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The Greater Tkaronto Bioregion initiative is creating a new story of how we live with each other on this living planet in this critical zone of the Great Lakes. Coordinated by The Legacy Project , the 7GTB has been engaging people across Southern Ontario towns, including the recent Toronto presentation with Joe Brewer earlier this year.
As we cross multiple planetary boundaries, we find ourselves in an unprecedented predicament. There are no simple solutions. Understanding how what you do in your place connects into the bioregion and into the planet supports deeper learning and can give everything more meaningful long-term impact.
The ultimate goal is ecopsychosocial wellbeing – ecological integrity, personal wholeness, social coherence – in the context of lifetimes across generations. 7-Generation GTB interconnects across seven broad themes: Environment and climate change, economy, community (including equity), health, education and lifelong learning, life course and aging, Indigenous worldviews and knowledge.
In February 2023, Joe Brewer presented an open talk at OCAD University, sponsored by Brian Puppa and the Legacy Project team to kickstart the Greater Tkaronto Bioregion (7GTB) initiative. About 90 people attended the OCADU event. Local engagements were held with municipalities, other schools and groups.
Joe Brewer is a transdisciplinary scholar with a background in earth sciences and cognitive science, an inspiring speaker and leading-edge
complexity thinker. He’s currently doing on-the-ground regeneration work in a 500,000 hectare bioregion around Barichara, Colombia,
and helping to create a global bioregional network.
Joe is founder of the Cultural Evolution Center and now the Design Institute for Regenerating Earth. He is the author of the new book, The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth. The first cohort of the Design Institute started in March and is open for attendance and participation by any and all who are interested in learning and leading bioregional regeneration initiatives.
Humanity is confronted with threats unprecedented in the history of our species. There is an urgent need to describe the “how” for managing the convergent threats of ecological overshoot and civilization collapse. This book offers a clear and cogent pathway for safeguarding humanity’s future through an extended period of cascading consequences.
To a great extent, the rest of our lives will be defined by how those who understand our global predicament organize and cooperate with one
other. We are in the midst of a planetary change process that extends far beyond a human lifetime. Most of us experience a kind of intergenerational amnesia—having never seen an intact ecosystem or a healthy human economy at any point in our lives. How can we design our way through the struggles that now lie ahead?
We design by embracing the fundamental insight that all living systems self-organize around the patterns of regeneration. Applied to the scale of entire landscapes, this reveals how all truly sustainable human cultures throughout history were organized at the territorial scale as bioregional economies. A planet-wide network of learning ecosystems is needed that can hold the complexity of birthing these regenerative bioregions during and after the rest of the collapse that
we were all born into.
This book offers genuine hope. There truly is a pathway to regenerate the Earth. It is not to be found in the shallow optimism of techno-fixes or consumer choices. Nothing short of a spiritual revival of indigenous lifeways will do. Combined with the best scientific knowledge about human behavior, cultural evolution, and the dynamic Earth; a path can be made by walking it throughout the rest of this century and beyond.
