Wellspring Commons
Forest Festival
August 2-4, 2024
Overview
Based in the Housatonic River Valley Watershed, part of the Forests of the Northeast bioregion, Wellspring Commons works to support a more holistic understanding of what it means to live in place within the limits and regenerative powers of that place.
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A cohort of representatives across the fields of land conservation, agriculture, environmental health, and biodiversity protection were invited to a series of events to develop collaborations for bioregional regeneration and resilience in the Housatonic River Valley Watershed. These events were on Right Relationship: A Bioregional View; Envisioning a Flourishing Future: Right Relationship Stewardship; and Funding Bioregional Work: Supporting the Transition to Local Living Economies.The final event in the series was a Forest Festival, open to the public and a wider community of practitioners, to celebrate local and regional forests and their ecological significance as well as their abundant contributions to our foodsheds, materialsheds, and knowledgesheds.
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​The event offered a series of immersive experiences, workshops, and specialist panels focused on ecosystem health, the local human food system, and material flows, highlighting their interconnectedness, within the context of valuing the forested landscape.
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The Festival considered the parallel needs of developing a bioregional food and resource system while protecting ecosystem health, ecological lifelines, and biodiversity. Goals included building community resilience to disruption, deepening a sense of connection to place, fostering right relationships with the larger community of life, and encouraging engaged citizenry and a communal sense of stewardship and responsibility. (and the communal sense of stewardship and responsibility on which the health of the world and human resilience to changing times depend.)
Day 1: Forest Kitchen and Feast, facilitated by Kyra Kristof
Forest Kitchen and Feast - A nourishing day of kitchen transformations working with foraged, forest, and locally bioregionally-sourced ingredients to highlight some of the richness of real foods available around us; to discover the magic that can happen when we follow curiosity, intuition and expanded sensing in the kitchen; and to create a shared feast.
“There is a story of food as fuel. A story that gets told in the counting of calories, reinforcing a vision of bodies as mechanical. But what if the transformations of the beings we ingest…the bodies who become our bodies…is a conversation we are having with aliveness? Whose bodies are we of? What conversations are we having? Are our bodies bioregional? How might we be able to listen to the places we inhabit when our bodies are truly of those places?” - Kyra Kristof
Building a Bioregional Forest Pantry
The first day of the Forest Festival explored relationship to place through food, discovering the taste and texture of place through the co-creation of a meal featuring the extraordinary diversity available in the local forested landscape and introducing participants not only to unfamiliar foods and palettes but also to the depth of nourishment available around them. Special attention had been paid to sourcing ingredients for the meal, seeking out providers who modelled right relationship in their growing and harvesting methods, which was a mapping exercise in itself, led by Kyra. ​​
The day received coverage in the local Lakeville Journal>>
Photos by Josh Yopp, Keetu Winter, and Chez Liley
Kyra Kristof
Kyra Kristof is founder of Forest Kitchen, a nine-year art project arcing toward a massive bioregionally-sourced Forest Feast on the Fall Equinox of 2030. Forest Kitchen is growing a Forest Pantry, stretching culinary curiosity in pop-up Forest Kitchens, and cooking up feasts of forested places as they are & are becoming. Kyra's life is full of art projects at the confluence of art and social change: you might find her cooking up stories in one of several kitchens {apothecary kitchen, curiosity kitchen, forest kitchen, wunderland.kitchen}, bridging food and medicine through ice cream sundays {ice cream apothecary}, co-working while honoring her full dynamic emotional range {hysterical society}, vocalizing with cultural sirens {siren school}, being exuberantly in love {alphabet of embarrassing love letters}, or exploring how animism in a kinship paradigm can be legible in modern food systems {kinship conversations}. Her creative home is with the reality rearchitecture firm, Imaginal Studio.
Day 2: Forests as Ecological Lifelines
The second day of the festival focused on ecological lifelines, mapping where ecosystems remain intact and must be preserved in their integrity, and where to prioritize regeneration efforts in those that have been degraded. The intent of the day was to give participants a sense of connection to place as well as the big picture view. The day began with immersive experiences in the forest, leading into expert presentations and forum discussions in the afternoon. ​
Heidi Cunnick
Heidi Cunnick has a Masters in Ecology and a PhD in Earth and Environmental Science. Heidi's dissertation and publication focused on mapping vegetation change in sub-arctic wetlands using spectrometry and geospatial statistics. Heidi resides in Cornwall, CT where she uses the more practical skills of her science background as the Chair of the Conservation Commission; and as the the head of the Cream Hill Lake Task Force for which she monitors the water quality and plant composition of the eponymous lake. Heidi's Qi gong practice comes through the contemporary lineage teachings, by (in descending order) by Master Wang Qingu to Dr Heiner Fruehauf to Kelly Jennings, of the Jin Jing Gong Shi Si Shi (the 14 brocades) which dates back to the Jin dynasty (1115-1234 CE).
Susan Masino
Susan A. Masino, Ph.D. is the Vernon D. Roosa Professor of Applied Science at Trinity College. Her long term neuroscience research spans among brain health, metabolism, and behavior, and disorders such as epilepsy, autism, and pain. She is senior or co-editor of several books, including “Adenosine, A Key Link Between Metabolism and Brain Activity,” “Homeostatic Control of Brain Function,” and “Ketogenic Diet and Metabolic Therapies: Expanded Roles in Health and Disease.”
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Dr. Masino’s interests lie at the intersection of health, climate, and ecology. She was a Charles Bullard Fellow in Forest Research at Harvard, and collaborated with a climate scientist and an ecologist to publish the seminal paper on “proforestation.” She co-chaired the Phase 1 report of Science and Technology Working Group of the Governor’s Council on Climate Change in Connecticut (GC3) and is on the Simsbury Open Space Committee. Dr. Masino is the Hartford County Coordinator of the Old Growth Forest Network and a board member of Aton Forest and the Pinchot Institute for Conservation.
Alicea Charamut
Prior to joining Rivers Alliance in May 2019, she was the River Steward for the Connecticut River Conservancy. While her career began working in genomics during the height of the Biotech boom, she found an outlet for her passion for rivers through Trout Unlimited serving in various roles at the chapter and state level. As a fly angler, paddler and rower, water is as central to her play as it is her work.
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Alicea also serves as a volunteer in several capacities as Secretary of the Fisheries Advisory Council, a member of the Connecticut Council on Environmental Quality, and on the Advisory Board of the Connecticut Institute of Water Resources. She is also the Co-Chair of the Water Planning Council Advisory Group.
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Alicea holds a B.S. in Biological Sciences from the University of Connecticut. She resides in Newington with her husband, Bob, children, Sean and Dannan, and their beloved dog Lizzie.
Zbigniew Grabowski
(days 2 and 3)
Zbigniew Grabowski is a transdisciplinary scholar and practitioner working at the intersection of social and ecological justice and the evolution of infrastructure and land use systems. He is the Executive Director of the Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed, Co-Chair of the Innovation Working Group for the Northeast Bio-Based Materials Collective, a Faculty Associate with the Urban Systems Lab at The New School, serves on the board of his local land trust in Canton, CT, and volunteers with Summit Adaptive Sports. He has previously worked as a statewide Associate Extension Educator in Water Quality at UConn’s Center for Land Use Education and Research, A Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Technical University of Munich and Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, The Breakthrough Institute, and the King’s Foundation for the Built Environment. When not applying his head and heart to healing relations between people and the land he spends his time enjoying travel at various speeds and modalities from sea to summit in the Northeast and beyond, often along with his partner Gretchen, fluffy companion Zosia, and daughter Oona.
Day 3: Forests as Models for an Abundant Circular Economy
Forest as Home - Soil to Product to Soil: Sustainability and a Circular Economy
Our current linear economy is a throwaway one. We extract finite raw materials to make products that—sometimes after a single use—become waste in toxic landfills or incinerators. More recycling won’t fix the problem of a dysfunctional system.
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Can we imagine a different way? Circulating value instead of waste? Regeneration instead of pollution?
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Held again at Flanders, the third day of the festival focused on our local materialshed (equivalent to a foodshed or fibershed) and its resource flows. Zbigniew Grabowski, co-chair of the Innovation Working Group for the Bio-Based Materials Collective, offered an overview of a regenerative circular economy, including the social processes through which materials systems are designed, implemented and maintained; the ecological interdependencies of manufactured products and the built environment; and how technologies past, present and future structure our materials systems and our understanding of them. Theory was followed by practical experiences to help understand those ideas in action.
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​Conservation timber framer Nevan Carling led a walk through the woods to a 19th century barn, where he gave a guided tour of the structure and its materials, analyzing how many days and how many trees were needed to build it, why they were chosen, what tools were used, how the barn had been built by people with average skills at the time that were good enough to create what they needed (that has stood for 200 years), and how form met function.
Photo by Keetu Winter
Photo by Keetu Winter
Live-Drawing by Carly Wanner-Hyde
Jennifer Duff of CT Fibershed then gave a talk about the CT fibershed, passing around various fibers for people to compare as she discussed the history of the fibershed, and the bottlenecks and other obstacles it currently faces. Keetu Winter passed around samples of nettle fiber she is hand-processing into fiber for weaving.
Jennifer Duff; Photo by Josh Yopp
Art by Carly Wanner-Hyde
Photos by Josh Yopp, Keetu Winter, and Chez Liley
Nevan Carling
Nevan Carling is a conservation timber framer based in Connecticut. He is a graduate of the University of York, England, where he earned a First Class undergraduate degree in Archaeology and Heritage Management. He is currently pursuing an MSc in Timber Building Conservation at the Weald and Downland Living Museum in Chichester, England.
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Nevan works extensively with First Period and 18th century buildings in the Connecticut River Valley, as well as on an array of both historic buildings and traditionally constructed new-builds throughout New England. As part of his MSc, he is preparing a dissertation on the timber framing traditions of the late 17th and early 18th centuries found in the towns surrounding Hartford, Connecticut, which thus far includes an analysis of over 20 buildings that meet this criteria. His research aims to demonstrate that the building traditions in this period were not derivative of those found in Eastern Massachusetts, but rather was an emerging regional tradition unto itself. This research has so far been presented as a lecture given to the Essex Historic Buildings Group in Essex, England.
In addition to domestic architecture, Nevan is interested in research and documenting agricultural and other outbuildings across New England, as part of an effort to save these quickly dwindling historical resources. Currently, this research takes the form of documenting 18th century barns in Buckland, MA as well as documenting early 19th century barns in Downeast Maine in the hopes to conserve them in future to further maintain this traditional landscape. Other work in Maine includes his recent appointment to the board of the Jonathan Fisher House in Blue Hill, ME, as part of the initial phase of fundraising for a major preservation initiative.
As a conservation timber framer, Nevan maintains a strictly traditional approach to his work. He specializes in using traditional tools and techniques to both inform and complete his conservation work, and is an advocate for preserving these techniques as much as the buildings. Nevan understands that the only way to continue to preserve our historic landscapes is through teaching and practicing the aspects of intangible heritage that built these structures in the first place. To that end he teaches and demonstrates hewing at the Eric Sloane Museum in Kent, CT, as well as making it an integral part of conservation work; maintaining the art of scribing buildings; and upholding sustainable forestry management practices. These skills are not only necessary for preserving our past, but are viable parts in creating a sustainable future for New England.
Jennifer Duff
Jennifer Duff (she/her), of CT Fibershed, is a lifelong artist with a BA from Bard College in studio arts. Local fiber production and local food systems are strongly linked. Jennifer's involvement in the local food movement began when she was manager of a hydroponic greenhouse. Her experience as a knitter and wool enthusiast led her to the CT Fibershed, which she co-runs, serving as a clearing house for information from the local fiber community, and connecting people and farms. Jennifer is the owner of Wildwood Mending, which specializes in visible mending, keeping woolen garments out of landfill by giving them repair and new life. She believes that repair is a way to honor the hard work of the people who produced the fiber, fabric, and garments.
Zbigniew Grabowski
(days 2 and 3)
Zbigniew Grabowski is a transdisciplinary scholar and practitioner working at the intersection of social and ecological justice and the evolution of infrastructure and land use systems. He is the Executive Director of the Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed, Co-Chair of the Innovation Working Group for the Northeast Bio-Based Materials Collective, a Faculty Associate with the Urban Systems Lab at The New School, serves on the board of his local land trust in Canton, CT, and volunteers with Summit Adaptive Sports. He has previously worked as a statewide Associate Extension Educator in Water Quality at UConn’s Center for Land Use Education and Research, A Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Technical University of Munich and Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, The Breakthrough Institute, and the King’s Foundation for the Built Environment. When not applying his head and heart to healing relations between people and the land he spends his time enjoying travel at various speeds and modalities from sea to summit in the Northeast and beyond, often along with his partner Gretchen, fluffy companion Zosia, and daughter Oona.