Lucky 13 by Marcus Petz

So we have begun the 13th r3.0  Conference. It has a mouthful of a subtitle name: Bioregional Regeneration as Collapse Resilience: Earth-centric Biocultural Kinship, Knowledge & Governance

Does it help to have such a long descriptor? It is certainly comprehensive. We have every inhabited continent represented in the hundreds of confluence participants taking part through Zoom. We have a variety of perspectives. There are those just getting acquainted with what a bioregion is – and wrestling with if we should use bioregional names or the “friendly names” of geographical placeholders shaped by human population growth, i.e. cities.

Arturo Escobar told us about “domesticated people” who are negating the 3 fundamental premises of our relations to the Earth. i.e. * We inhabit an intelligent cosmos and a living Earth (Relearn to dwell on the Planet as living beings) 

* The foundation of Life is interdependence (everything exists because everything else does)

* Every territory is a living territory, a complex relational entanglement. 

He called for action to have a revolution of care – a new entanglement. This requires a radical cartography and within that process a commitment to a lived relationality. In his praxis in “Cali” this means we want not a relationship with a big city, but rather a pluriverse across the local area. One with small, localised, living in place communities and actions. He says for us, in this time, this is a tapestry of transitioners.

So, transition means we must be moving away from something. Long gone are the ideas behind the concept of sustainability. Sustainability smacks of persistence and this seems perverse given where we are in a collapse dynamic. We cannot go on the way we have been, instead we want now a regeneration. We might say “collapse is the shadow of resilience”. The resilience we are going to build with a reclamation from the wreckage of our civilisation is what is proposed.

There is precedent for this approach. Luke Kemp’s book Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse looked at civilisations and how long they lasted. While they varied, he found generally the mega civilisations lasted around 150 years, that civilisations generally survived for 350 years. However, when looking at the so called “uncivilised” then examples of living with the rhythm of the Earth – Planet Drum you might think – gave examples of cultures persisting for over 60 000 years.

But what does it mean to rebuild or reclaim or regenerate? Bill Baue & Ralph Thurm gave us an analysis from mathematical reasoning. They told us about the idea of a basin of attraction. We can think of this as aspects within a system / an ecosystem of culture, land factors, climate, etc. which the system tends to remain with. It is maintained and desirable even if other things are changing. Our biggest basin has been the stable Holocene climate. It is desirable that we can maintain ourselves within that basin and our objective is to prevent moving to another undesirable basin.

However, though we want to stay in that basin (and others found in the Planetary boundaries), we have become more realistic and moved through a process of being collapse ignorant, to collapse aware, collapse denial and finally collapse acceptance. Acceptance does not mean despair. Rather we are at the point of collapse resilience. We want to repattern to move away from the anti-patterns embedded in civilisation to deal with the collapse. Shalanda H. Baker describes this as anti-resilience. Rather than bounce back to the same, we should bounce forward to a new configuration.

New configurations can of course be configured in different ways. Jennifer Menke of Sacred Contract told us of how bioregioning thrives on relational kinship, and how the work of Sacred Contract translates this embodied orientation to the more-than-human world into legal legibility. While we were able to question if human law is really the same as the law of nature and ask: Who is really speaking for nature? In the chat it was asked if the Zoöp (or Zoöperative) model is a gimmick masquerading in corporate boardrooms – and, for example, it may in fact be not a deep listening to an ancestral mountain, but speaking “for” it. 

This existential-from-animal-rights question of: Who speaks for the trees? Who speaks for the water? And Who speaks for the land? in a legal situation is a good one. Are there guardians or custodians or some other stakeholders involved in the governance? Nevertheless, Sacred Contract is exploring these questions with practical action to give legal personhood in the San Luis Valley, where there is now a legally sovereign mountain.

Beyond speaking we must also learn to listen. David Abram – cultural ecologist and geophilosopher prompted us to listen beyond. He told us how all things are animate and alive … all things speak, the waves, the wind in the trees or the big speech of thunder or a waterfall. Insisting on presenting without slides, he thus eloquently made the point that oral cultures are cultures of story and that “it is only where written language comes in do we think language is only human”. He quoted Gary Snyder from “Little Poems for Gaia,” in the book, “Axe Handles.”

As the cricket’s soft autumn hum

is to us,

so are we to the trees

as are they

to the rocks and the hills.

Such an awareness allows us to think that crows and crickets and boulders are all alive at different times speeds. They are all animate as they all move. The sounds nature makes are speech and language too. 

This awareness of the more-than-human can shape what kind of action we are taking for resilience. When we think about the weaving of these elements we think of our kinship with them. This kinship can be indigenous knowledge which Brooke Waldron of Natôquhsunônak Inter-Tribal Alliance presented to us. To her indigenous knowledge is a “system of care”. Within such a system history is very much alive. The emotions that lie in that history are not forgotten. Settler and non-natives may try to bury the meaning and not keep it alive. Yet, to Brooke even memories of regrettable happenings provide rage and wisdom to keep the struggle alive for a different way. 

So our panel presented us with some ideas for practical actions, philosophy and reasoning behind them, and launched us on the first day of Conference. To see more about the panel and their presentations see: https://conference2026.r3-0.org/agenda/#panel1