"How can we find words in a human language when we are learning to speak as water?"
This is one of the questions Listening to Rivers Alliance, LiRA, has been sitting with, in the Barlavento watersheds of southwest Portugal as they centre more-than-human understanding in their work. Beneath it lies another question, less easily spoken: how deep must a connection run before you can understand what a river wants, before you can create the conditions for it to have agency in its own future?
Halfway across the world, in Alagoas, Brazil, Quilombo elders are asking something different but kindred: How does one pass on generational knowledge about nurturing a relationship with land? Their concern carries the weight of a cultural heritage forged through survival, through centuries of co-living with the land. It also carries the quiet fear of losing this knowledge as the elders who hold it grow older, and the hope of drawing younger generations into the work of stewardship.
Neither question has a clean answer, but both hold a thread: that the knowledge which holds ecosystems and communities together lives in relationship, and relationship is something you cannot extract or hand over intact, but embody, practice, and live.
This is the second piece in our series exploring what the Sparks of Regeneration cohort is teaching us. In the last piece, we looked at "Regeneration as Healing". But healing is never a solitary act. It's based on relationships: between soil and survivor, between people and fire as kin rather than threat, between a person and the more-than-human world.
In this piece, we continue this exploration by looking at relationship as a living practice between people and land, between elders and youth, between knowledge systems and the communities that carry them.
Two initiatives in our cohort are showing us what this looks like, from two very different vantage points.
Place is refuge. Nature shapes culture and cultures shape nature.
This is especially true in Alagoas, Brazil, where Quilombo elders aged 80 to 90 are fighting the effects of deforestation and climate change largely on their own. The physically demanding labour of mangrove replanting presents growing challenges for these knowledge holders. This Quilombo community stewards 150 hectares of legally titled mangrove forest along the São Francisco River. They are defending the mangroves on their land against large-scale industrial shrimp farming and rising sea levels, with minimal external support.
Quilombos are communities founded by enslaved Africans who escaped captivity in Brazil and forged autonomous, Afro-descendant ways of life. The most famous community, Quilombo dos Palmares, was home to as many as 30,000 people and is situated in what is now Alagoas State, where Across the River operates.
In 1988, Quilombo communities gained the right to collective land title, yet very few have actually received it. Additionally, despite evidence that Quilombo land stewardship improves conservation outcomes, these communities remain at the margins of climate discourse and conservation funding. Funding is especially hard, according to the Across the River Initiative, for mangrove restoration work.
Across the River, an initiative led by Nicolas Salazar Sutil and Maria Aparecida "Cida" Vieira, connects and builds relationship between Quilombo elders in Alagoas and younger Black Manguezeiros — a coastal people whose lives and livelihoods are tied to mangrove forests across the São Francisco River in neighbouring Sergipe. The term “Manguezeiro” describes a cultural identity rooted in the mangrove itself, encompassing fishers, crab collectors, and their families, whose knowledge of tidal rhythms and forest ecology has been passed down through generations. For the youth in Sergipe, that lineage is alive but fragile as the practices continue, but the legal protections and communal land base that could anchor them remain out of reach.
Though already engaged in restoration work, the Manguezeiros lack the land tenure and legal recognition that Quilombos hold. Across the River brings these two communities together, united by their shared dependence on the mangrove ecosystem, and encourages them to co-create regenerative land care agreements built on cultural continuity, intergenerational dialogue, and mutual aid.
In the Barlavento watersheds of southwest Portugal, a different kind of severance is being addressed. LiRA, stewarded by Christin Lidzba, Heide Maria Baden, and Susana de Medeiros, is a bioregional initiative in Southwest Portugal that explores how relationships between people and the living world become part of watershed regeneration. They develop practices of listening in the Barlavento, together with its lands, waters, soils, plants, and the more-than-human world. At the heart of their work lives a simple question:
“What becomes possible when we listen to the living world before deciding what it needs?”
For LiRA, listening is not a step before restoration. It is part of restoration itself.
They weave community practice, artistic inquiry, storytelling, and different ways of knowing into the ecosystem restoration processes of the Barlavento. They are interested in what happens when ecological knowledge meets lived experience, memory, creativity and direct encounter with place. It’s not only about restoring ecosystems but tending to people’s capacity to belong to them as well.
What they are learning: As LiRA has become more deeply rooted in the Barlavento, one thing has become increasingly clear: people can care deeply about the land yet still feel separated from it. The challenge is therefore not simply to communicate why regeneration matters. It is to create experiences through which relationships can begin to return.
"An important shift has been the growing realisation that our watershed restoration work must first focus on creating spaces for restoring the human capacity to relate to, listen to, and interact with living systems differently, and even to recognise them as living entities."
This has led LiRA to place greater emphasis on practices that allow reconnection to emerge through direct experience: walking, sensing, listening, storytelling, art, food and shared presence. Rather than beginning with concepts or technical language, they begin with encounters.
What is becoming: LiRA is exploring the creation of a Water Listening Centre — a place and practice for learning to listen to the living watershed and bringing what people hear back into the ways we care for it. It could become a cultural, ecological and relational space where water memory, sound, local knowledge, art, food, seasonal practices and new forms of ecological understanding meet.
A prototype for a different kind of bioregional infrastructure: one that restores not only landscapes, but relationships and their memories.
Across the River and LiRA work in radically different contexts, yet their histories are connected by a deeply unequal past. Brazil was colonised; Portugal was the primary coloniser. Both places carry landscapes shaped by extractive relationships — relationships in which living systems were turned into resources for accumulation, power and control.
Across the River and LiRA respond to these histories from very different places. One works with the ongoing consequences of colonisation, racial injustice and dispossession; the other asks what it means to restore relationship in a landscape that has itself been shaped by centuries of extraction and ecological transformation.
Different histories. Different responsibilities. Different wounds. But perhaps a shared question: what becomes possible when we begin to replace extraction with relationship as the ground from which we live?
Before we can regenerate ecosystems, we must also attend to the relationships that hold them, and us, together. Not as a step before healing, but as a shape healing takes.
This is the second piece in our series exploring what the Sparks of Regeneration cohort is teaching us. In the next piece, we'll explore redesigning for regeneration. Read the first piece, Regeneration does not begin with fixing, here.
Disclaimer: This piece reflects Unearthodox's interpretation of the cohort's work and does not claim to speak on behalf of the innovators or their communities. We have done our best to represent the work of these initiatives with care, but the words and conclusions here should not be taken as the innovators' own account of their work.
