Confluence Communities
The Spring Creek Project provides support for people who want to come together in confluence communities. Interdisciplinary and collaborative in approach, a confluence community may take shape as a writing group, a reading or study group, a research group, or any set of people who gather regularly to promote conversations or other activities around a particular theme related to Spring Creek's mission. Bringing together a richness of experience and a variety of professional and academic backgrounds and disciplines, gathering faculty, students, community members, and practitioners, confluence communities create an opportunity for creative thought and constructive action.
The Spring Creek Project offers encouragement and material support to any three or more people who wish to come together to form a "confluence community," a group of individuals from different tributaries of knowledge, practice, and experience who share complementary interests or concerns resonating with those of the Spring Creek Project.
Confluence communities:
- bring together unusual combinations of people from within and outside of academia, and across disciplines. Interdisciplinary and collaborative in approach, confluence groups welcome a diversity of perspectives, and engage in activities which support mutual learning, insight, and discovery.
- may be a reading or study group, a research group, a writing group, or any group organized to promote conversations or other activities around a particular theme or set of themes related to Spring Creek's mission ? finding ways to understand and re-imagine our relation to the natural world through an engagement with the practical wisdom of the environmental sciences, the clarity of philosophical analysis, and the creative, expressive power of the written word. Examples of possible themes include poetry and entomology; bioregional philosophies and their creative expressions; restoration culture; watersheds and the literary imagination; writing the urban wild; environmental theater; vernacular, folk, and literary zoology; oral histories of regional watersheds; geology, time, and the written arts, etc.
- allow individuals to develop a capacity for thinking on the creative margins where the familiar domains of one's own knowledge border and intersect with those of others, and where one's own disparate concerns and interests can be brought together through dialogue with others. Confluence communities provide a forum for sustained conversations through which members of the community may learn from each other, and discover the benefits and pleasures of reciprocity, challenge, and mutuality within a thought community.
The Spring Creek Project staff members are also available to discuss and help develop your ideas about the possible formation of a confluence community. We can help with initial outreach and publicity, and/or provide suggestions for possible group members. We can make arrangements for meeting places; keep groups informed of the activities of other confluence groups; let your group know of any events that might be relevant to your group; and provide general assistance. If you are interested in forming a confluence community, joining an existing one, or finding out more about them, please contact us.
Consumers Anonymous
A Spring Creek confluence community dedicated to the proposition that if we can change ourselves, we can change anything. Our purpose is to promote innovative alternatives to the consumer habit and to offer mutual support and encouragement among people seeking better ways to live with the Earth. Find out more about Consumers Anonymous.
Dragonfly House
This confluence community is working toward the creation of a campus and community center for ecological education, practice, and reflection. The center would include a "dragonfly house", an enclosed wetlands simulation dedicated to dragonflies, built on the model of the "butterfly houses" in zoological parks and botanical gardens around the world. Guided trails, areas for research into and practice of ecological restoration, plots for organic horticulture, gardens of native plants used for indigenous forms of basketry, spaces where classes could meet, exhibits, spaces for reflection and writing, a laboratory for study related to ecological processes, wetlands, and dragonflies—all these projects are a part of the group's vision of a "dragonfly house". The center would be useful to OSU students and classes, encouraging interdisciplinary approaches to ecological study and reflection. It would also provide an important link between OSU and the surrounding community and region, from civic and scientific groups to public school students and teachers.