Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 12: Joe Brewer
This blog is a transcription of the 12th episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, hosted by Regen Network’s Chief Regeneration Officer, Gregory Landua.
In this episode, Gregory interviews Joe Brewer, earth systems scientist and complex systems thinker. Listen on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher; or read the transcription below.
Gregory Landua: Hello and welcome to Planetary Regeneration Podcast. I’m your host Gregory Landua.
Gregory Landua: Hello Regenerates this is Gregory with the Planetary Regeneration Podcast. In this episode I have the pleasure of talking with Mr. Joe Brewer who is currently writing a book on earth regeneration and is a complex systems thinker, earth systems scientist and really intelligent guy. I had a lot of fun talking with him and we dug into bio-regionalism, bio-regional regeneration. The sort of emerging theory of regenerative economics, the hubris and dangers and pitfalls of techno optimism and yeah just had a really fantastic conversation here at the intersection of planetary regeneration and technology and market forces and collapse and you know civilization and what it means to be setting up our future generations for a regenerative world and I think you’ll enjoy today’s episode. As always, you know there are a few little glitches where there’s some time outs due to internet issues and we’ll try to take those out if we can and we do as often times is the case here on the planetary regeneration podcast just kind of start mid-sentence. So bear with me, and I hope you enjoy the debt and quality of the conversation and can overlook some of the you know superficial glitchiness of the podcast as always I’m dedicated to providing the depth of quality of conversation and I am not currently making promises on the post production quality, so I hope that that’s okay with all of my listeners out there. Have a great time listening and please feel free to leave comments, questions and let me know if there’s anybody you’d like to see on the podcast.
Gregory Landua: Cool and we sort of jump right in
Joe Brewer: Yeah we can pull back
Gregory Landua: Part of that was cause my family was rustling about, getting ready to leave, I also have — I gotta just about 3-year-old and a one-year-old. So I was, you know just keeping the conversation rolling and wanting to learn more about your context but I think it would probably be useful just for listeners, if we kind of just zoom back out and you give a quick kind of overview about what you feel like you’re serving and what’s living through you and I know there’s — you’re working on a book and you know you’ve moved your family into a space here where you’re all working to embody a regenerative lifestyle and so there’s a lot of deep sort of vocational work that you’re up to. So I’d just love to get a little bit of context with that framing like you know what are you serving? What are you up to right now?
Joe Brewer: Yeah, one of the challenging aspects of trying to describe the focus of service and regenerative work is that it’s so multi-faceted and multi-scaled but the challenge are that they’re all converging within this window of time. If I step back and look at how my life evolved to this point as a way of contextualizing it. There was a time when I was studying complexity science and earth systems and getting to a place of grasping at aspects of that big dynasty — you know that big elephant that the three blind man are touching at which pieces I can feel into and for a long time my work was about the intersection of meaning making, the cognitive science and how the mind creates meaning and how that emerges collectively into political discourse and the directions of entire societies just this realm of how does meaning making shape the pathologies of this society and its attempts to address them and that really open me up in many deep ways to a recognition that all political activism is rooted at one level or another in trauma. Whether it’s direct acute trauma or bi-curious distributed trauma. Like the lack of connection to a home place or a lack of understanding of ancestral memory could be kind of a low level chronic trauma up through to a — I’m a woman who experienced a lot of violence by men in a patriarchal society and a very acute forms of trauma that political activism was a round of grappling with that and I felt a pretty strong often subtle but a very strong relationship or set of relationships between cultural trauma and the dysfunctions of politics and how we feel about the human relationship to what’s happening with the planet. It’s like how do we frame global warming, is this a discussion about economic policy issues or is it something deeper? And this sort of shapes where I feel my sense of calling and mission is now, which is — a number of people are coming to talk about Gaia consciousness. This feeling of, I’m a part of the unfolding biosphere of the earth and I feel a spiritual relationship to honoring the sacredness of being part of the earth and then doing whatever I can to serve that process of ongoing life of the planet. So a growing number of people that may not use the words Gaia consciousness to describe it, but they’re really feeling like they are a kind of self-awareness embedded within the planet’s unfolding process and are trying to become responsible servants to it and a lot of regenerative design is about healing of landscapes and related aspects of a — how can I be a part of this ecosystem and do something to heal it? And be self-aware or be an aspect of it that’s able to be self-aware. So I feel like a lot of my work is in that space of helping the people who are on the journey of becoming Gaia consciousness wherever they are on the journey of. The world is a really messed up place, human activity is a key driver of it. How do I feel about being human? And how do I build a life for myself and my loved ones? And how do I talk to my family that don’t understand it? And various interesting little aspects. They get right in the heart of that cultural trauma and the grieving process that really is essential and what I feel like I’m doing right now in a specific way, and the writing of my book is related to this is — how do those of us that are trying to restore planetary health, how do we come to a shared understanding of what that narrative feels like, as we live into it? How do we live into this process over the rest of our lives and actually beyond our lives? So the next fifty years up to maybe the next two or three hundred years where there are critical transitions that will have happened throughout this period of time. Some of them are really disturbing and really hard to deal with and some of them are really beautiful and really inspiring and it’s paradoxical cause we have the hold of — so this idea of articulating a design pathway for regenerating the earth is sort of like — I feel like there is not yet a discourse about this. Cause a discourse is something that has a lot of dynamic interactions between different actors and different tribes with their agendas that the discord among them is what creates the discourse.
Gregory Landua: Hmm um
Joe Brewer: And what I feel is happening now is that the discourse on regeneration is a discourse, but the discourse on regeneration for how we regenerate the entire planet is not yet quite a discourse, but it’s becoming one.
Gregory Landua: I don’t know, I feel like I disagree with people about that all the time.
Joe Brewer: Yeah, which is actually part of how it drives, right? The disagreements are how we generate it
Gregory Landua: Yeah
Joe Brewer: And so it’s not yet coherent in a sense that, um,
Gregory Landua: It’s just not enough disagreement is kind of what — I’m see hearing from you. It’s like, it’s like somehow the process of, and I experienced this in different ways, like as you’re, as you’re speaking, I’m sort of seeing this picture of, you know, my life experiences and, and also recently just hearing people tell stories about kind of, their — like big creative endeavors and how important it is to have someone who sort of disagrees with you to be kind of like struggling with so that you’re advancing your thought so that you’re proving a point, so that you’re able to have those moments of humility and say, well, what if they’re right and what would that mean for my life or my approach? Um, and how would I incorporate that? So there’s this like creative struggle, this, you know, it’s like grist in a mill. It actually is moving and creating something, um, in a way that doesn’t, if it’s just this sort of like a, I think a lot of people, just want frictionlessness, it’s just sort of like this striving, this belief that it’s just like, Oh, it’ll just be like, Oh, it’s no problems.
Gregory Landua: But what you’re saying is actually what we need is a critical mass of, of kind of friction devoted to the right. Mmm, yeah, yeah. An invitation to devote, you know, friction, attention, movement, um, to the, to the inquiry around what it means to be human in this moment of the evolution of the planet and how to do that well and how to serve the planet and humanity as a single, as a singular instead of, as these sort of like, you know, false — falsely opposed fragments.
Joe Brewer: Yeah. The person who I think articulates this with the most sophistication at the moment is Daniel Scharffenberger and he has a, two video interviews he’s done for [inaudible 11:34] wealth wisdom called: The War on Sense-Making, part one and two. And each one of them is about an hour and a half long where he just goes into the complexity of medics and how ideas and cultures co-evolve and uh, the challenge of sense-making, the challenge of discernment and one of the key elements of, uh, why it’s so hard to do this sense-making is this challenge of transcending and yet incorporating contradictory ideologies. How can we have an ideology and then work across them at the same time?
Gregory Landua: There’s not even, I mean, I would, I would argue that if you can’t hold seemingly completely opposed views, you’re not conscious actually, there’s sort of this, there’s sort of this, um, you know, it’s really interesting cause, yeah. So I mean a, Daniel’s great, Daniel Scharffenberger for listeners, um, and he has a, he has a bunch of really important gifts for the conversation, I think. Um, which would be [inaudible 12:37] to unpack some of those and it wouldn’t be that kind of perception of how do you hold two or more seemingly opposed perspectives at the same time and understand that they’re true in different contexts. Um, without that capacity. I think that’s sort of like one of the foundational capacities of kind of claiming consciousness. Because if you’re not doing that, I think there’s a pretty strong argument to be made that, that you’re just sort of running a pattern. Fully deterministic, there is no agency, you know, there’s just like, you were sort of describing this, you know, like, like how, um, integral, um, cultural trauma and as a function of that individual trauma is in shaping culture and shaping society and shaping people, everything from political activism to, you know, the, the songs that our children’s saying as nursery rhymes, all of that is somehow a reflection of these moments in history that were, you know, um, trauma because that’s, you know, that’s life responding to the trauma and sort of, you know, calcifying or, or scarring or responding in some way. So, if we can’t recognize that, that, you know, sort of like how the deeper context of that, we will have no ability to discern whether or not the present moment is a precise recapitulation of the original trauma or not. And so if you’re just sort of running the autopilot that you think, you know, and you’re not able to sort of see both perspectives and kind of like go for it. Now, there’s really not much chance to have a living response. You’re just to me, I mean, it’s just sort of — a machine response, just, you know, whatever it was, the binary, whatever, you know, whatever it’s shifted into, you’re just gonna go that way.
Joe Brewer: Input output, the input is A, the output is B, no actual cognitive, a solution generating is happening. And Jordan Greenhall who’s a collaborator with Daniel Scharffenberger talks about this as sovereignty. And he talks about sovereignty in a cybernetic way that the information processing of an organism, it’s, and the emergence of intelligence is the organism processing information. In its environment to pursue things that are life creating. So like, finding food, mating appropriately and other things that are kind of simple, cybernetics of living systems sort of way. But the autonomy of the living entity, the ability to function as like a paramecium swimming around in a fluid is autonomous and functions with, with uh, kind of sovereignty. When it’s information processing, let’s it make decisions to support its own life. And when you bring that to the much more complex level of multicellularity and then later to superorganisms and then to human cultures and you get these increasing levels of nuanced interpretation that are needed to make sense of information processing to make sense of things that uh, one of the elements of autonomy and sovereignty is that there’s the support of decision making actually support what the decision is trying to make.
Joe Brewer: So if you’re trying to find food as a paramecium, your ability to navigate the chemical gradients of your environment needs to direct you toward food or else that decision making process lack efficacy. And then you’re not really being sovereign because your decisions are based on incorrect interpretations of information from the environment. The discernment is not getting you to food and that way of purposeful action toward efficacy toward things that actually work. When we look at our complex planetary environment and our complex cultural environments that we’re in, the challenge of the sermon is huge. And so there’s ability to hold multiple perspectives is really important to that.
Gregory Landua: Yeah, I mean, I mean there’s a couple I’m drawn to maybe, I don’t know, Jordan and I don’t know his arguments, but I would, I, I’m, it feels like there’s something missing there, but I, but it may just be because I don’t really have the context, but, but I would, I would, I would argue that, you know, and, and here where, you know, they’re sort of holding this lightly because there’s the danger of getting in — into, um, a semantic situation where words mean slightly different things to different people. And we may end up in the end be saying the same thing or close to the same thing, but, um, in service to that sort of like, you know, creative friction generation, I have the sense, I have the sense that what everything you’re saying is true. And that’s not actually, I mean, I use the term agency. I, I don’t, um, sovereignty to me has a different connotation, but you know, when I’m thinking about agency, if, if agency is actually going to be born and survive, one of the primary attributes is that it is possible for the being in question to, to have a never before thought thought, to that [inaudible 18:43] .
Gregory Landua: If we’re just interesting conversation of, of metabolizing information and making decisions, we’re still stuck, stuck in the mechanistic input output. And it’s a calibration question and not a consciousness question. And so if there’s consciousness, it’s actually the, the ability for, for spontaneous sort of transcendence of, uh, you know, if you’re thinking in game theory, it’s like the spontaneous transcendence of a closed game into an open game.
Joe Brewer: Yeah.
Gregory Landua: Is the, is like somehow one of the earmarks of consciousness. And I would, I would also correlate that with sovereignty, although I use in my sort of thinking about all of this, that, that to me is tightly correlated with agency. You know, how, and, and you know, and it sort of tugs this philosophical, you know, strand and we good dive down the rabbit hole of freewill, determinism and I’d be, you know, I, I’m sort of curious, I mean, eh, I sort of say let’s shelf freewill for a moment because that’s a, it’s a whole big, beautiful conversation and I kind of want to circle around and approach it from a different perspective, which is, um, recently, we got in a little bit of a Twitter, a Twitter escapade in which, um, my interpretation of what you were saying is essentially, uh, and just upgrade if, if I’m missing it.
Gregory Landua: Um, my, my interpretation of what you’re saying is: “Hey, everybody, we have to, uh, come to terms with the reality that it’s, you know, we’re fucked. That, that civilization as we know it and humanity as we know it. And even the biosphere as we know it, is already done and we’re in sort of the sunset of that and the sun is going down. And, um, if, if, if we’re not able to accept that cognitively, and if we’re not able to accept that culturally, um, we will have no ability to interact with the real world”. Um, is that an accurate, uh, sort of, um, uh, re like mirror of your, uh, thinking on, you know, where we’re at and what we need to do?
Joe Brewer: I think it’s, it’s very close to my perspective on it. And the one place that I think, um, that I would clarify and distinguish from what you just said is, that I feel that people who are developing strategies for engagement for this regenerative work need to have that understanding. And when we get into the larger meshwork of ways people engage with regeneration, it becomes more blurry, more blurry, how critical it is. But the piece that I think is really essential that, uh, has been articulated probably the most powerfully and William Catton Jr’s 1977 book Overshoot. He was a human ecologist who described the dynamic of the human presence on earth as a planetary scale phenomenon. And like the work of Nate Hagens would be in a more like updated and detailed version of the same argument, which is that when you look at the thermodynamics or the energy flows, or if we were an ecologist, we might talk about the trophic flows of nutrients and energy through human ecology as it relates to the biosphere that the human population is, oh, is too large.
Joe Brewer: I grew this large through a brief period of, of consuming fossil fuels that took a lot longer to produce, than are being depleted and there’s a drawdown of nonrenewable resources or non-renewable is determined on human timescales. We can’t renew the things on the scales that we would need to, even if some of them, like fossil fuels may be renewable on million year timescales. Uh, and that part of our challenge maybe to give it a design heuristic would be, um, a key element of effective design is the ability to understand the constraints that the design is working with and then use that understanding of constraints to generate creativity that is workable. And so my sense of, um, understanding and accepting the planetary collapse is partly about the ability to discern where we are in that process. And one piece of it that is an obscurity and the way the discourse is structured right now, which means not everyone feels this way, but it’s sort of the predominant or default position as their collapse are defined in human terms.
Joe Brewer: So someone looks at the Roman Empire or some other historic human cultural example and sees the collapse as it hasn’t happened yet because the human population is still growing and the complexity of our globalized system is still growing. And the, the subtle step is seeing planetary collapse as something larger than that. So like the collapse of biodiversity in the last 100 years has already been occurring, but the human population has grown and partly by consuming those resources. So does this time mismatch between the peak of human population and its decline and the peak of biodiversity and its decline. And so there are other phenomenon like this in the planetary system. Where the planetary collapse has already been going on for a long time. And we’re in the middle of it. But the human dynamic of like the limits to growth study maybe as a, as an example where the population peaks and begins to collapse and there’s simulations starting around 2030.
Joe Brewer: So it hasn’t happened yet, this distinction of collapse for the planet and collapse for humans has been conflated in the discourse. And so there’s an un-clarity that comes up there. And when we’re thinking about regenerating the biosphere, we need to understand the collapses that have already occurred in the biosphere. The collapse of fisheries in the world ocean would be an example, um, or the loss of top soils up to this point or the amount of, um, biomes that are no longer intact because collapses have occurred to them in the past. And so this is where I think that — determine is really important for doing regenerative design at the strategy level. And it does create, a really important tension about whether collapse is seen as an anthropocentric term or a bio centric term. And that’s one of the things that I play provocateur, to try to, um, open up that paradox and hold the conversation.
Gregory Landua: Yeah. I mean that all sounds um, fine as far as it goes. I guess I’m, what, what I’m curious about is, you know, and, and I think this likely resonates with your — what I’m understanding about your kind of deeper work in the world. But you know, there’s sort of there’s, there’s a couple of different layers of this. One is, the sort of, um, objective, ecological reality of cascading ecological failures. But also the, what, what my problem is, is that, the story of cascading ecological failures is never paired with its equal and opposite, which is the story of cascading centropic ecological regeneration, which is completely miraculously possible. And there’s, there’s ample evidence of it. Um, so, so our, so it’s sort of like humans, destructive capacity and humans creative capacity as a partner with life. Mmm. I don’t know if they’re on par, but I have the sense that I would have the opposite sense.
Gregory Landua: My sense is that the discourse does not in any way lack people who are hand wavy and full of fear about cascading system failure. I see that everywhere, people are paralyzed by it. People are rambling on and on and in like these trauma responses about fisheries collapse and soil stuff. And it’s just, it’s all you hear everywhere. No, and people don’t get out of it. There’s no escape. It’s like this. So from my perspective where I’m sitting at, it’s like the opposite. I have the opposite experience. I have the experience of everywhere I go. People are just sort of like, they awakened and then they go straight into this sort of like paralysis of overwhelm. And I think you’re right to call out, you know, unprocessed grief and um, you’re right to, to notice that there’s deeper layers of personal and cultural trauma that are coupled with that, creating that kind of cognitive may Lou, that’s just like paralyzing.
Gregory Landua: And from my perspective, one of the, like the ability to hold that and to not run away from it. To hold that it is true, that that those things are true. Kind of keep bonking my, uh, excuse me, bonking my, uh, mic here.
Gregory Landua: That those things are true but also simultaneously hold the truth that, you know, Amazonian cultures stewarded, the biodiversity gardened, the biodiversity that we now find in the Amazonian basin and the Mayan people in Mesoamerica, um, got the bulk of their sustenance from forest gardens, not from annual corn tillage and that there are these examples all around the world of humans. Um, not just living in equilibrium, but like living in such a way that creates a, a, you know, negative entropy that life begets life. That there is more photosynthetic efficiency taking place and that humans are a part of the web that’s sort of managing that and upgrade.
Gregory Landua: And so there’s sort of like, there’s those two pieces to hold simultaneously. And then there’s, and then there’s the question, and I think this is, you know, then there’s the question for me, what do you choose? What narrative do you choose to embody and when, and what is that narrative going to? Uh, how does, how does that narrative affect your being state? How does that narrative affect your ability to be or become in the present world and, you know. There’s sort of, and, and what are the ethics of that? So, I’m just very fascinated by that question. And I have the, I have the reaction to, to the sort of discernment that you’re bringing. I sort of have [inaudible 30:43], I’m like, well, Joe’s saying that, you know, we’re all fucked and we should all go sort of like huddle in our little permi eco village bubbles and wait for the, you know, shit to blow over and then, and then come back out, you know, in a couple hundred years and try to fix things or, you know, what’s the, what is the, um, the strategic invitation if we’re holding the collapse story as singular?
Joe Brewer: Yeah. One of the pieces is that the collapse story is part of the regeneration story and the way that the collapse or one way that collapse story relates to the regeneration story is by understanding the role of senescence and, uh, the developmental life span of an organism. Or synopsis is the — senescence is the aging and dying process of an organism, where it’s regenerative capacities begin to lose coherence and then the new organism gradually comes to a place of death because the breaking down of the body of the organism, that’s the senescence process. And what’s really powerful about senescence is that senescence is a key aspect of ecosystem level autopoiesis, which is that if we don’t have the breakdown in the cycling of those bodies to provide them again to be the bodies of others, then the autopoetic process that larger than organism scale doesn’t occur.
Joe Brewer: So that kind of the composting aspect of the dying process is essential. And one of the pieces of a regeneration that I see, this human collapsed dynamic being so interesting to consider is the ways that ecological succession is hindered by the human management of simplified ecosystems like monoculture agriculture or basically a huge amount of effort is put into management to keep succession from occurring, to keep the ecosystem simple, keep it in that pioneering stage of you know, rows or cornfields or whatever they happen to be, versus embracing and finding beauty in the role of that dying process, which is a collapsed dynamic or many different collapsed dynamics that are part of that ecological succession. And I think that like when Joanna Macy has talked so eloquently about what our descendants would have gratitude for and with us as their ancestors for having chosen a regenerative path.
Joe Brewer: In this time in history, part of it is, having a healthy relationship to death, which our modern industrial cultures do a terrible job of giving people a healthy relationship to death, as is evident by the beauty industry and how many ways people try to stay young forever. And so there’s this set of issues that come out in that space that, um, you know, we shouldn’t try to cover all of them now, but just to kind of dip into it a bit, like one of the things is the idea that the mechanistic view of the universe, that kind of Cartesian clockwork universe, all living things are machines. You know, um, it’s been so destructive in the last few hundred years that lot — finds lots of subtle expressions called that are called biomimicry in terms of urban sustainability discussions. So like these electric cars as an example, where, um, basically, uh, an optimized machine environment is used to address the ecological issues and the deeper eco-literacy, the deeper understanding of ecological relationships is not developed fully enough in the life experiences of people who have not spent enough time in nature.
Joe Brewer: So they don’t really understand how the ecosystems work. Part of our challenge in getting that, um, a regenerative worldview like what’s happened historically in the Amazon rainforest. There’s a really powerful role in the cultures that had that relationship to ecology and those that still have it today that is grounded in an indigenous approach to spirituality and spiritual education for children. It’s about personifying things. The river is not an object it’s a person. The rock is not an object, it’s a person. The tree is a person. The fish is a person. And then developing a relationship with the sacred to the ecological aspect of those relationships, that indigenous spiritual education is one of the aspects of those cultures that enables them to function. And it is juxtaposed against the kind of machine metaphors that presume the universe is dead. Instead, takes a position of treating these as living relationships and then personifying them.
Joe Brewer: And this is really important when we get into the pathway for someone who’s been in these death economies where they’re from an industrial culture that treats the world as though it’s dead. And then feeling their disconnections from that and gradually finding the way into nature experiences and then trying to find their way to regenerative lifestyles. For many of those people there’s a shedding of hubris that needs to occur. There’s a shedding of assumptions about human exceptionalism and human superiority and the hubris of um, technological innovation and techno optimism that William Catton in his 1977 book quote: ‘To call those people, cargo colts’, which is where that term comes from, is from his book, uh, as a kind of denialism. And what’s happening on a plantery scale right now, is we’re entering into a mass extinction event, but we’re not fully in it yet.
Joe Brewer: We’re fully in it, then human extinction would be more or less a foregone conclusion if we’re at the place where the biosphere was unraveling enough for entire classes. You know for biological classes to go away, the viability of humans are duly low. Um, we’d be pretty likely to be, you know, extinction would be our almost foregone conclusion. We’re at a place where we’re not quite at that point yet. And what we need to let go of, is the fear of the dying, the fear of collapse for the things that need to go away, so that ecological succession can occur. And this is, um, part of how the people who grew up in industrial urban cultural settings that are trying to transition into regenerative lifestyles. They’re the people who have this trauma, grief processing that they need to do, which I put myself in that category as someone who has, has been needing to do it and is in the process of doing it. Um, and it really is a, a fuddle difficult conversation to try to capture in a sort of stereotyped way. Like, how do we create, turn this into a narrative. It’s more like what is the coherence among a diversity of narratives that can relate to this in appropriate ways, as we continue on this journey into the middle of this century.
Gregory Landua: Yeah, I mean there’s a lot there.
Joe Brewer: Yeah, there’s a lot there.
Gregory Landua: There’s a lot there. Again, I mean a certain amount of what you said, you know, at different points in my, you know, in my journey I could have said myself, certain other things I may have said differently. Um, and, and certain things I’ve come to question, I sort of said. I would just to kind of like anchor in, in, in service of creating like, like the right space for the discourse between the two of us. I would sort of say what, what I hear is a very accurate description of where I was at, like my work, my worldview in something like 2009, 2008, 2008, probably 2008, when I was hosting the, uh, Tents Bio-regional Congress, um, of Turtle Island. And, um, as you know, that was what I was focused on vocationally, that, and, and you know, prima culture eco-village education stuff.
Gregory Landua: And what I’ve, the small things that I’ve started through my life experience to have sort of not, not at, in that larger arc or narrative, which I would sort of assemble with some, you know, forgive me for broad strokes, but sort of —
Joe Brewer: Go ahead
Gregory Landua: This sort of understanding, this understanding of, um, the larger cycle of, uh, that larger arc of ecological succession, senescence and regeneration and, and an estimation of where we’re at at that arc, which places us in sort of a, you know, if we’re not careful, a somewhat deterministic space in this wheel of life where we have sort of no choice but to go to the next place. So there’s that, uh, piece of things. There’s the sort of, um, then there’s the bundle, the thought bundle around sort of techno determinism, techno utopianism, um, the singularian vision of, uh, sort of technology saving us in the world, sort of, uh, of, of like pure information, uh, being born.
Gregory Landua: And, and, and more particularly the reaction to that worldview by those of us who are in love with the poetic beauty of just good old fashion, biological life. And, and, and the experience of that. And then there’s some pieces in there that kind of like bring those two sort of mean plexus together around, you know, how, how to have daily and — daily cultural practices that make it possible to just like since make in the world. So that’s kind of what I’m holding and the things that I’ve experienced that sort of have disrupted those foundations of my worldview, which I think, you know, probably there’s a lot of shared reality between the two of us. Are a couple fold, one is I have increasing, uh, respect for chauvinism. It’s —
Joe Brewer: Interesting. Unpack that some more. I’m really curious to hear what you mean by that.
Gregory Landua: There’s this whole, I mean, so chauvinism has become through the feminist movement, a, a pejorative word that describes mostly men. You know, you almost never hear it. You never hear chauvinism. The only times you ever hear it in the modern discourse is male chauvinism or cultural chauvinism, is the only time you ever hear that word. Uh, however, if you ever go and have an experience with a somewhat intact, I hope none of us are going out and trying to find in quotes intact, uh, indigenous cultures because you, you know, you’re a carrier of, uh, infectious memes and shouldn’t be doing that. But if you ever are swept in your life towards a somewhat intact experience of an indigenous village, it’s chauvinist as hell. Extraordinary —
Gregory Landua: Chauvinism is like, uh, one of the pillars of tribal identity, it’s one of the pillars of meaning making for humans. It’s just what are you chauvinistic about? What are you proud about? What, what puts metal in your backbone? What is, what are the things that you would like stand and die for? And I think this is the, you know, in general, my, my critique of the sort of like sloppy postmodern, uh, infection that makes getting real work done very hard in the sort of prima culture eco-village, you know, broader sort of regenerative movement is people’s discomfort with owning their chauvinism because everybody is, whether they, whether they’re trying to avoid it or not, whether they’re making fancy stories to, to, to uh, degrade what they’re proud of, which is a crazy, silly thing to do, in my mind. So I’ve come to have a deep value and uh, not for sort of like, not for the juvenile and um, unselfaware chauvinism of, you know, a 15 year old football star, but, but for the deep, beautiful grief, drenched chauvinism of, you know, like a Jewish Holocaust survivor.
Joe Brewer: Yeah. I relate to this really powerfully around the sense of, um, whether we believe humans deserve to stay
Gregory Landua: Exactly.
Joe Brewer: Humans being a part of the planet and you know, I’ve been asked this question a lot. Why did my wife and I choose to have a child?
Gregory Landua: Yeah
Joe Brewer: [inaudible 45:17] just turned three —
Gregory Landua: Exactly. So exactly. You’re hitting the nail on the head.
Joe Brewer: It’s really powerful, yeah — and one of the thing —
Gregory Landua: Damn straight, you deserve to have a child and humans deserve to be here. And like, I am a human chauvinist to the core, humans —
Joe Brewer: Yeah
Gregory Landua: The world needs us. There is no — no room in my life for second guessing that, that’s — that’s deeply chauvinist and I would just sort of like, I’ll sing it from the mountaintop. And in order to earn that, in order to earn the, the, you know, what that does is it puts us in a place as people, as humans, as men, women, children, um, as, as members of a greater than human world, as, as you know, threads woven into a basket. It demands, it demands something of us. And that’s what, that’s in — the like, healthy expression of chauvinism is what you demand of yourself and you demand of others because it is so deeply ingrained in the sort of cultural fabric that it is, that is humanness, which is, you know, humans aren’t individuals. You know, we’re, we’re, we’re communities and the things that we’re, the, the negotiable thing that we will not negotiate our communities will not negotiate about, is sort of like, those are the boundary conditions, right?
Joe Brewer: Yeah. And what I think is really important too, build upon this, this place of, um, authentic moral judgment, meaning a judgment of an ethical position from a place of authenticity. Which is, I really do believe this. I really do care about this. And I’m gonna stand for it.
Gregory Landua: Yeah. It’s moral. It is moral. I mean, I think that it is, is, it is a morality and sort of, and it’s an interesting thing, but, so this is, this is something that’s moved for me and I think it was always there latent, but I got into the washer of the sort of, uh, of the movement that we’re in and I started to realize how many misanthropic like human hating people there are and um, and how easy it is to, to dance around and try and sort of like in the environmental movement how much people try to hedge in order to you know sort of like maintain this looseness mitt alliance that’s only real identity comes from being anti all of that. Um, and then there’s people who are, you know, like human chauvinists who are like, no, you know, people have a place on earth and we just have to learn how to live. And there are people who are like, we don’t have a place on earth and we need to just go away.
Joe Brewer: [Inaudible 48:21] we’ll colonize Mars or what some other version of the same thing [inaudible 48:24].
Gregory Landua: Well, I actually would argue that the Mars colonists are likely more, there’s more shared ground and more common reality. And this is where I was going to get to the next piece. So like foundation [inaudible 48:41] like erosion of [inaudible 48:45] nation — more sort of like nuance and um, and curious, uh, understanding of, of like the role of humans, the essential role of humans. And you know, I use the word chauvinism there to be provocative, but it’s, it’s a, it’s an invitation. The next is around techno determinism, which is sort of the, um, I mean, I totally resonate, the biomimicry field drives me fucking crazy. Circular economy drives me nuts, just because it’s kind of like sustainability, you know, 2.0, which all — has all of the baked in, misunderstandings of, uh, sort of physical [inaudible 49:44] in context. You know, this sort of like, do less bad, you know, mitigate harm —
Joe Brewer: One of the people that’s really laid this philosophical inquiry, well, is Peter Berg, when he was running the world drum foundation and promoting bio-regionalism. It’s writing about this stuff in the late sixties, early seventies, describing where the environmental movement was going wrong
Gregory Landua: Yep
Joe Brewer: At that time, it was beginning to, at this point, we look back and say, damn, that was [inaudible 50:11]. Cause that’s where it did go. Uh, that so much of this comes down to, uh, why do you sometimes called, um, life place, living, learning how to live in place, not just place-based living, which may or may not have this deeper ecological grounding. Uh, depending on what a person’s, you know, baggage is that they’re bringing to it. And you see a lot of that with biomimicry, that the biomimicry conversation can be completely embedded within a technical progress narrative and fail to be grounded in a deep ecology sort of way.
Gregory Landua: Well, I’m sort of trying to, that’s where I’m trying to, to a, that’s where I’m sort of wanting to make another distinction. I mean there’s a couple of layers there, but there’s another, there’s another distinction, which is that technology is calcified culture. Essentially. It’s, it’s like a, um, it’s an artifact of, and its dynamic now. And, and, and arguably, I think actually being imbued with all attributes of life essentially. So there is sort of like the speciation, there’s a new class being born into the world through, through humans essentially. Like we’re like the reproductive organs of some new life form. Um, which is terrifying and cool at the same time.
Joe Brewer: Yeah. If you’re familiar with the concept of evolutionary transitions, um, cause it’s very much about this and evolutionary transition is where there’s a symbiotic relationship between two biological entities that each have their own natural selection dynamics.
Gregory Landua: Yeah, sort of like bringing [inaudible 52:14] mitochondria into [inaudible 52:15]
Joe Brewer: Exactly, and then the transition is when they get to a higher level of interdependence and natural selection occurs at the higher integration level and they can no longer survive separate. So mitochondria no longer reproducing outside of the South of the [inaudible 52:30] a kind of classic example, but when people have attempted to not — to describe what are all of the evolutionary transitions in history, [inaudible 52:40] is one, but single cell to multi-cell is another form of social group. Formation of social groups of organisms is another. And people have identified human languages. One cause it creates a collaboration space and functional cultural integration and you get some interesting and in the later stages it gets more philosophical and difficult to determine for certain that they are. Whereas the [inaudible 53:06] transition is more obvious.
Gregory Landua: Yes
Joe Brewer: But this thing about technology becoming a dynamic living system as an example of an evolutionary transition attempting to occur or put in process. So that’s criteria really well —
Gregory Landua: It’s in process. And I think, I think the, the degree to which that transition takes place in a way that is, um, imbued and enchanted by life or Gaia consciousness is the degree to which that transition will be one that I — you know, to use that sort of Joanna Macy framing the one that I, I will be sort of proud to tell the story to my children and great grandchildren and the degree to which that transition happens without sort of an enchantment mytho poetic enchantment with life. Its very scary, sort of a planetary scape. It’s a scary, scary story to, to hold an image of. So from my perspective that then demands a very interesting softening and hardening at the same time of how we approach sort of techno determinism because it, it starts to, for me at least, it starts to identify the sort of the techno fixation as is, you don’t, but like in silicon, the, the world of block chains and the world of AI and the world of, you know, satellites and drones as one of the most important arenas for regenerative work taking place.
Joe Brewer: Yeah. When I was in graduate school, I was in an atmospheric science department in a satellite remote sensing research group where we were studying clouds using satellite data. And one of the big lessons that I sort of took immediately but became subtle and had lots of nuances emerged was how the first observational satellite is a moment of planetary consciousness. A moment of a new system of biological perception emerging as a cyborg, as a human interacting dynamic. And the same happens when you look at computer simulation and what we’ve learned to do with computer simulation where we have needs to manage complexity that we cannot do without computer simulation. And with the visualization of the, the computational outputs. So climate modeling as an example of something that we will have a very hard time doing regenerative planetary work without computational models of the dynamic planet because of the company we’re dealing with.
Joe Brewer: And this relates to the design pathway for regenerating earth, which is you know, one of the anchors, an intermediate anchor that is concrete enough for people to imagine around, but complex enough that we can’t quite make concrete is what is a bioregional economy. Yeah. What is a subsistence system at an ecological scale that’s meaningful and that is holistic. And um, one of the elements of regenerating the earth is, um, what Stuart Callan, who’s currently with the Regenerative Communities Network and the Capital Institute, uh, he and Sam [inaudible 56:56] wrote about this in the early nineties, they call it scale linking. How do you create cohesion of functional relationships across scales within a system. And the bioregional scale is really interesting for that because you have the landscape functions that are smaller scale. And you have the planetary functions that are larger scale. It’s like the weather patterns or the ocean currents or things that are larger scale and the smaller scale, you have this specific marsh that is doing this water retention and filtering as part of a larger watershed and you have these different nested scales and the bioregional scale is an emergent integration of the lower scales and the larger scales. The touch point between them that is coherent enough to design with. Which, and I say coherent enough because it’s, if you started to work with the law, you quickly realize it’s you can’t properly.
Joe Brewer: Concrete with it. It’s too complex, but it can be managed in a kind of Eleanor Ostrom polycentric governance of the commons sort of way, that the scaling of governance to manage the commons, has been demonstrated for things like coastal estuaries and sustainable fisheries and landscape restoration projects that if they’re not bio-regional scale, they’re at least approaching it. So we’re moving toward the ability to design bio-regional economies and we, um, from what I’ve seen, we have all the pieces to do it. It has not been fully demonstrated [inaudible 00:37] but we’re real quickly moving into it. And I think that —
Gregory Landua: Don’t think it can be fully demonstrated in a, it’s like, I don’t, I may be wrong about this, but I’m, I’m not sure. I mean it’s, it’s sort of a, it’s a statement that I hold loosely, but I’m not sure we can fully demonstrate a regenerative bio-regional economy, without sort of the full planetary. It’s, you know, it’s a chicken or egg scenario where, um, without having a planetary apparatus essentially, you know, without being able to, to, to borrow that sort of, uh, scale linking, I would refer to that as, you know, um, nestedness.
Joe Brewer: Yeah.
Gregory Landua: And the relationship between nested holes. And at Regen Network, we talk about a lot about, um, nested caring or that is establishing the, uh, essentially in our paradigm contracts, but the, the, the agreements between nested holes that creates a flow of mutual care. And in this case that’s around, you know, carbon cycle outcomes and biodiversity outcomes, right. In a very grounded biophysical way. Um, so a bio-region has to have a nested caring relationship with other bioregions and the rest of the planet. So you have to, in order to move towards a bio-regional economy, you have to have a singular global, you have to have like your pulse on kind of like the global carbon accounting for instance.
Joe Brewer: Yeah, yeah.
Gregory Landua: What is the role?
Joe Brewer: That is exactly why it’s — why it’s planetary scale for the regions to work. But the regions are what at the same time, the regions are what constitute the functioning of the planetary scale.
Gregory Landua: Yeah
Joe Brewer: They both have to arise in a concurrent dynamic, but it might not be a timeline, the entire sequence.
Gregory Landua: Yeah
Joe Brewer: And it’s unlikely to be one [inaudible 2:55].
Gregory Landua: Yeah, I mean I’m sort of in heated agreement.
Joe Brewer: Yeah. And there’s a, there’s a collapsing of or a breaking down of the globalized economy that’s part of it, while at the same time a globalized, um, supply chain dynamic that needs to maintain as much functional integrity through that transition as possible. So the way that the globalized economy is structured now is primarily extractive. And so it’s not regenerative. And the model of a bio-regional, a nested system of bio-regional economies, is that wherever there’s extraction, there’s [inaudible 03:33] replenishment in a robust circulation, meaning its living systems nested throughout, um, which we don’t currently have in place. And I think part of our challenge is the coherence of contextual measures. How do we understand the contextual measures of something like the health of an ecosystem, the embodied carbon. And this is why I think the Regen Network has something really powerful to offer is prototyping of how to measure this and then make financial transactions work around it as part of how that work on the creating the right financial instruments is super important.
Gregory Landua: Yeah, I mean, that’s right. I mean, I think that’s sort of our aim. I mean, there’s a couple of layers that we’re working. One is we sort of simply have to have a reference design for sort of the, the open, uh, for an open version of the current ecosystem service marketplace that just simply allows people to engage with the you know, carbon credit tools of today, which I’m, are kind of crappy. Uh, but, but there’s like an existing market and there’s, you know, existing exchange happening. So, but, really what’s exciting and I think what drives us is more exactly. You know, we’re right. So right now we’re working on a, uh, a design for, you know, sort of like a credit and, or even, you know, credit and bonds and even monetary schemes that are, that source value from bioregional potential. So, so creating sort of a scientific consensus of the bioregional holistic bioregional potential, potential functioning of the ecosystem, which includes, you know, in a planetary scale what you’re asking is what is the carbon draw down potential of this bioregion in —
Joe Brewer: Yeah
Gregory Landua: In an intact agri ecological conservation made you know landscape matrix. And then that instead of these con — strange concepts of like additionality and leakage, which were, which are like band aids over this fragmented carbon cycle science weirdness, that mumbo jumbo that happens in the carbon markets, you sort of have this holistic landscape approach and you’re simply making a statement about how any given — watershed or piece of property is performing against that potential you know. And then you can, you know, you can sort of, you can quantify that and then you can monetize that so that there’s this robust circulatory flow so that people can value and coordinate, you know, and, and that sort of links into whatever kind of commons management or market management mechanisms you’d like. Yeah.
Joe Brewer: Yeah, yeah. I think, um, we’re pretty, in pretty deep resonance on this part of the conversation where the part of the challenge is creating viable demonstrations where the word viable might need to be in quotes, viable demonstrations sufficient to de-risk investment.
Gregory Landua: Yeah.
Joe Brewer: Sufficient for people who have resources. Uh, that I was in, um, I was on the team with the Capital Institute for about six months last year where I worked with John Fullerton on this, around bio- regional economic development. And so I would hear and conversations with him the other people he was talking to. And one of the things that is like sort of the conversation is not as mature as we would like, but the conversation is at least happening is there are into — institutional investors who have trillions of dollars to invest, who have very important legal constraints on how they can spend the money.
Joe Brewer: While managing the risk because they’re investing other people’s money, so like pension plans and other large scale pools of investment and that there are people within that space who are trying to invest in regenerative, like portfolios of regenerative projects.
Gregory Landua: Yep.
Joe Brewer: And the mechanisms for managing the risk are not quite adequate for the legal, kind of the triggers of legal response that come up in those environments. So they’re not able to release that money, but it’s clear from the people having that conversation that that money will start to move into the regenerative space in the near future and the next 18 months to three or four years somewhere we’ll start to see hundreds of millions and then billions and then trillions of dollars moving into the regenerate phase. And if these financing mechanisms have not been set up in a regenerative way, it’s going to be a huge influx of wasted capital.
Gregory Landua: Yeah, totally.
Joe Brewer: There’s a real serious need to get this right and a very short time window to get it right. Um, so, so that’s uh, an immediate design. Well really a mill, you have design challenges, um, cause it’s like a one pulse blood infusion where the blood is money in this case, uh, that if that’s invested badly, we’re going to tremendously reduce our regenerative capacities for the subsequent decade or two. But if it’s, if it’s put into dynamics that really do stimulate bio-regional economic development, then it could be empowering in a transformational way.
Gregory Landua: Right.
Joe Brewer: So this window of opportunity is huge to get [inaudible 09:17].
Gregory Landua: And that’s where, you know, circling back, I mean, I totally agree. I’m in heated agreement with all of that and circling back to one of our initial — initial sort of points of conversation, which is, you know, okay, how do you hold that fact? Which is that there’s a never before seen potential to realign the human economy with the greater than human world. The biosphere and serve [inaudible 9:51] biosphere, you know, so that the emergent. Waste the, that which are day to day activities just creates innately is instead of being micro plastics and you know, carbon dioxide and methane and chemical pollution, the outputs, the innate outputs of the human economy are you know
Gregory Landua: Photosynthetic edge and niches and carbon edge and topsoil and Mm. You know, that, that, that is that shift of what the excess sort of energy is manifest as in the biosphere. That can take place. And we have, you know, okay, so we have 10 years and the next two years are pivotal. Like if we, if we fuck up the next few years, then we don’t actually have 10 years, you know, but we have a 10 year sprint right now where we have to do something miraculous, right? And we have to, a bunch of us have to be able to regenerate a being state and an awareness that allows us to show up every day to move through that. So it’s sort of like, it’s sort of like a, um, you know, the metaphor is it’s like a team competition, you know, or, or whatever. You have a team of people, you have a limited period of time, you have to perform really highly in order to do it.
Gregory Landua: So what do we learn from people who put themselves in that kind of experience by choice day in and day out? What are the, what are the attributes of, you know, uh, to, to steal, uh, Douglas Rushkoff’s term, you know, what are the attributes of team human over the next 10 years, you know, and, and what is the story that you tell yourself and this is where I wonder about, I fully agree with your assessment of the demand for, to like avoid cognitive bias. There is a demand that we face the reality of biosphere collapse, but then on the other hand we have to show up and we have to be sort of like Mm. In a, in a being state in which failure is not an option. So that’s —
Joe Brewer: I had a really specific example of this last year in June, I was at the reporting 3.0 conference, which kind of hosts a lot of the leading thinkers and practitioners and the space of a corporate social responsibility and sustainability measurements. Um, although they’ve actually moved beyond the corporate space. That’s sort of where they started 10 years ago. And there was this group of students at Erasmus university in Rotterdam that came to a talk that I gave in the morning about the cultural evolution of economics, where I explained how economics became based on the science of dead matter because of equilibrium physics in the late 1800s and then as all of the complexity and evolutionary based models of communities arose in the mid-20th century, economics became atrophied as I kind of professionalized domain. And there was a big gap. So it was a group of students who are economics students at Erasmus University who came to my talk in the morning.
Joe Brewer: But the conferences during finals week, they had to leave the conference to go to take final exams. Then they come back in the afternoon and there’s six students who came up to me and said, this morning we heard you explain how 80 years ago we knew these things about economics were falsified and wrong. And today we had to go and hold our nose and not vomit as we wrote those untrue things to be able to pass our exams and our economics class.
Gregory Landua: Yeah
Joe Brewer: And they said, so what do we do? And, and I sort of, you know, being a provocateur, I said, well, drop out of college and go find a regenerative campus to learn regenerative design and start practicing it. And all six of them, you know, in an enthusiastic way, said, I’m in, I’ll drop out of school tomorrow. Where do I go?
Gregory Landua: Where’s the campus?
Joe Brewer: Yeah. And my ans — And I was like, here’s the problem is these places are not known as campuses and they’re not visible and discoverable. And I started naming examples of there are places you can go to learn things like this that, uh, you, you know, like I just visited Rancho Mazda, Tal in Costa Rica last week. And as a place where people are learning some of this and there are other places like this, I said, the problem is that we do not have a wayfinding system for the millions of young people who would drop out of college tomorrow, drop out of high school tomorrow, and do this if they knew how, if they had a story that told them how.
Gregory Landua: But you know, I would say actually, you know, uh, this too, this too has happened. I mean, so Gaia university for instance, is, has a flexible, you know, take it where, take it in your back pocket, wherever you go. You know, have a rigorous community of advisors, have connection with peers and have connection with high quality content that is in increasing your capacity to engage with, you know, regenerative thinking and, you know, and on, and unlearn all of the various, you know, indoctrinations of, uh, outdated ways of thinking. So, and I, and I’m sure there may be others, but —
Joe Brewer: Yeah, there are, there are others, yeah.
Gregory Landua: They’ve struggled like Gaia university has struggled because in Europe people aren’t accustomed to paying money for education and you know, and in the States people are accustomed to pay a lot for education and Gaia U, is sort of this like a, you know, it’s like it’s cheap, but it’s, it’s, it’s cheap enough that can it be trusted in the U S and it’s too expensive that like why would you go pay for an education in Europe? So they have this sort of like interesting market fit problem.
Joe Brewer: Yeah. And one of the ways that I’ve thought about this is there are three domains of activity that are not well enough integrated yet. One of them is the uh, the restoration or regeneration of a piece of land. It’s like someone who comes into a degraded land, starts doing agroforestry or whatever they happen to be doing there. That set of processes. The second is the education of people to learn how to do that sort of regenerative work. And then the third is the financial investment. Of those activities as an integrated whole. And when those get put together, then what starts to happen is someone might get, I say a Gaia university education, go to a regenerative project to learn and practice and have their lifestyle supported by the investment and those improvements because the value chains are actually being tracked in the investment field.
Gregory Landua: Yeah, I mean that’s how I, that’s, that’s how I did my master’s degree is precisely, that is precisely like I did a Gaia university master’s degree program in 2006 and uh, lived in, uh, you know, lived in an intentional community and learned and taught and practiced and built several businesses, um, couple of which still exist today. And that was my like action learning, you know, so there was an integrated, you know, my livelihood was, was linked to building the economy of, of a community whose livelihood was linked to building the health of the region, you know. And so there’s this sort of, you know, it’s this nice ergonomic fit. Now at another level though, I do think there’s a vacuum because for instance, in order for me to get out and start doing the you know, sort of more economic systems change work that I’m called to do, you know, I essentially had to just like go the, the nested hole.
Gregory Landua: So there are Rancho [inaudible 18:18] or ecovillage training center or you know, Finhorn or some ecosystem restoration camp somewhere, or our little farm in Ecuador think [inaudible 18:29] or other things. Um, the scale you can go learn, um, forest gardening and you could go learn, you know, the economics of, uh, of running a permaculture workshop. But the next scale up, how to learn to create a transnational planetary regeneration cooperative or how to intervene with, uh, central bank Fiat currency issuance in a way that, uh, you know, creates avenues for regenerative finance. Uh, or, you know, the, the, the science, science of, um, earth observation and planetary regeneration. These, I think are still nascent. There is no that I’m aware of, sort of like beacon communities yet. And so therefore they’re sort of still dispersal. They’re still, you know, people are —
Joe Brewer: Yeah, yeah
Gregory Landua: And I think that’s sort of how we started the conversation was you saying, I think just this, which is we haven’t yet hit the critical mass where there’s enough density of communication and focus around these pivotal areas where we can like, uh, move as rapidly as we need to. And so, yeah. So what’s next? How, uh, I know you’re, you’re hosting a forum, um, as you’re writing your book that I think is sort of an invitation towards one such, uh —
Joe Brewer: Yeah, that’s a really interesting experiment because I started writing this book. Um, I’ve resisted writing books for more than 10 years with part of me wanting to, and part of me not, and just choosing to blog instead. And what made me feel like I needed to write a book right now is that last year when I was working on bio-regional regeneration projects, basically observing people in different parts of the world who were trying to create them and gathering insights about the frameworks that they were using. Whereas I started to see a concrete, practical coherence that it has nascent parts to go back decades. But there, there’s a moment right now where something is trying to emerge and one thing that’s needed is a narrative coherence for a growing number of people to enter into this space and have a shared at least a shared sensibility if not a shared understanding, depending on what level they’re working to be able to participate in it.
Joe Brewer: And when I started writing the book, I felt like I shouldn’t wait until the book is published. Yeah, which would take a long time. I don’t actually care about making any money off the book or having a published. That’s not my motivation. It’s to create a scaffold of learning around how to think at this planetary scale and that I put an invitation out to start a study group. Anyone who would like to read book chapters, we’ll use it to kind of inform our discussions. And um, that was a couple of weeks ago, got about a month now and uh, got 400 people who had signed up to the study group and we’ve created an online platform. So it’s just very new. But it’s interesting because part of the underlying motivation of this is not to create an online study group is the deeper work of creating networks of learning centers that already exist where people can go to do the deeper regenerative education and deeper regenerative practice to start to have those emerge in self-organizing ways.
Joe Brewer: So, uh, for example, in Costa Rica where we lived for 10 months last year, it’s not that difficult to imagine a two week or three week long bioregional learning journey to go visit half a dozen permaculture projects because they exist and it’s not that hard to form relationships among them. And then to start to use that to synergize a territorial scale relationship that each project alone wouldn’t do, but they would start to crystallize a larger conversation. That sort of activity is easy to do at this point in time if there are enough people thinking about this pathway of regenerating the earth and a coherent way.
Gregory Landua: Yeah.
Joe Brewer: So the study group is trying to bring that coherence. And I don’t have any false delusions of grandeur about this study group doing it, except that for those of us who are gathering in it, that’s what we’re grappling with. So it’s something much larger than this study group is needed. More decentralized with more participants. But, um, but at least this is a kernel of conversation that’s trying to figure out how to do it.
Gregory Landua: Yeah. Yeah. Well I would definitely, um, I mean there’s, there, there’s been some interesting attempts, you know, Gaia university being one, a global Eagle village network, NuMundo. To kind of create this basket, you know, to weave together different emerging grassroots, um, experimentation centers and kind of, uh, allow them to, to create, uh, a network that’s stronger and can attract more people and can learn faster. And I think, I also see in sort of larger crypto space, I see a bunch of evolution happening very quickly, um, in kind of like local currencies, local economy work, um, commons management, building, building tools for commenting. Mm. Which all leads me to be pretty optimistic, that, that we’re going to start to see these, uh, we’re going to start to see those of us who’ve been at, been at this for, you know, 10, 15, 20 years. Uh, not to mention those of us who’ve been at it for, you know, 40, 60 years. Um, we may need to check our expectations at the door because this might move faster than we’re ready to accept as possible.
Joe Brewer: Yeah. And one of the things that related to the conversation about planetary collapse was I organized a conference that I’ve — not a conference, a workshop that I now give them four times. And the name of it is Managing Planetary Collapse. And the way that I framed it, which started in like 2018, was, um, I wanted to create a filter that would basically cause almost everyone to select out and only those who selected in were ready for deep conversations about earth regeneration. And I found that it was successful at doing that on the scale of 15 or 20 people coming to a workshop which I did four different times and created a really powerful coherence among the participants. So I’m experimenting with it as a kind of a, as a pedagogical pathway is how to aggregate those, those imaginal cells of people in a dialogue together who are ready to do the deep work. And it’s, and it’s not meant to be a conversation for larger scales. It’s really, it works out at small scales, but if enough of them are happening at small scales, then they feed into a lot of these other networks that are already evolving.
Gregory Landua: Yeah, I mean, well hearing you say that, uh, a, uh, JG Bennet framework comes to mind of, um, sort of esoteric, mesoteric and exoteric levels of communication. And you know, how there are certain sort of initiatory threshold if you’re going to have it, it an esoteric conversation which is needed in order to have a core group of people who have deep coherence and sort of a, I guess cognitive flexibility to do, to do challenging work. Um, you know, how that translates, how that then translates up into a middle ground where you sort of have people at different levels and um, and then all the way out to what it, how it shows up to the, you know, to the public who just has no, um, connection with what’s happening is, you know, it’s just a really interesting invitation to be refreshing how we’re thinking about our language and we’ll set up filters that are just sort of like, Hey, if you’re not, if this filter bounces you, then that’s good. Cause you know, the conversation won’t be useful for anybody.
Joe Brewer: Yeah. And I actually feel like that filter of planetary collapse and its related implications beautifully worked for us to have this conversation where we actually found a point of contention. So it wouldn’t have just been, Oh, I like what Joe tweeted, I’ll retweet it. It was, here’s a place for a deeper inquiry that we could have fallen into a place of conflict and disagreement and not gone there. But we happen to have gone there now. And, um, and that doesn’t mean that I’m justifying my framing was right. It’s just that, here’s an interesting example of the holding of paradox. Uh, one of our challenges and the larger sense kind of the collective team human sense is how do these conversational dynamics that can create pathological relationships with each other where like I might have a conversational dynamic around planetary collapse. It’s very problematic in another space, but it’s actually doing something that’s useful. So that other space in ways that may not have been clear until [inaudible 28:04].
Gregory Landua: Right, yeah. Disruption is an important part of regeneration. So I mean, totally. And the art of trolling is probably something that the regenerative movement needs to get good at.
Joe Brewer: Yeah. Good point. I think we do actually because, uh, we, um, when the, this time of shakeup, where a lot of us are shaken up internally but we’re not able to be shaken up together or at least not adequately or sufficiently
Gregory Landua: Art, art trolling, trolling, you know, I was, I was listening to some podcasts, I can’t remember the woman’s name, but she, she, she grew up partially in the Soviet union and she was sharing the name of this art form that emerged in like the, the later Soviet and, and post-Soviet and still is kind of like a, it’s a thing in Russia around this art form where you, the, the highest form of art is where you, when you can’t tell if someone’s fucking with you or not.
Joe Brewer: Yeah.
Gregory Landua: Where, because the line, the blurry line between sort of, you know, what you are professing to believe and what you do believe and it’s sort of like, it’s a little bit wavy and it creates this really beautiful art form in which you know that, that is the antidote to this like strange hyper normalization, you know, post truth world where, you know, we can’t tell if the news is fucking true. Right. And so it’s sort of like our approach to communicating in public forums about Mm. In a way that magnetizes people to, to then engage with their own learning journeys somehow needs to sort of like, like match the trolling power
Joe Brewer: Yeah
Gregory Landua: You know it’s like the going gets weird and the weird turn pro kind of you know invitation.
Joe Brewer: Yeah. And I think in some ways what Jem Bendell has, uh, been able to do with this deep adaptations paper is opening that up where there’s, and now an aggregation of at least a few tens of thousands of people who are embracing the, the acceptance of dystopian conversation as a pathway of at least possible empowerment. Certainly not all of them are going into empowerment, but some of them are and it’s in that space that’s really generative.
Gregory Landua: Hmm.
Joe Brewer: And um, and just interesting to, to reflect on whether it’s net positive or net negative in the long term. We don’t know yet. Um, but from what I’ve seen and just being people seeing my work associated with it, so I’ve been in sort of collision with it a number of times. I see overall there’s a healing process occurring. I dunno statistically for the number of people if it’s occurring, but there’s a subset of people that are self-radicalizing together in a beneficial way.
Gregory Landua: Yeah.
Joe Brewer: And that’s useful.
Gregory Landua: Yeah. Yeah. Well it’s an interesting, uh, it’s interesting times we live in for sure.
Joe Brewer: No doubt.
Gregory Landua: Yeah. I’m just sort of feeling at any given moment. Um, there’s so much ripe, there’s so much ripeness and I don’t know what the historical antecedent of the moment is in like an anthropogenic kind of perspective. I, I don’t know if you have any thinking about that. I tend to think we’re somewhere right around, you know, like the, maybe the closest historical antecedent to the present moment minus the apocalyptic climate crisis. Uh, which, you know, probably we have to go back to like Paleolithic time to have a, a human experience that’s somewhat similar, but it’s, it’s like the invention of the printing press in Europe when you get all of these like it polarized, like people got super polarized and there’s, you know, religious war happening and it’s just, you know, it’s just a total mess basically. People are fighting over reality in this strange way that feels somewhat, you know, close to what’s happening.
Joe Brewer: Yeah. I think there are a couple of moments that we could look to for some learning on this. And one is the beginning of the Holocene, the moving out of a period of planetary climate instability to relative planetary stability where city States could form and more complex trade networks can stabilize. Mm. Because that’s related to the scale of change. Now that the Holocene is over, this is like that the kind of legal tiny print of the Anthropocene that most people are not reading is that the Holocene is over. And then we don’t actually know how to organize human societies outside of the Holocene. And just like our Hunter gatherer ancestors were organizing prior to the Holocene and a model of climate instability, which we can also learn from, but we have to be conscientious that even those ancient wisdom traditions and their cultural practices may not work in this post Anthropocene world.
Joe Brewer: It’s such a deep shift. We don’t know how to make sense of it and we won’t for quite some time as a, I think similar to how the printing press shifted the landscape of discourse in ways that no one understood at the time that, uh, leaving the Holocene is like that, no one understands what it means. I, as an earth scientist, I don’t understand what it means. I don’t pretend to understand what it means. And so part of our challenge is to embrace that ignorance, to accept the, the horizon of our ignorance, the place where we can’t even know that we don’t know anymore. The end of the Holocene is like that. And this kind of, ICT revolution of information and communication making it possible for us to have a globalized economy. That’s like mycelium is also new and it’s maybe 30 years old or 40 years old and it’s structural implementations. Um, but we still don’t understand its implications yet.
Gregory Landua: Well, if you think about, you know, if you think about the moment of, we take a step back and we think about the Earthrise photo and we think about a global communications network and a global trade network and, and, uh, you know, a global earth observation network in which we can essentially, you know, track atmospheric carbon in real time and track weather in real time and we can track, you know, I mean, it’s, there’s an amazing amount of, um, newly available sensory data to make, you know that. And that’s common at the same time, you know, part and parcel with that is this global climate perturbations and political perturbations and just upheaval of the new system. So I mean, it’s seems like it’s just par for the course in this new emerging that’s taking place. And uh, yeah, I mean, I, um, I really value the, the complexity and, uh, subtlety that you’re bringing to bear in kind of holding all of this and um, yeah. And the sort of discernment and invitation for other people to engage in discernment I think is, is really valuable, so. Mm. Yeah. Thank you.
Joe Brewer: Uh, the earth observing system is a nice example of a, we have eyes that we don’t even have been recognized as eyes yet in a collective sense. The earth observing system is one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of humanity that almost no one knows to recognize.
Gregory Landua: It’s so cool.
Joe Brewer: Like if you talk to David [inaudible 36:20] now, David [inaudible 36:22] proselytizes the hell out of it, but very few people do. And, um, there’s opportunity to make use of it for sense-making is so huge. That was one of the problems I see with the permaculture movement, which I don’t see this the fault of the permaculture movement, but it’s just part of, its part of its accidental history is that a lot of people enter the permaculture movement thinking it’s about small scale back to the land. When you talk to permaculture people, you have an array of nuance about what they actually mean. But it’s come to be, it’s sort of default marketed as small scale back to the land. You know which means that’s how most people come to understand it when they’re first engaging with it. And like I said, I don’t think it’s the fault of the permaculture movement. It’s sort of an accident of history. But if the permaculture movement could blend what the earth system science community, more people could see that these are a part of the same emerging consciousness.
Gregory Landua: Welcome to Regen Network.
Joe Brewer: Right, yeah exactly.
Gregory Landua: We have an open source processing pipeline straight into Copernicus ISA [inaudible 37:30] data set. People can just, you know, some Python you can just pull that data, do any manipulations you want and you know, make ecological state claims and agreements. Right on a public block chain and you know link your, link your small-scale permaculture site to a global movement for planetary regeneration.
Joe Brewer: Yeah, I had a great conversation with Claire Paula Tano in San Jose last summer when she was staying in the house of We are black sheep, you also know Josh Hughes. And just looking at examples like, uh, what’s being done with block chain, what’s being done with building supply chains and processing facilities for regenerative agriculture. Um, part of it is just getting the word out and then part of it is that people don’t know these and not enough people know these activities are happening. Another piece is there’s not enough scaling potential. Meaning if someone finds out about it, there’s not enough direct, understandable ways to get involved.
Gregory Landua: Well, yeah I mean we have about, I think, you know, the thing, the bridge between creating the sort of user interface that allows the appropriate number of people. I don’t think it needs to be everyone, but you know, the appropriate number of interested, smart people to engage with, with data and um, in a way that is not, uh, vandalized and monetized in a way that’s sort of counterproductive to the sort of cooperative, um, movement that needs to happen is there is a lot of work, there’s a lot of work to create a user experience that, you know, you and I can just hop on our Mac book or you know, or on a internet browser and an internet cafe. And so could someone else who has sort of like, you know, some experience using a smartphone and like plug in and get information about their bio-region and engage.
Gregory Landua: And that’s the, that’s the gap that the, the, the tools are still very esoteric, right? You have to, that it takes long time to be able to understand this intersection of earth observation, science and distributed network technology and you know, and money design. That is, you know, I think at the intersection of the toolkit that is needed for creating bio-regional economies for, for commons management, for engaging people. And so you know, that’s what we have to, that’s what we’re really trying to accelerate is just how do you create user experiences and, and uh, monetize the right pieces of it so you can you know, create an investment vehicle where more and more activities happening, but do so in a way that is really creating a new toolkit because it’s, you know, it’s sort of like what happened with Google where you have this enormously powerful search engine, but the ability but what it’s done, the ability you know Google search engine isn’t actually that crazy.
Gregory Landua: And there were, there were predecessors and it isn’t hard to create your own search engine, but there is no one in the world that’s creating tools for a build DIY search engine. Right? But —
Joe Brewer: Yeah.
Gregory Landua: But what we need is, sort of like people who are dedicated to algorithmic sovereignty and people being able to build their own search engines because otherwise you get this weird reality distortion field because everybody just uses that one and then it gets tweaked a little bit and then elections go weird or whatever. Right? So we’ve — the same thing is true in setting up the scaffolding for the trillions of dollars that are about to flow into the regenerative economy. How do you do that in a way that there’s enough of the toolkit distributed to a broad enough group of people so that it doesn’t create a strange reality distortion field that ends up you know perpetuating the wrong attribute?
Joe Brewer: Yeah, I think an interesting historical antecedent for this is the invention of double entry accounting, the creation of profit and loss sheets in the 1470s in Venice, which was just a few decades before the first joint stock company was invented in 1500 and then the age of corporatism arose, which made nation States possible and all sorts of other interesting things. And so that’s a really interesting historical antecedent because it was an accounting tool.
Gregory Landua: That’s right
Joe Brewer: Followed by a shared responsibility, shared ownership model that was new at the time.
Gregory Landua: And now we’re in triple, triple entry or, or you know, like beyond triple entry accounting system.
Joe Brewer: Yeah. Now we’re in the multi capital space and um —
Gregory Landua: Multi capital. Multi multi entry.
Joe Brewer: Yeah. And what’s, what’s really interesting about this, this challenge is, um, no, I’m part of a conversation with a group of designers in Italy that create platforms and do platform design. And we’re exploring how to do platform design for the regenerative movement. And one of our ways of thinking with several kind of perspectives that we’re exploring because it’s very early in the process, but one of the pieces is that there is already in fragmentation of global action networks. So you have things like Gaia University and Gaia education and global ecovillage network. And uh, you have the regenerative communities’ network and you have common lands foundation and ecosystem restoration camps and you can transition towns and you go on and on. There are different networks.
Gregory Landua: And those are all only like five people.
Joe Brewer: Yeah and they’re like, they are not coherent as action networks. And so the need for a platform strategy, a strategy that creates ecosystem coherence, is still really important to cultivate. And, and, and it’s a semantic space. It’s not that the tools or pieces or architectures may not exist. They probably do exist. It’s that they are not achieving on ecosystem coherence.
Gregory Landua: Well, there has to be an economic imperative. There has to be a shared, I mean that’s our, that’s our, our approach at Regen Network is to have a shared public infrastructure with where, where there is, there are stakeholders who earn money from securing the shared system and therefore there is vocational imperative for that kind of common unified system. And, and even if there’s another one even if there’s a competitor, that’s fine because there’s having two or three coherent groups that have that, that focus on providing something unique that, that the other group hasn’t optimized for [inaudible 44:48]. Doesn’t need to be some sort of like common coherence. I totally, it has to happen and I think it has to happen economically. I don’t think, I don’t think it can happen. Like we’re not going to sort this out ideologically. You know it’s not a, you know like is transition towns cooler or are you an equal ecosystem restoration camp person? Like it doesn’t.
Joe Brewer: Yeah, one of the problems that we have is that the, uh, we’ve thrown economics out with the ideological bathwater.
Gregory Landua: Yeah
Joe Brewer: You know and like there’s a lot of confusion around the words in economics, which is unhelpful for understanding how economics actually works. What we need is an understanding of economics actually works and then build economic systems.
Gregory Landua: Well so right. For a new, I’m so excited about the formation of like, like the next generation of economists if we play our cards right, because, the [inaudible 45:53].
Joe Brewer: It froze for just a second but we’re back.
Gregory Landua: Are you familiar with Delton Chin’s work?
Joe Brewer: No. No I’m not.
Gregory Landua: You should check out, I mean if you have time and one of the more accessible ways might actually be listening to the podcast I did with him. I don’t remember which episode it is, but you could look back. He’s proposing sort of like a unified biophysical sort of based in the reality of thermodynamics, economic paradigm and you know and, and then subsequent kind of, I guess, complimentary global reward currency system instead of the existing carbon markets. Anyway, it’s I think it’s important. Like its cool work. There are certain things that I’m like, he’s like a different approach. He’s more, he’s more like, “Hey we need to just go get the central banks to underwrite this”. And which I think is great, if they’ll do it, I’m like, go for it. But I’m more like, I’m not, I’m just not sure that that’s going to happen anyway. It’s cool and what he’s talking about is just the need and you alluded to this as well, you know, the economic, the discipline of economics has been off the rails for, you know 40 years or so. It’s done some important work. There’s pieces of it that are salvageable and powerful, but regrounding economics in, yeah, the biophysical reality of our planet is, it’s an exciting task and —
Joe Brewer: Yeah, I was involved in a project about four years ago. We launched an online magazine called Even-nomics, the evolution of economics. And it’s, that project is still going. And the way we started it was basically to recruit a set of advisors who are all experts and authors and related fields of what I would just call real economics, ecological economics, complexity, complexity economics, evolutionary science, behavioral science and a variety of related fields. And what, what we found was maybe not surprising was firstly, there is a real science of economics. It is coherent, but institutionally it’s a mess because neoclassical economics, it has been invalidated based on its assumptions of rationalism and equilibrium, that’s still, it holds too much sway. And then the other is the neoliberalism, the spread of an ideology pretending to be science, which has combined to make together they’ve made science or made economics unscientific, but the real like legitimate economics is all of the advances in the study of living systems in the last 100 years, which come from many different fields and all converge on the same foundational understandings. And so we have a real and robust and very powerful science of economics but most people that go study economics in university find the discredited ideological false god of economics, instead of the real economics. And so hacking that problem in education is a big part of getting the real economics to hold sway.
Gregory Landua: How would you name this new school? Cause it can’t you know, do schools only get named after they’ve already you know like a solidified to a certain degree or, or can we name it so that it has a tag in our minds?
Joe Brewer: Yes, it’s funny that we have a couple of contenders for it, which would be kind of equally good, which means we don’t have one. Like complexity economics isn’t bad. If you understand what complexity is. Evolutionary economics is pretty good if you understand Darwinian evolution and how the science of evolution has matured. Ecological economics is quite strong too as a name. But then you get into the camps of whose evolutionary economics and then there’s the greenwashing of what’s called environmental economics which is not as robust. But as you know it’s a space that’s been too propagandized for us to have a single name for it because of where everything stands at the moment, which sort of sucks to just say that, it’s we have a branding problem of too many groups, too many names have claimed space.
Gregory Landua: Well, it seems like there’s probably a right space for someone to step in and be, uh, you know, charismatic, uh, you know, cult figure and synthesize it all and put their brand on it.
Joe Brewer: Yeah. Yeah. And, and you know, you look at the work of people like Doug Rushkoff who have been talking in that space for a long time in various ways. Um, we don’t normally think of him as an economist and probably we shouldn’t, but you look at what he’s doing, he’s mapping out that terrain really beautifully. The evolution of technology, culture and media.
Gregory Landua: Douglas isn’t [inaudible 51:00].
Joe Brewer: Yeah, I love his work.
Gregory Landua: He’s working. He’s, he’s like, he’s like working on the, uh, regenerative trolling. Uh [inaudible 51:09].
Joe Brewer: He’s good at it. Yeah. He’s been at it for a while. Um, but yeah, no, it’s, it’s a, that’s a really essential one for us to collectively aggregate around what is real economics and how do we use it as a big piece of this conversation. So, um, I think what, uh, what John Buliton’s doing right now with his series of papers is on regenerative finance is a helpful piece. So maybe we call it regenerative economics. That could be the name because that isn’t a name that is known as a name yet, but it really resonates with all the others.
Gregory Landua: Yep
Joe Brewer: Um, so yeah, work on, work on promoting regenerative economics [inaudible 51:51].
Gregory Landua: Yeah, we’ll, we call it.
Joe Brewer: It’s already been called that, that how does that [inaudible 51:57].
Gregory Landua: Well, but it’s getting called that, but it’s maybe, um, I mean I think the body of work, I would appreciate, sort of, you know, like being able to see the whole, the interlinking whole of the ideas, you know, like what are the core concepts and what are the lineages of those core concepts that, that create a coherent whole and set of tools. Because ultimately economics is about tools, analytical tools for you know, decision making and sense making. So, um, that’s what I, I don’t have a completely clear, I mean I have my own set of, you know, I’m sort of like an amateur pseudo economist myself and so I have my own set of tools that I rely on in order to kind of like guide me, but I don’t think they stand up to kind of like, the the rigor of a community of practice necessarily. They’re just things ad hoc.
Joe Brewer: Yeah. What’s needed is a cannon, you know, like your first two years of undergraduate study is learning the cannon of the field, whatever that is. And if you’re going to learn physics, you better learn a little bit of electromagnetics, a little bit of thermodynamics, a little bit of quantum mechanics and you know, you have like a set of things then make an additional physics. And there’s a cannon of regenerative economics that has not been articulated yet as a cannon. And it’s like a two year undergraduate curriculum is sort of what you aim for in terms of breadth and substance. And coherence and all the pieces I would say are, I think all the pieces exist to create that cannon.
Gregory Landua: Isn’t there a danger though that if, if we go that route and create a cannon replicating sort of the two year course of study that it like calcifies and dies in the cradle, instead of being the force of actual regeneration somehow? Like what happens [inaudible 54:01] a good idea.
Joe Brewer: I think we’re at risk of that right now because universities are failing humanity so dramatically. Um, and one of the challenges is to make universities bio-regional to get them to function as learning ecosystems for bioregional economies which would start to — .
Gregory Landua: I mean we definitely need a whole reboot of, of our educational system for sure.
Joe Brewer: Yeah.
Gregory Landua: All the way down.
Joe Brewer: I’ve been invited to lead a blueprinting process for educational transformation with the reporting 3.0 community. We’re about to start, which we’ll attempt to outline what that design pathway looks like. Um, but it’s, I think that’s one that is going to be really tough to get agreement on. Sort of bringing together people and I think there are going to be a lot of pet ideas, so we’ll see. It’ll be an experiment to see if we can pull it off.
Gregory Landua: Well that’s, yeah, you get people, you get enough people and there’s always their, you know, everybody’s got an agenda I guess so. Well I’m just looking up at the time. I’ve got a, um, I’ve got to hop off and um, sort of flow into the rest of my day. I’ve got a little bit of work to do and some meetings. Um, so I think it’s probably a good moment to start wrapping. Um, do you have, would you like to, um, share any resources or, or invitations for anybody who’s listening? Just, you know, website or study group information or anything? Um, if people have been, if their interest has been sparked?
Joe Brewer: Yeah, I would definitely invite anyone who wants to, to join the, uh, our earth generators group, which is the study group and it’s just earth-regenerators.mn.co and ‘mn’ as mighty networks, because that’s the platform we’re using. Like the earth regenerators study group is one of the most interesting action at the moment around what I’m doing. Um, and otherwise just Google me and connect anywhere that feels appropriate.
Gregory Landua: Cool.
Joe Brewer: Um, but I, I want to also say that I’m making an intentional effort to be anti-ego. What I mean by that is I don’t want any of this to be about me and I’m not trying to build my own fiefdom. And actually I have a history of, uh, becoming the flame that attracts the narcissistic moths and I’m trying to short circuit that, um, to the best of my ability.
Joe Brewer: So I’m trying to defocus myself in the work in structural ways, which is a difficult challenge. Um, but what I really want to invite is this deep question of how do we discern reality to the best of our abilities, combined with how do we use that discernment process to increasingly co-create with others to regenerate the earth’s biosphere. And that there are a million touch points for that. And I’d much rather people be active in that inquiry than choosing only to do it with me or feeling whatever I’m doing isn’t quite right. That inquiry is what I care about and I’m trying to just be in service to it in my own little corners of the world.
Gregory Landua: Yeah. Beautiful. Well, thanks for that invitation, Joe, and thanks for hopping on to the planetary regeneration podcast and, um, yeah, I hope your, you and your family have a beautiful, a beautiful day and a beautiful year, and, uh, please, uh, come back and join us on the podcast again soon.
Joe Brewer: Yeah, I’d love to. I’m really happy that you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s, these conversations are essential, so thank you, Gregory for everything you’re doing.
Gregory Landua: Fantastic. Thanks so much.
Joe Brewer: All right. Take care.
