Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 4: Daniel Christian Wahl
This blog is a transcription of the fourth episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, hosted by Regen Network’s Chief Regeneration Officer, Gregory Landua.
In this episode, Gregory interviews Daniel Christian Wahl, the author of Designing Regenerative Cultures. Listen on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify; or read the transcription below.
Gregory: Hello and welcome to the Planetary Regeneration Podcast. I’m your host Gregory Landua. In today’s episode, I interview Daniel Christian Wahl, the author of Designing Regenerative Cultures. This episode is the break in the recent theme of deep dives with prominent leaders in the blockchain movement. Instead, with Daniel, who is a long-time member of the broader movement towards planetary regeneration with the specific focus on the complexity sciences, whole system design and the ecovillage movement, Daniel and I take a deep dive into some of the conversations that really have been building up over years around competition, cooperation between different lineages in schools of thought. This is a very personal conversation that Daniel and I had together and I’m very excited to be sharing it with everyone. Take it all with the understanding that this is two members of a community, just speaking to each other. I think that that is in keeping with how I’m hoping this podcast evolves, and some of my aims for the way that this podcast comes together, is to really have an authentic, real, pertinent conversations between myself and other folks who are working at this edge in forefront of re-growing human economy, and culture, in service to life. This is a very in-depth, complex conversation, and I hope that everybody out there listening enjoys. Without further ado, I bring you Daniel Christian Wahl.
Gregory: Daniel, I’m really grateful that you’re taking the time to hang out with me. There’s so much to talk about. I’m excited.
Daniel: Me too. I think that we can talk for hours. Let’s see what we’ll actually end up talking about.
Gregory: Yeah, exactly. What’s new and exciting for you these days in your life? What has you particularly fired up and inspired?
Daniel: Well, I think you’ve got a little one at home as well. Is that the first one or the second one for you?
Gregory: Second. I have a two and a half-year-old, and a seven-month-old.
Daniel: I have the 25 months year-old, so two years in a bit. Of course, that’s wonderfully exciting and inviting me to reprioritize my life. On the one hand, it’s reenergizing my work in the world, but it’s also asking me to say — to what extent do you do the global work and if it stops to cut into the local or regional work, the real connection with the community and bioregion. If I’m honest, I always have this, that when I got pregnant with a cross-connection with my life, it can take almost a year for me to be able to get the drift tab, to turn the big tab.
I’ve been trying to get more local and more regional with my work and stop traveling so much and really focus on getting my hands dirty here on the Island of Majorca, and what we can do here locally to create an example for bioregional regeneration in the Mediterranean climate. That’s big enough of a project.
Gregory: Yeah. It’s just as hard as the global work, if not harder somehow. I’ve always found that there’s a demand for rigor, discipline, and focus when you get to the scale of transformation that is represented by a bioregion. Sometimes, we can be a little bit sloppy and handwavy when we get to the global scale because it seems like it’s just beyond the scale of full comprehension. Whereas when you start to dig into the bioregion, it zooms in and requires a little bit more fine detail. If you’re anything like me, sometimes, I notice when I’m honest with myself that I’ll shy away from that level of rigor because it’s just easier. It’s more in the comfort zone to stay a little more zoomed out. When you get to that, you can’t get away from yourself basically. [laughter]
Daniel: Exactly. It’s at mezzo-scale. At the micro-scale of doing your little permaculture farm or your little community project with a pre-selected group of people, who somehow think alike and want to create an ecovillage, that’s complex enough. You run into enough trouble there. But you can ring-fence against people that you might not at all agree with. The minute you work at a bioregional scale, you actually have to work with the powers that be. In my case, living on an island that is 90% dependent on tourism, which is a globally extractive business that is, in its current form, enormously damaging.
At the same time [00:06:00–00:06:07 inaudible] at least start a conversation about transforming tourism, and make it the engine of transformation. If I try to fight it and say tourism’s bad and we mustn’t have it, then I’ll just turn into Quixote 2.0 and not much will happen. What you were saying earlier, even within talking about bioregional regeneration, it’s so easy to stay at that wonderful level of “we’re doing it,” and “what we could do.” My friend Joe Brewer with his work in Costa Rica, his conversations were very much at this level in the last year. It’s very inspiring to people, but it is actually when you start talking to people on the ground and you work with the complexity of human shortcomings and human potential, that it gets really interesting. In many ways, I’ve been trying to do this for the last eight years here on Majorca. I’m a bit scared of reengaging with it because I know that it will get really complex and it’s not necessarily the way that I finance my family economics.
Gregory: Yeah, right. Currently, you’ve carved out a niche as a thought leader and a consultant, inviting people to engage in regenerative culture building and reconnecting with the holism more broadly. That’s all correct, right? That’s mostly how you’re supporting your family.
Daniel: I’ve been on this journey — I call it an apprenticeship in the pilgrimage — of trying to understand how to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem for good 20 years. While for a long time, I did the research into my Masters in Holistic Science, and look at it through the complexity lens and Gaia theory, and all the wonderful mentors like John Todd and David Orr, inspiring me to see the power of design. Then, I did the Ph.D., which I called The Design for Human and Planetary Health, which, to my mind, was already quite regenerative in what it was actually proposing. It was addressing the upstream worldview, value system change, the need for participation, the need for starting with personal development and working from place.
In 2010 or 2011, I came across Bill Reed’s paper Shifting our Mental Model, and having read regenerative agriculture, and then Darren Doherty’s work for a while. In many ways, when I wrote the book, I didn’t fully appreciate how deep the work that Carol Sanford and the folks in Regenesis Group — Pamela Mang, Ben Haggard, Bill Reed and so on — had already curated over 20 years. I know you’re very deeply in that lineage. In many ways, you’re right. I’ve carved out this advocacy role for — we are the regeneration rising. We need to bring a bigger collection of like-minded people together.”
I don’t know what Carol would think of me saying that people like The Biomimicry Institute are also part of this movement. They’re taking a slightly different angle.
[00:10:00]
Daniel: I’m trying to bring us all into a larger conversation to see that we’re all actually broadly aligned. In Janine’s words, “What we’re trying to do is create conditions conducive to life.” I think that there’s the depth of practice, and process, and frameworks that Carol holds and that Regenesis holds, that is hugely valuable for where we want to go. I’ve also experienced that a little bit of ring-fencing against other parts of the movement. I’d love to hear your perspective on that because I feel sometimes I’m a little bit on a tight rope between wanting to really honor the depth that the elders are holding in working on deep regeneration and to open the conversation to as many people who are now already jumping on it in a bandwagonny kind of way and watering down the tournament. I recently was at a meeting on regenerative economics, where a high-level consultant type shared with me that Mckinsey has already put the money into building a regeneration consultancy team. That feels like, “aargh.” On the other hand, it might be an opportunity. There’s potential there. What do you think?
Gregory: I’m not surprised that Mckinsey is putting money into that. It’s become quite a buzzword. Through the hard work of many of us, yourself certainly included, I think that that’s an indicator in some ways of success, but also it’s not too hard to be victims of our own success either. I have a couple of minds here. One is, I can be pretty prickly when I see that people are banalizing the potential and the essence of regeneration of what I would consider, core to regeneration, which is resonant and deeply influenced and like I’m standing on the shoulders and in the lineage of Carol, and Bill, and the community around that particular community. Living systems frameworks, and embrace of continuous development, and really, disruption. I think that the unique piece is the embrace of continuous, conscious disruption and growth and through all the nested scales that we need to be challenging ourselves. The moment that you get too comfortable with a mental model, and start to solidify around it, it will perpetuate its own set of problems. Ourselves included, I think.
Daniel: Yes, absolutely.
Gregory: The attachment to regeneration and the [00:13:23 memeplex] around that, being focused on the embrace of the disruptive cycle and maybe cultivating almost anti-fragility. You start to look for that disruption instead of solidifying more automatic patterns. Whereas I think, biomimicry and even permaculture, in large, are looking to assess and analyze what are the patterns that we can currently see the living world expressing. We then solidify and crystallize patterns that are as close to that as possible, in a way that we interact with one another, in the way that our economy forms, in the way that our social structures form. That’s my interpretation. Regenerative Enterprise 1.0, when we published that, I just barely met Carol and the Regenesis Group. Ethan and I pushed that out knowing that we’ve just been disrupted and we were, “Oh, man.” We totally missed the boat on this, but we should publish it anyway. It is what it is. It has some good thinking in it that was a reflection of our work in the world. So, whatever. It is what it is. It will be useful for people. It’s useful for us to go through that process. I think it is dangerous. The process of banalization of, in essence, sacred lineage is the same process as mining a hillside or mining our soil, in my mind. People are externalizing, like Mckinsey. It’s essentially externalizing the cost of doing real thinking to other people, and then cherry-picking the things that they would be able to sell out of that without having a lot of things about the regenerative approach from the Carol Sanford’s perspective, that aren’t maybe so market-friendly. They demand such rigor and discipline around engagement that, as a consultant, you just want to make it easier for people to engage with. Let’s just make it easier. It’s too hard. It’s a common thing. I would ask — what is our theory of change? Is it that there needs to be a lot of people at a low level of understanding or is it that there needs to be a few people at a very deep level of commitment and understanding? Which of those is more powerful? Is it either/or? I don’t know. Probably not. I think it’s two theories of change and strategies arguing with one another essentially.
Daniel: I hope it’s not a real argument. There’s a level of banalization that really doesn’t serve. The flipside of that deep-lineage-type approach, for me personally, there are two. I spent a lot of time very obsessed with martial arts when I was a young teenager and adolescent. It got to the point where I saw the power of the almost guru-like martial arts teacher that just with a glance could make me really bad that I’d missed one training. It was really inside my story (not so much his) that all that was playing out. I see a lot of the structure that particularly Carol builds around her CEDP group that is very similar to this essence of the lineage and the guru to some extent, of the sensei. I’ve been trying to talk to people who are very deeply engaged with it to understand it better. I sense that so much of what Pamela and Carol have developed over the years, comes from Charlie Crown, and Charlie Crown’s work can be traced back to Bennett’s lab. There’s a lot of other lineages that have influenced a lot of people. A lot of Christopher Alexander’s thinking was influenced by the part of that same lineage. All the work of the International Futures Forum and the Three Horizons’ framework of Bill Sharpe comes from the same lineage. It’s actually the Three Horizons’ framework that Tetrad reframed. What I’m rejecting or reacting to a little bit, less with Regenesis Group and a little bit more with Carol, is the misunderstood or interpreted on a certain level — you could also say there’s American protecting of trademark and this is our little bit of protecting the lineage in that way and creating another — and other ring people who are actually part of the same impulse like my mentor John Todd. A lot of thinking is very similar, maybe not all of it. For me, it’s rather than us having this argument of do we need to create a small group of running around the sensei who will carry the pure essence. Wonderful, but let’s create them in such a way that they reach out to everybody else who’s maybe not quite ready to engage at that level yet. Therefore it’s great that they can engage with permaculture and biomimicry thinking, which is somehow for many that are part of the journey then to understand the deeper insights that will help them in working as a regenerative practitioner. I don’t know.
[00:20:00]
Gregory: I don’t actually think that the way that change agent development school that Carol runs — my experience of it being on the inside, is not an insular, protectionist community. If you’re going to engage, as you know in martial arts, if you are going to engage with rigor and depth, one of the things that has to be present is commitment. When it gets uncomfortable, you can’t just leave if you’re going to engage at that level of depth. In order to create a community around that, you have to lead with restraint. Do you really want to do this or are you just fucking around? It’s one of the core questions. People have their own reactions to that because then they think, “Oh, well. If I don’t really want to do it then the judgment is that I’m just fucking around.” I don’t really have the commitment and I’m being judged. The internal monologue becomes, “Oh, all those people are judging me because I have a different path.” Really, I think it’s better to look at that moment of restraint as exactly what it is. Are you willing to go past this threshold and commit in a way that is going to bring you discomfort and choose the discomfort? There’s a lot of different ways to do that, but generally, there’s a threshold. One of the greatest downsides of green meme post-modernism is the generalized reaction to all boundaries. There’s a boundary there. There’s no doubt about it, but it’s not like people sitting on the inside of that boundary are, “Oh, biomimicry. They don’t get anything.” People on the inside of that boundary will be thinking about — what is that we, as individuals, aren’t getting? What is it that we’re working on as individuals or as a group? That’s what people are thinking about on the inside of that boundary, not at all concerned with how people are or are not embodying something on the outside. That’s other people’s business, their personal work basically, whether or not they choose to engage it. You can’t pass judgment on people. Who knows? People may have all sorts of things going on that is discipline and rigor around that growth cycle.
Daniel: Every single person who’s in that group I’ve spoken to, speak so highly about the value of that process, to them, as individuals and to them in their work. For me personally, I’m in that state of life where basically I cannot really make that intensity of commitment that is required. There’s a little, which is part of this boundary that has been set and maybe the potential flipside of it, is that it’s assuming that nobody else has also (in a parallel evolution kind of way) been working almost the same way with touching exactly the same principles, the same way of questioning the deepening, and just using a different language maybe — maybe even a language that isn’t quite so complicating for people and therefore could actually help in taking more people deeper. For me, that’s the conversation that maybe we just haven’t had time to have yet with Regenesis and with Carol, and with other people who are working at this wider regeneration field to say — is there a way to honor that lineage and understand that it is just one parallel impulse of that same work that might already exist in people coming to the same way of working differently. Do you see what I’m trying to get at?
Gregory: Yeah, but I think that there’s a sense I have with you saying that. That’s fine. I don’t think that Carol or Regenesis are trying to — they are going to approach (or I as well) conversations with a particular set of Socratic tools and restraints around particular things, but the reaction I think to the restraints of boundary setting creates a whole projection cycle. People are, “Oh, you guys think you’re better than us.” That is certainly one way to respond to somebody asking a bunch of questions. Totally. I might respond that way too as my first reaction to that. But I don’t think that’s the intent. There’s that layer. I’m not sure that there’s any exclusive claim being tendered. I think there’s an interpretation of that, but I don’t actually experience it that way. That’s one piece. The second piece is I think I have never run across another community that actually sets a high bar around, “Hey, if you want to participate, you have to participate to this level. Otherwise, it’s not worth it.” There’s epistemology there around how we learn and how we change and how we grow. There’s a certain quantity and rhythm of commitment and attention that I would say we may be even a little below that threshold and what it really takes. My judgment would be that the minimum bar doesn’t actually get there in that community. I think Carol would probably agree with that, and everybody would. But it’s still higher than 99% of people can or are willing to commit to. How do you cope with that? I’m not so sure. I think that what Carol’s saying is it’s around will. If you have the will to focus on it, then you will, but again, you and others may very well be finding ways to have that rhythm and level of engagement in different ways. All I can say is I can’t. It takes a lot of will to engage with that particular school. I have access to a lot of will. I do lots of things in the world. I know that I’m a “willful person” with a positive way of thinking about the agency, choice, conscious suffering, and choosing to do things that are uncomfortable but that create transformation and regeneration benefits. But I don’t have enough to just do it on my own or even informally with a small group of people. My experience of engaging with other people who are connected to a similar discernment. What is being worked on in CAD and in Carol’s school, is not actually around mental models. It’s not. That’s not what’s happening. That’s a corollary outgrowth. That happens. You build capacity in that, but that’s not actually what the work is about. There is something there. I don’t experience that many other people that I bump into and it doesn’t mean that I don’t think they are doing great work, but that they’re just in that crucible process as constantly and as rigorously as people who are all in. I wouldn’t claim that A. I know that solely on experience, projection, and B. I have the sense that there’s other schools that are running parallel. As you’ve said, the school that’s intersecting, that Carol is currently one of the main stewards of, is now about to go through a transformation as Carol gets up and age. She’s very consciously designing that. As you’ve noted that it’s a multi-lineage. David Bohm, Bennett, Gurdjieff’s original work, Pythagoras, Socrates, and the lineage that many people have been influenced by these people. There’s many strands that go out, and there’s a lot of amazing, powerful work. John Todd’s among them that are so amazing. The New Alchemy Institute did so much, and John Todd’s work after that has done so much, and much more practical in a lot of ways.
[00:30:00]
Gregory: Just like living machine technology, and the work that Ocean Ark is doing, that level of engineering has to happen. Carol’s not an engineer. She’s just a very powerful lineage steward whose work is consciousness. Her work is consciousness. Other people have different work. She’s holding the consciousness flag.
Daniel: I always come back to my Ph.D. I called it a “meta-design.” Basically, if you go upstream the design process and you change the worldview, the value systems, the organizing ideas we employ to bring forth the world together, then you change everything downstream from it. The most powerful place of intervention in terms of design-led change is to work with consciousness.
Gregory: I have a question. In your experience knowing that that’s true — if you go far enough upstream we hit that point — how are you generating that meaning? How does that influence your choices? What other schools of thought and approaches are you [00:37:27]? Are they working? Are they not? What have you learned from your experience working with Gaia education, for instance, where worldview is one of the core pillars of the pedagogy?
Daniel: I think it’s maybe less formalized and structured. Gaia Education’s work — which partially I help to build that large drawing by numbers landscape of the big puzzle that it is trying to integrate — it’s more introductory in my understanding than any of the work that Regenesis is offering, but it is a very useful introduction. The people who have gone through it will be much more agile when they get to a point of saying, “Now, I want to do a regenerative practitioner training or Story of Place” That was one of the things that I got triggered at a bit when I did the regenerative practitioner training, that any mention of case studies or examples, were, “that’s not coming out of the essence of place and the Story of Place.” But to my mind, being aware of lots of good ideas that have worked with other people in similar climates or in similar situations and then deeply asking the question — could we do this here? How would we do this here? Is this place actually calling for it? — it still gives you more of a spectrum of things to work with. For me, Gaia Education is much more introductory, but in a very useful way. It names some of the schools that I would say are out of that rigor. For example, Henri Bortoft’s work of working with Goethean science is the same kind of deep practice like that book The Wholeness of Nature that he wrote, isn’t just a book to read from the first chapter to the last chapter. It’s a workbook that you can spend your entire life working with. It literally disrupts your habitual thought and awareness processes and takes you into a different way of seeing the coming into being of the world. It’s actually strongly informed by Bennett’s work. Henri Bortoft was at Bennett’s Lab when he started to work on the nucleus of that work. Again, there’s the link between the two. That’s what I find so fascinating. I was blown away when I realized that deeper I got into the work that Regenesis is doing, to see the parallels to these other lineages and how often they always come back to Bennett’s Lab in Cold Springs and then of course further upstream to George Ethan and all the other people mentioned. I’m just wondering right now, with the urgency that we’re facing on the planet — how do we create a funnel that all the people that are waking up to this urgency and really want to shed habits that no longer serve and build new habits, and want to build skills, even with the privilege of good education, that education might not at all had prepared them for what they’re now called to do? For me, this need to A. go beyond just talking about what we need to do, which I don’t want to fall into that trap, and I feel a little bit uncomfortable that the last year and a half, two years, since my book has got a little bit attraction and I’m getting invitations, I can easily fall into that trap and spin in that whirlpool for ten years and be comfortable (I wouldn’t see my family as much as I’d like to but I’d invited to lots of nice places and give nice talks) but I don’t think we have time for that anymore. I sense a level of urgency where I really want to [00:36:06–00:36:10 inaudible] of trying to become regenerative everywhere on the planet fast enough that we can actually have a chance of reversing current global warming trends, and in 30 years’ time not be victims to cataclysmic runaway climate change, but begin to see the effects of 30 years of trying to stop it and be at a point where we say, “Uh, we did actually make it.” I think that the Jury is out and we have to work really hard for decades not knowing whether our efforts would actually have started early enough to come to a positive outcome in that sense. For me, what’s interesting is that, whether we’re trying to do the global reversing climate change work locally in our bioregions, bioregion to bioregion, or whether we want to help each bioregion around the planet become more able to weather the storms that are now coming at us — even in that kind of scenario where I’m reminded of talking to Janna Macy in 2003, where we were talking about, “do we still have a chance or is it already too late?” She stopped in our walk and said to me, “Daniel, it really matters how we go out even if we go out.” That really stuck with me in a deep way. Being a father of a little girl, I look at her and I kind of say, “Okay, maybe I brought you into a world where you will not live to 80 because of environmental conditions worsening to the point that you can’t.” But what can I do in this region for the next 30, 40, 50 years, to make people value the beauty that is still in front of them, even if they know that we’ve created the trajectory where actually it’s only going to get worse, rather than better, and really reconnect with the beauty of human relationships? It’s the beauty of our conversation right now. We’re both breathing and we have an opportunity to spend that gift of life. We’re currently choosing to spend it in a conversation that is meaningful to both of us. I’m currently very much trying to not lose myself in the “I must go and save the world” thing, but find the balance between the mundane, ordinary, daily moments of saying, “This is how I can save what’s still here by valuing it, whether it’s a morning at the beach with my daughter or a walk in the mountains with a friend.” In this weird way, people are hungry for hope and a way out, and there’s talk about projection. I feel like there’s a possible track for me [00:39:28 inaudible] projected upon as the bringer of “Yes we can. Let’s build regenerative cultures everywhere and we’ll be hunky-dory and fine.” I think that would be too shallow of a message to build the global speakers carry on. I’m not interested in that. I’m really interested in walking my talk with what I want to do here locally.
[00:40:00]
Gregory: Yeah. That has to be a pretty challenging choice because it’s a beautiful thing to be the person that people choose to hear the hopeful message from. That’s an honor and a privilege, and an important piece of the puzzle too. On the flipside of what you’re saying, most of the information that people are getting, I think, it’s already done. Personally, I don’t really, fully resonate with that perspective. I can go back and forth. The projections aren’t great. [laughter] I love that you brought up Joanna Macy and I love your recollection of what she said, which I really often resonate with. It’s kind of like the success of our venture doesn’t really matter. What matters is how and why we choose to engage with it. For me, there’s really no other good choice, but to give it our best shot to transform ourselves, to be a steward of the planet, a keystone species really — a species that increases diversity, and health, and resilience of the biosphere and our bioregions within that. That’s a very exciting and invigorating thing. To me, it’s maybe more aligned with how Charles Eisenstein has been speaking about climate change, climate chaos, and approach to that. I’m appreciative of how he’s working to change the narrative out of this pure “numbers game.” I’m also somewhat frustrated from time to time, given that recently I’ve been focusing a lot of my attention on the numbers. [laughter] That’s probably a fairly minor equivalence in the scheme of things.
Daniel: But it’s an important one because I think that there’s something about the numbers. We’re going about and coming back to that the biggest change is in the worldview value system organizing idea level. It’s the weird paradox. Yes, the numbers are important because they give us feedback and we can assess progress and all that kind of stuff. At the same time, while there’s truth in this adage, what gets measured, gets managed, it’s also a whole lot of bs. What really brings vitality, beauty, health, dynamism to social and ecological systems, are the qualities of relationships, the qualities of the information that flows in the system, the qualities of that unique experience in moment — one perspective of the whole experiencing itself and forming the overall transformative process. Our linear way — going back to Galileo — of separating the world into things that can be measured and the things that can’t be measured, like the primary and secondary qualities that he set up, that then the scientific enterprise only focus on what can be measured. Now, we’re trying to find proxies that we can put into our number models that measure qualities, that measure the health of water waste? The minute we use the proxies, we actually lose so much of what we’re actually trying to nurture and bring back into wholeness. I’m also keen to talk to you a little bit about what you’re doing with the Regen Network and this blockchain-based attempt to both verify the change of state in a piece of land and being able to say, “We started in this state and it wasn’t very healthy and now we increased health, productivity, and also its potential to then — one that’s possible — find new ways for finance flows to enable more regeneration to happen,” which is something brilliant and it needs to happen. I have all sorts of question marks of pitfalls along the way that might, at some point, make us realize that in an extreme case the if we put census everywhere and create global allocation levels, we could create an eco-dictatorship very quickly.
Gregory: Yeah. There’s a lot there. The problem, in my mind, with quantification isn’t so much the process of quantification itself, but it’s that we tend to get attached to the method or results. If you engage in a disruptive rhythm of reassessment — of what is it that actually needs to be quantified that matches our deeper, intrinsic care — and if you’re rigorous around that, then I think that the pitfalls of choosing a proxy and putting it on automatic and having that runaway train go on are much less likely to happen. That’s one note. The second note is that I think the entire reason that we’ve chosen blockchain in some way is to avoid, or at least, create an opportunity to avoid (whether or not we succeed or not) this centralized control of a ecological state quantification and agreement apparatus, which will happen one way or the other. I’m here to say. Whether or not Regen succeeds, this is the writing on the wall. This is happening.
I think there’s enough time before things really start to get weird, and the pace of technology, and the current drift, the social and economic drift is all moving in this techno-optimization pathway. We can either do that well or we can do that poorly. It’s my opinion. I think, philosophically and ethically, I would probably tend to be — I’m techno skeptical — that really, my direct experience leads me to believe that the less technology is between myself and my day-to-day interactions with the living world, the better able I am to have what we might call a “regenerative relationship,” that is to say, a relationship where I can attune myself in a quick enough rhythm that my behaviors are coherent with the natural world, but that’s only true on a small scale. As a human, I’m also incapable of seeing exponentially. I can’t see exponentially. Machines can see exponentially. Technology allows us to have exponential vision in this way through measurement.
Daniel: Yes, but it’s based on an extrapolation of an algorithm that looks into the future.
[00:50:00]
Daniel: You’re cutting a slice of vision out of a 360-degree vision that we are capable as intuitive parts of the whole manifesting. We can see the future in a different way, not in that quantifying way. The danger of that exponential vision of technology is when we say — if we’ve got all the world’s datasets and we’ve got what’s integrating them all, and we’ve got the most brilliant minds operating the algorithms, we’ll get to that point where we’ll have to admit that we have to write all the decision-making to these guys, like the BAAI, because we’re so limited and fragile human beings. That’s really the discourse that is very prevalent in some people who care in the Bay area. Some of what you’re just saying that exponential tech is unstoppable because it is the trend. That’s what I’m sometimes wondering “is that really true?” and “do we want to create that kind of world?”
Gregory: Those are good questions. I’m not sure… you’re right. It’s possible that it’s not true. It seems to be the trend right now — “software eating the world” trend, to put a meme on it. I want to treat this thoroughly, but I also want to go back to your point earlier. Our assumption at Regen Network and my personal assumption is not actually that you need to monitor everything with sensors. It’s that, there needs to be a unified way to audit claims about ecological health. How those claims are made? Those claims could be made by somebody writing down on a piece of paper and taking a picture of it, as far as I’m concerned. At least in our model, the unification is through digital technology. I’m not aware of another way of doing at scale, of creating a unified, global, ecological state, ledgering system. I’m not sure how you would accomplish that without digital technology.
Daniel: It’s helpful.
Gregory: But I don’t think, at least for us, the assumption is that it can, or even should be, automated in any way. Depending on a type of agreement that people are entering into, there will be a need for more or less density of data, and rigor of data. If we’re talking about local agreements, there’s usefulness just in having the distributed ledger serve as a repository of agreements and basic data support about those agreements that’s very light. It’s like you and your neighbor in Majorca may be entering into an agreement about some watershed management outcomes that are happening, and the two of you agree that your friend can just go look. Your friend is just saying, “Yeah. I checked it out. The agreement was that there was going to be these check dams further down and a little bit of swells and some planting,” and that all happened. That’s it. There’s no satellites. There’s no sensors. There’s not drones. It’s just the three of you. You’re articulating what the agreement was, how you verified it, and whether it was or wasn’t verified. There’s a utility of just having a place where you can cheaply store that that can never be taken down essentially, for all of you and for all of your neighbors, and for the global community as well because that’s the scale.
On the other hand, you may have the sort of agreements that are very hard for human eyes to see, like a factory that has been putting PCPs into a waterway where it’s impossible for you and I to go look at the water and see that, but it’s not impossible for a sensor to be put in that says, “Hey, the agreement was that this is the baseline for this stream and you’ve gone past it.” There’s an ability for the community to take action in that way. I think it’s going to be a bit of both worlds really what ends up happening. It’s quite exciting and a little terrifying the sheer level of data that’s starting to be generated in the Earth observation world. ESA’s Copernicus program and the Sentinel Two data that’s streaming in for the last 18 months or so, and Sentinel One and Landsats — all these public remote sensing satellite datasets — it’s amazing.
Daniel: I was part of a piece of work here with Ecover, the detergent company, here in Majorca in 2014, and we were working with Rezatec satellite startup in Oxford. We never really got fully [00:56:06–00:56:08 inaudible] introduced the team a few years back to Christian. Rezatec was already working on algorithms to look at whether we could predict how much almond harvest it was going to be at the end of the season, based on satellite observations of the growth of almond trees. Looking from space — this is a citrus, this is an almond tree, this is a pear tree — and being able to look at what the biomaterials the economy locally would generate in terms of off-cuttings and refutes that would be resources for other processes.
Gregory: That’s going to happen. We have a global view of the planet now, with essentially human eyes — more like insect eyes — and the spectrum that we have available to metabolize is 12 bands at the moment with Sentinel two. As long as you have accurate ground-true data streaming in on what’s happening on the ground, you can calibrate algorithmically and create a lot of understanding about what’s happening in the world. Is that understanding being used wisely or is it being used poorly? Is it being used to create an eco-fascist global dictatorship? Is it being used to facilitate grassroots agreements between people to optimize what they believe the optimal expression of their relationship with place is? I think that that’s still in the balance.
Daniel: Yes, the Jury is still out on that, but in a related way because you said that ledger’s verifiable and can’t be taken down. I know that you’ve had conversations with the folks at Holochain and I’m not enough of a geek to really understand in a huge amount of detail what they are actually proposing, but it’s more from an intuitive understanding of the integrity of the people behind Holochain. Some of them I don’t know personally and others I’ve known virtually for quite some time. Quite a while ago, we sensed that maybe Holochain has a lot of advantages over Blockchain. I know that you’ve looked into this in detail, and made a decision to stay with Blockchain. Is there an easy answer to that or is it getting too technical? What I understand about Holochain is that it’s not just a technology, but their entire approach is to really give the Internet and data back to people and to run from the beginning with a biomimetic approach to how they build the entire system. A lot of the early conditions they were setting seem to be a lot more resonant with what we’re trying to do than the kind of work that Blockchain came out of and particularly, the amount of dangerous things that happened on the basis of it, like bitcoin eating up huge amounts of energy and data storage, and huge amounts of water in the process.
[01:00:00]
Gregory: There’s a whole bundle of things there to talk about. I think you do have to get down to a level of technical sophistication to answer that very good question. I think what you’re really asking is — what is an approach to regenerating a set of technological tools that actually are resonant with the first principles of how life works so that there isn’t an imposition of a machine worldview (in some sort of ill-fated attempt to reconnect humans to nature through the machine)? I think Holochain has done a really good job of their storytelling. I agree that the founders, the founding community around Holochain are all high-integrity, amazing people. I think there are trade-offs in choosing technology. There’s usually three things you can optimize for, and you have to choose two. You have to drop the other one, essentially. In a case of a database — I’ll see if I can remember the three — you can basically choose for availability. Can you always have access to the data or not? Are you choosing a technological design in which the data is not always available? It’s somewhere out there and you can get to it eventually, but maybe it’s not available right away. Can you create the right set of permissions where people only can access what they have permission to access or is it ubiquitous access or no access at all (which goes to the availability question)? Can you create conditions where it’s easy to put information up and capture that information quickly and inexpensively?
Holochain is currently an open-source movement and it has a lot of room to mature. This may not always be true, but currently, Holochain is optimized in a way that’s really good for doing things. Their general use cases are things like decentralized Twitter. They would say they are not looking for global consensus about things. They are looking for people to create small sub-groups that achieve consensus that doesn’t need to, have to, or most of the time, don’t achieve aligning with other, bigger groups in terms of consensus around things like — did I send you some money? In their model, that’s between you and I. There isn’t a global consensus about that. No one else needs to know. That’s a sane thing. That’s a sane proposition. For our use case, there’s a little bit more complexity. We actually feel like there is the need for a global, unified view around ecological health because of the single planet. Having the ability to create from nested relationships that are coherent with biosphere health, there needs to be a single, unified consensus. That’s basically impossible to do through Holochain without a bunch of extra work. They have not created a system where that is easily achievable, basically. That plus some other issues around availability and other things, have led us to use the technology that we’ve been building, which interestingly enough, has a lot of resonance with Holochain, but comes from a different perspective around the world. I love Holochain. I’m constantly frustrated by this techno-crypto tribalism. It’s very, I think, destructive. I think it’s destructive. For a little while there, three times a week, I was getting emails and text messages from people from the Holoworld telling me I was stupid and that I should be using Holochain because it would solve all of our problems. I was, “yeah.” [laughter] It was an erosive experience for me.
Daniel: The pathway that you are taking, one of the core questions that a lot of people would ask is — I know that not all blockchain applications are as data-intensive as the infrastructure behind the bitcoin. For me, the general question with this big data movement, this trend of ever-increasing amounts of data being generated and then stored over a long period of time and then integrated in more and more complex ways. That has an exponential, and not just exponential, but hyper-exponential growth curve built into it. Ultimately, there are sets of evidence around rare Earth running out, the impact of mining, and the limits of real renewable energy on planet Earth that make me question whether we are running the glass ceiling with all of this, where we simply just have to make a decision. Do we want that old, ubiquitous power of data integration, projection, and analysis or do we want the power over cities to the point that there’s a bit of light until 10 in the evening, that we can pump water and that we can do other things that might be more conducive to the immediate survival of people in place than basically wasting a huge amount of energy on this data work?
Gregory: I think that’s a false dichotomy, in my mind. It’s useful to understand the technical details underlying things. Bitcoin is based on an algorithm called proof of work, in which essentially you’re basically competing who can put the most energy through the most efficient computational process. It’s energy and computational efficiency competing against one another. It’s built in a way that is like an exponential world-eating race. It just doesn’t care and it just keeps going, and marching, and marching. With any dissipative cycle, there’s some positive things and some negative things about that. Positive things about that are that bitcoin is driving profitability of renewable energy creation because it’s just more efficient to do it with renewables than it is with coal for instance. Bitcoin accelerated the renewable energy sector for five to ten years. It’s a huge acceleration.
Daniel: Just in California or globally?
Gregory: Globally. Most of the bitcoin mining is not in California. It’s a globally distributed phenomenon. There’s some things we have to think. I personally think that bitcoin is kind of insane. [laughter] But as with any insane thing, there are some positives and negatives. The blockchain technology that we’ve chosen is a proof-of-stake system.
[01:10:00]
Gregory: You can also use different methods of consensus, but basically it creates a system where you can guarantee the integrity of all the computers that are running in the system, that everybody is acting with integrity to maintain a common database essentially. How do you do that? There’s different ways to achieve that. We’re using proof-of-stake algorithms to do that. Basically, what that means is that the mining rigs or the computers that bitcoin is racing against each other, we basically virtualized those and represent them as a digital currency. That means that your voting power on the network is related to how much of this digital currency you have. It’s proof of stake. Do you have stake in the network? If you do, then that gives you a market co-op. Basically, you can think of it as a taxi medallion or something. It gives you the rights to provide the work that the network needs to create the distributed ledger and to run computations, to store data. It gives you the right to participate. Depending on how many of those tokens you have, you have a variable share of those rights. You can dial that socially however you like. You could put caps on it or limits, but what it boils down to is, the amount of energy that bitcoin currently takes to keep its network running — we could go into bitcoin and how I’ve become a bitcoin appreciator if not a lover of late after I finish this little monologue — bitcoin currently uses about the same amount of energy as the country of Columbia in South America. That’s crazy. Ethereum uses something like the energy of Denmark or something. Our Regen Network, at global expression, keeping a global data-intensive ledger of ecological health and making it possible for people to make agreements, to query that, to have an understanding of a global sense of ecological health and create markets, market instruments and other things based on that, at full expression would be something like a high-rise in Manhattan.
Daniel: Seriously? Okay.
Gregory: Because we’re not wasting a bunch of energy having computers compete each other against each other to maintain a network. There will be somewhere between 50 and 300 computers that are running. That’s the distributed ledger. If you have 300 computers running around the world to maintain a ledger, the energy of that is negligible actually. If you layer on that data storage and all sorts of other things, you start to get a sense of what does it take to have a network that’s distributed enough that it’s resilient. We have to be thinking there are going to be people who do not appreciate having ecological states available to every citizen on the globe. Those people are going to want to take the network down. The network has to be secure enough and robust enough that it’s available all the time. There needs to be enough nodes running, so you have to run enough extra energy to create the resilience so that it can’t just be like somebody’s computer somewhere that you just pull the plug and it’s over. There has to be enough redundancy and enough distribution that it’s safe from attack, but not too much. You only need enough, you don’t need more. There’s no economic incentive for there to be more in our network design. In economic server design, there’s no reason to just have everyone in the world spinning up at Regen Network node. It doesn’t make any sense. It wouldn’t happen that way if there’s actually limits to that. Hopefully, that’s useful framing. Holochain is not unique in its achievement of distributed systems at energy efficiency. Although they might claim they are unique in that way, they are not. There’s a lot of people who have done a lot of good work around achieving distributed network consensus and redundancy, and essentially, just at the cost of running the number of computers that you have running on the network — 300 computers running in the world is probably less of a carbon footprint than my yearly air travel.
Daniel: I know you worked in Central America with your chocolate — was that chocolate business that you set up?
Gregory: Yeah, Central, and South America.
Daniel: The people you met there, the people on the ground, the farmers — to what extent do they really have the technological equipment and interest and know how to engage with that kind of network like all these other people in the world who are maybe passionate about stewarding their piece of land and even bringing back forests and rivers? [01:16:08–01:16:13 inaudible] technology, therefore, might have some stumbling block engaging with the infrastructure you’re building with the Regen Network. Have you thought about that and do you see that as a problem or not?
Gregory: I think it’s a reality. I don’t think it’s a problem. I think there’s a couple of different pieces here. One, the increase of access to smartphones right now is one of those exponential tech realities. Whether we like it or not, everybody is getting on Facebook and Twitter and other things. I guess I just have a pragmatic opinion that we might as well be using that technology for something useful. Not that social media doesn’t have its usefulness in certain circumstances. There’s that, which is that is a fact in the “developing world” or the global south where there is a rapid increase in access and ubiquitousness of technology in people’s lives. Building this on a blockchain platform and anchoring it in ecological health around agreements, does a couple of interesting things. One, it has the potential to create an increase in liquidity of access to cash, to money, resulting from ecological stewardship. It has the potential to level the playfield for people who are growing commodities mostly being consumed in the global North, and has the ability to give access — this last one I have mixed feelings about but at least people need to have their own choice around access to financial institutions. There’s a way in which financial institutions have been used for a couple of generations as a tool of colonial oppression on one hand, but then, on the other hand, equal access to financial tools is somehow an important part of creating a global society that functions well. It has to be done right, but it is important that everyone has access to a line of credits to start their own local business or express themselves so that they can send their kids to school. They can link a vocation to income, unless people are choosing non-monetary ways in order to organize their lives, and govern their commons, which is great. I’m just not seeing that happening anywhere much. [laughter] There are a few examples under pressure. There’s that. There’s plenty of people who have access to technology at the right level, and with capacity for the right level to engage.
[01:20:00]
Gregory: On the other hand, there’s basically nowhere in the world where there aren’t institutions and organizations that can help. Thinking of things like extension agents. We work a lot with the local NGO’s or international NGO’s, who are already working with these farmers, these Campesinos, these peasant farmers in Africa, and linking those farmers a good stewardship outcomes, increasing their ability to earn an income so that they’d be compensated for the public goods that their private property’s generating for our global commons. It’s a short-term solution in a way, but it has the ability to turn that trim tab really quickly. How do you incentivize and reward, support, and invite people to be thinking about the long-term health of their ecosystems? If you can create financial instruments around that, it’s great. The aid industrial complex is big and it’s everywhere, so there’s plenty of people on the ground that have smartphones walking around that are already collecting lots of data.
Daniel: In the absolute simplest nutshell, do I get it right that what you’re working on with the Regen Network is the technology that would ultimately enable any farmer anywhere in the world to not just have to eke out a living on the little bit of money they get from their produce, but that they would also be paid for other vitally important roles that anybody caring for land has always played, which is to be a steward of healthy ecosystems functions?
Gregory: Yeah.
Daniel: You’re effectively creating a second income stream for anybody working the land.
Gregory: Second and third, because they also will own the data that’s associated with their land as well.
Daniel: If people use that data, they have yet another one.
Gregory: Yes. If Rezatec wants to source ground-truth data from Africa to create an algorithm about the biomass production in order to generate some carbon trading scheme, there’s a lot of reasons why that data might be valuable to certain people to train algorithms. Yeah. The farmers who own that can essentially sell it. It adds two income streams to a land steward. One is the information about their land that they’re generating and that is associated with their identity in the system, and the other is the public goods generated through their stewardship outcomes.
Daniel: How far are you from being able to gift this to the world?
Gregory: We will have the platform ready for the main net launch at the end of this year, but we’re probably going to postpone the launch until maybe February of 2020 because launching in the middle of the holidays is crazy.
Daniel: Wonderful. Wow. That’s really fast going. When I talked with Christian Shearer, it was last year at the reporting of the Caux Conference. The timeline was further away, so you’ve achieved what you’re trying to do faster than you thought it would take.
Gregory: We’ll see, right? I actually think we’ve been shooting for a quarter four for 2019 launch pretty much the whole time, I think. Maybe it was just that it seemed so far off back then, which it was. We’re in the active pilot. We have autopilot running at Ecuador in the community that I worked with for many, many years. We’re in Cocao. We have a pilot in California, people grazing venues in the peri-urban area doing fuel and oil reduction. We have a pilot running in Australia doing biodiversity offsets. There’s a number of different pilots. Right now, where we at, we’re really just trying to focus on a single agreement type, a single contract type, a single user class of people who are on the funder side, who have something that they need that we can scale and get adoption. We’ve done a lot of broad work, testing different pieces. We have a clear roadmap format on the platform on the blockchain level, what needs to be built, and how it will all function. We’re on our third test net. We have already 35 of the 50 nodes that we’re going to be launching that are up and running, and there’s a distributed global computing system running a test net right now. We’re running through its paces and everyone’s trying to crash it in different ways. There’s a lot moving. It’s been quite an experience. I’m not a technologist. I don’t have a background in software engineering. It’s been an interesting endeavor beyond my capability. [laughter]
Daniel: Yeah, but you pulled the team together that made it capable, which is amazing. Hats off. Particularly when it’s not yours [01:26:08–01:26:11 inaudible] thing to bring the right people to make this happen. The core idea that we need to find a way to double pay the stewards of the land for the most important piece of their work, which is not just to suck a little bit of produce out of that land, but to actually heal the land, and improve it, and maintain it. That was a brain fart for me a few years back. I didn’t have the hotspot to actually pull together a team and make it happen. I’m really glad you did.
Gregory: What we’re doing is somewhere at the intersection of commons stewardship and a market-driven approach. It’s this very pragmatic way of creating contracts that are logical in today’s market economy that people just use. On the other hand, in order to do that well around the public good, you basically have to set up the whole infrastructure so that all of what we’re doing is open source. The interesting thing here is if people, if communities, would like to engage in setting up commons management agreements with one another that are non-monetized, that simply say — here are the stakeholders, here are the outcomes that we were looking for, here are the stewardship outcomes, here are the consequences, here are the benefits — essentially, what we’re creating is that people can create completely non-monetary agreements with, and either use our platform or fork it, clone it, spin it back up again, and have completely their own community system working. That’s what’s very exciting, which is thinking of people engaging. I have this theory that what we’re creating right now is like training wheels for the re-growth or regeneration of a vestigial organ that has atrophied in humans, which is a cultural organ, not an individual organ, which has to do with the linkage of the perception, and intuition, and understanding of landscape health, and how our cultural rituals and our governance reflect our ability to maintain a right relationship with the world. Right now, we’re building this technological apparatus to do that. I think it’s more like crutches than it is like building a set of legs. The legs are still there, but they are cultural and in an animized, fragmented, market-driven society, the pathway back to having that capacity has to check a number of boxes for people to be able to engage with it. It has to meet people where they’re at. It can be abstract. We can’t demand that people all of a sudden wake up to….
Daniel: I hear you. That’s why I think it’s such wonderful systemic acupunctural system’s aikido that you’re doing there.
[01:30:00]
Daniel: I think that a lot of people who are trying to turn their big companies around at the moment — what I keep bumping into are all these consultants who want to sell to people “I can turn you into a regenerative company” — I think that is actually an over-promise in an economic system that is structurally degenerative. How do we, on the one hand, create mechanisms (like you just described) that pick people up where they are at and work with the system as it is right now, but also understanding that we’re actually do need the fundamental redesign of our economic and monetary system? It’s structured around a zero-sum game that needs losers in order for other people to win. We can potentially redesign at that level as well.
Gregory: Maybe. Maybe not. The question is — does the deer who gets eaten by the wolf — is the deer a loser?
Daniel: In a very limited biological understanding of how life works as a planetary process. We get trapped in being very speciesist, or individualist, in how we define success. Life is actually a planetary process. That doesn’t help the deer at that moment.
Gregory: Right. My sense is, as we approach the redesign — and maybe this is where there would be some substantive argument between myself and the founders of Holochain like Arthur Brock (maybe not, maybe I’m not correct about that) — the key question here is not how to erase rivalries dynamics in human society. The key question is how to make, no matter what the outcome of these rivalries dynamics are for the individuals involved, for systemic regeneration to be the emergent result of any and all rivalries engagements. A deer getting eaten by a wolf is regenerative for the ecosystem. That is, I guess, part of our aim at Regen Network, in an abstracted way. If you think about it at a couple of levels of abstraction, is using game theory and economic realities to create a situation where there are still rivalries competing dynamics, but the results of winning or losing is that the system itself of life gets healthier which is right now emergent. The system that gets healthier right now with rivalries competition in the business world is the system of world-eating capitalism. That’s what gets healthier. The rivalries dynamics themselves — businesses competing to build a better product or consultants competing to give a better service, or what we’re trying to do, farmers competing to be the most ecological regenerative (which is I think very fun if you have a whole bunch of people competing to do, that would be brilliant) — I think it would be a mistake to try to short-circuit the impulse for people to be competing, in some way.
Daniel: Absolutely. I often use this metaphor that I tell people that in our storytelling of how life works, it’s not that competition doesn’t exist, but the competition is really what we pay attention to. It’s like the loud waves on the surface of the ocean when you stand in front of the Pacific and you hear the waves crashing. You could easily think that the ocean is all about the waves, but really symbiosis and the process of negentropy, the centrophic process of life creating conditions conducive to life as a planetary process, is so much more vast than competitions that fine-tune it on the surface. It doesn’t mean that competitions don’t exist.
Gregory: That’s the experience. The experience is somehow the competition. The easiest experience on this superficial level for people to connect. I think that’s a beautiful metaphor, Daniel. The metaphor of standing on the ocean and asking — is the nature of the ocean these waves you’re hearing? Even Charles Darwin understood that.
Daniel: Completely, and it has been misquoted ever since.
Gregory: Yeah. He never used the term “survival of the fittest.” He used the term “survival of the fit.” What he meant by that is how well does the organism fit. More often than not, as you’re saying, that means reciprocity, symbiosis, and cooperation because that’s how you achieve fit. The world just can’t do without you. [laughter]
Daniel: One thing that I want to quickly check. As you launch the network earlier next year and you also have the next-stage plan already. One thing that I can see, for example, a conversation that I would like to help facilitate at some point and there’s no rush. I think you’re busy enough getting things launched is, for example, Willem Ferwerda’s work with the Commonland Foundation. Wilhelm’s really committed and this form-return strategy, three landscapes, 20 years, is a wonderful way of communicating to people, what to some extent is abstraction basic permaculture principles or basic ecological restoration principles, but it does bring a lot more people in. I feel like what you’re generating or what you’re creating, as a tool, is going to turbo-boost the impulse that Commonland is trying to bring.
Gregory: I hope so. I would love to work with Commonland. Actually, the pilot in Australia is a subsidiary of Commonland, not-for-profit affiliate. We had the opportunity to test some things there and go back and have a conversation with the mothership as it were and say, “Hey, this is what went well. This is what we can improve. What does it look like to roll this out at the landscape scale?” The work that John Lieu is doing…
Daniel: He sits in a very, almost homeopathic way, with how Commonland helped spoon ELC to some extent. For me, the relationship is exemplified with the ecosystem’s restoration camp in southern Spain. It’s six hectares. The Alvalab project, which is the Commonland project in southern Spain, is one million hectares. The power of educational impulse that comes with the ELC is wonderful. Today, I’ve been on the call with John because earlier last week John said — everyone was talking about the Amazon and the fires and the social media attention that particularly Amazonian fires have gotten — he was saying, “Can we set up a camp in Brazil quickly?” I’ve put him in touch with some people that already have large-scale ecosystems restoration projects that would be ideal. What I always find is that we need to work in a scale-linking way and I think your technology would enable that in a huge way. On the one hand, we have more projects on the ground, but from the beginning see them in these larger landscape transformation processes that Commonland is having.
Gregory: and even having agreements on both scales, yeah. I think that that’s a fantastic approach. We’re trying to build tools that are be custom-built for that particular audience in order to supercharge the work that we’re doing, in order to make it simpler to cross the bridge between a commons management approach where, with the access to the tools, you could make agreements.
[01:40:00]
Gregory: You can monitor and verify, and steward a complex ecological commons with a complex social system, a complex set of stakeholders, and also be able to translate, as appropriate, ecological outcomes up into financial instruments and market systems because we have to build a bridge between sovereign wealth-funds and the huge flows of the financial capital back into living capital. That has to be a return of that money, and then the generation of a new set of capital assets that are linked to, and derivatives of, the heath that’s being stewarded. I think that’s a really exciting way to bring liquidity to the global regenerative movement more broadly and in a way, at least in the short term, to harness financial capital markets. I personally can’t think of any better or more feasible way in the next 10 years we have to do a huge amount of work. As you’ve said in the next 30 years, we have to be really on our game as a global civilization in taking local actions and local regenerative results. That’s going to take a whole bunch of money and a transformation of a lot of people’s livelihoods.
Daniel: About 30 trillion a year, according to some friend of mine who calculated it.
Gregory: Right. If you think about how that looks like in terms of a transformation and change, it will be a financial bubble that makes the .com boom look tiny, and that makes the housing bubble in the US look tiny. That’s how financial markets work. To think that won’t be a bubble, I think, is wishful thinking. It will be. There’s nothing more interesting than linking the greed competition like driver to ecological health. If we are all competing to be the most optimal ecologically for the next 30 years and there’s a big financial bubble around that, and the people are speculating and they’re putting millions and billions of dollars into different ways of achieving ecological regeneration because it’s going to be the next big thing, then it’s happened.
Daniel: What you’ve just said brings it back to an Israeli port and what we measure and how we measure the qualitative aspects.
Gregory: That’s right. It has to be done now.
Daniel: One of the things that has popped on my radar recently because I keep repeating this talking piece around not getting trapped in quantities-only measures is how we work with the qualities of the systems. Have you come across Blue Model of Evaluation?
Gregory: Yeah.
Daniel: I’m only starting to look at it, but it seems to me it’s also a piece in that larger puzzle.
Gregory: I haven’t dug super deeply in, but I’ve come across their work. I don’t remember where maybe in reporting 3.0 context. I’m not sure. Maybe Bill sent it my way.
Daniel: If you’re connected to any conversations within the regenerative community’s network and Steward Cohen and those guys from the Capital Institute — they’re edging a lot closer to it — and Glen Page is working with it a lot in Maine. I thought I just drop it with you because I think it might just be useful to your team as well.
Gregory: Yeah, cool. We’ll definitely check it out. I think there’s a couple of pieces here. One is in general, my thinking about this is that actually, this is one of the layered markets that we’re trying to assemble, which is a competition around what gets measured, and how it gets measured, and how that translates into what Norah Bates would call “a warm data approach.” Are you familiar with her work?
Daniel: Yeah.
Gregory: Are we answering the right questions with these approaches? If there’s a friendly competition around that, it drives a huge amount of innovation. If we get stuck and stagnant in a situation where there’s one way and that is the way, then I think it will start to trend towards eco-fascist nightmare that you’re talking about. This is the way that we measure. This is the way that we make decisions based on that measurement. If that’s the singular monolith, it will be, I think, problematic.
Daniel: I really loved your answer to that in terms of being willing to disrupt your own system and question your own system as often as possible. Most technologies have that problem that earlier the decisions and designs [01:46:09–01:46:13 inaudible] rather than questions whether the water is running in the right grove? If you understand the metaphor. It’s really important to revisit over and over again — are we measuring the right thing? — and to do it with valuing the human complexity of being able to assess health. Like you were saying, “It’s a set of crutches that is trying to help the atrophied but existing organ.” Our ability as part of nature and landscape, another part in a really holistic sensing feeling, intuitive, and thinking way to assess the health and wholeness of our communities, ecosystems, and everything is still vague. How do we value these more subjective experiences, bring them into an inter-subjective consensus of a number of people doing it, and run that against whatever the current measured proxy in the system is to make sure that we’re still on track?
Gregory: Yeah, exactly. The interesting thing about distributed ledger technology, broadly Blockchain, Holochain, Bitcoin or whatever it might be, is that all of it is social technology, interestingly enough. It is only useful if a group of people decide that it’s useful. It is only useful to the extent that there are developers who are engaging to upgrade the code and that there are people engaged in the governance of the system. There’s a derivative process out of that, that there’s a magnet, which is a common currency which relates to the technology and a bundle of assumptions about the world. I think, at Regen Network, we’re doing our best to source that generation of a new derivative value, which is the right to participate in the network that creates a global ledger of land health, land state, and makes it possible to make agreements on that, and sparks (we hope) competition between members of the network and beyond, around being the most ecologically regenerative, providing the most accurate proxy data, and providing the most rigor in approach on how we make claims. If there’s a strong enough community that holds those values and has a common unit of measurements around currency that gives you the right to participate in that and is a symbol of the social contract that we can then in a non-prescriptive way, without any single person (anybody’s idea’s welcome to throw them in and compete with them as long as they are moving towards that same goal) we can unleash a lot of what I would consider to be stagnation at this nescient state of the planetary regeneration movement, which is that there’s still no arena where the ideas to compete against one another in actualizing bioregional or planetary regeneration so we just argue with each other about it.
[01:50:00]
Gregory: What a joyful race to be in — who can most effectively regenerate a bioregion? Is it through a story of place mechanism or are we doing something at the Biomimicry Institute? Who cares really at the end of the day? Let’s see what actually works and let’s have a common unit to measure that in a way so that we can just sit around in our yearly gatherings and congratulate each other. Humans are humans. There will all the little weird competitions and social dynamics. Great. That’s just part of being in the village. For better or for worse. That’s at least my experience of being human.
Daniel: As a deep lesson from the regenerative lineage and gospel, it will be different for each place and each bioregion because it has to come out of that place. As a loop to the beginning of our conversation since we have been in it for two hours now — how to contribute to the global conversation and rebuilding of that atrophied muscle of being healers by nature, of really taking the potential that is within us as conscious reflections of the whole that we also emerge from, to contribute health and wholeness and wellbeing to it? That needs a lot of global learning across continents. Technology is wonderful. Without Zoom having created this wonderful technology we’re just using, we wouldn’t have had this conversation so easily. Both of us have immediate personal life to get back to. How to find the tension between both of them? For me, this has been wonderful, wildly rich, and now I also want right about now to check on my daughter and see if she’s about to go to bed, and what I can do in that world. I’ve noticed a lot in my conversations with the people of the regenerative community’s network, and a couple of institutes, an impulse of connecting all these bioregional impulses around “we’re going to create an example of a bioregional, regenerative economy.” Creating these peer-to-peer learning networks where they can all come together and learn from each other, it’s hugely important and it creates a movement and it creates energy behind this impulse. And it could, in the worst case, create some form of predatory delay because it could slow people down to actually engage with the messy work in their bioregion that they were about to embark on when they got sidetracked by too many zoom calls about “how are we going to do this?” rather than doing it and learning by doing. That’s certainly the paradox that I sit in with at the moment a lot. This advocation network building, global weaving, communicating ideas because they ignite people — all of that is really powerful work. It’s also really important to stay in integrity with practicing what I preach. That’s why I’m trying to get more community ways and regional ways.
Gregory: Yeah, I’m excited for the next time we chat. I image we’ll have lots of stories from the journey of engaging there in Majorca.
Daniel: Yes, let’s have another chat on that. I’m actually writing up eight years of all the things I have done and I’m amazed how all of it does add up. I felt like I didn’t do enough locally and I realized that I actually have.
Gregory: Yeah, awesome. Daniel, it’s been beautiful to connect after all these years of following you. I’m grateful for your work as a weaver, and a leader, and an inviter into the world we need to create. I’m super grateful.
Daniel: The gratitude definitely goes both ways. You’re one of the people I’ve learned from along the way and I hope to learn more with in the future
Gregory: Yeah. Have a beautiful evening. Bye.
