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Find the Others
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.
Midi 00:01
I really feel it in since I've found my tribe. This one is exactly where I want to be at this time in my life. I think there is something in the fact that we're waking up. We're all waking up together.
PJ 00:21
Some people, when they find this network, you're like, This is the thing. These are the people I've been looking for. And some of these people have been looking for this stuff for a long time.
Benji 00:33
I feel like it's the first taste of the type of community that I've always been looking for. Really hard to put into words, actually, you know, it's so much of my sensemaking it's so much of my emotional and spiritual support.
JP 00:54
As regenerators was an island of sanity. Absolutely an island of sanity in a sea of chaos. We've had the complete breakdown of our sense making apparatus in the world. So to come together with people in this context has really helped me shift my attention away from all of that to what matters.
Kath 01:25
I have never been part of an online community like this before. That connectedness Yeah, it's it's a bit of magic. It's hard to describe.
Benji 01:38
It makes me feel connected, relieved. Inspired, energized. Support. Yeah, held in some way. You know, feel like I can take some chances in my own life.
JP 01:59
It feels like safety. It feels like home. It feels like friendship.
Midi 02:06
It's my capacity to accept has expanded. My capacity to listen has expanded.
Joe Brewer 02:20
And I think my capacity to love has expanded.
Joel Krieger 02:37
Welcomed outside. I'm Joel,
Pavani Yalla 02:40
and I'm having each episode we'll discover design in unexpected places.
Joel Krieger 02:45
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. Welcome to part two of the earth regenerator story. In the last episode, we talked to Joe Brewer about his on the ground work regenerating degraded landscapes in Colombia. Today, we're going to explore the other side of the coin, the virtual community that has coalesced around his work. What began in the midst of the pandemic, as a virtual study group for the manuscript of Joe's new book has evolved into something much more profound. Somehow, this seemingly random assortment of people from all walks of life from all across the globe, has formed into this thriving, coherent, self organizing online community. Now at first blush, the sheer diversity of its members feels kind of random. But there is a common thread here. This is a community of people who have taken the proverbial red pill, they are fully awake, to the reality that most of us prefer not to think about. That is that the earth systems that make human civilization possible, are unraveling. We have overshot the carrying capacity of the Earth, we've exceeded four of the nine planetary boundaries, we are in the midst of a planetary scale ecosystem collapse. Now there's a phrase used to capture the state collapse aware, those two words evoke a very different way of being in the world. Because once you know, once you fully understand the gravity of the situation we are in, you will never be the same again. And it's very common that this realization is followed by a period of devastating grief, mourning for what has already been and what will be lost. So to be honest, This episode gets a bit personal. Because this was my lived experience as well. My depression lasted for the better part of four years. And no matter what I did, I couldn't quite pull myself out of that bottomless pit, until I found the cultural scaffolding of this community. Now, I want to be careful here not to paint the wrong picture. This isn't a support group for depression, the knowledge that brought these people together may be dire. But somehow, this heavy burden has catalyzed everyone here, into a life of purpose and meaningful collective action. This group is the embodiment of what it means to live a regenerative life. And it's a source of hope and support for those who choose to walk this path of regeneration. So to give you a better sense for what this community feels like, and what it means to its members, I spoke with several of the folks I've encountered along the way at Earth regenerators.
PJ 05:58
For a lot of people, it's the only time where they've been able to even find other people to talk about, enter, acknowledge each other in the fullness of what they know, to be true. Regarding the state of our planet, and the things to becoming, it's sort of like one of the only spaces out there that is collapse aware, and embodies it in a way that is healthy. We work through the grief, and we hold it and we go into it and then help each other and support each other in that
Benji 06:33
when you were willing to accept the depth of the problem and really embody that, then I think it opens up a whole new world of of inquiry. And, and so you're able to ask the right questions that
JP 06:50
I feel it as a rebuilding of trust. It's a we're reweaving. Like the the things that broke a long time ago, in our relations, we are reweaving them heart to heart in this community.
Benji 07:11
Yes, community regeneration, it starts with how we come together, it starts with understanding how we've evolved in a certain direction, that has really led us astray. We don't currently have the cultural scaffolding, and mentality to be deemed stewards of our landscapes,
Kath 07:33
we can only face the challenges we are facing at the moment, like civilization or Empire collapse, the dying of Mother Earth, we can only face all challenges when we truly connect as people. There's like, no healing off the planet. And no turning point of we are not able to look at ourselves and how we relate to one another. That is happening at Earth's regenerator.
JP 08:03
what's so beautiful about a lot of things that are happening is done. Despite any attempts at design, things are working out organically anyway. They just they just kind of emerge. Many of us are like, let's just surrender to this. Let's see what happens. And, and there's enough trust at this point that we can do that, which is amazing.
Midi 08:31
There is this sort of collective mind there is this Global Mind developing. So if one group learns how to be coherent, internally coherent, that is actually influencing the field.
JP 08:45
We are smarter together, we are wiser together, we are more insightful together with the collective wisdom is informing more than just the project that's in front of us.
Midi 08:57
What we've actually got is I think the the real makings of the thriving of the individual within the community, and therefore the community thrives because it's individuals are all deeply motivated to to follow their own stars, but they're within this collective role. I think that's one of the great things about the network that we're we're really all encouraged to live into our gifts and our experience when our skills than to share them.
PJ 09:32
Empowered participation, people actually feeling like they are empowered to contribute and to own what's going on. The the feeling that you get from that is very energizing, and it's very inspiring, and it's very, like, like it fills you with meaning.
JP 09:50
communities come and go. They have blooms, you know, they blossom and then they fade and they go away. And so what was What fascinates me is what makes a community continue, what makes it last, what makes it sustain. Here, we have all the ingredients of a long lasting community, not just because we have project, but because we actually care about each other.
Joel Krieger 10:26
So as you just heard, the experience of this collective has been transformative for so many people. Now, this is not random happenstance. The design of this community is intentional. In the conversation that follows, you're going to hear about things like decentralization, co creation, emergence, pro social, and permaculture. My hope is that, at the end of this episode, we'll have glimpse the edges of what it takes to design truly regenerative human cultures. Alright, so let's go ahead and get into it. We'll pick up right where we left off in our conversation with Joe Brewer. Maybe this is a good point to kind of talk about how technology is now influencing the way we evolve. Because there's a whole part of your work that we just talked about that's on the ground. There's another part equally as important, I would say that's via the internet. It's this online community. I'm just so curious. How did this come to be? And and how does this fit within the larger ambitions for your regenerative work?
Joe Brewer 11:41
There's a really nice phrase that one of my mentors uses. It's David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist and gotten to work with him on a number of occasions. And he has this phrase, he says, We must become wise managers of our own evolutionary process. So we're not only in an evolutionary process, we're aware of it. We're not only aware of it, we understand how it works. And not only do we understand how it works, we understand how we are creating the conditions for it. And then we choose the conditions for how the evolutionary process unfolds. And then we are intentionally designing the evolution. And this is really important because the root cause of our planetary predicament of human activities, destabilizing the Earth's climate and these other things that are happening is that in the human lineage, something happened, you could say a Pandora's box was opened, something that couldn't be closed again, which is going back a few million years and our ancestors, history goes back a long way. Our ancestors cultural capacities, began to have a cumulative evolutionary capacity, not just an effect a capacity. So just as how the anatomy of our bodies was altered, through an evolutionary process that created things like brains, that could have social capacities that could also evolve and change our anatomy. And so what's happened for millions of years, in the human lineage, I take it back about 3 million years, the cultural evolution, the evolution of the cultural part of the hominids that became homosapiens. So for example, the control and use of fire which creates the campfire, what happens is campfires, storytelling, why is their storytelling language? Why is their language, larger brain capacities? Why is there a larger brain capacities, smaller guts, why are their smaller guts, pre cooking of pre digesting of food by cooking? Why? Because there was fire, you see, the cultural practice of using fire can change the anatomy of the organism, and change the evolutionary pathway for the descendants. So what's really been incredible and beautiful about humans is that our biological evolution continues, but our cultural evolution has come to be orders of magnitude faster than our biological evolution. And so in the short to medium term, cultural evolution now dominates. So, our future biological inheritance will depend on whether or not we manage cultural evolution. Because cultural evolution could drive humans to extinction, or cultural evolution could enable humans to populate other planets. Its cultural evolution that will determine it, not our biology. A reductionistic sense, even though our biology is always part of it. And so a big part of my work has been to try to figure out a scientific way to design for social change. What did the best social sciences tell us about how change occurs in human cultures? And then how do we use that scientific knowledge to guide and manage change? For social change? This is the work I've been doing for the last 20 years, in one form or another. And so what we did with this online community, first of all, it formed around a book manuscript that I was writing that I chose to give away instead of publish. So what happened was, I wrote the first 16 chapters of a book, I felt it was too timely and important to wait for it to be published, which can be one to two years. And so instead, I just put out a call to my social media networks and said, Who would like to join a study group. Now remember what I said earlier about D financialized. Ng, I was able to do this because I didn't care about making money off of my knowledge, or off of book sales. Because at that point, I already had three years of being supported on Patreon, by people who just appreciate me because I give all of my knowledge away. And I was able to afford to live in Colombia on my Patreon support. So I could give everything away and not expect a financial return, which my ability to give away my knowledge became a commons, for this new community, so that I could create a pattern of a gift economy, because the gift economy as a community and not a market, which means we could keep the dynamics of market out long enough for a real community to grow. And this is what social media is terrible about. Social media is almost always deeply connected to markets. And we create a space where we can protect from the market by creating a community gift economy, which started out with people freely reading the manuscript of my book, freely attending webinars that I was giving, freely reading and participating in discussions of different kinds of material and starting to meet each other, which kala social and information comments. And those who really valued me gifted me support on Patreon, or on PayPal, but it was never a financial transaction. And there came a point in the process, where the work was primarily about what I was offering. And so a member of the community, Diego Gali, who was a community organizer from Italy, approached me and said, We should really create Decentralized Governance and community leadership. And I said, Yeah, I've been thinking about that, but I haven't gotten to it yet. That's really a good point. Let's do that. And we brought in a process called pro social. And we use the pro social process, to cultivate and train 45, what we call community regenerators. People who facilitate the continued evolution, people who manage the cultural evolution of the community, using pro social group processes,
Joel Krieger 18:17
I think there are two concepts we should unpack here. Before we get further one is the pro social methodology, and then decentralization. Could you speak to both those
Joe Brewer 18:27
I'll start with pro social, pro socialism, as a convergent body of knowledge and practice. People often think of it as a framework or an approach. But really, it's the way of understanding why any social group works. And then any method that supports the functioning of groups, is pro social. And it's built on three bodies of knowledge, all of the research about how evolution has given rise to cooperation for ants, for complexes of plants. For humans, it doesn't matter wherever cooperation has occurred, you know, multicellularity of your multicellular body is cooperation. How does cooperation occur? How does it evolve? The second is contextual behavioral science, which is a body of research and practice, about how to help people create change in their own behaviors, on the behaviors of groups. So organizational management, group therapy, individual therapy, and related things. And the third is Elinor Ostrom 's work on how to govern a common pooled asset, or how to manage any thing that's shared in common. So pro social is the knowledge from those three domains, the three domains of research and practice, about how to create healthy, effective social environments. And then there are tools and methods for doing so that's what presidential is, at least in a brief introduction, because it's it's beautifully rich and complex. decentralization is related to a phenomenon that's widely widely studied now, which is the study of emergence. And emergence is the capacity of a dynamic system to create new capacity, the capacity to create new capacity. Classic example is how water tension, which is an electromagnetic interaction between water molecules is an emergent property of liquid water. You cannot find it within the individual water molecules. But if you have enough water molecules together, they're in liquid forum, they self organize, and surface tension emerges. So emergence is the dynamic interactions of a system that has lots of parts. That gives rise to a capacity that cannot be reduced to the parts. Decentralization as an element of this because decentralization is the capacity of the system to guide its evolution in whatever form that occurs through local interactions. So just like how the water molecules have an electromagnetic interaction, and water attention arises, water tension has emergence, because there's decentralization of electromagnetic force. Every water molecule has the capacity to interact electromagnetically with other molecules. So each of them is empowered to interact locally. Decentralization is any capacity to interact locally, spread out across the system, specifically for human groups, now it means something else, something more decentralization. Decentralization is intelligence spread out across the social system, the capacity for local groups, or local interactions within a social context, to gather knowledge, to discern what's happening, to identify problems, to recruit solutions, to take action to solve them. So just like how platelets are moving around in your blood system, to attach themselves to ruptured tissue, they're decentralized and spread out through your whole body. And there's intelligence and what a platelet does, how it, how it directs itself out, sticks out begins to interact. Humans have all kinds of intelligence, that we can apply locally, through interactions with a system, if we have the Empowered capacity, or if we have the sovereignty, to take those actions. So decentralization is about cultivating this distributed intelligence across the social system.
Joel Krieger 22:51
And this is something that is is probably very different than what most people experience in their daily life, because most structures in the civilized world are centralized. And I mean, can you give us some examples of decentralized human structures,
Joe Brewer 23:11
I'll give some from the earth regenerators community that emerged around the book. So I have this book manuscript, the whole manuscript is freely available online. And there was a group of women and our three generators, who really thought the book was great for creating relationships, that each chapter had topics that as they read the chapter, they wanted to talk to other people. And when they did talk to other people, they grew their relationships. They just came to me and said, Joe, would would it be okay, if we just create a book club, with your, with your manuscript, every Monday afternoon, they would meet for an hour, they would read a chapter. And then they come together, it's been an hour, and they'll just talk about whatever came up from the chapter. And that was their facilitation of the book club. And it was decentralized, because I didn't have to manage them as the author of the book. They didn't need to ask anyone's permission. But during that same time, another group of people wanted to create a curriculum from all of the reading materials and the webinars that I was putting together around the book. So a group of people are gathering like, Joe, we're learning so much from the way you've done this. But there's so much more. And we all have different knowledge about how we can do that. We would like to design curriculum. So we created a section of the platform that we were using for a curriculum design, and people started talking. Some of those people were in the book club. And they said, you know, the way that we're learning in the book club is great pedagogy. This should inform how we design the curriculum. And people in the curriculum design group, you guys might enjoy joining the book club. It's a great group. And this is just an example of two places where there was emergent intelligence within the community. And each of them was empowered to guide their own evolution, including to synergize, between the two, when I felt appropriate, and there was no top down gatekeeper or authority to tell them, they could or couldn't do it.
Joel Krieger 25:12
The community is thriving. I mean, I've been a part of it for gosh, I don't know, maybe six months at this point, there are so many types of things happening, initiated by so many different types of people. And you can just see it building on itself, the momentum is there. And you know, I have to step back and say, is something like this even possible, if the founder were to require control, or ownership over how it unfolds, and it's not just, you just don't see that very often, at least, I haven't seen it in, in most of my encounters with human groups,
Joe Brewer 25:49
I want to step back and make an observation first, and then start to talk about this topic. What I found over and over again, is, most people who might do design, whether they're professionally designed or not, do not have a supportive environment, to design holistically. And so the absence of context is why regenerative design does not occur. So the design of this community was about creating contexts for co creation, which is contexts where everyone can be a designer, and they can design toward whatever they care most about. So there are very important considerations for social norms, very important considerations for models of leadership, very important considerations for economic patterns, economic processes, like one thing I had to be very careful of was that I was never potentially competing for funds with anyone else in the community. If money is raised in the community, it goes to the community and it never comes to me. And it cannot come to me, or it will destroy this principle. So I have to be very, in a sense, altruistic, I have to give away my knowledge, not be paid volunteer my time and role model, that kind of leadership, or else we cannot create this kind of community, which means I have to be privileged and empowered and supported to freely do that. So you see that there are elements of this that were years in the making, to make it possible for me to facilitate the emergence of this community. And one of my goals with the first cohort that we did the pro social process with, with was I said, I want to kill the mythical leader. And everyone is like, Joe, no, we don't want you to go away. We need you. But no, no, you don't understand. What I mean is, if you see the Buddha on the path, kill the Buddha, this is a same by Buddha, which is the idea that there is a centralized leader is not true. What is true is that there is any emergent wave of leadership, empowered through the way I role model leadership, the primary thing is, I am empowering others to be leaders. And that's why I look like a good leader is the the felt sense of the community is I see Joe, and there's all this stuff going on Joe did it. That's the mythical leader. Because that's not actually what's happening. What's happening is we're having a lot of small group conversations with a lot of creative leadership moment to moment. Like, in one moment, someone steps in and says, We need to talk about this. And I'm like, great idea. And everyone else was talking about it. That person during that time, was the leader. And the leadership is so ephemeral and so emergent. And so moment to moment, that all you can see is the stereotyped narrative of the guru, which is the mythical leader. And so I had to actively kill them ethical leader. And so there were a lot of moments like this where my understanding of cultural evolution and cognitive science, I knew what I needed to do as a designer, because I was designing the context in which design could occur. And I had that power as a leader, because I was setting norms as the initial leader and then amplifying it and the cultivation of the first and second waves of laters.
Joel Krieger 29:33
Yeah, there's this really beautiful symmetry, I think, to the design, the on the ground work, and this online community here because when you described listening to the land, kind of observing, it's kind of this real time instead of having a preconceived notion about a thing you want to make, being in relationship to the system, paying attention, and giving it nudges giving it support where it's needed as it evolved. It's It sounds like very much the same process for this online community. I'm curious, you started out with some, some principles like decentralization and the processional methodology. But how much of this in your mind was? Well, I think I think I know what we need to build versus this act of dance as it unfolds on its own.
Joe Brewer 30:21
Because of of a very diverse experience. And so I've worked in a lot of different contexts. And I've seen how organizations don't work. And I've done a lot of crowdsourcing and crowd funding and community work with online activist communities. And so I have a pretty good understanding of where organizational structure kills community, because I have a lot of experience of it not working. So one of the things I needed to do was plant cultural seeds for the future the same way I plant seeds for a tree. And this goes back to one of the great historic controversies of Western philosophy, which is teleology. For those who don't know, teleology is purposefulness is end directedness directly toward an end. Aristotle was the first person to articulate this in a way that was recorded when he said the acorn wants to become an oak tree. That's teleological thinking. The teleology or the purpose of the acorn is to become an oak tree. This has been very, very controversial in the history of Western philosophy, what I found in human culture because of our semantics, because we live as stories, and we live in the stories, that if I understand the narrative logic of a story, I can begin the story and I know where the story can or cannot go. So if I begin a story of decentralization, it cannot go to a place of a despotic leader, the community will rebel and destroy the community well before that could ever happen. And so the story is logic pulls things forward. And so one way that I was able to create these contexts was that I studied cognitive linguistics. And I understand how minds make meaning. And I understand how minds make stories. And I've read narrative psychology, research and other fields to help me do this. So as a designer, I brought all of that knowledge about narratives. And I would create a context where people could feel themselves entering a narrative that they would then create. And it's because the self select activity of the narrative is what causes people to participate in the first place. And there was a point about a year and a half into this when I did a Google search for the phrase, Earth regenerator Earth regeneration, regenerate the earth. And I was sort of surprised like, a lot of people talk about regeneration, why am I the only human on Earth talking about this? The reason I think, I have a hypothesis is that there's so much trauma and grief that people have about ecological crisis, that they have not processed their grief enough to be able to believe the Earth can be regenerated. So they don't think about it. It is not even possible for them to conceive that humans could regenerate the earth, when they can't yet believe that humans can destroy the Earth. Like I see how how bad humans are, they can't accept our power, and see the beauty of cultural power as potentially beautiful. They see its destructive power. And when I realized that the function of this narrative is to create enough cultural healing, that people can believe the Earth can be regenerated, so that they become a regenerator of the earth. And so just by naming it Earth regenerators it already selects away anyone who's not open to the idea that people can regenerate the earth. I strategically framed the community around the idea that humans can be Earth regenerators from day one, that was December 29 2019. When I created the study group, I called it are three generators. And this is really key because the power of a story is, if you fall asleep when the story is not done, you'll keep making it in your dreams that night. I mean, we know that some great stories, stories are so great, because they capture us and we become servants to them. And we fall in love with them. We're servants to them the way we be servants to to a lover when we really really love them. We want to care for them and nurture them and cultivate them. And we can be lovers to a story. And this, I think, has been the subtle part of all this because when someone steps forward and says, Joe, we need this to be more decentralized. Why? Because the story demands it. And the story would end, if Joe was an egotistical leader would end, it would crush the dream of that story. And so every step of the way, I have to support the control and power of the story that I don't have. I don't have that power or control. I never had it. I'm a humble servant of the story. The story requires it. There's a congruence between story and experience. And this is what user centered design and usability design are all about. There's not congruence between the story and the experience, it's broken. So I had to create the Embodied Reality of the story with people moment to moment for the story to exist. And now that's happened in the bodies of enough people, that it's almost at the place that can continue without me. And when that happens, when it no longer needs me, I will have killed the medical leader.
Joel Krieger 36:18
Yeah, it's, it just strikes me how important philosophy is, in all of this. It's active. It's not just these these ideas that float around, I mean, there's a kind of underpins all the actions that are that are taken as this community unfolds, I want to give people a better sense of everything that's happening here, because I don't use this word lightly. It really is a thriving community, could you just kind of describe the landscape of the different types of things that people are doing here.
Joe Brewer 36:45
So on the earth regenerators platform, the book clubs still exists, but now they watch movies together and do other things, but they gather around some piece of content, and they discuss it. And that's still continuing. There is another activity that's been really powerful called campfire talks, which is inspired by the Aboriginal practice of yarning, which is sitting around a fire and talking in a way that weaves human beings together. So there's a particular set of design heuristics for how to manage a campfire talk, they don't have an agenda, there's a sharing of time for how much people contribute. And there's an openness to non judgmental co creation of the story. So the campfire talks are happening. We run learning journeys, where, for two months, we form a cohort of people and spend two months taking them through a pro social process. So at the end of two months, they love each other literally, they say, they fall in love with each other. I'm not making that word up. That's what the members say about their participation. They love each other so much, they can't stop. And they find ways to continue interacting with each other after the learning journey is over. And we found that as a design practice, two months forms the cohort, then the cohort dissipates and the relationships continue. And then we give people other ways to stay engaged. Our first learning journey led to the birth of the regenerative project incubator, which holds weekly advisory circles, where anyone can propose a project and go and have a group of very smart people with diverse backgrounds, critique and support, and help them to improve their projects or even join it. And so we have the regenerative project incubator, we have teachings by experts on different subjects like right now, there's Charles up to him who is an amazing landscape restoration expert working with water retention. And about two hours, they're doing a session on, on how to return water to arid landscapes. So teach ends on really strong content, and no one is being paid. By the way, every bit of this is gift economy. There's also design sessions to explore common challenges between projects that occur on a regular basis. And we also have work groups that have formed around crowdfunding, we created the Bari Chara regeneration fund, and are enabling territorial design of regeneration in Colombia, with money that was raised and with volunteers that have come from the global network. So people physically come to bar HR and work with me. But even more powerful than that, there's an increasing number of photos of people from the earth regenerators community standing with their arms over each other's shoulders, because they're looking for and finding each other and hanging out physically. Which to me is like, one of the best measures that we have a real online community is they have to meet in person. I'm waiting for the first marriage from two people who start dating and waiting for now that'll be a little while. And then also, we have because of the project incubator. people's projects are becoming woven into the community and individual people who have been through learning journeys before and have cultivated leadership are now on pathways of personal transformation. They're sharing regular updates with the community, and then creating pro social processes for other members of the community to join them. And so these are just examples of organized activities, ongoing social events, personal life transformations, and everything is weaving. I use the metaphor and one of our community calls the other day, that we're like the way that you roll the dough to make bread, you flatten it and fold it back into itself. We spread out and refold and spread out and refold our community activities continuously. And that's why it is a vibrant community. The vibrancy and the creativity, and the felt sense of engagement is truly invigorating. Because it's real community.
Joel Krieger 40:53
I'm just reflecting on my own experience of encountering it. And everyone here shared a basic worldview, that people in my physical proximity do not. And I think that's one of the beautiful things about the internet is only because that's here, I can't describe it. But it is it is like a very quick hop, skip and a jump to becoming very tight friends with a lot of these folks. And I think so much of it has to do with a shared worldview. And the shared philosophy that even if they can't articulate it, there's this alignment there. And
Joe Brewer 41:30
then there's the additional pieces. When you people, when you bring people without affinity together, they enjoy being around each other. And they start to have fun. We've had conversations about planetary collapse, and people still have fun and moments. Because they feel so good, to be supported and to be able to support people like themselves.
Joel Krieger 41:54
Most people are familiar with a nonprofit and what it means to be a volunteer. And I don't think this is the same thing. Can you help us understand what's going on here? How does the gift economy work? Why is everyone feel so invested in wanting to contribute in this way,
Joe Brewer 42:12
one of the aspects of Commons that I mentioned in the pro social framework is that managing the Commons is part of that framework. One aspect of a commons is that the members of the group that manage the comments, need to have sovereignty, set another way that jurisdiction, the limits of who makes decisions and how they're made, needs to be the same as the membership of the group. If you're ever in a group, or someone else makes the decision that affects you, you do not have that jurisdiction, and you do not have that sovereignty. So to manage a commons, those managing it must have sovereignty. And anytime there's a nonprofit organization, there is a separation of management from volunteers, and management makes the decisions. And that is the fundamental structural difference. There are other things too. But one thing I learned about creating a comment or creating a gift economy is you have to create a commons first, which is why I was careful to say that I was able to give away everything in Earth regenerators because I was supported on Patreon. I was the commons. And by being a commons, my relationships with people could be an act of as David Bollier says, We were commenting just the verb, we were living as though we were a shared Commons. And by doing that we were in a gift economy. And a lot of people don't realize that the commons allows gift economies to occur. And markets privatize and destroy and extract profit from Commons. This is another way that markets and communities are at odds with each other. So you have to create a non market, a post market, a pre marketing something other than market built as a commons. And then people have to have sovereignty to make decisions. And as they do that, they start to feel empowered, and they amplify the spaces of creativity, because they actually have creative influence. And as a creative person, I'm sure you know this that it's frustrating as hell, to not be able to run with your ideas. But what's even more frustrating is to have ideas that you're running with, but you're alone. So the best is when you're creatively playing with someone else, like think of jazz musicians, after you've mastered technique to just get to riff with someone is the funnest thing ever. It's like making love. It's so awesome. And so people who are in a co creative empowerment, not an individualistic empowerment, a co creative empowerment, find the joy in writhing together. Which is why this is more improvisational like jazz. And I'm like surfing and there are a lot of improvisational metaphors we can use that would apply here. because they will be correct, that the co creation was deeply joyful. And you feel you feel an intimacy with someone when you're creative together. It's beautiful. You feel loved and accepted and seen and validated and how, and you're able to give to something and to someone you love and all these things increase our humanism make us feel good. So yeah, that vibrancy is as a natural outcome of cultural regeneration.
Joel Krieger 45:29
The mainstream mainstream culture really celebrates the idea of the individual genius. I mean, you see it everywhere. It's so entrenched in our way of thinking. But what you're describing here, and what I've witnessed is collective intelligence, which is something that I really believe is real, it's a real thing. I've seen it happen. Most people who work in creative disciplines where you have to collaborate with other people to do your work, you have seen it, you have felt it. Some people describe it as flow state, it is magic, and that that's happening here. Can you talk a bit about collective intelligence and what this means what's the bigger significance here for this community
Joe Brewer 46:13
will give the biggest significance first, which is the planetary level significance. There's a hypothesis put forth by James Lovelock called the Gaia hypothesis. And he named it after a goddess intentionally, which is he observed that living systems, because they're regenerative, they try to reproduce the conditions of being alive, he hypothesized that the entire planet does it. It's sometimes called the Goldilocks phenomenon, you know, not too hot, not too cold, not too acidic, not too basic, that as soon as there was life on Earth, there's continuously been live for more than three and a half billion years. So the hypothesis was that the biosphere of the earth maintains conditions conducive to life for the entire planet. And there's now very solid evidence that this is in fact, the case. And scientists who don't like you know, god and goddess language, called the Gaia hypothesis, the more technical name of Earth System science, but it's been very verified scientifically as true. So collective intelligence for humans, in the context of Gaia hypothesis, so we have a planet that maintains a temperature. So there can be all three states of water at the surface, liquid solid and gas, which is necessary for maintaining the biospheres integrity, it never gets too hot or too cold for all three states of matter to exist somewhere on the surface of the earth. That's an example of this Goldilocks phenomenon. Wow, within that, three and a half billion years of life on Earth, arose a particular kind of primate that has a social capacity for collective intelligence. So when we put satellites up in space, and put sensor networks on rivers, and we have all this intelligence capacity, to process information and create intelligence, we actually can be a collective intelligence for the entire planet. And we can help the planet to maintain this Goldilocks homeostasis, this balanced place, which can allow for complex human societies to exist. And so the real power of collective intelligence is that the evolution of the cosmos gave rise to a planet that could have life. And the evolution of life on that planet gave rise to a species, an organism within the planet that is capable of consciously participating in and CO creating with the self regulation of the planet. And this is why humans can regenerate the earth is that if we can get into this flow state and a small group of people and do something like design a website, then we could do the same thing for a river. We could do the same thing for a coastal estuary. We can still do this for floodplains. We can do this for landscapes. And there's actually a lot of evidence that people have. So this practice of being in these pro social groups is the practice of being collective intelligence, so that we can form the nested levels of collective intelligence all the way up to the planetary scale. And we do it by starting small and local, around a worldview alignment for people using a digital platform, like Earth regenerators, who increasingly organize themselves physically in space, around structures of their landscapes like reversions or watersheds. And as they do that they become collective intelligence of those landscapes. Notice the word of implies that it's part of. You don't do regenerative design on the watershed, you are the watershed managing itself. And this is the capacity of our collective intelligence. It is an evolutionary, the technical term is evolutionary transition. It's a new capacity that evolution created. There's also this beautiful phrase, the evolution of Evolve ability. Evolve, ability is whatever capacity a system has to evolve. Evolution of evolvability is that the evolvability can change. Well, now that we have conscious human cultural evolution, we have the ability to intentionally manage cultural evolution, which is collective intelligence, we have that capacity. So now the planet can guide its own evolution with her humans, if the humans don't go extinct. And so this collective intelligence topic is really interesting, because it reveals the gift that the Earth gives herself, by keeping us from going extinct. It's not the arrogance of human superiority. It's the humility of being the gift, and acting in service to what that the responsibility means. We can be collective intelligence. And therefore, when millions of non human species might go extinct because of collective stupidity, we have to learn collective intelligence. And we have to practice it with excellence.
Joel Krieger 51:44
Well said, this has been wonderful, Joe, I feel like that's a great place to leave it. Is there anything else you want to share with the listeners about your projects or how they can support or just anything else you want us to know?
Joe Brewer 51:59
I just want to say that the biggest absence in my life before this community emerged was that I didn't have a space to co create with others. So if anyone out there feels like, you don't have that supportive social environment, you can join us to learn how to create it, or find some other way. But please, for the sake of the future of humanity, I'm not being melodramatic here. For the sake of the future of our species, find or create it. Because Gaia is calling us, and we have work to do.
Pavani Yalla 52:55
I absolutely loved this episode. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, both episodes, but something about this one, it just song, you know, I was listening at the end of it, I was like, No, don't add, there's more, there has to be more. So it was really good, good job. I really loved that we unpacked this other aspect of Joe's work, which is very important. It was really clear that there are parallels between both the work he's doing and you said this, to him, the work he's doing in the field, as well as the work that is being done within the online community. It is. He's again, creating the context, getting things started, and then allowing it to emerge. He's starting the story, and then he's pulling back because that story kind of unfolds on its own. And the folks that are invited to participate or that choose to self select, in that story, generate the story themselves. And what's powerful about that is that when you let folks have autonomy or agency over something, they in turn feel empowered, and therefore, invested in the work and in each other.
Joel Krieger 54:16
I'm glad you liked this one. Yeah, it's it was you know, it's interesting how when we started out this podcast, our intention was to go experience the things ourselves as much as possible. But that turned out to be totally unrealistic with the pandemic and everything. But this is one that actually I've spent a lot of time in, maybe the best way to get after it is to just talk about the felt experience of being in it. And to compare contrast that with other common group organization models that people will have experienced, like, like a company. You know, the first one is age diversity, and this one's so so fascinating, because if you think about our experience, from the minute we're little kids, they silo us off, and you're only with people your age. And that's how it is all growing up. And then you get into the workplace and you only hang out with people that are your age. I mean, what does that do to us? Well, this community, one of the most striking things about it is, there are people here in their early 20s, all the way up to their 60s 70s, and even 80s. I mean, and there is something about having the wisdom of the elders with a spark of youth, that is just magic. And you don't see that anywhere.
Pavani Yalla 55:43
You know, that reminds me of extended families. And again, this is a practice that is slowly waning. But when I think back to my family in India, there are many intergenerational families that live together, you have grandparents, and grandchildren, coexisting, and quote, you know, just living life together long term. And I, I didn't get to experience that, but I got to see glimpses of it whenever we would visit. And I would have to imagine that that would tremendously change your experience of life. And what you can do. As a result,
Joel Krieger 56:21
it changes the entire group dynamic for the better. My experience is, this has a lot to do with the health of the community. The other big thing is hierarchy. So most people, what you've experienced, is hierarchical organizations that work off of a command control base model. Someone once told me, the reason why this is so pervasive in corporate culture is that after World War Two, all of the people that were in the war, then flooded the civilian population and went to work for companies, and basically just took that hierarchical control type practice into the business world, which is fascinating. It makes a lot of sense. Of course, of course, it's why that it's that way. But is that the right way to go about managing creative human endeavors? I mean, it feels gross to me now to be in the organization once you've tasted something else. That type of hierarchical control type environment just feels toxic. But that's what most people day in, day out exist in, in the default world. And this is actually part of what gives me a lot of hope. What we're describing here is a decentralized self organizing system. There's not really any hierarchy, Joe talked about it himself killing the fictitious leader. This is why organisms like anonymous, you know, the hacker group, they're so hard to pin down because there's, there's no leader what is where does it exist? How does it decide the intelligence is distributed through every person that's a member of it? I honestly believe that hierarchical control based systems cannot compete with decentralized self organizing systems. It's an it's an exponential level of intelligence above. A lot of it is about control versus letting go. Alan Watts has this concept called Huawei talks about Huawei, which is the art of not forcing, just letting things happen. Just noticing and kind of nudging and letting things emerge. And I think so much of a hierarchical governance model for groups is about force is about making things happen. And this is about creating the conditions for the right thing to emerge.
Pavani Yalla 58:51
Yeah. I mean, I think that's how we've gotten ourselves into this pickle to start, right. Yeah, control
Joel Krieger 58:58
control. Also, like motivations are really interesting. So when you think about people in a group, everyone's going to have personal interests. But there's also a collective interest at the group level. And how do you integrate those two? What one of the ways that this is done is there's a methodology that Joe talked a little bit about called pro social, which I'm actually taking a course in right now. It's, it's pretty fascinating. It's based off the work of Elinor Ostrom. I think she was a Nobel Prize winner. And it's all about the cognitive science, the behavioral psychology, whatever you want to call it around highly functioning groups, healthy groups, what are the conditions that make it possible for that to happen? So there is a real methodology being applied here, and it's working. It also begins to hint at something that we touched on just briefly, which is the gift economy, which is people's motivations for doing things. And when you think about a traditional group organ relational model, you're doing it, especially in a company. Yeah, like the, you know, they talk about purpose. But whatever you're there, because you're making money, you're there because you're trying to fulfill your own needs. But in this group, the gift economy really is at play, there's no money being exchanged, they want to contribute, they want to share their gifts with the group. And that is, feels so elemental, it just feels like how it should be. And it's so beautiful to watch people blossom, to watch people because everyone has gifts. And most people aren't able to express them in a normal group structure. Here you can. And it's just amazing, all of the wonderful things that that are probably suppressed and hidden in other types of group structures.
Pavani Yalla 1:00:47
Yeah, when he was talking about the, the power of co creation and collective creativity, the metaphor he used was, I think, jazz music musicians, were there riffing off of each other. And it's just joyful. And I think we, we know that to be like collective flow. We've experienced that with creative teams. And it is a magical place to be in like I crave that often. That generates a lot of energy towards again, the right things.
Joel Krieger 1:01:22
You know, when you think about why people get into a creative field, I think it first is because they get into individual flow state, and the end time fades away, and they just get totally lost in this act of creation. Then, if you're lucky, you get to experience that with other people. And something different happens. It's it's another level of experience. Because you and I have seen this happen plenty of times, within groups within creative teams. What I've seen happen here is different. Because it happens more frequently, it happens longer. And I think a big part of that is the reason why everyone's here. And their motivations. It allows that to happen more, it's almost like because everyone here and you'll feel it, you know, if you if you contrast being in a meeting, and just pay attention, a normal meeting, just pay attention to how there is no empty space, every bit of empty space is filled by a word. Everyone wants to get their point across. Everyone wants to show how smart they are, get credit for my idea, there's no space, you attend these meetings, they're actually filled with silence, there's a lot of silence in between. Because what's happening is everyone is there in service of what wants to emerge. So they're only going to speak, if they feel like something came to them that's in service of this beautiful thing that's bouncing around the team. And it's because we're getting reacquainted with how to listen to each other. And it's because the intent is pure. It's exhilarating. I mean, when you're in that space, where several people have somehow merged into this sentience organism, it's now its own thing. And other types of things are possible orders of magnitude more complicated and impactful than what you could do on your own.
Pavani Yalla 1:03:27
I told you earlier, this episode gave me goosebumps. And there was a specific spot where that happened. And it was towards the end of the episode where he talks about the Gaia hypothesis and the Goldilocks phenomenon, you know, like, it is such an energizing thought that we might be here to play a very critical role in the earth, you know, maintaining life and maintaining itself. It's a very different way, I think, to, to think about it than I was used to before where we tend the narrative, I think the dominant narrative is like, Oh, crap, like humans have messed everything up. We've destroyed the planet, which, you know, might be true, but it's not. It's not an energizing thought. And this narrative, what he's talking about, which I think to be very true, I can like feel it in my bones. And it just through the conversation, I already feel it, right. The thought that we have a purpose, and I don't know if he used the word purpose, but as he was speaking, like, I was just, I got goosebumps, because I was like, Oh, crap, that's why we're here. That's why Earth, Earth created us or we're part of this right? For this reason to play this role in. And I think it's an inspiring energy. It's one that gets you. It makes you want to get up and go do something. So I think that is the power of This narrative.
Joel Krieger 1:05:03
Yeah, it's it's important for people to have a story to live into a reason, a bigger reason for why we're here. And I think a lot of the old stories, they don't serve us anymore. You know that bit that at the very beginning, where Mindy, who I interviewed, she says, we're waking up, we're all waking up together. That's what it feels like, it really does feel like that. You should come hang out.
Pavani Yalla 1:05:37
Like tearing up? Yeah. Yeah, it's one, it was one of those conversations where I was listening to it. You know, when you you know it to be true, it rings so true. And you know, you haven't really lived into it yet. But you know, you have to,
Joel Krieger 1:05:58
it's, it can be very overwhelming and very dark. And I do feel like that is just part of the journey that you have to go through to get to the other side. But on the other side, what's there is pretty beautiful. Because there is an excitement in knowing that something is happening right now really profound. And it's happening everywhere. It's not just this community, these types of groups are springing up all over the place. And they're all informing each other. But it's happening, and to be a part of it just fills me with so much joy and meaning. This is the only experience of social media I've ever had that is healthy. It's amazing to be able to contrast that because you see how design decisions in building the scaffolding of the community have everything to do with how people interact with each other on it, which is why Facebook and Twitter feels so nasty.
Pavani Yalla 1:06:57
Yeah, that's, you know, that's That's it, isn't it? It's the scaffolding, if you can get that, right. If that's designed, everything else just emerges, and it's in the right direction. And it's joyful, and it's meaningful, and purposeful. And you just have to get the scaffolding, right. And I think, unfortunately, many of us are doing a lot within the wrong scaffolding. And it's like we're swimming upstream or whatever, because the scaffolding itself is not.
Joel Krieger 1:07:26
Right. That is so true.
Pavani Yalla 1:07:29
That's what I feel like, right? Like, that's what I feel like my lived experiences, in many ways where I have the best intentions, and I want to do good work. But it's all kind of like it's a lot of energy that's expended within the wrong construct. Yeah, I think that's why this was such a, something I've known to be true, but also yet another episode where it's like, you look inside a bit and have have some awakenings.
Joel Krieger 1:08:01
Essentially, what this two part series expresses is the inner work and the outer work, yes. And Joe, on the landscape, regenerating a forest in a river is the outer work. But it's not complete without the inner work, which is really what this online community is all about. I mean, we can't physically do anything together, because we're all, you know, virtually scattered across the globe. But what's happening, there is absolutely inner work, but it's happening together. Yeah. You can't have one without the other. There's got to be tangible action that happens in the outside world. But it won't be potent, it won't be effective. If the inner works not done as well.
Pavani Yalla 1:08:50
You know, that's actually a theme, as I'm thinking back to all of the people we've interviewed. We touched on that in many of them. Laura Kim talked about that. Kevin Jones talked about that. So many of them as a part of the stories that they told us talked about some of the inner transformation that they had to go through the inner work in order to do the outer work. So yeah, I think that's a really keen observation. And so we're doing the same,
Joel Krieger 1:09:16
the same. This concludes our two part series with Joe Brewer and Earth regenerators. So if you're a kindred spirit, who's been looking to find the others, look no further, just drop in on one of the many open virtual sessions over at or through generators. There's a project incubator, a book club, campfires, learning journeys, all sorts of happenings. You can find the trail heads to these things and more over at Earth regenerators.org. Also, you may want to check out Joe's new book, The design pathway for regenerating Earth I'm halfway through it right now, it's really important in such a powerful read, you can pick up a copy over at Chelsea green calm. As always, we'll have direct links or everything we talked about in the show notes for this episode, just head on over to outside and podcast.org and click on this episode page. So one last thing. We offer this podcast free in the spirit of the gift. And it takes an enormous amount of time and energy to put each episode together. 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 out more than you know. Special thanks to all the amazing people who took time to speak with us about their experience here. Our gratitude goes out to Midi Berry, JP Parker Benji Ross, PJ Connolly, Kathleen Martsch, Pamela Woodland, and of course Joe Brewer. Okay, so in tribute to the earth regenerators community, we thought we close with one of Joe's favorite sayings; “onward fellow humans”.