Compost the Year: Inside Lisbon’s Ethical Assembly 2025
At the tail end of a chaotic 2025 — a year of climate backslides, algorithmic delusions, and resurgent fascisms — Lisbon wants to compost it all.
On 29–30 November, the Ethical Assembly returns to the Beato district with an invitation that feels less like a conference and more like a collective detox: “Compost the year 2025 and seed new positive futures.” It’s both a call to mourn and a manual for re-germination.
Over two days, more than 60 speakers and 40 sessions will tackle the fractures of the present. Expect conversations that start in grief and end in blueprint: from AI’s extractive underbelly and the myth of green capitalism, to biodiversity as resistance and the hidden intelligence of mushroom networks. One session reimagines democracy through citizen assemblies; another dives into how we might build just, regenerative food systems without the colonial aftertaste.
There will be documentary premieres, hands-on workshops, and embodied practices that ask participants to move, breathe, and rethink how change actually feels in the body. Panels dissolve into round-tables, talks slide into climate-book-club moments, and somewhere between it all, a DJ set at Casa do Capitão will test the theory that joy is a form of resilience.
The Assembly’s language borrows from nature — compost, soil, root — but the mood is distinctly post-industrial. Beato’s warehouses and startup ruins become the stage for something raw and communal: a generation refusing both cynicism and empty optimism, choosing instead to stay with the rot until it transforms.
If most conferences still worship the clean, corporate face of “sustainability,” the Ethical Assembly speaks of dirt and decay with pride. It’s a space where activism and art collide, where future-building starts with honest decomposition.
Bring your doubts, your fatigue, your curiosity. Leave your PowerPoint slides at home.
On 29–30 November, the Ethical Assembly returns to the Beato Innovation District with a proposition that feels half-ritual, half-revolt: Compost the year 2025. Instead of pretending things are fine, the gathering invites us to face the rot — to turn exhaustion, outrage, and climate anxiety into fertile soil for something more alive.
This isn’t the usual sustainability summit dressed in recycled graphics and branded tote bags. It’s a reckoning. Two days of unlearning, reimagining, and dancing through the debris. Sixty speakers, activists, scientists, artists, and dreamers will show up not to sell solutions but to question the architecture of the mess — from AI’s invisible emissions to the far-right’s weaponization of fear, from biodiversity collapse to the burnout economy masquerading as green progress.
The language of the event borrows from nature’s logic: decay as transformation, endings as beginnings. “Composting” becomes a metaphor for dismantling what no longer serves — ideologies, industries, habits, the self-importance of the West — and watching what new forms might sprout once the ego decomposes.
What makes Ethical Assembly feel different is its tone: earnest but feral, more dance-floor than boardroom. There’s a climate-themed bookstore, documentary premieres, and workshops designed to ground reflection in the body. It’s not about optimism but stamina — how to keep imagining when collapse fatigue becomes the baseline.
Lisbon’s creative scene has turned into a kind of testing ground for this mix of activism and aesthetics. Beato, the former industrial zone now pulsing with cultural projects, feels like the right place for a collective reboot. Between sea winds and techno echoes, the Assembly proposes something rare in the climate conversation: a future that feels sensual, messy, human.
In a year when “sustainability” has been absorbed by the same corporations it was meant to challenge, Ethical Assembly tries to reclaim the word ethical itself — not as branding, but as practice. A living, composting verb.
Bring your doubts, your anger, your hope. Leave the corporate lanyard at home.
