Events Schedule
Below you’ll find a chronological listing of all upcoming EcoGather events, class sessions, and gatherings. There is a lot going on! If you’re new to our learning community, you might start with an EcoGathering…
Our EcoGatherings are free and open for anyone to join
– just drop in whenever you can, regardless of experience or preparation.
Open Hours (Erik)
Open Hours (Erik)
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.
Alienation and Exploitation of Labor
Alienation and Exploitation of Labor
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.
Good Grief
Good Grief
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.
Make Work
Make Work
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.
Intentional Community Study Group
Intentional Community Study Group
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.
Open Hours (Nissa)
Open Hours (Nissa)
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.
Reclamation of Labor
Reclamation of Labor
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?
Good Grief
Good Grief
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.
Work
Work
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.
Open Hours (Erik)
Open Hours (Erik)
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
Good Grief
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.
Intentional Community Study Group
Intentional Community Study Group
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.
Good Grief
Good Grief
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.
Population
Population
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?
Open Hours (Erik)
Open Hours (Erik)
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.
Constructing a Mesh
Constructing a Mesh
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.
Good Grief
Good Grief
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.
Prosperity
Prosperity
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?
Open Hours (Nissa)
Open Hours (Nissa)
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.
Language
Language
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.
Peace
Peace
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.
Dystopia
Dystopia
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.
Utopia
Utopia
Broken down into a literal translation, Utopia means "no place." This Topia is the territory that is often labeled 'off-limits' by an understanding of what is possible, based on what has been possible. It is where the imagination roams when left unbound and free from the limits of realism. Unlike the dystopic stories we question might be playing out in the real world we exist in right now, the utopia is inherently fictional. That being said, it can still serve a functional purpose in world-building. There is incredible power behind the unbound imaginative creative process that occurs when certain limits are removed. New pathways may be revealed for different ways of organizing ourselves into better forms of existence. If there's any room for delusion in Topias, let it be a hopeful delusion which allows us to believe that there is always a better way of being. Join us this week as we wonder with unbound curiosity what utopian ideals we might be able to learn from, comparing lessons from history and literature with our current predicament.
In the Shell of the Old
In the Shell of the Old
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.
Open Hours (Nissa)
Open Hours (Nissa)
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.
Thrutopia
Thrutopia
We can benefit from imagining, ideating, and criticizing utopias and dystopias, but what about right now? Utopias are unachievable and dystopias are undesirable, so what worlds should we inhabit and build, especially now and in the near future? In the pursuit of utopia and in the rejection of dystopia, we encounter Thrutopia. Join us this week as we explore what thrutopia could look like and mean in this stage of modernity and its ongoing collapse.
Ourtopia
Ourtopia
If thrutopia is what might get us through the near future, the near- to mid- to even long-term work of surviving the future, then what about our lives immediately, as we live them in this moment? What brings us joy and aliveness, closer to utopia, in our day-to-day? There are glimpses and tastes of utopia all around us: birdsong and sunlight; a beautiful garden full of produce and bees; a meal around a crowded table; crisp, slow mornings; warm evenings with loved ones. On this call, we’ll appreciate the ways the Earth has brought us little slices of utopia – ourtopia – and still brings it to us every day.
Open Hours (Erik)
Open Hours (Erik)
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.
Alienation and Exploitation of Labor
Alienation and Exploitation of Labor
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 EcoG...
Good Grief
Good Grief
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.
Make Work
Make Work
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.
Intentional Community Study Group
Intentional Community Study Group
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.
Open Hours (Nissa)
Open Hours (Nissa)
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.
Reclamation of Labor
Reclamation of Labor
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?
Good Grief
Good Grief
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.
Work
Work
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.
Open Hours (Erik)
Open Hours (Erik)
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
Good Grief
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.
Intentional Community Study Group
Intentional Community Study Group
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.
Good Grief
Good Grief
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.
Population
Population
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?
Open Hours (Erik)
Open Hours (Erik)
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.
Constructing a Mesh
Constructing a Mesh
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.
Good Grief
Good Grief
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.
Prosperity
Prosperity
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?
Open Hours (Nissa)
Open Hours (Nissa)
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.
Language
Language
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.
Peace
Peace
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.
Dystopia
Dystopia
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.
Utopia
Utopia
Broken down into a literal translation, Utopia means "no place." This Topia is the territory that is often labeled 'off-limits' by an understanding of what is possible, based on what has been possible. It is where the imagination roams when left unbound and free from the limits of realism. Unlike the dystopic stories we question might be playing out in the real world we exist in right now, the utopia is inherently fictional. That being said, it can still serve a functional purpose in world-building. There is incredible power behind the unbound imaginative creative process that occurs when certain limits are removed. New pathways may be revealed for different ways of organizing ourselves into better forms of existence. If there's any room for delusion in Topias, let it be a hopeful delusion which allows us to believe that there is always a better way of being. Join us this week as we wonder with unbound curiosity what utopian ideals we might be able to learn from, comparing lessons from history and literature with our current predicament.
In the Shell of the Old
In the Shell of the Old
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.
Open Hours (Nissa)
Open Hours (Nissa)
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.
Thrutopia
Thrutopia
We can benefit from imagining, ideating, and criticizing utopias and dystopias, but what about right now? Utopias are unachievable and dystopias are undesirable, so what worlds should we inhabit and build, especially now and in the near future? In the pursuit of utopia and in the rejection of dystopia, we encounter Thrutopia. Join us this week as we explore what thrutopia could look like and mean in this stage of modernity and its ongoing collapse.
Ourtopia
Ourtopia
If thrutopia is what might get us through the near future, the near- to mid- to even long-term work of surviving the future, then what about our lives immediately, as we live them in this moment? What brings us joy and aliveness, closer to utopia, in our day-to-day? There are glimpses and tastes of utopia all around us: birdsong and sunlight; a beautiful garden full of produce and bees; a meal around a crowded table; crisp, slow mornings; warm evenings with loved ones. On this call, we’ll appreciate the ways the Earth has brought us little slices of utopia – ourtopia – and still brings it to us every day.