Leadership and Listening for Liberation

Leadership and Listening for Liberation

by Kara Huntermoon

Liberation Listening is a radical community healing method designed to increase the effectiveness of change-making organizations in the face of systems of oppression and a collapsing society.  A major focus of our work is in developing and supporting leadership.  Although readers of this article may be unfamiliar with the practices of Liberation Listening, the principles of leadership apply to all kinds of human groups.

In Liberation Listening we define leadership as the ability and willingness to make a commitment to see that everything goes well to the limit of one’s resources.

Leadership is the commitment to help everything go well in your family, community, and environment.  It is realizing that you are responsible (able to respond) to the challenges that face us.

In order to do this, we must heal the old distresses that cause us to feel helpless.  The truth is that we are powerful, capable, loving, and intelligent.  The challenges before us are large, and we are the best people for the job.

Leadership is an inherent human characteristic.  In any group of people, leadership functions must be performed in order for the group to function well.  At least one person must think about the group as a whole rather than about just her or his role in it.

It is possible to deliberately create sanctuary spaces where we can connect with other humans, think, release emotions, and heal from old traumas.  This creation of sanctuary space can help the group to function better in terms of addressing the real-time challenges we encounter.  It is not necessary for all people in the group to be committed to specific emotional healing paths in order to use the safety of the group for their own healing.  It is only necessary that we make and follow agreements that lead to a greater sense of safety, trust, and connection with each other over time.

Leadership may include listening respectfully to people in your group who are unawarely acting out old emotional trauma.  Usually this listening requires us to decide that we are not actually threatened by the person’s emotional reactions.  By listening respectfully, we give the person time and space to heal themselves with the help of our positive regard.  We may also need to give ourselves attention for challenging emotions that arise while listening.  This form of listening assumes that each person has always done the best they possibly could with the resources available to them at each moment.  By listening, we offer a moment with additional emotional resources, to see if that may be what they need in order to do better than before.

Be aware, however, that it is not always effective or advisable to use compassionate listening skills on someone who unawarely acts out emotional distress in your group.  Sometimes the best option is to set clear boundaries and expectations for behavior, and ask people to leave the group if they cannot follow these agreements.  The specific appropriate response to each incident will require the thinking of the group, and while we can learn from other groups’ successes, we will require fresh thinking to solve our group’s problems.  Giving time to really hear all group members’ thinking is a valuable tool.

It is not the leader’s job to do all the thinking for the group.  Rather, a good leader listens to the thinking of every group member, fills in any gaps, and organizes the thinking into a consistent form.  The leader then communicates this synthesis of ideas back to the group well enough to secure their agreement, and, if possible, their commitment to it.

Being a leader opens you to attacks.  People have lots of old trauma about power dynamics in their past.  People also project hopes and frozen needs onto leaders.  A frozen need is something you needed in childhood, but did not get.  It continues to feel like something you need, even though it can never be met because it was actually a need in the past, not the present.  For example, many people have both current needs for connection, and frozen needs for connection from too much isolation as young children. Frozen needs can never be satisfied, so when they are projected onto leaders, they are bound to be disappointed.  People often react to this disappointment by blaming the leader.  (We can never satisfy our frozen needs, but we can heal them by mourning the developmental loss.)

As leaders, we must be ready to listen compassionately to ourselves and others in times of attack, and use it as an opportunity for further healing.  Peer support is essential in these situations.  Use your listening relationships to stay resilient during, and to recover from, attacks.  Look at it as an opportunity to heal old traumas and free more of your thinking from the binding power of past hurts.

Within the context of Liberation Listening, we agree to support the leaders of classes and workshops in several specific ways.  These include:

  1. Continuing to do our own thinking, and considering what we as individuals can do to help the classes and workshops go well.
  2. Supporting the leader’s thinking, even when that thinking is different from our own. This may include agreeing to take on roles delegated to us by the leader.
  3. Sharing our thinking with the leader. If we think the leader is making a mistake, or missing valuable information, or acting out distress in the class, we find an appropriate time to share our criticism. The goal is not to make the leader change direction, but to give the leader more information with which to make good decisions.
  4. Using Listening Skills on the leader. All people have patterns of behavior based on old trauma that they are not yet aware of. In order to help the leader move forward on topics that will make future classes go well, the class is asked to think together about the leader and use listening skills on the leader at the end of every class series.  Feel free to push the leader with persistent listening outside of class as well.  Of course, do this as two people thinking about one person—in other words, include the leader in your thinking about how you plan to use listening skills on her or him in persistent sessions.
  5. Using time in your listening sessions to talk about leading and leadership. What distresses make you want to avoid leadership or rigidly take on leadership?
  6. Learning to take on leadership ourselves. If there is a topic that is underrepresented by current Liberation Listening leaders, learn about the topic and do extensive listening sessions on the topic. Prepare yourself to lead on that topic.  Solicit the support of the leadership team in reaching for your goals.

Directions for Listening Sessions:

You can try doing this with a friend or co-revolutionary: Set a timer for 20 minutes.  One person talks while the other person silently listens with curiosity and interest.  When the timer goes off, switch roles and start the timer for another 20 minutes.  The second person talks while the first listens.  It’s important for each person to get the same amount of time.  Hold what you hear with confidentiality.

If you prefer to do this work alone, try journalling on the topic, or daydreaming.  You can also try telling your thoughts to a tree, animal, or rock.

Use the following prompts for your work on leadership: 

  1. Tell memories of good leadership in your past: mentors, people you admired, people who could think well about you and the group, people who helped things go well. If you can, start with the earliest memory, and tell each memory in chronological order.
  2. Tell memories of poor leadership in your past: authority figures, people whose power over you or over the group was tainted by their distresses, people who had power but could not accept feedback, etc. If you can, start with the earliest memory, and tell each memory in chronological order.
  3. What happened in the past when you tried to right a perceived wrong?
  4. Tell memories of your own leadership or attempted leadership. If you can, start with the earliest memory, and tell each memory in chronological order.
  5. What does it mean to you to be out in front? When you are in a group, and everyone is looking to you for guidance or leadership, what emotions arise in you? What thoughts come into your mind?  How does your body feel?
  6. What groups are you a part of? How could you help those groups function better? Think about the group’s current functioning.  What are the needs and challenges of its members?  How can the group meet those needs and address those challenges?

Kara Huntermoon is one of seven co-owners of Heart-Culture Farm Community, near Eugene, Oregon. She spends most of her time in unpaid labor in service of community: child-raising, garden-growing, and emotion/relationship management among the community residents. She also teaches Liberation Listening, a personal growth process that focuses on ending oppression.

How To Begin Creating Ecological Economies

How To Begin Creating Ecological Economies

What will come after industrial capitalism? In this piece, Kara Huntermoon envisions how to begin creating ecological economies through adaptation to place.


Ecological Economies

by Kara Huntermoon

Humans are ‘culture creatures.’ That means we evolve on two levels: biological and cultural.

Biological evolution is physical adaptation to environmental stresses. All life on Earth evolves biologically. A tree growing in a cold area must adapt to the cold or die. Those individual trees in the population with sufficient capacity to tolerate the cold are the ones who reproduce, eventually leading to a population of trees genetically distinct enough from other similar trees to be called a “species.”

Cultural evolution does not require physical adaptation.

A group of humans can build houses, grow or collect foods, make clothing, create tools, and organize waste management in many different ways. These different cultural adaptations also evolve. That means that as we take in information from the environment, we change our culture to adapt to the new information.

This ability makes humans highly adaptable to very extreme differences in climate and ecology.

The Inuit have developed a sustainable culture in the far north, in a place where the sun literally does not rise for two months in the winter, temperatures fall below zero for long periods of time, and the ground never thaws out, even in summer. On the other extreme, Australian aborigines developed a sustainable culture in a place where there is very little rain, summer temperatures regularly exceed 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and soils are so low in nutrients that agriculture―even livestock grazing―cannot be sustainably practiced. The people of the Inuit nations and the people of the Aboriginal nations are not physically distinct enough from each other to be considered separate species. They did not need to speciate because their adaptations happened on a cultural level.

Humans can adapt to things that would not be found in nature.

Driving a car, flying in an airplane, watching television, and using cell phones all seem normal to us, because our cultural adaptations normalize them. When humans live separate from relationships with ecological communities, they evolve cultures that ignore ecological communities. This is what happens in cities, where entire groups of people do not have access to the plant and animal people who support human life. Water comes out of a tap, so we do not have the opportunity to watch how it flows through the rivers as we collect water to drink. Warmth comes from electric heaters, so we do not have the opportunity to collect firewood and notice the health of the forest that warms us. Our cultures evolve a kind of ignorance of life-supporting beings.

When human cultures engage in active conversation with ecological community relationships, they evolve ways to adapt to their ecosystems.

Thus a desert-dwelling people will evolve a culture of nomadic land-tending, where they travel over large distances to avoid having too big an impact on any one fragile area of the ecosystem. People who live in areas with regular summer rain are more likely to practice active agriculture. Mountain people often develop cultures of livestock tending that include moving the herds up the mountains to graze during the summer, and down into barns for protection from the winter. Any of these cultural patterns could be indefinitely sustainable, as long as they are practiced “in place,” enmeshed in their ecology of origin, where they can receive feedback from the generations-long conversations that happen between humans and their communities.

Humans need multiple smaller in-place adapted cultural groups in order to maintain diversity and resilience.

We decry the loss of genetic diversity in food crops, because when you plant only a few genetic lines, the crop becomes really susceptible to destruction. The Irish potato famine is a good example of this. Irish people had access to only a small percentage of the potato genetic diversity available, because their original potato stock was a small amount imported from South America. This small amount was propagated until it became the basis of the entire country’s agriculture. When blight infected the potatoes, all strains being grown were susceptible, and people starved. If more strains had been grown, there would have been some with resistance to blight.

Humans are the same.

When we have a world-wide monoculture, there is less resilience for our species to respond to challenges. US hegemony and colonialism, combined with genocide of native peoples worldwide, has made our species less adaptable. For example, there are many ways to manage human waste, and they are dependent on their local ecology. In some tropical areas, it makes sense to defecate in running rivers, because poisonous snakes are attracted to the insects that gather around human feces on land. Using the river to remove that risk works well as long as the human population is small enough, the river is big enough, and the animals in the river who eat the poop maintain healthy populations.

There are people living in Eugene who refuse to use a humanure sawdust bucket toilet. Their cultural expectation is such that pooping in clean drinking water and flushing it away down a pipe seems normal to them, and other options become unacceptable. For someone from a different culture, even from a different subculture of this culture, that seems strange. Why would you foul your drinking water, and create pollution by combining that slurry with millions of other flushes, and then create a sub-class of people who try to clean it with nasty chemical processes? When handled differently, that “waste” could enrich your soil and help you grow healthy crops.

The cultural aspects of humanure management are relatively easy to change. My favorite way is to use finished humanure compost in the garden while someone is helping me. People will hesitantly follow me up to the pile, and hold the wheelbarrow for me while I fork into the finished compost. Slowly their faces change as the wheelbarrow fills. It looks like finished compost, it smells like fresh soil, and they can tell that it is healthy. “Can I touch it?” asked one. “Of course. It won’t hurt you.” Soon they are raking their hands through the compost, smoothing it out on the top few inches of the garden bed.

We need to be able to experiment like this to find ways to adapt in place.

In the future, we will not be able to depend on large-scale infrastructure like flush toilets, underground sewer systems to transport the flushes, and wastewater treatment plants to process the slurry. This system also relies on electricity, regular paychecks for the workers, and fossil fuels to transport the processed slurry to its next location. There are too many opportunities for this system to break down out of our control, leaving us in the position of needing to safely manage our own feces without spreading disease. The risk of disease transmission after interruptions in waste management systems is really high, as for example in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

Recreating ecological economies requires us to stay in place and commit to a single territory.

We cannot begin multi-generation conversations with our ecological communities if we are constantly leaving those communities. Even the difference between the West Eugene wetlands and the South Eugene hills is significant. We must start small, in our own neighborhoods, and then create a bioregional network of knowledge-tenders who can increase understanding of the big-picture patterns of our area. Learn the names and habits of the birds, insects, and mammals in your home. Look up ethnobotany for the plants, and start to use them for medicine, food, and fiber. Rebuild a local culture of dependence on each other (both other humans and other life). Get to know your neighbors and help each other.

The ‘homelessness’ distress pattern of colonialist dominator culture has infected all of us.

What would it take for you to commit to a place? To where would you commit? What would you have to give up in order to make that commitment? How would you cope with the experiences of loss when others are unable or unwilling to make that same commitment, and you lose relationships with neighbors that you have fostered for years? Who will you teach to stay, and how will you teach it? How can you create a local economy that has more resilience than the national one, and entices people to stay in place because “moving for a job” no longer makes sense? How can you love as big as possible?

Keep asking these questions.

Journal about them, talk with others about them, notice your feelings about them. Live with the questions.

Seek answers in all aspects of your life.


Kara Huntermoon is one of seven co-owners of Heart-Culture Farm Community, near Eugene, Oregon. She spends most of her time in unpaid labor in service of community: child-raising, garden-growing, and emotion/relationship management among the community residents. She also teaches Liberation Listening, a personal growth process that focuses on ending oppression.

Featured image by Christian Ziegler, Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.


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Patterns of Civilization Collapse

Patterns of Civilization Collapse

An unsustainable way of life is bound to end in collapse. Numerous civilizations and empires have met the same end. In this piece, Kara Huntermoon discusses patterns of civilization collapse.

For further reading, check out John Michael Greer on the onset of collapse, Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” the collapse scenarios in the book “Deep Green Resistance,” and Max Wilbert’s recent piece about the collapse of the American empire.


Understanding Patterns of Civilization Collapse

By Kara Huntermoon

Ecology is the basis of all economies. No human economic system can exist without the gifts of  water, land, plants, animals, insects, air, and other members of our ecological communities.  When capitalism treats “natural resources” as free and unlimited, it ignores the fact that these are living, spirit-filled entities who have needs, preferences, and boundaries.  All over the world, we have already crossed their limits.

 ‘Economy’ means how humans meet their daily needs.

Human groups have options about how to meet their daily needs.  Capitalism is only one option.  It is a relatively new and short-lived option which is coming to an end.  Capitalism is inherently oppressive and relies on separating people into constituencies which are given more or less power and privilege.  Capitalism is also inherently destructive to the ecological basis of all life.  It is not possible to have capitalism without oppression and ecological destruction.

Humans need direct relationships with ecology in order to receive feedback about whether their economic activities are enhancing, destroying, or neutral to the systems of life that support daily human needs.  Ecological feedback is often so slow that multiple generations of humans must be engaged in the conversation before the feedback is understood and human communities are able to respond to the information.  The information received through ecological relationships is often coded into religious practices and educational systems, including stories told to children.

‘Civilization’ means a human community organized around cities and their adjacent exploited ecological communities.

When human populations concentrate in cities, large areas of surrounding ecology are required to support urban human life, but the ‘consumers’ are not able to directly listen to the ecological feedback.  Consequently, the human culture becomes disconnected from the information needed to support all life.  Humans throughout time and place have tried organizing in urban centers and importing their needs from their surrounding ecology, including through empire (controlling adjacent ecological communities and importing goods from them).  

No civilization has ever been sustainable. Civilizations collapse when the human-ecological relationship breaks down far enough for the ecology to be unable to continue supporting the urban infrastructure and population.  Cities are not a sustainable way to organize human communities and ecologies. When city-states are organized into empires, the civilization collapses unevenly.  In some areas, life seems to continue in a way that would support the city continuing.  In other areas, cities collapse and are abandoned earlier in the widespread empire’s collapse.

‘Collapse’ means that social and physical infrastructure is abandoned or destroyed as it becomes obvious that it is obsolete.   The amount of true wealth available from ecological relationships is no longer enough to maintain the unsustainable infrastructure.  The amount of physical infrastructure decreases, the overall population of humans decreases, and a greater proportion of the human population returns to a direct relationship with ecological communities (subsistence agriculture, foraging, hunting).

The Early Stages of Civilization Collapse.
During the early stages of an empire’s collapse, people flee collapsing cities and move to other cities that are not yet collapsing.  Sometimes those cities collapse because of empire-related economic shifts (as in the “Rust Belt” cities of the US), sometimes because of ecological destruction (as in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, or Paradise after the Camp Creek Fire).  Regardless of the reason, the cities are not rebuilt because the ecological basis for creating true wealth (the capacity to meet human needs) is unable to support the rebuilding.

Later stages of collapse.

During later stages of an empire’s collapse, people flee cities to return to the countryside where they can grow food and attempt to meet their needs.  There is a steep learning curve while the relationship communication between humans and their ecology is not robust enough to support the current human population size.  People die because they do not know how to relate to the plants, animals, soils, and waters who support life.  The conversation also begins with the ecological communities running at a deficit, impoverished by the collapsing civilization’s exploitation.

It takes time for recovery, relationship building, and forgiveness.

Historically speaking, the average time it takes a civilization to collapse is about 300 years.  Civilizations collapse in a stair-step pattern, with large-scale economic shocks followed by partial recoveries.  In our recent history, collapse shocks happened in the 1970s (“Energy Crisis”),  in 2007 during the sub-prime mortgage crisis (“The Great Recession”), and now during the Covid-19 Pandemic (“The Global Downturn of 2020”).

Most of us remember the “Great Recession” and the Occupy Movement, and we have heard federal officials claim that the economy recovered from that and was booming (“the best ever” before Covid-19).  Concurrent with these claims, visible markers of decline have led to an increase of the number of homeless people on the streets in most major cities, including Eugene. Buildings are demolished without funding to replace them, including Eugene’s City Hall. There is  increasing personal and government debt and decreasing possibility of gaining stable well-paid employment, even with a college degree.

It is reasonable to assume that we are in the early stages of our civilization’s collapse, and that we will continue to see stair-step degradations in physical and social infrastructure.

Considering history, it is likely we will have a partial economic recovery after the pandemic ends.  Considering climate change, we need to be prepared for further rapid down-steps as ecological shocks increase and spread.  We may not live to see the end of our civilization, but we will see continued disorder, political circuses, domestic and international violence, and rapid economic shifts as a ‘new normal.’

Within seven generations, our descendents will see the end of our civilization.

Marked by a complete abandonment of city infrastructure and a return to direct relationship with ecological economies.  There is much we can do now to prepare them. For the purpose of our own preparation for the future, we should assume that there will never be a recovery. This is it.  Things will never “return to normal.” We are not going to get through this and continue our previous lives. We cannot expect our children to have access to the same privileges we have enjoyed.

How can we impact the way our communities respond to the Covid-19 Pandemic and the resulting economic crisis?  In what ways can we support and organize alternatives to the current economic system and its inherent systems of oppression?  How can we organize our own lives to be fully in service of sustainability and liberation?  How can we reach for people we love, people in our neighborhoods, people in our workplaces, and model for them the changes we wish to see?

The pandemic will bring up early feelings that are not about present time.   

Unhealed emotional scars from childhood can confuse us as we try to think about responding to novel situations. To help free our minds of early distresses, we can spend time journalling, talking to trusted loved ones, or meditating on the following: In what ways do you try to avoid suffering? What suffering of your earlier life do you never want to experience again? Go back there and give that young person a hand. You survived that. You won. It’s actually over, and you won. I know it doesn’t feel like you won; it feels like you barely escaped and you are irreparably harmed, no longer intact. But that is just a feeling.

The truth is that you won.

If you can make friends with those feelings―of loss, isolation, hopelessness, discouragement, terror, powerlessness―you will be able to notice that you are intact. You survived. You won. You get to have a big life now. You don’t have to settle for what you can salvage. You get to have people close-in who can fully support you.

We get to work together to make big lives for ourselves.

It is possible to see the current pandemic, economic collapse, and climate emergency as a fascinating challenge that will never stop giving us meaningful work to do.

It is possible to feel satisfied that we are fulfilling our reasons for coming to this life, that we are giving fully of our gifts to our communities.

Let us reach for each other, reach for full acceptance of ourselves at all stages of our lives, and reach for implementing our visions of a sustainable society in full communication with its ecological community.


Kara Huntermoon is one of seven co-owners of Heart-Culture Farm Community, near Eugene, Oregon. She spends most of her time in unpaid labor in service of community: child-raising, garden-growing, and emotion/relationship management among the community residents. She also teaches Liberation Listening, a form of co-counseling that focuses on ending oppression.

Featured image: Deep Green Resistance food distribution in response to the CoViD-19 pandemic.


Spring 2020 Fundraiser

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In Manila, Kathmandu, Auckland, Denver, Paris—all over the world—we are building resistance and working towards revolution. We Need Your Help.

Not all of us can work from the front lines, but we can all contribute. Our radical, uncompromising stance comes at a price. Foundations and corporations won’t fund us because we are too radical. We operate on a shoestring budget (all our funding comes from small, grassroots donations averaging less than $50) and have only one paid staff.

Current funding levels aren’t sustainable for the long-term, even with our level of operations now. We need to expand our fundraising base significantly to build stronger resistance and grow our movement.

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