Livelihoods at Sea: A Short Course in Trading by Sail
Reimagining Maritime Economies for Regenerative Futures
15th – 19th April 2026
A five-day, hands-on immersion into the emerging world of regenerative maritime livelihoods, trading by sail, and bioregional sea-based economies.
Our waterways have long been the world’s ancient commons of exchange, culture, and sustenance for humans and the more-than-human. This course will reconnect you with the skills, knowledge, and imagination needed to explore trade by sail in the 21st century.
How do we transform our bioregional economies, especially those with access to the sea? More regenerative enterprises and livelihoods might be a good place to start. And not just on the land and with the soil, but also wind, current and tides. Regenerative maritime livelihoods are possible, too, so let’s start them up.
This hands-on short course, in collaboration with Sail Trade South West and the crew of the Ibis, offers a shift in perspective - and invites you to explore what it means to think, feel, and work with the sea.
Over five days we will learn with head, heart, and hands: through dialogue, storytelling, and experiential practice. We’ll get hands-on with some of the practical realities of trade, scampering on board the Ibis, hauling cargo to market, working with charts and knots. We’ll learn the history of maritime trade in this region, and elsewhere. We'll question our land-biased assumptions about trade, transport, and commerce, exploring how waterways have always been highways for exchange - and how they might be again. We’ll dive into the economics and business model implications, too.
Course Structure
15th – 19th April 2026
Location: TBC
This course takes place over five days in collaboration with Sail Trade South West. Participation is active and experiential, involving hands-on maritime practice, collaborative inquiry, and embodied learning. No sailing experience required.
What we'll explore:
Drawing on the lived experience of contemporary sail traders, we'll examine the practical realities and possibilities of wind-powered commerce. How do weather patterns shape routes and rhythms of trade? What skills and knowledge does working with wind and current demand? How might sailing transform not just how we move goods, but how we think about time, value, and relationship with place?
We'll look at regenerative economics through a maritime lens - moving beyond extraction toward practices that work in concert with natural systems. This means understanding coastal and oceanic ecosystems, seasonal patterns, and the more-than-human communities that inhabit them. It means reimagining supply chains as living relationships rather than linear transactions.
Through conversations with sail traders, hands-on engagement with sailing craft and cargo, and collaborative inquiry, we'll begin to map what regenerative maritime futures might look like in practice. What goods travel well by sail? What markets and networks need to exist? What skills need reviving or inventing? How do sailing livelihoods fit within wider movements toward bioregional resilience?
** No sailing experience necessary, but come ready to get your hands dirty (or salty) and think differently.
Why Join This Course?
Beyond practical changes to our civilization, we need a radical alteration of our lived experience to feel ourselves as participants in the process of life on earth. This alternative perspective is offered by living cosmos panpsychism (Freya Mathews), biopoetics (Andreas Weber), biocultural stewardship (Sandra Wooltorton), and Australian Indigenous worldviews (Anne Poelina).
From a panpsychic perspective, the cosmos is One; a coherent field of mind/matter that differentiates into many self-realizing and self-refective beings. These beings form a community of subjects that communicate and co-create a 'poetic ecology'—the fundamental experience of being touched by the world and touching it in return. Trees in forests, for instance, continuously communicate with each other and with fungi through their roots.
In this relational reality, a communicative order of meaning unfolds alongside the material order through images, metaphors, and the language of things rather than human words. Modern humans are alienated from this poetic order: if we view the world as brute object, it will only reveal itself as such. But if we invoke a living presence then we may receive a meaningful response—if we are open to it.
The process of co-operative inquiry integrates theory with practice. It enables not just a philosophical understanding of our participation, it enables the development of forms of practice with the more-than-human world, all in a community of inquiry with other human persons.
Further Information
Accounts of the inquiry process drawn from previous workshops can be found at Learning How Land Speaks, Reading Lists and introductory videos are also available. Links and further information will also be sent to you closer to the start date.
Cost: £ 560
Facilitators
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Andreas Weber
Andreas is a biologist, philosopher and writer. His work focuses on a re-evaluation of our understanding of the living. Read more…
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Anne Poelina
Anne is a Nyikina Warrwa woman from the Kimberley region of Western Australia. She is an active community leader, human and earth rights advocate, film maker and respected academic researcher. Read more…
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Ezekiel Fugate
Ezekiel is the co-founding director of Deep Belonging, a co-founder of Springhouse Community School, and a co-editor of Starborne: The Journal of Autocosmology. Read more…
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Freya Mathews
Freya is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Philosophy at Latrobe University, Australia. She is the author of over one hundred books, articles and essays on ecological philosophy. Read more…
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Jacqueline Kurio
Since experiencing the Tohoku earthquake in Japan in 2011, Jacqueline has been engaging the living world in rituals of healing and connection through drawing and walking labyrinths. Read more…
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Peter Reason
Peter was Director of the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice at the University of Bath, and an international leader in the development of participative approaches to inquiry. Read more…
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Sandra Wooltorton
Sandra is from Noongar Boodjar, also known as southwest Western Australia. She works as a Senior Research Fellow at the Nulungu Research Institute at the University of Notre Dame Australia, in Yawuru Country (aka Broome) in the Western Australian Kimberley region. Read more…
Frequently Asked Questions
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This course is for anyone wishing to be part of a transformation of our relationship with the living Earth. Participants in the past have included educators, ecologists, artists, activists, organization consultants, writers and poets.
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No, this course is open to all. There will be a maximum of 24 participants on this inquiry, working in four inquiry groups of six persons.
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The minimal commitment to the course is: one encounter with the River each week; composing and posting an account of the encounter; reading and commenting on one fellow participant’s account; viewing video lectures and participating in a Zoom reflection meeting facilitated by a faculty member and contributing to community discussions.
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Participants must be prepared to spend significant time outside, possibly in inclement weather. You will need appropriate clothes, waterproofs, walking boots, flask and anything else needed to help you feel comfortable in your local climate. You may also like to include a notebook, art materials, or camera. Participants are responsible for undertaking their own individual risk assessment to ensure their health and safety.
What Participants Say…
“The key learnings were being pushed into trying new things, daring to be awkward and get out of the comfort zone, being confronted with habits, such as scepticism and one’s own values, and allowing to overcome them to see the river as a clear mirror, to see yourself to get reflected, where you are and what you are, through the river. We also found that the water brought personal healing, even release from bodily tensions and injuries. At least two people said that water brings huge joy and is a source of vitality. One of the takeaways is that this river gives so many of us this profound courage that is so much, truly so much more than human anxieties and egos”
