Let’s think about translating the book into action. What it might take is what I call “Living the Book,” a year-long program, where we go through a chapter or two each month and decide what action we can take on it, if it implies an action (so maybe we have to re-examine the book and pull out 12 key themes that we could cover, design a coherent program around that (e.g., have a speaker on water issues, kind of like an ERA town hall, only with specific actions each of us can do), bearing in mind that having an audacious goal (e.g., Building a Better Future Today) is more inspiring than individual tasks or projects. Maybe we could have different members of the group report on the various themes and keep track of key events, e.g., have a Google alert set up that reflects that theme), and we can coordinate via a Google Group that members can join easily to participate in the program. Please lay out a program in detailed but summary form, so it does not sound overwhelming but sounds inviting and inspiring. It does not have to follow the book’s format. but could be arranged around cross-cutting themes such as children’s education, the health of the bioregion, transforming the landscape, etc. Be creative, using everything that is currently being done in the field of global transformation and human survival.

This can become much more than a book club. The crucial design choice is to make Living the Book a year-long action-learning community: the book supplies the worldview, invited practitioners bring current experience, and participants gradually improve the places where they live.

Living the Book: Building a Better Future Today

A year of learning, belonging, and regenerative action inspired by Possible Planet

The audacious goal

Every place represented in the program should become more habitable because we came together.

By the end of the year, participants will have:

Created or strengthened locally rooted regenerative projects.
Built relationships across communities and fields of practice.
Influenced at least some institutional decisions—not merely changed personal habits.
Documented what worked so others can adapt it.
Formed an ongoing network that connects local intelligence into planetary intelligence.

This is ambitious without requiring everyone to do everything. Each person or local circle chooses one “Living Project”—a school, stream, neighborhood, landscape, organization, business, policy campaign, food initiative, or community network—and develops it throughout the year.

The underlying structure

The program moves through four arcs:

Seeing and belonging: Understand the predicament, imagine the future, and rediscover place.
Restoring living systems: Work with water, soil, food, climate, and biodiversity.
Redesigning human systems: Transform economy, technology, infrastructure, and livelihoods.
Building collective capacity: Deepen justice, resilience, democracy, culture, and planetary intelligence.

Three questions run through every month:

What does this mean for children and future generations?
What does it mean in this particular bioregion?
What can individuals, communities, and institutions do differently?

This reflects where the larger field is moving. UNESCO now emphasizes whole-community, intergenerational climate learning; the UN restoration movement calls for everyone to participate in reversing ecosystem degradation; and IPBES treats transformation as change across individual and collective levels, from local to global. UNESCO Greening Communities, UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, IPBES Transformative Change Assessment.

The twelve-month journey

Month	Theme and book connections	Speaker and action
1. Choosing a Possible Planet	Chapters 1–3 and selections from 7–8. Face overshoot, collapse, and regeneration without becoming trapped in despair.	Speaker: Earth-systems thinker or regenerative movement storyteller. Action: Create a “postcard from a habitable future,” identify the place each participant cares about, and choose a Living Project.
2. Learning to Inhabit a Place	Chapters 9 and 15. Move from living at an address to belonging within a watershed, foodshed, culture, and community of life.	Speaker: Joe Brewer, Penny Heiple, a bioregional practitioner, or someone from Barichara Regenerativa. Action: Make a simple bioregional portrait showing water, land, food, people, Indigenous history, institutions, assets, and threats.
3. Children and the Future	Selections from Chapters 6, 18–20. Ask what education would look like if its purpose were to prepare children to inherit and regenerate the Earth.	Speaker: Youth leader, teacher, nature educator, or intergenerational-learning practitioner. Action: Hold a youth listening circle or partner with a school, library, garden, or after-school program on one locally meaningful learning experience. UNESCO’s current guidance explicitly links schools, learners, and real community resilience projects. UNESCO Green School Standard.
4. Water Organizes Life	Selections from Chapters 4, 11, 14, and 15. Treat the watershed—not property lines—as a primary unit of understanding.	Speaker: Watershed steward, local riverkeeper, farmer, or Water Stories practitioner. Action: Conduct a water walk or neighborhood water audit; then undertake one appropriate intervention—stream monitoring, rain capture, infiltration, wetland protection, or watershed advocacy. Water Stories offers a useful learning-action model.
5. Transforming the Landscape	Chapters 11 and 14. Bring together ecorestoration, regenerative agriculture, biodiversity, soil, and food.	Speaker: Jon Schull, an ERA practitioner, land trust, regenerative farmer, or restoration ecologist. Action: Adopt a small site or join an existing project; record a baseline and improve habitat, soil, native vegetation, pollinator support, or food production. ERA’s town-hall and network model is a natural partner. EcoRestoration Alliance.
6. Climate: Emergency Action and Long Repair	Chapters 4–6. Combine rapid emissions reduction with restoration of forests, soils, wetlands, water cycles, and other living systems.	Speaker: Climate-solutions researcher, restoration scientist, or regenerative-finance practitioner. Action: Use the Drawdown Explorer to select one locally relevant, high-leverage intervention and pair it with an institutional or policy request. The current Explorer includes role-specific guidance rather than treating climate action as a list of household sacrifices. Drawdown Explorer.
7. An Economy in Service to Life	Chapters 5 and 10. Explore regenerative finance, community wealth, circularity, reciprocity, and alternatives to GDP.	Speaker: Doughnut Economics practitioner, community lender, cooperative developer, or regenerative entrepreneur. Action: Map where local money leaves the community and identify one spending, procurement, ownership, or investment stream that could be redirected. Doughnut Economics offers open tools for linking social needs to ecological limits. DEAL tools.
8. Designing as Nature Designs	Chapters 12 and 15. Bring biomimicry, permaculture, circular design, and living-systems thinking together.	Speaker: Biomimicry educator, designer, architect, engineer, or youth design team. Action: Hold a small design charrette around a real local problem—heat, stormwater, waste, mobility, school grounds, or habitat—and prototype a nature-inspired response. The Biomimicry Institute’s youth challenges show how local problems can become creative design invitations. Biomimicry Youth Design Challenge.
9. Homes, Energy, Work, and Local Self-Reliance	Chapter 16, Chapter 21, and selections from Part II. Connect right livelihood with buildings, clean energy, repair, local production, and resilience.	Speaker: Community-energy organizer, green builder, repair cooperative, C-PACE practitioner, or regenerative business owner. Action: Advance one shared initiative: a home-energy workshop, repair café, community-solar effort, resilient building, skills exchange, or regenerative livelihood network.
10. Indigenous Stewardship, Justice, and the Commons	Chapters 13 and 19. Examine relationship, sovereignty, stewardship, equity, and who participates in decisions.	Speaker: A compensated Indigenous leader or practitioner with a genuine relationship to the participating place. Action: Move beyond a ceremonial land acknowledgment: learn whose homelands participants inhabit, establish a relationship, and support an Indigenous-led priority. The global biodiversity framework now gives explicit importance to Indigenous participation, knowledge, and rights. Convention on Biological Diversity, Target 22.
11. Resilient Communities and Living Democracy	Chapters 2, 7–8, and 19. Prepare for disruption while strengthening trust, mutual aid, and collective decision-making.	Speaker: Transition practitioner, mutual-aid organizer, public-health leader, emergency planner, or citizens’ assembly facilitator. Action: Create a neighborhood resilience map and conduct a small public deliberation on a real issue facing the Living Project. OECD research supports deliberative processes in which ordinary people learn together and work through complexity. OECD citizen participation guidelines.
12. Planetary Intelligence and the Great Turning	Chapters 18–21, the Postscript, and the Earth-and-AI declaration. Integrate ecological, cultural, spiritual, technological, and civic intelligence.	Speaker: The participants themselves, joined by Possible Planet Lab or Institute contributors. Action: Hold a public “Possible Planet Assembly,” present the Living Projects, publish a brief field report, celebrate what changed, and decide what the network will carry forward.

The diagnosis remains serious: the 2025 Planetary Health Check found seven of nine planetary boundaries breached. But that is a reason to build capacity and agency, not to spend the year repeating the diagnosis. Stockholm Resilience Centre.

A consistent monthly rhythm

Each month could require only two or three hours from an ordinary participant:

Beforehand: 15–30 pages from the book, plus one short current resource or video.
Town hall: A 90-minute online gathering.
During the month: One chosen action, individually or with others.
Check-in: A three-question report: What did we notice? What did we try? What changed?

A good town-hall format would be:

10 minutes: participant story and current “signals of change”
25 minutes: invited practitioner
20 minutes: moderated conversation
20 minutes: local or thematic breakout groups
10 minutes: action choices and requests for help
5 minutes: closing reflection

Every speaker should be asked to end with three things: something a person can do, something a community can organize, and something an institution must change.

Actions without overwhelm

Each month offers three levels of action:

Personal practice: Learn, observe, change a habit, or build a skill.
Place action: Do something tangible with neighbors or an organization.
Systems action: Influence a school, municipality, business, funder, or public policy.

Participants choose one—not all three. They can also participate at different levels:

Listener: Attend and remain connected.
Participant: Contribute to a Living Project.
Steward: Help organize a theme, event, or local circle.

No one “falls behind.” People can enter at any point in the year.

The Google Group as a quiet commons

The Google Group should be the program’s conversational center, but not its filing cabinet. A shared folder and very simple tracking sheet can preserve resources and outcomes.

Suggested email subject conventions:

[MONTH] Monthly gathering and reading
[ACTION] Opportunity or request for help
[FIELD NOTE] What someone tried and learned
[SIGNALS] Important developments
[LOCAL] Rochester, Genesee–Finger Lakes, or another place circle

For current-events monitoring, two “theme stewards” could follow each subject throughout the year using carefully chosen Google Alerts, newsletters, and organizational sources. Rather than forwarding everything, they would prepare a monthly Five Signals digest:

One important scientific development
One promising project
One policy or institutional opening
One warning or setback
One action opportunity

This turns news monitoring into collective intelligence rather than information overload.

What to measure

The program should not reduce regeneration to numbers, but it should leave evidence. Each Living Project reports:

One number: people engaged, area restored, funds redirected, students reached, or institutional commitments gained.
One story: what changed for a person, relationship, or place.
One lesson: what others could reproduce.
One next step.

The year-end product could be a concise, illustrated Living the Book Field Report—part annual report, part collection of stories, and part invitation to the second year.

The larger promise is simple: Possible Planet would cease to be only a description of pathways. It would become a distributed practice—a way for people in many places to learn from one another while making the future more possible where they actually live.

I’d like to incorporate two further ideas into this. The first is that we need to start at home. In our own case this has meant the creation of “Elwell Eden,” the transformation of our quarter-acre lot from chemlawn to food forest, with all kinds of co-benefits. The second is that an ultimate goal is the creation of a Bioregional Assembly, followed by a permanent Bioregional Council, that can advise local and county governments on Bioregional matters.

These two ideas supply the missing vertical architecture. Living the Book would begin with the regeneration of actual homes and landscapes, then connect those efforts until participants are capable of speaking—and deliberating—at the scale of the bioregion.

A revised guiding phrase might be:

Begin at home. Learn from the land. Organize by bioregion. Build a better future today.

flowchart TD
    A["Homes and demonstration sites"] --> B["Neighborhood learning networks"]
    B --> C["Watershed and place circles"]
    C --> D["Bioregional Assembly"]
    D --> E["Permanent Bioregional Council"]
    E --> F["Advice to local and county governments"]
    F -. "Response and partnership" .-> E

Elwell Eden as the starting story

Elwell Eden gives the program something indispensable: a visible example of regeneration already underway.

The transformation of your quarter-acre lot from chemical lawn into a food forest demonstrates that regeneration is not merely a global policy objective. It can begin outside the front door. Its co-benefits include:

Food, herbs, flowers, and other useful plants.
Soil restoration and elimination of routine chemical treatments.
Pollinator, bird, and other wildlife habitat.
Greater water infiltration and less runoff.
Shade, cooling, beauty, and contact with nature.
Household resilience and practical learning.
Opportunities for children, neighbors, and visitors to participate.
A changed relationship with the place one inhabits.

Elwell Eden should not be presented as a perfect model everyone must reproduce. It is a living experiment, including its maintenance demands, mistakes, adaptations, and surprises. That honesty will make it more persuasive.

Nor does “start at home” require owning a quarter-acre. Home-scale action might mean a balcony, apartment building, rented yard, community garden, school, faith community, street, or neighborhood commons. The principle is:

Start with the place you can know, care for, and influence directly.

Each participant or household could create a simple Home-to-Habitat Plan. It would ask:

What is here now?
What flows through this place—water, energy, food, waste, wildlife, money, and people?
What is already healthy?
What could become more life-supporting?
What is one change we can make this year?
Who else could participate?

Participants who cannot undertake a physical landscape project could focus on food, energy, waste, mutual aid, children’s learning, local purchasing, or institutional change.

Two continuing tracks

Rather than adding Elwell Eden and the Bioregional Assembly as two more monthly topics, I would make them continuing tracks running through all twelve months.

1. The Living Places Track

Participants transform or support a home, school, neighborhood, stream, garden, business, or other tangible place.

Elwell Eden becomes the founding demonstration site. Over the year, other sites become part of a distributed network of “living landscapes.” These could be shown on the GFLBioregion.org map, with a photograph, brief description, ecological features, lessons learned, and opportunities to visit or volunteer.

2. The Bioregional Commons Track

Participants gradually build the knowledge, relationships, and civic legitimacy required to convene a Genesee–Finger Lakes Bioregional Assembly.

The Assembly would not merely discuss regeneration. It would deliberate on evidence, identify shared priorities, and create the mandate and initial charter for a permanent Bioregional Council.

The two tracks continually inform one another. Home and neighborhood projects reveal what is possible and what obstacles people encounter. The Assembly converts those experiences into regional recommendations, partnerships, and policy proposals.

The revised year-long progression

Months 1–3: Begin at home and rediscover place

Elwell Eden opens the program as a story of reinhabitation. Participants create Home-to-Habitat Plans, choose their Living Projects, and begin mapping their relationships to land, water, food, energy, neighbors, and future generations.

The bioregional track introduces the Genesee–Finger Lakes Living Bioregion Model and asks: What defines our region ecologically, socially, economically, and culturally?

The children-and-future-generations month remains important. Children might help inventory birds and pollinators, draw maps, imagine future neighborhoods, plant gardens, or interview elders about how the landscape has changed.

First-quarter outcome: A network of participating homes and projects, each with a baseline, aspiration, and first action.

Months 4–6: Connect homes into living landscapes

The water, landscape, food, biodiversity, and climate months become opportunities for collective fieldwork. Participants visit demonstration sites, undertake water walks, join restoration projects, exchange plants and skills, and identify landscape connections that cross property lines.

Elwell Eden could host a seasonal open house or “Living Landscape Day.” Other participants could hold smaller neighborhood tours.

The emerging network would begin documenting common barriers—lawn ordinances, lack of knowledge, costs, invasive plants, stormwater rules, access to land, nursery availability, or neighborhood expectations. These become potential subjects for bioregional policy work.

Second-quarter outcome: Several visible projects, a preliminary living-landscapes map, and a list of barriers and opportunities requiring broader coordination.

Months 7–9: Move from projects to systems

The economy, biomimicry, energy, buildings, and right-livelihood months ask what systems must change so that regenerative choices become easier and more affordable.

Participants might investigate:

Municipal landscaping and pesticide policies.
Native-plant and food-forest programs.
Stormwater incentives and watershed restoration.
Community composting and food-waste recovery.
Green infrastructure and building improvements.
Local procurement and regenerative enterprises.
Training and employment in ecological landscaping, energy, food, and restoration.
Financing mechanisms for household and community resilience.

During these months, the program would hold listening sessions with farmers, youth, educators, Indigenous representatives, environmental-justice communities, conservation groups, businesses, municipalities, universities, planners, and neighborhood organizations.

Third-quarter outcome: A draft State of the Bioregion briefing and three to five issues suitable for deliberation by the Assembly.

Months 10–12: Convene the bioregion

The final quarter concentrates on representation, resilience, governance, and planetary intelligence.

Month 10 develops the Assembly’s ethical and representational foundations. Indigenous Nations should be approached as sovereign peoples and potential partners—not treated simply as another stakeholder category. Deliberate outreach would also be needed to include rural communities, environmental-justice neighborhoods, youth, farmers, workers, municipalities, and people not already part of the ecological movement.

Month 11 can conduct a practice deliberation, testing the materials and facilitation.

Month 12 becomes the inaugural Genesee–Finger Lakes Bioregional Assembly. It would hear the year’s stories, review regional evidence, deliberate on selected priorities, and propose the structure of the permanent Council.

Year-end outcome: A public Bioregional Compact, an initial set of recommendations, and a mandate to establish the Council.

The Bioregional Assembly

The first Assembly should be broad, public, and carefully facilitated. It might include open participation alongside deliberately recruited or randomly selected resident participants to avoid becoming a meeting solely of established environmental advocates.

Its purposes would be to:

Share a comprehensible picture of bioregional conditions.
Hear from communities and practitioners.
Identify common concerns across municipal and county boundaries.
Deliberate on several actionable proposals.
Adopt a short Bioregional Compact.
Establish the mission, representation, and accountability of the permanent Council.

It should initially be understood as a civic advisory assembly, not a competing layer of government. Its influence will depend on inclusion, credible evidence, transparent deliberation, and constructive relationships with existing institutions.

The permanent Bioregional Council

The Council could consist of approximately 18–24 members with staggered terms, balancing:

Watersheds and geographic subregions.
Urban, suburban, and rural communities.
Youth and future-generations representation.
Environmental-justice communities.
Indigenous participation developed through proper relationships.
Agriculture, restoration, health, education, economy, and infrastructure.
Municipal and county liaisons.
Residents selected through an open or civic-lottery process.

Its recurring work could include:

Publishing an annual State of the Genesee–Finger Lakes Bioregion.
Maintaining the Living Bioregion Model and public indicators.
Advising local and county governments.
Preparing concise policy and investment recommendations.
Connecting projects across jurisdictional boundaries.
Convening an annual or biennial Assembly.
Tracking whether governments respond to its recommendations.
Identifying opportunities for collaborative funding and implementation.

To have real influence, the Council should seek formal arrangements under which municipalities and counties agree to receive its annual report, place recommendations on relevant agendas, and provide written responses. That is more consequential than simply issuing reports and hoping someone reads them.

The Council should also complement the Genesee/Finger Lakes Regional Planning Council and other existing bodies, not duplicate them. Its distinctive contribution would be to organize knowledge and public deliberation around ecological boundaries, long-term habitability, lived community experience, and the interests of future generations.

A strengthened ultimate goal

The program’s goal can now be stated more concretely:

Living the Book will help people regenerate the places where they live, connect those places into a learning bioregion, and create a permanent civic voice for the health and future of the Genesee–Finger Lakes region.

Elwell Eden is the seed. The participating homes and projects become the mycelial network. The Assembly allows the bioregion to deliberate. The Council gives that emerging intelligence continuity and a public voice.

Living the Book