The story of Bioregional Earth will not be realized in the lifetime of anyone reading this right now. This is at least 200-500 year work, measured in lifetimes across generations. It's a story we must pass down across generations. This is legacy work.

The story of Bioregional Earth was born at the 7-Generation Bioregional Earth Summit. The term "7-Generation" brings in the dynamic of time, in addition to the dynamic of place. It refers to an Indigenous concept of holistic, long-term thinking across seven generations. It also reflects the modern context of a historic demographic shift. For the first time in history, as more people live longer, we can personally know (in our family and/or community) seven generations – our own generation; three before us (parents, grandparents, great-grandparents); and three after us (children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren). There is comfort, insight, and power in this ability to "touch time," to connect more generations than ever before.

The idea of generations infers legacy – an interconnection across time, with a need for those who have come before us and a responsibility to those who come after us.

Someday, you won't be here. There will be no more sunrises or sunsets, no more minutes or days. All the things you collected, treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else or end up in the junk heap. Any power you might have had will shrivel to irrelevance. It won't matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant.

What will matter? How you spent your days, the little things that added up every day to define who you are and the path you walked in the world. If that path was in keeping with a bigger story that matters, then your life will matter.

Mattering doesn't happen by accident. It's a matter of choice. In the context of the story of Bioregional Earth, it's a choice between a path that continues to destroy life or a path that stewards the continuation of life.

Time

Time is the one thing we all have in common – though we don't know how much we have and we all use it differently. It's a significant part of our personal development, as well as our relationships with others and the world. It fundamentally influences how we think and act, individually and collectively.

We need a bigger sense of time to meet the global predicament. Our story of time is too small. Deep-time systems thinker Susan Bosak coined the term McMoment in her TEDx Talk Building a 7-Generation World.

The McMoment is a uniquely modern phenomenon created by the ways in which we've changed our understanding and experience of the speed and span of time. The Western world is fast-paced – a 24/7 blur of successive short-timespan activities. We experience one superficial, disconnected McMoment after another. The imperative of the McMoment keeps us constrained in short-term thinking.

The ancient Babylonians, in a tradition later adopted by the Greeks and by medieval Christendom, followed the concept of the Great Year, generally used to refer to a 36,000-year cycle, after which history was thought to repeat itself. Indigenous cultures understand time not as a straight line of "progress," but as a circle of never-ending cycles – summer to winter, birth to death, one life to another.

Like holding a fossil stone in your hand, to think in seven generations is to understand that every moment carries the carcasses of the past and is pregnant with the future. "Now" actually holds thousands of years – today is yesterday's tomorrow. When you embody the idea that every moment of time holds all other moments, you understand the rippling power of deep time.

Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta talks about deep-time diligence. He challenges our notion that time is a straight line, and he notes that time and place are actually inextricably interconnected.

Yunkaporta on time as a line:

‍

First Peoples and Second Peoples seem to have a fundamental disagreement on the nature of reality and the basic laws of existence. It all comes back to notions of time, and the existential acrobatics required for Second Peoples to make time run in a straight line, to create a beginning, middle, and end of things.

First Peoples' law says that nothing is created or destroyed because of the infinite and regenerative connections between systems. Therefore time is non-linear and regenerates creation in endless cycles.

Second People’s law says that systems must be isolated and exist in a vacuum of individual creation, beginning in complexity but simplifying and breaking down until they meet their end. Therefore time is linear, because all things must have a beginning, middle, and end.

In the first law of thermodynamics, energy is neither created nor destroyed, it only changes and moves between systems. In the second law of thermodynamics, entropy or decay increases in a complex system as it inevitably breaks down, giving rise to what physicists call 'the arrow of time' – but only in a closed system. Perhaps the desire to create closed systems and keep time going in a straight line is the reason for Second Peoples' obsession with creating fences and walls, borders, great divides and great barriers. In reality, we do not inhabit closed systems, so why choose the second law of thermodynamics to create your model of time?

‍

Yunkaporta also explains how in his Indigenous language, there's not a discrete word for time. Time is always related to place – as time-place. Time varies "seasonally and regionally and in a million ways related to place." A time to sow, a time to plant.

These deeply-rooted notions of time go back to living into right story.

Generations

Modern Western society is very age-segregated. But generations are embodied time, a way to touch time in a profoundly personal way. If you have all generations together in a place, you shift the understanding of and engagement with that place, and the timescale on which choices are made.

Intergenerational relationships are a vital human connection for healthy psychosocial development and ecocultural wisdom. Anthropologist Margaret Mead asserted that "connections between generations are essential for the mental health and stability of nations."

In some Indigenous cultures there's an understanding that, if you want to get something done, you bring together a "fired-up youth with a feisty granny." The young bring energetic potential and the old lived experience – two sides of one coin. Young and old balance each other and become a formidable force. Science supports this idea. Some brain research indicates that neuroplasticity slows significantly in your mid 20s and then ramps up again after 50 years of age. That means if you want creative innovation, your best bet is those two age groups – even better combined.

Because the two ends of the age spectrum are closer to birth and death (a beginning and an end), more vulnerable, and less invested in the status quo, young and old can also be truth-tellers. They remind us what really matters, often simply by being.

These relationships across generations aren't about "buddies" or "mentorship." It's more along the lines of what Tyson Yunkaporta calls "us-two." This is the dual first person, a coming together in a profound way through relationships of learning from and with each other. Says Yunkaporta, "Approaches to complex challenges take many dissimilar minds and points of view to design, so we have to do that together, linking up as many other us-twos as we can to form networks of dynamic interaction, especially across generations."

Meaningful intergenerational connections can start with something as simple as an elder and a young child planting together. Shares global regeneration leader Joe Brewer, "Perhaps the most important community support we have here in Barichara is the elders who care for the forest… [As Don Jesus and my daughter Elise planted a cactus], we were immersed in a cultural structure of exchange between an elder and a child, a living metaphor… Find your elders. Nurture connection between children and elders. BE an elder."

Thinking more intergenerationally is to see ourselves as elders-in-training, starting in young adulthood. We can also reflect on what it means to go from elderhood to ancestorhood. All of this is an important flow through the story of Bioregional Earth, because we need wisdom. Although wisdom doesn't automatically come with age, more years lived give us more opportunities to find our way to wisdom – especially if we're looking for it.

Legacy

Susan Bosak founded the Legacy Project knowing it would be her life's work as well as the vital work of our time. The story of Bioregional Earth is the legacy project of our time for all of us.

Susan shares this message about legacy:

‍

A dream is the front end of a legacy. We are in a moment when the dreams of the young and the legacy of the old both feel broken.

In the story of Bioregional Earth, we can give the young back a meaningful dream. In supporting the young, the old can rediscover a powerful opportunity for legacy.

Legacy at its worst is a burden across time; at its best, it is a gift. We often praise the young, saying "the future is in good hands." The future isn't in the hands of the young. It's in all our hands, right now – to give as a gift to the seven generations to come.

What's worth living for and dying for, in what we do and how we do it every day, day to day, year into year, generation over generation?

There has to be a connection to something bigger. There has to be a seasonal rhythm, and a generational rhythm. There are ripples of rhythms within rhythms, some things being able to be achieved in a short time span, others taking years.

It's about getting your bearings in eternity.

‍

As you live into the story of Bioregional Earth, you live into your own legacy and you help others live into theirs.