Beyond the Off-Ramp: Notes Toward a Regenerative Culture

The Off-Ramp Is Not the Destination

Systems thinking is the beginning of cultural change, not the end

The journey led me to dynamic governance (or sociocracy). It also had me asking questions about the limits of permaculture. I began to wonder about other systems thinking tools. I started talking about both permaculture and dynamic governance as off-ramps from the destructive systems our current civilization engages in. But that led to the obvious question—off ramp to where? 

If you had asked me that question in the middle of my own permaculture design course, I would have said that just implementing permaculture as I imagined it was enough. After decades of teaching permaculture, I have worked in permaculture groups. I have seen the unhealed, personal patterns people bring to those projects. I know this is just the beginning of the off ramp. It is not the destination. 

I watch people new to permaculture or sociocracy. They become inspired by a new structure. Then, they transfer all their old dysfunction into it. I believe in these frameworks and tools. I teach them. I will keep teaching them.

And I think we need to be honest about what they are and what they aren’t.

Let me say it another way. Permaculture and sociocracy are off-ramps. They have cousins in the broader ecosystem of regenerative design, nonviolent communication, restorative justice, and conscious governance. They are ways of exiting the highway of extractive, hierarchical, disconnected culture. That is no small thing. Finding an off-ramp when you’ve been speeding toward a cliff is lifesaving. But an off-ramp is not a home. It’s a transition. And we do ourselves harm when we mistake the exit for the destination.

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There’s a seduction to systems thinking that I’ve felt in myself and watched in others. When you discover that ecosystems don’t produce waste, you realize that everything is connected to everything else. When you understand that seven layers of a food forest can emerge from one coherent design logic, something in you exhales. This is the answer. When you discover that organizations can make decisions without ego-driven need or domination, you feel a revelation. A circle structure can distribute power without dissolving accountability. You want to give it to everyone, immediately, like medicine.

The problem isn’t that these tools are wrong. They’re moving in the right direction. But there are other needs that arise as we exit the highway. One problem is that a framework, no matter how elegant, cannot metabolize grief. A design principle cannot teach you to feel the soil under your feet as something you belong to rather than something you manage. A governance structure cannot tell you who you are when the old story of progress and separation finally collapses.

Systems thinking tells us how. It is largely silent on the question of what lies underneath it all.

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I’ve watched permaculture projects fail. Rarely because the design was bad (and let’s admit that no design is perfect). Almost always it is because the people couldn’t stay in relationship with each other, with the land, with the uncertainty of a living system that doesn’t follow a plan. I’ve hesitated to do design work where the client doesn’t come to OWN the work themselves. It’s their relationship to the land they care for that matters more than anything else. 

I’ve also watched sociocracy implementations that created beautifully documented circles and domains. Then they were filled with the same unexamined power dynamics. There was the same avoidance of hard conversations. The organization experienced the same ungrieved losses that had haunted them for years. The container changed. What was held inside it did not.

This isn’t a critique of the tools. It’s an observation about what the tools cannot do alone.

What they cannot do alone is give us back a felt sense of belonging — not belonging to a movement or a philosophy, but to place and to a people. To a specific piece of land whose seasonal rhythms shape your body. To a watershed you can name. To the non-human community that was here before any of us and will be here, in some form, after. Mainstream culture teaches us that people cannot be trusted. It tells us that we can pick up and move at any time. It also suggests that no relationship is permanent. I’m not saying don’t have boundaries—that would be hypocritical of me and unhealthy. But I am saying we’ve learned to not trust people. In my experience, working with people in Sociocracy for All has been incredible. It has taught me how to have hard conversations and build trust.

This is the thing that got lost long before our governance structures went wrong. The extractive economy didn’t begin with capitalism. It began, many would argue, with the severing of that felt connection — the story that told us we were separate from, rather than embedded in, the living world. Every system we’ve built since has been downstream of that wound.

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So what does the road ahead look like — the one these off-ramps lead to? I want to be careful here, because I think the impulse to design it in advance is itself part of the old pattern. We cannot permaculture our way to a living culture. We cannot sociocracy our way to belonging. These are things that grow, not things that are built. 

But we can begin to think about the conditions that allow them to grow. One important condition, I believe, is understanding how people adapt their society and their culture. It’s not about how we wish change worked; it’s about how it has always worked throughout human history.

That’s what the next post in this series is about.

This is the first in a three-part series written in preparation for the Global Earth Repair Conference.