Find the Others

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”.

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Regenerate, Renew, Rewild

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.

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