Ailton Krenak and Carlos Papas enjoying the OMVED gardens during the Meeting at the River (June 2023)
“We are the medium and also the environment. It is fundamentally unnatural for humans to perceive the landscapes in which we dwell merely as tools or resources. This represents an extractive mindset. As long as we use language that portrays the world as something external to us, we will persist in endorsing extractive practices. This applies both to the Earth’s biosphere and to the worlds we construct in our imaginations. Let’s consider the possibility of developing alternative ways of inhabiting this world.”
–Ailton Krenak
2023 was a year of powerful collaborations for Flourishing Diversity. Together with an incredible array of organisations, communities and individuals, we formed spaces where new collective agreements of hope, interconnectivity and respect took form.
A diversity of We As Nature storytellers bridged worlds: Urban food growers bridged music and permaculture, designers bridged art and research, theatre makers bridged human and animal sensibility, herbalists bridged wellbeing and place-based connection, and cultural workers bridged individual and collective healing. From urban gardens and theatre stages to mountain tops and inner-city cul-de-sacs, these personal stories shaped a collective agreement that we are, by very nature of being human, collaborative, adaptive and capable of connecting with and caring for place and community in such a diversity of ways.
Through a series of webinars with public health professionals, environmentalists, artists and decolonial practitioners, we formed the collective agreement that the health of people and place is intimately interconnected and must be treated as such at a medical, academic and societal level.
The Meeting At The River event series with Selvagem in sunny London seeded the collective agreement that the marriage of ancestral, scientific, artistic and mythical knowledge illuminates the mystery and splendour of the living world and supports individuals to better understand their reciprocal place within it.
And finally, we arrived back where we began, sort of! In October, the final session of the Earthed Summit was a beautiful dialogue between Flourishing Diversity co-founder Jerome Lewis and President of the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute and a spiritual & political leader, Benki Piyako. A relationship that sparked our first adventure – the Flourishing Diversity series in 2019
As we enter 2024, we are excited to announce a new way forward for Flourishing Diversity with Synchronicity Earth. Find out more here.