The Vision
To build a space where folks with histories of incarceration and movement co-conspirators can come to slow down, break bread, restore ourselves and practice new ways of being in the world. This is a site where organizers convene artists, activists, writers, and other changemakers to experiment with the more just worlds we desire and to ask the tough questions. We do not have all the answers we need right now. But sometimes the power of questions is in the asking rather than the answers. Earthseed Laboratories seeks to secure a land base in Humboldt County, California, where we can create a site for gathering, workshops, retreats, residencies and rituals that we might remake our relationship with the more-than-human world, learn to live differently and meet the challenges of our times.
Our Mission
Grounded in abolition ecologies, Earthseed Laboratories curates healing justice spaces and gatherings to nourish the liberation movement leaders needed that we might meet the challenges of our times.
Movement building, Leadership development and Fugitive Study
We must nourish the capacity of our movements and grow the leadership of those most impacted. Earthseed Laboratories brings healing justice to the center, challenging how capitalist time is reproduced in our responses to the crisis. This is about space to grow our capacity and the possibilities we can imagine. We will be offering one-day workshops, retreats ranging from a weekend to longer, stewardships and more.
Central to our values is a notion of praxis- whereby we move between reflection and action in an iterative process. Thus we engage in study in community. This is not only necessary for our individual development, but also the development of our “common tongue” across movements, shared language and ability to talk across our differences with dexterity. Folks reclaim their power as thinkers here. This work isn’t centralized but it has a foundation in the Octavia E. Butler Freedom Archive- an evolving collection of books, art, seeds and artifacts.
Abolitionist Reentry Praxis & Mutual Aid
This is the heart of what we do.
Those most impacted by state violence must be at the center of movements to transform modes of accountability, policing, prisons & carceral relations more generally. Organizations oriented toward abolition have known this for a long time.
Mainstream prisoner reentry work embedded in State structures too often fails to question the conditions of mass imprisonment’s emergence and then co-opts the language of critique while making the carceral system more flexible, legitimate and cost effective (See Byrd 2016). A lot of important survival work happens within mainstream reentry programs but we need to ground the work in a more fundamental transformation of the logics underpinning these processes.
Food+ Sovereignty
Earthseed Laboratories will be a working forest farm that challenges conventional notions of what a farm is and uses community farming as a method of social change. Growing food, medicines, fiber, flowers, seeds and our skills for a new world.
In Parable of the Sower, they establish a community called Acorn and there, everyone has to be learning a new skill and teaching one they already know. At Earthseed Laboratories folks are always learning and always teaching. We want to proliferate a diverse range of learning opportunities across regenerative & climate-just agriculture, green construction, sustainable technologies, and ecological restoration.
As people find their medicine we will incubate businesses and cooperatives so that returning citizens are supported in giving their gifts to the world.
