Inner Acres: Embodiment, land connection, and learning to live within plantary boundaries

Following the Global Conscious Food Systems Summit in Bhutan, this session led by Dan McTiernan continues an emerging global conversation about the deeper human dimensions of ecological and systems transformation. Food systems, climate instability, and human wellbeing are profoundly entangled, and many of us are recognising that technological innovation and policy change alone are not enough to halt degradation of our earth’s life support systems. We understand that the crises we face are fundamentally crises of relationship, perception, and imagination.

Modern societies often ask human beings to function as machines: productive, efficient, fast, and disconnected from body, emotion, place, and the wider living world. Even within ecological and regenerative movements these same patterns can persist, reproducing exhaustion, fragmentation, and extractive ways of relating.

Drawing on learning emerging from Inner Acres, a UK-based initiative supporting wellbeing and food systems transformation, this session explores embodied presence and land connection as foundations for resilience, ecological participation, and more regenerative ways working.

Pilot research in Inner Acres revealed that under chronic pressure – financial precarity, ecological uncertainty, social isolation, and relentless productivity demands – farmers gradually disconnect from their embodied and ecological intelligence as a survival strategy. Yet this narrowing of perception also reduces capacity for creativity, responsiveness, and long-term stewardship. At the same time, when invited into practices of embodied presence, many people rediscovered place-based presence and intuitive ways of relating. In this session we will explore questions such as:

How do chronic stress and survival pressures shape perception and ecological behaviour?
What forms of attention and practice help restore relationship with land, body, and community?
What can living systems teach us about resilience, adaptation, and mutual flourishing?
What might it mean to live and work within planetary boundaries?

At a time when ecological crises increasingly intersect with crises of meaning, loneliness, burnout, and social fragmentation, this session explores regeneration as a re-rooting into our place and our Inner Acres.