Family Seeking Life of Earth Regeneration
The Earth is in overshoot-and-collapse. There are deep systemic threats for the future of humanity. And we have a child who turns three years old in January. How are we supposed to live as a family? This is the learning journey we have been on for the last year.
We got rid of nearly all our possessions and moved to Costa Rica — joining an effort to regenerate entire bioregions that was preparing to launch there. This gave us an amazing opportunity to immerse our daughter, Elise, in a biodiversity hotspot on the edge of the famous Monteverde Cloud Forest. We moved to the mountains of this incredibly fertile part of the world and lived there for ten months.
Elise spent her second birthday at a regenerative farm and retreat center; learned how to identify different toucan calls by the melodies they screech; and began gaining foundations of cultural practices that are in harmony with nature. My wife, Jessica, practiced voluntary simplicity and expanded her knowledge of permaculture for food cultivation and plant medicine as we slowly entered the world of regenerative practices for this region.
I spent much of my time collaborating with the Regenerative Communities Network to lay foundations for regenerative education that supports the development of bioregional economies to embody living-systems principles. When my formal role in this work came to an end two months ago, we set off on a new journey to help spread regenerative practices around the world.
This year-long adventure included giving four workshops on how to manage planetary collapse and gathering together a lot of foundational knowledge about how to teach bioregional regeneration in the midst of ongoing disruptions and crises.
For the last month, we have been bike touring in the Pacific Northwest while I gave talks at permaculture farms, spiritual training centers, and community gatherings to share what we have learned so far. We met with people in Spokane, on Whidbey Island, and in Bellingham — all in Washington state of the Cascadia Bioregion.
This is part of a larger transition process that will soon take us to the town of Barichara in Colombia for three months of volunteer work helping set up a bioregional learning center that is emerging there.
Our approach has been to live authentically (to the best of our abilities) while struggling to (a) make sense of the planetary predicament humanity is now in; while (b) aligning our lives as much as possible with practices that help regenerate the Earth.
This is a spiritual inquiry about how to live in right relationship with the Earth in the midst of planetary-scale collapse. There is a “great unraveling” caused by specific pathological human cultures that is currently impacting the biosphere. We don’t know how to live appropriately (and suspect few others do either) in this unique historic period. So we are opening ourselves up with the humility of not knowing as a spiritual practice.
We are now entering the second year of this learning journey — with a significant amount of privilege as beneficiaries of historic colonial patterns of wealth extraction — and we strive to leverage our passions and energy from this privileged position in service to Gaia.
The town of Barichara has a 17-year-old food forest that was carefully cultivated by two elder women who organized their community around the protection of land for future prosperity of local peoples. A young family that practices deep ecology to promote peace and cultural healing has been invited by these elders to take over stewardship of the forest and establish a learning center around it. They have three small children about Elise’s age and are experienced educators who have worked in the war-torn regions of Colombia over the last decade.
We will join them in a search to find ways of regenerating their bioregion — weaving the growing network of regenerative projects around the world. This is a practice of emergent collaboration where we align our intentions around shared purpose and see what emerges.
This is our journey. You can follow along on Patreon, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (Jessica isn’t big on using social media so we share our lives through my accounts). Help us figure out how to live regeneratively as we raise our daughter and travel the world in the next year.
Onward, fellow humans. ❤
Joe Brewer is the executive director of the Center for Applied Cultural Evolution. Get involved by signing up for our newsletter and consider making a donation to support our work.
