Past Events

EcoGatherings
EcoGatherings were regular, ongoing opportunities to gather folks across experience, distance, and generations to reckon with and respond to the unprecedented times in which we find ourselves, as individuals, communities, and cultures. These gatherings provided safe spaces for participants to ask hard questions, to sit in uncertainty without judgment, and to untangle the knotted threads of reality together. Providing some suggested (but not required) reading or listening for participants to get acquainted with the topics and themes to be discussed, EcoGatherings provided a free space for people to deeply explore topics that aren’t always easily accessible in the dominant culture from a grounded and informed place, in conversation with community.

Our attendees found relief in the general understanding of the current world shared by fellow participants. In gathering spaces, there was no need to re-explain or justify how or why we got to our worldviews and philosophies based on our criticisms of the dominant economy and culture. This shared understanding allowed for the development of an expansive and supportive space to hold difficult questions. Rather than assuming the “doomer” role whose job is always to draw attention, again and again, to all that is wrong, in Ecogatherings we got right to the interesting, clear-eyed, emotional, and even exciting topics of how to respond and build more liberating and survivable futures. By engaging in this way, we sought to create the conditions for integrating responsiveness to ongoing, involuntary collapse with the pursuit of entangled, care-centered solidaristic, multi-species liberation and vivification. It was a space to help each other face the end of modernity, honor loss and possibility, behold the entwined nature of limits and life, praise the inevitability of death, and recognize the roles we can each play in a time of unpleasantly welcome reckoning and inevitable transition.

Eusociality - Using Insect Sociobiology to Evaluate How and Why to Cooperate for Improved Community Resilience & Effective Food System Strategy
In this session, we explored lessons from eusocial organisms, like the European Honey Bee, upon which our dominant industrial agricultural system depends, to inspire more cooperative, collective action in food system transformation. Through a brief introduction to eusociality, participants reflected on where their work falls on the sociality spectrum and how they can better align efforts for greater impact. Small group discussions focused on barriers and opportunities for increased collaboration within the food system. Participants left with insights and strategies for fostering cooperation and strengthening collective efforts. By drawing inspiration from nature, we challenged assumptions and deepened connections across the food system.
Growing Beyond Growth
We did a little bit of an experiment at the Radically Rural conference. Intended to be a smaller, more intimate post-summit roundtable/EcoGathering, we talked about a topic that can be seen as tricky: alternate economic paradigms. This session was for those who may have heard some terms like Wellbeing Economics, Doughnut Economics, Degrowth/Living Well, Human Centered Economy, etc. Those who have a curious mind, don’t just do things because “they’ve always been done that way,” those interested in finding ways to help your community and local economy thrive in new and meaningful ways, and those interested in forming rural communities of practice with this work.

We value what we measure, right? So what measurements do we use to tell us when an economy is thriving? How does a thriving economy translate to the wellbeing of the people and earth? What do we need to unlearn about what a thriving economy means? In this session, we talked about what happens to our rural communities when we outgrow our growth economy. And since we were talking, among other things, about “getting in the doughnut” economically, we had literal doughnuts (and coffee) too.

Regrowing a Living Culture: The Work That is Called For Now
In pockets here and there, gathered around kitchen tables or in the in-between spaces of online connection (including but it no way limited to EcoGather, Surviving the Future, the Dark Mountain Project, and Ecoversities, a patchwork of conversations has been maturing over these past years. They are conversations in which we step back from the rush to action or to answers, where we hold each other in the process of “giving up” on promises that no longer make sense and responses to the crisis that turn out to be themselves a part of the crisis. It’s sobering, this work – from some angles, it can look like a twelve-step program for the winners of modernity – and there are more and more folks arriving at the doors of these meetings.

At the same time, there are questions brewing among those who have already been part of this work for a while: how do we tell the story of what is worth doing now? What kind of maps are worth making to help each other find paths through an uncertain landscape? How do we release resources from the structures of a world that is ending to contribute to the possibility of worlds worth living for in the times to come? How might we move together in the space between the crumbling familiar and the worlds we won’t live to see? What are the practices that help us leave good ruins, become good ancestors?

In At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Climate Crises and Other Emergencies Dougald Hine wrote about finding “the small paths” into the unknown world that lies ahead. In this session, as he prepared for a US tour to accompany the paperback release of this book brought forth by Chelsea Green Publications, EcoGather’s Network Weaver Nicole Civita held space for Dougald to share where this work has been leading over the past year. We explored how it joins up with the conversations that EcoGather convenes. Finally, with attendees, we surfaced observations and insights from which we can mobilize responses to the questions alive in this long moment.

Cultivating Earth Democracy
Held at Shelburne Farms, Sterling College and its EcoGather initiative warmly invited local and regional leaders into a space of shared learning and reflection focused on the connections between our ecological relationships and the health of our democracy. This 4-day intensive journey for professionals and was facilitated by environmental philosopher, educator, and author John Hausdoerffer, PhD.
Food and Environmental Writing
Led by Joe Fassler, renowned editor and writer, this workshop-driven course immersed students in the art of food and environmental writing, with an emphasis on the way politics and power shape personal experience.

Through encounters with essential reading in key topic areas, and case studies of coverage that fell short, participants deepened subject matter familiarity while learning to navigate each genre’s unique challenges. They focused especially on the development of necessary skills, including the ability to:

craft compelling stories about vast, interconnected systems;
balance human-level narratives with complex science and policy issues;
interrogate popular narratives that mislead and obscure; and
handle culturally fraught topics with sensitivity and nuance.

The workshop component put these lessons into practice, with opportunities for students to develop a specific piece of writing through a process of instructor feedback and peer critique.

Each participant received in-depth consideration of at least one piece of nonfiction, as well as a personalized consultation with the instructor. This course also included a significant practical component, with mini-lessons related to newsgathering, story development, pitching, and magazine and book publication.

Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Time
Led by author, activist, and educator Shaun Chamberlin, Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Time curated spaces for realists about our troubled times. Originally hosted by EcoGather, this program explored the interlocking ecological, economic and social crises of our times, providing participants an opportunity to develop a cultural vision of how we might respond — reclaiming much that we miss — in the context of the diverse realities that we face.

Through both self-paced and live online offerings, Surviving the Future provided guests to explore together the critical issues reshaping our world, and how our families and communities might change direction before we end up where we are headed.

The program was designed intentionally to attract diverse participants, from 2020-2025 it developed alumni from forty-six countries on every continent on Earth, from ages 20 to 93.

Alongside guests like Vanessa Andreotti, David Abram, Sherri Mitchell, Nate Hagens, Lyla June, Kali Akuno, Isabelle Frémeaux, Mark Boyle, Kate Raworth, Stephen Jenkinson, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Iain McGilchrist and Vandana Shiva, participants were activated through conversations about life well lived in the context of the dramatic changes we face.

Edgework: Care and Creativity at the Margins
In it’s final months, EcoGather hosted Edgework: Creativity and Care at the Margins – a course developed by a Sterling alumni to redefine and reclaim creativity without the noise of societal expectations and self-doubt.

Rooted in care, lived experiences and more-than-artistic expressions, this 8-week journey helped participants rediscover and call upon the creativity that is already within of them. It was designed with the aim of reimagining creativity beyond traditional definitions, exploring creativity as an act of care, and seeing creativity as a tool for eco-social change.