The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth
BY JOE BREWER
Joe Brewer wrote The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth to present a clear-eyed understanding of the severity of the predicament we’re in and to demonstrate how it is possible to regenerate the entire Earth. He offers a clear and cogent pathway we can all walk together.
Humanity is confronted with threats unprecedented in the history of our species. We are in the midst of a planetary change process that extends far beyond a human lifetime. And most of us experience a kind of intergenerational amnesia – having never seen an intact ecosystem or a healthy human economy at any point in our lives. To a great extent, the rest of our lives will be defined by how those who understand our global predicament organize and cooperate with one another.
There is an urgent need to describe the “how” for managing the convergent threats of ecological overshoot and civilization collapse. How can we design our way through the struggles that lie ahead? By embracing the fundamental insight that all living systems self-organize around the patterns of regeneration. Applied to the scale of entire landscapes, this reveals how all truly sustainable human cultures throughout history were organized at the territorial scale as bioregional economies. A planet-wide network of learning ecosystems is needed that can hold the complexity of birthing these regenerative bioregions during and after the rest of the collapse into which we’ve all been born.
More About the Design Pathway
Walk the pathway. You can’t find it in the shallow optimism of techno-fixes or consumer choices. Nothing short of a spiritual revival of Indigenous lifeways will do – combined with the best scientific knowledge about human behavior, cultural evolution, and the dynamic Earth. We can create the path for regenerating Earth by walking it throughout the rest of this century and beyond.
Joe Brewer is a transdisciplinary systems thinker who has devoted his life to helping humanity through the sustainability bottleneck. He weaves insights from the scientific study of cultural evolution, human cognition, and Earth system science into frameworks for action. He is co-founder of the Design School for Regenerating Earth, established to organize and support bioregions around the world. Prior affiliations include the International Centre for Earth Simulation, the Center for Complex Systems Research at the University of Illinois, the Cultural Evolution Society, the Rockridge Institute, and the Evolution Institute. He currently lives in Barichara, Colombia, where he works to help regenerate the land in his bioregion.
As we all live into the story of Bioregional Earth, Joe urges us to recognize that “we really can do something worthwhile for our descendants that is worthy of these times. Together we can explore how to regenerate the Earth and safeguard humanity’s future. Are you ready? There’s no time to waste. Let us begin.”
