
“I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy."
- Wendell Berry, It all Turns on Affection
Seeing Ourselves
Threadspan is an interactive, collaborative, submission-based platform that exists in service of supporting the emergence of a regenerative, place-based society. Threadspan stems from a call from the collective to imagine, understand, connect, and weave the evolving landscape of regenerative place-based work. The highest goals of the platform are to:
- Facilitate the conditions for emergence by providing tools for communities of practice to visualize and explore themselves;
- Support connectivity, understanding, action, and the sharing of learnings within the vibrant landscape of place-based work;
- And evolve and adapt in service of the collective.
Currently, the project is an ongoing mapping of organizations and initiatives working towards ecological and social regeneration in the Hudson Valley, NY. The below visualizations are visualized from a single database here, which is populated by submissions.