If you’re a regular listener to the Spaceship Earth Podcast you may know about a bio-regional regeneration project called We Are Avon - in the Avon River Valley in the West of England where I live.

EP 98 and EP 102 have both featured the project.

In the last few years I’ve been putting more intention, time and energy into projects rooted into the lands around me where I live.

Some of that has been a response to the mysterious unfurling of life, which meant a letting go of parts of my work that I could no longer continue to serve.

And a big part of that is also a deep knowing that the future is local.

It’s how the operating system of life works on Spaceship Earth.

I’ve come to learn that nature doesn’t commute.

Nor does it scale exponentially.

As our global civilisation with its extractive foundations rooted in a living Earth is rapidly find out.

Life is inherently local.

Local participation is fundamental to weaving a regenerative universe as Bucky Fuller once observed.

One of these local projects is We Are Avon, a grassroots movement for bio-regional regeneration rooted in the River Avon catchment.

Our intention is to regenerate the valley ‘from the river out’, weaving a culture of care that empowers communities, farmers, creatives and wider stakeholders in becoming active stewards of land and water and participating in River Guardianship at a bio-regional scale.

I’m currently one of the co-directors of this project.

Birthed over a year ago, we have been convening community gatherings every three months to connect, share and hold space for co-creation - with our current focus on recruiting and establishing River Guardian groups along the river.

For our last gathering in November I invited a panel of guests to help us zoom out and explore a wider theme of ‘listening to the river’, intentionally making space to consider how we might collectively practice de-centering the human, tempering the urge to rush in and ‘fix’ and make time for listening, observing and sensing the more than human as an integral part of regenerative and bio-regional practice.

I hosted three amazing women:

Scientist, author and Explorer Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza, Ph.D.

Writer, campaigner and river wife Meg Avon - yes Meg married the river.

Sound Artist and Anthropologist Louise Romain

All three with very different stories and approaches to listening, noticing and sensing the more than human.

This is a recording of that panel, where we gathered upstairs at our friends Finisterre Bath store.

I hope you enjoy this one, and receive something, and if you do please let us know and share with someone else who might appreciate it.

If you’d like to get involved with We Are Avon follow the links below

Peace and out

Dan

LINKS

We Are Avon