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.
Beloved Community Circles is a network of small groups who make commitments to engage in spiritual practice and healing together and to participate in mindful action.
Trickster mythologies often teach us about the necessity for human culture to embrace and maintain a relationship with the marginal wilds of the natural world and the soul itself. In countless fairy tales, an ailing kingdom is revived by a heroine or hero taking a journey beyond its boundaries. The medicine needed most is almost always found in the dark forest, not in the comforting lights of home.
I was 25 years old when I witnessed human misery for the first time. It was 2008, and I had moved to a remote city in the underprivileged state of Maranhão, in Northeast Brazil. Despite moving with the illusion of building a new life, the harsh realities of extreme poverty and structural violence expanded my worldview in ways I couldn’t imagine.
Economics is a scary word. It has this way of making basic, critical questions of life—How shall we spend our time? Who gets access to which resources?—seem impenetrable, none of our business and, of all things, boring.
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.
Although the physical reforestation we undertake is, of course, important, it is secondary to healing the sacred relationship between people and Mother Earth. The loss of the sacred stems from the mistaken belief that we are separate—from Nature, from each other, from anything.
The Diaspora Coalition’s medicinal herb production project interconnects communities which grow their own plant medicine at the hyper-local level.
The ongoing creation of River Walk also speaks to the human element. It marks the confluence of ecological renewal, environmental and social justice, the underpinnings of the industrial revolution, and the vitality of a downtown.