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Regenerate, Renew, Rewild
Joe Brewer is a culture designer learning how to live regeneratively in the Andes mountains of Colombia. His project, Origen del Agua, aims to transform a community and a landscape — all to bring a river back to life. This living demonstration shows us a path to restore planetary health at scale. And is also giving birth to a design school for Earth regeneration.
Joe Brewer 00:06
The collapse process has been happening since well before we were born. The loss of biodiversity, the impacts due to climate change the increasing human population, I mean, you just go on and on looking at the major planetary scale changes that are being driven by human activity. Much of what's coming, and the next decade is kind of inertia that we can't avoid. Things will be lost that are sacred and we have to accept it. Once we accepted how complex that changes, and overwhelming it is, this basic starting point was the chrysalis of transformation. For realizing how much power we have to create regeneration and healing of ecosystems, including human communities. Regeneration is the only way to come out of overshoot and collapse. We've gone too far across planetary boundaries. This is the time for us to boldly ambitiously learn how to collaborate, to regenerate the world.
Joel Krieger 01:35
Welcome outside, I'm Joel.
Pavani Yalla 01:38
And I'm Pavani. Each episode we’ll discover design in unexpected places.
Joel Krieger 01:43
So these creators may not always call themselves designers. They actually go by many different labels. But they all have one thing in common. They create moments that have the power to change us.
Pavani Yalla 02:01
Tucked away deep in the Andes Mountains of Colombia, Barichara is a small town in the heart of indigenous quani territory. Long ago, this was once home to the only high Andes tropical dry forest on Earth. But looking out from atop the mountain vista in Barichara, you wouldn't know it. Today, the forest is almost completely destroyed. And the river system has long since dried up.
Joel Krieger 02:31
In 2019. Earth regenerators founder Joe Brewer moved his family here to realize a dream. His aim was to liberate this land from colonial models of private ownership to use watershed and permaculture practices to restore the forest and the water sources at the top of this tributary.
Pavani Yalla 02:52
He named the project Origen del Agua, which means the “origin of water”. By learning how to live regeneratively they intend to transform a community and a landscape, all to bring a river back to life.
Joe Brewer 03:11
Hello, everyone. This is Joe Brewer here at Origen Del Agua in Barichara, Columbia. Today I want to show you how well our Gabion systems are working for retaining water in the land. The sediments that have been gathering from the rain are still moist and are holding water. And there are some places here on the land where these areas start to actually look like little rivers. But if we go down just a little further. And you can see here that this is a really degraded stretch of land here. So we still have a lot of work to do. But if you look at this section down here, right there, you can see that it's all moist, and it actually looks like a river. So simply by building all of these stone walls, these little stacks of rocks, or creating little tiny river systems, accelerating the process of absorbing water to create slow release to begin to give birth to a little river or a tributary at the top of the ridge line. And within just a few months we're already seeing visible effects across the land. This really does work.
Joel Krieger 04:21
What you just heard was the voice of Joe Brewer out in the field. Every day Joe can be found somewhere in Barichara, getting his hands dirty.
Pavani Yalla 04:28
His on the ground work is informed by years of scientific study. While pursuing a PhD in atmospheric science. He switched fields and began to work with scholars in the behavioral and cognitive sciences with the hope of helping to create large scale behavior change.
Joel Krieger 04:46
Now Joe's worn many different labels over the years; change strategist, complexity researcher, cognitive scientist, but the most fitting I think, is that of culture designer.
Pavani Yalla 04:58
Joe has devoted his life life to helping humanity squeeze through the sustainability bottleneck, and at Origen del Agua. He's setting a bold example. This pilot project is a living demonstration for how to restore planetary health at scale. And in the process, it's also giving birth to design school for Earth regeneration.
Joel Krieger 05:21
So let's go ahead and get into it. Here's Joe Brewer.
Joe Brewer 05:31
When I was a kid, I thought there was something wrong with me. It took me a long time to figure out that the way that I felt different was because I was in a very unhealthy culture. I grew up in rural Missouri, and like a working class poverty, industrial scale chicken farm. And what kept me different from a lot of people at the time, was my deep connection to what is alive, and the feeling that it should be cared for. So I would watch like a kid that took a firecracker, stuck it in the mouth of a frog and blew it up because he thought it was funny. And I would just be like traumatized and for days, be bothered by what happened to that poor frog. While everyone around me laughed, and just thought it was funny. And I couldn't figure out at the time, how I would hurt so much by being sensitive to things that a lot of people around me weren't sensitive to. And I think that, just that probably genetically inherited capacity for empathy is where my work and regeneration began. And one way that it was expressed in the early days, again, in my early childhood, was I would get away from people and go out into nature, to recover from how I felt when I was around people. And that's strange to hear. Now, when people see that I'm really extroverted. I'm really social. I have a lot of friends. So this wasn't because I was a shy, quiet kid. It's because I was a really open, sensitive human body. In an environment filled with dangers to someone who's like that.
Joel Krieger 07:29
But then the last several years, you made a pretty big life change a pretty big move, you kind of packed up and taken your whole family to bar char Colombia. How did how did that come about? How did you get from there to this point?
Joe Brewer 07:47
I'd like to start that story by going back to 2003. When I was in an atmospheric science graduate program, and learning about what I now call the planetary predicament, or the ecological crisis, I started really learning a lot of what was going on in the world. And my new girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife have we been married for more than 15 years, we began a journey that started for us in 2005. It was as we were in this learning process. We moved away from where we lived in Champaign, Illinois, to Prescott, Arizona, and lived in a cabin 18 miles away from the nearest town, and spent the next year hiking, camping, doing bike touring, and trying to figure out how to live our lives in alignment with our values. And what we kept finding was all of the pathways available to us, brought us back to cities, and brought us back to civilization. And so we did things like we got rid of our car and started riding our bikes and things you can do in a progressive city. But we always felt a really deep inadequacy, and how we were responding to the global crisis. All of that changed. In January of 2017. When our daughter was born, we stared into the face of future apocalypse of possible human extinction. You know, I'm trained in Earth System Science, I understand how serious the situation is. So we delayed for years, should we bring a child into the world knowing how dangerous it is. And when we committed to having a child, we committed to a life of transformation. At the time, we were living in Seattle, which is a beautiful place to be a young, young working professional, and a pretty difficult place to be parents. Very expensive. It's really conducive to that fast paced corporate life. And so we already made plans that when our daughter was born, we'd moved to Eugene, Oregon, a place we lived before we were married in an old growth forest near there. And, and it was a lot less expensive. So we could move from two incomes to one income, and still devote ourselves almost full time to raising our child for both parents to be present. While we figured out the next step, it took us about a year living in Eugene, Oregon, for an opportunity to emerge for us to go live off grid in a tropical rainforest and a biodiversity hotspot in Costa Rica, helping to create the intention at least helping to create regenerative economic systems, and to create communities of people who bring the economic activities that are in into harmony with the rest of the natural world. We found a lot of greenwashing, we found a lot of problematic personalities. We found that we were not specifically in a place that our community and we still visited a lot of amazing projects. It's really mixed space. And we came out of our 10 months that we stayed in Costa Rica, feeling like we needed to spend a year traveling to different locations to find the community where we could raise our child. So while we were in Costa Rica, I was helping work with an organization called regenerative communities network. And we were building a network of regenerative economies. And I helped launch the first of these projects in Colombia as a convener just I helped convene a meeting, organized by local Colombians. And while I was at that meeting, I met someone who shared my vision for raising children within the mindset of regeneration, while embedded within a community reforestation project. And so I told my wife about this. She was like, that's what we want. And we came to Barichara Colombia, in the Northern Andes of Colombia, to, to explore if there was community here. And within two months, we were working on getting our visas like this place has so much community, has so much going for it. This is the place we can plant our dream and fertile social and ecological soil. And we've been living here now for almost two years. And it's like Alice in Wonderland, the rabbit hole just keeps going.
Joel Krieger 12:27
That's a great way to put it, you said something that I think is really key there, this, you left the place Costa Rica, which I think a lot of people think of is this eco paradise, the perception, at least from the outside is oh, they figured it out there. But you found a lack of community, which seems to be the foundation you need for basically everything that we're going to talk about today. It's really all about community.
Joe Brewer 12:52
It's really about community. And also it's really about something that is inferred and the story that I just told, which is de-financialization. How to take money pressure away from how you make important life decisions. And this is something that is a thread that weaves across everything that we do when people ask, how did you do that? Are you rich? Are you privileged, I'm like, I've got a world class education, privileged. I'm a white guy from of European descent, privileged. But I'm also working class poor kid, with very few social connections to rich people. And so what we've done is found a way to live that a lot of people can also do you don't need a lot of money, actually, you need to remove the need for money. And so that's something I think, is part of community in a profound way. Because which we can unpack this if you'd like, I'm going to make a provocative statement. The dynamics of markets are inherently destructive to community, and vice versa, the dynamics of community inherently undermine or destroyed markets. And so we had to remove ourselves from the dynamics of markets, intentionally and consistently, to be able to do what we do.
Joel Krieger 14:16
Can you unpack that a bit? Does this have to do with the kind of the need for markets to commoditize? You know, everything into a product or service, you know, basically transforming relationships into something that can be bought and sold, or is there more to it?
Joe Brewer 14:30
Well, that's a big part of it. But there's more. I'm going to draw upon the work of David Fleming. So anyone who wants to know more about this, Google the book surviving the future, by David Fleming and just go and grab it, your life will be changed. I'll give one example. Efficiency. Efficiency in the dynamic of a capitalist market is the ability to extract as much profit off of a transaction as you can. Efficiency is measured as reduced cost value to money. So they're, you know, water is worthless unless you can sell it. You know, good relationships are worthless unless you can sell them. Everything is about money. And when you myopically measure the world by money, and you ask, How can I get the most money out for the least money? And how do I minimize the costs, maximize the gains. And one thing that comes out of this particular version of efficiency is waste is defined as loss of profit. Okay, now, look at what a community theater project does, you have a group of people who are not going to ever get paid. So we spent a lot of time and energy and use a lot of material resources, with makeup, clothing, lighting, construction, set design, and they build the whole thing and run it for like one day or three days. And then they dismantle the whole thing. From a market efficiency point of view, it's absolutely insane. But from a community point of view, everything is about deepening social relationships, exploring meaning, finding power and experience and taking inequality that exists in the community. patronage. Now, the patrons who support their community theater, and distributing and community processes that destroys the excess inequality, experienced as community wealth. So the very logic that would say all of this as wasteful in the market is exactly what makes it valuable in the community.
Joel Krieger 16:37
It's almost like in the dominant view, if it can't be measured, it doesn't matter. And you can't quantify some of these things that you're talking about. It's the whole qualitative aspect of an enjoyable life in community, right?
Joe Brewer 16:53
Yeah, yeah. And also, mutual indebtedness, is the nature of friendship. If you're friends with someone, you feel like you want to do something for them, you feel like they've done more for you, you feel gratitude, you don't feel like I want to get the best price for this transaction, which is just offensive to the idea of friendship. It's exactly that same tension between the logics, the logics are incompatible with each other. For de-financialization is a process of de-commodifying your life, but even more fundamentally, it's de-marketing your life and its communities in your life. So you have to make up fake words to talk about this. Because we don't have regular words for this.
Joel Krieger 17:39
And I got to imagine this was a process for you. Because I mean, I think a lot of people listening would think about what you did and say, Gosh, that's so aspirational. I would love to do that. But I just don't feel like it's possible. How do I unhook myself from this thing? It's all that I know. I mean, what was that process like?
Joe Brewer 17:57
Part of the way I did this was a design process, designing semantics, defining how we make sense of things, and how things come to be meaningful for us. And so this process was partly recognizing what was soul sucking about my life. And feeling in my body, when I felt healthy, when I felt passionate when I felt alive. And then creating what you might call design heuristics. Just a felt direction of what does it mean, to move away from something or to move toward something. And now, I know a lot more about how that works. And we can talk in a little bit about the framework of prosocial it, there are ways to design this very clearly, with very good understanding of the mechanisms. But at the time, what I was doing was more intuitive. It was more like the design method was aesthetic. It was about feeling into my lived experience, and seeing what made me feel alive and what didn't. And then to the best of my ability, removing the things that got in the way, and doing more of the things that that's helped it to happen. And it was a series of small steps, with a very long period of time, feeling socially isolated. People couldn't understand what I was doing. Couldn't really relate to me like I for about 10 years. If I was at a party, and someone went up to my wife and said, Jessica, what is Joe do? Instead of answering them? This is my wife, who knows my work better than anyone, right? She wouldn't even answer she would just walk them over to me and say, Joe, explain what you do. I can't even explain it, would you explain it? And because what I was doing didn't fit within the semantics, or the aesthetics of how most people are making choices in their lives. My motivation for a lot of this time, really came out of despair. And I grew out of a promise I made to myself when I was 16 years old. I told myself that I wanted to lie on my deathbed at the end of my life and have no regrets. Which is a pretty high bar. And I really shaped my decisions a lot. And I was feeling time passing. And I felt regret coming about what I didn't do for the future that I knew was coming. And so a lot of what I do now is healing land, healing landscapes. And I mean, like very tangibly, I take a pickaxe, I go out in the rain, I dig a channel, like a little swale, a little ditch, that is level, so water can enter it and stay there, and the water will be absorbed to help the plants grow. And so in a very practical way, like, right in front of me with mud on my fingers, I am healing a place on the land. And so one thing that we're doing that has been a profound change for us, is instead of talking about what needs to be done with some mythical audience, how do I get people to listen to my ideas, and do what needs to be done. I'm the crazy guy who grabs the pickaxe and goes out in the rain by myself and just digs the damn ditch. And I don't care if anyone understands what I'm doing. And so part of this is, we move to a place where there is land that is stewarded by a community that if I actually dig that ditch, no one's private interest is going to come in and dig it. If I plant native trees, no one's going to come and cut them down to build their mansion. And so a big part of this was finding community that protected and cared for land that I could give myself to for the long term. So my wife had the dream of creating a food forest, which is a holistic economic system built around knowledge of local, native forest. And it's a permaculture process of regenerating landscapes to build forests. My passion was about designing for a living economy across an entire territory, and creating a design school where people can come and practice and learn how to do this. And so while I do practice digging those ditches and pulling invasive grass and planting native trees and collecting native seeds, and I'm doing that work, but also, I am creating a beacon of light. For everyone else who has the same dream for themselves. How could anyone else become a designer of transformational change for an entire territory? Because when we look at things like global warming, or the mass extinction event that's starting to happen, or micro plastics, in the ocean, pick any massive, overwhelmingly complex challenge. And we ask, How can what I'm doing locally, ever make a difference? And the answer is fractal. The answer is the little bitty thing I can do with my body right here is nested within something bigger, which is also nested within something bigger. And that nested thing like you know, Russian dolls have one inside the other, that nested-ness is what makes a difference. And so I can align the purpose of my action with the nested-ness. So what we're doing in Barichara is mapping out a territory, we're doing this collaborating with a lot of local people who know more about this place than we do. So that we can create an agenda for regenerating forest on anywhere between 50,500 1000 hectares of land. We're using ecological connectivity across the landscape, drainage basins for water migration patterns for animals, local biological corridors, and other parts of the landscape to organize our activities in nested levels. And we're raising money and buying private land and turning it into community projects, while also volunteering on existing community projects. And we're doing all of this work. And so the the thing I think is really powerful about this is I do it more than I talk about it. And I document how I'm doing it by telling stories about what we're doing, so that the narratives can connect other people to doing it.
Joel Krieger 24:43
So can you talk about some of these? Because I've watched a good number of these YouTube videos. I think one of the recent ones you're actually starting to see the effects of some of your work there with the river specifically. Maybe you could tell us a bit about that story.
Joe Brewer 24:58
Yeah, we bought this piece of land with crowdfunding, and we named the land Origen del Agua - Spanish for origin of water. And this is up at the top of a ridge line, heavily degraded erosion channels that are 10 feet deep. I mean, it's, it's in bad shape, it looks like a desert. Why is it the origin of water, because it's at the top of the ridge line. And as the air flows over, if there's an interaction with the land surface, that is the right kind of reaction, then clouds will form and rain will come. And if rain comes, it will be absorbed into the landscape and fill the river system below. But it doesn't do that now it just runs off and takes whatever's left, there's no topsoil takes the clay and rock at this point and washes it away. So what we've been doing is incredibly simple in its implementation. And that's what makes it profound is we just start at the top. And there are a lot of rocks on this land. So we just pick up rocks and make lines of rocks, where we see the erosion channels. And the erosion channels are like a language, they tell us the water is carving the land there, the water runs there. So if we just put a line of rocks and make a little barricade wall, and it could be six inches tall, there's a line of rocks, that as the water moves through during a rain, all the sediments that are carried in the water gets stopped. It's like a filter or a sieve. And they collect and build up and are dammed by these little piles of rocks. And what's interesting about doing this is we've now done enough of them, we built 70 or 80 of these little lines of rocks. And as you watch the way the water has already carved the landscape, it's like a serpent it spirals and curves, and where the sediments settle, because they're held by the rocks. The sediments have been ground up and pulverized by the water as they're dragged against the rocks during the rain. And so they're more porous, they're more aerated, they're softer, they're not compacted. And if they're any native seeds, they can actually take root and grow. So in just six months, during the rainy season of building these, we now have green serpents of native grass, where the sediments built up on the lines of rocks are allowing the germination of native seeds just because they stay put and because moisture stays below the surface. And I mean, like an edge below the surface, these are really small. But they're already doing this well enough that they're now creating a spongy layer of roots for the grass that is amplifying this and holding even more water and slowing down even more water and slowing down even more erosion. So the key is to understand, like I said, I was sort of describing nested-ness in space, there's also nested-ness. In time, I could do a little intervention and then repeat it and then repeat it do this from the top of the hill down. And as I do this, I create a fractal network of rainwater catchment, and are already organized the way the water flows, because I did it where the water was already flowing. And I'm taking a basic understanding of ecology to watch the birth of a little green channel of marshland in a desert, and this has happened in the span of six months. So and this is really tiny, I'm talking something that's three feet wide, making a little, you know, serpentine pattern, going down a piece of land over maybe five or 600 feet of land surface. Although we've done this in multiple places. Each of them is really small, but they're part of a tributary of a big river. So there's also a fractal in space. These tiny little rivulets are going to help restore an entire river that is more than 100,000 hectare catchment. It's a big it's a an entire plateau. And this is one of 15 major tributaries, we're sitting right at the top of it on three hectares of land, making tiny rivers of sediments with lines of rocks.
Joel Krieger 29:13
And right now, there's no the landscape is so degraded, right? There's no There's no river,
Joe Brewer 29:18
no river, it's gone. It's gone. It's been gone for decades. The long term vision for this land can be described in multiple ways. So I'll just pick one for now. There are children here, who were born in a degraded environment. And one dream that I have is for the children to grow up watching rivers come back to life. So that they just believe is part of normal common sense. Yeah, humans can bring rivers back to life. I actually know that they can, because there are a lot of examples, and I've studied those examples. So I know that it can be done. These children don't yet no, it can't be done. And I just want them to experience that it can. By playing with those same rocks that were piling up they're playing with them making little sandcastles and all kinds of, you know, things that kids do. We're growing a river, and they're gonna learn how to do it. And one way to think about this is just like how we carry baggage from our past that weighs us down as we move into the future. We can imagine a future that is so attractive, and so beautiful, that it pulls us forward in time, we’re drawn to it, that we need to help create it, that we need to live out and happening. And when I stand on this degraded land, and see those scars in the landscape, instead of feeling the pain of what was lost, when I'm looking at it from the past, if I sit there and look at it from the possible future, I'll start doing what I need to do to make that future happen because it's so alluring, and so attractive. And I know that I start by picking up rocks, and stacking them in the ditches, already carved by the water. And then just watching what happens, and learning from what the landscape teaches me as it changes. So what I'm documenting in the YouTube videos, is what the land is teaching me as I continue iterating, these very small, very simple interventions, with an understanding that that land is part of a complex adaptive system. It's dynamic, it's interdependent, and it's evolving. And now I am an agent of change within it. Because I can pick up and stack the rocks. Or I can take my pickaxe and dig a ditch. And so just like if I'm playing a video game, I'm world building in a video game. I can world build a river, from erosion channels and rocks.
Joel Krieger 32:08
And you do this every day. I mean, this is part of your daily practice, right? You're out there
Joe Brewer 32:13
It’s essential to my daily practice. Because I know enough about the world to be pretty depressed. I know enough about the world to be really hurt by how much loss has already happened and how much is now unavoidable. Now there are these estimates given that a million species will go extinct by the end of the century, which don't account for interdependent abrupt climate change, which we now know is happening. We're talking about the hollowing out of the Earth's biosphere. And if you want to think about that, in human terms, imagine everyone you've ever known and loved, and go back in time and prune away all those relationships before they happened. And how deficient your life would be. That's what will happen if humans don't form relationships with the abundance of non human life that we are losing, or we're not going to get to relate to. So I can sit in the pain of that, and contemplate suicide and not want to watch it, not want to see more of it. And it's so painful to be hurt by the future. So I have to protect myself from my own knowledge. And the way I do that, is by turning the same knowledge that lets me see the destruction. I turn it into healing. And then I see the healing happening and it heals me continuously. And there's actually something I learned from ethnobotany research. And and this is explored nicely and Wade Davis's book, one river when he tells the history of ethnobotany. But all psychedelics that are used as medicine, plant medicine, or fungal medicine, and indigenous cultures, every one of them without exception is poison. Because whether something is poison or medicine depends on the context, and the quantity and the process for how it's used. And so what I'm realizing is that, you know, for example, aspirin, which numbs the tissue in your body, as a side effect of the toxicity or the of the poison is what allows you to do surgery or to tolerate pain. So the medicine is a poison. It depends on the dose depends on how it's used and so on. If I turned the poison of ecological destruction, and the poison of ecological despair into medicine, what happens is, I take my sensitivity, same thing that separated me from the other kids when I was little, and I use my sensitivity to connect to land and instead of feeling the land being destroyed, I feel the land being healed and regenerated. And it because it's my body feeling it, it creates that in my body. So this is something really important is that not only are we not separate from the process, we must enter our own bodies deeply into an A felt experience of the relationship to do the work. For me to see the water moving to create the erosion after see the water moving to create the river. It's the same movement. It's the same dynamic, but it's how do I feel as an agent within the system?
Joel Krieger 35:39
How is this expanded out from your individual actions? I got to imagine it first. People are looking at this stranger, he's out there digging holes in the rain. What's going on here? And at a certain point, you know, you built these relationships. I mean, how has this project began to change the community of Barichara?
Joe Brewer 35:59
I want to tell a specific story about the purchase of the nature reserve, after we've crowdfunded and raise the money. And I want to celebrate my friend Margarita is from Colombia. She is a psychologist who specializes in cultural trauma. And we were meeting with the family to buy to talk about buying the land, and we visited the land together. So here we are on this absolutely destroyed land. And this is the family that stewarded its destruction. And Margarita said to them, I'm ashamed as a Colombian, that a white guy from the from North America had to come here and care for our territory, that we don't care for ourselves. And it was like slapping the owners of the land in the face. I couldn't have said this. I'm not from here. She said it. And this is something that I've seen is people are so quietly ashamed. I think this is relatable all over the world, people are so humiliated by their own participation in things that they can't find joy, and caring for those things, and opting out of care. Because I am not ashamed of the destruction of that piece of land, I can enter that piece of land and start to heal it during the period of time, that would be awkward for them. Until eventually, they start to see the healing, they start to see the land coming back to life. And they start to feel differently about their own land. And this is something that's already been happening. We've been here for about two years. And I like walk through the town with mud on my clothes. And some local people have even started calling me Tarzan, because I got a long wily hair, and they don't know what I'm doing, who's this crazy, dirty white guy who doesn't shave enough looks like a dirty hippie, dirty hippie. But, but what they didn't understand at first was that I was doing something about what they talked about. Everyone would complain about how there's not enough water. And the water scarcity is really chronic. And everyone's a little ashamed that they don't do something about it. But after a while they see me doing it. I don't judge anyone, I don't really even say anything to anyone about what I'm doing unless I'm asked. And obviously they're the specific people I work with. It's a different story. But I'm just talking about people in the community who see me walking around and going shopping in the stores and stuff. But gradually, the word is starting to spread, that I'm just putting water in the ground, restoring the water table, building soils, planting trees. And they start to feel proud that their territory attracted someone like me, who is this person from the outside that looked for a place worth healing, and they came to our territory, because I am in a very special territory, and they know it. But they're ashamed of how they've cared for their own territory. So I give them this parallel path where it's like alchemy, they can take the same parts of their, their feelings and feel differently about how they relate to me doing it as an outsider compared to how they feel about them not doing it. And so there's been this accumulation, it's still going, what two years and we're now people you know understand more of what I'm doing. It's like the rumors have been spreading. That guy's dirty a lot because he's up working in the community, good for the community. Be a part of the forest project reforestation project. And like and we're so glad because we love and treasure that place. We're so glad he's there doing it.
Joel Krieger 39:57
Yeah, have people started to join you yet?
Joe Brewer 40:00
People have been working with us locally, off and on since April of last year. So fairly early in the process. We actually formed a water brigade during the most intense lockdowns of the Coronavirus pandemic. And we would go up with groups of between five and 15 of us and, and dig some of these water retention systems together. So that happened before they reopened the tourism market. And like I said earlier, once the tourism market came in the community was destroyed and everyone had to go back to their shops to sell to tourists. So I've had very little volunteerism from the local community because everyone's so busy serving the market. Or when the market was like quite literally, barricades were set up and tourists were not allowed in. They would not allow the market to enter for about eight months. And during that time, community thrived.
Joel Krieger 40:55
Doesn't that tell you something right there.
Joe Brewer 40:58
And since tourism opened up again, in September of last year, I've had volunteers from the global community, because we have the online or three generators network. And people have been coming as volunteers and doing work. But it's been mostly people from outside coming in working with me because the locals are servants to the local market.
Joel Krieger 41:19
Actually think this word regeneration may be new to a lot of folks, can you help unpack what that means regeneration and regenerative design? What does that mean to you?
Joe Brewer 41:31
Yeah, it's really an important topic. Because regeneration, if you just take the parts generation to generate, to create the context for something to be made, so to regenerate as to reproduce the context that enables something to be made. It's just sort of like literally breaking down the word. So a biological organism expresses its body its existence, by reproducing the conditions of being alive. It does this by taking in food and other nutrients. And by expelling waste. And there's this continual generation of the body, that is reproducing the conditions to generate the body. So think of like the cells on your skin that every 30 days, your body reproduces every skin cell regeneration is this dynamic pattern of a living system, to reproduce the conditions of maintaining the ability to be alive. So a living organism is alive, and maintains its ability to be alive while at the same time reproducing those conditions. And so regeneration is the quality or capacity of any living system to keep itself alive. So if we work with regeneration, what that means is, we work with those aspects of any living system to help increase the capacities for aliveness within that system. So there is an environment that has five kinds of trees, three kinds of bushes and two kinds of grass. Maybe after doing permaculture practices on that land, there are 50 kinds of trees, 30 kinds of bushes and shrubs, seven kinds of ground covers, and an additional 50 Different kinds of birds 30 Different or 100 Different kinds of insects, measure however you want. But the capacity for aliveness. And the capacity for the living system itself has been amplified by working with the dynamics of the living system itself. So regeneration for me is it's a process. And it's a process that we can design with. And design as we are living systems. I'm a living biological creature, I can design as regeneration, while designing with and designing for regeneration, those are not exclusive terms. I can do design as for and with all at the same time by understanding how the dynamics work, just like how I understand that setting those rocks down build sediments, which creates the conditions for the native seeds to germinate.
Joel Krieger 44:18
This is something I'd love to dig in a little bit because this is actually quite a different way of understanding design than I think a lot of folks who practice design in the default world see it. Can you help us understand how this is different? kind of compare and contrast regenerative design, with design as I think most people understand it?
Joe Brewer 44:42
I think the most fundamental shift between design within a civilization. I'm not going to use that word very intentionally and design within a biosphere. I want to draw the distinction at that level. because what happens in the models, every model of civilization is that they begin with agriculture. And agriculture is domination and control of the fertility of land. It's a domination control and extraction of fertility of land, is how agriculture works. And that's how every civilization works, that within the context of I exist, because someone is dominating the fertility of land, and extracting life from it, so that my body can be fed through some Market that brings it to the city, that any kind of design I do is in service to the system that is extracting from the land, because the survival of the system depends on it. So I have to work and make money so that I can pay taxes, and so I can buy things in a consumer economy, I have to serve the system for the system to keep me alive. And so all design that happens within the mindset of civilization, any civilization is the mindset of design and service to the systems that keep us alive. But because the systems are built on domination and extraction or exploitation of fertility of land, there's inherently an oppressive separation. Just I cannot care for the land. And as a kinship relationship, I can't treat the land of my family, and then do that to it. Now, if I think of design in the context of a biosphere, a living ecology, a web of living relationships, that my survival depends on the thriving of that ecology. If the ecosystem I'm a part of is unwell, I'm likely to be unwell. And so all of my design, all of my conscious effort to address problems and improve the world, you know, whichever design approach I take, is in service to systemic health of the whole because it's grounded in a, a multi dimensional way of relating, which is I relate to the air that is excreted from the plants that are produced food through photosynthesis, that I depend upon micro organisms, and fungal networks in the soil that enable all those plants to grow. That I depend on the niches created by those forest ecosystems. For all the plants that I might forage or all the animals, I might hunt. My relationships are a web, a multi dimensional web of family. We're all part of the same holistic health or holistic pathology. And my design is in service to that. And so I think the fundamental difference between regenerative design and other kinds of design that are not regenerative is regenerative design recognizes that all of your design occurs within a life system. And by being within that life system, your relationships to the rest of life are mutual. I depend upon other other organisms, other species, other ecological processes, I depend on them being healthy for me to be healthy. A really clear example of this is Don't piss in your drinking water. You need that water clean to be able to drink it. So the bogs and the marshlands and the sand beds and the beaver dams and anything else that's cleaning and filtering the water in the river. Its health is why you have health when you drink the water. And so this mutual understanding of collective or systemic health is a natural byproduct of seeing yourself as part of a living system. And I think that's a fundamental difference because people can design aspiring to do things that are good for the environment. But look at the construction of that sentence. I do something good for the environment. Separate, yes, why are they separate? Because if I'm exploiting and raping the fertility of the Earth, just metaphorically, the mother of all if I'm exploiting and raping my own mother, I can't let that enter conscious awareness and do design. And design is so strongly based in empathy, to do good design, that I cannot do really good design, when I have a bad relationship with something as fundamental as the life giving processes of my own planet. Which is why all design within civilizations that is not regenerative. It's going to be different, because it cannot accept the sensitivity to Where the harm is being done? Which is exactly where we have to go to do regenerative design. So those places
Joel Krieger 50:08
you know, I've been wondering, at what point because this is the natural arc of how things usually go. These movements sprout up, like this happened with the word sustainability, and eventually gets co opted by the default kind of mainstream culture and gets distorted, gets green-washed gets, loses its meaning. And I, I, something feels different about what's happening with the regenerative movement to me, that almost makes it, I hope, impossible for this to happen. But I've also been a little concerned about it I've actually been looking at when, when am I going to start to see corporations use this word? Do you think that's going to happen? And if so, how? How do we keep sharp eyes out so we can spot it when it's when it's inauthentic.
Joe Brewer 51:03
It's already happening. It's primarily happening with regenerative agriculture. Agriculture is the wrong word. So they already have the wrong word without knowing it. And that's because there are two concepts, agriculture and agro ecology. And very few people have heard of agro ecology, so they don't even know that there's a better word, or not the word, there's a better concept. So there's already an ignorance of, of sustainable ways of growing food. Because all agricultural systems are not sustainable. There's never been an agricultural system that sustainable, just like there's never been a civilization that sustainable. Every one of them in the past its collapse, this one will be no different. And so this is where when Monsanto and Bill Gates owning his 100,000 acres of land, or whatever it is, huge amount of land. And they're taking organic, like how organic has been co opted, and they're doing the same thing with regenerative. And they're going to succeed within the mindset of people who are part of the civilization. But they're going to fail with the people who decolonize their minds, and no longer think, like part of a civilization. And so the key is not to protect the word, regenerative, that's impossible. People can twist and distort words to meet all kinds of things George Orwell told is this in the 1940s. But they can not contaminate what regeneration means as a web of familiar relationships to someone who's not in the mindset of a civilization. And so the work is not about the branding of the word. The work is about cultivating worldview mindsets mindsets about worldview, and people who see the world as ecology. And those people will be immune to propaganda, at least to this propaganda.
Joel Krieger 53:00
Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point. Yeah. It's just a label that describes something that is a universal truth. That's what it is.
Joe Brewer 53:07
Yeah. And also, when I entered this territory, and Barichara, one of the first things I needed to start becoming sensitive to, was who the indigenous people were that lived here. And if they lived here for hundreds or 1000s of years, how are they sustainable? Because if I want to create a sustainable economy here, one of the best things I could do the fastest way to it is there were people who did it here before, how did they do it? And you might have to change, something's a little different. But you know, to overlook that part of the design space, how did it work for the people who did it here would just be like ignorant and foolish. Like, as a designer, you'd say, what are the best ways someone's done this before? Let's go look at that. And so what I started to do was to become sensitive to how the conquistadores destroyed local culture, and exterminated the local people. And then only after that, did they destroy landscapes. And if I want to regenerate the landscapes, I have to go in the reverse order. Start restoring this indigenous mindset about the place, or at least, restoring awareness and knowledge about it. And then look at how they manage the land. And look at how they're related to the land, and then start to regenerate the land in a way that's similar in spirit, if not in practice. If you can't find the information about the practice, then you do it in the same sentiment. But if you can't find the practice, might as well try it out. It's probably a good practice.
Joel Krieger 54:51
Where do you look for this wisdom? Because it seems like a lot of the indigenous ways have been lost. I mean, how do you Where do you where do you even begin?
Joe Brewer 55:03
It helps that I'm trained as a complexity scientist. So I understand how complex systems work. And that's helpful because I care less about authentic history. Meaning, like where I live, the culture was destroyed 300 years ago. And mostly what we know is from archaeology. So there's a lot that's not known. I can't really know the authentic history very well. It's incomplete. It's like the fossil record for paleontologist, a lot of it's been lost. And I can piece together stories and they can guide me, but I can't fully know. So in the absence of that authentic history, what I can do is look at functions and capacities. So for example, a capacity that the local people had, was to use local plants to make all of their textiles. They had the capacity, they knew the plants, they know how to use them, they know how to process them. Because this was a place of famous weavers. Basket weavers, clothing weavers, they made fishing nets and fishing lines, because there are several rivers near here. And they couldn't go fishing without weeding. And they couldn't do weaving without knowing the plants. And we know which plants they were, because that part of the history is known. So there's a local type of agave plant, the local name is Fica. And on the long green branches, that's got these big, long, broad leaves on it, it's got this this textile that is extremely strong, rigid, yet flexible, I've got a little pouch I used to carry things in with it. That's, that's woven in the in the pattern of the indigenous people in this place. And when I put something big in it, it stretches out. But unlike cotton, which cotton is also from here, if I take the heavy thing out, it retracts. I have smart memory fibers from a native plant, because the indigenous people used it. And so part of this is understanding the functions on how their economy worked. And one of the functions was they made all their construction materials and all their clothing came from local plants. So I need to look to whatever remaining knowledge there is of local plants. And ask, who still knows how to do that? Who still knows how to make this, this Fica handbag. And now I have one, I'm learning how to use it. And part of my design practice is to try using what the indigenous people use to learn what it feels like. So the local name for this handbag is mochela. So I have a mochela, made of Fica. And as I use it, I've stopped using my backpack. Back when I lived in Seattle, and went backpacking all the time. And I engage with what I carry differently, using a mochila than I would using a backpack. And in subtle ways my body is learning the capacities of the local culture. And I don't have to know that I'm right to know I'm going in the right direction. And so this is a big part of, like I said, the design ethic and within regeneration is I'm part of a living system. So I need to experience it with my own body to be able to design within it.
Joel Krieger 58:19
Yeah, it really is. It's a it's like a philosophy, a way of being. I mean, it's eventually it affects every aspect of who you are and how you interact with others. Right?
Joe Brewer 58:28
Yeah, and that is, that is true. And that is the process of decolonization. Like I've learned there are all these stone paths that connect the villages, and I walk between them. And by walking, I feel the rhythm of the landscape. And I hear the chorus of music from the insects and the birds at different times of day. And I learned ecology simply by walking instead of riding in a car or a motor taxi on the highway. And so the indigenous life way is a an immersive training environment. It's an ecosystem of learning.
Pavani Yalla 59:28
So this was such a treat for me, because I actually didn't get to interview Joe. Right, which typically we're both talking to the person and to be able to listen to your conversation after the fact. It was a very different experience for me. And also it was special because I felt like I was getting a glimpse into something that you've been close to for quite a while now. And that has been a significant part of your life that I we haven't talked about at length But I kind of got this like peek inside or under the hood. So that was great for me. So as I think about the things that stood out as I was listening to it, the first one is the fact that he talked a lot about just doing it versus talking about it. And I think for many of us, as included on this podcast, we do a lot of talking or pontificating about the things that we want to do, or the change that we want to see happen. And we spend very little time actually physically doing anything with our hands, right? Joe's very different. He's like, he's the one out there digging the ditch by himself. And I think part of that part of the power that he leans into is that he knows that it is actually fun and joyful to do that work. And many of us maybe haven't experienced it enough to actually realize like, oh, yeah, this is amazing. This is energizing. And this is what life's about. The design part comes in, I think, where he's very strategic about the things that he is doing. So he is picking the actions that he takes. They are, he talks about nested-ness in time and space. So he's doing things that he knows are going to have this kind of like rebounding, generative effect. And the river is a beautiful example of that when he was talking about, it's really simple. We're just stacking stones, and then look what happens, right? So he's designing his actions in that way. But there's also there's a multiplier because of what he's the specific actions he's selected. But there's also a multiplier because, and I wrote this down, he said, I do it more than I talk about it. And I document what I'm doing so that the narratives can connect others to doing it too. And so the other multiplier is that he is documenting it, and he is sharing that and is an inspiration and like a beacon, you could you could say for others to follow suit. And so he's very strategic with what he's doing. The time that he spends physically doing stuff, so that it has that kind of multiplier effect. I thought that was very cool.
Joel Krieger 1:02:14
Yeah, it’s fractal. Yeah.
Pavani Yalla 1:02:16
Yeah, that was the word he used, right. Yeah. Yeah.
Joel Krieger 1:02:19
Yeah. So true. I think he said something to the effect of, it's not about creating awareness for some imaginary audience out there, which I think all of us have fallen trapped to. It's just kind of what we're trained to do. And, you know, I think we both thought that this was it for a long time. It's like this thought of wow, you know, if only we could create a critical mass of awareness, if only we could convince enough people. And that's not it at all. It's about just doing it. And it doesn't have to be so serious, like you said, yeah, like the, the overarching topic of what what encloses this is a little dark and dire. But you can take joy in in this act of healing, you know?
Pavani Yalla 1:03:02
Yeah, I mean, I think that there has been the sentiment for a while also about like, hey, let's just go do something or every action counts, but maybe not always directed towards the right actions. So if you think about just like planting a forest, anyone could probably go out and plant a bunch of trees. But the knowledge that he brings to the work that he's doing the knowledge from, you know, whether it's ecology or other fields, he's bringing all of that together in a way that you're doing, specifically the work of regeneration. And that's what's going to have that fractal quality. So I think, I think there's two messages here. It's one is yes, go do something, don't just talk about it, but then do the right stuff. To right, like, be aware of what to do. Yeah. So what else stuck out to you in this first episode?
Joel Krieger 1:03:57
When he was talking about developing his own design heuristics and listening to his felt experience of like, what, what feels right, what do I want to move towards? And what do I want to move away from? I feel like we can all relate to this if you if you just take a moment to examine your felt lived experience in this broader system that we live under. And you know, deep in your bones, that the system is unhealthy at every possible level. And it's hard to find somebody who doesn't dream of finding a way out of it. But like, where do you go? Most people can't imagine themselves actually running off and like joining a hippie commune, they're not going to do that. But what makes Joe's example so powerful, is that he actually did what most people only dream of he untethered himself from the system and just simply walked away. What people really need it is a plausible and preferable example for another way of being to choose from right now there's just no choice. And it's not just one, we need multiple. And Joe's out there, making it real, as are so many others right now. I mean, this is happening all over the place. And it's really exciting. So that that really spoke to me, just this, acknowledging this thing that we all feel, we all feel it, but we're not acting on it. And we need to act.
Pavani Yalla 1:05:29
Yeah, that was actually the second most major thing that I noticed as well, which was the fact that he designed his life. You know, I think most of us just sleepwalk through life, probably. And that's the harsh way of putting it. But to some degree, I think we all do it. And this actually reminded me a little bit of episode one with Shelly, and, you know, the work she does to live an intentional life and help others do so. And so I was thinking about how he has designed the context surrounding himself, such that he can do this work, and it can be an accelerant, the context and the environment, the people who's surrounding himself with are amplifying his ability to do this work. And it made me just think like, Okay, well, is it really, it feels really difficult, but in some ways, it's actually quite simple. It's just the who and the where, right, like, who you do life with, and where you do it. If you can choose those things carefully, then everything else just emerges, right? Everything else becomes part of that journey that unfolds towards the direction that you want it to go. So you have to have the vision for what you want. And then you pick the context, you design the context around it, and you just fall into it. And I think that's what he's, he's done. So that's inspiring. It's still big. As I think about like, the who, and the where it's like, oh, wait, do I uplift everything? But that was kind of interesting to see that he's applying the same principles in the field to his own life.
Joel Krieger 1:07:05
Yeah, it's so true, don't they say that you are basically the average of what like the five people you hang around with the most? Yeah. And you are absolutely a product of your environment. I mean, you you are not separate from where you are. So creating that construct is such a huge part of it.
Pavani Yalla 1:07:24
I think we we do it to some degree, within what I guess you would call, I've heard you use the term default world, right? When we're thinking about, well, what's the next job I want? Or where do I want to move? Or what house do I get? So we are doing that to some degree. But if you kind of zoom out of that, all of these constructs that we've created within civilization, he's just kind of zooming out and thinking about it in a broader context, which is what, what's so powerful about it?
Joel Krieger 1:07:54
One thing I'd like to touch on for a minute is this phrase regenerative design, because you know, you and I are both designers. But we were trained, we came up through practicing design within the system. When I first heard about this phrase, regenerative design, it had me because it combined two of my most favorite things, nature and design. I'm like, I'm all in this is great. It's but it's such a different way of thinking about design. And when you when you think about how practicing design, within civilization, within markets, there's a hidden context, there's a foundation that you almost don't even see, you just take it for granted. But the way you think about doing what you what you do, is completely informed and constrained by that underlying world, the needs that you're serving the motivations that play, the whole dynamics of the system. And what that produces is a very siloed way of looking at design, that's all about the product, the service, and it doesn't really take into account the system's the relationships. And to me, that's what's so interesting about regenerative design. And you know, I'm still very early in my journey of learning about this. I've read a few books. I still feel like I'm beginner's eyes here. But it's it's really exciting to begin to think about design in this other way, which is less about making and forcing, and influencing. And it's more like a dance. It's like listening, and watching and then nudging and then listening and watching and nudging. It's about it's about a new way of seeing where, instead of seeing objects, we see the relationships between them. It's just a beautiful way of seeing the world. One of the books that I've been reading I think it was maybe Daniel Christian wall he was talking about, can an object be beautiful? Like take the iPhone? Can that object be beautiful? Really? If the design of it involves horribly extractive mining processes, toxins in the ground, slave labor, can that object really be beautiful? I don't think it can. But most of us don't see that. And that is that web of relationships that surround the design of that product. So to begin to think about design, in a completely different way, that really focuses on the relationships between things is just been so inspiring to me. I'm going to lay out a spectrum, which I've read somewhere that really helped me to understand, regenerative how it sits along some other words that we know and understand. So the default system is an extractive system. It's all about, you know, taking, taking from the land taking from people. And it's inherently destructive. It's a self terminating system, then you have sustainable. And the idea behind that is, well, what if the human presence could cause no harm could leave no trace? It's not bad, but it's not good, either. It's just neutral. Then you have regenerative? What if the human presence could be a positive effect on the environment and the people? What if the effects of human activity could actually create more conditions conducive to for more life to emerge? That's, that's such an inspiring way to look at the role of people in the world. I think a lot of people have have definitely gone through a period where they see the human presences Oh, it's like a cancer people are, people were awful. Like, it's not, it's not in our inherent nature, there have been 1000s of cultures that have existed. So it's not people, it's just this culture. It's just this monoculture. There have been plenty of cultures that have found a balance, found a way to exist, that is regenerative. So it's actually not something new in many ways. It's like returning to what was not everywhere, but in some places. And so I just think it's so important for us to have an inspiring vision for what what is the purpose of our species? Why are we even here? What's our proper role in the web of life? And that's why I think that this movement is so important. And like you said, it's so important to have people like Joe, who are not just talking about it's not just theory, there's enough theory out there. We need practice. We need people out there doing it. We need bold examples. Yeah, I mean, what's your take on the whole regenerative thing?
Pavani Yalla 1:12:56
One thing that was refreshing for me when I was listening to Joe talk about regeneration was that it actually made me think about regenerative design, like everything that I thought I knew about regenerative design, or what I had heard about it was very much still within the context of civilization and the default world. Right. So it kind of shook up for me what I thought I knew about it. And now, I think this would be the beginning of a, hopefully for me, like a, an inquiry, and, and learning more about it. Because, yeah, even when you think about some of these design disciplines that are trying to practice regenerative design, like it's still all within right within the context of the the norms, yeah, the constructs that we have accepted within this world, and I don't think that's what he's talking about. So,
Joel Krieger 1:13:54
absolutely. And that's why I think it's so important to really spend some time talking about this, because what society does what civilization does is it co-opts the stuff. What it does is instead of fight against it, it usurps it, it takes the word, it takes the label, and applies it to all sorts of things that it's not, which then waters down its meaning, which is why it's so important for us to be able to to discern what is regenerative and what isn't. I think more and more, we're going to start to see this word, regeneration, regenerative design, we’ll start to see it pop up. And it's going to be applied to all sorts of things
Pavani Yalla 1:14:32
that makes us feel better about ourselves, right? Yeah. Yes, self care is important. But if we can, and we get into this probably more in the next episode, but just like, once you go through the motions of understanding what's really happening, and you go through the grief of it, and then you emerge on the other side, that's really only when you can really truly I think apply those practices. because otherwise you're still living within the illusion of this world. I think that's probably why you see that happening everywhere because people have not gone through those motions yet.
Joel Krieger 1:15:14
That's a keen insight.
Pavani Yalla 1:15:15
I haven't gone through it myself, right? Like I don't let myself go there. I would rather just put band aids on things and, and call it a day. And that's why I relate so much to these episodes, and I hope that others will as well. I think we're all kind of a different parts of that, that journey.
Joel Krieger 1:15:43
This wraps the first chapter in our two part series with Joe Brewer and the Earth Regenerators. In this episode, we took a local on the ground perspective, and in part two, we'll explore their virtual presence, we'll unpack what it takes to design regenerative human cultures. By taking a look at the intentional design of the earth regenerators community itself, we'll learn how a disparate random bunch of people from all across the globe somehow formed into a coherent, thriving online community. So if you're curious to learn more about Joe's work in Barichara, you may want to visit regeneratebarichara.org. And we're excited to share that Joe's new book, The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth is now available, you can pick up a copy over at Chelseagreen.com. As always, we'll have direct links for all these and more on the show notes for this episode. Just head over to outsideinpodcast.org and click on this episode page. Okay, so one last thing. We offer this podcast free in the spirit of the gift. It takes an enormous amount of time and energy to produce each episode. So if our work resonates with you, please help us out. Take a minute right now. Head on over to Apple podcasts and give us a rating and review. This will help us reach more kindred spirits like you. Okay, that's it for now. We will see you again in part two.