Who and what are the ecological timekeepers who ground you in the passing of the seasons? How have these timekeepers shifted?
What knowledge are you tapping into as you think about weathering the impacts of climate change?
How might you benefit from and contribute to a community dedicated to building ecological knowledge needed for an unpredictable future?
I used to feel it in my bones when a summer storm was on the way. I could trust inherited wisdom of when to plant my garden, and I didn't think about irrigating in May. Under climate change, the knowing that once lived in my body often is... wrong. Now that electricity and heaviness that I knew preceded a June soaker might just be a wind storm. It gets so hot so early that my spring crops bolt before the last frost. The unpredictability is destabilizing, but it's also forcing me to notice, to experiment, and to learn more intentionally.
We invite you to the launch of a new WFAN project dedicated to co-creating tools to help land stewards cope with the unpredictability of climate change. Over the next year, we will gather women and non-binary food producers, landowners, and other land stewards to co-create an ecological calendar. During this first, virtual session we will introduce ecological calendars as a process for building and recording collective ecological knowledge. Ecological calendars have deep roots in indigenous traditions from all over the world and have been used to support herders, fishers, hunters, farmers, and other communities who maintain close relationships with the land to build their/ our capacity to adjust to the repercussions of a changing climate.
We hope you will join us on August 23rd to launch this new project and begin sharing stories that will form the foundations for our collective ecological calendar. Participants from this first session will shape the direction of our work and will be invited to a series of virtual gatherings where we will co-create the full calendar. Members of this project also will have access to action project funding to grow their own ecological resilience. Together, we will build a tool that supports land stewards in and beyond WFAN to better navigate climate change.
Leading into this meeting, we encourage you to consider: what are your harbingers of seasonal change? Together, we will gather our ecological knowledge, prep our beds, and plant the seeds of a year-long collaborative project between caretakers of the land and the Women, Food, and Agriculture Network. We hope these seeds grow into projects and connections in your own communities.
Details:
Virtual Launch Session
Wednesday, August 23rd, 7:00-8:30 p.m.
We invite you to explore the imagery of this Ngan'gi Seasons Calendar, a collection of captured moments throughout the seasons that are helping map the interconnected human and ecological relationships of the Ngan'gimerri indigenous people of the Northern Territory of so-called Australia.