Let’s mingle and connect over lunch. This is a great space to share community announcements.

This workshop will explore the principals, practices and lessons learned form a highly successful community-based watershed management project based in the Slocan Valley near Nelson, British Columbia. After 30 years of failed attempts by government agencies Stephen Martineau and his team of facilitators worked in unique and sometimes counterintuitive ways, referred to as Integral Mediation and Ecology, to pull together a diverse set of often polarized stakeholders to devise a plan that was acceptable to all. Join us to learn what the principals and practices are of this approach and to reflect on its applicability to your region.

Join David MacLeod: A David Holmgren essay that I have been authorized to summarize in a powerpoint presentation. The sustainability debate has shown a deep confusion about the processes and systems which support life and humanity. The lack of conceptual tools to incorporate previously ignored environmental “givens” into calculations used by economists and decision makers is painfully obvious. There are no simple answers to the complex question of costs, benefits, and sustainability. However, there is a natural currency we can use to measure our interdependence on our environment and assist us to make sensible decisions about current and future action. That currency is energy. This presentation summarizes the important contribution of pioneering systems ecologist Howard T. Odum on the development of permaculture principles and the role of energy that should be considered in all processes.

Join Phoebe Barnard in an exploration on what’s needed across scales to drive transformative civilizational change. There’s never been a more critical – or perhaps more challenging – time to weigh up alternative futures and harness energy for change that involves determined realization, rather than entropy and bloodshed. I hope to start an explicitly multi-scaled conversation about how to achieve a new restorative/regenerative civilization focused on repairing the planet, climate and society. My departure point will likely be from a 2021 paper of mine (World Scientists’ Warnings into Action: Local to Global, Science Progress, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00368504211056290) to how the new Global Restoration Collaborative can serve to radically accelerate, align, upscale and upskill progress towards this civilization in and beyond the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. (a temp site for this collaborative is at https://www.stableplanetalliance.org/restoration.) Please come and contribute!

Sharon Abreu and Michael Hurwicz of Irthlingz Arts-Based Environmental Education, based on Orcas Island, will share how music helps us to communicate and retain key concepts in a way that is fun and engaging, raises vibrational energy, and reaches people on a deeper level than the mind alone.