March 20, 2022 | Essay
Fractals, chaos, networks, and dissipative structures describe the geometric forms that living systems take and yet who would have guessed that they would carry profound spiritual messages as well as design lessons? The shapes, structures, and patterns of life illustrate the sharpest contrast between how life organizes itself, maintains stability and order, and facilitates change, and how colonial and supremacist societies do such things. Life's geometric forms, more than other organizing principles of life, remind us that cultures that lean into the dynamic powers of fractals, chaos, networks, and dissipative structures tend to be regenerative and liberatory, whereas cultures that attempt to contradict these principles often cause ecological degradation and systems of oppression that we have witnessed throughout human history.
February 20, 2022 | Essay
Life has been able to diversify and proliferate into every inch and corner of this planet by adhering to basic principles of organization. These organizing principles steered life's first coming into being nearly four billion years ago and continue to govern life's evolution today. They form the basis of all living things. I call them life's organizing principles since that is how I learned them from reading Fritjof Capra, but they go by several other names, including patterns of nature and ecological principles.
June 2, 2021 | Essay
Regenerative cultures are those in which we are in right relationship with all our relations—human and more-than-human—such that our actions contribute to ever more life on earth. The concept of regeneration is powerful. It activates cellular memory deep within my body of a time when humans were not separate from nature but belonged to it. Unlike the White-dominant environmental narrative that tells me that humans are a cancer to the planet and that the only way to protect nature is to estrange humans from it even further, the concept of regeneration speaks of the possibility of being a positive presence in this earth.
