The following ideas are drawn from my rough draft notes for a research white paper I’m writing at the moment based on my articles since 2007. The paper is intended to be a survey and my reflections of some of the emerging ideas and ages old wisdom born from our community of practice over the last 35-50 or so years, and how we can improve the creations and contributions many of us are making to serving and evolution of capital markets, economic development, business systems, ecological management, regenerative agriculture, circular economy, impact investing, restoration and reconciliation, etc. and all the various approaches you can imagine to find better ways forward:
There is an imperative for a new paradigm that goes beyond sustainable development, one that involves a collective vision for redesigning our civilization, drawing inspiration from nature through biomimicry. At the heart of this transformation is working within planetary boundaries and embracing a city-to-city, citizen-to-citizen cooperative community of practice within a larger bioregional framework. This framework accounts for local community efforts and nature's context within each bioregion from which cities operate.
For example, Mediterranean cities—or leaders within cities residing in Mediterranean climates in one of the four bioregions of that template—can cooperate with each other since they face very similar conditions of climate and the challenges of those unique environments.
To fulfill the grand aspirations of regenerative development and economic transformation, it is essential to establish guiding principles for future inquiry and create contexts that are resilient and adaptable. Adopting a localized approach to development and financing allows for improved coordination and tailors solutions to the needs of specific communities.
There needs to be a new era of cooperation emerging, benefited from the technosphere—the conscious cultivation of communities across the planet harnessing relational bonds that can now be formed through ubiquitous tools like communication networks, videoconferencing, peer learning platforms, cooperative tools, and AI.
Yet to underwrite evolutionary cooperation—a hallmark of the emerging Symbiocene—we need resources. Among these are the eight types of capital, of which money is only one.
We must transcend the logic of the global casino toward a culture of care—place by place, culture by culture, people to people. This new ethos provides a responsibility to steward the collective through this conceptual emergency. Like sailors navigating treacherous narrows, we require deft leaders—systems leaders—who operate with full responsibility to care equally for future and current generations.
This must be grounded in ecological principles, evolutionary systems thinking, and multidisciplinary approaches to resilience. Cooperation has brought humanity this far; we must partner together in new and innovative ways for a win-win society. Emerging scholarship on Darwin’s thinking reveals that cooperative systems increase survival as organisms learned over eons that working together gets us farther than working apart.
From intergenerational wisdom such as the Golden Rule, we must also listen to life's principles through biomimicry and symbiosis—patterns tested over nearly four billion years on Earth—to guide civilization design. For example, we can create curricula inspired by living systems for human settlements, land use planning, and urban-rural landscape regeneration.
By integrating scenarios for opportunities emerging from today’s chaos, we harness collective intelligence to co-creatively architect better futures. This involves creating bioregional regeneration communities of practice—peer-to-peer learning laboratories designed to improve life for families today while ensuring better outcomes for future generations in hometowns, cities, states, and countries worldwide.
We must design ways to steward our heritage and wealth as fiduciaries for our collective inheritance. This requires fully recognizing the incalculable value of Earth's life-support systems that have enabled humanity’s existence.
By reevaluating notions of value, risk, and growth, we can develop a new Modern Portfolio Theory encompassing all treasures—whether tied to places like cities or bioregions or families or neighborhoods. Our worldview must evolve beyond calcified 20th-century models into frameworks suited for 21st-century challenges.
If money makes the world go round, we must redesign how it is managed to unlock wealth embedded in living systems around us. Just as a caterpillar uses its gifts to become a butterfly, we must integrate impact investing with economic development through regeneration—not mere sustainability.
This perspective nurtures ecosystems and communities while fostering innovation through living laboratories that test frameworks for development. Fiduciary responsibility should extend beyond financial capital to encompass all eight types of capital—reflecting holistic views on wealth.
Rather than hoarding insights privately, these tools should serve as public utilities empowering sovereign communities toward stewardship over their collective inheritance.
The fusion between cooperative mindsets across disciplines is essential for integrating impact investing with bioregional development rooted in living systems principles. Observing how plants or animals harmonize with nature offers profound lessons for designing finance aligned with ecological resilience.
Such systems embrace complexity while fostering connectivity, diversity promotion, resilience cultivation—all grounded locally yet regenerative globally—and community-led approaches holistically integrated into finance models ensuring thriving futures.
Were finance allowed evolution serving humanity's needs alongside ecosystems under "Five R’s" (Relationship/Resilience/Regeneration/Reconciliation/Reverence), it would awaken humanity’s sense belonging within interconnected webs spanning life itself.
Bioregional financial systems being developed globally promise flourishing cooperative economies supporting humans alongside ecosystems alike—a transformation requiring expanded imaginal capacities distributing solutions innovatively across cities/bioregions alike accelerating adoption best practices enhancing quality-of-life everywhere.
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