What if the humble dandelion, derided as a "weed," can be a model for regenerating the entire Earth? It may be able to show us how to start organizing ourselves in a world that is increasingly descending into turmoil.
Now is the time to prepare for the storm that's coming and to work on birthing a new world that wants to emerge. The Dandelion Strategy for 1,000 Bioregional Learning Centers (BLCs) is a key stream in the Living Flows Fund. It's inspired by nature, practical, and groundwork has already been laid throughout the last several years in the Design School for Regenerating Earth. In other words, this isn't theory – it's already happening on the ground.
Understanding Evolution
We need to understand how living systems adapt and change to understand what the Dandelion Strategy is and why it works.
Simply put, there are a diversity of traits in any population. The traits that are better adapted to a given environment will tend to increase and spread in future generations. Traits that are poorly adapted to the context will tend to decline – like green bugs in an environment where birds are partial to eating the green bugs.
This is important because right now the human population of roughly 8 billion people has many diverse cultures. Some of these cultures – like those of Indigenous Peoples emphasizing ecological practices – are inherently regenerative, and thus well-adapted to support life in the future. Most cultures in the world today aren't regenerative. In fact, they're profoundly unsustainable and poorly adapted to the future.
Increasing ecological and social pressures are going to lead to rapid shrinking as unsustainable cultures die out. The question is a statistical one: What proportion of future cultural diversity will be regenerative, and how many regenerative cultures will there be after the population decline? If the unsustainable cultures die out, and take many regenerative cultures down with them, it's possible that the number goes to zero. This would mean all sustainable human cultures go away – and we arrive at the extinction of our species. That's a sobering thought.
So, how do we increase the number and diversity of regenerative cultures in the world – to hedge our risks in a collapsing world? This brings us to the Dandelion Strategy for regenerating the Earth.
Learning from the Dandelion
Dandelions, bright yellow flowers that look like little bursts of sunshine on the ground, symbolize persistence, resilience, and survival.
Today, you can find dandelions around the world; but this wasn't always the case. Originally native to Europe and Asia, they made their way to temperate regions as their roots took hold in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and even parts of the Middle East like Turkey. They can grow just about anywhere, from fields and forests to barren wastelands and burn sites.
Dandelions play an integral role in ecosystems. Because they're among the first to flower in the spring, they're an important early source of nourishment for many creatures including bees, beetles, butterflies and even birds like sparrows and goldfinches. Humans rely on them, too; they've been used through the ages as medicine to heal upset stomachs, asthma, and skin conditions. Their young leaves in salads are rich in vitamins and antioxidants, and their flowers can be turned into wine.
Dandelions can take root in places that seem little short of miraculous, even emerging from cracks in concrete. They're fast growers and have a long lifespan – the roots sink in deeper over the years, and can go down as far as 15 feet.
Dandelions spread primarily through wind-dispersed seeds. Their seeds are some of the best flyers in nature, catching the wind and traveling as far as 100 kilometres. The wind carries them to many different places. Some of the seeds land where they can germinate and take root. Others land, and will wither and die. The key insight for the Dandelion Strategy is that the dandelion has no way of knowing ahead of time which locations work better or how to find them. A dandelion simply pushes out a huge number of seeds that are carried out into the world. Dandelions propagate well because they take root in many unexpected places.
Translated to our planetary predicament, this means we can't know ahead of time which places will be resilient in the face of collapse. The world is just too complex for planning out where to establish regenerative cultural hubs. There are some things we know. There are more things we don't know, especially in an uncertain time. And there are even more things that we don't know we don't know as change happens more rapidly than we can find knowledge and meaning.
Follow the winds of change and seed regenerative cultures in as many places as possible because we don't know which ones will prove viable to survive across the decades of this century. Some of them – retrospectively – will be resilient for reasons we never could have guessed. Collapse is happening and nothing is certain. Extreme weather events are more frequent, social unrest is rising. Ignorance is strength when we know that we don't know which places will succeed. The smart thing to do is disperse seeds and let them fall where they may. Some will germinate and take root. Others will wither and die.
Seeding Regenerative Cultures Through BLCs
Through the Living Flows Fund, we're creating Bioregional Funding Ecosystems, which have as their anchors Bioregional Learning Centers (BLCs).
We follow in the footsteps of the late Donella Meadows, the lead author of Limits to Growth. After the report came out, she held ten years of meetings of The Balaton Group, made up of some of the best sustainability thinkers in the world. They concluded that the only viable strategy was to establish a planetary network of BLCs.
Out came a vision of a number of centers where information and models about resources and the environment are housed. There would need to be many of these centers, all over the world, each one responsible for a discrete bioregion… This will take years, but [the centers] have the potential to transform the way people all over the world think about their [life place] and their options.
— Donella Meadows
This is an approach Joe Brewer shared in The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth and is the approach we've been cultivating in the Design School for Regenerating Earth.
BLCs enable whole-system intelligence, where each bioregion comes to know itself in a holistic manner and can guide itself toward whole-system ecopsychosocial wellbeing (individuals, communities, life systems). A BLC brings together the best of Western science with the knowledge and stories of the people who know the land best, local First Nations. Its activities include sharing bioregional vision and storytelling; creating an accessible knowledge database about the life place; offering learning for all generations and people in different leadership positions; research and evaluation; participatory design and experimentation; community practices and monitoring systems; and ultimately resilience at the holistic scale of the bioregion. Find out more in the short video What is a Bioregional Learning Center?
A BLC is certainly about helping respond to immediate needs in the face of crisis. But more importantly, as global systems unravel, it helps people answer the question, "How do we live in this place now?" It anchors, informs, inspires. As BLCs in various bioregions share learning and support each other, we create translocal resilience for a new world. Humans can live into the story of Bioregional Earth.
1,000 BLCs by 2035
Unlike the dandelion, we as human beings can learn the patterns for how ecology gives rise to holistic systemic patterns at the bioregional scale. We can weave and integrate the cultural and ecological heritage of each life place through coordinated efforts. Contrary to what we read in the headlines, humans are actually really good at cooperating. Just look at how many millions of us can peacefully reside together in modern-day cities. Or look at our capacities to create complex technological innovations through shared management frameworks.
Our approach through the Dandelion Strategy is to focus flows of time, energy, and funding into a planetary network of BLCs. We are seeding as many of them as we can, pooling and distributing resources locally. We also need to aggregate and flow resources across the network, to support learning exchanges and improve resilience at the structural level of the planetary network.
We can cluster regional hubs geographically – like a local network of BLCs in the Great Lakes Basin in North America or around the Mediterranean Sea – so that learning and mutual aid can flow horizontally as well as vertically across local to regional and up to planetary scales.
Now you can begin to see the power of this strategy. We lean into a design pathway for regenerating the entire planet by creating resilience within and across a diversity of local efforts because we don't know which specific places are going to make it through to the other side of collapse.
Between now and 2035, we want to seed 1,000 BLCs into the world. Let them emerge from everywhere. Support them to weave into regional networks. In this way, we create translocal resilience and transformative potential, while dispersing resources far and wide to see what is able to grow.
Why 1,000? The general estimate is that there are somewhere between 500 and 2,000 bioregions on Earth. Estimates vary because each bioregional identity needs to emerge from the local people who live within the natural contours of culture and ecology that define their place. No outsider can map it from afar because that would just replicate the patterns of thinking we have now rather than reconnecting us with the living Earth.
Here's a webinar excerpt explaining the Dandelion Strategy for 1,000 BLCs.
We have precious little time to implement this strategy. Members of the Design School for Regenerating Earth have already started creating their own BLCs in places as diverse as the Great Lakes, Colorado Basin, Mediterranean, Northern Andes, and the North Sea. Perhaps you will become a founder of one where you live? Or learn alongside those who do the heavy lifting and support their efforts? Perhaps you'll be a donor to provide vital financial support? All are welcome.
Dandelion Wisdom
When you're feeling existential, think of dandelions. As you speak your words into what might seem like the wind, you really don't know where they'll go. In the same way, we don't know who will see this page and be moved to act by it. Sometimes an idea in the wind takes root in places we think are impossible for anything to grow, persisting against the odds, nourishing the life around them.
The interesting thing about dandelions is that the flower has to die to change into seed. As the flowers die, one dandelion makes thousands of new flowers. In a dying world, there's something important in that fact.
And finally, as the world gets scarier, it's tempting to bury your head and think only of "saving yourself." As the proverbial plane is about to crash, we need to not only put on our own oxygen mask and help the person beside us with theirs, but we also need to help land the plane as safely as possible. We hear the wealthy are building bunkers. Instead of bunkers, let's build BLCs. Just think about the potential. We hope you'll join us.