Some people dedicate their lives not just to imagining different futures, but to deliberately, courageously crafting and inhabiting them — long before the mainstream catches up. This week on The Passing Through Podcast, I’m very excited to introduce Anna Kovasna.
Anna is a systems thinker, creative convener, and passionate weaver of local resilience and kinship with all life. She works with communities worldwide to nurture regenerative practice and systems change grounded in animist and relational worldviews.
She’s is cofounder of Kincentric Leadership, nurturing ways of leading and living rooted in kinship with a living, intelligent Earth. With deep roots in the ecovillage movement, she also serves as Strategic Lead for Community Resilience at the Global Ecovillage Network, exploring community-led ways of navigating the polycrisis. She is co-chair of Transition Network International, a trustee of Gaia Education, and cofounder of the Living Systems Alliance — a cross-movement initiative advancing place-based more-than-human governance and living systems design. After decades of ecovillage living, Anna now lives with her more-than-human kin on a small permaculture homestead in the Pyrenees.
We talk about relationality and kin-centrism — which is the understanding that all of the beings around us (the plants and animals and fungi and rocks and rivers) are our relatives, to whom we are inextricably linked. We talk about how to be good kin to our brothers and sisters on this planet, we talk about indigenous life-ways, Anna’s experience in the Peruvian Amazon with the Matses, reciprocity, how to show good etiquette to human and non-human persons, how animist/kin-centric worldviews can shift the way we organize our communities, relationships and governance systems; principles such as sacredness, animacy and interdependence, equity and justice — not just for humans, but also for non-humans — belonging and place, imagination, and lots more.
This was hands down one of my favorite conversations of the year. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
If you’re interested in connecting with Anna you can find her on her website at https://www.kincentricleadership.org.
Or on LinkedIn at https://fr.linkedin.com/in/anna-kovasna.
