Dealing with Our Shit – Can WTR help close the poop loop? A Work That Reconnects Network Webinar with Dr. Sarah Nahar

Event Overview

In order for complex life forms to survive on planet Earth, people – especially those of us responsible for contributing to climate changes and benefiting from global inequality – must make significant transformations to how we live at a basic level.

Saturday, October 10
5 – 7pm UTC

**Check your time zone here.**

Register Here

Human survival depends on access to water and food. We have rightfully given considerable attention to these essential human needs. But we have given far less consideration to the equally essential human need to release excess water and food from our system through urination and defecation.

This is not just an issue of technological innovation however, it is one of worldview, practices, and values. Dr. Sarah Nahar researched how we might deal with our crap literally and metaphorically, doing part of this doctoral research in the same program as Joanna Macy, in the department of Religion at Syracuse University. One of her dissertation chapters, entitled “Shit as System,” is in dialogue with Joanna’s dissertation about the dharma of natural systems.

Come find out what all of this crap might have to do with the Work That Reconnects. We will brainstorm how to integrate into your facilitation examples or phrases that can make this subject less taboo, we’ll center how we might “do unto those downstream as we’d have those upstream do to us!”, and dive into how the context of Syracuse, Onondaga Lake and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy shaped the WTR and our dissertations.

This talk will promote a shift in consciousness–or at least generate some laughs–as we consider the serious importance of the potential of our body’s daily gift to the planet in the Great Turning.

Event logistics

This event will be recorded. The recording will be available three days after the live event and will be sent by email to all those who are registered.

Translated subtitles will be available for this event.

If you are in China and having difficulty registering for this event, please contact Helen Sui 海静.

A portion of the donations for this event will go to the facilitators of the event to honor their work and contribute to their livelihood. Donations also cover the tools, resources and staff hours each event requires. Whatever is donated above and beyond these expenses will go to the general operating fund of the Work That Reconnects Network so it can continue to provide support, networking and programing for our global WTR community.

The requested donation for this webinar is between $25-$35USD. However, no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Please donate generously within your means and feel free and welcomed to join us even without a donation.

Guest Presenter

Dr. Sarah Nahar (she) was trained in the Work That Reconnects via the 2nd People of Color Cohort over the course of the year 2014. She is also a nonviolent action trainer and interspiritual theologian. An emerging expert of Excreta Infrastructure Technologies, her doctoral work centers on ecological regeneration, community cultivation, and discard studies. She teaches in the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. She was a 2019 Rotary Peace Fellow and worked at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in Atlanta, Georgia. She has been the Executive Director of Community Peacemaker Teams. She attended Spelman College, and has an MDiv from Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in her hometown, where she also initiated climate justice efforts.