A Breakdown Van Called ‘Omnibus’ … Bioregional Carrying Capacities … Place-Based Solutions for the Displaced … Sunday Thoughts.

Edition 29 | March 2025

Welcome to Edition 29 of the Lighthouse Keeper Newsletter. And welcome to 250 new subscribers since the last edition. I am thankful you are interested to reserve time to read this content in such times, when the world order is turned upside down, when impertinence is often undisputed and becomes a reality blur by constant repetition. When elected members of parliament can’t vote for their true motivation because they fear for the health of their families. When 80 years of cross-Atlantic partnership are thrown under the bus for a ‘deal’. And when a true leader fighting for the freedom of us all (not just in the Gobal North West) is mortified as dictator, war-monger and corrupt, while the aggressors aren’t even named any longer and might become ‘business partners.’ The world has become a different place within less than two months, where fascist and autocratic regime power figures grin at each other, trying to position themselves for the best new distribution of what’s still out there to exploit. As a collapse-acknowledging person I book all that under the heading ‘surreal collateral damage’ at the end time of our existing economic system towards collapse.

Underlying all this are stressors like harshening climate change, increased biodiversity loss, increased resource unavailability, with more human displacement than ever as just one effect. But where do we see these addressed these days of turmoil? In times of such system weaknesses, autocrats thrive, close the borders, see the immigrants as enemies, and even exploit their own people. This will continue until what Peter Turchin calls ‘Elite Overproduction’ (see ST#127 below) played out, in which the system will eat up itself until collapse is complete. That’s how civilizations always die; but what was a regional phenomenon in the past is now a global one.

‘Islands of coherence’, the wording from the famous Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigonine’s quote, will be the only left places with the seed from which a new system can be born.

Helping to midwife these through my, my colleague’s and our network’s work at r3.0, and in what we call ‘collapse resilience’, is the final chapter of my professional life’s story. In this Lighthouse Keeper I try to decode some of what’s going on and what to do about it from the perspective of collapse resilience strategies.

A Breakdown Van Called Omnibus

Those who read the Lighthouse Keeper Newsletter know since the very beginning (2021), actually since the 4-parter that I called ‘The Big Sustainability Illusion’, that I wrote a lot about the shortcomings in the sustainability community when it comes to honesty about reaching sustainability and reliance on the original paradigm. I often said sustainability today is just a comic version of the original concept, incrementalism and ‘go with the flow’ are part of a major cognitive dissonance.

Today, looking back at the developments in the sustainability reporting field since 2006, when GRI G3 had it all set up for corporates and governments in their Guidelines, and me being a happy bunny since we thought we reached an overall breakthrough (albeit some data availability challenges), I know the majority of corporations and their boards – for many reasons – NEVER wanted, HARDLY understood, and BARELY integrated sustainability in ways that could have enabled them to cross that thin line from less degenerative to regenerative acting. The actual distance to sustainability, the ‘unsustainability gap’ too big, the market dynamics, the constant lobbyism of shareholder and certain stakeholder groups too strong, and the constant overshadowing of geopolitical and mentally challenging economic crises, pandemics and acts of warfare never allowed any of this to break through.

COPs on Climate, Biodiversity (even with a finance agreement there now), Plastics, etc., mainly government-led processes with corporation’s co-optation tactics in full swing, are just white noise, with minimum results on minimum scope way too late, seen the urgency at a moment when the culmination point of the polycrisis is now so evident that many call it ‘meta-crisis’. We are not decades away of all the domino effects against we humans have a means of reacting towards avoidance! All of us together, from well-meant activists and enthusiastic professionals, to those in corporates that tried to fight the windmills, people in NGOs and some seldom obstructionists within certain governments acting against the bureaucratic orders of standstill, we failed. We squarely failed!

All this is the context to assess and understand what happened in Brussels in the last weeks, and even clearer with the ‘Draft Omnibus Package’ now delivered – I called it ‘a derailment long foreseeable’ in my ST #132 (see below). But what really annoyed me was the reaction of those ‘opportusultants’ that never visibly opened up an inch to these shortcomings of pure ESG Reporting, long addressed, actually for more than a decade. Those that were carking the hym of praise for the CSRD and ESRS, now suddenly felt gutted, disappointed, discouraged, devastated or surprised. My first reaction was: Really? And my first response to these posts was: If there were people that really had a reason to be gutted, then it‘s us sustainability experts (many of us from the ‚pioneering years‘) that offered help for an authentic approach to GRI, to EFRAG, to the IFRS many times, but got brushed over for the most ridiculous reasons by Apparatschiks of the current political bureaucratic order and logic. It became once again clear that sustainability was NEVER the target, never thoroughly understood, for the exact same reasons we are in continued economic system collapse. What happened on February 26, 2025, was totally logic in the light of my introductory remarks, and any future watering down evenly so.

Just a small reminder of how we did get here. Our message since 2012 has always been that weak ESG incrementalism will not succeed. The Sustainability Context Group – up to 160 global experts united in its best days, initiated by my colleague Bill Baue, and now part of r3.0, was raising these concerns all the time, with supporters from all over the world multiplying it. There was really a chance to finally do something robust, but that could only happen by inclusion of thresholds and allocations into the perspective of authentic sustainability measurement. But the ‚interoperability’ alliance including EFRAG denied their historic responsibility.

It already started with a ridiculous misappropriation of scientific terms in the EU Taxonomy through politicizing them, and that exact same pattern continued into the ESRS. Now that we have been presented with a bureaucratic monster, people fire from all sides for all the right and wrong reasons, asserting ESG reporting being ‚woke‘ or ‚weak‘ or ‚overburdening‘. They want simplification, delay, and less scrutiny. We are thrown back to the level of 2006, but worse, confusing us with ‘double materiality’ and ‘interoperability’ myths.

Trumpian ‘deal’ politics or EU Corporate Lobbyism only have Enterprise Value Creation (or in their words ‘fear of its destruction) in their focus. To all here that now ‚suddenly‘ feel gutted or devastated, you‘ve all been part of dragging this dead horse to water over many years.

How that, you may ask? Well, the criticism was loud and clear, part of public comment processes, presented in workshops and keynotes, and training was given on the UNSDPIs as a way to cure the immense shortcomings for 2.5 years already. Most of the opportusultants decided to ignore the criticism, and now need to live with the consequences for their own business. They already find ‘what to do now’ holding messages more important than to REALLY rethink all this madness.

At r3.0 we have worked with the UN (who came to us acknowledging this exact problem) in order to develop a solution to this immense misappropriation in 2019, and then offering the UNSDPI for simple adoption since 2022. We trained hundreds of experts in context-based reporting. It is impossible the opportusultants never heard of them. If they‘re now gutted, I’d ask: ‘where have they been all those years?’

And while the Omnibus derailment will further go down the rabbit hole of continued incrementalism (the new Brussels voting realities will take care of that, no worries), let’s end with good news: even now you can still come on board. Nothing is lost if you cure this shortcoming by adding the UNSDPI to your spectrum. See: https://lnkd.in/eJtdfJGT. And there is even more reason why context-based sustainability measurement will remain important. Let’s look into that now:

Bioregional Carrying Capacities

What explains the idea of ‘Islands of Coherence’ better than the existence of bioregions, those geological and cultural areas that always was and is the birthplace of humans, as long as we humans can think? The place-based symbiosis of nature and souls. The interbeing of all life. It has always been the source code for human survival, bioregioning is our species’ evolutionary survival pattern, as Daniel Christian Wahl tends to describe it. Indigenous people have been gardeners of what Westerners perceived to be wildlife. They were the architects of abundance until the modern-day arrogance of markets, national boundaries, chemicals, plastics, globalization and economics rolled out the greed carpet above the original, always putting a ‘deal’ above what’s healthy.

Over the years I learned that I did bet on the wrong horse myself, thinking corporate’s and government’s action will find the path to true sustainability and regeneration. Today I know that this is not possible any longer with the crossing of close to all planetary boundaries and all its consequences, and the overshadowing by ‘just another catastrophe.’

Measurement of success is not a question of a corporate ROI, Enterprise Value and superiority above others (called ‘competition’), it has always been – but not acknowledged – the healthiness of a place, a bioregion, and between bioregions. What’s needed is clarity about System Value Added! Measurement of such success describes how a bioregion stays within its environmental carrying capacities and social caring capacities, how it is in balance with what’s offered in this place, and in dialog how to exchange goods between nearest-by bioregions to exchange additional goods needed for the wellbeing of one or various bioregions. This weaving in and between bioregions needs information, and now guess what is necessary: thresholds and allocations! And again, who offers an ‘authentic’ assessment of that? Yes, the UNSDPI are a starting point

At r3.0 we have a while ago started to collaborate with the Design School for Regenerating Earth, to organize a series of Bioregional Carrying Capacity Dialogs, exploring aspects of bioregional carrying capacity measurement and management. You can find more information dedicated to the series here, and on our YouTube Channel. We also announce these sessions in advance on our social media channels, and will post recordings / decks / Zoom chats afterwards. So far we had three of them, and the fourth one with CSO-Founder Mark W. McElroy, PhD is already planned.

I find these sessions highly educative, and help to better understand what’s at stake for us humans living in bioregions, as there are many more aspects than to just measure success. It’s the activities that make all the difference. And here’s a monster challenge in front of us:

Place-Based Solutions for the Displaced

In our third Open Dialog on Bioregioning in February, we focused on Bioregioning & Permaculture with our guests Elyes Mkacher, sharing his experience in Tunisia teaching permaculture to bioregionalists in the Design School as part of the Mediterranean Bioregional Hub; Gloire Mudekuza, describing how Plethora Social Initiative supports residents of the Nakivale Refugee Settlement in Uganda to practice permaculture; and Julie Davenson of the Soil & Climate Initiative, discussing the role of permaculture in the development of bioregional bio-based economies, see the recording and slide deck here.

Already in the pre-calls to this dialog, I was connecting the horrible data that Jonathan Porritt’s Report ‘The Exodus Equator’ was presenting on climate migration by 2050, with the need to find ‘place-based solutions for the displaced’. In this session I also learned the difference between migration (mostly voluntary) and displacement (forced), and it made sense to me.

But now looking at the sheer numbers and the ridiculous nationalistic strides of political players for votes (see my ST #130 below) in the developed world, how would the ‘Islands of Coherence’ react to that challenge? There’s no one good answer to that, but when I heard Gloire Mudekuza’s input, talking about his work with his organization PLETHORA SOCIAL INITIATIVE, supporting residents of the Nakivale Refugee Settlement in Uganda to practice permaculture, the magnitude of the challenge became once again clear to me.

Some of these ‘camps’ are close to permanent and are better described as ‘cities with little infrastructure’ for the basic needs of humans. Deploying permaculture there is a life-saver, reduces violence and supports with healthy ‘home-grown’ goods. There’s hardly anything more fulfilling than achieving that! What is it that we can all learn here? Refugees want to work, want to support their own families, want to be part of the place they’re at, even if it’s not their birthplace. And they need mental support for mourning their losses, while restarting into what bioregions may offer. It will be hard to bring needs and offers together in a balanced way, but we need to have the perspective clear of what’s coming and how we embrace the challenge(s). To be continued … but this is now clearly centred in my mind as one of the most burning issues for bioregions.

Sunday Thoughts #126 – #132

As always let’s finish with the collection of Sunday Thoughts that I offered since the last Lighthouse Keeper Newsletter in January. Some of the language used in these also made it into the main essay text here. Make sure you see my Sunday Thoughts whenever you have a moment, many I know read them with their first morning coffee. Some already already on Saturday as I post these mostly before enjoying my Saturday evening (of course already Sunday morning in New Zealand).

A Sunday Thought (#132): ‚Omni-Frustrated‘ – a derailment long foreseeable (March 2, 2025)

A Sunday Thought (#131): ‚Victim-Offender-Reversal‘ – a logic collapse cruelty (February 23, 2025)

A Sunday Thought (#130): ‘Regenerative Migration’ – the idiocy of closed borders (February 16, 2025)

A Sunday Thought (#129): ‘Tariff Wars’ – Bioregional Resilience as the Antidote (February 9, 2025)

A Sunday Thought (#128) – ‘Regrets of the Dying’ – changing attitudes for a life in collapse (February 2, 2025)

A Sunday Thought (#127): ‘Elite Overproduction’ – Heading Into the Teeth of Another Storm (January 26, 2025)

A Sunday Thought (#126): ‘GDP Implosion’ – the concept of ‘business’ at risk (January 19, 2025)

I wish you all well. Let bioregionalism be your door-opener into another world that IS possible!