About us

Woodbine is an experimental hub in Ridgewood, Queens for developing the skills, practices, and tools for building autonomy in the Anthropocene.

Woodbine

The end isn’t pretty. Collapsing glaciers and a melting Arctic, droughts and wildfires in the west, fantasies of AI and leaving the world behind. Katrina and Fukushima, billions of selfies, and 200 species going extinct every day. Any way you look at it, we’re living at the end of a civilization, of its entire way of life and everything that upholds it.

We’re at a crossroads. In the face of this disaster, we find ourselves preoccupied and paralyzed, working just to scrape by and drowning in the endless chatter of a world watching its own end. Even with the occupations, riots, and blockades that have overtaken cities from Cairo to New York in recent years, nothing has come close to confronting the situation. We remain hostages to a way of life determined to take us down with it. Right in front of us is the choice: whether we’re going to live a life on our knees with our head in the sand or whether we are going to take the leap and make a break.

We must build new worlds from the ground up. It’s clear that no one’s going to save us – no government or startup, no new law or techno-fix. It’s up to us to take hold of our futures. Together we have to create the material basis for another way of life: shelter and water, fire and food, communication and coordination, strength and courage, loyalty and love. Giving ourselves a new ground and overcoming the obstacles we face, step by step.

Woodbine is a hub for building autonomy in the Anthropocene. Our mission is to expand collective material and organizational capacities in order to build revolution in the 21st century. With a workshop, library, kitchen, and meeting space, we focus on efforts to self-organize, connect, create infrastructures, and develop greater individual and collective efficacy.

OUR PLAN

With so many people making, hacking, designing, and self-organizing, we propose combining our capacities –our various skills, knowledges, resources, and energies— along shared trajectories such that they might become capable of actually supporting an exit from our current, untenable way of life, and making another way of life live.