Fall in Love with the Future: A Participatory Visioning Experience

Fall in Love with the Future: A Participatory Visioning Experience New York Climate Week • September 24 • 9:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Friends of the Earth U.S. and Pachamama Alliance invite you to Fall in Love with the Future. In the midst of an information-dense Climate Week, this session invites participants to move beyond the research into imagination, embodiment, and possibility. In a time of mass anxiety, we invite you to find active hope in relationship and collective action. Drawing on the work of visionary deep ecologist Joanna Macy and Transition Town co-founder Rob Hopkins, we will honor the grief and love we carry for our world, then journey into a regenerative future where humanity has transformed our relationships with each other and with the Earth. By experiencing that future as lived memory, we’ll look back at the present and ask what it took to get there: What values, practices, relationships, ways of organizing, and commitments helped bring that future into being? Looking back from a thriving 2050, how did we do it? This session will draw on ideas explored during a linked Friends of the Earth event on September 22 focused on transforming the political economies of land, food systems, forests, and human rights. What to Expect By the end of the session, participants will: • Honor both the grief of what is being lost and our love of life • Experience an embodied vision of a regenerative future through imagination, storytelling, and somatic practice • Surface collective wisdom about the practices, relationships, and organizing principles that made transformation possible • Translate messages from the future into concrete commitments • Leave feeling more hopeful and resourced for the work ahead Facilitators Aryeh Shell is a professional facilitator, popular educator, and cultural activist with more than 25 years of experience in somatics, leadership development, and transformation. She has been a Work that Reconnect facilitator since 2001 and currently serves as a Program Director with Pachamama Alliance. Aryeh has designed and implemented dozens of training programs for racial, gender, and climate justice in more than 30 countries throughout the U.S., Africa, and Latin America. Jeff Conant is Deputy Director of Food, Forests and Finance with Friends of the Earth U.S. A longtime climate and global justice organizer, educator, and campaigner, Jeff is the author of A Community Guide to Environmental Health and A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency, among other publications. About the Hosts Pachamama Alliance works in partnership with Indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest to preserve their lands and culture, and provides global transformational programs to bring forth an environmentally regenerative, spiritually fulfilling, socially just human presence on this planet. Friends of the Earth U.S. is the United States branch of Friends of the Earth International, the world’s largest grassroots environmental network, which fights for a healthier and more just world. “Every day, choose to be wildly in love with the world, even as it breaks your heart.” — Joanna Macy