Healing our World: From Repair to Despair
Conferences return to the Ecovillage · 16–20 October 2026 · Universal Hall
For decades, Ecovillage Findhorn was one of the places the world came to think together. The Ecovillage became known for its conferences, drawing thousands to the Moray coast to sit with voices like Eckhart Tolle, Vandana Shiva, Joanna Macy and Caroline Myss. After some quieter years, that tradition is returning: Ecovillage Findhorn CBS is holding conferences at the Park again, and this October brings the next one.
It could hardly come at a better time. Between the climate crisis and the steady loss of the living world, it is easy to feel the weight of the moment. But despair is only where this starts. All over the world, people are repairing what is broken and showing that another way of living is not just possible, it is already happening. Healing Our World: From Despair to Repair gathers many of them at the Park, five days hosted by Ecovillage Findhorn CBS for anyone who feels that weight and wants to do something with it. You will leave with practical ideas you can act on, and with the reassurance that you are not in this alone.
That heritage runs deep here. It was at a 1982 gathering called Building a Planetary Village that the community first set out its path as an ecovillage, and one of its organisers, John Talbott, is speaking again this October.
Ecovillage Findhorn CBS reopened this chapter in the spring with Economics as if Life Matters, three days on how communities can build economies that serve life rather than the other way around. Healing Our World is the next step.
A full house in the Universal Hall
The conference faces our situation: the overlapping crises of climate, nature and community. Then it asks the more useful question. What can we actually do about it? Ecovillage Findhorn has held for sixty years that a community like this has a part to play in exactly this kind of moment.
“The role of Findhorn is to help humanity turn within and be part of the solution to the chaos and confusion in the world.”
Over five days, the conference brings together practitioners, thinkers, activists and artists who have spent their lives on that question, and who can speak to both the despair and the repair.
Mike Berners-Lee, professor and bestselling author of How Bad Are Bananas? and There Is No Planet B, on facing the climate and nature crisis without flinching and without giving up hope. Donnachadh McCarthy, campaigner and broadcaster, on three decades of activism and what shifted after he lived with Indigenous communities in the Amazon. Phoebe Tickell of Moral Imaginations, on using imagination to change the systems we feel stuck in. Angela Manno, sharing her Sacred Biodiversity Oracle with an international audience for the first time. And John Seed, founder of the Rainforest Information Centre, who has carried deep ecology around the world for thirty-five years.
Alongside them are voices from the Findhorn community and the wider region: Jonathan Caddy on restoring the Findhorn Hinterland, Alan Watson Featherstone of Trees for Life and Pupak Haghighi on bringing nature back, John Talbott on the evolving ecovillage, and Sally Bogale of Gaia Education on learning that serves the planet. More names are still to come.
Why come?
Come for the ideas and the people, and for the place itself. If you know the Park, you know what October is like here: quiet and golden, with the community drawn back in for the winter. Your days move between talks in the Hall, hands-on workshops, music and shared meals, and your evenings unfold in community.
If you have been carrying the weight of all this on your own, here is a chance to set it down for a few days among people who understand, and to leave replenished and with a clearer sense of what to do next.
Findhorn beach at sunset · Britta Schmitz
Tickets are open now. You can take part in person in the Universal Hall, or online via Zoom from anywhere in the world, with live sessions and the chance to put your questions to the speakers.
If you can be here in person, make a few days of it. There are tours of the ecovillage and the Findhorn Hinterland, beach walks, and community gatherings before and after the conference. Book a room in one of the ecovillage guest houses and give yourself time to properly arrive.
The proceeds of this event will go to Ecovillage Findhorn CBS, the community benefit society that looks after the Universal Hall and the shared spaces at the heart of the ecovillage.
The Ecovillage has always drawn people back when the world feels heavy, to think clearly and to remember what is possible. This October, that invitation is open again.
A community gathering at The Park · Mark Richards
