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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

Vocabulary for Our Era

Education at the End of Modernity

Another world is possible. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

Arundhati Roy

The most important area of domination [is] the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceive themselves and their relationship to the world.

Jason Hickel

People do not survive racism, xenophobia, gender discrimination, and poverty without developing extraordinary skills, systems, and practices of support. And in doing so, they carve a path for everyone else.

Mia Birdsong

[A] case must be made for relentless optimism and radical hope in the face of the many challenges the future will bring. Historically speaking, real social progress often begins with hopefulness, extreme dreaming, and crazy ideas...

Kristen Ghodsee

EcoGather asked @nimonte of @thefarwoods to design

“Why surviving?”, we asked Surviving the Futur

“Why surviving?”, we asked Surviving the Future course host Shaun Chamberlin. “Well, because that is about the size of it, already, for so many of us. Especially when we expand 'us' to include the non-human.”

In a modern world built on a persistent colonial legacy, Shaun reminds us that the thriving of the happy few comes at the expense of the majority of “others”. “We live in a culture where the norm is seeking your own thriving ("look after number one!"; "self-care!"; "I earned this!") while operating within systems that are built on the colonizing and suffering of others.”

How we have come to think of survival is itself starkly reduced. Writer @alexispauline speaks beautifully to how “survival has never meant bare minimum, mere straggling breath, the small space next to the line of death.” Instead, she argues that survival “references our living in the context of what we have overcome. Survival is life after disaster, life in honor of our ancestors.” This corresponds more closely to the etymology of “survive”, which is to “outlive”.

Yet, we have created a condition wherein the profoundly unsustainable products of our own making far outlive us, visible in the plastisphere and the #plastoscene — our epoch, visible in the sedimentary layers of plastics now found in the earth’s interior.

For Shaun, there is great wisdom in respecting the limits of what's possible in a given circumstance. Surviving shifts the baseline of our conversations and challenges the norm that survival is already a given. How can we look “The Long Dark”, as Francis Weller calls it, straight into the face and commune with it, rather than disengage from darkness in the pursuit of the luminous ideal?

EcoGather and Dark Optimism are hosting Surviving the Future precisely for those who crave holding difficult conversations and learning together to encounter our predicament.

You can find more information about the upcoming learning journey through the link in our bio!

#climatechange #survival #ancestors #collapse #modernity

Stories are powerful, so powerful, that we sometim

The day after the election, we spontaneously hoste

The day after the election, we spontaneously hosted an EcoGathering to bring together our core #community.

Our Network Weaver & Creative Collaboration Director Nicole Civita @plenty.enough shared a message with our community to inspire hope and provide an alternative perspective. Both our community and team deeply appreciated it, which is why we wanted to share it with you.

"How are you feeling today? Because I'm actually feeling pretty good, and while I know that might just be like a big dose of rebound neurotransmitters after yesterday's unshocked despair, or it might be the very real benefits of having spent time coming together with our community and grieving together last night. But I am. I'm feeling like fired up, in a way, of being filled with light and warmth. I'm motivated this morning.

"These giant cracks are real opportunities. We can shift consciousness in moments like this, when things break open big, more folks become aware of the ruptures.

Fewer people can ignore the chasm between the world as they have been told it is and the world as it shows itself to be.

We can stand above this big crack, and we can pull people out of despair. We can lay planks across it and bridge to some folks who did not like their choices but knew they needed to move themselves off of the fault line.

And then we can climb into some of the smaller fissures and conspire and create there. We can light the dark and see each other. We can protect each other and let new things grow from underground."

The song is called Before the Stars Have Left the Skies by Salt of the Sound, Dear Gravity

How is your hospicing modernity going? 🤔 #mem

How is your hospicing modernity going? 🤔

#meme #modernity #patriarchy #metamodernism

This week’s EcoGathering explores enclosure —

This week’s EcoGathering explores enclosure — seen by many as the beginning of capitalism as a dominant economic system. Enclosure is the process by which early capitalists laid claim to the commons — land, rivers, fisheries, etc., by privatizing and limiting access to them, including to those who managed them for generations. Inherent in the process of enclosure was the act of breaking people's connections to the land, to their lifeways and livelihoods, and to each other. #Enclosure is a predicate for separation.

These domineering and extractive ways of relating weren’t just limited to the land and livelihoods but also to the bodies of people assigned the role of woman, disrupting bodily sovereignty. During the enclosures, the majority of women were forced to provide labor, in the form of care work, without compensation or at minimal wages and their subsistence was taken away. Those who resisted or practiced rituals that reaffirmed relationality to the land, were condemned as witches and, oftentimes, executed.

Though buried under several centuries of history, awareness of the enclosures is essential to understanding some of the deep-seated drivers of contemporary power-relations and politics. Some say that authoritarianism is inevitable under late-stage capitalism, others aver that #capitalism is late-stage patriarchy. Capitalism and #patriarchy both got a huge boost through the enclosures.

Join us to explore these connections and some of the historical shifts that set the stage for a volatile present in which access to land, rights to inhabit particular places, bodily autonomy, reproductive behavior and labor, and the very constructs of gender are again being used to consolidate power, wield it undemocratically, and condone violence as a tool of control.

#USelection #resistance #power #witchtrials #womensrights

Find the link to sign up in our bio (click upcoming ecogatherings). Thursday, November 7, 6:00-7.30 PM ET.

Political polarization. Bipartisan genocide and ec

Political polarization. Bipartisan genocide and ecocide. Corporatocracy. Duopoly. Staggering short-termism. The 2024 US federal election is big. But our predicament is bigger.

As our friend @natehagens recently said: “Who wins is important, but if we take a step back and look beyond the short-term fervor of election politics, it becomes clear that what ultimately matters isn’t which person wins but how we - as individuals and as communities - respond....[O]ur current government will continue to contribute to a future that is far from sustainable - regardless of who heads the next administration. The ‘bend not break’ moments of the future will require informed policies that go beyond what can be addressed in today’s political environment.”

We agree — and we’re trying hard to avoid cleaving along the lines of terrible electoral choices in a captured representative democracy. Those of us looking to avoid winding up where humanity is headed understand that politics (and profits are) subordinate to the state of the biosphere, the quality of our relationships, and the vitality of our cultures.

So today, we’re reminding ourselves that:
1) Voting is just one way we participate in a broken political system with an electoral college that disenfranchises so many. Approach your choice strategically. (Check out @swapyourvote )
2) We need way more democracy - and more direct democracy — not less. Work toward democracy in forms and places that we aren’t used to seeing it — in citizens’ assemblies, in our workplaces, perhaps even where we buy and sell essential good and services.
3) Deep pain and a roiling sense of betrayal is coursing through U.S. American society right now. We must tend these flows of grief, the feelings of being wronged, of being complicit. Metabolization of big feelings and needs to happen in community... (continued in comments)

For September's print, Renée was inspired by Ecog

For September's print, Renée was inspired by Ecogather’s recent themes of weaving, (re)connection, lines, and shapes. These prompted her to think about spiders in the dark making webs. This is something that honestly used to unsettle her, but more recently, she's begun to think about spiders and their webs in new ways and with new feelings.

Renée slept with this piece of linoleum by her pillow as part of the creative process, reclaiming the night as something connecting rather than alienating, aware of the spiders probably out there making their own pieces of art throughout the night, inspiring her.

In a small but meaningful effort to make art a bigger part of our experiences at the end of the modern era, EcoGather has commissioned Contributing Artist Renée Barry to create a series of twelve block prints that support sense-making in the space between. Each month, EcoGather will share a new piece of Renée’s work and a brief statement about the print or it’s inspiration. The collection will build over the next year, populating our free art page with art that is intended to be accessible. We encourage you to download these files, print them, post them, share them, given them as gifts… We ask only that you credit Renée (@reneebarryart) and point folks toward EcoGather (@eco.gathering) when you do.

Swipe to see the other pieces she has made so far!

Link in bio to download and share!

Some of us understand the seriousness of our times

Some of us understand the seriousness of our times, while some choose to be oblivious to it.

Surviving the Future is for those aware of our predicament, ready to hold complex conversations, and eager to find the others.

It is a co-learning journey for anyone who refuses quick fixes and techno-solutions and seeks to co-develop different responses altogether.

Hundreds of people went through "Surviving The Future" Deeper Dive, and many found the courage and knowledge to "plant the flag" in their communities, mobilizing allies to lead profound change.

The annual Deeper Dive offers a long moment — a 10-week opportunity — to slow down, pull back, and explore responses as part of a small global community, among and alongside some of the world’s leading thinkers and doers.

Confirmed guests include @natehagens, @vandanashiva1, @davidriversabram, and @planetcritical. They will infuse our spaces with their knowledge, yet your presence, wisdom, and experiences matter just as much.

Enroll now for The Deeper Dive 2025. Follow the link in our bio!

#survivingthefuture #ecologicalcollapse #predicament #survival #community #learningjourney #learning #collapseawareness

EcoGather is a co-learning #community. Together,

EcoGather is a co-learning #community.

Together, we help each other 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.

We hold space to loosen our attachments to the #systems and #stories that need to be broken down and metabolized, to hospice that which must give way, and tend to our complex feelings. We sense into what is shifting and emerging at the edges. We move marginalized and more-than-human perspectives toward the ever-moving center.

We offer refuge and renewal for those who desire a different relationship to the #future.

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.

Attend. Tend. Attention. Tendrils. Etymologically

Attend. Tend. Attention. Tendrils.

Etymologically united by the Latin root tendere – to stretch toward, give heed to – these words convey a process of extension. Stretching one thing towards another, be it a body towards a place, energy towards a recipient, mind towards an idea, or roots towards a life-giving source.

After moving through the necessary sobering work of hospicing, metabolizing, and grieving life in death, we gather for the last meeting of this lunar cycle for a generative session on attending the birth of something new. Drawing on the framing language provided to us by Vanessa Andreotti and the work of midwifery, birth and death doulas, we will explore the skills required of us to attend to the birth of futures that are presently unimaginable.

Meeting this Wednesday, October 23, from 6PM to 7.30PM ET. Find the link to our upcoming EcoGatherings in our bio!

Credits:

1. Unknown
2. From the Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman
3. @el_papi_kriko
4. @nielsdevisscher
5. Unknown
6. From Love at Sea (1965)
7. Unknown
8. Unknown
9. Unknown
10-11 @nielsdevisscher

#hospicingmodernity #rebirth #renewal #death #attending #growth #moodboard #mood

What does the future of education look like? What

What does the future of education look like? What would happen if we start to co-create education with the Earth? How can we cooperate autonomously to re-imagine education?

How can we listen to our territories to inform our actions, decisions, and lives? How can we nurture our soils to regenerate all the damage the education system has brought to our minds, bodies, and spirits?

What might happen if we composted the word “education”, what nutrients will be out of it? How can we change the predatory system that we live in into a cooperative one? How can we bring more cooperation into systems that are dominated by unhealthy competition?

This week we'll be at the Re-Imagining Education Conference (REC 4.0) to hold these questions, immerse ourselves in conversations about how we imagine the future of learning, and learn from those who are living into the need for learning that honors all forms of life and draws from pluriversal wisdom.

There are so many flavors, scents, and textures of sessions on offer. If you glimpse the schedule, we're sure you will find a few that call to you. We hope you'll join EcoGather - as well as our friends from the @ecoversities, @courageofcare, @postgrowth, @the_emergence_network, @yesworldjams, @3rd_space_culture, @unitedplayfulness, @climate_run and so many others - from Oct 24th- 27th! Register here: https://re-imagining.education/(Link in bio.)

This event is offered in the spirit of the gift economy. Pay what you can and/or bring your gifts.

After years as avid listeners, sometimes-sponsors,

After years as avid listeners, sometimes-sponsors, and grateful fans, EcoGather has embarked on a partnership with @upstreampodcast to produce additional paradigm-shifting interviews about heterodox economics, collective action & belonging in an enlivened world. This was a really natural next step considering the constant crossover between their guests and the voices we lift up in our courses. Our facilitators and community members are always recommending Upstream episodes to each other. And collaborating with @dellazduncan and @robpertraymond has been a dream come true.

We’re really excited for both the new episodes themselves — the first of which drops tomorrow — AND for what will happen after. 🌟 We’ll be holding special EcoGatherings for each of our co-produced episodes this year. These sessions may feature the hosts, some of our guests, or just our community. They will let us continue the conversation, give us chances to connect the dots between topics, theories, and praxis. And, of course, they’ll help us foster radical community and build the kind of solidarities we need as we navigate endings and attend to the emergence of ancient and as-yet-unimagined futures. 🌟More info on each will be shared when the associated episode is released — keep your eyes out here, check the Events page on our website, or find details in the shownotes.

We are so excited to be collaborating in a way that can bring you all into the conversation…

EcoGathering: Grieving. October 19, 11 AM - 12.30

EcoGathering: Grieving. October 19, 11 AM - 12.30 PM ET / 5-6.30 PM CET (link in our bio!)

In the approach and the wake of death, we are presented with #grief.

A word too small to encompass the extent of what it carries in meaning, grief is a master key to an entire warehouse of complex emotions, memories, and depth in understanding the world.

Because our modern culture largely fails to integrate death into our understanding of life, many of us have misconstrued concepts of and strained or guarded relationships to grief. In the absence of an abiding cultural reverence for grief, and with a lack of practices and norms that make space for its sonorous, unfurling expressions, grief is often hidden or minimized.

It is viewed as an obstacle we must overcome at a pace compatible with faith in progress. Grief is also viewed as private — something we must experience in solitude.

By treating grief as something private, we miss the opportunity to collectively harness the transformative power of inevitable change in a world that is simultaneously living and dying all around us, all the time. If metabolism promises to transform life through death, grief is the guiding force that allows us to remain connected to that living energy.

Register by clicking the link in bio or head over to http://www.ecogather.sterlingcollege.edu/schedule
As always, these calls are free and you can stay however long you like (and participate however you like). We hope to see you then!

#ecoanxiety #loss #ecogrief #ecogathering #groupsupport

Cover credit: Lull by Pete Serrard (sculpture)
Images 3&6: @nielsdevisscher
Text and hosting by the wonderful @butteratroomtemp

"In a culture consumed by endless growth, it is ne

"In a culture consumed by endless growth, it is necessary to bring awareness to the metabolic balancing act – to emphasize that growth is dependent upon breakdown. Existence depends on a constant exchange of energy and resources. With this in mind, we can better appreciate the internal and external work of deconstruction as it gives way to reconstruction. We can situate ourselves with a wider, entangled Earth Metabolism."

Emily Shaljian, our host for today's EcoGathering, shared this beautiful insight with us in her Metabolism newsletter. Join us today (Oct 10, 6:30pm ET) for a deeper exploration of metabolism and how we can digest loss and destruction to create a more enlivened existence. You can sign up (as always, for free) in the registration link in our bio.

That wondrous mystical forest art comes from @robmulhollandartist And thanks to @butteratroomtemp for hosting this EcoGathering!

#gather #metabolize #breakdown #deepecology

Metabolism is the sum of all the energetic movemen

Metabolism is the sum of all the energetic movements of matter which facilitate life itself. It’s the endless flow of nutrients from one corner of the universe to another, the process of breaking down to build again, the mechanism behind the fundamental concept that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It is the cycle of life. Metabolism allows catabolism and anabolism to dance in their true state of constant motion and exchange. One must die for another to be born.

In the upcoming EcoGathering this Thursday, we will gather to metabolize. By identifying what is currently breaking down, has already broken down, or can be expected to break down soon, we see what becomes available to reassemble and reintegrate into something else, something different, something perhaps better for the beings suffering in modernity. With the knowledge that existence depends on a constant exchange of energy and nutriment, we can better understand our own energetic entanglement to every living being, and hold a greater appreciation for both the internal and external work of deconstruction and decay as it gives way to reconstruction anew.

So if you're interested in some digestive reflection, join us on October 10 at 6:30pm ET – as always, these calls are free and you can stay however long you like (and participate however you like). You can find all registration link in our bio. Hope to see you there!

Thanks to @butteratroomtemp for hosting this warm but unflinching round of calls, and @nielsdevisscher for these wonderful, humic images (1, 3 & 4)

#metabolize #digest #decompose #decompress #compost #enliven #growth #decay #eroticecology #modernity #radicalcommunity

What does it mean to live an *elemental life*? In

What does it mean to live an *elemental life*? In a time when the elements are disrupted by climate chaos —flooding waters, intensifying fires, heating air, sliding earth — how might those same elements teach us to transform our way of living among them, to thrive as part of the human and natural communities that they generate? How might building more intentional relationships with the elements in our day-to-day lives, our play, our gatherings, our spiritual practices help communities like ours that now experience catastrophic flooding? Is there a version of mucking out our hearts and rerouting our mental pathways that might need to happen alongside the mucking of our homes and rebuilding our roads?

EcoGather & Hard-Pressed Community Printshop invite you to a reading and conversation with John Hausdoerffer who recently co-authored and edited a new book, An Elemental Life, part of a 5-book series, Elementals, published by the Center for Humans and Nature. In this casual community gathering, we'll explore what it means to see the elements as elders with agency and to reclaim our place as elemental beings ourselves.

**When**: Tuesday, October 15, 2025, 6-8pm

**Where**: Hard-pressed Community Printshop, 12 VT-15, West Danville, VT 05873

We'll have local apple cider, bread, and cheese to share.
You are welcome, but not expected, to bring something to help make it a meal.
No fee, consider donating to flood relief in VT or NC

We're so excited to showcase Renee Barry’s secon

We're so excited to showcase Renee Barry’s second stunning piece from her residency with us!

"Ahead of EcoGather's late August conversation with Dougald Hine, Renee visited with and took inspiration from Hine's writing, and was particularly moved by ideas from the Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009) written with Paul Kingsnorth.
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Loons are skilled swimmers, migratory birds, and able to adapt in both fresh and saltwater. They are known for diving, kicking from webbed feet and following their pointed bills deep, up to two hundred feet below. Renee's memories of loons kept coming to mind as she read the Manifesto."

Learn more about this piece and more on our website, and keep an eye on our feed for her monthly prints as Renee continues her residency through June 2025.
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#EcoGather #EcoGathering #CommunityCollective #Discussion #GetInvolved #Outreach #KnowledgeIsPower #BlockPrinting #Art #Deepen #Artist #Printmaking

In Lauren Zitney's latest blog with Ecogather, she

In Lauren Zitney's latest blog with Ecogather, she writes "In a culture as obsessed with speaking – and feeling heard (which isn’t the same as being listened to) – as ours, it’s no wonder language first felt like a slinky to me. The fragile single helix was slinking and moving out of control, taking on the form of the plastic branding of the consumerist culture we live in. What looked like a single helix was actually a broken strand of DNA, the helix of speaking, expression, language ripped from its pair: listening."

Curious about how our focus on speaking might be missing a crucial piece? Head over to our blog to explore the rest of this fascinating take on communication.
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#EcoGather #EcoGathering #CommunityCollective #Discussion #GetInvolved #Outreach #KnowledgeIsPower #Communication #Language #newblog

We are gearing up to start the second 10-week cycl

We are gearing up to start the second 10-week cycle of studying intentional community together, starting October 2nd. It's not too late to sign up!

Whether you're ready to take the leap or just curious, join us in researching, discussing, and designing pathways toward shared housing and life-making. EcoGather study groups hold space for facilitated and supported collective learning. There's no expert teacher leading it all, but there is structure, thoughtful facilitation, and group accountability so that participants actually make time for the topics they want to learn about -- and ample opportunities to crowd source wisdom from each other and develop skills together.

For more info on how to join the next cycle and to co-create the schedule, check out the link in bio.

https://www.ecogather.sterlingcollege.edu/intentional-community-study-group

#EcoGather #EcoGathering #CommunityCollective #Discussion #GetInvolved #Outreach #KnowledgeIsPower #StudyGroup #IntentionalCommunity

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