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. Read more

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 do I worship? Where is home?’ Community will come into focus.” This, of course, is part of the core philosophy behind revillaging: even as we encounter the end of the world as we know it, we can still rediscover and co-create beautiful relationships and ways of being. We are very… Read more

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. Read more

In this session, 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. Read more

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, “undiscovered” varieties, we should do everything we can to bring diverse and locally adapted fruits, vegetables, and grains to our diets and our landscapes. Join us for this otherGardens gathering as Adam shares his experience with some of these seeds! Read more

In this workshop, we will come together for a weekend to learn a creative approach to framing a small bespoke wooden structure that will allow us to piece together salvaged windows into a workable greenhouse. Discarded and cracked windows that can no longer serve as working windows in a house due to problems with insulation or even just aesthetics can find new life sheltering our seeds. We will discuss sourcing windows, cleaning them up, and putting them together. Read more

Our Placedness cycle takes us next to a special aspect of place: Terroir. Terroir is the unique flavor and properties a food or drink develops depending on the unique regional conditions in which it was grown. When we experience or aspire to placedness, in many ways we’re aspiring the deepening of our relationship with cultural and physical terroir. Read more