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A living laboratory for a sustainable human future.

Author: NikiAnne Feinberg

NikiAnne (she/her) was born and raised on a horse and cattle ranch on the ancestral lands of the Salinan people in the Central Coast of California. She currently lives at Earthaven Ecovillage on unceded lands of the Catawba and Cherokee (Tsalagi) people. Her ancestors come from Eastern and Western Europe — France, Germany, and English Isles as well as Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia, from Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. Throughout the last two decades, NikiAnne has been immersed in community and in service to a wide range of educational endeavors focused on nature connection, personal empowerment, and community resilience. NikiAnne considers herself the grease and glue – that which helps things run smoothly or holds things together. Before co-founding SOIL in 2012, she worked and traveled through much of Asia, the Americas, and Europe, which made her formal education at George Washington University in International Affairs come alive in ways that can only happen through personal experience and relationships. Collectively, these experiences have undeniably shaped her cooperative cultural values and commitment to supporting leaders to think, feel, act and design from a foundation rooted in interrelationship. No matter what she’s teaching, NikiAnne is always on the same mission: to raise awareness of our whole selves – gifts, passions, blind spots, shadows – and help those whole selves find and fill niches in their communities. This is how the web of life is woven, and the fabric of culture repaired. She’s especially eager to support those in transition – between vocations, stages of life, and stories of world and self. Within this context, she is particularly passionate about community grief tending and death care midwifery.

Are We At The End Of The Experiment?

I just learned about this word: “Anthropocene,” which is a proposed geological epoch starting with “significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems,” including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change. I pulled that from Wikipedia. But the concept that humans are creating...

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Making Biochar

Have you caught the biochar fever? We certainly have. About ten years ago, many of us watched a YouTube documentary called The Secret of Eldorado and got wildly excited about the possibilities of biochar. Biochar is a kind of charcoal made by burning carbon in a way that produces a stable amendment...

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Chicken Wrangling at Earthaven Ecovillage

Transcription from the Chicken Wrangling NikiAnne: We’re out here at the horn of plenty field with nutter, the great pyrenees and a bunch of chicks.Broiler chicks.And some wranglers.So that these chicks are protected from the hawks.They obviously have a mind of their own...

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Building Community Through Ritual

  Above: 2017 Ancestor Feast Altar featuring Chuck, Suchi and Kimchi   by NikiAnne Feinberg   Rituals to help land-based and regional communities process what has happened and is happening in our world are so powerful. We look to ritual to help us digest the unsavory and the unpalatable....

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Grief Rituals in Our Communities: Partnering with our Ancestors to Compost our Grief

  Why a grief ritual? We all experience pain and loss in life – conflict, illness, disappointed dreams, broken relationships, loved ones who die or suffer, even inherited or ancestral pain…. Having healthful ways to release that pain and regularly cleanse that space inside ourselves, helps prevent...

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