Ecostage Roots

Ecostage and the Seven Ecostage Principles have been inspired and informed by:

• Ecological Thinking – a holistic approach to understanding our world as interconnected, with the aim of reducing harm, and promoting diverse and thriving systems for people and the planet. This includes a broad spectrum of ideas, such as Deep Ecology, founded by Arne Næss.
• Permaculture – a practice-based philosophy derived from learning from the rhythms and cycles found in Nature.
• Creativity – a tool for change that goes hand in hand with ecological thinking, drawing on the diverse ways we go about making work, expanding how we see the world, through play, curiosity and imagination.
• Ecoscenography – coined by Tanja Beer to describe “a movement that seeks to integrate ecological principles into all stages of scenographic thinking and production in the performing arts.” Includes regenerative approaches to design, which go towards creating positive legacies.
• Indigenous and local knowledge, including the principle of Seventh Generation Stewardship from the Iroquois First Nations people.
• Intersectionality – how ‘aspects of a person’s social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege.’ [Wikipedia]
• Processwork – created by Arnold Mindell, this is a modality that brings awareness of our positionality in the world and our relationships to each other, with many applications from psychotherapy to public forums using a model of Deep Democracy.
• The work of social and environmental justice liberation movements, and professional associations and trade unions, including conversations with colleagues around the world in a cross-fertilisation of ideas.
• The cradle to cradle model – from the 2002 book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart, which puts forward a circular design framework characterised by principles derived from nature including ‘Everything is a resource for something else.’
• Doughnut Economics – from the book of that name by Kate Raworth, the idea that instead of unsustainable growth and consumption-based economics, we measure our activities in terms of the ‘safe and just space for humanity, between what’s necessary for the social foundation and doesn’t break the ecological ceiling.

• Regenerative cultures – these consciously develop the conditions that promote the ongoing renewal and restoration of natural resources, consider the wide-scale and long-term implications of practices and systems on human and non-human communities, and promote justice, equitability, compassion and cooperation in order to create the conditions for more resilience, diversity and thrivability for all.

Ecostage incorporates these concepts, frameworks and practices to bring a wider, ecological perspective to how we make work that challenges current measures of success, from a project’s inception to its afterlife.