Adam Alexander has spent many years searching out communities that have still conserved their rare, endangered garden crops. His travels have taken him all over the world, from Albanian villages to Ethiopian farmer collectives, and he’s written two books on his research and the importance of locally-adapted, community-sovereign seeds; The Seed Detective and The Accidental Seed Heroes. In his own garden he experiments with his own landrace varieties, and he’s currently growing heritage Syrian vegetable seed to be returned to the Middle East as part of a programme to revive traditional horticulture. Whether with newly developed strains or old, long-stewarded,…

Far from being rare or exceptional, mutualistic relationships really are everywhere. Plants could not survive without fungal partners. Animals cannot function without microbial ones. As Lynn Margulis famously and regularly complex life did not arise solely through struggle, but through symbiosis: through mergers, alliances, and long negotiations between once-independent beings.

Using wood that we provisioned earlier in the winter in our chainsawing workshop, we will begin to prepare for spring food production by inoculating our logs with shiitake mushroom mycelium. Developing a strong relationship with our fungal kin is a key practice in forming diverse, resilient community food networks because they are so quick, easy and passive to grow. Understanding general fungal biology and cultivation is also a great skill to develop for a variety of applications from recycling/composting various forms of organic excess, rehabilitating polluted landscapes, creating biomaterials such as certain forms of synthetic leather or insulation, art, medicine…

In this two-hour workshop session, led by community members Lauren Zitney and Nicole Civita, we will explore Roles for reWorlding, a framework developed within otherWise to help communities name, value, and practice the diverse orientations that make collective change and transformation possible. Instead of centering productivity or conventional leadership, this framework honors the often overlooked capacities that sustain collective life: from knowledge carriers, healers, and pattern-workers, to menders, protectors, builders, and subverters.

In this session, we will explore how edges, whether ecological, emotional, cultural or systemic, serve as fertile sites of imagination and change. Rather than seeing the edge merely as a site of rupture or precarity, we’ll consider it as a space where new questions, relationships, and ways of knowing become possible. Through shared reflection and dialogue, and collective meaning-making, we will explore how care shapes our creative processes and how creativity expands our capacity to care.

This opening circle invites us to being where many of us already are: in the midst of the uncertainty, rupture and rapid change. Here, we explore care and creativity as ways people have stayed alive, oriented, connected, and human under conditions that were never meant to sustain them.

Farmer and author Chris Smaje has long understood that the scale of our material extraction and energy consumption cannot be reliably continued for the coming decades, never mind indefinitely. He understands that dominant narratives of progress and human control over the living world were always illusions, and those illusions are beginning to rapidly unravel. He’s also long advocated for far more localized, small-scale, and bioregional farms and futures as a response to this ongoing and accelerating collapse. As liberal-modernism confronts its dark age, Chris recognizes that “people will begin to ask: ‘Who are my people? Who is my community? What…

If revillaging is the process of reclaiming our ability to make place-based, relational communities—especially with less industrial energy and fewer imported goods—then we’ll all have a part to play in relearning the skills most of us no longer need to practice. In this session, we’ll learn about different reskilling initiatives two of our community members, Don Blair and Greg Nelson, have been working on in the last few year. We’ll consider reskilling means for us, and how each of us might need to reskill ourselves in a changing world.

The dominant global agriculture is the largest threat to the world’s forests. What would it look like for agriculture to treat our forests differently? What would it mean to be a forest farmer? Chris and Kat Parker have been answering this question for decades. They run [The Forest Farmacy](https://www.theforestfarmacy.com/) in western North Carolina, where they grow food while protecting their forest and teach others how to do the same. Chris will join us for our upcoming otherGardens gathering to share about his experience in mycology, botany, agriculture, permaculture, and ecology, and his 30 years of mushroom cultivation, wild harvesting, and…