In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And increasingly on this podcast, we are acknowledging that the current paradigm is breaking apart in real time and asking ourselves the question of how we become the light that shines through the cracks. How do we build ways of being that reunite us with the web of life, create new or perhaps old ways of letting value flow and become what humanity has been and could be again, stewards of that massive, magical, heartbreakingly beautiful living system that is the web of life. This week’s guest, Joe Brewer of the Design School for Regenerating Earth, works at the leading edge of these ideas, testing out answers on the ground in communities of place and purpose and passion on all five continents. Joe is a transdisciplinary systems thinker and earth regeneration designer who has worked in everything from agroforestry to starting a Waldorf Forest school, to co-founding a territorial foundation, to starting a trust to bring more local land into the commons. He was founder of the Earth Regenerators study Group, which became the Design School for Regenerating Earth, of which he is a co-founder. And he’s the author of The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth, which we talked about when he was last on the podcast back in May of 2022. Now, as the world is turning ever faster towards something completely new, Joe is becoming a leading global voice on the ways that we can return to a bio regional way of living.

Manda: That is, as you will hear, how we have lived for over 99% of human history. It’s the way that makes sense, the way that can heal our relationships to all parts of ourselves, each other, and the living web of life. The question always is how do we make this happen? How do we shift our entire culture out of a world where lines drawn on a map are more real than the flows of a river? Back to a place where clean air, clean water, clean soil are our priorities; the non-negotiable baselines from which everything else arises. How do we shift our concept of value flows away from the accumulation of stuff in a zero sum game, to a place where human needs are trusted and met? Joe is working with all of these concepts, finding ways where they actually do work in real communities. He has so many inspiring, heartwarming examples of how these are happening in cultures around the world. And as he says, this is the work of this moment. It is urgent. It is also the single most inspiring, meaningful, purpose giving thing that we can do if we strive to find a life of being, belonging, becoming. This is the way that we do it. So with great delight, people of the podcast, please welcome back Joe Brewer of the Design School for Regenerating Earth.

Manda: Joe Brewer, welcome to Accidental Gods. Where are you and how are you as the summer really comes in? We’re very near the solstice, the point where the sun stands still. Where are you?

Joe: I am in British Columbia, where three tectonic plates twist the northern Andes from going northwest toward northeast. An acupuncture point on the planet and a spiritual gathering place of indigenous peoples for thousands of years. And how am I? I am connected to that energy. I would say that the way that I am showing up today is with a deep awareness that we are in the meta crisis. The inability to fully make sense of what’s going on and making very deep changes in the world. So I’m both overwhelmed and grounded and paradoxically, both at the same time.

Manda: Right. Yes. And so many of us are. That sense that the thing that we thought might happen in our grandchildren’s time is actually happening here today now. The breakdown of the existing system. And Leonard Cohen says the cracks are where the light gets in, but having to draw the light in somehow and look through the cracks and find it and go, come to us, it’s okay, can be overwhelming. But also what a privilege to be alive at this moment where every single thing we do can make a difference. One of the things that I think as a novelist, we’re always taught that if we write time slip novels, people go back and you tread on a worm or something, and the whole of the future changes. And yet we end up in the present day and everyone goes, well, I’m only one person, I can’t possibly make a difference. No; every single breath you take and every single conversation you have makes a difference. And you are doing far more than that. You have so many ways of connecting with people to help them to understand that the world doesn’t have to be the way it has been for such a short time of human evolution. So just before we head into that, for those who haven’t yet listened to our last podcast, give us a little bit of your biography of how you got to being the person who co-created Design School for Regenerative Earth, and who is the leader of the bio regional movement.

Joe: I would start by saying that I grew up on a farm in southwest Missouri, in a place in the Midwestern United States. Where I felt a really, ironic in today’s context, a very ironic lack of connection. I felt very disconnected from the people and the culture of that place. Which is ironic because my work now is about helping people to find rootedness and belonging in place, including discovering that my rootedness to my place, which is not just called Missouri, it’s the Ozarks Plateau and is the birthplace of the bio regional congresses that started around the time I was born, in the late 1970s in Missouri, very close to where I was born, and that I am a child of the Ozarks. And the Ozarks is a very unique bio region that we could talk about more if you like, for sure. But my journey from there to here was really one of going out and learning how does the world work? So in a sort of thematic or academic sense, to make it brief, I learned a lot about physics and mathematics and the study of scientific approaches to knowing the world, and became pretty highly trained at a university level in complexity science. And in Earth systems science, the studies of the dynamic Earth, and in cultural evolutionary studies, and in cognitive and behavioural sciences. Which is to say, I took the time to learn how does change happen in physical systems, in ecological systems, in astronomical systems, and in human social systems. And I apply all of that knowledge to everything I do today.

Manda: Wow. Okay. How does change happen? This is what we want to know. But just before we get there, let’s talk about the Ozarks, because I will forget to come back otherwise. Tell us a little bit about bio regionalism and how it arose when you were born in this place.

Joe: So in the 1960s and early 1970s, there was a movement that took place in the United States and in parts of Western Europe that in English is called the ‘back to the land’ movement. People who were leaving the city and coming back to the land. My parents, who were both born in Saint Louis, a small Midwestern city, moved to southwest Missouri on the other side of the state, to have chickens, to have a big garden, you know, to make our clothes. We knitted our own Christmas presents. And I was like, in a way, a hippie child in the time of this back to the land movement, which was part of the early, I’d say, the modern environmental movement with Rachel Carson. And in the United States, it was the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act, and planetary wide it was the rise of global consciousness with satellite data and the Blue Marble. All kinds of things were happening. And the bio regional movement was really initiated by the people who rejected international institutions, technocratic ideas, and at a very core sense, the idea that humans are separate from nature. And so they rejected the idea that environmentalism was about the environment separate from humans. And so in the late 1970s, there was a man named David Hinky, who’s still alive today, still lives in Missouri, and he observed that he would walk on a hiking trail between the state of Missouri and the state of Arkansas, and that the fictitious state boundary was just like a bad joke. Like the forest was the same on both sides. So the idea that you could organise ecologically really made a lot of sense to him. And so he started organising the first Ozarks Bioregional congress. He started organising in 1977, and the first congress took place in 1980. And they just celebrated their 45th consecutive Ozarks bioregional Congress in October of 2024. So they’re still going.

Manda: Wow, brilliant. And were you there?

Joe: I was not there. That’s what’s so interesting, is I discovered it when I was 40 years old when I was living in Costa Rica. So the ironies of connection to place.

Manda: Okay, but the wonder of being in the first quarter of the 21st century is that you can watch it online, presumably a reasonable amount of it is going to be online. So let’s unpick what bio regionalism is then. You said it in the fictitious boundaries. I always remember being taught that after the Second World War, the British colonialists decided to break up the Middle East, and somebody drew a line across a map with a ruler between, I think, Iran and Iraq. And there was a notch in the ruler, so the now is 150 square mile triangle in what would otherwise be a straight border, because nobody went that was obviously meant to be a straight line. It was just a notch in the ruler. So the border between these two countries has 150mi² of extra or less, depending on which side of the ruler you were on. And it’s bonkers. At least in Britain, occasionally the border between England and Wales follows a river, because in the end the warring parties decided, okay, a river is a good boundary. Your side of the river, our side of the river, let’s make it work. But mostly it’s lines drawn on a map which don’t apply. So tell us David Hinky’s idea of bioregionalism and then what you have done with it.

Joe: So bio regionalism is an old idea with a new name, because bio regionalism is what indigenous people have done since, as they would say, since time immemorial. Or another way of saying it more scientifically is that something like 99.7 or 99.8% of all human history humans were self-organized into semi-nomadic horticulturalists or other forms of hunter gatherer or other forms of local place based human cultural patterns. And so humans have been organised bioregionally for as long as we’ve been humans, until the emergence of agriculture, city states, warrior chieftains, empires, civilisations and the globalised culture.

Manda: Trauma culture, yeah.

Joe: So bio regionalism is a very old idea with a new name. The name was given to it in the early 1980s or maybe the late 1970s, but it’s a very old idea. So bio regionalism is an understanding that all living beings have a geographic range of space and time. So if you look at starfish, they exist within an intertidal zone, the high tide and the low tide. You look at an oak forest in the Northern Hemisphere, it has a range of latitude, and it’s dependent on the kinds of geology and the kinds of soils and on and on and on. There’s a geography for biology. And so bio region, if you want to think of it as a shorthand, is the shorthand for biological region. And sometimes people say biocultural reason. I mean, in human culture. But I think that’s a bit of an oxymoron or an unnecessary double statement because human culture is human behaviour. Humans are animals, therefore human culture is a subset of animal behaviour, which means it’s a subset of biology. So culture is a subset of biology. So the bioregional movement emerged by recognising humans have to be kept in the environment. We literally are, it’s factually true that we’re part of nature, so you can’t artificially separate it. And so in the early days of the biological movement, one of the big advocate, kind of the categories of people that were advocates, were the indigenous people who were wanting to defend their ancestral lands. And they would claim that their culture was inherently part of the ecology of that place. So there was a natural partnership between land defenders and indigenous communities and allies from settler culture who recognise that humans are part of nature.

Joe: So you see, bioregionalism is a very deep way of understanding how to organise the world. And the early thinkers of bio regionalism, including Donella meadows, the author of the Limits to Growth study; people who came to understand what this point of view tells us; found that it is actually, quite literally, by definition, the only way to achieve human sustainability. If we want to be sustainable at a planetary scale, the smallest holistic unit that we can organise around is the bio region. We can organise around holistic watersheds, we can organise around types of land and ecology. We can organise around the material flow of which plants we use to make our clothing, which materials we use to build our houses, what is appropriate to the climate of the place. All of this is the definition of sustainable, material human culture. And that is because human cultures that are sustainable or organised as bioregion, basically, by definition, that is the definition of a bio region. It’s the geography for the holistic life system for a population. And so it’s the definition of a sustainable element, a sustainable unit.

Joe: So what we have done with bio regionalism, I’m not the only one, by the way, there are a lot of people working on that. But what we have done in the last maybe 8 or 10 years is we’ve interwoven bio regional thinking with the emergence of understanding about regeneration and regenerative design, connected to what we know about the dynamic planet. What we know about the planet’s climate system and its biosphere and its ocean circulation, and what I’ve talked about as tipping points of the Earth system and how they regulate themselves, how the planet regulates itself, is all interconnected.

Joe: And so in early 2020, I wrote the manuscript of a book called The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth, which I published as chapters and PDF form in an online learning community, for free, called Earth Regenerators, which grew to almost 5000 members. And in the early days of that learning community, I gave a webinar about the need to create a design school for regenerating Earth. So when we twilighted and closed Earth regenerate in 2023, we simultaneously gave birth to the Design school for Regenerating Earth as a community of practice to manifest and live out what was talked about in that book. So we have been activating bio regional processes and building a planetary network of bio regions. And when I say we, I mean local people self-select into organising locally and join a community of practice. And so now the design school has members on five continents. And last year we hosted a six month learning journey about bio regional learning centres, and 15 or 20 different places have actually created their own bio regional learning centres as part of that learning community. And this year we have a learning journey about how to organise your bio region and people all over the world are doing this. So it’s really a moment of transformation for the human presence as part of the Earth.

Manda: Wow. All right. So I would like to just take a moment to honour that. Because this has not yet hit the mainstream media and people don’t know that this is not just bubbling under that very, very thin, brittle crust of what used to be normal. It’s a huge torrent, actually. It’s like a river under very thin ice. And in a short while, the thin ice is going to be gone and we’re all going to be swimming in the river. I sincerely hope. So. You’re working in Colombia. There are other people working on 5 of the six continents, I’m guessing. Antarctica is the one that’s not.

Joe: That’s correct.

Manda: Not terribly inhabited except by penguins who are probably quite bio regional. I heard you recently say that Donella Meadows, who is a god of systemic thinking and systems change thinking, and she had her levers of change and the very top lever of change was to abandon all paradigms. And it seems to me that to get to that, we need to change narratives so that abandoning paradigms becomes a thing that’s both possible and useful, and people can see how to get there. I have an acronym of MADE, which is motivation, agency, direction, and empowerment. People can see that they need to do it. They can see how to do it. They can see where it’s going to take them and they feel able to do it. How are you creating that sense of agency? Pick any of the areas, but I’m thinking Colombia will be where you know best. I guess what I’m really asking, where I’m heading for, is people are very wedded to their national identity and to these lines on the map that say, I’m Scottish and you’re English, or I’m Canadian and you’re American. How are we going to gently dissolve those so that people realise that, I don’t know, I live on the Colorado River or I live on the Seine, or I live in the catchment area of the River clun or whatever. That that becomes how we know who we are.

Joe: Well, it’s a beautiful parallel to the birth of Buddhism, where Siddhartha Gautama, who we call the Buddha, sat under a tree for 40 days and reflected on the suffering that he saw. And he was able to see through the illusion of the structures of his society. Well, that’s exactly what we need to do. Except instead of, you can sit under a tree but maybe better is to sit next to a river. And the reason is that water connects all life on the planet, right? And so, all of the molecules of water in your body have moved through the world’s ocean and through the major rivers and through the atmosphere as clouds and rain and snow; and water truly does connect all life on Earth. And so what’s interesting about water in this way of thinking about paradigms, is that water teaches us how to create life, right? Whether we presume to know or not. So you don’t have to have a preconceived notion of how water creates life. Just go be with water. An example is go to a place after the rain where there’s a little bit of mulch, and notice the little organisms there, maybe some sprouting seeds, maybe some mould on the decomposing leaves.

Manda: Yes. I have a story; I have a friend who got some money, in fact from Coca Cola. They’re very good, they didn’t want him to particularly tell anyone, he’s going to be on the podcast soon. And he created 11 ponds on the farm that he manages. And he said he brought in a digger and he had this JCB to create a pond, and it’s clay so he didn’t have to line it. And the guy was putting the digger hook back on the low loader, and the pond was already filling up from all the rain and the ditches. And he heard this plop and there was a water boatman landing to skid across the surface of a pond that literally had not been there three minutes before. It’s amazing how fast water draws life. And now he’s got emperor dragonflies that apparently only ever lay their larvae, eggs and larvae in new water. How the heck they always find new water is their problem, not mine. But they’ve got the emperor larvae and they’ve turned into dragonflies. And now they’ve got successions and they’ve got life where there wasn’t water before. It’s amazing. So anyway, sorry. I just wanted to share that.

Joe: That’s a beautiful setup, because what you can see in the story you just told is that a human being does not need to already have a preconceived notion of how life works for life to work. In other words, the way that water brings life does not depend on human mental constructs. So whether I’m an American, whether I speak Spanish or English, or whether I’m a vegetarian or a meat eater, these are human social constructs. And they have their important places and their value and all of this, but they have value within human relationships, including how humans relate to that realm of life around them. But we forget to our peril, we forget that life is primary and humans are secondary.

Manda: Right.

Joe: And without the context in which life could occur, we wouldn’t be here. And so one of the things about moving beyond paradigms is the ability to relax into an openness with the world around you, so that you can feel the presence of, I’ll just generically call ‘more than’. What is more than me? What is more than my understanding? What is beyond what I see right now, where I have to lean over and look around the thing to see what’s ‘more than’. And there’s this receptivity that’s required; receptivity to the other. So like you said about the dragonfly, if I’m going to go and be with the dragonfly, I need to be open to receiving whatever the dragonfly wants to do. You know, I don’t have a little remote control, and it’s a little flying robot, and I tell it where to go. No. That animal has agency and the agency of that animal is a mystery to me. And I have to be receptive to coming into relationship. When I can do that, I can transcend my paradigms.

Joe: But I may not know. I’m transcending my paradigms until I try to make sense of it. And as I try to make sense of it, I’m going to try and create a story about what just happened. And I’m going to discover that I have a lot of biases about how I do that. I bring my own metaphors. I bring my own experiences. I bring my cultural baggage. And so what I need to be able to do is recognise that it’s okay that I’m doing that. It’s okay. I need to be psychologically flexible. I need to have that same relaxed gaze for my own mental constructs. And so an example of this that I find really powerful is like you said, about Scotland and Wales being on either side of a river.

Manda: England and Wales.

Joe: England and Wales, I apologise. Clearly I’m not from that place. So what’s interesting is in a bio regional point of view, you actually can’t divide a watershed.

Manda: No, no. Exactly. Yes. The tributaries are all feeding in from either side, and they don’t care. They’re all going into the same river. Yeah.

Joe: Because of the gravity that’s pulling the water, not human political borders. It’s not like there’s a military patrol that says, sorry, gravity doesn’t apply here. The law of our land says you can’t come in, like you can just see how ridiculous that is. And so what happens is we organise ourselves around what is real, and we discover that there’s more than ourselves.

Manda: Right

Joe: And there’s more than our paradigms. So an example that that I could talk about is I used to be very critical of things like capitalism. I used to talk about what’s good or bad about socialism and whether people understand it or not. And I actually find that kind of a discourse just it’s not relevant to me anymore.

Manda: Okay.

Joe: And it’s not relevant because as I work with regenerative economics and I create regenerative economic systems, I don’t create them from an ism. I don’t say this is socialism and that’s my category and therefore I’m going to create the world in what I think socialism is. Instead, while living systems are economies because they’re material exchanges about the management of our home, and so they are economies. And they’re regenerative if they have living patterns that are continually renewing and and reproducing them moment to moment. Like how my skin is regenerated every 30 days, it’s reproduced moment to moment, is that economy regenerating itself. And when I ask that, I notice that I don’t need categories. Instead, what I need is an understanding of relationships. Which in a sense brings in some categories. But I don’t need categories as in ‘is this socialism?’, ‘Is this capitalism?’, ‘Is this..?’ insert some other paradigm.

Joe: Instead it’s a-paradigmatic in a particular sense. Which is that I can see parts of what is happening with different paradigms. Oh this part, look, I can look at multi capital assets and see how a way of thinking with capitalism helps me understand the diversity of things that are happening here. And I can say but look at how there’s this shared context of managing a commons and there’s elements of what I would have called socialism going on here. And I’ll notice different things and my paradigms are still there and they’re still useful, but they I know that they are limited and I know that they’re not primary.

Manda: Okay. All right. So let’s talk a little bit because I don’t really care about capitalism, socialism. I think they haven’t ever really been other than… No, that’s not true. I loathe predatory capitalism. I think it’s a disaster and I think it’s how we got to be here. But deciding to do ‘not capitalism’ is not useful. What we need to decide is what is primary? What are our value systems? What is it that motivates how we organise our store exchange and accounting for value, which is what monetary systems do? How do we look at the flows and become part of them, and do what is ours to do within them in a way that is holistic, in a way that helps the overall flow patterns, I guess that for me would be what’s primary. So let’s talk about how we assess primacy and then what flows from that in terms of organising people.

Joe: So one of the starting points that’s really important is to assert with your ontology, with your philosophical kind of perspective on what is real; assert that life is inherently part of the universe and not outside of it. Because if you think that there’s some other spiritual realm and our souls came from another realm, and this is a dead mechanical universe, and the only thing that’s alive is those souls from another plane, then you’ve already lost the game in a sense. Instead, we have to start with life is inherently part of the creative living universe.

Manda: Do you get much pushback on that? I mean, I know Musk thinks that the odds of this being base reality are so small that it can’t be, and there are presumably people who believe that with him. But do you get many people who assert that this is just some kind of clockwork universe, and the life happens elsewhere?

Joe: People with a fundamentalist interpretation of religion in the Judeo-Christian tradition would very strongly say God is there, and I’m saying the fundamentalist view, the literal biblical view. Because many Christians would have more of a mystical pantheistic perspective, but they wouldn’t have necessarily analysed it. So they say God is the universe; if God is the universe, then life is inherently part of the universe and we’re good, there’s no problem. It’s the ones who are like, we can destroy everything here because who cares? God’s going to take us to some other heavenly realm. That’s where you get the problems.

Joe: In some ways, you can sort of start from first principles of observation. Okay, what can you observe? Oh, there are stars and there are planets and there’s gravity and there are these forces. And you basically end up with the big history story, right, the story of this evolving universe. And where is there life in that universe? And you’d say, well, we know it’s on this little planet, third rock from the sun, from this typical middle star that’s a yellow sun. And you find that there’s life on our planet. And is there life on other planets? Well we’re still looking and we’re getting better looking. But where do we know it is? We know it’s on this planet. And so just from that observational place, then you ask well, how did that planet create life? And you rewind the clock 4.5 billion years; watch the Earth form, watch the moon form, watch the oceans settle onto the Earth. Plate tectonics is happening. And you notice life is inherently part of this particular planetary process. Life is part of a living creative universe. Life emerged as part of the cosmos. And so from there, it’s not hard to assert that it’s a living universe. I just proved it: look, there’s a universe that had an evolutionary process that gave rise to life within that universe. There’s life in that universe. Check. And so I don’t actually get much pushback. It’s more that people just don’t think this deeply very often, because they’re not invited to.

Manda: Okay.

Joe: And so if you were to ask, where does life come from? Most people wouldn’t know to say that life comes from probably ocean vents on a young planet, as it’s cooling down. Because most people have never learned astrobiology. But if you start to explore the question, you know, they find, oh, that’s a really cool conversation. So people really are drawn in with their curiosity.

Manda: Okay. And we get to we are here, we are surrounded by life. I am aware also that there’s the kind of transhumanist view in certain parts of Silicon Valley that what they call nature, which is already a separate word, is an aesthetic option. Which means by definition you can choose to not have it, and you just wear some sort of headset that shows you a sort of natural world and surf and things, and you don’t need the real thing. Let’s assume that most people are not there, and most people are frankly struggling to survive and just pay the bills, feed their family, keep a roof over their heads and not get chucked out of their job unexpectedly. How do we, you and I and others like us, bridge the gap from sitting by a river and being completely heart exploding in love with the process of being alive in a world that we perceive to be vibrantly alive in all places, and that we are an integral part of it; how do we bridge that gap to people whose domestication was in a culture that told them that basically, Citadelle mind is a thing. They only exist from the head up. The rest of the world doesn’t really matter, everything is a zero sum game, and you either win or you lose and it doesn’t matter. The externalities of whatever destruction happens really don’t matter because your life is okay. Are you finding people are beginning to connect across conceptual boundaries like that?

Joe: At the core, there’s this reconnecting, or this becoming aware or awakening to how our bodies work. Like when you draw in a breath and you feel your body being filled with the atmosphere from outside and you’re reminded to notice thank you trees, thank you ocean. Without all that plant matter…

Manda: No oxygen.

Joe: It couldn’t happen. And so there’s something really basic about being sensitive within your own body, about how you’re connected to things outside of yourself. And then recognising that the reason people can’t be deeply philosophical, because they’re in this survival mode, is because those are exactly the bodily things that are being threatened. So I’ll give an example from something I was participating in last week. I was at this gathering called Governance Futures, and I co-presented a session on bio regional governance with a Colombian man named Amari Padilla. And Amari has been doing peace building work for something like 30 years in the war torn regions of Colombia, which is famous for its violence. And so he’s done really difficult work, and he told the story of this mountain chain called the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, which is where there’s an indigenous group called the Kogi people who live there. They call it the heart of the world and it’s becoming well known. And on the kind of eastern and southern sides of the Sierra Nevada mountains, because, you know, on the north and west is the Caribbean, on the east and south is where you go into the mountains and join with the northern Andes. There’s an area where there’s a lot of mining of oil and gold. So international companies that are coming and assassinating indigenous leaders and all the things that happen are really terrible, for them to take those resources. And as they do the mining, they contaminate the rivers.

Joe: So, of course, the local people, many of whom are quite impoverished and are in that survival mode, what is their most basic need?  Their most basic need is that you don’t contaminate their water. And so the peace building process of that region was helping to build relationships among the different groups that were fighting with each other around the protection and the care of the rivers. Because the rivers come running down, it’s a really steep mountain range. So it rains and there’s snow and glaciers at the top, and then it rains and the water comes down and it comes down into the valley and that’s where most of the people live. And the mining is on the slopes of the mountains, contaminating the water that then comes to the towns below. So in this kind of a context, it’s easy to connect basic survival needs, health and well-being with the health of the river. And so the peace building process is deeply connected to watershed governance. And that’s just how it’s done in practice.

Manda: Right. And this is a bioregion?

Joe: Yeah. It’s a bio regional way of thinking. And so what’s interesting about this is that because it’s so concretely connected to our bodies, you don’t need an advanced degree. You know, the best education would literally be to go sit with the river. Literally just be present or to be a farmer who’s working the land and noticing if it gets harder to grow crops. That direct bodily connection is exactly where our ecological awareness can come from. Now, it doesn’t always, but that’s where we can go to cultivate it. And so the people like Elon Musk, who put on a headset to avoid the world, are deeply traumatised and broken human beings. And they have chosen, through a form of very immature spirituality, to ignore reality and pretend that their ego is more important than the entire universe, a form of extreme narcissism. Rather than recognising that they were born to a woman, so maybe they should treat women with respect. That that woman’s body was 80% water and so is theirs, so maybe they should care about water. And see if they were truly being scientific, these are basic facts; all humans have mothers, actually all mammals were born of mothers, you know. And you can just make your lists, like these are just basic things you learn in fourth grade. You know, my daughter’s eight she knows these things. So there’s something really fundamental about reconnecting. Reconnecting. Like I was just with a woman who I work with here in Columbia, where we’ve created the Northern Andes Regeneration Fund, and we’re creating collaboration among seven different territories, with local groups leading the way in each territory. There’s a woman, I won’t name who she is, because she’s just gone through some trauma healing work, so anonymize who she is, but say that her deep work was recognising that she had turned off her feeling in her own body because of a history of abuse. And that she couldn’t actually do regenerative work when she at a bodily level, because of a trauma response, she chose not to believe that she deserved to be regenerated. And until she focussed on that wound in herself, she couldn’t go and work with the river and help to heal the river.

Manda: Right.

Joe: And so that’s a very sensitive and intelligent woman having that connection with her body, having been, in her case, sexually abused as a child. But what happens to men who grow up in abusive and traumatising cultures? They tell them that their feelings aren’t okay,  you know.

Manda: Which is almost universal in Western culture.

Joe: Now you can see there’s a really big connection between the complete delusion putting on a headset and letting your mind be more valuable than the entire universe, just ludicrously ignorant, versus I should care for my mother because she gave birth to me, which we extend back out to the whole planet. So this is where that that inner work and the outer work must come together. And where our paradigms in many cases are actually crutches, meaning they’re coping mechanisms for our trauma and we have to let them go to move deeper.

Manda: Yes. Okay. This is going in a direction I hadn’t expected. I want to come back to your 500,000 hectare project, let’s pin that. Let me think about this. So within the paradigm that I work within, and I’m prepared to make it as fluid as we need to make it, we have to do the outer work and the inner works simultaneously. Basically, we in the West, we probably have up to 10-12,000 years of trauma history. At the point when Western agriculture that enslaves the web of life split off from what we recognise now to be indigenous initiation culture, connection with and working with the web of life; then we began to create hierarchies and patriarchy and power over systems, and to promote the dark triad of narcissism and psychopathy and sadism, instead of helping it to heal. And we don’t have another 10,000 years to heal that. Basically, we have to do the healing with the people alive on the planet now. And so recognising that we need to step into our bodies, that we need to fully embody, and that we need to feel where the trauma is in our bodies as the frozen places, and with compassion for all parts of ourselves, help them to thaw. While connecting to other people and to the web of life. While working for clean air, clean soil, clean water as the absolute baselines that have to be restored, is the work of the moment.

Manda: And I’m wondering, within the bio regional movement, I know within design school for regenerative Earth you have the inner work, but I find in some of the areas that I go where people are talking about these kinds of things; new governance structures, new economies, new ways of being; talking about the inner work is still taboo. It still gets everybody. You can see the ‘oh no, don’t go there’. And I don’t think it’s optional anymore to not go there. I realise for some people it’s harder than others. And perhaps somebody’s work is working for clean water and doing less inner work and if that’s what you want to do, you can’t force someone to do the inner work. But you can open doors to make it possible. And I wonder whether you’re seeing a change, I suppose, is what I’m asking. Whether, first of all, you see that ‘whoa,no’ response sometimes. And also whether you’re seeing perhaps a softening of that resistance. Or maybe it’s only me that sees it.

Joe: I see both of those things are happening. And the softening, in a sense I might just reframe it as deepening, but we’re getting at the same thing. Softening allows you to go deeper. But that the deepening is that the people who have been in the generally, in the environmental space for a long time are coming to realise the problem was never out there.

Speaker3: Right.

Joe: Like the problem is the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; that’s out there. The problem is the number of trees cut down; that’s out there. That actually it’s our relationship to what we call out there that matters, and that we find that in here. And so I think that that is deeply happening, and I think it’s happening in part because we have elders in our movement. We have people who have been doing this for decades, and those people are still here. So in the bio regional movement, many of the initiators of that movement are still alive and still active. I come into contact with them when I travel, they’re still there. You know, people in their 70s and in their 80s, and they’ve been doing this since the 60s or 70s of last century. They’re still here. And they’re like, when are the young people going to come back? You know, we never stopped. So the permaculture movement is like that, there have been people doing permaculture since the 1970s. And so there’s a way in which the younger generation is awakening to the fact that they actually have cultural elders.

Manda: Right, that they can trust. Actual elders as opposed to people who just got old. Because we have a lot of people who just got old that you would not want to be your elders. But we have, in this movement, we have actual older people who can function as genuine elders and hold the initiations and the growth of the younger people.

Joe: There’s that and there is in the indigenous cultures of the world The Pachamama, Gaia, the Great Mother, the Great Spirit, and different cultures they give this different names. But in all cases, they’re being told by the Great Spirit or by the Mother Earth that now is the time for them to share their wisdom with Western culture, or with settler culture. And so you’re seeing an opening and a revealing of indigenous wisdom practices all over the world, including, very importantly, plant medicine ceremonies. And so where I live in the northern Andes, I’m very close to the native home of ayahuasca, or as they call it here in Colombia, they call it Yahi. But there are other very important medicinal plants, such as tobacco. Tobacco’s from the northern Andes, it’s what’s used in the peace pipe in North America. And tobacco connects men to the wisdom of their male ancestry. And so there are these kinds of connections. Like when I smoke tobacco on the full moon, remember I’m from Missouri; like where are this guy’s indigenous roots? And the answer is in the earth. And that I have been learning that I can smoke tobacco on the full moon. The full moon is a time when the sacred feminine is really strong in the world, and I can receive guidance from my male and female ancestors. And tobacco calms my body, opens my awareness, and makes me more receptive. And I can sense patterns as holistic gestalts, because tobacco does that. Not cigarettes with other chemicals, I’m talking about tobacco, what you might call a cigar, basically rolled tobacco leaves. Or you can do it as rapé, which is where you burn the tobacco and make ashes. And there’s a way of basically snorting it up your nose into your sinus cavities. And it’s part of bringing bringing men into a place where they can have an important conversation, and it increases their ability to cultivate peace.

Manda: But you’re doing it intentionally, you’re doing it with the plant, not in spite of it. And I’m guessing you’ve got ways of gathering the tobacco leaves that are honouring to the plant and isn’t combined going through fields in Kentucky. It’s a whole different thing. Right.

Joe: So this connection with indigenous wisdom and plant medicine is really, really important in what is happening. And so there’s the intergenerational part. There’s this indigenous and non-Indigenous coming together. There’s actually the collaboration of the plant world itself; that the plants are bringing their wisdom to us, not just the human indigenous, the plant indigenous are bringing their wisdom. And and so there’s all of this, plus the fact that the breakdown is increasingly obvious.

Manda: Right. You can’t pretend that business as usual is carrying on.

Joe: Are you going to try and vote Democrat in the United States and that’s going to fix something?

Manda: Exactly.

Joe: Partisan politics isn’t part of the problem? You know, like that deeper just basically giving up through frustration is happening for a lot of people.

Manda: Yeah. I saw Robert Reich post earlier today, and he used to work for Clinton. And he’s posting we need a whole new system. We can’t go back to the old two party. And he was absolutely embedded in there. So if someone like him can get to that realisation then the cracks are beginning to show, it’s amazing. Yes. Can we go back to the plants a bit? Because I would trust your input on this and you’re working with the plants and the web of life. In the shamanic world that I work in, and I don’t teach working with plant medicines because I was taught by indigenous people that Western people basically are not safe to do that. And I’m not saying you can’t become safe, but I wasn’t prepared to put in two decades of work in order to become safe. I had other things I needed to do. And I am seeing a lot of people who are going to do an Ayuhuasca ceremony without having done very much internal work at all, frankly. And they come out very screwed up and they still haven’t done any internal work, but now they’ve got to sort out the fact that their perception of reality shifted without their paradigms shifting. And that creates really interesting torque inside. And watching that in an energetic space is hard to hold and hard to watch and I’m not sure it’s achieving very much. Or it might be and it might be that something explodes and everything falls apart, but I think it might be quite messy. Messy is not necessarily bad. But I’m thinking that for those who want to use plant medicines who are from a Western background, there must be ways to do it that are more useful than others. Have you got thoughts on that?

Joe: I would start by saying that the best plant medicine would be to learn gardening.

Manda: Okay. Get your hands in the soil.

Joe: Simply to come into a context where you can experience your contribution to bringing life to a place and start to notice that the plants have intelligence.

Manda: Yeah. Okay.

Joe: Instead of thinking that it’s something in my neurochemistry that has to change. Which I’m not saying that someone shouldn’t have a San Pedro or a tobacco ceremony or ayahuasca ceremony, because I also don’t advocate or teach that. I recognise the importance, but it’s not my role to do that. But I think it is my role to say all humans can connect with life. And so you can connect with flowers in your garden. I’ll describe briefly something I’ve been doing for almost four and a half years now. Is I’m growing a forest, the native tropical dry forest of the region where I live here in British Columbia, in a community forest space. There’s this land that’s set aside as a community forest, and I’ve developed a deep relationship with the two women who started it and I have a part of that land that I have the access and support to just grow a forest there. And I’ve been doing it now for more than four years. And the primary thing that I do is pull the invasive grass from Africa that was brought to feed livestock that came from Europe. It’s a kind of grass called Brachiaria. There are about 100 different varieties of Brachiaria, and this particular grass is from eastern Africa. And once you plant it, it suffocates out all of the bushes and shrubs and you have a permanent food supply for your cows.

Manda: But your entire ecosystem is destroyed as a result.

Joe: And so one of the most important things that I do is with a pickaxe, I just use the pickaxe to leverage the roots of this grass and pull up the roots of the grass with all that clod of dirt. And then in the open area where I’ve already been pulling grass, I break it apart with my fingers and make a layer of mulch. And what I end up with is an open area with mulch that no longer has this intensive, aggressive, invasive grass. And then I watch as the wind comes in with the seeds, as the birds land on a tree and poop out seeds. And I wait for the rain and because this is a place where it’s a tropical dry forest, I might wait several months during the dry season. But when the rain comes, two things happen. Seeds from that invasive grass start to sprout, so I have to go in with my little fingers, teeny tiny plants.

Manda: Oh, god.

Joe: So it doesn’t dominate again. And the other thing I have to do is absolutely nothing. Which is I just watch.

Manda: And just not tread on the other little seeds that are coming with everything else.

Joe: And I watch as this abundance of life comes forth. And because this is the tropics, once the rain comes, within about three months, I have fully formed bushes and they’re flourishing. And there are tens or hundreds of thousands of tiny flowers. So all the pollinator insects come. And Colombia has the highest amount of butterfly biodiversity on Earth. So all these butterflies show up and all these native bees show up. And the hummingbirds that are incredible, they all show up. And then with them come the predators; the birds that eat them, some of the wasps actually eat the spiders, and the spiders come to eat the insects. And pretty soon I have filled the niches of this ecosystem simply by pulling the grass and getting out of the way.

Manda: Wow, that’s so cool!

Joe: Now when I talk about plant medicine, you know who’s restoring that landscape? It’s not me. It’s those native plants that are restoring that landscape and then all the other life associated with them. And so for me that is plant medicine.

Manda: Thank you.

Joe: And it’s healing and it’s plant intelligence and it’s what we need to be doing. You know, we need to be restoring ecosystems and landscapes. And so there are two lessons here. One, if someone didn’t pull out that grass after it was put there, the ecosystem couldn’t come back. Humans have a necessary role in the restoration of the landscape. And two, once we pull the grass the ecosystem is smarter than I am. I don’t have to design it. I don’t have to know how it works. I don’t have to know the names of all these plants. I just have to watch what they do and learn from them. And this is a deep decolonising process.

Manda: Yes. That’s so incredibly lovely. Thank you. And even in rural England, which was colonised a very long time ago by the Romans, even so, I live in the middle of nowhere and I can go outside and just stay open. And maybe the cleavers say you need to make tea from us, or the nettle says it, or the dandelions say it, or the hawthorn says it, or later in the season it’s silver birch and whatever. And drinking something from newly picked cleavers heads, it’s like drinking raw spring. It’s amazing. And I feel so alive afterwards. And thank you. And that just being able to connect with the plants and your garden in that way, particularly the ones that we call weeds, is phenomenal. Thank you. That was very insightful. So you have 500,000 hectares that you are helping to steward, a bio region in this part of the world where you live. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about that?

Joe: Yes, of course. So what’s great about the place where I live, which is a unique and uncommon feature, is the shape of the mountains very nicely create a definition for the climate of our region. So there are three different mountain ranges. The northern Andes divide into three mountain ranges, and they form the shape of a triangle where we are. Which means that to our west, there’s a high mountain range that blocks all the water by creating a cloud forest. The mountains are so tall that the air rises and it forms clouds and it rains and then the dry air comes over on our side. And what that means is that the moisture has to come in from our southwest, where those mountains get lower and they enter into a triangle. If you think of three lines of mountains that form a triangle with one little corner of the triangle kind of open, where the air can come in at a lower elevation, but then it circulates as it bumps up against the mountains, creating this really clear, well-defined climate pattern

Joe: In the last 80 years, local people have cut down about 95% of the forest to grow monoculture crops. Tobacco for the British Tobacco Company, which would sell it to Marlboro and Philip Morris and others and such and all of that. But when you look at it now, it’s a giant heat island because they deforested it. It’s bare clay. When the clay is exposed to the sun, it just bakes and is like an oven, like a ceramic oven. And then that pushes the moisture away and so we’re becoming a desert. It’s like the short answer of what happens when you come to a place like this and cut down all the trees. So there’s a need to restore the connectivity of the ecosystems. To put a layer of forest back into this area, to restore the cycling of water. But in order to do this, we have to change our economy. And the town that I’m in, it’s mostly a tourism economy. The town is a national monument for Colombia, and they preserve a lot of the cultural practices. The streets are made of cobblestone that are hand-carved with hammer and chisel by stone workers. There are textile workers who work with native plants and there’s like a huge wealth of knowledge in this place. It’s still here.

Manda: Brilliant.

Joe: And so a lot of what we’re doing is connecting what is here into patterns of landscapes. So we’re connecting watersheds and ecological corridors and ecosystem types together with programs and education. And with models of tourism and manufacturing connected with the material flows of this kind of forest that is here. Just the high Andes tropical dry forest. It’s the only one of its kind on Earth. And so we have very unique plants and animals, and it’s very beautiful. And a lot of the work is about building trust between people to collaborate and having them organise at the scale of large landscapes.

Joe: And so we’re doing this in Colombia in this area of area 500,000 hectares. But we’re also part of a movement of territorial foundations. We created a foundation that’s organised territorially. We create a platform of collaboration among all of the social actors in our territory, and have this non-profit that manages that collaboration. But there are nine other territories in Colombia where people are creating their own territorial foundation, and there’s relationships between them. And last year we created the Northern Andes Regeneration Fund as a collaboration among seven. So our territory plus six more, where we’re working to regenerate the entire northern Andes. And so this way of collaborating at landscape scales then grows up, through a sort of fractal nested layers. This similar pattern at different scales. For example, our climate system, these three mountain ranges gives rise to a cluster of canyons and three major watersheds, three big rivers, all of which drain into the largest river in Colombia, the Magdalena. The Magdalena River is comparable in size to the Colorado River in the United States. So it’s a very large, very significant river that runs into the Caribbean eventually. And so you can see that we have three major watersheds within a cluster of mountains. And they all drain into the Magdalena River. So we’re part of a bigger system. We’re part of something bigger.

Joe: And so our bio regional framework started as the territory around Barichara. But now our understanding of the bio region is the network of connectivity between these different territories and different ecosystems across the northern Andes. And so our bio regional regeneration work has grown to the scale of something like maybe 25% of South America. Something similar to the scale of the Great Lakes in North America or the North Sea in Western Europe.

Manda: Right.Wow.

Joe: There are a lot of different watersheds that drain into it.

Manda: Yeah. Or the Nile in Africa. It’s huge.

Joe: And this is the scale of the work in the design school for regenerating Earth, is people are organising their own landscapes within larger connectivity to parts of a continent that are coherent to themselves. Like the basin of the Colorado River, the basin of the Great Lakes, because all of the Great Lakes are one big basin. The basin of the North Sea, the basin of the Mediterranean, which actually fuses three continents. And so the the scale of this seems overwhelming until you see how water already organises it. Which brings us to sitting with the river.

Manda: Go and sit with your river. How are you building trust? You talked about this at Governance Futures and you’re talking about it again now. In real terms on the ground, I’m guessing 1 to 1 conversations, but do you get the ripple effect you’d expect when you talk to three people and they each talk to three people and you grow exponentially? Is that how it works?

Joe: No, that’s not how it works. Because exponential growth is not human cultural scale, okay. It’s human technology scale at the moment, but it wasn’t before. It’s not a normal way for human technology to develop. So the way that we did it initially, which is a good way to think like of a ‘recipe’. I’ll put my finger quotes up, because there’s no real recipe. But as a way of thinking, is you gather like minded people and form a group around a shared purpose. So in our case, we started with 15 people who were already doing regenerative projects in the territory, who had a track record of success, who had demonstrated their devotion. And we gathered around the shared purpose of organising to restore watersheds, because water unifies the people of our territory. And so we gathered 15 like minded people and we organised around water. When we did that, we created a coherent set of social norms, priorities and expectations and we practised making decisions about allocating funding. Because I would go and do fundraising, I’d bring it to this group, they would practice making decisions together. And then in this way we created governance.

Manda: Can I ask did you use sociology or another kind of social technology? How did you organise the making of decisions amongst people who presumably didn’t know each other? What were your baselines of that?

Joe: The main thing that we did was organising around pro-social processes. So Elinor Ostrom’s eight core design principles for how to create an effective commons together, with the cognitive behavioural work on psychological flexibility and the use of acceptance and commitment training to be able to create shared contexts and flexible and agile relationships. So there’s a lot that you could learn from pro-social world, which teaches people this approach. And we discovered that sociocracy was very useful at one point in our process. We discovered that tracking value flow was very important. We discovered that Pablo Ferreira’s work on the Theatre of the oppressed was really important. We discovered that indigenous practices like speaking and listening circles, or in Spanish it’s called circle de palabras, word circles. An indigenous practice of non-judgmental, compassionate listening. That way we use a lot of. Plant medicine ceremonies to build trust and relationship. So there’s actually been quite a few different approaches in different contexts, and all of them have been useful.

Manda: Okay. And presumably they’re emergent and you fold in what’s useful in the moment and let it go when it ceases to be useful and fold in something else. Yeah, but really I’m curious. You’ve got 15 people, are you all going out and going ‘okay, so here’s sociocracy I learned a little bit about sociocracy. Let me teach you all about that’. Or is there a person in the group who goes off to explore other potential ways of doing things?

Joe: Well, that was five years ago, so we’ve come a long way since then. Now we’re working with about 50 different processes, which is like regenerative projects and initiatives, frameworks of collaboration, multi-stakeholder networks. So now we’re doing a lot more. But those 15 people, we actually went through two rounds of crisis and conflict and a breaking of the group. And some people left and those who stayed, which was the people doing their inner work, we eventually, after about three years, legally constituted a territorial foundation and have now set up frameworks of governance that are multi-scale and multilateral and multi centric, meaning different centres of decision making. We have different thematic areas of our work. So there’s committees that organise around regenerative education, groups that work with water, groups that work with reforestation and so on. So now it’s very complex and a lot has happened. But in basic principle we would recognise, meaning someone in our group, would recognise that we had a deficiency in our capacities. So someone that was familiar with sociocracy would notice that we were making decisions in a way that were kind of clumsy, and maybe if we had a workshop on sociocracy, it would help us to do things better. So it’s this ability for someone in the group to know about a tool or framework and to recognise that it would be helpful, and then to invite it in in an appropriate way.

Manda: Brilliant. And everybody’s flexible enough that they don’t go, you know, I adhere to what I used to do because it’s my way. And everyone’s flexible enough and has done enough inner work to go oh, this is interesting, let’s try it and see. And good enough for now, safe enough to try, becomes quite a good baseline I think, for those sorts of things. This is really interesting. I could talk about this forever, but just one more question on that. How did you track value flows?

Joe: So we actually had a training on value flows, where we explored what they are and how they work. And we also had experts in community currencies and crypto Web3 frameworks, who came and helped us set up some structures so that we could start to measure value flow and then learn value flow through practising measuring it. Which by the way, when you measure value flow, you discover there are some things you can measure and you discover the whole idea of measurement is limited.

Manda: Because you can’t measure friendship or love or companionship or care, or pulling the grass out of the ground and watching the butterflies come.

Joe: So we started to have instead of numerical measurement, we started to have principled frameworks of action. And I’ll give you an example. We have a project here called Casa Comun. Translates to English as Common House. Casa comun is a hub and an incubator of regenerative economic models, an active exchange of about 140 local producers, creating lots of different things and creating different market dynamics. And so it’s a very dynamic place. But one of the things they realised in the early days was that price was not useful. What was useful was for people to name their needs and for other people to believe what they said. Which is that if two people came, I bring avocados and you bring avocados and from a quality point of view, they’re the same. So there should be a fixed price for the avocados, right? No, there shouldn’t. Because maybe you have a sick mother and you have to buy medical supplies for her, and someone else doesn’t have that. So you need more money for your avocados than the other person. And so by having the principled framework that says we trust what people say they need, and we recognise it’s not the same. That’s a principled framework of action. And they did time banking and other kinds of interesting and agile forms of commons based economics to try to create a community currency. And what they found was the problem was always when you tried to tie the community currency to a single price point.

Joe: So instead they created three price levels and they colour coded them. So if you’re a tourist and you come into this community store, you can just pay the price that’s on the label. Or you could come and pay a lower price, because you’re a member of the community and you’re providing value in some other way. Like you have the the extra pineapples are given to someone who has food dehydration, and they become ingredients for the granola that someone else sells, which creates income to support the store. So you pay a lower price because you’re bringing value in some other way. Or you just come in and say I need this. Like there are battered women who are leaving domestic violence, who come and stay at Casa Commune in some of their rooms, and they just pay a lower price because they’re in a place of vulnerability and their community is caring for them. So they ended up setting three different price levels, so that you could choose which one you want. No judgement. Pick the one you want.  And if you want to give even more, you can donate extra. You can pick over the store price because they have a big sign that shows you these three different levels. So the way of thinking here is that value flow becomes recognised by letting the human relationships be primary, and the market dynamics are secondary in practice. In actual practice.

Manda: Yes. This is how capitalism becomes undone. Because if everybody did this tomorrow, everywhere, that’s it gone. We have a way of sharing  where people and planet and the ecosystems and whatever we want to call it, the web of life, matters. Instead of an economy that has to grow regardless of everything else. Gosh, Joe, this is so inspiring. In an ideal world, where does this go? Where do you go when you dream with the plants or without them? With your river or without it? Where is the future of this?

Joe: I see the most powerful attractor in the future is a deep sense of belonging and joy, and the awe and majesty, the beauty and the wonder of the world. By people coming back into relationship with it. And I’ll just give a little example from yesterday to show how concrete this is now, even though it’s where we all need to go. I’ve been really powerfully impacted by choosing to have a child while knowing that collapse is happening. And so my daughter is eight years old now, and I’ve made a lot of decisions on her behalf, and we created a regenerative school for children and my daughter goes to that school. And then we realised the word school is wrong and now it’s a community learning ecosystem, and we’re undoing the school part and all of it. But yesterday my daughter wanted to go to a place where there was this amazing huge tree full of vines and she wants to climb on the vines. But it’s been raining really hard and the river is high. So we get to the edge of the river and we just start grabbing rocks and building a leaky dam, which is a way of cleaning the river, actually. But we’re also building a bridge where we can walk on those rocks to get to the other side. And so we’re building a dam to go play in a playground, that’s the forest in a place where we’re actually restoring the river as we do it. And then we go and as my daughter is climbing in all the branches and the trees, I’m building another Leakey dam and just having fun restoring the river.

Joe: And in the midst of that, I see this black mound that’s about up to my waist. I’m like, what is that? And it’s a beehive of native bees. And these black bees that don’t have stingers, come out of this beautiful beehive and in a moment I’m enraptured. I’m enraptured by just the awe that in this place, right next to this contaminated river, next to this amazing tree with all these vines, my daughter’s climbing all over it, and I discovered a treasure which is these beautiful native bees. Now that is what we all can have. And so what I see is the future for humanity is people all over the planet realise that their home is a life place. Peter Berg, one of the pioneers of bioregional thinking, was a beat poet and did street theatre in San Francisco in the 1970s. And he created words. So he said, we aren’t residents, we’re inhabitants. Why are we inhabitants? Because we’re in a habitat. And he did this like beat poetry game with words, and they created lots of beautiful words. But his idea of life-place, a life-place is that life and place are the same thing. That we recognise our life exists because the place gives it to us, and therefore we are in a reciprocal relationship with the place. But that place is part of a planet. So I see the future as humans belonging to our home planet. And then the kind of experience I had with my daughter yesterday is just a normal human experience.

Manda: This becomes what we do. Yes. The heartbreaking bit of that was the contaminated River. We’re very near the end. I promise to let you go soon. But I’m really curious, that you started off with the we bring people together because they’re mining for oil and gold. I realise that wasn’t in your area, but in Colombia, mining for oil, mining for Gold and it’s poisoning the river and it’s poisoning everybody. And we can build trust amongst all these conflicted and conflicting people in order to aim for clean water. How is that going?

Joe: At this point, it’s still going very badly. If you’ve ever travelled in Latin America I think it’s safe to say that most of the rivers are dead, meaning they have no water in them or they’re still heavily contaminated. That very little life can be sustained. I would say something similar is probably the case all over Africa, and the opportunity is to recognise the problem was never the water, it was our own level of consciousness and that what we bring to the water is the cleansing of… As that same friend of mine that I had mentioned had been sexually abused and was going through this healing process, she really focussed on the fact that her body is 80% water. And she focussed on her uterus. Even though her daughter, she has a daughter that’s an adult now, she’s not going to have more children, but she’s like the water that moves through my body, literally as a woman that water creates life. I need to cleanse the water of my body.

Manda: Wow.

Joe: And for us to recognise that it’s that intimate. That cleaning the river is cleaning the water in ourselves. Not because the water from the river is what we drink. That’s what happens, is that we clean that water. But what causes it is we recognise it was the water in ourselves that was dirty and not the water in the stream.

Manda: Oh my goodness, Joe, there is so much inner work to be done. And finding the elders who can hold that work feels to me like part of the work of our time. Finding someone that we can trust to hold the space while we help ourselves to clean the water inside. Clear it, and then we can begin to be part of the clearing of the water outside. That is so huge, but naming it is a step on the way.

Joe: Yeah

Manda: I wanted to ask you about governence futures, but I think we’ve probably run out of time. Maybe we come back another time and you tell us all about that and what else you learned, because that sounds like a really interesting thing that happened. And the fact that it’s happening. I think this is something that I really want people to take away. Is all of the work that you’re doing, on five continents, there are people everywhere doing this. Anyone listening, there will be somebody that they can reach who is doing this, and it isn’t getting mainstream attention, but it is the water flowing underneath this thin crust of stuff on the top that that will shatter and is shattering. Is there anything that you want to say as a closing concept?

Joe: I would just say that, um, now is the time. There’s no time left. And it is, because we’re very far into the collapse process, it’s completely unavoidable at this point. And the silver lining is those cracks in the shadows. But I would modify that metaphor with the intention of saying the light that is cracking through the shadows is us.

Manda: Thank you. That is an amazing place to end. Thank you so much. Joe Brewer, thank you for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. We will put links to your various places, to design school for Regenerating, to your website, to anything else that we talked about in the show notes. Thank you.

Joe: Thank you Manda.

Manda: And that’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Joe for all that he is and does. Wasn’t that just completely inspiring to know that the communities of place and purpose and passion that we talk about so often on this podcast are actually being built on all five inhabited continents. That somewhere in the space where you live you’d be able to find somebody who is doing their best to bring people together in communities where we can trust each other, where we can take at face value what somebody says, where we can begin to build flows of values that are genuinely built on people’s needs, and, I’m guessing, on the needs of everything around them. This really makes my heart sing, and I hope it does for you too, because it seems to me this is the way forward. Joe is right. It’s getting urgent and the time is now. But he has ways that we can change things. It’s not all just theory. It’s actually happening in real places, with real rivers and real soil and real air that we can ask to be clean and perhaps take part in the cleaning of it.

Manda: So there we go. We are recording this in the lead up to the solstice. It’s been quite an interesting week around the world. Slightly disconcerting at times, and I feel a lot more hopeful at the end of this podcast than I did before. I hope the same applies to you. And if you know of anybody else who’s interested in how we make it through, in how we create the new structures of the new world, that has to come. I know I say this every week, and I am generally aware that exponential stuff is not really how humanity works, but I do think if you could share it with three people and each of them were to share it with three people, it would spread quite fast and quite far, and this would be a good thing. So give it a go, eh?

Manda: Anyway, that’s it for this week. Huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot, to Alan Lowell’s of Airtight studios for the production, Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcripts. Faith Tilleray for the website and the tech and all the conversations that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you have any spare bandwidth and energy, a subscription, five stars and a review on the podcast app or YouTube, whatever you like. It really does make a difference to the algorithms, and that makes us all very happy. So if you want to make us happy, go tick a couple of boxes! And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you.

Manda: And goodbye.

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