A recent headline in the Washington Post stated, Writing to the future is one of the most powerful climate actions you can take Social scientists say writing a letter to loved ones in the future can overcome a critical climate problem: inaction. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/04/29/climate-action-letter-to-the-future/ Apparently, having people write letters to their future children is one of the best ways to motivate… Read more →
Chapter 6: Rethinking the Economy: From Extraction to Regeneration
The economy as we know it is not a law of nature. It is a human construct, based on a set of assumptions, incentives, and institutions that have evolved over time. Yet today, these assumptions no longer serve the wellbeing of humanity or the living systems on which all life depends. As climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequality converge… Read more →
Aside: A Note on the Role of AI
Without artificial intelligence, this book would never have been written. While all the ideas are mine, elaborating and articulating all the arguments is now beyond my patience and endurance, so I invariably turn to AI to spell things out and elaborate the arguments. It rarely fails to surprise and delight me, even though I sometimes have to curb its worst… Read more →
Chapter 12: Changing Our Way of Thinking
Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, reminds us that paradigms do not evolve incrementally—they break. They collapse when their internal contradictions become too great to bear, when the answers they provide no longer match the realities they seek to explain. This is very much the situation we find ourselves in today. Our dominant frameworks—economic, political, and cultural—are faltering… Read more →
Bioregionalism: A Better Model
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — Buckminster Fuller The world’s dominant economic and political systems are failing — they are failing to sustain ecosystems, nourish communities, and secure a future for coming generations. Yet attempts to reform these systems from within often meet… Read more →
Preface: The Emerging Reality (AI Enhanced)
In response to the complex, multi-faceted ecological crisis now unfolding on Earth, a new consciousness is beginning to emerge. This consciousness doesn’t introduce a novel idea so much as it revives an ancient truth: we are not separate from Nature. Our well-being, our survival—even our sense of meaning—are intimately tied to the health of the living Earth. To nurture the… Read more →
Preface (AI Enhanced)
Why We Wrote This Book Our journey has taken us to many places over the course of our remarkable and, at times, improbable lifetimes. Like others of our generation, we’ve lived through cultural revolutions, technological upheavals, political sea changes, and the dawning realization that humanity’s impact on the biosphere threatens the very systems that support life on Earth. Over the… Read more →
Preface: Our Journey (original)
Our journey has taken us to many places over the course of our remarkable lifetimes. Over the last dozen years, our focus has been on solutions to the climate crisis and to the accelerating loss of biodiversity, which may prove to be more harmful to us in the short run. In 2012, following Superstorm Sandy, we established the Center for… Read more →
Chapter 13: Right Livelihoods — Making It Through the Next Ten Years
In the early days of Earth Regenerators, Victoria and I led a series of workshops on the idea of “Right Livelihoods.” The basic premise was simple but profound: there are many ways to make a living, rather than trying to make a killing, by doing what you love in service of life. Especially now, as the dominant economic system accelerates… Read more →
Chapter 6: Bioregionalism
Chapter 3: Bioregionalism — Living Within the Limits of Place Bioregionalism starts with the recognition that each region has its own ecological, cultural, and hydrological identity. By organizing social, economic, and political life around bioregions—rather than arbitrary administrative boundaries—we can realign human activity with the natural systems that sustain life. Bioregionalism fosters place-based governance, regenerative economies, and a deep sense… Read more →