The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Bioregional Futures: Reconnecting to Place for Planetary Health with Daniel Christian Wahl

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

(Conversation recorded on July 24th, 2024)   In the past century of abundant energy surplus, humanity's globalized, large-scale approach to problem-solving has yielded remarkable benefits and innovations. However, as we face a future with reduced energy resources, mounting waste, and a biosphere in danger, the negative impacts of this approach are increasingly overshadowing its gains. How should we evaluate and change these tactics as we look to build future societies that can better attune with their environments and the health of the planet? This week, Nate is joined by Daniel Christian Wahl, a leader and activist in regenerative living, for an exploration into what our lifestyles and communities could look like if we aligned human systems—like agriculture, economy, and community planning—with the natural ecosystems of a specific bioregion to create more sustainable and harmonious ways of living.  How can small, incremental  improvements made at the local ecological level create emergent benefits for the entire planet? What do we need to unlearn from past centuries of living in order to find balance with nature in the habitats and regions that we call home? How can individuals incorporate regenerative principles into their own lives today, regardless of their surrounding systems?    About Daniel Christian Wahl: Daniel Christian Wahl is one of the catalysts of the rising reGeneration movement and the author of Designing Regenerative Cultures - so far translated into seven languages. He works as a consultant, educator and activist with NGOs, businesses, governments and global change agents. With degrees in biology and holistic science, and a PhD in Design for Human and Planetary Health, his work has influenced the emerging fields of regenerative design and salutogenic design. He is the winner of the 2021 RSA Bicentenary Medal for applying design in service to society and was awarded a two year Volans-Fellowship in 2022.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on Youtube  --- Support Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

We're now at a point where we don't have any guarantees anymore. And you need to find pathways that both offer a path towards healing, both of communities, of social cohesion, of people's relationship to place and people's relationship to each other. You need to have a path towards resilience in the face of disruption. So that's local provisioning as much as possible. All of those are also a potential path of transforming the way that people interact and relate to the system. You're listening to the Great Simplification.

I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification. Today I'm joined by a leader in bioregioning

and regenerative thinking, Daniel Christian Wall. Daniel and I have known of each other for 20 years, but this is the very first time we've spoken. He is one of the catalysts of rising regeneration movement and the author of designing regenerative cultures. He works as a consultant, educator, and activists with NGOs, businesses, governments, and global change agents. Daniel has degrees in biology and holistic science as well as a PhD in design for human and planetary health. His work has influenced the emerging field of regenerative design. Daniel has spent over two decades studying, teaching, and living in bioregional and regenerative ways of being. In this conversation, we discuss his experiences, how they've shaped his present work and life on Majorca Island off of Spain,

as well as how these concepts apply at the individual and community level, including how healing local biospheres can, help heal the entire system. Additionally, if you are enjoying this podcast, I invite you all to subscribe to our Substack newsletter for free where you can read more of the system science underpinning the human predicament and where my team and I post special announcements related to the Great Simplification, you can find the link to subscribe in the show description. With that, please welcome Daniel Christian Wall. Daniel Christian Wall.

after all these years of liking each other's LinkedIn post, you and I are finally meeting face to face. Thank you for inviting me, and it's really a pleasure to have this opportunity to have a chat. Yeah, so this could go a million different directions, but your work now is focused on regenerativity, and we've discussed regenerative agriculture a few times on this show, but your work goes beyond that to what you call regenerative culture.

So let's start there. What does it mean for a culture to be regenerative? In order not to confuse people, because a lot of people think of regenerative cultures as something new that we now need to define like in a utopia that then needs to be created, I just want to anchor a couple of things. like regeneration is not a new concept. Regeneration is a core pattern of life itself.

To call regeneration a concept would be saying respiration is a concept, digestion is a concept. Yes, there are concepts, but there are also biological processes, and so is regeneration. It's happening in every cell of your body right now. Your bones have regenerated themselves in the last seven years, and every ecosystem is in a constant process of regeneration. And we as a species wouldn't be alive today if all our indigenous ancestors that were place-based cultures in the bioregions they emerged from had not been regenerative cultures previously.

So we know how to be regenerative, how to be positive keystone species in the environments that bring us forth to the point that we make them more biodiverse, more bioproductive, more abundant. And we use our human intervention that is often a disruption as a creative disruption at scales that actually make the system flourish rather than destroy it. And so for me, a regenerative culture is one that tries to come back home to place, to come back home to context that stops trying to solve a world problematic or a meta crisis or a polycrisis or anything. and tries to handle complexity by looking at the specificity of real people, real place, real context, real climate, real aquifer. And suddenly, by stirring into the skit and meeting all these problems in the context of a specific place, you have a sort of Koonian Gestaltz switch where the problems suddenly show up as real potential, because you see what non-manifest potential in that region is still inherent. And it's that healing process of how we bring ourselves back home and what you call the great simplification,

where we reconsider what is actually necessary and what is part of our consumer culture that we now believe is necessary, but it isn't, and how we can once again become custodian keystone species in the ecosystems that brought us forth to the point that we stop thinking of them as our territories. but we think of ourselves as expressions of that territory again. It's a return to a kin-centric worldview, so you can't be a regenerative culture if you think that there is an objective other out there to be exploited and manipulated and controlled. It's only when we re-enter into that participatory worldview

of understanding that we're very much off this world, that we can responsibly participate in it again, And that needs our shift of perspective back into the community of life. Well, as you know, I largely agree with that. I have a lot of questions, including one, would a kin-centric way of life be feasible for 8 billion humans? But I'll defer that for now and ask you, what are some examples of fundamental ways we would need to change

in order to interact with and relate to the environment in a more regenerative way, as you described? Well, for one, I would say that we've not entirely without intention have tried to tackle the climate change issue through a reductionist element like carbon that was very easily parable with the agenda of digitalization of everything. And so somehow we wove responding to climate change

and driving ever-increasing digitalization into a necessary thing around carbon in order than to create another casino economy around carbon trading and offsetting and lots of not-transparent measures. if we had explored our role in rebalancing global climate regulation mechanisms through water cycles, and had begun to look at life again like every individual tree has a water cycle, every forest has its own little hydrosphere that it creates, every larger landscape watershed has a hydrological cycle that is a mini, cycle within the larger cycle. And in order to heal the larger cycle, we need to heal the smaller

cycles. It's the same thing that I was saying earlier, that in order to solve the problem, you actually have to solve it in the small, and you don't then scale up the solution. You just heal place by place by place, and that heals systemic health, or brings systemic health back. So we would need to heal our hydrological cycles at the local scale, which means healing the soil, soils can retain water again. We would have to heal the rivers, bring back the forests, bring back the grasslands. All these natural, like the biggest ally that we have in getting through these tumultuous three, four decades that we don't know whether we will get through is life itself.

But we now need to set the points so life itself can help us. and that means paying attention to healing local ecosystems and re-regionalizing our basic need provisioning. And that's a massive innovation opportunity around re-regionalizing production and consumption attuned to the bioproductive resources available in a particular reason. So the platform technologies might be the same, But the resources going into it might be rice husk or bamboo in Asian countries and pine or whatever biomass in European or North American bioregions.

And in that, it's literally undoing some of the brittleness that we've created in the push of globalizing everything. and making everything more energy intensive because we ship everything around the globe unnecessarily and we were chasing scale, scaling up. If we turn back to really looking at what technologies to use and how in order to provide people within a bioregion with the core basic needs of energy, water, some form of transport, education,

a fiber resource and a diverse diet. And of course, this is not some kind of prerogal falling back into survival units. Of course, we'll have global trade, and we will need global trade to have the enabling technologies developed that would help this re-regionalization. I think it's the operationalization of your great simplification, is to bring it back home into the context of communities and bioregionialization. And yeah, that's a long journey ahead, and it's encountered all of the legal systems and global trade tariffs and all the things that we've created in the last 50 years.

So you're saying that instead of having some technology or vision and scaling it around the world, you start with an understanding and a shift in consciousness. and you have local responses depending on where you are in the world. And those aren't necessarily interconnected, but the aggregate of all of them brings us more towards a regenerative culture. Yeah, I mean, you've been in these forums with government and stuff as well as when I follow you on LinkedIn. Like, if you take the same conversation with like the Ministry of Defense and how do we respond to climate change, It's the only way to build the systemic resilience into the system if we know that we're moving into a world of cascading collapses and massive disruptions. The only way that you can avoid that, like, people will suffer.

But if we now do what our species is the unique contribution as life in the bigger ecosystem, we're just a cell in a larger body. But our cell, this human capability, is the capability. of anticipation and foresight, that we don't know whether other species have to the extent that we do. And if we anticipate that the current economic system and many of the systems we've built over the last 200,500 and 1,000 years are about to transform in a profound way, then the best way to create resilience is to create redundancy, which means that core provisioning of water, energy, transport, food needs to be in a scale-linking way, provided as close to home as possible, but not exclusively. So here's the problem that I see, or the challenge.

Let's say there are millions of people that totally understand and agree with what you're saying, and they would like to have redundancy and locally, produced food, water, shelter, basic needs, transport. But then other people have their redundancy met by the potential energy and stored fossil fuels and the complexity that they still offer us, even at a recognized impact on the biosphere and increasing cost and unfairness. Won't that other culture that's relying on the potential energy that is at a flick of a switch at our fingertips or a digital transfer,

won't people prefer that until they have no other option? In other words, the things you're talking about are desperately needed in coming decades, but by the time the majority of people understand the framework you're presenting, the options will be fewer. I mean, what you've just described is my life in the last 25 years.

And I know you know, you know that too. Like it's no fun to say, I told, to be able to say, I told you so in 2002 or 2003. Like, for an academic,

it might be to say, oh, yeah, but, but it's actually really frustrating. So in that sense, just because it will take a while for people to wake up and it will be,

like we're already at, not a 5 to 12, but at 25 past 1. And if we take, until dawn to wake up, we're probably not going to survive. But we're now at a point where we don't have any guarantees anymore anyway. And you need to find pathways that both offer a path towards healing, both of communities, of social cohesion, of people's relationship to place and people's relationship to each other.

you need to have a path towards resilience in the face of disruption, so that's local provisioning as much as possible. And all of those are also a potential path of transforming the way that people interact and relate to the system. And it needs to be more attractive to be in that relationship with deep analog being, then the kind of disembodied world where we like to be on Zoom calls and solve the global problematique or lose ourselves in the metaverse. I think that as you yourself speak about so much, some of that other alternative will, to my mind, lose some of its wind in the sale as climate change will make it more and more clear that we can't burn more carbon. And as if we take that long, these resources are non-renewable.

There are increasingly scarce. And I don't need to tell you that. A viewer I met just recently at an airport came up to me and said, I have so many questions. And they were making fun of the fact that apparently I always say that, which I don't even recognize that I always say that. But in this case, I have so many questions, Daniel. So is it possible that there could be a scout team or a bunch of nodes around the world that recognize what you're saying and could get ahead of this and could that scale? I know you're affiliated somehow with the global eco-village network. And I met Amina Ball when I was in India.

And they have like thousands of eco-v villages around the world. Are those acting as third attractors for people? Or what are your thoughts on that? I mean, there's so many well-meaning networks that are trying to build sandboxes where aspects of what we're trying to birth is being lived in the presence. It's this, I think more and more we need to,

like part of why we're so trapped in not creating the truly new is that we are still thinking in transition means from we're here and we need to transition to this other world. And it's always a sort of, it's a relationship to the future that disempowers us with regard to our agency in the now. And there's this notion that a friend of mine, or two friends of mine, Bill Sharp, who also worked on Three Horizons and Tony Hodgson,

who's actually the co-originator of the Three Horizons, they speak of something called the future potential of the present moment. And for me, all these kind of, like I've been with the global eco-village network for 20 years. I lived at Finthorn. I ran Finthorn College for four years and brought universities to one of the most established ecovilages in Scotland. And for a while, I believed in the story that they were kind of living the new culture and implementing them. That's where I learned that the village scale isn't enough. That's where I lived, not intellectually, but in a lived way, understood that bioregional approaches are the enabling constraint around which you can do things.

But they're not a solution. There's still eco-villages are, to some extent, privileged people hiding away from confronting the mainstream culture by co-creating a better, more amenable culture amongst themselves. And then they're surprised that they very often fall out because most of them have slightly anarchistic tendencies questioning the status quo. And just because that's the one thing they have in common, they think they can create communities together. And which is wonderful. And I've learned a lot, they're pressure cookers for human development. And then I don't think they're like,

there's an interesting historical thing here. When Danela Meadows started the Ballotin Group and wrote that early paper of the Ballotin Group about the need for regional learning centers to bring people back into, to solving what I was just talking about, basically, solving the world problematique in the true context, in the real specific context of a particular region,

and that that needed a new kind of observatory and a new kind of learning center for the region, about the region. This, one of the, the main funder behind the global Ecovillage Network and Gaia Education is a Danish, Canadian guy called Ross Jackson, and he was part of the Ballotan Group. And so the strategic use of the eco-villages that already existed at that point, and the bringing together of them interfirst the Danish network and then the European network and then the different secretariats around the world in national networks.

And the original vision of making the more established eco-villages like Oroville and Crystal Waters and Finthorn and a couple of others, the farm, living and learning centers where people could practically learn about alternatives, basically living a great simplification in the modern age and improve well-being and improve the impact on the environment. That vision was there, but somehow in the, I don't know, when mid-2000s... Humans were involved.

Yeah, somewhere in the mid-2000s, humans were involved, and funding got scarce, and all sorts of things happened. And it's still, I mean, you know it. Like, failures contribute. Failures contribute hugely. And while many of these projects are failing, I mean, Albert Bates, who was one of the early members in the farm in the U.S., recently shared how the farm is turning into some form of suburbia and people are putting up fences. and he's kind of going, what happened here? I'm thinking about having him on to talk about biochar, which is a topic I've not discussed. Another topic that I've not discussed, you've mentioned several times here, which is bioregionalism.

So in a regenerative movement, how do localism and bioregionalism fit in? And maybe for our viewers, could you define what bioregionalism is for, One of my mentors, Satish Kumar, gave me this little warning. The Schumacher Institute. Schumacher College in Devon and England. He gave me this little thinking help regarding the use of any word that has ism at the end. He said, every ism creates a schism. So I don't like talking about bioregionalism.

it's bioregiening or bioregional way of relating to the landscape and that is our species survival pattern. We have always lived as a bioregional species for 99% of our species journey.

And fossil fuels is what kicked us off of that. Exactly. Well, early use of agriculture, settlement patterns, the shift towards the power over rather than power with system that happened with the onset of city, states, agriculture, and then the use of raw materials in a different way.

But the bioregional movement reberthed in a number of places. In Europe it was Sir Patrick Geddes, who was one of a biologist who became the founder of the discipline of town planning. he taught at Dundee and wrote a book in 1910 called Cities and Evolution in which he suggested that every city should be planned in the context of its what he called the valley section which was from the mountains down to the sea

the watershed that the city was in and it needed to build its basic provisioning on that and he actually was the first person to then map that area around Scotland in that way, in different layers, and that created overlay mapping that Ian McHark then further developed and that later developed into GIS, the global geographic information system. So that's on the one side. And then in America, you had the Planet Drum Foundation in Peter Burke and Raymond Dusman

and these guys, together with the poet Gary Snyder, start, and David Hanke in Arkansas, They were in the 1960s and 70s, bioregional movements that were also reconnecting to indigenous land use patterns and land like territories. And the first bioregional Congress in the U.S. I think was in, I would come up with the wrong. I think it was early in 1970s, if I'm right. And for me, what it's best described by Michael Thomas Hall's definition, which is a bioregion is both a biogeophysical terrain and the terrain of consciousness. How so? What does that mean? If you think of the place you grow up in,

and if you close your eyes and you make a kind of journey from that house away, by bicycle, near Dad's car, or whatever, there's normally a feature in the landscape crossing a bridge, a ridge, a canyon, somewhere, where there's a sort of felt sense of, okay, now we're leaving the Shire and we're out there in the real world. And likewise, when you come back, there is that feature in the landscape.

That's the territory of consciousness that for you defines a region. And there's a collective... And we all have that feeling. and all our ancestors presumably had that feeling. And likewise, when you, I just came back from a visit to my hometown, that's why we postponed the conversation. And I learned a lot about from a man that for 35 years ran the project that has led to the rewilding of the River Issa,

which the town Munich is on. And the political nightmare was to get that through the system and all of us. But the way he, because he's from the soul, all the way to past Munich, he has been in every single village along that river for decades talking to the people about their relationship to the river.

And so he knows exactly from each village and each region how they kind of go, well, over there. Well, they're not us. In most places, particularly in rural places, we have a very clear, and it doesn't mean a othering of

others. The boundary is a boundary of relationship building and of self-identity building. And it's that kind of boundary that we actually need as a sphere of meaning that enables true collaboration at a human scale. And so that's the terrain of consciousness that is actually still present in all landscape. We're losing it in many. And as we're losing languages that are specific to landscape in dialect or actually

real languages of that place, we lose a lot of the encoded information of the story of that place. I mean, one of the core things about regeneration is in terms of people asking, how is working regeneratively different. And this is coming from the work from Carol Sanford is you cannot work regeneratively if you don't work place and culture specific. So the work has to not just come out of the story of place as it's being told through the humans.

It also, the place itself, the geology, the hydrology, the hydrology, the climate has to inform the work. If we consider from the mountain to the sea and the way that the water moves and the community is built around it, and if we consider that each place should look at the resources it has to go towards a regenerative future, there are some places that only exist because of fossil fuels and cheap energy allowing them to. and their own regenerative capacity is not only low, because there is no river from the mountain to the sea

in many cities around the world. So does regenerativity and the things you're talking about imply massive movements of people, immigration, et cetera, what are your thoughts on that? I mean, massive movements of people are the forecast and reality of planet Earth. And yes, that is a really big question. As people try to heal the bioregions that they're in, even if they become successful, there will be disruptions of all.

all sorts and part of that will be the pressure of people coming in whose bioregions, the healing of whose bioregion has failed because it was too late. And that will, is a moral challenge and a question of how we as a species are capable of dealing with that. And it's to some extent the right of passage of our species where, what path we choose and how we deal with that. But it's literally, I think we're trapped in the scientific paradigm to the point that we're kind of have a blind spot in even shining the good work of science onto the possibility of how life synergetic processes and synergistic processes could actually really surprise us if we go in. into this deep healing of place and capacity building in place to meet basic provisions

and also the deeper nuanced conversation, how we would, in order to enable them, create a higher ground globally, to say what are the key mining and high technologies that are still needed in an enabling of this radically re-regionalized system. And of course, I'm fully aware that there's so many things where you kind of go, there's so many vested interest in the system, so many big power and industry players and so on. That chance this is going to happen. At the same time, because you were earlier asking about networks,

there are already existing networks that are working on building this, collapse resilience back into the system and they're pretty well funded and some of them are from the right my mind right intentions others are coming more from a sort of billionaire with a three-story

bunker survivalists or like preppers on steroids funding that kind of stuff but I mean how do you do your work knowing what you know

with increasing difficulty because this isn't a single issue podcast, as you're aware, everything is connected and a lot of people care or focus about climate change or social justice or international activism or whatever it is. And everything is dependent on this ancient sunlight and our monetary claims and our global system of just in time commerce. And as this sunlight dwindles and becomes more expensive, it's going to change everything. I don't have an easy answer for it. Okay, I'll tell you the truth. The truth is I handle it and I cope by hosting conversations with bright pro-future humans

like yourself. And that gives me a boost of oxytocin and serotonin to carry on. But it is really difficult. I mean, this is a musical chair's sort of moment. And like you said, it's a rite of passage. It will be, we're going through a right of passage for our species. It's a species level conversation. We know where we came from, how we got here, what we need, what we're doing.

At least we have the ability to know that. So I hope that there's an emergent changing of people's consciousness that comes from your work and mine and a lot of people that we know, and that that creates something that we can't yet spell out or articulate. That's my current thinking on it. Yeah, it's interesting because I also noticed that, I mean, Goet famously,

he said a lot of really wise things 200 years ago, and one of the things he said is that it's really difficult to speak about the new, without the language of the old bringing the old back in. And I just see that in all these movies, like there's so much blending of who I like this vision of a regenerative future or regenerative present, but I also like to be a tech entrepreneur and I'm horny about AI and I need to blend it all together or no. I know how to use cryptocurrencies to make all of this financeable.

And it just becomes a kind of real freak show of weird blending of memes. Could we have a weird freak show of a culture for a couple more decades where there are regenerative spots in the planet that are not only doing things bioregially, but their preferences and consumption and behavior habits are adjusted along with the implications of that? And simultaneously across the mountain and another valley are the tech bros and the crypto thing. Can those coexist or are they mutually exclusive? I mean, they probably will. The future is already here just unevenly distributed and there's a lot of terrible dystopias going on everywhere, already every day.

And there's also some wonderful kind of oytopias, good worlds going on in different places. I sit personally, I sit on like, Sometimes I find privileges hard to carry when you know what you know, because ultimately we're still very comfortable and can make a living doing what we're doing. And yeah, I have that same coping mechanism. Like my group therapy is also talking to interesting people and feeling I'm not alone. There are the people who actually care.

And even if they don't think we'll still have a chance, they still believe that doing the right thing, despite makes a difference. It makes a difference how we go out. And to bizarrely, I think, if enough of us, all of humanity, reaches the point of maturity of caring more about life and less about individual lifespan or our species' survival. And we find our peace with maybe living the end day of a relatively young species.

I think exactly in that point we will find the maturity to develop the patterns that will take us into not dying an early death as a species. I love that. I mean, what's at stake is really we're moving from a human-centered worldview to an earth-centered worldview. And that happens one human at a time, I guess. And if we have a critical mass of that, then better decisions and better examples might be out there. There's a beautiful little book that, if you haven't read it, I recommend it highly. It's called Saving Appearances by a guy called Owen Barfield. This small little book, easy read, one day read kind of thing, written in the 1960s, Oxford University Press.

And he was an Oxford scholar that also was close to the Anthroposophico, Montessori movement and so on. And in this book, what he means with saving appearances is the same as the phenomenologist, so David Abram and all these people are talking about like we need to get back in the body, back into the awareness of how the way we see the world, the organizing ideas we take, the stories we tell actually makes the world show up to us in a certain way. Reality isn't like experiences of reality is not a one-way process. There's no opening of eyes and there's this objective world just coming in. There's something going out, the ideas which we make sense of all of this.

And Owen Barfield speaks in this book about an arc of humanity. And he speaks about all indigenous cultures and their wisdom, their kincentric worldview, is a participatory worldview. You're in the world. You are the world. Nature, there is no word for nature because nature isn't another. that's he calls that primary participation it's it's the shaman who walks through the forest and sees the light hitting the dewdrop and there's a little spark and he knows that that was a

communication and that that was significant and he doesn't say oh yeah that was a light beam hitting the thing it's a physical manifestation of light being broken by a dewdrop um that's primary participation also may be called embodied participation also may be called embodied participation maybe. Well, yeah, I'm just saying what he calls it. And then he calls about the separation, the age of the Enlightenment, the world as other, and what that brings, science and technology and the capability of being detached enough, so you actually hurt your own skin, your own larger being and exploit its resources.

That's the culture we're in. And he basically says there is a final participation state. stage, that is a healing of those two. And twice now, as we were speaking, I find that's the sort of framing that he brought up ages ago of how do we come back in, that we understand. And science tells us that, of course, everything is fundamentally interconnected, and that, of course, the mind is, whether you look at Heisenberg or Bateson or all of those people, Maturana and Varela, they're all talking about that.

It's just that science in its popular form hasn't caught up to the true insights of complexity science, that this is a participatory, dynamic wholeness in which we're embedded, or dynamic complexity, and everything is an interaction in it. So we are participants. It's based on Ponqueray's three-body problems from 100 years ago, every system that has more than three interacting variables is a complex system and is mathematically non-linear and fundamentally unpredictable or uncontrollable unless you limit the time space or the time or locality.

And if we take that inside seriously, then more control, more prediction, more manipulation, through more data, through bigger datasets, through bigger blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is more of the old system. The insight is you can't predict and control it, so the new purpose for science should be teaching us to intelligibility, not prediction, dancing with the system. How do we really understand the system? And that has to be in the granularity of a specific place and context.

It can't be global conferences about global problems, more global abstract definitions, and then bring in the engineer and designers and have a solution hackathon, and then bring in the investors and have a three-minute pitch and then scale it up. And then when it arrives in place, oh, it doesn't fit. How surprising? It's like Einstein, the definition of madness doing the same thing over and over again, being surprised. that it's leading to the same fucking result. So on your road to this work on regenerative cultures,

I know you often use the term unlearn to unlearn the worldviews of our current dominant culture and ways of interacting with the world. What does it mean to unlearn? And what does this look like in your own personal life? Yeah, I was going to go there anyway because that's the only way I can talk about it. Basically, I became a biologist because I loved Goethe and Humboldt.

I grew up in Germany, and I somehow thought it was still possible to be a natural philosopher and kind of be just enthralled by the awe of how it all fits together, not by taking a deep dive into one specific, like the beta chain of the hemoglobin molecule and write a PhD on that.

And so I went into science in third degree in biology and zoology, oceanography, and evolutionary science, and studied a lot of marine mammals in Santa Cruz, Anya Nuevo State Park with Bernie Leboeuf watching elephants, seal's largest, longest marine mammal life history study. And spending lots of time on an Indian midden watching elephant seals during the breeding season

and then seeing how little of that three months experience was expressed in the data set I collected and how much was just Occam raised away. It just felt like a big animal going in and one fillet, coming out and the rest being discarded to use a brutal animal use metaphor. But basically I just got this hardened with science

and then couldn't leave the marine environment, became a scuba diving instructor for a while, realized that hedonism wasn't a solution either. And then I found out about Schumacher College, there I mentioned earlier. And that's where my

unlearning really started. I guess my interest because when you mentioned ancient sunlight, what's his name again that wrote the book? Thomas Hartman. Thomas Hartman. That book was after I had this diving instructor time, which was kind of at least 18 months, 24 months of not reading a single book

and being very much in the physical. And then we ended up, like I had this vision of starting in Eco Village and Environmental Education Center in southern Spain. And my wife and now wife and back then girlfriend, and I ended up in the Alpaharas in southern Spain with this hippie dream, long hair, V.W. Abbas, looking for an old thinker wanting to start the permaculture community.

And we ended up taking care of a friend's olive grove for a summer and had this eccentric English couple as neighbors. And they gave me hours of ancient sunlight as the first book that I read in Donkoy. case yes. And then through that book, because Neil Donald Walsh, the guy who wrote conversations with God,

wrote a foreword in that book. And suddenly, at the time, was very much on a spiritual seeking thing. I read all these conversations with God books. And that was a real inflection point in 2001, where I realized that I wasn't

ready yet to build this environmental education center. And through that time, that's when I then did rudimentary internet research when the internet was still spitting out kind of strange-looking printed documents. And I read a lot of Joanna Macy, Fred Jof Kappa, John Seed, and through that found that all of these people were teaching at Chumacher College. And then I realized that people would, there was actually a team of people doing a Masters in holistic science addressing all the things that I didn't like about science. And so like James Lovelock was teaching there, Robert Sheldrick was teaching,

the Henry Bortov, the student of Bohm was teaching Goethean science. There are Margaret Cahoon, also a Gertian scientist. David, I met David Suzuki, Carl Henry Coburb, Emery, Lovins, you name it. And I met them in human scale, like at a, in a small English countryside cottage of the Dartington Estate, where there were never more than 30, 35 people in the building. And very often our master's group were nine people, three teachers, and then the visiting teachers.

So the depth of dialogue, four hours a day of being with all these people, that's where learning and unlearning happened at the same time and also a sort of embodiment of like cleaning the college together and preparing food together and all of that. So before we get to the bioregionaling and the watershed and the change in value systems that would require that, could such an educational experience that you went through at Schumacher College, could something like that be scaled today around the world?

Well, I've been basically for 20 years trying to do that. in one way or another, not scaled in a kind of, or let's find the unicorn billionaire who wants to do some karma cleaning and throw 300 million at something and, oh yeah, let's scale it. I don't believe in those solutions anymore. I actually think that a bloody waste of time. But what I've seen that Gaia education, the educational,

arm of the global eco-village network we spoke of that was founded in 2005. I bumped into them at a conference at Finthorn, which was called Restoring the Earth in 2001, where people doing earth regeneration projects in ecosystems around the world, 250 people came together at Fintan for a week with John Munner-Cherry, who was working for UNIP at the time, and we declared the 21st century, the century of Earth's restoration. 120 people. And in that conference, there was a brief preview of some of the team of Guy education of what they were working on.

And it matched one-to-one what I was working on with my master's thesis at Schumacher College. And that's when my relationship with them started. And then when I finished my PhD on Design for Human and Planetary Health in 2006, the funding councils didn't have any understanding of what I was working on. It was too transdisciplinary, and I was in an art and design school, but it was all scientific, and so I just couldn't get any funding. And I used my last funding to go to Finthorn and do the Eco Village Design Education course. There was the very first one they were running, and it was a training of trainers' course.

And I wasn't necessarily as interested in what they were teaching because I thought I knew that material quite well, but I was interested in how they were teaching it an embodied practical way in an eco-village. And since then, I've basically helped over the years. They took that course online with that. They brought a lot more content in. And basically my PhD was written into that. And they've worked in 55 countries on six continents. And in places like Brazil,

there's a whole layer of connection between the different cities of networks that have gone through this course. There are people that meet each other. say, ah, eras a guy, you're a guy in. You also did that course. And then the level of conversation

jumps to a whole different conversation because you don't have to bore people with tell them what you know, because you know what, you have a shared background. And so that's one example. And then I've worked with a number of educational outfits. And right now,

a friend of mine, Tobias Lute, at Etihad Zurich, which is the seventh ranking university in the world quite respected, kind of the MIT of Europe. We're bringing the same kind of unlearning, re-learning, valuing, indigenous knowledge, bringing in different ways of knowing and warm data into a top science and engineering university

with this designing resilient and regenerative systems MOOC series, so anybody can do it for free. And then there's also a certificate of advanced studies and a master's in advanced studies. And so I keep believing that education is the leverage point to make this happen. And I've been working on it for 20 years. And I've had moments of literally talking to a San Francisco-based.com billionaire about, or just after my book came out, and he asked me, people tell me you have all the answers.

And I said, well, they haven't read my book. There are 250 questions in it. I'm not offering answers. If anybody says to you they have all the answers, I would be careful about that. And that's not how it works in America. In America, you just say, sure, yeah, give me the money and I'll show you all the answers. And then I was asked the question, so where do you think is the biggest leverage point? And then I said education, and the answer came, oh, that's too slow.

And that's precisely where we're fucking up, because that's why we do what bioacomolafis says. So beautifully in his question, maybe the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis. And that's what I see over and over again. People think because they were successful in creating a unicorn in the dot-com world, that they know how to scale and how to implement things, rather than trust that what is needed is so close to the ground that they can't get it with reporting. It can't be mega funds of through 100 million at this vision. It needs to be trusty, locally deployed money that, like there's some funders now that are starting to identify local agents that know the local system and then just build

trust with that person and then give that person almost like a flow fund to fund small and unconventional projects in context. Have you heard of local peace economies? No, but that sounds good. Yeah, that's an example of that in the U.S. So when you talk about unlearning and teaching and some of the efforts you mentioned, is it older people that want to shift like you mentioned Fendhorn that they've experienced all this in their careers

and they see the logic and veracity of what you're saying, or are the young people 22 years old that are absolutely clear that our current global high carbon pulse society, its days are numbered, and so they want to move in this direction. What is the distribution of students in your teaching? Well, it's shifting a lot over the years. And that's also part of, like, I always remember that when I finished my PhD, my second PhD supervisor was John Todd, like a real elder to this movement,

together with Bill McCloney. So they found a new alchemy institute in 1969. And I visited them in 2006 at Cape Cod at their house. and there's actually a video of the conversation on YouTube. And I asked them, so what has changed from you writing the briefing paper to the 1972 conference on the environment in Stockholm? And like, have we actually moved an inch forward

or have we just move further into the abyss? And of course we've moved further into the abyss, but the big change that has happened, that they talked about back then, is that, well, when we started, we were 35, 40 people and we all knew each either by first name and were globally connected through telefax and phone calls and letters. Now there are massive movements that are rooted and give nuance, different language, an approach to these impulses in pretty much every country or most countries around the world.

They're still marginal, maybe, but they're, They're there. And in terms of what I see with, like the profile of Gaia education, the educators, the people designing the program somehow thought people would take these courses to start eco-villages. But very soon it became clear that people were just interested in well-being and right relationship and appropriate participation at that kind of scale. And so most of the profiles were people that. were kind of social entrepreneurs and community workers and kind of community activist

consultancy organizational development type people who really wanted to work with their context and their local community. And it's lovely. And it was different in different contexts because it's so wide. Like there were programs in Bangladesh and programs in Senegal. There's a national ministry for eco-v villages in Senegal. And the EcoVillage mode of development is the national development plan. So there were interesting things happening there.

But what I've seen, like, for example, now with the ETH course, the MOOC was so successful that normally when you open up a MOOC in the first year, a massive open online course, run on this X platform that is trying to make a quality education accessible to everyone. internet access. Normally, you build it and then you run it with 30 or 50 of your mates. You just offer them a free run and say, please go through it and give us some feedback. Well, we just threw ourselves in the deep end and announced it and made it public. And we had 2,500 people from 101 countries.

And that community has now grown to over 7,500 people. in 130 countries, and they are extremely diverse. So something is changing. Do you think that the impulse and the demand for that is more about people craving community than it is about knowledge about some more sustainable future? Is the impulse, I want to be with people that make sense of the world and see what I'm seeing and learn and travel this together?

Yeah, that's a good point because I do, like the demographic profile of the echo chamber is slightly different in different contexts. And for example, when I a couple of times was invited to Jeremy Lent's Deep Transformation Network, you kind of look at the people and you realize it's a large group of retirement-aged North Americans who are kind of kind of. instead of watching a bloody telenovela or something, spending their evening with human beings in conversation, somehow engaged in something meaningful. So there is definitely some of those people, but you also mentioned young people. There's a huge uptake of this region, village, that and region,

and people trying to kind of create, there's in Portugal soon, there will be a gathering, of the tribes that is some form of reinventing burning man in Portugal with a bit of a region paint on it. And I'm saying it's slightly tongue-in-cheek because I don't think the motives of everybody involved are fully to serve the movement. But there are, that the interest is vast.

The problem with, there is actually one cultural current, I do see post-pandemic that people are suddenly interested in community and eco-village-type stuff again, but it's being rebranded as Regen Village or whatever. And the danger I see, and that's why I think it would be lovely if you invited Albert Bates on your show, is that we are missing some of the vital wisdom of the elders who have run 40, 50, 60-year real-world experiments. Of course, the world has changed in that time, but there's still a shed lot to learn from that. So do you fear or do you see that the word regeneration is starting to be misused like sustainability or even climate change or fractional reserve banking or some of these terms that have become so used that the real meaning is being lost? Yeah.

I mean, it was vicious. the way it came in really fast as early as 2018. I can't remember it was. There was some kind of big marketing agency actually published a report that was called Regeneration, the New Sustainability. And when I saw that, I was like, oh, wow, they're really getting onto this killing of the meme, watering down of the meme, making it understandable because there are too many versions of it, very fast.

And particularly in the agricultural industry, you've got the big Monsanto, Cargill, BASF, they all got into it more seeing an opportunity here. There are people now doing this stuff that everybody thinks is the next thing after organic, but it's not regulated yet. So why don't we get in on it? And then we can sell it to people and blah, blah.

So there's definitely a lot of misuse of word, but at the same time, if we anchor it, like I did at the very beginning, in life itself and as the survival pattern of our species, Homo sapiens, then I think there's still a lot of promise in it being a kind of unifying process that enables people to make that shift towards healing places and healing context again. And so doing place-sourced work rather than system change work. No, I agree with that. But the more you really look into the concept of regeneration and trophic cascades and net primary productivity,

the more the reality of the disconnect between our current scale and something that is, you know, regenerativeable over centuries. and decades ahead becomes like really stark. For instance, in addition to all the 100 million barrel of oil equivalents per day that we use of ancient sunlight, humans are appropriating 35 to 40% of all the net primary productivity hitting the planet and directing it to our endeavors. I did a paper 15 years ago, I'm sure the math is almost the same, but a forest in the United States or in Europe regenerates or grows around 2.6% of its biomass every year.

So from the sun and from the soil and the rain, a large tree will expand by two and a half percent, give or take. So that's the interest. So when we talk about regeneration using some human technology combined with the natural flows of Earth systems, It's a smaller amount of yearly and daily interest. So that is a wake-up call if you really research it. Well, I mean, the thing is we need to pay attention to the centropic effect. What is that? It's that if we do most of the hard data on growth rates and so on,

are in monoculture systems or focused on specific species in a kind of very, all context removed, we're just doing a study of this species. And when you actually work with systems in this nurturing the diversity in the system, actually with periodic pulse disrupting the system, in order to create signals in the system that say, help, we need growth again because we've just been pruned. Those exudates of the sub-root system actually make the entire forest grow faster and also help the plants to be healthier and more resilient. And the density of rootstock and the mycelial networks that they can then build create increased communication,

between the trees, which creates increased resilience against pests and all of that. It creates resilience because the trees can actually use that internet of connection under the ground to shift vital elements across the system. And most of our data that kind of engineering style goes into this, well, yeah, all this talk about, like Bill Gates is famous for always going on about, you can't. solve the gribein problem by planting trees. It's, yeah, if you think like a computer geek, you can't. But if you understand how ecology works, you can.

Because it's not just about planting trees. It's about healing cells. It's about mycelian networks. It's about restoring grasslands and water. It's all one healing process. And it's actually at the same time healing every single cell, the microflora of our guts. of our mouths. It's a salutogenic, a health-generating approach to how we fit back into the system. And in that, I believe, of course, we need many more people to manage those systems.

They will not, and this is the danger that in the bastardization of regenerative agriculture, there are the geeks that say, it will all be drones and there will be robots and harvesting, and we all just be whatever, playing cards while, it's just, you know, the techno fantasies that people promise. But a regenerative system is a system that understands that we can reinvent our education system. We can reinvent work. We can solve well-being issues and human connections here. We don't need dating agencies anymore and everything.

If we connect people into the joy, of taking care of a thriving ecosystem, of an agroforestry landscape, where I can't tell you how much joy it is for me and my family and how much health to just have nine chickens and eat healthy eggs that are still warm from being laid every morning. Since then, I can't eat eggs anywhere else anymore. I do the same. That's why I was late for this podcast, because I have two baby chickens and I was trying to protect them from the, the guinea fowl. I wouldn't have it any other way. So you and your family are doing a,

my understanding is a regenerative forestry project on Mallorca where you live. What was the inspiration for that? How is it going? What are your hopes and dreams about that? It's, well, I mean, 20 some years ago when I was in that phase of my life in the Albuhrara are trying to set up that eco-village in southern Spain. I heard myself say a lot that I would love to live a life in which somewhere between four to six hours a day I could do intellectual work and writing

and connecting with people and learning and all of that. And somewhere between four and six hours a day, I could do physical work of connecting with place, with landscape, with wood, with real analog engagement. And it's actually really difficult. I even went to the eco-villages, hoping that that must be the ideal place

to have that lifestyle. And again, specialization is for insects, but it came back in. The people who were good at finances in the eco-villages were in the finance department spending their time on the computer, doing their accounts, and the gardeners were in the gardening.

And there wasn't a creative mixing of it in a way. So yeah, for me, having through the privilege of an inheritance from my father who died three, four years ago, been able to become a custodian of 6,900 square meters of this beautiful island, I finally had an opportunity

to do the work of entering into deep relationship with a place. And it's so, it's like, it's a hyper object in the sense that it gets more and more complex, the deeper you look into the detail of it. It's, first, I was busy planting trees, 350 trees by now. But then you build relationships with each tree, maybe not everyone makes it,

but it's been a very good survival rate so far. Some of them were very small trees. Some of them were larger trees. But after three years, you have a relationship with the land. You begin to see the efforts. I've found a source of spent organic mushroom-growing substrate. So after they harvested mushroom flushes and then they composted all of that, I got lorry loads of the stuff from about 30 kilometers from here

because I'm in my 50s and I can't start from zero and build up the soil. over the next 50 years. And to see what happens when you bring organic matter and nutrients back into the system. And to see how it works when you align the trees in such a way that in the high sun of 2 o'clock in the afternoon, they shade each other. And then in between the trees, you grow the vegetables. It's just for me, it's been really remarkable. not just as a agro-fitness and becoming fit again and coming back into my body again and balancing

all this Zoom-based online work and all that. But it's been a deep personal re-inhabitation process, like really re-inhabiting my body, growing roots literally in this place, building a relationship to the climate, the patterns. It's been magic. And yeah, we're in the middle of it, the forest is slowly taking shape. It's a lot more verdant as it was. I'm a bit overwhelmed with being a father, renovating a house and doing all this work at the same time because it's more than one human being can really whoop.

But yeah, it's a privilege. It's a privilege. I hear you. How many kids do you have? Just one. After 21 years of not having kids together, Ellis and I were, surprised by now almost eight years ago.

And so we have a daughter who turned seven next Monday. And so what is your daughter learning before she has to unlearn that's different from the other students in Spain, her age, might you speculate? Well, I mean, poor little creature speaks four. languages at seven because her mother is English, I'm German, we live on Mallorca and there's Spanish and Mayokin or Catalan and she's at a school that is a local school that speaks Catalan and Spanish so yeah she she's now finally getting into the easy sailing phase where we're not adding another language every

couple of years but also her intimate relationship with these chickens and the way she really communicates with them and is a bit of a chicken whisperer and she can handle them much better than I can. And having birthday celebrations where all the little ones plant a tree together and then she can meet that tree again and again and again and can see that that tree

that she planted on a sixth birthday on her seventh birthday looks very different. And so all those things I think are positive learnings and she's in a great school that there's no exams, no classes or project-based very much focused on emotional

literacy and not getting to be worried about whether you start reading with one or with one and a half, like in the first year or the second year or whatever. But that's it. I don't know, do you have kids? I do not.

other than my cultural children from the University of Minnesota, no biological ones. Because you do notice when you sent them to school how insidious, even in an alternative school, the societal norming is and how it's a fine balance

because you can't say, oh, that's terrible, I don't want her to be brainwashed in that way, pull her out. I mean, how are you going to be in a dysfunctional world where everybody's crazy? You need to understand, the collective's insanity to some

extent, otherwise you're the crazy person and you can't engage at all. So it's not fair to not socialize at all, but at the same time, you do have to be careful of what comes in. When I first really struggled with this,

of realizing how, as my friend Monish, Jane provocatively likes to question, maybe education is the worst crime against humanity ever committed. that's a sentence that is worth sitting with a couple of times because it sounds too radical, but when you really think of it, there's a lot to it.

Is it education or is it this particular type of education? Because your whole last 20 years is about education. Of course, it's what we call education in the education system invented in the first Industrial Revolution in Victorian England and exported through colonialism all over the world the system where you produce the factory workers

the cogs for the machines of industry the sitting in roles and repeating viral information competing against each other singling out disciplines and skills sorting

the population into the mind workers and the hand workers that kind of system I think has a lot to answer for with regard to effing things up but yeah I had a conversation with Nora Bateson when I was first really

worrying about like I knew I couldn't also homeschool like that's just too much and she said that the way she worked with this with regard to her daughter was this notion like what's the

Persephone or something the wife of Odyssois in the like in the Greek mythology while he was on his long journey where he couldn't come home to Ithaca everybody wanted to get

married to his wife all the princes were kind of saying he's never coming home we want to be married with you and have your Ithaca for us and the way that she kept them at bay was she was knitting a scarf and she said publicly that

I will take my time I'm still waiting for my husband and I'm making up my mind about who to marry and I won't tell it until the scarf is knitted and she was in public all day long when she was having these meetings always busy knitting the scarf

in an order to give a dishoise more time at night she would undo the scarf what she'd knitted in the morning and that's the metaphor of you send your children to school where they get knitted and then you have to spend the evenings and the weekends and the holidays unknitting. And it's helping me dance that dance with education and my daughter.

That's great. So earlier in the episode, we talked about dystopias and you mentioned there were some oytopias. Could you maybe give our listeners a couple of examples of things that have surprised you that you were excited about that are moving in a positive direction around the world somewhere? Well, because we talked about bioregioning, I find it really encouraging that that is coming back big time in many different contexts. Even at very high levels within the kind of UN system, people are beginning to understand that there's something to the regional scale. but much more on the grassroots or regional network level, whether it's across Central and South America, in North America, in Canada,

in parts of Africa and parts of Europe, Asia, there are movements defining their watershed, their context in which they will make their stance to become regenerative in that place. And whether it's the regenerative communities network that John Fullerton founded through the Capital Institute that then sort of evolved. And then a lot of people like Stuart Cohen from the Buckminster Fuller Institute and Isabel Carlisle from the bioregional learning center in the UK. And a number of friends have just, they're just running this what's called bioregional conversation. series of webinars where they basically have people from these different bioregions share about

their experience and how they work. And there's beginning to build some form of supportive course that would help people who are trying to work bioregially do that. And in a kind of parallel way, there's lots of parallel attempts. like for example the Common Land Foundation in the Netherlands, William Verveda, who was the head of IOC in Netherlands for 20 years, he took a year out after stepping down from that job and then wrote a sort of paper which he called the Four Returns Framework.

And then he fundraised and built an organization which is now very strong called Common Land. and they're working at landscape scale in the intersection between social, ecological and economic regeneration but through the landscape healing. And they use the theory, and invest quite significantly in building the social networks in a region

to work on what they call the return of inspiration as the first return. And focusing that on ecosystems restoration and so going into the practice not just talking about it even if it's in small contexts builds working together

so it builds human social returns and ecological returns because you actually are doing some tree planting and healing work together and then if you foster that long enough and you show that when the vision is concrete of how could we bring this landscape back how could we support this aquifer?

The important bit here is that it's a thinking that is ecosystems thinking. So it's over 25 years. And that was the key thing that Willem did so beautifully is that he actually turned big funders down when they said the classic, will be with you for the first three years, and then we'll revisit whether we're still funding you. He said, OK, I don't care that you offered me a million. If you're not with me for 25 years, I'm not interested. And that's, Kouhanes.

And that approach is really helping. Like, it's really working. And what he's now able to do, because he's seven, eight, nine years, ten years into the story in some landscapes is that he can actually make an argument to show it wasn't mad to spend half a million per landscape to do the social process, the theory you, with all the stakeholders. because that built the network, the associations, the cooperatives, the new entrepreneur, your fabric that then allowed ecological and social returns to really flourish. And look at this, you only have to be patient for six or seven years, and now economic returns are actually starting to come into the region. It's the local economy is kick-starting.

Here, here. So as I predicted off camera, I didn't get to half of my questions, but let me ask you a two-part question. For the viewers who are watching this, who are all around the world, what sort of steps, first steps would you recommend if they intuitively recognize the importance of bioregionaling and localism and doing things in this? their place. What was some first steps that you could recommend? I think, and I'm still at the beginning of this, because I'm in a weird space that I've chosen a bioregion that is not my native bioregion. I was born in Munich, and I'm working with a group of people that are doing bioregional regeneration

of the Isam Munich bioregion, which is interesting to, in my body feel how differently I can be in that group, but a simple fact that I was born in that bioregion and that I have all these early childhood memories along that river and went to a monastery school up that river and all these kinds of, it immediately gives me sort of a standing and a participatory allowance in that system, whereas here on Mallorca, it's a culture that has been invaded by so many different places around the world, that it's very different to engage with the Mayokine and trying to help the system here. But to answer your question quickly. Maybe the first step is to move back to where you were born.

Well, I don't think so, because we all have, like, I personally spent a lot of time, like all my childhood with my grandmother in the Mediterranean and all the holidays. And so I was also imprinted on the Mediterranean. My passport is German, but I never felt German. I actually felt it was weird to go back there. So I feel I am in the place that I feel most at home in, but of course I have to accept that on this particular island, people will never really see me 100% as somebody who's from here. But I think for anybody who wants to start the process of what Peter Burke and Gary Snyder called re-inhabitation, coming home into the body, coming home into community, coming home into the bioregion is about paying attention. It's about having interest again

in the detail, not having this way of seeing that a tree, general label, all trees, I've seen trees before, so you don't see the tree in front of you, you don't even care what type of tree it is. just like I studied biology but I've learned so much about trees in the last three, four years that I realized the entire landscape opens up like a book opens up when you learn how to read when you understand the trees

I've walked in this world for 48 years and now I can read it and it's that kind of coming home whether it's tree, water, ancient stories, the local fairy tales, the way that names talk about what happened at that place, the deep kind of aboriginal knowledge of that place that is beyond what the culture that currently calls itself, the local culture, it's deeper than that. By finding that, you can find that in every place, fall in love with the place again. sounds like

almost an animist perspective. Basically we need to come back to an animist perspective because otherwise we won't treat our larger body in a way that doesn't hurt it because you have to be

an animist to understand that what I do to this world I do to myself to some extent. And I think if you deeply understand the complexity of

what's coming out of science right now and how it is all interrelated with regard to microbiome and soil and all of that, you begin to see that it is actually somewhat more parsimonious to use the scientific term to assume that life and consciousness is primarily present in everything, then that it emerges ex nihilo at some point in the system. And so it's just as scientifically valid to understand life as a planetary process that manifests through species and individuals,

but is one whole un and infolding in a kind of BOMian way, then it is to map that complexity through individuals and species and their characteristics, I'm not saying that that science is false, but we're not looking at the other side of the coin, which is what James Lovelock and all those people try to build, and what somehow Earth System Science is inviting us more into and soil science, and it's inviting us more into and medical science. And now even Quompen field theory is making us basically understand that the story we tell about the nature of reality

is highly limited and limiting. So second part of this question, in addition to giving advice to listeners on how to be more connected to their place, what about the town and city councils around the world that have kind of high status, successful people that were voted or elected or volunteered to be part of that,

but they're part of the economic superorganism. with all the modern complexity and inventory and supply chains. And how could someone in that position start thinking about regionalizing and more local futures and preparing their city or their watershed if they adopt that perspective ahead of when they will have to? Do you have any words of advice for that sort of listener? I think that the work of Patrick get us on town planning. And there's actually a wonderful retake on that by a guy called Herbert Girade, who worked for the World Futures Council, and they published a little booklet that is freely available on the internet called Regenerative Cities.

So if you put World Futures Council, regenerative cities. And in that, he describes the move from Petropolis to ecopolis. as a thinking tool. And he shows how a city can actually do all the kind of closing the loops and so on to make its international trade dependencies a lot less and build these vital relationships of the city to the hinterland. And this goes beyond just building regenerative, sustainable, salutogenic cities. It is actually vital to health.

it's vital to food security, it's vital to disaster preparedness. It has so many, it's vital to avoiding the kind of mess that your country is in right now. Because the disenfranchising of the ruralities by the city elites leads to the uprising of demagogues like your once and possibly future president. that is like if we if we want to in it it is a creative way of taking the energy out of the sales of the ultra-right people that are fishing for these disenfranchised people because if you come back to bioregion in place and you clearly distinguish yourself we're not creating a bioregion for us against others. You really bring it in like this bioregions is richer because of the diversity that is now here. Also, our diversity of opinions and different nationalities in this bioregion

is part of life's diversity and therefore part of the creative potential of this place. In that framing, we can build city and rural development that is much more inclusive to everybody who's there, that engages them, that creates new job opportunities, new opportunities for production and consumption in a regional economy that buffers against the volatility of the now increasingly volatile global economy that if you haven't noticed, is in its last 24 years. We can briefly talk about why I think that is, if you want. Not 25 years, 24. Yeah, please briefly talk about why that.

I mean, it's just that I've noticed that when guy education, first put out the online course and in that course we've had a really radical critique of the growth economy and how money is structured and how what's the core of why national economies need to grow it at minimum of 3% per annum it's to do with taking different like creating money out of nothing and creating differential interests for deposits and loans and um In that process, like, basically what's shifted, and the first person I heard say this, and it made a lot of sense to me, is Al-Nuad Latga, who wrote this book on kind of post-capitalist philanthropy recently. When in 2010, I would give talks and critique the growth economy.

A lot of people would just dismiss me or still completely outright. I is one of these radicals, forget it. But 2015, that had already changed quite a bit. And more and more people were talking about degrowth and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what's now interesting is that if you talk to a complete arch growth economist and you ask him the question, do you think the global economy or the national economy of the United States is going to double in the next 24 years, they will look at you and will kind of fall silent and will basically say,

I really don't think so, if they're honest. And that is indirectly admitting they were in the last 24 years, because if you have a economy that grows at 3% per annum, you get doubling within 24 years. Yeah, now I get it. I agree with you. The next doubling is not going to happen.

No. Yeah. So this has been awesome, and I will publicly, I will publicly say, that I want to have you back. I do have a few closing questions, though, that I ask all my guests. So you gave some advice on regionalizing and localizing,

but do you have any other advice to listeners who are carrying the burden of all this knowledge like you and I are just in their lives? What could they do, any behaviors or patterns or rituals or suggestions that you have? It's interesting. on the one end I want to put in parentheses one has to be really careful to give advice because things come out of context and it's so easy to give advice

from a position of privilege that can be quite offensive to a lot of people I live I mentioned earlier that one of the sort of epistemological Aikido I do in my book is that I don't summarize each subchapter with a bunch of bullet points and say, here are your take-home points. I actually purposefully turn them into questions.

So at the end of every subchapter, there are a bunch of questions and it adds up to about 250 questions throughout the book. And because of that, I often get asked, so can you leave our listeners with some questions? Okay. Let's do that. And what I often answer is that there is an ancient triethica that you can find in almost every indigenous culture around the planet. The whole way of council, circle work and rites of passage work often hinges on those three questions. Does it serve myself? Does it serve my community?

And does it serve life? and the interesting thing there is that in our world there will be some listeners who go what the first one is not very eco-social whatever, that's the ego-speaking blah blah blah but you can't serve the collective and you can't serve life if you don't serve yourself

if you think you're part from it and so but the important bit is to not only ask one of those three questions the important bit is to get into a daily practice of when you have to make a decision that affects how you live your life and how you act, to find two good answers on all of those three levels. And if you can't find answers on one of them levels, then to really think about whether to go ahead with that. I think that's like it worked for our ancestry in many places. to ask those questions.

That's an excellent response to that. How would you change that advice or supplement it for the young listeners of this program in their late teens or early 20s starting to learn about or trying to unlearn what they've been taught? What advice do you have for them? Again, my echo chamber seems to suggest that they're actually really tuned in in many ways and they understand that the system is being counted out. and it's a weird thing to be in when you're that age

to kind of go, hey, wait a minute, didn't you promise us if we work it at school we would get somewhere in life? And at the same time, I think that there's a huge opportunity to create the world in a new way with a closer relationship to place and community. And in the, in this

the kind of more privileged young people listening which I'm probably taking this opportunity of that phase of life to really learn skills that aren't just intellectual but are all so embodied skills to pay attention that you don't just have it all up here but that you can actually do something

whether it's woodwork or whatever carpentry or whatever is of interest. And the other dimension, which is more of a call for, please help, is I have realized that if we want to spread this meme of our innate capacity to create regenerative cultures and this kincentric participatory worldview, if it's only two old guys with overeducated backgrounds and PhDs like the two of us talking about it, that's not how culture shifts. We need the artists, the musicians, the dancers, the graffiti artists to do this stuff. We need a form of activism like Banksy stuff that just hits the system in a really creative way in every street corner with its own, like holding a mirror up to how perverse this world is that we supposedly call normal. And I, yeah, so enjoy the kind of youthful activist sabotage the system energy and be creative.

Like, and I want to hear the regenerative culture rap. If you had a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to you or your reputation, what is one thing you would do to change human and planetary future trajectory? There's so many places that could go there. I mean, what do you mean by one thing that is actually feasible to do? Well, a lot of the things that we think in our minds would help the future, we can't do them because of the political hierarchy and the rules and the social ceiling of what can be said.

So if you didn't have to worry about any of that, could you speculate on one macro change? even if it's not practical. And the reason I ask this is to act as an Overton window mind-expanding question from different guests who've thought a lot about this, where ultimately are the leverage points, whether they're popular or not? And I just wanted your quick take on what is one direction that could, if it were feasible, even if it's not, actually result in massive change for the better.

I think it's where we look for answers and solutions and it's written into the Torah with the Golan, it's written into the Bible, it's written into Marlowe's and Goethe's Faust, it's written into the famous Zauber Learling, the wizard's apprentice that Goethe wrote and Disney made it a little cartoon out of it's in Mary Shelley's

Frankenstein over and over again we're warned that our cleverness our way of looking at the world and then turning that into technology so that the power of science and technology

can create a self-fulfilling prophecy a suction that can actually where the the magic runs away with the Wizards Apprentice

and becomes like a major problem. And I think the way we talk about technology and the way we still believe the technology and AI and all these kind of things, let's just bend it, let's just use it, we can do stuff with it and the potential and all of that.

I think that that's where we really need to reach a new maturity of not doing something just because we can because we can do all sorts of fucking things but but we need to have the maturity

of saying yes we can but we won't and we need to find the maturity of a system that enforces that I mean you've talked a lot with with Danish Machenberger like that whole how do we control and create memorandums on certain tech

and hopefully you're right and we run out of energy before that tech becomes ubiquitous because if it does work, F, you see K, eat. Well, we actually have magic wands right now. The carbon pulse has afforded us to do so many things, which we do because we can, like you just said. So what you're really making an appeal for is wisdom over cleverness and I happen to agree. This was fantastic. I am going to have you back on some roundtables. If you do come back on an individual episode in the future,

can you speculate on one topic that you are passionate about that you would like to take a deep dive on that's relevant to human futures? Obviously, education and agroforestry are things you're working on. But is there one topic that you could suggest? Health. Health and solutogenesis. There's a whole... Salutogenesis?

There's a guy called Aaron Antonovsky, who in the late 1960s developed an alternative theory of health that I think is vital to build the meta-framework to the response we have. That's why I wrote my PhD in 2006 on design for human planetary health rather than design for sustainability. And in that, I argued for salutogenic design. And I'm beginning more and more to understand that when people talk about regenerative design these days and the bioregional pattern and all of that, like talking about planetary health and solutogenesis and health as the emergent property at different scales within this nested wholeness of which way are expressions, that could be a really interesting. Let's do it. Let's do it. And if you have the time, I would love to, because I would like to put the, who's speaking and who's asking wait to the other side and ask you a few questions about your work.

Would you be willing to come on voices of the regeneration sometime? Absolutely. Yeah? Great. Perfect. I'll send your email about it. Happy to do it. So nice to meet you finally.

And we're very aligned, my friend. and to be continued. Thank you. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit ThegreatSimplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast,

check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No, Troublemakers media and produced by Misty Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyan, and Lizzie Siriani.