Home » Posts tagged 'Joe Brewer'
Tag Archives: Joe Brewer
The Survivors Will Be Bioregional
I want to talk to all of you today about the humans that survived the current planetary predicament. How did they organize their lives? What was the key to their success? It is no secret that we are in the midst of a severe period of ecological collapse. The exploding human population lay flat on its growth curve for hundreds of thousands of years until the invention of industrial agriculture. Then it shot skyward in an exponential arc corresponding with the rapid depletion of intact ecosystems, healthy environments, and stored materials across the Earth. All of this happened in the blink of an eye in a few short centuries.
It has become fashionable to talk about sustainable businesses and the greening of economic growth. Yet rarely do these conversations go deeply enough into the ecology of our species to see how profoundly unsustainable this growth arc has always been. Ecologists like William Catton Jr. in his classic text Overshoot have called the period of exponential growth for any species the “exuberant” phase. It is quickly followed by a peak and subsequent collapse. Those of us who study history will recognize that the Great Myth of Progress arose in Western Civilization just as it was embodying the most brutal forms of colonial expansion into the Americas. Terms like manifest destiny and self-reliance were blended within the microspheres of this macroscopic pattern, blinding many to the ecological limits of the Earth that were soon (in geologic terms) to be leapt beyond in a giant pulse of destabilization.
Ecologists have a practice of defining species according to their ecological niche. How does this ant make its living? Where does that bird call its home?…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Three Ways to Regenerate Bioregions
Three Ways to Regenerate Bioregions
Is it even possible for humanity to safeguard its future? Are we bound to a fate of extinction… a still-birth on the way to becoming a planetary species? Or might we evolve our diverse cultures toward the regeneration of landscapes and ecosystems — making it possible to continue existing?
These are not idle questions. Humanity is currently in overshoot-and-collapse. We are causing a Mass Extinction Event that will take us down with it if it really takes off. Simply look at the Earth from space and you will see how much we have degraded the mountain ranges and valleys, flood plains and coastlines, tropical forests and high plateaus, all over the planet. The human impact is impossible to miss and largely destructive at present.
But what if we learned how to regenerate landscapes at increasing scales? Might we learn how to organize our economies around regenerative principles that turn all of this around? It just so happens that there might be a way to save ourselves.
We need to organize our societies (and all of their material flows) around bioregions. Only then might we learn how to function as regenerative economies that restore ecosystems and heal the Earth.This is what my colleagues and I are supporting at the Regenerative Communities Network. We are mobilizing a growing number of existing efforts to create bioregional economies into a peer-to-peer learning network that shares tools and knowledge to speed up all our efforts.
In this article, I would like to share three ways that we are observing in our network of communities for how to design the regeneration of an entire bioregion. These are patterns of emergence we have observed arising on their own in each collaborative effort. And each is now a focused work stream for how we consciously evolve the global network.
#1 :: Regenerative Education and Transformational Leadership
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
