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: Ritual
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This EcoGathering coincides with May Day, which represents the cross-quarter day of Beltane, which translates to “Bright Fire” and is the point at which the Earth is halfway between her Vernal Equinox and Summer Solstice. Historically, understanding and tracking the natural rhythms of the Earth has been paramount to survival and making meaning. Marking these rhythmically significant days with land-based rites and rituals was an important part of maintaining meaning and mooring in many cultures. May Day also has historical significance as Workers’ Day, which celebrates the struggles and gains of the labor movement. We will explore how communities in diaspora, without connection to their ancestral roots and place, can reclaim their rituals, traditions and heritage in light of new circumstances, to become more connected with their history, their spirituality, their mind and body, and the natural world around them. We’ll also ponder the power of connection land-based rituals, right livelihood pursuits, and labor justice struggles.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
Surviving the Future Alumni Reunion
Open to currently enrolled Surviving the Future learners and alumni.
Empathy as a Force for Social Change Guest Speaker/Q&A Session
Open to currently enrolled learners.
EcoGathering: Parenting
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Parenting in deeply troubled times is heartbreak and heartbeat.
Heartbreak and heartbeat.
Heartbreak and heartbeat.
Making and sustaining a life of one’s own, finding and nurturing community, and channeling the care you are capable of providing into the living world can make for a meaningful go-round as a human — without the need to, the desire for, or the circumstance of bringing new human life into a wounded world. And yet, some of us — whether by primal instinct, through the kind of love to begs to participate in creation, via rational calculation, or through happenstance — find ourselves wanting or having children in our care. And we are keenly aware that the entire lives of these children will unfold, yes, in an era of collapse, but also in an era of presently unimaginable possibility.
The very few headlines and think-pieces on the narrower topic of modern parenting and climate breakdown emphasis either (i) a sense of existential crisis among younger adults grappling with ethics of procreating and their own decisions around whether to become parents at all, or (ii) the fears and anxieties of parents wrestling with how to prepare their beloved children for the end of the world as we know it, often while trying their best to provide for their families in an time of scarcity, separation, and decline.
While there are no definitively right answers to any of the above, we suspect that living these questions is better done together. So, middle-aged mother of two, Nicole Civita will hold space for questions and conversation around journeying into the double-unknown of parenthood now. We’ll consider how to talk with your children about the world they inhabit, the one they’re inheriting, and the ones they might make possible with our support. We’ll consider how we might tenderly shepherd children into adulthood amidst uncertainty and how to share grief within and between families. We may even think about how pro-natalist culture and disturbing trends toward forced parenthood are themselves a symptom of collapse. We, parents and not, will guide each other, across different stages of life and explore the roles we can each play in extending the human story.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Language
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As children grow, the values and perceptions of the world are shaped by their experiences and the adults in their communities. Words begin to take on certain nuanced meanings and connotations. As we saw in our discussion of anarchy (and countless discussions that preceded it), sometimes, the meaning of words change, their definitions are not clear, or they become corrupted.
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?
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Roots & Fruits
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In a the relatively stable climate of the now past-Holocene, the end of May in the Northern Hemisphere, was typically a time of fast maturity. By late May, the young, fresh leaves and delicate blossoms that festooned early spring give way to deeper greens and embryonic fruits. Many tree beings perform the majority of their root growth in the spring and early summer, then they devote more of their energy to fruiting throughout late summer and fall.
Human beings have lessons to learn from our tree kin.
Hopefully, at some point in our lives, we will find ourselves rooting into place, nourishing and expanding into the community around us, just as tree roots do by breaking up compaction and releasing saccharine exudates to feed the biology of their soil ecosystems. But, it’s an increasingly common human experience to move regularly and only visit places for short periods of time. When we do so, we miss the opportunity to grow our roots. We can, however, offer our fruits: little gifts we put out into the environments we visit; sweet, nutrient dense offerings that we expect to leave behind and hope will nourish others.
On this call, we’ll consider two of the different stages of life we might occupy – rooting or fruiting. We explore how those stages feel to us, and consider how we can take both the language of rooting and fruiting (paired with the lessons from last week’s call on language) to imagine generous and nourishing ways of being.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering Social Session: Enlivening
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Erotic ecology, a genre of deep ecology, encourages us to appreciate the sensual (not necessarily sexual) experience of the world around us, and how powerful it can be to exist as a body amongst, within, and composed of other bodies. To inhabit the world with this living, somatic lens–granting meaningful, sensual, conscious experience not just to ourselves, but to all the bodies around us–we come to understand the experience of existence as that of love. As erotic ecologist author Andreas Weber defines it, love is the desire to bring more aliveness to the beings around you; to help them feel more alive, to express themselves more fully. In so doing, we empower ourselves to feel more alive. This week, we’ll explore what makes us feel most radically alive, how we can experience intimate relationships with the more-than-human world, and how we can love and enliven the beings around us.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Futurism & Foresight
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Being “for” and “against” things are two sides of the same coin of caring. But a lot of world-shaping and activism currently stands “against” injustice, and it can be rarer to find the movements and ways to stand “for” things we believe in. Maybe it’s easier to name the things that are messed up, but it’s harder to get clear about what we would rather have. It’s rare to come across exciting visions of futures we want to inhabit. Fiction writing is often the closest we get. Futurism is a practice of imagining possible futures – joyous ones, frightening ones, and everything in between. And importantly, futurism makes us talk about these futures. Futurism offers us a tool for imagining the specific, vivid worlds we long for. And with those visions in our minds and hearts, running toward them suddenly feels possible. What small action can I take today to embody the world I want to live in?
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
Surviving the Future Alumni Reunion
Open to currently enrolled Surviving the Future learners and alumni.
EcoGathering: Shades of Optimism
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It can often feel like dominant culture asks us to take on blind optimism: to believe that science and technology will “save the day,” where “saving the day” looks something like preserving the status quo. But if you’re reading this, that shade of optimism likely feels naive, manipulative, exploitative, or simply irresponsible. If we give up on blind optimism, must we embrace pessimism? Of course not. Let’s explore the shades of optimism that become available to us when we reject the blindness dominant systems ask us to accept. Dark Optimism and Urgent Optimism are a couple shades that have their own followings. Let’s learn about those shades, and consider what shade of optimism you bring to our future.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Dance
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Dance, itself a dancer, stretches self-expression, waltzes with tradition, taps into friendships, and swirls with music, art, and culture to weave the stories we share and the realities we embody. Let’s talk about the role of dance in our own lives, and consider the richness that dance as a metaphor might bring. What does it mean to dance with change, or systems? Does dance provide a framework for the give and take required to move between stories and worlds?
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Social & Reflection Session
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This session is a pause, to reflect on what we’ve discovered and created together in our community. Come take a collective breath with us, and reflect on our past few months together: what has brought us joy and connection? How would we like the community to evolve?
EcoGathering: Anarchism
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Anarchism is often misunderstood, even feared, yet it arises regularly in radical communities, resistance movements, natural disaster response, change shaping efforts, and traditional cultures. As a general starting point, we posit that anarchism is rooted in a deep suspicion of hierarchical authority. Anarchists often envision and work toward building stateless societies in which free individuals organize themselves and collaborate voluntarily without the need for centralized authority. Anarchists come in many flavors — and the tactics they favor vary accordingly. While images of anarchistic direct action (e.g., protests, strikes, sabotage, and civil disobedience) are the most commonly conveyed in mass media and popular culture, so much anarchist activity takes the form of grassroots organizing, mutual aid, cooperative development, and community-building efforts aimed at creating alternative institutions outside of the state. Many in the collapse community gravitate towards anarchism in some form, perhaps because it seems like an approachable, participatory, realistic and manageable type of change — one that we can begin to be a part of where we are, with those who are already by our sides. Anarchism invites us to build a new world in the shell of the old. This week, we will explore what anarchism really is, its relationship to cosmolocalism, whether we think it could work in any form(s), why people are attracted to it, and how the word itself came to invoke such controversy.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Intentional Community
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One of the myths of dominant culture is the natural inevitability of the nuclear family. In fact, anthropology tells us the nuclear family is quite an anomaly, and that humans have lived with each other in a wide range of ways. But these arrangements have almost universally been more communal than the nuclear lives so many of us lead. Intentional communities offer answers to the question “how might we prefer to live with one another?” Often seen as fringe, idealistic, dysfunctional, or even dangerous, intentional communities are living experiments in how we relate, cohabit, child rear, eat, learn, and love together. This week, we are going to have a longer session, with representatives from a few real co-operative living arrangements, so we can hear their personal experiences first hand, and ask whatever burning questions we have.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
Empathy as a Force for Social Change Teaching Session
Open to currently enrolled learners.
EcoGathering: Land
Register Here!
More than half of humans worldwide now live in cities, detached from land–and ancestral homelands–to varying degrees. Concerns about land, especially on a small scale, are often dismissed as trivial or quaint when our predicaments–climate change, global inequality, geopolitical tensions–are so large. However, the importance of land on any scale cannot be overstated: it is the foundation of language, culture, and for those of us terrestrially inclined beings, life itself. So how did we get to this point where half the human world has been deracinated from their ancestral lands? What does this mean for our relationship to the living world and each other? And how might we relate more intimately to land–belong to a living place–in our various contexts? Access to land is also a fundamental requirement for procuring one’s needs for survival. Without land, the barriers to opting out of breaking systems of oppression are that much larger.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
Culture, Coalition, and Movement Building Guest Speaker/ Q&A Session
Open to currently enrolled learners.
Surviving the Future Alumni Reunion
Open to currently enrolled Surviving the Future learners and alumni.
EcoGathering: Myth
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What myths do you believe in? Many of us don’t think of ourselves as being big believers in myth: we’re believers in science, in process, in disinterested, data-driven truth. But when you step back to really consider myth, you realize money, corporations, and perpetual progress are among the many myths that underlie our dominant culture that we unconsciously accept. The stories we tell ourselves – whether we think about them or not – are based in myth. Realizing some of these myths we all believe can open up little cracks in our worldviews: if what one believes is a story forced upon them by dominant culture, what would appear or be different if inside of another story? And another? What myths have cultures before ours believed, and how did those myths inform behavior and identity? What can we learn from older stories, and how can we harmonize traditional lessons with our need for new contemporary stories?
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Social Media & Platform Capitalism
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Platform capitalism is when technology companies provide minimal infrastructure to help connect users to service providers, while extracting as much data as possible from each of those interactions. These platforms aren’t giving us what we want anymore. We've been lured onto platforms with great services, and then our preferences have been made to play second fiddle to businesses, so the company can claw back the revenue all for themselves
It absolutely is unreasonable for each of us to single-handedly claw back all of our attention, autonomy, privacy, time from these platforms.
And yet, these platforms sometimes feel like the primary tools that might be able to, say, spread the good word about these EcoGatherings. Or offer the best shot at helping our small art shop get some traffic. Or they might even just feel like an easy way to distract ourselves from -- or educate ourselves on -- the latest atrocity.
I hope you’ll join us for a conversation about social media and platform capitalism. How we can all draw our individual boundaries to allow for genuinely helpful (though extractive) services while collectively resisting the many dark sides? As with so many of these topics, there are no easy answers, and the forms of resistance we are each able and willing to take will be unique to our circumstances. But one thing remains clear: we will need each other and collective action to process and respond adequately.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Resisting Techno-optimism and Appropriate Technologies
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Many of us understand and accept the simple truth that we live on a finite planet. We generally have a growing awareness that what we consume comes from somewhere and what we discard goes somewhere. Yet, we still somehow believe (or behave as though we believe) that it is possible to keep upgrading our stuff, maintain our current levels of consumption and rely on techno-capitalist “solutions” to our problems, even in the face of mounting climate and ecological crises.
This moral and logical disconnect is largely due to adherence to "techno-optimism," the vague idea that Science and Innovation will find us a way out of this mess. We will invent some new chemical to degrade plastic or train bugs to eat Styrofoam. We’re developing floating wind turbines to power fleets of electric Amazon trucks.
Yet, rejecting techno-optimism may leave you reeling with some very important concerns. How will we feed a population in overshoot without fossil energy? How will I travel to visit my family? How has my lifestyle so far affected other human and non-human beings? What will we do without medicine? Can’t we just all move to cities and automate things and use clean energy and have a circular economy like so many folks say is possible?
These are all extremely valid questions, and warrant an attentive and serious conversation about how we allocate and prioritize use of the energy and resources we have already extracted and have remaining.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
EcoGathering: Tech, Stuff, and Capitalism
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Technology encompasses a lot of things. Depending on who you ask, technology ranges from material and evident—phones, solar panels, spear throwers, chewed sticks that enter anthills easier—to more abstract and debatable—writing, laws, myths, economies, or language in general. But however it’s defined, technology indisputably shapes our behaviors, our economies, our cultures, our language, our identities. It requires materials from the living world and labor from the human world, and often costs us more than we realize.
One of those costs is how technology empowers our exploitative and exhausting economic system. Technology informs and empowers capitalism and capitalism returns the favor for technology. Are we happier now that we can buy a $10 toaster or 55-inch smart-TV, or are we burdened with excessive cheap appliances that are less reliable and more replaceable (that is, easier to throw “away”) than ever? Technology, especially since the industrial revolution, creates uncontrollable positive feedback loops that drive increasing energy consumption, societal changes, and demand for more technology still. The more advanced and intensive our technology becomes, the more separated we become from local, diverse, relational economies. The effects of technology compound and entangle themselves so deeply in culture that people can’t imagine living without that technology.
None of us alone can solve the techno-capitalist predicament, but it’s sure important to talk about. As Plato would probably tell you, it’s worth a critical conversation on Zoom or two. So join us next week as we dive more into the world of tech, capitalism, and all that other stuff!
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
Culture, Coalition, and Movement Building Teaching Session
Open to currently enrolled learners.
EcoGathering: Climate + Revolution Session 2
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This is a popular topic, and in an effort to make space for as many people to join as possible, we have decided to add a second session. Feel free to join one, the other, or both!
The dominant systems we live under oppress us, exploit us, make us ill both mentally and physically, and are literally fatal to both millions of humans and millions of other species as well. To speak of revolution in the era we are living through should not be radical, and yet it is. Derrick Jensen lists these atrocities and asks if we will not fight now, when will we? What will it take? And what shapes might those fights take?
What is revolution? The dominant discourse frames revolution as scary, irresponsible, even immoral. And yet, what could be more scary, more irresponsible, or more immoral than the situation we are already facing?
How do the frameworks we use for building power amongst ourselves shape the ways we show up in the slow-moving catastrophe that defines our era? For each other? For those we may never meet but are linked to in innumerable ways? For futures we believe in?
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering: