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Our Manifesto: Why are we doing this?

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IEntangled crises in a fragmented world Life is entangled, but humans divide it so that we can understand it, organise it and master it. A row of large irregular blocks in different states—some toppled, leaning, fractured or overgrown—with a small bird perched on one block.
IIThe displaced costs of success Once life is divided, its purposes become pocket-sized: we pursue success within separate pockets while pushing the costs of that success beyond the horizon of what we are willing or able to see. A person climbs a wooden ladder that is cracking and being repaired below while its upper rails grow into living branches; several people stand, repair, or steady the ladder at its base.
IIIThe manufacture of not-enough To survive, this global success machine has to keep moving. It creates, maintains and magnifies conditions of not-enoughness that keep us producing, consuming, competing and accumulating, while concentrating security and power in some pockets and scarcity in others. A sparse deserted island with a modest lived area at one end and four ownership signs extending progressively into unused territory: MINE, MINE TOO, ALSO MINE, and STILL MINE.
IVA system of invisible walls The system then builds institutions, rules and ways of living that dam life-giving imagination. We learn to experience their necrotic arrangements as reality itself, as simply what life is. We do not merely inhabit the master's house. We become the house itself. People go about everyday activities across a two-storey home suggested by partial stairs, roof fragments, lamps and domestic traces, while most walls remain absent.
VLiberation activism is a path We carry the system in our belly. Even when we rise against it, we are not automatically free from the extractive and violent ways it taught us to think, relate, obey and dominate. Birds carrying a ‘Freedom’ sign leave an open cage for a larger cage containing a plump bird and a pile of food. Outside, another bird tugs a perched bird towards the cage; clouds mark the open sky above.
VIThe interdependences of wellbeing Alternatives are already speaking from everywhere. Interdependence is older than any system we have built, older than humanity itself. By recognising it as a condition of life, we may begin to imagine forms of living organised around connection, regeneration and slowness. Two brown-skinned adults touch foreheads with visible nervous systems; lines extend outward from their bodies into scenes of care, family, animals, food, work, cultivation, water, trees, birds and ordinary life.
VIICreating relational abundance Some forms of value are abundant in a different way: sharing them can create more rather than leave less, through relationship, participation and allowing cycles to pass. A diverse group of people gather around a large outdoor wooden worktable, building, drawing, sharing food and drink, playing guitar, and gardening together.
VIIIBecoming intimate with the wild To embrace such possibilities requires dislodging the fantasy that human beings stand at the centre of a cosmos made for us. A man sits on a fallen tree covered in mushrooms in a dark forest; a wolf watches him from the central shadows.
IXThe Wild School as a wager The Wild School is a wager that we can experiment at the edges of these possibilities, put them under pressure through living, observe what they make possible and what they fail to solve, encounter their limits and contradictions, and travel towards ways of life we cannot yet fully imagine. A watercolour of a small stone circle in a grassy clearing, with wooded hills and a low sun beyond.