Benjamin Life
10.21.19
As Earth transitions from an extractive, exploitative, colonial-capitalist economic system into increasingly distributed, cooperative, and regenerative systems, designers of these new systems are becoming more and more aware of how nature’s complex adaptive living systems can be used as design templates for human endeavors.
Ranging from applications in governance, architecture, holistic product development / sourcing, urban planning, information / database systems, and circular economies, the designs of nature consistently provide the most efficient and self-generating principles that support resilience and thriving.
REGENESIS is a meta-pattern design cooperative that leverages these design principles to create open-source templates and holistic value sharing models that empower local communities and create scalable, distributed, interoperable, self-sovereign collectives.
From pre-colonial times until the present-day, First Nations peoples and other systematically marginalized groups have held traditional ecological knowledge that was disregarded within a colonial-capitalist context. This highly advanced knowledge was often expressed in mythopoetic terms that was perceived to be incompatible, irrelevant, or limited in a colonized context. Through deep listening and cross-cultural dialogue, this wealth of knowledge has begun to be recognized and integrated into adaptive living systems design.
Due to overwhelming pressure from planetary ecological collapse, humanity is faced with a choice: begin to transition from extractive systems into adaptive regenerative systems or face increasingly disastrous consequences. At the precipice of this massive planetary transition, it is vital that new systems actively contribute to restorative justice for communities who have suffered the vast brunt of ecological, spiritual, and social extraction.
Indigenous Environmental Network, a grassroots Indigenous-led organization created in 1990 to address environmental and economic justice issues, describes the concept of Just Transition as follows:
“Just Transition strategies were first forged by labor unions and environmental justice groups who saw the need to phase out the industries that were harming workers, community health and the planet, while also providing just pathways for workers into new livelihoods. This original concept of Just Transition was rooted in building alliances between workers in polluting industries and fence-line and frontline communities.
Just Transition is a new term, but to most of our Indigenous peoples, it is understood, first by our heart, and secondly by our mind. Just Transition is a framework, a set of principles, to shift from a “stopping the bad to building the new”. In Indigenous thought, it is a healing process of understanding historical trauma, internalized oppression, and de-colonization leading to planting the seed and feeding and nurturing the Good Way of thinking. It is lifting up Original Instructions and Teachings of respecting ourselves, our clans, our family systems and how we are all related with all living things and our relationship with the spirit, personality and consciousness of the sacredness of Mother Earth and Father Sky.”
― TO RECLAIM OUR FUTURE, WE MUST CHANGE THE PRESENT
Facilitating the Just Transition begins with providing meta-systems that allow for the recognition, remuneration, and scalability of traditional ecological knowledge across cultural contexts. Our diverse teams of wisdom keepers, permaculturists, biomimetic designers, healers ethnographers, technologists, democratic governance specialists, and evolutionary biologists work with diverse groups of stakeholders to create open-source templates based on cross-cultural research into adaptive living systems.
Each use-case specific design template contains a self-generating replication function which allows groups to implement the template as part of a network of living systems cooperatives. Through a fractalized token system, each collaborator and community of origin will receive remuneration each time the template is instantiated.
Through an iterative feedback loop design process, evolutions of the templates can be shared and implemented across agreed member cooperatives, creating forks in the fractal financial model.
Combining the best of distributed technologies like Holochain, DAOstack, and SEEDS with a truly holistic design process that lifts up a vast array of living systems knowledge, we are building a world that truly works for everyone.