2026–2027 EDC Theme
Seeds of
Healing
A seed is small, but it carries worlds of potential. It is not yet a forest, a field, a flower, not yet a medicine, a meal, or a movement; however, it hints at what might become possible if cultivated. For 2026-2027, the Ecological Design Collective is cultivating the theme Seeds of Healing.
After a year of thinking with Antidotes to Toxicity, we turn now toward what might grow after, within, and against toxic conditions. If an antidote interrupts harm, this year’s theme gathers up those efforts and potentials of healing after that harm. Although healing cannot erase toxicity, embryonic efforts of regeneration point us to what can be planted in damaged ground, what can be tended in places too quickly dismissed as ruined, and what forms of collective life might become possible in what has been deemed toxic.
To cultivate healing, this year, we will explore seeds literally and metaphorically. We will think with seeds saved, shared, planted, threatened, scattered, and held in trust. We will learn from soil, grasses, roots, pollinators, gardens, farms, compost, rain, and microbial worlds. We will ask how seeds regenerate damaged landscapes and how ecological design can make growth possible.
We will also think with seeds as ideas, projects, practices, experiments, stories, images, and teachings. The ideas we offer children are seeds. The narratives we repeat are seeds. The institutions we build are seeds. But so too are there seeds of destruction, seeds of harm that colonize the imagination. Against this, Seeds of Healing seeks attunement toward other potentials without denying the realities of crisis.
We are drawn to seeds because they suggest a weedy hope for the future. A seed may crack, scar, shrink, and split before it grows. Sometimes resting for a long time in darkness before anything appears above the surface, a seed goes down before it comes up. To work with seeds this year is to learn how to discern potential where others see only devastation. It is to recognize promise in the winter, in the dark, in the damaged, in the places where health has not yet taken a recognizable form.
Ecological design must begin in these troubled places, our seeds of healing rooting themselves in depleted soils, abandoned lots, polluted watersheds, exhausted institutions, overburdened bodies, fractured neighborhoods, and imaginations saturated by doom. Like seeds that must be watered and tended, healing requires care and effort, even, or especially, when repair is not yet visible. Looking at a landscape, a body, a classroom, a block, a farm, a story, or a broken system, we can design for healing by asking what forms of repair are latent?
Seeds of healing are just beginnings. They do not claim that damage has been undone, that toxicity has disappeared, or that repair is guaranteed. They do not say that healing has already happened. A seed signals that more tentative hope – a healing future can be nourished.
For Seeds of Healing, the plural matters. We are concerned with seeds, not a singular seed. We are not searching for a universal solution or a design that scales in the familiar sense: bigger, faster, more efficient, more totalizing. Seeds provide a different framework for scale, reminding us that whole new worlds can emerge from the small and slight. Transformation may begin with a single packet of seeds, a gesture, a hunch, a conversation, a backyard, a single refusal, a single act of care. Healing may happen through soil remediation, food sovereignty, art, theater, breath, touch, rest, ritual, mutual aid, therapy, pedagogy, planting, building, storytelling, collective study, and so much more.
Every small beginning may carry more life than we can yet perceive.
In this spirit, Seeds of Healing invites artists, farmers, designers, scholars, organizers, healers, builders, students, neighbors, and caretakers to gather around the beginnings that matter. What kinds of ecological imagination are needed to recognize seeds of healing in the midst of toxicity? What seeds are we planting through our curricula, our designs, our technologies, our economies, our art, our conversations? What are we sowing in one another? How does healing move between the personal and the planetary, the organism and the ecosystem, the wound and the world?
For 2026–2027, the Ecological Design Collective invites you to join us in planting, tending, studying, and sharing Seeds of Healing.