The
Center
Land-based healing + Transformative Justice
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The Ecotone Center for Land-based Healing and Transformative Justice tends abolition futures by activating the leadership of justice-impacted communities, cultivating deep movement connections, and nourishing healing relationships with land, food and planet.
eco•tone from ecology (eco; Greek οἶκος, oikos “house/dwelling”) + tone from the Greek τόνος tonos, “tension.” Two or more houses in tension. An ecotone is a border zone where different ecological systems meet and mingle, sometimes forming a new and different community. The edges between ecological systems are both places of tension and incredibly fertile.
An ecotone is a metaphor for what we humans are being called to in these times— rather than difference being a reason for violence, we must learn to use our differences as the generative tension to build a new world.
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“We need to know where we live in order to imagine living elsewhere. We need to imagine living elsewhere before we can live there.”
-- Avery Gordon. Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People.
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We are living through converging crises that cannot be solved in isolation— racial injustice, genocide and ongoing colonization, state violence from prisons and migrant detention centers to the streets, an increasingly unstable climate impacting the most vulnerable, a resurgence of a transphobic, sexist supremacy culture— these all form a mutually reinforcing network of violence and marginalization.
Our relationship to food, that which is meant to sustain life, has become defined by an industrial food system which is brittle and poisonous, deepening harm in our bodies, communities, and ecosystems.
These conditions are not accidental, but produced by extractive systems that treat land as commodity and some lives as disposable. As those harmful systems begin to collapse under their own violence and contradictions, the question is not whether change is coming, but whether we will meet it with fear and domination or with collective care and liberation.
This moment calls us to go beyond surface reforms, get to the root causes, and more thoroughly reimagine our ways of living.
WE ENVISION
* A world where our communities are in right relationship with land, food and planet, where we practice stewardship that restores our bodies, spirits, and the more-than-human world.
* A solidarity economy rooted in cooperation, mutual aid, and shared abundance where everyone has the resources necessary to live their purpose.
* A world where safety is not enforced through punishment or surveillance, but cultivated through care, prevention, and deep community accountability.
* Cultural transformation beyond policing and prisons, refusing the narratives of state violence and militarism that treat some lives as disposable.
* Communities where we practice transformative justice, repair, and collective responsibility when harm happens, supported by real resources and lasting relationships.
* Lives abundant with gatherings, rituals, and daily practices that are spiritually nourishing, grounded in ancestral wisdom, and committed to dignity, self-determination, and liberation from systemic oppression.
Our theory of change, strategic pillars and core organizing principles are centered around the understanding that healing ourselves, our communities and the land are interwoven processes.