EcoGather

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.

Intentional Community Study Group
2025-03-24 12:00 - 14:00, 2025-04-28 12:00 - 14:00
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.

Learn More and Apply!

What is Work?
2025-03-25 18:30 - 20:00
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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

Open Hours (Nissa)
2025-03-26 16:00 - 17:00, 2025-04-15 10:00 - 11:00
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Good Grief
2025-03-27 18:30 - 20:30
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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 (Erik)
2025-04-02 11:00 - 12:00, 2025-04-22 14:00 - 15:00

Alienation and Exploitation of Labor
2025-04-03 11:30 - 13:00
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Our exploration of work questions the differences between jobs, care, creation, production, and more. There is no question that in order to stay alive work needs to get done. It takes energy to grow photosynthetic leaves, forage for food, to hunt for prey, to sow seeds to harvest, to shop at the grocery store, or to make enough money to eat out at a restaurant. There are plenty of arrangements for doing the work of sustenance and subsistence. Most critters alive are responsible for procuring the energy to do work to stay alive themselves, or in collaboration with a group. But, in our modern human societies, many people are able to meet their needs by using someone else’s energy without reciprocation. This is (or runs a very high risk of) exploitation.
We have already explored the processes of Primitive Accumulation and Enclosure that established capitalism and coerced people into meeting their material needs through wages rather than subsistence. This rift separated (or introduced a middle-step to) the work done for meeting materials needs. Indeed, the work done for wages is sometimes referred to as alienated labor. And under Capitalism, the alienated labor of workers is a key component to making profits, which mean that labor must be compensated at less than its true value. Because laborers receive less than the full value of their work, members of the working class who must work for another person or entity to earn wages so they can pay for the necessities are typically working in an inherently exploitative arrangement. (Degrees of exploitation vary tremendously, of course.) Additionally, capitalism relies upon – and is continually subsidized by – unpaid work in the so-called “informal economy” (or non-monetary economy). Think here of the work associated with maintaining a car for commuting, shopping for “work appropriate clothing,” making and packing meals, and even the maternal labor of gestating the next generation of exploitable laborers. In this EcoGathering, we will explore the often invisibilized micro and macro examples of exploitation that result when the work we do to meet our material needs is exploited, and separated, or alienated, from the work we spend most of our lives doing.
Recommended resources for this gathering:
Much To Do
A big long blog post on relating to and reuniting with out working lives. For this session, we recommend reading the Exploitation and Devaluation of Necessary Work sections.

The Myth of Freedom Under Capitalism by Upstream
Home is Where the Unpaid Labor Is
Marx, the ‘Metabolic Rift’ and Capitalism’s Assault on Nature
The work of care is vital. Why don’t we pay like it is?

Good Grief
2025-04-03 18:30 - 20:30
Register!

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 Third Gate, The Sorrows of the World. Through guided discussion and ritual, we will allow this newly 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 3
For 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 Grief
A brief summary of each of the five gates of grief
Grief Belongs in Social Movements
A deeply moving piece by Malkia Devich-Cyril on the importance of our grief in taking action towards inspired change.

Make Work
2025-04-09 18:00 - 19:30
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In a time of crisis, there is so much work to do. Most of us exist in a state of alienation that amounts to having two full time jobs – the work for wages and the work for ourselves, leaving little left for (the work of) pursuing passions and participating in community. To add insult to injury, as many wage-labor jobs have been automated or accelerated by technology, there has been an increase in the amount of work we are doing that is decidedly not necessary. There is so much important work that isn’t being done or isn’t properly compensated because it is not profitable to capital. Folks are too overworked to have the time and energy to do it. Rather than redistributing the work that is essential to more people and reducing our working hours, or mobilizing around the many existential crises we face, we have all continued to work faster and longer to meet our needs and eke out some semblance of individual security in an uncertain world.
Why do are we doing so much unnecessary work? In part because it generates profit for someone, somewhere. In part, because few places have pro-social systems of wealth distribution or even adequate social safety nets. And in part because an un- or under-employed populous lacks the money to generate more economic activity as consumers. (So even as essential work is made more efficient, workers aren’t given their time back, they are compelled to work increasingly less necessary jobs that grow the economy.)
In the words of David Fleming “[we] are conditioned by the market economy; [we] have to be competitive, and cannot forgo an immediate advantage from which [we] would individually benefit in favor of a future (and larger) advantage from which everyone would benefit.” In this EcoGathering, we will explore the many ways we continue to be exploited and alienated from our labor, as well as how we might recreate a culture that would allow us to slow down, and actually get the important work done.

Recommended resources for this gathering:
Much To Do
A big long blog post on relating to and reuniting with out working lives. For this session, we recommend reading the Creation of Unnecessary Work section.

On The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs A Work Rant by David Graeber
I Didn’t Want a Job by Aimee McNee

On Meaningless Jobs A conversation with David Graeber

Intentional Community Study Group
2025-04-10 19:00 - 21:00
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.

Learn More and Apply Here!

Reclamation of Labor
2025-04-17 12:30 - 14:00
Register!

There are plenty of examples of labor movements throughout history (spanning rights recognition, practical advocacy to improve wages and working conditions, and radical re-envisioning), from worker unions and cooperatives, fully automated luxury communism and neodecadence, social security and even insurance, to universal basic income, wages for housework, and expanding who is allowed to work for wages. In this unprecedented time, we might begin to consider how prefiguration and divestment from the myths of progress and efficiency might play a role in re-establishing forms of subsistence and work-life integration that heals the rift of alienation, meets our needs without exploitation, and values finding joy in the work that we all love and rely on. What diverse arrangements for getting the work done in a weird world can we imagine anew and return to?
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
Much To Do
A big long blog post on relating to and reuniting with out working lives. For this session, we recommend reading the last section, subtitled Reclamation of Labor.

How to Drop Out by Ran Prieur
Retreats: Marble Hill Short film documenting the life of Mark Boyle, The Moneyless Man
Jem Bendell: Keeping Your Job at the End of the World (As We Know It)

Good Grief
2025-04-19 14:00 - 16:00
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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.

The fourth session will focus on The Fourth Gate of Grief, What we expected and did not receive. This gate provides us the space and grace to acknowledge and grieve the expectations we have held for ourselves and the world around us that cannot be met. 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 fourth session of this series, it’s highly recommended that you read the section of this chapter subtitled “The Fourth Gate: What we expected and did not receive” (pages 54-63)
The Five Gates of GriefA brief summary of each of the five gates of grief

Work
2025-04-19 15:00 - 17:00 | Hard-Pressed Community Print Shop, 12 VT Rt. 15, West Danville, Vermont
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).
Most of us exist in a state of alienation that amounts to having (at least) two “full-time” jobs – the work for wages and the work for ourselves. This leaves little time for (the work of) pursuing passions, participating in community, and pursuing transformative change. To add insult to injury, as many wage-labor jobs have been automated or accelerated by technology, there has been an increase in the amount of work we are doing that is decidedly not necessary. Rather than redistributing the work that is essential to more people and reducing our wage-working hours, or mobilizing around the existential crises we face, most of us now work faster and longer just to meet our needs and eke out some semblance of individual security in an uncertain world.
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?

Examining End Times Fascism
2025-04-23 15:30 - 17:00
A focused, ad hoc EcoGathering to discuss the analysis put forward in Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s recent article in The Guardian, The rise of end times fascism.
Please read the featured essay in advance, it will take approximately 30-40 minutes, as per The Guardian. We’ll gather to discuss.

Register!

Good Grief
2025-04-26 14:00 - 16:00
Register!

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 focused on The Fourth Gate, What we expected and did not receive. Through guided discussion and ritual, we will allow this newly 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:
Rough InitiationsAn article by Francis Weller which details the teachings of Malidoma Somé on trauma vs. initiation cultures.
The Four Mountains StoryAn excerpt retelling of the Cree knowledge keeper, Cash Ahenakew’s story of The Four Mountains from Vanessa Machado de Oliviera’s Hospicing Modernity.
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, Chapter 3
For the fourth session of this series, it’s highly recommended that you read the section of this chapter subtitled “The Fourth Gate: What we expected and did not receive” (pages 54-63)
The Five Gates of Grief
A brief summary of each of the five gates of grief

Progress
2025-04-30 18:30 - 20:00
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‘s For this lunar cycle, we’ll dissect the narratives told to us by modernity, and how they falsely shape our expectations for navigating the modern world. First up: progress, and its vital role in the mythmaking of empire.
One of the most popular, powerful, and pernicious myths of the dominant culture is that of perpetual progress. Watch any car or electronics advertisement, and you’ll be pelted with appeals to ever-improving technology. Listen to any politician, and amongst appeals to nationalism and exceptionalism, you’ll get flooded with appeals to past progress and promises that this particular politician is best if we want to keep advancing. Read any report on the stock market, and you’ll be invited to celebrate or assured we’ll soon resume the perpetual upward growth of the economy. Progress is used to justify cultural and technological colonization, economic expansion, and political power grabs. The myth of perpetual progress (shortened to MPP by some authors like Chris Ryan) permeates the dominant culture and most nations’ self-understanding: we’re all advancing, moving forwards, away from a dismal past that’s best discarded and forgotten.
But is the narrative of progress at all true? We’re promised that progress will bring us somewhere… better… but better by what standards, and according to whom? This week, we’ll explore that omnipresent narrative of progress, to what extent it drives and justifies modernity, and all that it misses.
Recommended Resources:
Daniel Schmachtenberger’s most recent interview on Nate Hagens’s podcast
Death in the Garden podcast: Who Were the Luddites? (start this one 8 minutes in)
The World is a Mess, and It’s Still the Best Time to Be Alive
Steven Pinker’s Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed

Population
2025-05-06 13:00 - 14:30
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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?
Recommended resources for this gathering:
OVERSHOOT Podcast: Progressive Pathways for a Smaller Population with Hannah Evans and Pam Wasserman
Twilight Greenaway: Can We Talk About the Population?
David Fleming: Population, Lean Logic

Good Grief
2025-05-06 18:00 - 20:00
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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 fifth session we will focus on The Fifth Gate of Grief and the last entryway into the Weller’s Communal Hall of Sorrows, Ancestral Grief. Walking through this gate asks us to address the generations of untended grief and compounded losses of our ancestors, passed on to us to heal and hold. 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 fifth and final session of this series, it’s highly recommended that you read the section of this chapter subtitled “The Fifth Gate: Ancestral Grief” (pages 63-69)
The Five Gates of GriefA brief summary of each of the five gates of grief

EcoGather Team Open Hours
2025-05-07 10:30 - 11:30, 2025-05-22 18:00 - 19:00

Constructing a Mesh
2025-05-08 19:00 - 21:00
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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.
After some brainstorming between EcoGather organizers and participants, community organizers and scientists, we have decided to embark on a project of collaboratively creating a strategic radio-node mesh that has at least 2 purposes in Vermont (and beyond, non-Vermont folks are welcome too!) – to communicate without reliance on large centralized communication infrastructure, and to monitor and disseminate environmental changes. We would like to begin experimenting with using some strategically placed nodes to monitor stream levels to give us some resilience in predicting and communicating flooding around the state, as well as establishing more reliable and wide-spread regular communication. In this first iteration, the more people that have nodes and understand the basics of how to use them, the more functionality for communication there is for folks to innovate and communicate with one another. Beyond that, we need folks that are excited to go on reverse-scavenger hunts to identify and place key nodes to connect nodes in mesh – basically, hiking up mountains and climbing trees to stash transmitters so that more folks can communicate from further away.
If you are interested in learning more about Meshtastic, how Meshtastic integrates with other forms of communication, simply helping be a connector for communication in your community, mutual aid, disaster preparedness or citizen science, we are organizing an on-boarding session to help folks get their set-ups running and plugged in to a wider network.
To participate in this event, we advise watching our presentation on the basics of Meshtastic in advance and purchasing a basic set-up that works for your needs. In the session, our guides will walk you through getting up and running, as well as brainstorming next steps for getting creative about community resilience projects and other possible applications we might support each other in experimenting with and deploying.
If the cost of purchasing a basic set-up is prohibitive to participating, reach out to be considered for one of our limited stipends or free basic kit set-ups.

Recommended resources for this gathering:
Constructing a Mesh Orientation Guide
Purchase Your Supplies!
Autonomous Communications Club Resource Guide

Good Grief
2025-05-12 18:00 - 20:00
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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 as we opened up the fifth and final gate to address Ancestral Grief. Through guided discussion and ritual, we will allow this newly 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 3
For the fifth and final session of this series, it’s highly recommended that you read the section of this chapter subtitled “The Fifth Gate: Ancestral Grief” (pages 63-69)
The Five Gates of Grief
A brief summary of each of the five gates of grief
Seeds, Grief and Memory with Rowen White
A beautiful conversation relating ancestral grief with seed keeping as a means of remaining connected to the cultures of our ancestors.
Roots Deeper Than Whiteness
An essay on the historical emergence of whiteness and how it coincides with the forced assimilation and inherent disconnection of European peoples and their distinct cultures and traditions.

Prosperity
2025-05-14 17:30 - 19:00
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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?

Language
2025-05-17 11:00 - 13:00 | Hard-Pressed Community Print Shop, 12 VT Rt. 15, West Danville, Vermont
How does language shape the way we see the world? What ideas are we more or less able to access, hold, and develop because limitations of the languages we speak? What is the value — and the limits — of having a robust vocabulary, and developing shared, nuanced definitions of words? Somewhere around 20% of the world’s population speaks English? How might this expand or constrain the diversity of concepts that can be communicated? As Rowen White has said: “If we are bound by the constraints of language and lexicon, how is modern culture really going to shift in the powerful and positive ways it needs to to restore our collective spiritual power.”
How can we can communicate ideas that we haven’t even imagined yet? Can we make up our own words? Should we? And if we do, how do we do we define and translate them so that we can continue to communicate across differences and with newcomers?

Peace
2025-05-22 12:00 - 13:30
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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.
How does our ignorant pursuit of modernity’s “peace” exacerbate the many conflicts of the polycrisis? How has our growing inability to address the inevitable conflict that arises, on both macro and micro scales, contributed to even more disruptions of the peace we claim to want for the world? In the last session of this cycle, we will break down the peace narrative we’ve been told, and make space to build out a new one which acknowledges the inevitability of conflict and our response-ability to address it with maturity and inclusivity.
Recommended resources for this gathering:

“The Duty of Repair”
Concluding excerpt from Conflict Is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman

Recommended Quiz:
Which Conflict Archetype Are You?
Take this quiz to find out!

Recommended Listening:
Navigating Conflict with Kazu Haga
A conversation from Prentiss Hemphill’s podcast Becoming the People

Reimagining the Family
2025-05-25 11:00 - 12:30
We’ve partnered with Upstream once again to host a discussion on their recent episode with Kristen Ghodsee, Post Capitalist Parenting Pt. 2: Reimagining the Family, which, expectedly, continues their mini series on post capitalist parenting (their first was another EcoGather collaboration with Toi Marie Smith). Join us as we share the difficulties we’ve experienced as parents, caretakers, or children under capitalism, and explore the alternative ways of being we can strive for (many of which Kristen mentions in the episode and her book!).
Recommended resources for this gathering:
Upstream Podcast: Reimagining the Family with Kristen Ghodsee

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Dystopia
2025-05-28 19:30 - 21:00
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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.
The dystopias we familiarize ourselves with in literature have long warned us of the dangerous potential of humanity to create worlds of incredible suffering. But where does the fiction end, and reality begin? At least 90% of oceanic fish populations are overexploited. There are microplastics in every human body, in every mother’s breast milk, as well as our hearts and in our brains. Only 4% of Earth’s remaining mammals by biomass are wild beings – 96% of mammals are humans and our livestock. The dominant culture has created a dystopia for every non-human being, and for most human beings too – yet our dystopias look different, and will continue to unfold differently. In this EcoGathering, we’ll discuss our dystopia, driven in large part by the human population-consumption dynamics in this dominant culture.
Recommended resources for this gathering:
“Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel, Chapter 6
(It’s less than two pages long, and you’ve already gotten maybe half of it quoted above. But maybe give this another read, and imagine what would be on your own list.)
Slaughterbots – a short film by Dust
(This contains depictions of violence and blood – not too much, but this is a video about theoretical dystopian killing drones – so if that’s not for you, totally pass on this video.)
Worldmaking in the Dark with Octavia E. Butler, with Ayana Jamieson and Sophie Strand
(This touches on Dystopia and its opposite, Utopia, but like any good conversation with wonderful minds, it wanders about and doesn’t stay just on the topic of topias.)
