Branch Out is a regenerative media non-profit organization that works at the intersection of climate media and regenerative agriculture. We are developing a symbiotic model between the two that enables regeneration to serve as a financial and substantial basis for interdependent media, in contrast to the mainstream model of dependence on corporate/fossil fuel advertising.
For the last five years, we have operated an online climate journalism outlet at branchoutnow.org. On our site, we highlight the perspectives mainstream media often overlooks, conduct original interviews, and offer deep dives into important issues around regenerative agriculture, climate justice, and more.
Our newest project and first Web3 offering is Climate Wiki, which we are stewarding as we bring it to maturity.
Once sufficient material has been compiled through Climate Wiki, we are planning to build a regenerative publishing house to issue stewardship handbooks and other media from the Wiki. We are undertaking this joint venture with a 100% hemp paper company, putting us on the cutting edge of creating media which is inherently physically regenerative.
With our publishing house, we will work closely with others in the climate movement, regenerative agriculture, and ReFi space to help our messages reach wider (& non-digital) audiences while producing carbon-negative media.
Wikichar | Biochar: The purpose of any wiki is to reduce a chaotic flood of content into sites of self-regulating production. This dynamic of reductive-productivity resembles that of biochar as a porous soil medium. As biochar condenses carbon, a wiki organizes information to create a porous ('open’) structure, supercharged with the best (re)sources and ready for further enrichment.
Biochar is the most stable form of organic carbon storage, which makes it a valuable asset in the fight against entropic decay. In the same way, wikis condense the frequent redundancies of information overload and indicate the dead-ends found within its easily confusing noise.
Like Biochar in compost, Climate Wiki will perform best when integrated within the stewardship of Regen Network’s community of practice.
Colloquial | Polycultural: The reductive-productivity of Climate Wiki will make the challenge of translating millions of climate science articles orders of magnitude more efficient.
In the process of rendering climate science accessible to a diverse, global audience, Climate Wiki will help to compile and organize knowledge in a form ideally suited for equitable collaboration and co-production among land stewards excluded by academic science, technical jargon, & corporate IP.
This will be essential to achieve the goals of decentralized science with the urgency required to address the climate crisis. The shift from a monocultural to a polycultural climate media ecosystem will render it more dynamic, participatory, and balanced, just as in agroecology.
Symbiotic | Mycorrhizal: Mycelium is nature’s most advanced decentralized information-sharing network. Crucially, the symbiotic connection mycorrhizal fungi establish between the roots of plants not only enables multi-species communication throughout an ecosystem, this process is inherently tied to the redistribution of resources from places of excess to places of need in ways that maximize regeneration.
This highlights that a Wiki is ideally suited not only to reflect this decentralized information sharing process (through inviting open participation and interweaving connected topics). Crucially, by integrating Web3 features, Climate Wiki will also be able to achieve the other two functions of mycorrhizae: tying these information flows to the redistribution of wealth (tokens) and regenerative action.
Just as a mycelial network forms symbiotic relations with other organisms in its ecosystem, our symbiotic media approach will design Climate Wiki to facilitate mutually beneficial connections between regenerative actors and organizations.
We are building Climate Wiki to simplify and organize climate information. Designed for general use by non-crypto audiences, it will also incorporate Web3 features.
Climate Wiki will cater to the needs of:
1. The general public: providing a well-organized and easy-to-understand comprehensive library for learning about climate topics, connecting with projects, web3 onboarding, and taking action.
2. The climate movement: to take stock collectively of how far we’ve come, and where we can most effectively focus our efforts. To pool our knowledge to avoid ‘reinventing the wheel,’ and integrate the importance of TEK (traditional ecological knowledge).
3. Land stewards: as a manual for browsing high-quality, compiled expertise providing implementation guidance and best practices for available eco-credits. As stewards experiment with various techniques, Climate Wiki will enable them to record their own results and ideas on personal or organizational profiles, and integrate this directly in the knowledge commons-as-manual in a dedicated section of each article.
4. ReFi community: providing a platform to show how regenerative finance, and associated Web3 projects, are addressing the climate crisis and developing solutions to key logistical and conceptual hurdles. Further, creating the transparent knowledge infrastructure for open-source verification of claims underlying ecological assets.
We are beginning this process by developing the foundational knowledge infrastructure of Climate Wiki, starting with our media collaboration with the Kulshan Carbon Trust. The KCT is developing a biochar eco-credit methodology with the support of the Regen Network. This first collaboration will showcase how Climate Wiki can serve the needs of the Regen Network and its partners by:
We intend to accomplish the above through close collaboration with RND to achieve the best possible integration between Climate Wiki and the Regen Registry, Marketplace, and Ledger.
Through the Registry, a user-friendly open-source interface will enable collaboration between stewards and integrate ecological data to improve the knowledge commons.
Through the Marketplace, the public ‘intellectual capital’ and participatory verification infrastructure embodied in Climate Wiki will align information and resource flows, i.e. signals of price & truth.
Through the Ledger, we plan to offer a $Branch token and a $Branch/$Regen Liquidity Pool, so that Climate Wiki and stakeholders can invest in valuable contributions to the knowledge commons.
Other Web3 plans for Climate Wiki include using tokenomics for decentralized editorial practice/governance, and integrating NFTs as featured images on relevant pages as an art gallery and L2 for audience discovery.
NFT Hackathon Presentation on Knowledge Equity: https://www.loom.com/share/69734409c22f4b57a8c56da64a30d66b
Gitcoin Grant: https://gitcoin.co/grants/5029/climate-wiki
