The ‘Great Dislocation’ – all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons … Transcending to ‘Active Hope’ through Bioregionalism … Sunday Thoughts

Edition 28 | January 2025

So here we are! 2025! How has the year been so far for you? For me I started the year with echoes from the Magdeburg Christmas market attack, where an islamophobic Arabic psycho (!) thought to get attention for his sick thoughts by ramming into people and kill 6 of them and injuring 300 more. And just right after we welcomed the new year a similar attack happened in downtown New Orleans, killing many civilians in another barbaric act of terrorism. The year started as the old year ended, but soon after the Los Angeles Inferno broke out and is still threatening parts of the city, while other parts burned down to the ground, and with that tens of thousands of human illusions of a safe life in California. At least half a dozen of lies are so far the only contribution we heard from the liar in chief that Americans chose to be the best political option for their country. They’ve seen nothing yet, and so do we. Time to stand still for a moment and look deeper with a clear view on where we stand. In this first Lighthouse Keeper of 2025 I call this …

The ‘Great Dislocation’ – all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons (in an age of economic system collapse)

Since I started to write about the ‘Big Sustainability Illusion’ in 2021, instigating the Lighthouse Keeper as a periodic newsletter here on Linkedin, I was contributing by both sending warning signals and ideas for curation. We are all individually tasked to step up against all the wrong things happening in our work and private lives; we are all called to take drastic consequences. But most of what I saw ever since were rather obscure obstacle avoidance manoeuvres than really redesigning lives and organizations, institutions and regions in what could be called ‘in line with the environmental and social needs’ in a closed system. Here are my top 5 conundrums:

• The ‘wokism’ argument in sustainability: Sure, there are those that called sustainability already ‘a killer of market freedom’ from the moment it was conceived. That hasn’t stopped, but after 35 years of squeezing it into the existing economic system logic, little is left from its original meaning, namely to assess intragenerational and intergenerational equity in ways that it would guide ourselves out of overshoot of environmental carrying capacities and undershoot of social caring capacities globally. Instead, placebos were placed in many ways: first and foremost, voluntary agreements of industries for all sorts of incrementalism. Most of them blew up over the years, obviously they were never intended to really transition industries, but to create wave breakers in front of the sea shore so that the kids could continue to play safely. I was part of too many discussions in the 1990s and 2000s during my time at Siemens and GRI, so that I became an offender of voluntary agreements.
• The ‘wokism’ argument in ESG: A further reduction of the sustainability idea to blunt and pure ESG. The wokism argument is complete bollocks, it’s rather the opposite that discredits ESG, namely its ‘weakness’. Reducing information gathering to just performance information without proper context only allows us to do one thing: documenting the collapse that is happening since we discredited sustainability (as per my point above). The occurrence of regulatory agreements like the ESRS and ISSB are nothing more than the prolongation of that weakness, now in regulatory arrangements. The ‘omni-buzz’ is just another prolongation of potential watering down, something that several governments have asked for, including – shame on them – the German government too! All of this has led to so-called sustainability experts that degenerated into being ESG ‘apparatschiks’, walking like zombies after an illusion that will never happen: transformation. ESG standards cement incrementalism to a degree that it is just an amusement park to entertain software solutions for data gathering, implementation services, webinars and discussion groups. I seldomly attend any of those and if I do, I feel like I come to a self-help group on how to do a materiality analysis for incremental blurring. There’s no questioning about how useful these analyses are, there is no feeling of incompleteness given that proper sustainability context is missing and that all that’s done is merely more than a blind flight. And while people like us at r3.0 offer an alternative with the UNSDPI and have a monthly training lined up (and having backing by the OECD, KPMG, ICAEW, and even the EU, as well as through an academic study), I hear excuse after excuse why people can’t attend, they do not even have budget to be properly trained and only look for the freebees out there. That brings me to my third point:
• The idea that ‘retraction’ is an opportune reaction for business: we have seen this for more than a year now. Companies are taking back earlier set performance goals, reduce or merge sustainability teams with classical comms or strategy functions again. Some of the initiatives that were installed over the years now implode (GFANZ as an example, the big Blackrock cool-downer as another). I’ve always wondered what ideas boards have instead in order to reach necessary transformation needs. But the reality is: they don’t have any, they just return to short-term revenue optimization in collapse times, where the corridor for making revenue becomes smaller and smaller. Squeezing the existing business model out until the end, that seems to be it. I just can’t think of anything else. The 20 years of WEF Risk reporting seem to have had no impact at all. Maybe an announcement that the global economy will face a 50% loss in GDP by 2070 will have some impact, but I doubt it, given the long timeframe. Surely, this topic is also infused by:
• The idea that ‘politics has the solutions’: I’m done with the idea that we can expect anything useful from politics. The co-optation of politics by media, corporate lobbying and billionaire influence is complete. The Musk/Trump example is probably the most obvious, but it happens elsewhere too. At least three international political negotiation formats continue to fail us (Biodiversity COP, Climate COP, International Agreement on Plastics). Democracy processes and elections have turned from freedom to vote for the greater good of all of us to individual securing of an existing materialistic status quo, hence the surreal voting for right-wing extremists that don’t have a plan, just platitudes that speak to the fear of people of losing status. That this will lead to losing for all of us has just left the mind of many voters. What’s happening in the US and in Austria are just precursors of a reality in which globalized trade and liberality will be destroyed through the right-wing wrecking ball. It seems we now reach a point of ‘mental obesity’ where there’s no way out but letting the economic system logic that causes all of this eat up itself. This has already happened so often before in history, just now it’s global.
• The notion that ‘nothing can be done’ against all of this: maybe this is the biggest of all wrongs I am seeing out there. I am in constant discussion with people that try to tell me they can’t do anything about what’s happening, that they wished they could, but the economic system’s strait jacket wouldn’t offer them an alternative. I feel reminded of the time when I left Deloitte in 2012, escaping the unsustainable logic of big 4 revenue making needs, and founding what was then still called ‘Reporting 3.0’ (now r3.0 – Redesign for Resilience and Regeneration). Everybody I know was ‘concerned’, wanted to convince me to rethink my decision. I just had the backing of my family and support of one person with a vision – Peter Teuscher of BSD Consulting, still a Trustee at Oncommons gGmbH, the legal home of r3.0 as the flagship program. He allowed me to rethink sustainability reporting in ways that simply made sense, hence my plea for context-based reporting and the development of 9 Blueprints of a knowledge commons that is one of a kind. I admit we needed initial (financial) support, and a mastermind like Bill Baue to join me, now a colleague that allowed a level of completeness of our world view that I couldn’t have created alone. And then came many more to collaborate with, and we created so many openings as Advocation Partners, Project Partners, conference speakers and community builders. A journey always starts with the first step, and I just can’t imagine that this is impossible for so many others.

Transcending to ‘Active Hope’ through Bioregionalism

What does my assessment above do to you? Despair? Hopelessness? Anger? Fear? All of that is understandable. I have often enough mentioned I went through all of this myself (and called it a ‘mourning process’), especially because I thought our work at r3.0 and so many obvious arguments for transformation would somehow lead to something. We are proud to have developed a generic counter model, a ‘Knowledge Commons’ for …? Yes, what? Intended to be a set of Blueprints to ‘avoid collapse?’ Have we failed as collapse is obviously happening? Or did we just miss the activism towards a development that already existed? My view of today is that all we produced in our first decade of existence was necessary to arrive at what we didn’t see already existing in parallel to the globalization monster and colonial economic system logic: bioregionalism. A global community with place-based focus, not yet interwoven in ways they would be visible enough. Over the last 1-2 years this picture has drastically changed for me and has led to a repositioning of r3.0. What does that practically mean? We described that in our last Medium article ‘From Liminal to Landed: r3.0 Shifts into Place-Sourced Resilience & Regeneration’, so here are a couple of the most important points:

• We framed our role in the bioregioning movement as curators of coherence in the context of collapse. As ecological and social systems careen toward catastrophic tipping points, incoherence increases in self-reinforcing feedback loops, exponentiating information quality degradation and confounding synergistic collaboration potential to the point of polarization. We at r3.0 counteract incoherence (and coax coherence) by 1) prioritizing ethical integrity and scientific rigor over political positionality; 2) rejecting competition in favor of collaboration; 3) embracing necessary transformation in the face of widespread incrementalism; and 4) centering prosocial relationality and cross-cultural solidarity, among other strategies.
• We at r3.0 have long sought to curate coherence — and counteract incoherence — through two primary means: Convening, and Knowledge Commons Co-creation (bridged by the common denominator of Self-Governance). Each of these means are applicable to regenerative bioregioning, so we can apply the learnings from our first decade in this new context.
• We focus the 12th International r3.0 Conference on the bioregioning context (our theme this year: Catalyzing Bioregional Resilience & Regeneration: Learning to Reinhabit Earth Together) while also inviting bioregions globally to Confluence alongside our Conference, using its content as a launch pad for their own bioregional deliberations. To support this, we are developing a Confluencing template that bioregions can customize to their own contexts.
• As well, we devote our online Open Dialogue format to bioregioning, focusing our practice of hosting monthly public Zoom gatherings with featured speakers followed by facilitated discussion, on the co-creation and dissemination of bioregional knowledge. All our convenings center relationality to potentiate collective action, invite emotional authenticity, create space for generative tensions to energize conflict transformation, and nurture collapse resilience. The first of these Open Dialogues has now been announced for January 24, see here and here for more details and how to participate! Starting off this serieswith nobody less than Dr. Layla June Johnston, Brandon Letsinger and Karie Crisp is just fantastic!
• r3.0 focused our first decade on co-creating a knowledge commons of Blueprints co-created with Working Groups, as well as Common Good Resources and other materials. We now draw on this experience to initiate design of two-eyed bioregional knowledge commons (braiding Indigenous knowledge and Western knowledge), first focusing on the information architecture, drawing on diverse approaches (such the wiki — see examples here and here), formats (textual, video, audio, graphical, etc), and languages. Knowledge informs action, underlining the vital importance of co-creating knowledge as an unenclosed commonsto inform collective action for stewarding resources at the bioregional scale regeneratively, respecting the carrying capacities of these ecological and social capitals.
• As information architecture solidifies, we will start prototyping content that dynamically balances generalization with specificity. In other words, we will seek to encompass knowledge that’s broadly applicable and customizable across diverse bioregional contexts, while also including specific knowledge applications in specific contexts to provide illustrative detail. Bioregional knowledge we may cover includes: Bioregional Regenerative Economies and Cultures; Bioregional Learning Centers; Bioregional Funding Ecosystems / Bioregional Financing Facilities; Bioregional Carrying Capacity Measurement & Management; Bioregional Self-Governance; etc…This last element illustrates the bi-directional aspect of knowledge commons, which both serve as a repository of information about bioregional self-governance, while also enacting the practice of self-governance of the knowledge commons by its users.

This to me sounds so much better use of my time than to invest into supporting an inevitable economic system collapse. Personally, and as a family living in the here and now, I/we will continue to also live with the consequences of collapse. I will talk about that sometime in the future, but I can already throw in that the nature of r3.0’s work will increase the need to become ‘bioregional nomads’, weaving interactively between bioregions and support their interbeing. Turning sixty next year, I look forward to refresh my next decade of professional work with new paths, and staying mentally flexible.

Sunday Thoughts

It’s been some time since the November Lighthouse Keeper Newsletter, so here’s the chronological list of what got posted since then:

A Sunday Thought (#125): ‘Mac Inferno’ – Cause & Effect in one picture (January 12, 2025)

A Sunday Thought (#124): ‘2025’ – the year in which bioregionalism takes off? (December 22, 2024)

A Sunday Thought (#123): ‘Not seeing the forest for the trees’ – a distracted ESG Community(December 15, 2024)

A Sunday Thought (#122): ‘Conundrums of Collapse’ – the impossibility of politics to ‘solve’ our polycrisis (December 8, 2024)

A Sunday Thought (#121): ‘Black Friday(s)’ – the release valve of the consumer megalomania (December 1, 2024)

A Sunday Thought (#120): ‘Migration’ – A Human Right? (November 24, 2024)

A Sunday Thought (#119): ‘Post Election Blues’ – the pacemakers of collapse are on the rise! (November 17, 2024)

A Sunday Thought (#118): ‚Chief Love Officer‘ – a collapse resilience creator (November 10, 2024)

Friends, this is it for the first edition of 2025. I am happy to see the community of readers growing, and I wholeheartedly welcome about 150 new subscribers since the last edition. May 2025 be a year in which some dreams can become true and the hospicing of the old happens with grace. We all need to do our part in that!