About Us
Commoner Woodlands Collective is a team of holistic ecological practitioners and designers who work with individual landholders and diverse stakeholders to increase ecological health, and human participation in the landscape. We believe the uniqueness of our offering is in its personal and whole systems approach. Our design process weaves together the diverse expertise of our team–rooted in our experience as farmers, educators, and healers. Our work is to amplify the resilience of woodlands, and to cultivate tree-based agricultural ecosystems as an expression of community-building, bioregional self-determination, and ecological adaptation. We see our work as that of promoting productive ecological landscapes, building up bioregional economic livelihoods, and seeding a durable, place-based culture rooted in equity, solidarity, and mutual aid.
Who we are:
We are landscape designers, agricultural educators, seed-keepers, nursery folk, community builders, and research farmers. We tend a small nursery where we’re building relationships with particular species of plants–and select genetics–that we see as catalysts and future keystone species in adapting to the rapidly shifting climate. These selections are creating more reliable and abundant agroforestry systems for the provision of food, medicines, and essential materials. These include hybrid chestnuts, American persimmons, shagbark hickories, yellowbud hickories, pears, plums, bur oaks, nut pines, serviceberry, elderberry, mulberry, neohybrid hazelnuts, and many other selections, cultivars, and local ecotypes that are standouts for our bioregion.
Our work is carried out in the spirit of reciprocity and healing with the land--and in "re-membering" humans as integral to the health of an ecosystem. We're driven by an instinct to reclaim our own ancestral land-based practices and to weave them with contemporary ecological frameworks. Our work is deeply indebted to local indigenous practitioners that have generously shared knowledge and practices. We work to locate and embody our responsibility to the ongoing harm and legacies of colonialism, as well as the opportunities of collective liberation. We recognize our place on stolen Nipmuc land and locate efforts to align with the sovereignty of Nipmuc peoples. We join in solidarity with the global peasant movement and seek out meaningful ways to achieve land justice and collective liberation in our watershed and bioregion.
