EcoGather

Good Grief
2025-03-27 18:30 - 20:30 (America/New_York)
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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.
Join us in our third session as we direct our grief to The Third Gate, The Sorrows of the World. In this Sharing Session all participants are welcome to release the grief that arises at this gate to be witnessed and held in the collective well of sorrow. It’s highly recommended that you attend the companion Integration Session offered the following week, for the sake of group continuity and comfortability, as well as the opportunity to fully sit with the experience of witnessing and processing the grief at this gate.

Recommended Resources
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, Chapter 3For the third session of this series, it’s highly recommended that you read the section of this chapter subtitled “The Third Gate: The sorrows of the world” (pages 46-53)
The Five Gates of GriefA brief summary of each of the five gates of grief

Open Hours (Nissa)
2025-03-26 16:00 - 17:00, 2025-02-27 10:00 - 11:00 (America/New_York)
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What is Work?
2025-03-25 18:30 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
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By some estimates, contemporary humans, on average, spend about 1/3 of their lifetimes “working”. (Actual proportions of time spent “working” vs. sleeping vs. engaged in leisure pursuits vary widely based on culture, economic system, ability, need/wealth, gender, — and also based on what we actually count as “work.”) Without question, it’s evident that 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. (Indeed, the persistent non- or under-compensation of this work is a powerful means of upholding the patriarchy, but we’ll get to that later in our Exploitation session). For now, suffice it to say that what is or could be considered work varies widely. So, we will begin this cycle by unpacking a familiar term, exploring our perceptions of work, and evaluating definitions provided to us by physicists, ancient Greeks, and modern society.

Recommended resources for this gathering:
The School of Life: History of Ideas – WorkMichael Luong: The Past, Present, and Future of WorkMuch To Do: Relating to and Reuniting with Our Working Lives

Intentional Community Study Group
2025-03-24 12:00 - 14:00, 2025-03-06 19:00 - 21:00, 2025-02-17 12:00 - 14:00 (America/New_York)
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.
We will meet in 5-session cycles with breaks in between. This cadence of focused study punctuated by periods for absorption, reflection, and implementation is intended to enable participants to sustain engagement and to support each other in moving from theory through ideation into practical action. In this way, we can balance group formation, active collaboration, and openness to newcomers.
At the end of the first 10-week cycle, study group participants will make suggestions about schedule for the next cycle, including choosing a new book. EcoGather will reopen the study group to new participants. If you are interested in joining for the next cycle, learn more about the group and apply, follow the button below.

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Solidarity
2025-03-20 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York) | Hard-Pressed Community Print Shop, 12 VT Rt. 15, West Danville, Vermont
Our work as people who want and deserve better is to understand the game, stop playing in the ways that we can, get clearer about the kind of world in which we want to live, and be more involved politically and in our communities instead of less. – Toi Marie Smith
Through the lens of collapse awareness, interdependence is apparent and solidarity becomes essential to survival. We recognize that we are all beings suffering from a devastated biosphere, an insatiable extractive economy, and socio-geo-political decline. When we say all, we really mean all: all human beings, all more-than-human beings, all communities of all beings, and all future beings who will inherit the effluent of empire. Ultimately, nobody will be spared the sufferings of collapse, especially those humans and non-humans with less wealth, power, or protections. We share far more in common with present and future living beings than we do money, machinery, the economy, or the aspirations of empires.
Solidarity invites us to show up for other people fighting what turns out to be the same fight as ours – even if we are not positioned on the front lines. It offers us an opportunity to contribute what we can (in whatever forms or concentrations we can share) to a struggle for survival that may not be distinctly or acutely ours, but diffuses easily across the porous membranes between self and other.

Necessity
2025-03-20 13:00 - 14:30 (America/New_York)
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We are a planting species. For thousands upon thousands of years, humans have tended to ecosystems, and perhaps our most substantial partners in that co-creative relationship were, and still are, plants. Matters of regeneration and rewilding are immensely necessary to help the living world — and by extension, us — survive the onslaught of civilization. But rekindling and nurturing an abundant, emergent relationship with plants and ecosystems is also necessary for us to express that innate, deeply human part of themselves that has worked intimately with plants for millennia. On this final call, we’ll gather to appreciate how essential an ecomaximalist world is. Ultimately, we can begin to ask: How can we learn to see and empower the living world differently?

There are no resources to read or listen to for this week’s call. We’re going to explore the abundance and aliveliness in our daily lives. Take a few moments throughout your days to notice and appreciate the lives around you!

World Ecology
2025-03-12 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
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This gathering will explore the entangled histories of climate change, capitalism, and the “ends of the world.” Often taken at face value today, “existential threat” and “climate emergency” language have a long history rooted in capitalogenic climate change since the sixteenth century. Charting the relation between climate change and political crisis during the Little Ice Age (c. 1300-1816), Moore shows how successive climate-class conjunctures shaped the modern world, a capitalist world-ecology of power, profit and life. These included a series of invasions and transformations that imposed the “end of the world” on countless peoples in the interests of turning planetary life into profit-making opportunities. By the early twentieth century, the logic of genocide and ecocide was complemented by state-of-emergency politics. This culminated in Cold War regime change politics and the neoliberal era’s “shock doctrines” (Klein): emergency rule to establish predatory imperialist policies across the South. The two claims, of survival and exigency, today combine in emergency rhetoric that lends aid and comfort to an authoritarian, technocratic politics of climate change rather than what is needed to pursue a just transition – a radical extension of popular democracy.
Recommended Resources for this gathering:
The Capitalocene & Planetary Justice, by Jason Moore
The Fear and The Fix: Environmentalism Serves the Powerful, by Jason Moore

Good Grief
2025-03-11 19:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York)
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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.
In this Integration Session, we will focus on working with the grief that was revealed in the last week’s Sharing Session for The Second Gate of Grief, The places that have not known love. Through guided discussion and ritual, we will allow this unearthed grief to move into practice as we venture into a collective Apprenticeship with Sorrow. It’s highly recommended that you attend the companion Sharing Session offered the week prior, for the sake of group continuity and comfortability, as well as the opportunity to fully sit with the experience of witnessing and processing the grief at this gate.

Recommended Resources:
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, Chapter 3For the second session of this series, it’s highly recommended that you read the section of this chapter subtitled “The Second Gate: The places that have not known love” (pages 31-46)
The Five Gates of GriefA brief summary of each of the five gates of grief

Post Capitalist Parenting
2025-03-08 12:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York)
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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.
Recommended resources for this gathering:
Upstream Podcast: Post Capitalist Parenting with Toi Marie SmithForget Hallmark: Why Mother’s Day is a Queer Black Feminist Left Thing, in Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, Alexis Pauline GumbsOur Role As New Paradigm Parents, excerpted from Raising Children in the Midst of Global Crisis, by Jo delAmorNicole Civita: Parenting at the End of the World as We Know It

Hospicing Modernity Together
2025-03-05 18:30 - 20:00 (Asia/Karachi)
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Living Time
2025-03-05 12:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York)
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The physical spaces we inhabit both shape and reflect how we spend our time and what our overculture values. We infrequently immerse ourselves in lush landscapes, taking time to wander off path, stopping to notice an oak gall or to observe that you can only find butterflies around the weedy goldenrod growing in the ditch. Far more often, we drive past at 60 miles an hour, completely encased in plastic and metal. We don’t let sprouting acorns planted by squirrels grow to maturity. Instead we mow them and all the other “weeds” down, then budget massive amounts of time and resources into cultivating trees and ornamental bushes offsite to then transplant them. But the living world doesn’t work on the impatient timescales of the dominant contemporary economy. Beings, ecosystems, and all their interconnected relationships take time to form, time to grow to maturity, and time to recover when damaged. We humans don’t take the time to understand ecosystems, to engage with them and to humbly ask what they need. 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.
Recommended resources for this gathering:Deep Time Diligence: An Interview with Tyson YunkaportaFrihet, by Peter SandburgGrowing Through Grief: Derek Jarmin, by Maria PopovaModern Nature by Derek JarminDavid Farrier: Wild Clocks

Good Grief
2025-03-04 19:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York)
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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.
In this second session, our first meeting will be for sharing the grief that arises for each one of us at The Second Gate, The places that have not known love. Holding tender space for the places within ourselves that have never been given the chance to know love, this Sharing Session is an opportunity to release our grief to be witnessed and held in the collective well of sorrow. It’s highly recommended that you attend the companion Integration Session offered the following week, for the sake of group continuity and comfortability, as well as the opportunity to fully sit with the experience of witnessing and processing the grief at this gate.

Recommended Resources
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, Chapter 3
For the second session of this series, it’s highly recommended that you read the section of this chapter subtitled “The Second Gate: The places that have not known love” (pages 31-46)
The Five Gates of Grief
A brief summary of each of the five gates of grief

Abundance
2025-02-26 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
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The gardens of our imaginations may be verdant and flowering places, but a tremendous amount of what’s done in the name of horticulture, infrastructure and agriculture creates landscapes of botanical and ecological scarcity. Whether mowing lawns, mulching garden beds, or paving a parking lot, we have created, are surrounded by, and have become acculturated to the very voids that nature abhors. Given this ecologically impoverished state of affairs, how might we summon the ecological abundance that exists in our midst at the scale and pace that is needed to offset what is passively termed as “habitat loss?” We could follow the cues of charismatic weeds and build flourishing landscapes that fulfill the needs of the human and non-human world alike. Could cultural and botanical reproduction co-create new lands outside of conventional capitalist paradigms? Might we call this approach “eco-maximalism”?
Recommended resources for this gathering:
Nick Anderson: Improvised LandscapesNick Anderson: The Opposite of ExtinctionOlogies Podcast with Alie Ward: Ethnoecology with Leigh JosephThe Wildlife Homestead: I Built a Wildlife Pond

Hospicing Modernity Together
2025-02-24 11:00 - 12:30, 2025-02-19 18:30 - 20:00 (Asia/Karachi)

Rage and Joy
2025-02-22 15:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | Hard-Pressed Community Print Shop, 12 VT Rt. 15, West Danville, Vermont
Are we allowing rage and joy, grief and celebration, to remain fiercely connected to each other?
Are we tending to each so that neither trauma nor delusion define us?
We will start by exploring how we might express our individual and collective rage without being overwhelmed and subsumed by it. Rage may at once be a true reaction to the events around us, or perhaps a debilitating manifestation of other emotions such as grief, fear, or impotence. How might we discern between these valid reactions and metabolize the helpful parts of that energy into something useful action and sustainable?
On the flip side of holding our rage is to find glimmers of joy to sustain us despite all that is going on around us. How can we use expressions of joy to balance our rage, to sustain our fire and celebrate the little things as a form of radical resistance?

EcoGathering: Kin
2025-02-20 19:30 - 21:00 (Asia/Karachi)
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There is one identity that cuts across all other labels we could apply to humans and more-than-humans, no matter what kinds of citizens or conquerers or stewards we and others might be. Beneath it all, we are all irrevocably kin.  This relationship to each other has been (and must be) suppressed in the name of growth, progress, and superiority. Join us this week as we discuss how we can welcome back kinship into the interconnected world.

Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
To read:
Kinship Beneath the Family Tree: Emily’s blog post about expanding the limits of our understanding of Kinship
Kinship is a Verb: A conversation between Robin Wall Kimmerer, John Hausdoerffer, and Gavin Van Horn
To listen:
A Little More Than Kin: A conversation with Richard Powers
To view:
Ancestral Mathematics

Autonomous Communications Club
2025-02-12 19:00 - 20:30 (America/New_York)
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In this study group club we discuss all the myriad ways we might gain great control of our communications, whether for crisis response, grid-down scenarios, increased security, improved attention, and anything in between. In this session one of our participants will be presenting on the use of Meshtastic!

EcoGathering: Citizens
2025-02-12 12:00 - 13:30 (Asia/Karachi)
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What does it mean to exist as a “citizen”? A citizen of where, exactly? We are only told to identify as a citizen of a nation-state (in the context of empire), and we are reduced into so many other flattening categories conducive to the growth of oppressive systems (“consumers”, “voters”, and other labels that amputate our role in the world and leave us only as captured participants in abusive systems). Can we simultaneously exist as citizens of empire, of our smaller communities, and the living world?
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
1. Nissa Coit: The Good Citizen
2. Jon Alexander: Citizens not Consumers or Subjects
3. Political Philosophy with Dr. Laurie Johnson: Who is a Citizen?

Open Hours (Erik)
2025-02-11 17:00 - 18:00 (America/New_York)

Hospicing Modernity Together
2025-02-10 11:00 - 12:30, 2025-02-05 18:30 - 20:00, 2025-01-27 11:00 - 12:30, 2025-01-22 18:30 - 20:00 (Asia/Karachi)
A guided group reading of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Andreotti)’s Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism.

Good Grief
2025-02-09 11:00 - 12:30 (America/New_York)
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Good Grief is a group exploration of our collective grief guided by 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.
Join us for the first of a series of five sessions in which we will discuss and tenderly hold the grief that awaits us at The First Gate of Grief, which welcomes in the familiar grief accompanying the understanding that everything we love, we will lose.

Recommended Resources
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, Chapter 3For this first session, it’s highly recommended that you read the section of this chapter subtitled “The First Gate: Everything you love, you will lose”
The Five Gates of GriefA brief summary of each of the five gates of grief

EcoGathering: Stewards
2025-02-06 19:30 - 21:00 (America/New_York)
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What is our place in the world? What should it be? What do we have to offer Earth and her living and non-living (so far as we think we know) communities?   We regularly see appeals to the privilege or necessity of humans as stewards of the Earth. But what do these claims imply — ownership, power over, possession? Are we above the Earth, separate from her, as her managers? Where does our stewardship lead — or, how do we choose to make decisions as stewards? Do we choose what’s best for all beings, or do we consciously or unconsciously shape the world for our specific benefit?  The idea of being a steward does get at an important point of course: we can and should have a role in co-creating an abundant, diverse living world. Could we do that as stewards? Or perhaps it’s better to imagine ourselves as siblings or neighbors, a more horizontal relationship with all other non-human members of the living world.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
Mordecai Ogada: The Big Conservation Lie
Lyla June: 3,000 Year Old Solutions to Modern Problems
Rob Lewis: No Nature Poems, Please

EcoGathering: Conquerers
2025-01-29 13:30 - 15:00 (America/New_York)
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Humans are offered – forced into, really – relatively few roles and identities in modernity. On this first call, we’ll unpack how we’ve been made to live as conquerers, occupiers, Homo colossus, separated from and domineering over the living world. Our population, our consumption, and the myths we’ve been offered all inform this role we can choose to resist.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:

Genghis Khan (Part 2) – How to Take Over the World podcast
Conquerors and Culture – National Geographic
