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!
Sign up for a monthly email with all the events for each month.
EcoGathering: Prefigurative Politics and Workplace Democracy
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Upstream Conversation
There are many more ways to affect change than what conventional politics offer. The goal of prefigurative politics, for instance, is to build and practice the worlds we want to live in now. As Saio Gradin puts it, prefiguration "sees the project of... changing society as a much bigger project than changing those centers of power... it's a bigger project in learning new ways of being, and practising new ways of being.” Whereas other strategies to achieve political change, such as protesting and policymaking, work towards future reforms, prefiguration actively implements changes in daily material life.
One current example of prefigurative politics in action is worker self-directed organizations. Gradin points out the contradiction of capitalist workplaces in a supposedly democratic society, where workers themselves have little to no say in the management of their employer. Nicole Wires describes an alternative model in which workers employ shared collective governance, non-hierarchical structures, and financial transparency. She describes some ways her organization, the Sustainable Economies Law Center, practices this philosophy of decentralized and accountable decision-making.
Join us in this special EcoGathering as we explore the implications of prefiguration, and how we can take its lessons to continue working towards the better world we know is possible.
For people newly interested in EcoGatherings, we host community-focused virtual gatherings almost every week covering a variety of topics. Those can all be explored here. They're completely free and you're always welcome to hop in and out of the calls as you please. For our regular EcoGathering attendees, this call will be in addition to our usual call cycle.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Mystery
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Conversation
If we step away from the dominant culture’s compulsion to classify, measure, quantify, and know everything it can, we find ourselves in the realm of mystery. There is a whole other side of the world that cannot be known, but only marveled at and dumbfounded by. There is a whole other kind of knowing not ground in causal certainty, but a certain kind of intuiting, or feeling, or experiencing. Join us this week as we explore the mysteries in the world around us and appreciate the mysteries in our own lives.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Story
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Focus
How can we hold the unquantifiable more-ness of mystery and spirit? How do we begin to describe and share and live these suspicions, feelings, and knowings? Probably the way humans have done it for as long as we've had language: through story. This week, we'll dive into a particular story as one form of entry into the world of spirit and mystery.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: The Sacred
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Generative
Right before much of the world enters the dominant-cultural hegemony Christian holiday of empire-sanctioned celebration, worship, and consumption, we’ll explore the original roots of what this holiday and many others sought to celebrate: the sacred. This is not a session centered on any one organized religion or holiday. It will be a conversation about what we find sacred in the world, and how we relate to what in our lives – no matter what religion, spirituality, or philosophies we follow – is sacred.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Re-Commoning
Generative
In this final generative EcoGathering of the lunar cycle on Commoning, we will unveil the beginnings of EcoGather’s digital learning commons to receive feedback and proactive input from our community of learners on how best to develop and manage the space to be most useful and enlivening to its users. We will practice applying what we have learned throughout this lunar cycle to a real-life example.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Commoner’s Consciousness
Focus
David Bollier said “There is no commons without commoning.” The commons is more than just a collectively managed resource. It is a nuanced, adaptive, participatory culture that requires community, history, connection, communication, and reciprocity. We may have forgotten the skills and knowledge that make commoning a part of life, but it is possible to intentionally reclaim the mindset of a commoner with community and practice. How might we learn from examples of historical and contemporary commons to begin reclaiming the commoner’s consciousness? How does a commoner think and view the world? In this EcoGathering, we will dive deep into a focus session on a piece that explicates the examples of commoning, and the shared characteristics of commoner cultures, so as to begin reclaiming these skills in our own communities.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: The Fight for the Congo
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Upstream Conversation
On this special EcoGathering, we’ll convene to discuss the Upstream podcast episode featuring Vijay Prashad, The Fight for the Congo.
The extraction of materials so necessary for our way of life is inextricable from the suffering of humans and more-than-humans in the DRC (and pretty much anywhere else where mines are operated). Thanks to the work of people like Vijay, we are forced scrutinize the central promise of the dominant culture – that through inevitable progress, technology, growth, and a “clean energy" revolution, we can maintain our current consumptive lifestyles and even do good for the world through that consumption. Join us as we explore what it might mean for the DRC to have more sovereignty over its natural wealth, whether any minerals can ever be extracted ethically even with national sovereignty, and why we want to extract more minerals from the Earth at all.
For people newly interested in EcoGatherings, we host community-focused virtual gatherings almost every week covering a variety of topics. Those can all be explored here. They're completely free and you're always welcome to hop in and out of the calls as you please.
For our regular EcoGathering attendees, this call will be in addition to our usual call cycle.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Enclosure
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Conversation
Enclosure is seen by many as the beginning of capitalism as a dominant economic system. It is an ongoing process of claiming once commonly managed resources (both physical and abstract) as private property that can only be accessed through a financial transaction, while facilitating the forgetting of the skills and culture needed to cooperatively manage those resources. The history of enclosure is often overlooked, yet it is a vital piece of the puzzle about how we got to this point of disconnection on the brink of civilizational collapse. In this EcoGathering, we will discuss the forgotten history of enclosure, how it is continuing to claim ever more abstract frontiers, what will happen when it finally runs out of new ones and how we might resist enclosure and reclaim commons.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: The Commons (Repeated for Mushrooming REC Sessions)
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Conversation
In this lunar cycle of EcoGatherings, we will discuss the ways that Commons are misunderstood, and the role that a more nuanced understanding of their past, present, and future might serve us in a just transition from this world into the next. To begin the cycle, we will conversationally unpack our own assumptions, misconceptions, fears, hopes, around the Commons.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: The Commons
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Conversation
In this lunar cycle of EcoGatherings, we will discuss the ways that Commons are misunderstood, and the role that a more nuanced understanding of their past, present, and future might serve us in a just transition from this world into the next. To begin the cycle, we will conversationally unpack our own assumptions, misconceptions, fears, hopes, around the Commons.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Attending
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Generative
Attend. Tend. Attention. Tendrils. Etymologically united by the root tendere – to stretch toward, give heed to – these words convey a process of extension. Stretching one thing towards another, be it a body towards a place, energy towards a recipient, mind towards an idea, or roots towards the unknown. Attending is how conscious human beings extend themselves to and arrive at the present moment. Modernity often frames attendance as a chore or a calendar task to be completed, but attendance is much simpler than this; in truth, we are constantly in attendance to one thing or another, stretching our minds and energy to whatever is unfolding before us. As we move towards an uncertain future -- one we cannot predict with any degree of certainty -- we must be ready to adapt the ways in which we show up in attendance to it.
After moving through the necessary sobering work of hospicing, processing, and grieving death and loss, we gather for the last meeting of this lunar cycle for a generative session on attending the birth of something new. Drawing on the framing language provided to us by Vanessa Andreotti and the work of midwifery, we will explore the skills required of us to attend to the birth of futures that are presently unimaginable. The future is forever fluid. We can never be prepared for what is to come, but by developing our practice of attending the present moment -- and offering care for that which is nascent and precious -- we may become better equipped to show up, extending ourselves in attendance to life as it is born before us.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Grieving
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Focus
In the approach and the wake of death, we are presented with grief. A word too small to encompass the extent of what it carries in meaning, grief is a masterkey to an entire warehouse of complex emotions, memories, and depth in understanding the world. Because our modern culture largely fails to integrate death into our understanding of life, many of us have a misconstrued concepts of and strained or guarded relationships to grief. In the absence of an abiding cultural reverence for grief, and with a lack of practices and norms that make space for its sonorous, unfurling expressions, grief is often hidden or minimized. It is viewed as an obstacle we must overcome at a pace compatible with faith in progress. Grief is also viewed as private -- some thing we must experiences in solitude. By treating grief as something private, we miss the opportunity to collectively harness the transformative power of inevitable change in a world that is simultaneously living and dying all around us, all the time. If metabolism promises to transform life through death, grief is the guiding force that allows us to remain connected to that living energy.
Following the full moon in this lunar cycle, we gather together to honor grief as a great gift which allows our love for life to metabolize into other shapes and forms after death. As the scale of loss and mass death we collectively witness expands – be it by genocide, pandemic, wildfire, flood, or other ecological/cultural events of collapse – so, too, must our practice of grief. Through discussion and ritual, we will dive into the depths of grief to shape our practice of collective grieving and deepen our understanding of its power in cultural transformation.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
An Elemental Life in Unbalanced Times Book Talk with John Hausdoerffer
What does it mean to live an elemental life? In a time when the elements are disrupted by climate chaos —flooding waters, intensifying fires, heating air, sliding earth — how might those same elements teach us to transform our way of living among them, to thrive as part of the human and natural communities that they generate? How might building more intentional relationships with the elements in our day-to-day lives, our play, our gatherings, our spiritual practices help communities like ours that now experience catastrophic flooding? Is there a version of mucking out our hearts and rerouting our mental pathways that might need to happen alongside the mucking of our homes and rebuilding our roads?
EcoGather & Hard-Pressed Community Printshop invite you to a reading and conversation with John Hausdoerffer who recently co-authored and edited a new book, An Elemental Life, part of a 5-book series, Elementals, published by the Center for Humans and Nature. In this casual community gathering, we'll explore what it means see the elements as elders with agency and to reclaim our place as elemental beings ourselves.
We'll have local apple cider, bread, and cheese to share.
You are welcome, but not expected, to bring something to help make it a meal.
No fee, consider donating to flood relief in VT or NC
EcoGathering: Metabolizing
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Conversation
Metabolism is the sum of all the energetic movements of matter which facilitate life itself. It’s the endless flow of nutrients from one corner of the universe to another, it’s the process of breaking down to build again, the mechanism behind the fundamental concept that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It is the cycle of life. Metabolism holds the imagined oppositional binaries together as one allowing catabolism and anabolism to dance in their true state of constant motion and exchange. One thing must die for the other to be born.
In this session, we gather to metabolize. By identifying what is currently breaking down, has already broken down, or is soon expected to break down, we see what resources, nutrients, and energy become available to reassemble and reintegrate into something else. In a culture consumed by endless growth, awareness of the metabolic balancing act required to sustain that growth via breakdown and collapse is necessary. With a strong foundation of understanding that existence depends on a constant exchange of energy and nutriment, we can better understand our own energetic entanglement to everything living, and hold a greater appreciation for both the internal and external work of deconstruction as it gives way to reconstruction.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Hospicing
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Conversation
In the cycle of life and death, death is grossly misunderstood. Dying has been marketed as the ultimate defeat to living – it’s a product of disaster, discomfort and disease. We often shroud it in euphemisms to avoid offending life. It is an unwanted crack in the glass of a mass individualist delusion that a valid measure of the quality of a life is how well it eludes death. In a dominant culture obsessed with vilifying death, we’ve lost our ability to acknowledge its inextricable relationship to life itself. Denying death’s inevitability leaves a gaping hole in the understanding of the intimate section of life on the precipice of death – in denying death, we deny life itself. What would it look like if we were to recognize and actively tend to what is dying before us with the same loving care that we give to what is living?
This October lunar cycle invites us to explore the ways that we can – and must – welcome death back into the discourse. We will gather for the first session to discuss what is means to actively hospice as a verb, a beautiful and seamless addition to the lexicon thanks to Vanessa Machado de Oliveira's inspiring work Hospicing Modernity. As we stand on the precipice of a long-denied cultural death of the modern, dominant culture of Western patriarchal capitalism, we will hold space for the unsettling acceptance of what must be relinquished as necessary work for showing up fully to the birth of what is to come. Over the course of this cycle we will come together to hospice, grieve, metabolize, and attend together, bearing witness to and welcoming the infinite cycle of death and life. Join the first session to offer your awareness to that which is dying around and within us and develop your own stamina for letting go of attachments to the futurity built from what we’ve known.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Mending
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Generative
When something is broken, we have a few choices: ignore, discard, purpose, or mend. Mending is a close cousin of fixing, but is usually more focused on bringing back together. Moreover, mending does not necessarily seek to result in an invisible repair.
EcoGather Collaborating Artist Nina Montenegro is also the author of a lovely book full of practical and heart-centered advice for leading what she and her sister/co-author Sonya call Mending Life. They tell us "[m]ending encourages us to cherish our things by repairing them rather than discarding them by rediscovering intimate connection and preciousness, so integral to our well-being as humans."
In this generative session, we’ll first gather up the broken bits; then, we’ll sort through what to do with each part. Participants are invited to tenderly carry their own brokenness into the space and seek support in figuring out how to approach their own mending processes. After all, as the Montenegro sisters remind us, mending "strengthens not only the object we are repairing, but ourselves as well."
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Diagonalism
Reweaving social fabric, (re)connecting across cultural fissures, and refusing a politics of polarization are all vital practices in troubled times. Yet, not all connections are genuine or healthy. Not all overtures of friendship, indicia of alignment, or perceived resonances are benign. Some are, in fact, quite dangerous and manipulative. And some people – especially those who have and wish to retain substantial power and privilege – will cynically leverage a deepening desire for connection and tactically appropriate the language of liberation to conflate, confuse, and diffuse collective power.
In Doppleganger, Naomi Klein cautions about the dangers of diagonalist politics, which draw longed for post-partisan connections but have a troubling tendency towards the authoritarian or fascistic. They “get the facts wrong, but the feelings right.” Diagonalists distract from the real sources of our problems. They capitalize on widespread exhaustion, rising human misery, widening inequities, and the sense that important truths are being hidden.
We’ll do a focused reading on diagonalism, discuss/critique the theory, share examples of it from our own experiences, and explore how to remain open to building real relationships and truly freedom-cherishing politics across divergent affiliations without falling into the snare of diagonalism.
EcoGathering: Social Weaving
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Conversation
After centuries of strategies that separated its people (especially by race, class, and gender) and several decades of fierce political ‘othering’ and civic unraveling, there is a pressing need to reweave the social fabric of America. The present epidemic of loneliness or decade of despair can be traced back to a crisis of connection and widespread erosion of care and trust. Causes can be found in the rise of algorithmic social media, parasocial relationships, consumerism and overwork (i.e., reduction in leisure time); as well as the decline of once-vibrant social, religion, and civic institutions.
All this is contributing to declining life expectancy and mental health, more deaths of despair (e.g., suicide, addiction, violence), persistent social and racial tensions. It produces political gridlock that makes it impossible to compassionately and collectively address these challenges. That said, our worn-through social fabric cannot be fixed by merely shuttling through new laws, policies, or market-based responses. Rather, we must reinvigorate culture and reweave social bonds. Join to explore practices for social weaving, recovery of neighborliness, and community care locally. We will also pay attention to how we might resist the dominant culture's tendency to unravel our bonds. Finally, we can consider how social weaving might scale out to pull a nation back from the brink.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Warp and Weft
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Conversation
“We are all connected in the great circle of life, and every thought and action weaves the tapestry of the world.” – Chief Seattle. Literally speaking, weaving is the process of interlacing two distinct sets of threads—warp and weft—to create fabric. The warp consists of the vertical threads stretched taut on a loom that form the foundation of the fabric. They remain stationary and provide the structure over which the weft threads are interlaced. The weft, then, is the set of horizontal threads that are woven in and out of the warp threads. The weft runs crosswise, over and under the warp threads, A weaver passes the weft threads back and forth through the warp, typically using a shuttle or other tool. Weaves of different strength, stretch, and appearance are made by altering the over-under patterns and colors of the threads. As we open a new lunar cycle for the Corn Moon of September, we begin with careful consideration of this ancient craft, which provides a thematic metaphor for one of several ways we need to relate in times of trouble and disconnection.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
Regrowing a Living Culture: The Work That Is Called for Now
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 prepares for a US tour to accompany the paperback release of this book brought forth by Chelsea Green Publications, EcoGather’s Network Weaver Nicole Civita will hold space for Dougald to share where this work has been leading over the past year. We will explore how it joins up with the conversations that EcoGather convenes. Finally, with attendees, we will surface observations and insights from which we can mobilize responses to the questions alive in this long moment.
EcoGathering: Geometry
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Generative
Geometry is the branch of mathematics concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. While none of our hosts are especially advanced geometricians, we are all very curious about what lines we draw (and where), what theorems to employ (and when), and how we might arrange good ruins to lay the foundations for what could come next. If you've engaged with any of our sessions in this cycle, you might be starting to sense the shapes you might want to take, encourage, or align with as we re-world. (We don't expect any of you to have found a fixed new form, but we're hoping that your geometric awareness is a bit more finely attuned.)
In our final shapes session we will consider how the stories of the current arrangements take hold and spread so widely. Then, we will move into groups to construct new stories that encourage formation of new shapes and liberating geometries. Depending on the preferences of those present, our groups may focus on reshaping (a) dualism of humans and nature; (b) the binary of gender; (c) the hierarchy of white supremacy; (d) the dichotomy of socialism vs. capitalism; and/or (e)possible new shapes of diverse economies.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Shape-Shifting
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Focus
The dictionary definitions of shape-shifting often focus on the ability of an imaginary person or creature to change itself into a different shape or form. But for this session, we are not limiting the population of potential shape-shifters to fantastical beings. Nor are we limiting them to regular old humans. After closely reading Sophie Strand's provocatively titled essay: We Must Risk New Shapes, we will consider shape-shifting as an evolutionary practice, explore the potential of symbiosis as a survival strategy. Our conversation will move between consideration of our own human bodies, our mental formations, and the shapes of our systems and ideologies. Finally, we'll be sure to discuss what we risk by maintaining old shapes and by risking new ones.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Hierarchies
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Conversation
“Because I said so.” Perhaps one of the first and most ingrained hierarchies many of us have experienced is the parent-child relationship. Not that human parents and children must organize themselves in a higher and lower relationship like that. But our western culture has hierarchy woven into most everything: teacher and student; boss and employee; landlord and renter; hierarchies even find their ways into some erotic settings with Spotify uses making public playlists titled “Sub & Dom." The company and consumer relationship is deceptive: characterized by lingos like “the customer is always right,” the relationship shows its true form as we all click the “agree to the terms and conditions” buttons. Companies have the law on their side, and we have no negotiating power. The etymological roots of hierarchy lead us to a deeper understanding of the concept: hier = "holy", archy = “ruler.” With holy rulers at the heart of the concept, it makes sense a vital vein, pumping blood throughout is the concept of power. And in a country whose official currency reads “In God We Trust," the government makes clear holy rulers are something to be revered. Hierarchies are just one model of power, though. Let's explode this one and see where the bits land. Perhaps we'll find paths lead us to previous EcoGather topics like Anarchy ("no ruler”). As always in EcoGatherings, we'll cultivate a space without hierarchies to explore this particular power structure, and explore what might happen when we look to other structures of power.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
Intentional Community Study Group Book Club
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We have decided to open our book club discussion of Kristen Ghodsee’s book Everyday Utopia up to anyone who has read the book! If you are interested in joining the intentional community study group, sign up for next cycle here.
EcoGathering: Binaries
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Conversation
Good vs. Bad. Male vs. Female. Progressive vs. Conservative. Human vs. More-Than-Human. Animate vs. Inanimate. Binaries are so often presented as the default framework for engaging with the news, each other, and the world. Binary thinking tends to suck nuance out of a conversation. In the process, we stand on two sides of a perspective and are asked to bridge the chasm. Sometimes this chasm feels unbridgeable. Sometimes the chasm feels big enough to suggest we might be living in different realities, different worlds. When binaries isolate us from others through conceptual chasms, it becomes much easier to define ourselves against others. And it becomes much easier to other others. Are there any actual binaries? Are there times using binary thinking is helpful? How does binary thinking shape how we are able to relate?
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Solidarity
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Generative
Rather than another searching, stimulating conversation about abstract concepts, we'll work on applying the idea of solidarity and its activation in a collapse-responsive manner. To do this, we will examine Deepa Iyer's Social Change Ecosystem Map, which helpfully elaborates ten roles that people and organizations often show up in when they are participating in social change efforts. After reviewing this resource, we will take a pass at co-creating an alternate version suited for the end of the world as we know it. We will brainstorm the roles needed to support shared safety as things fall apart, to protect the more-than-human world, to preserve possibility for future generations, to reorient ways of knowing, doing, being, belonging, and to invent and manifest new worlds. We'll consider this in both abstract and specific ways, asking ourselves what roles are needed and what roles can I (or others in my network) readily fill. By the end of the session, we aim to have a draft framework to share and refine within and beyond EcoGather, to test in our place-based communities, and to share with other collapse-responsive groups.
Recommended resources for this gathering:
Intentional Community Study Group Synthesis Session
Open to registered participants. Sign up for the next cycle here.
EcoGathering: Disruption
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Disruption. It's one form of resistance that's broadly understood, generally-ish accepted, and in some countries, even enshrined in (deteriorating) constitutional protection. People around the world regularly boycott, assemble, and protest to slow, challenge, or disrupt business as usual. The common response to disruption is disproportionate state violence, whereas a far less common response is the state's commitment or willingness to make the structural changes that protestors demand.
Recommended resources for this gathering:
Intentional Community Study Group Guest Speaker Session
Open to registered participants. Sign up for the next cycle here.
EcoGathering: Violence
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We live surrounded by – and if you peak into international supply chains, dependent upon – violence, or at least its constant underlying threat, or at least people willing to use or threaten it for their own agendas. We cannot avoid its existence, so the least we can do is talk about it. If violence underpins the world order we seek to shift, what role might its various forms properly or inappropriately play in resistance? What is our relationship to normalized violence, either obvious or intentionally hidden? How should we respond to violence done to us? To anybody? We certainly don’t have those answers, but we also know it does us no good to avoid these questions. So next week, join us in exploring these tricky but persistent questions.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
Intentional Community Study Group Goal Session
Open to registered participants. Sign up for the next cycle here.
EcoGathering: Opposition
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EcoGatherers tend to resist the subjugation, exploitation, and destruction of the dominant culture. We recognize and don’t appreciate that we’ve been made complicit in unjust, extractive, oppressive systems from birth, without any opportunity to consent or opt out. To embody our morals, defend what we value, or just maintain our sanity, we are inclined to resist. But what acts amount to resistance? How do we actually do it? At what or whom do we aim our resistance?
If resistance is the umbrella held against the winds of the disagreeable (or the downright atrocious), opposition is perhaps the active push back against, or the steps taken back into the storm. Perhaps opposition is how we try to physically change the conditions around us. Perhaps opposition is always tied to action. But it may not always be about the negative because we can absolutely ground our opposition in our relationship with the positive…. In this gathering we’ll turn our attention to one facet of resistance — opposition — explore it’s many forms, and take up the many questions that resistance and opposition raise.
Recommended Resources
- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
- Isabel J. Kim: Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole?
- Harry Flood: Vibe Shift
- Indigenous Resistance as an Antidote to Climate Crisis with Nick Estes