2026 Speaker Series

Events

Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today
  • History Rhymes: Echoes of the Past in Today’s Society

    The Good Life Center 372 Harborside Road, Harborside, United States

    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...

    Read More

  • From Individual Precarity to Collective Resilience: The Revolutionary Ecological and Social Implications of Local Microfactories, Community Fablabs, Personal Fabrication, and Fabcities

    The Good Life Center 372 Harborside Road, Harborside, United States

    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...

    Read More

  • Seeds of the Good Life

    The Good Life Center 372 Harborside Road, Harborside, United States

    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...

    Read More

  • The Influence of Helen and Scott Nearing: A 50-Year Journey

    The Good Life Center 372 Harborside Road, Harborside, United States

    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...

    Read More

  • Deep Dive with the Bullfrog

    The Good Life Center 372 Harborside Road, Harborside, United States

    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...

    Read More

  • Going Against the Grain with a Legume!

    The Good Life Center 372 Harborside Road, Harborside, United States

    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...

    Read More

  • Swordfish in Wabanaki Homeland

    The Good Life Center 372 Harborside Road, Harborside, United States

    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...

    Read More

  • Mobile Commoning: How Sharing is Caring in a Climate Hope World

    The Good Life Center 372 Harborside Road, Harborside, United States

    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...

    Read More

  • Protect Ancient Forests

    The Good Life Center 372 Harborside Road, Harborside, United States

    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...

    Read More

  • Loving and Leaving the Good Life

    The Good Life Center 372 Harborside Road, Harborside, United States

    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,...

    Read More