With our lives hanging in a balance this morning, I’m carrying on here now with what will be relevant presuming we still have our marbles tomorrow.
Understanding is spreading that after we get beyond Trump we need to not return to what had us headed for disaster. But how, without having visionary leadership, can anything radically new come into play?
And, even now, there is something insane about allowing him even one more day in office. Aren’t there any adults in Washington? Take that man to a psychiatric hospital. And then, in the face of the endangerment of the world he leaves in shambles, maybe we’d have a little miracle where, as happens in fires and floods, everybody would decide to work together to get the country moving. Everyone in the non-evil majority of humanity would be relieved, so why oh why aren’t we talking about getting him gone NOW? Not for the sake of the Democrats, but for Life!
My plan-A, presuming we make it past today, would be to bribe him so he fires his hires before he and Vance resign. I make that case here. It could save his face if his physician diagnosed a sleep ailment that impelled him to nobly sacrifice and give up the position he had been so honored to hold. Before you say he’d never give up his office, remember jail is beckoning when his term is up. And, with his miscalculation about Iran I think he knows he’s lost any glory he thought he was in line for. How to get a national conversation going pronto about what bribes might do it? That would be good energy for us!
In that vein, look at us. We are beyond fury at Trump. But if we were all winking at each other for getting him to agree to leave, what good energy for the road ahead that would be!
Recently I’ve connected up some writers I’ve cross-posted to you and written about in my posts, who have visionary ideas for how our different world could run. In the over-riding energeticof starting to think together, they are comparing notes. One of them, Ernesto Van Peborgh, knocked me out again this last week with what I wish I could make required reading. It’s about how, in the big picture, the running of the world should be a function of the ultimate purpose of humanity, which is to enhance the workability of the living system we are in.
The buzz phrase for what an enlightened humanity would be dealing with has gone from the green revolution to regenerative design. But, slow down, says Ernesto, to consider the different way of evaluating that regenerative design demands. Vital is insurance to not just to cover physical losses but having to consider risk from the multiple parameters our living systems depend on. What’s bolded in these excerpts, that I’ve strung together here, was in the original.
There is a point at which a word begins to lose force not because it is wrong, but because it begins circulating faster than it is understood.
Regenerative design today sometimes approaches that threshold.
Often it arrives wrapped in a moral tone, as though regeneration were simply sustainability made more ambitious: less damage, more repair, a more elegant ecological intention.
But what gives regenerative design its growing relevance is not primarily moral ambition. Something more structural is pressing beneath it.
The present moment resists the ordinary language of crisis.
Crisis suggests interruption, a disturbance after which prior arrangements may return.
What seems to be unfolding now resembles something slower and more difficult: a passage in which assumptions that once made entire systems intelligible no longer metabolize the complexity they themselves helped generate.
Hidden inside that success was a simplification so deep it became almost invisible: the assumption that systems remain governable when treated as objects, that complexity eventually yields if enough technical intelligence is applied.
And yet most of what sustains life never behaved that way.
A forest is not assembled.
Regenerative design is often misunderstood as an advanced form of sustainability.
It is not.
Sustainability asks: How do we reduce damage?
Regenerative design asks something far more demanding: How do we participate in processes that increase life’s capacity to evolve?
It increasingly resonates with something quantum thought intuited long ago: that nothing exists independently; everything participates in everything else. Not metaphorically. Structurally. Every actor affects and is affected. Every intervention enters a field of reciprocal consequences. Every human system is nested inside larger systems that do not negotiate with ideology.
A landscape may continue producing while fertility weakens quietly below ground.
A financial system may continue generating returns while detaching itself from ecological conditions it rarely needed to name.
A political order may preserve procedures long after trust and legitimacy begin thinning beneath them.
From a distance everything may still appear functional.
But function and vitality are not interchangeable.
A whole is not merely a successful assembly of parts. It is a condition in which relationships generate enough coherence for vitality, resilience, viability, and developmental potential to continue through changing conditions.
A living whole does not remain whole because it resists change.
It remains whole because change can move through it without immediately breaking its coherence.
Financial sophistication expanded while leaning on conditions it did not need to describe.
That arrangement holds only while invisible infrastructure remains stable.
The moment it begins to fail, it becomes visible very quickly.
That is increasingly what is happening.
Insurance now encounters hydrological instability not as background noise but as altered insurability.
Agricultural finance cannot evaluate future yield without eventually confronting nitrogen dependence, water retention, soil structure, and exposure to energy shocks.
Biological conditions are ceasing to remain external to economic continuity.
And finance faces a difficulty for which its classical language remains incomplete.
It understands scarcity, volatility, discounting, expected returns, correlation, optionality.
What it has not fully learned to interpret is living coherence.
This is where regenerative design enters finance not as ethics, but as interpretive necessity.
Because regenerative design offers something increasingly difficult to replace: a way of reading whether a system is gaining or losing the capacity to remain viable through time.
The strategic question shifts almost quietly.
Not only what produces return.
But what remains coherent under pressure.
Another word enters, often avoided because it still sounds excessive: collapse.
Yet collapse is rarely theatrical.
More often it begins before language fully catches it — in the subtle loss of coherence, in the growing difficulty of maintaining arrangements that for a long time seemed almost natural: supply systems that no longer stabilize easily, institutions that continue operating while trust thins, landscapes that still produce while losing the invisible depth that once made production resilient.
Things remain in place.
But they begin to require more effort, more correction, more compensation, more energy simply to continue resembling what they were.
That is why hospice may offer a more precise image than catastrophe.
When older certainties weaken one begins to notice what had remained hidden beneath them.
The quiet intelligence of living systems.
The patience with which a watershed reorganizes itself when pressure recedes.
The way degraded soil, given time and reciprocity, begins again to breathe.
The way relationships, once restored, generate possibilities no plan could fully predict.
Perhaps that is one of the least understood dimensions of regenerative work.
It is not only the design of what should come next.
It is the discipline of staying attentive enough to recognize where life is already trying to return, even if weakly, even if unevenly, even if still surrounded by structures that belong to another logic.
Regenerative design matters now far beyond architecture, agriculture, or environmental language.
Because more and more, what is being asked of us is not simply how to improve systems.
It is whether we still know how to participate in processes larger than our own designs.
Life does not hurry when it rebuilds coherence.
It does not argue.
It does not announce itself.
Very often it begins below visibility, long before institutions learn how to name what has already started.
The better we understand what’s making us tick, the better we can serve what will occur. When you click to get the whole piece, see the comments for what Ernesto and I say.
Just before I was going to schedule this, I read this complement to it. I pay attention to Jeremy Lent, and fingers crossed you’ll read this. We all need to be at the edge of wisdom at this fertile time between worlds.
“There is no blueprint that will save us. No one person or group can design in advance what such a civilization will look like in its particulars. But a framework of core principles can orient us — the way a distant horizon orients a traveler moving through unmarked terrain. You may not yet see the exact path, but knowing the general direction changes everything about which opportunities you embrace and which you recognize as alluring detours.
“The trance that keeps us from seeing this is powerful. But it has been broken before. Every paradigm that once seemed like reality itself — the divine right of kings, the natural inferiority of women, the Earth at the center of the universe — turned out to be a myth that was shattered. The story of TINA — There Is No Alternative — is the defining myth of our moment. The first act of system change is to stop believing it.”
For your pleasure, that we all need more of, Colossal, a site for the presentation of artists, is one of my favorites. Through all darkness, the lights of artists don’t go out. You’d think every way to make art has been done, but there are endless new ones. For what to post here, I picked this, in the category of what-will-they-think-of-next, because it reflects the decay going on in our world.
Marianne Williamson doesn’t disappoint. Here’s her Meaning of Easter talk, from Sunday.
We’ve had two eagles hatch at Big Bear Lake, in California, this week. Playing picture-in-picture of the camera covering their nest gives me a plug-in to nature’s flow. You will be among what’s usually tens of thousands of others watching (41,039 as I write this). Do stick around at least long enough to see one of the frequent feedings.
To send you out on a high, this is an inspiration for what extraordinary things a human being can do: “Doctors believed that Woody Brown would never be able to speak or process language. He went to graduate school and is publishing his debut novel.” I found this in one of my Dave Pell’s NextDraft don’t-miss compilations of bests of the day, that are delivered by an extraordinarily sharp and witty curator. Link to Woody’s story, I Thought I Would Be Caged My Whole Life, via Dave’s mailing, which is how the NYT will let you see it. As you scroll down to it, under #6 Feel Good Friday, you’ll get a chance to enjoy the rest of what Dave wrote.
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¨They were trained to follow orders, but also sworn to defend the Constitution.
During COVID-19, U.S. service members were given orders that many believed were unlawful, and told their careers depended on compliance.
Some obeyed. Others refused. Nearly all paid a price.
Duty to Disobey reveals what happened to those who refused, and why their story matters to every American. This is a film about courage under pressure, institutional failure, and the quiet line where lawful authority ends.¨
There’s a sense that we’re not just in a crisis we can fix, but in a deeper transition where the foundations of how we’ve organized society are no longer holding. Not just politically, but in how we relate to each other, to the natural world, and to the systems we’ve built. Things still appear to function, but the disconnect underneath them feels harder to ignore.
What stood out to me most in your post is the way regenerative design is being described. Not as an improvement on what we already have, but as a shift toward aligning with how living systems actually sustain themselves. That feels important, especially when so many of our current systems are organized in ways that extract, separate, and concentrate rather than support balance and collective wellbeing.
I also feel the tension in your opening. The urgency to change what is clearly not working, alongside the deeper question of how something truly different begins to emerge. Not just replacing one structure with another, but rethinking the values and relationships that shape the whole.
For me, this moment keeps pointing back to the need for more cooperative, life-centered ways of organizing, where economies, governance, and communities are grounded in care, interdependence, and long-term balance rather than short-term gain.
DUTY TO DISOBEY
¨They were trained to follow orders, but also sworn to defend the Constitution.
During COVID-19, U.S. service members were given orders that many believed were unlawful, and told their careers depended on compliance.
Some obeyed. Others refused. Nearly all paid a price.
Duty to Disobey reveals what happened to those who refused, and why their story matters to every American. This is a film about courage under pressure, institutional failure, and the quiet line where lawful authority ends.¨
www.dutytodisobeyfilm.com
Thank you Suzanne.
There’s a sense that we’re not just in a crisis we can fix, but in a deeper transition where the foundations of how we’ve organized society are no longer holding. Not just politically, but in how we relate to each other, to the natural world, and to the systems we’ve built. Things still appear to function, but the disconnect underneath them feels harder to ignore.
What stood out to me most in your post is the way regenerative design is being described. Not as an improvement on what we already have, but as a shift toward aligning with how living systems actually sustain themselves. That feels important, especially when so many of our current systems are organized in ways that extract, separate, and concentrate rather than support balance and collective wellbeing.
I also feel the tension in your opening. The urgency to change what is clearly not working, alongside the deeper question of how something truly different begins to emerge. Not just replacing one structure with another, but rethinking the values and relationships that shape the whole.
For me, this moment keeps pointing back to the need for more cooperative, life-centered ways of organizing, where economies, governance, and communities are grounded in care, interdependence, and long-term balance rather than short-term gain.