Modern culture has a disconnection infection.
I spent nearly twenty years co-founding and operating a sustainable winery — making over a million bottles of wine by farming microbes. My most important title was never winemaker. It was farmer of microbes. Healthy soil, full of what I call “soil animals,” produces delicious, complex wines. My job was to create the conditions for something extraordinary to emerge, and then get out of the way.
I left that work in 2023. A life-altering event demanded I abandon the status symbols I had oriented around since birth — the accumulation of money, property, power, and a certain kind of fame. In doing so I broke free of what I now call the “modernity matrix” and its manipulation of my perceived reality.
What followed was three years of deep study and thousands of conversations with people around the globe who are asking the same questions I am. People who see the collapsing systems and are passionately building pathways toward something better. I call them regenerates. And I am dreaming of a way to unite them.
This post is that dream — and the beginning of a plan.
The Moment We’re In
Leaders and scientists around the world now regularly and publicly discuss the ecological destruction driven by financial markets. They warn of the real possibility of human extinction within my daughters’ lifetime — they are 15 and 21 — and of dark days ahead: wealth concentration, oligarchs, and authoritarian regimes, now supercharged by an AI arms race between the Frontier Labs and the governments they serve.
AI dominates markets, industries, news cycles, and natural resources — controlled by a very few billionaire humans whose incentives and status symbols are at odds with restoring the planet and its communities.
I was an early user of Chat GPT in November 2022, using it to write attention-capturing ad copy on Google and Meta to drive revenue for my small business. Less than four years later, technology leaders are making films like The AI Doc to warn us about the immense dangers of allowing financial markets to drive this technology. Voices around the world are calling for moratoriums on data centers, public ownership of Frontier Labs, universal basic income — and for people to arrest the AI trajectory before the technology ceases to be a tool and becomes our adversary.
How we arrived here has been examined, measured, analyzed, and reduced to the many parts of a nearly incomprehensible puzzle. I am not going to try to convince you of the urgency, scale, and complexity of the human predicament. There is already an overwhelming abundance of speakers, seminars, webinars, retreats, books, classes, and fellowships aimed at doing exactly that.
Instead, I want to share what I see as a win-win possibility — one that follows the logic of teaching communities to fish, rather than providing one fish for one meal.
Regular People Need a Life Ring
Underneath the headlines and the noise in our feeds is a simple and brutal reality: we live on a finite planet, and our modern lives — all 8.3 billion of them — depend upon it. This is not new information. But it is a reality modern culture has elected to ignore in order to keep the machine running.
This inconvenient truth has been widely shared for decades, yet here we are: facing unprecedented collapsing ecological systems around the world while simultaneously allowing financial markets to drive extraordinary scales of ecocide in the name of national security, technological innovation, and the desperate need to grow GDP.
At the same time, billions of people are struggling to exist. For regular people like myself, every day is a marathon at the pace of a sprint, on a treadmill that never stops.
What if we focused on giving regular people a life ring — resources and support so they can enjoy their birthright to exist on this planet while contributing to the restoration of the earth and the community around them?
Not a wholesale replacement of what exists today. Circular, regenerative flows of resources aimed at providing the ballast needed to live within planetary boundaries — where all life belongs and all people are cared for.
Five Questions That Haunt Me
How do we unravel and deconstruct the invisible norms driving modernity’s planetary destruction? Which norms are the culprit and who decides?
How do we personally and collectively recognize and metabolize our complicity in the destruction of our planet?
How do we show up for the present, compost the past, and reorient towards regenerative futures where all life belongs?
How do we unsubscribe from consumption-based systems and join care-based systems — or create conditions for their emergence?
How do we know what is real versus what is perceived to be reality?
These questions have both inspired and haunted me for three years. They led me from farming microbes to studying regenerative economics with John Fullerton at the Capital Institute, and from there into regenerative technology and governance. Regardless of the domain, the principles of healing, restoring, and ensuring circular longevity remained constant. So did my first principle, the one that grounds every application:
All life belongs.
The Vision: A Federated Regenerates United Guild
I dream of uniting regenerates to heal and revitalize our planet. I dream of ontological rewilding practices that help us let go of systems built on othering — systems that extract benefit for an in-group at the expense of all others. I dream of future societies oriented around regenerative status symbols: being a planet-positive, life-affirming species that strives to live on the doughnut.
By replacing modernity’s wealth-based status symbols — money, property, fame, power — with new ones tied to participation and service, we can drive the cultural change needed to reorient humanity’s compass from the ground up.
The vehicle proposed for this is a Federated Regenerates United Guild (RUG): a decentralized, self-governing network of local chapters operating autonomously while aligning under shared ecological and social regeneration goals. When considering infrastructure, scalability, and the need to activate communities to heal their local ecologies, guilds offer a unique container for igniting a coordinated, grassroots, changemaking movement grounded in systems and complexity science. A Federated Regenerates United Guild can catalyze funding flows to ensure communities are resourced, connected, and given the tools to care for their domains.
The Philosophy: Regenerism
To get there, we need a new economic philosophy. I call it Regenerism.
Regenerism is planet-positive, life-affirming, and care-based. It is a philosophy where all life belongs, without unaccounted externalities — and the foundation for an economic system based on contribution and the right to exist.
It is an infinite system built on credit, not debt. Where the means of production is collective stewardship. Where participation is a real choice — not a survival demand to accumulate basic needs. A system that provides democratic distribution of economic choice-making units. Regenerism is based upon circularity, reciprocity, democracy, mutualism, science, equity, sufficiency, and interdependence with all life forms and flows.
Core Principles:
Property — Life forms and flows are not legally “ownable” by individuals or organizations. They are held in perpetuity for all life to care for and benefit from, with responsibility and accountability.
Thriving and Flourishing Motive — The primary driver of economic activity is the desire to create conditions where all life can thrive and flourish — encouraging consideration of impact and communities of care, striving to stay within the ecological limits of planet Earth.
Freedom to Enjoy the Privilege of Existing — Being born does not create a debt or enter us into a race to survive. Being alive means being an interdependent contributor who receives a baseline flow of choice-making units without conditions — akin to a citizen of a democracy receiving a vote.
Choice-Making Units — Personal credit is distributed to access what society produces: housing, food, transportation, education, care, art, leisure. There is no application or justification. Personal credit is a birthright and baseline — the floor, not the ceiling. Above it, contribution adds: when work is performed, the system offers credits matched to the kind of work and the experience of the worker. Equal categorically, fair quantitatively — and by design, not identical the way UBI is.
No Accumulation — Choice-making units cannot be stored, traded, purchased, or leveraged. When spent, they disappear from the system like a vote. Once used, the system records the entry and the units are depleted. The system credits the producer based on their contribution.
Civic Choice-Making Units — The system also issues choice-making power directly to communities, in proportion to the people in them, for the work that holds the shared world together. Communities can be organized at multiple scales — neighborhood, city, region, network, or planetary commons — depending on the kind of decision being made.
* Regenerism’s economic substrate rests upon and is an expression of Creditism, pioneered by Remzi Bajrami and published in Common Planet: A New Game of Life and at common-planet.org
Proof of Concept
Capitalism emerged and evolved over the last 500-plus years with varying iterations around the world. Regenerism cannot be designed and prescribed by a few visionaries, a for-profit platform, or a government. It must be allowed to emerge from communities ready to care for the earth and the people in their domains.
Critically, Regenerism is supported by protocols — not platforms — providing trust infrastructure as a shared commons.
The internet has four layers. Layer 1 (network) moves packets. Layer 2 (transport) delivers them reliably and encrypts them. Layer 4 (application) is the apps you use — browsers, email, the web you see. Layer 3 — community trust — was never built.
Who is a real person? Who vouches for whom? What groups have standing? How do credentials move across community boundaries? These questions have no protocol-level answer on today’s internet. Platform companies filled the gap with proprietary systems. A proof of concept for Regenerism, collaborating with Weave, fills it with open protocols.
Communities everywhere — across every continent — are hitting the same wall. They need coordination infrastructure that is not controlled by corporations and cannot be shut down by governments. This is a global need:
Personhood without wallets — defeats the blockchain-native population barrier.
Community vouching rooted in relationships — not cryptography.
Groups as first-class protocol objects — the actual unit of stewardship.
The convergence requirement — fund and require interoperability.
Indigenous communities in the Global South need data sovereignty infrastructure on their own terms. Bioregional movements in Europe need coordination tools that cross national boundaries without corporate intermediaries. Community organizers in the United States face a specific near-term stress test in the 2028 elections — but the underlying need is universal.
Weaving together the protocols for trust infrastructure as a shared commons, the protocols for a true regenerative economy built upon choice-making units, and the protocols to reorient communities to care for the earth and the people in their domains — this is the proof of concept we aim to create.
* Regenerism’s technological substrate rests upon and is an expression of the ideas and work of Project Weave, pioneered by Kaliya Young and Kevin Triplet and much of the copy above is from the Project Weave website.
Neighborsheds: Where Regenerism Meets the Ground
Philosophy without a place to land is just philosophy. Regenerism needs somewhere to take root — a domain where its principles can be tested, refined, and made real in people’s daily lives. That place is a Neighborshed.
A Neighborshed is a community-centric digital and physical domain — a neighborhood, a block, a rural parcel — where members organize around restoring their local ecology and meeting each other’s needs. It is the smallest coherent unit of Regenerism in practice: a fundable, self-governing regenerative domain where all life belongs.
Neighborsheds create conditions for anyone ready to care and serve the stability of their domain, to belong and be supported on their journey of learning and doing.
Each Neighborshed begins by mapping its domain — the assets and liabilities of the place itself. Indigenous history, soil and geology, water flows, land use, demographics, governance structures. This living map becomes the foundation for what the community needs and what restoration looks like in that specific place.
From that map, the DERR (Doughnut Economic Regenerative Rubric) — a relational technology protocol proposed to be built based on Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics framework — generates domain regeneration recipes: specific, actionable pathways toward living within planetary boundaries. Members’ skills, passions, and available time are then matched dynamically to the domain’s needs. When a member takes a service action, they generate value claims — the early expression of Regenerism’s choice-making units in practice.
Neighborsheds operate across five disciplines working together: storytelling, place-based programs, governance, economy, and technology. None of these alone is sufficient. Together they provide the cultural infrastructure for communities to shift identity and belonging away from wealth accumulation and toward ecological stewardship.
Starting with Soil
To create a proof of concept an Alpha Pilot is imagined with the most tangible entry point available: front yard ontological rewilding to restore soil health. Grass lawns, plastic lawns, and bare dirtscapes — the dominant suburban landscape — are replaced with fresh tree mulch, compost, and native cover crops. This is not a symbolic gesture. Healthy topsoil holds carbon, filters water, grows biodiversity, and can ultimately grow nutrient-dense food. It is the literal foundation of a regenerative domain.
Restoring soil also provides something invaluable for the larger project: baseline data. Soil health metrics before and after rewilding, community participation rates, member engagement patterns — all of this becomes the evidence base that allows Neighborsheds to scale, and that allows funders and partners to trust the model.
The theory of change rests on empowering the people and meeting them whereever they are, in their understanding of the human predicament in this moment:
Awaken — through belonging and rewilding practices, to the moment humanity faces.
Remember — our biology and ecology as members of the universe of life.
Activate — to become regenerative community members.
Empower — to restore, regenerate, relate and reimagine how to live within ecological limits while caring for all people and all life
Symbiosis — 7 generations planning and care for domains based on circularity where all life belongs.
Soil is just the beginning. The rewilding programs open the door to biomimicry, circular supply chains, nature-backed stewardship models, and domain-based financing flows. Each Neighborshed becomes both a living laboratory and a replicable model — the seed of the federated network that the Regenerates United Guild is designed to grow.
Join Us In Living Into The 3rd Horizon!
We are not interested in supporting the 1st Horizon — business as usual. And a far-future 3rd Horizon for humanity is unlikely, if we fail to arrest the trajectory of technologically enabled billionaires, determined to win at all costs.
Help us midwife the conditions for any person who wants to regenerate their domain — to do so. And to ensure as they can do this work while being supported, resourced, valued.
This is what I dream and what I want to co-create. Will you join me?
Tracey Rogers Brandt
👏👏🫰🌟
Wow truly incredible mama❤️