“If you want to make small changes, change the way you do things. If you want to make major changes, change the way you see things.” - Don Cambell via Gabe Brown

I am a retired architect and an avid cyclist, I use a bicycle in California as my primary transportation, and have for years felt it very very necessary to transform our approach to climate from a carbon-based perspective. Watching Walter Jehne has led me to a more nuanced understanding that, in a nutshell, it is our land use practices that have led to what we are now calling climate change. In around 2010, I stumbled upon Gabe Brown and his YouTube talks about regenerative agriculture. Brown refers to urban folk as cousins and I, being a cousin myself, felt at a loss as to how to introduce a regenerative mindset into the non-agricultural landscape. Currently, I am enrolled in a class with the Regenesis Institute. This mind-expanding architectural design-based learning journey is a significant factor shaping my evolving worldview. Regenerative cognizance is a broader holistic and inclusive embrace of negentropic design. Negentropy (negative entropy) is the inverse or opposite of entropy. Entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, is the Newtonian Scientific basis of our mechanical and economic constructions. Systems–tools–become less effective with use and seem to comply with the idea of tending toward disorder; scarcity is a fundamental driver of political economy conversations. 

Negentropy, on the other hand, is a term coined by Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger, which refers to the measure of order or organization in a system. It is sometimes referred to as "negative entropy" because it implies a decrease in entropy. Negentropy can be seen as the opposite or negation of entropy, that nature tends to complexity. A political economy based on negentropic cognition leads to abundance. 

The commonly accepted view of the causes of climate change, burning fossil fuels, is a massive red herring. We have been chasing this for nearly 50 years. It is baked into all of our fundamental conversations and is what we hear in the popular press. There is nothing we can do about atmospheric carbon. As Mr. Jehne so convincingly explains that Earth’s atmospheric carbon is at 400 parts per million and there is an enormous carbon battery in the oceans that will maintain that 400 parts per million carbon reserves in our atmosphere for the next thousand years. There is no answer in the carbon fuel burning reduction path and this is leading us to feelings of hopelessness and despair. When we re-examine our positions and see that planting plants, embracing nature, learning to dance with nature, and understanding that a negentropic embrace of our basic economic relationships will lead to peaceful life, abundance, and hope. This is a message that could potentially transform our landscape and leave us with realistic expectations of grand and great-grandchildren. We are in the midst of what the watchers and people who are truly learned are calling our time, the 6th extinction, and have led me to wonder how the seventh incarnation will be expressed. Recognizing negentropy as a new paradigm-informing mindset gives me hope. 

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope that we can collaborate in honing this message and moving Forward. 

Jim