Finding the Right Stories for Living Flows

We are a storytelling animal that profoundly depends on stories to keep us alive. Some stories can kill us. Others can heal us. Which we choose can literally change the course of humanity in these dangerous times. Right now we are living through planetary collapse. We need strategies for how we choose our stories — and with whom we choose to live them out.

I am one of the stewards for a story that has deep healing potential. It is the Story of Bioregional Earth. Grounded in life-affirming relationships. Acknowledging that humans are part of this world and that we have a sacred responsibility to care for all life on Earth. Weaving a pathway that brings together the best of western science with ancestral knowledge systems of our Indigenous brothers and sisters.

What do I mean when I say that some stories can kill us? Let me give a few examples. If you listen to the collective delusions of professional economists, they will tell you that our economies can grow without limits — all consequences be damned. If we live this story out long enough, we will degrade all life supports that make our economy possible. This is a self-terminating pattern.

Another might be that humans are separate from nature. We don’t need water to drink or air to breathe because we are cut from some spiritual cloth in a parallel universe. So we can dump pollution in our water and destabilize planetary climate because our souls will be saved in the afterlife. If you live this way, you negate all sacred responsibilities to that which actually created you. You can let yourself live out a hedonist narrative of material wealth accumulation while ignoring how it lays waste to the very foundations of life that you hold dear. This is another self-terminating pattern.

What if we ask about stories that can heal us instead? For example, you might feel isolated and alone. Without meaning or purpose. Just a consuming machine who needs to work and earn money so you can survive. In a context like this, stories become a kind of medicine. What if your family is much bigger than you thought? Your home always present. All that you have ever needed to live a healthy life freely given? That is pretty much how it would be to remember that your Great Mother is the Earth and you were blessed with life by Grandfather Sky thanks to the energy our Sun provides to make life on Earth possible.

You belong here. You are an Earthling. Your family is every being who has ever lived throughout the multi-billion year history of this miraculous planet. And you can find meaning in every simple act of gratitude and care that you give back in thanks for all that you have received. Live into this story and you will discover a path back into right relationship with your ancestors.

Last week in the Design School, I gave a webinar about our Living Flows Approach to create dynamic relationships that connect money that supports life with stories that are able to embody the continuation of life. My focus (which you can view in the video above) was on the power of stories — and how our best intentions can get hijacked by people who lack conscience or live out their actions through a life-destroying worldview.

Said another way, there is a role for frame semantics that reveals how humans express meaning and make sense of their actions that is of fundamental importance here. A lot of analysis has been done about the structures and processes for how to create healthy financial institutions — yet very little attention has been given to the semantics of consciousness or worldview.

In the video above, I shared how we had really good intentions for bringing financial resources into a local community reforestation project. Unfortunately this movement of money took place in an environment where deeply corrupt and unethical actions are generally tolerated. We began the process with an ethical partner who was forcefully removed by a political coup of the community organization that received the money. As a bizarre twist, our intentions to protect community forest enabled a bad actor to swoop in and capture the money to then go on and destroy the forest with these very same resources.

I went on to share an example where we flowed financial resources into a local context that had an alignment of conscience and worldview. We brought funding to a permaculture project in Tunisia that seeks to demonstrate a beautiful regenerative alternative for industrial olive production.

Many lessons can be drawn from these two examples. What I want to focus on here is that there are various kinds of what Tyson Yunkaporta describes as “right story versus wrong story” — an insider’s lingo held among Indigenous communities to help their own members remember how easy it is to fall into the wrong kinds of stories. You can read more about it in his book Right Story, Wrong Story. He talks about right story as being holistic, relational, and interwoven with sacred responsibilities. Wrong story is linear, reductionistic, and decontextualized.

I playfully explored this in my presentation with a visual image of the regenerative olive farm in Tunisia. You can see a beautiful permaculture ethic for restoring ancestral human relationships with olive trees together with ecological patterns of biodiversity and soil health. All of this is in the realm of right story. Yet the farm is surrounded by an endless ocean of wrong story — monoculture olive production that is deeply mechanistic, reductionist, and prone to disease.

This semantic layer of human story is fundamental to our Living Flows Approach. We have been practicing regenerative finance for years and have learned a lot about when funding actually leads to regeneration in the world versus when it does not. We have learned that discernment of reality (and care for the truth) is really important. Ecological mindsets are fundamental. The ability to see relationships as dynamic and alive. Treating people as living commons instead of exploitable resources. And so much more.

We want to work with wealth stewards to create living flows. Harmonize our intentions as human beings to act in service to life with the healing processes that enable these flows to manifest healthy outcomes. This is very different from reading a project description to see if it is thematically aligned. We might discover that the person using words to describe ecological regeneration are still living out (even it if is unconscious to them) stories of extraction or reductionism. You’ll notice this with an over-emphasis on metrics. Short-changing the people involved. Presuming to know ahead of time what the living system is supposed to do. And more that we could describe.

Check out more of the beautiful maps created by BioregionalMaps.com

Many of us live within the inherently life-destroying stories of nation states. Is your work based in the United States? How does it relate to my tax benefits? I’m sorry but we don’t fund work in Canada — even though half of Lake Ontario is in their jurisdiction. Human thoughts that divide the world based on prior histories of conquest and domination.

Anyone living out a story of national patriotism is inherently already in wrong story. Nation states were created through the active suppression, displacement, or outright genocide of Indigenous peoples. Their borders were drawn by the spoils of war and conquest, ignoring ecological and cultural realities. They are all failing us today as they repeatedly demonstrate an inability to respond to the interdependent web of crises humanity is confronted with.

Bioregions are sometimes described as the natural countries or “ecological nations” of the Earth. They have boundaries and membranes that are constituted in living systems and that honor the responsibilities we have to our life-places. I won’t elaborate more here but simply say that all regenerative economics approaches need to correspond with the living flows of the Earth. This means we discover and come back into healthy relationships with how life flourishes in each unique place on Earth.

The more deeply we live into stories that are both good and true, the more we discover that we are living expressions of the bioregions that keep us alive through any given moment. You and I are living flows of air, water, and nutrients. We are constituted in the living flows of any place we inhabit in any given moment. If that place is hostile to life, we immediately suffer and are at risk of dying.

Bioregionalism is the recognition that right story is shaped by the bioregions that animated us with life in the first place. This is a spiritual insight as much as it is an empirical one. We are meaning-made-manifest as a living story of the place where we are. I write these words today as oxygen flows into my lungs from nearby trees here in the Northern Andes (because I am in Colombia right now). This makes me part of the story in this place in this very moment. The sooner I recognize this, the better I can behave responsibly and seek out what right story means.

Living systems are nested fractals. Multiple scales of life all at once. One of them is the scale of the bioregion that represents the holistic life flows of materials and energy for a bioregional population. It is very important whether we realize it or not. But our ability to care for our bioregions and act responsibly absolutely depends on our ability to realize it as true.

And it is with this that I leave you to reflect for yourself. How will you contribute to the living flows of a Bioregional Earth? A planet where humans recognize we are part of the local bioregions that give us life in any given moment? How can you help more people unlearn wrong stories and move toward right ones?

Onward, fellow humans.