The long history of humanity has been one of deep harmony with all other life on Earth. But now, we find ourselves out of balance with life itself. All generations alive in this moment have a choice: do we continue to destroy life or do we choose the continuation of life? We can choose to cultivate, steward, regenerate and connect bioregions around the planet. The emergence of Bioregional Earth is this new/old story.
For humans, story is everything. It defines our species – the ability to pull from both the past and the future in our mind as we create the story we live out in any given moment. We can shift and evolve stories, and by extension our experience of the world. Some moments can change the story of humanity profoundly – like the Earthrise photo. It was taken by William Anders during Apollo 8 on December 24, 1968. It shifted our perspective on Earth and our place in the universe. Its legacy continues to inspire and remind us of the interconnectedness and fragility of our planet.
How can you live into the story of Bioregional Earth? If you listen closely to what's deep inside yourself and to the land, you will find the path. One meaning of "human" is literally "earthling" – from the Latin "humus," meaning earth or ground. We come from stardust, and we will return to the dust.
The story of Bioregional Earth can emerge collectively around the planet through embodied practice, which is why the Design School for Regenerating Earth was founded. We are creatures of the Earth, and we can (re)learn how to be stewards in the ongoing cycle of life on this unique and beautiful planet.
Right Story
The story of Bioregional Earth was born at the 7-Generation Bioregional Earth Summit. It's grounded in Indigenous worldviews and knowledge as well as evidence-based science. From Western science, the story of Bioregional Earth is about being in balance with life and understanding the fundamental facts of physics and Planetary Boundaries. From Indigenous cultures, the story of Bioregional Earth is about right relationship within Natural Law, as Indigenous scholar Lyla June shows in this journey of ancient wisdom where Indigenous peoples didn't just inhabit the land, they enriched it.
The best of Western science can come together with Indigenous worldviews and knowledge as right story for Bioregional Earth. Global regeneration leader Joe Brewer and Dan Longboat of the Indigenous Environmental Institute at Trent University in Canada shared a powerful conversation about Finding a Third Way. That conversation is foundational for the story of Bioregional Earth. Working with Dan Longboat, Susan Bosak and Brian Puppa continue exploring this Third Way in the Greater Tkaronto Bioregion.
Right story is slow, difficult, and messy, especially when it's surrounded by wrong story. The story of Bioregional Earth is slowly starting to be lived out in bioregions around the planet. From these explorations and experiments, we see some subtle dimensions to the emerging story of Bioregional Earth.
Understanding your bioregion is to see your place as defined by both its natural and its human stories: its history as told through soils, landforms (mountains, valleys, plain, prairie, forest, desert), watersheds, native plants and animals, and, finally, the inhabitant human cultures which have become adapted, over time, to life there.
Thinking in terms of bioregions, you start to embrace looser mental boundaries and divisions between places. A bioregional story recognizes the gradual processes of time in the land. It encompasses the contributions of human activities and imagination. It seeks to understand the character, capacities, and limits of a bioregion not only within itself, but as it connects to other bioregions and planetary processes. It's a story that continually slides across scale and time.
The story of Bioregional Earth goes beyond the sterile – no one calls their home an "environment" or their feeling about their place "anthropocentric" or their connection to place as "ecological." This is about the spirit and sacredness of people in their place.
As deep ecologist Gary Snyder wrote, "It is not enough just to 'love nature' or to want to 'be in harmony with Gaia.' Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place, and it must be grounded in real information and experience."
As you experience your place, you begin to understand that you matter in your place – because you are the one who needs to take care of your place. If you feel like a steward, that automatically implies relationship – because you have to be taking care of something. This story inherently counters feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and disconnection.
The outer work is important in this story, as is the inner work. It's about digging into the soil as well as our own souls – about healing as much as (re)learning. Drawing on Prosocial research, two important personal capacities we need to develop in the face of change and uncertainty in the world are the regulation of emotions and psychological flexibility. These capacities will make the unprecedented collaboration we need for Earth regeneration more possible.
We need to be cautious about how dearly we clutch our story of place so that we don't perpetuate a reductionistic, polarized worldview (wrong story). We need to understand our bioregion fully in ecological terms, with an ecological worldview. As Joe Brewer often says, no bioregion is an island – not even the islands. What we need to take into our very being is that everything is connected to everything else, and what we do to one part of life we do to ourselves. To remain a viable long-term vision, the story of Bioregional Earth must see the local as inextricably embedded in the planetary.
Fundamentally, this story is about building a different culture – a different "terrain of consciousness," in the words of bioregional thinker Peter Berg.
Our real connection to each other and our place is "the work" – more specifically the "good work." It may look different in each place, but it's the work of care, respect, curiosity, wisdom. Good work is always modestly scaled and interconnected upward and downward into everything else. It's also interconnected across time at the span of lifetimes across generations. The story of Bioregional Earth is 200-500 year good work.
Our horizon isn't the edge of a forest, or the expanse of the ocean. It isn't the vastness of space. It's the fork in the road where we must choose either to continue to destroy life or the continuation of life. It's not just about the story of place, but the story of how to BE in life. Once we see that, there's no going back to not seeing, no hiding in old ways of non-sensing.
Take a look at how people in bioregions around the planet are standing up for the right story of Bioregional Earth.
We Are Stories
Story by story, we create our world. We are stories – and so stories become our most powerful sources of wayfinding in an uncertain time. The stories we create and share are everything. Research in marketing, politics, and social change shows the thing is far less important than the story of the thing.
A civilization is very much about the bigger story of stories, the Overstory, we all share over time – the meanings, values, and structures that guide us collectively. As our stories crumble, we crumble – individually and collectively. People are feeling fear and uncertainty about what the future holds for them and even the human species. Deep narratives from our past are breaking down and we're trying to recraft them.
If we can individually and collectively make some good sense, we can act in ways that make sense. Story is the most effective way human beings have to navigate through the world, find psychological cover, nurture healing, imagine possibilities, pass values on to generations that follow us. Stories can tell us about places other than the here and now. They present us with situations we haven't experienced and may never experience. Stories bring mental order to chaos, some meaning to the seemingly meaningless. Stories also provide us with a collective decision-making matrix.
The dangerous thing about story – especially wrong story – is that it doesn't matter if a story isn't true. It doesn't even matter if people don't really believe it. What matters is that people coordinate around the story – that the story is told and heeded. So tending right story is vital.
The other problem with stories is when we substitute telling them for meaningful action to deal with the real issues the stories are about. Most people trained in Western institutions have been taught to depend on abstracted reason. Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, live in embodied story. The stories are archetypal, dynamic, and constantly evolving in context. We think that abstracted description is a higher form of knowledge, but then we struggle with how to go from the abstraction to "implementation" in the real world. If you start with lived experience on the land in the living world – something you can touch and feel and tell – those stories will help us find our way.
During the 7-Generation Bioregional Earth Summit, one of the most memorable comments came from an Indigenous speaker who simply asked, "Can we just start with the Indigenous stories?" Indeed, that's where we're most likely to find right story.
In this moment, stories that bring us together and help us see our collective power are essential when we need unprecedented collaboration. We need more than the individualistic notion of The Hero's Journey. We need something more relational and dynamic. Systems thinker Nora Bateson asks, "Who can I be when I'm with you?" You are only a "me" in the context of a "we" – family, friends, partners, neighbors, teachers, and children, all swirling in the past, present, and future. Who was the hero in Lord of the Rings – Frodo or Sam? Neither could have made the journey without the other. What we really need to nurture is a more collaborative story, and a more collective sense of leadership and action.
To be clear, the story of Bioregional Earth isn't a single, written story with a beginning, middle and end. It's a living, multifaceted story that really has no beginning or end, only an ever-evolving middle. It may be expressed and take shape in many ways.
This is also a story that must slide in time. As we re-evaluate stories of history (e.g. North America was "discovered"), three narrative opportunities are in play: the story of what happened (rethinking historical stories, who told them and from what perspective); the story of what now (if we change our understanding of history, how does that change what we see/value today); and the story of what next (can we find the imagination and courage to see and pursue new possibilities). We have a chance to reconceptualize the past, present, and future.
If the ultimate goal is at the scale of an Overstory – like the awe-inspiring top foliage from multiple trees that combine to create an overhang or canopy under which people can walk, sit, reflect – then the storytelling has to be both intensely human in the current moment and timelessly mythic, co-created across generations.
Find out more by reading Grounding.