Evan Marks

"All of it is inviting participation. Participation in the magic around us.” - Evan MarksIf you haven’t already, please make sure to subscribe and give Five Rules for the Good Life on Spotify & Apple Podcasts. Evan MarksEvan Marks, founder and executive director of The Ecology Center, joins me to share his Five Rules for an Abundant Life. We talk about finding gratitude in the miraculous, growing your own food, taking nourishment seriously, making things with your hands, and sharing whatever you have in surplus. Together, his rules offer a thoughtful invitation to reconnect with nature, contribute to your community, and build a richer life by becoming an active participant in it.What Evan and his community have built in San Juan Capistrano is more than a regenerative organic farm. It is a living example of what becomes possible when people come together around food, nature, and a shared sense of purpose. The Ecology Center reminds us that life is not something we are meant to simply observe or consume. We have to participate—to plant something, make something, share something, and give a little of ourselves to the world around us. The more we take part in life, the more abundant it becomes.IntroductionHello and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz. Today, I sit down with Evan Marks, the founder and executive director of The Ecology Center, a truly awe-inspiring, regenerative, organic farm, cafe, and education center located in Southern California.He’s here to share his five rules for an abundant life. He talks about the importance of participating, that making something yourself leads to a much richer life, and that the more you share with others, the more the world shares with you. This conversation offers incredible insights on a different approach to living and how, by redefining your relationship with nature, you will be able to live a much richer life.So let’s get into the rules here on HRN.The Ecology CenterEvan, so nice to meet you. I’m so excited to be talking to you today about The Ecology Center. You’ve built such a beautiful space. Welcome to the show.Thank you, brother. Honored to be here.For those who might be unfamiliar with The Ecology Center, truly a unique place, can you explain its mission and its approach to food?Its mission is to shift culture. How we’ve done that so far is we’ve built an environment, an ecotopia. It’s a 28-acre ecosystem that inspires us to think and be in a different state, and that connects back to food, reminding people of the basic tenets of knowing where your food comes from and being deeply nourished, mind-body-spirit, in those endeavors of food or otherwise.As the founder, how did you take your life studies and adventures and turn it into something tangible?The Sum of a LifeI like to say that we’re just all individually a sum of the parts that we’ve been paying attention to. I guess I was lucky to have good mentors, and I attuned my awareness to mostly traditional people, Indigenous cultures, and tropical environments. I just became fascinated with how humans have lived on this planet for centuries in harmony.That’s really been the design challenge: How do we take those pieces of civilization and culture and integrate them into the present and future tenets in a place unlikely like Orange County?The Principle of ParticipationThere are a lot of tenets that make up what you’ve put together. One of the ones that really stuck out to me was this fundamental principle of participation. How do you weave this through the Center’s farm, garden, cafe, and all of its endeavors?We’re a village, so we’ve got a lot of different expressions. All of it is inviting participation. Participation in the magic around us. Participation in our food system. Participation in the joy of being on this beautiful planet.We do that through a whole myriad of programs, from farm dinners to music festivals, to yoga classes, to field trips, to cooking classes, to shopping at the