One of the core issues of our times is how humanity has become disconnected from the reality of our ecological nature. We live as though there are no planetary limits and do not respect the natural law of ecological consequences.

Our Indigenous brothers and sisters have much to teach in this regard. As do ecologically trained scientists. Each in their different ways will tell us that we need to honor our responsibilities to the natural world. Each will remind us that our lives utterly depend on the gifts this planet has bestowed upon us. All of this is related to a fundamental concept -- that of bioregional learning.

Bioregional learning is a phrase that draws attention to all the ways we learn how to live in each place. How do we treat our water? Which plants are medicinal? Which plants can be eaten as food? How do the other living beings create a life for themselves here? What are the consequences if we disrupt their natural balance? All of this and more is shaped by the observation that each place on Earth is ecologically (and culturally) unique and has its own contextual ways for humans to come into harmony if they want to remain there for long periods of time.

In the research field of cultural evolution, there is a huge amount of evidence for ecologically informed ways of living. The Indigenous people of the Great Plains have constructed their entire worldview and way of life around the movements of buffalo. Inuit people build igloos from snow and warm their homes with whale blubber. People of the long houses honor the life cycles of bear, beaver, and salmon while also depending on them for their survival. Those who live on islands grow palm trees and fish nurseries. The list goes on and on.

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Readers interested in learning more about cultural evolution and unique adaptations to local place will learn a lot from the book The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich.

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What I want to share in this article is why bioregional learning centers are at the heart of the work to bring humans back into harmony with the rest of nature. This is because the work of a bioregional learning center is to gather and organize the diverse ways of learning how to live in a particular place -- so that holistic understandings can be achieved. As this capacity emerges, the people living in each place gain the ability to diagnose the systemic risks and challenges that are revealed by these holistic understandings.

The process might go something like this:

1. Construct the geologic, ecological, and cultural histories of your bioregion.

2. Discover how life works here and how human inhabitants evolved livelihoods that were sustainable over long periods of time.

3. Convene key stakeholders who bring different aspects of this knowledge into one community and explore the present context of your bioregion.

4. Construct a shared agenda for the regeneration of the bioregion informed by the historic assessments that have been done earlier in the process.

5. Invite other key stakeholders into the process and share the diverse ways of learning how to live in harmony with your bioregion as this regenerative agenda is manifested in practice.

If you do this, you are going to discover the need to transform local food systems. That you need to improve how watersheds are managed. Envision different land-use practices that restore ecological integrity. How important it is to explore appropriate uses of technology and models for social organization that are well suited to your place. In brief, you are discovering the transition pathway from dysfunctional extractive systems towards their regenerative alternatives.

Bioregional learning opens up the design pathways for systemic change to emerge. And it does so with life at the center of every major decision that needs to be made. As we learn which kinds of housing and shelter are appropriate to our local place, how to make textiles from local plants, and which plant species improve our soils while feeding healthy bodies, we are learning holistically how to live in our own bioregion.

I know this from personal experience. We created a regenerative school for children in Colombia where they have community gardens and participate in ecological restoration of the native ecosystems. It is so beautiful to watch the kids learn craft skills from local elders while contributing to the health and resilience of their community. They are engaging in bioregional learning as it makes sense in their local place.

It is also something I get to witness as we travel on our bioregional pilgrimages to inspire local teams to create their own bioregional learning centers. Weaving a golden thread among different bioregions with regenerative education as the common thread. What we witness during these travels is how local teams form so they can address the systemic threats to their local places in a holistic, ecological manner.

For example, the work in Tunisia focuses on the network of oases in the Great Sahara Desert as they interact with coastal areas of the southern Mediterranean Sea. Here the totemic being is the olive tree that sits in the heart of community life and has been there for thousands of years. It is iconic for the bioregional context of this unique region.

Similarly, our friends at actively learn about the flora and fauna of the Thames river system that flows across England and into the North Sea. They know about the chalk cliffs, how industry has shaped their landscapes, and what might be needed to restore health to nearby areas. Learning about their bioregion reveals different focal areas and regenerative strategies than what would be needed in Tunisia.

Or look at the bioregional organizing that has been underway for almost fifty years in the Ozarks in Missouri and Arkansas in the heart of North America. Here you will find vast expanses of oak forest, thousands of caves, and the largest natural springs on Earth. People in this area engage in fisheries management, conservation of vast forest areas, and various kinds of local food production in a landscape that is shaped by four different seasons throughout the year.

What we start to see is a general pattern — learning how to construct a healthy life where you are is unique and distinctive. Bioregional learning gets at the heart of regenerative living. It also helps us ground ourselves into the living systems of each place as we engage in analysis and strategies for how to address local challenges. There is so much to learn in each place. And so much to be shared among them. This is why we are creating the BLC Action Network for practitioners who set up their own bioregional learning ecosystems, so that they can learn from each other and share best practices along the way.

In my travels to different bioregions, I find that learning how to live in place is essential. It is core to where we need to focus our attention in these difficult times. And it is something that is already in process — meaning there are local people doing great regenerative work already — in every bioregional context on Earth. What we are doing now is helping weave them and support learning exchanges among them.

This is what our Dandelion Strategy for birthing 1000 bioregional learning centers is really about. Focus on bioregional learning. Help people set up their own local networks. Weave educational supports among them. Speed up the process and increase the resilience of our collective efforts. Is this something you would like to do? I hope you’ll join us!

Onward, fellow humans.

With all the bad news in the world, here is a little beam of light shining through the cracks. The dreamers are stepping into their power to imagine different kinds of futures. Ecological healing. Spiritual connection. Regenerative education. Economies that act in service to life. You won’t hear about this in the corporate media. Neither will it be viral on social media. Invisible though it is, this is all really happening.

I write this little postcard from the edge to share a glimpse into a gentle weaving process that is already underway. We are weaving a golden thread of light as we travel — and I are bioregional pilgrims on a spiritual journey to catalyze and strengthen a series of landscapes where local teams have already been hard at work laying the groundwork for their own bioregional learning ecosystems.

You might have heard about our Dandelion Strategy for Regenerating Earth where we envision at least 1000 BLCs (bioregional learning centers) coming into being by the year 2035. As the collapse processes intensify in ecological and social systems, these will be “islands of coherence” in a sea of chaos. Places where learning hubs coordinate across local networks of place-based regeneration. Weaving the dreams of rivers, mountains, forests, and humans toward a new kind of harmony. Held in the dreams of bioregional minds — humans who have learned to listen deeply and act in support of life in their own local settings.

We already went on a pilgrimage in June through the Heart of Turtle Island. Our travels took us to sacred headwaters and major confluences of rivers throughout the Mississippi River Basin. Along the way, we planted seeds for bioregional learning centers in places like the Ozarks, Lower Missouri River Valley, in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin, along the front range of the Central Rockies, in the panhandle of Texas, and the Miami River Valley of southern Ohio.

Penny and I will begin the next wave of this weaving process on the southern shores of the Mediterranean in mid-September. Our journey begins in Tunisia with a sacred journey to visit bioregional learning sites that will be followed by the Mediterranean Bioregional Activation — a three-day workshop on September 27th - 29th with people arriving from the four corners of this vast sea that connects Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Our strategic intent is to lay the groundwork for a Mediterranean hub of bioregional learning sites that grows in strength, diversity, and connectivity in 2027. We have partnered with to host this gathering and are excited to see which dreams reveal themselves during our pilgrimage.

This gathering is receiving financial support from the Earth Regeneration Fund through its Bioregional Activation Funding Pool as part of what we are able to do with membership dues in the Design School for Regenerating Earth. Everyone who signs up for an Active Hope Lifetime Plan is contributing $500 to help gatherings like this take place around the world.

Next we will be hosted by théra in Tarn-et-Garonne, France. This is a watershed system with deep historic roots and many local regenerative projects. Penny and I will join their team for locally-organized events from October 2nd thru 6th.

In the Tarn-et-Garonne region, they are laying the groundwork for a bioregional learning center to emerge. This includes a strategic piece of land they have brought into their efforts that plays a central coordinating role for the regional planning and ecological restoration work that they hold with deep care.

We confirm every time we travel that there are local regenerative efforts underway everywhere that we go. Stream restoration work. Alternative education. Community spaces. Regenerative farms. They are often working in isolation from each other. The bioregional scale is not present to them yet. So many efforts poised to move through a tipping point that changes the direction of regional economic development at the larger, holistic scale.

This will be true when we continue our pilgrimage on October 8th to 10th in the Leuven region of Belgium where the team of And Now What — and — has been weaving deeply with diverse local stakeholders around collapse-informed approaches to systemic change. This includes bioregional organizing and the potential for creating a bioregional learning center in their region.

We will participate in a series of local site visits, give public talks, and co-facilitate workshops with the And Now What team to dream more deeply into what a bioregional approach can do for local resilience planning while we are in Leuven.

Our journey continues to the Netherlands where a local network of community organizers has been weaving the Rivers of the North Sea and North Sea Delta into dynamic spaces for bioregional learning. We will be hosted by and for several days of activities on October 12th, 13th, and 14th.

You can sign up for the full-day event on October 12th that is being co-hosted with to help stimulate deeper relationships with their efforts that span across Europe. What we envision during our time in the Netherlands is to witness and get inspired by all of the great local work that is happening. They too are already on the path to create a bioregional learning ecosystem with multiple diverse place-based regenerative hubs.

Are you feeling the potency of this pilgrimage now? We start in Tunisia. Move into France. Visit Belgium. Weave with the Netherlands. And then the threads continue across to the British Isles as we journey on to spend time with near Reading. We will participate in the Living Thames Bioregional Convergence on October 16th and 17th.

There are a lot of people who love the River Thames. It has deep ecological, cultural, historic, and economic significance. Just like the other places along our pilgrimage, the local organizing team is moving through the process of exploring what it would mean to create their own bioregional learning center.

We bring our pilgrimage to a close on October 18th and 19th by traveling on to West Sussex where we will be hosted by and the Really Regenerative Centre that promotes the emergence of regenerative economies at scale. She has hosted gatherings about place-based work for many years — as well as bringing deep insights to the philanthropic and institutional landscape for how these efforts need to be supported. will also invite us to key regenerative projects and regional efforts in the Sussex area during our time there.

All of this is scaffolded through our learning ecosystem of the Design School for Regenerating Earth. We flow financial resources through the Living Flows Approach and have a narrative strategy for how stories come alive and make visible what is happening in many different parts of the world.

The Dandelion Strategy for birthing a thousand BLCs is working! Planting seeds for bioregional regeneration across the planet. We also do work in the Northern Andes and have a clear vision for how to keep all of this going in the next several years. If you feel moved to support us, please consider making a donation. This is a very grassroots effort. Local people caring for local places with an emphasis on regenerative education and bioregional organizing.

Please let me know if we might meet up in person during these travels. Join us and get involved. Gather with those who are organizing to receive us. Support them to keep going too. With many hands, this work truly becomes possible.

Onward, fellow humans.

We are a storytelling animal that profoundly depends on stories to keep us alive. Some stories can kill us. Others can heal us. Which we choose can literally change the course of humanity in these dangerous times. Right now we are living through planetary collapse. We need strategies for how we choose our stories — and with whom we choose to live them out.

I am one of the stewards for a story that has deep healing potential. It is the Story of Bioregional Earth. Grounded in life-affirming relationships. Acknowledging that humans are part of this world and that we have a sacred responsibility to care for all life on Earth. Weaving a pathway that brings together the best of western science with ancestral knowledge systems of our Indigenous brothers and sisters.

What do I mean when I say that some stories can kill us? Let me give a few examples. If you listen to the collective delusions of professional economists, they will tell you that our economies can grow without limits — all consequences be damned. If we live this story out long enough, we will degrade all life supports that make our economy possible. This is a self-terminating pattern.

Another might be that humans are separate from nature. We don’t need water to drink or air to breathe because we are cut from some spiritual cloth in a parallel universe. So we can dump pollution in our water and destabilize planetary climate because our souls will be saved in the afterlife. If you live this way, you negate all sacred responsibilities to that which actually created you. You can let yourself live out a hedonist narrative of material wealth accumulation while ignoring how it lays waste to the very foundations of life that you hold dear. This is another self-terminating pattern.

What if we ask about stories that can heal us instead? For example, you might feel isolated and alone. Without meaning or purpose. Just a consuming machine who needs to work and earn money so you can survive. In a context like this, stories become a kind of medicine. What if your family is much bigger than you thought? Your home always present. All that you have ever needed to live a healthy life freely given? That is pretty much how it would be to remember that your Great Mother is the Earth and you were blessed with life by Grandfather Sky thanks to the energy our Sun provides to make life on Earth possible.

You belong here. You are an Earthling. Your family is every being who has ever lived throughout the multi-billion year history of this miraculous planet. And you can find meaning in every simple act of gratitude and care that you give back in thanks for all that you have received. Live into this story and you will discover a path back into right relationship with your ancestors.

What Happens When We Create Financial Flows to Wrong Stories?

Last week in the Design School, I gave a webinar about our Living Flows Approach to create dynamic relationships that connect money that supports life with stories that are able to embody the continuation of life. My focus (which you can view in the video above) was on the power of stories — and how our best intentions can get hijacked by people who lack conscience or live out their actions through a life-destroying worldview.

Said another way, there is a role for frame semantics that reveals how humans express meaning and make sense of their actions that is of fundamental importance here. A lot of analysis has been done about the structures and processes for how to create healthy financial institutions — yet very little attention has been given to the semantics of consciousness or worldview.

In the video above, I shared how we had really good intentions for bringing financial resources into a local community reforestation project. Unfortunately this movement of money took place in an environment where deeply corrupt and unethical actions are generally tolerated. We began the process with an ethical partner who was forcefully removed by a political coup of the community organization that received the money. As a bizarre twist, our intentions to protect community forest enabled a bad actor to swoop in and capture the money to then go on and destroy the forest with these very same resources.

I went on to share an example where we flowed financial resources into a local context that had an alignment of conscience and worldview. We brought funding to a permaculture project in Tunisia that seeks to demonstrate a beautiful regenerative alternative for industrial olive production.

Many lessons can be drawn from these two examples. What I want to focus on here is that there are various kinds of what Tyson Yunkaporta describes as “right story versus wrong story” — an insider’s lingo held among Indigenous communities to help their own members remember how easy it is to fall into the wrong kinds of stories. You can read more about it in his book Right Story, Wrong Story. He talks about right story as being holistic, relational, and interwoven with sacred responsibilities. Wrong story is linear, reductionistic, and decontextualized.

I playfully explored this in my presentation with a visual image of the regenerative olive farm in Tunisia. You can see a beautiful permaculture ethic for restoring ancestral human relationships with olive trees together with ecological patterns of biodiversity and soil health. All of this is in the realm of right story. Yet the farm is surrounded by an endless ocean of wrong story — monoculture olive production that is deeply mechanistic, reductionist, and prone to disease.

This semantic layer of human story is fundamental to our Living Flows Approach. We have been practicing regenerative finance for years and have learned a lot about when funding actually leads to regeneration in the world versus when it does not. We have learned that discernment of reality (and care for the truth) is really important. Ecological mindsets are fundamental. The ability to see relationships as dynamic and alive. Treating people as living commons instead of exploitable resources. And so much more.

We want to work with wealth stewards to create living flows. Harmonize our intentions as human beings to act in service to life with the healing processes that enable these flows to manifest healthy outcomes. This is very different from reading a project description to see if it is thematically aligned. We might discover that the person using words to describe ecological regeneration are still living out (even it if is unconscious to them) stories of extraction or reductionism. You’ll notice this with an over-emphasis on metrics. Short-changing the people involved. Presuming to know ahead of time what the living system is supposed to do. And more that we could describe.

How Does This Relate to Bioregionalism?

Check out more of the beautiful maps created by BioregionalMaps.com

Many of us live within the inherently life-destroying stories of nation states. Is your work based in the United States? How does it relate to my tax benefits? I’m sorry but we don’t fund work in Canada — even though half of Lake Ontario is in their jurisdiction. Human thoughts that divide the world based on prior histories of conquest and domination.

Anyone living out a story of national patriotism is inherently already in wrong story. Nation states were created through the active suppression, displacement, or outright genocide of Indigenous peoples. Their borders were drawn by the spoils of war and conquest, ignoring ecological and cultural realities. They are all failing us today as they repeatedly demonstrate an inability to respond to the interdependent web of crises humanity is confronted with.

Bioregions are sometimes described as the natural countries or “ecological nations” of the Earth. They have boundaries and membranes that are constituted in living systems and that honor the responsibilities we have to our life-places. I won’t elaborate more here but simply say that all regenerative economics approaches need to correspond with the living flows of the Earth. This means we discover and come back into healthy relationships with how life flourishes in each unique place on Earth.

The more deeply we live into stories that are both good and true, the more we discover that we are living expressions of the bioregions that keep us alive through any given moment. You and I are living flows of air, water, and nutrients. We are constituted in the living flows of any place we inhabit in any given moment. If that place is hostile to life, we immediately suffer and are at risk of dying.

Bioregionalism is the recognition that right story is shaped by the bioregions that animated us with life in the first place. This is a spiritual insight as much as it is an empirical one. We are meaning-made-manifest as a living story of the place where we are. I write these words today as oxygen flows into my lungs from nearby trees here in the Northern Andes (because I am in Colombia right now). This makes me part of the story in this place in this very moment. The sooner I recognize this, the better I can behave responsibly and seek out what right story means.

Living systems are nested fractals. Multiple scales of life all at once. One of them is the scale of the bioregion that represents the holistic life flows of materials and energy for a bioregional population. It is very important whether we realize it or not. But our ability to care for our bioregions and act responsibly absolutely depends on our ability to realize it as true.

And it is with this that I leave you to reflect for yourself. How will you contribute to the living flows of a Bioregional Earth? A planet where humans recognize we are part of the local bioregions that give us life in any given moment? How can you help more people unlearn wrong stories and move toward right ones?

Onward, fellow humans.

Today I want to share something that is deeply important to me. It is a perspective I gained through more than 25 years of study. It is how I make all major decisions in my life. And it is why I am doing what I do now.

This may frighten you. It could really shake you up. But it is too important for you to ignore — because it is true. Six years ago, I was interviewed by a lovely man named Nicky Rew. He asked a series of questions. My answers outline the core purpose of my life and what humanity actually needs to do right now.

We talked about planetary collapse. The human predicament. Our present moment in history. And the only way to achieve planetary sustainability. Create local living economies. Organize into a planetary network of bioregions. Coordinate with the vital processes that stabilize our Earth Systems. It was what guided me to write my book The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth. To give hundreds of webinars. Train thousands of people. And now to live out the Dandelion Strategy for Regenerating the Earth with a thousand bioregional learning centers.

Watch the recording of our interview. Forgive the poor video quality. It was recorded in late December 2020 during the COVID pandemic. We attempted all that is described near the end. Much of it failed due to sabotage by people who claimed to be allies. And the message is still largely ignored today.

As you watch this, you will see why and I co-founded the Design School for Regenerating Earth in 2023, began co-stewarding Bioregional Earth with Susan Bosak and Brian Puppa in early 2024, birthed the Earth Regeneration Fund in late 2024, and launched the Dandelion Strategy in 2026.

More importantly, I hope you will gain insights into what planetary collapse is and why it is so vital for you to understand. We are not simply in the breakdown of a civilization. What is happening now is unprecedented in the history of our planet. The next few decades are critical for deciding if humans may go extinct.

Share this with friends. Invite them to join the conversation. Subscribe to my Substack where I will continually share more about what we are doing to face planetary collapse — and why regenerating the Earth is our most essential and healthy response.

Thank you for being here. Let’s do all that we can together. I still have faith in humanity, even though it has been a very difficult journey for me to carry such knowledge for so many years with many around me who do not understand what it actually means.

Onward, fellow humans.

For all my English-speaking readers, I am writing this one in Spanish because it is focused on a powerful three-part video series that explores the Bogota River and how it became the most contaminated river in Colombia.

As part of our planetary network of bioregional learning centers, we are now several years into the work of creating learning exchanges for large-scale regeneration of the Northern Andes. You can read more about it in English here and here. If you know people who work in Colombia that might be interested in this article, please pass it along to them.

Onward, fellow humans.

En este artículo, quiero compartir un serie de documentales sobre la contaminación de Río Bogotá y porque necesitamos montar en centro de aprendizaje bioregional para tejer los actores y procesos regenerativos que hacen cosas tan importantes en Colombia.

Para los que no me conocen, vivo en Barichara hace siete años pero nací en los estados unidos. Llegue acá con la visión para regenerar territorios — cuencas hídricas, ecosistemas, culturas ancestrales, oficios locales, y demás — con mi familia en 2019. Hago parte del equipo de Sueños del Bosque enfocado en educación regenerativo con niños. También soy co-fundador de la Escuela de Diseño para Regenerar La Tierra.

La mayoridad de mi trabajo está en inglés. Pero tengo una colección de videos en español que puedes ver para conocerme mejor. Puedes verla acá: Regeneración desde La Práctica

Listo, con todo eso en mente podemos empezar.

Un Recorrido Poderoso Sobre Río Bogotá

Capitulo 1: El rio más contaminado nace PURO

Hay un canal en YouTube para Pao Pineda en donde ella y su equipo publicaron tres documentales sobre el Río Bogotá. Cuando miras el serie, quiero notar algo que es las problemas son muy complejas y interdependientes. No existen soluciones sencillas. También notar que ella ofrezca un análisis muy importante pero no tiene perspectiva sobre lo que es la regeneración bioregional.

Voy a expandir el punto abajo. Acá comparto los tres capitulos. Número uno está arriba. El segundo y tercero abajo.

Capitulo 2: El tramo más PELIGROSO del Río Bogotá

Capitulo 3: Así termina el Río más contaminado de Colombia

Para mi es muy poderoso que el nacimiento de Río Bogotá es un páramo — algo demasiado importante porque los páramos solo existen en la región norte andino. Algo muy especial y sagrado. Los frailejones son plantas maravillosas. Los humedales y conexiones entre evaporación del Mar Pacifico, movimientos del aire sobre las montañas, y las cuencas hídricas que fluyen hasta el Mar Caribe en el sistema de Río Magdalena.

Es decir que existen sistemas mayores que constituyen las dinámicas claves para regenerar el Río Bogotá. Algunos ecológicos. Otros climáticos. También más que son culturales con la sabiduría y conocimientos ancestrales de los pueblos indigenous.

Que Es La Regeneración Bioregional?

Hace dos semana que ofrecí un webinar para explorar algunas preguntas que puedan dar luz a nuestra conversación. Que es la regeneración? Como está afiliado con el concepto de una bioregion? Porque necesitamos organizarnos en el nivel de una bioregion? Cual es el rol de un ecosistema de aprendizaje bioregional en la regeneración de sistemas como cuencas hídricas o paisajes holísticas?

Les invito a ver la grabación acá para explorar los temas con tranquilidad. Son temas bastante importantes y toca tiempo para pensarlos bien. Para ahora solo comparto todo acá y espero que podemos gestionar un dialogo durante los próximos meses y años.

Estoy muy comprometido a tejer un red de bioregiones en el mundo — con equipos locales que empiezan a organizar sus acciones con pensamientos bioregionales. Para eso necesitamos cultivar un lenguaje compartido. Conceptos básicos. Intercambios entre territorios. Colaboraciones robustos. Todo eso necesita tiempo.

Lo que quiero explicar ahora es que la humanidad se encuentra en un momento planetario muy grave. Existe un riesgo para la extinción de nosotros. Estamos muy lejos de sostenible. La evidencia es enorme y no voy a hablar sobre eso acá. Destrucción de ecosistemas. Sistemas extractivas en la economías del mundo. La ilusión que el ser humano existe aparte del resto de la naturaleza. Cambio climático y mucho más.

Durante las 70’s y 80’s del siglo pasado surgió un movimiento de ecología profundo para renacer la consciencia humana con su propio relación al dentro del universo. Hacemos parte de la Madre Tierra. Olvidemos eso y estamos perdidos. Tenemos que reconocer que es un ser vivo en nuestro planeta.

Todo eso y más hace parte de los pensamientos bioregionales. Mis compañeros y yo estamos sembrando una estrategia para nacer mínimo 1000 centros de aprendizaje bioregional durante los próximos 10 años. Uno está en proceso de nacimiento en Colombia para la bioregion norte andino.

Lo que quiero proponer es que no podemos regenerar el Río Bogotá si no hacemos eso. Tenemos que tejer los regeneradores de la Tierra en Colombia con un propósito ambicioso. Montar un centro de aprendizaje bioregional y organizar su trabajo con las cuencas hídricas norte andinas.

Espero con animo para escuchar las respuestas de ustedes.

Seguimos adelante!

In this article, we explore two prophecies — the Eagle and Condor alongside that of the 7th and 8th Fires — as they relate to living into the design pathway for regenerating the Earth. If you are passionate about collaborations between Indigenous and Western approaches, this one is for you!

It has been an honor in the last several years to come into contact with many different Indigenous cultures — each holding wisdom about universal patterns of human life as well as for how to live in a specific bioregional context. During our multiple visits to the Greater Tkaronto Bioregion, we have held space within the Two-Eyed Way of Seeing that brings Indigenous and Western perspectives together in the same realm.

It is a complex endeavor and has many challenges that I won’t go into today. For simplicity, you can think of it as if there are two very different ways of seeing the world that each has something to offer the other. They share purpose around caring for life on Earth. And just like with human eyes on a face, there is a space between the perspectives that Mohawk scholar Dan Longboat describes it as the ethical space between the different worldviews.

Watch this conversation that Dan and I had a few years ago to get a deeper feel for the Two-Eyed Way of Seeing:

What I want to do today is share how I have become an embodied expression of this ethical space between worldviews. I am an incarnation of the Prophecy of the Eagle and Condor — which means I help bring together knowledge from the Western scientific lens with the embodied wisdom practices of Indigenous cultures. It also means I help weave connections between North and South America where 500 years of colonization have wrought tremendous harms.

A brief history: I was born in the Ozarks in 1976. This is a place in the heartland of America. My parents descended from Italian, British, and German immigrants who moved to the St Louis area and surrounding countryside a few generations earlier. Throughout my childhood I never really fit in. I was too sensitive, too intellectual, and too empathetic for the harsh cultural setting of Southwest Missouri. Decades later I left the United States to live for a brief period in Costa Rica and have now been in Colombia for nearly seven years.

During my time in the Northern Andes, I have held deep tensions in my body from the extreme violence that scars the Ozarks and that of colonial and post-colonial violence in Colombia. The area where I grew up was a hotbed of conflicts during the US Civil War. It was the birthplace of fundamentalist Christianity and the Ku Klux Klan. The threads of extremism and violence run very deep there.

Similarly, I arrived into the Colombian department of Santander and the small town of Barichara. This is a place with ferocious clan-based violence in its recent history. It is also the origin of Colombian independence from the Spanish crown because the people here were fiercely opposed to outside domination. There is a lot that these two places hold in common with each other — including that both are deeply traumatized and have their own forms of entrenched corruption today.

I have lived in both places as a kind of spirit medicine. My family arrived in Barichara with the dreams of reforestation and large-scale regeneration with our young child playing in the middle of the work. Bringing children and alternative learning pathways together with the restoration of dead rivers and the recovery of native ecosystems. What I found in Barichara has been a blend of deeply colonized local people, profound forms of corruption and cultural pathology, and a crucible of healing within myself.

Yet most of the time I’ve lived in Colombia — a span from November of 2019 up to the present day in 2026 — has been outwardly focused on weaving a planetary tapestry of bioregions for the regeneration of Earth. This is what we do in the Design School that we founded in 2023. My life in Colombia has been a conduit for holding bioregional activations and pilgrimages throughout Turtle Island (the Indigenous name for North America) and also in other parts of the world. For example, we are enacting pilgrimages in the Mississippi Basin, Mediterranean, British Isles, and Western Europe this year that you can read more about here.

I embody the Eagle and Condor because I bring deep scientific knowledge from the fields of cognitive science, cultural evolution, complexity studies, and Earth System sciences to the design practices that we promote. At the same time, this is a deeply spiritual path that is guided by profound relationships with Indigenous cultures and knowledge systems.

A visceral example of this took place on our recent pilgrimage through the Mississippi Basin when an Oneida medicine man blessed our journey. He offered me a goose feather and instructed me on how to lead a cleansing ritual of gratitude for the waters we were going to visit along our path. It was this same feather that I held ceremony with yesterday in a recently damaged area of the community forest we had been supporting in Barichara.

As I sat in Bioparque Móncora — land that has been stewarded for restoration of native forest since 2009 — I could feel how a corrupt local leader had full power to destroy the forest a few weeks ago because the local culture does not stand up to the kinds of abuse that are so typical in this part of Colombia. What I also felt as I sat in the place where forest had been removed was the presence of the spiritual being the Ojibwe people of Turtle Island call Mississippi - the Father of Water.

In our recent pilgrimage, we visited sacred headwaters and major confluences of rivers throughout the Mississippi Basin. Now I hold the signature of these energies in my body. I can feel them and be guided by their wisdom. The ability to integrate Western and Indigenous perspectives in my being is part of another prophecy — what the Anishinaabe call the 7th and 8th Fires. In brief, the prophecies go like this:

There will come a time when humanity realizes that we are in trouble. This will be the lighting of the 7th Fire and it roughly corresponds with the 1960’s and 70’s when the global ecological crisis seeped into human consciousness across the entire planet. Later will come the time of the 8th Fire when humanity must choose between the charred path that leads to our destruction or the green path that acts in service to the continuation of life. We are in the time of the 8th Fire now.

This year in the Design School for Regenerating Earth we are hosting a learning journey called Regenerating the Earth Through Collapse that is a Two-Eyed practice of holding deep grief while also planting seeds for a flourishing future. We birthed the Dandelion Strategy for creating at least 1000 bioregional learning centers in the next decade as part of this learning journey. We also hold integration sessions for the heavy emotions that come with living through continual social and ecological disruptions.

All of this is related to the prophecies of the Eagle and Condor as well as the 7th and 8th Fires. Humanity must come together and heal our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the planet. Discover that all of us are descended from Indigenous cultures. Gather the knowledge and tools from both ancestral lifeways and the best of modern science. Weave these capacities across the planet through bioregional organizing. Navigate the collapse that is already underway. Continually return to acting in service to life.

In my own work, this includes all of the bioregional organizing in Turtle Island alongside our efforts to create a bioregional learning ecosystem for the Northern Andes. We have had many Earth Regenerators visit us in Colombia throughout the last seven years. Cultural exchanges that also represent the Eagle and Condor in many ways. This path has not been easy. It isn’t graceful and sometimes is not very pretty. But it is deeply restorative and healing as we bring our learnings out to the world continually through the planetary network.

I am writing this article today because I want to invite us all into the deep brokenness of humanity. And the profound need for us to go back into our personal and cultural histories so that wisdom might be brought forth into this moment of planetary change. Now is the time for lighting the 8th Fire. Now is the time to choose life and its continuation. We do this by discovering the Indigeneity within each of us together with the serious cultural traumas that we all hold in our bodies — that get expressed as contaminated rivers, destroyed ecosystems, and massive die-offs of other species.

I invite you to ponder how you might be part of these prophecies too. What can you do to heal your ancestral lineage and contribute to regenerating the Earth? Perhaps you will become part of our BLC Action Network as we deepen into this spiritual path.

Onward, fellow humans.

P.S. If you feel moved, please consider donating in the Earth Regeneration Fund to support all these efforts.

What is a narrative strategy and why do we need one? This is something I’d like to explore with you today. In a world where most of our stories are broken, this is an opportunity to bring about the profound healing that is truly needed.

Humans are a storytelling animal. Some even go so far as to say that we were misnamed by scientists when they chose to call us Homo Sapiens (the hominid who is wise) — preferring instead to say we should be Homo Ludens (the hominid who plays). See this Wikipedia page for more about the deeper thinking behind this distinction.

Play is how we discover the world. How we create stories and live them out. Go to the theater and you will see people enacting a play so they can take on different characters, explore ethical themes, and develop new ways of being in a safe environment. We need stories. We are stories. They are fundamental to social life. And humans are profoundly social.

We need better strategies for our stories. Better ways of choosing which stories we live into being and which ones no longer serve us. About eight years ago, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by about the false choice between hope and doom. She created a beautiful short video so I could say how we need to live a new story into being because it doesn’t exist yet. You can watch it here:

If a story doesn’t exist yet, it needs to be manifested. Guided into being. Shaped with intelligence, conscience, and care. This is where strategy comes in. We need to understand how narratives work and apply this knowledge to how we bring about the changes that need to emerge.

In one of my recent articles, I shared how I devoted ten years of my life to creating narrative strategies as a cognitive linguist — working with social movements all over the world. This is an area I know very well. For example, a story will only take hold in your mind if it becomes dynamically entangled with unresolved emotions. An example might be that if you felt a deep sense of rejection in your family when you were a child, you might be lured into stories about adventure and discovery to help you construct a new sense of identity for yourself.

Stories are alive in us. And they bring us to life. They animate us. And we need them for our spiritual, emotional, and social wellbeing. I gave a webinar two years ago when we birthed the Earth Regeneration Fund to share how it is not primarily about money. Mostly it is a tapestry of stories weaving new realities into existence. Here is the webinar recording:

In essence, the narrative strategy is that we design immersive experiences and live them out as part of a larger, coherent framework of transformational change. We hosted a learning journey in the Design School last year called How to Organize Your Bioregion and we introduced the lens of design immersions for bioregional regeneration. In parallel with this, we flowed funding into several powerful transformational processes — supporting design immersions in different parts of the world.

The immersions were funded with a reciprocity agreement:

(1) Receive the money.

(2) Organize a design immersion.

(3) Share your story out into the world.

(4) Weave the stories.

This is how the Dandelion Strategy for Regenerating Earth emerged with such clarity this year. We were already living the stories that move us toward the birthing of bioregional learning centers (our learning journey from two years ago) as real-world experiences. Stories that people are living out in a fully embodied way. See how it flows? This is powerful stuff!

Here are the design immersions that we funded last year:

• The Design Immersion in Barichara, Colombia

• The Design Immersion of Living Thames

• The Design Immersion in Tarn-et-Garonne, France

• The Design Immersion of Marin/Sonoma Watersheds

• A Bioregional Pilgrimage to the Edge of the Great Sahara

• Willamette Valley Listening Tour 2025

Each of these immersions is a narrative. A story of people living into a different way of being. Expressed uniquely in each place with its distinctive cultural and ecological patterns. The weaving is at the strategic level. Through our learning journeys in the Design School, bioregional activations and pilgrimages that we embark upon. And more that is hard to see because it is interwoven in a distributed way into the tapestry of realities as they emerge.

This year, we have flowed financial resources into three bioregional pilgrimages to seed the Dandelion Strategy into being. We have also flowed money to the bioregional learning center of the Northern Andes and that of the Mediterranean. And we are moving toward the birth of the BLC Action Network that will sustain our narrative strategy as it grows out to the planetary scale — all of this is part of the phase transition we described in one of our webinars of this year’s learning journey. This year’s learning journey is called Regenerating the Earth Thru Collapse.

Part of the strategy is the way I use my Substack account. I launched here in February of this year and have already grown to several thousand subscribers. Each subscriber receives the stories and is invited to live out their own story. You can join us and be part of it. Also, we are seeking wealth stewards with conscience who seek Return of Legacy instead of “Return on Investment” to help us pool the Living Flows at the planetary scale that was described in my Billion Dollar Proposal for Regenerating the Earth. Can you help these people find us? We want to enter into meaningful relationships with philanthropists and investors who care about the future of life for our beautiful planet.

Perhaps I should add that last year we also launched Historias Regenerativas to document regenerative stories in the Northern Andes as part of our work that is continually advancing in Colombia. They created these videos for the Sueños del Bosque funding round on that just concluded about a week ago. These are living stories that breathe the narrative strategy into being. Living it. Expressing. Doing. Weaving continuously.

In summary, our strategy is to weave a tapestry of living stories as they emerge. Seed the stories into being with design immersions and bioregional pilgrimages. Flow financial resources into the growing network of places around the world as part of the Dandelion Strategy. This is how we can birth 1000 BLCs by 2035. And you can help. Share this story. Reach out to friends who might contribute money into this. Join us in the Design School and move towards creating your own bioregional learning center.

We are a living tapestry of stories. This is what humanity truly is in a deep and profound sense. Let the new stories rise up from the biological world — bringing deep meaning, spirituality, purpose, and reverence to how we can relate to the only home we’ve ever known, Mother Earth.

Onward, fellow humans.

A few days ago, one of my friends at Films for Action posted an old article of mine on Facebook that I had written in 2017. The article is titled A Design School for Planetary Collapse. It’s an interesting read, especially considering what has emerged since then. Go take a look if you are curious what I wrote back then.

In summary, I said that all design schools in the world were failing humanity. We needed to apply design thinking to the root causes of ecological harm, the creation of poverty, wealth hoarding, and the capture of institutions. This should all feel familiar considering what is happening in the world today.

I also suggested that a design school for planetary collapse would need to explore the following thematic areas:

1. What is the Earth System and how does it work?

2. What does it mean to be human and why is this important?

3. How does one study change in all its forms?

4. How can a design approach be applied to systemic challenges?

5. What kinds of competency will be needed to do the work?

It is interesting to flash forward to this year — 2026 — and see that I actually did it. It began when I started writing my book The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth in late 2019. An online community was created as a “study group” for this book in 2020 called Earth Regenerators, where I gave more than one hundred free webinars and hosted six learning journeys about how to regenerate the Earth.

Continuing into 2023, my partner and I co-founded the Design School for Regenerating Earth and have set in motion the living out of what is written as the “design pathway” in my book. We now have a planetary network of bioregions, members who live on five continents, and the Dandelion Strategy for birthing at least 1000 bioregional learning centers by 2035.

In the Design School, we are now on our fourth learning journey. True to form, this year’s focus is Regenerating the Earth Thru Collapse and we are taking the continual disruptions of social and ecological systems very seriously. All of the themes outlined in my 2017 article are integrated into what we do now. And we’ve added a lot more into the mix.

Our members learn about bioregionalism, how to practice large-scale regeneration, what it means to be human while living through these challenging times, and a lot more that pertains to funding, governance, collaboration, and the spiritual dimensions of this work. We also focus a lot of our energy on the inner work that one needs to be doing in order to discover and remain devoted to their personal life purpose. Being an Earth Regenerator includes all of these things.

I had not thought about that 2017 article in a long time. It was written shortly before my 2018 article for The Billion Dollar Proposal for Applied Cultural Evolution that shares threads of logic with the 2026 article I wrote this year called A Billion Dollar Proposal for Regenerating Earth. Interesting to look back on this and ponder how life has shown us the way, isnt it?

So if you’d like to be part of a design school for how to navigate planetary collapse, come join us in the Design School for Regenerating Earth. We are proactive and fully aware that we are living through collapse now — and that it is only going to get worse. We need to “find the others” and come together. Join us and be an Earth Regenerator.

Onward, fellow humans.

An important conversation is happening now about what has come to be called the nature funding gap for regenerative projects — where estimates have been made for how much money is needed to robustly move toward regenerative economies at the necessary scales.

Here is an example from the Ma Earth platform that recently mobilized $1,000,000 in matching funds for 200 regenerative projects around the world. They want to show that money can be pooled and distributed through processes that are more open and inclusive.

They explain how there is a “gap” of at least $1 TRILLION dollars, informed by the UNEP State of Finance for Nature 2026 report that came out earlier this year. What I want to do here is offer a bit of frame analysis informed by my background in cognitive linguistics to show how our mental models get in the way of seeing how financial flows need to be completely transformed.

The truth is not simply that there is an absence of financial resources — which would imply that we go looking for them to gather what is missing. We need to fundamentally reframe what an economy is if we are to move from a life-destroying system and arrive into a life-continuing pathway into the future.

If you would like to see some of my earlier work in this area, I was one of the linguistic analysts for the Finding Frames report co-authored by Andrew Darnton and Martin Kirk that revealed how deeply it would be necessary to reconceptualize our mental models of the economy if we were to bring chronic poverty to an end. That is one example among many that I contributed to between the years of 2007 and 2016.

With this in mind, let’s delve into the framing of regenerative finance to see how deep the rabbit hole goes…

Thinking with False Ideas of A Broken Reality

Let us begin with the language of a Nature Funding Gap. Where is the gap? Separating what? And how did it come to be empty in the space in between? This is where we can see something very perverse and strange. Nature is treated as somehow separate from the economy. What?!! That’s crazy talk. How can the human economy be something different from all the rest of nature in the entire Universe?

This is where we begin to see how deeply the dialogue about finance is skewed. Right at the beginning we are invited to question how there can be a “gap” between humans and the rest of the Universe. You can also see this in the graphic created by Ma Earth above — when they display Environment and Local Communities as each being different line items pulled out of the much larger category of All Other Causes.

How can the environment be a separate cause? What kind of semantic damage must occur for us to cut reality into chunks where everything in the natural world (which includes stars, planets, galaxies, and everything in the known Universe) is not part of anything that deserves the name “all other causes” — other causes than what? Here we see that human beings can engage in some really silly behaviors. We can imagine the world IN OUR MINDS in ways that are so blatantly wrong that only our mental gymnastics make it possible for us to not see what we are doing.

We can destroy the foundations of life on our Living Planet and call it progress. Grow the amount of money in the world while reducing biodiversity and claim we are somehow generating wealth. Ignore pretty much all of reality and call it the global financial system. This is — in a word — completely insane.

I’ll state it plainly. There is no funding gap. Nature is not on one side with the economy on the other. We don’t have a problem with how to fill the space between with piles of money. What we have is the problem of creating the mental gap in our thoughts. The problem is in our minds.

How to Fill the Nature Gap — See Reality As It Truly Is

I recently wrote an article titled A Flow Funding System that Works Like the Living Earth. Informed by the science of Earth Systems, I listed several major processes of our dynamic planet that give rise to the only real economy we know. The biosphere. An experiment in regenerative economics that has been running for 3.8 billion years.

Why would innovative designers of financial systems ignore such a test case? How could they fail to see that all real economic systems are ecological in nature? I mean this literally. They are ecological and they are IN nature. There is no separation!

Let me stress here that I am not criticizing Ma Earth for the terms they use in their graphic. They are among the people working to be sure The Regeneration Will Be Funded — a catchphrase they use in their work. What I am doing here is much deeper: Inviting us to question the metaphysical basis of treating economics and finance as somehow separate from everything else in the Universe.

Does it make sense to say that wealth only exists after life has been destroyed? Like when a timber company earns money for cutting down a forest? Or when decayed fossilized bodies from millions of years ago are dug up and burned, like in the fossil fuel industry? What if real economies happen before things are dead? What if they include the continual recycling of dead matter into new life? What if real economies are alive?

Hint: they are.

Finance as if Reality Was REAL?

I wrote the title for this section on purpose. Imagine if we treated the creation and movement of value as if reality was real. Seriously. Act as though the energy and matter of the Universe gives rise to the awe-inspiring complexities of life. Include this in our mental calculations.

How could we fund something like the rights of woman and claim it is not in the same category as the environment? Women don’t live in the environment? If not, where do they get their food? How did their species evolve? Are they not biological creatures? What about minorities? Are they not human? And are humans somehow not part of the Universe?

When we let the crazy go, we discover something profound. ALL finance is a subset of living economies. Humanity has a “global” economy that currently pretends it doesn’t exist anywhere on the globe — as if it is not part of the Earth. All social causes are expressions of human behavior. And humans, being mammals that evolved within Earth’s biosphere, are part of the only living planet we have found so far. This means all social causes are a subset of animal behavior and thus fit within the study of Earth’s biosphere.

The philosophers among us at this point might sign the argument with a QED. I have now proved what I set out to demonstrate. Finance is part of nature. It is impossible for there to be a gap between money and reality — except in the minds of delusional humans.

Let us fix this. See reality as it is, an integrated whole. Humans never were separate from nature. If we continue to pretend that we are, the consequence is quite natural. Nature will continue without us and we will go extinct. Insert another QED here.

I hope this tiny bit of frame analysis is helpful. Let’s deconstruct the unhelpful mental models getting in our way. Invest in reality more. Restore healthy relationships between humans and the rest of nature. You know, the nature that gave rise to us and is the reason we exist? Yeah, more of that please.

Onward, fellow Earthlings.

We have been laying the groundwork for six years to structure and support the Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth — with the launch of Earth Regenerators in 2020, the Design School for Regenerating Earth in 2023, the Earth Regeneration Fund in 2024, naming our Dandelion Strategy in 2026, and now we are getting ready to launch the BLC Action Network.

This is deep, transformational work. It is happening in many places simultaneously. Members of the Design School are already creating their own bioregional learning centers in Belgium, Britain, Cascadia, Colombia, France, the Netherlands, Tunisia, and other places. We have planned three bioregional pilgrimages this year to Awaken the Dreams of Bioregional Earth.

Right now, we are in Phase II of this year’s learning journey called Regenerating the Earth Through Collapse that focuses on the design practices for large-scale regeneration. You can still join us if this sounds like something you want to be part of.

My purpose in writing today is to share a few initial thoughts about what the BLC Action Network is and how it will emerge in the next few months.

We have a timeline for the learning journey that continues into early September — with different bioregional pilgrimages to seed the Dandelion Strategy into diverse geographic landscapes. This will be followed by the first Bioregional Design Certificate Course that will be offered through the Design School in November. Those who are already working to create their own bioregional learning centers will be invited to join the first cohort of the BLC Action Network in January.

What Is The BLC Action Network?

Imagine that there are local teams of people who have learned about bioregional organizing. They realized the importance of creating an ecosystem of regenerative learning that rises up to the holistic scale of their bioregion. They need to be among others who are also doing this highly challenging work. These people need to be in a community of practice for bioregional learning centers.

This is why we are creating the BLC Action Network. Earlier this year, we announced our ambitious vision to birth at least 1000 BLCs by 2035. This is only going to be possible if people who take on the responsibilities to set one up in their own bioregion have all the support they need. Leadership retreats. Learning exchanges. Financial flows. And whatever else might emerge along the way.

We draw inspiration from various craft guilds throughout history. Those who set up monasteries, created new technical realms of practice, shared spiritual devotion to a common purpose, and so forth. A specific example that I was involved in about ten years ago was the Activist Ashram of an organization I was part of called /TheRules. My role was director of cultural research to engage in strategic framing and discourse analysis to support a planetary network of front-line activists who were working to resist globalized extraction and the creation of poverty in their local communities.

We set up the Activist Ashram to gather these activists from around the world for a 12-month process of helping them learn deeper skills for culture hacking and to learn from and support each other directly. This included at least one in-person gathering, focused trainings, and weaving with our allies around the world to mobilize innovative responses to local crises.

I witnessed the power of this kind of community supports first-hand. Now we need to do something similar with the work of bioregional regeneration. The BLC Action Network will be a supportive space for local teams that create their own bioregional learning centers. We will gather in person at different sites around the world, create mechanisms for learning exchanges within and between bioregions across our planetary network, and mobilize financial flows through the Earth Regeneration Fund and the Living Flows Ecosystem that we have been piloting in the last few years.

In order to join this network, local teams will need to apply and demonstrate basic knowledge about bioregionalism, regenerative learning and funding ecosystems, and other key elements of bioregional-scale regeneration. This is why we are going to offer the BDC (Bioregional Design Certificate) as a course in the Design School this fall and start to offer it regularly thereafter.

People need to cultivate a common language, have shared perspectives and understandings, as well as tools and frameworks for setting up their own bioregional learning centers. All of this and more will be part of the BLC Action Network.

If you would like to join this effort, become a member of the Design School today.

Onward, fellow humans.

Those of you who have followed my journey through the last ten years will know that my relationship with my daughter (who is currently nine years old) has been a deep source of spiritual guidance in the regenerative work I help bring into being. When in moments of doubt or struggle, I found the light by placing children in the heart of what is needed and this has guided me in truly profound ways.

Today I want to share some of the fruits of this journey. We have an amazing documentary film crew in Barichara called Embodic Films. They lead our work through the initiative that we call Historias Regenerativas and have prepared a series of short films about our teachers who do the most important work with us in our learning ecosystem.

If you feel moved by what you see here, please consider supporting Sueños del Bosque in the current Ma Earth funding round — where we receive matching support for every donation that is made. These funds will help us create an off-grid permaculture learning site for the community on the land of Las Ruinas and also go directly to our teachers by providing salaries in 2027.

With no further ado, here is how we are placing children in the heart of our work to birth a bioregional learning center in the Northern Andes of Colombia.

Be Inspired by Children Growing Native Forest

When we began our work in Barichara back in 2020, I led a crowdfunding effort to purchase a heavily degraded piece of land that we call Origen del Agua. Watch this video to see Jessica Lisiewski sharing about how the children inspire her as she teaches them reforestation of the native tropical dry forest of our region.

Note how this is foundational for learning how to regenerate an entire bioregion. If you want to know more about Origen del Agua, there is a longer video that Historias Regenerativas created last year. You can watch it here.

The Garden As Teacher :: Regeneration of Community

Here is one of our teachers named Jona sharing how we are guided through our community gardens to reconnect ourselves with living soils, food security, and weaving of community. What we are discovering is that a regenerative pedagogy takes direct inspiration from the natural world.

The community garden garden program started earlier this year as a pilot on the land of Las Ruinas and is now expanding into several rural schools. Our main limitation in growing this program is staffing and salaries for our teachers.

Notice here that a pattern of territorial regeneration emerges among children and schools through the work of creating more food resilience and the sharing of local knowledge about how to work with living soils.

From Garden to Learning Center

Here is our teacher Nina sharing how her work with children between the ages of 4 and 10 is creating a pattern of regeneration as we move from placing gardens at the center of our pedagogy and begin the work of establishing a community learning center on the land of Las Ruinas.

My partner has created a beautiful design layout for Las Ruinas as part of a permaculture design course that she took earlier this year. Here is a visual representation for how the land can hold a lot of biodiversity and become a living food forest for the children of this territory.

On the right is the community garden that we established this year. In the upper left, we plan to apply bioconstruction techniques for an off-grid design — meaning we will harvest rainwater from the roofs, install solar panels (and possibly a small wind turbine) to produce electricity, and focus on creating an agroforestry system that promotes ecological education.

You can follow our activities for Sueños del Bosque on Instagram. Check out the website too. And of course, donate to our Ma Earth campaign that runs through July 21st, 2026.

Please share comments below and let us know if you have any questions.

Onward, fellow humans!

We embarked on a journey of transformation on May 29th, 2026 — traveling to many sacred sites across the interior of the North American continent. Penny and I did this to enact the Dandelion Strategy for Regenerating the Earth by going out into the world to dance with the emergence that is possible. We can say with confidence that our journey has helped seed at least a few more of the 1000 bioregional learning centers that are at the core of this strategy.

Our mission: To seed bioregional learning centers throughout the heart of Turtle Island.

Our route: Visit the major headwaters and confluences of the vast Mississippi River basin.

Our strategy: Learn from the innate intelligence of dandelion seeds and catalyze a phase transition through the intensifying collapse that is unfolding now.

Learn more about the pilgrimage here. Read our update from the first week of travels here. What I want to do today is give you an overview of what has happened along the way now that our pilgrimage has come to an end.

Traveling A Heart-Shaped Path Into the Continent

Thank-you to Charles Syrett and for creating this beautiful map for us

We began and completed our journey at the confluence of two great rivers — where the Missouri and Mississippi become one just north of St Louis, Missouri. We felt how this site (which is also the launching place of the historic William & Clark Expedition) brings unity and coherence to many landscapes as the waters gather from the Rockies to the west and the lake country in the far north.

From there, we visited the historic archeological site of Cahokia Mounds to make visible the deep history of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island. It was only the first of many “mound” sites that we witnessed throughout the Mississippi Basin during our pilgrimage — though it is the largest and perhaps best known.

Our work to seed the idea of bioregional learning centers really began when we entered the Ozarks, where we spent time with Dianna Bryant and David Haenke. The first bioregional congress was held in the Ozarks and they have remained a constant presence in the world since the late 1970’s. Their 47th annual bioreigonal congress takes place this fall. Check it out here.

Inspired by this deep history, we contributed to gatherings in the Missouri River Valley near Kansas City, along the western shore of Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, in the heartland of Madison, along the front range in Boulder, in the high plains in Amarillo, and up the Ohio River near Dayton. All of these places have local organizers on the ground and the idea of participating in the Dandelion Strategy resonated among all of them.

Along the way, we visited the headwaters and confluences of several rivers. There were the headwaters of the Mississippi, Missouri, Yellowstone, Arkansas, Cimarron, and Tennessee Rivers. Confluences we visited included the meeting of the Minnesota and Mississippi, Missouri and Mississippi, Missouri and Yellowstone, Missouri and Milk, Laramie and North Platte, Cimarron and Canadian, Arkansas and Mississippi… it was amazing to feel all of these connections.

And then there was the delta itself — where all of these waters (and many more) find their way back to the sea. I had to fly the drone to get any kind of perspective on this vast threading of sediments, marshes, estuary flows, and pooled waters.

It was here that we felt the merging of living flows. A gathering of stories. Healing of landscapes. Weaving of places. Returning to the sea from which all life began. It was spiritual. Grounding. A place of depths that helped us sense what it truly means for Mississippi to be the Ojibwe word for “Father of Waters.”

What Is Emerging From This Journey?

Our learning journey in the Design School kicked off just as the pilgrimage was coming to an end. I wrote about it here. We hosted a webinar to share how we will embark on two more pilgrimages in September and October, launch a global community of practice called the BLC Action Network in January, and offer the pathway to join with our first Bioregional Design Certificate course that begins in November.

All of this is part of our pathway to seed at least 1000 bioregional learning centers into being by the year 2035. It is the enactment of our Dandelion Strategy. And we are giving ourselves time to feel what emerged within our bodies as we traveled throughout the Mississippi Basin. Layers of story. Witnessing with our own eyes the destructive fossil fuel infrastructure — oil shipping in the delta, fracking across the Missouri River, mining up high in the Colorado Rockies, and all of it sitting like a veneer on top of profound regenerative patterns of life at the continental scale.

The idea began to emerge — mostly as a feeling at this point — that we need to anchor into the bioregional history and geographic positioning of the Ozarks and weave a tapestry of bioregional learning centers across the entire continent of Turtle Island.

We also gained clarity about what we will need in order to do this. You’ve probably read our Billion Dollar Proposal for Regenerating the Earth and how we are creating a Flow Funding System that Works Like the Living Earth. To create it, we will need three years of stable support. Here is a graphic that captures the core features:

We wrote about what we could do with $1,5 million between 2027 and 2029 to grow this vision and manifest it across the planet. You can read about it here. The important thing is that we need seed funding that we can flow into nascent bioregional learning centers, the capacity to learn-by-doing with our efforts in the Northern Andes, and the ability to continue creating vital infrastructure for the planetary network as it diversifies and expands.

All of this is being catalyzed by what we experienced in June while traveling among the headwaters and confluences of the Mississippi Basin. We experienced many living seeds of regeneration across Turtle Island — so many places that have a lot of regenerative work happening, yet are not organizing up to the bioregional scale. We want to do our part to be sure this happens.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Please share them in the comment thread below. Also, join us in the Design School for Regenerating Earth where all of this learning is unfolding now.

Let’s grow!

Onward, fellow humans.

In my last article, I explained how we can create A Flow Funding System that Works Like the Living Earth. Learning directly from the regenerative capacities of our planet. Weaving the living flows of human relationships, knowledge, passion, and finance into the living flows of the actual planet that we call home.

Today I want to invite you into the flow funding system we created six years ago that has evolved continuously up to the present day -- and now takes the form of a nascent bioregional learning center for the Northern Andes in Colombia. Some of you will remember the launch of the Barichara Regeneration Fund in late 2020. How we mobilized resources and created an ecosystem of relationships that gave rise to many local processes. Others may have followed the birth of Sueños del Bosque and our deepening emphasis on placing children at the heart of our regenerative work.

We now have an amazing team of teachers who have developed a powerful collection of community education programs. Three different pieces of land have come into our active stewardship -- the nature reserve Origen del Agua; the former home of an alternative school El Totumo; and the recent purchase of a strategic piece of land in Barichara’s municipal greenbelt called Las Ruinas.

Money has arrived through the years as small donations, through crowdfunding campaigns, a pledge drive of supporters, gitcoin rounds with cryptocurrencies, small and large grants, and a lot of our personal money that we have invested along the way. Starting today, we have a special opportunity through the MaEarth Funding Platform to receive matching support for all donations that we raise between July 1st and July 21st. There is a pool of $1,000,000 that will be divided among the 200 projects participating in this funding round.

We are raising money for Sueños del Bosque and the way for us to get more of the matching pool is to have a combination of (a) as many donors as possible, regardless of the amount each contributes; and (b) the total amount that we raise if some of the contributions are larger amounts. This is your chance to donate into our funding pool for Sueños del Bosque and help us receive matching support.

What are we going to do with the money we raise? There are two urgent needs that we have right now:

Urgent Need #1: Construction of Regenerative Community Center at Las Ruinas

We are creating an off-grid permaculture center that is for the children of Barichara and other territories across the Northern Andes. It will be a community space for regenerative education that includes the construction of a central gathering place, off-grid capacities for solar and wind production, the principal location of our “training” garden for teaching agroforestry and local food production, a composting system for human waste, as well as the seed bank and plant nursery for our community garden programs with local schools.

All of this will cost about $25,000. We have purchased the land without debt and have already established the first community garden there. Now we want to make this land the home base of operations for all Sueños del Bosque programs.

Urgent Need #2: Salaries for our Teachers to Continue Their Vital Work

Thanks to a generous grant that is now coming to an end, we have been able to provide full-time salaries to five teachers and other part-time contract work for many local educators throughout the last two years. We have not yet secured the money it will take to keep our teachers going in 2027 -- our current funding runs out at the end of this year.

We hope to raise at least $100,000 to continue paying all our teachers a generous living wage so that they can fully devote themselves to creating educational programs that we offer to local schools and families who enroll individually.

Read more about Sueños del Bosque and the MaEarth funding round here. Please consider making a donation. Even $1 will add another donor to our pool of supporters and help us get additional matching funds.

Weaving with the Larger Planetary Vision

Those of you who have been following this Substack will know that we have a planetary-scale vision for our work that we manifest through the Design School for Regenerating Earth. We have a vision to birth at least 1000 BLCs by 2035 through our Dandelion Strategy for Regenerating Earth that is emerging as we travel and embark on different bioregional pilgrimages.

The evolution of Sueños del Bosque throughout the last three years has continually moved us closer to becoming a bioregional learning center. Our teachers are deepening their pedagogical approach to encompass the different watersheds of the Northern Andes, ecological and cultural connections among different territories in Colombia, and to participate in our planetary network of BLCs held through the Design School.

I wrote about this relationship in late May with an article titled Walking the Path to Brith a Northern Andes BLC that makes some of the connections visible. We have the opportunity to weave our work in Barichara with other territories throughout Colombia and among different bioregions around the world.

Please consider making a donation to our MaEarth matching round. This will help us get to the next level with our regenerative learning center at Las Ruinas and support our teachers to continue the wonderful work they have been doing with children in Colombia.

Every contribution counts! Thank you for stepping up.

Onward, fellow humans.

Image Credit: NASA

Living systems can inspire us to create models of regenerative finance that transform the human relationship with life on Earth. This is an area with a lot of diverse activities and efforts where people are doing their best to contribute. Yet what I often see lacking is a Whole Earth perspective informed by Earth Systems Science. What I would like to contribute with this article is a weaving of insights about how life works through our dynamic, living planet so that we can create in collaborative partnership with the naturally occurring processes of regeneration that exist across different and relevant scales.

First, let me say that I have extensively studied, practiced, and taught regenerative finance. You can find more than 30 webinar recordings that are publicly available on my YouTube channel with this Regenerative Finance Lab playlist. Theory and practice inform what I am going to share. The one other credential I’ll offer is that I have a Masters degree from the University of Illinois in atmospheric sciences and have contributed to the field of Earth Systems Science education in various ways. Check out my LinkedIn profile to get a feel for this background.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s dig in.

What Are the Key Earth System Processes?

Image Credit: NASA

Anyone wanting to create a regenerative economy should study the only real example we have -- the biosphere of Earth. This is a living flow of relationships that has sustained healthy forms of economic exchange for more than three and a half billion years. It exists thanks to a very special configuration of life-giving processes. In our work to design the architecture of funding ecosystems, we can integrate these processes directly.

But what are these processes of the dynamic Earth? How do they work? And what might it look like to design the financial flows that bring humanity into harmony with them? That is what this section is meant to explore. Let’s list them out:

• Radiation from the Sun

• Earth’s Rotation

• Seasonality through Earth’s Orbit

• Existence of Water in All Forms

• Ocean Circulation

• Weather Systems

• Plate Tectonics

• Weathering on Land

• Small Water Cycles

• River Systems

Before going into each one. Let me say that I am not trying to be exhaustive here. This is not an intellectual exercise! These are basic processes that make life possible on Earth as it has existed across vast geologic timescales. Without considering these foundational patterns, we are flying blind and designing in the dark. We need to understand the basic ways that Earth continually regenerates itself to see how the biosphere exists as an emergent phenomenon that integrates all the above elements.

Radiation from the Sun
Life exists far from equilibrium. Thermodynamics tells us that all physical systems seek equilibrium in closed form. Open them up to energetic flows and they can be pushed far from equilibrium. We have a literal thermonuclear engine for this. It is called the Sun -- continually bombarding Earth’s surface with radiation that heats land, water, and air. It is also the source of food through photosynthesis that comprises the base of our global food web.

Earth’s Rotation
When our planet was formed, it was part of a spiraling mass that gave rise to the Solar System. Due to the Sun’s gravity, the Earth has remained in orbit ever since it was born. Its rotational inertia was altered by a collision that created the Moon while also reconstituting the Earth from the debris that exploded into being during this cosmic event. Now there is energy from the rotation of Earth that creates winds in the atmosphere, tidal forces in the ocean from the Moon’s proximity, and the Coriolis force that continually stirs the World Ocean.

Seasonality through Earth’s Orbit
There is a continual wobble of Earth on its axis, fluctuation of stretching and contracting for the shape of its orbit around the Sun, and an oscillation into and out of the orbital plane. This creates the continual changes in how sunlight distributes across Earth’s surface, changing how energy moves into the ocean, over land, and in the atmosphere. These changes take place on timeframes of tens to hundreds of thousands of years -- yet play a continuous role in the evolution of ecosystems and their distributions across the planet.

Existence of Water in All Forms
Anyone who studies the origins of life in the Universe will know that you need water at the surface of a planet if you want life to emerge at all. Perhaps less known is the fact that you need water to take all its forms -- solid, liquid, and gas -- because each phase of matter contributes to the conversion of energy and movements of minerals that living organisms need in their bodies. Ice to crush and cut through rock. Gas to form weather patterns. Liquid to circulate and flow.

Ocean Circulation
Energy from the Sun is distributed unevenly across Earth’s surface. This together with the rotation of Earth causes the World Ocean to continually stir and mix itself -- pumping huge amounts of energy from equator to poles and transporting immense quantities of minerals around the planet. This gives rise to plankton populations, different rates of evaporation, regional climate effects, and much more that continually replenish life on Earth.

Weather Systems
In a similar fashion, there is continual circulation of air masses in the atmosphere. Water drives most of the energy exchanges by continually changing form -- vapor condensing into clouds and falling as precipitation, air rising high enough that water freezes into ice crystals, and so forth. These dynamics drive the weather, create jet streams that push high and low-pressure systems around, and have profound consequences on the ecology that can exist both on land and in the sea.

Plate Tectonics
The strongest driver of change over long periods of time is the carbon cycle. Tectonic plates moving over Earth’s surface. Convective mixing of magna deep below the surface. Earthquakes, volcanoes, and steam vents continually bringing material up from the depths. Formation of mountains and other large geologic features that enable carbon to cycle and transform everywhere that it encounters living beings.

Weathering on Land
As we start to combine different processes, we see how regeneration works at large scales. The ocean circulation together with movements of air give rise to local weather patterns. Geologic processes cause mountains to rise. Wind and water erosion cause weathering that release vital nutrients. Rivers and streams carry these nutrients into valleys and plains to continually renew the soils. Regeneration occurs in hydrological systems. landscape processes, geologic forces, and among the living ecosystems themselves.

Small Water Cycles
Zoom into the local ecosystems and you’ll see that the shape of land together with weather patterns can interact between land and atmosphere. The breathing of plants (called evapotranspiration) continually cycles water as an exchange between trees, shrubs, grasses, and the movements of air. Shade and humidity interact to create the conditions that are conducive to life. All of this occurring within the larger processes mentioned above.

River Systems
About 99% of all the water on Earth is salty -- held in the vast reservoir of the World Ocean. A meager 1% is held in aggregate across all the freshwater lakes, groundwater systems, ice sheets, mountain glaciers, and rivers across the planet. Yet these freshwater systems are the arteries of circulation for life on all the continents. Life gathers along their banks. Microclimates are much more hospitable to life in these humid places. Nutrients are continually weathered, eroded, flooded, and distributed as sediments across very large distances. Tributaries work as patchwork quilts of confluences that create the nested fractals of life on land. All of it driven by the rivers.

What we can start to see by naming these features of our living planet is that regeneration is always happening. It is happening at different scales. Each process influences all the others. The complexities and interdependencies are astonishing to behold. All of this comes together to create and sustain Earth’s biosphere. Life -- once it emerged several billion years ago -- has continually altered and been altered by all of these processes and more to keep itself going at the planetary scale.

We have quite a regenerative economy here on Earth!

Glimpsing the Structures of Regenerative Finance

Global Map of Net Primary Production (Credits to NASA)

Now let us start to cultivate a perspective for how regenerative finance becomes visible in this meshwork of living processes. First, I should clarify that finance is not reducible to money. It is helpful to think of finance as representing anything that meaningfully holds value that can be held, exchanged, converted, or transformed. When viewed in this way, we can take what is sometimes called a “multi-capital” approach to recognize that there are many forms of capital that hold value and can move through a financial system.

For example, there needs to be physical capital in the form of land and built structures for a business to function. And there needs to be knowledge capital about how to work with materials and transform them in ways that create value in an economic system. These are two among many more kinds of capital that could be described.

When we talk about regenerative economies and the financial systems that enable flows to occur within them, it is necessary to move away from human-centered thinking so that we can see how economies operate more generally. There is an energy budget for how the Sun’s radiant energy arrives to the Earth -- with profound measures like what is called Net Primary Production, which is the total amount of biomass created by photosynthesis on the planet at any given time. When we move away from human-centered thinking, we see that Net Primary Production is part of the financial system of the Earth. Energy arrives from the Sun. Chlorophyl in the bodies of plants is able to convert this energy into sugars that build up their bodies. This is converted into animal bodies when the plants are consumed.

What begins to reveal itself is that the food web is a financial system that stores, converts, and exchanges energy in a complex diversity of forms that is inspiring to behold. Regenerative finance begins to reveal its true nature when viewed in this way. If we want to design a regenerative finance system, we’ll need to start with the basis of all real economies on Earth -- the living processes of the Earth itself.

Seeing the Patterns of Regenerative Economies

Nested Fractals in a Hydrological Basin

When we hold this profound truth -- that Earth’s biosphere is the best example of a regenerative economy available to us -- something can happen that was stuck before. We no longer need a “proof of concept” to show that our ideas about regenerative economics are correct.

The burden of truth gets reversed. Now we can critique and dismiss all approaches to economics that fail to arise from deep ecological knowledge about the evolution of complex systems and systemic wellbeing on a living planet. Many years ago, I helped launch a magazine called Evonomics that thoroughly documented how real economic systems arise from knowledge about evolutionary theory, the science of complex systems, and insights into the cognitive and behavioral sciences.

All the criticisms about economics being tragically false and dogmatically religious can accurately be directed toward the political ideologies that give rise to false delusions about what economics is. The true basis of economics is ecology. Period. And anyone who says otherwise is literally selling something like a swindler on the streets. We can lean into and deeply trust the natural intelligence of Earth for giving us a multi-billion-year track record of case studies about real economic systems.

Let us look at one level of these examples with major rivers that shape entire continents. Three specific cases of this category are the Mississippi River Basin in North America, the Amazon River Basin in South America, and the Ganges River Basin in the subcontinent of India. Each is a massive system of nested scales. Small streams form high in the mountains. Confluences gather them together into larger streams. Eventually they all join the main branch and flow out into the ocean.

Look into the details and you will see that all of the Earth Systems processes mentioned above are in play. Radiation from the Sun together with Earth’s rotation give rise to weather patterns that bring water and nutrients together in these continuous life-giving flows. Tectonic plates help create the mountains and shape the continents through which the forms emerge. Changes in ocean surface temperatures and movements of jet streams alter how precipitation arrives. And so forth.. what we observe is that the economic reality of each river is driven, guided, formed, shaped, and constrained by the larger nested scales of the dynamic Earth.

There’s no escaping this conclusion. All of the real economies that exist in this world arise from and are shaped by the dynamics of the Earth. We can only create regenerative economies when we realize this. All attempts to divorce economics from ecology will be doomed to fail.

Flow Funding for Regenerating the Earth

In this section, I will defer to several of the webinars I’ve given about flow funding for how to regenerate the Earth. This is because the topic makes more sense when you see it in action -- and we have been taking actions with this way of thinking for many years now. Everything that follows is informing our Billion Dollar Proposal for Regenerating the Earth.

Check out this collection of webinar recordings:

• Creating the Earth Regeneration Fund

• Cultural Scaffolding for Regenerative Economies

• Multi-Capitalism as Ecological Flows

• Value Flows in a Bioregional Funding Pool

• Flow Funding for Regenerating the Earth

• A Narrative Strategy for the Earth Regeneration Fund

• Introducing the Bioregional Activation Funding Pool

• Investing in a Bioregional Funding Ecosystem

We have pooled and helped create financial flows for several million dollars so far. It has given rise to a planetary network of bioregions. All of this helps contribute to our Dandelion Strategy for Regenerating Earth and the vision to birth at least 1000 bioregional learning centers by 2035.

What you can see throughout it all is the grounding in real-world processes of regenerative practice. Shaped and organized by living patterns of the Earth. Orchestrated and led by the Earth through these organizing patterns. The intelligence is there to be found by anyone who takes the time to look. I will end this essay by saying that we are really doing this and you can get involved. Come be part of the regeneration of the Earth by Joining the Design School today.

Onward, fellow humans.

We are halfway through our learning journey Regenerating the Earth Through Collapse that started in March and continues into September. Today I want to give updates about how it is going so far and invite you to join us. (It’s not too late!)

As you can see in the graphic above, the first part of the learning journey was about laying groundwork for what it means it live through a time of unprecedented social and ecological breakdown. How do we navigate the immense complexities and difficult emotions? What is our strategy for regenerating the Earth? How can we come together right now and participate in birthing the new world as the old one dies around us?

Watch the kick-off webinar to get a feel for what we set out to do:

The second phase of our learning journey begins on June 30th -- where we will move into design practice for how to regenerate the Earth through collapse. There were five webinars in Phase I that you could watch and catch up if you’d like to join us now. Simply become a member of the Design School for Regenerating Earth. The learning journey is open to all our members. You can sign up for $5/month, $50/year, or Pledge Active Hope with a lifetime membership for $500.

Living Into the Dandelion Strategy

During the first phase of the learning journey, we named our Dandelion Strategy for Regenerating the Earth that includes the ambitious goal to birth at least 1000 BLCs by 2035. This is an action-oriented vision that we are currently seeding on our bioregional pilgrimage into the Heart of Turtle Island. I’ve written two updates from the road as we travel throughout the vast Mississippi River Basin that will give a feel for the potency of this strategy:

Important Update: Our Vision to Birth 1000 BLCs

Sacred Headwaters Help Show Us the Way

I am writing this article from Boulder, Colorado where we just participated in a gathering hosted by our friends at Spirit of the Front Range to catalyze bioregional organizing toward a BLC in this local setting. Later this week, we will arrive into Amarillo, Texas hosted by Ogallala Life to do the same thing there. We are living the Dandelion Strategy into being in real time!

All of this relates to the second half of our learning journey because we are moving from Laying the Groundwork into the embodied actions of Design Practice. Together we will explore how bioregional learning centers are taking form in different parts of the world, share the other bioregional pilgrimages in the Mediterranean, Western Europe, and UK that will take place in September/October to continue seeding the Dandelion Strategy, and more -- which you can contribute to by joining the learning journey today.

Building the Support Structures for This to Work

Part of our design practice will be to create two important offerings -- both of which provide vital social supports to the Dandelion Strategy as more people come into the flows of local organizing around the world. One is the creation of our Bioregional Design Certificate (BDC) that teaches the foundational pillars of bioregional design for creating a BLC. The other is the BLC Action Network that will be the global community-of-practice for bioregional learning centers all over the world.

We plan to offer the first BDC training course in November and if all goes well, we will launch the BLC Action Network in January. These are ways to structure and support how people come together and learn how to regenerate their own bioregions -- while engaging in learning exchanges with local teams who are doing the same thing in other places.

Phase II of the learning journey incorporates the design and implementation of these support systems. Design School members who “find the others” and begin organizing in their local landscapes. Getting inspired by the grassroots empowerment of dreaming a new world into being. Navigating the collapse processes as they come more quickly and with greater intensity.

Would you like to join us? Consider getting a lifetime membership with the Active Hope Plan that helps pay for our bioregional pilgrimages. Or sign up with the monthly membership. You can also donate to the Earth Regeneration Fund to support this vital work across the planet. Let’s walk this design pathway into being together.

Onward, fellow humans!

A Perspective on the Continental Divide as Birthplace of Many Rivers

We have been traveling throughout the Heart of Turtle Island for the last two weeks. Water is our guide. The living flows of rivers that form a tapestry and give rise to one of the largest watersheds on Earth -- the vast Mississippi River basin. In the last few days, we visited the headwaters of the largest river in this system. We were in Montana and went to where the Missouri River is born from the living flows that come down from the Rocky Mountains to nourish the northern High Plains.

A few days before that, we were at Lake Itasca. It is a very special place in Minnesota where glacial movements created deposits of gravel and sand in the form of a moraine. Now the water pools into a series of lakes -- one of which gives birth to the Mississippi River. These are sacred lands of the Ojibwe people. The river is not born from a single location. It arises gradually from many layers of geologic and ecological processes. A continent carved by ice ages. Rainfall that seeps into the porous land. Wetlands and forests that filter and pool the water. Gravitational flows that pull it into a current that eventually leaves the headwater catchment.

And a river is born.

This is where water flows out of Lake Itasca and the Mississippi is born

What can we learn from the sacred headwaters of the world? How can they guide us in learning how to think like a living planet? What might this have to do with strategic planning and the operational work of weaving regenerative efforts across the world? These are the kinds of inquiries that I carry with me as we make our pilgrimage through the Mississippi Basin.

Insights into Bioregional Funding Ecosystems

Those of you who are familiar with my work will know that I have been involved in the creation of bioregional funding ecosystems for several years now. We have designed and implemented different kinds of funding pools that are scale-linked -- meaning there are explicit relationships from one scale to another. For example, local regenerative projects are linked to a holistic landscape through thematically defined portfolios. Territories are linked with each other within a larger bioregion. Learning sites are held in coherent relationships with regional networks. This is described in our Billion Dollar Proposal for Regenerating Earth and in a case study that looks at Legitimate Intermediaries and Nested Funding Pools.

The question I’d like to explore today is this: What can we learn from sacred headwaters as we design the flow funding ecosystems that will be necessary for regenerating entire bioregions? This is a question we have been exploring in practice since 2020, by mobilizing resources across scales and in different geographic settings. Now we are being guided in our thinking by the sacred headwaters as they shape how we see the world.

In my previous article, I shared an update from the road about our visits to different places where bioregional learning centers are taking form in the Ozarks, Missouri River Valley, along the shores of Lake Michigan, and in Madison, Wisconsin. You can read about it here. What I’d like to do today is share our travels to three major headwaters -- with stops at several important river confluences -- to see what we might learn from them as we envision how to Birth 1000 BLCs with our Dandelion Strategy for Regenerating the Earth.

Listening to Three Sacred Headwaters

In the second week of our bioregional pilgrimage through the Heart of Turtle Island, we visited three major headwaters -- where the Mississippi, Missouri, and Yellowstone Rivers are born. It was deeply moving to experience what is shared (and what is distinct) about each place. Let us look at each of them in turn.

Lake Itasca -- Birthplace of the Mighty Mississippi

In the language of Ojibwe, the word Mississippi translates as “father of water” and it refers to a profoundly sacred landscape that is located near Lake Itasca in present-day Minnesota. This is a place that was shaped during the long Ice Ages through the movements of very large ice sheets that carved up the landscape and deposited a silt comprised of sand and gravel that geologists call a moraine.

As you can see in the photo above, there are many lakes embedded within gentle rolling hills. Each lake is a pool of water that seeps out of the silty hillsides -- with one lake seeping into another until they arrive at Lake Itasca with enough force to generate a water current. This is how the Mississippi River emerges as it is pushed out of a spongy landscape filled with pristine pools of water.

We went to the visitors center of Lake Itasca State Park where I took photos of some of the information displays. Here is a map that beautifully reveals how the headwaters is geographically spread out across the entire Itasca Moraine. While many consider the “official” birthplace of the Mississippi River to be the point where it takes the form of a stream flowing out of the lake, it is more accurate to describe the entire headwaters system as what gives birth to one of the most important rivers in the world.

Map of the Itasca Moraine that Gives Birth to the Mississippi River

This distributed pattern of many processes that all come together at the right place -- ancient ice sheets, silt deposits that created an elevated moraine, spongy land that pools water into several interdependent lakes, and a gentle pushing of the water that creates enough current to produce the initial stream of the river system. All of them come together as a meshwork of regenerative processes.

Where Three Rivers Become One -- The Missouri Headwaters

It is hard to imagine something more beautiful than the headwaters of the Missouri River -- as three smaller rivers arrive to the same point in a ring of snow-peaked mountains of the Central Rockies to forge the largest river in North America. Again, there are sand and gravel deposits from the movement of ancient ice sheets.

What makes this place different is that the landforms are tall mountain peaks that create a meteorological phenomenon called Orographic Lift, which refers to how air must rise over the mountain peaks in order to continue on its journey. This leads to the formation of rain clouds over the mountains with water that pools into the land to sustain the vast network of watersheds that all converge into the headwaters system.

You can see this in the photo I took below. Note how the skies are more clear as you move out in front of the mountains. Yet those who form above the peaks give rise to thunderstorms that drop a lot of rain along the edges of the mountain ring -- all of which flow downward into the headwaters to form the Missouri River.

Note the Line of Rain Clouds that Linger Over the Mountains

What this shows is that we have several key features of the headwater system that all come together and birth a great river. There are landforms conducive to gathering and pooling water. Gravel and sandy soil mean the water seeps into the ground everywhere the rain falls over the landscape. This continually feeds smaller streams that converge into one primary current of water that pushes out of the landscape as the way to birth a major river.

We were really struck by this combination of features that all come together in one place. It is the blending of regenerative processes that include geology, climate, and hydrology that make the headwaters occur.

Through A Super Volcano -- Where the Yellowstone is Born

Yellowstone National Park is world-renowned for its geothermal activity and the most densely populated basin of natural geysers on Earth. This is because it sits over a hot spot in the magma below Earth’s continental crust -- a super volcano that (luckily for us) only erupts on hundred-thousand-year timescales.

The main channel of the Yellowstone River begins at the rocky face of Younts Peak. Many other small rivers and streams gather from the surrounding terrain and join with the Yellowstone River throughout the national park and farther downstream. You can see this in the watershed map below.

The Yellowstone River is Born from Mountain Peaks

Again we see the distributed nature of the headwaters area. Landform features provide the container for waters to pool in many places and flow into each other. In this case, the primary water supply is snow pack in this vast region of the Central Rockies.

If you were asked to choose one place where the river system is born, it would be a misleading question. The reality is that many places are spread out across a larger geographic region that has the right combination of features to birth a major river system.

What Can These Headwaters Teach Us?

Let us begin with a note of caution. It is very easy to feel the desire for some kind of model that we can think with -- which is prone to be abstracted into a framework by consultants and design strategists. We can learn a lot from these three sacred headwaters that will be of general insight for watersheds around the world. But when we attempt to bring our learnings into other realms, which we will begin to do in a moment with regenerative finance, I caution us that The Map is NOT the Territory!

Why do I say this? Because it is easy to be inspired by nature and then fall into the mental habit of translating what we learn into some kind of conceptual model. An example would be the Pando Grove (the world’s largest organism) inspiring some people to create a funding model for strategic impact. It is one experience to sit in board rooms and talk about abstract models, while a very different experience to journey into the remote landscape near Capitol Reef and visit the 47,000 identical trees in their real-world context.

I have a lot of experience with the pooling of financial capital through crowdfunding campaigns, Gitcoin rounds, targeted fundraising for portfolios of projects, and more. This includes working with trust-based philanthropy and flow funding practices. When I talk about what can be learned from sacred headwaters, it is because I see how poorly we enact what these real landscapes have to share. I don’t want people to sit in board rooms with fancy diagrams. I want them to visit the headwaters and seek their own spiritual relationships with them.

With this in mind, let us note a few of the key patterns:

• The water always arrives from somewhere else.

• It is transformed as it enters the headwater system by local geographic features.

• One of the key structures is that of a womb or some kind of vessel to gather and pool water.

• It gathers and pools from many places within the headwater system.

• The pooling itself is what gives rise to flow.

• Many small pools lead to many small flows.

• These flows converge and gather as they are pulled in the same direction by gravity.

• With sufficient convergence, the principal stream of the river takes form.

What I am describing here is the emergent behavior of a complex adaptive system. It is continually evolving and changing in details as energy moves through it. There are macro-scale patterns like the landforms and historic geologic processes. There are micro-scale patterns like small pools and localized contours within the large geography of the system.

It is fractal. You can see the same geometric patterns repeat across different scales. It is decentralized while having a tendency to gather and centralize the energy flows. And it is directional with cumulative forces aligning to achieve the emergent goal of birthing a major watershed system. And all of this continually nurtures and supports life to exist.

Now imagine what a financial system would do if it behaved like a headwaters system. There would be continual arrival of flows from elsewhere. The resources would be transformed by the shape and dynamic relationships of the system. Resources would pool into local places. Actions would converge in the same direction. And all of it would support the continual emergence and maintenance of life.

Pretty powerful, eh?

I have been talking about and experimenting with funding pools for a long time. They are described as nested tapestries of energy flows that support regenerative efforts on the ground. Now I will integrate what I am learning about the dynamics of headwaters to see how directional flow and accumulation of capacities can support larger shared goals.

For example, we have named our Dandelion Strategy for Regenerating the Earth. How we envision birthing at least 1000 bioregional learning centers by 2035. And how we seek to pool large amounts that continually flow into nested geographic systems with our Billion Dollar Proposal for Regenerating Earth. Now imagine that this planetary pool of money comes into headwater structures. That it nurtures small pools and convergent flows of regeneration that move up to the landscape and eventually continental scales.

Do you see what I am getting at? We can sit with nature. Visit her sacred places. Receive instructions about how to move energy. And flow our resources toward the regeneration of the Earth.

This is how sacred headwaters help show us the way.

Onward fellow humans.

Sacred Headwaters Where the Mississippi River is Born

I am writing to you from the field. and I are in the middle of our ambitious bioregional pilgrimage through the Heart of Turtle Island. And we are learning a lot. Specifically, we are learning a lot about the true potential for the Dandelion Strategy for Regenerating Earth. And we are learning a lot about what will be needed to manifest it in a robust way throughout the next several years.

Let me say this plain. We are going to need your help.

You can help us in at least three ways. First, we are going to need funding for this to happen. You can make a personal contribution, help us find like-minded people who steward wealth, and spread the word to make what we are doing more visible. I’ll share more below about how much money we need and what we plan to do with it.

Secondly, we are going to need people organizing locally in as many places as possible. You can host local gatherings. Join the Design School for Regenerating Earth to learn all about bioregional organizing. Find the others in your community. Create maps of local regenerative projects. Convene and weave them. Move towards becoming one of the bioregional learning centers in our planetary network.

And third, we are going to need teachers. People who really get what this is all about and can explain it in every kind of situation -- from informal conversations through to giving workshops and more in-depth trainings. This has to do with the Bioregional Design Certificate that we will offer through the Design School starting this fall. You might have heard of a PDC (Permaculture Design Certificate). Well, we are going to offer a BDC that focuses specifically on how to create a bioregional learning ecosystem.

Why am I writing this now? As we travel through the Mississippi Basin? It is because we are getting first-hand experience that (a) our vision is viable and can work; while also confirming that (b) now is the time to make it happen. The collapse processes in social and ecological systems have arrived at the threshold that I recently called the “Edge of Chaos” when structures break down, and everything can change across all relevant scales. Add to this that we are validating our hypothesis that many local places are ready to take their regenerative efforts up to the urgently needed bioregional scale.

With all of this in mind, the next two sections of this article are written to convey what Penny and I are experiencing with more depth and clarity. First we will share the real potentials we are confirming in different parts of Turtle Island (together with our planetary network of collaborators in different parts of the world). Then we will explain what our operational plan is and the funding needs that must be addressed if we are to pull this off.

What We Are Witnessing on the Ground

In the first week of our pilgrimage, we have confirmed that there is real capacity for local organizing in at least five places that we have visited. This means five potential bioregional learning centers -- each with unique capacities and profound possibilities. This is complementary to what we had already been cultivating in other parts of the world. Let’s look at each and reveal the planetary-scale potential of this moment.

Our pilgrimage began at the confluence of the two largest rivers in North America -- where the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers merge just north of St Louis, MO. On the very first day, we gathered in the City of Hazelwood where a deep healing process is underway to restore Coldwater Creek more than seventy years after the US government dumped radioactive waste into the groundwater supply. Families have been dying of cancer for decades and it is a rallying call for deep transformation.

The local process is already quite far along. The Army Corps of Engineers is doing the cleanup. Funding is available that sustains the work through a legally mandated period that ends in the year 2038. Local community leaders like (she is the one who gathered us) are working hard to elevate the conversation... reframe it from restoration to regeneration and invite the community to dream of a better future together.

We departed from St Louis and went into the bioregion where I grew up, and which also has the longest history of bioregional organizing as the place that hosted the world’s first bioregional congress in 1979 -- the Ozarks. While we were there, it was a deep honor to spend time with the man who started the process. His name is David Haenke, and he has played a leadership role in 46 convenings of the Ozarks Area Community Congress. The 47th will take place this fall in October.

Preparing for a Tobacco Ritual with David Haenke

What we felt here was the presence of grounded wisdom, deep experience based in decades of practice, and an ecological spirituality that has guided the bioregional movement for quite some time. Here we felt the potential for evolving from place-based identity towards large-scale regeneration with a hub in the heart of Turtle Island. Something that grounds and informs whichever BLCs take form on this continent.

The third place we visited was the Missouri River Valley near Kansas City. Our host was Dianna Bryant in her role as coordinator among key actors working on regional food systems. We gathered at Powell Gardens, a 700-acre botanical garden and ecology learning site that has deeply embraced regenerative agricultural practices. As Penny and I spoke about our planetary predicament and the need for BLCs, a seriousness could be felt among the inspiring leaders who gathered with us while we were in town. Included among them was Stan Slaughter -- another pioneer of the early bioregional movement who also attended the Ozarks bioregional congress in 1979 (later at all of the continental bioregional congresses throughout the 80’s and 90’s). He is a real powerhouse with composting and soil health who works with large-scale urban agricultural systems.

Big Smiles with Stan Slaughter — Hero of Composting

What we felt here was the possibility that Powell Gardens could evolve into a bioregional learning center. They have incredible infrastructure, a great team, and an abundance of energy to create regenerative food systems. Suffice it to say, we came away very inspired!

This leads us into the fourth place that we visited -- when we arrived into Milwaukee, Wisconsin where (an active member of the Design School) has been moving towards organizing a BLC for about two years. She hosted us and organized a series of site visits, community gatherings, and sacred processes with Indigenous friends that made visible the potential for Milwaukee to create a BLC that provides a bridge between the two large basins of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi.

Here we sensed into the profound history of Havenwoods State Forest that went from being a prison, internment camp for prisoners of war, a missile silo during the Cold War, and now is an incredible native forest and flood mitigation system with education programs that work with public schools. We also visited Trickle Bee Cafe to see how food deserts can be transformed into mutual aid and community resilience in the urban core of the city. Again, the potentials run quite deep for a BLC to take root in this place.

Gathering for a Tasty Lunch at Trickle Bee Cafe

And the fifth place was when we visited Madison -- a place with such deep roots in organic farming, conservation practices, and permaculture that it was a very rich experience to be among them. Four women hosted us. , Sunshine Jones, Beth Racette, and Kate Heiber-Cobb. We gave a public talk at the Pinney Public Library, made a bioregional walk through the Madison Arboretum where Aldo Leopold had left quite a legacy, and moved into strategic weaving of regenerative processes at a local Unitarian Church in the evening.

We felt it again. Madison is poised to birth a BLC. They have decades of history in large-scale ecosystem restoration, regional food systems, ecological education for youth, and mutual aid networks -- all of which could become transition pathways into a regenerative future for this part of the world.

Pretty incredible, isn’t it? In less than a week, we catalyzed dialogue and convened local stakeholders in five places that each have their own local potential to become a bioregional learning center. Add to this that we are already seven years into the weaving of territories in the Northern Andes, working closely with regenerative leaders in the Mediterranean, and traveling among BLC founder communities in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and UK later this year. This is to say that we are already weaving toward a planetary network and have the bold vision to help birth at least one thousand bioregional learning centers in the next ten years.

And we are only a quarter of the way through our Mississippi Basin pilgrimage. I write these words as we enter North Dakota and will visit major confluences and sacred sites of the Upper Missouri River before making the journey down the Front Range (with an event in Boulder, CO on June 15th and another in Amarillo, TX on June 19th). We have already provided seed funding to the BLC that is taking form in the Texas Panhandle to restore the Ogallala Aquifer. And we are confident that we will encounter many other potential BLCs during the rest of this journey that comes to an end in early July.

Which begs the question: What will we need to manifest this dream? That is what we turn to now...

Operational Plan for Manifesting the BLC Dream

Penny and I are the kind of people who get things done. She grew up on the Front Range in Boulder, Colorado. I’m from the Ozarks in Missouri. We don’t mess around. We speak straight and act upon what we feel is right. Our bioregional roots are deep and have been nourished by these travels. We know what we are meant to do -- our life work is to enable the manifestation of a planetary transition of humanity through bioregional learning centers.

And we have a good understanding for what is ours to do. But we can’t do it without support. This is a heavy lift that requires many hands. Are you ready to lean in and give us a lift? In this section, I’ll share what we plan to do and what we’ll need in order to do it.

First and foremost, we are tired of being dragged out and left to dry. Support comes and goes. Aside from a three-year period of precious support by a dear friend at the NoVo Foundation -- before he was fired and all funding abruptly cut from the bioregional field in the reckless actions of the foundation -- we have done nearly everything with crowdfunding and at severe personal risk. Now that the planet is entering the acceleration of collapse, we need to be held through it for a sustained period of time.

Right now, we need to be held for at least three years. Free us from begging the billionaire class for scraps from their overloaded tables. Liberate us to serve. This means we need funding for more than the next funding cycle. Our work spans the next decade. Setting it all in place will take about three years. We have already expressed that this work is huge -- the “first billion dollars” outlined in a proposal we published last month. To keep us going, we need to partner with stewards of wealth who can secure $500,000 per year for the next three years. This is a 1.5 million ask to sustain us through the years of 2027, 2028, and 2029. With this precious stability, we will do all we can to build the social infrastructure for much larger financial flows.

What will we do during these three years? This is a topic that warrants deeper explanation. I can only offer some of the clarity now -- because the complexities involved are monumental and we have several layers of activities that all weave together. What I can do now is sketch the contours of it to give you a feel for what we will be doing. To help with this, I want to (artificially) separate three parts of the process that need to be sustained:

Systemic Design and Implementation
Penny and I are the conveners, the weavers, the sustainers of forward motion. We need to be sure we are taken care of so that we can act fully and generously in service to everyone else. Part of the financial resources are to keep us focused and on task as we manifest all of the structural components and immersive practices that give rise to the planetary network of bioregional learning centers.

This includes maintaining the Design School for Regenerating Earth, our bioregional pilgrimages and activations, deep institutional memory for all that has emerged so far, and so forth. Without us, none of this would be happening.

Seeding and Growing the BLC Action Network
We have been seeding the formation of bioregional learning centers for several years now. Local teams have formed and been sustained in diverse bioregional contexts. Examples include Regenerate Cascadia, the work in the Greater Tkaronto Bioregion, théra in Tarn-et-Garonne, France, the weaving across Rivers of the North Sea, and so forth.

Now we need to have dedicated resources for leadership retreats, learning exchanges between bioregions, seed funding to initiate new expansions within them and activation support for getting new ones going. Part of the funding we seek is to support the community of practice for creating bioregional learning centers -- which we are calling the BLC Action Network. It is scheduled to launch this fall.

Continuing Our Living Lab of Practice at Scale
One of the things that sets our work apart is that we integrate theory and practice with our own BLC effort in the Northern Andes of Colombia. This effort started with the Barichara Regeneration Fund in late 2020 that has since grown into a rich tapestry of regenerative efforts spread throughout the territories of Colombia. The “anchor” for it all has become clear -- in the form of the learning ecosystem focusing on children and families that we call Sueños del Bosque.

Part of the funding we seek is to continue offering salaries to the teachers who design and implement educational programs for children, youth, and adults in the Colombian context. We learn a great deal from what works (and what doesn’t!) as we develop frameworks for action and test them in real-world settings. This is a living laboratory for bioregional regeneration at scale. And it is vital that it continues as part of the planetary network of BLCs.

When we put all this together, the fuller picture starts to appear. The breakdown of funding for each year becomes $150K for design and implementation, $250K for the BLC Action Network, and $100K for the living lab in the Northern Andes. Add it up and you get the $500K per year that we are seeking.

And you see our plan for implementation more clearly too. Set up the BLC Action Network. Invite people to get trained in bioregional design with the Bioregional Design Certificate (BDC) that will be offered starting in the fall. Keep the core team going that holds all of these processes. Continue the living lab where we figure out how to set up BLCs while moving toward the exchanges among leaders and local actors in the bioregions that join the network.

All of this builds upon years of prior work. It sustains and continues the effort while we grow towards maturity. The focus is on activating bioregional organizing that leads to the creation of BLCs, deepening the capacities of those who create them with a global community of practice, and maintaining the core management practices that hold coherence across scales from local to planetary.

The question for us now is Where will the first $500K come from? How do we get the ball rolling for our next phase of work? Who is going to fund this first three years of building capacities and diversifying the ecosystem? And how will this enable us to mobilize the much larger resource pools that will be needed in the long run?

We can only answer these questions by walking the Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth into being. And that means keeping the core processes going for the next several years. You can donate directly. Or help us connect with wealth stewards who need to know about what we are up to. Become a member of the Design School with our Active Hope Plan. Get involved and create a BLC yourself.

Can you help us make all this happen? Now is the time and there is none left to waste.

Onward, fellow humans.

In the Mediterranean bioregion, there are seas of olive trees that extend as far as the eye can see. Entire landscapes transformed into a giant machine. A grid of mechanization that has created an ecological desert of fragility and systemic risk for olive production. We are writing today to share that there is a better way. It is informed by permaculture. There is an emerging demonstration site in Tunisia. It is positioned to offer a pathway into the future that has implications for the entire Mediterranean Bioregion.

From Travesty to Transformation of the Regional Food System

The iconic olive groves of the Mediterranean are dying, not of old age, but of industrial farming. The industrialization of olive planting is more visible now than ever before. People plow, water, and use chemicals with increasing frequency and intensity. Many farms are still organic and rain-fed, but the trend is clear.

Olive trees should be protected for their profound ecological and cultural significance. They are indigenous to this part of the world. Very resistant to changing climatic conditions. Attractors of biodiversity and ecosystem health. But when there are too many isolated trees, with no diversity surrounding them, it becomes a very serious problem. The agricultural system becomes profoundly fragile. The result is a biodiversity desert. An epidemic is imminent. We see it coming from miles away. A disease spreading through millions of genetically similar trees would not just collapse a harvest, it could collapse entire economies with dizzying speed and ferocious intensity.

Soil should not be compacted by heavy machines. It should be protected with layers of mulch, so it gets back its spongy structure, absorbs rain better, keeps moisture longer. We need to stop breaking it into dust that erodes with the wind.

We need to bring hedgerows back. They stop erosion. They also reduce pollution. Lower evaporation. Produce food, wood, protection, beauty. They create corridors for biodiversity.

After ten years of experience in food forest gardening in the Mediterranean climate, one of us (Elyes) is launching a small-scale prototype to transform a conventional olive grove that he stewards into a thriving, biodiverse food forest. Olives will remain, joined by carob, figs, pomegranates, almonds, Bay Laurel, mulberry, aloe vera, prickly pears, medicinal and aromatic plants, and more.

This project is happening on ancestral land. A land that is sacred to him. A land stewarded by generations of his family before him. This land needs stewarding by human hands again, just like it was cared for across the timespan of many thousands of years -- with deep care, love and reverence, not extraction. Not heavy machines imported from overseas. Not fossil fuels. Reintegration of animals too: donkeys, chickens, pigeons, goats, sheep, horses. Traditional practices that have withstood the long test of time in this part of the world.

This is not about losing olives. It is about gaining resilience, yield, and life.

As a permaculture teacher and designer, Elyes has the support of the Design School for Regenerating Earth to test this model on both irrigated and non-irrigated lands. He is receiving $15,000 of financial support from their Earth Regeneration Fund for 1000 BLCs — and hopes to secure another $10,000 to complete the project. His goal: create small islands of polyculture that inspire olive farmers locally, and across the entire Mediterranean bioregion, to move to the next level of production and resilience. This prototype will prove that we can produce more, risk less, and restore beauty and harmony to the land.

It is a pilot farm in the arid landscapes of Tunisia. An example for others to learn from. A testament to ingenuity and wisdom that can be applied even after it seems to be too late. His farm is an island of green in a sea of compacted dirt. An inspiration that others can follow. Elyes wants to restore the sacred relationship that has sustained human families in the Mediterranean bioregion for millennia. Trees as elders. Grandmothers. Wisdom-keepers. Soils as memory. Mother-layer. Life’s original womb. So much more than a financial yield in an extractive global marketplace.

You can follow Elyes here on Substack to see his progress. Donate into our Earth Regeneration Fund to support other projects like this. Contribute to our efforts to show that a better way is not only possible. It is already here.

Onward, fellow humans.

Today we begin a series of pilgrimages to awaken the dreams of Bioregional Earth. We are catalyzing the Dandelion Strategy with sacred journeys into three different parts of the world. Penny Heiple and I depart on our pilgrimage into the heart of Turtle Island. We will spend the next month traveling to headwaters and confluences of major rivers that comprise the vast expanse of the Mississippi Basin.

This is only the beginning. In September we continue on to the Mediterranean and then in October through four regions of Western Europe and the British Isles. A silver serpent of dragon dreaming -- as we plant seeds of bioregional imagination across different continents of our precious Planet Earth.

I am writing to you now as an invitation to join us. Meet us along the path as we arrive into a living tapestry of stories about how to live in right relationship to each unique place. We are walking into being the Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth. It is really happening now. People all over the world are answering the call to Birth 1000 BLCs by 2035. They are Pledging Their Active Hope for the future of humanity. A strategy to catalyze the Planetary Phase Transition that makes it possible to regenerate the Earth.

Our journey unfolds in three parts:

I have written separate articles about each of these three legs of our journey. You can find them here:

· Awakening the Heart of Turtle Island :: Travels across the vast area of the Mississippi River in North America (May 28th - July 1st)

· Mediterranean Bioregional Activation :: Immersion in diverse learning sites of Tunisia followed by a design workshop to catalyze a regional hub (September 18th - 29th)

· European Bioregional Activation :: Local gatherings and site visits across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and United Kingdon (October 2nd - 20th)

Please share this article with anyone who lives in these different parts of the world. Spread the word that the dreams of regenerative futures are being seeded into being throughout the next several months. Invite them to join us in the Design School for Regenerating Earth -- a community-of-practice for Earth Regenerators all over the world who are weaving this vast tapestry into being.

As I said above, we begin today. Penny and I are flying out of the Northern Andes (where another bioregional learning center is being born). We will arrive to the confluence of two great rivers -- the Missouri and Mississippi -- in the city of St Louis. Our journey begins at this sacred site where two enormous flows of water within Turtle Island great each other before continuing on their path to the Gulf of Mexico.

You might ask who is leading this effort? How is it being funded? What is our agenda? Questions like these are very important! In truth, the effort is led by what many Indigenous peoples call the Great Spirit. Others call it God or the Creator. We are called by Mother Earth to feel the suffering of her living beings. Sense her vast beauty. Give blessings of love in ways that only humans can do. While the human expression of leadership is embodied in the two co-founders of the Design School -- Penny and me -- we are led by something much deeper. The life pulse of our Universe that created this paradise that we call Earth.

How is it being funded? The short answer is a combination of no one and everyone. For three years, we were blessed with financial support from the NoVo Foundation as part of their portfolio of bioregional projects. That funding came to an end earlier this year. These journeys are being funded by everyday people who sign up for our $500 lifetime membership in the Design School. Many hands make small work. All hands on deck. Grassroots through and through. We are looking for the stewards of financial wealth who can answer our request for a Billion Dollars to Regenerate the Earth. They haven’t appeared yet. We don’t know if they will.

What is our agenda? To plant a thousand seeds of bioregional learning centers. Awaken the human heart into a dream of regeneration for the Earth. Humans walking each other home. Coming back into right relationship with our Indigenous ancestors. Remembering we always were part of this living universe. As we travel, we will share our vision for at least a thousand bioregional learning centers to come into being by 2035 -- so that local networks of human change agents can guide community resilience in their own bioregions as we collectively navigate toward a fully healed Planet Earth.

This is what I wrote about in my book. It is what we have been living into being for several years. It is how we have already made tremendous progress in the emergence of a planetary network of bioregions. It is what keeps us going through those dark nights of the soul. This is hard work. It is necessary work. And we know what role we have been called to play.

Will you join us in North America, Tunisia, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, or UK? Are you ready to answer the call? Have you answered it already? Then join us. Together we are a tapestry of living flows bring harmony back to the human relationship with Earth.

Now is the time. There is none left to waste.

Onward, fellow humans.

Today I want to share more about how we are structuring the bioregional funding ecosystems that we create with local teams in different parts of the world. There are a lot of theoretical discussions about financial systems for Earth Regeneration, but not very many explorations based in the daily practice of creating one. I hope today’s article is helpful in this regard -- by offering insights based in our direct experiences of mobilizing financial resources into a very complex real-world environment.

The topic I want to explore today is that of Legitimate Intermediaries in a Nested Funding Pool. What are they? Why are they so important? How do we create them? How can we evaluate if they are working? We will use an example where there is still learning to be done. I will apply this conceptual lens to the practice of creating the first Northern Andes Regeneration Fund to show how important it is in practical terms.

Yet I will take care to keep the information that I share at a general level because of the delicate nature of an inquiry like this. There are real communities involved. People and places that I deeply care about. Human leadership that is still a work in progress. Challenges that have yet to be addressed. More details can be shared privately if interested donors/investor wish to reach out and discuss how they can support this work in the context of the Northern Andes. With these caveats in mind, let us begin.

What IS an Intermediary and How Might They Be Illegitimate?

We are dealing with nested systems in the work of bioregional regeneration. There are local actors who hold and implement regenerative processes within each community. There is a territorial scale of landscapes across and within which these local processes play out. Coordination is needed within and between territories to move up to the bioregional scale. Support infrastructure is needed to monitor, evaluate, administer, and coordinate among all levels involved.

In the case of the Northern Andes, this takes the form of a network of territories. All of them are in the country of Colombia. Each territory has a community foundation that maps local processes and coordinates the collective agenda of its multi-stakeholder network within its territory. A support organization has been set up to help the community foundations. I was involved as a founding member of the movement of territorial foundations in Colombia. I was also a co-founder for one of the territorial foundations. I was the primary mobilizer of funding for local efforts across the span of several years. It was my idea to create the Northern Andes Regeneration Fund in the first place. I then went on to connect a large foundation with this local effort and mobilized more than one million dollars into the local ecosystem.

All of this is to say that I have intimate knowledge about the bioregional funding ecosystem we will discuss today. And that I played several key roles in its development over the span of many years. With all of this in mind, I want to share a disturbing statistic. If we look at all the money from international development that flows into Colombia, only 1% makes it to local people in any given community. This means 99% of the money arrives to intermediaries who are not part of the local communities that the money is presumed to serve.

This information gives us context for defining what an intermediary is. An intermediary is any relationship between actors or stakeholders of a system where they have power to represent and act upon this relationship.

In the Northern Andes Regeneration Fund, we initially identified the following intermediary relationships:

• Local regenerative practitioners represent their own projects on the ground.

• A territorial actor (the community foundation) represents local regenerative processes through portfolio approaches, mapping of local efforts, the construction of a territorial narrative, and the distribution of funding into the local community.

• A governance circle comprised of community foundations represents the network of territories in relation to the funding ecosystem.

• An administrative organization represents the legal management of the fund itself.

• An ambassador to external actors represents this ecosystem of relationships to potential investors and strategic partners.

All of this is depicted in the graphic below. I held all these roles except that of the administering organization. This is to say that I engaged in local regenerative practices, was part of the founding team for one of the community foundations, was in the governance circle of the fund, and was an ambassador to cultivate external support for the funding ecosystem.

(Let me also note that I withdrew from membership in both the local community foundation and the governance of the fund after playing a whistleblower role of naming governance concerns that were not being addressed in an ethical manner.)

Now the question becomes How to Tell if an Intermediary is Legitimate? What happens if a representative in one of the territories does not give an honest or complete account of what is happening with local processes? How could the narrative of the Northern Andes Regeneration Fund elevate the administrative organization to the detriment of local actors in the territories themselves? When is an intermediary behaving in a manner that undermines the legitimacy of the funding ecosystem in its entirety?

This funding ecosystem was created in 2024. I brought in $150,000 US of seed funding and a structuring process began that included educating the territorial foundations about bioregional-scale regeneration. Local regenerative processes began to get mapped within the four thematic areas of regenerative education, regenerative economy, ecosystem restoration, and territorial healing. Throughout 2025, I brought an additional $600,000 US into the fund (as well as more than $300,000 US into our local territory) and began to receive invitations to visit several of the territories involved to help them deepen their understandings of regeneration and bioregionalism among local stakeholders.

It was through this process that I developed the concept of the legitimate intermediary. Why did I do this? Because I began to see patterns that would hinder the collective vision to regenerate the entire Northern Andes bioregion. For example, I began to learn how local efforts that were quite powerful and effective were not being communicated to the governance circle of the fund. This was partly due to lack of capacity in a local community foundation, and because there was a history of distrust among some community foundations with respect to the support organization that administers the fund.

I also began to see how some of the community foundations would intentionally exclude key regenerative processes in their local territories for political reasons. Greenwashing. Suppressing key actors to advance personal agendas, Things that are quite normal, yet need to be addressed if the funding ecosystem is to achieve its ambitious goals. I also learned about specific conflicts between members of a community foundation where the support organization behaved in a biased manner. And I was also made aware of situations where some territories were given priority over others without transparency or accountability.

Now we can begin to name what an illegitimate intermediary looks like in this situation. A community foundation can misrepresent what is happening on the ground. Local actors can misrepresent their contributions to a territorial narrative. The administrative support organization can hinder accountability and behave in a biased manner. And so forth.

How Might This Be Addressed at the Structural Level?

We cannot address issues that we don’t know about. The first step was to communicate what was being observed and provide an analytic lens that makes sense of it. This was how the concept of a legitimate intermediary came into being. By observing that several key relationships exist where an intermediary role needs to be cared for if the system is to work at all necessary scales. The first structural element is the map of relationships where an intermediary exists and criteria are identified for how it can become legitimate in the funding ecosystem.

Having such a structural map in place enables evaluations to occur. Where are the intermediary relationships in the system? How are they behaving right now? What kinds of improvements might be recommended based on what is learned? I attempted to bring this analysis into the group and discovered that a specific manipulation of the field was taking place. A power dynamic of exclusion and control of information was hindering the effort to improve governance. A power dynamic was in play and the response was to withdraw even more deeply into its own self-preservation.

This is why I came to the conclusion that I needed to name what I was observing and then leave the governance of the fund -- even though I was the principal actor in both its creation and the mobilization of 100% of the funding that came in. What I observed was a web of relationships that need deeper healing. And that the concept of a legitimate intermediary could bring structural (and impersonal) clarity to how the funding ecosystem’s governance could be improved. My recommendation was to learn about bioregional mapping and engage in deeper proactive communications about the regenerative work on the ground.

Focus on “verifiable truths” through the mapping and storytelling. Prioritize that the majority of available funding goes to local processes. Support how the stories get told in an honest and accurate manner. Create information feedbacks that reveal blind spots and biases. Cultivate an ethical space of responsibility for those who are represented in the stories that are told -- and do so at all relevant scales of the nested system.

You can see how political this becomes. It is not easy to do. Yet it is vital if the bioregional funding ecosystem is to emerge into all of the nested scales involved. I learned that a concept like what is a legitimate intermediary brings forth the need to map the relational field. Identify key criteria for healthy function. Discover weaknesses and name them as opportunities for improvement. Make systemic recommendations based on these kinds of learnings.

I also learned that in this specific case, there was something like a cultural immune response that meant I should withdraw my presence. I wish all involve in the Northern Anes Regeneration Fund the success that they seek. My roles in this system came to their own limits and I moved on to focus my energies on the creation of bioregional learning centers.

Our work to create nested funding pools continues. We have a planetary vision and still engage in local work that focuses on the Northern Andes. What I hope this article can do is provide insights about how complex the real-world practice of bioregional finance truly is. We are learning by doing and what we learn is deeply practical. I hope this is helpful for all who seek to provide financial support to local regenerative efforts. We deeply need financial flows that are legitimate and healthy into the planetary network of bioregions that has been emerging throughout the last several years.

In closing today, I will add that part of the clarity that emerged for me personally was that this learning process revealed who I could legitimately work with and how to continue holding the level of integrity that I demand of myself in the Northern Andes context. I was able to see which actors care about being legitimate intermediaries and which actions made visible those who do not. This too was vital discernment on the path that I walk to help local bioregional teams do their part to regenerate the Earth.

Onward, fellow humans.