The Forest Way

Please note that the venue is in the vicinity of the Scott Monument and will be announced to RSVPing members closer to the event date. We will NOT be meeting at the monument, itself.

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For this event, we’ll be asking questions about widespread demoralisation, dysfunction, and depopulation in the West from the starting point of John Calhoun’s famous ‘mouse utopia’ experiment.

Here’s an excerpt from the article about the experiment that we’ll use as the basis for our discussion:

“Calhoun constructed an elaborate, enclosed habitat for mice, which he called Universe 25. This wasn’t just a cage — it was an engineered paradise…

At the start, the results were exactly as expected. The mice thrived… But as numbers grew past a certain point, subtle changes began to emerge…

By Day 1,580, the last mouse died. Not from starvation, disease, or predation—but from the collapse of the social structure that made survival possible…

The Universe 25 experiment has often been used as a cautionary tale about overcrowding, urban decay, and the dangers of population growth. But Calhoun himself believed the core lesson was deeper.

For him, the tragedy wasn’t just that the mice ran out of space—it was that they ran out of social meaning.”

The experiment offers food for thought on what is happening in our own societies. Are Western nations experiencing a ‘meaning crisis’ that is, in different ways, leading to decline? Has material and social prosperity brought us—strangely perhaps—to a point of decadence, dysfunction, and despair?

Here’s a link to the article (along with a few supplemental links):

Please note that the venue is in the vicinity of the Scott Monument and will be announced to RSVPing members closer to the event date. We will NOT be meeting at the monument, itself.

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What lessons can author, Irina Nevzlin, teach us not just about Jewish identity, but about European identity?

Please come and discuss with us an interview with Nevzlin about her book, The Impact of Identity: The Power of Knowing Who You Are:

Please note that the venue is in the vicinity of the Scott Monument and will be announced to RSVPing members closer to the event date. We will NOT be meeting at the monument, itself.

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In many ways, our personal and collective identities flow from more basic assumptions about how our lives work — not just as concerning our social and economic circumstances, but more fundamentally, the energy expenditures upon which we depend for basic goods and services.

What happens to our society, culture, and politics when that energy expenditure changes, particularly if energy is curtailed? In ‘The Great Simplification,’ Nate Hagens describes just such a scenario in which total available energy decreases and our lives radically simplify.

We’ll use his documentary as a starting point for a discussion about the impact of energy upon society, politics, culture, and more. If the ‘Great Simplification’ is coming, what can we do now to prepare for it? If it’s not coming, what alternate scenario could we expect in its place?

Please note that the venue is in the vicinity of the Scott Monument and will be announced to RSVPing members closer to the event date. We will NOT be meeting at the monument, itself.

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For this event, we’ll pair up with our newly launched 'European Paganisms' group to discuss the 2025 documentary, 'Lost Gods: The Future of Christianity and Paganism in The North,' asking basic questions about what it means to be ‘pagan,’ how paganism stands in relation to Christianity in the West, and what place it might have in future spiritualities of European peoples: