Episode #127 Bio-Regionalism: The Design Path for regenerating earth with Joe Brewer
The Holocene is over, we all know this. The Anthropocene may segue into the Symbiocene, with the opportunity to experience the surprising abundance of the world, but only if we work at it. Joe Brewer, bioregionalist and earth regenerator, offers a rawly honest evaluation of where we are, and where we could go
Joe Brewer has separate bachelors degrees in physics, mathematics, and interdisciplinary studies and a masters in atmospheric sciences. He is a complexity researcher, innovation strategist, experience designer, and serial social entrepreneur who brings a wealth of expertise to the adoption of sustainable solutions at the cultural scale.
Among his notable achievements are the creation of an undergraduate degree program in Earth Systems, Environment and Society at the University of Illinois and design of new collaboration protocols for strategic communications among European NGO’s with WWF-UK and Oxfam, in the UK.
He was an active member of the Center for Complex Systems Research from 2001 to 2005, where he studied pattern formation in self-organizing systems. He was a research fellow at the Rockridge Institute in 2007-08 analyzing political discourse in the United States. He contracted with the International Centre for Earth Simulation in Geneva in 2010-11 to help build a globally-focused high performance computing facility dedicated to holistic simulations of the dynamic Earth.
His experiences as a social entrepreneur and cross-disciplinary scholar weave together a combination of skills dedicated to open collaboration, interactive design, and empowered civic action for catalyzing change toward greater resilience in our turbulent world.
More recently, he has moved to Colombia and is engaged in regenerating an area of dry desert with the aim of returning it to flourishing biodiversity. He has written The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth and established Earth Regenerators, a community, a study group and a place to share ideas that will bring us closer to a prosocial world, focussed on bioregions where the human and More-Than-Human worlds integrate, where we organise with direct local democracy, create a steady state economy, based on shared values and not on growth, and where we predicate our actions on trusting the good intentions of others.
In this deep, penetrating conversation, full of radical honesty, we discuss the end of the holocene and its implications, explore the age of the anthropocene and what may come of it, and how all of us can become earth regenerators – what it means, and how it might work. Joe outlines the processes of his 8 week course and his new GoFundMe project to birth a bioregion.
In Conversation
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