“The path to regeneration is not one of domination or control, but of remembering our rightful place within the living Earth.”
—Joe Brewer, The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth (Earth Regenerators Press, 2021)
We are living through a time when the dominant civilization of the industrial age is unraveling, and a new planetary culture is beginning to form. It is not coming from the centers of power or capital, but from the peripheries—where people are rediscovering what it means to belong to place, to each other, and to the living Earth. Among those who have articulated this emergence most clearly is Joe Brewer, whose work has inspired a generation of practitioners to align their lives with the regenerative processes of the biosphere itself.
The Design Pathway: A Roadmap for Humanity’s Maturity
In his book The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth (2021), Joe Brewer offers both a diagnosis and a prescription for our planetary predicament. His central insight is that the crises of climate, biodiversity, and social fragmentation are not separate problems but interwoven symptoms of a civilization that has lost its feedback with the living systems that sustain it. The pathway forward, he suggests, lies not in technical fixes or political reforms alone, but in redesigning our way of living—at every scale—from households and communities to bioregions and the planetary commons.
“The challenge before us,” Brewer writes, “is to evolve a planetary-scale network of regenerative cultures—each rooted in its own bioregion, but sharing a common design pathway.” This design pathway is not a linear plan, but a living process of learning, adaptation, and deep participation in the patterns of life. It draws on ecological literacy, systems thinking, and the wisdom of traditional and indigenous lifeways that have long understood humanity’s role as caretaker rather than conqueror.
This vision resonates strongly with the themes of Possible Planet: that regeneration is not merely about restoring ecosystems, but about cultivating the consciousness capable of living regeneratively. Brewer’s framework gives this idea a clear practical trajectory—how to move from insight to action, from despair to design.
From Earth Regenerators to the Design School
Brewer’s work emerged from a unique synthesis of disciplines—complexity science, cognitive linguistics, cultural evolution, and deep ecology. After years of working on global sustainability initiatives and observing their failures to shift underlying paradigms, he founded Earth Regenerators, an online community devoted to exploring how we might rebuild the capacity for stewardship at the bioregional scale. What began as an informal learning group soon became a living laboratory for regeneration—a global network of practitioners experimenting with projects in Colombia, Kenya, the Philippines, the U.S., and beyond.
From this fertile ground grew the Design School for Regenerating Earth, co-founded by Joe Brewer and Penny Heiple. The Design School is not a conventional institution, but a distributed learning ecosystem—a community of learners and doers cultivating the skills, relationships, and inner development required for planetary healing. For a modest membership—$5 per month or $50 per year—participants gain access to a rich body of teachings, recorded sessions, and live events, all designed to weave together the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of regeneration.
In its first few years, the Design School has produced an extraordinary archive of knowledge and practice. Its YouTube library alone offers hundreds of hours of talks and discussions—from bioregional mapping and watershed restoration to narrative design and cultural healing. Yet beyond the content lies the deeper value: a living pattern of mutual support and collaboration, echoing what Brewer calls “the social mycelium of regeneration.”
The Design Pathway in Practice: Barichara and Beyond
The small town of Barichara, Colombia, has become both a symbol and a prototype for this movement. Nestled in the Andes, it is where Brewer and Heiple settled to live the principles they teach—to regenerate a landscape, revitalize a local culture, and prototype the governance of a regenerative bioregion. There, they have catalyzed reforestation efforts, bioregional planning, and the creation of an ecological learning center that hosts immersive experiences for practitioners from around the world.
When I attended a Barichara immersion in February, I felt firsthand what it means to live inside a regenerative field. The experience was not merely educational—it was initiatory. We worked the land, listened to the elders, shared stories around the fire, and glimpsed what Brewer calls “the scaffolding of a planetary-scale learning ecosystem.” This was the design pathway in embodied form: a convergence of heart, hand, and mind in service of life.
Speaking for the Earth: A New Moral Imagination
Brewer’s more recent work, Speaking for the Earth, extends this design framework into the moral and ethical domain. To regenerate the planet, he argues, we must also regenerate our capacity for empathy with the living world. “The Earth does not need our saving,” he writes. “She needs us to remember that we are part of her voice.” This act of remembering—of reawakening our identity as expressions of Earth—is both spiritual and practical. It grounds the scientific and systemic work of regeneration in a deep moral foundation.
This theme echoes through the Design School community, where participants are encouraged to cultivate not only ecological literacy but also emotional maturity, humility, and reverence. Regeneration begins within—the cultivation of the “inner soil” that allows right relationship to take root.
Networks of Regeneration: The Emerging Bioregional Tapestry
What distinguishes the Design School and its allied initiatives is their commitment to building regeneration at the bioregional scale. Bioregionalism, as explored in earlier chapters, has long been a vision of reinhabiting the places where we live—an idea championed by Peter Berg’s Planet Drum Foundation, the Balaton Group, and others who recognized that ecological boundaries are more meaningful than political ones. Brewer and his collaborators have taken this vision to a planetary level, creating a network of bioregional hubs that learn from and reinforce one another.
This network includes the Legacy Project in Canada, Regenerate Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest, and the global coordination platform BioregionalEarth.org. Together, these initiatives form what Brewer calls a “fractal architecture of planetary regeneration”—a pattern that replicates itself at multiple scales, from the backyard to the biosphere.
As Possible Planet, we are honored to serve as the U.S. fiscal sponsor for the Design School for Regenerating Earth, helping facilitate the flow of philanthropic funds to regenerative projects throughout the Americas. This partnership is both practical and symbolic: it demonstrates the kind of cross-organizational collaboration that regeneration requires—one rooted in trust, reciprocity, and shared purpose.
Fractals of Regeneration: From the Backyard to the Bioregion
The fractal nature of this work becomes tangible in the creation of local organizing hubs—small, self-organizing communities connected through the Design School’s Mighty Networks platform. These hubs serve as focal points for local engagement, where global principles find expression in specific places and projects. Each hub is unique, yet each reflects the same underlying pattern: restoring relationships among people, land, and life.
In the Genesee Finger Lakes bioregion of New York, we are cultivating one such hub. Through gflbioregion.org, we are mapping the ecological and social patterns of our home territory and exploring how regeneration might take root here. Our tiny food forest in Rochester is a living microcosm of this vision—a small act of reinhabitation that mirrors the global effort to restore the web of life. It reminds us that regeneration begins where we are, with what we can touch and tend.
Toward a Regenerative Civilization
What Brewer and his collaborators have initiated is not merely a program or an organization, but a prototype of a new civilization—what he calls a “regenerative planetary culture.” It is emerging organically, through the convergence of thousands of local experiments, each guided by shared principles and mutual learning. It is not managed from the top down, but grown from the bottom up—from living soils, loving communities, and the patient work of restoration.
As we have seen throughout this book, the pathway to a habitable future is not linear or uniform. It is a pattern of emergence, coherence, and resilience—what systems theorists would call a self-organizing process. The Design School for Regenerating Earth embodies this process: a living, evolving ecosystem of people and places learning to speak for the Earth, act on her behalf, and remember ourselves as her children.
In the end, the design pathway is not only a roadmap for planetary regeneration—it is a practice of remembering who we are.
References
- Brewer, Joe. The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth. Earth Regenerators, 2021.
- Brewer, Joe. Speaking for the Earth. Earth Regenerators, 2024.
- Earth Regenerators & Design School for Regenerating Earth (www.designschool.earth).
- BioregionalEarth.org, Regenerate Cascadia, The Legacy Project Canada.
- Genesee Finger Lakes Bioregion (www.gflbioregion.org).