2017 Geography of Hope Conference: Ancestors & the Land: Our Past, Present, & Future

As one of northern California’s most exceptional literary gatherings, the Geography of Hope Conference brings together leading writers and activists to the coastal village of Point Reyes Station for a three-day feast of readings, discussions, and activities to inspire and deepen an understanding of the relationships between people and place. We interview presenters, Lauret Savoy and Wendy Johnson, and Steve Costa, co-founder of Black Mountain Circle, a co-sponsor of Geography of Hope. Tracing memory threads Lauret Savoy’s life and work: unearthing what is buried, remembering what is fragmented, shattered, eroded. A woman of African American, Euro-American, and Native American heritage, she weaves together stories we tell of the American land’s origins and the stories we tell of ourselves in this land. Her latest book, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, won the 2016 American Book Award. It was also a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award among other honors. Lauret is a professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College, a photographer, and pilot. Wendy Johnson leads meditation retreats nationwide as an ordained lay dharma teacher in the traditions of Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh and the San Francisco Zen Center. She co-founded the Organic Farm and Garden Program at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County, which inspired her book Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate. Since 2009, she has served as a founding instructor and mentor at College of Marin’s Indian Valley Educational Organic Farm and Garden. As native people here in West Marin and throughout the world have taught us, we can best care for the land by knowing its history, by cherishing its stories, and by actively working to protect it. The Conference hopes to stimulate conversations honoring ancestral connections to this and other landscapes—whether Native American, European, African, Asian, Latino, or elsewhere—that will lead to dialogues between generations and cultures to help us reconnect to place and restore balance to Mother Earth. “This is a time of unprecedented threats to clean water and air, national parks and forests, and to productive farmland,” conference founder Steve Costa says. “Clearly in the coming months and years, we will be called upon again and again to act to protect our fragile ecology. We will be called upon to decide what kind of ancestors we will become.”