In these times of turbulent change, we cannot depend upon the stability of human systems. The boundaries through which most of them were created are fickle and unfit for the complex challenges we must face today.
For example, there are political lines drawn across bodies of water that divide nation states. The Great Lakes don’t care where the United States ends or Canada begins. Only human institutions do that. Thematic categories break apart holistic realities into narrow policy domains. Reality doesn’t break health down into psychology, medicine, or water quality. That is something human institutions do.
What if we let our human systems be organized by something more robust? Think about how rivers bring life into a landscape. Nutrients flow from higher peaks into wide valleys. Soils take root with many diverse plants and forests grow near these life-giving waters. Humans can re-imagine our social systems as the ecological realities that they always were — even though most of us were never taught to see the world in this way.
In the Design School for Regenerating Earth, we are preparing for a learning journey that begins in March called How to Organize Your Bioregion that is gathering people from all over the world. The deeper invitation is to let the land organize us.
How the United States is Organized as Groundwater Systems
When we ask a question like What Will It Take to Regenerate the Ogallala Aquifer? it becomes necessary to look at continents in a different way. The United States is organized around political boundaries for states like Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. But when we look at it in the form of groundwater systems, we see that the real life-giving capacities are in the Ogallala Aquifer that supports life in the High Plains.
The same can be seen when we ask how to organize the coastal regions of Western Europe. Rather than seeing countries like Belgium, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands, we can see that there are rivers that flow off the continent into the North Sea — and that historical cultural patterns have always conformed in one way or another to these life-giving waters.
I could give many examples like this. All of them will point to the profound truth that the Earth has already organized herself into the living systems of watersheds, ecosystems, and the holistic landscapes through which they function. What if we humans were to organize ourselves in this way too?
You are invited to join us on this learning journey. Find your way into the natural organizing patterns of life in the place where you live. Consider how financial flows can move into bioregional funding ecosystems — like how we are cultivating relationships in the Earth Regeneration Fund right now. Ask yourself if you believe more in the political functions of dying empires or in the life-giving realities of Earth Systems.
When you are ready to Live into the Story of Bioregional Earth, you will see that humans have always organized our cultural patterns within living landscapes. Any time we failed to do this, our cultures quickly collapsed and went away. The 21st Century is no different in this respect.
Land is already organized by life. Let it become true once more that humans organize in this way too.
