How to reimagine work? 

In nature everything is at work, from bees collecting nectar to beavers building bridges to whales migrating thousands of miles, feeding and breeding. To work is to sustain, to take part in the cycles of the earth, and to become more than the self in service in exchange. 

Our economy is in an intimate relationship with the Earth. The extractive and reductionist systems based on ideologies of scarcity are harming the land and our bodies, with microplastics entering the ocean and our bloodstream and fossil fuels polluting the lungs and the sky and pesticides disrupting farms and our inner microbial garden. 

We are called to remember reciprocity, which sits at the core of our being, with every breath we inhale, the exhalation of trees. Exchange is essential and universal.  We must not fear taking from the Earth, as long as we are prepared to give back; the question is how. 

What happens when the economy reciprocates with the ecology? How is the cyclicity of nature – birth, growth, decay and regeneration – guiding the transitioning world? What lessons of kinship, reciprocity and communal living can we learn from the more-than-human world? What rituals and practices across cultures honour exchange with the Earth? What does inheritance mean across generations and across species? Is capital only monetary or also spiritual, mental and relational? What is the meaning of inheritance from generational and planetary perspectives? Does mechanisation of labour free the human to pursue existential queries or create a wider hole in the void? Why is sustaining nature sustaining the self? 

These questions are only suggestions; we’re interested in your creativity and perspective on abundance, ecology and economy.