environment

The 45th annual E.F. Schumacher Lecture will be given on Saturday, November 22, at 3 pm EST, by Samantha Power and Tyler Wakefield, Co-Founders of The BioFi Project, a leading “think-and-do tank” dedicated to novel finance infrastructures and strategies to support bioregional economies. 

The Biofi Project collaborates with bioregional organizing teams across the Americas—from the Amazon Headwaters to Salmon Nation—to prototype a new generation of financial institutions rooted in place, reciprocity, and planetary repair.

Samantha Power is a regenerative economist, systems futurist, and bioregionalist who co-authored the book Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet. Her work focuses on building a new layer of global financial architecture: place-based institutions designed to serve rapid, radical regeneration. For over a decade, Samantha has pursued one central question: “How do we change where money flows so it supports, rather than destroys, life?”

Isabel Carlisle is a leading figure in bioregional education and action who has a great term for describing the planetary eco- mayhem now underway -- “Gaia on the move.” As climate change intensifies and humankind disrupts ecosystems, Gaia is causing ice caps and glaciers to melt and the atmospheric jet stream to skitter and shift course. The Amazonian forest becoming a net emitter rather than absorber of atmospheric carbon 

As these system-changes disrupt local ecosystems, through coastal flooding for example, Carlisle sees cues for how to move forward. The disruptions “reveal where the fragility is,” said Carlisle, and that’s where to focus attention.

“By working into those points of fragility, we think we can flip them around and make them leverage points for change,” she said. “We can start to demonstrate the value of bioregioning and what it is.” 

Carlisle founded and now directs the Bioregional Learning Centre in Devon, England, in 2017. Over the past eight years, she and a modest team have taken a leading role in mobilizing bioregional action at practical, strategic, and policy levels. One sentence nicely captures the group’s mission: “We generate trust through partnership, resource others, lay out pathways for practical action, inspire and demonstrate.” 

The Bioregional Learning Center (BLC) is chiefly concerned with improving the resilience of its own regional ecosystem in southwest England. But it has also become an important node in the global network of bioregional activists. BLC hosted a major virtual conference on bioregioning in 2022, which helped re-energize a field of activism that had been somewhat dormant since its  heyday in the late 1970s and 1980s. 

Look behind the glitz and glamour of global fashion, and you will find an ecologically harmful, anti-social industry largely unable to shed its capitalist dynamics. Its factories generate huge amounts of pollution and rely on underpaid, abused sweatshop labor. Fast fashion fills up landfills with mountains of cheap clothing discarded after a few uses. To keep consumption and sales going, fashion's relentless marketing machine peddles fantasies of luxury, rail-thin bodies, and sex appeal. 

While this juggernaut may seem unstoppable, a brave and hardy band of creative insurgents is pioneering entirely new models of textile production, garment design, production and distribution. Their goals are to rehumanize and relocalize garment production, and to escape the hamster wheel of endless consumerism and economic growth. 

To get a better sense of what this grassroots global movement looks like, I recently spoke with British designer/ecologist/activist Zoe Gilbertson on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #56). 

Gilbertson has worked in the fashion industry for more than 20 years -- for an athletic shoemaker in Germany, a major outdoor clothing brand in Canada, and eventually at her own startup company. But it slowly dawned on her that the ecological performance of major fashion houses was painfully modest if not an outright marketing deception. 

Inspired by climate activists, coursework at Schumacher College in Devon, England, and by her father -- who helped start the fair trade movement -- Gilbertson decided to take a deeper plunge. With support from a Churchill Fellowship, she began an in-depth research project to explore the feasibility of bioregional fiber production. She wanted to figure out ambitious, practical ways of  transforming fashion from the ground up (literally!). 

I didn't know Stephan Harding well, but the fruits of his work -- especially his books and Schumacher College -- have influenced me a lot. It is with sadness that I'd like to note that Harding, a brilliant zoologist and ecologist who pioneered many novel ideas about a living Earth, passed away on September 2 at age 71. 

Harding was often mentioned in the same breath as James Lovelock, the environmental scientist and Gaia theorist with whom he closely worked. Dr. Harding was also revered as the "wisdom-keeper and guardian" of Schumacher College's vision and mission, as a Wikipedia entry notes, no doubt because he showed a quiet resolve, courage, and imagination in his scholarship and teaching.

Harding helped found Schumacher College in 1991 with Satish Kumar and other progressive activists and scholars. Based in Devon, England, the College was a storied hothouse that hosted legendary thinkers such as Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, Matthew Fox, Joanna Macy, Vandana Shiva, Jonathan Porritt, Charlene Spretnak, George Monbiot, and Helena Norberg Hodge. 

Over the course of more than three decades, the College produced more than 20,000 alumni who learned about, and helped develop, the fields of ecology, philosophy, climate science, economics, design, art, and sustainability. A wonderful video from 1994 shows Harding explaining the mission and ambitions of Schumacher College. 

One of the most encouraging recent developments has been the resurgence of bioregional thinking. About four decades ago, in the late 1970s and 1980s, there was a huge public appetite for re-imagining the economy, eco-stewardship, and lifestyles around natural bioregions, but it gradually waned with the advance of neoliberal ideology. Now bioregionalism is emerging again, with much more force and sophistication.

A great deal of vanguard leadership, then and now, has come from activists, academics, and social innovators in the Pacific Northwest. They are often associated with the term Cascadia, which is the name they've adopted for the bioregion stretching from British Columbia and southeast Alaska to Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, and Northern California. The area encompasses more than 750,000 square miles of old growth rain forests, volcanoes, and wild habitats for salmon, wolves, bear, whale and orca – and 16 million people. 

Cascadia activism is part of a larger global movement that wants to reinvent markets, cultures and identities to sync with regional ecosystems. It's a bold, long-term effort to persuade modern societies to honor their ecological gifts and mindfully inhabit the distinctive places in which they live. It’s also about trying to transcend arbitrary political boundaries and global markets, building instead a world that revolves around a region's particular hydrology, weather, plants, and wildlife, and to develop economies, cultures, and ways of being that complement that landscape.

As the renaissance of bioregionalism gains momentum, I wanted to learn more, especially about the most promising strategies and challenges. I turned to Brandon Letsinger, a Seattle organizer who was founding director of CascadiaNow!  – an incubator of grassroots, community-centered projects – and more recently, cofounding director of the Cascadia Department of Bioregion.  Our conversation is featured in my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #54). 

The conservation movement has always lived within the contractions of the capitalist political economy. Much of it celebrates the global system of market growth, private property, and profit-making while trying, in irregular, PR-driven ways, to compensate for the appalling ecological destruction of this system by creating nature preserves. 

More recently, the conservation establishment has explicitly come to embrace market-based forms of conservation, such as eco-tourism, hunting, and the patenting of exotic plant genes. Land is recast as "natural capital" and made to pay tribute to markets to assure its own protection.

The problem with both of these approaches to conservation is that they regard humans as entirely separate from nature, a premise that is biologically absurd. 

So what if humanity instead were to begin to see itself as an integral, engaged part of nature – a force that could engage respectfully with more-than-human life and even restore and regenerate it?

That's the vision that Bram Büscher, an activist-scholar in The Netherlands, has for reinventing conservation. As Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University, he wants to move beyond the extractive logic of capitalism itself to develop a more commons-based approach  that changes the very premises of how land is protected.  

Büscher's vehicle for this mission is an ambitious, newly launched international project, the Convivial Conservation Centre.  

A growing legion of renegade conservationists, ecologists, farmers, activists, and academics have joined him in rejecting the idea of "fortress protection" for land, through wilderness preserves, as well as the idea of converting landscapes into money-making "natural capital." Convivial conservation wants new practices and policies that can reintegrate people with nature in constructive ways, nourishing wholeness, while addressing the eco-pathologies of capitalism itself.

The idea that the Ganges River in India or the Amazon Basin in Brazil should have "legal personhood" – and thus be able to defend its interests in court – was considered zany only ten or fifteen years ago, at least in Europe and North America. Now this once-fringe legal concept is going mainstream. Legislatures or courts in twelve countries have recognized the "rights of nature" at the state, local, and/or national levels in a dozen nations. In the United States alone, some three dozen communities –from Pittsburgh and Toledo to Orange County, Florida (population 1.5 million people) – have enacted such laws, often with overwhelming public support. Ecuador now has a constitutional provision recognizing the rights of nature.

It's somewhat surprising that unorthodox legal concept has taken root and developed so quickly. After all, western jurisprudence generally privileges private property rights over nature, humanity over plants and wildlife, and individual rights over collective rights. So how have conventional systems of law come to accept the daring idea that natural systems are alive and deserving of legal protection?

A lot can be learned from the impressive legal work of Thomas Linzey, a fiercely creative attorney who has not only pioneered the rights of nature, but developed legal doctrines for "community rights" and more recently, "self-owned land." (More about both of those in a moment.)

Linzey, based in Spokane, Washington, is Senior Legal Counsel at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, where he has been a leading champion of community empowerment and the rights of nature for more than twenty years. Previously, at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, Linzey had argued for "community rights" as a legal response to corporate abuses such as fracking and water pollution.

In Episode #40 of my Frontiers of Commoning podcast, I quizzed Linzey about his legal hacks that attempt to protect ecosystems and communities in novel ways.

Disaffected with his way of life in the US and concerned about the multiple ecological crises bearing down on humankind, Joe Brewer set off on a journey to learn what he might be able to do. He had considerable background in the earth sciences, studied cognitive linguistics and philosophy, and had worked with the activist group, The Rules. But restoring an entire ecosystem would be a novel challenge.

In 2019, Brewer ended up in Barichara, Colombia, with his wife and infant daughter, where he soon found himself helping to catalyze a "living laboratory of regeneration" of a degraded landscape, an arid tropical forest, in the northern Andes.  Ninety percent of the forest in the region's one million acres had been cut down, causing the once-fertile food forest to dry out and become a desert.

How does one begin to restore such a profoundly degraded landscape? 

As a newcomer to the region, Brewer quickly realized that there were many great local projects underway, but their practitioners barely knew of each other's existence. So he slowly waded in, forming relationships with farmers and eco-players, and bringing them into closer communication with each other. Brewer also relied on the principles of permaculture, closely observing the patterns and cycles of the ecosystem to try to identify what it needed to begin to flourish and sustain itself.

Fortunately, Brewer had learned a great deal about earth sciences through former affiliations with the International Centre for Earth Simulation, the Center for Complex Systems Research at the Uni­versity of Illinois, the ­Cultural Evolution Society, the Rockridge Institute, and the Evolution Institute. 

But for Brewer, reclaiming the ecosystem was not some abstract exercise or supervisory challenge. It was personal and gritty. In April 2020, one month after the pandemic lockdowns in Colombia, Brewer would sneak out of his house to the edge of town, and start to dig "contour swales" in the side of the mountain. These are horizontal irrigation ditches perpendicular to the flow of water that help catch rain water and encourage it to sink into the soil. 

As humanity hurtles inexorably toward a steady-state, no-growth economy, whether by choice or the imperatives of climate collapse, the idea of sharing electricity on a global scale is becoming more relevant than ever. Such an infrastructure would deliver huge benefits. It would spur adoption of renewable energy and reduce carbon emissions while making the world's power systems more flexible and resilient.

The systems thinker and maverick architect Buckminster Fuller first proposed the World Grid idea in the 1970s. While the idea was daringly futuristic then, it garnered some serious attention. When the World Grid concept was presented by Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau to then-USSR premier Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet technical experts concluded that the concept was "feasible" and "desireable."

The point of a world electrical grid is to re-engineer hub-and-spoke transmission networks designed for central power plants so that electricity can be easily transmitted between daytime to nighttime regions of the world, and between the Global North and South. The infrastructure would make it more feasible for countries to rely on renewable energy because the grid would solve the problem of intermittent energy flows (no solar energy can be generated at nighttime; the wind is not always blowing).

For years, Greg Watson, Director of Policy and Systems Design at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, has been leading an effort to integrate the world's electricity production and distribution into a single network of networks. The World Grid's design would loosely resemble the design of the Internet, whose standard protocols enable different types of networks to interconnect and share on a global scale.

Since publishing Doughnut Economics in 2017, renegade British economist Kate Raworth has become a phenomenon that mainstream economics largely declines to acknowledge but increasingly cannot ignore. Her book has been praised by the Pope, the UN General Assembly, and Extinction Rebellion, and translated into over 20 languages. Guardian columnist George Monbiot calls the book “brilliant, thrilling and revolutionary,” comparing it to John Maynard Keynes’ bravura General Theory book, which revolutionized economics in 1936. 

Raworth’s reconceptualization of the economy as a doughnut accents two features that should be at the center of any economy: the ability to meet everyone’s basic human needs (the inner ring of the doughnut) and the ability to stay within the ecological “carrying capacity” of Earth (the outer ring). 

The framework doesn’t sound so controversial. But when I spoke to Raworth for my podcast Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #15), I was astonished to learn that the economics profession, at least within the academy, has largely ignored her book despite its popularity. Scholars in development studies, political science, and architecture are keenly interested, she notes, as are countless students, activists, and city governments. The cities of Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Brussels, among others, have actually embraced “the doughnut” as a way to guide their municipal policies and programs.