I think as do, activists, scholars, writers, leaders, farmers, educators, people whose work informs permaculture and sparks the imagination of what a post-COVID climate-resilient social future could look like. Their ideas and projects help us to make sense in this changing world to composite and digest the ideas and to nurture the fertile ground for new ideas, connections, and actions.
Together will open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking community action, earth, repair, eco-literacy, and much more.
Download this list of 10 of Morag’s favourite books.
Morag’s 4 part introduction to permaculture video series.
I can’t wait to share these conversations with you over the last three decades of personally making sense of the multiple crises we face. I always returned to the practical and positive world of permaculture with its ethics of earth care, people care, and fair share. I’ve seen firsthand how adaptable and responsive it can be in all contexts from urban to rural, from refugee camps to suburbs. It helps people make sense of what’s happening around them and to learn accessible design tools, shape their habitat positively, and contribute to cultural and ecological regeneration.
This is why I’ve created the permaculture educators program to help thousands of people to become permaculture teachers everywhere through an interactive online jewel certificate of permaculture design and teaching. We sponsor global PERMA youth programs. Women’s self-help groups in the global South and teens in refugee camps. This podcast is sponsored by the permaculture education Institute and our permaculture educators program. If you’d like to find more about permaculture, I’ve created a four-part permaculture video series to explain what permaculture is and also how you can make it your life record as well as your way of life.
We’d love to invite you to join our wonderfully inspiring and supportive global learning community. So I welcome you to share each of these conversations, and I’d also like to suggest you create a local conversation circle to explore the ideas shared in each show and discuss together how this makes sense in your local community and environment. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I meet and speak with you today.
The Gubbi Gubbi people and pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging. It’s my great pleasure to welcome Joe Brewer to the show. I talked with him just the other day from his home in Costa Rica. Joe described himself as a culture designer in service of humanity and the planet. Joe and I have known each other for some time now, but this is actually the first time that we met. We both live permaculture lives and working regenerative work globally. I just love the chance to explore so many ideas with him about how to live regenerative life, how change happens, and what are the seeds of regenerative culture. He’s recently published a book, the design pathways for regenerative earth, and he’s actually one of the most interesting thinkers of my generation. And I was delighted to be able to spend this time talking with him
Joe describes his work as being in service to humanity and the planet. Joe created the Center for Applied Cultural Evolution and the Design Institute for Regenerating Earth which holds “the vision to see entire communities gain the ability to guide their own evolutionary processes to become more healthy and resilient in our rapidly changing world.”
WATCH EPISODE 33 WITH JOE AND MORAG HERE
Joe created the Center for Applied Cultural Evolution and the Design Institute for Regenerating Earth which holds “the vision to see entire communities gain the ability to guide their own evolutionary processes to become more healthy and resilient in our rapidly changing world.”
His book The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth is available through the gift economy. You can access it free via this link, and also offer a gift via his patreon account. You can also join the Earth Regenerators study group that meets weekly to explore how we might collaborate to regenerate the Earth.
Learn more about Joe’s work here more by perusing these articles:
- Culture Design Labs — Evolving the Future
- A Global Network of Culture Design Labs
- Tools for Culture Design — Toward A Science of Social Change?
- Cultural Evolution in the Anthropocene
Read the full transcript here.
Morag Gamble:
Welcome to the Sense-making in a Changing World Podcast, where we explore the kind of thinking we need to navigate a positive way forward. I’m your host Morag Gamble.. Permaculture Educator, and Global Ambassador, Filmmaker, Eco villager, Food Forester, Mother, Practivist and all-around lover of thinking, communicating and acting regeneratively. For a long time it’s been clear to me that to shift trajectory to a thriving one planet way of life we first need to shift our thinking, the way we perceive ourselves in relation to nature, self, and community is the core. So this is true now more than ever. And even the way change is changing, is changing. Unprecedented changes are happening all around us at a rapid pace. So how do we make sense of this? To know which way to turn, to know what action to focus on? So our efforts are worthwhile and nourishing and are working towards resilience, and reconnection. What better way to make sense than to join together with others in open generative conversation.
In this podcast, I’ll share conversations with my friends and colleagues, people who inspire and challenge me in their ways of thinking, connecting and acting. These wonderful people are thinkers, doers, activists, scholars, writers, leaders, farmers, educators, people whose work informs permaculture and spark the imagination of what a post-COVID, climate-resilient, socially just future could look like. Their ideas and projects help us to make sense in this changing world to compost and digest the ideas and to nurture the fertile ground for new ideas, connections and actions. Together we’ll open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking community action, earth repair, eco-literacy, and much more. I can’t wait to share these conversations with you.
Over the last three decades of personally making sense of the multiple crises we face I always returned to the practical and positive world of permaculture with its ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. I’ve seen firsthand how adaptable and responsive it can be in all contexts from urban to rural, from refugee camps to suburbs. It helps people make sense of what’s happening around them and to learn accessible design tools, to shape their habitat positively and to contribute to cultural and ecological regeneration. This is why I’ve created the Permaculture Educators Program to help thousands of people to become permaculture teachers everywhere through an interactive online dual certificate of permaculture design and teaching. We sponsor global Permayouth programs, women’s self help groups in the global South and teens in refugee camps. So anyway, this podcast is sponsored by the Permaculture Education Institute and our Permaculture Educators Program. If you’d like to find more about permaculture, I’ve created a four-part permaculture video series to explain what permaculture is and also how you can make it your livelihood as well as your way of life. We’d love to invite you to join a wonderfully inspiring, friendly and supportive global learning community. So I welcome you to share each of these conversations, and I’d also like to suggest you create a local conversation circle to explore the ideas shared in each show and discuss together how this makes sense in your local community and environment. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I meet and speak with you today. The Gubbi Gubbi people and pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging.
It’s my great pleasure to welcome Joe Brewer to the show. I talked with him just the other day from his home in Costa Rica. Joe describe himself as a culture designer in service of humanity and the planet. Joe and I have known each other for some time now, but this is actually the first time that we met. We both live permaculture lives and working regenerative work ,globally. I just loved the chance to explore so many ideas with him about how to live regeneratively, how change happens and what are the seeds of regenerative culture. He’s recently published a book, The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth and he’s, he’s actually one of the most interesting thinkers of my generation. And I was delighted to be able to spend this time talking with him. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Hi everyone. And welcome to the Sense-making in the Changing World show. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here talking with Joe Brewer today. Joe, and I’ve been in kind of similar circles for a long time, but this is actually the first time that we’ve chatted. And I’m really looking forward to diving into a whole lot of different concepts and ideas with you. I love your work. I love how you share the ideas of your book. And I wanted to start with asking you about something I read in an article that you wrote, which was at the same time that the climate strikes were happening. And you said something along the lines I’m paraphrasing here that stopped going to school, drop out or drop into regeneration, learn permaculture and other things like biracialism and do something radical. Now, the reason I’m picking up on this particular thread is because that’s exactly what my 11 and 13-year-olds did. They just didn’t see the point of school after that whole.. And they dropped out. So just to kind of add another little segment into that before I hand over to you was another thing that you have written about in your book, or it’s sort of one of the threads of questioning that you explore, which is ‘are humans bad for the planet?. And so this is the other kind of side of why my 11 year old son kind of quit because he’s going really.. Humans are just, what are the point of humans on this planet? We’re just destroying and messing everything up. You know, what is the point? What are we learning all that stuff for and what are we supposed to do? And so I just wanted both sides of that. If there’s some way you could put that in the perspective from where you were coming from, when you said that it would be a fantastic place to start.
Joe Brewer:
Oh, well, I want to talk to your children. So let me answer it as though I’m speaking to them. Because I have a four-year-old daughter and so much of what we do as a family is built around how we think. We should not be preparing our children, it’s not necessarily knowing what we should do we’re trying to figure that out, but what we should not do. And one thing we should not do is pretend that it is extremely bizarre, unprecedented and four and a half billion years history of the earth this moment is what we should treat as normal. That’s just so far from any empirical trend you care to look at, that goes far enough back in time. And so this idea that people should basically do job training, which is what now since roughly the 1990s, there has been.. The economic ideology of neo-liberalism has taken over so much of universities. That it’s really, I mean, I graduated high school in 1995. And even then I was so odd for going to college because I wanted to learn. When almost everyone was going to get a better paying job. And that was 25 years ago. So this idea that we should go to school as if that’s the place to learn is very historically bizarre. And I spent nine years in the university, I’m a total academic nerd. I loved it. I flourished in it. So I get it. You know, I really get it. But at the same time, when I look back at where I learned fast it was when I bent, broke or ignored the rules of the university. Like I invented my own undergraduate degree and interdisciplinary studies. I convince the Dean of the college to let me have extra independent study credits. I convinced professors to join a committee to let me study what I wanted, that wasn’t offered, you know, like I was breaking the rules. So I wouldn’t say go to a place where the rules are broken, the rules they’re using don’t work. And that’s where you’re going to learn because that’s not what I did. I just took advantage of having an academic scholarship, to read books in the, and sit in classes with really knowledgeable people and things like that. And in this time where really the future looks absolutely abysmal in so many ways to continue on a path that stays within the world that creates that terrible future. It’s just the wrong thing to do. It’s like not a good idea at all. And when I started looking back into other areas of my own life and into sort of IP anthropology and archeology of human history, the things that resonated most with were authentic human experiences like my wife and I do bike touring. And when we’re out in the weather and the landscapes experiencing something on roughly a human scale, I mean the go goes a little fast, definitely not inhuman scale. I find that there’s so much to learn that, we only learn by paying attention to the world. And I had to go to college sort of to get away from my dysfunctional cultural history, which gets a little bit at your second question to start finding the part of human culture that I really just deeply love. And one of the things that I think has made this so powerful for me is that I studied cognitive linguistic and I worked with this famous cognitive scientist, George Lakoff. And if you wanted to summarize his work in like one sentence, it would basically be the kinds of minds we have, depending on the kinds of bodies we have, the kinds of environments we find ourselves in, including the social environments. And so we create our realities through those actions and we can choose which stories to live, including absolutely delusional stories that have no basis in reality. And we can live in nightmares and we can live in false, naive, hopeful dreams. But when I started realizing what permaculture was and that I’d already been practicing it, the idea that you just observe and be present and then learn how to care for and love the context that you’re in and then become responsible for it, like the basic ethic of permaculture, and then all the beautiful things you do with it, like, Oh, well, mostly not doing that in the classroom. I was doing that when I was taking what I learned in the classroom and took it into the world. And so that’s.. Oh I’ll stop there for a moment.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. Look, I thank you. Because I love what you were saying there about, you know, we choose the stories we love. And I also like the way you described permaculture there too. And I guess perhaps this is, you know, I wanted to ask you too, what brought you to.. You’re now in Colombia? Is that right?
Joe Brewer:
Yes. yes.
Morag Gamble:
So what brought you to Colombia and where are you in and what was a bit of your pathway of getting there? Just to kind of give us a sense of your, I guess, where I’m trying to think with this is that you were in the academic world and you were studying at atmospheric science, and then you moved into, you said cognitive linguistics, and now you’re living in Colombia. What was a little bit of the arc of that and how you landed there and the reason why you’re there?
Joe Brewer:
Well, I’ll give a couple of moments. One of them was 2003. In 2003 I was in a graduate program in atmospheric science at the University of Illinois in Champaign, which is it’s amazing university with very powerful supercomputer and lots of great professors and stuff. And I would look out the window of my office and see all of the students going about their lives like everything was normal, except that the United States had invaded Iraq, false pretenses, and our country was quote unquote at war. So I would look outside and see no [inaudible] whatsoever people going about their normal lives and immediately connected this with climate change, which is that we have a world of perception of the economy as normal. And it’s working just fine in our tiny little cultural bubbles. And we do not have the perception to experience the world as it really is including that our wealth and village comes from the rape and pillage of the planet and creation of poverty. And a lot of things, I was just starting to learn about that. So there’s recognition that the world was in a bad place in part because humans could perceive a false reality and that this was the making of our minds and our ways our bodies experience the world. That was a key moment. And when I shifted from atmospheric science to cognitive science, it was because what I was actually studying was complexity. I went into atmospheric science because it was a place to study how patterns form and how patterns form in very complex situations. I was studying clouds and clouds are very complex things. And a lot of little interactions that create these emergent patterns. And I was applying what I was learning to, to human behavior and society. And that took me on this road of how does the human mind create this ability to not see a climate change? How could those students on the campus not see we were at war? And that’s how I ended up eventually working with George Lakoff and doing cognitive linguistics and applying it to politics and to social movements. And years later realizing that what I was actually doing was studying cultural evolution. How do living systems evolve and what is so distinctive and interesting about human culture and human culture changes. And this gets me closer to how we ended up in Colombia because I spent more than 10 years teaching people about the science of the human mind and the scientific knowledge that informs how social change occurs. But I had this planetary science background. So I was always thinking about the earth and very aware of the earth as a presence in all of it. And one of the things that I came to discover was that there is a long history of human cultures that are not the way this human culture is that I grew up in. And there’s even an acronym flip from a 2010 psychology paper, weird, which was the discovery that almost all psychological research is bias because they study people from weird cultures – Western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic, translation – college students at Western universities. No sustainable cultures in history that meet those criteria, they don’t exist. All sustainable cultures have been indigenous. And as I came to realize there was this huge diversity of human cultures that I always felt this strange connection with. Like I wanted to be part of them. I used to be part of them. I forgotten how. And I didn’t know how to get back. Just turns out in the human evolution story is historically correct. All of us are descendants of hunter-gatherer peoples who either were conquered or were the conquerors, but to be the conquerors, we were probably conquered. And so our path to Colombia involve a lot of steps in between, but when our daughter was born in January of 2017. We just couldn’t take halfway changes anymore. Got rid of our car years ago, only got around by bike, did work that was related to environmental issues, but I was still working with social movements, trying to address global poverty. And my wife was working for a university on waste diversion and recycling and urban sustainability realizing that all faith-based because there’s zero evidence of sustainable cities in human history. So it’s just based on faith that they can be made sustainable. And when we looked at our daughter knowing full well like we chose to have a child, we debated it for years, we’re talking about possible human population crash and all kinds of things. Should we do this? So I always say as we had a baby with eyes wide open and that made us very responsible to have every moment of our decisions after she was born, be something we could look her in the eye years from now, even if terrible things are unfolding and say, look, we knew, and we still did this. And one piece of that was we teach to believe in the future of humanity and to the quote from Nassim Taleb, who is kind of a narcissist and a bit of a jerk, but he’s also really smart guy. He observed that people who make investments in the stock market do a lot better if they use their own money than if they invest someone else’s money. So as this phrase, people need to have skin in the game. Well, we literally have skin in the game, the skin around the body of our child and the skin in the game, as we invested in the future of humanity, because our daughter is going to be 33 years old in 2050, if she lives that long, that’s where she’ll be. So we put ourselves into the necessity of living into a human culture that has a future for our child. So we made plans step-by-step to leave Seattle where we were living at the time to Eugene, Oregon, that was less expensive and more family oriented to Costa Rica living Off-grid at a like eco hotel permaculture project, regenerative agriculture project and found it wasn’t really the right place to raise a child. And it was just complicated in a lot of ways, but traveled a lot in Costa Rica at the time. And that was when I really started diving into regenerative economics at the large scale, I had a previous history that enabled me to do that fairly quickly. I wasn’t starting from scratch. And I worked with John Fullerton in the capital Institute and Stuart Cowan for those who know him, a wonderful regenerative finance expert and biomimicry expert for economies. And we started exploring how to create regenerative bioregional scale economies. And just a little side note, I was born in the Ozarks in Missouri and the first international bioregional Congress in human history was a year after I was born, 10 miles from where I was born, just outside of Springfield, Missouri, which has a very strong bioregional craft culture, artisans of many kinds. And I wanted to get away from that place my entire childhood. So to have the irony that I grew up in the hot bed of bioregionalism, having no idea what it was until decades later. The humor is not lost.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. There’s a lot of things that I wanted to pick up on in what you just said then, but maybe start with that last comment around bioregional economics. So can you kind of describe what a functioning bioregional economy looks like and perhaps how, how we can start to really move towards that at a pace that we need to be moving towards that.
Joe Brewer:
The first thing is that bioregion is a term that doesn’t just apply to the humans. I like to use the example of starfish. Starfish live in an intertidal zone and their bioregion or the biological region is the geography of place that supports their entire life system, which for them is the intertidal zone and the tide pools. But if they looked at the Roosevelt elk of the Pacific Northwest and North America, you’re at the end of the bioregion of these coastal forests and mountains or into the mountain ranges of the continental interior. And you would look at their entire life system and say, well, what do they need to survive? And you’d be able to say, what was their niche? What is their population’s needs? What are the individual’s needs? And so on map that out. And most people would just say this is ecology. So it’s interesting when we apply this concept to humans is that a human bioregion includes the structure of culture. So we can do things like engage in regional trade. So it changes what a bioregion is for humans. And it also starts to show us what our regenerative bioregional economy is. And that is a subsistence economy. An economy that enables people to just survive and live. Obviously you can do better than that, but at a minimum, they need to have subsistence in a place in a way that is sustainable for the long-term. And so it can look at historical human patterns of Hunter gatherers that move with the seasons, and maybe they follow the migration of animals that they hunt, then that entire geography and everything about their culture that enables them to live that way. Is there a bioregion? And what’s interesting is most bioregions are defined around watersheds, islands, coastal zones, or estuaries that specific mountain range specific floodplain, which may be a little different than the watershed, depending on the trade network. Like what are we are in Colombia? There are three major rivers and three mountain ranges that together and have this plateau in the center. And the entire area is about 500,000 hectares. And there is an indigenous culture called Guane that lived here for well, as the Guane people may be only a few hundred years, but ancestrally there’ve been humans here for more than 13,000 years. And the geography of the mountains and water that the canyons and the rivers creates an extended trade network that is limited by the geography of the structures. [inaudible] You can start to design the conditions of an economy. You can ask yourself, what is the ecological history of this place, and how did humans live here? What was their ancestral range? If they had a trade network or a Federation of tribes interacted, what did that look like? How much did they have relative autonomy? Like maybe 90% of their economy is local and they traded it just for information and shiny things like seashells, when they didn’t live close enough to the ocean and what you start to see as a fairly clear cultural boundary that is also biologically, geologically AND ecologically constrained. So this is the natural organizing pattern of human economies. Actually all economies of all biological organisms, but particularly for humans we need to understand this.
Morag Gamble:
It’s interesting to look too at the map of Australia or what is called Australia. When you look at the indigenous nation, the regions, and then you overlay that with by regions and it’s pretty much this perfect fit and there’s hundreds across Australia. And so that idea of using that as a map for regenerating human culture in this country is what we’re working on now. I’m actually going pretty much straight from our conversation to a meeting that’s indigenous led conversation of people around Australia, looking at a regenerative way forward. And it’s such a different way of perceiving where we are and where we’ve got to go. which kind of leads me to another question that I had for you too, which is based around this idea of being indigenous. As you said that we’re all indigenous. Can you kind of unpack that a bit? Cause sometimes I get in to trouble, trying to explain what I mean by that. And I would love to hear someone else share that because you know, you get into these conflicts around, well, no, you’re the colonizers, you’re not the indigenous. And, you know, particularly in a place like Australia, it can be quite a fraught concept.
Joe Brewer:
Well, one place to maybe start is going back to the cognitive linguistics piece, which is colonization happens to our minds. And so we can think of it this way, that the life form that colonized humans to make us colonizers was [**inaudible**]. It was information patterns and a lot of them are connected to the neolithic revolution, the emergence of agriculture, the need to have slave labor connected with agriculture, Imperial models of conquest and domination for empires and civilizations. And you sort of just come forward in time and it becomes pretty complex. But what’s interesting is you can have a person within one of those empires or civilizations who doesn’t have that mindset because they’re still connected to their ancestry. And so, you know, we could think of like some of the gypsy cultures of Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, or look at some of the like here in Colombia, there are a lot of ways that people practice indigenous rituals with tobacco, with the Coca leaf or other, such things. And they’ve held on to part of the indigenous culture, even though it’s blended. And what we can see is when they are able to connect to landscapes in a sacred and meaningful way with an ancestral history, they’re behaving as though they’re indigenous. And when they feel like they’re an owner of land, separate from it, dominating and extracting from it, they’re behaving like a colonizer. Doesn’t matter, their blood ancestry to the place. It’s the cultural orientation of those relationships. And my favorite diagnostic for this is an Algonquin term from the Algonquin people of the new England areas of North America. And they have a term that they call wetiko. There are other tribes like the Cherokee that call it wendigo, and there are a couple of different names, but they’re really talking about the same thing. And it comes from the basic human psychology, the ability to imagine something that’s separate, that’s not separate. Like imagining your body separate from your mind or that men separate from women. Well, that humans are separate from nature. You pick your version. And Wetiko is the illusion of separation that enables the mindless consumption and destruction of life, pathology the disease, but also in their spiritual tradition, it’s a monster. It’s like a zombie. And in particularly because there are, you know, the Northern part of North America, it’s a mindless zombie that engages in cannibalism that comes out of the winter, the dark winter from the North. And it’s an emaciated human form that has its heart and ice. So it’s no longer empathy or compassion and it mindlessly consumes and destroys all life. And when they see a human person who represents this as an embodiment of it, like Christopher Columbus as an example, they called him a big Wetiko. Cause he was the embodiment of Wetiko. I find this a very helpful diagnostic because you can be within a colonizer culture and not be Wetiko. And when you do that, when you’re not being Wetiko, you’re being indigenous, or at least you’re moving toward, or you’re seeking to be indigenous. You may not remember your ancestry. You may not know the land you’re from and so on a whole bunch of things. But the reason this is really important now to disconnect being indigenous from ancestral indigenous is because we’re an unprecedented moment in time and what we need as indigenous people of the future. And because human cultures are adapted to their environments and environments are changing so quickly, we can’t simply trust that ancestral cultures are adapted to these changing environments. So we need to actively create cultures that are trying to be indigenous and this changing context. And it may not be like the indigenous of the past. So we might use Western science for part of it, just as an example. But do you [**inaudible] in an indigenous way? I think there’s a lot to learn from indigineous, but you know, it’s, it’s very muddy, very messy,
Morag Gamble:
Thank you so much for explaining it in that way. And I think it also encourages to the shift from this idea that culture is a fixed thing. You know it’s constantly shifting and it’s always sort of pigeonhole different ways of being it’s like when you started out saying, what we see is now is what we see is as normal. It is the way of life, but it is just such a short period of time in all of human history and traditional cultures in all different places have shifted and changed over time. So I wanted to maybe then jump to where you were, where you were heading to and saying, actually we need to imagine a different way forward. We need to design new pathways forward. So you describe yourself as a cultural designer. So there’s sort of two parts of this question. Like what, I mean, you’ve talked a bit about it, but if there’s some way that you could describe what that world is that you’re imagining, and it’s not one world either it’s multiple worlds, I would imagine too, but also linking in there to where are some of those blocks? So you were talking before about when you saw, you know, the Iraq war was just starting and people were walking around with blinkers on, and we still see that now today with everything that happens, you know, all the multiple crisis that we’ve been facing over these last, you know, year or so, even just things seem to be going on like normal now we’ve kind of, uh, climatized to those sort of bits of news. And, you know, people are back out onto them onto the streets and just continuing on as though nothing’s really changed and we’re back into, we sort of snap back to normal. So there’s this big shift that needs to happen in our way of thinking and in our way of being. So what is a cultural designer? How and how can we all become more like cultural designers in our own places?
Joe Brewer:
Well, I really liked the way that David Sloan Wilson describes this. And he is a evolutionary biologist in New York and he says, we need to become wise managers of our own evolutionary process. And he’s very careful with every word to be in an evolutionary process he really speaking about Darwinian evolution, which is that there is a dynamic fitness that is related to the kind of environment an organism is in and what it means to thrive in that environment. And because every population has variety of different expressions of physical traits and behavioral traits, some of them are better suited than others to a particular moment in an environment. And there tends to be a statistical pattern that over time, the things that are more fit tend to propagate things that are less fit, tend to die off. And so that’s like the shorthand of the evolutionary process. So we’re in this evolutionary process, which is that with lots of more details. And if we’re going to be managers of the evolutionary process, first thing is we need to understand that that’s what we’re in. We’re in an evolutionary process, but then we know that evolutionary processes are complex adaptive systems. So we don’t manage them as though they’re other kinds of systems. We have to manage them as complex adaptive systems, which means we don’t have control, it’s improvisational , it’s creative. If there is control, it’s limited. When there is insight it’s limited. And so what we need to do is develop understandings of system logic, system behavior, dynamic system attractors, phase transitions, instabilities, and other such things. And then we need to know how to work with them. And that’s how we can manage an evolutionary process. [**inaudible] is a good facilitator, can hold a conversation and work with what comes up, but they can’t predict what’s going to come up. And so that’s an example of managing an evolutionary processes to facilitate a dialogue. Now, to be a wise manager means we need to understand how our personal values and our ideology and our worldview relate to the future of the evolutionary process and wisdom and it’s deep kind of practical sense is anything that relates to wellbeing and flourishing of living systems. And you can define that in lots of particular ways, but if we’re thinking about the entire biosphere of this of the earth is a three and a half billion year living process, that we’re a part of. Then the highest form of wisdom is to serve the future evolution of the biosphere of the earth at the planetary scale. And so this is how we can get into design. We’re designing for the living system of the entire planet, but then as nested scales, it comes down to local and we do this by understanding how to manage complexity and how to be part of a complex system. And we need to understand what the evolutionary processes are and what this relates to is that this there’s only one way that ends up falling out of this and thank goodness that Dana Meadows named this in 1983. So I don’t have to be that the white guy in the future who’s doing it. She was a pretty smart lady and she gathered, it was a lot of really smart people. And what they found was, in this very mistitled paper called a brief history of the Balaton group and the Balaton group was the think tank that formed out of the study was they said after 10 years of meeting at lots of universities and talking about this with really smart people, we need to create local living economies organized around their territories. And each one is to have its own bioregional learning center. Turns out that’s the way. They were right. And so the way we design then this is what you said, we look at ancestral humans, human patterns, the biogeography of place. And then we design for the the dynamic living pattern of living systems at that scale. And what we find is that does not work unless we network up to larger scales, because let’s say that you do this really well in your bioregion. And then the next bioregion over there are fundamentalists militants with a dictator and they come and kill you and steal all of your stuff. So it turns out that doesn’t work. The only way that works is to network this across entire continents and the entire planet. And this is the solution. It’s actually quite simple to state doing it as a different story. And so the design of this becomes partly to know that the scale of analysis, which is the scale of these bioregional territory and then the networks of them. Now we create collaboration across. And what’s beautiful about this scale is that as a relatively autonomous organizing, you know, it’s like a super organism, not exactly it doesn’t quite meet all the criteria. [**inaudible**] then it would be close. It’d be a good first approximation to think with. And so you start to see things like, well, how do you manage a watershed? What is the carrying capacity of your bioregion, which Peter was asking this question back in the seventies and no one had good answers back then. I think we have much better answers now because we have satellite data of net primary production and embodied carbon and amount of available rainfall and how it’s connected to a larger. Like we actually know a lot about the carrying capacity. Unfortunately, we over the carrying capacity decades ago. [**Inaudible] is the low number of [**Inaudible] levels. And this is a predicament, not a problem. What it means is we have to design for these regenerative economies as that collapsed process runs its course. I think this is a really critical thing because a lot of people are afraid of collapse, but they don’t realize that collapse and breakdown is part of emergence. It’s actually essential we understand how it works to design as part of the process. So that’s decomposition, composting and so on.
Morag Gamble:
So collapse is something you talk a lot about. And it’s what you just said is acknowledging that that’s actually part. A necessary part of the process. So how would you describe what it is that we need to do to people who kind of want to take this step forward, but still feel apprehensive because you know, it’s comfortable where they are. They know what’s happening. They know they need to step over there, but just don’t quite have the confidence possibly to make that transition. How would you speak to someone like that to encourage them to take a step across?
Joe Brewer:
I think there are two big pieces that are really important to this. One is that most don’t have social support that make it clear what the steps should be. So we just don’t know what we should do. And I think that’s very common. So to help build these like social bridges of support groups and friends who can show us better ways and help us take simple steps without taking big, risky steps, it’s going to be very important. So that’s where like ecosystem restoration camps, visiting a permaculture project, participating in a community garden or things like this that can be small steps. But in order to do that, there’s other piece, which is we have to let ourselves feel our grief, we have to stop being numb to it. And this is important for a very practical reason. You know, like earlier I named, or I described permaculture as a way of observing and engaging with a context and then acting with care toward it. It’s hard to act with care when you love something and then you watch it being destroyed because that hurts you. It hurts, you feel it, it hurts to stay connected, but it turns out the way we regenerate landscapes is by feeling the life in the landscapes, which means in most cases we feel the death in the landscapes because we begin by feeling what is being destroyed, that we a love. And so the beginning of the process of change is to embrace the grief so that we can become sensitive enough to feel the patterns of life that are still present and work with them. But most of us are so overstimulated and distracted and numb and in pain that we’re not able to feel this much. Embracing grief is sort of paradoxically the first step. We regenerate our ability to feel and to love so that we can attune ourselves to the living systems that we work with.
Morag Gamble:
I think that’s just such a big piece of this, isn’t it? With all of the knowledge that we have, the scientific knowledge in all of this system, it comes back down to that, that deep connection and well, the heart connection and feeling the love. Because like you say, until you love something that deeply and feel so drawn to carry about that you’re not going to be motivated to shift. I mean, I think this is this when you feel broken up about it, when you know. I don’t know if I’d cried so much when the climate rallies were happening and all of that information was just being poured out. And I spent my days researching more and more. I’d been doing this work for decades, but I just decided to just throw myself deeply into exploring collapse. Whereas I’ve been focusing so much on, you know, creating permaculture systems and community gardens and ecovillages, and on that positive side. But I hadn’t, I kind of almost desensitized myself to this collapse that’s happening around because it’s too painful, but I dived into it. I don’t think I’d cried so much for so long and it, I’m not opening up again to it completely, I think, shifted how I decided to enter into this space as well. And so you’re right. It is, it’s definitely about this, you know, it’s not just what we know and how we can speak and communicate it. It’s how we really humanly connect and then relate. It’s the relationship isn’t it. It’s the qualities of the relationships that we have with our place and with one another and our ability to step out, into being fully present in that.
Joe Brewer:
Yeah. And I think this gets nicely to the question, are humans good or bad because one thing humans can do that is different from other animals and there’s the name homo Ludens instead of homo sapiens. Homo Ludens L-U-D-E-N-S. And there’s actually a book called homo Ludens by an anthropologist. And it translates roughly as the hominid that plays and think of it like theater to enact a play. We enact plays, we play out imagine scenarios. What this gives us, and then think of like the role of the shaman in an indigenous culture is it gives us the ability to take perspectives. Like I can take Ayahuasca and become a plant and then connect with the spirit energy of the Jaguar. And I can learn the Jaguar and I can even go and kill someone or a neighboring village as the Jaguar, which happens sometimes in the amazon. So this deep ability to take perspective is also very important for how to cultivate a sacred relationship of care. And so what’s really beautiful about this as we start to be the earth, knowing the earth, caring for the earth, we have, we take our god-like powers and act as though we’re worthy of being gods, which is how we become humbled by the greatness of creation that we’re apart. And we learned to serve it. Without like messing to it. We sort of in the spirit of gratitude, and this is something that is I remember a really a beautiful story once since coming to Colombia. It’s probably the best knowni ndigenous group in Colombia at the moment is the Kogi people. the Kogi people live in Santa Marta. They sent a message. They called the message little brother in the 1990s speaking to all of us. And so they’re one of the better known within, Colombia. And one of the things I learned about after coming here is that if there is violence or conflict in a village near a Kogi village, so the Kogis are fine. They’re just living their lives peacefully. And they find out about a conflict in a nearby village. They begin a ritual. Everyone in their village begins a ritual of purifying their minds so that they don’t have things that might be coveted or desired by someone else. They don’t have insecurity in themselves. They come back to a peaceful place in themselves where they don’t feel like they need anything. And they do this to ward off the temptation of the outside world’s coming to attack them and their practice to do this is to practice gratitude. And it’s really unfortunate that the Spanish word that’s used for this as pagamento which translates into English as payment. Like they’re making payments. Cause really it’s better to call them gift offerings and their gifts of gratitude. What they do is go back and connect with the mother earth and they offer gifts of gratitude. And in doing this, they feel wholesome and complete. And without need, they feel like their needs are taken care of. And this creates a mindset and a real lived expression of peace. They do it by expressing gratitude to what gives them life.
Morag Gamble:
That’s beautiful. And you know, this entering into this way of being in gratitude, but in a gift economy as well. Like I’m just thinking about shifting from where we are now into being in a community in a bioregional context where much of our interactions can be from that place of gifting what we have in our skills is a part of this. I’d like to kind of circle back around to where we were with the youth before because one of the programs that I’m working with a lot is the PERMAyouth and this is a youth led group who are kind of connecting other young people who are exploring. They’re exploring The Systems view of life with Fritjof Capra. And he comes in and he mentors them. He’s, we’re working with Nora Bateson and warm data concepts. And so they’re all becoming sort of warm data hosts and working with them with permaculture. We have groups that are sort of forming up around the world for refugee settlements, to this. And I would love if you would come and speak with the PERMAyouth, they have these monthly festivals. But beyond that permanent youth group itself, if you were to speak to a whole full of teenagers, what would you say to them?
Joe Brewer:
Hmm. I think I’d say to them that I would just say something true. So they’d know that I’m not full of sht. I’d start by saying, the adults are being children and there really aren’t an adult? The world of adults is not full of adults. And we need a world with adults and with elders. And if we’re going to have a world with adults in with elders, then when we need the youth to be adults. And one way that this would be expressed that they could do is to learn how to be humans that are worthy of continuing to exist as part of the earth. I would just say you know, if you are unable to love yourself enough to give yourself to the source of all life that we know in the universe, because we only know of life on this planet at this point in time. If we don’t love ourselves enough to let ourselves have that, then we don’t deserve it. So how can we be worthy of it? How can we deserve it? How do we become responsible enough to serve it and to receive it? And I’ve been really holding the [**inaudible] for a couple of years now on what it means to give a gift and to receive a gift. And what I’ve learned, or one thing I’ve learned is that a gift cannot be given unless it is invited. And a gift cannot be received unless there’s gratitude. And I’m the only one that had this insight. It’s just that I realized that some very practical terms. So I use a practical example. I started this study group earth regenerators because I was writing a book I’ve avoided writing a book for a long time. And finally, one day in mid December of 2019, I’m like, I’m going to write a book. And two weeks later, 60 days later, I’ve written like 14 of the chapters. It’s just like a chapter a day is like, I’ve been putting off writing this so long. It’s like wrote the first half of the book in two weeks. Like, what the? I don’t want to wait a year to publish it. I don’t even have a publisher. I don’t want to feel like I should make money off of it and be known for it because that’s not.. What I’m writing about is regenerating the earth. And I’m taking everyone else’s knowledge that’s been given to me and just repackaging it. I’m a historian while there might be a couple ideas in there that are mine. It’s hard to tell which ones they are. And almost all of it’s not mine. It’s someone else’s. So I’m just filled with so much gratitude to receive all this knowledge. And so it just felt right to create a study group.. Who would like to have a study group to read the manuscript for my book. And as of right now, there are 2,600 members of the study group, and we’ve done quite a lot. We actually started a bioregional investment platform, raised enough money to buy some land, starting nature reserve, and all kinds of other interesting things that are happening. And it all comes out of giving and receiving gifts. So what I would do is I would give away the book chapters, give away my facilitation of learning and all I would say it was at the bottom of like golden had my two book chapters in it and discussion questions. Now just say this it’s freely given in the spirit of a gift economy. If you’d like to support me, here’s my Patrion and here’s my PayPal. But you’re under in no obligation. I give this in service to the year. Now I can say that as a marketing gimmick, but what I found was people invited me to give it simply because they were seeking to find it. And I was grateful to give it. I was actually, a lot of people felt gratitude to me, but from my perspective, I felt deep gratitude that I had some things to give. That in the midst of this terrible time with all of the knowledge I have about it I had something to give. Which validates and affirms my existence and helps me to feel loved. And that’s painful to be as a sensitive person, dealing with all of these things that are in the world. So that there was this reciprocity and then flash forward about eight months when we started a community regenerators training program, we invited anyone in the network who wanted to facilitate the development of the platform to have a free training in the spirit of the gift economy, with the idea that they would receive the training and join a cohort and exchange for being of service to earth, regeneration, to anyone who’s regenerating the earth. And the first day of our gathering first community zoom call, I presented a sacred contract for earth regeneration. And a small number of people were really uncomfortable with the idea of a contract. And we sort of had a conversation that ended without us basically affirming the agreement that was the invitation for them to join. They were unable to receive the gift I was offering as a group. And I reflected on this for a few days. And I was co-facilitating with a guy, Diego from Italy, talked a lot about what was going on. And what I realized was you can’t have a gift economy without a functioning commons, and you need to create the commonts first. So all we did was we started the pro-social training process, which has as one of its pillars, Elinor Ostrom’s work on the commons and how to build a comments. So what we did was we facilitated for two months, the formation of a community and social bonds, a shared sense of identity and purpose using a set of different techniques. And then we had a commons and only then could everyone engage in a gift economy? They could freely participate in the creation of a work group of their own making, what other people shared their interests. And they would freely give it joyfully and with gratitude back to the earth regenerators community, because they were supported by the cohort, which was a commons. So to see that people could not actually receive the gift without the ability to receive the gift and someone cannot give the gift without the ability to have it received. And the gratitude has felt on both sides only if there was a functioning commons was visible in that process. It was not visible to me before that process.
Morag Gamble:
It’s really interesting. Yeah. A lot of the work that when I first dived into permaculture work was creating a community garden. And at the time it was really about applying what we’ve learned and creating a garden and thinking about, you know, teaching sustainability. But as it went on, it became so much about exactly what you were just saying about. It’s this place where we have a shared sense of belonging connection and things just started to emerge because people came in there they felt deeply connected to that place, too. They were dreaming into this process that was emerging. It was new, no one had ever done this before in this city, it was this kind of novel, playful, creative space where we were imagining where we wanted to be and how we wanted to do it. And we’re all in service to this place, no one was paid. We had no grants, but yet this unfolding happened. And and a healing happened. Do you know some of the best stories that I share about.. I mean, this started over 25 years ago. Some of the best stories I have are around the healing that took place to, you know, the various individuals, but also what was happening on the land and how people’s lives completely shifted from that into different ways of being, different ways of working, different ways of living in community and thinking about land and housing. And we couldn’t have kind of planned and managed that process without first creating that commons. And then that also ripple down, people were looking at that and saying, Oh, we would love to have one of these in our neighborhood, or when we would travel, we would be attracted to places that were, you know, having those. So that network of these commons became what we created, like the Australian city farms and community gardens network, which wasn’t an organization. It was really simply just this thread of connections. But again, this pointing to that as being one of those seeds of regeneration, I think is a really important thing to do because often we overlook that part of it and we get focused on the actions or the doing rather than the kind of the space, the threads of connection that hold us together. And that sense of, Oh yeah the recommoning. I live in an ecovillage. I’ve been here for about 20 years too in the sense that I don’t own this land and there’s no fences. And that we share this land with all the other species that are here, that we are part of this regeneration of this piece of land here. So the commons I think is a really important seed of regen. What are the other kinds of, cause I know we need to wrap up this conversation really soon. And I’m wondering if we could kind of just bring it back into thinking, well, what are those seeds of the regenerative culture, the pathways that we can kind of identify as being maybe the points that we could see, we could focus more energy on or give more love to.
Joe Brewer:
Yeah, I was thinking of just reading a brief quote of something I wrote, but I was just thinking it fits appropriately here. I wrote this as like a Facebook post, I think a couple of weeks ago and then realized it was sort of profound. I said, I’ll let you in on a little secret. The way we generate the planet and safeguard humanity’s future is to cultivate the conditions for cooperation. We do this at the scale of small functioning groups. Then we weave them together. And this is something that we’re very practically doing. So we now have about 30 self-organized work groups and three generators, and we’re creating more all the time and we’re using the framework called pro-social to do it as I was mentioning earlier. And what’s great about pro-social just to promote it for a moment is pro-social has three like foundational bodies of knowledge and practice connected to it. Elinor Ostrom’s work on managing the commons is one of the pillars, the work of evolutionary studies for how to create conditions of trust and cooperation. So the evolution of trust and cooperation, and the third is contextual behavioral science and a set of techniques called acceptance and commitment therapy, which sort of like the best blend. It’s like what came after a cognitive behavioral therapy as the next better thing. And it’s one of the best established practices in therapy right now and what acceptance and commitment therapy does, which is the piece that we haven’t really talked about so far today is it helps us build up two psychological capacities and thinking of design pathways. These two capacities are foundational. They are the regulation of emotions and psychological flexibility. And it turns out when you scan the public health research on human development and public health outcomes, your success depends entirely on the existence or the absence of these two things. The emotion regulation, and like I get angry, but I manage how I respond instead of just responding impulsively. And you can see all the ways that’s fundamental to cooperation and trust. And the other about psychological flexibility is about not being too judgmental, not being too rigid or dogmatic, being open-minded and creative, engaging in lateral thinking, taking on different perspectives, et cetera, et cetera, right? Like, so there’s this innovative adaptive capacity combined with the ability to manage our emotions. And acceptance and commitment therapy starts with acceptance. We can accept with a mindfulness practice. We can accept when we’re not doing what we feel like we should be doing. We can commit to doing more of what we feel we should be doing. And then we train in that. There are also techniques for doing this, but this is sort of like the secret design pathway for regenerating the earth, because the secret as we cultivate these capacities in ourselves, by practicing them in groups. And as we do this in groups, the groups begin to regenerate the people and they begin to regenerate their places. And then those people, whether they’ve learned it or not start doing ecosystem regeneration and other things, because they observe it as being needed. And so this is it’s so like surprisingly simple.
Morag Gamble:
I also think it’s really interesting too that when you throw in the idea that you’re raising children in that way, how their perceptions are quite different. Because, you know, I grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne, a city and, you know. Even though it was a kind of an ethical frame, there was still that consumer culture and I’ve had to learn and relearn and unlearn and kind of adapt over. I’m now 51. So it’s a lifelong journey and it’s gonna continue to be a lifelong journey of exploration and deepening and connection. But my kids have grown up in this Ecovillage here. Growing up in commons. Growing up in a gift economy. Growing up with systems perspectives and permaculture ethics. And, you know, I started to talk with them about something. This is kind of leading edge ideas and they’re going, what’s leading edge about it. It just is. And I think this creating the conditions for changing the way that we perceive ourselves and our relationships is, as you’re saying, I think the key. Absolutely the key. And we can raise young people in this way or introduce them into this. So it’s not like they’re going, you know, it’s a cycling right back to that point of drop out of school because if they don’t have to go through the school and university and then eventually afterwards, find out how they’re going to make sense of all of this, the sense-making takes place, right from that very beginning.
Joe Brewer:
Yeah. This might be a good time to share a very important research finding from the field of cultural evolution that’s not widely known. As you know, throughout the history of human studies there’ve been different assumptions about humans being exceptional. Humans are the only ones with intelligence. Oh, wait, dogs are intelligent. Humans are the only ones with language. Oh, wait, whales have whale songs. And it’s a language. And you know, so we have these various things. And as you chip away at anthropocentrism and you say, well, what is left? And they’ve now come to a pretty robust finding that is unlikely to be disproven and it still might, but tHtit seems really robust. And it is humans have the ability for cumulative cultural evolution. which is we can create cultural knowledge and then build on it. And there’s no other animal or plant that we have evidence of that does this. And one thing that this relates to that’s connected to what we were just talking about is another concept from biology called niche construction. The classic example is the beaver that changes the shape of the river by building a dam. It builds. It constructs its niche. So the cultural corollary of that is called social niche construction. And it turns out that humans don’t just inherit genetics. Like I’m born into an English speaking culture. I learn English. So I inherit culture, but we also inherit social niches. So if you were born in New York city, you don’t have to rebuild the subway system. You inherit the built environment with the subway system. So what’s interesting about this is if we design social niches, then the social niches can be inherited and they accumulate. Now what’s interesting about accumulation is cumulation as an iterative process, which means sometimes it’s exponential. So cumulative cultural evolution is why human culture can change faster than human biology. Estimates are about 10,000 times faster. So you can change human culture through cumulative cultural revolution. And the way you do this is by designing and translating social niches. So now why would kids drop out of college or not go because it’s the wrong social niche for the future. They’re going to learn all the things they need to survive and do well in a university environment. The wrong incentives, the wrong directions, the wrong objectives. And then they’re going to come out later and be just as lost and still have to find the social niches. They could have found four years earlier, except during those four years, there’s exponential planetary change. And they’ve lost four years of time to deal with crucial issues that are urgent and they’re at their doorstep and they don’t have that time to waste. And that’s why I tell students to drop out of college.
Morag Gamble:
I think the role too, that there are many of us have been working in this for awhile is to be present and to be available. If young people are choosing a different pathway and not going to college, they still want to learn. So where is it that they can find those ideas that they’re wanting to learn about? Or how do they find the ideas they don’t even know that they want to learn about, but in conversation with people like yourself, that they can actually start to grow. So how can we support younger people more to feel confident and possibly even. So this should be my last question. I know, possibly even the parents, you know, because that’s often we get pushed into a particular pathway of well, this is what you need to do. And you have to almost as a young person to sort of peel off that layer, first. All those expectations and the drive and from that’s coming behind you to push you in a certain direction to say, actually this direction, and then to have us have that, those conditions that can receive them. How can we support that?
Joe Brewer:
I think one of the things that young people really need is they need to know that there is a way to do this and there are places to practice and then they need to lower the barrier to entry to get to those places. So my sort of simple conceptual model for this isn’t quite accurate, but it’s a good start is to combine something like a permaculture camp or an ecosystem restoration gap with something like the folk high schools of Scandinavia together with WWOOFing. So if you think of WWOOFing, but you don’t just volunteer on a project, you actually get trained. And I wrote a paper like just a collection of thoughts about two years ago where I identified 42 thematic elements of bioregional education, just from reading a bunch of stuff. And I just summarize them. And one of them was what I called the passport system. And I had to explain what I meant by that. So instead of getting a college degree, like a passport into professionalism. You get something like badges. Like in social media, you can get badges. You get a badge for learning cob buildings and art and construction. You get a badge for learning group facilitation. You get a badge for learning microorganisms, whatever it is. You know, there are lots of things you can get badges for. But if that’s connected to WWOOFing and connected to real-world long standing regeneration projects that are structured around regenerative economics so that people don’t have to pay to be there. The barriers to entry are lowered and they can have a livelihood that is meaningful and enriching for them to do it. Then they would do it. The one thing that parents can do is encourage kids to explore these things. Another thing that parents can do is make it financially viable for their kids to do it by helping them to like, Oh, you want to go to Rancho Mastatal in Costa Rica, a fricking awesome permaculture camp, or their parents might say, well, I’ll pay for your airline ticket. You know, just whatever it is, those things that make it easier or more possible to do. And in each context, it’s going to be a little different. But I think the gesture of the parents saying I’m investing in you being part of the future that I know you need to be, as the young people are inquiring into, it is huge. It’s just so big. To validate them and say, yeah, you shouldn’t seek the world I was a part of. I grew up in the wrong world and I’m trying to find my way out too. Some of us as parents, we found a way out, but so many parents still haven’t. I think this is really key because we have to break the intergenerational pattern. And one way to do that is to provide social supports and social supports are a kind of niche construction. So they’re doing exactly what I said earlier. It can have calming effects and so on. And so it can change things very quickly.
Morag Gamble:
It’s that it’s the rapid transition that we need. And that what I’m hearing you say is that the rapid transition can take, can happen by fully embracing, being really local and bioregional. It’s this, the multiplicity of those everywhere and the connection of those everywhere. Because a lot of the big picture sort of big ideas about, well, this is going to solve the world’s problems. It’s actually not this one big silver bullet kind of idea, or a few. It’s actually everyon,e everywhere making a shift into this other way of perceiving and being, if I have, I kind of paraphrase that kind of right what you’re saying?
Joe Brewer:
Yeah. And I’ll give a little example that’s probably going to be very familiar to you for from all of the work you’ve done, because you have more experience with it than I do, but it’s something that just happened yesterday. So it’s on my mind. As we have this community reforestation project, that’s owned by an association with 40 members and it’s been going for 12 years and they’re trying to reforest the native tropical drivers to this region. And we’re in an area where there’s this African grass that was brought in for agriculture or for pasture. It’s very aggressive. It kills all of the ground cover. All the bushes. They cannot compete with it. So you can grow trees, but all of the understory, the Spanish bosque all of that dies off and it’s just grass. So we were in this part of the [inaudible] this project and we’re pulling grass. We’re pulling grass in a place where there are some of the little native bushes and shrubs, but they will quickly be choked out by the grass. And we’re at a time of year where the dry season’s about to end the rainy season’s about to start. And right next to it, a lot of these shrubs and bushes sending all their seeds with when to disperse all flying over this area. So if we just pull the grass, chances are good that these bushes are going to out-compete the grass. Cause that’s actually what happened in the area that the seeds are coming from. So here’s the example. You go to this place and you spend an hour pulling grass. Well, what does it mean? It means you’re serving ecological succession to protect and encourage a type of ecosystem that is on the verge of extinction. So you’re not just pulling grass, you have a story and nested levels of a story. That’s simple act of pulling the grass it’s connected to. And so what people need is very simple, very local actions that are nested in stories that actually make sense. And this is a story that someone understands when this tropical dry forest, 78% endemic species, it’s fricking incredible how much only exists here. And it’s 98% deforested and it’s becoming a desert. So like this is a nearly extinct type of ecosystem. And to pull that African grass and help those native bushes to grow is deeply meaningful. We understand the context, but all we’re doing is pulling grass. Yeah. Like it’s so simple. And I think this is what people need is very simple acts and really holistic stories.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. Oh thank you so much for joining me today, Joe, it’s just been an absolute pleasure to have the chance to finally talk. Like I said, it started, you know, we’ve kind of been floating around similar worlds for a long time and it’s just wonderful. Oh, there you are.
Joe Brewer:
We’re very close to the equator. Yeah.
Morag Gamble:
Just kind of the lights just go off, down there. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me. It’s been absolutely wonderful. So where can people find out more about what do, so if I could put some links below, where could they find your book for example to read or where can they find out more about work that you do
Joe Brewer:
The best place would be the Earth Regenerators network, which is on an mobile app called Mighty Networks. And I’ve dropped into the chat right now a link to the preface of my book, which is also on Earth Regenerators so you get them both because the whole book is available for free online. And what I would suggest is join earth regenerators. And we’re structuring a set of social supports for people to make like our design focus of Earth Regenerators is to provide stapling for life transitions. So people can move away from extractive lifestyle to a regenerative lifestyle, and they do this through social support. So we’re trying to create the context in which all this social supports become present. As an example to borrow the beautiful Aboriginal concept of yarning. We have a member of our community who changed the name because it didn’t want to appropriate it. He calls them campfire talks, but it’s more or less the same thing. It’s creating these woven tapestries of people through unstructured conversations hosted regularly. Now this becomes a form of social support for finding ways to make life choices, make life transitions. So we’re setting up really. I say we’re setting up as long emerging dynamically through all of these pro-social groups or these kinds of capacities. And so someone who wants to find out about my work really should try to find out about these community supports more than my work. Because that’s where they find their localized social scaffolding to help them make life choices and to act them out. Just kind to be really important because in the next 10 years, we need a lot more people doing regenerative work tens hundreds of millions of more people.
Morag Gamble:
Thanks, Joe, it’s been just an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today and I look forward to hopefully many more conversations with you over time.
Joe Brewer:
Yes. Thank you so much for reaching out. I’ve been a fan of your work for a while now. So it’s lovely to get to connect.
Morag Gamble:
Take care and have a good evening. Well, thank you for everything that you do. It’s really inspiring and I’d love to connect all the youth programs that I work with with what you’re doing and to sort of explore that with them too. And, you know, maybe create a sort of a campfire kind of concept with them too. That sounds like a perfect place to start.
Joe Brewer:
I think that’s lovely. And it would also be lovely to find ways to invite them to come here to Colombia and work with us on projects. Those who are interested to just start to build relationships.
Morag Gamble:
Excellent. Take care! So that’s all for today. Thanks so much for joining us. Head on over to my YouTube channel, the link’s below, and then you’ll be able to watch this conversation, but also make sure that you subscribe because that way we notified of all new films that come out and also you’ll get notified of all the new, all the new interviews and conversations that come out. So thanks again for joining us, have a great week and I’ll see you next time.
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Much love
I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I live and work – the Gubbi Gubbi people. And I pay my respects to their elders past present and emerging.
- Podcast Audio: Rhiannon Gamble
- Podcast Music: Kim Kirkman