Tamara Belland is the creator of Back to Our Nature (BTON), an imaginative family series that blends storytelling, music, communication skills, systems thinking, humor, environmental awareness, and community life into a hopeful vision for the future.

Her background combines many creative and human-centered disciplines. Tamara holds a BFA in Design/Illustration from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from the University of Washington, and a Certificate in Screenwriting from the University of Washington Professional & Continuing Education program. She has worked as a screenwriter, filmmaker, illustrator, photographer, painter, singer, songwriter, teacher, and creative collaborator. She also has a nursing background (BSN), which deeply shaped her understanding of emotional life, communication, caregiving, and the human experience.

Tamara grew up in a community that emphasized music, morality, service, community life, and spiritual questions. Later experiences in communication workshops, transformational group processes, systems thinking, and experiential learning greatly expanded her perspective and influenced the vision behind Back to Our Nature.

In the 1980s and 1990s, she participated in programs inspired by role-play, emotional honesty, creative problem-solving, and human potential work. These experiences continue to influence the Communication Circle aspects of BTON.

A lifelong admirer of Buckminster Fuller's ideas about synergy and comprehensivism, Tamara's interest in his work began at age eleven during a memorable family vacation to Expo '67 in Montreal, where she experienced Fuller's iconic geodesic dome for the United States Pavilion. Her understanding of Fuller's ideas later deepened through an extended editorial collaboration on two books exploring his philosophy and its implications for education, wholeness, and human development.

These experiences helped shape Tamara's interest in how human beings develop their capacities, work together creatively, and generate possibilities that no individual or institution could have predicted alone. Tamara is especially interested in helping children and families imagine healthier ways of living, communicating, learning, and creating together. Her work emphasizes emotional honesty, creativity, intergenerational connection, and the belief that ordinary people can meaningfully contribute to a better future.

By 2019, after decades of work in writing, visual arts, music, education, and human development, Tamara began developing Back to Our Nature. A five-week filmmaking workshop at San Francisco Film School helped provide additional tools for bringing the project to life.

In addition to developing BTON, Tamara sings and performs music for senior citizen audiences at retirement centers throughout Iowa and surrounding areas, sharing heartwarming songs and stories that encourage memory, connection, and joy. She also writes original songs and collaborates with musicians and recording artists on music connected to both BTON and her independent creative projects.

Through Back to Our Nature, Tamara hopes to create a world that feels emotionally real, imaginative, welcoming, and nourishing for children, teens, parents, and elders alike.

In 2006, Tamara interviewed environmentalist Lester R. Brown, author of Plan B 2.0. At the time, Brown was widely respected for his clear warnings about the environmental and economic consequences of ignoring nature’s limits.

During the interview, Tamara asked what individuals could do to help make a difference. His answer focused on writing elected officials, voting, and leaving large-scale solutions to industry, corporations, and government.

While Tamara respected his work, that answer did not feel complete to her. Through years of studying Buckminster Fuller’s ideas about synergy, she had come to believe that ordinary people working together creatively can generate solutions that no single institution could predict or produce on its own.

That question stayed with her.

Over the following years, it gradually evolved into a broader question: What helps human beings become more capable, creative, connected, and able to contribute meaningful solutions together?

Eventually, those ideas became the foundation for Back to Our Nature—a family series designed to help children imagine themselves not as passive witnesses to climate change, but as creative participants in a better future.

Back to Our Nature was created for children and families because children are still close to wonder. They can imagine, question, play, collaborate, and see possibilities that adults sometimes miss. The series offers practical tools for communication, creativity, cooperation, and problem-solving, while presenting climate change through a lens of possibility rather than despair.

Tamara hopes the show will help children know that they have more options than previous generations believed they had. Some of the most innovative solutions may be waiting to be discovered by curious minds working together — with synergy on their side.

Climate change is not only an environmental issue. It affects food, water, health, migration, weather, economics, homes, communities, and the future that children will inherit.

Some people point out that a changing climate may create certain economic opportunities in some regions. That may be true in limited ways. But upsetting the balance of natural systems carries a much larger cost, especially when those changes happen faster than communities, ecosystems, and economies can adapt.

I care about climate change because it asks something important of us. It asks whether we can wake up, work together, listen to one another, and become more creative than we have been before.

Even with the dangers ahead, I believe this challenge can become a catalyst for people to discover their authentic gifts and contribute to meaningful solutions. Back to Our Nature approaches climate change not only as a crisis, but as an invitation to create community, work together in ways that generate synergy, and help build a wiser, more life-giving future.

At this stage, Tamara is focused on developing Back to Our Nature and is not broadly available for public speaking engagements. Select conversations related to the project, collaboration, or potential presentation opportunities may be considered.

For inquiries, please contact: ChangingCourseProductions@gmail.com