EcoGather is a co-sensing and learning community.
Together, we help each other make and sustain our paradigm shifts. The vast majority of us didn’t learn how to show up for the predicament we’re facing. So we gather to help each other move from collapse awareness (and fear) to collapse responsiveness (and courage). Together, we figure out how to simultaneously be alive in a world of endings and weave the more beautiful world(s) our hearts know to be possible.
EcoGather offers courses and recurring gatherings to find like-spirited people who treat the exhausted earth with reverence and want to reclaim the human story. Find hope in each other, and explore the resources necessary to engage meaningfully in your place and community.
Paradigm Shifts
Join us this Saturday, April 19th from 3-5 pm in West Danville at Hard-Pressed Community Print shop for a community discussion about Work! Leading up to International Workers Day and a larger celebration, we are going to begin considering how our working lives fit into the broader context of a changing world.
We spend so much of our time and energy working, that we never really get the chance to explore the question of what really is work, anyways? Where did it come from, and who does it serve? There is no question that in order to stay alive work needs to get done. Living in a time of upheaval, we sense that there`s very important work to do -- and for many of us, that`s not the work we`re actually doing.
Further, today it is common to meet needs through someone else`s labor, without reciprocation. Such arrangements are prone to exploitation and are entwined with the greatest challenges of our time. Simultaneously, under capitalism, almost all laborers receive less than the full value of their work. Thus, members of the working class (all who must work for another person or entity to earn wages so they can pay for necessities) are typically working in inherently exploitative arrangements. Additionally, capitalism relies upon – and is continually subsidized by – unpaid work in the so-called "informal economy" (or non-monetary economy).
In this unprecedented time, it is imperative that we examine our relationship to and reclaim some control over our labor, individually and collectively. If we divest from the myths of progress and efficiency, we might find ourselves inclined to re-establish forms of shared subsistence. We might reorganize power and practice prefiguration in our workplaces. And we might even toss out dated and impossible-to-achieve notions of work-life balance in favor of work-life integration.
If you`d like to meets more of your needs (and those of your neighbors) with less exploitation, actually respond to accelerating crises, and find joy in good work, start by joining us for this EcoGathering. What diverse arrangements for getting the work done in a weird world can we imagine anew and return to?
The history of labor organizing and peasant resistance gives those of us interested in reclaiming and reorienting our effort and attention a loaded toolbox to work with. Nevertheless, to heal the metabolic and spiritual rifts caused by the extent of alienation and exploitation of our working lives we will need to think way beyond the priorities of most labor organizers today. What we need is to fundamentally use our labor power – including our power of refusal – to reclaim and re-essentialize work.
Divestment from the myths of progress and efficiency are a good place to start. Prefigurative Politics and democratized workplaces can take things a big step further. But we need to keep our focus on the real goals: re-establishing forms of shared subsistence and work-life integration that could end labor alienation, enable us to meet our needs without exploitation, and open up room for joy in good work and essential endeavor.
Join us on the last EcoGathering in the *Work* cycle!
When? Thursday, April 17
Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM ET UTC+5
All details and registration: link in bio.
Renée Barry @reneebarryart shares her latest artwork for EcoGather titled “What Do You Need?”.
Renée asks:
“But if help is one of the most sacred words, as stated by Cole Arthur Riley, I wanted to respond actively by addressing immediate needs at whatever scale with curiosity and care.
In this print I like the ambiguity of who is asking the question. Is the Earth inquiring about my needs at this moment, or am I reminding myself of my own? How do personal needs relate or fit into the responsibility of responding when help is needed in my community and planet? Are our needs connected even when they are different? How may they evolve over time? How can we learn to listen better?”
The commissioned art is made accessible to the public and can be downloaded at https://ecogather.ing/art
Without question, work makes up a significant portion of the human experience.
In a clever capitalist catch-22, we spend so much of our time and energy working, that we never really get the chance to explore the question of what really is work, anyways? Where did it come from, and who does it serve? Is there inherent value to work? And why do we spend so much of our precious time living doing it?
In the 20th and early 21st centuries, we`ve tended to narrowly define work as the labor we perform in exchange for wages or other monetary earnings.
This construction is broad in that it covers a wide range of roles across all aspects of society, necessary or essential, productive or value-adding, non-essential and incidental to profit generation, and questionable or degenerative. But it is also narrow in that it excludes the typically unpaid labor required to meet the demands of daily living. This oft-unpaid work (known variously as carework or social reproductive labor) has been disproportionately assigned to women in recent centuries.
We will begin our next EcoGatherings cycle by unpacking a familiar term, exploring our perceptions of work, and evaluating definitions provided to us by physicists, ancient Greeks, and modern society.
If this sounds like your cup of flat workplace coffee, join us on Tuesday, March 25, 6:30-8PM ET. As always, link in bio!
#workplace #capitalism #labor #unpaidwork
EcoGather’s Vermont based facilitators of community learning are collaborating with @hardpressedvt 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.
Join us this Thursday at the in person EcoGathering, on the theme of Solidarity!
When? Thursday, March 20
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm UTC+5
Where? At @hardpressedvt
12 VT Rt. 15
W. Danville, Vermont
For the last gathering in our Ecomaximalism cycle, Nick Anderson will rejoin as co-host and help us explore Necessity – how and why humble, co-creative collaboration with the living world matters so much to the human species that has been— for hundreds of thousands of years, so deeply enamored with plants.
Regardless of whether we can regenerate billions of human lives or billions of acres, working towards more ecological interconnection just simply matters.
It’s more beautiful to live along the ethics of maximum abundance, diversity, and life, whether you group those ethics into rewilding, deep ecology, or ecomaximalism. It’s necessary to live beautifully. Ahead of nect week`s EcoGathering on Necessity, we invite you to try to take the time you would have devoted to articles or podcasts to really focus on what feels beautiful in your life, as you live it. Feel how necessary a sunny breeze is, or the taste of clean water, or the first whiffs of spring blossoms. How necessary it is to talk to your dog or thank the sunrise.
📆 When? Wednesday, March 5
⏰ Time: 12.00-1.30 pm ET pm
Online and free!
Click the link in our bio or go to ecogather.ing "upcoming events".
Deep gratitude to Nick for providing these beautiful flower photos from his projects!
#ecomaximalism #rewilding #wildmeadow #landregeneration #gardening
“The whole point of intentional community is to address the problems of society. It’s naive to think that by creating one and stepping into it that these problems will magically go away.
This is why it’s important to be clear about our shared purpose. To have a north star to guide us, and to feel like we’re doing it together. It’s what makes it feel worth it.” — Sky Blue
If you are actively engaged in forming an intentional community — or you are curious about what doing so might entail but are intimidated by the process — EcoGather’s Intentional Community Formation Study Group might be for you.
From February through April, we will convene 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. We will convene every 2 weeks for 2 hours each session to learn together about the different ways that intentional communities are established and operated.
This group will be flexible, adaptive and co-created with the participants to create momentum and inspiration around the daunting process of divesting from individualism and atomized housing and shifting towards shared housing and life-making.
Sounds interesting? You can find more information and express your interest for the next cycle on our website under “offerings”, “study groups” or simply click the link at the top of our profile!
For our next gathering, we`ll welcome a new special guest, Jason W. Moore, PhD, an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, who will lead our discussion on World Ecology.
Register via the link in our bio!
In Moore`s own words: “Nature is - and was from 1492 - a class project, an imperial project that fused the production of “surplus value” and the exercise of “sur- plus power”. World-ecology therefore takes the history of ideology and cultural domination very seriously. I do not think this history is separate from capitalism’s devastations of the web of life; nor do I think we can make sense of race, gender, and sexuality abstracted from the world-historical fetishes of Nature and Civilization. Fundamental to world-ecology is the claim that modern modes of thought and culture, power and accumulation constitute an evolving totality.”
In the last 2 sessions, we explored the EcoMaximalist principles of Living Time and Abundance. World-Ecology and Ecomaximalism inform and empower each other. Plants perform crucial labor that is stolen and invisibilized by the dominant culture, quite similar to the labor of women, marginalized peoples, and whole communities who raise the human bodies necessary for capitalist economic functioning. Certain “good,” “civilized” plants like Kentucky Bluegrass and Boxwood Shrubs are forced into all manner of landscapes whether they’re meant for it or not. They are then aggressively monitored and held back so they don’t become too ornery, whereas “wild,” “undesireable” native plants like blackberry thickets, Devil’s Walkingstick, and poison ivy – who provide nourishment for vast communities – are pushed aside and suppressed, and their crucial contribution to life is marginalized. When viewed through an ecomaximalist, world-ecology lens, however, ornamental plants and unwanted weeds no longer exist as bodies to enclose in nurseries or suppress with herbicides, but as beings whose labor and liberation we can acknowledge and celebrate alongside our own.
#capitolocene #anthropocene #capitalism #worldecology
Capitalism has placed us under many spells that influence and limit what we believe to be normal and natural. Parenting is one intimate site where capitalism’s spell is particularly impactful. Often leaving parents and children to feel especially isolated, alone, and precarious—perfect for keeping working people separated and oppressed and for grooming children into docile workers under capitalism.
To kick off Upstream’s new series on Post Capitalist Parenting and intersect it with EcoGather’s interest in Parenting at the End of the World as We Know It, we invited on Toi Smith, mother of four and a Growth and Impact Strategist. Toi’s work centers on doing life, business, and motherhood differently and collaborating with people who are countercultural, liberatory, and revolutionary.
In the this episode-anchored EcoGathering, we will consider what Capitalism has whispered to us about what parenting should look like and what it is for. Join us to deconstruct mothering, fathering, and caring for the next generations under capitalism and swap post capitalist child-rearing strategies.
Join us tomorrow in the Post Capitalist Parenting Ecogathering, inspired by @toimarie work.
📅 When: Tomorrow, March 8th
⏰ Time: 12-1:30 PM ET
👉 Join by clicking the link in our bio.
One of the myths of dominant culture is the natural inevitability of the nuclear family. In fact, anthropology tells us the nuclear family is quite an anomaly, and that humans have lived with each other in a wide range of ways. But these arrangements have almost universally been more communal than the nuclear lives so many of us lead. Intentional communities offer answers to the question “how might we prefer to live with one another?”
If you are actively engaged in forming an intentional community — or you are curious about what doing so might entail but are intimidated by the process — EcoGather’s Intentional Community Formation Study Group might be for you.
From February through April, we will convene 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. We will convene every 2 weeks for 2 hours each session to learn together about the different ways that intentional communities are established and operated. This group will be flexible, adaptive and co-created with the participants to create momentum and inspiration around the daunting process of divesting from individualism and atomized housing and shifting towards shared housing and life-making.
Sounds interesting? You can find more information and express your interest for the next cycle on our website under "offerings", "study groups" or simply click the link at the top of our profile!
#intentionalcommunity #communityliving #studygroup #ecogather
join us as we bravely enter the Communal Hall of Sorrows together through the second gate of #grief, sharing what we find there with the collective to be witnessed and primed to move into acceptance. For the Sharing session, it is only required that you familiarize yourself with the section of Francis Weller`s The Wild Edge of Sorrow (pages 31-46, find the excerpt on our website) that speaks to the Second Gate of Grief.
As a reminder, we have adjusted the series to allow for the opportunity to work the grief unearthed in our Sharing sessions into practice as we venture into a collective Apprenticeship with Sorrow. The companion Integration Session will be held one week after at the same time and recommended resources the Zoom link for the session will be sent to all participants present on the Sharing call. It’s highly recommended that participants attend the Integration session for the sake of group continuity and comfort, as well as the opportunity to fully sit with the experience of witnessing and processing the grief at each gate.
Show up just as you are, and please have handy a writing utensil and paper to write on.
Participation is online and free.
Sharing Session: Tuesday, March 4 7:00pm-9:00pm EST
Integration Session: Tuesday, March 11 7:00pm-9:00pm EST
#gatesofgrief #griefcircle #grieftending #francisweller
Earlier this week, we introduced our new cycle of EcoGatherings: ecomaximalism. In case you missed it or need a refresh, ecomaximalism, coined by our co-host Nick Anderson, is a philosophy of ecological co-creation, entanglement, and scrappiness, and perhaps most of all, appreciation for the living world and some of its most dependable, remarkable, and beautiful members: the plants. The theme for next week is Living Time.
We humans don’t take the time to understand ecosystems, to engage with them and to humbly ask what they need. However, if we want to contribute to a more resilient, emergent abundance, we must examine how we all relate to time — goldenrod and oak trees included. Join us for another timely conversation with our community, and arborist and the ecological maximalist himself, Nick Anderson, as we stretch our notions of time, and tune into the lived experience of the plants and pollinators around us. How might we come to see ourselves and our work in new light?
💐 Theme: Living Time
📆 When? Wednesday, March 5
⏰ Time: 12.00-1.30 pm ET
📍Where? Online (free)
Sign up by clicking the link in our bio or head over to ecogather.ing/schedule
In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke reminds us to “be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
This beautiful sentiment and provocation corresponds strongly to spirit of the artwork that artist @reneebarryart created for us.
EcoGather’s Nicole and Renée were brainstorming a possible new direction to take in the series of block Art prints Renée has been developing for EcoGather. Nicole suggested the language “deconstruct indoctrination, pray through questions” and Renée split them into a pair of images that can go side by side. Together, they twine a thread that runs through Renée life, as she reckoned with her own religious upbringing and created space for a new spirituality to grow.
The artworks speak to the process each of us inevitably embarks on as we unlearn and break through the doctrines and dogmas our families, communities, and society have built around us. While religion teaches us to memorize and utter prayers, we choose to pray through questions. If questions are a type of prayer to meet unknown and uncertain times, which ones will you bring?
What if we were able to put aside binary ideas of “good and bad” plants in favor of “more and more”? What if we stepped back and allowed plants to do the bulk of the work? Plants are merely one visual index by which we can recognize abundance, because thriving plants bring thriving bugs, thriving soil microorganisms, and even thriving local water cycles. Rainfall and soil particulates are meant to teem with life. The plants all around us have a lesson to teach us about abundance.
This week’s call on Abundance is co-hosted and co-written by Nicholas Anderson, an ecological land manager, consultant, and arborist in Massachusetts and founding member of the Creative Commons Collective of Cape Ann. Nick would be better summarized as a human practicing the humble and curious art of ecological maximalism, a term he created to attempt to describe the unconventional, emergent ways he strives to empower plants and heal landscapes
To practice ecomaximalism is to work with the abundance and knowledge that all beings offer. The philosophy invites us to reject binary thinking, to question the values we’ve unknowingly accepted (especially those dictating how humans should relate to the living world), to welcome the contributions of our beyond-human kin, and to realize that the work to re-enliven deadened landscapes also re-enlivens us.
👉Join our today’s EcoGathering! Register via link in bio.
💐 Theme: Abundance
📆 When? Today! Wednesday, February 26
⏰ Time: 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM ET
Since the late 1700s, grass lawns became a popular status symbol among the wealthy. It signalled that they were rich enough to forgo using it as farmland. Still to this day, green, well-mowed lawns remain widespread, particularly in the Western world. Some reason that their appeal is less in the social status it grants them than the application of indoor aesthetics and ideas of purity and cleanliness to outdoor spaces.
However, more and more garden owners decide to trade the lifeless lawns for abundant plant life, and native plants are increasingly finding their way back into the modern garden, enriching the soil, supporting pollinators, and benefiting humans in the process. What becomes possible if we let our gardens grow wild, and plant them to maximize natural abundance?
This question is at the heart of arborist and this month’s EcoGathering co-host Nick Anderson’s EcoMaximalism approach and our next cycle of EcoGatherings.
Together, we’ll be exploring how we can create ecological abundance at the scale and pace to meet the biodiversity crisis. We’ll talk about regeneration, rewilding, and what it means to be an EcoMaximalist.
Join our upcoming EcoGatherings! Register via link in bio. Next one this Wednesday:
💐 Theme: Abundance
📆 When? Wednesday, 26th March
⏰ Time: 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM ET
Another brilliant speaker from Surviving The Future: The Deeper Dive!
Isabelle Frémeaux is an educator, facilitator and author. She grew up in France before moving to London, where she worked as a tenured Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. In 2011 she resigned to escape wage labor and academia, and to explore her fascinations of popular education, ritual, storytelling and collective forms of creative, joyful and fruitful resistance.
Shaun Chamberlin shares his reflection: “To my eyes, her life since embodies Mark Boyle’s call to “destroy what needs to be destroyed, and create what needs to be created”. Engaged in social movements for almost 20 years, with her partner Jay Jordan she has co-organised and facilitated international mobilisations and climate camps, trained thousands of people to reinvent modes of disobedience, and co-founded the renowned art-activism and permaculture collective ‘The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination’.
In 2011 they published the book/film Paths Through Utopias (La Decouverte, 2011), after which they set up the community la r.O.n.c.e (Resist, Organise, Nourish, Create, Exist) in Brittany. They later moved 70km to the ZAD, the 4,000 acre ‘autonomous area in resistance’ near Nantes, which eventually defeated government plans for an international airport on the site, despite intense and repeated police assault, and has inspired numerous other ZADs around France and the world. Their experiences as part of this resistance led to the essential little 2021 book We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones.”
Recognizing our kinship with the life that surrounds us is the first step. Moving into relationship with those elements is the next.
As humans, we have an active responsibility to consider our more-than-human kin just as much as we would all the human kin on our family trees.
In fact, considering those humans and their futures requires that we actively work to support the living world that they all exist within and depend on.
Human kinship is only one nested network in a greater web of interconnectedness with the more-than-human kin that surrounds us.
This understanding releases us from the myth of separability modernity relies on to continue its tirade of extraction and exploitation of the living world, and asks us to reassess or re-image our human roles as conquerors, stewards and/or citizens using the lens of kinship.
Join us in this week’s session as we call into question the limited understanding of kin, and how we may re-member ourselves to the greater web of kinship we belong to.
📆 Date: Thursday, February 20, 2025
⏰ Time: 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm UTC+5
As always, for more resources and registration, follow the link in bio. 🦋
As our Surviving The Future: The Deeper Dive live course moves in full swing, we’re sharing some of the quotes from our live sessions with our speakers.
This week we share @natehagens insight into Energy blindness, economic super organism, attention economy, and becoming a communal root system.
Nate Hagens hosts The Great Simplification podcast and YouTube channel, lectures around the world on the big-picture facing humanity, and sits on the board of the Bottleneck Foundation, the Institute for Integrated Economic Research and the Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future.
A former Vice President at the investment firms Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers, he holds the unusual and valuable combination of a Masters Degree in Finance with a PhD in Natural Resources, and when we first met he was lead editor and an outstanding content producer for The Oil Drum, an outstanding but now defunct hub for energy analysis.
Thank you @natehagens !
@dark_optimism
EcoGather’s Vermont based facilitators of community learning are collaborating with @hardpressedvt 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.
We will also be partnering in hosting larger events around MAY DAY and Summer Solstice, building community resilience through celebration. With so much shifting all around us, we sure do need each other to share the Rage and Joy, thicken and activate Solidarity, reclaim the power of our labor and dignify Work, explore the power and limits of Language, and muster the radical imagination needed to build new worlds In the Shell of the Old.
We hope you’ll join us for these community gatherings!
As a result of the ways #modernity fails to acknowledge and process death, our relationship to #grief is similarly strained and misconstrued. It is too often presented as a problem that we must learn how to deal with so that it does not interfere with our abilities to be productive and efficient. It’s viewed as an obstacle we must overcome, a diagnosis to be treated, or a personal struggle to deal with in privacy.
In Autumn last year, EcoGather hosted a series of conversations that touched directly on grief. We will be holding additional online space to collectively hold and tend to our grief through a series of EcoGatherings we`ll be calling: Good grief, hosted by @butteratroomtemp
May Good Grief be a reunion with the love that was once incredibly alive inside of you, which failed to find a way out after loss. Through community, ritual, imagining and witnessing, may we honor grief as a sacred gift that allows us to maintain our connection to the life that came before us and all the sacred wisdom it holds.
In a series of five individual EcoGatherings over the next few months, we will work through each of the Five Gates of Grief from Francis Weller’s work The Wild Edge of Sorrow. Join us at the first gate “All that we love, all that we lose” next Sunday, February 9.
Click the link in our bio to sign up! We hope to welcome you and grief in #community.