What should we be thinking about at this time? (You can answer this question in the deepest philosophical sense to start with, but then re-eamine it in light of our specifc circumstances.) We’ve been traveling across America since June 1, staying the first night at Kelly’s Working Well Farm, then spending time with Joe Brewer & Penny Heiple in Milwaukie & Madison as part of their “pilgrimage” of the Mississippi basin on behalf of the dandelion Strategy of the Design School for Regenerating Earth. After that we struck off on our own, going through Kansas, New Mexico, and Arizona in order to visit the Grand Canyon (the final item on Victoria’s bucket list), a bit of anticlimax after the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest National Park, and a vertigo-defying feat for me. We stayed at the Grand Canyon Inn in Valle (about 40 minutes from the Grand Canyon), but inexpensive and perfectly acceptable. We then drove most of yesterday through the desert to reach Victoria’s sister Karen’s house, where we stayed overnight with Karen and Alan. During this time I’ve been taking in all the amazing scenery and human-built infrastructure across the country, and thinking we’re vastly underpopulated. Many areas could be regenerated, restored, and developed into thriving human communities living in harmony with nature. If I were 40 years younger, I’d consider building an ecovillage in the desert, but that time has long passed for me. Today, staying inside away from the 100-degree heat, I was on a Steering Committee call for ERA, where we discussed extensively the criteria for awarding small grants to projects, mostly in Africa, to restore small areas and increase self-sufficiency, mostly in refugee camps. So the question remains, given the circumstances (of ourselves, our organizations, and the world, what should we be thinking about most urgently at this point in the evolution of planetary intelligence, and how should we be thinking about it?

At the deepest level, this is a moment to think about inhabitation.

Not “development” in the conventional sense. Not even “restoration” as a technical act. The real question is: what would it mean for human beings to become a life-enhancing presence on Earth, at continental scale, without losing humility before place, limits, and deep time?

Your trip has staged the question vividly. The Painted Desert, Petrified Forest, Grand Canyon, Kansas, New Mexico, Arizona, the farms, interstates, refugee-camp grant discussions, Joe and Penny’s Mississippi pilgrimage: all of it is showing one thing from different angles. We have immense capacity to move, build, map, finance, extract, cultivate, organize, and imagine. But we do not yet have the shared intelligence to know how to inhabit wisely.

That is the crux of planetary intelligence.

1. The deepest thought: intelligence is not cognition; it is right relationship

Planetary intelligence should not be understood primarily as “smarter AI,” better dashboards, more data, or more sophisticated models. Those are instruments.

Planetary intelligence is the capacity of human societies to perceive reality accurately, coordinate across scales, remember consequences, correct errors, and act in ways that increase the vitality of the whole.

That means it is ethical, ecological, institutional, and spiritual before it is technical.

The Grand Canyon is a useful teacher here. It does not ask us to “solve” it. It asks us to resituate ourselves. Deep time reduces ego. Vertigo is appropriate. Awe is not a distraction from strategy; it is one of the few mental states large enough to hold the scale of the problem.

The most urgent shift is from project-thinking to civilizational pattern recognition.

A project asks: What can we fund, build, publish, launch, map, or measure?

A civilizational pattern asks: What forms of life are trying to emerge, and what institutions, narratives, tools, and commitments would let them persist?

2. Your “underpopulated America” thought is important — but needs discipline

I would reframe it.

America is not simply underpopulated. Much of it is under-inhabited.

There is a difference.

“Underpopulated” can drift toward a settler-development fantasy: open land, new communities, new villages, new opportunities. But there is no empty land in that innocent sense. There are Indigenous histories, water constraints, heat limits, damaged soils, broken rural economies, land speculation, extractive property regimes, and fragile ecosystems.

But “under-inhabited” means something more promising: we have not yet learned how to live in many places in ways that increase their ecological and cultural carrying capacity.

The urgent question is not, “How many people could this landscape hold?”

It is: What kind of human presence would make this landscape more alive in fifty years than it is now?

That question changes everything. It brings water, soil, shade, governance, land tenure, food systems, repair economies, cultural memory, fire ecology, migration, and local self-reliance into the center. It also prevents regeneration from becoming a romantic overlay on old colonizing habits.

3. The specific convergence: ERA, DSRE, Possible Planet, and planetary intelligence are now asking the same question

The public description of the Design School for Regenerating Earth emphasizes practical application in one’s own region, and Joe Brewer’s pathway is described as organizing around bioregions and connecting them into a planetary network of learning exchanges. (Bioregional Earth) ERA’s own materials describe its mapping work as displaying thousands of ecosystem restoration stories and projects around the world, while the Big Map presents itself as a global atlas of restoration efforts affecting climate, water, food security, and health. (Ecorestoration Allia) The current Mississippi Basin pilgrimage by Joe and Penny is explicitly framed as awakening bioregional imagination and planting seeds for the Dandelion Strategy. (LinkedIn)

So the strategic convergence is real:

DSRE is cultivating the bioregional learning pathway.
ERA is surfacing and supporting restoration actors.
Possible Planet / CRCS / the Institute for Planetary Intelligence can supply the integrative frame: narrative, decision support, ethical criteria, AI-enabled pattern recognition, and public meaning.

That is where your role becomes clearer.

At 40 years younger, you might build an ecovillage in the desert. At your present stage, the higher-leverage role is different: help build the interpretive and institutional architecture by which thousands of people can build appropriate versions of that dream, in their own places, without repeating the errors of isolated intentional communities, boutique sustainability, or donor-driven pilot projects.

4. What should you be thinking about most urgently?

The central question now is:

How do scattered regenerative efforts become a coherent planetary learning system without becoming centralized, bureaucratic, extractive, or captured?

That is the live edge.

Not “how do we find good projects?”
Not “how do we tell inspiring stories?”
Not “how do we use AI for regeneration?”
Not even “how do we scale restoration?”

The sharper question is:

How does Earth’s self-repair become socially organized intelligence?

That requires five kinds of thinking.

First: think in bioregional units, not isolated projects

A refugee-camp food forest, a Kansas prairie restoration, a Mississippi Basin pilgrimage, a Rochester bioregional hub, a desert ecovillage fantasy, and a global restoration map should not be treated as unrelated “initiatives.”

They are nodes in a possible learning ecology.

The key unit is not the project. It is the place-based learning system: people, land, water, governance, memory, metrics, livelihood, culture, and adaptive feedback.

Second: think of grants as intelligence probes

ERA’s small grants should not be judged only by immediate output: trees planted, wells dug, hectares treated, workshops held.

They should be treated as low-cost probes into conditions for regeneration.

A good grant does three things:

It helps people survive with more dignity.

It measurably increases local ecological capacity.

It teaches the network something transferable.

That third criterion is often missing. Every grant should answer: What will this project teach the larger restoration movement that we do not already know?

Third: think about dignity before metrics

Especially in refugee camps, the danger is to turn desperate people into “beneficiaries” of someone else’s restoration story.

The criteria should privilege local agency, maintenance capacity, women’s and youth leadership where appropriate, host-community relationships, food and water security, and ecological durability. The best projects will not merely “restore land.” They will restore competence, belonging, and future-making capacity under conditions of displacement.

Fourth: think about AI as connective tissue, not command center

AI should not become the brain of planetary regeneration. That would be both technically naive and politically dangerous.

But AI can become useful connective tissue: helping compare projects, extract lessons, detect patterns, translate between fields, visualize tradeoffs, identify gaps, and support decision-making.

The right model is not “AI decides.”
It is: AI helps living communities perceive, remember, compare, deliberate, and learn.

That is a defensible meaning of planetary intelligence.

Fifth: think about succession and legacy

This is personal, not sentimental.

Victoria has completed a final bucket-list item. You have just published Possible Planet. You are traveling across the continent in a vehicle, through heat, infrastructure, beauty, exhaustion, family, old friendships, and emerging movements. That is not incidental. It is a liminal passage.

The question is not only, “What should I do next?”

It is: What pattern of work can outlive my direct labor?

That points toward codifying frameworks, mentoring successors, creating usable tools, convening the right people, and turning Possible Planet from a book into a field-building platform.

5. The specific strategic move I would make now

I would put the following at the center of your thinking:

Planetary intelligence emerges when bioregions become capable of learning from one another in service to life.

Then organize your next phase around that sentence.

For ERA, this means small grants should not just fund restoration; they should generate learning. The grant framework should include simple but rigorous criteria: local leadership, ecological appropriateness, survival and maintenance plan, social benefit, evidence of learning, replicability, and contribution to the wider map.

For DSRE, it means the Dandelion Strategy is not merely metaphorical seeding. It needs memory, feedback, documentation, translation, and cross-bioregional exchange.

For Possible Planet, it means the book becomes the narrative gateway into a practical architecture: dashboards, essays, talks, convenings, grant criteria, field notes, bioregional case studies, and AI-supported learning tools.

For the Institute for Planetary Intelligence, it means resisting grandiosity. The Institute should not claim to “represent planetary intelligence.” It should help define, steward, and test the conditions under which planetary intelligence can emerge.

6. How to think from here

Think less like a founder trying to launch another organization and more like an elder cartographer of emergence.

Your task is to name patterns, connect actors, sharpen criteria, and prevent category errors.

The most important category error is confusing scale with replication. Regeneration will not scale like software. It will scale more like mycelium, watersheds, language, apprenticeship, seed dispersal, and culture. That requires pattern fidelity, not uniformity.

The second category error is confusing hope with evidence. Restoration stories are essential, but the movement needs disciplined hope: what worked, what failed, what conditions mattered, what could transfer, what cannot.

The third category error is confusing intelligence with abstraction. The intelligence you are seeking is embodied in farmers, refugees, rivers, Indigenous memory, local organizers, soil organisms, children, maps, stories, and yes, AI systems — but only when held in right relationship.

7. The urgent formulation

So my answer is:

You should be thinking most urgently about how to convert scattered regenerative aspiration into a trustworthy, place-based, globally connected learning system.

And you should be thinking about it through four lenses:

Deep time: What will this look like in 100 years?

Place: What does this watershed, desert, camp, city, or bioregion actually need?

Dignity: Who gains agency, livelihood, and belonging?

Learning: What does this teach the wider planetary network?

That is the bridge between the Grand Canyon and the ERA grant call. Between your vertigo and Victoria’s bucket list. Between the desert ecovillage you will not build and the thousands of regenerative settlements, camps, farms, hubs, and bioregions that others still might.

The work now is not to do everything.

It is to help the right things recognize one another.

This is outstanding. What I’d like to do is convert it into a shorter piece specifically on inhabitation, which strips out most of the references to our personal travels but continues to connect the organizations, and serves as a blog post for the Possible Planet book site, a Medium, Substack and linkedin post that invites folks to look at the book site. Please provide a draft of this.

Inhabitation: The Next Question for a Possible Planet

We often speak about sustainability, resilience, regeneration, and restoration. Each word has value. But beneath them all is a deeper question:

How shall human beings inhabit the Earth?

Not merely occupy it. Not merely extract from it. Not merely protect fragments of it from ourselves. But inhabit it: dwell within the living systems that sustain us in ways that increase their vitality, beauty, diversity, and capacity for renewal.

This is one of the central questions of Possible Planet: Pathways to a Habitable Future. The book argues that the future is not yet decided. Collapse is possible. So is renewal. But renewal will not come from technology alone, policy alone, markets alone, or even restoration projects alone. It will require a transformation in how we understand our role as a species.

For too long, modern civilization has treated land as real estate, nature as resource, and communities as labor pools or consumer markets. Even much environmental thinking has accepted the separation between “human systems” and “natural systems,” as though the task were simply to reduce the damage caused by one to the other.

But the deeper task is different. We need to become a life-enhancing presence.

That begins with a shift from development to inhabitation.

Development asks: What can be built here?

Inhabitation asks: What does this place need in order to become more alive, and what forms of human presence would help that happen?

This question is especially urgent now because so much of the Earth has been degraded, abandoned, fragmented, or misused — not because humans are inherently destructive, but because our institutions, incentives, and stories have taught us to live badly. Across rural landscapes, urban neighborhoods, refugee settlements, former industrial sites, damaged watersheds, and overextended suburbs, there are opportunities to restore both ecosystems and human dignity.

But we must be careful. Inhabitation is not a new version of conquest. There is no such thing as “empty land” in the old settler-colonial sense. Every place has a history, a watershed, a climate, a biotic community, and often a long human memory. To inhabit wisely is to enter into relationship with those realities, not overwrite them.

This is where the idea of planetary intelligence becomes essential.

Planetary intelligence is not simply artificial intelligence applied to global problems. Nor is it the fantasy of a single planetary brain. It is the emerging capacity of human societies to perceive ecological reality, learn across scales, remember consequences, correct mistakes, and coordinate action in service to life.

That intelligence must be grounded in place. It must be bioregional before it can be planetary.

A bioregion is not just a geographic area. It is a living context: watersheds, soils, forests, farms, species, cities, cultures, food systems, economies, and histories interwoven over time. To think bioregionally is to ask how people can meet more of their needs within the carrying capacity and character of the places they inhabit.

This is why the work of organizations such as the Design School for Regenerating Earth, the EcoRestoration Alliance, and the emerging Planetary Intelligence community matters so much.

The Design School for Regenerating Earth has been helping people understand regeneration as a cultural, ecological, and bioregional process. Its “Dandelion Strategy” points toward a distributed model of change: seed local capacity, connect learning communities, and let regenerative practice spread through relationship rather than command.

The EcoRestoration Alliance is helping make visible the thousands of restoration efforts already underway around the world. Its mapping, convening, and support for local projects show that regeneration is not an abstraction. It is already happening — in farms, forests, riverbanks, villages, refugee camps, and urban margins. The question is how these efforts can learn from one another and become more than isolated good works.

The Institute for Planetary Intelligence, now emerging alongside the broader Possible Planet work, can help frame the next step: how do scattered regenerative efforts become a coherent learning system without becoming centralized, bureaucratic, or extractive?

That may be the most urgent question before us.

The future will not be saved by one master plan. Regeneration will not scale like software. It will spread more like mycelium, seed, language, apprenticeship, watershed restoration, and cultural memory. It requires pattern recognition, but not uniformity. It requires technology, but not technocracy. It requires metrics, but not the reduction of living communities to data points.

The work ahead is to connect restoration, bioregional learning, ecological design, community finance, Indigenous wisdom, public policy, and AI-enabled tools into a more intelligent whole.

Small grants, for example, should not be judged only by how many trees are planted or how many acres are treated. They should also be understood as learning probes. A well-designed project should improve local conditions, strengthen community agency, and teach the larger network something about what works, what fails, and what can be adapted elsewhere.

The same is true of ecovillages, food forests, watershed alliances, regenerative farms, neighborhood resilience projects, and bioregional hubs. Each is more than a project. Each can become part of a planetary learning ecology.

This is the deeper meaning of inhabitation.

To inhabit is to belong responsibly.

To inhabit is to ask what a place is asking of us.

To inhabit is to restore the feedback loops between land, livelihood, culture, and governance.

To inhabit is to recognize that human beings are not outside nature, but neither are we automatically beneficial within it. We must learn how to become beneficial.

That learning is now a civilizational task.

Possible Planet was written as an invitation into that task. It is not a prediction that everything will work out. It is an argument that a habitable future remains possible if we can align our intelligence, institutions, technologies, and imaginations with the conditions of life.

The next frontier is not merely sustainability. It is not even restoration in the narrow sense.

It is inhabitation.

How do we live here — on this Earth, in these watersheds, within these limits, among these beings — in a way that makes the world more alive?

That is the question that should guide us now.

To learn more about Possible Planet: Pathways to a Habitable Future and the wider work emerging around planetary intelligence, bioregional regeneration, and ecological restoration, please visit the Possible Planet book site.