WELLSPRING COMMONS
Weaving a holistic understanding of what it means to live in a mutually thriving relationship with the larger life family within the limits and regenerative powers of place.
Mission
Our mission is to cultivate a holistic understanding of what it means to live in a mutually thriving relationship with the larger life family within the limits and regenerative powers of place.
Our work focuses on protecting ecological lifelines, helping to build a real food system and bioregional forest pantry, supporting the development of the regional materialshed for a sustainable and regenerative circular economy, collaboratively building a knowledge commons to share tools and information in service to life, and helping to create funding ecosystems that will support regenerative work across the bioregion.
Our geographic scope focuses within the Housatonic River Valley Watershed of Western MA, Eastern NY, and Western CT, expanding through nested scales across New England and the Forests of the Northeast bioregion (US and Canada).
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Wellspring Commons
Climate change and ecological degradation render the future highly uncertain. Natural systems are approaching or past tipping points. Protecting key local landscapes, everywhere possible, is crucial for navigating this crisis and providing the best defense against future unknowns. Intact ecosystems, clean water, healthy soil, and biodiversity are the foundation for long-term resilience. Keeping older growth forests standing, protecting habitat for biodiversity, preserving remaining agricultural land and developing local food production helps build community resilience and wellbeing.
In the face of present and future climate challenges, more place-based models are needed of the practical possibilities that make sustainability and regeneration achievable on a local scale. The vision for Wellspring Commons was born in response to this need.
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Our name: A wellspring is a source of abundant and continual supply; commoning is a worldview and also a regenerative social system that tends to the wellbeing of the whole - the rest of the natural world as well as humans.
