Last week’s r3.0 Bioregional Open Dialogue 14 featured our Research Fellow Andrea Farias announcing the public launch of her Bioregional Knowledge Commoning database, available at Bioregioning.Earth. Andrea introduced the first public output of one element of r3.0’s broader Bioregional Knowledge Commoning Project: a structured secondary-research database — 57 organization profiles and 59 in-depth case studies drawn from 117 sources on bioregional organizing worldwide — built into a queryable, Markdown-native knowledge base designed for discovery, comparison, and eventual federation across bioregions.

Andrea — an autonomous researcher who’s also a co-founder of the ReFi Barcelona worker collective (rebranding as Motiu) — first shared her own background (she also works with the Bioregional Weaving Labs and Commonland), then the background of this particular research (which was first outlined in her Bioregional Knowledge Commons — A Meta Perspective research paper published by r3.0 in May 2025.

For the remainder of the session, she walked step-by-step through the formulation of Commons = Community × (Wealth = Resource × Value) × Protocols (nodding to the commoning work of David Bollier & Silke Helfrich) — including a live demonstration of the new Bioregioning.Earth website interface.

The Dialogue segment kicked off with a set of questions from Dave Wolf, Kaliya Young, Michael Lennon, Emmanuelle Chiche, and Wendy Ellyatt clustered around questions of user accessibility for posting and updating information on their own bioregions.

We then grappled with another challenging question from Michael: “Elinor Ostrom’s definition of Commons include a sense of shared property/stewardship that contrasts insiders’ rights / privileges and obligations from non-members. By participating it this “knowledge commons”, whose rights — including IP around the knowledge and meta-knowledge — are privileged? Do all knowledge consumers have rights to “mine / enclose” these commons?”

Kaliya then shared more about her work with the Protocol Institute (which Andrea referenced): “I was a 2024 fellow of the Protocol Institute - they funded this research into the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) protocols for protocol creation. David Hodgson was so inspired by this — and its potential to be understood / experimented with by bioregional governance — that we might do a learning journey to the IETF.”

“Also, at Project Weave, we are really thinking deeply about the protocols we need for our movements and networks to have them be sovereign and autonomous while connected,” Kaliya continued. “Not just Open Source but Open Protocols (we can talk about the difference). David and I have been thinking about these things and put this forward to consider some of these and inviting a guild of technologists embedded in the bioregional movement to be more organized and coherent so we can make good technology choices.”

She ended by noting “you need a trust substrate,” to which Jimmy Schappet responded: “I like this as a concept. Thinking of the whole collection of knowledge as the bare soil, and then trusted information grows out of that. Maybe the trust comes from demonstrated results.”

We ended the session pointing to next opportunities to learn more about the broader r3.0 Bioregional Knowledge Commoning (BKC) Project — including in the Bioregional Knowledge Commoning Panel Session at the r3.0 Conference on Sept 9 (in which r3.0 Research Fellow Eli Ingraham will present on the overarching BKC Project) and then the next week when I will present on the BKC Project with Project Advisor WarīNkwī Flores at the Turtle Island Bioregional Congress in the Cascadia Bioregion.

You can access all the review materials here:

• Recording

• Presentation Deck

• Living Resources Document

How do we relearn to live in right relationship with the land and water that sustain us? Communities around the world are already answering it in practice, through regenerative food systems, watershed stewardship, and new forms of place-based governance. But this knowledge often stays scattered: locked in reports, oral histories, and disconnected systems, largely invisible to the wider field trying to learn from it.

The 14th r3.0 Bioregional Open Dialogue introduces the first public output of r3.0’s Bioregional Knowledge Commons Project: a structured secondary-research database — 57 organization profiles and 59 in-depth case studies drawn from 117 sources on bioregional organizing worldwide — built into a queryable, Markdown-native knowledge base designed for discovery, comparison, and eventual federation across bioregions.

r3.0 Research Fellow Andrea Farias will walk through what’s in the database, how it’s structured, and what the team learned building it — then zoom out to the larger landscape it’s part of: a “local / meta” model of federated knowledge commons, and parallel efforts to build bioregional intelligence infrastructure that helps places understand and steward themselves. The throughline: territories and communities need better ways to know themselves and each other — and that infrastructure is just beginning to take shape.

This last Bioregional Open Dialogue session before the r3.0 Conference will tee up the Bioregional Knowledge Commons Panel Session at the Conference, where r3.0 Research Fellow Eli Ingraham will present on the overarching Bioregional Knowledge Commons Research Project, focusing in particular on the Primary Research elements, including engaging bioregional groups globally about their regenerative practices, and then applying a pattern analysis method to discern commonalities across biocultural contexts. r3.0 Senior Director Bill Baue will also be presenting on our BKC work at the Turtle Island Bioregional Congress.

The Session will take place on 20 August 2026 from 3:00-4:30pm UTC (click here to convert to your time zone) on the r3.0 Zoom line:

https://zoom.us/j/4785801785?pwd=RU50bUFWSG5wUnBBc21JMFUyaEhyUT09

Meeting ID: 478 580 1785

Passcode: 902564

You can (optionally) sign up for the Session and/or download a calendar invite here.

After the Session, we will post the Recording, Presentation Deck, and Living Resources Document on the r3.0 website here.

“We engage Sylvia Wynter’s definition of human beings as homo narrans – the ones who narrate ourselves – to examine how people create stories about life and about who we are, and how we live within the stories we create.”

Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil & Kriti Sharma, Relationality, 2024

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff’s work on cognitive framing, popularized in his 2004 best selling book Don’t Think of an Elephant!, re-framed how we understand framing. His brilliant title succinctly illustrates the power of narrative framing: cognitively speaking, we can’t not think of an elephant, once it’s invoked, because the very invocation triggers neural pathways in the brain that fixate on – and fix – that frame.

Sylvia Wynter’s framing of humans as homo narrans reminds us that the power of story to define experience and understanding is as old as our species: we are storytellers, whose stories not only narrative, but more literally define our lives. A change of story can transform our life.

The tension between this fixity and fluidity of framing is what imbues story with such deep power: since stories are constructs of the imagination, we can change them at any time, simply by shifting what we think; and, since our minds are “hard wired,” new stories can shift how we think. And compelling stories can stick.

Interviewee Steve Keen illustrates the power of framing – and re-framing – through the “story” of mainstream economic theory.

“Economic theories have got to go in the garbage bin – mainstream economic theory is completely delusional. It’s a very convincing delusion, which is why it’s lasted 150 years. We can date it back to the 1870s, but the intellectual components of that have mathematical flaws and empirical flaws, which, in any genuine science, would have overturned the theory: it should have been overturned in the 1920s, certainly by the 1960s or 70s.”

“So that theory has to go, and you then need to apply a physical approach to economics, one that realizes production necessarily involves using raw materials and energy we find in the environment, and necessarily generates waste and necessarily obeys laws of thermodynamics, and that, with that framing, we would never have let ourselves get in the situation we are in now. It’s the absence of that framing that has allowed this to happen, and the most delusional people on the planet are the economists specializing in climate change.”

Gaya Herrington also picked up on the power of framing using the example of degrowth, not only as an economic and social theory / movement, but as a cognitive frame that consciously fucks with traditional marketing wisdom for specific purposes.

“People complain that degrowth is not good marketing, which is true. More and more, I am starting to become appreciative of their argument that yeah, that’s on purpose, because then it can’t be co-opted. Even terms like sustainability can be co-opted. But it’s true that degrowth can’t be co-opted.”

Scientifically, the term sustainability has robust precision, but in popular usage, it has been greenwashed to the point of meaninglessness. This development was both purposeful (evidence documents conscious manipulation and dilution of the term’s precision) and systemic: the predominant capitalist economic system and cultural modernist system are inherently unsustainable and violent (as Vanessa Andreotti has shown), so the systems themselves reinforce the undermining of terms that challenge their hegemony.

What’s so brilliant about degrowth framing as co-optation insulation is that the case against degrowth – that the framing is uncompelling and turns people off – is precisely the case for this framing, which forces those who encounter it to confront their own deeply embedded biases toward growth, which is thermodynamically impossible to sustain as infinitum (particularly when compounded) and socially unjust due to inherent concentration of wealth & power.

Gaya names another powerful aspect of narrative framing: the ability to create coherence through mutually validating and reinforcing storylines.

“So again I’m more and more favorable towards degrowth, also because I think the movement itself has grown a lot – I think the movement is, everybody saying the same thing basically, now, so I think it’s very coherent.”

In describing the practice of commitment pooling that he engages in with the Indigenous Kenyan communities where he lives, Will Ruddick explains the use of the narrative device of visioning.

“When we’re practicing this, we put it within a visionary process to community action planning framework. So, we start with asset mapping: we talk about social assets, like belonging, we talk about skills, we talk about spiritual purpose, we talk about governance and voice, we talk about the nature around us, we talk about infrastructure, and we talk about our commitments. So, commitments are one element of a whole bunch of assets that we have as a community.”

“And then we worked on vision. We say, where are we actually trying to go? What is our vision of a healthy environment? What does health look like to us individually, as families? And so we do a lot of drawing, we do a lot of processes, and then we say, okay, well, how do we get from, here we are with our assets, and, there’s our vision. How do we get there?”

“And we build these sort of structural tension charts with them, we use rubber bands. We say, what’s the tension between where we are and where we’re going? And how do we release that tension? What does it actually look like to do so? And we come up with action steps and whatnot with them, but a core part of that is, what are the tools, the instruments, and agreements we need to take these assets and reach our vision?

Ashish Kothari called for enabling people at the fringes to tell their own stories and bring them to the center. Specifically, he laid out a strategy to

“identify where those movements already exist, to document them, to talk about them, to enable those people to tell their own stories, not just people like me going and writing an article about it, but for them to voice their own stories and for that to reach audiences where policies are being made… It’s about documentation, visibilizing, networking, creating the platforms for communities of that kind to be able to meet each other.”

Sahana Chattopadhyay was the interviewee who focused most on story and narrative framing – and the most eloquently and persuasively – so we will let her speak for herself extensively. Sahana started by outlining the conscious nature of narrative development through conscious collaboration to achieve the kind of coherence that Gaya advocated through multi-voiced perspectives.

“We need many more communities of intention, communities of purpose where we are developing skills very deliberately, we are sowing and seeding new narratives very deliberately by design -- we are not leaving it to, ‘it will happen if we repeat it often enough.’ It has to be, I would say, a concerted, deliberate, painstaking effort to co-create those narratives that are not only representing different voices but are also representing a confluence of voices that are microcosms, literally microcosms of the world that we wish to inhabit, inherit, and leave behind.”

Sahana extended this conscious approach to cultivating the necessary “outside-the-box” creativity, calling for advocates of regenerative economies and cultures

“becoming radical imagineers: imagination, not as flights of fancy, but very deliberate imagination, which I personally feel is a holistic skill of sensemaking and intuition, tapping into our own deep wisdom and deep listening to many, many voices and narratives outside -- so listening within, listening outside -- and imagining from there.”

“I even put it beyond foresight, because foresight operates using certain frameworks within the present hegemony, so it ends up tweaking and recalibrating the hegemonic narrative rather than making that leap of faith into a very different imagination, which is currently a deliberately exiled capacity, because the hegemony is scared of our imagination.”

“We have to re-invite that exiled capacity back and deliberately build it in these communities for us to manifest different alternatives, and I think it’s so possible… These communities become not only crucibles, but I would also say they become these collective imaginal cells, holding the DNA for possible futures -- but they have to be very deliberately nurtured, nourished, stewarded, facilitated, and the skills and capacities have to be deliberately built and held on to.”

Picking up on the points Ashish made, Sahana directs our attention away from the mainstream to seek out the stories & narratives that have been rejected by today’s hegemonic cultures.

“So communities imagine becoming imagineers and listening to the periphery, listening to the edges, listening to the margins -- the voices of Indigenous and tribal wisdoms, and beyond that, because there are so many voices and narratives that are delegitimized, invisiblized, silenced -- they are not even sought out. We have to deliberately go seeking those narratives, become story seekers, pattern seekers, then weave these qualities into these communities and build those skills and capacities that will collectively enable us to embody what we want the world to be.”

“So let the hegemonic narrative go. We don’t have to fight it. The more we fight it, we give it more energy. It’s like, if you keep saying ‘No, we won’t do that,’ we are repeating what we won’t do, so let’s not fight it. It will die its own death. It’s already impaling itself on its own stupidities.”

“Certain powers would rather have us polarized, and are trying to keep us polarized. We won’t be polarized, we won’t be fragmented. We won’t be fractured. We won’t give in to propaganda. How can we do that? We can do it, and I would say, the best examples I’ve seen in recent times are the stories of the student encampments supporting Palestinian resistance to genocide spread all over the globe. I mean, they just came together. I’m sitting a world away, continents, away from them, following their stories, because their stories speak about community, speak about cultural pluriversality, speak about empathy, speak about solidarity, speak about allyship or relationship. They embody what we can do in a very short space of time to create alternative narratives collectively.”

For previous installments of the r3.0 Seeds 2 serialization, please see the Seeds Series feed on my Substack here. And you can read Seeds 2 in its entirety here.

In the next ~24 hours, I encourage you to please donate to one of the 23 bioregional projects in Ma Earth‘s 3rd Quadratic Funding Round, which ends today. Click here to view them.

Tomorrow, after this Round ends, the need to support bioregional projects does not -- so I encourage you to please also donate to the r3.0 Bioregional Confluencing Fund (here) which will support ~70 bioregional groups across 6 continents to host in-person Confluences in parallel with the r3.0 Conference in September.

You can see a listing of all Confluences (and background information on the Confluencing process) here.

And you can explore more on the Confluencing Community -- including presentations made in the monthly Confluencing Community Calls spotlighting specific Confluences and their bioregional work from Uruguay, Brazil, Turtle Island, Australia, Italy, Switzerland, Kenya, and Finland, as well as stories of their work from our Media Partner StoryMoss Magazine here.

These 2 different opportunities to fund bioregional work have both similarities and distinctions.

Both deliver needed funding directly to groups doing on-the-ground work activating bioregionalism (and other regenerative practices, in the case of Ma Earth).

The main difference is scale and visibility: Ma Earth‘s 3rd Funding Round will distribute ~$1m amongst ~200 projects (of more than 800 who applied -- including our Confluencing Fund, which wasn’t selected for this Round), a subset of which are explicitly devoted to bioregional work.

Our Confluencing Fund has a much more modest fundraising goal of $50k to distribute in fair shares across ~70 bioregional groups -- meaning much more modest funding filtering through to the initiatives.

Both funding mechanisms are important. Please support both.

(I’ve donated very modest amounts to the 9 bioregional projects in the Ma Earth Round where I know participants directly -- including one I’m directly involved in: Turtle Island Bioregional Congress. The beauty of the Quadratic Funding process is that it weighs the number of donations more than the amount of those donations to determine fund-matching...)

As the September r3.0 Online Conference nears, we focus our the upcoming July installment of our Bioregional Open Dialogue series spotlighting the in-person Confluences hosted by bioregional groups concurrently with the Conference, in particular focusing attention on 2 (amongst the almost 80 Confluences across 6 continents) Confluences in particular, as described below.

The Session will take place on 29 July from 1:30-3:00pm UTC -- to convert to your time zone click here. To optionally sign up and/or download a calendar invite, please click here.

Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, who was nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, will share on the work he stewards with the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) of Bethlehem University in the Western Asia-Palestine Bioregion. The goals of this work include:

• Research and knowledge dissemination on the fauna, flora, and human ethnography of Palestine.

• Promote environmental protection and responsible interaction between people and the environment, including cultural heritage.

• Use research results in areas such as biodiversity, history, culture, permaculture and biological control to promote sustainable communities, focusing on marginalized communities.

Yasmin Mohamud of Dryland Solutions — which works to revitalize Somalia’s semi-desert grasslands, reversing the damage from climate change, deforestation, and conflict to realize its vision of a transformed Somalia where the semi-desert grassland ecosystem flourishes — will present on this work in the Somali Arid and Semi-Arid Lands Bioregion.

Dryland Solutions’ holistic approach to creating lasting positive change includes: Environmental Regeneration; Community Empowerment; Innovation & Education; Collaboration & Peacebuilding; Biodiversity Conservation; and Sustainable Development.

The Session will take place on the r3.0 Zoom line:
https://zoom.us/j/4785801785?pwd=RU50bUFWSG5wUnBBc21JMFUyaEhyUT09
Meeting ID: 478 580 1785
Passcode: 902564

If you would like to submit an Expression of Interest to host a Confluence, please click here. Confluence participants attend the Conference for free :-)

We look forward to seeing you there!

The June spotlight featured Magdalena Urioste representing Pampeanas Regenerativas Orientales, an all-women's bioregional collective in Uruguay. (See her deck here) Magda ended her presentation by quoting Collective member Maria Teresa Rodriguez saying "Do we have the political and cultural will to use the power of nature to heal our soiled planet?" (The answer on all our minds, inspired by the work of the Collective, was a resounding YES!)

Accompanying Magda were Emmanuelle Chiche & Megan Lindow of StoryMoss, Media Partner for the r3.0 Conference this year again, providing storytelling about the Confluences. They shared about their work weaving narratives that bring to life the work of all the groups doing this Bioregional Confluencing, as a means of encapsulating the vibrancy of the Confluencing Community. (See there slides here as well)

The May spotlight featured Danilo Olivaz & Samara Tanaka sharing about their work with Associação Pedagógica Terra Educa in the Marumbi Watershed in the Serra do Mar Bioregion in Brazil, including their founding of a school to help seed bioregional consciousness within their own community, as well as in collaboration with the public schools throughout the region. They're also creating a digital avatar for the Marumbi River to further support their relational pedagogy. (You can check out their deck here)

The July spotlight later this month features Benjamin Erlandson presenting on the work in the Upper New Bioregion in North Carolina, Virginia & West Virginia on Turtle Island, and Ghalia Naseer sharing on the work of Rivers of the North Sea Bioregion in the Netherlands through a Spoken Word expression.

Session recordings are available for Confluencing Community Members, so please consider hosting an in-person Confluence alongside the r3.0 Conference in September in order to join this vibrant global bioregional community and share your own work (each monthly call includes a section for brief sharings from each bioregional group present, to further support cross-seeding of ideas.) You can submit an Expression of Interest here.

“Life is a pattern of self organization, of self generation, of regeneration.”

Fritjof Capra, Regeneration is fundamental to living systems, 2020

We ended the last section on mindsets / paradigms / worldviews with a quote from Daniel Christian Wahl that encapsulates this section on regeneration, which “is part of the systemic evolutionary process of how life creates conditions conducive to life,” according to Daniel. It is perhaps unsurprising that regeneration emerged as a consistent theme in our interviews, given that we framed our questions around “regenerative economies and cultures.” But an assumption that our questions introduced a bias that wouldn’t have otherwise existed seems overly simplistic, as regeneration is already at the core of many of our interviewees’ thinking and action.

Joe Brewer concisely encapsulated the essence of our exploration: “Regenerative economies are based on living systems.” We explored this assertion earlier, in the Systems section, but it warrants repeating here. Joe further elucidated that

“a regenerative economy is not simply a metaphor of a living system. It is actually the embodied living system itself. Meaning, you build your economy from the landscape of a watershed, and its ecology and the material flows of that ecology. It is literally a living system. And so this is extremely important that we don’t just have sweet and cute metaphors of water flow as the way of creating a monetary system. I mean, the monetary system is actually based on the flow of water, creating biodiversity and biomass. And I mean that the energy flow coming from photosynthesis and the sun is literally a basis for economic measurement of value.”

Indeed, Daniel pointed out the fractal nature of this foundational relationship with life, noting that regeneration “happens in every cell of the body” and “happens in every organism on this planet” – including economies, if we base them on the regenerative impulses and patterns of living systems.

Daniel also pointed out that we are already doing so: “Don’t fall into the trap of making it sound as if regenerative cultures and regenerative economies don’t exist yet, and are some kind of future Utopia that we now need to achieve.” Yes, they exist, to a much greater extent than is visible when looking at mainstream sources of information. The opportunity now exists to migrate regeneration from the margins to the mainstream, in ways that avoid cooptation (as we’re already seeing in the corporatization of regeneration).

Nate Hagens calls for aligning with the longer timescales of biophysical regeneration, noting that the extractive timescales of our current accelerationist, anthropocentric economies (and the cultures undergirding them) are unsustainable as a simple mathematical matter: “Nature regenerates at a much slower rate than our current economies are growing.” He explains:

“So we’re adding millions of years of ancient sunlight to our current economic output. And we’re taking 30 to 40% of the net primary productivity of the planet for all the 10 million other species, and directing it towards one species, ours.”

“In a forest, the sunlight and the rain and the soil – nutrients – allow trees to grow at around 2 and a half, 2.6% a year in the amount of biomass. So if we took all of the tree growth in the United States and didn’t leave it for any other purpose, but we took that biomass growth and compared it to what amount of energy we’re using right now – if we had to use that amount, we would clear cut the entire North American forest in 5 years, just to heat our homes with the amount of natural gas coal and electricity we use right now. So one of the imperatives of a regenerative future is the scale of the human enterprise, which is consumption times population, is going to have to be moderately to substantially lower than it is today.”

Will Ruddick echoed this temporal perspective, drawing attention to the multigenerational legacy of enslavement to monetary systems that need to transform to the multigenerational cycles of regenerative activities, achieved by implementing Commitment Pools at the community level oriented towards the common good.

“I work with a lot of Indigenous communities where I live here in Kenya, and there’s been an extreme push into an addictive, predatory type of economic system that centralizes power and essentially enslaves the population, which contrasts starkly with how communities have and do work together.”

“The introduction of money here wasn’t with the British, it was with spice traders and slave traders coming in early on. Addiction to sugar was a huge thing, and a lot of the stories of grandfathers of grandfathers here is that Permende Sweets was their introduction to money itself. It was through spice trade, and the Arabs and Portuguese would basically convince the local population to go and round up people they don’t like and sell them for sweets, and eventually money came into the picture that way.”

“And then the British conscripted people that they had indoctrinated into the monetary system to go out and enslave their local tribes and villages through hut taxation. So they would go in and say, if you don’t have this money – colonial script – we’re gonna beat you, pull you into a labor camp. And the only way you can get the money is also by working in the labor camp. So wage slavery came in there. So the introduction of a monetary system at all was incredibly horrific and dominating.”

“In fact, just to bring up the name or word money is essentially to bring up multiple generations of a form of slavery, almost everywhere in the world. I don’t think we really realize how horrible the introduction of money was at all. A lot of what we do nowadays is trying to fix money, which is a funny thing to be saying and doing, rather than really understanding what resource coordination or pre-monetary economics was all about.”

“And I think a lot of what’s happening now with decentralized ledger systems, is actually trying to come back to those pre-monetary situations. So my work here in Kenya is really just to learn from those pre-monetary traditions – try to understand them as you would protocol, try to do the translation so we can formalize them into a language that the rest of the world can understand, and then solidify them into the point where they can actually unite with each other. And, I mean, because if you look at the sort of parasitic methods of monetary imperialism, it was really to isolate and control individuals and groups, pull them away from the flock of the other clans, and control them.”

Will’s point also underlines the distinction between tangible biophysical regeneration on the one hand, and the more intangible regeneration of human activities, which can compress timescales radically.

Kate Raworth enumerated some of these human activities, calling for a “move to regenerative dynamics in terms of industrial design, in terms of product design, in terms of the metrics we use, and the mindset, and then, of course, distributive dynamics.” When enumerating the activities associated with the Solidarity Economy, Emily Kawano listed regenerative agriculture as one key component, as well as community land trusts, affordable housing, worker coops and mutual aid, community production and local sourcing, and spaces for cultural connection and learning.

Joe Brewer picked up on this same grounded nature, as we saw earlier in the Systems section, asserting that a

“a regenerative economy is place-based in a cosmologically significant way. So let me clarify what I mean by that: it could be place-based because you have a foodshed, and it’s the minerals, and the water, and the energy flow of photosynthesis of your agro-ecology system for your foodshed. It can grow to the scale of a bioregion where you have autopoiesis and self-organizing principles achieving a holistic scale. But it’s also fractal and embedded. So the idea that we honor community in place, is to also have an architecture that represents how our reality works.”

“So this is where we get into the nested earth systems, plate tectonics and continental patterns, ocean mixing processes, continental scale precipitation patterns like evaporation from the Pacific Ocean, dropping snow to make snow back in the Colorado Rockies. These continental- or planetary-scale processes become the basis in which regenerative economies can make sense, which is that regenerative economies will need to be organized as landscape systems.”

Nwamaka Agbo built on this localization as grounding for weaving webs of “trans-local connection, sharing information, tools, technical assistance, and approaches, which allows for coordination and connection without duplication. This information sharing accelerates the growth of a regenerative economy worldwide.”

Finally, Sahana Chattopadhyay noted that the very questions posed in the interview caused her to reexamine her own understanding of the intersection between regeneration, economy, and culture, and the narratives she holds around this clustering.

“So you know, again, your questions were so good that they prompted some different kinds of – or rather, they’ve just made me think in a certain different way. Because I do talk a lot about social and cultural narratives, but I was also seeing culture through the lens of economy, and vice versa. So when I read this question about ‘3 to 5 fundamental imperatives of regenerative economies and cultures’, I may need to clarify what I mean by regeneration, or what I understand by regeneration.”

“So for me, I would say that in a regenerative world, the economics is a facilitator, a steward of cultures. It is not the primary piece. It enables cultural evolution, it enables civilizational thriving. It enables harmony and peace and existence of a life sustaining civilization. So, economy becomes here, I would say, a bulwark, a support, a facilitation, a facilitator, a stewardship of cultures.”

For previous installments of the r3.0 Seeds 2 serialization, please see the Seeds Series feed on my Substack here. And you can read Seeds 2 in its entirety here.

“One must make what we call an ‘OntoShift’ — a recognition that relational categories of thought and experience are primary... OntoShift refers to a shift in a person’s fundamental presuppositions and perspectives about the nature of reality and how it is structured. People’s ontological viewpoints are reflected in their perceptions of how people and objects exist in the world, and, as a result, what general types of culture, political economy, and coordination structures they see as possible and desirable… A real paradigm shift occurs when our fundamental presuppositions about reality change. The challenge that political changemakers rarely address is how to step outside of entrenched worldviews and question unexamined assumptions built into our cognition.”

David Bollier & Silke Hilfrich, Free Fair & Alive, 2019

In his “Introductory Essay” to the 50th Anniversary Edition of Thomas Kuhn’s landmark text The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn simply called it the book), Ian Hacking devotes an entire section to the term “Paradigm,” noting that back in 1962 when “Kuhn wrote [the book], few people had ever encountered it… Nowadays, paradigm, along with its companion paradigm shift, is embarrassingly everywhere.” In a footnote, Hacking ventures a “flippant guess” of “a ratio of one to a million … for comparing the use of the word paradigm in 1962 and on the fiftieth anniversary of the book.”

Hacking points out the dilemma this popularization introduced for Kuhn, who wrote a 1974 essay “Second Thoughts on Paradigms” clarifying the nuanced way he intended to use the term in the book. Kuhn’s essential point is that paradigms are a double-edged sword, aligning us around shared interpretations of reality (or ontologies) that “hold water”, but entrapping us when emergent understandings challenge the legitimacy and tenability of previously stable shared interpretations. These stable regimes increasingly resist paradigm change (Kuhn’s preferred term) until the potential energy of these new understandings wells up enough to spill over into the kinetic energy of paradigm shifts (the term that has gained currency).

The key point for our purposes is that paradigms (and the adjacent terms mindsets, worldviews, and even ontologies) are not merely passive concepts, but rather powerfully determinative constructs that control our spectrum of options for how to engage our world. The magical aspect, as Dana Meadows points out in her landmark 1999 essay Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,1 is the fluidity of cognitive concepts, which at the individual level “can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing.”

Meadows acknowledges the greater challenge at the collective level, and channels Kuhn for guidance on how to change paradigms:

“In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.”

The inputs from our interviewees flesh out this guidance in more depth, acting as invitations to transcend the limiting dynamics of paradigms, mindsets, and worldviews by tapping into their empowerment to co-create a just and liberatory world.

Starting at the individual level with mindsets, Kate Raworth advocated for “a mindset of sufficiency. So, in the language George Monbiot put it, instead of private luxury and public squalor, achieve public luxury and private sufficiency.” Kate also argued for integrating complexity and systems thinking into mainstream economics: “we need to bring natural science understanding into the economic mindset.”

Steve Keen also focused on transforming the mindset of neoclassical economics, using the ratio of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas that exacerbates climate change when concentrated in higher-than-normal background levels to the degree of posing existential threat to humanity and other life forms, as the fulcrum to leverage change. In particular, he discussed carbon rationing as the market mechanism for transforming economist mindsets.

“But you’d also be getting an annual ration or given out virtually, only we could do it on a virtually a daily basis. Given modern technology so long as that survives. But I’d be rationing carbon consumption. So everybody who’d be buying anything would be paying its carbon content as well as its money price, would have a per-capita distribution of carbon allocations we call tradable carbon credits to everybody.”

“In a society, the per capita would be set at the average for each country as it currently stands. And of course that means the ultra wealthy would run out of their carbon credits before they got out of bed, while the the poor would have excess carbon credits they could sell back to the rich, and this would be a market mechanism to set a price on carbon, which would be a complete different process to what neoclassicals have been doing, where they’ve been trying to work out the carbon price themselves by basically pulling numbers out of their backsides.”

“This would say, ‘let’s get the market to do it,’ and that would have two effects. It would be an income redistribution from the rich to the poor, and it would put enormous pressure upon both the rich, and on corporations to find lower carbon ways of producing output.”

“But this is totally impossible until people realize this is an existential threat. Until that realization comes through, I don’t think anything can be done. Of course, when you have that, then you have a complete change in the direction of politics, and then it’s feasible to bring in measures like this [rationing carbon consumption], but it’s not feasible to bring them in beforehand.”

Steve, in his signature bluntness, continued on this line of thinking by pointing out the particular need for mindset transformation concentrated in the Global Minority (in both class and racial terms) of wealthy whites.

“So we just have an incredible need to change direction. But I frankly do not believe it’s going to happen until we start seeing truly catastrophic damages. And what I mean by catastrophic is climatic events that kill lots of white people – because fundamentally, there’s no way the West is going to wake up until white people start to die en masse. Just as you’re doing this interview right now, we’re seeing reports coming out of Jaipur in India of hundreds of people dying of heat exhaustion; the West won’t even react to that. But if the same thing happens in Texas, maybe they might.”

Lourenço Bustani generalized this sentiment from a subset to the whole of humanity in calling for a shift in consciousness to trigger the necessary worldview shifts.

“We’ve been trying to shift our intellect without doing the more profound work of shifting our consciousness. And if we don’t shift our consciousness, then there’s no real way for us to assimilate what’s changing intellectually because there’s a deeper worldview shift that reframes the world you live in. But, more importantly, the role you play within that world. And so we are living a crisis of consciousness at the root of all the other overlapping crises that define the metacrisis, or whatever you’d like to call it.”

“It’s a crisis of consciousness, and in loving the wrong things, we kind of forgot all those things worth loving. So we love money. We love plastic. We love Instagram. We love ultra-processed foods. We love cars. And we forgot to love each other – and the land we stand on, which, existentially-speaking, on a hierarchy, is much more important for our own survival and our own prosperity and our own well being than those other things. And so we need to elevate human consciousness through self-discovery, through self awareness.”

Lourenço believes that leaders, in particular, need to undergo “self discovery work to check their egos, to elevate their consciousness, to inspire them to channel their power towards greater purpose.”

Picking up on the power-over dynamic of ego-based leadership, Gaya Herrington calls for flattening this power and transforming it into a collaborative approach, citing current circumstances as an appeal to both historical precedent.

“On the continuum of partnership and domination, we need to shift from a domination mindset to a partnership mindset. We’re way too much under domination, and it’s very well documented that domination will always lead to unsustainable societies. And that’s just what’s happening.”

Nwamka Agbo takes up this time continuum, extending it from the present status quo into the potential future.

“How we get there is through developing the deeply personal capacity to navigate the contradictions of both our current system and world while aspiring and working towards something more transformative.”

From the individual level of mindsets, we proceed to the collective level of paradigms, where we hear again from Lourenço and Steve.

Focusing on the corporate and investment component of the economy, Lourenço critiqued the institutional frameworks that uphold the shareholder primacy paradigm. He said we need to

“overturn shareholder primacy by actually requiring companies that seek certification to alter their articles of incorporation or their equivalent documents so that the leadership of those companies actually has a fiduciary duty to encompass stakeholder governance, looking at all stakeholders as opposed to just shareholders. It’s using the regulatory frameworks to incentivize and hold accountable the people in power to make decisions based on the interests of workers, communities, customers, suppliers, and ultimately the environment. And I’m a big advocate for having Mother Nature have an actual seat on the board of companies as an entity, which is very symbolic, but also ensures that those interests are being taken into account when these decisions are being made.”

In a broader scope, Lourenço advocates for abandoning the growth paradigm.

“I think we also need to bid farewell to the hegemony of growth as a 21st century paradigm, changing the performance indicators with which we measure the health and prosperity of the planet... there’s a steady-state point past which growth can actually lead to a decrease in well-being, livelihood, and prosperity.”

Steve called for a shift in the paradigm of urgency, using the concept of a “wartime” economy, though not in the conventional sense of this term. “So it is a wholesale conversion of the economy from what you might call a peacetime economy to a wartime economy. But this war is against our own mistreatment of the climate.”

Worldviews (which we’ve encountered already) were the most oft-cited framing of human cognitive constructs (akin to what David Bollier calls ontologies) that need to transform.

Jude Currivan focused on the relationship between real-world behaviors, and the worldviews (of separation or wholeness are the ones with most sway, she believes) that inform them, positing that shifting worldviews shifts behavior (as well as underlying emotions).

“This is a disease of separation, and of course our behaviors flow from our worldviews. So the behaviors we’ve had are the symptoms of that disease of separation. Our collective trauma is luggage we carry that unless we’re able to heal that and release it and lighten it, then we’re not able to really fully access the deep wholeness that is deep within their hearts. But that accretion, that sort of overlay of the perception of separation is a tough nut to crack. We know that facts don’t change people. Feelings change people. Just as conflicts are a natural behaviour of a worldview of separation, peace is a natural behaviour of a worldview of wholeness.”

Jude also points out that the dynamic can also go in the other direction, from behaviors to worldviews. “The other thing that I’m very conscious of is a conversation with Lynn Twist which spoke to how changing behaviors can have a feedback effect on changing worldviews. Just as worldviews have a forward effect on changing behaviors.”

While some might interpret wholeness as homogeneity, Ashish Kothari advocates for the heterogeneity of a pluriversalism, distinguishing between the isolated agnosticism and quantitative focus of pluralism and the holistic qualitative encompassment of pluriversal worldviews, calling for an embrace of the latter as a more profound commitment to transcend the universalisms of modernity and coloniality.

“Sometimes when people say plurality, it is this sort of a numerical thing that, okay, we have X number of cuisines or X number of languages, let’s say. And I think we need to move beyond the numerics of it, beyond the quantitative aspects of it, to look at the qualitative aspects of it. And when we say pluriverse, we’re not just talking about individual elements of diversity, like languages and cuisines, and so on – we’re also talking about worldviews, visions of life, cosmologies of life.”

“Pluriversality entails moving away from homogeneity and universality to the pluriverse, to understanding that if you’re talking about diverse societies, diverse cultures, diverse economies, we’re not saying there’s only one solution out there, there’s only one model out there. There’s many, many of them, as long as they are within the tenets and the principles in the ethics of equality, justice, solidarity and so on. So I think moving from universe to pluriverse, from homogeneity to heterogeneity and diversity is another imperative.”

John Fullerton considers the potential for regeneration as the fundamental worldview shift needed.

“The just transition path comes through seeing and recognizing and manifesting regenerative potential. Otherwise it won’t be a just transition. It is already unjust, and it will get more unjust if we’re realistic about it. So the imperative of doing this worldview shift in order that we can begin to see where to find this regenerative potential is, is the work. It’s the transformation. It’s the worldview shift that will open that up.”

Daniel Christian Wahl likewise centers regeneration, with a slight twist: he sees regeneration as a fundamental component of a kin-centric (or relational) worldview – which he sees as the key.

“You need to ground this whole conversation in understanding that there are certain patterns that are core to life itself, and then a call to our evolutionary survival pattern. Regeneration happens in every cell of the body. Regeneration happens in every organism on this planet. Regeneration is part of the systemic evolutionary process of how life creates conditions conducive to life. Therefore we would not be here if our ancestors had not excelled in being regenerative.”

“And we need to frame the entire thing as a coming home, as a listening, as a being more humble again, as a return to a kin-centric worldview. Otherwise it’s not going anywhere, to my mind.”

For previous installments of the r3.0 Seeds 2 serialization, please see my feed here.

“Inside the teaching lodge, we engage in a process I’ve termed relational systems thinking where awareness-based systems change centers mutual benefit, a foundational principle that Uncle Dan [Longboat] shared with me, between all the humans, the non-humans, the unborn generations and our Earth Mother.”

Melanie Goodchild, Relational Systems Thinking, 2021

“Since competition reduces the carrying capacity for all concerned, natural selection favors those who can avoid competition… The prosperity of the community grows from the flow of relationships, not the accumulation of goods… Making good relationships with the human and more-than-human world is the primary currency of well-being”

Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry, 2024

“...love as well as grief and loss are often portals to relationality, and to designing relationally… At its heart, relationality points to the radical interdependence of all things.”

Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil, Kriti Sharma, Relationality, 2024

Melanie Goodchild’s notion of relational systems thinking – which bridges the distinct epistemologies of Western systems thinking and Indigenous systems thinking – also bridges from our previous thematic cluster (Systems) to our current thematic consideration (Relationality), underscoring the interrelationship (or relationality, if you will) between and amongst our thematic clusters themselves.

If a systemic lens aligns with considerations of regenerative economies (and not all of the systems investing initiatives listed in the introduction to the last section necessarily do so), the relationality lens naturally lends itself to considerations of regenerative cultures. Here again, though, we caution against simplistic assumptions, as systems inform cultures, and relationality informs economies – as evidenced by the recent publication of the essay Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions by David Bollier & Natasha Hulst of the Schumacher Center for New Economies, further bridging relationality and systems.

“Relationalized finance is our generic term for finance that is not meant to generate private financial gains, but rather to support and deepen new relationships – social, economic, and political – in particular bioregions. This noncapitalist finance is nonextractive, peer governed, place-specific, humane, and designed to support the generativity of living systems. It does not regard ‘nature’ and ‘finance’ as separate and autonomous entities, but as artfully aligned and entwined with each other.”

Relationality introduces emotion – love, grief, and loss in the words of Relationality authors Escobar, Osterweil, and Sharma (from the above epigraph) – but more broadly, empathy, as our interviewees repeatedly stress.

Perhaps the most succinct articulation from our interviewees came from Kate Raworth, who calls for prosocial relationality. Other interviewees started their exploration of this theme focusing on internal relationality, or relationality to self.

Vanessa Andreotti shared an exercise she co-developed with the Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures collective called 7 Steps Back, which invites us to examine our relationships to ourselves. The exercise calls for taking successive steps back from:

• your self-image;

• your generational cohort;

• universalization of your social / cultural / economic parameters of normality;

• your immediate context and time;

• familiar patterns of relationship-building and problem-solving that you have been socialized into;

• normalized pattern of elevating humanity above the rest of nature; and

• the impulse to find quick fixes and expand your capacity not to be immobilized by uncertainty, complicity and complexity.

These are “the kinds of questions we need to be asking,” Vanessa suggests. “But we’re not even beginning to be able to do that collectively,” opening from self-relationality to broader relationality.

Carol Sanford called for a shift “from institutionalizing fundamentalism that says, you can’t question anything, to a move back toward an Indigenous theocracy designed to help people think for themselves as an everyday practice.” She essentially advocates for a shift from universality (“unquestionably unmovable” fundamentalist “theocracy”) that ultimately isolates individuals from themselves (and thereby others), to pluriversality (“people were allowed to own their own theocracy”) energized by the personal agency for critical thinking that enables more authentic relationality with others across difference.

Such self-awareness centers us, enabling expansion into broader relational awareness. Carol advocated for “place-centric work,” appealing to her notion of “lifeshed” that integrates watersheds, airsheds, etc: “It’s imperative for our Mother Earth that we define how we work with economies based on place – lifeshed-by-lifeshed – because they are defined by awareness of natural systems. Go become compost and feed the entire system, including the wetland.”

“Making good relationships with the human and more-than-human world is the primary currency of well-being,” says Robin Wall-Kimmerer in the epigraph above, underlining how this “horizontal” relationality (with all life) is foundational to regenerative economies. Sahana Chattopadhyay calls this biocentric relationality:

“regenerative economy moves from anthropocentrism to life sustaining biocentrism, embedded in relationality. In a community, in a society, in a civilization or culture that is based on regenerative economies, there is individual agency, sovereignty, and thriving as well as community and society thriving. It is not the community at the cost of the individual, or the individual at the cost of the community. I’m saying the individual is in an interrelated, entangled society. So you have regenerative economics supporting this entangled, interrelated civilizational evolution.”

In addition to this spatial relationality, interviewees also appealed to temporal relationality. Nwamaka Agbo introduces the notion of intergenerational relationality by speaking of the need to be

“thinking about and preparing for intergenerational conversations. We’re starting to be more intentional about how we continue to hold onto the learnings and wisdom of our elders, while also bringing in the excitement and innovation of younger generations – and our ability to reclaim a way of living in relationship where you can have communities across generations be in interdependence with one another. I think this is also part of how we hold onto our traditional ways and wisdoms of stewarding land, of being in relationship with each other.”

Vanessa Andreotti adds another temporal line of retrospective relationality that supports repair through accountability – encompassing what she elsewhere called relational maturity.

“No shit, no starter. If we don’t compost what we’ve done, and really look closely at how big of assholes we’ve been as human beings to the planet, to other species – if we can’t even sit with that, there’s no way we’re going to weave something different. So if the main problem is fractured relationships, we need to sit with that first and learn to repair it. And repair doesn’t mean we will all agree with each other or validate each other. Repair means something completely different – it means something that is currently unimaginable for us: it’s honoring the tethers we have with each other.”

Nwamaka Agbo extends this retrospective relationality from accountability and repair to transformative healing in collective contexts:

“You don’t heal by ignoring or trying to evade the truth of what happened, right? You actually heal by being able to sit in the unfortunate and deep discomfort and pain of what has happened. Being able to bear witness to that pain, and with that, then, having choice around, how you want to transform that hurt and harm. And to also know that we actually heal in community. A lot of the ways that you’ve been taught that healing happens is, you as an individual. You go into a separate meeting, and you talk just with your therapist, and it’s your own little private secret, and that is it. And what I also know is that if I want to help transform my community, there are times and places where we actually need to heal in community. We need to bear witness together. We need to go through deep accountability and recognition of the hurt and harm that has happened, and take actionable steps for repair together.”

Nwamaka adds geopolitical spatiality to the temporal, seeking to transcend the discursive loops of entrenched relational patterns:

“We just want to ignore what has been done to Indigenous, Black, and Brown communities in the Global South for decades. We just want them to go away so that we can move forward. And that is why we are all stuck, because the inability to actually reckon with the hurt and harm that we could cause and continue to cause even to this day, is what means that we end up replicating the same pattern over and over again. We actually do not learn from our actions – and the steps of reconciliation and repair and restitution are all deeply grounded in ensuring that we learn from previous actions and history, so that we don’t recreate them again in the future. So I think that is where the missed opportunity really really sticks out to me for what healing can look like in community.”

Daniel Christian Wahl anchors spatial / temporal relationality to specific place, as a means of navigating to healing through a more transformative discursive emotional experience:

“There’s so many opportunities in the bioregional movement – from healing people’s relationship with place and past traumas that happened in that place, to making people fall deeply in love with place again.”

“Every act of caring, sharing, healing, nurturing, protecting, connecting with place, stewarding place: all of that is an expression of life’s regenerative impulse coming through us as human beings, which are part of life. It’s naturally happening everywhere.”

Daniel also points to the risks of what Escobar, Osterweil, and Sharma call “nonrelationality,” which warrants quoting from their 2024 book Relationality here, by way of explanation:

“In other words, one can describe the dominant story as the making of non-, or anti-, relationality, given that it banishes profoundly relational life-worlds and knowledges to the margins or death, while simultaneously enshrining an ontologically dualist worldview in which either/or, subject/object, good/bad, spirit/matter, body/mind, and so on, not only dominate, but seem natural. It is important to recognize, however, that in those very gestures and stories, there is a kind of relationality. This double maneuver, which involves denying, hiding, and/or annihilating relationality, on the one hand, and making dualism seem natural, inevitable, and universal, on the other, is what we call the active production of nonrelationality.”

Here is Daniel’s reflection that echoes nonrelationality:

“I think that the biggest danger that we have is that social media and a number of other forces have unleashed the machinery of othering, of separating, of divide and conquer, that is so effective that even in the context of justice – racial justice and decolonialization, economic justice and gender justice - the potential for polarization rather than healing is enormous. So for me, the biggest challenge is to address justice without doing it in such a way that we’re actually just opening up yet again, even in the way we frame it, more dualism that’s framed in a way that doesn’t have a resolution.”

In response to this challenge of polarization, Daniel proposes planetary relationality, and ties it into human emotional capacity for empathy.

“We need to build a solid enough higher ground in which we are all one life form on a living planet, and continue to try to do justice in the frameworks of polarization from one nation to another.”

Indy Johar pivots to a counter-intuitive interpretation of seeming polarization in a more positive light, viewed again through the lens of empathy.

“societies that are oscillating – i.e., from left to right – actually, may even be a good thing. The oscillation function is not polarization. The oscillation function in complexity is a wayfinding mechanism for societies, and actually they build the intelligence and the capacity to be able to operate in complexity. So it’s a sort of tool – this oscillation that we’re worried about is actually a tool for societies to way-find in complexity. So how do we? What we’ve got to be able to do is hold a decision field, not a decision – and hold the empathy of a decision field as being the real asset, not the decision being the real asset.”

Nate Hagens picks up this connection of our living planet & our capacity for empathic care:

“We have to change our value system from a religion of economic growth towards something that puts us as caretakers of the ecosystems and the health of the natural world on our home – the only planet in the known universe to support life, let alone complex life like whales, dolphins, bonobos … and humans.”

Bioregional Relationality & Regeneration as Collapse Resilience — that’s the title of the keynote I presented this weekend at the Spiritualities of Resilience: Aligning with Earth Symposium at Hartford International University for Religion & Peace (HIU) alongside fellow keynoters Erik Assadourian & Lisa E. Dahill (who caring curated the event).

HIU President Sherry Turner kicked the day off asserting the spiritual imperative of relationality with (not dominance over) the more-than-human world.

Erik’s keynote followed, where he laid out the convincing case that we are in advanced ecological & social collapses. Pictured above is his slide comparing current consumption with fair share consumption – a stark contrast! I truck in this understanding all the time, but I was surprised at how emotionally impacted I was as a recipient of this dire message!

My keynote dovetailed with Erik’s, as I introduced the concept of Collapse Resilience as a way to empower bioregional relationality & regeneration. Pictured above, I compare maps of the Eastern Algonquin-speaking Tribes and an ecological interpretation of the Northeast Woodlands bioregion, to make my point how bioregionalism bridges culture and nature (“geographic terrain & terrain of consciousness” to quote Peter Berg.)

Instead of the traditional format of individuals posing questions, Lisa introduced an innovative “write / pair / share” format of brief solo journaling after each keynote, then reflecting with one other, then sharing impressions in groups of 4 to jointly brainstorm questions. This format resulted in much deeper questions for me & Erik.

After lunch, Lisa’s keynote bridged through the lens of spirituality (“one’s personal relationship with the more-than-human world, in all its fullness”), invoking Thomas Berry’s notion of incendence: “the impulse to not to rise above the world (as in transcendence) but to climb into it, to seek its core.”

The afternoon continued with 5 parallel outdoor workshops (in cold windy weather!) led by Katharine Houk, Jennifer Dhyana Nucci, Alia Stewart-Silver, LCSW, Regan Stacey, River Strong & Heron Martin (I communed on the “long now” with a huge oak in the Voices from the Wild: A Tree Council workshop.)

The day ended with a Closing Circle centered around a nature collage, where we collectively honored the depth of connection and learning.

(Michael Centore summarized the event comprehensively.)

Thanks for continuing to read the serialization of r3.0’s Seeds Volume 2 (which you can read in its entirety here). We’re now up to the main body: the synthesis of findings from our interviews with ~20 leading regenerative thinkers / doers — we call this a meta-conversation, as the interviewees didn’t directly speak to each other in a group interview, but their sharings do actually “speak” to each other through synchronistic alignment. Chapter 2.0 includes an introduction to the interviews overall, and to the Aligned Findings section (which covers 8 themes). In this installment, we include these introductory sections as well as the first theme: Systemic. (Chapter 3.0 covers 3 Idiosyncratic Analyses where interviewee perspectives were more divergent — in interesting ways!)

If you missed previous installments, before diving in to this week’s edition, you can catch up here (or over on Resilience.org where our friends are reposting these pieces in slightly edited formats — I include these links in parentheses after).

• Executive Summary (or read here on Resilience.org)

• Chapter 0.3: Affinity of Inquiry – A Synthesis Approach (& Chapter 0.2: r3.0 Seeds Series Knowledge Co-Creation Due Process)

• Chapter 1.0: Introduction -- Unmaking and remaking, here at the edge of dissolution (or read here on Resilience.org)

2.0 Interview Findings: A meta-conversation amongst & across interviews

There is a unique joy encapsulated in the interview process, where interviewer and interviewee develop a degree of intimacy within the microculture of the conversation, specific to this particular encounter, enlivened by the jokes that emerged from certain word-play, or a commonality discovered between lived experience. As with a good book or meal or movie, you almost don’t want a good interview to end.

And yet it does, yielding to other joys – in this instance, the meta-conversation that emerged amongst and across interviews. The most striking instance emerged in real time, when we interviewed Vanessa Andreotti (see here) and then Jude Currivan and John Fullerton (see here) jointly, on the same day: each dialogue offered a unique, counter-intuitive – but mutually reinforcing – new perspective on just transitions (which we encompass in our Transcend Justice chapter in the Idiosyncratic Analyses section).

We also interviewed Sahana Chattopadhyay (here) and Steve Keen (here) on that day (we were busy, apparently!), and while each of them discussed issues that intersected with other interviewees’ perspectives, neither advanced this intriguing perspective on the potential limits of a justice framing.

This anecdote, capturing a snapshot in time from the research process, succinctly summarizing the key dimensions of our analysis strategy: identify and cluster Aligned Findings according to patterned categories; but also spotlight key Idiosyncratic Analyses, as not all wisdom is contained in consensus – sometimes, we must also listen to lone voices.

This point was reinforced more recently, in the structuring phase of a separate r3.0 Research Project, when Seeds Working Group Member Claudia Gasparovic reminded us of the strength of our Aligned Findings / Idiosyncratic Analyses approach, which surfaces both consensus and dissensus – and we decided to apply it to the new Project.

So, what follows is a long Aligned Findings section, cataloguing the common sentiments on 8 thematic clusters: (Systemic; Relationality; Mindset / Paradigm / Worldview; Regeneration; Story / Narrative; Solidarity; Indigeneity; and Community- & Place-Based), followed by a shorter section on Idiosyncratic Analyses that focuses primarily on one significant counter- intuitive perspective that arose from a small minority of interviewees, and a cluster of other unique perspectives.

2.1 Aligned Findings: Weaving common threads into tapestries of meaning

There’s an uncanny sensation that arose during the processing of the interview notes and transcripts, whereby responses from individual interviewees began to converse with responses from other Interviewees, weaving common threads of perspectives and analyses into tapestries of meaning. Thematic clusters arose from the spreadsheet of distillations, and shared understandings emerged. While each interviewee (and a few paired interviewees) spoke only with our Interview Team, the assessment of the interview transcripts as a holistic body of knowledge enabled us to discern patterns stitching together a kind of emergent coherence.

This is particularly evident in this Aligned Findings section, where we curate meta-conversations around the 8 thematic clusters that follow below. Each section begins with very brief introductory contextualization, and then primarily focuses on synthesizing the voices of our Interviewees into choral harmonies, with distinct voices still audible, and yet at the same time, the collective vocalization rises into confluences that transcend the sums of their parts.

2.1.1 Systemic: Building beyond and outside of the systems that oppress us (Agbo)

“[I]f you really understand the systemic nature of life, [you understand] a living system is a regenerative system. That’s the very definition of life.”

Fritjof Capra, Regeneration is fundamental to living systems, 2020

The theme that arose most in responses to the second (fundamental imperatives of regenerative economies & cultures) and third (necessary elements of just transitions to regenerative economies & cultures) prompts orbited around systems.

Appreciation for the role of systems in life has been growing for more than a half century, building on Indigenous worldviews that have integrated systems thinking (without necessarily using that term) for millennia. (Melanie Goodchild calls this intersection between Western and Indigenous perspectives on systems Relational Systems Thinking, which starts to bridge to our next section.)

Spotlighting a component of the economy – namely, investing and finance – just since the turn of this decade (2020 – with roots dating back earlier, of course) reveals an explosion of initiatives and framings integrating elements of systems awareness.

• Systemic Investing starting in 2020 (iterated in 2023 & 2024) led by Dominic Hoffstetter of the Transformation Capital (TransCap) initiative he co-founded from Climate-KIC;

• System Value Creation, explored in the 2020 r3.0 Multicapitalism White Paper (based on the concept coined in 2017 by Geoff Kendall of the Future Fit Foundation);

• System-level Investing, based primarily on 2021 books by Jon Lukomnic & James Hawley and Bill Burkart & Steve Lydenberg, that focus on tackling systemic risk;

• Design Foundations for Systems Capital in 2022 researched by Ingrid Burkett et al of Griffith University in Australia;

• FEST (Financial Ecosystems for Systemic Transformation) co-founded by Steve Waddell of Bounce Beyond and others, now led by Jen van der Meer of The New School;

• CoFundEco (Co-creating Funding Ecosystems), a network borne of the Working Group for the 2022 r3.0 Funding Governance for Systemic Transformation Blueprint.

• TWIST (Together We Invest for Systems Transformation), an investor, practitioner and facilitator network launched in 2022; and

• System Investing and System Finance initiative launched by Dark Matter Capital Systems Lab in 2025, spearheaded by Indy Johar, Irina Wang, Raj Kalia & Leon Seefield.

This increasing application of systems awareness to the investment system supports our interviewees’ identification of systems as one fundamental imperative for just transitions to regenerative economies (and their underlying cultures). The question is the degree to which these initiatives move beyond siloing a systems focus to embrace the broader, more holistic (more systemic, if you will) set of fundamental imperatives of regenerative economies and cultures (absent an in-depth analysis, it’s safe to say the initiatives vary greatly on this count.)

Our interviewees’ systems considerations started at the systems-within-systems level, as Jayati Ghosh focused on necessary transformations in two provisioning systems (within broader earth systems and social systems) in particular – the food system (away from industrial agriculture) and the energy system (reducing energy unit per output, shifting the technological and sectoral composition of economies, and changes in energy types.) Here’s her analysis of the former:

“You know, we tend to underplay the significance of food systems, both in global warming and in our overall destruction of nature and the environment, but we have moved increasingly towards industrial agricultures that are deeply damaging of the soil, of the climate, and of human health. And too, this whole desire (especially in the Global North) for access to strawberries all year round, or, every kind of fish you want at all times, etc, etc, all of which are hugely carbon-emitting – but they’re also unnecessary!”

“And so we have currently an unequal, unjust, unsustainable, and unhealthy global food system, which has to change. Now, again, huge interests are involved. We have very major agribusinesses, we have global finance, which is deeply involved. But we at Earth4All have argued that the transformation of global food systems is an essential part of a wider transformation that would actually make our planet livable, again, for all species, including humans.”

Stepping back to look at systems as a broader strategic lens, many interviewees underscored the need for systems approaches, systems literacy, and systemic awareness. Kate Raworth stated most succinctly the need for “a foundational understanding of systems dynamics” underpinning a “complexity, systems thinking mindset.” Nate Hagens reinforced the perspective that “we absolutely need a systems approach” that integrates key elements such as energy, environment, money, human behavior (both individually and collectively), etc… “The parts and the processes of these systems do fit together, and their relationships fit together.”

Lourenço Bustani framed “ecological literacy as an imperative, which comes with systems literacy. This would be a response to our complete disregard for our ancestry and our lost connection to the land.” Indy Johar focused on awareness of systemic lock-in through the metaphor of fish and water. “One fundamental imperative of regenerative economies and cultures is recognition that we are fish living in water, and the water is systemically entrapping us. Or let’s imagine we are birds that don’t live underwater, but are trapped in the water and aren’t able to fly. That’s where we are right now. So having this conversation is really important.”

Several interviewees honed in more specifically on living systems. Kate Raworth asserted that a regenerative economy “works with and within the cycles of the living world – it’s ecologically grounded… we need to understand the cycles of the living world” framed through planetary boundaries (or other living systems frameworks). Joe Brewer observed that “a regenerative economy is not simply a metaphor of a living system. It is actually the embodied living system itself.” He further elucidated:

“Meaning, you build your economy from the landscape of a watershed, and its ecology and the material flows of that ecology. It is literally a living system. And so this is extremely important that we don’t just have sweet and cute metaphors of water flow as the way of creating a monetary system. I mean, the monetary system is actually based on the flow of water, creating biodiversity and biomass. And I mean that the energy flow coming from photosynthesis and the sun is literally a basis for economic measurement of value.”

Joe Brewer further focused on another common theme amongst interviewees: the place-based nature of systems – in his instance, the organizing logic of regenerative economies as place-based landscape systems:

“A regenerative economy is place-based in a cosmologically significant way. So let me clarify what I mean by that: it could be place-based because you have a foodshed, and it’s the minerals, and the water, and the energy flow of photosynthesis of your agro-ecology system for your foodshed. It can grow to the scale of a bioregion where you have autopoiesis and self-organizing principles achieving a holistic scale. But it’s also fractal and embedded. So the idea that we honor community in place, is to also have an architecture that represents how our reality works.”

“So this is where we get into the nested earth systems, plate tectonics and continental patterns, ocean mixing processes, continental scale precipitation patterns like evaporation from the Pacific Ocean, dropping snow to make snow back in the Colorado Rockies. These continental- or planetary-scale processes become the basis in which regenerative economies can make sense, which is that regenerative economies will need to be organized as landscape systems.”

Daniel Christian Wahl picked up on this thread, asserting that “we need to re-regionalize production and consumption and pretty much all affairs that provide community resilience and wellbeing as quickly as possible. That’s an imperative, because that’s the only way we can take as many of us through the eye of the needle as possible.”

“And in doing so, creating vast opportunities for regionally regenerative economies, and reinventing the playing field of business where it’s not just about creating regenerative companies; it’s about cascading resources and energy use ... to optimize the way they provide for the local economy in ways that regenerates the local ecosystem. And that’s an opportunity for innovation, and coming home to place and learning and reusing the best of science and the best of different disciplines in the context of a specific place in a specific bioregion, to basically redesign the human impact on Earth, which is what we would do if we created regenerative economies and regenerative cultures.”

Several interviewees also picked up on the central role of ecosystems, using this term both for natural ecosystems, and the human ecosystems nested within them. Sahana Chattopadhyay held that

“we need the wisdom that comes from different intervening of cosmologies that can give rise to economic systems that are focused on thriving, that are focused on flourishing, that are focused on mindful, need-based development, that are focused on wellbeing of communities and societies in the ecosystem that they operate in, whether it’s an organization, an institution, a corporation, whatever – they are operating in an ecosystem within an ecosystem.”

Emily Kawano enumerated the dimensions of just such an economic system – namely, a Solidarity Economy. Specifically, she listed the five key elements for “developing the whole ecosystem” of a local Solidarity Economy: community land trusts (especially those that support affordable housing); regenerative agriculture; worker coops / mutual aid; a center for community production to support local sourcing; and space for cultural connection & learning

Finally, interviewees repeatedly stressed the need for systems change. Emily Kawano invoked this by first framing “capitalism and some of its unavoidable dynamics”:

“The class conflict, the unavoidable pressure to compete and accumulate and grow – make capitalism inherently unsustainable. And the need to maximize profit often means divide and rule, using whatever divisions – whether it’s race or gender or immigration status, or whatever it might be – to divide and rule workers. I’m just giving a hint of some of the dynamics of the system, regardless of what paradigm of capitalism you’re talking about – there’s this underlying logic to it.”

From this foundation, Emily lays out the need for system transformation:

“So, what’s the alternative to that? First, thinking about system change, right? We need to move beyond capitalism to post-capitalism, which means that we need to move beyond it. I no longer use the term anti-capitalism, partly because... there are actually some things about capitalism that have been useful – like some of the productivity and innovation has been good, some of that growth has been good. When it becomes blind growth, when it’s sacrificing people and planet, then that’s a problem… But now we’re at a stage where, in order to achieve that more just and sustainable and democratic world, we need to move beyond it.”

Ashish Kothari lays out alternatives beyond incrementalist tweaks of the current system, such as techno-fixes like geoengineering, or market mechanisms like carbon trading, or managerial solutions like recycling.

“The same system that’s actually creating or exacerbating the problems, capitalist statist patriarchy, is telling us, don’t worry – we have the solutions. But we know that, at a fundamental level, none of these are solutions, really. I mean, they might help to stave off the problem and delay the inevitable collapses a little bit. But they’re not really going to fundamentally change anything.”

Kothari calls instead for what he calls “radical, genuine, systemic alternatives.”

“Even as people resist and say no to a certain system, we need to recognize, support, and help to network radical alternatives... Genuine alternatives, therefore, or systemic or radical alternatives, then, are those which actually challenge the structures and relations of inequality and unsustainability and injustice.”

Kothari then distinguishes between reform as transitions that “actually only strengthen the current status quo,” on the one hand, and on the other hand, “reforms will help us to go towards the fundamental systemic transformations that we want.” To illustrate this distinction, he cites the example of food sovereignty.

“In India, we have a Food Security Act, which is essential because it makes the State responsible to make sure that food is provided to those who don’t have enough food – they’re hungry, they’re malnourished right now. So, making the state accountable is very important, but unless we move also from that into a food sovereignty law, which enables small scale producers especially to actually gain sovereignty, we are, in a sense, only reinforcing the status quo in the sense we’re making the state even more powerful and sustaining a certain dependence on the state of people who otherwise would actually be able to grow their own food or generate their own incomes, to be able to purchase the food from farmers. So the food sovereignty movement actually is a fundamental systemic radical alternative to the food crisis that we have.”

This example brings us full circle to the outset of our consideration of systems (with Jayati Ghosh making the case for transforming the food system away from industrial agriculture.) Which brings us to our final input: Nwamaka Agbo urges us to rediscover our lost “ability to think about how we are ultimately building beyond and outside of the systems that oppress us.”

The clock is ticking for bioregional groups / hubs to register a Confluence in time to qualify for a fair share of the r3.0 Confluencing Fund -- you must complete this brief Expressions of Interest form by May 31 (this Sunday!)

You'll be in the good company of 46 bioregional groups across 6 continents that have already registered to host an in-person Confluence alongside our September Conference. Can't make it happen by the end of the month? No worries! We'll continue fielding Confluence registrations after this deadline, qualifying all Confluence participants for free Conference registration (so they can attend from home in case sickness keeps them from attending the Confluence in person).

And the Confluencing Fund is growing! Kinship Earth Executive Director Syd Harvey Griffith recently informed r3.0 of a generous grant to support our Confluencing Fund -- which gets us a step closer to our $50k goal!

In our role as a Flow Funder, r3.0 will distribute fair shares of the Confluencing Fund to the bioregional groups that host Confluences alongside our Conference this year. Want to join Kinship Earth in taking us another step closer to our fundraising goal? You can donate the Confluencing Fund clicking here (and for background, see here).

As a reminder, in September, r3.0 is hosting our 13th Annual Conference themed "Bioregional Regeneration as Collapse Resilience: Earth-centric Biocultural Kinship, Knowledge & Governance."

The lion's share of the audience will participate via Bioregional Confluences, or in-person gatherings of bioregional groups to 1) experience the Conference content together; 2) share reflections with ~300-400 other bioregionalists in other Confluences happening globally across 6 continents; and 3) deliberate internally on matters of vital importance to their own bioregions. For more background on Bioregional Confluencing, see here.

As soon as bioregional groups register to host a Confluence, they immediately join the Confluencing Community of ~400 participants strong, which meets monthly to spotlight work in specific bioregions (from Finland, Kenya, Australia, Italy, Switzerland, Turtle Island (US), and Brazil so far this year). And ALL bioregional groups who attend these calls have an opportunity to update the Community on its recent developments.

Please join us -- I look forward to seeing you!

Metabolic Founding CEO Eva Gladek & Strategic Initiatives Coordinator Serena Joury will present on its new white paper, BioHubs: Infrastructure for Resilience and Regeneration, which proposes BioHubs as a means of intentionally anchoring place-based regeneration in physical sites to support bioregionalism as a return to place.

The paper (to be released at the Katapult Future Fest in late May) provides 10 case studies on existing entities that fit the vision of BioHubs. Founding Director Thais Corral of Sinal do Vale in Brazil – one of the BioHubs profiled in the paper – will share on its work coordinating regeneration of 200,000-hectares in Recôncavo da Guanabara Bioregion.

The first half of the Session is devoted to speaker presentations, and the second half is dedicated to facilitated dialogue with all participants.

The Session will take place on 16 June 2026 3:00-4:30pm UTC (Click here to convert to your time zone) on the r3.0 Zoom line:

https://zoom.us/j/4785801785?pwd=RU50bUFWSG5wUnBBc21JMFUyaEhyUT09

Meeting ID: 478 580 1785

Passcode: 902564

Optional sign-up / calendar invite download here.

What an honor and pleasure it was for r3.0 to host Bioregional Open Dialogue 11 as a conversation between Riane Eisler and our Senior Director Bill Baue, who jointly explored how Bioregionalism actualizes Cultural Transformation to Partnership Systems.

r3.0 Research Fellow Eli Ingraham (who's former CEO of the Center for Partnership Systems that stewards Riane's work) exhibited such grace and nuance in curating and facilitating this dialogue.

You can check out the Recording (apologies for the late start -- Bill forgot to hit the record button until partway through Riane's first input — you can access that first bit here, thanks to our good friends at StoryMoss), Deck, and Living Resources Document (that lists participant questions and also includes a session summary).

Eli got the ball rolling by asking Riane to share how her background informed her lifework — and Riane shared how surviving the Holocaust first introduced her to domination systems, and how a sexist “compliment” from her law firm boss awakened her valuing of the partnership modes that female-gendered dynamics often energize.

Eli posed 3 questions to steer the conversation:

1. I’ve worked closely with both of you, and heard you ask opposite ends of the same question. Riane, so much of your work stems from asking, “Does it have to be this way?” and Bill, I’ve heard you say, “There has to be a different way.” I’d love for each of you to share a few words on how Partnerism and Bioregionalism align as drivers of systems change through cultural transformation.

2. Riane, your partnership–domination continuum describes deep cultural patterns, one of which is “ranking” or hierarchal ordering. But you also discuss “actualization” hierarchies in early cultures, as well as nature. Bill, your recent Seeds report discusses class and elite over-production as recurring reasons for societal collapse. I’d love for you both to share your perspectives on hierarchy and discuss whether you think they show up today even in regenerative work.

3. Riane, your work has focused on the hidden system of gendered values, where productive work is coded masculine and reproductive work is coded feminine and completely undervalued. You advanced Caring Economics, based on the inclusion of care work and nature (among other excluded sectors) in your economic model. Bill, bioregional economies are exploring ideas like import replacement, commitment pooling, and bioregional currencies, but are still nested within an extractive system. I’d love for you both to share your thoughts on emergent economic models and discuss how we navigate the tensions between human needs and ecological limits without reverting to domination logics.

Each question led to rich exploration together!

And then Eli opened up to questions from participants, starting with one from Michael Haupt:

“David Graeber, in his book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, referred to the Military-Coinage-Slavery-Complex. What are your thoughts regarding a bioregional monetary system as an alternative to the existing monetary system? Which bioregions are addressing this?” After Riane and Bill both responded, Michael added: “My proposition for this dialogue is that national monetary systems are designed for contest, therefore bioregionalism should prioritize partnership monetary systems. This to me is a core design requirement that needs more attention and r3.0 is uniquely positioned to bring this to the table.”

The conversation ended with a significant focus on the role of shifting consciousness as a means of cultural transformation.

I strongly encourage you to experience the dialogue through the recordings (here and here)…

I will briefly say that this Introduction has already generated some degree of critique — in particular, the fact that we call into question the framing of “civilization,” pointing out its embedded self-destructive collapse cycle, and questioning whether a less “unsustainable and violent” (to use Interviewee Vanessa Andreotti’s term) and more life-affirming framing might make sense. We propose Collapse Resilient as one key element of such a framing, and share our preliminary definitions of this emergent term.

Here are the earlier postings if you want to read them in these shorter forms (outside the full document, which you can access here):

• Executive Summary

• Chapter 0.3: Affinity of Inquiry – A Synthesis Approach (& Chapter 0.2: r3.0 Seeds Series Knowledge Co-Creation Due Process)

1.0 Introduction: Unmaking and remaking, here at the edge of dissolution (Wynter, Escobar, Osterweil & Sharma)

“...that which we have made, we can unmake, then, consciously now, remake.”

Sylvia Wynter, Human Being as Noun, 2007

“Remembering that our dominant stories are myths that can be unmade and remembering our capacity to choose – from among all our potentials – stories and practices that will serve us, we finally come more squarely to the question of what we will choose, practice, and make. What will we call forth, here at the edge of dissolution.”

Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil & Kriti Sharma, Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human, 2024

As we asserted in the title and text of Seeds Volume 1, humanity faces a predicament – one of our own making, no less. In his 2008 book The Long Descent, John Michael Greer famously writes “a problem calls for a solution,” while a “predicament, by contrast, has no solution.” Greer continues: “Faced with a predicament, people come up with responses. Those responses may succeed, they may fail, or they may fall somewhere in between, but none of them ‘solves’ the predicament, in the sense that none of them makes it go away.”

This distinction between solution and response is pivotal when faced with what some call a polycrisis, or conjoined cascading crises1 that can aggregate into existential threats, and others call a metacrisis, or meaning-making crisis, which adds that the logics (the ontologics and epistemologics, if you will) causing these crises are also cognitively and culturally embedded in the solution space, paradoxically creating self-reinforcing feedback loops that further lock-in our predicament. Prominent leaders and predominant institutions in our contemporary civilizations don’t realize that the solution is the problem.

1.1 Civilization is Predicament: Class-based power defines civilization & ensures collapse

The very term civilization demonstrates the paradox of predicament quite well. The term carries two important connotations, one quantitative, the other qualitative.

Quantitatively, civilization simply implies size – a large society, typically one that knits cities together (the term civilization derives in part from the Latin civitas, or city). A common usage has emerged that’s shorthand for sufficient societal scale to impact at systemic levels, and it is commonly used in solution spaces to indicate a kind of gravitas of scale: “don’t worry, we’re thinking big big picture,” the use of the term signals.

Qualitatively, however, the notion of civilization carries much heavier baggage, most problematically its inherent supremacist nature. Civilization is predicated on class (and often race and sex) hierarchies,2 enforced via state monopolization of violence. “Civilization concentrates power,” according to Wikipedia, the broadest consensus source available, “extending human control over the rest of nature, including over other human beings”.

Interestingly, it is this very cleaving of access to power that dooms civilizations to collapse.

Let’s unpack that sentence slowly, starting with the last part first.

The average lifespan of civilizations is 336 years, according to Goliath’s Curse author Luke Kemp, and their common destiny is certain death – they have all “overshot their ecological and social carrying capacities” according to Joe Brewer (one of our Interviewees).

Figure 1: Ancient Civilizations (Source: Luke Kemp / BBC)

Now, perhaps more importantly (from a causal perspective), let’s unpack the first part of the sentence: Peter Turchin’s cliodynamic (scientific study of history) database identifies elite overproduction (or competition for limited power) as the single most constant factor in civilizational collapse. Turchin writes:

“As we explain in Secular Cycles, all large-scale complex societies experience periodic waves of political instability ... a general social dynamic that all complex societies share, ever since they arose some five thousand years ago… We call such periodic waxing and waning of political instability Secular Cycles because each cycle consists of two secular trends—a positive (increasing popular well-being, internal peace and order) and a negative (declining well-being, growing political instability that often culminates in a civil war or revolution)...”

Below is a striking snapshot of the Secular Cycles of elite overproduction compared to popular well-being from 1780 to 2010.

Figure 2: The “Double Spiral” of Well-Being and Elite Overproduction (Source: Peter Turchin)

Distilling this dynamic down to its essence: hierarchical power defines civilization; and competition for this concentrated power dooms civilization.

The irony is that the very term “civilized” (derived from the Latin civilis via the French civilisé) has long been weaponized to gaslight societal cultures deemed “inferior” (uncivilized / barbaric / savage) for lacking the distinguishing features of civilization – and yet these very cultures have proved the most resilient and sustainable, outliving the swell-and-topple, swell-and-topple, swell-and-topple dynamic of their larger (more “civilized”) neighbors.

In other words, civilization is predicament.

We know that we cannot solve predicaments. But if we make our predicaments (just as we make our civilizations), can we not unmake them, and then, consciously now, remake something different – here at the edge of dissolution?

Something without its own collapse baked into its genetic code?

Something necessarily uncivilized?

Something collapse resilient?

As noted above, the we who make civilizations that swell and topple, swell and topple, swell and topple, is not all-inclusive of humanity. Indigenous communities throughout Oceania, for example, have persisted for 60,000+ years by continually refining their cultures and self-governance practices in dynamic, intimate, reciprocal, regenerative relationship with Mother Earth. These are the very cultures that civilized cultures distinguish themselves from, branding them (explicitly and implicitly) uncivilized, inferior, unrefined. It seems civilizational culture suffers psychological projection.

In sum, while civilizational culture cohabitates with collapse (by definition), other cultures have evolved high degrees of collapse resilience.

Unfortunately, civilizational collapse patterns are no longer self-contained, but have expanded to systemic and existential scales, with social collapse dynamics triggering ecological collapse dynamics encompassing entire earth systems at planetary scales, and furthermore, civilizations (as well as “uncivilized” societies and cultures) are entangled in common fates globally. We’re all in it together.

Again, we cannot solve our predicament, but we can respond. How? Following our line of thinking here: by unmaking our civilizational collapse patterns, and remaking societies and cultures that are collapse resilient.

This Second Volume of the Seeds Series explores this question – which requires us to first understand a little bit more about collapse resilience.

1.1 Collapse Resilience: De-patterning & Re-patterning

We at r3.0 recently proposed a Collapse Response Continuum, formulated within the current context of civilizational collapse patterns.

Figure 3: Collapse Response Continuum (Source: Bill Baue / r3.0)

Here’s how we provisionally defined these terms:

Collapse Ignorance: Unaware of the inevitable ecological and social systems collapses that are impending or already unfolding.

Collapse Awareness: Recognition of the potential for ecological and social systems collapses.

Collapse Denial: After becoming aware of the potential for ecological and social systems collapses, some respond with denial of this potential and/or denial of the impending or unfolding status of these collapses.

Collapse Avoidance: The belief that ecological and social collapses can be averted if we only work feverishly enough (often, within the very paradigms creating the collapses in the first place).

Collapse Acceptance: Coming to terms with the impending and unfolding inevitability of ecological and social collapses.

Collapse Resilience: Recognizing the inevitability of ecological and social collapse by enhancing resilience that can 1) mitigate the severity of collapses and 2) adapt to emergent post-collapse scenarios.

The second element of Collapse Resilience points toward a nuance in the understanding of the equilibrium → perturbation → equilibrium dynamics of resilience, where re-equalibrating is commonly understood as a return to the pre-perturbation norm. This assumes that that norm is sufficiently desirable to attract a return.

But what if it isn’t? That’s the question Shalanda Baker explores in her Harvard paper on what she calls “anti-resilience,” where she proposes viewing perturbation (in the case she explores, energy system transition toward climate resilient renewables) as an opportunity to re-equilibrate out of an undesirable norm (in this case, socially oppressive renewable energy systems) into a new norm (in this case, energy systems that are both ecologically and socially sustainable and regenerative).

While her term “anti-resilience” hasn’t caught on, the idea of leveraging perturbation as an opportunity for transformation has increasingly embedded itself into the term “resilience.” We believe this understanding of resilience as responsive (not simply elastic) aligns with the living systems dynamics described in the Adaptive Cycle that we explored in the Seeds Volume 1 Introduction.

“CS Hollings conceived of the Adaptive Cycle to represent ecosystemic lifecycles as recursive loops through four phases: a “front loop” of 1) growth or exploitation (r) and 2) conservation (K); and a “back loop” of 3) collapse or release (Ω) and finally 4) reorganization (α). “Hereby, the adaptive cycle is deduced from the interplay of three essential variables: potential, connectedness and resilience. Together, these span a space within which system development is depicted by the characteristic ’lying-eight’ gure.” (Castell & Schrenk 2020)”

We focused attention on the back loop, in particular the transition from Omega (collapse) into Alpha (reorganization). In the latter, the two-letter prefix (“re-”) carries a heavier load than the 12-letter stem (“organization”) in the sense we’re exploring here – namely, the transformative opportunity of perturbatory resilience. In Seeds Volume 1, we considered Nafeez Ahmed’s Planetary Phase Shift theory, which likewise sees perturbation as opportunity. Here’s the final bit of of our quoting from Ahmed:

“the ultimate direction of travel is clear: to collectively shepherd a new civilisational life-cycle entailing the metamorphosis of the superorganism from a dissipative structure into a regenerative one.” [emphasis added]

Note that Ahmed retains legacy-system language (civilizational) in advocating for a metamorphosis; we assume he infers civilization’s scalar connotations, and not its entrenched collapse patterns: but can we separate them?3

That’s the question we explored in further clarifying our working definition of Collapse Resilience, recognizing the value of de-patterning away from the entrenched template of civilizational collapse cycles, and re-patterning toward a pluriverse of alternative ways of organizing and structuring human societies and cultivating human cultures in ways that harmonize with more-than-human life, including the living systems of Gaia, or Mother Earth.

We therefore added these de-patterning and re-patterning dynamics as a third element to our working definition of Collapse Resilience.

Figure 4: Collapse Resilience (Source: Bill Baue / r3.0)

As noted above, the primary patterning that feeds civilizational collapse is supremacism: the segregation of society into superior and inferior classes – elites and commoners – with power concentrated amongst elites, whose vying for limited power causes civilizational collapse. (In Designs for the Pluriverse, Arturo Escobar notes that Latin American critical theory defines coloniality as “the hierarchical classification of peoples in terms of race and culture” – thus identifying a strong overlap between civilization and coloniality.)

So, the focus of de-patterning is to reject all forms of supremacism (and hence coloniality), including: white supremacism – the mistaken belief that one race is inherently superior to all other races; patriarchy – the erroneous belief that men are inherently superior to women, and that masculine dynamics should dominate over feminine dynamics; class supremacism – the misguided belief that one class of humans is inherently superior to other classes (in Seeds Volume 1, Carol Sanford countered this with the notion of contributionism – namely, that all beings make valuable contributions to the whole.)

In other words, human beings make supremacism (it is not inherent), therefore we have the capacity to unmake it, among many other counter-productive dynamics – the fundamental flaws of cultures that were the focus of Seeds Volume 1.

This unmaking through de-patterning makes space for re-making through re-patterning – the focus of the document you have in-hand, Seeds Volume 2. In this volume, we focus on the fundamental imperatives of regenerative economies and cultures, as well as the transformative pathways – the just transitions – that guide the de-patterning to re-patterning process as responses to our predicament.

These two focal points – the fundamental imperatives and just transitions of regenerative economies & cultures – are the second and third questions we asked of the 20-odd prominent thinkers and doers we interviewed for this project, the responses to which form the basis of this Seeds Volume.

The critical mass of thematic focus in these responses clustered (in Aligned Findings) around a handful of ideas:

• Systemic;

• Relationality;

• Mindsets/Paradigms/Worldviews;

• Regeneration;

• Story & Narrative Framing;

• Solidarity;

• Indigeneity; and

• Community- and Place-Based.

In this Volume, we explore interviewee perspectives on each of these themes, in particular focusing on how these perspectives synergize (or not). We also look at a few Idiosyncratic Analyses that stood out as unique but significant factors:

• Transcend Justice;

• Sovereignty & Autonomy; and

• Empowering Women

Before diving into these explorations, we first pause to offer a story that helps illustrate the centrality of some of these themes.

1.2 Multiple Systems Failure: An Illustrative Story

In the mid-1970s, my family moved from the Midwestern US, where I was surrounded by loved ones – a swarming hive of grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and lifelong family friends – to an East Coast state that my 7-year-old self had never heard of, and struggled to spell. As my father was settling into his new role as Chair of Yale University’s Department of Surgery, he wrote a “classic 1975 editorial” for a scientific journal where he introduced the concept of Multiple Systems Failure.

In it, he described how the body’s organ systems – previously considered in isolation by the surgical field – could now be understood as intimately interconnected, such that these systems experience cascading collapses in response to acute trauma, and so must be treated as interrelated, interdependent systems within larger systems (the human body, and its life context). Just as the interdependence of organ systems trigger cascading collapses when traumatized, their intertwining regenerative capacities enable chain reactions of cyclical healing.

My dad built his career on deepening his field’s understanding of Multiple Systems Failure, around which emerged a global community of researchers and practitioners from Lebanon, India, Japan, Germany, and elsewhere, devoted to addressing it. They developed a solidarity around their research and practice that crossed cultural boundaries. Their work transformed mindsets, paradigms, and worldviews in the surgical and broader medical fields, shifting from a mechanistic mindset that treats bodily organs in isolation, to a more holistic paradigm of treating organ systems as interwoven elements within our dynamic anatomical systems.

Despite his success, Dr Baue was ousted from his position at Yale for prioritizing excellence in research & care and patient well-being over institutional power dynamics. This pattern repeated itself at St. Louis University, where he was ousted as Vice President for the Medical School and University Hospital.

In retirement, he spiraled into debilitating, dehumanizing alcoholism (wine replaced coffee in his morning mug), forcing me to set painful emotional boundaries that distanced me from the father I’d loved very deeply.

In 2011, months after my mother passed away unexpectedly, I cancelled (at the last minute) a 2-hour drive down to visit my father; later that day, my sister called to tell me he’d died alone in his nursing home apartment. I don’t remember crying at the news: I’d already been mourning him for years.

So: Multiple Systems Failure remained a biographical detail until sometime in the past 5 years, when I was in a hospital for a Covid vaccine, and I overheard a doctor mention Multiple Systems Failure. In the moment, it was a pleasant reminder that my dad’s legacy continues to enhance public well-being, a welcome respite from my own painful emotional distance from the dysfunctional alcoholic who had once been a wonderful father with a mischievous sense of humor that retained child-like exuberance.

Soon thereafter, though, out of nowhere, a proverbial lightning bolt struck. A realization suddenly crystalized – a connection I’d failed to see, even though it was hidden in plain sight: exploring how systems experience cascading collapses in response to acute trauma, and so must be treated as interrelated, interdependent systems within larger systems was not only my dad’s lifework, but my own as well – simply in different contexts, and at different scales.

What spurred this transformation was my realization of how, what I previously considered to be an isolated factoid from a distant past, was, in fact, deeply intertwined in the core of my being, a living element of my ongoing evolution as a dynamic being. I came to understand meaning behind the memory.

While my father focused on the human body as a (set of) complex adaptive system(s), my lifework focuses on broader ecological and social systems – the earth’s disrupted climate regulatory system and water cycles, for example, and the violent and unsustainable (to use Vanessa Andreotti’s couplet) global capitalist economic system, and systemically unjust, patriarchal, and racist structures. The realization that I walk in my father’s footsteps has helped me heal my fraught relationship to him – to learn to love him again.

Now: why tell this story?

To illustrate and enliven some of the key findings of this Seeds inquiry, such as the intertwined relationality amongst organ systems and their regenerative capacities, the value of solidarity amongst research and practitioner communities to trigger profound shifts in mindsets, paradigms, and worldviews in the field. And finally, the power of narrative in recognizing the underlying meaning of a story. And, as with any good metaphor that would lose its power if it were a perfect fit (according to researcher Peter Elbow), our overlap is not complete – the themes of Indigeneity and community- / place-based don’t factor into this story – and we don’t have to force-fit them in order for the story to support understanding.

Another reason for telling this story is to humanize and personalize the act of inquiry; just as I have intimate relationship with the themes of this exploration, so too do I invite you, dear readers, to explore how these themes resonate in the marrow of your bones.

We also share our approach to artificial intelligence (AI), explaining how we prioritize more direct relationality with fellow humans — and with the research itself!

Finally, I’m also including Chapter 0.2 on the r3.0 Seeds Series Knowledge Co-Creation Due Process, which is somewhat technical but is helpful background information on how we’re going about this Seeds Series (building on our previous Blueprints Series).

0.3 Affinity of Inquiry: A Synthesis Approach

“As a group of people, our relationship is grounded in affinity of inquiry, rather than shared identity or ideology. Affinity of inquiry is the creation of experimental and experiential spaces where we can hold questions differently and support each other in a continuous learning and unlearning collaborative inquiry process.”

Vanessa Andreotti, Outgrowing Modernity, 2025

“There’s so many people who are opining on a regenerative, sustainable future who are an expert in X without having a group of people working on more of a systemic approach.”

Nate Hagens, Seeds Series Interview, 2024

“We need many more communities of intention, communities of purpose where we are developing skills very deliberately … to co-create those narratives that are not only representing different voices but are also representing a confluence of voices that are microcosms, literally microcosms of the world that we wish to inhabit, inherit, and leave behind.”

Sahana Chattopadhyay, Seeds Series Interview, 2024

We introduce this sub-chapter with two recent, illustrative anecdotes:

First, my brother-in-law – a PhD who specializes in applying AI to support mathematics education – quipped that he would spend the weekend engaged in “analog inefficiency”: “cook slowly and walk slowly and pick up my guitar and play it poorly…”

Second, participants in a recent Trans-Bioregional Coordination Circle call collectively considered how best to prioritize an emergent set of discussion options we brainstormed, and someone proposed quickly running the options through AI to support our decision. The facilitators – technologists themselves – wisely put the question to all of us on the call. Support was essentially unanimous to forego AI-ing our decision, and instead, grapple with the issue in “analog”. We made a decision pretty quickly – quicker than running the options through AI, I imagine. I, for one, experienced the resulting breakout discussions as enlivening, buoyed in part by the relational deepening of choosing our own capacity to enact agency over outsourcing it.

The Seeds Series has been fermenting much longer than most bodies of research nowadays. We believe this to be a good thing, and appreciate your patience.

Current practice increasingly prioritizes efficient output over embodied inquiry. It is now de rigueur to work with artificial intelligence (AI) agents to help analyze results fast, bypassing the tedious labor of wading through voluminous raw data. Whether these agents uplift or subvert human agency is an open question.

We at r3.0 respect others’ decisions to deploy AI to advance their research and thinking – and we sometimes (unavoidably) use it, for example, as an element of Zoom’s transcription feature that generated our interview transcripts. That said, in our work, we generally choose consciously to prioritize human engagement – with one another, and with the resulting information – over AI intervention. We recognize our own biases – the individual and collective predilections (both conscious and unconscious) of the Author and Project Director, Interviewees, Working Group, etc – and follow the recommendation from activist Global South / Global Majority colleagues to identify ourselves in-depth, to expose our potential biases. Toward this end, we include a story from my personal experience (as lead author) in the Introduction to simultaneously advance substantive inquiry and share details on my positionality.

So, we transparently prioritize our own biases over the biases programmed into AI agents by their creators and trainers, who are less knowable. What is at least partly knowable is the growing recognition of AI’s significant blind spots – from cognitive / epistemic hijacking to energy hogging to the existential risks outlined terrifyingly by Daniel Schmactenberger.

But in larger part, our decision was spurred less by avoidance of AI, and more by our commitment to lived relationality. We love to engage directly with others, including not only other humans but also the pluriversal others who co-inhabit our natural world and vast cosmos. This commitment to relationality also extends to the research itself: we also love to engage directly and un-intermediatedly with our research – to read and reread (and re-reread), to contemplate, to be struck with unexpected realizations that cross-pollinate seemingly unrelated ideas. As well, the bright moon in a starry sky, the hawk riding spiral updrafts, the broken-legged fox hobbling across a stone wall – these have been as important contributors and inspirations to this work as the interview transcripts.

Along these lines, we embrace what Vanessa Andreotti articulates around Affinity of Inquiry, in describing her engagement with the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) collective. GTDF explores not universalized, homogenous, ideological ideation, but rather, revels in a pluriversalist, heterogenous, experimental and experiential space for collective inquiry. In other words, the act of inquiry is what binds, rather than any specific idea or identity.

This Affinity of Inquiry dovetails well with Nate Hagens’ observation from our interview with him (transcribed as an epigraph to this sub-chapter): essentially, that we have an overabundance of individual ideologies and doctrines, and precious little synthesis of these isolated ideologies and doctrines into a more systemic meta-conversation that might lead to a more coherent meta-discourse.

Our Seeds Series seeks to address this imbalance by advancing a Synthesis Approach. Namely, we weave together the various interviewee perspectives with our own analytical framing, inclusive of our Working Group inputs, to result in a more polyvocal text. Perhaps more importantly, this approach bypasses the kind of siloization that can result by following any one doctrine, philosophy, methodology, framework, etc. Of course, the risk is that specific elements of specific approaches may be necessary components that are context-reliant. But we trust that this potential downside is far outweighed by the upside of a pluriversalist Synthesis Approach.

Given our prioritization of relational intimacy with our interviewees (over the more “objective” outsourcing of bias to AI agents), we have adopted the protocol of identifying interviewees by their full names when first mentioned in each chapter, then referring to them by first name thereafter in the chapter – in a nod to the warmth of our human engagement with them, and an invitation for you as readers to feel the halo of this glow. We also always format their names in bold, to highlight our act of ongoing respect for their generous contributions.

As well, to support the conversational quality of the interviews, we have taken liberties in light editing – for example, when an interviewee uses a pronoun for a referent noun they established earlier than the section we quote in the text here, we opt against the disruptive use of bracketing to retain strict adherence, and instead simply insert the referent noun used earlier. Ultimately, we endeavor to stay true to the integrity and authenticity of Interviewee voices, in their unique contributions to the meta-conversation we weave amongst them.

0.2 r3.0 Seeds Series Knowledge Co-Creation Due Process

Since the beginning of r3.0’s Blueprinting work in 2015, we developed a robust and inclusive Due Process approach to knowledge synthesis and co-creation. We started by identifying a thematic focus (such as Reporting, Accounting, Data, etc), then gathered a Working Group of 20-40 practitioners / researchers focused on this area, globally. Our collective inquiry was then guided by a triangulation of questions:

• What is the current state of practice in this field?

• What is the current state of ambition in this field?

• Is this practice / ambition sufficient to spur the emergence of a truly sustainable, regenerative, and distributive economy / society?

Our working hypothesis was that the answer to the third question would always be No – in which case the goal of the Blueprint was to backcast from the ideal of a sustainable, regenerative, and distributive economy / society, and articulate recommendations for filling the gaps between current practice / ambition and this future ideal.

The work itself consisted of an initial research phase (primarily a semi-formal literature review), followed by two Drafts reviewed by the Working Group (sometimes in a 1-week asynchronous dialogue hosted on the Currnt engagement platform), then a Final Draft opened to a Public Comment Period, after which we published a Final Blueprint (typically released at the annual r3.0 Conference).

Most Blueprints were authored by r3.0 senior staff, and in several instances, we called on key partners to do the authoring. As the Due Process matured, we developed a more inclusive and collaborative research and authorship approach, in part enabled by sufficient funding to apply an innovative funding self-allocation process (documented in a chapter of Blueprint 8: Funding Governance for Systemic Transformation).

Going forward with the shift to the Seeds Series, we’re optimizing Working Group input and streamlining the drafting and feedback process. Perhaps most importantly, for this Seeds Series, we sourced knowledge from the field through interviews with diverse thinkers and practitioners.

We endeavored to synthesize this crowdsourced input from practitioners & researchers across as broad a spectrum of alternatives to the status quo as possible when it comes to economies & cultures – including regenerative economy & cultures, restorative economy, doughnut economics, indigenous economics & cultures, solidarity economy,ecofeminist economics, ecological economics, degrowth economics, common good economics & culture of the commons, wellbeing economics, decolonial economics & culture, post-development culture & economics, bioregional economics & currency, prosocial economics & cultural evolution, and multicapitalist economics (among many others).

That said, we did not endeavor to apply a strictly scientific approach to our selection process, as that degree of rigor transcends the scope and budget of this project. Notwithstanding, we believe this representation provides a sufficiently diverse set of perspectives to assert a relevant body of knowledge.

Here’s who we interviewed:

• Nwamaka Agbo | CEO, Kataly Foundation | Managing Director, Restorative Economies Fund | Recording

• Vanessa Andreotti | Dean, Faculty of Education, University of Victoria | Co-Founder, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures | Recording

• Joe Brewer | Co-Founder, Design School for Regenerating Earth | Recording

• Lourenço Bustani | Co-Founder, Mandalah | Recording

• Sahana Chattopadhyay | Founder, Proteeti Consulting | Recording

• Jude Currivan | Cosmologist, healer, author, and co-founder WholeWorld-View | Recording

• John Fullerton | Founder, Capital Institute | Impact Investor | Recording

• Jayati Ghosh | Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst | Recording

• Marcelo Gleiser | Director, Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement, Dartmouth College | Recording

• Nate Hagens | Host, The Great Simplification | Recording

• Gaya Herrington | Vice President Sustainability Research, Schneider Electric | Recording

• Indy Johar | Co-Founder, Dark Matter Labs | Recording

• Emily Kawano | Co-Director, Wellspring Cooperative | Co-Founder, US Solidarity Economy Network | Recording

• Steve Keen | Distinguished Research Fellow, University College London (UCL) | Recording

• Ashish Kothari | Founding Member, Kalpavriksh | Initiator, Vikalp Sangam | Initiator, Global Tapestry of Alternatives | Recording

• Kate Raworth | Author, Doughnut Economics | Co-Founder, Doughnut Economics Action Lab | Recording

• Will Ruddick | Founder, Grassroots Economics Foundation | Recording

• Carol Sanford | Regenerative Educator, Long Thought Researcher & Thinker | Recording

• Daniel Christian Wahl | Author, Designing Regenerative Cultures| Recording

Our goal was not to assert a new regenerative & distributive economy / society framework, theory, regime, etc…, but rather to offer a synthesis of leading frameworks / theories / regimes etc that already exist. Our hypothesis was that there is significant overlap amongst these interviewees, as well as idiosyncratic ideas amongst them.

To pursue a rigorous and structured process, we employed a set of 3 standardized questions in all interviews:

• What are the 3-5 fundamental flaws of current economic systems & cultures?

• What are the 3-5 fundamental imperatives of regenerative economies & cultures?

• What are the 3-5 necessary elements of just transitions to regenerative economies & cultures?

We also typically included a fourth question on the role of bioregions in transforming to regenerative economies and cultures.

We invited 1-2 Working Group members to attend each interview to take notes and monitor for any missed issues, then invited them to “clean up” the AI-generated transcripts. We then created a spreadsheet to harvest the 3-5 crystallizations from each question for each interviewee, then assessed this compendium for synthesis into thematic clusters, which we transferred into a separate tab of the spreadsheet for tabulation.

Stepping back, we recognized that the sheer volume of content warranted devoting a distinct document to each question (or question cluster). So, the first Seeds Series Volume focused on the first issue of fundamental flaws, with an introductory chapter providing necessary contextualization. This Second Volume that you have in-hand picks up on the remaining two questions, with necessary contextualization in the Introduction chapter, and in the introduction segments to each of the themes identified in the Aligned Findings and Idiosyncratic Analyses sections.

In thematic chapters focused on issues named by interviewees, we weave their voices together into a polyvocal meta-conversation to synthesize diverse perspectives on common focal areas. (We describe this method in more depth in the next sub-chapter.)

We plan a Seeds Volume 3 focusing on the bioregional context, drawing on responses to the fourth question, and also drawing on a new round of interviews to hone in further and also encompass the rapid developments in the bioregional movement since our initial round of Seeds interviews. As well, this Volume will build on its predecessors, so we endeavor for the meta-conversation cultivated in the first two Volumes to mature into a meta-discourse in the Third Volume (and beyond) – adding the layer of conscious strategic direction that discourse provides for anchoring fields and movements.

Ultimately, we believe that the Seeds Series offers a vital contribution to our shared understanding of how to navigate our predicament, by synthesizing individual perspectives into a collective conversation that taps into communal wisdom.

The miraculous thing about seeds is that they germinate unseen beneath the soil until Spring, when they burst forth in their green glory! Likewise, r3.0’s Seeds Series Volume 2 is now springing forth, as we announced its release in our Newsletter earlier this week. It’s appropriate that Seeds 2 -- after germinating underground for a year -- now sprouts in early Spring (here in the Northern hemisphere)! And as with all plants, it’s worth the wait to behold the vibrant life emanating from within.

Entitled Unmaking & Remaking at the Edge of Dissolution: A Meta-Conversation on Re-Patterning for Just Transitions to Regenerative Economics & Cultures, the document synthesizes perspectives from ~20 Interviewees supported by a ~30-member Working Group.

We’re posting Seeds 2 serially here, starting with the Executive Summary, which you can find below (and as a pdf here), and you can find the full document here.

Executive Summary

The predicament humanity has made for ourselves cannot be solved. It can only (possibly) be unmade, to create space for our collapsing social systems to be remade in ways that revitalize collapsing ecological systems. Seeds Volume 1 focused on defining the core dimensions of our collapse predicament; Seeds Volume 2 focuses on the Collapse Resilience necessary to de-pattern away from the entrenched template of civilizational collapse cycles, and re-pattern through a just transition toward regenerative economies, cultures, societies, and ecologies.

This Volume draws on interviews of almost 20 prominent thinkers and doers on regenerative economies and cultures. Here’s who we interviewed:

While Seeds 1 synthesized Interviewee responses to the first question (“what are the 3-5 fundamental flaws of current economic systems & cultures?”), Seeds 2 synthesizes Interviewee responses to the second (“what are the 3-5 fundamental imperatives of regenerative economies & cultures?”) and third (“what are the 3-5 necessary elements of just transitions to regenerative economies & cultures?”). As with Seeds 1, here again we present the resulting findings in thematic clusters in the Aligned Findings section, and more unique Idiosyncratic Analyses in their own section, based on a coding process we employed through a comprehensive review of the interview notes (taken by members of the Seeds Series Working Group) and transcripts.

We identified 8 Aligned Finding themes:

• Systemic;

• Relationality;

• Mindsets/Paradigms/Worldviews;

• Regeneration;

• Story & Narrative Framing;

• Solidarity;

• Indigeneity; and

• Community- and Place-Based.

And we identified 3 Idiosyncratic Analyses:

• Transcend Justice;

• Sovereignty & Autonomy; and

• Empowering Women.

For each of these themes, we provide a brief introduction followed by an interweaving of Interviewee quotations, to create what we call a meta-conversation: although the Interviewees did not speak to each other directly (as we conducted separate interviews), the perspectives they shared very much spoke to each other in a conversation that we braided together. We believe this structural design leads to the emergence of a rich tapestry of voices that become more than a sum of their parts.

This methodology underscores a fundamental strategic objective of this Seeds Series: our goal is not to assert a new regenerative & distributive economy / society framework, theory, regime, etc… (as Interviewee Nate Hagens says, “there’s so many people who are opining on a regenerative, sustainable future that are an expert in X without having a group of people working on a more of a systemic approach”), but rather to offer a synthesis of leading frameworks / theories / regimes etc that already exist. Our hypothesis – that there is significant overlap amongst these interviewees, as well as idiosyncratic ideas amongst them – proved itself out. We firmly believe our synthesis-based systemic approach brings significant value.

We label this synthesis approach Affinity of Inquiry, borrowing the term from Interviewee Vanessa Andreotti, who contrasts it with an insistence on “shared identity or ideology.” Instead, Affinity of Inquiry “is the creation of experimental and experiential spaces where we can hold questions differently and support each other in a continuous learning and unlearning collaborative inquiry process.” This perspective supports our prioritization of a pluriversalist approach over a universalist approach.

We draw the title of Seeds Volume 2 – Unmaking & Remaking at the Edge of Dissolution – from the Introduction epigraph quotes from Sylvia Wynter (“...that which we have made, we can unmake, then, consciously now, remake”) and Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil & Kriti Sharma (“Remembering that our dominant stories are myths that can be unmade and remembering our capacity to choose – from among all our potentials – stories and practices that will serve us, we finally come more squarely to the question of what we will choose, practice, and make. What will we call forth, here at the edge of dissolution”).

Our predicament is dissolution – more specifically, ecological and social systems collapses. In the Introduction, we also assert that civilization is our predicament. More specifically, the class (and race and sex) hierarchies that define civilization also curse it to collapse (per Peter Turchin’s elite overproduction research, which demonstrates conclusively that competition for limited power is the single most consistent cause of civilizational collapse across the evidence compiled in the Seshat Global History Databank.)

So: if humanity wishes to persist, we need to unmake (or de-pattern) our civilizational collapse dynamic (which may require creating an alternative to the civilization model of societal structure) and remake (or re-pattern) a sustainable, regenerative societal structure whereby life may flourish on Earth forever (to riff on our Conclusion epigraph quote from John Ehrenfeld).

Stated slightly differently, humanity needs to adopt Collapse Resilience whereby we first insulate ourselves from the worst impacts of the collapses that are already unfolding, second we adapt to post-collapse scenarios, but most importantly, we pursue this de-patterning by abandoning our collective suicidal tendencies, and we re-pattern into the more mature form of collective self nurturance.

Seeds Volume 1 identifies the patterns we need to unmake; Seeds Volume 2 identifies the patterns we need to remake. The forthcoming Seeds Volume 3 will map out this necessary re-patterning in the bioregional context – which we believe is the most promising context for humanity’s post-collapse survival.

To access the complete Seeds Series Volume 2, please see here.

r3.0 kicked off this week with a fascinating Bioregional Open Dialogue on Indigenous & Bioregional Funding Flows Across Turtle Island spotlighting the work of Alexander Sterling with Turtle Island Community Capital, Cheryl Chen & Donna Morton of Salmon Returns, and Syd Harvey Griffith of Kinship Earth.

You can check out the summary materials here: Recording | Deck | Living Resources Document

After really strong presentations, we kicked off the dialogue section with a question from Cynthia Johnson on ways to get bioregional funding out more quickly during these challenging times.

Then we addressed a cluster of questions shifting from extractive to regenerative capital flows:

Ann Stapleton asked “who decides what is extractive or not?” -- which yielded very interesting responses (my favorite was from Alexander, who noted “market rate (10-100x) literally means maximum extractive...” (at the 1:16:30 mark)

Carrie Norton asked (rhetorically) “what if Venture Capital as we know it today is screaming for redesign due to its structurally extractive premise?”

And Louise Adongo asked “can it be an issue to capitalise noncapitalizable aspects of our humanity? (our tendency is towards extraction; how do we mitigate extractive “trust” , “civic engagement” etc.)”

I was particularly pleased to see Priya Bala-Miller PhD on the call (we collaborated together through Preventable Surprises) and to hear her ask:

“Cheryl, do you feel there is a scale threshold to how the Salmon Returns service offering can grow? So much of the value in your model requires connection into community. The ecosystem needs a lot more support from capital stack designers/intermediaries like Salmon Returns, and the growth design pathway, akin to Alexanders’ organizational temporal threshold of 25 years is an important ecosystem consideration. Grateful for the panels thoughts on how to right size these pathways in ways that don’t simply default everything just getting bigger.”

So many deeply insightful questions, such nuanced responses! I encourage you all to view the Recording, review the Deck, and check out the Living Resources Document.

And please share any thoughts here as well...

In my conversations with ELI INGRAHAM onboarding her as a r3.0 Research Fellow, she proposed a fascinating ... and humbling ... idea. Eli is former CEO of the Center for Partnership Systems, which stewards the work of Riane Eisler, and she remains an Advisor there. So she proposed facilitating one of r3.0’s Bioregional Open Dialogues as a conversation between Riane and me, exploring the intersection between Partnership Systems (and its underlying Cultural Transformation Theory) and Bioregionalism, opening up this exploration to dialogue participants in the broader bioregional community.

Of course, I unhesitatingly said YES! (Who in their right mind would pass up an opportunity to engage with such an important cultural figure as Riane Eisler?!?)

I had just been engaging with Riane’s work in my writing / editing of Volume 2 of our Seeds Series (which we’re releasing later this month), where Seeds Interviewee (and r3.0 Steering Board Member) Gaya Herrington gave extensive input on the significance of the Partnership Systems framing. So I delved back into Riane’s 1987 masterwork The Chalice & The Blade that redefined our understanding of cultural evolution based on significant advances in archeological, biological, and other scientific evidence bases.

In a nutshell, Riane asserted that the patriarchal Domination Systems that have predominated for centuries are not set in stone; we can (and indeed, must) return to the Partnership Systems that predominated in other human cultures that are neither patriarchal nor matriarchal. In other words, human culture does not require supremacy, or domination of one human subset over other subsets.

To my mind, Bioregionalism represents the best opportunity for returning to Partnership Systems, as bioregionalism embraces partnership not only between and amongst humans, but also with the more-than-human world.

r3.0 Bioregional Open Dialogue 11, which we’ve entitle “Living Systems – Bridging Bioregionalism and the Partnership Model,” will take place on Monday 18 May from 7:30-9:00pm UTC (Click here to convert to your time zone)

Optional sign-up / calendar invite download here.

The Session will take place on the r3.0 Zoom line:

https://zoom.us/j/4785801785?pwd=RU50bUFWSG5wUnBBc21JMFUyaEhyUT09
Meeting ID: 478 580 1785
Passcode: 902564

You can find more information on the Session on the r3.0 website here.

I look forward to seeing you there. What questions would you like us to consider exploring?

What does it take to move from regenerative theory into working bioregional infrastructure?

That's the question explored by Regenerating Mornington Peninsula, the volunteer-led bioregional initiative in the Mornington Peninsula Bioregion of Victoria, Australia that we spotlighted in the March r3.0 Bioregional Confluencing Community Call.

Tomi Winfree, Matthew Parnell PhD, Neil Simpson, and Andrew Keast presented on how they (along with their colleague Alana March) convene landholders, businesses, educators, and community leaders to co-design escarpment resilience plans, regenerate soil systems in partnership with CarbonCycle, support enterprises navigating sustainability and social licence challenges, and map regional regenerative capacity.

Using Regenesis Institute for Regenerative Practice's Story of Place methodology as its foundation for an iterative engagement tool, they are building shared understanding and stewardship across the bioregion. They have begun hosting bioregional exchanges with Regen Melbourne and partners in Gippsland to strengthen learning flows between places and build shared capability.

Alongside this grounded work, they are designing governance and regenerative financing pathways to sustain long-term stewardship. In partnership with the Regenesis Institute and a global network of practitioners, they are establishing a local Bioregional Regenerative Learning and Research Centre and launching their public hub online within the Design School for Regenerating Earth.

They are exploring enterprise evolution with the Flourishing Enterprise Institute and piloting the hum.community participatory funding platform with Regen Melbourne to test transparent, community-based funding flows. They are seeking aligned collaborators and support to formalise this infrastructure and document the journey so it can contribute to and learn from a growing global network of bioregional regeneration.

You can view the deck here.

Confluencing Community Call recordings are available to Community Members. To join the r3.0 Bioregional Confluencing Community, register to host a Confluence alongside our Sept 2026 Conference here.

(All Confluence participants get a free pass to the Conference, and those who register Confluences before May 31 qualify for a fair share portion of our Confluencing Fund, which we are currently fundraising for with a $50k goal.)