The kilele project
ABOUT THE PROJECT
The Kilele Project is a platform for environmental storytelling and peacebuilding rooted in the belief that we need more relational ways of thinking, leading, and living. Drawing from the ecological and cultural landscapes of East Africa—kilele meaning summit in Kiswahili—this work is committed to an integrative quest for peace between humans and with nature. The name gestures toward those moments of clarity, connection, and wonder that emerge through patient journeying, deep listening, and friendship with the unknown.
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​Through writing and visual storytelling, emergent facilitation, and adaptive consulting, my work supports people and organizations working at the fault lines of ecological and social complexity. I work with those navigating intractable conflicts—where environmental, cultural, and historical dynamics make it difficult to move forward with clarity or care. My approach integrates reflection, moral capacity-building, and creative mediation to help uncover more relational, just, and enduring ways of responding. This work is grounded in the belief that sustainable change requires not only better strategies, but deeper relationships: to the land, to our stories, and to one another.
ABOUT ME
My name is James Mixon, and I am, most simply put, a field philosopher. My professional path has been shaped less by a single discipline and more by the questions that keep returning: How do we live well in a world transforming? How do we hold complexity without collapsing into despair or control? What does it mean to listen well—to land, to others, to our inner world?
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Over the last decade I have explored these questions across a range of roles and landscapes. I worked in conservation and peacebuilding in northern Kenya, serving as a communications liaison and mediator during a time of deep tension between private landowners, Indigenous communities, and government actors. I've also taught wilderness leadership and experiential education for institutions including NOLS and Outward Bound, with a focus on guiding young people through meaningful, often uncomfortable thresholds. Throughout, I've told stories around these questions in many ways, contributing writing and photography to publications like Alpinist, Climbing Magazine, Rock & Ice, Travel Africa, Nomad Magazine, Wilder Magazine, SA Climber, and Kenyan newspapers such as The Star and The Standard; serving as story consultant for several documentaries; and practicing public environmental storytelling at conferences on ecology and spirituality.
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I’m currently pursuing a Master of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, with a focus on environmental peacebuilding, spiritual ecology, and systems transformation.
On wilderness
a short reflection on a troubled metaphor
I am interested in stories from the ragged edges of the world; of journeys through both the inner and the outer landscapes; of humans finding a home on this remarkable rock we woke up on. Stories, like my own, where people defy the script laid out for them and venture bravely into authentic experience and the unwritten future.
Kilele means “summit” in Swahili, my second language and the lingua franca of East Africa. The equatorial mountains and highlands were the first landscapes that truly held and shaped me and continue to be where I learn the most. This fascination with wilderness has guided much of my work.
The journey through a landscape is an ancient and deep allegory for the human life– the lessons of ascent and descent equally essential. The word ‘wilderness’ is in great dispute these days, and I use it as a conceptual term: the places that are hard to reach, geographically but also culturally, politically, and spiritually. The places we wander when we have no answers. The places that transform us.
Our relationship to a landscape is a powerful tool to examine the tendencies of our cultures: do we extract, conquer, and dominate, or do we honor, heal, and reciprocate what the world has given us? As we participate in the conversation, are we oriented by what divides us or what connects us? Even more profound, perhaps– what is the relationship between those two apparently polar approaches?
The beauty and power of wilderness is this: no matter the idea or intent you carry into it, it will inevitably evaporate in light of the grandeur and complexity of what’s out there. It will alchemize into an always new sense of self. It will call you out, it will send you home. It is just this journey, again and again.
Thus the “Kilele Project” – the idea of landscape as metaphor and teacher with the idea that this is only ever a project, a process, a pilgrimage: there is no end to a globe, nor to the journey, nor to our questions. We tell the story and are the story all at once.
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