Drop in and talk with Nissa or Erik about anything on your mind. If you are new to EcoGather this is a great place to come get up to speed with everything that has been going on in the community. We'll be here for the whole hour, so drop in whenever you can.
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.
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.
A guided group reading of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Andreotti)'s Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism
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.
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 our 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.
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.
This talk explores 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.
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?
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.
