--- title: Ecoweaving url: https://ecoweaving.org/about.md canonical_html: https://ecoweaving.org/ language: en --- # Ecoweaving > Ecoweaving is an invitation to the practice of breathing the same beloved air, together. Ecoweaving is an initiative weaving people, projects, places, and worldviews in an emerging ecosystem of indigenous wisdom and innovation from intersections in finance, ecology, computational law, and beyond, with the goal of collective action and coordination around the crises in climate and ecological collapse. ## The term and its origin The word ecoweaving arose in the space between two gatherings at Wilbur Hot Springs in Northern California: the Ecocoins coordination convening of October 2022 and the Wisdom Weaving and Ecocoins gathering of April and May 2023. Between them, in early 2023, a small delegation travelled to Ecuador to visit the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance, at the invitation of Atossa Soltani and Uyunkar Domingo Peas Nampichkai, and was called in: not the moment for solutioning, but for meeting the land, each other, and each other's dreams. > And thus, ecoweaving was ritually en-spirited as a values-aligned, collaborative and emergent process of inter-being and becoming-with, a weaving amongst people, projects, places, and worldviews. First principles of the Allies Covenant: 1. Acknowledging our inherent unity and interdependence 2. Cultivating our capacity to act in integrity to the whole 3. Walking together on a learning journey 4. Honoring the innate sovereignty and personhood of all 5. Harmonizing our relations through the pursuit of truth and right action 6. Achieving coherence between the material, spiritual, and social dimensions of reality ## Lineage No one invited is named; those present appear only as layers of perspective. ### 20 April – 4 May 2022: Nature, Technology, Politics and Philanthropy The first Wilbur Nature Workshop · Wilbur Hot Springs, Northern California A two-week deep dive, the first of what became the Wilbur Nature Workshops, an extitutional series held each spring at Wilbur Hot Springs. Taking inspiration from a novel that imagines a ministry for future generations, and considering tools from smart contracts to satellite data, it asked how we might take more radical steps to accelerate safely out of the present collision and towards a positive future for nature and humans. - **Care**: Two weeks on healing land, long enough for people to arrive as more than their roles. - **Field**: Nature, technology, politics and philanthropy held in one conversation instead of four. - **Resonance**: Brainstorming how personal and collective impact might be maximised to preserve and restore nature. - **Presencing**: The future, through an imagined ministry that speaks for generations to come; the present, through satellite data and smart contracts. Layers of perspective presenced: conservation; earth observation; philanthropy; public policy; decentralised technology; climate finance; law and governance. The questions of that spring seeded a second, more focused convening in the autumn. ### 15 – 17 October 2022: Ecocoins Coordination Convening A coordination convening · Wilbur Hot Springs, then a reflection salon at a co-living community house in San Francisco A coordination convening around “ecocoins”: the social, technical, legal and financial tools and infrastructure for coordination, governance, and the digital measurement, reporting and verification of carbon drawdown (and keepdown) and the full range of ecosystem services that protect and regenerate biodiversity. - **Care**: A weekend on the land, then an evening salon in a shared home in the city, open to a wider circle. - **Field**: The stack of tools for valuing nature: satellites, registries, credits, tokens, law. - **Resonance**: Working sessions in the hills; reflection, food and conversation in the salon. - **Presencing**: Remote sensing, climate data, ecological credits, rainforest advocacy and commons economics in one room, with white papers on nature-based currencies, credit governance and nature oracles shared beforehand. Layers of perspective presenced: satellite earth observation; ecological credit infrastructure; climate data coordination; computational law and blockchain policy; rainforest protection; token and commons economics; sensemaking and social change; open knowledge; public-interest advocacy; law and engineering; impact funds; art and conservation; carbon reward economics; drawdown and design science; decentralised storage and data; climate technology; humanitarian systems. Between this convening and the next, a journey south changed the question, and gave the work its name. ### Early 2023: A journey to the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance A learning journey · The Amazon Sacred Headwaters, Ecuador, on the shores of the Pastaza River, and Puyo A small delegation from the Global North, collaborators on fairer systems design, travelled at the invitation of Atossa Soltani and Uyunkar Domingo Peas Nampichkai to live for a time with an Indigenous community on the shores of the Pastaza River, as the arrival of voluntary carbon markets in their territories drew near. They came ready to help, and were kindly called in. - **Care**: To pause in urgent times: not the moment for solutioning. To encounter the ‘how’ before rushing to the ‘what’. - **Field**: Territories protected for hundreds of generations, now pressed by roads, extraction and carbon offers that pit families and communities against each other. - **Resonance**: Meeting the land, meeting each other, meeting each other’s dreams. - **Presencing**: Leaders of the federations of the Alliance entrusted the delegation with a further invitation: to gather aligned people into a learning and unlearning journey, on their terms. Layers of perspective presenced: the hosts’ ways of life, stewarding the forest across generations; Indigenous federations deliberating together; fairer systems design; law and governance; climate finance; technology; storytelling. On 9 April 2023, in Puyo, thirteen federations of seven Indigenous nationalities (Waorani, Sapara, Achuar, Shuar, Shiwiar, Kichwa and Andwa) signed a political agreement to inquire together into how to protect their territories, ways of life and ancestral wisdom. Ecoweaving was ritually en-spirited in the space this journey opened. See [the origin](https://ecoweaving.org/origin). ### 21 April – 4 May 2023: Wisdom Weaving and Ecocoins The first gathering under the name ecoweaving · Wilbur Hot Springs, Northern California An initial week among a smaller group to build the context and container, then a four-day gathering of around forty to fifty people. Its prompt: how the tools and infrastructure for climate finance and biodiversity regeneration are created and governed will determine the fate of our planet, and the current path rests on stories that displace or silence the very earth protectors and wisdom keepers who steward its most biodiverse places. - **Care**: A land revered as healing and ceremonial ground by the Yocha Dehe, Patwin and Colusa tribes of the Wintun Nation, and by the Pomo; an embodied reset from default patterns of cognition and relation; space for grief and for getting it wrong. - **Field**: A shared context on remote sensing, climate data, ecological credits, impact certificates, bioregional funds and an eco-coin architecture; then working groups on oracles and truth-seeking, personhood and sovereignty, community data, an Indigenous rights hotline, nature finance and personal accountability. - **Resonance**: A Council of All Beings, letters to ancestors, tea ceremony and a grief circle, a storytelling game, qi gong, dance, watershed restoration, an ancestral story of the myths of money, a meditation for threatened living systems, and a closing ceremony. - **Presencing**: Descendants of Indigenous root gatherers who have come to that land for over a century visited, and a basket woven from local pine needles became a symbol of connection between gatherers and participants. Layers of perspective presenced: Indigenous facilitation and ancestral tradition; forest protection; satellite remote sensing; climate data; ecological credits and registries; impact certificates; bioregional finance; commons and blockchain law; film and storytelling; ritual and ceremony; somatic practice; dance; watershed and keystone-species restoration; economics and myth; meditation; design justice; community data mapping; Indigenous rights advocacy; nature finance; software and data engineering; care and accountability practice. The question of a single “ecocoin” met its contradictions: what would a framework look like that does not assume it has the right solution? Participants formed a relational response team for the federations’ technical working group, prepared a Gift Basket of options, precedents, risks and opportunities, and entered an Allies Covenant on six first principles. ### Summer 2023: From an eco-coin to a learning journey A storytelling and ecosystem report · Online, and in working groups across several continents Six months on, the most significant outcome was a reappraisal: from defining a system architecture and solution, to a reciprocal learning journey that optimises for relationality and kinship. - **Care**: Making time for relational vulnerability and sitting with contradiction, as daily practice. - **Field**: Storytelling and ontologies: what is the underlying ontological operating system we are building on, and is it enough to add voices to a table without looking at the table itself? - **Resonance**: A weavers’ covenant, a Gift Basket of threads (finance flows, Indigenous-led governance, government relations, legal structures), and patterns for gathering: unlearning journeys, salons, a shared glossary, recognition of contributions. - **Presencing**: Learning out loud, beside an alliance of around thirty federations stewarding some thirty million hectares of forest. Layers of perspective presenced: storytelling and film; ontology and philosophy; Indigenous-led governance; finance and funds; government relations; legal structures; community knowledge tools. The reappraisal was shared in public at Funding the Commons in Berlin that September. ### 8 – 9 September 2023: Ecoweaving, presented A talk · Funding the Commons, Berlin Beginning with a shared breath and the atmospheric rivers breathed out by the Amazon, the talk unfurled extitutionality, a word born out of jams among commons-aligned kin, as the counterpart to institutional theory: coordination beyond rules and roles, being seen not for the institution you represent but for the fullness of who you are. - **Care**: Opening with breath: one atom in each body from every breath every human has taken. - **Field**: Why finance-first solutions, carbon processes out of right relation and solutionism fail the living commons. - **Resonance**: Ecoweaving is not a new institution, nor a new solution: a pluriverse of paths, an open-source learning and unlearning journey that is itself a commons. - **Presencing**: The six first principles, and the federations’ two emerging ideas: to set their own terms as sellers, and a fund to buy on them. Layers of perspective presenced: the decentralised web; commons governance; computational law; ecological economics; Indigenous-led stewardship. The following spring, the gathering at Wilbur turned towards the body and the land. ### 5 – 8 May 2024: Energetic (Re)Connection A three-day gathering · Wilbur Hot Springs, Northern California Three days of deep connection, ceremonial co-creation and rejuvenation, attuning to the rhythms of the earth, the wind and our own hearts, and carrying the energetic connection some had brought back from the Amazon Sacred Headwaters. - **Care**: Each day opened and closed with somatic practice; meals were cooked by a sacred kitchen; the healing waters held the group. - **Field**: An ecocredits initiative for the land’s own sacred spaces and biodiversity, and an introduction to autonomous ecological institutions. - **Resonance**: Guided meditation, animist nature walks, music and ceremony, elemental groups, a guided procession to a spring. - **Presencing**: Three days, three horizons: those we walk alongside, those who walked before us, those who walk after us. Layers of perspective presenced: somatic and aquatic therapy; land-based ceremony; music; earth law; land stewardship; earth observation; ecological credits; regenerative agroecology technology; art and design; health and human rights; planetary health; decentralised organisations; new economics; social innovation; environmental data science; open knowledge infrastructure; carbon removal; the bioeconomy; ethnography; regenerative economies and art. That summer, the weaving turned to ecological intelligence. ### 16 August 2024: Ecological intelligence and the aesthetics of an emerging Earthwave movement An afternoon jam · A co-living community house in San Francisco, and online An afternoon into evening of jam sessions, weaving threads from the decentralised web, collective intelligence, speaking for forests, Earthwave musicalities and interspecies listening, at a turning moment in the history of the planet. - **Care**: An open door, in person and remote, from the afternoon into the evening. - **Field**: Towards interoperable ecological institutions: protocols to grow autonomous and convivial ecological actors. - **Resonance**: Earthwave possibilities: ecology, music, art and dance in poetry; somatic synaesthesia; place-based grief and belonging. - **Presencing**: The voice of nature, and collective intelligence with agents. Layers of perspective presenced: collective intelligence and AI governance; AI safety and foresight; environmental advocacy; off-grid energy; experimental communities and social science; commons-based social media; network economics; social impact design; agroecology and food sovereignty; blockchain law; forest monitoring; new economics philanthropy; interspecies communication; humanitarian principles; research software; education; somatic and spiritual care; decision science; governance tooling; international environmental policy; AI art; regenerative technology; evolutionary economics. Seven months later, the weaving was offered as a talk on beloved intelligence. ### 15 – 16 March 2025: Ecoweaving with Beloved Intelligence A talk · Funding the Commons, the Internet Archive, San Francisco A meditative talk on collective breath, ancestral wisdom and relational knowledge: ecoweaving as an invitation to breathe the same beloved air, together, and as a new and ancient form of diplomacy. It was the first time the Declaration of Autopoietic Hyperstition and Universal Interbeing was introduced. - **Care**: A breath with the hum of the archive, and an acknowledgement of the unceded homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone. - **Field**: Computational law as an interface of legibility; AI and more-than-human beings in citizens’ assemblies. - **Resonance**: Semantic crystals that share a node with breath: aroha, samay, qi. - **Presencing**: Beloved intelligence: intersubjective, collaborative, un-coerced. Read [the full talk](https://ecoweaving.org/beloved-intelligence), with its recordings. ### 29 March – 4 April 2027: Ecoweaving Ecosight & Xenohealth A residency week, to come · Feÿtopia, France A residency week weaving ecoweaving with ecosight and with xenohealth, the theory of health for an era of biological, ecological and synthetic entanglement. See the [xenohealth lineage](https://xenohealth.org/lineage). ## The talk [Ecoweaving with Beloved Intelligence](https://ecoweaving.org/beloved-intelligence) (https://ecoweaving.org/beloved-intelligence.md)