Earth Regenerators and the Design School for Regenerating Earth
THE PROBLEM:
Earth's ecosystems, especially its freshwater rivers and the watersheds that feed and protect those rivers, have been degraded over centuries of large-scale agricultural practices and industrial pollution, to the point of death - as in, drying up, or poisonous to life forms.
WHO'S ON IT ALREADY:
This is the group and the leader that showed me my craziest, most expansive, millennia-spanning vision for how to fashion a new world was not impossible after all – in fact, it was already in progress, in a mountainous region of Colombia, founded and led by a man named Joe Brewer.
Joe Brewer was educated as a cognitive scientist and worked as a complexity researcher. He wound up moving to a small town in Colombia, Barichara, with his young family, where he bought a huge tract of eroded, "useless" land. He and his neighbors and friends are slowly transforming this land into a "bioparque," a food forest demonstrating syntropic agroforestry. An important part of this work has been to study rainwater's downhill pathways over the land, and build simple, traditional landforms to slow the runoff and redirect the water back into the ground.
Joe's book about reviving landscapes and community relationships is The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth. His YouTube channel is packed with three or four years' worth of videos, interviews, and webinars on the work at Barichara, practical alternative financial models for more just and equitable exchanges, prosocial models for local governance of landscapes and finance, and how river systems can be regenerated. Joe's latest international work is the Design School for Regenerating Earth, which expands his role as a teacher of regenerative methods.
#Ground #Civica #soil #water #bioregions #food #prosocial #regeneration #groupdynamics #finance #watersheds