2019-2020
Kalinago Territory

I was invited to participate in an international team to study and propose a design a regeneration plan for the Kalinago Territory in Dominica, an indigenous community that has been resilient for millennia.
The last 500 years of industrial/extractive economic paradigm have taken their toll community: social malaise, lack of meaningful livelihoods, high rates of alcoholism, failed economic schemes by central government. Hurricane Maria, was the last of many hard hits. The watersheds had suffered massive erosion and the few rivers left flowing, were mere trickles.
Our team was to study every aspect and co-create a comprehensive approach to regenerative development of the community. My role on the team was to develop an regenerative agriculture & agroforestry based design to jumpstart a local living economy.
The design addressed multiple scales: home-scale: every home nestled within a half-acre edible forest garden; community-scale: each of six communities had cooperative agriculture enterprise with a plant nursery and producer incubator program; and the territory had large-scale agroforestry enterprise buffering the sensitive ridgelines and rivers, which would be reforested with native species.
EU Conference+ Tour

For years, I had tended my relations to friends-in-the-work via International Permaculture Convergences: Cuba, UK, India.
PhD in Complexity

For some time, I had been playing with the idea to do a transdisciplinary PhD to deepen my understanding of the many learnings over the last few decades of systemic interventions.
On a torentially rainy day in Riga, while on my EU tour, where I could scarcely get out of bed, I began researching possibilities for doctoral programs in the EU.
I found one in Portugal of all places, in Complexity, a transdisciplinary program, which I barely new existed as a field in itself.
I applied that summer, was accepted and by October 2019 had begun the program. It was an international program, in English, and online. I was furious that I didn’t have to live in Portugal, so I took it as a sign that I should.
The latest iteration of my research design pivots around the question: What does it mean to be fully-human in a universe-of-complexity?
The research is titled: Coming Back to Life: (Re)awakening radical [fully-human] participation in a universe-of-{generative} complexity. With it I develop a three dimensional theoretical framework to explore the various qualities of living systems, that we may apply towards designing ecosocial systems with that serve to regenerate Life.
Along the way, in order to build the living soils for these ecosocial systems, I look at how we can reorganize knowledge, the way we know what we know about the world we live in, an epistemology equally up to the task of interpreting our and supporting a fully-human presence on the planet.
With this foundation in place, I am exploring four areas of practical application: (1) A Regenerative Theory of Complex Knowledges: An exploration into Morin’s method in Method; (2) Regenerative Development Aims: A study in the practical application of wholeness-aliveness; (3) The Self-Organizing Bioregion: Complex organization of transformative ecosystems in practice; (4) Economies of Scale-linking: A regenerative commoning framework for living economies.
Dodoma Foodway

After my presentation in The Nature of Cities conference, I became good friends Paul Curie, (a brilliant fellow from Capetown who works for ICLEI Africa), who I shared the concept of Foodway with… it was exactly the kind of intervention he was looking to address the many ecoscial issues faced in Dodoma, Tanzania.
Abrigada Eco Community
