A Message from Joe Brewer

Catastrophic climate change has already occurred in some parts of the world. It happened before I was born and has continued throughout my lifetime (and yours) without us being aware that this was the case. If we were unable to discern this reality, what other truths are we missing? How might the stories we tell ourselves be misleading, incomplete, or downright wrong? This challenge of discernment applies equally well to how we understand what does work for addressing our planetary predicament.

Campaigns have been launched to “plant a billion trees” and restore health to the Earth. Yet those with ecological training will observe that there is a profound functional difference between what are effectively giant monoculture tree farms – like so many of the “forests” in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, comprised mainly of Douglas firs – and real forest ecosystems that have gone through the stages of ecological succession while increasing the number of interrelated niches for diverse species to coexist within them.

The old adage tells us that we must have the courage to change what can be changed and the wisdom to separate wheat from chaff, to discern what might yet be changed. The regeneration of Earth is a process that humanity must enact in the middle of a planetary-scale collapse. Some things cannot be changed, like the climate disruptions which have already caused widespread human suffering. Other things, one might say, should never have been allowed to happen in the first place, like the invention of the Haber-Bosch process for manufacturing the synthetic fertilizers that enabled the human population to grow to billions beyond our carrying capacity.

Yet there is also a horizon of hope beyond the despair that deserves to be recognized and honored. We find it 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.

To regenerate Earth at the scales needed, we must consciously and intentionally nurture our bioregions and cooperate across those bioregions at unprecedented levels. Members of the Design School for Regenerating Earth are choosing to step fully into this challenge and do what we can to embody and live out the design pathway for regenerating Earth.