Rooting a Life-Place Culture: Pathways into the Ecozoic Era

Rooting a Life-Place Culture:

Pathways into the Ecozoic Era

For Mariano, John, and Judy‌ For Introducing me to the Earth again and again

How To Build an Ecological Culture Written by members of the Bioregional Congress of the Americas

Befriend a wren Imagine how a river thinks Listen to the music of the spheres Dance in the muddy rain Watch a tree drop its leaves, and then bud out again Ask at whose expense your comfort comes Build soil Grow turnips Meet your neighbors Teach a child how to hold a frog, or raise a butterfly, or make compost Learn the boundary of your Bioregion and then let it dissolve Write a love poem to a mountain or a pond or a mushroom Envision an economy that gives more than it takes Cut your energy use in half Then do it again Plant a forest Preserve a marsh Know where your water comes from, and how it goes Strive to leave no waste Thank someone who is standing up to the powerful Look to your possessions for the seeds of destruction Leave a piece of this world better than you found it and envision the whole thing renewed.

Table of Contents 1.

Proposal for Alleviating the U.S. Financial Burden: Promoting Social Responsibility and Tolerance while Exercising Personal Intellectual Acumen and Developing Specific Mental Attributes Through Advanced Higher Learning

Abstract: A new paradigm for city planning that naturally delimits expansion to maintain communal effectiveness and skill crafting, educational process optimization, national empowerment, and capable quality control.

2. Communicating Perceptions: Towards an Education Program for Sustainability, Equity, and Artistry Abstract: This document arises in response to the question of how to align an education program to the evolutionary impulse of the universe’s creative aspects. There is a real need for an integrated learning program addressing the systemic lessons of big history: the earth system, climate change, human evolution, and the renewal of life. In other words, what steps do we need to take to ensure the continuity of humanity as an interrelated species in the larger earth community?

3. Ecolympics for the Ecozoic: An Ethical Framework for Green Games Abstract: A social network that can navigate the transition to sustainability, reducing our total human impact by organizing collaborative and competitive events that are fun and entertaining. By staging "Ecolympic games" across a global platform and partnering with community organizations, we can design a permanent breakaway economy to restore habitat and subsistence patterns while mapping alternative ways to live directly with the land around us.

4. Rewilding Language; Dwelling Poetically: Supporting Generative Emergence toward Thriving Futures Abstract: Increasingly, one can point to the emergence of symbolic language as a geologic event, one able to harness the power of conscious self-awareness as an evolutionary force: our symbol systems undermine the conditions for life, unravel the climate, and drive species extinct. How then can we proceed?

5. The Last Capitalist: A Quest for Culture, Ad Absurdum Abstract: Two people use an online blockchain platform to affect the wider political economy in evolutionary ways. This work started as an independent inquiry into digital potential based on the a “self-sovereign web of trust engagement model.” It offers a user story aligned to the Information Lifecycle Engagement Model to present a biocentric illustration of two individuals’ experience in a self-sovereign decentralized realization of the Web of Trust, adapted for blockchain platforms with the intention of outlining problems and questions that may arise as implementation begins and continues.

6. 198 Methods of Bioregional Reinhabitation: Principles and Methods for Sustainable Futures Abstract: Opportunities for transformation in education, food, land use, transportation, economic, media, health, and civic activism.

Proposal for Alleviating the U.S. Financial Burden: Promoting Social Responsibility and Tolerance while Exercising Personal Intellectual Acumen and Developing Specific Mental Attributes Through Advanced Higher Learning,

*** A new paradigm for city planning that naturally delimits expansion to maintain communal effectiveness and skill crafting, educational process optimization, national empowerment, and capable quality control.

The recent financial crisis has brought with it an opportunity to begin a remedial break-away economy composed for those who genuinely want their time and energy devoted solely to dealing with nature’s restrictions and incursions. Establishing a physical presence that is highly effective at promoting human conscientiousness regarding what best fundamentally defines human life will provide that opportunity.

This is the next stage of evolution for higher education.

Summary of Goals: Rather than propagating the Class-Power Establishment through a production-line mentality, citizenship demands it be allowed to act in accordance with nature through arts & sciences, relaying its powers and archives most effectively to later generations. This will not be possible without setting aside Town-Colleges (TCs) similar to National Parks and Indian Reservations, or by allowing current college towns and campuses to transition to TCs engineered to provide an array of “lifeboats.” This is opposed to permitting the current failing economic system from seeking to rework and return to its previous purposes, governing resources once more when city/state distributions are deemed “healthy” again.

It will not be up to the TC network to respond to fixing these economic problems from within, nor will it impose itself upon currently operating universities and their campuses, but rather will reconstitute the potential to set an example for civilization, focusing on a “best destiny” via an unconventional approach of “First Principles.” Adventuring at, designing, and putting into practice a superior form of campus and support structure, Intentional Communities (ICs) and TC networks can absorb 1) Homeless 2) Jobless 3) New high school graduates not accepted to institutions of higher learning 4) Retired academy graduates able to coach intellectual activities through dynamic launching 5) Volunteers Thus released from the obligations of a deteriorating system, these categories can help build the IC/TC network (started as a land grant institution? Run as a non-profit organization?). With minimal investment, this network will act as a Futures Option that may later be “activated” for its new inventions and skilled people, specializing activities, discoveries and inventions, and

upgraded/modified self-development. This network must be free of obligating ligations so as to run independently of the national economy, NOT for wildcat business enterprises or employment for salaries, NOT for the exchange of laboring on one product or service in exchange for others, NOT for companies to trade commodities across borders, and NOT to create a market for advertising campaigns or sales. Instead, the INDIVIDUAL will be considered the Product with his or her Service enacting the future. The result will minimize bureaucracy, manufacturing, maintenance, and repairs, while maximizing exploration, skills-acquisition, research, and study.

Effective Process: The process of education will be strictly an instrument external to state and college administrative processes. It must be The People’s avenue for practicing American ideals of freedom (rather than chasing a profit).

Resources-centered planning and goals interfere with Seeker-centered planning and goals, made evident as students and professors dissolve their personal responsibilities for supporting and sustaining what they do (as they head into debt), while market-place culture deemphasizes education as training for business and industry only. This distracts students from pursuing wisdom, curiosity, and the possibility for invention and comprehension. Instead, ICs will allow children to retain their values within experimental examples of a high-intensity TCs. This design may be promoted via: a) The creation and distribution of animation film of the college town and campus in-action for those not familiar enough to believe it acceptable or worthwhile; b) Web-publishing manuscript in book form to eventuate c) Some experimental initial Collegiate Communities setting an example, starting and running the program The main purpose of higher education will be that of reaching current knowledge of one’s faculties and capacities for PEAK PERFORMANCE. This is not something one does by answering questions in textbooks but comes through EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING in circumstances of partial control involving peers. PEER TRAINING then allows students to become alert to their abilities for knowing how to do one’s best in the least amount of time.

Fleshing out one’s own best judgment (for procedures, materials, tools,) likewise happens via PROFICIENCY LEARNING, that is, continuity of application so that no artificial boundaries will prevent one from becoming adept.

The functioning of mental faculties without reference to any particular topic will help to develop social instincts and intuition. Students may thereby discover/explore/enhance these faculties by open-ended exercises in peer groups to better prepare for any pursuit or interest: lessons about nature in ALL pertinent and technical subjects…

TCs are developed as self-supporting, self-governing, enriched environment collegiatepreparatory townships guided by nearby Ecovillages. New design concepts of WAYS and MEANS for personal development at College preparatory levels thus promotes lifelong learning, with permanent residence preferred by the majority of its residents who stay in town to participate as student teachers on and off campus. Conferences decide by consensus which practices shall define communities’ SPECIALIZED college town and campus. One can then go to fraternal craftsman “temp agencies” that hand out assignments and get requests for performing essential tasks of the TC, establishing the individual’s right to remain in the TC. One’s needs are met through computerized allocation determined in conjunction with the requirements of actual production.

IC/TCs can maintain an ethical consciousness in the face of current dominant psychopathic/sociopathic/ecopathic worldviews, by orienting itself to include four basic precepts: 1) Evolutionary Consciousness- ecologizing human inquiry to contextualize our sense of place in time and space.

2) Planetary Consciousness- harmonizing the bio/anthrop relationship to ensure continuity of life.

3) Transdisciplinary Consciousness- bridging unconscious gaps (overcoming ignorance) by appreciating all fields of knowledge 4) Enchanted Consciousness- healing the destroyed natural world through a participatory framework that promotes freedom.

Each TC can run parallel to the current civilization, interfacing least until and unless fundamental interface operations or emergency demands transduction.

Synopsis of Purpose: Special work studios bring pupils up to date and up to par regarding their understanding of how the past contextualizes the present and their vision for their future, empowering their achievement of humanity’s goals by acclimating to the structures and schedules we participate in.

Students are then able to find their place and voice along the history of education, sustaining the country’s cultural heritage while knowing and contributing to the education occurring around the world.

This can be expected to reduce campus violence due to undirected youthful naiveté as students develop a taste for automatically obtaining or composing as an art, establishing a region or device’s history and territorial map and operations manual before setting foot within or utilizing acumen-augmenting activities. There will be greater liberty to select from specific lectures and attend in-person/audit/non-semester/non-courses format. Lectures and classrooms being not central to education, subjects studied will no longer be primarily for ‘programming’ students to gain knowledge and skills, but as peripheral aid at boosting brainpower, accelerating mental processes, and attaining and sharing insights. This celebrated cause permits and encourages individual selection of lectures for the purpose of sensitizing students to wisdom by practicing

the assessment of risk, personally and directly judging decisions, responding to a full spectrum of choices, entering depressurization through discussion groups physically and philosophically…

Vision Statement: The educational ecology needs to evolve. Whereas we are now preoccupied with an economy derived from the consequences of the Industrial and Information Revolutions’ “assembly-line” Organizational Man/diploma-factory mentality, TCs will enable entire communities to operate in “college mode,” evolving to the next phase of civilization.

250 Intentional Communities of North America are currently operating off the power grid, farming much of their own food; many are independent of the employment system and state welfare, and children need education that heavily fosters their ideals. These ICs are able to form networks that oversee construction, provide guidance, and customize TCs. Each network constitutes one element in a nationwide self-sustaining network, independent of the manufacturing and distribution derived from excessive material consumption, able to communicate through Internet conferencing and communications and high-speed transportation.

The effects of TCs will set new standards for communities running on “Mini-Max” principles (minimum waste of talent/resources, maximum relevant development), allowing for human destiny to be prioritized above incurring debt, economic ordeals, eras of monetary repression, etc., optimizing human output whereas it would otherwise be lost to entropy (disillusioned workforce/reluctance to loan in banks). As communities perform (individually and collectively) developmentally useful activities, the need for increasing “productive capacity” is reduced as there is no longer any need to create new jobs since each individual is developing the ability to invent and build prototypes, rather than over-producing (only production line mentality demands more job opportunities).

Students are thus inherently inclined to start projects in TCs as a way of life, supervised for efficiency and precision in professional laboratories at the next level. Through this holistic design, thoughts and actions of students and professors in roles like farmers and factory workers will be aligned with the innate goals of education, conferencing for research and learning with people who would otherwise go into different fields, possibly incompatible with their attitudes about sharing insights or formulating integrated projects, demonstrating what a community of seekers can do by way of a commission that sets an example for country.

Educational activities of TC: 1) Peer Training off campus 2) Outside classroom on campus 3) Futurist lecture-demonstrations to pressurize and accelerate.

These 3 activities boost brainpower to accelerate mental processes, preventing missed discoveries and an inhibition of insights through student immersion in day-to-day situations of TCs. We request the formulation of a taskforce to undertake an initial brainstorming conference.

Communicating Perceptions:

Towards an Education Program for Sustainability, Equity, and Artistry

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.

-Martin Luther King Jr. If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear. People who can open to the web of life that called us into being.

-Joanna Macy

Overview: This document arises in response to the question of how to align an education program to the evolutionary impulse of the universe’s creative aspects.

There is a real need for an integrated learning program addressing the systemic lessons of big history: the earth system, climate change, human evolution, and the renewal of life. In other words, what steps do we need to take to ensure the continuity of humanity as an interrelated species in the larger earth community?

This task offers a pathway towards 1) Racial and Economic Justice 2) Protection of the Life-support System To recreate a new worldview based on the integration of disciplines, an education system must reconsider the capitalist and imperialist forces behind climate change and the relations between and effects of industrialization to colonialism and globalization.

This document focuses on how an interconnected movement can share its collective understanding through a meta-framework that weaves together active organizations via galvanizing issues while offering regional learning standards for transformative change.

Through leadership transitioning and the application of new standards and principles, these changes can help students make new connections in purposeful ways, transforming a social system they may otherwise feel trapped in.

Suggestions include an exploratory committee to create multi-year case studies for independently staffed programs, advocate for curricula, funding, teacher training, and accreditation at schools, commiting to four principles1: 1) Vision (community/organizational identity): What do children need to know? What is important? What is necessary? What is it that we most want to understand from the culture we participate in? What do children want to know and receive from learning experiences? Once these questions are addressed, aiding educational facilities in fulfilling their obligations to students proceeds more easily.

2) Viability (financial resources for self-sufficiency): Sustainable funding relative to goals can be achieved through local, state, and federal contracts, corporate/foundation donations, membership/constituency fundraising, etc..

1 See “Internal Memo for Healing the World Concerning Education.� Written for Tikkun Magazine

3) Stakeholder Participation (decision-making): Priorities and projects can be determined through forums and colloquiums, with committee structures creating broad public benefits—training, jobs, equity, housing, services…—that link future communities to the quality of the education they foster.

4) Accountability (authority): Self-determination and autonomy in decision-making processes enforce and ensure local policy statements are seen through. Community investment can, through individual/collective empowerment, address concerns to produce a meaningful and lasting set of values, spurring members to create the change needed to continue actively pursuing advanced degrees and their own sense of purpose.

Reevaluating education according to our shared collective concerns calls us to envision the sustainable culture such a program will afford, less according to assumed political and economic feasibilities, but rather through a process of participatory enactment.2 To begin, we might ask, in a society that ensures ecological sustainability, what is the role of electricity in the education system? Buildings? Bussing? Worksheets? What technologies must students learn to use to contribute to a sustainable future? Only radical answers reconceiving basic premises will resolve the crises we face today. 3 In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wristthick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.

–Tyler Durden

2 See Participatory Action Research, 3 Joanna Macy explains the “ecological and social crises we face are inflamed by an economic system dependent on accelerating growth. This self-destructing political economy sets its goals and measures its performance in terms of ever-increasing corporate profits—in other words by how fast materials can be extracted from Earth and turned into consumer products, weapons, and waste.”

Teaching Worldviews Civil society (and the level of freedom it ensures) significantly factors into sustaining economic life, combatting poverty, and protecting human rights as the ends and means of community development. The level of development sustained in a community is thus relative to the freedoms its citizens are allowed to enjoy.

Both social and ecological justice are fundamental tenets for emancipation, extending dignity to the non-human world. In this respect, education is the means toward a just, equitable, and sustainable culture. ”Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”4 This section outlines a curriculum that privileges a spiritual synthesis of science and humanities to form a working knowledge of ecological and civic engagement. The result includes what we might described as a political theology of nature, in which students uncover their deepest potential through innovation, artistry, and healing practices to understand how to effect deep and lasting change in their own lives and communities, working to “realign our lives and values—and even reframe our perceptions—as we seek authentic liberation...To the extent that we can align ourselves with the deep energy [Tao] and purpose evident in the unfolding evolution of the cosmos, we tap into a vast potentiality that can enkindle, guide, and sustain our work for meaningful change.” 5

4 See Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Friere 5 See Mark Hathaway’s essay on The Tao of Liberation http://www.taoofliberation.com/Excerpts/Overview.aspx

Adult educator/activist Mark Hathaway offers a fourfold path to system transformation: 1. Invocation; opening ourselves to the guiding energy of the Tao, of reconnecting to the Source and our communion with all beings, of celebrating and praising the goodness of creation. This path is closely related with finding our place and feeling at home in the cosmos—not as masters but as creative participants—as well as with sensing the sacredness of life.

2. Letting go, or embracing the void; we can never fully open ourselves to beauty and awe unless we also clear away the cobwebs of delusion and create space for the Sacred to dwell. This means becoming aware of the ways that despair, denial, and addictions have deadened our souls. In an attempt to block out pain, we build walls that also cut us off from the wellspring of energy that can motivate and inspire us as we work for change.

3. Creative empowerment; reconnect with the embodied energy of the Tao in a way that combines both intuition and compassion. Science teaches us that living systems can change in rapid and often surprising ways through the process of emergence. In this perspective, the key to effective action is not brute force but rather finding the right action for the right place and right time.

4. Incarnating the vision; moving from the realm of vision to action. This is perhaps the most complex of all the paths, for it calls us to work together in new ways that are infused with the power of creative synergy that remains open to the possibilities and potentiality of each moment while at the same time renouncing the exercise of domination and manipulating control.

Through this framework we can understand ourselves in relation to others as the selfconscious experience of the creative energy of the cosmos. That is, our bodies emerge from those cosmic powers of the universe that remain latent or dormant in humans until they are (re)activated in their “hominized” form. The universe as a whole is bound together in a forceful process of self-organization that has given rise to the tendency of life. To this end, our knowledge of an underlying ordering principle is contingent upon our noticing earth’s cosmic alignment, so that our conscious awareness of our own relation to it makes this principle selfevident in our own lives. Like the cosmos itself, we too can be seen as fractals of self-similar archetypes striving for freedom, justice and truth too!

This can be understood as the entire purpose of education/existence: to capture the mind of the child through a cosmology that inspires a profound significance of one’s greatest self, empowering children to reorient their relations to the power and presence of place.

Cultural Historian and “Geologian” Thomas Berry explains how only a mutual enhancement can change exploitive relationships, so that “the long-term survival of our children will depend on a new relationship between human and the natural worlds.”6 He points to 9 obligations that are necessary to fulfill for children’s education.

1) Health and Environment (pure air, clean water, psychological security…)

2) The Great Community (becoming functional members in a community of biodiversity) 3) Literacy (understanding living relationships and prosperity in a new sense) 4) Energy (learning benign forms and effective skills) 5) Food (gardening, nurturance, seasonal rituals, physical survival, permaculture, emotional responses and elementary education…)

6) The Managerial Role (managing entropy, energy cycles, renewable infrastructure, ecological economics) 7) Revelatory Experience (learning through modes of divine communication about the spontaneities of genetic diversity in bioregions) 8) A Sense of History (students’ historical role in the future world, contextualizing themselves in an irreversible sequence as integral forms of functioning reality, imagining and contributing new realities 9) America (leading the guidance of children toward a more splendid future presently in the making) Berry writes, “the radiance of their surroundings is even now reflected in the radiance of our children’s countenances,”7 and that human understanding, emotional life, imaginative powers, sense of the divine, and capacity for verbal expression would all be terribly diminished if not for the biodiversity of various life-places. Referring then to these “bioregions” as the “context for reinhabiting the Earth,” he conveys a way forward to preserve the integrity of the process of bioregional functionality.

“The solution is simply for us as humans to join the earth community as participating members, to foster the progress and prosperity of the bioregional communities to which we belong. A bioregion is an identifiable geographical area of interacting life 6 Pg. 12 “Our Children: Their Future” by Thomas Berry, in Only the Sacred: transforming education in the 21st century 7 Pg. 15, ibid.

systems that is relatively self-sustaining in the ever-renewing processes of nature. The full diversity of life functions is carried out, not as individuals or as species, or even as organic beings, but as a community that includes the physical as well as the organic components of the region. Such a bioregion is a self-propagating, self-nourishing, selfeducating, self-governing, self-healing, and self-fulfilling community. Each of the component life systems must integrate its own functioning within this community to survive in any effective manner.”8 Approaching ecological learning in this way necessitates reorienting one’s perception toward a pattern-based conceptual foundation to holistically analyze the biosphere as a grouping of interconnected living systems: “Once you understand the basic earth/land/water movements of a biogeochemical cycle and the various teleconnections between these mediums, you have perceptual awareness of a fundamental biospheric process…Pattern-based environmental learning is the conceptual foundation for a biospheric curriculum.”9 Additionally, pattern-based learning can emphasize: 

Waves: rates of the tangible manifestation of environmental change



Thresholds: describing the points, levels, sequences, events, and flows that cause dramatic shifts in conditions.

Cycles: the predictable series of relationships within a system in which the flow and exchange of materials, ideas, or events move according to repeatable, yet variable patterns.



Ecology thus offers both a subject and context by which participatory studies may occur, providing a transformative value in the co-arising of worldviews.

For this reason, research suggests 3 Pathways for a sense of environmental responsibility: 1) profound encounters with nature, 2) contemporary spirituality, and 3) their convergence in spiritual nature experiences.10 The question of spiritual wisdom then seeks to know how to journey to the center of the universe (one’s own deepest energetic self) and revere its dynamic creativity, to enter into right (“good”) relation while enhancing the cosmic journey.

8 Thomas Berry, Bioregions: The Context for Reinhabiting the Earth, in The Dream of the Earth (Retrieved from Catalog of Bioregional Primary Sources, Planet Drum Books 9/14/2013 9 Mitchell Thomashow, The Gaian Generation: A new approach to environmental learning, in Gaia in Turmoil 260-1 10 Pg. 178 Hedlund-de Witt “Pathways to Environmental Responsibility: A Qualitative Exploration of the Spiritual Dimension of Nature Experience, in the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture

Praxis Consider then the following lesson plan objective to focus on bonding human with the earth: if all powers are one and seamlessly omnipresent in a self-display of radiant energy, certain cultural practices can make it easier to resonate with “goodness,” or right relation, embodied in a given life-place.

Learning to appreciate the history and complexity of their local bioregion, students explore their own role in the universe, practice wilderness skills, and identify important ways to prevent species extinction, empowering their communities to become more sustainable. They'll appreciate and enjoy being outside while understanding the importance of local habitats and their own relationship to the world around them. Beyond knowing how to be self-sufficient, students learn how to lead sustainable community development projects, while becoming able to teach others the essentials of what it means to be human in the 21st century.

Students might spend days learning about particular themes (Fire, Earth, Water, Air) and how these relate to their own lives: 

Fire: From the primeval fireball to the power of the Sun, students learn about the relevance of fire while making a fire bow, understanding the fundamental forces that make up "deep time" as well as the role of fire in human evolution.



Water: From hydrogen atoms to their local watershed, students learn the importance of water and water catchments as they weave baskets to test pH levels, and learn how to purify drinking water.



Air: From the planetary cycles, seasons, and climate patterns, students learn about the effects of pollution while minimizing their carbon footprints.



Earth: Students learn about soil, gardening, and how to recycle and compost to make paper for a personal journal that includes poetry, nature journaling, plant drawings…

Finally, students can see how these elements converge when they plant trees and garden while familiarizing themselves with the significance of their own actions. In these cases, all activities are intended to emphasize the exploration and care for students’ local life-places while using simple technologies and learning about symbiotic relations between ecology and culture.

Through games that promote an understanding of biodiversity and wellbeing, students develop deep relationships with nature to expand their sense of home. Understanding themselves as emerging from these same cycles, students realize a common root experience as they awaken and activate the creative energy of the universe by focusing and developing it into arts, crafts, music, rituals, mandalas, and other cultural phenomena, learning about various

traditions and techniques as well. In this case, our own experience might be characterized as the subjective interior experience of the physical nature of reality. 11 In this way, the gap between subjectivity and objectivity can be bridged as mental and physical aspects of a deeper order, challenging us to form new concepts and methods to discern the features of perception and experience a shared organic being. Students might recognize the phylogenetic tree as a tree of life (symbolizing a larger Self), understanding their own experiences as an archetypal process whereby conscious mental states (“interiority”) offer the subjective character of a revealed physical operation.

By introducing an integral methodological pluralism by which to more deeply relate to the dynamic complexity of a creative cosmic essence, an understanding of the world as “big history” offers a more complete understanding across disciplines, with the development of consciousness arising we experience energy over time, now in its human form.

Such an approach provides the basis of an integral education that incorporates body, vital, heart, mind, and spirit into a participatory model of transformative education where a multidimensional program supports the creative cycle of learning and inquiry.

“Whether in nature or in human reality, a creative process usually unfolds through several general stages that correspond roughly with the seasonal cycle of nature: action (Autumn, preparing the terrain and planting the seeds; the body, studying what is already known about a subject matter, i.e., the body of literature); germination/gestation (Winter, rooting and nourishment of the seed inside the earth; the vital, conception of novel developments in 11 See Archetypal Cosmology for an endless thrill on this subjects

contact with unconscious transpersonal and archetypal sources); blooming (Spring, emerging toward the light of buds, leaves, and flowers; the heart, first conscious feelings and rough ideas); and harvest (Summer, selection of mature fruits and shared celebration; the mind, intellectual selection, elaboration, and offering of the fruits of the creative process). 12

Students begin to develop an ethic of responsibility, as such a curriculum would emphasize outdoor experiences while endorsing the child’s right to connect to nature and a healthy environment.13 By further integrating a Capstone Project as a core responsibility, students can synthesize the science of sustainability, humanitarian concerns, and traditional ecological knowledge, 12 The images of the four seasons and planting a seed derive from Ramon V. Albareda and Marina T. Romero’s innovative approach to integral growth and training (see Albareda & Romero, 1990; Romero & Albareda, 2001; Ferrer, 2003) and have been adapted for an academic context by Jorge N. Ferrer and Marina T. Romero in Integral Transformative Education: A participatory proposal 2005 in Journal of Transformative Education 13 See Rights of the Child in Nature

identifying real world problems about which they are passionate, engaging in in-depth transdisciplinary research from literature and field experts, communicating results and key findings to audiences, and connecting this information back to the community using their own vehicles to match the purpose.

Here, the sciences and humanities are integrally wed by focusing on 1) social responsibility and 2) ecological embeddedness via personal action projects, civic engagement, and cultural artistry.

Students therefore learn how social movements and cultural revolutions relate to the surrounding ecologies as they participate in a comprehensive inquiry and practice.

By engaging in systemic change, using integral ecological metrics to assess the impact of their interventions and applications of transformative and emancipatory learning, a course or program that mobilizes powerful psychic energies to assure proper relations in sacred healing rituals can hereby revitalize the loss of the sense of the sacred in western society that is indicative of a loss of soul of the earth, of the cosmos, and of human society.

Organizing Study Groups The above curriculum outline emphasizes social responsibility as ecologically embedded, understanding the natural world as both the subject and context for learning. This is not limited to one kind of student population but rather seeks to cultivate a broad-based bioregional education program so alternative-learning institutions can more easily engage similar topics for future learners to participate in the co-creation of a shared reality.

Whether taking the shape of Permaculture Design Certificates offered as elective credit for at-risk youth, parolees, or returning war veterans, a sense of revitalized connection to the community can offer a greater feeling of belonging and purpose while addressing concerns of alienation, violence, and trauma in students’ own lives.

A bioregional approach14 stresses 1) Restoration and Maintenance of Natural Systems 2) Satisfying Basic Human Needs with Local Subsistence Practices 3) Celebrating a Life-Place Culture So, a Bioregional Education Program might focus on a) In-school education and action programs; b) Hands-on restoration projects through volunteer workshop-workdays; c) Community-based teach-ins that bring leaders and learners together to envision and implement sustainable projects.

As students identify critical needs currently unmet, they can fill them via personal action and community projects.

For example, some students might determine a critical need to ensure elders have access to fresh organic food, envisioning as a program “Elder Evolution� to address their concern. They talk to food providers, delivery programs, administrators, gardeners, and senior citizens about the location, logistics, and best practices for how to deliver fresh organic food to participants, while working with participants and learning how to garden. They document the process as it grows, communicating to others ongoing relationships while participating in the creation of a sustainable trade network and community gardens through community praxis. As locally sourced meals are cooked and shared, the community gardens expand and neighbors come together over new restorative eco-justice projects to heal the human and non-human communities.

14 Envisioning Sustainability, Berg

"To transform the world, you need to first cultivate the seed of an idea, inspiration, and aspiration. To do this, go outside your boundaries and network and engage those who know how to nurture change from its very source. From this beginning, possibilities are multitudinous, variations endless, goals reachable‌" 15 The idea here is working across lines of difference where social norms tend to exclude those most impacted, empowering minority groups to confront the prejudice that is structurally ingrained in overarching social patterns. People have to learn the legacy of their oppression in order to understand their place in time so as to create a new future.

For instance, we might recognize the stigmatized relationship to the environment of African-Americans, who have a history of trauma in the form of slavery on plantations and sharecropping, as well as a sense that environmentalism is seen as a "bourgeois" movement, perceiving so much social inequity needing to be taken care of first. By focusing on the idea that a community emerges out of interconnected experience, a sense of self-reliance may recognize diversity as the main ingredient for socio-ecological resilience, offering ways to cherish a revitalized relationship to one’s own land-base.

Four ingredients for social change through ecological engagement: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Empowerment through Eco-Literacy (Information as a Resource) Culturally Relevant Programming Growing Leadership and Building Guilds (Empowerment, Follow-through, and Support) New Media Forms as Storytelling Platform

Study groups might engage in eco-district projects focusing on urban planting, smart transportation, sustainable planning, renewable energy, neighborhood character and employment, recycling, reuse, and remanufacturing projects, celebrating life-place vitality, urban wild habitat, socially responsibly small business or other cooperative endeavors, each of which more adequately locates cities in their ecological contexts, while minimizing deleterious effects.

Reconfiguring student government to promote effective learning strategies can also account for new ways to scale for larger projects and programs. As eco-districts connect with one another to further the goals of eco-cities, greener metropolitan areas can form networks that include watershed councils, bioregional alliances, and continent congresses to organize opportunities for active ecological justice work.16 15 Paul Hawken 16 Environmental justice is the right of all people to have equal access to their basic needs. This includes safe energy, healthy food, clean air and water, open space, non-toxic communities, and equitable educational and employment opportunities, each of which are understood as basic human rights. Here, ecological justice implies equity as extended to the non-human world as well.

We might then understand this student government as a self-transforming political process with an enduring search for truth, forming an integrated whole whose potential for catalyzing rapid shifts in personal and collective awareness is achieved through Individuation, Socratic discussion, Direct Democracy, and the cultivation of a community narrative, or Big Picture. 17 By practicing each of these four aspects, student government can have at its core a process by which the Truth Quest occurs through a pedagogy and epistemology in which participants both teach and learn from others in the back-and-forth dialectic of face-to-face discussion, constituting the nexus in which this search transforms the participating individuals into a primary political community whose ultimate purpose is the ongoing search for knowledge by which to live the “good life.�

As this education process realizes its own dynamic political expression, a self-sufficient bioregional political economy can emerge to prioritize the health of local ecosystems and the flourishing of human systems. Based on voluntary cooperation, democratic decision-making, 17 See Primal Future

and conflict resolution, an ethos of responsibility for the whole and concern for the unique needs of individuals is cultivated, and a revolutionary creativity can be communicated through art. The renewed relation to wilderness similarly transforms and heals minds, souls, and systems as they come into relation with the primary source of spiritual, moral, and physical regeneration to permeate socio-ecological networks.

As such, tailoring each action towards the four pillars of Gross National Happiness can provide a realistic basis for policies that promote and enhance the autonomy, self-sufficiency, health, and education of the whole. These pillars include: o o o o

economic self-sufficiency, preservation/enhancement of the natural environment, preservation and promotion of the traditional culture, good governance

Here, a vision of the world students want becomes ecologically sustainable, fosters an expanding individual awareness, is politically empowering, and satisfies basic human rights, including the need for food, shelter, and education – in short, this program achieves a more lifeloving, biocentric vision congruent with a primal vision.18 The cosmic energetic force is expressed and applied through liberated, seeker-centered praxis to the social organization of living community networks as they are collectively transformed within their ecological contexts.

18 ibid.

Green Games The rate of transformation can be accelerated by mobilizing coordinated groups and individuals to learn about local problems while advancing collaborative solutions. This provides a meta-framework for enacting a sustainable future by 1) Organizing Transformative Events, 2) Building Sustainable Infrastructure, and 3) Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change For example, the 9 counties of the San Francisco Bay Area could organize an “Ecolympics” to converge and compete to transform the regional metropolitan/rural areas into a sustainable and equitable place.19 Organizations cultivating active audiences (community leaders, schools, legislators…) might craft and implement agendas via communication strategies that map organizations and interagency collaboration.

A Green City Resources database could include a calendar, maps, alerts, how-tos, testimonials, etc., so participants can organize to “win” by working together to grow a living culture most effectively. Individuals and groups entering Ecolympic games would receive school credit through the Bioregional Education Program as facilitated by the Bioregional Sustainability Institute by enacting eco-city projects through school education/action projects, adult workshop/workday praxis sessions, and intergenerational teach-ins. Through a coordinative ecological democratic body—or Bioregional Congress—conditions would be implemented for functional structural change in the human complement of the physical dimension of the ecosphere.20 Bioregions would then collaborate and compete through decentralized coordinating bodies to grow a life-place culture, with ideas contributing to a fractal energy exchange and distribution system. Projects might include urban creek restoration, planting food forests, bioregional parks, wildlife corridors, urban gardens, green connections, neighborhood farms, building retrofits, or life-place celebrations. Free stores, seed banks, and community spaces can similarly emerge as eco-city projects transforming neighborhoods, with citizens gaining job-skills for life.

Groups could be supported for participating in enacting their visions, with resources donated and transformative actions according to sustainable parameters set by local bodies.

Students receiving course credit would promote eco/social responsibility by effecting and exercising personal intellectual acumen and developing specific mental attributes through advanced learning techniques, offering a new paradigm for regional planning that naturally 19 See Place-Making activities 20 See “Coordinative Bioregional Eco-logical democracy” diagram in “Bioregional Brilliance” presentation. http://prezi.com/phjavecplmkf/bioregional-brilliance-joy-and-freedom-in-theplay-of-watershed-consciousness/

delimits reckless expansion to maintain communal effectiveness and skill crafting, educational process optimization, national empowerment, and capable quality control, keeping in mind the carrying capacity and integrity of the land base.21 Town-Colleges (TCs) making up Intentional Communities (ICs) might absorb homeless, jobless, high school graduates foregoing college, retired academy graduates able to coach intellectual activities, at-risk youth, felons, parolees, community service volunteers, etc., focusing on a “Best Destiny” via an unconventional approach of “First Principles.”22 Seekercentered learning would pursue wisdom, curiosity, and the possibility for invention and comprehension through dynamic launching.

The main purpose of this higher learning would be knowledge of one’s faculties and capacities for Peak Performance through Experiential Learning and Peer Training, becoming adept via Proficiency Learning. New design concepts of Ways and Means for personal development would promote local lifelong learning, with temporary agencies or guilds offering assignments and gathering requests for performing essential tasks to fulfill any credit obligations. Needs could be met through computerized allocation determined in conjunction with the requirements of production as well.

IC/TCs can further maintain ethical standards within experimental examples of highintensity by including four conscious principles: 1) Evolutionary Consciousness- Ecologizing human inquiry to contextualize our sense of place in time and space.

2) Planetary Consciousness- Harmonizing the bio/anthropo relationship to ensure the continuity of life 3) Transdisciplinary Consciousness- Bridging unconscious gaps (overcoming ignorance) by appreciating all fields of knowledge 4) Enchanted consciousness- Healing the destroyed natural world through a participatory framework promoting freedom Students thus find their place and voice within the history of education, sustaining their cultural heritage while knowing and contributing to the education process of TC/ICs that enable entire communities to operate in “higher-education” modes. These effects set new standards for communities running on Mini-Max Principles (minimum waste of talent/resources, maximum relevant development).

21 See “Proposal for Alleviating the U.S. Financial Burden.”

22 See Proposal for Seeker-Centered Wisdom Community

As communities perform (individually and collectively) developmentally positive activities, students are inherently inclined to start projects in TC/ICs as a way of life, supervised for efficiency and precision in professional laboratories at the next level. Through holistic design, the thoughts and actions of students and professors can align with these innate goals of education, conferencing for research and learning with people who would otherwise remain in differing fields. By sharing insights, formulating integrated projects, and demonstrating by commission activities boosting brainpower to accelerate mental processes, missed discoveries or the inhibition of insight is prevented through student immersion in day-to-day situations of TC/ICs as they are embedded in the maturing values and lifestyles of a planetary wisdom network.

A soul-centric society living by an eco-centric sequence of developmental stages is therefore acted out through a global culture change rooted in the mystery of reality and the healthy balancing of nature and culture in every stage to include free-ranging nature-play in childhood along with cultural instruction, with students maturing into artists of cultural renaissance able to imaginatively engender a healthy community of life through responsible action.

Conclusion: The preceding pages outlined a networked interaction to protect habitats through a regulation system enforced through bioregional self-governance. By restoring planetary ecosystems and stopping the flow of poisons at the source, an education program may restore human communities through a self-healing ecological economy whose shared work creates durable artifacts for a stable population in which everyone has everything they need to contribute new forms of ecstasy to a shared life community.

Hence curricula considering leadership for the 21st Century might include the following elements.

1. Theme: a. Individuals who participate in a process of thoughtful inquiry, experiment, and organized collaboration determine history. They offer a way toward social change through civil rights successes, the dissolution of oppressive institutions, justice movements for human rights, etc. b. Students discuss and consider some of the major leaders in America and around the world, and how they can understand their own potential in changing the circumstances of their world today.

2. Academic Subject: a. Social studies, Humanities, Religion, English, Writing, Sciences, Philosophy, Civics, Physical Education, Economics, Psychology, College Applications, Electives‌ 3. Big Ideas: a. Each individual has the right to think and the opportunity to employ critical thinking skills b. Understanding how the social context of important change-makers and the roles of influential leaders are relevant today. c. Learning about contemporary problems, responses, and implications of civic engagement. d. Understanding oneself in relation to local grievances along with best practices for conflict resolution.

4. Outcomes a. Students understand the role of “higher education� in formulating responses to setbacks and problems. b. Students learn public speaking and presentation skills c. Students are empowered for community empowerment and personal development

d. A general sense of civic engagement and social responsibility in ecological context.

5. Learning Experiences a. Analysis of current leadership examples b. Historical appreciation of paradigmatic leaders and instances of social change through brief case studies. c. Discussion of personal examples of leadership opportunities d. Brief presentation of leadership as applied to own situation.

Ecolympics for the Ecozoic BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF IDEA A social network that can navigate the transition to sustainability, reducing our total human impact by organizing collaborative and competitive events that are fun and entertaining.

By staging "Ecolympic games" across a global platform and partnering with community organizations, we can design a permanent breakaway economy to restore habitat and subsistence patterns while mapping alternative ways to live directly with the land around us.

Leading to‌A Sustainable Planet!

PROBLEM TO SOLVE The problem of course is the cumulative impact of humanity on the wider world.

One method for measuring societal and ecological well-being is the I= f(PATE) framework, which shows human impact (I) as a function (f) of the dynamic relationships between population (P), affluence (A), technology (T), and human ethics (E).

Understanding this equation can help us determine how to keep our own impact within the earth's ecological limitations, drawing targets and action plans that require implementing creative solutions.

HOW THE IDEA WILL SOLVE THE PROBLEM By focusing on one variable (E) to provide an actionable Ethic, presumably the entire impact could be eliminated altogether. This ethic would be developed out of the idea of a move from the Anthropocene to the "Ecozoic" era through bioregional reinhabitation.

By mapping an Ecozoic ethic, scaling it up to a global level, and framing it in a way where communities reward creativity and social artistry in games that reconnect people to land, a network could catalyze and guide the transition to a new, sustainable culture.

WHAT INSPIRED THE IDEA This idea is inspired by wildness and how to live freely in the wild. If we can learn techniques to satisfy our own basic needs from the world around us in ways that do no harm to the community of life, we can become empowered

to find new ways to live together! To quote Thoreau, "In wildness is the preservation of the world!"

Rewilding Language; Dwelling Poetically: Supporting Generative Emergence toward Thriving Futures We dwell in language.

Increasingly, one can point to the emergence of symbolic language as a geologic event, one able to harness the power of conscious self­awareness as an evolutionary force: our symbol systems undermine the conditions for life, unravel the climate, and drive species extinct.

We dwell in language, even as our home disintegrates.

Ecological linguists suggest inherent failings in languages, which simply do not have the language to convey certain realities. The language we speak requires regeneration, to understand the signs that the cosmos cries to us in, letting us know each aspect– from the greatest galaxy to each spinning quantum—is sign­ificant, if we but listen to and learn from her.

“Poetically, man dwells…”

Such was the declaration by phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, following the poetics of Friedrich Hölderlin. That our perceptions, sensations, embodied psychic patterns might be guided by energy condensed in poetry, unleashed as language crafts the spells needed to build new worlds to dwell in.

Dwellings emerge as poiesis.

Poetry makes us laugh and sob. There is poetry that captures the sensuality and feelings of reality; and there is poetry that fails to adequately convey experience.

Language constitutes our dwelling.

Poetry is knowledge of the soul – not just our own, but the soul of others, human and otherwise.

How we relate to others, poetically, generates our experience. Soul knowledge is indispensable for social cohesion.

We dwell, together. Here.

As our language changes, our dwelling is rebuilt.

Far from paint on caves, from Venus figurines, the oral storytellers, written myths wherein wisdom dances in the living lyric…screens now separate us from words—worlds—every day.

Algorithms program each minute, from alarm and email to stock and survival.

Our revolutions are tweeted. Our repression encoded. How many times each hour do words move at the speed of light, through plastic tubes? Who would hear us if not for these plastic tubes?

We dwell in these tubes, the stratigraphic signal of our geologic era.

As our language fragments, broken into bytes and bits, so too does our world. This broken world stems from our linguistic failures.

We see tubes where we once saw trees. We see screens where we once saw skies. We see electricity where we once saw enchantment. We see commodities where we once saw goddesses.

What images are imaginable? What magic can we image? What spells can we speak? What language can build new foundations upon which to together dwell?

Where are the mages? * There are unifying principles behind how galaxies are organized, how suns make light, how lightning appears, how plants are shaped, how rivers run, how cities are arranged…behind even how language transforms.

They are simple enough formulas, power­mass laws detailing how energy runs through mass as efficiently as possible over time; the intricacy of a system’s structural complexity corresponding to the increase in the free energy rate density of the system.

This cosmic tendency manifests fractally as branching patterns, self­similar across scale. From this equation, forests burst out of soil. Blood veins deliver life to drive forward history. Neural nets are cast. At these branch points, the past and future break into the present.

There are unifying principles behind how stars and civilizations collapse, how ecosystems and businesses are drained of life. They are simple enough formulas– complexity is sustained by energy flows. The deprivation of such flows provoke contraction, breakdown, failure, death.

Beyond this dance on the knife’s edge of life and death, between creativity and collapse, lies an eternal law. Energy structures complexity. Its absence destabilizes it.

We dwell within the language of this law. * Within this landscape, strange attractors induce phase changes across every aeon.

What power is there to move such a mass as the community of life, the Gaian goddess herself?

What power is there to avert the collapse of destiny?

Can poetry move one so completely as to remake a world paved in concrete?

Can poetry inspire a flower to break through asphalt?

We dwell poetically, inhabiting language.

An evolutionary force.

What geological event can emerge to reinhabit this language?

This landscape?

This life?

A poem? * Somewhere, someone is inspired by a flower. Energy flows through her. She writes a program in a language she knows well. The program is a game. The game gives people points. People get points by completing tasks.

These tasks are tested techniques to transform the terrestrial world into something attractive. Into something tantalizing.

She provides resources: a database of information. A calendar of events. An institute to teach techniques. A network of translation centers where a thousand lexicosmions cross­pollinate.

Her game identifies 198 methods for bioregional reinhabitation. Through these pathways, energy is distributed fractally. Ideas are spread and planted and new art bundles are exchanged to bloom and blossom.

Here, seeds are planted. Here, seeds are harvested.

Her program begins to run. There is praxis. There is vision. There is hope. There is joy.

There are rules to the game: Rule #1 – Natural systems must be restored and maintained.

Rule #2 – Sustainable means for satisfying basic human needs must be developed.

Rule #3 – A broad range of activities to fit better into a life­place must be created and supported.

There are players in the game.

They join bioregional gatherings. Independence groups. Watershed councils. Free republics.

Continent congresses. Decentralized coordinating bodies take root; a life­place culture grows.

These players coordinate around resolutions to translate the signs and significance of the ecosystem functions of the bioregion into a working political economy for the human dimension of the bioregion.

So they can play. And find joy.

And get points.

There are phases to the game.

One must first play hide and seek with the sunlight, with the rain and wind, the mountains, the bodies of water, the soil, plants, and animals. The boundaries extend however far one extends them. One finds the worst things people do. One finds the best things people do.

A forty­day teach­in inaugurates the game.

Creeks are restored. Food forests are planted. Bioregional parks are linked by wildlife corridors.

Empty lots turn to vibrant plots. Community farms and rooftop gardens explode. Buildings are retrofitted. Life­place celebrations abound. Vegetables are grown. Shelters are built.

New players join the game.

Not everyone knows they are in a game.

But they play anyway.

The poetic infrastructure is placed appropriately, and the forty­day teach­in launches a forty­year teach­in. Free stores hold seed banks to support neighborhoods. A living culture grows its roots deeper.

People get points.

Regions are restored.

Those with the most points are thanked, celebrated, and rewarded by grateful neighbors. Folks learn job skills for life.

In the middle of the game, a tiny girl realizes a deep truth: “if we win in the cities, we win.”

She is invited to join a team. Instead, she invites the team to join her.

Active reinhabitants dwell poetically in parallel biogeographic terrains of consciousness.

Towns tell new stories of new destinies. Online communities find each other in the land.

Education is recognized for what it must become: the evolutionary adaptive inheritance of the Earth­system.

Like the eternal law of the cosmos, people refuse to allow energy to be monopolized by institutions beyond their control. Rather, they establish a direct relationship to that energy, letting it wash over them. Letting it become part of them.

Enchanting them.

Their direct experience creates new structures in place of obsolete alienating ones.

Mother Earth’s brain tumors dissipate. A new geologic era is whispered about. Some call this the ecozoic era. Some don’t call it anything. Some are happy with silence. They enjoy the wind parting the trees. The birds sing songs to them. Coyotes are free to chant their own poetry at night.

Some prefer these to words.

Breakaway wisdom ecolonomies begin to outnumber desolate wastelands. Soon, communities of life are the only memories people have any direct experience of. The rest are just stories.

The animals and plants can breathe again. Everything breathes together, sharing in the breath of a solar wind. An eternal law reiterates in each heart. In each body. Each mind. In each point. In each soul and society.

Poetically, we dwell.

Together.

In destiny.

A digitized ecozoic vernacular programs another world to dwell poetically within, a whole lexicosmos rooted in the universal tradition of evolutionary genius. Children and adults together learn biospheric patterns. They learn the science of sustainability. They learn what it takes to make peace. They practice sharing water. They design anew, to renew their bodies. To regain their souls.

Until the screens are forgotten altogether. And each student is able to attract the ecological patterns that constellate new worlds.

The concepts, activities, problems, projects, and services they engage in are unfathomable to us today.

The distance between their

culture

and

ours is

measured in

Dwell, Poetically.

points.

The Last Capitalist

(A Quest for Cultu.re, Ad Absurdum) Abstract: Two people use Cultu.re’s platform to affect the wider political economy in evolutionary ways.

Introduction: This work started as an independent quest of Cultu.re based on the Amira 1.0.0 “self-sovereign web of trust engagement model.” It offers a user story aligned to the Information Lifecycle Engagement Model to present a biocentric illustration of two individuals’ experience in a selfsovereign decentralized realization of the Web of Trust, adapted for Cultu.re with the intention of outlining problems and questions that may arise as implementation begins and continues.

Sadie and Nathaniel (Nat) are ecological and educational activists respectively, working to transform the dominant paradigm into a more egalitarian one, where autonomy, mutual aid, and self-defense from exploitative relations are pursued. Whereas Nat is more established in the mainstream community, Sadie is part of an anarchist milieu that, after being disrupted and dispersed, reunites as an anonymous, autonomous subculture using the Cultu.re platform. As Sadie connects with Nat to “ecologize” the education network he has built in the community so far, projects are established that make waves and must stand up to inevitable repression leveled at the activists’ subcultures.

The interactions of Sadie and Nat with Cultu.re uses an Information Lifecycle Engagement Model whose 15 stage model captures the experience of two fictional individuals as they interact with the system. This approach intentionally limits focus to two human experiences, presenting a few paragraphs in each lifecycle step. It is not meant to express the requirements or variability in a system, rather assuring the human experience of each stage is understood and accounted for.

Participants: Sadie- a permaculturalist/ecological activist involved in an underground anarchist community Jenny- Caretaker for an urban farm Alex- Property owner where Jenny’s urban farm is temporarily located Nat- an education consultant and activist curating an education intentional community Sarah – Sadie’s life-partner who sits on the board of Morning Star, a 501c3 that uses Cultu.re Ernesto – radical lawyer specializing in non-profit and corporate law Mike – An FBI special agent tracking anarchists and looking to bring them to “justice.”

Amira – a tech/app programmer Madeleine – Sadie’s protégé Roger- Capitalist beach property owner

Stage 1- Pre-Contact Before Contact, both parties engage in activities that lead to contact Sadie escaped life in a domestically abusive household, living on the street for several years before finding friendship and comradery with a commune of individuals who are fiercely antihierarchical and sensitive to the misuse and abuse of power. Many of her friends are selfdescribed anarchists, with many different varieties within them: some are communists, others are anti-tech primitivists, some are insurrectionists, illegalists, feminists, mutualists, agorists, etc. On the whole, their belief system holds that institutions that promote a concentration of power (government, banks, churches, corporations, tech, etc.) are problematic and should be abolished by any means necessary.23 Because of these beliefs, many of Sadie’s friends illegally squat in abandoned buildings or tenancies. To make ends meet, many of them take odd jobs, mostly under the table so they do not have to pay taxes that support a war-machine. Sadie, who dropped out of school to escape her homelife eventually received her Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC), now offers services to various greening projects, enlisting the help of her friends at times for bigger projects, splitting any proceeds between them.

This situation has been relatively sustainable for years, but as an influx of real estate developers begin buying up a number of properties, property owners worry their values may be tarnished due to the anarchist squatters. They send an anonymous call to the police, who in turn raid the location. Several members of the commune are arrested, while others flee. As several police struggle with the squatters, a cop falls down the stairs and breaks his neck. The police force is up in arms and threatens to violently crush the Anarchist movement they believe are threatening law and order in the city. Several days later Sadie and others meet at a local infoshop to determine what to do next. They decide to leave the city which has become brutal and unresponsive to the needs of the underclasses, moving to another city location that has not yet been taken over by special interests of the rich and powerful.

They agree to leave, each searching out possible endeavors that might benefit them all, and agree to use anonymous message boards and blogs to communicate and coordinate activities in the future.24 They bid each other farewell for the moment and hope for the best.

23 Deep Green Resistance’s Decisive Ecological Resistance, while not anarchist, offers a fourphase model for how such resistance would take place https://deepgreenresistance.org/en/deep-green-resistance-strategy/decisive-ecologicalwarfare#four-phases along with a Taxonomy of Resistance https://deepgreenresistance.net/en/resistance/action-taxonomy/goals-strategies-tactics/ to offer a detailed plan with regards to this directive. Images can be seen at the end of this document.

24 One such blog they create is https://bayarearesistance.wordpress.com/, creating non-public drafts in which they communicate, while publishing stories and other information publicly to spread ideas and recruit new members.

Stage 2: Contact Initial contact is made between the individual and an initial steward After some time looking into various organizations and institutions in the new city, Sadie finds a large plot of land that is being turned into a community garden/urban farm. The caretaker, Jenny, envisions the land as offering a place for teach-ins and skill-shares to occur, where food can be grown and provided to low-income community members and those working on the land.

Jenny has come to an agreement with the property owner, Alex, who has allowed her to implement this vision until the property will be sold, at which point the farm will have to leave and find another area.

Since Sadie has volunteered her services to Jenny to help beautify the area, her skills have become apparent and Jenny invites her to participate on a more permanent basis, helping grow an increasing yield with the intention of teaching how to minimize costs by growing food. Sadie agrees and uses the opportunity to help organize more radical speakers and events on location that help promote awareness of social and ecological justice movements and events, offering space for other activists to use as a hub to connect and share ideas as well.

At one of these teach-ins, Sadie gives a talk on how local schools can help teach nutrition to children by establishing school gardens, while working with local farmers to ensure each student has access to seasonal, organic, unprocessed, local food. Nathaniel (Nat), an education activist in the audience is inspired and after the teach-in approaches Sadie with an opportunity to do ecological education consulting for his own group. He explains he and a number of other teachers are fed up with the current state of education, and have incorporated a non-profit called “Communicating Perceptions” (CP) in which an integrated learning program is implemented through a series of “networked Education Cities/Intentional Communities (TC/ICs)” to help transition neighborhoods to eco-villages by learning and teaching sustainability methods through holistic, accessible, and experiential classes promoted through “green games” or an “ecolympics” between and within nodes meant to spur innovation and competition towards these ends.25 As the conversation unfolds, Sadie is inspired and shares a bit about her past and values, bringing up the fact that she is worried her storied past might make her a target for law enforcement. Nat, knowing she is the right person for the job, suggests Cultu.re might be the right platform to work together, providing an anonymous way through its use of the Reputation and Identity Software-assurance Kit (RISK), Web of Trust community, reliance upon Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to transfer money anonymously, with a number of other services and tools to boot. Sadie is intrigued.

25 For more information, see: https://issuu.com/activefolklore/docs/town_college_grant_proposal as well as https://issuu.com/activefolklore/docs/communicating_perceptions.docx

Stage 3- Triage The initial steward investigates and inquires to decide the most appropriate direction for the individual. Negotiations may occur Sadie knows she wants to contribute to Nat’s project, but is worried that a formal business arrangement might put her on the map. Further, she knows that if she gets picked up it may affect her friends. On the other hand, she knows that the urban farm will not last forever, her credentials (with no high school diploma) are limited, and judging by the communiques on the message boards, she knows her friends are becoming desperate. She sees Cultu.re as a way to protect her real-world identity while shifting society’s systemic imbalances that are anchored in ecological injustice, namely the lack of access to land and its potential bounty.

Sadie, not knowing anything about computers, comes to learn from Nat that a distributed system relying on transactional reputation to establish pseudonymous identities for people who want to keep their real identities secret and change the world is exactly what she needs to support herself and community: a way to bring stakeholders together to build projects that improve people’s lives, decentralize power, while protecting the identities of those using the system. She decides to use Cultu.re and invite her friends to participate.

Stage 4: Agreement/Direction Based on triage and negotiations, both parties agree on a particular course of action Sadie sets up an afterhours teach-in on Jenny’s Farm where Nat can spell out the vision and objectives of his project, “Communicating Perceptions” (CP) for the commune, while at the same time sharing how participants can use Cultu.re towards these ends. He explains the cryptography and consensus mechanisms that make it work.

Immediately, things fall apart. The anarcha-feminists have no desire to work what they see is a male-based economic system. Anarcho-insurrectionists believe that non-profits are a way to blunt the revolution, anarcho-communists believe the board structure is antithetical to the nature of anarchy, the individualists are not interested in consensus, and the anarchoprimitivists just laugh, pointing out the increased dependence on technology will only deepen the addiction to unsustainable technologies and huge supply lines that increasingly mediate our lived experience while maintaining exploitative relationships that necessitate ecocidal relationships. None of them want to use computers as they are certain that this will make them vulnerable to surveillance by the FBI they have learned has opened a case on the commune.

When it looks like everyone is about to leave, Sadie offers a solution: they will keep their particular anarchist commune’s subculture intact, while she, having no qualms about interfacing with CP through Cultu.re, will be the point person for contact to help Nat with the kind of parallel subculture they are building, and together they will reassess the relationship based on

the outcomes and effects at a later point. After some discussion and with some security protocols in mind, the group agrees and leaves, with the expectation that Sadie will communicate with them the same time next week at Jenny’s farm after she has set up her account and made necessary preparations.

Sadie writes down the URL for Cultu.re’s decentralized source code repository, creates a handle (@BurntheFuckerDown), and, after checking in with Nat and learning his handle (@WisdomBuilder), the two come up with a passphrase to uniquely identity herself to Nat when they connect online. Since Sadie doesn’t know anything about computers, Nat gives her a quick tutorial, shares a few tricks, and teaches how to secure her systems so as not to pop up on any government radars.26 Stage 5- Consent Consent is asked and given for creating an identity record, which is then provisioned.

Since Cultu.re operates on a system of mutual, earned trust, founded on a commitment to respect individuals right to privacy, this commitment is grounded in a mutual agreement between all parties using the network. Sadie recognizes that ethics are relative and anonymity is fleeting, so doesn’t bother reading any of the fine print of the Terms of Engagement, seeing the platform as only a tool to help her get what she needs at the time. If the Terms prohibit that, she will break them.

After cryptographically signing a statement containing her new pseudonym @BurntheFuckerDown and a statement of terms she agrees to, she generally disregards any consent receipts (as she has no interest in keeping any records of her online activities whatsoever just in case any of her property is confiscated).

Stage 6- Configure Information is shared and associated with the individual. Services are configured.

26 A basic overview might be found at https://theintercept.com/2017/02/20/how-to-run-arogue-government-twitter-account-with-an-anonymous-email-address-and-a-burner-phone/ which explains how to run an anonymous account by hiding IP addresses with a Tor Browser, using anonymous operating systems, anonymous darknet email addresses, VPNs, buying a burner phone with an anonymous phone number with cash (while avoiding security cameras and making sure the store it is purchased from is in another city), using it only in public places, removing the battery or SIM card when not in use, not telling anyone about the accounts, ensuring strict need-to-know confidentiality along the way, not clicking on links people send and maintaining high security, including engaging in differentiated writing styles to ensure difficulty in language analysis, never logging in from work or even looking at the program/site without a Tor Browser or logging in from a personal account, uploading photos that might contain metadata, etc.

Sadie downloads Cultu.re and creates a unique identifier in the form of a Decentralized Identifier on Cultu.re’s distributed network. This binds a publicly verifiable credential to her new pseudonym and the related DID27 will allow her to securely interface through Cultu.re without revealing her real-world identity.28 Using the Cultu.re introduction system, Sadie looks up @WisdomBuilder and contacts him using her new handle. Cultu.re establishes a secure channel and Sadie and Nat confirm each other’s identity using their memorized phrases. Now both have each other’s cryptographically secure identifiers for ongoing correspondence.

Stage 7- Services Services are provided Sadie doesn’t much care about her reputation on Cultu.re, since she is trying to establish a minimal presence, but creates a verifiable credential self-asserting her capabilities as a permaculturalist to her identity @burnthefuckerdown anyway, sending @wisdombuilder the credential and requesting a counter-signature with a written endorsement, just in case any of her friends decide to get on Cultu.re later or Nat’s co-organizers need it for some reason. @wisdombuilder complies and posts a hash of the countersigned credential and endorsement, providing @burnthefuckerdown the ability to selectively give permission to anyone to verify the credential and endorsement. In addition, Nat can revoke the endorsement in the future, should Sadie become compromised.

Once @burnthefuckerdown is in Cultu.re with a suitable endorsement, the work begins! Those engaged in CP can see @wisdombuilder’s endorsement of @burnthefuckertotheground, giving her status as a subject matter expert should Nat introduce her to anyone.29 Nat shares background materials outlining the project specifying requirements, timeframe, and acceptance criteria with @burnthefuckertotheground and, after reviewing the materials, Sadie responds with some clarifying questions and a draft statement of work, including a provision that she and anyone who works with her on the necessary permanent subsistence zones will be able to freely access the areas forever after. The Statement of Work is formalized into a contract using Cultu.re’s contract template including pricing, technical milestones, evaluation criteria, and progress payments.

The standard contract templates are supported for cryptographic smart contracts, and the full contract value in bitcoin is deposited into a smart escrow account, so that after each technical milestone is achieved, @burnthefuckertotheground will receive the agreed payments to her wallet, after which she can convert it to cash if necessary and disperse it to the commune, while 27 What is the difference between a profile name and DID? 28 How is a publically verifiable credential binded to an anonymous username helpful if they can’t verify the person due to anonymity? Can authorities cross-reference these credentials to target certain activists with specific credentials?

29 Can anyone see this or can only people who @burnthefuckertotheground chooses see it?

the smart contract independently records @burnthefuckertotheground’s project delivery and @wisdombuilder’s reviews and acceptance into the reputation system.

As Sadie and Nat work together over the next few months, they begin to establish the first node in what will become CP’s nodal land community network, in which permanent subsistence zones lay the infrastructure for a sustainable Education City-Intentional Community (EC-IC) web.

Sadie enlists the support of the commune to help with the transitionary work while Nat uses the CP network and Cultu.re platform to cultivate a wider community in which each student/teacher is paid for the value they produce, whether it goods, services, research, contributions, etc., with each student engaging with the wider community to learn techniques necessary for the subcultu.re to flourish. As CP’s EC-IC starts to get international recognition, Nat suggests to Sadie that they expand their network to develop new nodes in major cities around the world where other education activists have contacted him through Cultu.re’s RISK services.

Stage 8. Enhancements Enhancements are offered and accepted After successfully delivering on @wisdombuilder’s project requests, in which students now have an ecological basis for engaging in experiential projects designed to learn content and skillbased knowledge through projects they are compensated for, Sadie is given a glowing review and invited by Nat to engage in an ecological education consulting tour via a new contract, in which she would work with new partners to expand Nat’s EC-IC nodal land community network.

Still worried about vulnerabilities, she decides to talk it over with the commune before getting back to Nat. In doing so, the anarchist commune she has been a part of suggests that Nat’s CP subcultu.re is a greenwashed capitalist rouse meant to legitimize the commodification of labor and reify a class-based system that inevitably generates a bourgeoisie elite. They consider what an anarchist subculture would actually look like and, after many days of discussing the theoretical basis and lived praxis of their own anarchist experiences, decide to create their own subculture on the wider Cultu.re platform they name the Green Association of International Anarchists (GAIA). GAIA, they decide, will be an “anti-government,” a bioregional federation overlaid onto the Permanent Subsistence Zones that serves as the natural infrastructure Nat’s EC-IC cultu.re depends upon, which they have access to forever due to the provision Sadie’s initial contract included.

One of GAIA’s main cultural values therefore will be that all members are guaranteed access to the subcultu.re’s goods and services without dependence on cryptocurrencies or money at all.

Sadie talks to Nat about this idea, suggesting that the two cultu.res occupy the same space, while holding different values, with members moving between them as needed. Nat agrees, showing Sadie how to use the Cultu.re platform to set up this breakaway subcultu.re, before she agrees to a second contract with Nat so the two can continue promoting the parallel CP subcultu.re.

Sadie and Nat both make updates to their resumes and subcultu.re descriptions, sharing their values and objectives in the public Developer Directory.

Stage 9: Updates Anticipated changes in information lead to revised records To date, Sadie has become the point person for establishing the GAIA subcultu.re on Cultu.re, while contracting with Nat’s CP/EC-IC cultu.re as well. She has completed one successful contract (turning node one into a permanent subsistence zone) for CP, with multiple contracts in the pipeline as CP continues to advocate the success of their projects that rely on Sadie’s skills and vision.

By this time, Jenny informs Sadie that Alex has requested the urban farm be disbanded so he might sell it to local developers in the next few months. While this was expected, most of the anarchist community has begun to consider this area their home, caretaking the area, growing food, with a number of temporary shelters popping up to house them at times. Together, Sadie and the commune determine a course of action to move themselves to the Permanent Subsistence Zone of Node 1. However, as a way to launch the GAIA subcultu.re on Cultu.re they use the CP EC-IC network to promote what they begin to call a 40-day teach-in. 30 In this regard, participants will focus on three basic goals: 1) restore and maintain natural systems, 2) develop sustainable means for satisfying basic human needs, and 3) create and support a broad range of activities to align human systems with the wider life-place. This is done by mapping the natural elements and creating the conditions for a biodiversity hotspot to emerge, promoting the best things people do while eliminating the worst things. Through a Bioregional Education Program that establishes Green City Resources, urban sustainability is achieved through a global network of bioregions (what will become GAIA’s “Planetariat”) that engage in the bioregional federation’s coordinative bioregional ecological democracy to integrate activities determined by bioregional gatherings, watershed councils, continent congresses, etc. As the decentralized coordinating body grows a life-place culture through a fractal energy distribution system, 198 methods of Bioregional Reinhabitation are implemented to modify and enhance the permanent subsistence zones.31 Though Sadie and the commune are mostly technologically ignorant, they recognize they will likely need several Decentralized Apps (dApps) to help facilitate their work, asking Nat about possibilities. He uses the RISK reputation system to find and ask Amira, a technological savvy activist, and the commune asks Sadie to use some of the money they have earned from CP to 30 For more information on 40-day teach-in/bioregional Reinhabitation plan/approach, see https://prezi.com/phjavecplmkf/bioregional-brilliance-joy-and-freedom-in-the-play-ofwatershed-consciousness/ 31 https://ecomagicians.wordpress.com/2018/03/09/198-methods-of-bioregionalreinhabitation/

contract Amira to build four dApps that Sadie will retain rights to, which are named “Global Insurgency,”32 “M-City,”33 and “Free Society,”34 and “GAIA”35 respectively, meant to set up a game between organizations to compete to creatively transform oppressive systems into liberated ones through direct action; grow and distribute essential products to be processed into beneficial goods; establish a nonmonetary gift-based political economy in which individuals are granted access to basic goods and services for free; and a global accounting system that allows users to map projects around them and facilitate the effects of the activities of the other apps.

These dApps build upon the Universal Citizenship IDs, Universal Love Agreements, Universal Space Registrations, Dispute Resolutions, and Personal Culture Creation that have already been set up in other subcultu.res on Cultu.re’s platform. For instance, membership in GAIA can be attained through Universal Love Agreement with someone already in it, according with the GAIA subcultu.re’s stance on free love and polyamory.

Because Sadie recognizes the need for property to be easily donated or transferred to GAIA’s control, she sets up a 501c3 called “Morning Star,” (meant to highlight the ambiguity of qualifiers like “good” and “evil” as both Lucifer, Christ, and various pagan goddesses were granted the same name) with the intention of using the GAIA subcultu.re on the Cultu.re platform to manage Morning Star’s “internal” activities. She places herself, Nat, and her lifepartner Sarah on the board with the expectation they will follow her lead, giving her the title as “Bishop” to ensure their activities are protected as religious speech and activities, while maintaining tax-exempt status for any donations that might arise, including homes and

32 Global Insurgency will allow affinity groups to provide communiques while detailing the effects of their direct actions for others in secure ways, so individuals can see what groups are near them and where they fit in a wider political spectrum, their motivations, media projects, etc. Groups compete with one another to have the most impact within respective causes and can collaborate or coordinate actions to maximize the effect.

33 M-City will allow all labor sectors engaged in beneficial sustainable production methods (for instance, cannabis/hemp cultivation) to trade and distribute produce to process centers in order to freely access end products (food, medicine, nutritional supplements, bedding, fuel, feed, construction materials, plastics, textiles, paper products, and any of the other 50,000 uses and benefits). Surplus products are sold to the external market, with proceeds used to bolster green industries and provide a universal basic income for all members of the subcultu.re. However, Sadie decides to have a very small percentage of profits go into a secret anonymous cryptowallet she maintains, just in case this whole “anarchist thing” doesn’t actually work out.

34 Free Society will be modeled on the basic network/services and operating principles of MCity, but simply expanded to all products and services.

35 In a similar way, the GAIA operating system will use the basic structure of the other dApps, yet engage in a green accounting service meant to determine sustainability metrics of any given products, while mapping and coordinating the activities of members engaged Ecolympic Activities that include 198 Methods of Bioregional Reinhabitation. Metrics will be aggregated to generate a top 12 industry actors that are least green (“Dirty Dozen”) which will be fed into the Global Insurgency dApps “Top Targets List.”

abandoned buildings that can be offered as homeless shelters or co-housing cooperatives and new communes. The original commune thinks Sadie is hilarious.

After Amira delivers the four dApps in question, Sadie and Nat begin promoting the 40-day teach-in through CP’s EC-IC culture, by which each of the 198 methods of Bioregional Reinhabitation are implemented across Node 1 via the four dApps, establishing a breakaway permanent subsistence zone that is completely sustainable, autonomous, while offering refuge for individuals (refugees, undocumented workers, homeless, veterans, dropouts, etc.) in the real world wishing to maintain anonymity while providing funds through CP’s EC-IC subcultu.re.

Along the way, several visionaries get wind of Sadie and Nat’s goals for a federated bioregional wisdom economy and transfer property rights to the 501c3 tax-free, in turn providing other potential nodes in different bioregions to eventually be turned into permanent subsistence zones for CPs EC-IC network.

Sadie in turn uses the RISK Cultu.re to find a Ernesto, radical lawyer to help her market Morning Star as a way to “baptize” corporations (i.e. “persons”) into her “Church” so that they conform to a more socio-ecological spiritual mission (turned into non-profits themselves), presiding over “marriages” that offer ways for such “persons” to engage in mergers, or offering “funeral” services, by which corporations can be dissolved, their assets being resurrected in the wider Morning Star community using the GAIA subcultu.re’s dApps that cultivate and curate the community that functions as Morning Star’s “Council of All Beings” that advises the board as to any updates that may need to be made. That is, she allows any group that wants to contribute to the Morning Star project will become a member who in turn receives all the benefits the community offers in turn. In addition, Sadie connects with Amira again to begin work on two WMDs for the church (a World Music Database, and World Media/Movie Database) meant to disrupt the entertainment industries altogether, as well as a Temple Sex Magic Project, a dating dApp meant to encourage and reward people for activities in which they are able to experience divine presence through entertainment work. In each of these other dApps, individuals share their “value,” and are rewarded for services by access to all other goods and services offered by the church, with the wider community taking account of who the top “producers” are and rewarding them with various special prizes, etc.36 36 For instance, Jenny’s farm joins the Morning Star network, providing free food and space to those in the community who might need access to it. In return, Jenny’s farm members are able to freely access the world media database to listen to any music or movies available, whose producers are able to get stop by Jenny’s Farm to grab a bite for free or see a teach-in, etc. Sadie can similarly “baptize” corporate “persons” like Apple into the community as well, provided their products are able to be freely shared with the wider community (like Jenny) as well, in which case their employees would also be able to access other products and services freely (like Jenny’s Farm). In this regard, production, allocation, distribution, and consumption levels are tracked through Sadie’s dApps Amira has built, with top producers/change-makers being identified (anonymously or publically), celebrated, and rewarded by the community, in turn given access to the products/services of the wider Morning Star community, maintained by the GAIA subcultu.re.

Once the 40-day teach-in in node 1 is completed under the auspices of CP’s EC-IC subcultu.re (yet also in anticipation of the GAIA subcultu.re), the commune moves from Jenny’s farm to Node 1 permanently, while Sadie and Nat set off to make good on their promises to develop the CP’s EC-IC subcultu.re internationally, establishing 40-day teach-ins using the dApps after reflecting, critiquing, and updating the first ones to be more effective, and giving Amira a glowing review of course.

Stage 10: problems/issues Issues beyond the normal support interfaces arise and are resolved Before Sadie leaves, she and the commune have an intense discussion about phase 2 of establishing their anti-capitalist GAIA subcultu.re. As they now have access to a permanent subsistence zone that acts as a growing base of operations, and a number of dApps to maintain and encode the values of their subcultu.re, they determine to better define the “Green” in their subcultu.re. They determine that all capitalist, industrial, and most if not all hi-tech products/services are antithetical to socioecological sustainability and determine they will use the dApps to engage in an intercultu.ral war with the other various subcultu.res as well as the dominant culture that Cultu.re itself operates within.

As such, they use dApps to organize green bans, BDS movements, general strikes, and include Gene Sharp’s 198 methods of Nonviolent Action as well to disrupt the daily flow of what they consider to be unsustainable industries, electing instead to focus on teaching each member of GAIA how to be completely self-sufficient, so that nothing in its subcultu.re will be unsustainable. Sadie and Nat determine that while all members of GAIA will be free to move between GAIA and CP as needed, CP’s EC-IC will continue to allow capitalist industrial technologically based goods and services, while GAIA will not, while Sadie’s dApps will be used to engage in a “green audit” of sorts that will ensure GAIA remains 100% sustainable while also exorcizing monetary relations from the equation altogether.

Some of the educational activists that work with Nat in CP worry that this amounts to a kind of declaration of war, and foresee a civil war brewing, as many of CP’s EC-IC’s have firing ranges and weapons caches to teach students about law enforcement and military training, along with farming and subsistence techniques. Nervous about the fiery rhetoric of the anarchoinsurrectionists and the free access clause of the smart contract, they put in anonymous tips to the police and FBI, calling them “insurgents,” “communists,” “anarchists,” “radical environmentalists,” and “eco-terrorists” bent on violently overthrowing the United States.

Sadie and Nat time their departure to other CP EC-IC projects to occur before the commune’s campaign in order to distance themselves from the “subversive” activity, while the commune maintains strict security countermeasures so they are not picked up by government SigInt operations. As the campaign ramps up however, some of the commune’s actors become violent —which are of course out of line with GAIA platform principles (and by nature fall “outside” of the subcultu.res and Cultu.re activities). Nevertheless, the FBI, headed by Special Special Agent

Mike of the FBI, who has experience shutting down a number of anonymous online dark economies, and who has been on the case since the police officer was killed in the original raid, begins to target the campaign with his team, and in interrogating those who are arrested, find GAIA, CP, and Cultu.re to have been providing the technological support for organizing the campaigns, and begin making initial arrests. In response, many of the users cite their use of the code as a free speech issue,37 seeing the government response as a breach of their civil liberties, not to mention violating the free exercise of the religion clause and internal activities of Morning Star’s spiritual mission to promote justice.

As months go by, Sadie and Nat continue to make good on their contracts to turn property into permanent subsistence zones that form the basis of CP’s EC-TC network, establishing 40-day teach-ins through which she is able to make connections with radical blocs of student-teachers and invite them to the GAIA subcultu.re, who in turn use the dApps to expand and intensify the spectrum of resistance prior to her and Nat moving on to the next bioregion, leaving freely accessible subsistence zones in their wake.

Because the core commune that knows Sadie is relatively small, uses security countermeasures, stays offline for the most part, and organizes most of the direct action campaigns without the use of Cultu.re, even while promoting them through the dApps at time through intermediaries, Sadie’s anonymity remains intact, and is able to move into other countries as an contractor and education consultant, doing the same work in different bioregions.

Still, as the first year of GAIA’s now international campaigns come to a close, waves of repression are ramped up everywhere. Rumors that governments are using every technological device available to them to destroy what they increasingly are calling “terrorist threats” are being vindicated, and the most brutal regimes are investing in technology that will cut the kill chain to near instantaneity, creating an assassination program to destroy and dismantle GAIA cells where they pop up.38 Various GAIA subcultu.re users and even some CP users are having their accounts hacked, messages are sent inviting friends to various places, who are in turn targeted for imprisonment or assassination. Sadie and Nat do everything they can to maintain security so that they, their networks, and their tools are not compromised. Occasionally accounts are restored, or recreated, but more often than not individual networks within the subcultu.re’s are compromised, leading to waves of mistrust within the community. Such 37 What precedents are there for code amounting to free speech? What degree of distance needs to be maintained for it to remain legal. For instance, if something like “Silk Roads” was in existence, what could keep it from being shut down? Not explicitly linking the information exchange with illicit products and ensuring any illicit activity was not explicitly referenced?

Asking for a friend…

38 In some cases, governments are attempting to automate the kill-chain entirely, meaning that the ability for governments to receive signals from activists whose identities have been fed into a terrorist database that is greenlit for targeting allows for near immediate orders to be sent to drones that fire precision-laser technology at targets, ensuring the time between target acquisition and target elimination is less than one minute.

compromises prompt GAIA’s Council of all Beings to request Morning Star hire analysts to quickly eliminate access for those dApp users that seem to entrap others, though even this becomes a near impossible task without the resources needed to confront and repel bad actors that continually penetrate the system.

In America, the question of whether Cultu.re’s code should be considered terrorist propaganda or free speech sparks major defections in the government, with major disruptions of services catalyzing the migration of the wider public to CP’s EC-IC network where services and goods are provided anonymously, some moving from CP to GAIA who do not want to deal with cryptocurrency or the targeted BDS and violent campaigns leveled at them at all. Many nonprofits, and even some for-profits request “baptism,” “marriages”, or “funeral rites” under Morning Star, and as such, nations are restructured, militaries are disbanded, and cyber warfare operations against Cultu.re are initiated are ramped up.

Decision makers at Cultu.re are pressured to disband the GAIA and CP subcultu.re’s. Fortunately, they have good lawyers who know the Constitution better than the FBI and tell the government to go get fucked.39 In some bioregions, even less benevolent governments work with informants and cooperating witnesses to locate Cultu.re hubs and set off EMPs to derail various subcultu.res’ dependence on the wider network. Repressive regimes on various continents threaten to use Nitro Zeus-type cyber weapons against the United States, accusing the United States of maintaining Cultu.re as a CIA operation to subvert their national sovereignty.40 Some of the subcultu.res on the permanent subsistence zones are rendered dependent again on the governments’ systems and institutions that attack them, but others are able to withstand the attacks, continuing to use the CP and GAIA subcultu.res to ensure basic needs and services are provided by the local community so that it remains self-sufficient.

As the intraCultu.re civil war plays out, rumors continue to spread that GAIA is a violent religious movement that is rewriting a new political theology of nature to engage in cosmic warfare, and splinter sects spin off each with their own version of the GAIA subcultu.re to various degrees of religious zealotry. Sadie and Nat maintain good relationship, where dual power allows for GAIA to continue eroding the power of the worst polluters and bad actors, while the green tech of CP’s EC-IC network is used for carbon capture and other technologically advanced attempts to address systemic imbalances. Debate is fostered between the two subcultu.res, persuading 39 How would Cultu.re determine decision making processes that affect subcultu.res?

40 Nitro Zeus is a cyber-weapon, much like the so called “Stuxnet” or “Olympic Games” virus.

However, instead of simply focusing on one particular industrial target (an Iranian nuclear power plant), it has the potential to infiltrate all industrial systems: communications systems, the power grid, financial systems, transportation systems, food and water systems, defense systems, and other vital systems through electronic implants in computer and electronic networks so as to shut them down permanently thus destroying the entirety of a target’s infrastructure across a continent or even the planet.

members to their respective causes in what are increasingly becoming fully autonomous subcultu.res.

Being targeted from all sides, both Sadie and Nat switch from subcultu.re to subcultu.re as needed. As anonymous nomads on Cultu.re, they are now freely provided with basic necessities, or teach via contract for cryptocurrencies to be converted into cash where needed, or other subcultu.re cryptos are engaged in occasionally.

In this regard the consequence is that the climate begins to stabilize as polluters are dismantled, the mass extinction ends as habitat is increasingly restored and protected, and socioecological justice, democracy, and the earth community begin to flourish as the activity of the 501c3s under the US code generates the conditions for life-support systems to remain intact and strengthened to promote biodiversity and self-sufficiency.

Stage 11 – Maintenance Software, hardware, or operations are updated and upgraded Meanwhile, before the Supreme Court, after five years of watching the government’s lawsuit make it through the lower courts, determines whether the GAIA code (even subversive code) is free speech, Sadie and Nat determine the best course of action would be to delete the GAIA subcultu.re altogether, so that people no longer need to use the technology at all. That is, the 40-day teach-ins have created the infrastructure for a 40-year teach-in to exist, with individuals and communities focusing on themselves without need for money or technology to help them with their autonomy, mutual aid, and self-defense. Members have engaged in it for so long, they know mostly all of the critical information needed to maintain the cultu.re themselves without externalizing the information to blockchain technologies anymore. However, GAIA’s Council of all Beings requests a transition period to prepare for the transition to a non-tech subcultu.re.

Updates and upgrades to dApps and the overall RISK operating systems are implemented, information in copied in the real world and committed to memory for several months so that each member of the GAIA subcultu.re is aware of permanent subsistence zones and the wider CP network should they need to rely upon the technological infrastructure in the future.

Stage 12 – Migration Records are moved, transformed to a new schema, input, or output Sadie deletes the GAIA subcultu.re after announcing to the community it will be shut down and provides resources for GAIA’s free society to exist only in the real world, encouraging people to produce whatever records they need for their own benefit, while remembering they are in the middle of cyberwar where Nitro Zeus may soon eliminate the entirety of their infrastructure. On the other hand, she suggests to the users they migrate to CP’s EC-IC and continue using the dApps should they find them useful, so they can continue to network, organize, and find ways to monetize their value should they need, while also explaining that GAIA’s purpose of providing a nonmonetary international bioregional federation is complete and a list of historical records will be available under Morning Star. She maintains her profile on CP to stay in contact with Nat and

the wider CP network when necessary, but ultimately has no real need for it, as she can move anywhere, get basic needs and services met for free, and generally finds she is living a selfactualized life in which the GAIA subcultu.re she set up with the commune is perpetuated in perpetuity. She climbs a mountain and pats herself on the back, before having a spiritual revelation that redefines her life’s purpose.

Stage 13 – Recovery Lost credentials or identifiers are restored or reset Having no need for the Cultu.re operating system of CP’s subcultu.re, Sadie, over months, forgets her password. She contacts Nat and they meet in person to confirm a new profile, @btf2tg. Nat recreates the endorsement and records, and makes connections with any relevant contacts to refer them back to her. After asking a few questions, they revoke their endorsement of the previous handle and transfer it to the new one. Sadie fully expects to forget her password again.

Stage 14 – Exit The individual concludes their relationship with stewards in this lifecycle Sadie comes to terms with her divine revelation and contemplates the possibility of eliminating tech from her life altogether so she can develop her wilderness skills and not pollute her mind with the mediated existence provided by the use of technology. She talks this over with Nat who encourages this. She ends her contractor status with CP, recommending her protégé Madeleine take over for her, retaining the title of Community Ecological Organizer (CEO) of the Morning Star 501c3, but asks Nat to take over the day-to-day activities, which Nat agrees to. Nat hires Madeleine for further CP ecological education consulting and establishes a new contract with her, while Sadie goes dark, running for the hills.

Stage 15- Re-engagement The individual is invited and accepts a new opportunity to engage the system After years of honing her primitive skills, Sadie stumbles upon a beach she falls in love with.

Unfortunately for her, it is owned by Roger, a die-hard capitalist and ideologue who doesn’t want her on his property. Sadie reaches out to Nat once again with her new profile and the two talk about an opportunity for Sadie to join the CP network fulltime to get the project back on track. Sadie suggests she doesn’t really care about the project anymore. What she really wants is to cash in and buy Roger’s beach front property. Sadie, as CEO of Morning Star, who alone owns the intellectual property rights to the dApps that are still making money of which a small percentage up to now been stored in a cryptowallet (see footnote 11), invites specific advertisers to pay to promote their products, following strict guidelines to do so to ensure only those whose mission aligns where her sense of non-hierarchical socio-ecological justice are promoted. She dissolves the Morning Star 501c3, transferring all assets to CP, which agrees to maintain the Permanent Subsistence Zones and free access to basic needs and services for

members and their partners, while Sadie alone retains the rights to the dApps, converts a portion of the crypto in her wallet to cash and approaches Roger.

With the billions of dollars she now receives from the dApps, she goes back to the capitalist to buy the property and, after making some changes with regards to the property, invites the original commune to live with her whenever, and for however long they wish, doing anarchist stuff as only anarchists can do. The group publishes materials that continue to promote the vision of non-technological lifeways with proceeds from the dApps, with members migrating to various watershed councils in the wider bioregional federation, organizing continent congresses for the Planetariat until the last semblance of hierarchy and oppression is eventually abolished, a new world emerging out of the shell of the old.

Fin.

198 Methods of Bioregional Reinhabitation        

Principles: Community self-sufficiency de-centralization Eco-centric/bio-centric perspective Bioregional identity Cooperative organizing principals Sustainable economic practices Nonviolent action Respect for biodiversity, including human multi-cultural values Social/environmental justice Methods:

Education for Sustainable Future 1. Learn about ecology, systems thinking, and natural sciences!

2. Determine your ecological footprint through an ecological assessment and take steps to lessen it 3. Map your bioregion, paying attention to plants, animals, natural features, cultural components, best and worst practice regarding human activities…

4. Set up bioregional study groups that meet regularly 5. Create a climate/bioregional action plan to catalyze transition 6. Engage in eco-pedagogical praxis through project/service-based learning 7. Establish partnerships between education groups and green businesses 8. Set up monthly gathering to teach principles of sustainability 9. Hold forums for presentations and discussions 10. Organize gatherings, summits, teach-ins, and major conferences on specific topics (renewable energy, responsible construction, sustainable regional economies, infrastructure design, sustainable communal well-being, sustainable life-place culture…)

11. Offer seeds, saplings, and appropriate tools for those without them 12. Provide technical assistance to those without it 13. Subsidize classes that promote bioregional awareness 14. Publish a directory of urban gardens and gardeners 15. Solicit neighborhood visions of futures and integrate them into action plans 16. Encourage teachers to develop courses in local bioregional health 17. Teach bioregional information and sustainability as required subjects 18. Offer points of entry for the public 19. Provide a source of general bioregional information 20. Provide organizing skills 21. Annual organizing conferences 22. Provide concrete lifestyle examples 23. Cultivate bioregional arts 24. Create a world-wide presence on the web 25. Develop an online sustainability map 26. Develop an online green calendar for public events

27. Establish databases with bioregional information 28. Establish a skills exchange database 29. Assist local organizations in bioregional activities 30. Do outreach at schools and universities to present bioregional perspectives 31. Establish a speaker’s bureau from different bioregions 32. Learn navigation techniques and survival skills 33. Provide free basic ecological education universally (MOOCs‌) 34. Generally explore and play nature games!

Local Food System 35. Redesign your meal plan to become independent from industrial systems 36. Forage your food!

37. Begin a compost 38. Plant a garden 39. Locate all of the local organic, unprocessed, whole foods coops/collectives in your area 40. Establish a neighborhood food distribution/trade network to share garden harvests 41. Redistribute surplus foods to food pantries 42. Discover all of your local farmer’s markets from a 100-mile radius 43. Find every Community Supported Agriculture that delivers fresh food in a 100-mile radius 44. Organize local community meals with neighbors 45. Establish local composting centers to provide parks and gardens.

46. Initiate programs that involve communities to grow food through small-scale agriculture 47. Convert unused lots to garden plots and community spaces 48. Organize guerrilla gardening and urban planting projects 49. Convert city parks into food forests 50. Plant native species in median strips, sidewalks, etc.

51. Open up spaces for gardening, i.e. rooftop and balcony gardens 52. Renovate former manufacturing and storage spaces for growing food 53. Restore water purity of rivers, creeks, lakes, wells, etc.

54. Reuse filtered grey water and establish grey-water systems in buildings 55. Develop new sustainable ways and techniques to better satisfy basic human needs 56. Employ indigenous subsistence techniques where possible 57. Establish permanent subsistence zones where possible 58. Establish nodal networks of gardens and permaculture subsistence zones where possible 59. Learn preservation skills Green Building and Renewable Energy 60. Decrease energy use 61. Build a sustainable cobb house out of natural elements 62. Retrofit homes to be off-grid 63. Install solar roofs and solar water heaters 64. Install living/vegetated roofs 65. Install native plant landscaping

66. Demonstrate and make accessible cost-saving applications of renewable energy 67. Design new buildings to be LEED platinum (or whatever the highest standard is) certification 68. Find clean sources of energy 69. Commit to zero net energy development 70. Sponsor energy education programs 71. Subsidize low-income energy retrofits 72. Conserve land through dense clustering 73. Locate and convert greenhouse gas emissions towards carbon neutrality 74. Pass ordinances requiring homes and apartment be weatherized/retrofitted when sold 75. Redesign building codes to remove restrictions for renewables and ensure their use 76. Install utility meters that show dollar cost of energy and raw consumption data 77. Convert city waste into energy, assuming environmental quality and recycling options are not compromised.

78. Research how biomimicry can be used to supply a region’s energy needs and implement strategies 79. Institute curbside pickup of separated recyclables Land Use and Transportation Alternatives 80. Commit to going car free 81. Convert your car or vehicle to use and recycle renewable energy (veggie fuel/biodiesel) 82. Set up a ride share 83. Set up a bike share 84. Install city-wide bike racks and encourage public use 85. Establish car-free zones 86. Reclaim common areas for public use 87. Rewild large tracts of land 88. Establish, expand, and connect wildlife corridors 89. Reintroduce rare species 90. Require developers to set aside areas as plantable space 91. Require companies to shoulder transportation costs 92. Adopt mixed use zoning policies to enable homes, workplaces, and entertainment to be near each other 93. Discourage sprawl and housing-only subdivisions and suburbs through zoning policies 94. Introduce green audits to ensure no public funds subsidize unjust/unsustainable projects and all city/regional planning is sustainable 95. Emphasize long-term, regional sustainability in planning 96. Prohibit converting agricultural land into low-density housing 97. Identify sacred spaces and natural habitat that may not be removed or disturbed 98. Purchase ecologically sensitive areas for protection or damaging buildings for conversion or removal 99. Reexamine city activities to restrain toxic chemicals 100.

Require minimal distance between development and habitat.

101.

Protect and restore wildlife habitat within city limits through set-asides

102.

Establish mechanisms (taxes, etc.) to fund maintenance of existing urban wild habitat 103.

Create new wild places 104.

Create Departments of Natural Life to coordinate efforts to protect and restore wildness 105.

Daylight creeks and streams to constitute wild corridors 106.

Redesign parks and open spaces as habitats for ecosystems using wild places as models 107.

Use local native plants whenever possible in parks and landscaping 108.

Restore and conserve natural systems 109.

Eliminate industrial farm subsidies; shift to urban farms Local Living Economy 110.

Establish a green resource hub and mutual aid associations to provide gardening facilities, tools, and equipment for all citizens 111.

Purchase from fair-trade stores that are sustainably certified 112.

Promote a local network of green businesses 113.

Boycott, divest, and sanction all non-green business 114.

Ensure agriculture is organic, sustainable, biodynamic, etc.

115.

Begin a food delivery service 116.

Begin a time bank 117.

Set up gift circles 118.

Begin a local currency 119.

Lobby for green jobs, i.e. remanufacturing, etc.

120.

Learn to design and produce clothing from local sources 121.

Set up a place to donate and reuse clothes and items 122.

Design and utilize compostable containers 123.

Organize seed exchanges 124.

Celebrate community ideas about livability by underwriting blueprints for success 125.

Form neighborhood design review boards to require developers to incorporate recommendations 126.

Set up a credit union to fund green or ecological justice projects, or opening and expanding locally owned sustainable businesses 127.

Create small business incubators to encourage green start-ups 128.

Establish zoning policies favoring neighborhood sustainable start-ups 129.

Fund neighborhood scale activities and institutions that carry out local projects like place-making common areas 130.

Use city money, tax incentives, or district levies for urban revegetation projects 131.

Encourage local life-place celebrations to strengthen connections and express cultural diversity 132.

Find ways to express community identification with local natural features and characteristics 133.

Establish metrics and transition plans to increase gross domestic happiness

134.

135.

136.

137.

138.

139.

140.

Develop rituals and spiritual activities that foster a sense of place Institute “green bans� to prohibit ecologically destructive projects Protect and restore forests Conserve and rebuild soils Regenerate fisheries Protect and restore biodiversity hotspots Plant trees!

Alternative Media 141.

Promote causes that offer solutions 142.

Focus on positive news 143.

Detail examples of sustainability 144.

Identify destructive practices 145.

Cover festivals of life-place culture 146.

Link local issues to global issues 147.

Engage in case studies of habitats for biodiversity, soundscapes, etc.

148.

Produce bioregional documentaries 149.

Set up neighborhood lending libraries 150.

Ensure public access to all materials 151.

Blog about re-inhabitation 152.

Advertise for bioregional solutions and issues 153.

Assist in developing localized media such as murals, newsletters, radio shows, community bulletin boards, etc.

154.

Showcase public artwork that stresses descriptions of natural history 155.

Establish media contacts/distribution centers 156.

Share information, beliefs, and experiences from a bioregional perspective 157.

Publish bioregional newsletters 158.

Provide a handbook of ideas for how to organize locally 159.

Prepare a wide variety of stock materials 160.

Compile reading lists from each bioregion 161.

Distribute tapes and conference talks 162.

Develop public sustainability information for citizens in public places 163.

Create bundles sharing critical bioregional information and culture 164.

Set up a clearinghouse/network to contact other bioregionalists 165.

Raise awareness of elements, techniques, and importance of sustainable practices 166.

Create press releases and news conferences taking vocal positions on bioregional issues Health 167.

168.

169.

170.

Offer free health clinics Eliminate food deserts Open organic and health coops Teach and provide herbal remedies

171.

172.

Exercise outdoors!

Offer free birth control and family planning services

Citizen Activism 173.

Boycott, divest from, and sanction dirty industry 174.

Build coalitions, movements, and consortiums to coordinate greening operations 175.

Identify and eliminate point and nonpoint sources of pollution 176.

Research conservation groups and donate to or volunteer for them 177.

Advocate for devolutionary policies promoting local empowerment and sufficiency 178.

Repeal ordinances/procedures that are barriers to planting native species and fruit trees 179.

Use volunteer groups as labor forces for ecological restoration 180.

Levy gasoline, severance, parking, and auto taxes to pay for public transit and other reinhabitory activities 181.

Engage in district elections to improve representation of neighborhoods in municipal decision-making process 182.

Establish watershed councils for long-term ecological planning 183.

Set up bioregional gatherings and continent congresses 184.

Determine metrics to convert urban areas into eco-cities 185.

Initiate participatory government and economics 186.

Set up bioregional committees of correspondence 187.

Get involved in NGOs and ensure they operate according to bioregional standards 188.

Set up Community Sustainability Indicators to reach and improve upon 189.

Set up non-hierarchical informal global eco-regional federation to protect human rights and the rights of nature (natural rights) 190.

Establish a comprehensive cybernetic monitoring and analysis system to determine ecological limits of earth in ways that can be applied to economy 191.

Establish a global reserve to stabilize earth systems and allocate and distribute basic human services and goods 192.

Establish a global trusteeship of Earth’s commons to protect earth’s life support systems and ensure these are used for the flourishing of the community of life 193.

Establish a global court to prevent the abuse of power and enforce global rules 194.

Learn how to live without electricity 195.

Live without money 196.

Live a zero-waste life 197.

Engage in ecological defense actions 198.

Implement Gene Sharpe’s 198 methods of non-violent resistance to build toward a more ecologically sensitive world!

EduArtiVism:

A Living Cosmology of Bioregional Reinhabitation Step 1: GROUND YOUR STORY IN YOUR COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGY What communications objective will this story support?

The communications objective of this story will be to promote eduartivism as an alternative way of learning that can transform students and their communities into ecozoic participants.

Who is the target audience?

1) 2) 3) 4)

Wisdom Council (strategic partners, educational leaders, tech innovators?)

Students, Co-teachers/collaborators Parents, community organizations, national and international bodies

What is the purpose of the story?    

Simplify the complex. What do they need to understand?

Create an emotional connection. What emotion will you evoke?

Build credibility. How will they see your organization?

Other?

1) Understand the nature of the universe and live accordingly. (Simplify the complex) 2) Evoke joy and wonder at the opportunity to learn, transform, and emotionally connect and grow.

3) People will see this organization as a premier model due to credible metrics.

What kind of story do you need to tell to fulfill that purpose?  Nature of our challenge  How we got started  Performance  Where we are going  Emblematic success  Striving to improve  Why we do what we do The nature of our challenge is to teach healthy living. We got started by analyzing performance, determining where we wanted to go, defined what emblematic success would look like, and strove to improve. Refining the evolutionary impulse.

Which of your messages will the story reinforce?

The story will reinforce the nature of our challenge, emblematic success, performance, where we want to go, and how we are striving to improve, all of which contribute to refining the evolutionary impulse that guides the school.

What is the lesson of the story that will help move your audience to action?

The lesson of the story is that education is our salvation, and a new reinhabitory education can move us to actualize new ecozoic lifeways/era.

STEP TWO: BUILD YOUR STORY The Characters Who or what is the hero?  Is your hero a person? If not, what is it?  Name your hero  Describe your hero with vivid details The heroes are the students, who learn healthy living strategies (lifeways) in ways that contribute to the reinhabitation of their bioregions. Since everyone has access to this education, everyone can be a hero!

Who or what is the villain  Is your villain a person? If not, what is it?  Name your villain  Describe your villain with vivid details The villain is the Anthropogenic activities done as a result of being ignorant or intentional of their ill-effect, who contribute to the ecological injustice creeping into our daily actions. We must always be vigilant towards, and mindful of the resolutions to these crises.

The Plot: Where’s the conflict?  Why are your hero and villain in conflict?  What obstacles must the hero overcome?  What’s at stake for your hero?

The conflict stems from ignorance of ecozoic principles, so that ecological evil is done as a result of that ignorance. Therefore, the imperative to learn these ecozoic principles so as to not do ecological evil exists, with students practicing how to do ecological Good in right relationship

with the larger community instead, honing their techniques and lifeways through praxis and mimesis.

What major developments carry the story forward from beginning to end?

1.

2.

3.

4.

Find the principles Translate principles into lessons Apply lessons to problems Demonstrate by transformation for resolutions

Summarize your story in one sentence that includes your big lesson (Ex. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. This is the story of a shiny-nosed reindeer who was banned from reindeer games, ran away from home and eventually realized that his difference was actually his greatest strength).

This is a story of a little school that needed to differentiate itself to stay in business, realigned its education curriculum to the evolutionary impulse of the cosmos, and turned into a community resource by teaching students how to adapt and reinhabit their bioregions in ways that promoted ecological flourishing in holistic ways, levels, quadrants...

The Structure: Once upon a time…  (How will you get their attention from the start, introduce hero, set scene) And then what happened?  (How does the conflict build? Describe how with vivid details) And then what happened?  (How does the conflict build? Describe how with vivid details) And finally, what happened to resolve the conflict?  (How is conflict solved? What is result?)

Why does this matter?  (What lesson should your audience take away? Link to your ask) Once upon a time, a teacher developed curriculum based what he learned was the most important things he could think of, before teaching, getting feedback, and refining it.

He continued to improve it, asking experts in the domains to help him derive the mathematical formulas, scientific laws, philosophical truths, and religious insights to facilitate the emergence of an overarching pattern in the evolutionary structure of consciousness in the community over the course of the three years of middle-school, before expanding it to K-12, and ultimately what it took to become a whole person participating in the larger community of life.

As this process continued to be refined, the school could analyze its own disturbance in the larger social patterns it was immersed in, as well as apply its effect towards enacting the highest good for the ecological community.

Finally, as the pattern the school was engaged in resonated in other areas as similar principles were enacted all over the world, the ecozoic brilliance that shone through the curriculum, school, community, and network they were now immersed, engaged, and transformed through remade the socio-ecological patterns that had formerly been based on death into lifepromoting, thriving, and flourishing principles that endured throughout time forever after.

This matters because this learning process is the process by which human adaptation and cosmic evolution both take, and we should be intentional and precise about what we teach and learn during the time we are dedicated to this process. Please help in whatever way you can: Cultural conflicts need epistemological and anthropological resolutions to be applied to logic.

STEP THREE: FINAL CHECK

How many elements of good storytelling does your story have?               

Attention-getting beginning Hero your audience can relate to and respect Villain that represents a real problem you are trying to solve Vivid details that bring the story to life Evokes a specific emotion Conflict that creates tension One clear plot line A surprise or unexpected twist Does not hide or glass over any critical moments of the story Ending where conflict is resolved A central lesson No soul-killing jargon Brevity—can you tell it in three minutes or less?

Memorable—will it stick in the mind of your audience?

Repeatable—will your messengers be able to re-tell it?

Mother Earth is dying from a brain tumor, an infection in the neurological capabilities of an organism that has redirected the entire living system against its nurturing host, Her. There are those fighting against the spreading damage of the neurological capabilities, who have been developing an antidote that mediates the effect of the infected organism to soothe and rejuvenate the neurological capabilities and larger living system that have been damaged. But the nature of the infecting organism duplicates whenever it is killed, so that it is always causing more new damage.

In one school, a teacher teaches students to learn the nature of reality to such a degree that they are able to align with any bioregion of the biosphere and reinhabit it in ways that encourage the redirection of energy over time towards healing patterns of justice and goodness.

They identify social evils, address them, and resolve them in ways that restore joy and faith in humanity and, for some, a higher power.

As the school grows its affect on the world and community around it, other forces not aligned with the natural impulse of the cosmos are overcome in a unitive movement towards healing: The ignorance that is killing the host is the same wisdom that is healing it, just in different stages on its journey towards truth. The Journey of the Universe is the distance between our understanding of the nature and source of energy, so that by knowing this nature and its potential, we can redirect this energy according to our understanding of it, and in doing so transform the nature of reality in ways that more align with a deeper understanding of it. For the time students are in this school, we dedicate ourselves to measure that time as the distance between ignorance and understanding in the lessons we teach about the world we make up.

The implication of this is world peace, the kingdom of heaven on earth, utopia, the ecozoic age, and the constant struggle towards truth as a way to understand for oneself whether they are living in the ecozoic or Anthropocene. This means studying the entirety of the universe, knowing there is a psychological component embedded in it. Each of us experience the mystery of existence from our own positions, each with our own evolutionary inheritance for how to live.

Our experience and knowledge emerge in relation with the larger community of life and its cosmic dynamics. Students inherit our collective understanding of cosmic evolution, remembering how to live and adapt to the conditions we experience, to study and carry out the patterns we co-design as life.

Step 1: Program Decisions Broad Goal: What do you want to achieve over the long term?

Develop school curricula that encourages critical analysis of the world and worldviews, traces the history of the cosmos, life, and human evolution into the future, and empowers students to engage in locally transformative work. Students master the ability to actualize their own creativity by contributing to the great work of the time.

What I hope to accomplish personally, professionally, and globally: Personally: To have a one-year curriculum plan that can expand into a three-year program for a California Middle School History/Social Studies program. To learn lifeways and living traditions that continue to guide human growth.

Professionally: To work towards mastery of the profession, in tandem with other disciplines to foster a school culture that celebrates the community of life we participate in. To understand the evolutionary dynamics of the cosmos and our consciousness and develop professional techniques for teaching and cultivating this process. To generate a framework for understanding human and community empowerment and achieving that potential.

Globally: The curriculum can act as a plan of action that can be applied to any bioregion, while networking participants into breakaway lifeways that together constitute breaking through to the next threshold (ecozoic).

Objective: What’s the first measurable step you need to accomplish within the next 12-24 months to move toward your goal?

1. Create 5-10 Units that integrate ecozoic education in a. culturally responsive, b. academically rigorous, c. experientially tailored, and d. developmentally appropriate lessons that e. connect the story of the universe’s journey to students’ own journeys in ways that f. respond to social and ecological crises with the utmost effect.

2. Craft corresponding assignments aimed at a. developing student understanding b. of the integrative micro, meso, and macro levels of cosmic evolution c. to connect past-present-future d. into meaningful art-forms that e. educate and transform localities.

3. Interview 3 or 5-10 experts to help shape a transdisciplinary approach for 3 years of coursework. a. Teachers b. Schools c. Conversations 4. Create four (4) action units a. the future, b. genius project, c. service learning, d. sustainability/justice report e. all geared towards transformative change.

5. Craft a compendium that includes a vision of how this curriculum fits in the overall process, using it as a case study to track change and look for areas of improvement across time. a. Individuals b. Organizations c. Institutions d. Communities e. Regions 6. SMART

a. b. c. d.

7. Create a. b. c. d. e.

Research human development in deeper context Identify ecozoic metrics of personal, community, and global health and development Build into three-year curriculum and school culture Units, lessons, activities, homework, projects, assessments, expeditions, capstones disseminate information, raise consciousness, mobilize, build pressure, forward momentum incremental progress to goal: ecozoic emergence; power down Anthropocene appropriate tech

“Wisdom for the Ecozoic” Decision maker: who can make your objective a reality by taking a specific action or changing a specific behavior?

Key community leaders and friends, students, coders, elders, institutionals… others can demonstrate a process: whoever learns how to see injustice, consider a just alternative, and implement those just alternatives in ways that reflect why they are just, will have an invaluable opportunity to redesign socio-ecological patterns in ways that effect those ways that are just.

This requires a merger between learning, politics, and technology (total body of techniques) so as to communicate and coordinate wise actions to ensure socioecological flourishing and signal the ecozoic age.

Step Two: Context Internal Scan: What are your organization’s assets and challenges that may impact your outreach strategy? (budget, staffing skills, resources, reputation, etc.)

Assets: Smallest private independent co-ed stand-alone middle school in California, professional growth opportunities, personal and professional connections, laptop, ~30 years of elite westcoast education, fate, love, gravitas…

Challenges: Time, ignorance, other people are busy with own agendas, egotism, studentinterest, parental interference, timing, coordination, fear, laziness, other commitments, political power, lack of funding, conservative suppression…

External Scan: What is already happening outside your organization that may impact your strategy (e.g., timing of the issue or events, activities of other organizations in this space, barriers audiences may face to taking action, other potential obstacles or opportunities Polarized political landscape can signal need for hyperdevelopment and hyperorganization of alternative living arrangements. School growth can provide new avenues for creative potential.

This year represents a novel approach able to create a foundation for three years of transitionary bioregional and reinhabitory education.

Assets:

Stars aligning

Challenges: Not aligned yet

Define your position: Do you need a plan that will frame, fortify and amplify, or reframe the debate? Just note which position you’re in here – you can figure out the details later.   

Frame (no one is talking about your issue) Fortify and amplify (you like the direction the debate is headed and want to push it further) Reframe (you want to change the discussion about your issue)

“WISDOM FOR THE ECOZOIC” At the moment, too few people are talking about the ecozoic. The trend needs to build, but it comes from a long tradition, the survival of the human project through myriad lifeways converging here. We seek to power down dirty energy and empower a new future. If we are to follow the law, let the law follow truth, beauty, goodness, and justice. We have a personal responsibility to see the issues our children face do not threaten them, and so the discussion around education needs to change. We will not teach our children to serve a violent and oppressive arrangement with each of their actions, but to align and grow into their truest selves, and in so doing their consciousness of the depth-of-place they reinhabit will remain perpetual as it grows into the biotic community forever.

Step Three: Strategic Choices Decisions to Make Audience Target: Who must you reach to achieve your objective?

(There’s room to describe three audiences here. You may not have that many or you may have more)

Audience 1

Audience 2

Audience 3

Reality Check

Wisdom Council

Students

Co-workers and Schools

Who can most help you achieve your objective?

Create a threeyear program that resolves conflict by empowering students to heal the affected area

Students understand world and worldviews along with their own world in cosmic evolution to transform energy and actualize own potential.

Co-workers work together to structure transdisciplinar y activities and lessons, and facilitate the coevolution of a community.

Work together to embrace science and philosophy of

Think smallsegment your audiences as much as possible. This is not the general public. Your audience may be your decision maker, or it may be people who can help influence your decision maker.

learning in a way that respects the tradition

A research team to put together a curriculum for coworkers to implement for kids.

Then, a tech team to interface with larger process.

Readiness: Where is your audience on your issue? Are they ready for what you want to tell them?

   

Core Concerns: What existing value can you tap into to engage and resonate with your target audiences?

What existing belief might be a barrier you can overcome?

Stage 1: Sharing Knowledge Stage 2: Building Will Stage 3: Reinforcing Action

 

Stage 1: Sharing Knowledge Stage 2: Building Will Stage 3: Reinforcing Action

  

Stage 1: Sharing Knowledge Stage 2: Building Will Stage 3: Reinforcing Action

Need to build will to share knowledge that reinforces action: What knowledge will reinforce action?

Need to build will to reinforce action to share knowledge: What will actualize knowledge?

Need to share knowledge to build will to reinforce action: What actions will reinforce knowledge?

Value:

Value:

Value:

Simulation Epistemology Anthropology Ethics Resolution Transdiscipline Evolution

Fun Novelty Empowering Creative Collaborative Captivating Maturing

Barrier: Complex Radical = Risky

Barrier: Boredom Difficulty

If they don’t yet know about, care about and believe in your issue, check stage 1. If they know, care and believe – but aren’t ready to act – check Stage 2. If they’ve already taken action and are ready for the next steps, check Stage 3.

What does the audience believe?

Hardworking Where’s their Innovation comfort Zone? Note Depth lifestyle Competition considerations (e.g., Professional to get parents to an Development evening meeting, Interdisciplinary you may need to provide childcare).

Barrier: Understanding Compartmental these factors will Time consuming help you make the

Timeconsuming Intellectual property

Parent influence

Knowledge is Fun training to power…wisdom empower is empowered. creative resolutions Theme: What is the best theme to use to reach your audiences?

Your theme will guide solid messaging that reaches your audience and reinforces the core concern you want to tap. For example, if your audience’s core concern is their pocketbooks, your theme might be “we can’t afford not to invest.”

Message: What key points do you want to make with each target audiences?

Activate cosmic wisdom to ensure our collective evolution.

The past and the future are buried inbetween the present.

What is most important to know?

What lifeways can we learn from?

What lifeways should we keep growing into?

Make sure to list all four points for each audience (tap value, overcome the barrier, ask, echo vision)

Experimental New directions in expeditionary learning; depthof-place called home.

Save the world To know the nature of reality, know thyself.

Easier More efficient Coherent Time is money

Independent living means independent learning.

Forefront of education

Responsibility and maturity mean decisions about effort and growth mindset.

The future is in your hands.

Premier expeditionary learning.

Family and close-culture

Select a theme that matches the audience’s values, not your own. Offer hope for change.

Consider the emotion you want to evoke and the tone you want to strike. Happy, mad, excited, and hopeful are all motivating emotions while emotions like guilt, shame or fear tend to be disempowering.

Network for growth

Make sure to list all four points for each audience (tap value, overcome the barrier, ask, echo vision)

Rich history; because of them, us.

Because of us, them.

Make sure to list all four points for each audience (tap value, overcome the barrier, ask, echo vision)

See chart to fill

See chart to fill

A genius is in this room.

issue personally relevant for the audience

Make sure you messages:  Are based on the audience’s core concerns  Overcome – rather than reinforce—

See chart to fill out message boxes below

out message boxes below

out message boxes below

Your knowledge is valuable.

What are the formulas? How did we come to know that?

How have cultures been informed by it?

How can it resolve conflict today?

Your work is valuable. What do you want to learn? How can you put that knowledge into action? How can that action help other people?

Your will is valuable. How will we arrange time in ways that promote best praxis?

How will we connect and create community?

Why expeditionary learning?

How can your knowledge be put into an ecozoic lesson?

Messengers: Who will best connect with your audiences?

Share lessons with leaders of community based institutions

How can you use knowledge to act in mature ways?

Applications of knowledge by student demonstrations of knowledge

Who is their social reference group on your issue?

Can you show them a trusted leader taking action?

Step Four: Communications Activities

How to promote mature activities?

Orientations and Experiences by key teachers, elders, and administrators able to model process







their barrier Have an ask that is in their comfort zone (or offers a benefit that outweighs the risk) Emphasize reward and convey hope toward success; Are consistent with your chosen theme.

People listen to people, not institutions. Make sure your messenger is credible. The right message delivered by the wrong messenger may fall on deaf ears

Tactics: What activities will you use to deliver your messages? (e.g. meetings, websites, newsletters, press events, letters, phone calls, paid advertising)? Don’t forget to consider organizational capacity.

Timeline: When will you implement each tactic?

Note key dates, deadlines and events.

Be realistic – you can’t communicate with audiences 24/7. Note natural opportunities when your audience is most likely to be attuned to and act on the issue. Plan ahead for the unexpected— sometimes events beyond your control can be a chance to connect with your audiences.

Use a timeline to plot out all the steps that go into each tactic listed.

Assignments: Who will implement each of your activities / tactics?

1. Write assignments and lessons

Budget: How much time and money will you spend on each tactic? Be realistic about what you can accomplish given available resources.

(Prioritize)

Audience 1: Tactics: 1. Surveys 2. Professional Development 3. Technical network to share expertise and practice applications 4. Develop language and book of formulas Further research project metrics

Lesson units Write assignments and lessons

Printouts?

New book?

Audience 2: Tactics: Formulaic Games Exciting Collaboration Creative Freedom Independent

Units Fun assignments Activities Materials HW Projects Texts

Outline

Conversations Put together survey

Survey

Printouts?

New book?

Audience 3: Tactics: Lead a meeting Survey Independent conversations

Step Five: Measurements of Success Outputs: What will you produce to reach your objective? (e.g. emails sent, events planned, phone calls made) Email threads with survey sent out Outline of deep history/social studies course Assignments In class learning material Interviews ďƒ Routines

Outcomes: What are the results of your outputs that demonstrate incremental progress toward your objective? (e.g. increased donations, positive editorial, new members)?

Compendium for MacroPraxis/Ecozoic

Students and Parents are delighted Portfolio of work Skills to reinhabit bioregions Metrics of transformation Local empowerment for carbon neutrality Bioregional inter-federation Increased donations Positive editorial

Test for accuracy: What additional steps do you need to take to ensure your strategy is solid?  Is the strategy doable? Build a curriculum as foundation to the ecozoic age.  Are your resources in line with your strategy? Does your internal and external scan support the decisions you’ve made? Schools in Trumpland are salvation from ignorance

 Are you motivating the right people to take the right action at the right time? Students, co-workers co-create evolutionary experience to learn and understand truth of reality.  Are your choices consistent? Does the logic flow from one box to the next? Tip: Try testing your decisions backwards: o accomplishing these tactics: Design curriculum, independent learners, culture o using these messengers, Brian, student council, Odyssians o deliver these messages, deliver experiential learning for ecozoic wisdom o support this theme: future lifeways based in evolving tradition. Creative praxis o tap into these values, fun, epistemologically precise empowered depth-of-place; o move this target audience, etc. experts, children, co-workers convince parents, citizens o Does the logic work as well in reverse as it did when you worked through the chart? If not, go back and address trouble spots.)  Will the tactics move you toward your objective? Will they reach the appropriate audiences? Yes: Expertise delivered in engaging ways and encouraged in culture.  Are you using the best persuasion practices, o respecting the audience’s lifestyle, o sharing hope, o making them the hero, o positioning the issue within the social norm, o etc.  Are there any assumptions or guesses built into the plan that require further research to confirm or correct? What is best living practices / lifeways for ecozoic?  Is there buy-in from your organization to implement the plan? Yes, need other to teach  Are there other objectives you need to Smart Chart to ensure you’re taking a comprehensive approach to meet your overall goals? What to teach?  Can you measure your progress? Lesson, HW, Projects, Assessments, Investigations…

If you answered no to any of these questions, go back and work through your choices again.

And remember, you may have other objectives you need to Smart Chart separately to ensure you’re taking a comprehensive approach to meet your overall goals.

Create teaching outline – what formulas/metaphors/historical example of next units Materials, Activities, HW, Projects, Readings, Assessments, Reflection Questions Collective learning, Ag, Modern, Future, genius, service learning, sustainability/justice Call leaders and others: experiential and expeditionary learning, precision Co-create curriculum for magic: reorienting energy for the ecozoic age “Lifeways into the Ecozoic.” A compendium  ecozoic societies What else can you think of to activate your strategy?

MESSAGE BOX:

Reflect Community Desires – We are here to help others get what they want!

Audience 1/2/3: 1. Wisdom Council 2. Student Work 3. Co-teacher Culture

Value:

Barrier:

Evolution Fun/Grades Efficient growth

Wasting Time Complexity/Difficulty Compartmentalized

Wisdom Council Vision Statement

Value Message

Barrier Breaker

Harness collective learning and design for wisdom experiences…

Wisdom for the Ecozoic looks like what:

Transdisciplinary curriculum surveys threshold moments and wisdom traditions to teach lifeways into ecozoic.

“Lifeways into Ecozoic”

Health, Movement Art as energy over time.

Ask: Create/answer SURVEY Meeting or professional development Book or business?

Metrics for app Turn school into carbon neutral justice center in school NETWORK of bioregional federation. (TECH?)

Student Work: Vision Statement

Value Message

Barrier Breaker

Ask:

Students understand cosmic evolution of world and worldviews, transforming energy to actualize potential.

Experience of

Elite (precise) training for empowering creative solutions on truthquest. Fun/health measured (gradient Independent

Standards and fun beat boredom and resistance.

OUTLINE CURRICULUM

People want this, good for accountability,

“Please do these, and act in a mature way” “How can you apply

lifeways (depth-ofplace) actualizes knowledge.

Captivating maturity; innocence of youth.

learning/living).

Freedom to learn: GRIT Effort of growth mindset grows future geniuses to sustain justice, save the world and know thyself.

consolidate wisdom, leader in teaching standards.

what you’ve learned?”

Barrier Breaker

Ask:

Materials, Activities, HW, Projects, Readings, media, assessments, current events….

Co-teachers; Vision Statement Science and philosophy of learning and wisdom traditions based on conflict resolution and healing to facilitate co-evolution of community.

Value Message Promote best praxis in time, create connection for community.

New directions in expeditionary learning; depth-of place called home.

Premier: efficient, coherent, forefront of indu$try, family and culture, rich history ODYSSEY LIFEWAYS – habitat and culture = natural identity.

Expeditionary learning, maturing activities, experience and orientation of odyssians

Three year calendar program, transdisciplinary curricula, and class/school culture

Thanks for reading ď Š You can make the universe a better place