Animate Earth
Annual Confluence 2024
Hosted by Rachel Fleming with speakers
Manda Scott, Rupert Sheldrake, David Abram, Helena Norberg-Hodge & Colin Campbell
Course Structure & Fees
An Online Event
Structure
Dates: 10 November 2024
Times: 4pm – 8pm (UK London time)
Fees
An Invitation
This November we held a celebration of the wonderful book Animate Earth, written by our late mentor and advisor Stephan Harding who passed away this September.
It was Stephan’s pioneering and courageous work on the edge of science – a new holistic science that brings our subjective experience and felt relations with the natural world alongside the study of ecological processes – that so inspired the work that we now continue in his name. His insights, from a scientific perspective, were foundational in our understanding of contemporary animism, the experience that all life is intelligent, working, evolving and communicating together in a great collaboration.
In the days before his passing Stephan asked us to remember Animate Earth to you, a book that has made such a huge contribution to our collective understanding of humanity and its place within the natural world at this time.
We were joined by friends old and new to talk about Stephan’s insight about an earth that is animate and what this understanding means for all those committed to a future world in which life thrives for all.
This event is FREE.
We are also collecting donations towards the publication of Stephan’s final short story, The Water Dragon, an animist’s journey through the water cycle of the world. Illustrated by Hanien Conradie.
Friends & Guest Speakers
This event is hosted by Rachel Fleming and Colin Campbell with guest speakers Manda Scott, Rupert Sheldrake, David Abram and Helena Norberg-Hodge.
Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. At Cambridge University he worked in developmental biology as a Fellow of Clare College. He was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Hyderabad, India. From 2005 to 2010 he was Director of the Perrott-Warrick project for research on unexplained human and animal abilities, funded by Trinity College, Cambridge.
Manda Scott is a novelist, smallholder, shamanic teacher and – soon – podcaster. Her Boudica: Dreaming books both grew out of and informed her shamanic dreaming practice and were the start of a fifteen year journey of teaching small groups. Now, as we near the biggest crisis in our evolutionary history, she is focussing more on how to bring the birthright of shamanic dreaming to wider groups of people and combine it with the explosion in cognitive neuroscience that is teaching us how to shape the structures of our minds. Her belief is that we can make the next evolutionary step consciously, but that we will need to know how to ask for help of the Heart Mind of the Universe – and that we need to get to grips with this as a matter of urgency. Yesterday would be good. Today will do. Tomorrow might be too late.
Dr. David Abram, cultural ecologist and philosopher gone wild, is the award-winning author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. Described as “daring” and “truly original” by Science, as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, David’s work has helped catalyze the emergence of several new disciplines, including the burgeoning field of ecopsychology. Named by both the Utne Reader and Resurgence as one of a hundred visionaries transforming contemporary culture, David is co-founder of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), an organisation exploring the manner in which sensory perception, language, and wonder inform our relation with the rest of the animate earth. He lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.
HELENA NORBERG-HODGE, linguist, author, filmmaker and pioneer of the new economy movement, is the founder and director of Local Futures. Based on decades of experience in indigenous cultures, in particular Ladakh and Bhutan, Helena has been promoting a big picture understanding of the foundations of human, as well as ecological wellbeing. Her work has gained her the Alternative Nobel prize, the Arthur Morgan Award and the Goi Peace Prize for contributing to “the revitalization of cultural and biological diversity, and the strengthening of local communities and economies worldwide.”
Helena is author of the inspirational classic Ancient Futures, and Local is Our Future and producer of the award-winning documentary The Economics of Happiness, of Planet Local and Closer to Home.
Colin works with the wisdom traditions of South Africa, specifically those that are based on our relationships with the ancestors and spirits of nature. He looks at where these ancient indigenous practices collide and coalesce with the knowledge and belief systems of the west.
He now works around the world as a diviner, teacher and public speaker, developing forms through which to bring this knowledge to the modern world.
Rachel has worked with animist education for many years, designing and delivering educational programmes for Schumacher College, University of Wales Trinity St Davids, Lampeter and Embercombe, with a focus on the meeting point between ecology and ‘spirituality’.