This article was originally posted here on the Bioregional Earth website.

The concept of fractal scale-linking is central to a vision of a bioregional Earth. Pioneering bioregionalist David Haenke speaks of bioregions as eco-holo-fractals, terminology that may seem esoteric — until you unpack it.

The first part of the term (eco) refers to bioregions’ natural and social ecologies — or “geographic terrains” and “terrains of consciousness” in the words of fellow bioregional progenitor Peter Berg — which applies at the scale of specific bioregions.

The second and third parts of the term refer respectively to bioregions’ holonic (simultaneously self-contained and a part of larger systems) and fractal (self-similar across scales) natures, applying both at and beyond the scale of specific bioregions.

In other words, holonic, fractal, and ecologies apply to bioregions within the borders of their own terrains. More significantly, the holonic and fractal framings understand these borders also serve as bridges, interconnecting bioregions to lower and higher scales — particularly the latter, as bioregions are holonically “a part of larger systems.”

This final point carries significant implications: namely, that bioregions function at the self-contained scale while simultaneously interweaving into a global tapestry of a bioregional Earth.

These implications are so significant as to warrant spelling them out more explicitly: a bioregional approach toward regeneration of the entire Earth requires practitioners to adopt what we might call fractal consciousness — working synchronously at specific bioregional and cross-bioregional scales (all the way to the planetary or even cosmic scales).

This fractal consciousness becomes increasingly important to stewarding the coherence and sustaining the integrity of a bioregional approach as its profile rises, and thereby necessarily contends with co-optation and dilution. For example, far-right factions embrace bioregional isolationism (for example in the northwest US), which contravenes the fractal consciousness that defines authentic bioregionalism (which Regenerate Cascadia upholds).

We at r3.0 (Redesign for Resilience & Regeneration) embrace this fractal consciousness (or more precisely eco-holo-fractal consciousness, but we’ll keep things simple here to explore just this one aspect) through how we enact our work on bioregional coherence stewarding. To provide specific examples of this interweaving in the context of the story of Bioregional Earth, I share three elements of our work: Bioregional Convening, Bioregional Knowledge Commoning, and Bioregional Co-Governance.

Bioregional Convening

We at r3.0 curate three main forms of Bioregional Convenings: Dialoguing, Conferencing, and Confluencing. Each of these plays a conscious role in weaving Bioregional Earth coherence.

Dialoguing

After a year of hosting Open Dialogues on a diversity of issues, we entered 2025 devoting all our work — including our Open Dialogues — to what we call “bioregioning.” In curating the focal issues of these sessions, which mix presentations with participant engagement, we consciously seek to engage globally, in particular with initiatives that may be lesser known.

For example, our Third Open Dialogue spotlighted the work of the South Asia Bioregionalism Working Group, exploring several angles of bioregional mapping in India and cross-border bioregional governance in the Himalayas, while the Fourth Open Dialogue shifted attention eastward to Australia to apply an Indigenous Relational Ethos to a bioregion approach before downscaling to the municipal context in Sydney and even the neighborhood lens in Waverly. The Second Open Dialogue on Permaculture & Bioregioning not only features speakers from Africa (Tunisia and Uganda), but also explores permaculture application in a refugee settlement, introducing the issue of forced displacement as a bioregional question.

We’re also hosting a parallel series of monthly dialogues on Bioregional Carrying Capacities in collaboration with the Design School for Regenerating Earth, introducing theoretical, conceptual, and methodological dimensions at diverse scales as precursors to piloting applications in specific bioregions.

Conferencing

As we enter our second decade of convening our annual conference, we’re focusing this year’s online r3.0 Conference exclusively on the bioregional context. The theme, Braiding Bioregional Resilience & Regeneration: Learning to Reinhabit Earth Together, encapsulates our focal exploration of fractal consciousness and interweaving into a global bioregional tapestry.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the first session, Bioregional Earth: Braiding Bioregions Globally Across 3 Horizons, which features representation from four continents (North America, South America, Asia, Australia) to consider how bioregional efforts interweave globally. As well, the session features United Nations representation to consider how to evolve our legacy nation-state context into the emergent Bioregional Earth context — or in the terms of the Three Horizons framework, from Horizon 1 to Horizon 3.

Confluencing

Given the virtual nature of the Conference, we’re expanding on the Confluence modelprototyped last year by r3.0 Advocation Partner And Now What. A Confluence is an in-person opporunity to both experience and process the online Conference content in community.

This year, we’re inviting bioregions to convene autonomous in-person Confluences concurrent with our Conference, enabling them to both benefit from global perspectives on “bioregioning” and also set their own bioregion-specific priorities outside the Conference times.

In the lead-up to the Conference, the Design School for Regenerating Earth and r3.0 are collaborating to integrate the Confluence organizing process into the Design School’s How to Organize Your Bioregion learning journey, for cross-organizational reinforcement.

The third day of the Conference is devoted to a Global Confluence Debrief, enabling the 40+ bioregions that have already registered to reflect on how the Conference content informs and intersects with their own unique bioregional contexts, thus inviting in-depth cross-pollination of learnings (reinforcing the fractal Bioregional Earth consciousness). To respect bioregions in time zones that don’t align with the Conference timing, we’ll host a second Global Confluence Debrief a week later, enabling them to experience the Conference recordings at their leisure.

The tagline of our Bioregional Confluencing is Ambling Toward Planetary Bioregional Congressing, with David Haenke keynoting the Debriefs to share his half-century experience convening bioregional congresses in the Ozarks and at the continental scale. Joining him will be Laura Kuri, of the Bosque de Agua bioregional initiative in central Mexico, who will share her experience with bioregional congressing as a co-host of the first continental bioregional congress convened in the global south — in Cuahunahuac, Mexico in 1996. The Bioregional Confluencing tagline also echoes Peter Berg’s 1976 essay Amble Toward Continent Congress, which first planted the seeds for the practice of bioregional congressing that merges gathering with governance.

In the months following the Conference and Confluences, we’ll convene further Confluence Debriefs on a continental basis, inviting more interweaving amongst bioregions while supporting them to convene their own Congresses at fractal scale — from bioregional to continental to planetary — over the coming years.

Bioregional Knowledge Commoning

We at r3.0 are working on creating and supporting Bioregional Knowledge Commons.

A knowledge commons is only a knowledge commons, according to Simon Grant, “if people are using the knowledge that they are curating, just as a genuine physical commons implies that people are using the shared resource.” In other words, knowledge commons are neither information sitting on a shelf untouched, nor mindless practice, but rather, knowledge commons fuse understanding and action in mutually-reinforcing positive feedback loops.

Clearly, a bioregional approach requires Bioregional Knowledge Commons.

Rodger Mattlage has produced a useful visualization of David Bollier and Silke Helfrich’s Triad of Commoning Patterns, from which he and I conceptualized a fractal relationship between scales of Bioregional Knowledge Commoning. Rodger and I see a global meta-layer of Bioregional Knowledge Commoning focused on documenting the patterns of bioregions, complemented by a layer comprising knowledge commons specific to each bioregion, documenting the regenerative practices unique to the bioregional context — pattern and practice, interlinked fractally.

r3.0 Research Fellow Andrea Farias and I are stewarding the launch of a Bioregional Knowledge Commoning (BKC) Community of Inquiry & Practice (CoIP), with preliminary involvement from all six inhabited continents planting seeds for this global meta-layer of Bioregional Knowledge Commoning through preliminary identification of use cases and experiments. We’ve just released Bioregional Knowledge Commons — A Meta Perspective.

r3.0 is co-creating some of the knowledge to populate a Bioregional Knowledge Commons. We just released the first volume in our Seeds Series, entitled Our Predicament: The Fundamental Flaws of Predominant Economic Systems — the Cultures Scaffolding Them. Future volumes in the series will explore the fundamental imperatives of regenerative economies and cultures; the necessary elements of just transitions to regenerative economies and cultures; and the role of bioregions in transforming to regenerative economies and cultures.

Bioregional Co-Governance

Convening and Knowledge Commoning are the two pillars of r3.0’s bioregional work, with Bioregional Co-Governance bridging the two. As mentioned above, Bioregional Congressing melds gathering and governance, while governance will also be a key content area of Bioregional Knowledge Commons.

Inspired by the work of the Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed, a participating organization in the Northeast Woodlands Bioregional Collective (where I live), r3.0 is focusing significant attention on the notion of Co-Governance that the Alliance is advancing.

Specifically, Co-Governance entails shared co-leadership between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities as a conscious act of decoloniality that disrupts patterns of hegemonic Western power usurpation. Indigenous co-leadership is particularly important in a bioregional context given the millennial-long history of bioregional-scale Indigenous Regenerative Ecosystem Design (IRED) and management that Diné scholar Lyla June Johnston documents in her research.

We will explore this Bioregional Co-Governance model in a session at the r3.0 Conference titled Bioregional Co-Governance — Pluriversal Self-Determination. Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Elder Mike Thomas and Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed Co-Founder Maggie Favretti will share stories of their work together — which also encompasses the creation of an Intertribal Alliance to help heal the fragmentation of centuries of colonization.

Such reintegration across Indigenous communities, and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, represents yet another means of expressing bioregional fractal consciousness in action, as the scaling out of such harmonization can potentially reach around the globe.

An Invitation

Fractal consciousness isn’t necessarily a novel development. One could argue that the formation of the League of Nations (1919) and United Nations (1945) introduced a degree of globalized governance, scale-linked to the nation-state level. This is, of course, the core of the problem: the nation-state model is predicated on colonialism that is inherently contrary to ecological and cultural coherence (think of imperially imposed boundaries), thereby cementing dysfunctionality into the mix.

Bioregional fractal consciousness invites us into a decolonizing dynamic that also harmonizes ecological and cultural holonic integrity.

Current bioregional work is well-positioned to actualize bioregional fractal consciousness — but it requires a critical mass of humanity to embrace working synchronously at the local bioregional and global cross-bioregional scales.

Consider this your invitation.

Bill Baue

Senior Director, r3.0 (Redesign for Resilience & Regeneration)

By Ralph Thurm

At r3.0 we’re happy to see Said E. Dawlabani’s new book ‘Second Sapiens’ being published recently. We align on many things with Said, having gone from collapse awareness to collapse acknowledgement, to arrive at the need to focus on collapse resilience. We both agree on the need for systemic interventions in order to build what Said calls ‘Gaian Intellingence’. We would think that what we’re now up to at r3.0 could nicely be characterized as ‘in prolongation’ of what Said calls ‘Speaking Gaian Truth to Economic Power.’

As the book back cover text neatly puts it:

What will it take for us to preserve what remains of life on the planet? Is humanity itself at risk? These are the overarching questions Said Dawlabani asks in this book’s comprehensive development model. The current leading edge of intelligence that rules over our scientific, political, and economic reality is incapable of mitigating many of the unprecedented challenges we face.

Dawlabani asserts that our present institutions and ways of thinking are an extension of humanity’s journey through its first six stages of development that have been marked by imperfection ever since we became hunter-gathers. This is the journey of the First sapiens that has brought us to where we are now: to the edge of the Sixth Extinction.

Effective solutions to our problems need a whole ecosystem approach which is the domain of what Dawlabani calls Second Sapiens. It is an emerging expression of humanity that propels our psychosocial capacities into an exponential leap forward. It is on that other side where we embrace the complexities that have defined life for billions of years. Second sapiens answers the question: what would Mother Nature do? It is an alignment with that intelligence that takes into account all forms of life — not just our own — on this exquisite, fragile planet that happens to be the only one we have.

Said, who we know for more than a decade through direct interaction in our 20214 r3.0 International Conference in Berlin, Germany, where he held an opening keynote, has been a colleague and friend ever since. He asked our Managing Director, Ralph Thurm, to write one of the forewords in which he recommends a thorough read:

‘With the release of his book Memenomics (2013), Said Dawlabani entered my space in the search for the economic system design that supports all life in balance with Planet Earth. He brought the unique work of Clare Graves and of Don Beck’s Spiral Dynamics to introduce his distinctive developmental perspective on sustainability and regeneration. In 2014, he was the keynote speaker at the annual gathering of global sustainability experts organized by our nonprofit organization, r3.0 (Redesign, Resilience, and Regeneration).

In Second Sapiens, he takes his evolutionary framework one step further and offers additional insight into the needs of human enlightenment if we want to continue as a species. I specifically appreciate his clustering of the problems of the “Age of Acceleration” and the “Great Obsolescence” in part 1 of the book.

Unlike many who articulate these issues through a “meta-crisis” perspective, Dawlabani, through his stage-development life-cycle model, provides a deeper layer of connection that exposes the organizing principles underlying today’s chaos and collapse. But that is not the end of the journey, he says. He sees an awakening to a higher stage of human consciousness, a shift in humanity’s stages of development from that of the First to the Second sapiens.

Such profound change comes with his acknowledgement of collapse in part 2, specifically in chapter 7, “The Darkness before the New Dawn.” His conclusions and shift in focus parallels our own at r3.0 as we, too, have taken the steps necessary toward collapse resilience.

In part 3, Dawlabani looks at some of the leading-edge, economic-development models. His review includes sustainable development goals (SDGs), doughnut economics, planetary boundaries and alternatives to GDP measurement, not without hinting at shortcomings of their Second Sapiens potential, using criteria of the “Gaiametry economic protocols” to test their ultimate resilience.

I wholeheartedly agree with his summary in chapter 10: “A post-collapse homo sapiens will embrace higher states of awareness that reconnect us to the psychic and spiritual states that have long been sidelined. This is where the road to being one with Nature and cosmic wonder will begin anew. It is in these higher realms that natural and spiritual intelligence reside.”

Dawlabani’s new book is an appreciated and highly recommended contribution to the discussion about humanity’s future and role on Planet Earth.’

His two previous books, ‘Memenomics — The Next-Generation Economic System’ and ‘The Light of Ishtar — a Story of Love, Loss and the Search for Meaning’ are evenly advisable.

By Bill Baue

This edition of What We’re Reading is so jam-packed that we’re reverting to brief annotations — we hope this helps steer you to resources that support your own learnings!

• Nafeez Ahmed. 2024. “Planetary phase shift” as a new systems framework to navigate the evolutionary transformation of human civilisation. Foresight. Preprint. https://doi.org/10.1108/FS-02-2024-0025

Nafeez sent me his latest publication for my review. Here are excerpts of my responses to him:

“Planetary phase shift theory makes good sense. Your analysis of the potential upside seems to rely on overly optimistic projections of the limits of the downside.”

[From the paper: “Every foundational sector of the material production system of human civilisation — which now operates at a planetary scale — is experiencing a phase transition, which points to total transformation over the next three decades. This transformation is driven by disruptive technologies, which could make possible a large reduction in material extraction compared to prevailing industrial structures, while creating new possibilities for networked superabundance within planetary boundaries whereby clean energy, transport, food and knowledge is distributed to all.”]

Back to my assessment: “It strikes me that the scale of collapse dynamics is amplified by the planetary scale systemic interactions you mention at the beginning, which could obviate the potential for the metamorphosis you project. What would you make of a more low-tech scenario as a means of navigating the phase shift with less reliance on techno-optimism?

“Re low tech, the defining aspect for me is collapse resilience. Seeing as we agree that we are experiencing significant collapse of many ecological and social systems — arguably the worst in human history due to human exacerbation — then I’m very cautious of collapse navigation pathways (forecasts) that rely significantly on technologies that in turn rely on significant resource availability, sophisticated / far-reaching supply chains, social cohesion, etc…”

“That said, the way I understand your framework, it is agnostic to high v low tech — it is simply a mechanism for fore-/backcasting that takes panarchy / Hollings / adaptive cycle dynamics explicitly into account, which helpfully provides empirical guidance for what the phase shifting of these cycles suggests about potential futures.”

“So yes, I think there is strong value in fore-/backcasting a lower tech future than what you describe, explicitly from a collapse resilience perspective.”

• James Scott Cardinal & Jennifer Loughmiller-Cardinal. 2024. Information, Entanglement, and Emergent Social Norms: Searching for ‘Normal’. Societies 14(11). https://doi.org/10.3390/soc14110227

I’m still reading this, but I want to excerpt a few of my favorite quotes thus far:

“Norms operate at the intersection between individuals and their communities, reconciling the information needed to find optimal solutions. We view social norms as a mechanism for identifying, aligning, and refining information. Social norms embody provisional information that forms the leading edge of selection for social evolution and learning. Subsequently, the utility or fitness of this information is evaluated against the repeated experiences of all members of the population.”

“Given the natural variations in individual experiences and abilities and the diversity of contexts, each assessment of these norms yields distinct evaluations and expectations based on the provisional information. Individual evaluations are then transmitted back through the same social network, reintegrating updated information and contributing to the adaptive refinement of collective norms. Successes and failures as well as the specific environmental conditions and situational contexts all serve to refine the current information exchanged. This cyclical and recursive process of evaluation, assimilation, and retransmission of information functions as an evolutionary search to identify an optimal set of potential solutions within complex and dynamic environments.”

Here are a few of the figures that illustrate the Cardinals’ ideas:

• Julie Davenson, Karen Nordstrom & Shane Rogers. 2024. From Extraction to Regeneration: A Just Transition approach to Financing Climate Resilience in the Food System. Policy Brief. Food Solutions New England. https://foodsolutionsne.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/FSNE_Issue_Brief_Extraction_to_Regeneration.pdf

We collaborate with Julie in our bioregioning work, and were very glad to see our work — and the work of our collaborators, including one of our funders (Lankelly Chase) and our Funding Governance for Systemic Transformation Blueprint lead author Ben Roberts — referenced in this policy brief.

“Innovative foundation leaders are starting to acknowledge the extractive origins of their wealth and are supporting projects that foster social capital, shared governance, and equitable access, especially for underserved populations. Abandoning traditional charity, Lankelly Chase redistributed funds to communities and organizations seen as better stewards, while acknowledging that how they accumulated their wealth was based on extractive models of colonialism.

There are alternative models of philanthropy emerging funding projects in the northeast such as Earth Regeneration Fund, Kinship Earth Flow Fund, and Co-Creating Funding Ecosystems for Regeneration (CoFundEco) that use a decentralized approach to flow resources through relational structures in bioregions. Regenerative funding governance, a term used by Ben Roberts of CoFundEco, is viewed as essential social infrastructure needed to ensure regenerative outcomes are achieved at systemic levels. “We’re inspired by the possibility that the process of gathering and allocating funding can shift from being an extractive to a regenerative one for all participants and that this is also the best way to support regenerative (and) transformational outcomes from the work being funded.” Since CoFundEco’s launch in June 2023, Roberts, who lives in Connecticut, has co-stewarded a growing community that spans the globe, with participants spanning from New England to Africa and the Middle East, as illustrated on the public map of their ecosystem.

• Miriam Jorgensen (ed). 2007. Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development. University of Arizona Press.

I’m in a bioregional reading group, this is meeting bi-weekly to discuss this book, upon the recommendation of Mike Thomas, a tribal elder in the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation.

In the last meeting, the thing I most appreciated about the chapter we read was the addition of 4th element of governance to the “standard” 3 elements of legislative, executive, and judiciary: an overarching “oversight” role over these functions — to govern the governance, so to speak…

• Kiran Kashyap. 2024. Designing for Earth Democracy transitions: Processes to foster an economics of radical interdependence. PhD Dissertation. University of Technology Sydney. https://www.kirankashyap.com/_files/ugd/e5eeeb_9efb560349ec4f5c8d8c2b716b327aeb.pdf

I recently spoke with Kiran about his dissertation and the work behind it. To give you a taste, I’ll excerpt from the Summary of Findings:

3. Systems convening: Development of platforms for prefigurative movement building through emergent network weaving across public and private sectors. Constitution of ‘middle out’ coalitions that attract top-down institutional engagement along with considered bottom-up political insurgency — to enable decentralised ownership and power through social learning.

5. Grounding in place-context: Deeply contextual practice that is led by engagement with the qualities and needs of the stakeholders, communities and ecosystems in question, including through ongoing partnership with First Peoples. Development of participatory cultures amongst citizens through collaborative forums and deliberative democracy.

6. Multiscalar engagement: Navigation of interconnected nested systems in seeding alternate forms of economics and governance, underpinned by the political approaches of cosmopolitan localism and polycentricity. Developing local contextual interventions through consideration of regional socio-ecological conditions, including questions of global justice.

8. Interconnected needs and thresholds: Fostering the development of bioregionally-adapted regenerative economics through development of both deficit-based imposition of limits, as well as strengths-based intersubjective approaches founded upon care and reciprocity. Drawing from existing methodologies e.g., DEAL’s Doughnut Unrolled in this endeavour, uplifting qualitative articulations of wellbeing as a counterweight to the predominant focus on quantitative approaches.

10. Systemic investing: Encouraging the creation of multi-party agreements for the financing of long-term portfolios of linked projects, moving beyond a reliance on only philanthropic capital. Creating visibility for the value of catalytic funding, and engaging in the ongoing development of place-based capital and local pooled funds such as through bioregional bank accounts.

• Matthew Moroney. 2024. Place-based Transition Funds: A Playbook for Systemic Portfolio Construction. Metabolic. https://www.metabolic.nl/projects/playbook-for-place-based-transition-funds/

I also recently met Matt, who conducted the work behind this report while a fellow-in-residence at the Foundation House, as far as I understand it. I haven’t had time to delve deeply into this work yet, but it clearly resonates with the work of the BioFi Project on Bioregional Financing Facilities, and the work of the Design School for Regenerating Earth (as well as our own work in our Funding Governance for Systemic Transformation) on Bioregional Funding Ecosystems.

See the figure below for a graphic summarization of the model proposed in this playbook:

• Johan Rockström et al. 2024. Planetary Boundaries guide humanity’s future on Earth. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 5, 773–788. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-024-00597-z

From my LinkedIn post: “Having worked on the application of sustainability thresholds to organizational & investment contexts for about a half-decade, I clearly remember the profound impact of the Planetary Boundaries concept when the first studies came out in late 2009. The graphical representation alone was groundbreaking, enabling us to visualize sustainability thresholds (or PBs) against the background of the boundary of the earth’s biosphere itself, enabling contextualization of potential tipping points across 9 interrelated earth systems.”

“This new study adds a new visualization to the mix (see below), mapping out the recursive trajectory humanity must follow to steer our impact on earth systems from the Great Acceleration of the 1950s, through the current state of overshooting 6 of the 9 PBs, into what the study calls the “Great Turnaround” where we return to the safe operating space (and ultimately to the safe *and just* space).”

“I also appreciate the PB timeline (also below), showing the developments informing the PBs (going back to Boulding’s 1966 “Economics of Coming Space Ship Earth” and Meadows et al’s 1972 “Limits to Growth”), and then the many strands of maturation of the PBs framework (from its 1.0 iteration in 2009, through its 2.0 phase starting in 2015, into its 3.0 phase starting in 2023).”

“When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system.”

Ilya Prigogine

2024 was a liminal year for r3.0, as we navigated across the threshold from a decade of pursuing a theory of transformation focused on economic entities (ie corporations and investors) as the most powerful levers of change, into a new place-sourced theory of transformation, with the bioregion and municipality as the locus of leverage. We first announced this transition at the beginning of the year; now, as the year winds down, we affirm our commitment to pursuing place-sourced resilience and regeneration. In this piece, we share in more detail the future trajectory of our journey, focusing in particular on our work in the bioregioning movement.

A few months ago, we framed our role in the bioregioning movement as curators of coherence in the context of collapse. In physics, coherence emerges when waves are in phase (or constructive in science-speak) — the combined waves multiply the amplitude beyond what the waves are capable of producing individually. Incoherence emerges, on the other hand, when waves are out of phase (or destructive in scientific lingo) — as you can see below, the wave amplitudes zero each other out.

This physics applies (metaphorically and literally) to social dynamics, including the practice of bioregioning: activation efforts can enable the emergence of constructive coherence when in phase, creating multitudes of amplification; or, efforts that are out of phase can cancel each other out in destructive incoherence [1].

As ecological and social systems careen toward catastrophic tipping points, incoherence increases in self-reinforcing feedback loops, exponentiating information quality degradation and confounding synergistic collaboration potential to the point of polarization. We at r3.0 counteract incoherence (and coax coherence) by 1) prioritizing ethical integrity and scientific rigor over political positionality; 2) rejecting competition in favor of collaboration; 3) embracing necessary transformation in the face of widespread incrementalism; and 4) centering prosocial relationality and cross-cultural solidarity, among other strategies.

The contemporary bioregioning movement emerged concurrently with the conceptualization and simultaneous actualization of overshoot and collapse [2] — namely, at the 1972 Stockholm Environment Summit that inspired Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft to launch the Planet Drum Foundation, which helped galvanize the movement. Berg asserted coherence by healing the schism between nature and culture, grounding the bioregion as “a geographic terrain and a terrain of consciousness.”

We at r3.0 have long sought to curate coherence — and counteract incoherence — through two primary means: Convening, and Knowledge Commons Co-creation (bridged by the common denominator of Self-Governance). Each of these means are applicable to regenerative bioregioning, as we outline below.

1. Convening

“…congress is a verb. Congress, come together. Come together with the continent…”

Peter Berg, 1976

Convenings played a key role in galvanizing the early wave (1970s — 2000s) of the bioregioning movement, in particular through the Continental Bioregional Congress [3] format that gathered practitioners from geographically dispersed bioregions into an extended immersive experience that created cross-cultural coherence while also advancing hands-on self-governance through delegative policy development. As early as 1976, Berg asserted the need to Amble Towards Continent Congress, which bioregional reinhabitants did for the next eight years, building foundations for convening the first Continental Bioregional Congress (CBC) in 1984 on Turtle Island. The tenth (and last) CBC convened a decade-and-a-half ago…

The bioregioning movement is now ambling back toward Continental Bioregional Congressing. We at r3.0 see a role for us to play, by Confluencing (“flowing together”) toward Congressing. At the 11th r3.0 Conference this September, r3.0 Advocation Partner And Now What? prototyped the Confluencing model whereby primary events are complemented by distinct (geographic, temporal, scale, etc) events that weave together into a greater whole.

We will focus the 12th International r3.0 Conference on the bioregioning context (our theme this year: Catalyzing Bioregional Resilience & Regeneration: Learning to Reinhabit Earth Together) while also inviting bioregions globally to Confluence alongside our Conference, using its content as a launch pad for their own bioregional deliberations. To support this, we are developing a Confluencing template that bioregions can customize to their own contexts.

As well, we will devote our online Open Dialogue format to bioregioning, focusing our practice of hosting monthly public Zoom gatherings with featured speakers followed by facilitated discussion, on the co-creation and dissemination of bioregional knowledge. All our conveneings center relationality [4] to potentiate collective action, invite emotional authenticity, create space for generative tensions to energize conflict transformation, and nurture collapse resilience.

2. Knowledge Commons Co-Creation

“Every commons is based on natural resources. Every commons is a knowledge commons. Every commons depends on a social process [5].”

–David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, 2019

r3.0 focused our first decade on co-creating a knowledge commons of Blueprints co-created with Working Groups, as well as Common Good Resources and other materials. We now draw on this experience to initiate design of two-eyed bioregional knowledge commons (braiding Indigenous knowledge and Western knowledge), first focusing on the information architecture, drawing on diverse approaches (such the wiki — see examples here and here), formats (textual, video, audio, graphical, etc), and languages.

Knowledge informs action, underlining the vital importance of co-creating knowledge as an unenclosed commons to inform collective action for stewarding resources at the bioregional scale regeneratively, respecting the carrying capacities of these ecological and social capitals. Two key elements of knowledge commons curation include direct engagement with:

• knowledge stewards with their consent for sharing the knowledge respectfully; and
• practitioners applying the knowledge in on-the-ground bioregioning work.

“[Y]ou can only call it a knowledge commons,” Simon Grant points out, “if people are using the knowledge that they are curating, just as a genuine physical commons implies that people are using the shared resource. And, as Ostrom famously pointed out, a commons is only a commons if it is governed, and governed essentially by its users, not, for example, by a remote authority.”

As information architecture solidifies, we will start prototyping content that dynamically balances generalization with specificity. In other words, we will seek to encompass knowledge that’s broadly applicable and customizable across diverse bioregional contexts, while also including specific knowledge applications in specific contexts to provide illustrative detail. Bioregional knowledge we may cover includes: Bioregional Regenerative Economies and Cultures; Bioregional Learning Centers; Bioregional Funding Ecosystems / Bioregional Financing Facilities; Bioregional Carrying Capacity Measurement & Management; Bioregional Self-Governance; etc…

This last element illustrates the bi-directional aspect of knowledge commons, which both serve as a repository of information about bioregional self-governance, while also enacting the practice of self-governance of the knowledge commons by its users.

Municipality Engagement

Finally, nested within our bioregioning work is our work in the municipality context, which is anchored by a Partnership Engage Grant (PEG) from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, in collaboration with Randy Sa’d of our Advocation Partners, the Flourishing Enterprise Institute (FEI) and REFOCUS, and Daniela Senkl of the University of Guelph.

This applied research will explore the transformative potential of context-based sustainability (CBS) for municipalities, drawing on the experience of the City of Nanaimo that Ting Pan presented in the 2024 r3.0 Conference. Following this example, we will look at municipalities that have applied the Doughnut Economics and/or Sustainable Development Goals models (as Nanaimo did), and explore how the application of CBS enhances outcomes. For more information about this research project, see here.

In conclusion, while we won’t necessarily abandon our decade-long history of good-faith efforts to transform corporate and investment contexts to regenerative sustainability (see here & here for documentation of these efforts), we recognize that the systemic lock-ins of incrementalism and predatory delay present significant obstacles to success. Place-sourced work represents a much stronger attractor for collapse resilience and even the potential for flourishing. We look forward to some of you joining us on our landed journey.

Notes:

[1] We recognize the existence of other dynamics as well — such as the fact that destructive forces can also be “coherent” (ie in phase).

[2] The Limits to Growth (1972) conceptualized carrying capacity overshoot and consequent systemic collapse in 1972 (the phrase “overshoot and collapse” appears repeatedly in the book). Subsequent Ecological Footprint research in the 1990s confirmed that humanity actually entered Earth Overshoot (ie, depleting resources faster than they can be regenerated) on December 25, 1971. So humanity has been operating on phantom carrying capacity (“the illusory or the extremely precarious capacity of an environment to support a given life form or a given way of living” Catton, Overshoot, 1980) ever since.

[3] See here for a video of a dialogue on the history of Continental bioregional Congresses: https://vimeo.com/970582386

[4] We particularly frame our work around Melanie Goodchild’s notion of relational systems thinking. See here https://devondoughnut.org/ and here https://jabsc.org/index.php/jabsc/article/view/2027 for peer reviewed papers.

[5] David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, 2019, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons, New Society Publishers.

By Bill Baue

I cut my teeth in the sustainability field journalistically, writing 4 articles a week for SocialFunds.com on socially responsible investing (SRI), with a particular focus on shareowner advocacy. One thing that drove me crazy then (and it still does!) was mainstream coverage of proxy voting that reported votes of less than 50% on shareowner resolutions advocating for greater environmental and social responsibility as losses — revealing a fundamental miscomprehension of the actual dynamics at play.

In reality, minority votes (in the 15–30% range) often represented a sufficient groundswell to prompt corporate management teams to implement the proposed measures (rather than continue to expend precious resources fighting against their owners over common sense guidance to act responsibly).

This somewhat mundane example illustrates a tipping point, which Milkoreit et al 2018 defines thus:

“tipping points in general can be defined as the point or threshold at which small quantitative changes in the system trigger a non-linear change process that is driven by system-internal feedback mechanisms and inevitably leads to a qualitatively different state of the system, which is often irreversible. This new state can be distinguished from the original by its fundamentally altered (positive and negative) state-stabilizing feedbacks.”

“This general definition applies both to natural and social phenomena. Here, we focus on the latter,” write Veronica Pizziol & Alessandro Tavoni of the University of Bologna and London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in a June 2024 Nature paper — From niches to norms: the promise of social tipping interventions to scale climate action — that’s the focus of our review here.

Later in the paper, they note that “[o]nce the tipping point is reached, the actions of a minority group trigger a cascade of behavior change that rapidly increases the acceptance of a minority view.”

In particular, they focus on social tipping interventions (STI) — “actions such as policies and nudges aimed at triggering self-reinforcing surges in support … An important specificity of the work on social tipping is thus its focus on deliberate interventions aimed at desirable change. Successful STI intentionally promote contagion with targeted interventions that have the potential to not only instigate change among the target but also among the susceptible untreated population.”

The authors illustrate STI with a nifty graphic of a targeted “kick” that “destabilizes the status quo and drives the system into an alternative stable equilibrium, leading to disproportionate and possibly irreversible changes.”

This example inhabits the intersection between a social tipping point (STP) — a non-linear shift from high- to low-carbon dioxide (CO2) emitting behaviors — and an ecological tipping point: namely, the looming phase shift in the earth’s climate regulatory system due to crossing atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration thresholds. The authors illustrate this overlap in another (slightly less nifty) graphic.

“While ETP are predominantly discussed in the natural sciences, the distinction between the two is less pronounced in the social sciences, where many experiments often explore the interaction between social (strategic) behavior and the threat of disasters represented by ETP. Hence, these social science studies (e.g., ref. 55) belong to the intersection between ETP pertaining to climate change and STP related to human behavior.”

The paper also notes the relationship between STI and social norms, but also introduces a nuanced distinction between them:

“While social norm interventions and STI both aim to promote behavior change through social influence, they differ in approach and scope. Norm nudges leverage social norms to encourage individuals to conform to the perceived norms of a community, providing information about others’ behavior or emphasizing social expectations. STI target tipping points within social systems to achieve larger-scale behavioral changes, by mobilizing targeted individuals with the aim to initiate a cascading effect that leads to widespread and persistent adoption of new behaviors or ways of life.”

The authors proceed to cite studies demonstrating experimental evidence of tipping points in social norms (or conventions, as Centola et al 2018 calls them in this now-famous study) as support for STI, kind of backpedaling on the above distinction between STI and social norms they’d just established.

But helpfully, Pizziol & Tavoni spotlight lesser-known empirical studies, which introduce some folds, in particular diversity:

“Other recent studies have challenged some of the findings from earlier research, emphasizing the heterogeneity of individuals in social dynamics and arguing that the assumption of homogeneity might have led to underestimating the critical mass required for tipping. They suggested that the critical mass needed for tipping may vary depending on factors such as the size of the intervention, the target population, and the distribution of preferences within the population.”

Threshold Models (TM) — in which each individual in a potential tipping dyanamic is “characterized by a threshold value — ranging from 0 to 100 — representing the proportion of others who must take a certain action before that individual is motivated to follow suit” — represent another key element introduced in this study. “The weaker an individual’s conviction in changing to the alternative, the higher the share of others needed to trigger the individual’s decision to switch. These models thus build in conformism and the ensuing inertia in abandoning an entrenched norm.”

Weirdly, the paper discusses voluntary GHG emissions disclosure as an example of tipping, but focuses on a much less relevant case of companies drawing on primary data as compared to industry averages, which is a bit of a “so what?” compared to the much more relevant case of companies disclosing emissions in a science-based way (ie compared to normative thresholds, namely the carbon budget.)

The paper helpfully ends with a reality check on the perils, challenges, and limitations of STI, including “premature labeling of social change processes as tipping, as well as lack of evidence for tipping dynamics” (from the important Milkoreit 2023 paper). This is an important caveat contextualizing the promising elements of STI that serves as the paper’s primary focus.

However, the paper neglects to scope back further to consider even more significant perils / challenges / limitations. In particular, the paper’s focus on climate action — and decarbonization in particular — results in a kind of “solutionism” that risks portraying techno-fixes within existing economic system paradigms as sufficient to resolve humanity’s predicament.

Perhaps more problematically, the paper (and the broader community of social tipping advocates — of which we at r3.0 consider ourselves a member) risks serving up hopium, in the sense that long-standing overshoot of ecological systems (and undershoot of social systems) have essentially created lock-ins of collapse dynamics. Pursuing social tipping points is still very much worthwhile, for ameliorating the worst outcomes and building necessary collapse resilience. But the incommensurability between adverse and beneficial tipping points in ecological and social systems results in significant limitations in the degree to which social tipping interventions can function as silver bullets — much as we might wish otherwise…

See previous What We’re Reading reviews on social tipping dynamics here and here.

And the 2024 r3.0 Conference — themed Tipping Points on Tipping Points: Building Necessary Collapse Resilience — will be digging much deeper into the issues addressed in these reviews on 10 & 11 September. You can register to attend this fully online event here.

By Bill Baue

Earlier this month, our good friend (and r3.0 Advocation Partner) Philippe Diaz posted a LinkedIn article entitled Embracing Collapse and Enjoying It? in which he urges readers to “invest time and capital in upskilling”:

“better use whatever time remains to do and learn stuff: growing food, foraging, stitching, woodworking, playing an instrument, dancing… whatever really. It helps increase resilience.”

This message resonates deeply with me. I’m on the cusp of transitioning from several years of transitional home-renting into owning a modest homestead, so I’ve been devoting all the time I can spare to educating myself on resilience skills. My wife is an even more voracious reader than me, and is famous at our local library for filling entire shelves with 20–30 books at a time on order from interlibrary loan. So I proposed a library catalog search strategy to her: filter for Chelsea Green Publishing.

I’ve long respected Chelsea Green as a preeminent publisher of books on sustainability, including The MultiCapital Scorecard by Mark McElroy & Martin Thomas, Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth, Thinking in Systems by Dana Meadows, and the 30-Year Update of Limits to Growth, to name just a few.

But what really distinguishes Chelsea Green is its focus on regeneration and resilience, two things dear to our heart here at r3.0 (along with redesign)! In particular, Chelsea Green specializes in permaculture, a fundamental umbrella concept for a collapse resilient skill-set.

So I want to devote this edition of What We’re Reading not to an in-depth review of one or two books, but rather to touch on a host of books I’m currently dabbling in, with the hope that this kind of guidance can help you navigate your own upskilling journey.

First on my list would be Ben Falk’s The Resilient Farm and Homestead, which is infused with awareness of carrying capacity overshoot — accompanied by hands-on strategies for adapting to the consequences thereof at the homestead scale. I particularly appreciate is Falk’s 72 permaculture Principles, including using fossil fuels available today (before they run out or become prohibitively expensive) to build resilient systems — and of course, I heard this Principle mentioned the very next day after I read it (on a Design School for Earth Regeneration call in the Birthing Bioregional Learning Centers Learning Journey.)

(Funny story — we had 2 copies floating around for a while, one from the library, and one that my wife had forgotten having bought in the past. I mentioned this story to my good friend and former cohousing neighbor River Strong, and he inquired if one of them was the new Revised & Expanded Edition — alas, no, so it looks like we’ll be sending some more $$ to Founding Publisher Margo Baldwin…)

Next up is the two-volume permaculture bible (ok, Bill Mollison’s 600-page Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual is the original permaculture bible), Edible Forest Gardens (Volume One on Vision & Theory, Volume Two on Design & Practice) by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier, which only just arrived in our household, so I haven’t had time to do more than scan it. But I’ve known about this line of work for years, since my time living in Western Massachusetts where much of the thinking and practice documented in the books was developed — including through the Tierra de Oportunidades new farmer program at the 30-acre La Finca urban farm run by Nuestras Raices, a grassroots urban agriculture organization based in Holyoke (that is the subject, in part, of Toensmeier’s Paradise Lot).

Toensmeier is also author of The Carbon Farming Solution, which lays out a comprehensive case for regenerative agriculture as a means of sequestering increasing amounts of (soil-enhancing) carbon while also developing approaches to food production that are more resilient to climate change. What’s particularly satisfying about this book is how it blends a necessary grounding in the research documenting the case for agriculture as a sufficient carbon sink to put a dent in global warming (drawn in part from his fellowship position at Project Drawdown).

Other recent arrivals include Fibershed by Rebecca Burgess, which taps into the growing global movement to return to a localized textile economy exemplified by Fibreshed Scotland that my colleague Kate Dyer is active in. The fibershed movement is integrally linked to the bioregional movement that is similarly focused on the interweaving of geophysical landscape with metaphysical culture-scapes.

Rainwater Harvesting by Brad Lancaster is yet another pragmatic guidebook that will prove necessary as extreme weather events (on both ends of the water spectrum, from drought to deluge) intensity, forcing us to become more creative with how we engage with this most vital of all resources.

The Chelsea Green catalog integrates social justice with books such as Farming While Black by Leah Penniman, which chronicles her work establishing Soul Fire Farm as a manifesto and guidebook for farmers of color to assert agency and reclaim the legacy of agricultural heritage that has been denied through racist oppression and political policies.

I could continue on for pages (you should see the stack of Chelsea Green titles on my bedside stand!), but I want to end this overview with one modest step outside the Chelsea Green ecosystem, into its realm of its west coast counterpart / rival, New Society Publishers.

The permaculture concept that currently captures my imagination is Coppice Agroforestry by Mark Krawczyk, which covers the ancient art of tree-cutting in ways that promote re-sprouting — which is also known as pollarding when cutting at chest-level or higher to retain some height for preventing animals from grazing the sprouts.

(It is telling that the New Society logo, which has existing since long before this book was published, is a graphical representation of coppicing, with a new shoot emerging from the “stool” (ie stump) of a felled tree…)

I look forward to upskilling with coppicing and pollarding for fence-making and biomass harvesting to fuel the woodstove in ways that move toward self-reliance — and perhaps transferring these skills in the future as part of a bioregional learning center curriculum that includes many other skills gleaned from the Chelsea Green and New Society catalogs…

By Bill Baue

“To reform or to transform, that’s the question” — to riff on a well-known Shakespearean quote — is an age-old question. For the sake of this inquiry, we apply this choice to the case of science based targets (SBTs) that compare company-level impacts to systems-level sustainability thresholds in earth systems, including the climate regulatory system in the case of the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), and other ecological systems such as biodiversity and water in the case of the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN) and its associated Earth Commission, which both fall under the umbrella of the Global Commons Alliance.

More specifically, this exploration is pursued in a recent scientific study by Sasha Quahe, Sarah Cornell, and Simon West entitled Framing science-based targets: Reformist and radical discourses in an Earth system governance initiative, published late last year in the peer reviewed journal Earth System Governance.

While this question was relevant throughout the study period “between late 2019 and the middle of 2020,” it has risen in prominence exponentially in the current context of the “shitshow” of the SBTi Board announcing a “decision” to allow carbon credits and other “environmental attribute certificates” to offset Scope 3 emissions, in flagrant violation of SBTi’s own Due Process, given that SBTi Staff were still in the process of analyzing results from its Call for Evidence and its Technical Council had yet to weigh in on the decision.

While this controversy is clearly a question of governance integrity, it also bears in on broader theory of transformation questions. Specifically, investigate reporting from the Financial Times and Bloomberg identified how the Bezos Earth Fund, as the predominant SBTi funder (at $18 million, alongside the IKEA Foundation), likely exerted undue pressure for SBTi to drop its no-offsets policy in favor of allowing such offsets, which form the basis of the carbon credit market that the Bezos Earth Fund is pursuing alongside the Rockefeller Foundation and US Department of State through their joint Energy Transition Accelerator (ETA) initiative.

Essentially, the ETA’s reliance on offsets-based carbon markets represents a “reformist” agenda, which the SBTi Board chose to prematurely rubber-stamp instead of respecting the integrity of its due process — which could stand to financially enhance the actors behind the initiatives advocating for its embrace.

The real-time unfolding of this real-world drama directly demonstrates the high stakes of the conceptual theorizing of this study, which applies Q Methodology that “aims to analyse subjectivity in a scientific, empirical and structured manner.” Specifically, the study applies “Q” to two subjective “factors”:

• Factor 1: ‘We need science-based targets to help economic systems move towards global sustainability’; and
• Factor 2: ‘The system itself is unsustainable and needs to change — science-based targets can help’.

The researchers noted: “Factor 1 and Factor 2 generally emphasised reformist or radical environmental discourses respectively, showing a clear preference for either working with ‘the system’ or critiquing it.” According to the researchers, “Factor 1 saw SBTs as the catalyst for such transformation” while “Factor 2 depicted the opposite causality in its theory of change; transformation was a prerequisite for achieving SBTs. As a Factor 2 participant explained, ‘I’m not seeing how [SBTs] can be met without that significant economic system transformation.’”

Significantly, the researchers applied this assessment primarily to “insiders” in the SBTi and SBTN ecosystems: “we included both sources advocating for SBTs and those presenting critical commentary; the former group was larger.” We need to take this imbalance into account in interpreting the results of this study — while further considering the fact that the study neglected to integrate a critical mass of external critical perspectives.

The study categorized 64 statements along the Factor 1 to Factor 2 continuum in a Venn Diagram, with some statements clearly delineated along the poles, and some statements falling into the overlap zone.

While the study assessed Factor 1 (reformist) and Factor 2 (transformative) perspectives separately, it also assessed syntheses of the two perspectives:

• “Could SBTs be seen as a Trojan Horse of radically transformative ideas hidden in a depoliticised shell?”
• “Research on transition management has found that innovative niches are more likely to diffuse and transform regimes when they are radical enough to have transformative potential, yet compatible with the incumbent regime.”

Significantly, the study spotlighted incumbency power dynamics, noting the danger “that the boundary object function of SBTs could reproduce hegemonic discourse(s) and existing power relations by keeping alternative counter-hegemonic discourses sidelined” and “a possible bias in transdisciplinary sustainability science and Earth system governance towards more reformist interpretations of transformation processes, with more radical versions excluded on the basis they are ‘too political’.”

Ultimately, the study identifies a confounding paradox at the intersection between the two seemingly divergent Factors:

“There is a paradoxical tension involved in working for sustainability transformation: that of seeking to fundamentally change a system whilst working within it. It concerns the interplay between the idealism involved in envisioning a desirable and radically different future, and the pragmatism of trying to fit into the current system to increase support for and uptake of ideas and tools. This situation gives rise to various environmental discourses along a radical/reformist continuum.”

The researchers explain this paradox in deeper detail:

“The findings point towards a paradox relating to sustainability transformations.

We understand paradox to be a kind of tension in which contradictory yet interrelated elements exist simultaneously and persist over time…

On one hand, the interpretive flexibility of boundary objects and their ability to fit into dominant discourses enables broad participation of actors and widespread uptake of SBTs within the existing system, which implies transformative power.

However, by filtering out more controversial discourses, the boundary objects (here, SBTs) perpetuate hegemonic discourses and potentially inhibit alternative visions of deeper or more radical transformations.

This paradox arises because there are pressures to both fit into and challenge dominant discourses, as several respondents indicated in interviews.”

This study, grounded in robust theoretical frameworks, carries profound practical implications in terms of the ultimate effectiveness of SBTi and SBTN in achieving the systemic sustainability they ostensibly embrace. Specifically, the current SBTi controversy vividly illustrates the dangers of the reformist narrative, which risks prioritizing achievability within current systemic constraints while failing to achieve actual sustainability. This danger is not “academic” — given the existence of non-linear tipping points in ecological systems, the danger is existential.

Stated more plainly, while radical transformation from the self-reinforcing existing system is necessary, the cards are stacked in favor of incremental reform and against necessary transformation. This bias is replicated by the study design itself — as the researchers transparently acknowledge, they weighted their interviewee sample toward reformists.

We thus need to resist the hegemonic influence of the study’s findings, and introduce a counterbalancing weighting toward more radical transformative interpretations. After all, the ultimate question posed by SBTs is “to be or not to be.”

What we’re reading at r3.0 (11)

By Bill Baue

You may have seen the recent news that the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) rejected the proposal to create an Anthropocene epoch (though the controversial decision is under appeal).

But what does this matter — isn’t the categorization of the Anthropocene as an epoch just a fairly obscure academic exercise, devoid of any practical implications?

Quite the opposite: how humanity understands the Anthropocene carries existential import. In a 2019 Keynote at the New Metrics Conference, I framed the Anthropocene as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, humanity came to realize its collective geologic-scale force through accumulation of adverse impacts; on the other hand, if humanity can have negative geologic-scale impact, it stands to reason that it can also exert positive, beneficial impact at scale, if we only so choose. It’s the “greatest opportunity in human history” I proclaimed!

Here’s how geographer Arun Saldanha framed it, only somewhat more soberly, in a 2019 peer-reviewed paper entitled A date with destiny: Racial capitalism and the beginnings of the Anthropocene:

“Defining the Anthropocene intrinsically carries with it a laying of culpability for the past and a responsibility for the future, while the research on how geological agency is distributed across time and across species cannot but involve the deepest of moral conundrums. Since the processes gathered under the Anthropocene umbrella are almost all self-reinforcing and nefarious for ecosystems, hence possibly jeopardizing the viability of our species itself, the question is properly existential: who or what is to take care of humanity’s survival?”

To illustrate the implications of this question of past culpability and future responsibility, consider the proposal on the table before the ICS SQS: whether to qualify the advent of the nuclear age as the starting point of the Anthropocene. What’s arguably much more interesting, as I explained in a recent LinkedIn post, is the proposal NOT under consideration.

Rewind to 2015, when the scientific journal Nature published a study by Simon Lewis & Mark Maslin that laid out a number of different options for “Defining the Anthropocene” — for example, the origins of farming (~11,000 years ago), or the advent of the Industrial Revolution (starting in 1760). (See the below figure for a full listing of options.)

Based on the geology discipline’s requirement of a physical marker to anchor a shift in epoch, Lewis & Maslin made a compelling case that the strongest geologic evidence favored the demarcation event as the “collision” of Indigenous and European cultures peaking in 1610. That was the year when the carbon record documents a clear dip in CO2 emissions resulting from the genocide of Indigenous populations at the hands of European colonialist settlers (called the “American Holocaust”), as it led to an agricultural collapse that briefly paused carbon emissions.

Geologists call such an event a “golden spike”, or a “location of a global marker of an event in stratigraphic material” known as a Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP); Lewis & Maslin labeled this specific 1610 GSSP the “Orbis Spike,” Latin for “world”.

In their 2018 book The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene, Lewis & Maslin further explain their case for the Orbis Spike, connecting it directly to mercantile capitalism, racist genocide, and colonialist imperialism, which carries much different political implications than the choice of the nuclear age.

Interestingly, both Maslin and Lewis engaged with my posts on social media. Lewis responded in a Twitter thread I helped seed:

“The community needs to decide if they are going to define the boundary as the first global geological-level impact of humans (for me the mixing of species across continents, so after 1492) that is detectable in a geological record (for me 1610-ish), with a small signal, or

Or… where the evidence is overwhelming, basically v. close to the present day. I feel the latter is about persuading people, but isn’t that logical in terms of a formal definition based on geological-type evidence (as you end up missing so much that humans did earlier).”

Maslin engaged in more depth in a set of comments on my LInkedIn post:

“The short sightedness of the Anthropocene Working Group — who would only consider a post 1950 start date — meant many of us who want a more inclusive term have suggested the Anthropocene Event — Events can be massive changes in geology such as the introduction of oxygen into the atmosphere over two billion years ago. But it means that the Anthropocene can start in different places at different times — it also means no one is to blame — we are in it and we must decide how to deal with it…”

To which I responded:

“Your ‘no one is to blame’ comment gives pause. It strikes me that an embrace of the Orbis Hypothesis means that ‘someone’ IS ‘to blame’ … or perhaps not someone as much as the entire cultural orientation of modernity / coloniality.”

Maslin replied:

“…I still really like the Orbis golden spike — as I think of it as the start of capitalism, mass slavery, and global colonialism. But the problem I see with picking a single date is that it lets others off the hook. What about the industrial revolution and oppression of the workers, what about the great acceleration and the spread of American consumer capitalism (colonialism) post Second World World. So by acknowledging we are in the Anthropocene Event and certain parts of humanity caused it — we can examine causation in a more detailed nuanced way. And like the Industrial Revolution has four distinct phases, then we can think of dividing up the Anthropocene Event into phases. But thank you for the great post.”

I asserted:

“The way I read your 2015 paper, you focused on the Orbis Spike because of the demands of the discipline to identify a *specific* physical marker. And you made a compelling case that Orbis was a better spike than any other options.

But I think where we find ourselves now, shifting from Epoch to Event, is in an even stronger position, as it frees us from the shackles of reductionist science focused on single markers. Reality is, of course, much more complex, with entangled causation spanning multiple historical political dynamics that intertwine with natural causation as well.

The key point for me in all this is to realize that, if humans have the collective power to exert geologic force that is ultimately destructive (ie genocidal, imperial, extractive, racist, enslaving etc), then we also have the collective power to exert beneficial, prosocial, altruistic force. It just requires us to realize the inherent alignment between self interest and common interest.”

Maslin agreed that

“…human impacts are unique — as we can increase them, reduce them and we can even decide to repair the damage. And we need to keep pushing the fact that our negative impacts are not inevitable.”

This line of reasoning — that the Anthropocene more relevantly represents a long historical arc of interwoven events with sociopolitical significance than a single event with a discrete discernible geologic impact — aligns with a case made by Saldanha (who we quoted at the outset): “the Anthropocene debate has immediate political implications,” he succinctly summarizes late in his paper.

Interestingly, Saldanha expresses appreciation for Lewis & Maslin’s Orbis case:

“There is a lot to be said for taking 1610 as the golden spike for the Anthropocene, the official year it began. Lewis and Maslin’s “Orbis hypothesis” is the only one proposed which takes the interplay of political-economic and geochemical processes seriously as measurable at the global level (orbis, “world”). Their effort is commendable for appreciating that the decimation — literally, with some ninety percent eliminated — of Indigenous America was, in hindsight, a necessary condition for European global dominance and anthropogenic climate change.”

But ultimately, Saldanha rejects the Orbis hypothesis as insufficient to encompass the full spectrum of causativity:

“While it is encouraging to see “capitalism” mentioned repeatedly in Lewis and Maslin’s book (2018) and they show familiarity with world-systems theory, their take-home message is that the environmental consequences of the European settling of the Americas are a fundamental marker of modernity.”

What Lewis & Maslin’s hypothesis misses, according to Saldanha, is the totalizing and long-abiding impacts of what he calls “racial capitalism” (a term coined by Cedric Robinson in 1983). In a nutshell, Saldanha argues that the expansionist imperative of capitalism requires the creation of racialized hegemony to support the kind of “primitive” (“a better translation is original or primary”) accumulation of capital, the concentration of wealth before and necessary for industrialization. “To understand why the capitalist state is intrinsically expansionist and racialized, the concept of primitive accumulation is crucial,” Saldanha states, before quoting Marx:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.”

Ultimately, Saldanha uses this foundation to make the case that limiting the defining aspect of the Anthropocene to the Orbis Spike falls far short of the much broader historical trajectory of industrialization as the advent of geologic scale impact. But in making this case, he acknowledges its own limitations, butting up against the geologic discipline’s defining parameters.

“I would like to identify the geological term ‘Anthropocene’ with the planetary state of racializing industrial capitalism, but I cannot suggest how this epoch be measured as demanded by geological method.”

Rather than throw in the towel, Saldanha offers a “compromise solution”:

“Another option presents itself: simply continue using “Anthropocene” in an informal and capacious manner and accept there are many environmental and sociological markers which together point to North England at the end of the 18th century as its beginning. Between earth science and other practices, we can inhabit the impasse instead of ignoring it.”

Essentially, Saldanha proposes what Maslin and his colleagues proposed (albeit more expansively) three years later (in 2022): to abandon the goal of defining the Anthropocene as an epoch, thus requiring a golden spike, and instead conceive of it as an “event” stretching over centuries, with a host of “defining” episodes.

Which brings us back to where we began, almost: what Saldanha adds to the mix is a necessary interpolation of the dynamic tension between capitalism and racism as animating factors behind the emergence of human force as a geologic scale impact that will ultimately expand into an existential threat to life on earth.

Understanding these sociopolitical underpinnings of the Anthropocene, far from being an esoteric distraction, serve a vital purpose for potentializing the transformation from aggregate human power exerting catastrophic consequences to collective human agency actualizing beneficial outcomes — with the possibility of averting life extinction.

What we’re reading at r3.0 (10)

A review of Jem Bendell’s ‘Breaking Together — A Freedom-Loving Response To Collapse’

By Ralph Thurm

Many of us will still remember when they first read Deep Adaptation — A Map For Navigating Climate Tragedy — the 2018 soulful cry of an academic professor that couldn’t take it any longer. Jem Bendell’s groundbreaking paper got rejected by an academic Journal, condemned by many other academics, but was downloaded more than a million times within the first two years after its publication. It spoke to us at r3.0 right away, and I think it’s fair to say, it helped quite a bit over the last several years to shape our own organizational (and personal) journies from collapse awareness to actual collapse acknowledgement. Since then, other books on the topic of collapse were on top of our reading piles, assisting to further crystalize a view which we now call ‘post-collapse readiness’, most notably Pablo Servigne’s two books, and other literature paving the way to regeneration, like Vanessa Andreotti’s Hospicing Modernity, Daniel Christian Wahl’s Designing Regenerative Cultures, or Joe Brewer’s The Design Pathway For Regenerating Earth, just to cite some of the many thinkers in our field.

Motivated by the many interrelated aspects of the polycrisis (or what Dana Meadows and William Catton call our “predicament”) and longing for a better understanding of the systemic logic of collapse and how to respond to it, Bendell then embarked on a three year ‘critical interdisciplinary research analysis’, which resulted in Breaking Together — A Freedom Loving Response to Collapse. It describes Bendell’s growing insights in the interwoven web of what he calls ‘Imperial Modernity’, which holds us humans strait-jacketed, and developing ‘Ecolibertarianism’ for the deeper ideas for transformation that many people share. When reading, it becomes clear that this is a counter-model that cuts a lot of the ties with what exists, institutionally, politically, economically, often personally. We often say a lot of the old must be ‘hospiced’, and the new must be ‘midwifed.’

The book can be divided into two parts, the first part asking ‘what do the data tell us about collapse?’ (reasons), and the second part then focuses on ‘now how can we respond to that evidence?’ (reactions). As Bendell says,

‘for now, I opt for the necessary conversations and efforts to defend universal rights, accountability, and justice. If people like us do not try, then we leave preparing, guiding, and potential recovering from collapse to people and institutions who will not be approaching it with the same values.’

He continues to clarify

‘when I say “breaking together” I mean allowing the breakdowns in our privileges, comforts, worldviews and identities, to allow a new openness for connection with people, nature and even the eternal. We can also allow this breaking to reconnect us with aspects of who we are that have been hidden under the social conditioning we’ve experienced since birth. We have tended to cling to the products of that conditioning, in order to feel safe, respected, capable, and able to have fun in ways we already know. But we’ve got to let go and begin breaking together.’

Chapters 1–6 of the book develop the ‘dashboard’ of collapse indicators in great depth. Bendell discusses economic collapse, monetary collapse, energy collapse, biosphere collapse, climate collapse, and food collapse extensively. The span of data used, the interpretation of the role of diverse players involved, and the inability for us to reject, step out, and re-design what’s necessary becomes painfully clear. While aspects like water, housing, mobility, information technology, or health are not discussed in separate chapters, they are either woven into the existing chapters, or it is clear that they are severely and negatively implicated by those factors discussed at length. In that sense, this first part is rather complete in its assessment.

Chapter 7 then discusses Societal collapse as an ongoing parallel decay. It is clear that it is undeniably the consequence of the beforementioned discussed areas of collapse. What’s particularly interesting in this chapter is a deeper dive into our denial of the reality, the ‘taboo’ to acknowledge. Aspects like siloed research and reductionism, normalcy bias in all its forms and consequences, and elements of the ‘cultural cement’ (legal, commercial, monetary, political, and personal egoisms) are discussed in quite some length.

The chapters of part two of the book all start with ‘Freedom from…’ and by that invite us all to personally develop what Bendell calls ‘critical wisdom’ (the ‘Freedom to know…’):

the ‘elusive capability for understanding oneself in the world that combines insight from mindfulness, critical literacy, rationality, and intuition. A capability for mindfulness involves awareness of the motivations for our thought, including our mind states, emotional reactions and why we might want to “know” about phenomena. A capability for rationality involves awareness of logic, logical fallacies and forms of bias. A capability for critical literacy involves awareness of how the tools by which we think, including linguistically constructed concepts and stories, are derived from, and reproduce, culture, including relationships of power. A capability for intuition involves awareness of insights from non-conceptual experiences including epiphanies and insights from non-ordinary states of consciousness.’

He comes with warnings against anti-radicalism on environmental issues, and how there will be a tendency to retrain the conclusions we reach about collapse. It opens a range of ‘third way’ options for thinking about collapse, releasing pressures that create the stress symptoms we now feel and see all the time. It is interesting to see that ‘woke’, a term nobody knew a couple of years ago, is now all over the place to discredit critical thinking of the current collapse-causing setting, instigated by those in power and hierarchy.

Further chapters in Bendell’s ‘freedom-loving response to collapse’ include ‘Freedom from progress’, ‘Freedom from banking’, ‘Freedom in nature’, ‘Freedom to collapse and grow the doomster way’, and ‘Freedom from fake green globalists’. Each of these chapters is a treasure trove of insights and argues for positions against Imperial Modernity.

‘Freedom from progress’ helps to rediscover the immense wisdom of indigenous peoples. Bendell mentions Lyla June Johnston (a 2023 r3.0 conference speaker) and her incredible dissertation about indigenous regenerative food systems that lasted for thousands of years. He also refers to David Graeber and David Wengrow’s reminder of ‘seasonal dualism’ (the dynamic, based on archeological evidence, that human groups governed themselves in different modes — from egalitarian to hierarchical — in different seasons). It debunks all sorts of classifications of the ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ kinds and to allow the ‘fluid ecological arrangements’ that offer a right to nutrition due to the people’s freedom. A fascinating concept, while the reader will be met with the question if we humans will ever be able to reach such a state of freedom again? The chapter is full with more examples from Deep Adaptation Network protagonists and known experts like Vandana Shiva (a 2022 r3.0 conference speaker) and Satish Kumar, mentions Robin Wall Kimmerer, as well as examples from different past cultures. Finally, r3.0 2023 conference speaker Vanessa Andreotti’s famous remark

‘more of us, who live in Imperial Modern cultures, need the courage and time to “compost our shit” rather than rush towards a nicer story and feeling about the situation’

closes out the chapter.

‘Freedom from banking’ is a continuation from the chapter about monetary collapse from part 1 of the book. Bendell writes

‘[…] we will see that monetary systems and the monied classes were crucial to the colonialism and imperialism that destroyed societies that were living more in balance with nature. I will demonstrate how monetary power has been involved in reproducing various restrictive and destructive paradigms, including neoliberalism, modernity and even patriarchy. Then we will observe that, by creating a growth imperative for economies and an expansion imperative for corporations, a particular kind of money system routinised social, environmental, cultural and political oppression. That monetary power was not an accident, but organised by a complex of people, organisations, resources, norms and rules that served the monetarily wealthy.’

He delivers examples of socio-environmental oppression (including describing his own situation), cultural and political oppression, and how the delusional story of wealth is separated from nature creates ‘omnicide’, especially combined with the everlasting growth imperative. As a result, modern societies will crash hard and fast.

In ‘Freedom with nature’, Bendell starts with a sharp attack of the Davos Summits, saying

‘What I didn’t realise is that the one thing worse than the world’s elites not taking climate change seriously would be them taking climate change seriously. The ideas and policies emerging at Davos primarily focus on accessing more public money for private ventures with dubious ecological credentials and creating digital infrastructures for the control of ordinary people. What the world’s elites fail to consider is how their own ideas, worldviews and decisions drove the world to the brink of collapse. Or how because of that track record, they aren’t the best people to be deciding what to do about it.’

So how do we liberate ourselves into a free will to allow for ecoliberatarianism to be birthed? Bendell criticises the purely natural scientific approach to only rely on what can be proven to exist (the ‘Enlightenment’), as a mechanistic understanding and a reductive approach. He mentions neuroscience, quantum physics, to then land at spiritual perspectives on free will, Abrahamic religions, Buddhism, and discusses a universal consciousness creating a ‘co-causal awareness’ as the source of free will, participating in the cocreation of the physical, chemical, biological and social factors that shape ‘it and everything’. Free will is therefore relative and contextual, which Bendell then discusses for the development of ‘Natural Freedom’ and his vision of ‘Ecofreedom’ for ecolibertarians. He calls his vision of the future ‘Evotopia.’ He explains:

‘My vision therefore includes millions of people of most faiths and none, having become newly aware of the way some of the dominant systems of communication have distorted their experience of themselves, others and nature. Consequently, they will cause less suffering, resist it more, and enable more joy, creativity and transcendence. Henceforth I will refer to this vision of the future as an Evotopia. That is because “evo” means to behold or witness and “topia” means a place or reality. An Evotopia is the idealised scenario where humanity better beholds natural reality so that both destruction slows and beauty flows.’

Bendell also hastens to clarify the difference of ecolibertarianism from mainstream right-wing libertarianism. The rest of chapter then discusses consequences of his thinking to rebooting environmentalism, countering eco-authoritarianism or eco-Stalinism, and degrowth.

In ‘Freedom to collapse and grow’ Bendell calls us people in the collapsology arena ‘Doomsters’. He explains

‘the term “doomer” has been used to criticise people for having a negative outlook and giving up. Some people who self-identify as doomers are happy with that characterisation. However, others think it ignores the ongoing passion they have for being useful in society. To move beyond that baggage, some of us have begun describing ourselves as “doomsters”. The suffix “ster” has been used to indicate something good (e.g. rhymester), or bad (e.g. gangster), or a profession (e.g. pollster), or a fashion trend (e.g. hipster). If one uses a word with “ster” to describe oneself, it indicates a confidently chosen identity.’

He gives us 15 charactereristics of doomsters (see box).

The chapter is a potpourri of examples of people who went through personal collapse to arrive at ecoliberatarianism, and what they did, mostly spiritual experiences, to get there, and how their lives changed. Bendell comes with 5 approaches to develop intuition, or ‘vital compass’ for developing the necessary confidence (meditation, calming fears, exploring sensations held within our own bodies, addressing sense of personhood within Imperial Modernity, and critical literacy). He also mentions his own 4R framework (Resilience: what do we most value that we want to keep, and how?Relinquishment: what do we need to let go of so as not to make matters worse? Restoration: what could we bring back to help us with these difficult times? Reconciliation: with what and whom shall we make peace as we awaken to our mutual mortality?). Finally, the chapter discusses policy agendas in an era of collapse and offers six areas of scholarship and action on social change that are incorporating an acceptance of the breakdown of industrial consumer societies, disciplines like planning, community-level initiatives, collaborative governance, cosmolocalism, transformative adaptation, networking in local groups.

To close, in ‘Freedom from fake globalists’, we come back to the earlier mentioned critical literacy, e.g. to counter media manipulation (Bendell uses the Covid hype extensively as an example,) refers to conspiracy porn, and arrives at ‘Reclaiming’ as a 5th ‘R’ to his 4R framework. It would help to resist authoritarianism, avoiding distraction and dilution.

In a conclusions chapter Bendell comes with some answers to some of the most frequently heard questions on collapse.

‘Most senior officials are unfamiliar with the evidence that I have summarised in this book, and typically repeat the same blocking tropes that prevent proper engagement with the topic. Those tropes are the following, and they all arise from deep assumptions ingrained in us through what I call Imperial Modernity: we can’t know for certain; scientists are undecided; technology is amazing; the kids are going to change everything; we can’t lose hope; we can’t undermine people’s commitment; we mustn’t create a self-fulfilling prophecy; we can’t risk anarchy; and we should have more faith in humanity or more faith in God. In this book, I have demonstrated each of these blocking tropes are unintelligent. If I may crudely summarise for a moment, I can respond to each of those statements as follows: we certainly know what’s happening already; scientists aren’t trained to integrate from outside their specialisms; technology cannot fix multi-system collapse; protesting teenagers often evolve into salespersons for green business; whereas our passions are unleashed by recognising the full destructiveness of elites; blaming realists for being right is obviously moronic; voluntary self-governance will be better than constant manipulation and control; because our faith in humanity and the divine means we trust our freedom to care for each other and nature once freed from the cowardly and narcissistic officers of Imperial Modernity. Just saying‘.

Breaking Together — A Freedom-Loving Response to Collapse offers the reasons and reactions to our joint collapse. It offers additional depth to those that were pretty sure that collapse is already happening. The different perspectives in which data are presented (especially on energy and food) in part 1 of the book are specifically helpful, and are of course also essential reading for all starters on collapsology. It is appreciated that the second part of the book is so rich in content and examples, while of course nobody knows exactly how the culmination of 50 years of collapse will unfold. There is more to find than in any other book on the topic, it’s the most comprehensive compilation so far.

Want to hear more about the book and from its author? Please join us on April 8, 2024, 5pm CET for r3.0’s 3rd Open Dialogue Session, titled ‘Jem Bendell — Breaking Together: a talk about reasons and responses to collapse’. Just let r.thurm@r3–0.org know or respond with a PM to posts on Linkedin or facebook.

Embarking on the second decade for r3.0 (Redesign for Resilience & Regeneration) offers an opportunity to orient ourselves by scanning the horizon for our way forward while also turning around to view our journey through the past.

Of course, we as living beings only ever exist in a perpetual present, so starting there, we at r3.0 find ourselves at a confluence, merging our long-standing work focused on organizational accountability with our newer place-based focus — specifically looking through bioregional and municipality lenses.

This ongoing work on organizational accountability itself represents a kind of confluence of successes and challenges. Atop the list of successes is our 4-year collaboration with the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) to jointly conceptualize, pilot, and ultimately launch the UN Sustainable Development Performance Indicators (UNSDPIs) in 2022. Since then, we have been actively advancing practice through our monthly UNSDPI Trainings.

As for the challenges, we chronicled those in our The Lost Decade Common Good Resource report, documenting how the sustainability standards have essentially sabotaged sustainability. Seeing as these standards act as normative institutions, we can only say that our institutions are failing to steer us in the right direction, at the very moment we need them to do so the most.

The success struggles mightily to make up for the systemic dysfunctions perpetrated and perpetuated by the challenges.

So, it should come as no surprise that we continue to widen our aperture to take in other strategic angles. Specifically, we first encountered the notion of the bioregion as the “unit of management” for assessing necessary transformation, in John Fullerton’s Keynote at our 2015 Conference. This message was reinforced by Joe Brewer in his Keynote at our 2019 Conference, and by the end of that year, r3.0 had joined the Regenerative Communities Network via the Connecticut River Valley Bioregional Collaborative. But this place-based work remained on the sidelines of r3.0’s focus.

Now, as we move forward, we shift this place-based focus from the edge to the center. In addition to our bioregional work — for example, through the development of Funding Ecosystems for Bioregional Learning Centers through the Co-Creating Funding Ecosystems for Regeneration community that is activating the recommendations from our Funding Governance for Systemic Transformation Blueprint — we are also deepening our collaboration with our Advocation Partner, the Flourishing Enterprise Institute (FEI), on its municipality work — for example its Municipalities Adapting in Response to Complexity (MARC) partnership with ICLEI (see here for more on this). Of course, municipalities are nested within bioregions, so there are clearly fractal relationships here.

We merge our work in this place-based direction not only due to the relative promise of effectiveness (compared to the dysfunctional sustainability standard setters), but also because it aligns with the imperative — from our post-collapse readiness perspective — to continually enhance the resilience of the places we live, so that those places can continue to provision our needs across the spectrum from the physical to the spiritual.

So, what does all this mean in practice? One thing is doesn’t mean: we are not necessarily abandoning our work at the organizational level — we will continue to advocate for organizational accountability for the sustainability of their impacts, so organizations can contribute to regeneration and flourishing, within and beyond their own boundaries. As specific opportunities at the organizational scale present themselves, we will assess them on their own merits.

And, we’re diversifying into the place-based space, in some instances using the same kinds of tools we’ve deployed in the organizational space. For example, the City of Kitchener participated in the pilot testing program we ran for UNRISD, and the City of Nanaimo has taken this a step further, by building out more sophisticated indicators using the MultiCapital Scorecard.

As you can see, we’re not abandoning our history to pursue this new direction, but rather simply expanding our horizons!