The Wilds Beyond Climate Justice Project Description

The Wilds Beyond Climate Justice: A gathering at the end of hope was an experimental online event to engage in different activities, actions, and conversations that evade Western logic as it defines rational climate solutions. The gathering took place from May 31–June 4, 2020 and included an enormous cadre of volunteers, artists, musicians, contributors, and over 1200 participants. Part ceremony, part workshop, part arts project, The Wilds Beyond Climate Justice brought together a community of people to mourn, vision, play, and open up places of power and imagination.

At a time when many of our assumptions about the world have been called into question, the project to discover what might lie beyond our habitual approach to global challenges has gained a new urgency.

Through live workshops and an interactive online space for conversation, creative expression, and sharing of artistic and personal works, participants explored what lies beyond the limits of our mainstream approaches and frameworks – and opened up to new possibilities. 

What if the world we want to save is alive and has imperatives of its own? What might be obscured by a rush to find solutions? Who is telling the story of this time, what cultures and frameworks reinforce this story, and in what ways does this story shape and stabilize our imaginations? What can we learn from the Anthropocenes of Black and First Nations peoples from the ‘past’ that are still very much active in what’s excluded in the present? What if time is not linear and power is not scarce? What other ends, feelings, invitations, instigations, response-abilities and actions are possible?

These were just some of the questions that met us.

Speakers and workshop leaders included: 

• Pat McCabe (Weyakpa Najin Win, Woman Stands Shining), Diné (Navajo) mother, grandmother, activist, artist, writer, ceremonial leader, and international speaker. 
• Báyò Akómoláfé, Visionary Founder, The Emergence Network
• Alnoor Ladha, mystical anarchist and former founding member and Executive Director of The Rules (TR), a global network dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality, poverty and ecological breakdown
• Annie Humphrey, 2018 Native American Music Awards Artist of the Year
• Aunkh Chabalala, a Medical Natural Scientist, African Medicine Practitioner and Infectious Diseases Epidemiologist
• Toni Spencer, facilitator, poet, mentor and Deep Adaptation Advocate
• Charles Eisenstein, author of Climate: A New Story

The principal curators for the Wilds Beyond Climate Justice were Karen Leu, Owólabi Aboyade, Alex Rodríguez, and Aerin Dunford.