Arachne Project

The Arachne Project participants gathered in the forests and meadows of the Cabin at Shotpouch Creek in Oregon's Coast Range for a weekend in May 2024. This group put their collective minds to the problem of what "conservation" might mean in times of accelerating changes to our climate and ecosystems.

We invite you to explore their ideas in the Arachne Film Series, a collection of short films (each 4-8 minutes) captured among the trees on the Shotpouch land. After the gathering, participants collaborated on "A Declaration of Principles: Conservation for an Interwoven World, Unravelling," a set of emerging visions and values for conservation practices. Together, we hope these offerings contribute to the growing movement that is reimagining how best to live in an interconnected, interwoven world.

Arachne Film Series

Alison Hawthorne Deming is a poet, essayist and editor who has published fourteen books. She's received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, the Stegner Fellowship from Stanford, and the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice, she is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of The Serviceberry and Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain and numerous scientific journals. In 2022, Braiding Sweetgrass was adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith. This new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the earth’s oldest teachers: the plants around us. 

Stay tuned for a new short film release each week during spring 2025.

 

A Declaration of Principles: Conservation for an Interwoven World, Unravelling

In a complex, interconnected and interdependent world,
conservation practices should:

Integrate people and places, rather than isolate them. 

Historically, conservation has assumed a dichotomy between land presumably untouched by human hands (which is to be protected) and land that is exploited, trammeled and trampled (which is to be ignored or sacrificed). This has justified conservation by exclusion, protecting selected places by keeping people out — the so-called "fortress conservation." Most often the people excluded have been the original inhabitants who have long cared for the land.

The emerging Earth ethos recognizes that humans and other beings are not only metaphorically, but biologically, kin. We share the same progenitors, we share the same places, and we will share the same fate. The question then becomes how human presence — as relatives, not as managers or owners — can enhance the fecundity and beauty of the land, and how fecund and beautiful land can increase human thriving. 

Recognize and honor the inherent value of all beings, rather than privilege solely human interests.
In an anthropocentric world, conservation practices are judged by how well they advance human interests: Places of extreme scenic beauty are conserved for the pleasure of the few. Wild birds are conserved as quarry for hunters, “marine resources” to feed humans, forests are for “multiple uses” and “ecosystem services.” 

But in the emerging Earth ethos, natural entities — animals, plants, minerals — have values beyond their usefulness to human ends and rights to their full evolutionary destiny. The inherent value of natural entities creates a place in conservation practices for awe, respect, even reverence, and calls for a balance among the interests of human and other beings. 

Align the goals of ecosystem conservation and social justice.

The necessary connection between the well-being of people and their places invites alliances among environmental, social justice, and Indigenous conservation practices. Healthy ecosystems are a necessary condition for healthy cultures, and healthy cultures are a necessary condition for healthy ecosystems. Conversely, social injustices drive environmental devastation. And degraded ecosystems degrade also the health of their communities. Conservation work to repair one will necessarily require work to repair the other.

Moreover, it is time to call into question long-standing conservation practices that discount the damage caused by extractive industry by disguising or ineffectively addressing it. These include plans that trade environmental destruction in one place for some sort of restoration effort in another, as well as any attempt to cover the physical scars of extractive industry while discounting or overlooking the wounds inflicted on human lives and communities.
 

In a changing and uncertain world,
conservation practices should:

Move beyond preserving the past, toward empowering the future. 

The biosphere, including people and societies, is resilient but not infinitely so. Given the velocity of change and loss, many plants and animals are driven beyond their ability to adapt, and entire ecosystems are collapsing. 

The challenge is to stand against the disruption of current ecosystems, while also developing a moral relationship with what is new.  Memory can be a productive tool of conservation, but in a rapidly changing world, the impulse to honor the past will be balanced by the need to welcome what is coming next. Conservation then becomes the determined defense of the future, which is a motherlode of possibility in a world of ruined chances. 

Choose improvisation over management. 

Earth is a master improvisor, building on disturbance and surprise. Some changes can be reliably predicted, but many cannot. This variability calls for improvisational conservation, the creativity of those who work without scripts or scores or predicted outcomes, to encourage the growth of something wonderful and new. Conservationist improvisations will succeed to the extent that they re-examine the language of control or management, reinforcing and enriching life-enhancing patterns and relationships. 

A primary skill of improvisation is listening. There are many voices to be heard in the land, and they tell instructive stories. In addition to listening to the land, conservation should listen to and learn from multiple human voices — scientific, Indigenous, emotional, spiritual, aesthetic, and especially those that are silenced or grieving. 

Measure the morality of its policies less by their outcomes, than by the virtues they embed. 

Uncertainty weakens the usual moral measures of Utilitarian planning, such as cost-benefit analyses, outcomes, and scenarios, because these depend on the ability to predict and to some extent control the future. In unpredictable situations, it may be enough simply to do one’s best. If so, conservation in an uncertain world looks to virtues as a moral measure. On these terms, a conservation plan is right, not because of what it accomplishes, but rather to the extent that it embodies the virtues of humility, empathy, intercultural cooperation, gratitude, and reciprocity.

In this work, the virtue of reciprocity can be a prudential and moral touchstone. Prudential: The evolved complexity of the planet — interlocking systems of cyclical self-renewal, resilience, and self-invention powered by the sun — have provided what humans and other beings needed to thrive. The smart thing is to reinforce the planet’s ability to continue to do so. Moral: Life is a gift that the Earth freely gives. Gratitude is owed in return, and the gift should be not hoarded, but reciprocated, either in a return to the giver or in a gift forward. An emerging Earth ethos invites this imagining: How can conservation practices express gratitude? How can conservation be understood as reciprocating Earth’s gifts?
 

In a wonderful, beautiful and deeply
imperiled world, conservation should: 

Stand against the wreck and pillage of the planet. 

It is no longer enough to try to save species and special places. The world in which humans evolved is in terrible peril. There are powerful and world-wrecking forces at play.  Established patterns of exploitation have been normalized, as corporate profiteering and climate chaos are taken as the expected price of human thriving and the natural consequence of human privilege. In some cases, extractive industries have captured governmental regulatory agencies or coopted conservation NGOs, which now engage in apologetics for practices that have an outsized harmful impact on the world. The danger requires urgent, courageous action.

Conservation should transition from facilitating ways to take from the Earth, to finding ways to give back to the Earth, and transition from advancing private benefit to advancing the common good.  An important part of this work will be to unlearn destructive ways of being and dismantle institutions that no longer serve Earth’s thriving.

So, the work of conservation in the emergent world is two-fold: to stop the world’s destruction, and to imagine new ways to live on Earth without wrecking it. This work can’t be relegated to the professions of the few but must be embraced as the good work of all.

Imagine new ways to live on a life-graced planet. 

Even as it stands against destruction, conservation is called to think creatively about how humans might collaborate with the natural world to fill genuine human needs while meeting the needs of the land for replenishment, regeneration, and respite. This will require the greatest exercise of the human imagination the world has ever seen.

Earth is scarred from over-use and under-care. But a changing world and an emerging Earth ethos present an opportunity to start over and get it right this time. Healing is built into natural processes — cleansing fires, nurturing currents, the return of redemptive rain. Emulating such a world, conservation practices can be acts of material and moral reparation.

Search for a new moral relation to the Earth. 

The world holds both possibilities and perils. This invites a reconsideration of the human condition. The interdependence of the world is a window to the deep moral order that is manifest in the way the world works, the way it gives and takes, calls and responds, creates and recreates, each species and each individual finding its own thriving in the thriving of others.  Find that, follow that, and conservation will know its work. Then, an emerging Earth ethos can be at the heart of human decision-making and the shared human quest for the meaning of life.

This Declaration is also available as a PDF, which you can download here: 

File

the_arachne_declaration.pdf (6.97 MB)

 

Community Conservation Conversations

In the winter of 2025, the Spring Creek Project invited creative thinkers and thought-leaders from local Corvallis conservation organizations to come together for dinner and conversation at Oak Creek Conservancy. The gathering, which we called Conservation | Conversation 2025, had two goals. One was to bring local conservation leaders into community in a time of unprecedented stress and uncertainty and the other goal was to share the Arachne Declaration of Principles. Throughout the evening, the local conservation leaders offered ideas for how these principles might inspire the courage and ideas required for a determined defense of the future.

We invite others to use the Arachne Declaration as a starting point to have conversations about the future of conservation in their own communities.