A PEDAGOGY OF DEATH, DECAY & DESTRUCTION

How can we hospice a dying way of knowing/being and assist with the birth of something new, still fragile, undefined and potentially (but not necessarily) wiser with radical tenderness?

– Vanessa Andreotti

I am interested in death, decay and destruction as generative forces and in collapse as a precursor to creativity. This is an essential part of re-learning ecological and cyclical thinking and an important thread in decolonising and un-learning a growth based, hyper clean, youth focused, death and dirt-phobic mindset.

These themes have been with me for a long time and I’m currently in a more active research phase, including solo and collaborative explorations, kindly funded by Lankelly Chase. I want to see how these themes might further inform  practices of transitioning organisations, activism and group processes to something more rooted in ecological praxis, in the process of decoloniality and in climate justice. The context (as ever) is the social, ecological, cultural and climate breakdown at all levels of scale, including how it is distributed unevenly across the world. It’s situated in these questions

About the project

In most approaches to transformation, even in conversations of systems change or regenerative culture, something of the whole is often missing. Traces of modernity’s story of growth, innovation, youth and perfection remain and we can miss the essential and generative nature of death, decay and destruction. And so we miss developing the important skills, values and qualities of being that arise from loss, discomfort, disturbance and even healthy aggression!

What if collapse could be a precursor to creativity? Mould a message of new cultures yet to come? Ashes the laying of fertile ground for whole system change? 

What if we recognised ‘dirt’ - and all who die on it  - for the life giving community it is? Teaming with detritivores (yes! those who feast on detritus!) and microorganisms, or ‘the smalls’ as Siv Watkins calls them.

A  Pedagogy of Death, Decay and Destruction (PODDD) explores learning and inspiration from other species, ecological phenomena, cultures and practices, alongside somatic and ontological invitations to explore these themes from the inside. 

From here, the landscape our collective imagination can explore, the questions we might ask and the stories we might tell are rooted in wholeness and possibility that doesn't shy away from ‘the grungier aspects of change’.

PODDD is an offering of multiple perspectives, provocations and possibilities. An invitation to stretch our imagination and narratives around change and generativity. We are interested in death, decay and destruction as generative forces and in collapse as a precursor to creativity. In our organisations, leadership, creativity, education, activism, communities and everyday lives:

Death, decay and destruction, are all part of natural systems. At the same time, we are facing unprecedented social, psychological and ecological breakdown in the early 21st Century. Many are also still bearing the past and ongoing traumatic effects of the intentional breaking down of ecological, cultural and racial health and dignity through generations of Empire and Capitalism. While we do what we can to counter these harms, to transform human culture and to find new shapes of justice, there will be more degenerative and heart breaking collapse of ecological, social, economic, political and cultural systems in our lifetimes. Attending to the grief and anger we have is an important part of collective resilience. 

Here we suggest that, having an awareness of natural systems and cycles can help us be open to what might emerge from the cracks of decay, what might grow from the rubble after destruction and what can be tended to and nourished after death. Many earlier cultures have practices that engage with healthy violence, with decay and decline as generative forces (past and present)

Certain kinds of violence, death, destruction are central to how modernity functions. The past and current enslavement of people, species and ecosystems to produce goods for consumption, to look good, to keep economies going and that excrete byproducts of pollution and sickness.

Pedagogy

the art, occupation, or practice of teaching.

the theory or principles of education; a method of teaching based on such a theory (Oxford English Dictionary)

What does a study of death, decay and destruction offer us? Who holds the knowledge? And what theories, practices and principles might arise from this?

How might we explore impermanence and transformation as educational values? How might we normalise asking what needs to be let go of or destroyed (ideas, systems, identities) as much as what needs to be nurtured, grown or made more resilient?

“...In system terms, expectations are the programs or codes around which a system self-organises. In order to change, and let new responses or new life emerge, systems reorganise—the old codes break down. I like the term positive disintegration. We’ve done this countless times in our five billion years here. We have reorganised all the way along, by receiving and responding to feedback about what’s going on. Sometimes it can be pretty uncomfortable. Imagine when oxygen first came in, or when we were pushing around on our fins trying to find some water. We have to absolutely be open to feedback…”

— Joanna Macy

Frame

Who, what and why?

Who am I to be writing this? If it helps, see this footnote to know something of why I’m writing this and how that will be particular, possible, limited (as we all always are) and contextual. And if you’d like to know a little of the history…

Who is this for? Anyone interested in systemic change, in transformation, creativity, healing cultures, imagination, ecological thinking, decolonisation,philosophy, postactivism. In particular practitioners working with these threads. In particular anyone wanting to stretch frames of reference, orientations, narratives,  possibilities for creativity, collective and ecological imagination. People with the space to explore.

See Acknowledgements (LINK).

What shit show? you ask

In a paradigm of infinite growth, and denial of planetary and ecological limits

In a paradigm where bigger is better

In a paradigm of hidden violence necessary to keep it going

In a paradigm of mind over matter

In a paradigm of reductionism, linear thinking…

In a paradigm where young, fit and perky are top of the hierarchy

In a paradigm of squeaky clean, bacteria free domestic aspirations

In a paradigm of ”it’s good to be busy”

In a death phobic, grief phobic, individualist paradigm

In a paradigm of denial of past and ongoing collective trauma

(setting the scene)

The 21st Century sees the world in polycrisis - multiple intersecting and complex crises are intensifying. From ecological and climate, to societal and economic. From mental health and global politics to water health and indigenous, ethnic and racial justice. Death, decay and destruction of thriving life are rife as byproducts of the extractive, unethical, ecocidal and racial injustices of modernity. The collapse of social and ecological systems is already happening in the background of business as usual.

Stepping back, we see how behind it all, the west (and therefore anywhere that globalisation and modern economics prevail) is in metacrisis. A crisis of meaning, perception and understanding of the systemic and intra-dependence nature of life. A crisis of paradigmatic stuckness, of narrative and of collective imagination.  

I’m often curious therefore about what is being marginalized in any conversation about ‘changemaking’. Whose voice isn’t here? Whose culture (and here I include all species, including human!) is being occluded, what aspects of our inner and outer worlds are taboo?

Come in close, anywhere there is thriving life, and you will meet those involved in the sacred and mundane work of decay, dismembering, death. This, for these creatures or ecological phenomena involved,  is life giving work, nourishment, shelter and home. Without their daily prayers of consuming and digesting, rolling and pooping  out that which others have surrendered (shit, urine, old skin, bark or fur, flesh, blood, carapace), how would the world be? There would be fields and pavements piled high with untouched endings. Nothing rotting, dissolving or being transformed again into that which supports life. Layer upon layer of carcass, tree branch and excrement. How many metres high after one month? One year? Nothing would grow, or breathe or emerge anew.


If we think of industrialised human societies, economies and organisations in the 21st century, who does this essential work and what’s missing without it? What might we do  with the detritus, the old bones and the excreta of our redundant ideas, our collective challenges and the societal shit show we find ourselves in?

How might we explore these gestures and threads for our own orientations to the challenges we face and to enrich our collective capacities to navigate troubled times?

I advocate that… My hunch is that…

This comes from observing… those already ongoingly knowing… and personal experience of breakdown and breakthrough (depression - in the right conditions - can be a painful but extraordinary teacher about collapse as creativity, bereavement, creative process

and sensing in recent years an emerging research and practice in certain quarters

To  Illustrate a personal one, organisational (decelerator and others?), g/r, encounters, 

On the actions and patterns of death, decay and destruction we are living within that are 

A caveat: it’s easy here to slip into a binary sense of ‘the right and wrong kinds of destruction’. Who am I, who are you to choose? Where is the line? Is it a line, a spectrum or another shape much less definable? And ‘what is ‘natural’? Surely if it exists, it is natural as it’s happening! To talk of ‘natural’ versus ‘manmade’ perpetuates the illusion of separation and that we are not also part of nature - simply a two legged mammal with a very particular brain and opposable thumbs.

Again, who decides what counts?

And so here I am pointing to what I might frame as a spectrum and that at one end there are the habits and patterns of capitalism, colonialism, extractivism, human exceptionalism and cultures of separation that rely on causing harm to others in order to create the experience (or illusion) of success within a modern paradigm of consumption and power.

PODDD teachers & curriculum

Ecological

See the whole. Take another’s perspective. Explore systems in relationship.

Life happens at the scale of continents and cells, in geological, seasonal, cyclical and many tinier timeframes.

For any of this life to exist, death is necessary. The dead provide nourishment, shelter, space and possibility. When some die, others have room to grow. Many species and ecological phenomena are key to the essential and generative nature of the dying process, They are co-evolvers of decay and composters of endings, vital interventions for new life to emerge. Versions of the examples offered here exist within healthy ecosystems all around the world, specific to bioregion, season, terrain, and weather.


Think maggot, microbe and the crushing force of an elephant’s hoof. 

See ravens and flood water, termites and fallen trees.

Smell fungi and bacteria, hyena’s breath, and the sweet soil made of things long dead.

Explore examples of Ecological teachers below.

  • Vultures are a keystone species in many ecosystems across the globe, yet they’re often used as metaphors for the corrupt, seen as repulsive, predatory, or self-serving. While some cultures regard them as sacred or mystical beings, others view them as threats to livestock and cull them, or hunt them for rituals seeking visions or clairvoyance.

    Ecologically, vultures serve a vital role in turning death into renewal. While there are multiple species involved in transforming the dead, large carcasses need large birds and Andean Condors (a ‘New World Vulture’) have wingspans of up to 3.2 Metres wide, Cinereous Vultures (Old World) up to 3.1 Metres. With powerful beaks, razor-sharp talons, specialized microbiomes, and complex social structures, different species are adapted for different tasks. Some excel at tearing into thick hides, opening the carcass for other species to eat, others consume bones almost exclusively. Their corrosive stomach acid allows them to digest carcasses often teeming with deadly pathogens like anthrax, rabies, and botulinum toxin, diseases that would kill other scavengers. By clearing away the dead, vultures help prevent outbreaks and recycle nutrients back into the living web of life.

    Many vulture species are now endangered through cultural and ecological risks. 

    In 2018, while designing a course with The Emergence Network called Vulture: Courting the Otherwise in a time of breakdown, I heard tell of over 300 vultures found roosting and nesting on a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) radio tower in Kingsville, Texas.  Building a "big, beautiful wall" between the US and Mexico had been part of President Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign and this was a tower essential to monitoring the border along 245 miles of the Rio Grande River and Lake Amistad that forms the barrier between the U.S. and Mexico. “They will often defecate and vomit from their roost onto buildings below that house employees and equipment,” a spokesperson for CBP said. “There are anecdotes about birds dropping prey from a height of three-hundred feet, creating a terrifying and dangerous situation for those concerned.”

    A memo from the Department of Homeland Security spoke of droppings, mixed with urine on railings, catwalks, supports and rails throughout the tower, where workers can come in contact with it. The corrosive vomit regurgitated to kill bacteria on their bodies can slowly eat away at metal. Under the weight of the birds and their bodily fluids, the radio tower has become increasingly dangerous for workers to climb and maintain.

    As protected species they cannot be shot and last I heard, Homeland Security were still working on deterrents.

    In Practice:  See the ‘Vulture Process’

    Have a look at…

    https://4vultures.org/

    https://www.wildlifeact.com/blog/why-are-vultures-so-endangered

  • In many landscapes across the world, fire is not only Destroyer but also Regenerator. 

    Fire is central to the health and wholeness of many landscapes around the world. Often started by lightning during warm, dry seasons, fire clears out dead or dying vegetation, opens up the understory to allow more diversity, recycles nutrients back into soil and is a key collaborator in evolving specific species for these habitats. 

    There are fire ecologies within vast forests and savannas, grasslands and peat bogs, shrublands and coastal marshes. e.g. Fynbos shrublands across South Africa;  southeastern United States longleaf pine forest ecosystems; aeas of ‘old man banksia’ or wiriyagan’, a woody shrub or tree native to the east coast of Australia; Siberian Taiga.


    We’re talking here about a multiplicity of relationships amongst and between species, time frames, elemental forces and seasons. Some plants (passive pyrophytes) adapt to being taken, but not destroyed by fire that sweeps through their home. Others, the active pyrophytes  have more agency, more skin and bark in the game. They offer oils to temp the flames and accelerate the fire that tempers the influx of other species into their habitat, while simultaneously evolving their own resistance to destruction.


    And then pyrophiles, the fire lovers, cannot begin their life cycle  without the presence of fire. This meeting of matter known as Serotiny is where trees have co-evolved with fire, a dependance on the intense blasts of heat to release their seeds, sometimes decades apart. They will delay seed fall, sometimes for decades, awaiting fire before they drop their cones or pods to begin new life.

    Most mammals and birds adapt to flee, amphibians and reptiles burrow in soil or water. There is some evidence to suggest that some species of fire-foraging raptors help fuel the fires as a way to flush out prey


    And human mammals too have co-evolved with fire in these places, developing relationship, culture and strategies to cohabit. However, in the wake of colonial, capitalist and human centric histories, forest fires have become increasingly volatile and uncontrollable. They have become another clear symbol of global ecological crisis and therefore seen only as a problem to be fearful of rather than the distortion of a natural phenomena.

    These intense and wide reaching fires are due to complex systemic misuse including modern land and water management for commercial agriculture; urbanisation without relationship to place; climate change; and the outlawing or denigration of centuries old cultural fire practices. 


    In Practice: See ‘Cultural Burn’ in Culture Section 

    Have a look at…

    Serotiny – The Story of Lead to Life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJLxB95c-MA

    Lead to Life: The Alchemy of Atonement

    https://reader.giarts.org/read/lead-to-life

    https://www.treehugger.com/serotiny-and-the-serotinous-cone-1342894

  • There are over 5,000 types of dung beetle around the world, busy moving, eating and breeding in the shit of other species. Some eat more than their own weight in a day.  They navigate by smell, and some even by starlight, guided by the Milky Way.


    There are dwellers (Endocoprids) who lay eggs and raise young on the dung; tunnellers (Paracoprids) who tunnel up from below and bring bits of dung back underground; rollers (Telecoprids) who shape dung in to balls and roll them to a chosen spot to bury underground as food and a place to lay eggs and stealers (Kleptocoprids) who steal balls from rollers. 


    Their labour is holy. They clear waste, aerate soil, prevent parasites, and cycle nutrients. Imagine a world without them…

    How do we recognise and honour the unseen labour of waste workers, human and nonhuman alike?

    In Practice:

    In 2021, with The Emergence Network, three of us became “Underground Custodians” to listen for what was next over a 9 month gestation of deep listening. Emerging from this, we invited seven people to work with our ‘dung’: the excretions from our work so far, digesting matter from the underground listening, and the mess of the wider world. 

    As an experiment in leadership. succession and organisational change these “Dung Beetles” were tasked to metabolise the ‘excretions’ of TEN’s past work; to hold the mess and legacy in looking to the future. 

    Their focus included money, succession, conflict, localisation, and power. A radical model of non-heroic leadership born in the dirt asking “What is TEN’s work to do now?” and  “How shall we do it together?”

    Have a look at…

    The Dung Beetles at TEN | Bug Farm | True Facts on Dung Beetles

  • In a growth-centric culture, it’s easy to forget that not all progress is forward. Sometimes survival, or true transformation requires a halt.

    Diapause is a hormonally triggered pause in development seen in certain insects, amphibians, fish, and mammals. This biological phenomenon allows an organism to suspend growth until conditions are right to begin again. Some insects can remain in diapause for years, patiently awaiting the perfect moment.

    Unlike hibernation (a metabolic slowdown typical in warm-blooded animals) diapause is a developmental halt. Monarch butterflies, killifish embryos, and kangaroos all experience forms of it, delaying growth or reproduction until environmental signals (temperature, day length, food availability) indicate it’s safe to proceed.

    This deep pause is not passive; it is strategic. It reveals that cessation is not failure, but adaptation. The word itself - diapausis, from the Greek - means “to pause, bring to an end,” reminding us that endings can be purposeful.

    Diapause reflects a broader ecological truth: cycles of death, decay, and destruction are not simply losses, but transitions.

    As metaphor, diapause offers a potent lens for systemic change. Societal transformation may begin in periods that look like collapse or stasis e.g. economic downturns, political upheaval, social unrest, personal or relational breakdown. These are often seen as signs of failure, but they can also be thresholds: suspended, fertile moments from which something new might emerge.

    Sometimes, real change demands we metabolize endings. Sometimes, when the old structures no longer serve, the most generative act is a (dia)pause.


    In Practice:
    In 2023–4, I worked with gentle/radical as they explored a possible ending.

    We explored different metaphors for endings within explorations of decoloniality, care and organizational health including: 

    • Hospicing - tending what may be dying

    • Composting - transforming old ideas into fertile ground for new growth

    • Diapause - a period of suspended development, a conscious pause, without rushing a rebirth

    What emerged was not a conclusion, but a threshold, a long exhale, a letting-go in to not knowing. Diapause challenges our notions of progress, of time, of urgency.  It is a teacher of cycles, thresholds, and adaptive stillness.

    Have a look at…

    https://gentleradical.org/


Cultural

Challenge societal norms. Unearth unconscious bias. Revive skills and values embedded in place.


Around the world cultures old and new have evolved practices, rituals, and cosmologies that engage directly with the principles and realities of death, decay, and destruction. When life is lived   intimately and tangibly with place, people participate as part of their ecosystem. Here people learn from other  species, cycles and seasons, and know themselves as one species amongst many, embedded and integral. 

Knowledge emerges through cycles of tending, composting, rupturing, mending.

Over time and industrialisation, these threads of connection and participation in the whole have become thinner. Separation between body and land, ritual and regulation, food and soil, birth and death has increased as community and cultural lineages become abstracted or erased. Surrounded by stories of growth, youth and notions of longevity or even immortality, we lose the benefits and boundaries of knowing that death, decay and destruction are inevitable parts of the cycle of life, and therefore lose the ability to integrate this understanding in our societal structures and orientations.

Cultural responses to death, decay and destruction have always been more than beliefs or metaphors. They show up in form and function: in food and farming practices, in myths and deities, in art and politics, in grief rituals and rites of passage. In creative destruction. In cultural burning. In shadow work. In compost piles.

Some of these practices have persisted in quiet corners, others have adapted, revived, or emerged anew as responses to rupture. They carry vital teachings for how humans might once again live with, not against the cycles that govern all of life.

This section explores how cultural practices can become acts of re-membering. Not nostalgia for a simpler time (even if we may long for that!), but ways of listening and participating in the world as it is that interrupt extractive norms and realign us with the truths of an entangled life. These are practices that challenge binaries, restore kinship, and create space for grief, beauty, repair and refusal.

Ritual and Cosmologies

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  • rites of passage

    Rituals to destruction

    In the Rudra Tandava (Dance of Destruction) celebrating Shiva’s role as the destroyer, who ends the universe’s current cycle to make way for a new one. This sits within the Shiva Tandava, the cosmic dance of Shiva in Hindu mythology, representing the cyclic nature of the universe and the relationship between . It includes dances for creation, destruction, preservation, salvation, and illusion.  

    The Dance of Destruction itself acknowledges the destructive and regenerative energies inherent in the universe.

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Psyche and Soma

exploring from the inside: Personal, Existential, Somatic, Relational 

If we turn inwards to the ontological, sensory, somatic and biological we find fertile ground for inquiry. Here we explore our own orientations, often culturally informed but also built upon family context and personal history, the ways our psyche has adapted to life growing up. Here we find the universal in the individual and vice versa.

Referring to philosopher Gregory Bateson’s work ‘towards an Ecology of Mind’, poet David Whyte says (From Poetry and The Preservation of the Soul at Work):

“The abiding image of a diverse and rich ecology is the Amazon rainforest. As human beings we look at the rainforest and see an ecology made up of thousands of species that fit together exquisitely. The image is so satisfying to us, because when we see the forest and all the disparate forms, odours and cries that make it up, we intuit a life where all our own strange and eccentrically exotic parts can fit too. A place where the cross-grain of experience makes not a disconnect, but a mysterious, embracing pattern. A balanced, intricate ecology in effect asks us to stop choosing between parts of ourselves according to what we think belongs and what does not. A mature ecology needs its microscopic leaf-moulds as much as its panthers. It does not make a choice between them, saying “I’ll take three dozen of those gorgeous panthers and forget the tacky leaf-moulds.” If it did, the rainforest would soon, as the metaphor goes, be out of business. No leaf-moulds, no compost; no compost, no life.

In a sense, we put our sense of self out of business because much of our education has been bent towards raising us not as an intricate ecology of qualities but as a monoculture, where our own internal leaf-moulds are eradicated from our self-identity in the name of drying us out tidying us up, and making us presentable for the great economic system that awaits us.”

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Aesthetics, psychologies and philisophies

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Land, Fire, Food and Waste

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  • Modernity has a scatophobia problem.

    In the gleaming towers and sanitized infrastructures of industrialised society, we’ve engineered elaborate systems to disappear our waste. We flush ‘away’ without considering where that might be.  But our shit tells stories and asks good questions - about what we eat, what we value, what we hide, and who we depend on to carry the grungier sides of life.

    There was a time (and in some places this is alive and well) when feces were not waste but wealth.

    These are cultural practices riding the threshold between disgust and fertility, shame and transformation.

  • In 18th-century Edo Japan (now Tokyo), human excrement was a prized commodity. Night soil (the term for this nutrient-rich harvest) was collected from urban households by ‘Night Soil Collectors’ and sold as fertiliser to farmers. So valuable was it, that landlords would sometimes take excrement as part of rent. The more bodies in a home, the more shit produced, the cheaper the rent!

    Across the world, from gong farmers in Tudor England, to bucket carriers in pre-1960s Singapore, night soil collectors played a vital role, descending into pits and hauling containers full of nutrient rich ‘waste’ through city and countryside alike.

    These workers often laboured at night (hence the name), unseen and uncelebrated, their bodies marked by odour and their social status degraded by proximity to what others wanted hidden. 

    In choosing to touch what others avoid, night soil workers were intimate with how life depends on the cycling of death, decay, and defecation. What if these practices were revivied in ways that these roles were not shameful, but sacred? What if their work hauling the raw truth of digestion was a kind of holy work?

  • Today, as our industrial sewage systems choke rivers and oceans with nitrates, and phosphorus mines begin to run dry, a new wave of cultural remembering is emerging. The humanure movement invites us to reimagine human waste not as disgusting, but as a fertile resource.

    Unlike conventional sewage, which often pollutes water sources, composting toilets and dry sanitation systems transform excrement safely into soil. The Humanure Handbook, a cult classic of ecological sanitation, outlines the simple logic: shit + sawdust + time = safe, rich compost.

    But the shift isn’t just technical, it’s ontological. It calls us to decolonise our disgust, to see ourselves not as clean beings above nature, but as participants in the wider digestive juices of place.

    Where once we were told to be ashamed of our waste - our poo -  we might now ask: What nutrients lie in the shit I carry? What might grow from what I’ve tried to bury? Where is the flow of life impeded by innovation that isolates us from decay?

    Have a look at…

  • Before refrigeration and plastic wrap, before E-numbers and antiseptic wipes, there were bubbling crocks, hanging fish, clabbering milk, and the shared wisdom of co-existing with invisible kin of the microbial world.

    In every region of the world, people have collaborated with bacteria, moulds, and fungi to preserve, to refine, and to relate. Fermentation traditions are inherently place-based. They depend on local yeasts, ambient temperatures, the water in your region, and the hands that mix the salt. In this way, food becomes memory, and memory becomes embodied. No two krauts or kimchis are the same.

    Examples of Fermented Wisdom from Around the World:

    • Kimchi (Korea): Spicy, wild, deeply seasonal.

    • Sauerkraut (Europe): Salted cabbage, buried for winter survival.

    • Attiéké (Côte d’Ivoire): Fermented cassava, light and tangy.

    • Natto (Japan): Sticky, stringy soybeans, pungent and potent.

    • Hákarl (Iceland): Fermented Greenland shark, hung to dry for 4 to 5 months. Often eaten as a ritual

    • Surströmming (Sweden): Fermented Baltic herring—banned on planes for its odor.

    • Garum (Ancient Phoenicia, Greece and Rome): fermented sauces of fish gut, salt and sunshine. The ancestors of Worcestershire Sauce and Thai Nam Pla.

    • Bokashi (Global): Microbial composting of kitchen waste.


    • Wine, beer, sourdough, tobacco, blue cheese: Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.

    But modernity, with its obsession with cleanliness, progress and shelf life; and its fear of unpredictability has struggled with fermentation beyond the lab-born yeasts used for supermarket bread and mass manufactered beer. The fridge became a god. Sterility became virtue. Mould was demonised.

    And yet, in small corners of the modern world, the bubbling crocks are back. Scobys are given as birthday gifts and the sourdough starters have names. We are remembering. Fermentation is more than a food process. It’s a metaphor for culture itself, slow, unpredictable, alive and much wilder in age than linear time and human years. It asks for surrender, care, and a willingness to be changed.

    What biotic culture might you add to your situation? What wild yeast or fungal spores might you try to catch from your local vicinity?

    Where might you allow mould to grow, as an improvement?

    How does thinking about the lifespans of ancient bacterial cultures and their life cycles help you sense in to a more porous sense of your own life and death?


    Have a look at:

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Classes

Ways to play & places to forage

Take care 

Lean in to the creative edges and take care with the emotional and relational ones. We all have very different histories, legacies and direct experience with touching grief (ours and others’) and with shapes of collapse or aggression. Go slowly, go gently where needed.

See ‘acknowledgements 1’. 

Practices:

Solo or Group

Scan the examples from the Ecological thread

These can be adapted to explorations in 

Take each theme and explore

pair inquiries

whole group

sharing images or stories of some of these, invite people in trios to do some research and bring back stories for the group / project. They might take on perspectives and personify ….

Council of All Beings

Inquiry Q’s

Vulture Wake

Games & Labs

Destruction Meditation

Destruction Meditation

  • This is a creative and somatic inquiry into destruction as a generative force. We explore themes of death, decay, collapse and transformation through hands-on destruction of natural materials. Participants are invited to work without a fixed agenda, allowing the materials and the act of breaking things down to reveal insights, emotions, and new ways of knowing.


    We’re tapping into the work of compost, termites and hurricanes, of elephant feet, beavers and fallen trees. We’re exploring the multiple forms of agency that live in ecosystems to see what we might have to unlearn or learn to allow new strategies and practices for collective transformation and justice. 

    This can be challenging for some people, for very different reasons so it’s good to frame the invitation in ways that people feel free to meet their learning edges in kind ways.

    • Begin with a simple 5-minute warm-up: stretching, rotating joints, light movement, ending with 30 seconds of running on the spot.

    • Then say: “Let’s push this building down, with all our hearts and might — destroy the oppressors!” (Adapt language to suit the group.)

    • Demonstrate pushing positions against a wall (palms, back, feet, etc.) and invite people to experiment.

    • Offer sound options: loud exhale, roaring, growling, soft humming, raspberries.

    • Encourage deep breathing, mindful muscle engagement, and curiosity about resistance.

    • Push for 5 minutes, including pauses. Then rest for 3 minutes, leaning against the wall or lying down. Invite shared silence and eye contact in the spirit of collective effort.

    • Allow for 5 minutes of reflection. Then take a short break (tea/bio break) while setting up the next phase.

  • Materials:

    • Black A3 sugar paper (1 per person)

    • Items to destroy: twigs, dried grasses, eggshells, cardboard, pinecones, bark, seed heads — all compostable


    Instructions:

    • Invite participants to choose materials and sit in a circle.

    • Place materials on paper, close eyes, and rest.

    • Frame it simply: We are going to do a meditation on destruction. When the bell sounds, we will destroy what is in front of us mindfully. There is no right way to do this, follow your body, your senses, your imagination and your heart. Be present with it all. No talking please but sound is OK if it comes.

    • Ring a bell or chime to begin. After ~20 minutes, ring three times to close.

    • Invite quiet sitting, noticing sensations and thoughts. Then open eyes and look around in silence.

    • Begin with open sharing — what did people notice or feel?

    • Possible prompts:

      • What did you notice about your own relationship with destroying things?

      • Did you imagine anything you would like to destroy - with care?

      • In conversations and spaces where Non Violence is the holy grail, what might we miss if destruction is taboo? 

      • Can you imagine how you might translate this experience to a specific scenario,  context or aspect of the world?

    • Be wary of trying to know what will come out of this. Let the destruction sit there, digest itself. Notice how death, destruction, decay, collapse, breakdown and disintegration take multiple shapes, qualities and cycles, and are embedded in multiple relationships. 

    • Further reflection prompts:

      • Sometimes there is a sense of artistry and beauty-making in this process of destruction. Do not invite or frame it as this, let the group comment on it if it arises, and affirm this in your reflections later.

      • Sometimes there are emotional responses as people are touched by something. Again, do not invite or frame it as this, but let the group comment on it if it arises, and affirm it in your reflections later.

    • What are we propping up, colluding with, tolerating or inadvertently perpetuating that we could instead allow to die? This might be  internally, collectively, practically or philosophically. What would it take to let go?

    • What is there to un-learn in our responses to Climate Justice when we hold on too tight to identities as kind, peaceful humans? 

    • What wisdom, healing or ordinary magic inherent in natural cycles of destruction and collapse could be hiding behind the shadows cast by the violence of war, abuse and colonialism? 

Resources

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Origin Story 

Acknowledgements

With care:

In cultural and ecological appreciation:

With thanks:


In solidarity:

MORE ABOUT

THE PROJECT

Arising from the industrial growth paradigm we are facing unprecedented social, psychological, ecological and climate breakdown, unevenly distributed across human populations and across species. Many are also bearing the past and ongoing traumatic effects of the intentional breaking down of ecological, cultural and racial health and dignity through generations of Empire and capitalism. While we do what we can to counter these harms, to transform human culture and to find new shapes of justice, it’s also clear that there will be more and worse degenerative and heart breaking collapse – on multiple levels – to come.

Attending to the grief,  anger and other feelings we have about what is happening is an important part of collective resilience. Finding ways to act in solidarity with others bearing more of the burdens is an essential expression of reciprocity and healing justice. 

At the same time, I’m interested in how our relationship – within modernity – to the natural cycles of death within life has got us into this mess in the first place and how the unlearning of this might help. 

Within modernity, the idealised life hides away any signs of death, decay and destruction. 

The falling apart of things: breakdown, collapse and disintegration are seen primarily as negative experiences. This might be at levels of personal, communal, societal, ecological, cultural. From the breakdown of a fixed idea of identity to the disintegration of a building, from the collapse of a dam to that of a power structure in an organisation (on any scale). 

It shows up in things like: toilet and waste systems where all evidence of ‘the end product’ is hidden from the average citizen; in advertisements for cleaning and personal hygiene products (many of which kill off essential healthy bacteria too); in youthfulness as a constant aspiration (“oh, but you look so much younger than your age!” – suggesting that we must never get old). As a death-phobic culture, money is poured into ways to keep us alive as long as possible, regardless of quality of life. Elderly people are hidden from view and at the point of death, relatives rarely see and tend to their loved ones’ dead bodies.

If things fall apart or collapse in our relationships, work, health, creative projects it’s seen as failure, shameful. We are rarely supported to grieve, nor given healthy tools to relate with any kind of breakdown as an opportunity for new opportunities and learning – for breakthrough. 

Once these aspects of life can be revealed and  integrated, I’m interested in how breakdown, collapse, falling apart can all act as generative forces. How seeing the essential role of these  within natural systems and cycles can help us be open to what might we find in the  cracks of decay in modernity, what might grow from the rubble after destruction of what has been known, and what can be tended to and nourished after death creates space for emergence.

This work is tapping into the work of compost, termites and hurricanes, of elephant feet, beavers and fallen trees. It’s exploring the multiple forms of agency that live in ecosystems to see what we might have to unlearn or learn to allow new strategies and practices for collective transformation and justice. 

Further questions in the inquiry include:

  • Where could a different relationship with death, decay, destruction, disintegration be needed?

  • What needs to collapse? Or where is their generative potential in the collapse that’s already happening / happened?

  • What if we had a healthy relationship with grief and loss? What might be healed, enabled, possible?

  • What if we had a healthy relationship with natural aggression? What might be healed, enabled, possible?

  • How might the problem (living in a time of breakdown) also be the doorway to the solution?

HOW TO ENGAGE

RECENT EVENTS

I’ve recently run the two events below and some online “conversations at my kitchen table”.

INTERVIEWS

I am interviewing people about this work from maggot and vulture experts to cultural burn practitioners and post-activist thinkers.

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED TO KNOW MORE,
OR HAVE IDEAS TO ADD: