The long history of humanity has been one of deep harmony with all other life on Earth. But now, we find ourselves out of balance with life itself. All generations alive in this moment have a choice: do we continue to destroy life or do we choose the continuation of life? We can choose to cultivate, steward, regenerate and connect bioregions around the planet. The emergence of Bioregional Earth is this new/old story.
Bioregional Earth isn't a project, initiative, organization, or even a movement. It's something deeper and more profound. Bioregional Earth is a story. It's a story that ultimately we must all steward across generations. It's a story of life that flows in our veins and across watersheds, that exists under the soil and reaches its branches up to the stars. It's the mountain that's been carved by time and the sunsets that paint a new picture every evening. It's everything valuable in us and around us. A story as ancient as time – and more relevant in this moment than ever before.
For the first time in human history, we've created a polycrisis that threatens the entire planet. We need to #ChangeTheStory. There will still be cascades of collapse, but there can also be cascades of resiliency, which is what living into the story of Bioregional Earth is all about.
For humans, story is everything. It defines our species – the ability to pull from both the past and the future in our mind as we create the story we live out in any given moment. We can shift and evolve stories, and by extension our experience of the world. Some moments can change the story of humanity profoundly – like the Earthrise photo, taken by William Anders during Apollo 8 on December 24, 1968. It shifted our perspective on Earth and our place in the universe. Its legacy continues to inspire and remind us of the interconnectedness and miracle that is our planet.
How can you live into the story of Bioregional Earth? If you listen closely to what's deep inside yourself and to the land, you will find the path and it can become your legacy. One meaning of "human" is literally "earthling," from the Latin humus (for ground or earth). We come from stardust, and we will return to the dust.
Only stories will help us to rejoin human to humility to humus, through their shared root. The root that we're looking for here is dhghem: Earth.
— Richard Powers, novelist
We are creatures of the Earth, and we can (re)learn how to be stewards in the ongoing cycle of life on this beautiful planet.
Overstory
The story of Bioregional Earth was born at the 7-Generation Bioregional Earth Summit in 2024. The Summit took place in the Greater Tkaronto Bioregion over six days, with in-person sessions and livestreaming reaching 7,000 people of all ages and backgrounds around the planet.
Here, one of the Co-Stewards of Bioregional Earth, Joe Brewer, talks with philosopher Jonathan Rowson about the meaning of Bioregional Earth, a vital story yet one that's difficult to tell.
The story of Bioregional Earth is at the level of a worldview or Overstory. A civilization is very much about the bigger story we all share over time – the meanings, values, and structures that guide us collectively. To be clear, this isn't a single, written story with a beginning, middle and end. It's a living, multifaceted story that really has no beginning or end, only an ever-evolving middle. It may be expressed and take shape in many ways.
This is also a story that should slide in time. As we re-evaluate stories of history (e.g. North America was "discovered"), three narrative opportunities are in play: the story of what happened (rethinking historical stories, who told them, and from what perspective); the story of what now (if we change our understanding of history, how does that change what we see/value today); and the story of what next (can we find the imagination and courage to see and pursue new possibilities). We have a chance to reconceptualize the past, present, and future.
The story of Bioregional Earth can emerge collectively around the planet through embodied practice, which is what the Design School for Regenerating Earth is doing.
Right Story
Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta talks about right story and wrong story. Wrong story is reductionistic "unilateral or unbalanced ritual, word and thought." It's the overly left-brained, narrow way of attending to the world and being in it that neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist discusses with nuance. If our Overstory is wrong story, then everything we create is wrong story, and we are both trapped and inevitably thwarted by it. Over the last fifty years, we've walked far down the path of wrong story.
Can we find our way from wrong story to right story? Right story is alive. We need to find our way back to being alive. Yunkaporta talks about right story as the "metaphors and relations and narratives of interconnected communities, living in complex, real-world contexts of knowledge and economy and ecology, aligned with the patterns of land and creation. Right story never comes from individuals, but from groups living in right relation with each other and with the land."
From an Indigenous perspective, cultures which have lived in harmony with life for millennia, our first relationship is with the land – in the broadest sense of the soil, water, trees and other plants, and all other living entities on a living planet. It's what's real. Everything flows from that. When we're in right relationship with the land, we learn how to be in right relationship with ourselves and each other. How can we have democracy or peace if we don't respect life itself, which starts with respecting the land from which we come? If we're degrading our Mother the Earth, then it follows that we degrade each other and everything else around us.
A bioregional approach is both a way of doing things and a way of thinking – a terrain of geography AND a terrain of consciousness. The bioregion is a concrete, real-world pathway (geography) toward right story (a shift in consciousness). We can learn from and be/act in right relationship with the land, and in doing so it shifts our consciousness, toward right story. Scientific research tells us that consciousness doesn't shift in the "mind," but through embodied action in relationship. The physical place enables us to get to a better cognitive place.
Moving Toward Right Story
Right story is slow, difficult, and messy, especially when it's surrounded by wrong story. The story of Bioregional Earth is slowly starting to be lived out in bioregions around the planet. From these explorations and experiments, we see some subtle dimensions to the emerging story of Bioregional Earth.
Understanding your bioregion is to see your place as defined by both its natural and human stories – its history as told through watersheds, landforms (mountains, valleys, plain, prairie, forest, desert), soils, native plants and animals, and, finally, the inhabitant human cultures which have become adapted, over time, to life there.
Thinking in terms of bioregions, you start to embrace looser mental boundaries and divisions between places. A bioregional story recognizes the gradual processes of time in the land. It encompasses the contributions of human activities and imagination. It seeks to understand the character, capacities, and limits of a bioregion not only within itself, but as it connects to other bioregions and planetary processes. It's a story that continually slides across scale and time.
It is not enough just to 'love nature' or to want to 'be in harmony with Gaia.' Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place, and it must be grounded in real information and experience.
— Gary Snyder, deep ecologist
The story of Bioregional Earth goes beyond the singular and the sterile – no one calls their home an "environment" or their feeling about their place "anthropocentric" or their connection to place as "ecological." In real life, we feel the interrelationships and live them out every day, even if we're not as aware as we should be. This is about the spirit and sacredness of people in their place.
As you experience your place, you begin to understand that you matter in your place – because you are the one who needs to take care of your place. If you feel like a steward, that automatically implies relationship – because you have to be taking care of something. This story inherently counters feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and disconnection.
The outer work is important in this story, as is the inner work. It's about digging into the soil as well as our own souls – about healing as much as (re)learning. Drawing on Prosocial research, two important personal capacities we need to develop in the face of change and uncertainty in the world are the regulation of emotions and psychological flexibility. These capacities will make the unprecedented collaboration we need for Earth regeneration more possible.
We do need to be cautious about how dearly we clutch our story of place so that we don't perpetuate a reductionistic, polarized worldview (wrong story). We need to understand our bioregion fully in ecological terms, with an ecological worldview. We need to take into our very being that everything is connected to everything else, and what we do to one part of life we do to ourselves. To remain a viable long-term vision, the story of Bioregional Earth must see the personal and local as inextricably embedded in the planetary.
Right Relationship
We talk about the story of Bioregional Earth as being about ecopsychosocial wellbeing. In Indigenous terms, this might be expressed as being in right relationship within Natural Law for a good life.
Bioregional Earth is grounded in Indigenous knowledge as well as science. From Western science, the story of Bioregional Earth is about being in balance with life and understanding the fundamental facts of physics and Planetary Boundaries. From Indigenous cultures, the story of Bioregional Earth is about right relationship with the land, ourselves, and each other. Our role is to take care of the living world, to be conscious stewards of life. Indigenous scholar Lyla June Johnston shows that Indigenous Peoples didn't just inhabit the land, they enriched it.
Joe Brewer and Dan Longboat, of the Indigenous Environmental Institute at Trent University in the Greater Tkaronto Bioregion, shared a powerful conversation about Finding a Third Way. That conversation helps lay a foundation for how we can steward the story of Bioregional Earth. Will we choose to continue to destroy life or will we choose the continuation of life? As Longboat says, the choice is ours.
We Are Stories
Story by story, we create our world. We are stories – and so stories become our most powerful sources of wayfinding in an uncertain time. The stories we create and share are everything. Research in marketing, politics, and social change shows the thing is far less important than the story of the thing. As our stories crumble, we crumble – individually and collectively. People are feeling fear and uncertainty about what the future holds for them and even the human species. Deep narratives from our past are breaking down and we're trying to recraft them.
If we can individually and collectively make some good sense, we can act in ways that make sense. Story is the most effective way human beings have to navigate through the world, find psychological cover, nurture healing, imagine possibilities, pass values on to generations that follow us. Stories can tell us about places other than the here and now. They present us with situations we haven't experienced and may never experience. Stories bring mental order to chaos, some meaning to the seemingly meaningless. Stories also provide us with a collective decision-making matrix.
"The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."
— Muriel Rukeyser, poet
The dangerous thing about story – especially wrong story – is that it doesn't matter if a story isn't true. It doesn't even matter if people don't really believe it. What matters is that people coordinate around the story – that the story is told and heeded. So tending right story is vital.
The other problem with stories is when we substitute telling them for meaningful action to deal with the real issues the stories are about. Most people trained in Western institutions have been taught to depend on abstracted reason. Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, live in embodied story. The stories are archetypal, dynamic, and constantly evolving in context. We think that abstracted description is a higher form of knowledge, but then we struggle with how to go from the abstraction to "implementation" in the real world. If you start with lived experience on the land in the living world – something you can touch and feel and tell – those stories will help us find our way.
During the 7-Generation Bioregional Earth Summit, an Indigenous speaker simply asked, "Can we just start with the Indigenous stories?" Indeed, that's where we're most likely to find right story.
In this moment, stories that bring us together and help us see our collective power are essential when we need unprecedented collaboration. We need more than the individualistic notion of The Hero's Journey. We need something more relational and dynamic. Systems thinker Nora Bateson asks, Who can I be when I'm with you? You are only a "me" in the context of a "we" – family, friends, partners, neighbors, teachers, and children, all swirling in the past, present, and future. Who was the hero in Lord of the Rings – Frodo or Sam? Neither could have made the journey without the other. What we really need to nurture is a more collaborative story, and a more collective sense of leadership and action.
If the ultimate goal is at the scale of an Overstory – like the awe-inspiring top foliage from multiple trees that combine to create an overhang or canopy under which people can walk, sit, reflect – then the storytelling has to be both intensely human in the current moment and timelessly mythic, co-created across generations.
Share the Story
Fundamentally, the story of Bioregional Earth is about growing a new/old Overstory – a different "terrain of consciousness," in the words of bioregional thinker Peter Berg.
Our real connection to each other and our place is "the work" – more specifically the "good work." It may look different in each place, but it's the work of care, respect, and wisdom. Good work is always properly scaled – in this case at the bioregion – and interconnected upward and downward into everything else. It's also interconnected across time at the span of lifetimes across generations. The story of Bioregional Earth is 200-500 year good work.
People around the planet are standing up and sharing this story.
Let's #ChangeTheStory.