We are a women-led land conservation organization working across disciplines to honor land for life through indigenous land care, plant-centered foodways, and wildlife habitat enhancement.
Indigenous Land Care
INTEGRATING land conservation with RECIPROCAL HUMAN ACTIVITY
LivingFuture Foundation is focussing its efforts on land care that reflects an indigenous/naturalized relationship with the earth and her inhabitants. We coalesce decades of knowledge gained across disciplines—forestry, wildlife ecology, regenerative, plant-centered farming, land conservation, the law, wildlife coexistence , ecological food systems, and human health—to question the predominant mindset (including our own) that expresses humans’ separation from the rest of life, a separation that still informs how we deploy cultural resources, even within the fields of philanthropy, land conservation, and activism.
We examine the meaning of ‘conservation’ within our era of habitat loss and climate catastrophe (conditions created by humans) where a ‘pristine’ wilderness devoid of humans is often viewed as a solution. Instead, we seek out a more deeply pragmatic, intimate, sacred, and reciprocal relationship between humans and the rest of life as we engage in the work ahead.
Future of Food
GROWING FOOD WHILE ENHANCING CLIMATE, LIFE, AND HEALTH.
As we lose habitat and ecosystem health due in large part to a dysfunctional industrial, commodity-based food system and severe climate impacts, it is important to bring integral imagination to what the nourishment of the future can look like. More than just sustainable or regenerative agriculture, more than placing livestock in sanctuaries, far more than designating “forever wild” conservation zones, Living Future collaborates widely to encourage food, fiber, & medicine gathering that’s in dynamic relationship with wild habitats and healthy human communities, even challenging the food-as-commodity premise that guides the present system.
Sanctuary at SHO/SHOkin
animals as Kin in harmony with place
In the summer of 2016, LivingFuture Foundation established Sanctuary at SHO when we adopted a flock of 116 ducks from a local, organic rice farm that were headed for slaughter.
Culinary Incubator
CREATING OPPORTUNITIES FOR A REGIONAL & RESILIENT food system THROUGH CULINARY INNOVATION
SHO Culinary and the Permaculture Food Lab have been capturing and rediscovering a spectrum of flavors and sustenance present in our own landscapes through brewing, fermentation, and creative gastronomy. We combine pan-indigenous, global food traditions with regional seasonal staples to create food and medicine for communities—all in partnership with animals, all with sacred intention. Foodways powerfully orient our relationship with Earth, with each other, and with life itself. Decolonizing our foodways and restoring intimacy with the land go hand-in-hand.
Relational Conservation
With rapid biodiversity loss and rising atmospheric CO2 levels, both farming and a more inclusive sort of land conservation are poised to facilitate multiple habitats that meet human needs while simultaneously building habitat and mitigating climate catastrophe.
LivingFuture Foundation has been sponsoring this research on SHO Farm’s 1296 acres since 2007, and since 2010, with Co-director Shawn Smith, an Indigenous woman of the Americas and international conservation expert, we’re incorporating multiple knowledges to craft a durable conservation model that re-unites human and ecological communities.
SHO’s habitat abuts over 20 thousand acres of plublic land—itself core habitat—to provide a unique wildlife corridor leading from the height of land in the surrounding mountain range to the riverside village settlement below. READ MORE
Photo credit: Susan C. Morse, used with permission.
northeastern Land & food
A series of immersions in holistic land care and wildlife-integrated, plant-based cuisine.
For the last 16 years, we’ve built professional relationships with wildlife ecologists, agroforestry researchers, leading permaculturists, and perennial, plant-centered systems thinkers. We have years of experience in the best practices of veganic soil-building, annual plant cultivation, including low-till organic farming, bio-intensive growing, and biodynamics.
We believe that gastronomy and best land conservation practices are most effectively conceived as one; as visionary partners in any viable foodshed of the future.
Living Future is proud to offer intensive study and engagement in the multi-faceted work of establishing and stewarding a wild + cultivated food ecosystem—where no deliberate harm comes to animals, and where culinary innovation meets the rigors of multi-habitat conservation.
Hard apple cider, wood barrel fermented, combining heritage, wild, and cultivated apples from LivingFuture land.