FERAL SALON PRESENTS: ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION

About this event

Bread, Roses & the 20-Hour Week

Imagining a low-tech, solarpunk future worth living in.

What if progress meant working less, living better, and needing fewer resources -- not more?

Europe is racing to develop its own technologies, secure its supply chains, and build a circular economy. But can we achieve genuine autonomy without reproducing the extractive systems we hope to escape? And what if the central challenge of the energy transition is not simply replacing fossil fuels, but overcoming the historical tendency for new energy sources to accumulate alongside old ones?

What would an ecological civilization actually look like?

Imagine walkable neighborhoods, locally sourced materials, community-owned energy, repairable technologies, shared workshops, regenerative agriculture, and economies organized around meeting human needs rather than manufacturing endless demand.

Imagine a society with full employment, where a full working week is 20 hours, everyone's basic needs are met, and prosperity is measured not by how much we consume, but by how much freedom, security, beauty, and belonging we enjoy.

Less compulsory labor. More time for art, care, learning, ecological restoration, and one another.

Bread and roses. Not austerity, but abundance reimagined.

This Thursday, Feral Ecologies Lab and Salon Ruigoord invite you to an evening of radical yet grounded imagination. Drawing on solarpunk, degrowth, circular economies, low-tech innovation, and decentralized governance, we'll explore what it takes to build a flourishing society within planetary limits.

Not a retreat into the past. Not another techno-utopian promise. An invitation to imagine and begin building a civilization worth inhabiting.

Thursday, November 5, 2026
18:00–21:00
Salon Ruigoord | Ruigoord 36, Amsterdam

An evening of open inquiry, conviviality, and collective imagination.

Dinner and drinks will be served on a donation basis

Feral Salon is a collaboration between Feral Ecologies Lab and Salon Ruigoord, bringing together undomesticated minds to explore the great rewilding of our world.

Less work. More life. A future worth wanting.