This is a mixed-experience group of people with different skills to research and assess varied models for collective and cooperative land-based living, sustenance, and enterprise. Study group members will identify together several possible paths to investigate more fully, divide up the work of familiarizing themselves with helpful models, literature, and case-studies.
Good Grief is a group exploration of our collective grief through the frameworks of Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief (The Wild Edge of Sorrow). Inspired by our EcoGathering on Grieving during the autumnal Composting series in 2024 and an increasing urgency to process the compounding loss we experience as the continuation of modernity relies on genocide, ecocide, omnicide and fascism’s impingement on our basic rights and liberties, we will hold space to tend to the complex and often unaddressed grief that accompanies these losses and expand our emotional capacity for collective grieving as a skill for navigating uncertain futures.
Human population is, somewhat confusingly, a controversial issue to discuss. Many people understand that having 8 billion humans on the planet creates lots of ecological and social problems, and maybe the population shouldn’t keep growing endlessly if we want the biosphere to remain intact. Many others seem to believe that we must keep growing the human population for the sake of civilization and the economy, and questioning human population challenges the sanctity of human life, or borders on misanthropy or eco-fascism. Certainly, dominant myths about the supremacy of human life over all others, and the separation of humans from nature, informs sensitivity around the topic, but conversations around population can also easily turn into finger-pointing at poorer, more populous nations that have contributed far, far less historical ecological harm. How does human population contribute to the polycrisis? What other factors, like the demands of global economic system or individual human consumption, play into the polycrisis?
If you are interested in learning more about autonomous communications and being a part of a larger decentralized network of community builders, or simply to get creative, or to go on mission-driven local adventures, you may be interested in receiving support from other interested and knowledgeable folks beginning an organized community Meshtastic project. If you don't consider yourself particularly interested or savvy with technology - there are plenty of other reasons to be excited - creating whimsical enclosures for the hardware, helping your community, connecting with nature, solving exciting problems and responding to an uncertain world.
Good Grief is a group exploration of our collective grief through the frameworks of Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief (The Wild Edge of Sorrow). Inspired by our EcoGathering on Grieving during the autumnal Composting series in 2024 and an increasing urgency to process the compounding loss we experience as the continuation of modernity relies on genocide, ecocide, omnicide and fascism’s impingement on our basic rights and liberties, we will hold space to tend to the complex and often unaddressed grief that accompanies these losses and expand our emotional capacity for collective grieving as a skill for navigating uncertain futures.
Modernity has brought us more energetic and material prosperity than the royalty of antiquity experienced. This prosperity comes at an obvious, though intensely hidden, human and ecological cost. Most economists and CEOs want to convince us our levels of prosperity aren’t nearly enough, and we need more energy and more materials. Certain thinkers, such as Derrick Jensen, think that none of this industrial prosperity justifies the costs, and we should disband with our material and energy wealth altogether in order to save as much life on the planet as possible. Others, like Jason Hickel, think that we can maintain relatively high levels of prosperity – every human being can still own a laptop, for example – and we can still maintain a sustainable existence on the planet. Considering the myth of perpetual progress and the massive human population, how should we weigh arguments about our wealth? There are plenty of definitions of wealth outside of the dominant materialist, individualist, growth-based culture, so what really is wealth anyways?
EcoGather's Vermont based facilitators of community learning are collaborating with Hard-Pressed Community Print shop in West Danville, Vermont to offer a series of EcoGatherings in the Northeast Kingdom. We're eager to share space, snacks, and substantial-talk – the opposite of small-talk –with folks who are craving conversation about who to live well in a time of endings. These casual, cozy events are an easy way to connect in community, practice co-learning, and get connected to EcoGather's globe-spanning cosmolocal network composed of beings and communities ready to courageously confront the collapse of both the natural systems that we depend upon and human systems that are hostile to life. We help each other make and sustain paradigm shifts.
Just as modernity has shaped the narratives of progress, population, and prosperity to its own benefit, there is a story of peace that we've been told which deserves some critical analysis and questioning. In a culture where "peace deals" are synonymous with a temporary pause on genocidal bloodshed carried out by an incredibly unbalanced power dynamic, our very notion of what "peace" actually is has become warped by our conditioning to witness and increasingly tolerate unspeakable violence. The question of peace must hold an aspect of social spatiality… peace where? And for whom? A pervasive "Protect your peace" type of neo-spirituality has arisen in modernity's hyper-individualized society. It requires its followers to ignore the very violences that their so-called peace depends on, as well as the conflict that inevitably arises from the unaddressed violences. But there is no peace in existing amongst the comforts of modernity when those comforts are dependent on the extraction and exploitation of other life.
Our realities are shaped by the physical world we inhabit; whether that's the nature that surrounds us, the humans we interact with in community, the food made accessible to us, or the stories that reach us, filled with knowledge our own realities or those far away. But just as much as we absorb these inputs from the outside world to shape our understanding of it, we are also exerting our own inputs into the realities of others. We all contribute to a greater understanding of the physical world which surrounds us, the Topia we exist in. In this lunar cycle, we will examine the different Topias, from the more familiar types found in literature, Dystopia and Utopia, to the more generative and less well-known genre of Thrutopia and Ourtopia.
