How do alternative futures take root?
Alternative futures won’t emerge fully formed. They’ll arrive in our bodies in contact with the living earth, and take root through countless acts of practice: through the ways we live, build, grow, make, and listen.
For me, practice is where enquiry becomes embodied. It’s where ideas encounter the resistance of reality, and where new possibilities slowly arrive through lived experience.
My own practice brings together two main strands: living lightly on the earth and holding myself in close relationship with the more-than-human world; and learning from the remarkable ecosystem of people and projects pioneering land-based culture across Britain.
Living small
“Need Little, want less. Forget the rules. Be untroubled.”
—Lao Tzu
Living in a tiny straw-bale roundhouse is part of my ongoing attempt to explore what a good life might look like within the limits of a finite planet. Here you’ll find reflections from my little life and glimpses into its joys and challenges.
Field notes
“The stories we tell shape not just how we think but what we conceive of as thinkable, and can be astonishingly powerful.”
— Jessica Prendergrast
These notes document encounters from the evolving field of land-based practice in the UK. Rather than case studies, I think of this as a way of paying attention: to what is working, what is struggling, what is emerging, and what is perhaps still waiting to arrive.
Field Notes
The point of land-based practice is not simply to reduce impact, nor even to prepare for an uncertain future. It’s deeper purpose is to reshape our relationship with ourselves, each other, and the wider community of life.
Whether or not land-based living becomes possible at scale in the near future, every act of deeper belonging helps preserve ways of being that our culture has almost forgotten, yet which may one day become essential once again.
Coming soon!