Unión de los Rios is a non-profit association working to create a space for education, ecology and the arts at Finca La Herradura in Las Alpujarras, Andalusia.
Unión de los Rios aims to create enabling conditions for the emergence of a situated, complex, life-supporting natureculture; a living tapestry woven from the fabric of the land by all of its inhabitants and visitors, human and more-than-human.
The project is made up of three core strands; a land-based democratic learning community for young people aged 6 – 18 called Banana Mountain, a small residential centre for learning, unlearning, creative practice and collective process, and the exploration of eco-centric stewardship practices which might meet human needs and expand the possibilities for other forms of life to thrive.
Anchoring and connecting these strands is a recognition of the inseparability of all that lives and a commitment to engaging humbly and honestly with the questions this recognition implies. How can we honour our entanglement with life without denying our complicity in so much that is destroying it? How can we un-numb our capacity to feel without being overcome by guilt and grief? What might it mean to try and live as a responsible keystone species?
We don’t have answers to these questions or any of the many others like them. These are not questions to answer or solve. They are questions to sit with, live with, and navigate by. Unión de los Rios offers a place to be with and explore our questions, contradictions and complexities, in grief and in joy, in theory and in practice, in an active participatory relationship with an emergent ecological intelligence both greater than our own.
