Episode 98 - We Are Avon - On Sacred Rivers, Community Activism and Bio-Regional Action

This episode was from a live panel I hosted recently here in my home city of Bath.

A conversation with a brilliant crew embedded with the lands and rivers who are working to steward, guardian, protect, connect and regenerate life between human communities and more than human ecologies.

This was part of a community engagement day for West Country Bio-Regional project We Are Avon.

We Are Avon is a movement of landworkers, organisations and communities collaborating for regional transformation of our land, river and food systems.

This is a self organising bottom up collective of folks around the Avon River who are collaborating and experimenting to envision a bio-regional future - this is proper roll up your sleeves become the change movement - very much in the spirit of becoming crew.

I was invited to host this panel by We Are Avon instigator and regenerative farmer Hamish Evans from MiddleGround Growers who was a guest on the podcast in EP 61

The panel was focussed specifically on exploring rivers, our relationships to them, the state they are in and why they are such a key connection in a bio-regional project.

My guests were a quite brilliant crew:

Amelia Crews - ocean and river activist, community energy organiser and climate and nature action dynamo.

Eva Perrin - Aquatic Ecologist, PhD graduate in freshwater biogeochemistry, community activator for citizen science and river protection, co-founder of Conham Bathing Group and Rave on for the Avon.

Hamish Evans - permaculturist, regenerative farmer and prefigurative activist - co-founder MiddleGround Growers

Paul Powlesland - river guardian, rights of nature campaigner and activist lawyer, who featured in EP 67

These are four amazing humans serving life, becoming the change, doing difficult yet joyful work.

This is a dynamic conversation, full of insight, provocation and invitation to get stuck into whatever hood/river/forest you find yourself close to.

It’s very much a conversation about entanglements, relationships and interdependence, the future we’re being called to shape is one of new relationships, of learning to relate in new ways to ourselves, to each other and to this more than human world we call home.

And the ways we relate to the wild waters of this Earth is such a fundamental indicator of the health of the human and more than human crew on Spaceship Earth.

What does it look like to see ourselves, not at the centre of a landscape of place, but decentered, in kinship, in relationship with all life that is there ?

What does it look like to step into a way of being that sees us in a place of kinship, as part of a sacred web of life, not above it trying to create power and control over it, but within - in relationship with.

I think the big take out in this conversation is to get into relationship with something that is alive and more than human where you are.

It could be a stretch of water, a river, a pond, a coastline, a meadow, a patch of soil.

As you move into regular relationship with something more than human that is alive, you become to understand that there are all kinds of other relationships impacting the health of that thing, and you’re part of that, you become part of that, in some ways, you begin to understand the complexity of things.

So get out there and find your own your way back into this great mysterious entanglement of life, and do it with others, becoming crew on Spaceship Earth.

And if you’re in the Avon hood, come and get involved in We Are Avon - links below.

Photos and film by Leoni Fretwell .