engagement, facilitation, lifecycle analysis, and organizational learning. I became interested not only in what organizations want to accomplish, but in how people understand those goals, how responsibility becomes part of organizational identity, and why some sustainability efforts become embedded while others remain peripheral.

Rooted in this, Radicle Earth explores the question:

What allows meaningful change and authentic participation to actually take root within the systems where people live and work?

The roots of Radicle Earth began in the mountains of south-central Oregon, where Rachel lived off-grid while preparing to welcome their first child into the world. Living closely with the land illuminated how our relationships are connected to resources, ecological systems, community, place, and future generations.

Sustainability stopped feeling like an abstract idea and became a way of understanding relationship and responsibility.

Experiences with uncertainty and upheaval reinforced another lesson: our ability to adapt is never determined by individual effort alone. It is shaped by the relationships, environments, institutions, and systems around us.

Those experiences fuel Rachel’s educational pursuits and professional work in sustainability, systems thinking, ecopsychology, stakeholder engagement, and lifecycle analysis.

Sustainability challenges do not exist in isolation. The challenges emerge from relationships, organizational structures, resources, policies, environments, histories, and the experiences of the people who participate in them. Together, these conditions shape what an organization actually has the capacity to sustain.

Radicle Earth helps organizations widen the frame around a challenge by making these relationships and conditions more visible. We explore what is already supporting the work, how capacity building is being constrained, and where commitments and everyday practices may be pulling in different directions.

The goal is not to impose a predetermined solution, but to help organizations better understand their own context so they can recognize opportunities, strengthen alignment, and make more informed decisions about what comes next.

Understanding the systems you operate in creates the foundation for meaningful participation.

The people connected to an organization already hold knowledge about how the system works, what matters within it, where challenges emerge, and what may be possible.

Sustainability becomes more durable when that knowledge can meaningfully inform decisions and when responsibility is shared rather than concentrated in a single person, department, or initiative. Over time, participation becomes stewardship: a shared practice of contributing knowledge, taking meaningful responsibility, learning through implementation, and adapting as conditions change.

Radicle Earth works alongside higher education institutions, municipalities and public agencies, nonprofits, mission-driven organizations, community initiatives, and cross-sector collaborations to create the conditions for that stewardship to take root.