Ancestral Futures: Guardians of the Forest. Bioregion: Boreal Forests & Southern Rockies.

Ancestral forests and traditions are essential to re-imagining a future where humans and trees can co-habit harmoniously. In what ways does ancestral knowledge inform the way future treescapes are being imagined, specifically in relation to iconic forests such as the great Siberian Forest and the Boreal Forest of Canada? How can scientists, environmentalists and technologists join traditional forest communities to conceive a future where the care and guardianship of forests is secured?

2 June, 2021

Workshop 1 led by Julia Adzuki in Sweden on embodied relationship to trees, resonance with ancient Ash and rituals for environmental grief.

Workshop 2 led by Andrey Laletin will share ways in which the Siberian forest is protected drawing on ancestral practices and traditional ecological knowledge and future initiatives for the guardianship of boreal Treescapes in Eastern Russia.

9 June, 2021

Workshop 3 led by David Abram: ‘A Collective Sentience: Listening and Learning among the Aspen Groves’. Aspen groves are among the largest singular organisms in this breathing biosphere, and easily one of the oldest, their aspen trunks sprouting again and again from an outrageously ancient rhizomal root-complex within the ground underfoot. What are a few insights we can glean from these white-barked and expressive elders with their leaves glinting and whispering in the winds? For some of us they are the most medicinal of all plants.

Workshop 4 led by Natasha Myers will present an affective ecology and the ability of plants to sense, communicate and teach human communities how to live in an age of climate emergency, also drawing on her collaboration with the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle.