In **Chainsawing for Forest Citizens**, we will cover fundamentals of chainsawing, including proper technique, safety, and honorable harvesting. We will be cutting logs for later application as substrate for shiitake inoculation. In the spring, we invite you to join us again to use these winter wood provisions to set up a mushroom yard in another workshop. This four-hour workshop will be a winter solstice adaptation of [Pine Hill Voices’ Chainsawing for Greenhorns Course](https://www.pinehillvoices.love/woodlands). We will be focusing primarily on learning and practicing chainsaw fundamentals, with a slight focus on applying these skills in a way that sets us up to…

We each have multiple sides to our existence — different ways we’ve reflected throughout our lives, and the fractals of our existence in this current moment. When we launched otherWise, we came up with 16 archetypes of people who might find value in our community, or 16 different attempts to articulate some of the many forms people find they’ve come to inhabit in modernity. These archetypes are like mirrors held at different angles, showing different parts of us from different perspectives, how we show up in different contexts. We all contain multiple archetypes, some described here, and maybe others we’ve…

For the past 25 years, Victoria Ferguson has dedicated her work to uncovering and interpreting first-person accounts and archaeological evidence about the daily lives of the Yesáh (Eastern Siouan) peoples during and prior to early European colonization. She has shared her findings through written work and presentations at institutions such as Virginia Tech, Washington and Lee University, Sweet Briar College, and James Madison University, as well as at numerous archaeological conferences. Victoria has also organized lectures on a wide range of topics, including dietary health, textile craftsmanship, Indigenous matriarchy, enslaved communities of color in Virginia, soil health, and environmental justice.…

In a time of deepening polarization and institutional distrust, we find ourselves in what Naomi Klein names the Mirror World, a landscape of distortions where genuine grievances, misinformation, and identity politics blur together. This has given rise to “diagonalism,” where people from across the political spectrum converge around shared suspicion of institutions, sometimes in generative ways and sometimes in ways that feed conspiratorial, extractive, or anti-democratic energies. Beyond Diagonalism invites us into a deeper discernment: how do we honor multiple knowledge systems without falling into epistemic relativism, and how do we differentiate between healthy skepticism and narratives that deepen fear,…

To what extent, then, do parasites exist? Despite its ecological origins, is the term more useful sociologically than it is biologically? What is revealed in our search — or empathy — for parasites?

Our algorithmic mirrors are everywhere. Surveillance capitalism meticulously tracks our behavior to create virtual replicas of us. We create our own digital doppelgängers as well, every time we post something online. We’re surrounded by bots, trolls, and alter egos posting otherwise unspeakable beliefs under the protection of anonymity every time we enter the digital universe. Every time we go online, we enter a hall of mirrors, an endlessly refractive simulation of reality, and our reflections change based on the digital surfaces we look into. What should we make of all these algorithmic reflections of reality?

The vilification of witches and witchcraft was a crucial, and very intentional, part of the process of capitalist enclosure. It is one of many examples of genocide against women, pronatalism, demonization of traditional knowledges, disruption of non-male solidarities, and the beginnings of the invisibilization of women’s labor. Despite these attacks, people persecuted by patriarchy and sacrificed to capital practiced resistance and solidarity that still persist strongly today. So too do the spaces for holding unconventional and traditional wisdoms of those villified as witches. In this discussion, we will explore what it means to be a witch, why they have been…

Phantoms, spirits, apparitions, poltergeists, wisps of white vapor, floating sheets with eye holes cut out. Spooky as they may be in popular fiction, there’s certainly more to ghosts than blockbuster films. Whether interpreted metaphorically, felt bodily, or dismissed as mythical while hurrying past a creepy graveyard, ghosts are well understood as ancestors, legacies, and former or lingering presences on the land. They can be meaningful ways of relating to and understanding the past. Who are our ancestors’ ghosts? Who are the ghosts who inhabit the land on which we live?

Food activist and organizer Sam Bliss runs Food Not Cops in Burlington, Vermont. Join us on November 3rd at 6pm ET as he discusses the ways we can acquire and relate to food when it’s not purchased, and how he shares and gifts food within his community, whether it’s homegrown, hunted, wild-harvested.