As writers and artists, Rob, Aran, & Margot Lee Shetterly will explore the failures and successes in history in order to plan better for a more just future. Rob Shetterly is the artist behind Americans Who Tell the Truth, a portrait series honoring those who stand for justice and the common good — joined here...
In this talk we'll see how the Nearings use economy has evolved into the maker movement and Fabcities. Fabcities are cities that produce everything they make using a circular economy. Atoms cycle locally while ideas, designs and best practices flow globally and open source. Lonnie Gamble is a professor, educator, and sustainability leader working across...
In this conversation, Eliot Coleman & Barbara Damrosch will share stories of Scott & Helen Nearing—the homesteaders who shaped their lives—and explore what the Nearings' revolutionary politics and radical experiment in simple living still has to teach a world hungry for alternatives. Eliot Coleman & Barbara Damrosch are pioneers of the organic farming movement, internationally...
In 1976, inspired by the ideas of Helen and Scott Nearing, Sherrie Lovler and Norm Lee began a back-to-the-land life in upstate New York. They later founded The Good Life Get-Together, a yearly summer gathering with workshops for those drawn to the back-to-the-land movement and published Homesteaders News magazine for over nine years. Helen and...
Thousands of people have visited the Nearings' final homestead, at The Good Life Center, in Harborside, Maine, and many have seen the Bullfrog documentary film about their lives. At this gathering, Greg Joly will offer live commentary on the Nearings' homesteads, their life-ways, and the political and economic radicalism that undergirded everything they built. Greg...
In this talk, Sarah Speare, CEO and co-founder of Tootie’s Tempeh will share the story of how a food company stood up to nearly every norm in business to become best in its category. Sarah Speare is the CEO and co-founder of Tootie's Tempeh, a worker-owned cooperative in Biddeford. Tootie's is the first commercial tempeh...
Archaeological sites along the Maine coast show that swordfish existed in the Gulf of Maine between approximately 5,500 and 3,700 years ago. Excavations at multiple Maine sites have produced swordfish rostra, vertebrae, and other remains, indicating that Wabanaki ancestors harvested and processed these large fish for millennia. In this presentation, Dr. Bonnie Newsom will discuss...
This talk considers the history of "commoning" as a way in which generations of people around the world and right here in Maine have resisted private property, settler colonialism, and enclosure by moving more lightly across places, from swamps and forests to urban edges and oceans. Can sharing energy, food, and transport help us achieve...
Alyssa & Michael O'Brien, co-founders of Protect Ancient Forests, make the case for working together to protect our remaining old-growth and mature public forests — why they're irreplaceable, how policy shapes their fate, and what it looks like to build a movement on their behalf. Drawing on law, education, and deep roots in the Maine...
Helen Nearing's last full book, Loving and Leaving the Good Life (1992), insists that how we live and how we die are not separate questions. Kate Braestrup has spent her life walking alongside people in their hardest moments and arriving at something like the same conclusion. In this talk, she will reflect on grief, presence,...