Helping Everything Shift at Once

Creating the Conditions for a Planetary Phase Transition

We have a strategy for how to create the islands of coherence that many have been talking about in the last two decades — and it is something I would like to share with all of you today. It has to do with fundamental discoveries in the fields of complexity science and evolutionary studies that were made a long time ago but haven’t been widely known by people who are trying to create positive change in the world.

If you have been following along in my Substack writings, you’ll know that we shared our Dandelion Strategy for Regenerating the Earth about a month ago. It is our way of expressing how to get to our goal of Birthing 1000 BLCs by 2035. And it is why last week I shared our Billion Dollar Proposal for how to structure the financial flows that will get us to this goal.

But how does this phase transition work? That is the topic of today’s writing. It has to do with insights from complexity science for a phenomenon called self-organized criticality that was discovered by the Belgium chemist Ilya Prigogine in the 1970’s. He has a famous quote that many people use. It goes like this:

Our world today is indeed far from equilibrium — and it is very complex! Millions of us are feeling the sea of chaos as various kinds of order break down around us. But do we really have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order? That is what self-organized criticality is all about.

It feels like a long time ago, but I studied exactly this phenomenon when I was a graduate student in the atmospheric sciences department of the University of Illinois between 2001 and 2005. My research looked at fractal geometry for studying how clouds form in the atmosphere. I was lucky to become a member of the Center for Complex Systems Research led by my dear mentor who passed away a few years ago — a German physicist named Alfred Hübler. He taught me a lot about the behaviors of complex systems and how it can be taught even to young children with the right mindset and approach.

Yesterday in the Design School for Regenerating Earth, I gave a webinar titled Helping Everything Shift at Once that explains what self-organized criticality is and how we can apply it directly to our global moment in the world today. You can watch the whole webinar here:

I strongly encourage you to watch this recording. It will explain things in much more depth than this writing. The main point I want to make now is that knowledge about phase transitions in complex adaptive systems is useful in two ways — (1) we can apply this knowledge in moments of deep change and guide ourselves through to the other side; and (2) we can also see when the existing structures are too strong to allow a phase transition to occur. This is why we can know how to do it and it still won’t work most of the time. The conditions need to be just right.

And the conditions ARE right now! Humanity has entered the sea of chaos. Order is breaking down all around us. Now is the time to learn about self-organized criticality and become part of the dandelion strategy. We have entered what complexity researchers call the “Edge of Chaos” and now we are empowered agents of transformation for creating those famous Islands of Coherence. Watch the video above to see what I am talking about.

If you want to read the definition of self-organized criticality, here it is:

And if you would like to know how it works, I created this logical flow that walks through the various parts of the process (again, this is explained in the video in more depth):

The moment is now because our social and ecological systems are all losing their internal coherence. While this is a scary time in many ways, it is also the most potent time for becoming coherent ourselves and coordinating our actions. We do this by coming into direct relationship with the naturally-occurring coherence of life on Earth. Become present to rivers, ecosystems, and all that they hold in their own self-organizing patterns.

Organize ourselves bioregionally and we do this — we come into direct relationship with the natural coherence of living systems. Create a bioregional learning center (BLC) and you start to weave existing human activities that are ecological and regenerative with the “geography” of your life-place that is the bioregion itself. Treat each place where a BLC is born as a nucleation site for an island of coherence and it becomes possible for more of humanity to move toward a planetary phase transition.

This is all depicted in this slide of the presentation in the recording above:

We are already living into this strategy and have been for several years. Through the Design School and even before it was created in 2023, we were planting seeds of bioregional activation in different parts of the world. We catalyzed support from the NoVo Foundation to mobilize a few tens of millions of dollars into this space — even though they didn’t know about the strategy we were manifesting.

Now we are teaching the strategy. Living it into our upcoming bioregional pilgrimages for the Mississippi Basin in June and the Mediterranean + Western Europe in September and October. It is also how we connect what we are doing in the Northern Andes with the rest of the world. There is a logic to what we are doing. It is the logic of the Dandelion informed by insights about self-organizing patterns in complex systems. And we weave with it the design of social niche construction and developmental scaffolding from cultural evolutionary studies. That is another topic I touch on in the recording above and have given previous talks about throughout the last six years.

What is important now is to know that we are manifesting this strategy. You can be part of it. Help make it happen. If enough places become nucleation sites for the islands of coherence that humanity needs, we can transition from an extractive death culture to become a living quilt of bioregional regeneration that takes us into the regeneration of the entire Earth.

I hope you will join us. Be part of it. Perhaps even travel with us or join us in one of our upcoming pilgrimages. You can also pledge your Active Hope for Regenerating the Earth to help make this happen.

Let’s do this!

Onward, fellow humans.