In this three-part interview, Ross Jackson shares with Kakoli Mitra why he was motivated to co-found the Gaia Trust and the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) several decades ago. He was trained in physics and economics, working as a management consultant at the beginning of his career. In the 1980s, he was at a conference in India on transpersonal psychology and visited an āśram, which awakened him and changed his life. Ross realized that life could be experienced at a completely different level of consciousness, a planetary consciousness. So, with a few Danish friends, he founded the Gaia Trust, with the mission of moving the world in a sustainable direction. A few years later, he and others agreed that the most effective way to use Gaia Trust funds would be to support and promote ecovillages around the world by creating a network they called the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN). Ross explains that people in ecovillages are aligned in their value systems with those of Indigenous communities, but that ecovillages are not necessarily built on/around Indigenous knowledge-technologies-practices. Ross envisions that ecovillages will be an increasingly attractive alternative to living within existing mainstream extractivist systems that might collapse in the near future.