Subcontinental Scale Narratives

As someone raised in the country, I’ve always been flabbergasted by cities and suburbs. They reform the landscape so completely. My formative years were spent 7 miles or so into the relative protection of the Front Range of Colorado. There, it’s too mountainous for the mechanistic sprawl of urban development to completely take hold. The same can’t be said for the flat plains I’d pass through on family trips to Denver. They’ve since been gobbled up by the machine. They’ve been reformed according to some template for suburban development, changed from something unique on Earth into the same America as just about anywhere else.

I think that a lot of people these days have some sense of this, of the parasitizing push of urban boundaries into whatever landscapes are unlucky enough to be relatively flat and nearby. But what I don’t think a lot of people have a sense for is the overwhelming changes that urbanization and the modern world have on our landscapes in their entirety. For this, we have to see big scales, we have to learn about the Earth systems that most define our place, and we have to understand the living processes of entire continents.

It was only a week ago that I returned from a road trip that had exactly this intention. With Joe Brewer and Penny Heiple, I traveled down the Colorado River Basin from headwaters to the now extinct Colorado River Delta to feel into the basin as a living whole, and to feel how it interacts with the planetary scale systems of North America and beyond. Along our journey we came to understand, to feel the essential role that the Rocky Mountains serve in drawing out precipitation, holding snowpack, and providing meltwaters to feed a river system that cuts through expansive desert landscapes. For millennia, the mouth of the Colorado was an incredibly rich delta ecology that was completely reliant on a mountain range over a thousand miles away. Thinking at these scales is essential to understanding and stewarding the Earth. It’s also really fun.

Thinking at this scale also enabled us to feel how much the entire river basin has been transformed into a continental scale machine. Dams and canals now define the Colorado River and its surrounding basin as much as the majesty of Canyonlands or the Grand Canyon. In our current era, the main storyline of the Colorado River can’t be anything but the insanity of its politics and the pillaging of its ecological potential. It takes a continental scale perspective to see this level of dysfunction, to see the size of the machine.

But with that same continental scale perspective, we can inhabit the appropriate vantage point to form new holistic narratives about a healthier future for the basin and all of the life that calls it home. This can give the landscapes and communities within the basin a shared story and identity, creating the conditions for deep allyship, collaboration, and increasing shared regenerative capabilities.

This can develop a clear sense for how our local regenerative acts are making for a healthier, more resilient basin. This brings more meaning to the work we do locally, it becomes visibly part of a greater whole. The nested story doesn’t end there, because when we see the world this way we see how the health of the basin is impacting the Earth. This is an essential reintegration of what is now a fragmented world. This subcontinental scale can weave together the local and the global. This is a big deal.

Now we find ourselves in a discovery and design phase, inquiring into how to cultivate “nested” or fractal narratives that link neighboring bioregions in ways that naturally organize to larger scales, like the Colorado Basin, the Great Lakes Basin, and the Salish Sea. This has only been made possible with recent innovations in digital technology. We can nurture large place based narratives because of the ease of convening across huge geographies on our computer screens. This is new. Now we have some experimenting and prototyping to do!

So to those who feel called to both regenerating the Earth and to the art of gathering people, let’s experiment at this subcontinental scale and share their most important and orienting stories. I will soon be hosting some gatherings for the Colorado Basin and I have two friends who are doing the same for Cascadia and the Great Lakes Basin. There are other subcontinental scales that have community leaders who seem primed and ready to step into the action. What might we be able to create together?

This is community art, it’s time to get creative.

If you’re moved to participate in this, to learn with a community about regenerating the Earth, please join the Design School for Regenerating Earth. Here’s a link: https://design-school-for-regenerating-earth.mn.co