Get in touch with Social Ecologies if you have a project to discuss or inquiries about our services.
“Social Ecologies creates durational projects that aim to build healthy habitat and interaction through direct engagement of place with those who dwell there. We seek to encourage holistic, systematic thinking through varying levels and degrees of project participation. Projects are typically birthed and supported for several years. Substantial research, learning and dialogue is used to develop and allow for ideas to emerge. Social Ecologies believes embodiment fuels continuing action.”
︎ Nance Klehm, Founder and Director of Operations
︎ Nance Klehm, Founder and Director of Operations
Team
Nance Klehm
︎Founder and Director of OperationsNance Klehm has been an ecological systems designer, landscaper, horticultural consultant, and agroecological grower for more than three decades. Her approach is centered on instigating change by activating already existent communities, and her work demonstrates her lifelong commitment to redefining the way human populations coexist with plant and animal systems on this planet.
A consultant, speaker, and teacher, Nance is internationally respected for her work on land politics and soil health. Her work has received extensive national and international media coverage and is mentioned in many books, including Leila Darwish’s Earth Repair and Sandor Katz’s The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved. She won the 2012 Utne Visionary Prize and has been a two-time finalist for the Curry-Stone Design Prize. In addition, she has lectured broadly in museum and university settings as well as for countless community groups worldwide. Most recently, she was the subject of the independent documentary Weedeater.
She currently splits her time between Little Village, a densely packed, diverse urban neighborhood in the heart of Chicago, and fifty acres of land in the Driftless Region of northwest Illinois, where she cultivates and forages medicinal and edible plants and fungi, keeps bees and a fruit orchard, raises ducks and quail, and grows for indigenous seed banks.
Tessaria
︎Carbon Head Analyst & ResearcherTessaria is an ecosystem engineer and pioneer species, raising the level of soils and making way for mature floodplain forests where new microclimates are ultimately formed.
They are a transitional hygrophile, found most commonly among willows and groundsels, preferring dry, waterlogged, or brackish soils.
Known as a “compass plant,” Tessaria makes habitat conditions better for themself and other species. They flower during periods of extreme flooding and can survive prolonged droughts.
They are full of antioxidants. They help heal certain types of cancer as well as heart disease. They contain a resin known as “pitch.” And they also make great biochar.