Dreaming with Forest: from memory to stewardship
A participatory online gathering with Sofia Batalha & Evgenia Emets
What Must a Culture Remember Before It Can Regenerate a Forest?
A forest is regenerated through planting trees and supporting ecosystem. But before this, it is regenerated through the ways a culture learns to perceive, remember, imagine and collaborate with the land.
This gathering brings together eco-mythology and practice. Rather than offering a conventional conversation between two speakers, we invite participants into a shared process of learning how to read and listen to the land differently.
The central question we hold:
What must we learn to notice, remember and imagine if we want to participate in the regeneration of a forest?
We plant trees, restore water, care for soil, and create space for biodiversity to return. Alongside this work lives another layer of regeneration: the culture that surrounds a forest. The stories we inherit and weave. The language we use to name. The ways we perceive a place. The relationships and practices we keep alive across generations.
How did forests become timber, property, scenery, carbon, hectares? What relationships disappeared from view along the way?
And what might we remember, practice and pass forward if future old-growth forests are to emerge?
This gathering is for forest stewards, present and future. For people already caring for land, for those beginning restoration projects, for artists, ecologists, farmers, educators, community builders, researchers, and for anyone who feels a relationship with a particular place beginning to call for deeper attention.
What we will explore
Together we will enter the central question:
How can we regenerate forests through regenerating the cultures that surround them?
We will explore what culture may have forgotten as forests gradually became resources.
We will look at myth and eco-mythology as ways of shaping attention: how stories influence what a culture sees, values, fears, protects and allows to disappear.
We will ask how a landscape carries ecological memory and cultural memory at the same time.
And we will reach towards a question that sits at the heart of Eternal Forest:
What kind of culture can care for a forest for 1,000 years?
Sofia Batalha is a Portuguese eco-mythical activist, writer, and researcher based in Lisbon, Portugal. Author of multiple books stemming from the wound and beauty of our ecosystemic condition, traversed by memory, rhythm, and the irreparable nature of loss. Her work in eco-mythology explores the relationships stories create between people, place, memory and the non-human world.
Her book, The Sanctuary, inspired Evgenia to create this event inviting Sofia to reflect on the questions of relationship between culture and intergenerational forest stewardship through the lens of eco-myth.
Together, Sofia and Evgenia will bring you to a place where ecological restoration, culture, community, memory and long-time guardianship meet.
A shared journey
This gathering will move through conversation, observation, reflection and collective imagination.
You will be invited to bring a place with you: a forest, river, garden, or a single tree that you know.
Through a guided Land Memory Map, we will look at that place through the living layers:
its ecology and relationships,
its stories, names and cultural memory,
and the responsibility that may be emerging now.
From there, we will move into future time.
Imagine returning to this place in 100 years.
What has returned?
What relationships have deepened?
What has the human community learned?
What has been carried from one generation to another?
What had to remain alive for this future to become possible?
At the end of the gathering, you will take with you a seed: one relationship with a place that you want to begin, deepen or protect, and one simple practice of return that can continue through the coming season.
A forest guardian can begin anywhere: with paying attention and stepping into relationship.
With the decision to care for something whose future will continue far beyond our own life.
So, what must a culture remember before it can regenerate a forest?
By Sofia Batalha and Evgenia Emets
About Sofia Batalha
Sofia is an independent researcher, an eco-mythologist, writer, and a facilitator, with extensive experience in eco-psychology, applied mythology, decolonial pedagogies, and relational ecology. With an interdisciplinary practice weaving together ecological, mythological, and embodied approaches to collective repair, and ecological belonging. Sofia explores the intersections of decoloniality, and radical alternatives to modern/colonial epistemologies, grief literacy, and multi-species kinship. Author of multiple books, including The Sanctuary: Essays on Eco-Mythology, Siduri’s Nectar, Tales of the Serpent and the Moon, the research essay Eco-Mythic Praxis, among many others.
Instagram: serpentedalua
Substack: https://substack.com/@sofiabatalha
About Evgenia Emets
Evgenia Emets is an international artist, poet and founder of Eternal Forest Global. She works across drawing, calligraphy, language, ecology, film, artist’s books, performance and large-scale land-based works.
Her practice explores the relationship between human culture and the living world, with a focus on forests as places of memory, intelligence, transformation and long-term continuity.
LinkedIn: emetsjane
Instagram: eternalforestglobal
Substack: https://substack.com/@eternalforest
Website: https://www.eternalforest.earth/
Telegram Group Eternal Forest Community: https://t.me/eternalforest