Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration Vanessa Machado de Oliveira: Sensing into collapse and what it is asking of us
Feb 19, 2026
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, scholar and author of Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity, explores how to sit with collapse without quick fixes. She discusses seeing crisis as cumulative consequences, the limits of written literacy, and the need for metabolic, place-based practices. Short, probing reflections invite feeling, relational maturity, and slow communal work amid urgency.
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The Raided Eco‑Village Warning
- Vanessa recounts being advised by an eco-village friend that isolated self-sufficiency will invite raids.
- That story shattered her bunkering fantasy and revealed the impracticality of lone survivalist strategies.
Concepts Are Not The Thing
- Modernity privileges concepts and names as if they equal reality, which flattens living complexity.
- Vanessa urges sensing oneself as ecosystems of cells and relations rather than fixed labeled individuals.
Shift From Eloquence To Relation
- Avoid treating crises as informational problems solved by better language alone.
- Vanessa recommends shifting from word-centric fixes to relational and embodied approaches to change.
