Drawing from systems thinking, indigenous stewardship models, and emerging legal innovations (such as rights of nature and intergenerational governance), the author outlines pathways toward a multi-level trust structure that redistributes authority, redefines prosperity, and embeds long-term ecological resilience at the core of global governance.
The millions of peasants who were forced off their land, losing their communities and means of subsistence, faced a grim reality. Starving, homeless, and bereft of any support system, they became refugees in their own country.
Drawing from systems thinking, indigenous stewardship models, and emerging legal innovations (such as rights of nature and intergenerational governance), the author outlines pathways toward a multi-level trust structure that redistributes authority, redefines prosperity, and embeds long-term ecological resilience at the core of global governance.
Earth has an enormous capacity for regeneration. It’s possible to restore Earth’s natural climate regulating systems through decentralized rain water retention, reforestation and regenerative agriculture. We realized that in times of perpetual government failure to do something about the climate crisis, this good news needed to be spread, urgently.
A bioregion is a coherent geographical entity—a landscape—not politically defined. It has coherent geology, landform types, fauna, flora, rainfall, and human history. So, there's a coherent story that runs through all these layers. When we think about the kinds of "islands of coherence" we need to move forward as a species, bioregions provide that cultural grounding—what was historically true and what we need for the future.
"The destructive capacity of nuclear weapons is beyond imagination, poisoning the Earth forever. These horrific devices place before us every day the decision whether we will be the last human generation. The power to unleash this destruction is in the hands of a small number of people. No one should be holding such power over the very creation, which we regard as a sacred gift for all today and for future generations."
I believe the commons paradigm can help us develop a new social and cultural vision, and new strategies for practical change. Paradoxically enough, redirecting our attention away from conventional politics and policy may offer the most promising possibilities for developing a transformational vision.
Farmers in urban civilizations have always been subject to powers beyond them. Indeed, there is ample evidence that urban civilizations were invariably built on the conquest and subjection of farming cultures. Our current food industry grew out of the defeat of farmers’ efforts in the late nineteenth century to win fair prices for their production.
As I have learned about the social life of trees and the intimate bonds that indigenous peoples have with various lifeforms and rivers – and as I pore through recent ecophilosophy that explains aliveness to the western mind -- I’ve concluded: We really ought to be talking more about animism and commoning.
Some years ago, CapeNature launched a highly successful land acquisition project called the Stewardship Programme. It offers incentives to land owners to make land available for conservation. These Contract Nature Reserves are designed to establish areas and inter-linked corridors of land to promote conservation—and it works.