Prairie Roots: Growing a Sustainable Future

30th Anniversary

KAW Council Gathering

Event   Co-Sponsors   Workshops, Events & Traditions   Registration

May 4 – 6, 2012, Camp Hammond, Deer Creek Watershed of the Wakarusa River (between Lawrence & Topeka)

featuring Stephanie Mills, author of Epicurean Simplicity, In Gandhi’s Path and Whatever Happened to Ecology?

Gene & Joyce Marshall, bioregional movement authors and organizers, founders of Realistic Living Research Institute and Training Center

Become a Co-Sponsor: We invite your organization to become a co-sponsor for this Spring Kaw 30. In exchange for $30 and helping us get out the word on this event, we will list your organization with a short description, logo and link on our website, and on much of our publicity. Please send a check payable to Kaw Council  for $30 to P.O. Box 1512, Lawrence, KS 66046. Please also email us — via Kspoetlaureate@gmail.com — a 50-word description of your organization, a URL for your website, blog and/or facebook page, and if you wish, a jpeg of your logo.

   KAW Council: When we started the Kansas Area Watershed Council in 1982, we envisioned this community growing and lasting over 100 years. We’ve made it to age 30 now, one of the oldest bioregional groups on the continent. We explore, protect and celebrate the prairie and local culture. We’ve offered workshops, weekend gatherings, special programs, classes and performances since 1982, and we’ve been primary organizers in the continental bioregional movement, and we published two decades of a bioregional journal, Konza, and Ken Lassman’s Seasons & Cycles and Wild Douglas County. A generation of KAW kids grew up with a close connection to the earth. We invite you to come grow with us for generations to come!

Prairie Roots: Growing a Sustainable Future

30th Anniversary

KAW Council Gathering

Event   Co-Sponsors   Workshops, Events & Traditions   Registration

May 4 – 6, 2012, Camp Hammond, Deer Creek Watershed of the Wakarusa River (between Lawrence & Topeka)

featuring Stephanie Mills, author of Epicurean Simplicity, In Gandhi’s Path and Whatever Happened to Ecology?

Gene & Joyce Marshall, bioregional movement authors and organizers, founders of Realistic Living Research Institute and Training Center

At the first KAW Council, May, 1982; photo second up from bottom: Kawsters at British Columbia bioregional congress in 1988

Become a Co-Sponsor: We invite your organization to become a co-sponsor for this Spring Kaw 30. In exchange for $30 and helping us get out the word on this event, we will list your organization with a short description, logo and link on our website, and on much of our publicity. Please send a check payable to Kaw Council  for $30 to P.O. Box 1512, Lawrence, KS 66046. Please also email us — via Kspoetlaureate@gmail.com — a 50-word description of your organization, a URL for your website, blog and/or facebook page, and if you wish, a jpeg of your logo.

   KAW Council: When we started the Kansas Area Watershed Council in 1982, we envisioned this community growing and lasting over 100 years. We’ve made it to age 30 now, one of the oldest bioregional groups on the continent. We explore, protect and celebrate the prairie and local culture. We’ve offered workshops, weekend gatherings, special programs, classes and performances since 1982, and we’ve been primary organizers in the continental bioregional movement, and we published two decades of a bioregional journal, Konza, and Ken Lassman’s Seasons & Cycles and Wild Douglas County. A generation of KAW kids grew up with a close connection to the earth. We invite you to come grow with us for generations to come!

The Kansas Area Watershed Council is one of the oldest bioregional groups on the continent. Our vision is to explore and celebrate the prairie ecosystem, and make community with each other, the land and sky.Many of us are active in continental bioregional organizing, local peace and justice work, ecofeminism, wetlands preservation, prairie restoration, holistic health and healing, consensus training, and many manner of enhancing and sustaining local culture. Contact us for more information on how you can get involved.

Welcome Home

A growing number of people are recognizing that in order to secure the clean air, water and food that we need to healthfully survive, we have to become guardians of the places where we live. People sense the loss in not knowing our neighbors and natural surroundings, and are discovering that the best way to take care of ourselves and to get to know our neighbors, is to protect and restore our region.

Bioregionalism recognizes, nurtures, sustains and celebrates our local connections with: Land, Plants and Animals, Springs, Rivers, Lakes, Groundwater and Oceans, Air, Community, Native Traditions, Indigenous Systems of Production and Trade

It is taking the time to learn the possibilities of place. It is a mindfulness of local environment, history, and community aspirations that leads to a sustainable future. It relies on safe and renewable sources of food and energy. It ensures employment by supplying a rich diversity of services within the community, by recycling our resources, and by exchanging prudent surpluses with other regions. Bioregionalism is working to satisfy basic needs locally, such as education, health care and self-governance. The bioregional perspective recreates a widely-shared sense of regional identity founded upon a renewed critical awareness of and respect for the integrity of our ecological communities.

People are joining with neighbors to discuss ways we can work together to:

1. Learn what our special local resources are
2. Plan how to best protect and use those natural and cultural resources
3. Exchange our time and energy to best meet our daily and long-term needs
4. Enrich our children’s local and planetary knowledge. Security begins by acting responsibly at home.

Welcome home!

This statement was adopted by the Continental Bioregional Congress (then called the North American Bioregional Congress) at its first gathering in 1984, and it has been affirmed by many organizations and congresses since that time, including our own KAW Council.