Curating Content To Support Learning About Humanity's Transition

This content was posted on  27 Mar 23  by   Joe Brewer  on  Medium
Weaving the Bioregions of Earth

The living systems of Earth are already interwoven. This simple truth should have profound consequences for how we as humans organize ourselves across the landscapes of our precious home planet. Yet if you look at most maps created by humans, you will notice how frequently we project our own delusions of separation on the world around us.

Political maps exemplify what I am talking about. The one you see below has carved the Earth up into the spoils of domination and war among human factions. Why is one half of Lake Ontario in Canada and the other in the United States? How is it that headwaters of the Amazon flow from Colombia and Ecuador into Brazil? What does it mean for the Colorado River to cross state lines and then flow into the ocean through Mexico after leaving the colonial power to its north?

A world map comprised of profound delusions

These are not idle questions. Humanity has destablized the Earth’s self-regulating processes to such an extent that we have now crossed seven of the nine planetary boundaries that define a “safe operating range” for our species. This happened in large part because the human cultures who believe we are separate from the rest of nature have lived out this false narrative almost to its completion — which can end in nothing other than collapse and ruin.

Those of us who seek to regenerate the Earth will want to find our way into the real connections that exist among living systems for our planet. We can organize ourselves into “biological regions” called bioregions and weave these connections into new harmonies. This is what our indigenous ancestors did before many of them were conquered by colonizer cultures. It is what our indigenous brothers and sisters still do today in places where they retain the sovereignty to do so.

You can join one of these efforts called the Design School for Regenerating Earth to help organize humanity into a planetary network of bioregions. The timeline at the top of this article captures how we are already weaving among neighboring landscapes in the Great Lakes, Colorado Basin, and Salish Sea across North America while also engaging in territorial-scale regenerative work in Barichara, Colombia.

A more realistic map showing land types as “ecological zones”

Imagine if we took maps like this one to help organize ourselves. Each color represents a combination of soil types, local climate, and biodiversity for a specific ecological zone. It should be natural to recognize that cultural diversity in human societies should co-evolve with these ecological regions. Said another way, we as humans can organize ourselves around the local ecology of each place and in doing so have a chance of becoming sustainable.

Note how different this is from techno-fixes like wind turbines and batteries for electric cars. What I am describing is the wholesale re-imagination of humanity as living tapestries within landscapes themselves. This is how indigenous cultures experience reality and it is the expression for more than 99% of human history when all of our ancestors were indigenous.

At the Design School for Regenerating Earth, we are weaving a tapestry of bioregions. It is the most difficult work we have ever undertaken. In the next few decades, humanity needs to learn how to reorganize itself around the bioregions of the world. We need to do so as many critical tipping points continue to be crossed. And we need to heal ourselves of many intergenerational traumas to cooperate at this scale.

I invite you to join us.

Onward, fellow humans.