It’s time to rewild

Hi friends,

As our team wraps up the year, we are working to honor and draw strength from the in-between: putting thought into our intentions for the year to come, holding faith in (and accountability to) the world we are creating for our descendants. Sending gratitude to all of you for being here with us, as we make our way to that future.

Earlier this month, Next River held a virtual event to share updates on our work. The note below is what Mia shared with the folks who attended. You can also watch it here.

A note from Mia

The combination of the elections and the coming of winter—these real and metaphorical winters—has me thinking about this season of being in the wilderness. The metaphor of being in the wilderness is often used in a political context to describe a period of being out of power or unsuccessful. But I’ve been thinking about what else the wilderness might offer. What if this is a time for rewilding?

From an environmental perspective, rewilding is a conservation approach to restore the processes and biodiversity of a landscape that humans have brutalized. I am drawn to the opportunity for a kind of rewilding that this current crisis presents us with. This is not about desperate silver linings, but hopeful pragmatism. Being denied control over the systems and approaches that weren’t serving us well anyway means we have to do something wholly different. This is a moment to ask ourselves:

• What do we need to remember of what a human ecosystem can be?
• How might we restore what has been brutalized by the same feudal and futile human conventions that have devastated the earth?
• What ways of being–with each other, with other living creatures, with land–would serve all of us?

This is a Next River moment: a time for standing with one foot in the realities of the present and one foot in our dreams of the future. This is a time to build the systems, narratives, and practices that can both sustain us through this long winter and help us thrive once spring comes.

This is not a nice-to-have exercise or a feel-good approach. It is essential. If we slip into designing our visons, strategies, and tactics from a place of present fears and anxieties, we’ll be caught continuing to tinker around the margins with reforms or fixes. But, y’all…ain’t enough duct tape, plywood, and chicken wire to make this thing run.

This is a time to imagine and build new things for now and the future.

We are bringing this sense of necessary possibility into the new year. We hope you’ll join us.

What we’ve been up to

If you are interested in learning more about what we’re thinking about, our plans for the next few years, and some of the research we’re excited about, watch the video of our event.

Current inspiration

• ProPublica's Uncovered series is about the shameful practices health insurance companies utilize to deny millions of claims for care every year. In addition to more than a dozen articles, they made [this tool](https://projects.propublica.org/claimfile/) that helps you find out why your insurer denied your claim.
• Our internal compasses are getting tuned up (do you tune up compasses?) by Dean Spade suggesting that this is a good time to divest from certain kinds of hope that are disempowering and demobilizing.

Dean Spade on Instagram: “A lot of people are talking about hopelessness. Maybe it is appropriate right now to lose hope in some things and cultivate hope and faith in others. Maybe it is appropriate to be letting go of liberal fantasies of state reform and elite rescue and face that we really only have each other. This means we have to cultivate faith in the goodness of ourselves and others, in our generosity and courage. We’ve been taught not to trust each other, to compete, to hoard, to think that humans are greedy. It takes active practice to shift our faith from the delusions of liberalism to grounded faith in one another, in our shared values and caring, though imperfect, work together. It makes sense that this shift is disorienting and scary, but it’s necessary.”

2,141 likes, 35 comments - spade.dean on November 27, 2024: “A lot of people are talking about hopelessness. Maybe it is appropriate right now to lose hope in some things and cultivate hope and faith in others. Maybe it is appropriate to be letting go of liberal fantasies of state reform and elite rescue and face that we really only have each other. This means we have to cultivate faith in the goodness of ourselves and others, in our generosity and courage. We’ve been taught not to trust each other, to compete, to hoard, to think that humans are greedy. It takes active practice to shift our faith from the delusions of liberalism to grounded faith in one another, in our shared values and caring, though imperfect, work together. It makes sense that this shift is disorienting and scary, but it’s necessary.”.

Instagram

• Julia Bouwsma’s Dear Reader—Reaching Toward Community in a Time of Winter is the letter we are keeping close.
• Naomi Klein reminds us that “Trump is a rolling shock machine which is a recipe for keeping us scattered and reactive to the latest shocking news.” So, instead of giving in to relentless consumption of the shock machine or swinging in the opposite direction as dissociating from the present moment, we’re sitting with Daniel Hunter’s “10 Ways to be Prepared and Grounded Now That Trump Has Won.”

We’ll leave you with this poem from the late, great Nikki Giovanni. Biography
By Nikki Giovanni

There is a bat
In Chile named
Micronyteris giovanniae
Dr. Robert Baker named it
After me. He discovered it
While studying bats
And thought the big ears
Were just like me
Maybe if the bat wrote
She would be
A poet

There is a plaque
In Lincoln Heights
Where I went
To school
And a Plaque
In Knoxville
Across the street
Where my grandparents lived

I’m also lucky
To have awards and daydreams
Or is that
Daydreams
And Awards
And I’m lucky to be happy
At what I do
And how I do it

So that is this
Bio
I’m here
And if I mist
On emotional soil
A weed will
Grow

Make Me Rain

Let me be a part
Of this needed change