A Resilient Future - Pt 2: Building New Resilient Communities
Why Build New Regenerative Communities?
For the vast majority of our time on Earth as Homo sapiens, we settled differently than we do today. Very differently. People didn’t move around and relocate into other tribal territories - to do so would mean death or conflict. Our population did not expand uncontrollably - to do so would also mean death or conflict. Evolutionary balance over millions of years has driven all successful species to occupy a place-based niche in the environment and to respect the laws of life to which we humans are inextricably linked.
Roughly 12,000 years ago we diverged from this balanced structure of settlement and have been on a path of ecological conquest and resource consumption ever since. As a result, we’ve been growing faster and faster, and our core human infrastructure is struggling, even failing, to keep up.
If every place had a perfectly stable population experiencing no growth, we wouldn’t need to build more settlements, but that’s not the case. In our modern world people are unrooted and relocate as they please, and our global population continues to rapidly expand and shift. The resource extraction and depletion required to fuel such human activities is what’s causing the 6th mass extinction event that we’re experiencing right now.
On top of that, the majority of our human settlements are the result of opportunistic developers that have their bottom line and the profits of their shareholders as their primary objective, so we’re not even building good human settlements anymore. The quality, health, ecological impact, and longevity of the place they build is an afterthought. Looking at the state of many urban and suburban environments, it’s quite clear that this modern iteration of human settlement has been a failure.
Yes, some human settlements are in a more balanced state than others and have the ‘bones’ required for a positive future (as discussed in Part 1 of this series: Community Resilience in Existing Towns), but in our attempt to build resilient communities, strengthening existing communities can only get us so far. For the time being, we need to build new human settlements that can support us through this transition from degenerative to regenerative, and can serve as a powerful living example of what’s possible in this new chapter of our human story.
So, what do these new communities look like?
Common Ground for Resilient Communities
Let’s say a new village is going to be developed.
At the core of everything is the land. ReCommon works with various stakeholders to facilitate the acquisition of the right piece of land for the project. If this community is to survive and thrive, there must be a perpetual stewardship system in place. The land must be shared, passed on, and exchanged with others in ways that preserves it as a commons for future generations of the people and all life that inhabits that space. After all, the ‘stakeholders’ aren’t only the humans - they’re also the wolves, worms and waters.
Ecological design is integral to all planning and decision making. After a deep study of the to-be village's environs, a permaculture master plan is developed through a collaborative effort led by ReCommon. The primary objective is to design the village so that the human presence and impact of the community increases the health of the whole ecosystem over time instead of designing it in a way that leads to a slow death of degradation and extraction.
This place-based master plan allows the community to maintain balance over time by weaving together reliable and renewable infrastructure, food sovereignty, conscious water use,, healthy and affordable shelter, conservation and regeneration, local economics and nurturing community spaces. The result is a diverse, mixed-use space that is in harmony with the surrounding environment and defines the proper use for each unique parcel of that land.
Stewardship and Protection of the Land in Perpetuity
Title to the land is transferred to the Bioregional Node (the legal title holding entity specific to that bioregion), which is managed by the node’s Board of Directors in collaboration with ReCommon and the various members and stakeholders of that Node. The conditions for each parcel’s proper use, as identified in the master plan, are reflected on the leasehold for the land. And thus the gift and responsibility of land tenure is granted to people and businesses through long-term, renewable leaseholds imbued with ecological design principles.
The people and organizations that have the leasehold may own the structures and the fruits of their labor on the land, but don’t own the land itself - that always stays with the Bioregional Node as a commons that is to be stewarded in perpetuity. The new village is developed by a mix of private, public, nonprofit and for-profit ventures that all abide by the fundamental ecological principles as outlined in the master plan and leaseholds. ReCommon continues to work with the village on an ongoing basis as a resource hub of connection, expertise, and funding.
This fundamental shift in land tenure is a master stroke against speculative private land ownership, creating a human settlement system with conditions that are repugnant to gentrification, ecological destruction, skyrocketing housing prices and globalist enterprises consuming the local economy.
Web3 infrastructure further strengthens the village by ensuring that the funding, governance and economics of the village commons remains democratic, scalable and adaptive for generations to come. By weaving regenerative cryptoeconomics into the CLT model, incentives are aligned for the various stakeholders. This will allow token holders to participate in activities like bioregional staking, where staking rewards are shared with projects on the ground for that bioregion. Another example is a ‘carbon credit’ or ‘eco credit’ co-op, where the village and its residents are financially rewarded for the positive impact of their regenerative practices. All these forms of value flow have the potential to create a stream of perpetual funding that all regenerative projects need to succeed. ReCommon will grow with the ReFi (Regenerative Finance) ecosystem and integrate the appropriate technologies as they emerge.
Regeneration as the Schelling Point for a New Culture
All around the world, at nearly the same time, people have been waking up to the dire need to establish a culture of regeneration that can pull us back from the brink of destruction. Isolated individuals will not be able to make enough of an impact on their own - we need to come together, to live, work and celebrate as we embrace this cultural evolution. For people that are ready for the transition and have embraced the necessity of full-blown regeneration, simply connecting to internet communities is not enough.
In the past, villages were created to support industry. Companies building large auto manufacturing plants and mining operations would create worker housing and support businesses to further their own extractive, private profits. They even launched their own money supply, which became yet another instrument of debt slavery instead of viable currency. The economic activity of that private company was enough to warrant a small village for the time being, some of which are still around today while others have become ghost towns.
As Buckminster Fuller once said…
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
All large-scale regenerative projects need people on the ground to implement and monitor their impact and success. These new villages will make our existing model obsolete. People inherently know that something is wrong, they feel it in their bones - but unless you’re observing the frontier of commoning, regeneration, and cryptoeconomics, it’s hard to point out any meaningful change that is fighting the existing reality.
It’s time to start building resilient communities of the future to serve as a tangible synthesis of the many solutions for the converging crises of our time. Founded on regenerative activities and the ecological economics that support them, these new communities will be powerful examples of an alternative living system that’s capable of carrying humanity into a new story, a new culture that allows all life on Earth to thrive once more.
