It has been an incredible journey.

Back in April, and visited several learning sites with me, all of which are being woven into a Mediterranean bioregional learning ecosystem. One of these sites is particularly close to my heart, land stewarded by my direct ancestors for generations, where I have poured time, care, and whatever little savings I could make, drop by drop, over the last ten years. Working without funds made it really hard to stay motivated. I had to be patient and let everything grow very slowly. For me, that land was like a seed I was holding onto, along with a few others, waiting until I had enough water to help it germinate and flourish.

That seed carries a very big dream. I want to show how an olive tree monoculture can be transformed into a food forest full of life, producing abundant food and beauty, and giving people a way to reconnect with the land and with each other. These olive monocultures cover almost ten million hectares across the Mediterranean. Just imagine if all of them followed this path and became resilient, productive food forests. With the world around us unravelling, we knew we could not wait.

The drone picture Joe took during the April visit shows the surrounding lands, permanently tilled and exposed. But the picture does not show the countless small rocks covering the soil, making it hard and even dangerous to walk on. These lands became the territory of machines, designed only for them to maintain and extract from the olive trees, while removing any other form of life through constant soil disturbance with heavy equipment that also compacts the earth.

I want to reclaim these lands for humans and other living beings. I want them to welcome human hands and feet of all ages, along with wild animals like owls, rabbits, frogs, and reptiles. I want them to welcome native plants, fungi, and insects, rebuilding a healthy ecosystem where humans are fully part of it.

When loving humans visit a piece of land, they bring many benefits: nutrients, water, and care. I want this land to welcome them in the best way possible, so they build a relationship with it and spend more time there. That is why I started by closing it to big machines with a hedgerow that marks the boundary, or the membrane protecting this ecosystem. Then we designed pathways branching all around the land, like veins for this living body, and cleared them of small rocks so we could walk safely. We also built water reserves that can be used for swimming before being used for irrigation. This too attracts people, especially in the summer, when watering is most needed and everyone longs for relief from the heat.

When I shared this story with and during their visit, it became their favorite seed, the one they wanted to flow funds to right away. To help this seed germinate, I explained that we needed a room, a space where stewards could rest or spend the night whenever needed. A first shelter that would allow us to spend more time there, accumulating care and building a deeper relationship with the land. That room would be the beating heart of this living body, pumping care and presence through the whole system.

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We started the construction on July 7th, made possible by the generous support of Earth Regeneration Fund, learn more about it here. The team included Radhouan, the project manager, and three highly skilled brothers: Yassine, Amine, and Wadia. They worked early in the morning, rested in the middle of the day, and continued in the afternoon. The temperatures were extreme for many days in a row, with hot winds coming from the Sahara. Other days were gentler, with breezes from the Mediterranean and little clouds passing by. The construction was finished in exactly thirty days, just as planned. We were all very proud.

This room now feels like the cotyledon emerging from the seed, one of its first leaves that will help nourish this land with a loving human presence. This site will be part of a Mediterranean bioregional learning ecosystem, which is itself part of a global network of bioregional learning centers woven together by the dandelion strategy of the Design School for Regenerating Earth.

With my deep gratitude to and and the entire Design School for Regenerating Earth community for making this germination possible.

My decision to organize around the Mediterranean came from a quiet, personal frustration. Every time I look at a map, I see this inner sea and its connected shores, with their distinct natural and cultural landscapes, broken into political pieces. The borders we have drawn are for control, yet we have come to accept them as truth. But we need to look beyond them. We need to remember how to belong to the Mediterranean, this vast, living ecosystem that has been hosting us for millennia. We need to learn how to care for it, organize across its shores, and connect our efforts to regenerate it at the scales that truly matter.

Because scale matters. The Mediterranean bioregion sits one step below the planetary one. It is a distinct, breathing entity that does not exist in isolation. It is woven into other important bioregions like the Sahara, the Atlantic, the Alpine watersheds, the Nile and more. At the same time, we must nurture the smaller bioregions nested within it: the Adriatic, the Aegean, the gulfs, the deltas, the islands, the coastal plains, the wetlands, the mountain ranges… each needing its own kind of intimate, place-based care. We must learn to hold all these layers together.

For millennia, this sea was not a divider. It was our liquid heart, an Anti-continent that bound the Atlas Mountains to the Apennines, and the Levant to Iberia, in a single, breathing ecosystem. The olive tree, the fig, the carrob, the rhythm of hot, dry summers and mild, rainy winters, these do not recognize the borders we drew. Our ancestors developed deep, intimate knowledge of these landscapes: terracing the hills, harvesting the winter rains, fishing regeneratively, building with stones, and rotating crops in a dance of reciprocity with the land.

But that kinship was broken. Colonialism carved this living entity into pieces, treating it as a prize to be won rather than a relative to be tended. The result is a territory that feels impossible to navigate freely, its ecological networks severed by invisible lines. We see the cost in our waters: overfished, overheated, poisoned with radioactive waste, choked by plastic. We see it in the degradation of soils and the bleaching of seagrass meadows. The extractive economy treats our home as a resource to deplete, not a garden to nurture.

Bioregioning offers us a way back home. It asks us to shift from control to stewardship, from extraction to care. It asks: “How do we regenerate this land, this water, this community?” This is not about erasing nations. It is about remembering a deeper geography: one that works at the planetary, the regional, and the local levels all at once. It is about kinship, recognizing that the health of one coastline is the health of all.

I know this story does not speak to everyone. In the regenerative field around the Mediterranean, we each feel our own call to a particular peninsula, a specific valley, or a different scale of belonging. And that is as it should be. There is room for all of us. But for me, the call to organize around the Mediterranean is clear. This is the scale that helps me and those with me decolonize our minds. It allows us to see beyond the colonial borders that have fractured this region for centuries. It invites us to remember who we were before these lines divided us, and who we can become again.

This is why I am grateful for my journey with the Design School for Regenerating Earth since 2023, learning together with a global community of bioregional leaders and practitioners how to do the work. I am honored to be part of the Dandelion Strategy, a vision to create 1000 Bioregional Learning Centers by 2035, places where we relearn how to live with our landscapes, share knowledge, and coordinate regeneration across watersheds and seas.

The Design School is already sharing resources to help this seed of a Mediterranean hub germinate and grow. It has provided virtual spaces for a Mediterranean hub to form, where members meet monthly for the last two years to connect and share. A month ago, it flowed funds to one of the learning sites that is transforming a monoculture olive plantation into a regenerative landscape. And this September, it is helping to host a Mediterranean Bioregional Activation, a gathering that will bring together members of the Design School from around the Mediterranean and beyond. Together, we will explore what bioregional organizing at this scale could look like, how to activate it, and how to support it.

Stay tuned, and join the Design School to follow this journey.

A Crisis of Purpose

The world stands at a precipice. Economic instability, social fragmentation, and environmental degradation are converging into what many experts describe as an imminent systemic collapse. Nation states, in their fear, are responding the only way they know how, by building bigger armies, stockpiling more weapons, and preparing for armed conflict.

But does an 18-year-old soldier truly need to wield an assault rifle to make their nation safer? What if this turns out to be the wrong question entirely?

Modern militaries face a profound crisis of meaning, stemming from a fundamental shift in what wars achieve. Young soldiers, particularly from young generations, join the military seeking purpose, discipline, and the chance to serve something greater than themselves. Instead, they find themselves deployed into ambiguous, unwinnable armed conflicts, fighting illusory “wars on terror” with unseen targets or defending borders from desperate refugees and other non-combatants. Many of those who return have to contend not only with physical injuries but deep psychological wounds.

But what if these well endowed militaries representing the largest, organized, disciplined and logistically capable workforce were to answer a different and more urgent call: to regenerate the land, feed a nation, and heal a planet.

New Doctrine: Regenerative Security

In pursuit of this repurposed mission, soldiers will be trained in five forms of defense:

1. Defense of land: Soil restoration, water harvesting, reforestation, fire management, biodiversity protection

2. Defense of people: Trauma healing, community rebuilding, food security, disaster response, protection of civilians

3. Defense of meaning: Service that gives young soldiers a reason to live beyond obedience to command

4. Defense of peace: Conflict prevention, mediation support, demobilization, reintegration, and rebuilding trust

5. Defense of the unborn: Long-term stewardship of the conditions future generations will inherit

This would not eliminate the military overnight, particularly in these fraught times . It would begin by redirecting part of its war economy toward the places where war actually germinates: scarcity, humiliation, ecological collapse, corruption, displacement, and despair.

A “ Shield and Shovel” Structure Created and Enabled

To fulfill the new doctrine and its main defense tasks, a two-pronged military structure is proposed:

The Shield (Specialized Forces): An elite, technologically enabled force supported by advanced robotics and drones to handle asymmetric hard security threats.

The Shovel (Regenerative Corps): This corps, comprising the majority of personnel, becomes the engine of national and global regeneration. Its primary task would be to restore their own nation’s ecosystems—reforesting, rehydrating landscapes, restoring cultural and historical agricultural legacies, growing and maintaining food forests, among other ecological practices

To facilitate this primary task they undergo a four phase training and development program:

Phase 1: The Inner Turn—From Domination to Stewardship
The first training is not technical. It is moral and psychological. Young soldiers must be invited to ask: What am I protecting? Who benefits from my courage? Am I being used to preserve life or to preserve someone else’s power? Can discipline become devotion rather than coercion? This matters because many soldiers are wounded not only by violence, but by moral injury—the collapse of meaning when they feel their sacrifice was used for something unworthy.

Phase 2: Ecological Literacy
Soldiers would learn the basics of living systems: soil health, water cycles, tree systems, composting, agroforestry, watershed restoration, seed sovereignty, local food systems, and climate adaptation. To fulfill this aim, they undergo a 72-hour permaculture design course that provides a rapid foundation in these principles, with practical application following afterward to develop on-the-ground skills. A critical advantage of this approach is the sheer number of people who can guide this education. Around the world, a vibrant community of permaculture teachers and practitioners has been cultivating this knowledge for decades, and they are ready to share it. Whether they are elders in indigenous communities, instructors at recognized training centers, or fieldworkers in dryland restoration projects, these educators are eager to partner with the military. They hold the keys to the course content, and they are prepared to co-create the learning experience, ensuring that the soldiers not only receive a standardized curriculum but also absorb the local wisdom specific to the landscapes they will be regenerating. And here is the multiplier: anyone who completes the course and practices for two years can become a teacher themselves. This means the military will produce its own instructors from within, scaling the program from dozens to thousands in just a few years.

Phase 3: Regenerative Engineering
Military engineers already know logistics, roads, bridges, camps, transport, communications, and rapid deployment. The shift is to teach them to build in ways that restore rather than deplete. That means rainwater systems, community nurseries, food forests, flood defenses, erosion control, infrastructure, and post-disaster reconstruction that leaves communities stronger than before.

Phase 4: Community Partnership
Soldiers must not arrive as saviors. That would simply be a greener form of domination. They would be trained to ask local communities: What is already there? What knowledge do elders, farmers, women, youth, and indigenous communities already hold? What would help these communities become more self-sufficient after the soldiers leave? The military brings capacity. The community brings wisdom. The land brings instruction.

Practical Implementation Options

To facilitate the overall implementation of this transformative proposal, the following options could be considered with the United Nations playing a normative and catalytic role.

Option A: National Regenerative Corps
Individual nations establish their own Regenerative Corps within existing military structures, with the option to participate in international exchange programs. This maintains sovereignty while building global capacity.

Option B: UN-AU Regenerative Peace Service Pilot
A joint initiative between the United Nations and African Union to train soldiers, veterans, ex-combatants, and local youth in regenerative land restoration, disaster resilience, food security, trauma-informed service, and community peacebuilding. First pilot regions would be placed where climate stress, youth unemployment, food insecurity, and conflict risk are already converging.

Option C: Regional Regenerative Security Academies
Regional organizations (ECOWAS, IGAD, SADC, the Arab League, the EU, ASEAN, etc.) create academies that train soldiers, veterans, and civilians together. This is important—if only soldiers are trained, the model remains militarized. If soldiers and civilians train together, the model becomes relational.

Option D: Integrated UN Peacekeeping Transformation
The UN could develop a doctrine of Regenerative Security and Nature-Based Peace Operations, linking peacekeeping, climate adaptation, DDR (Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration), and ecological restoration. This would begin with pilot units in existing peacekeeping missions where host countries request support.

The Catalytic and Normative Role of the United Nations

In support of the new security doctrine and the execution of the above options, the United Nations could play a normative and catalytic role through the following mechanisms:

1. Create Doctrine: Develop a doctrine of Regenerative Security and Nature-Based Peace Operations

2. Launch Pilots: Test regenerative units in peacekeeping and special political mission settings

3. Build Training Standards: Create modules for soldiers and peacekeepers on soil, water, community resilience, and trauma-informed service

4. Connect to Climate Security: Link this work to the UN Climate Security Mechanism

5. Integrate with DDR: Train ex-combatants and veterans for regenerative livelihoods

6. Finance the Transition: Help governments redirect funds toward regenerative service units

7. Protect Against Abuse: Establish safeguards against land grabs, militarized conservation, forced displacement, and greenwashing

Building land and people-centered Peace

The transition from a war economy to a life economy is the definitive challenge of our time. Armies, by their very nature, are designed for large-scale, coordinated action. What is proposed above is an invitation to harness that capacity for the greatest peace-building mission of all: the regeneration of the Earth.

By giving soldiers a new, profound purpose, we solve the identity crisis many face in modern militaries. By creating food and water security, we directly address the root causes of mass migration and civil unrest. A community with food in its belly and water in its wells has little reason to fight.

The choice before us is stark: continue pouring our resources into the machinery of destruction, or redirect them toward the work of restoration. The proposal outlined here offers a framework for considering this shift. It acknowledges the existing strengths of military organizations while suggesting a new application for those strengths.

So I have been wondering: what is the opposite of that? What does liberation taste like? I think it begins with something we urgently need to remember: our bioregional diet. It is not a new invention. It is the oldest human practice there is. For nearly all of our existence, people ate what grew where they lived. They knew where and when to find it, how to grow it, how to cook it and store it using local available resources and ancestral skills developed through generations. This was not a lifestyle choice. It was simply how humans survived. And it worked for millennia.

In contrast, look at the globalized diet. Most food is imported or grown in chemical monocultures, packaged in plastic, shipped long distances, and grown in artificial conditions. It runs on fossil fuels at every step. Where the bioregional diet tastes of place and season, the globalized diet promises convenience, at a cost the planet cannot afford. And this system is deeply unreliable. Supply chains crack with every crisis. Supermarkets can go empty tomorrow.

What is a bioregion? It is not a political line on a map. It is a living body, defined by water, climate, culture, and native species. This is how I learned mine. A bioregional diet asks three honest questions: What is abundant here? What grows without fossil fuels? What has co-evolved with this land?

The global food system today is colonial extraction on a plate. It flattens ecologies, erases place-based knowledge, and drains wealth upward while destroying soil, water, and bodies. System change must start with food systems change. Colonial powers used food to colonize. We can use food to regenerate. Shift allegiance from the supermarket to watershed. Eat place-based polycultures. Your body becomes a healer, not a destroyer.

This practice goes beyond just eating local. It reconnects us to the story of how humans once lived in harmony with this specific place, how they honored it, cared for it, and received its gifts with gratitude. It invites us into reciprocity: we take care of the land, and the land takes care of us. By accepting our bioregion’s edible gifts and valuing them, we start noticing the many other gifts that are keeping us alive. We notice how our bioregion is a living system and we are part of it. Our health and life depend on its health. Just like the bacteria in your gut depend on your body’s health.

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Eating the bioregion means becoming the bioregion. When we eat from local, living soil, we swallow its microscopic creatures, bacteria that have been part of this land for thousands of years. They take up residence in our bodies, and we become, quite literally, one with the land. But the cycle is not complete until we give back. Our urine and feces, which the globalized world calls 'sewage' are actually the land's inheritance from us. Returned respectfully to the soil, composted, transformed, offered, they become fertility again. The circle closes.

This reconnection is extremely relevant and urgent in the context of the imminent economic and ecological collapse. We step back into community with our bioregion, as our ancestors did. That is our best way to survive and thrive beyond the collapse.

This is not a solitary path. The Dandelion Strategy calls for a thousand Bioregional Learning Centers by 2035. The vision is a planetary network of bioregional hubs where we relearn, put into practice, and celebrate bioregional design and ways of living. You are welcome to join us.

The journey took place in December 2025. We began near the southern Mediterranean coast, on a farm where ancient terraced olive groves taught us our first lesson in symbiosis: how culture and economy have served these trees for centuries.

Traveling south, the landscape shifted. In the central mountains, we found warmth in rooms dug into hills and walked the paths of local farmers. We saw the clever jessour systems, which capture rainwater and soil to create fertile land in rocky valleys. Over shared tea, regeneration revealed itself not as a theory, but as a daily, granular practice.

We walked to a hilltop ksar, where communities once stored their harvests. Watching the sunrise from that sacred place, we meditated on the breathtaking view and listened to the deep cultural stories held within the stone.

From the mountains, we descended into the open steppe. A nomadic shepherd welcomed us with his traditional tent for a night beneath a boundless sky of stars. Sharing food and stories, we each found space to connect with the vast land and with ourselves.

This growing sense of connection prepared us for the gateway to the great sand sea. With local guides and dromedaries, we walked into the silence of the dunes. Around an open fire under an infinite starry blanket, we heard tales of this distinct landscape, a corridor between the Daher Mountains and larger territories, historically crossed by nomads and their dromedaries.

A rare, gentle rain blessed our return, a quiet moment of magic. Our path led next to the ancient oases of the pre-desert foothills, where layered food forests have thrived for millennia. We explored abandoned villages built into cliff-sides and oasis thickets, and witnessed stunning waterfalls and canyon waterways from within, a breathtaking immersion into millions of years of Earth’s story, carved by water.

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This journey was an act of active sensing. For our group, many meeting for the first time, these shared, visceral experiences transformed the concept of a “bioregion” from an abstraction into a felt reality. Our conversations, over shared meals and long walks, were rich with individual insights; some saw patterns, others felt profound personal reconnection. From this tapestry, a collective feeling emerged: a deep and grounding hope.

This hope was born from repeatedly witnessing the living intelligence of place-based life. It forged a shared conviction, that to regenerate our world, we must not invent from nothing, but restore our kinship with specific, interconnected places. We must listen and learn from the harmonies that already exist.

By moving simply together through these landscapes, we created space for reflection and forged a deep capacity for future collaboration. This first gathering affirmed a powerful idea: that such immersions are more than journeys, they are bioregional pilgrimages. They transform us, feeding our spirits with the essential essences of connection: to the living and non-living world, and to a future that is regenerative by design.

It is the first of what we envision as a series, a vital thread in reweaving the web of belonging, from the Mediterranean shores to the edge of the great desert. A bioregional pilgrimage, nurturing a way forward, together.

All photos are taken by me.

Big Thanks to the participants of this first immersion from right to left:

Annelieke Verkerk Safouan Azouzi 🍉 Radhouan Gafsi, Nadia Tmenni, Ayoub Kacem, myself ( Elyes M. ), Nadia Latiri ( Sara Bouzgarrou, Sami and Zied who left the group before this picture was taken)

And Deep Thanks for and for their trust and their guidance.

Formal employment often feels like the only path to survival today. Yet, history and diverse cultures show us vibrant alternatives. I find inspiration in Indigenous communities, self-sufficient stewards, and resourceful individuals whose fulfilling lives flourish beyond the conventional job market. But simply having a livelihood isn’t the goal; we need Right Livelihood.

Why “Right”? Because livelihoods have vastly different impacts: healing or harming, ethical or exploitative. What resonates deeply with me is that Right Livelihood is deeply personal and contextual. It evolves with us. And crucially, I believe it finds its highest expression when aligned with regeneration, actively restoring rather than depleting our world.

Finding your Right Livelihood feels less like stumbling upon a hidden path and more like intentional design. Over time, I’ve found these pathway questions truly helpful:

• Is it regenerative? Does it heal ecosystems and communities while nourishing me?

• Is it ethical? Is it guided by Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share?

• Is it resilient? Can it adapt and withstand disruption? Does it diversify my sustenance?

• Is it bioregional? Is it rooted in, responsive to, and supportive of my unique ecological and cultural place?

• Is it fulfilling? Does it allow me to express and grow into my best self?

• Is it Symbiotic? Does it foster mutual benefit with others and the Earth?

• Is it Kairotic? Does it enable the right action at the right time?

• Is it consciously Designed? Is it Aligned with my true needs, values, and vision?

This design process could unfolds through key steps:

1. Assess: Honestly look at my current reality, resources, and core needs.

2. Vision: Dream boldly. What essence defines my ideal, values-aligned livelihood?

3. Design: Brainstorm creative pathways connecting where I am to where I envision.

4. Implement: Start small. Take manageable steps, learn, adapt, iterate.

5. Maintain & Evolve: Nurture progress, celebrate steps, and consciously revisit.

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The Ripple Effect: Right Livelihood, I’ve come to see, is far more than personal satisfaction; it’s foundational for a regenerative economy. It fundamentally shifts how we meet needs: prioritizing healing over extraction, restoring landscapes, and strengthening communities. This inherently builds resilience through diverse, place-based (bioregional) approaches. What excites me most is the shift towards symbiosis, replacing competition with collaboration, weaving a stronger social fabric. Aligning our work with genuine human needs and planetary boundaries moves us beyond mere growth metrics to serving life itself. This naturally fosters localization, reducing reliance on destructive global systems. Ultimately, supporting Right Livelihood transforms work into an engine for regenerating people and the planet.

A Living Example: Picture a regenerative fisher-farmer: nurturing land and waterways within their watershed, collaboratively building shelter using local materials, turning harvests into nourishing meals, passing on place-based wisdom, sharing knowledge, maintaining tools and environment within their bioregion. This isn’t just a list of tasks; it embodies a holistic, deeply bioregional Right Livelihood. It actively heals local ecosystems and social bonds, embodies ethics and resilience, fosters symbiosis, provides deep fulfillment within planetary limits, and is consciously designed for a specific, meaningful context. To me, this exemplifies the profound power of livelihood aligned with regeneration and place.

Reflecting on this, I believe gently reassessing how we sustain ourselves is a powerful act. Wherever we stand, we can nudge our livelihood towards greater resilience and alignment. It’s a gradual journey of designing sustenance grounded in the unique landscapes, cultures, and ecological realities of our bioregion. This builds something inherently regenerative: a livelihood that not only supports us but actively contributes to healing our place, weaving the thriving, interconnected future we need to build. This path, deeply relevant to both our home territory and the wider world, feels like one worth walking.

The world map is a masterpiece of fiction. Its bold, colored blobs (Europe, Africa, Asia...) are presented as self-evident, primordial truths. We are taught they represent fundamental divisions in our world.

But what if this entire framework is backwards? What if the most powerful and defining geographical features are not the isolating landmasses, but the expansive systems that connect them?

Welcome to the geography of Anti-Continents.

An anti-continent is not a solid mass of land, but a unifying basin, sea, or biome that transcends and dissolves continental borders. It is defined by a dominant physical reality, whether a sea, a desert, or an ice sheet, that creates a coherent ecological and historical zone, binding the shores or lands it touches into a shared destiny. While the Sahara Desert (stretching from the Atlantic to Arabia) is one, and the Bering Sea is another, no example is more potent, more ancient, or more instructive than the Mediterranean Sea. It is the archetypal anti-continent.

To understand why, we must first dismantle the mythology of the continents themselves. Their names are not geological truths, but human stories told from a limited viewpoint. Europe is named for a kidnapped Phoenician princess from Greek myth. Asia simply meant “the east” to ancient Greeks. Africa began as a Roman label for a small province near Carthage. These are not neutral descriptions; they are cartographic inventions born of specific perspectives and imperial ambitions, tools to categorize and control. The continental model is, at its core, a project of segregation.

Anti-continents reveal this project as a fallacy. They operate on the logic of the living Earth, which organizes itself into bioregions: coherent zones of climate, ecology, and life. An anti-continent is a super-bioregion, a connective force.

Take the Mediterranean. Its very name, from the Latin Mediterraneus, means “in the middle of the land.” is a rare geographical honesty. It is a simple, powerful description of its function as a liquid core. While a continent like Europe aims to separate, the Mediterranean exists to connect.

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The Mediterranean: An Archetypal Anti-Continent

Ecologically, the Mediterranean creates a seamless world. The distinctive rhythm of hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters carves a band of shared life from Lisbon to Beirut, from Nice to Tangier. The olive tree, the grapevine, the fig, the scent of thyme and pine... these belong solely to this basin. This climate and its flora and fauna respect no imaginary line drawn through the sea. A cicada’s song is the same on a Cycladic island as it is on a hillside outside Tunis. This bioregional unity is the first and most fundamental proof of an anti-continent: it weaves a unified fabric of life that human borders strive, and fail, to cut.

Historically, this connective power is its legacy. For ten millennia, this sea has been a highway of confluence, not a line of division. Long before “continents” were conceived, people used its waters to weave a shared world. The exchange between ports and peoples across its span was not a clash of isolated worlds, but a continuous dialogue across a liquid common ground. Spices, ideas, architecture, and recipes flowed with the currents. The sea did not keep cultures apart; it was the medium through which they became themselves.

The Logic of Connection

This is the ultimate purpose of an anti-continent: it shatters the illusion of isolation. The Sahara connected the Sahelian kingdoms to the Mediterranean coast through a vast network of oases and trade routes, making Timbuktu and Tripoli part of the same world. The Bering Sea facilitated a continuous network of exchange, where stories, peoples, and lifeways flowed as freely as the waters between its shores. Similarly, the Red Sea functions as another potent anti-continent, a narrow aquatic corridor that has persistently linked the the Ethiopian Highlands and Somali coastsand the Arabian Peninsula, facilitating the movement of languages, genes, and cultural practices for millennia, binding its shores in a shared, dynamic history far more profound than the continental split between Africa and Asia would suggest.

Seeing the world through anti-continents is a radical recalibration. It reveals that Naples and Algiers share more, ecologically and historically, than Naples and Oslo. It shows that the true border is not the Mediterranean Sea, but the climatic line where the olive trees stop growing, the edge of the anti-continent itself.

In an age of hardened borders and divisive narratives, the concept of anti-continents is a vital corrective. It recovers a deeper, more enduring truth: our planet’s most profound stories are written not on isolated landmasses, but in the connective spaces between them. They are written in the sand of the Sahara, the ice of the Bering, in the saline embrace of the Red Sea, and the timeless waters of the Middle Sea.

Forget the continents. It is the anti-continents that show us how we are truly connected.

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At first, I sensed that people around me assumed I would say Africa. And that made sense on the surface. I grew up and live in North Africa. So why wouldn’t I belong to Africa?

But I didn’t answer right away. I sat with the question quietly.

Here’s what I came to recall: Africa is a colonial label. It doesn’t describe anything real on the ground. It is not one single ecosystem. It is not one unified culture. Africa was a name invented by colonizers who wanted to simplify domination, not to honor living systems.

The same is true for Asia, for Europe, and for America. These “continent” names were drawn on maps by empires. They were useful for dividing land and controlling people.

So I decided to sit with the question differently. I reached for a connection I needed to remember and honor.

I remembered the smell of wild lavender. I remembered the taste of olive oil just pressed during the harvest days, and the hot flatbread fresh from the clay oven. I remembered the feeling of limestone under my palm. I remembered the time I spent swimming and playing on the beach. And I remembered the sea itself, the Mediterranean, A body of water that carries incredible stories and deep inspiration.

And that’s when I knew.

My bioregion is not Africa. My bioregion is the Mediterranean.

I don’t see the Mediterranean as a bridge between “continents”. That is still a colonial way of seeing. No. The Mediterranean is a single living body, not just the sea, but the lands that surround it, shaped by its winds, waters, and rhythms in both their natural and cultural landscapes. One climate. One shared rhythm of wet winters and dry summers. One family of plants. One pattern of animals moving across it. And the people living in these landscapes: they have traded, fought, loved, mixed, and borrowed from each other for thousands of years. If you observe deeply, you can see it as one culture with shared roots.

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The Mediterranean is not divided. It was divided on paper. But on Earth, it breathes as one.

The Design School’s learning journeys helped me deepen this understanding. We did bioregional immersions. We heard stories from around the world. Little by little, I learned to see living systems at every scale, from a single handful of soil to the whole watershed to the planet itself. And I gained something precious: clarity. Clarity about what needs to be done for humanity to thrive beyond collapse.

This is what I believe now: We must decolonize our imagination. First. Before new technology. Before new policies. Before anything else, we have to free our minds from the old maps we were given. Those maps were made to serve empires, not to help us belong to the Earth.

I have explored this in a little book I published a year ago, Decolonize Imagination for Planetary Regeneration, and in essays like “Change the Story: Africa, Asia and Europe are One Continent,” “Forget Continents. Think Anti-Continents,” “Africa Is a Colonial Label,” and “A Geography of Kinship.” The maps we were given are wrong.

Right now, the Design School is running a learning journey called Regenerating Earth Through Collapse. For me, this journey is doubly important.

First, because I deeply believe in the capacity of humans to be regenerators at different scales. We are not just destroyers. We are also healers, menders, and rebuilders. That is in us.

Second, because we are living through social and ecological collapse right now. This is not a future warning. This is now. We are watching the death of an old world, a world built on injustice, extraction, domination, and separation. That world is falling apart. And honestly, that is not something to simply mourn. It is also something to accept and move through. Because on the other side of collapse, a new world wants to be born. A world of coherence, abundance, wisdom, and care. A world where belonging is not based on colonial borders but on living systems. A world where we know our bioregion the way we know our own body.

So I invite you. Join the Design School. Come explore these pathways with us. Every year, we gain more clarity. We are a growing global network of Earth regenerators. And we are damn serious about the urgency of regenerating this planet and its living ecosystems.

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What we do not see yet is a bioregional approach, one that connects the sea with the land, and both with the people, culture, food, architecture, language, traditions, music, lifestyle, and stories that emerged from that ancient marriage.

That missing link is the activation of the bioregional mind within stakeholders acting in a specific territory. When farmers, fishers, educators and activists learn to see their home as a living system, their decades of hard work suddenly become exponentially more powerful and efficient. Regeneration stops being a collection of isolated projects and becomes a coherent, self-organizing whole.

That is exactly why we are gathering in Tunisia this September. As it was shared in an earlier announcement – Earth Regenerator: Activating the Mediterranean Bioregional Hub in September – with the active support of the Design School for Regenerating Earth, we are calling Earth Regenerators from across the region and the world to help birth the first Mediterranean Bioregional Learning Center.

We actually live inside living systems. The Earth is not a backdrop or a collection of resources; it is a living body, and every bioregion is a distinct organ within that body – with its own climate, watersheds, soils, species, and rhythms. Humans are not separate from these systems any more than the bacteria in our gut are separate from us. Our health, our comfort, our very survival depend entirely on the health of the organs we live within. When a bioregion is sick – when its waters are poisoned, its soils degraded, its cultures eroded – we are sick too. Regeneration is not altruism. It is self-care at the scale of place.

The Mediterranean is ready to remember what it truly is: one living system, awake to itself.