Climate Levers Blue Dot Project

About Episode:

In this episode of Climate Levers, host David Vranicar explores the concept of regenerative communities with Alex Corren, co-founder of ReCommon. 

Drawing from extensive experience and passion for environmental stewardship, Alex shares insights into key factors that lead to successful regenerative communities. He emphasizes the importance of considering the landscape, engaging with all stakeholders, and aligning with regenerative principles.

Alex’s early years in New Jersey helped him develop a deep connection to nature. He shares how his firsthand view of suburban real estate development sparked his passion for building communities that harmonize with the natural world. 

Here Alex provides his perspectives on the opportunities and challenges of establishing regenerative communities that can thrive for generations. 



About Guest:

Alex Corren, co-founder of ReCommon, is a dedicated advocate for regenerative practices. With a background in environmental science and a deep-rooted passion for nature, he spearheads initiatives to create communities that prioritize ecological regeneration and sustainable living.



Mentioned in this episode:


Regenerative Communities


Regenerative Agriculture


Land Stewardship


Sustainable Living


ReCommon


Bioregionalism


Permaculture


Environmental Science


Impact Investing

About Episode:

In this episode of Climate Levers, Alex Corren shares his insights into the pressing need for regenerative communities and helps visualize likely elements of their realization. Alex is co-founder of ReCommon, a company that pioneers in this new and fast-developing field.  



Host David Vranicar sets the stage for a deep dive into the structural and operational facets of regenerative communities, with Alex serving as guide.



About Guest:

Alex Corren is leader in the fast-evolving field of planning, building, and enabling regenerative communities. His company ReCommon develops suitable approaches to land access and governance. It provides frameworks, governance models, enabling technologies, and capital structures. 

Corren’s efforts to establish and promote resilient bioregional communities are helping set the stage for a shift toward sustainable living on a large scale. ReCommon’s efforts in Colorado serve as a proving ground and example for similar initiatives worldwide.



Mentioned in this episode:


Planetary Boundaries


Regenerative Communities


Impact Investing


Good Urbanism


ReCommon

About Episode:

This is an early chapter in the fast-developing story of a serial entrepreneur who radically changed his work and his life in his forties. 

In 2022, Eduardo Esparza downsized his successful business to help repair Earth’s badly damaged natural environment.    



About Guest:

Eduardo, a Mexican-born U.S. citizen, ran a successful marketing agency for a decade. But he had grown concerned about the world he would leave to his family and to future generations. 

So Eduardo downsized his company to focus on reducing climate change. 

After a year of intense research, he decided his best contribution would to help heal the damage human activity has done to our planet. 

Now Eduardo works with impact investors and multidisciplinary teams. Their immediate goal is to finance projects and communities that regenerate nature. The ultimate goal is to provide resilient food supplies and a sustainable path forward by establishing a new relationship with the natural world.



Mentioned in this episode:


Climate Change Mitigation


Earth Regeneration


Planetary Boundaries


Regenerative Agriculture


Regenerative Communities


Eduardo Esparza


Indigenous Elders from the Kogi tribe in Colombia

About the episode:

Some kind of collapse of our natural systems is imminent. Every empire and civilization in history has collapsed, and the current civilization is showing signs that it's well into collapse, states Joe Brewer. The planetary Boundaries framework identified nine self-stabilizing processes of the planet that maintain the Holocene period. However, we have crossed several of these interrelated boundaries. 

Sustainable human cultures are organized into entire landscapes, and they treat nature as sacred, personifying and having a kinship relationship with it. They honor relationships with non-human people and act pro-future towards the ecosystems they depend on for survival. The approach to sustainability is identifying bioregions and landscapes to integrate humans and form deep relationships with the ecological functions for survival. Being pro-future requires intimacy and familiarity with the landscape to know the health of the river, soil, and forest.

In this second episode of a two-part series, we discover a million-acre living laboratory, in Barichara Columbia, for watershed restoration, building of soils, protecting native species, building a local economy with indigenous traditional practices, preserving cultural knowledge, and building sacred relationships with the land and nature.



Joe Brewer

Earth System Science

Earth Regenerators

Planetary Boundaries Framework



Joe Brewer is a complexity researcher, innovation strategist, experience designer, and social entrepreneur who has earned three bachelor's degrees in physics, mathematics, and interdisciplinary studies and a master's in atmospheric sciences. He has extensive experience in promoting sustainable solutions at a cultural level. 

Joe has achieved many notable accomplishments in his career, including creating an undergraduate degree program in Earth Systems, Environment and Society, and being the founder of Earth Regenerators and co-founder of the Design School for Regenerating Earth. 

He was also an active member of the Center for Complex Systems Research, where he studied pattern formation in self-organizing systems. 

As a social entrepreneur and cross-disciplinary scholar, he brings together his expertise in open collaboration, interactive design, and empowered civic action to drive change toward greater resilience in our turbulent world. Joe's diverse skill set is an asset to any team focused on sustainability and social innovation.

About the episode:

The current rate of extinction of nonhuman species is at least 10,000 times faster than the natural background rate, caused mainly by humans destroying habitats and natural ecosystems. This leads to the breakdown and destruction of the Earth's biosphere, and planetary health, increases inequality, and difficulties with the ability to manage complexity.

Unfortunately, fragmentation of knowledge and the suppression of knowledge synthesis across fields have resulted in few places for holistic and integrative education, which can reveal how the planet and the globalized economy are functioning as whole systems.  

This episode 13 is a first of a two-part series wherein complexity researcher and innovation strategist Joe Brewer shares with host Dave Vranicar about his upbringing and his unique background in physics, math, philosophy, dance, atmospheric science, complexity research, and cognitive linguistics. He is the founder of Earth Regenerators, which is a group committed to regenerating Earth systems to mitigate climate change. 

In this episode, Joe is offering valuable insights into the challenging politics of climate change. Global warming skeptics are denying that carbon dioxide is causing climate change, but their claims lack credibility and they're often heavily funded and supported by corporate media infrastructure. Joe states that grasping the dynamics of climate change requires building out conceptual understandings to even see with the right eyes to understand how the planet works.



Mentioned in the episode:

Joe Brewer

Earth System Science

John Dewey

Stephen Jenkinson

Earth Regenerators

Hans Rosling

Steven Pinker

Center for Complex Systems Research



About the guest:

Joe Brewer is a complexity researcher, innovation strategist, experience designer, and social entrepreneur who has earned three bachelor's degrees in physics, mathematics, and interdisciplinary studies and a master's in atmospheric sciences. He has extensive experience in promoting sustainable solutions at a cultural level. 

Joe has achieved many notable accomplishments in his career, including creating an undergraduate degree program in Earth Systems, Environment and Society, and being the founder of Earth Regenerators and co-founder of the Design School for Regenerating Earth. He was also an active member of the Center for Complex Systems Research, where he studied pattern formation in self-organizing systems. 

As a social entrepreneur and cross-disciplinary scholar, he brings together his expertise in open collaboration, interactive design, and empowered civic action to drive change toward greater resilience in our turbulent world. Joe's diverse skill set is an asset to any team focused on sustainability and social innovation.

What did you do once you knew about the state of the world?How do you make space for the grief that comes from understanding our current situation?How to combat the fear of scarcity as a society?How do organizations and businesses transition into creating thriving life on Earth?How do we actually build regenerative businesses?

In this episode guest Ra James, a regenerative business revolutionary and co-founder of (re)Biz, FutureElders, and Pueo, ponders on these questions and argues that implementing a model of transition for businesses, that is future-ready and supports a sustainable future, will lead to business success.

Episode 12 is the second part of a two-part series and highlights the importance of new leadership and community. It discusses the topics of our flawed educational system, our current economic model that values nature more dead than alive, and the importance of ancestral wisdom, among others.

Ra also eloquently accentuates the concept of decomposition, kincentrism, and of biomimicry and how the latter involves observing and replicating patterns and processes found in nature to design sustainable and regenerative systems.



Mentioned in the episode:


Ra James
(re)Biz
Future Elders
Biomimicry
Kincentrism
Restoring the Kinship Worldview
Tongva Chumash nation
Vandana Shiva 
Jason Hickel
Tyson Yunkaporta
Lakota