Explores the nature and forms of Hypermodern cooperative systems, regenerative economics, and Bioregional Food Systems Planning as new models of civic engagement and their effectiveness in solving wicked problems such as climate change.

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On Hypermodern Regenerative Economics and Hyper-Local Regenerative Food Systems Planning:
Platform-Cooperativism, Social-Entrepreneurship, Blockchain, and the Emerging Distributive
Collaborative Engagement Models for a Regenerative Future for All
Travis Driessen - July 22, 2018
The ailing signs of late-stage capitalism and strained 19th
century liberal democratic institutions are all
around us. As extractavist agents more efficiently transform ecological capital into economic capital and
push labor costs down to supply cheap products and services to a global consumerist culture, the
inadequacy of degenerative modes of production are increasingly brought to light. Systemic economic
externalities (e.g. environmental costs, public health impact, etc.) are, by definition, unaccounted for in
the bottom line of corporate firms. Yet these externalities are paid for by all and are expressed in a
warming climate, acidification of the ocean, rising sea levels, desertification of top soil, and the rise of a
new refugee class. Harder to see, yet visible to some, are the empirical markers that we are now
entering what scientists call the, “Sixth Great Mass Extinction Event”. The recent proposal to enlist more
than 26,000 types of living organisms on the endangered species list is latest in continuing tell-tale signs
that our planet and all life attached to it is in a full-scale free-fall ecological collapse. This is difficult to
notice as ecological transformations do not occur over the scale of a week as they do in Hollywood
movies, rather ecological phase changes take decades or longer to play out. This time-scale challenges
human beings perception of the significance and connectedness of these changes as they unfold.
Whereas mass migrations of human populations in previous epochs were caused by ice-ages and moving
glacier plates, in our turbulent times, desperate populations are increasingly uprooted from resource-
competition based wars, ecological degradation, and increasing lack of economic opportunity. In it’s
current trajectory, these systemic outputs will only get worse. By 2050 over 1 billion people will be
refugees; well beyond the capacity of our current governance models. The implications are profound.

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Complementing this disturbing ecological trend, three decades of neo-liberal austerity and privatization
policies have hollowed out the state apparatus in western democracies. Taking its place, social goods
and basic services are now more often delivered by a new class of global corporate monoliths that
provide energy, transportation, retail package shipping, social networking, education, health care, and
financial services. As many of these types of services are often considered natural monopolies by
economists, they have traditionally been regulated as utilities as to guarantee equitable access. As
demand by these private firms for relative products and services is defined as the quantity of units able
to be purchased at a specific price marker, rather than the true social need, this results in accelerating
inequality in a feed-back loop that we must tweak. No amount of people in the streets nor politicians
voted in or out of office will fix this. We need to create, innovate, and build our way out of this problem.
On the other end of the spectrum, a paradox exists in that we simultaneously live in an era of epic
advances new communication mediums that promote social capital and hyper-connectivity,
exponentially growing scientific knowledge, revolutionary medical treatment, and new forms of
exploding wealth across our planet. The intrinsic properties of these media and informational resources
have the potential to forge new synergies and create nuanced mechanisms and capacities to improve
the quality of life for our planet and our species. Our global species now dangles on the cusps of collapse
or rebirth. How we decide to reorganize ourselves in a new Humanity 3.0 will affect how well we are
able to access our collective strength and intelligence to deal with the most adverse conditions our
species has ever faced as we culturally evolve and give birth to an inter-planetary organism.

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This article introduces the concepts of hypermodern cooperation and hyper-local regenerative food
systems planning to underline regenerative economic development models for hyper local cities. Broad
scale cooperation among small decentralized yet interconnected agents now occurs more frequently in
local and global economic processes. This hyper-connectivity, facilitated through new media forms and
shared ownership of facilities, sustain agent capacity to co-produce with less administrative overhead.
These reduced barriers increase incentives reward more individuals, groups, and communities directly
connected to the system or indirectly effected by the systems outputs. In hyperlocal regenerative food
systems, the emergence of new cooperative approaches is analyzed to demonstrate a sea change
phenomenon emerging in hyperlocal cities. Doing so, it demonstrates how new regenerative economic
models can be considered a new bastion of civic engagement and to meet the challenges of structural
inequality and ecological degradation which are intrinsic properties of degenerative economic systems.
Furthermore, an argument is made that we as planetary citizens, communities, and collective agents of
governance, economic, and social regenerative systems must fundamentally rethink our approach to
solving wicked problems and find nuanced and novel ways to engage, contribute to society, find self-
worth by pursuing our passions, and regrow our common resources for the health of ourselves, our
planet, and all life connected to it. Hypermodern forms of cooperative social organization across a sea of
hyperlocal settlements, can usurp the fundamental structural challenges in today’s governance and
economic models while providing participatory democratic and regenerative economic systems. To
make this argument, we first provide a diagnosis of the inadequacies of current civic engagement and
consumerist economic to peer to the horizon of collaborative regenerative economic systems.
Arguments for a New Model and Approach of Civic Engagement: Wicked Problems and the Failings of
State Institutions as Problem Solver
The limitations of using traditional representative and participatory governance mechanisms to solve
the wicked problems of climate change, refugees, declining ecologies and increasing inequality in access
to quality health care, housing, nutritious food, and education are more and more apparent. While this

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article is not suggesting to not participate in representative democratic institutions, it makes the
important point that systemic failures in these institutions are accelerated as our societies and global
problems become more complex to solve thus urging a shift to parallel and diverging paths. These
intrinsic systemic limitations now require us to develop new ways of civic engagement if we are to be
effective and achieve fundamental goals of such as equity, democracy, and environmental sustainability.
The road most taken by engaged citizens to address their grievances or attempt to improve lived and
environmental conditions is via voting for representative or in direct and associational participation
venues that exist in different network locales across various government scales (e.g. city, state, national,
and international). Direct participation might relate to voting for a specific referendum initiative or
attending a public meeting on the expenditures of government budgetary allocations. Yet, these
institutions are increasingly less effective for resolving these matters. Campaign finance and redistricting
laws marginalize voters from getting representatives that reflect their demographic backgrounds.
Moreover, as todays societies become more heterogenous and complex, traditional government
responsibilities are more often concentrated within executive institutions, at any scale of governance,
thus increasing “democratic deficits”. That is, it is impossible to sanction a representative by voting for
or against reelection of a representative for their performance in individual decisions they have made on
a myriad of issues over their time in office. Moreover, representatives increasingly appoint technocrats
to commissions or posts who handle orders of business under the executive power (e.g. FCC
Commission Chair appointed by Obama and the highly contested Freedom of the Internet decision)
which represents a break in the chain of accountability by voting to sanction a representative’s
performance. Moreover, changes to election funding due to the Citizens United supreme court decision
have greatly influenced the spending of corporations at local, state and national levels that undeniable
impacts on representatives carrying out a corporate agenda while in office. The complex and indirect
webs of governance networks that foster democratic deficits to occur are demonstrated in Figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1 Different network configurations in representative and associational democracy
Global venues in addressing climate change issues have consistently failed in the past thirty years to
provide a coordinated international government response to effectively fight climate change. From the
Rio Summit 1992, to the fall of Kyoto Protocol in 2000, to the collapse of Copenhagen in 2010, to the US

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backing out of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2018, presidents and their appointed representatives
shirk or back out of their commitments made in these venues essentially rendering them ineffectual in
achieving their crucially important mandates in terms of preventing temperature rise and the
accelerated pace of climate change that we see today and no doubt into tomorrow.
Image 1.3 Demonstrators at Paris Climate Agreement March for International Climate Change Targets
Baby-boomer generation activists since the late 1960s, through protest and through institutionalized
non-governmental organizations carry on the tradition of government lobbying are increasingly
irrelevant and ineffectual for meeting the nuanced challenges our global society currently faces at local
and supra-local levels. Generation X activists have adapted these repertoires of collection in the 1990s
and 00’s and have adapted them into the growing network of international governance institutions of
development (e.g. IMF, World Bank) and trade (e.g. WTO, NAFTA, etc.) that proliferated in the era of
neoliberalism. Domestically, these actors operate under a logic of dependence upon the welfare of
nation, states, and municipalities rich coffers to redistribute resources to the population through elected
politicians supported by technocratic and administrative agencies. Here too, neoliberal austerity policies
have cut government revenues rendering them increasingly less effective in meeting social demands.
Instead, in many ways, it is the private market place that is more responsible in the form of the creation
of renewable energy have probably made more advances and effectiveness in creating the technologies
that will reduce emissions than has government agencies. While state subsidies and cap and trade
systems do incentivize emission reductions and new wind and solar start-ups, innovations in solar and
wind power are being led by the market. In terms of carbon capture, the market also plays a very
important role for nuanced ways of carbon capture. Public Universities and research centers have also
certainly played a role in research and development, and this too is under attack from the reach of
powerful corporations who coop political representatives and undermine our principal institutions that
promote the public good. Moreover, it is the state beholden by powerful lobbies that continue to
subsidizing corporate industrial agriculture or failing to innovate environmental protection mechanisms
which artificially distorts the market by reducing prices or firms not accounting for the environmental

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costs that are incurred from the unsustainable practices that is one of the main obstacles to ushering a
transition to regenerative agriculture that can regrow soil, improve water quality, and draw down a
significant amount of carbon in the process.
The past thirty years of international neoliberal policies have riddled the nations states and transformed
them into empty and ineffective shells in the realms of delivering water and sanitation, health care,
transportation, and other social and safety net services. It is now increasingly apparent they are also
inept in regulating corporations as utilities in order to providing them in an equitable manner.
The recent cases of the senate inquiry of Facebook’s culpability in allowing private firms to promote
misinformation and the campaign to enact an employment tax to fun affordable housing in Seattle,
demonstrate how inadequate representative institutions have become at holding corporations to
account for their systemic impacts at local and national scales. The senate hearing and testimony by
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg clearly illustrated clearly just how inept elected representatives are in
protecting the public interest. Whereas the public was essentially in a frenzy over alleged Russian
interferences, beholden representatives pandered to entice the company to invest resources in their
ailing state economies all well on display for a prime-time television audience.
Moreover, the failure of the recent Seattle initiative in which a highly mobilized activist left using its
allies in municipal council were unable to pass a resolution to increase worker taxes to pay for the
growing housing crisis. The housing crisis in Seattle, and in many cities across the country, are a systemic
output in which gentrification is caused by the asymmetric influx of professionals who work for
corporate headquarters like Amazon and the public expenditures to provide the facilities to support the
company in its production and shipping activities. These new affluent migrants and rising property
values push urban dwellers out of their neighborhoods as their rents become unaffordable. Whilst the
activist left coalition were initially successful in getting the city council and mayor to commit to an
employee tax to fund affordable housing initiatives, the council later reversed its decision to hold
Amazon accountable. It is clear in both cases and in both scales of government, representative
approaches are failing to serve the public’s interest vis a vis increasingly concentrated wealth.
Image 1.4 Allied City Councilor and protestors unsuccessfully demand increased corporate tax on Amazon in Seattle. If the most
mobilized urban left in the country can not stave off Amazon, what chance do you think any other City Council has?
Yet on a more fundamental level, concerned citizens and civic organizations spending months or years
to elect a candidate for short year representation enacts a heavy opportunity cost of distracting our

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attention on creating solutions and relying solely on candidates to solve the unprecedented problems
and challenges we encounter in our cities and across the planet. Moreover, myopic strategies of
lobbying corporations to make small improvements in their purchasing patterns or wage structures,
takes away our focus from building socially-oriented organizations, businesses, and co-production
synergies were agents assist to create the regenerative conditions we seek. Drilling down and
understanding the fundamental roots causes of many of our local and global problems, we can see that
nuanced hypermodern alternative approaches exist and can be revolutionarily successful on a higher
level that are more appropriate and synched to add value in an interconnected co-produced world.
Therefore, seminal hypermodern approaches for effective civic engagement must be created and
supported to meet contemporary challenges. Specifically, new forms of hyper connectivity, increasingly
broadly accessible information technologies and knowledge, and an emergence of starts up and social
entrepreneurship to address how small-scale actions by individuals, organizations, and businesses can
be connected to provide new forms of hypermodern civic engagement should be pursued. That is,
creating and exchanging value through small businesses, self-sustaining civic organizations, platform-
cooperatives, and other social enterprises organized under the principals of equity, inclusion, and
regenerative economics represent a significant opportunity to usher in a paradigm shift to a new world.
Democratizing the Future: From Consumerism to Co-Production and the Conceptualizing of Direct Civic
Engagement through Socially-Oriented Enterprises of Hypermodern Regenerative Economic Systems
A new era of Hyper-modernism and regenerative economics that weave direct democratic participation
into instruments, organizations, and institutions of co-production to provide a myriad of vital goods and
services essential is budding. Hypermodernism is a both a philosophical approach and sociological
organizational model that blends the benefits of post-modern critical decentralization models through
recombinant central coordination mechanisms. It moreover relies on modernistic approaches to science
such as the enlightenment ideas of truth and reasoning which can then be accelerated in collective
actions through of big data and objectivity in intellectual and practical inquiry and pursuits for achieving
certain goals and missions. Regenerative economics modes of production move us into a new physics,
beyond extractavism logic by internalizing ecological factors and promoting social inclusivity and benefit
in the creation, exchange, and installation of value among constellations of hyper-networked actors as
various types of business cycles are conducted.
Democratizing the future means that we already have the available technologies, tools, and capacities to
begin rebuilding our world anew to move past the wicked problems that have emerged in the past
several decades. Hyper-modern cooperation and co-production instrumented by small scale actors
through open platforms, generate big data and create and exchange value in regenerative systems to
change the physics from degenerative to regenerative systems. The sharing-economy within which
Platform Cooperativism serves as an organizational apparatus can support a broad range of projects
from renewable energy, new local and global education via such as MOOCs, glocal research platforms,
house-share, housing cooperatives, active transportation systems like bikeshare, relocalized food
systems, localized apparel industries, decentralized media sharing platforms which demonstrate many
fundamental products and services can already be built. The challenge is of our time is to co-create
them into existence through innovation, practice and community building; new forms of social-oriented
entrepreneurship which is a higher expression of civic engagement and productive model for all.

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Regenerative economics also helps in moving us from a consumerism to co-production economic model
that serves as a tool for empowerment, ecological restoration, and community health. The consumer
model itself is form of extractavism where purchaser merely participate in trying out and using goods
and services, versus adding value and co-constructing them. Regenerative economics implies moving
from a growth algorithm that solely focuses on extracting economic capital from all links in the supply
chain to a reconfigured and expanded bottom line that interfaces human capital, social capital and
environmental capital as growth measures to be achieved and from which participating actor
performance can be evaluated and sanctioned. This is essence grows the pie for everyone. Through
regenerative cooperative models newly created hypermodern firms can be agents for progressive
advances in social well-being, community health, and that of our environment.
The potential for creators, inventors, musicians, academics, scientists, farmers and cultivators, media
designers, scientists, artists, writers, athletes, architects, house builders, engineers, fashionistas, and
digital nomads are set afoot as many are more able to freely pursue their passions and form new
associations and community in an upward spiraling world of new forms of value creation and exchange.
Figure 1.2 Conceptualization of overlapping and cooperating sectors (e.g. energy, music, scientific publications, housing, food, apparel,
blogging, craft beer, transportation, etc.) creating and exchanging value in hypermodern regenerative economics
There are many real-world examples of regenerative economics and Hypermodern firms emerging that
are disrupting extractavist oriented firms. Open access scientific communities are displacing private
journals whose rising pricing structures are debilitating institutions of higher learning. PlusOne Open
Bioscience oriented journals have been path-setting in developing Open Access frameworks. Artificial
Intelligence scientists have also recently formed associations and are creating open peer-review models.
Open access allows scientists to interact, co-produce information, and make knowledge available to

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each other and the public at an increasing rate. And it is not a coincidence that these innovations come
from first from the scientific fields in which are data needs are intensive and aggregate as to sustain
ground breaking discoveries. They highlight the need for hypermodern systems of value creation and
exchange to build upon our knowledge base and pave new innovations. As public universities have
buckled under austerity policies, these new types of collective organizations and regenerative business
models are sustaining the scientific enterprise supporting it to increasingly flourish.
Image 1.5 A neural network resembles the hypermodern coordination in the co-production and access of scientific knowledge
And it is not just the advanced scientific and information fields, new socially oriented businesses and
cooperative of material type goods are resurging in hypermodern cities around the globe. Reconfiguring
supply chains in many progressive American metros provide new economic growth via local firms with
social chartered and environmentally sustainable missions. A super good book for those who planning
on moving to Portland, or anyone interested in the new economy of local producers, is Brew to Bikes:
Portland’s New Artisan Economy by Charles Heying 2010. It’s an edited collection of wide range of new
types of socially-oriented entrepreneurship that includes chapters on companies around the local music,
fashion and apparel, just short of covering the video gaming industry. While certainly cooperatives and
socially progressive businesses have always existed, what is different today is the increased access to
forms of hyper-coordination and accelerated feed-back loops via readily linked local and global patrons.
Image 1.6 Hampsten Cycles provide custom made bike shop manufacturer in Seattle, Washington

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Amidst this proliferation of social-oriented entrepreneurship, rests an emerging and fundamentally new
technology that is key to unlocking unlimited value creation through exchange: Digital Ledger
Technologies. DLTs offer unlimited potential for creating block chains allows for a set of standards that
allow traditionally disconnected institutions and small-scale actors to collaborate in new contexts within
and across sectors in new forms of hyper-coordinated regenerative economic actions with incredible
potential for creating and exchanging new wealth and other emergent effects. Similar as early email and
text-messaging systems were unable to speak to each other across segmented companies, establishing
standardized communication protocols allowed AOL email subscribers to interact with yahoo email
account holders and text messages to be sent from Verizon to Sprint. This platform thus opened-up a
new era of electronic scripted messaging displacing the prominence and centrality of voice
communication technologies provided by the descendants of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. In all
these cases, the potential to change our society through novel communication devices was not
immediately clear. As DLTs become more pervasive and adopted by businesses, research institutions,
public agencies, civic organizations, and citizens alike, new forms of value creation and exchange will
flourish and incentive collective action across a broad band of agents. These accelerated exchanges will
help accomplish grander tasks via these new types of hyper-coordinated social organization.
We must stay focused and realize that wealth which roots from and builds upon a thriving ecological
base can always be created, shared, and recreated given certain regenerative parameters to the modes
of production which we can optimize to achieve greater expenditure and participation effects. These
new models of civic engagement form by directly transforming our world and co-producing ecologically
sustainable goods and services that we can share with each other, build upon, and meet functional
needs as well as creative, intellectual, and recreational needs. These regenerative modes of production
of goods and services must be rebuilt through new organizational, direct democratic forms of
engagement through our individual and collective regenerative economic institutions. That is
businesses, platform-cooperatives, and open platforms that connect to produce, exchange, deliver, or
recycle goods and services – buttressed by research and technocratic platforms that provide support
scaffolding- under regenerative ecological, socially and culturally inclusive, and empowerment logics
form the conduits through which collective practices are operationalized and sustained. Our
participation in our re-networked commons hence functions more so as a natural extension of our daily
activities for which we are drawn into and not pushed towards. The professions for we have a calling for,
activities that are intrinsic to who we are as individuals, the interest-based communities we seek and
through which we thrive from components of a regenerative economic engine that builds social,
economic, and environmental capital.
Through regenerative economic modes of cooperative production, where we choose to live, how we
transport ourselves to get around, where we get our food and we drink, what we choose to do career
wise, how we produce and get our music, what we do for entertainment and recreation, and how we
interact with each other to co-produce and access our creations, can enrich our environment, our social
networks and generate and distribute wealth and health for ourselves and the community. These
systems flourish once they reach a critical mass. It takes the early adopter types of persons, groups, and
businesses to foment this new regenerative economy and to sing and shape it into fashion. It takes
courage to avoid the traps of using ageing governance infrastructure to solve new complex problems. It
takes courage and commitment to ignore the old ways and sculpt and to build the new. Media theorists
and neuroscientists alike have an expression that in complex systems, “more is different”. This means
emergent properties appear as network connections increase, leading to sums that are greater than
their individual parts; this is the essence of what regenerative mode of co-production and living means.

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The next section will provide a brief overview and quick analysis of the fundamentally new types of
hyper-localization of food systems in cities and hypermodern coordination that can be created in
transforming the agricultural sector to not only provide new engines for regenerative economic growth,
but also to provide opportunities for individuals, firms and organizations, communities, and cities alike
to become hyper-local conduits for enhanced access to nutrition and public health, restoring ecologies,
and providing economic value to participants, all while solving the wicked problem of climate change in
a manner that looks like the past as much as it does the future.
The Hyper-Local City and Regenerative BioRegional Foodsheds: Applying a Hypermodern Coordination
and Regenerative Economic Lens to BioRegional Food Systems Planning
The problems of global water stress, dwindling top soil, dead zones in our oceans, and climate change
are still proliferating as big industrial linked corporations conservatively continue to use century old
technologies of nitrogen-based fertilizers and petroleum to convert forest land to intensive agriculture
and ship those agricultural commodities all around the globe. These inefficient distribution methods are
supported by an artificially reduced costs in petroleum that do not account for their carbon outputs, the
wear and tear that enact on transportation facilities, nor the increased congestion they cause in our
highways and cities. While 80% of insects around the planet have disappeared in the last 40 years along
the same time horizon as the 1970’s green revolution and wide spread adoption of petro-chemical
pesticides across the globe. It is clear we need a new path immediately if we are serious about saving
our planet and reversing the onset of the Sixth Great Mass Extinction Event. It is estimated that by
switching to regenerative agriculture agricultural fields around the planet has the potential to draw
down 100% of annual carbon emissions and sequester more than enough carbon to bring us back into to
a safe 300ppm. Regenerative agriculture also provides us with miraculous potentials to restore pristine
water conditions and bring back the biodiversity and insect life on our planet that have been hit the
hardest by this outdated industrial onslaught. This mandate is echoed by professionals in the United
Nations that have repeatedly stressed that only “small scale regenerative-organic agriculture” must be
instituted worldwide if we want to bring our planet and our species from the brink of a lifeless abyss and
provide a more secure future for all. Hyper-local Regenerative Food Systems seeks to address these
challenges by fundamentally reorganizing our agricultural production system spatially and through
coordinated actions of small-scale actors that form the supply chain actors connected to the food sector.
Bioregional Regenerative Food Systems Planning reorganizes the food sector spatially by relocalizing
agricultural production and basing it around cities and population centers. It operates under the
principal of “as local as possible”. This means that while cities strive to form connections with proximate
producers to provide the nutritional needs and dietary choices of its inhabitants, it still allows for trade
of agricultural products in away places to provide the produce we have become accustomed to like
avocados, bananas, and papaya. Yet, these near and away producers operate under a regenerative
ecological mode of production (i.e. they do not produce a supply that is greater than sustainable
ecological inputs in their producer region). This field is being pioneered by Urban & Regional Planners.
Urban Planners have the proper perspective of their city’s inhabitants taste preferences as well as they
have the inherent tool sets to address simultaneously the supply and demand side of the equation.
Inventorying available agricultural land use parcels to meet the nutritional demand of growing
populations, environmental planning methods that can connect sustainable agricultural food production
with the positive and negative environmental externalities, the transportation and logistics skill sets to
restructure the various exchanges of material that flow in various phases of the business cycle, the
economic development approaches which can assess the endogenous economic development growth

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potential and impacts, community development needs for job training and access, all which occur in a
transitioning from an import based model to a hyper-locally based foodshed model. They can analyze
this while evaluating how well local demand and cultural taste preferences of the inhabitants
correspond with the interest of individual, community, and public health.
Figure 1.3. Delineated Pedestrian Walksheds can be conceptualized as Hyper Local Regenerative Foodsheds similarly as they can be modeled
and optimized by considered natural capital conditions and food miles around their bioregional urban nucleus.
At the heart of an emerging new model of agriculture, is the transition from large scale international
food system of centralized production of grains, fruits and vegetables, and other proteins that are
highly concentrated in one particular ecological setting and intended to meet the aggregate
homogenized demand of a “global population” through an increasing set of efficiency indicators that
externalize water consumption and degradation to the surrounding environment whether it be with
depleting of aquifers, the erosion of top soil, or the detriment of water quality and local water-based
economies downstream. Not only has this mode of centralized production increasing caused
desertification over the past 10,000 years in existence, as the earth’s population reaches unprecedented
levels, the negative ecological impacts of this model are being brought to light. Current agricultural
methods will not sustain our species nor life on our plant. Moreover, as centralized production models
are inherently more vulnerable to risk of food shocks caused by erratic conditions, we are one storm
away from seeing the detrimental impacts this non-resilient model can unless upon our population by
causing mass starvations the likes of which we have never seen. They are henceforth not a model for the
redundancy that we need to build into the system to guarantee resilience in a less predictable climate.
One of the key tools that can help facilitate this transition is the adoption of traditional indigenous
agricultural techniques and philosophies that “design with nature”. This has also been adopted and
adapted by western permaculture approaches. These approaches attempt to build into the topography

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of a land and optimize water harvesting structures to slow, sink, and diffuse rain water into the soil as to
provide extended growing seasons and less need for irrigation.
Hyper-local cities and regions that are adopting Bioregional Regenerative Food Systems are adapting
and operationalizing these systems, in part, through distributed and highly connected agents that
cooperate to coordinate their activities in the various phases of the food sectors operational cycles (i.e.
producing, processing, distributing, retailing, and recycling). This hypermodern coordination creates new
synergies which result in the increase of social capital as well as human capital, as the feedback loops
grow tighter and value is created and exchanged.
Figure 1.4: Recombinant Decentralization includes distributed nodes along with hubs and centralizing care takers (put in a slide of regenerative
foodshed economic supply chain
Moreover, these individual actors can harness this value and collectively benefit by achieving economies
of scale that cannot be achieved by working in isolation. Small farmers are now collaborating with seed
breeders and biologists to co-produce scientifically sophisticated strains of plant varieties that are
adapted to the natural capital conditions of their bioregional setting. Farmers in collective fashion are
purchasing from seed breeders inject the critical economic capital to fund the work of these biologists.
Once the crops are grown, cooperative food hubs like The Redd on Salmon in Portland, Oregon, for
example, allows small scale farmers to pool their resources to make capital investments in processing
and labeling equipment that makes it financially feasible for them to produce their products and bring
them to primary and secondary market actors. Food hubs are also supported by new urban logistics
operators that help distribute this food to small scale purchasers such as the plethora of new locally
owned restaurants, breweries, and bakeries and farmers markets and cooperative grocery stores alike.

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These market actors, like restaurants and breweries, are also connected directly to the producers in
many ways, often pre-ordering and issuing supplier contracts that is coordinated through quasi social-
network open platforms online. Moreover, these can be facilitated by Digital Ledger Technologies.
Image 1.7 Redd on Salmon Street cooperative and B-Line Logistics company in Portland, Oregon
Key to unlocking this new highly coordinated action among small scale actors is block chain technology.
This technology revolutionizes just how we define value (e.g. financial capital, environmental capital,
etc.) and provides nuanced mechanisms in how can be created and exchanged within and across the
BioRegional Regenerative Food Sector. Moreover, this redefinition and accounting of standardized in a
plethora of ways through blockchain can foster sharing and coordination among actors not typically
directly linked into the food sector. These increased synergies reinforce positive externalities and
feedback loops among the newly connected actors. For example, collaboration among urban planning
agencies and urban and rural farmers for storm water management and creating a system of exchanges
to reward farmers for sinking storm water runoff. Moreover, homeowners and property owners can also
get into the game, perhaps eclipsing planning agencies in the process. That is, highly sophisticated
modeling than can map highly specific topographical contexts in different bioregions can pin-point the
sources of storm-water, the land parcels downstream, and create a new direct purchasing contract for
those homeowners and businessowners to incentive and reward farmers for investing in rainwater
harvesting facilities. This newly created capital source not only deals with the storm water problem but
lowers the input costs of farmers allowing them to produce more crops and increase their revenue.
Moreover, carbon capture systems that place value and rewards contracts for farmers who practice
regenerative agricultural methods that have a latent benefit of carbon sequestration. As farmers use
compost, cover crops, and other natural biofertilizers they use these increase yields as biomolecular
machinery in which the plants breathe in carbon and store deep into their roots which push down into

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the soil. No-till practices thus ensure those roots, or micro-pockets of carbon stay in the soil in their solid
form. As states and markets develop cap and trade carbon markets, block chain technology is key to
synchronizing local and supra-local agents involved in producing or capturing carbon. The Healthy Soils
Initiative in California is an interesting experiment occurring now in carbon sequestration it remains to
be seen if they will adapt a block chain contracting systems to accelerate feed-back loops and more
tightly connect these relative network actors. New block chain organizations like Regen and Nori Carbon
Market Place have leaped out to develop these new currencies yet certainly many new actors will
emerge to attempt to provide the necessary innovation and tools that can be adapted across a myriad
of hyper-local contexts. While the possibilities seem infinite, certainly new patterns and common
techniques will emerge across different sites.
It is important to point out one flaw in the organizational logic of new organizations like Regen and Nori
Carbon Market Place. That is, these new currency providers often attempt to posit themselves in the
network as the centralized oversee and monitor of the carbon sequestration or whatever positive
externality they hope to achieve. This is a classic network strategy, defined by Robert Burt in Structural
Holes, of putting this organization as the middle wo/man or broker between agents and benefactors
requires an increasingly exponential overhead in administering this top heavy bureaucratic model that
slows innovation and stifles truly novel approaches that can be invented in different localities and
shared across localities while adapted to the needs of a hyper-local context.
Figure 1.5 Social Network Analysis demonstrating the role of broker as monitoring agent fragmenting producing and beneficiary agents. This is a
way to extract value with providing unnecessary value that can otherwise be gleaned from the data trails in highly distributed networks.
Another fundamentally distinct alternative approach, an approach that would be developed by those
who are distributed network oriented in their thinking is to conceptualize how monitoring and
verification systems can be internalized into the network of actors. As these network agents participate
(e.g. purchase, sell, and utilize certain goods and services) they leave data trails which can be created
into an accounting system. For example, by integrating businesses linked to the food sector as DLT
agents a registered seed company who sells cover crop seeds to a local farmer can thus be an indirect
verified that a farmer has converted to organic. This can be dually verified by the types of products this
farmer later sells to restaurants and other market actors. A farmer could be directly compensated for
carbon sequestration quantities implied by the amount of cover crop seeds one has purchased as long
as their later organic sales are recorded downstream in a form of cross-checked verification. This latter

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way suggests a more internally connected system of oversight where the checks and balances are
performed through accounting for the items purchased, the dates of when they were purchased, who
the purchaser was, the location of the purchaser and same details of the selling companies. These new
mechanisms of incentives and cross-checked accounting and verification of implementation have the
potential to disrupt and displace centralized monitors and internalize this process in distributed form.
Another frontier of digital ledger technologies is in developing total cost and directly distributed pricing
systems. Total Cost Pricing of food miles are incurred by farmers or distributors who decide to target
away markets. The wear and tear on roads, the increased congestions they cause, and the carbon
emissions they create can all be internalized into the pricing structure which creates a structural
incentive to produce for local markets. Yet, populations who may depend on these goods must not be
penalized in higher costs if there are no local substitutes.
Image 1.7 The reticulate nature of a dynamic social network configuration viewed as the revolutions of a kaleidoscope.
Digital Ledger Technologies may also provide the capacity of meeting the challenge of replicating and
internalizing these new processes within various agents and institutions in bioregions across the planet.
DLTs provide the tools to create and merge a common language of indicators and approaches to
articulate planning and cooperative strategies to effectively scaffold that, in part, supports budding
regenerative farming practices. It is crucial that in these turbulent times of ecological collapse that one
fundamental area of research and application for newly forming rigorous social sciences being built to
manage, mitigate, and otherwise avoid ecological collapse be directed towards the role of DLTs.

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Looking to the Horizon: Cultural Support Scaffolding and Promoting Replicability and Adaptation of
Hyper-local Bioregional Food Systems and Regenerative Economic Across the Planet
Newly forming Massively Open Online Communities of higher education based on permaculture design
and international Schools of Cultural Evolution are attempting to counter the ecological, social and
political fallout that will occur from the Sixth Great Mass Extinction Event. These institutions provide us
with unprecedented opportunities to train an army of academics and practitioners to not only
understand and document the degenerative processes at the root of this problem, but to develop the
counter-strategies and tools to reverse the physics to a regenerative mode of economics. These
organizations are perhaps one of the greatest assets that need to be sculpted and supported to meet
this formidable challenge to our species.
The structure and trajectories of this support scaffolding is emerging by mirroring the inherent content
and form of the hypermodern bioregional agents as they rise-up to and cooperate to co-produce and
exchange value under a regenerative economic logic. By defining and tweaking the indicators and value
that incentivize appropriate social-economic behavior among recombined distributive network agents it
is possible to meet this challenge within an adequate time-horizon. As new agents step up and out of
the shadows and target key areas with precision accuracy, it cannot be forgotten the fundamental
importance that cultural adaptation and evolution that we, as social-entrepreneurs, artists, scientists,
innovators, theorists, and practitioners, must undergo to achieve this dazzling feat. Rethinking how we
conceive civic engagement through hyper-modernism thought and operationalizing new forms of hyper-
cooperative collection action across bioregions within regenerative economic systems is critical to heal
the wounds post-dated degenerative economic and political system. Achieving these conditions are
paramount to individual, community, and planetary health as we move forward and birth an inter-
planetary species worthy of being the caretakers of our planet and seafarers under and amidst the stars.