About the Congress
The Environmental Joy Congress brought together community organizers, Indigenous leaders, farmers, scientists, and neighbors over three days in early 2026 to answer one question:
What kind of future would actually be worth working for?
The room produced over 400 pages of deliberation notes. This site is the directory of what survived - the ten priorities the Congress chose to carry forward, and the framework for translating them into action wherever you live.
The deliberative frame
Climate conversations usually default to two modes - what we're losing and what we're building. The Congress added a third question that policy debates almost never ask, and rebalanced the other two around it.
01
The hardest question, because we are still inside what we are leaving. Extractive economics. The map drawn in straight lines that ignore the rivers. Growth as the sole measure of success. The illusion that environmental cost is an externality.
5 priorities answer this
02
The question that requires the most listening. Indigenous knowledge that predates colonization by ten thousand years. The rituals of mutual aid. The seed banks, the soil practices, the songs. What lasted is the proof of what works, and we have been throwing it away.
4 priorities answer this
03
Not a forecast. A commitment. The question rephrased: what would we have to be accountable to in order to look back from 2036 and call this work worthwhile? Every priority on this site has a 10-year vision attached, written in those terms.
9 priorities answer this
The four currents
The themes are not categories. They are the angles - economic, structural, spiritual, epistemic - that any priority can be approached from. Most priorities live across two or three.
5 priorities touch this theme
Who pays, who gets paid, and who decides. Reparations, regenerative agriculture, community wealth, sufficiency. The money question, read as a moral question.
Priorities in this theme
3 priorities touch this theme
The physical and institutional bones of a different future. Energy grids that belong to communities. Food systems that build soil. Watersheds governed at watershed scale.
Priorities in this theme
4 priorities touch this theme
The practices that hold communities together when systems fail. Mutual aid networks. Sacred sites. The rituals of solidarity that climate change is making everyday skills.
Priorities in this theme
5 priorities touch this theme
Whose knowledge counts as knowledge. Indigenous land-based wisdom. Bioregional literacy. Intergenerational education. The epistemology of climate response.
Priorities in this theme
Methodology
1. Open call.
Every Congress attendee submits the priorities they would walk away from this room having lost if they weren't named. Roughly 140 candidates were submitted in 2026.
2. Affinity clustering.
Candidates are grouped by the room. Duplicates merge. Adjacent ideas surface as families. The 140 collapse into roughly 30 clusters.
3. Strategic communication coding.
Each cluster is read against the four dimensions: Value (the why), Barrier (the but), Action (the how), Vision (the future). Clusters that don't hold all four get sent back for sharpening.
4. The Joy filter.
Each surviving cluster is tested against one final question: does this give anyone reason to wake up tomorrow and do it again? Doom-only priorities get held aside - not because they're wrong, but because they're not what this Congress was built to deliver.
5. Ten chosen.
The Congress votes. The top ten become this directory. The remaining clusters are archived and become candidates for the next Congress - this is a process, not a one-shot.
"The work of the Congress is not to produce a list. It's to produce a way of arguing that the people in the room can keep using after they leave it."
- From the 2026 Congress methodology charter
We are gathering candidates for the 2027 Congress. If your community has deliberated something that belongs here, send it.
Submit a candidateThe Congress is convened in partnership with land trusts, tribal councils, mutual aid networks, and bioregional assemblies across the country.
Explore partnershipThe 2026 Congress methodology charter, attendee list, and full deliberation notes are available for press inquiries on request.
press@example.orgThe framework is the scaffolding. The directory is where the work lives.
