Impact investors in the emerging field of regenerative finance need ways to reduce the financial risk. One method is to create criteria by which third parties can certify regenerative projects. Third-party certification can rate how regenerative a project is and how likely it is to succeed. By establishing clear, objective, and transparent criteria, regenerative certifications can help not only investors but also developers of regenerative communities. They can help by raising the bar for the planning and operation of future communities. 

In this episode, host David Vranicar explores with guest Nicole Reese her early efforts to create an open-source regenerative certification process initiated by the Blue Dot Project.    

About the Guest

Nicole Reese, founder of the consulting firm Terrenity, is an expert in the emerging field of building and operating regenerative communities. For about six years, she has been visiting a broad range of intentional, nature-oriented communities around the world. She has lived in several. Her data and observations on the functions of such communities are among the most comprehensive available. The Blue Dot Project has engaged her services to draft the first version of open-source regenerative certification criteria. 

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Is your food safe to eat? Maybe less so than you think. Guest Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America, shares disturbing findings from her organization’s privately funded food testing in the United States. 

For impact investors, the episode highlights the potential to support and benefit from the small but accelerating movement towards regenerative agriculture.

Testing sponsored by Moms Across America found that foods produced through both industrial and organic farming processes are often contaminated with high levels of glyphosate and residue from other herbicides. These chemicals believed to cause cancer and other diseases. 

The chemicals also include high levels of heavy metals and other neurotoxins, even in school lunches and baby formulas. Organic foods sometimes contain surprising amounts of heavy metals because organic farmers use manure as fertilizer, and the manure is often contaminated by the food livestock eat.   

The solution, Zen says, has three elements: (1) Conduct more privately funded testing of foods. (2)  Educate the public about the health dangers and social costs of the food they eat. (3) Urge the public to pressure food brands to insist their growers use both regenerative and organic production methods. 

About the Guest

Zen Honeycutt is the founder of Moms Across America and the author of the book Unstoppable. As a well-informed and tenacious mom committed to food safety, Zen has led efforts to test and publicize the contamination in the U.S. and global food supply. Her grassroots organization works with counterparts around the world to raise awareness and promote more healthful, safer food. 

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This second episode in a two-part series where guest Neal Collins highlights two novel regenerative real estate projects in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. 

The projects show how regenerative development processes can transform neglected land into thriving, eco-friendly communities that improve local economies. For impact investors, these detailed examples show the potential to generate solid risk-adjusted returns by thinking differently about real estate development.   

The Salish Sea Farm project starts with abandoned farmland that was thought to have little potential for commercial development. Regenerative thinking turned undervalued land into a project with a strong pro-forma financial plan. The plan includes a regenerative farm, more than 200 residences, a hotel with three farm-to-table restaurants, and a commercial center. 

The Marrowstone Inn project shows how regenerative development can blend hospitality with environmental restoration and also strengthen the local economy through unusual financing.    

About Guest:

Neal Collins is co-founder of Latitude Regenerative Real Estate Development with agents and partners across North America. He also hosts The Regenerative Real Estate Podcast, where he has interviewed dozens of people with diverse knowledge and experience in creating sustainable, thriving communities.

In the past few years, Latitude has joined a small but growing number of regenerative real estate development companies at the forefront of this fast-changing field. Their work exemplifies how regenerative principles can transform real estate and support local economies.

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What is regenerative real estate development, and how is it different from conventional development? Investors who seek to fund regenerative projects should understand this emerging field because it’s so important to reducing financial risk and achieving expected returns.  

In this episode of the Blue Dot Project Podcast, guest Neal Collins talks about regenerative real estate development with host David Vranicar. 

For impact investors, we explore how regenerative real estate development differs from conventional processes in five key areas: community involvement in the planning process, the focus on long-term success, the goal of regenerating nature rather than just protecting it, and the challenges and opportunities of working with a variety of funding sources. 

About Guest:

Neal is co-founder of Latitude Regenerative Real Estate, a company based in the U.S. state of Washington. He also hosts the Regenerative Real Estate Podcast, where twice a month for four years he has interviewed dozens of people with diverse knowledge and experience in creating sustainable, thriving communities.

In the past two years, Latitude has transitioned beyond offering transactional real estate brokerage and services. Today they are among a small number of regenerative real estate development companies at the forefront of this fast-changing field. Latitude has agents and partners across North America. 

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In this episode of the Blue Dot Project Podcast host David Vranicar explores the concept of regenerative communities with Alex Corren, co-founder of ReCommon. 

Drawing from extensive experience and passion for environmental stewardship, Alex shares insights into key factors that lead to successful regenerative communities. He emphasizes the importance of considering the landscape, engaging with all stakeholders, and aligning with regenerative principles.

Alex’s early years in New Jersey helped him develop a deep connection to nature. He shares how his firsthand view of suburban real estate development sparked his passion for building communities that harmonize with the natural world. 

Here Alex provides his perspectives on the opportunities and challenges of establishing regenerative communities that can thrive for generations. 

About Guest:

Alex Corren, co-founder of ReCommon, is a dedicated advocate for regenerative practices. With a background in environmental science and a deep-rooted passion for nature, he spearheads initiatives to create communities that prioritize ecological regeneration and sustainable living.

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In this episode of Climate Levers, Alex Corren shares his insights into the pressing need for regenerative communities and helps visualize likely elements of their realization. Alex is co-founder of ReCommon, a company that pioneers in this new and fast-developing field.  

Host David Vranicar sets the stage for a deep dive into the structural and operational facets of regenerative communities, with Alex serving as guide.

About Guest:

Alex Corren is leader in the fast-evolving field of planning, building, and enabling regenerative communities. His company ReCommon develops suitable approaches to land access and governance. It provides frameworks, governance models, enabling technologies, and capital structures. 

Corren’s efforts to establish and promote resilient bioregional communities are helping set the stage for a shift toward sustainable living on a large scale. ReCommon’s efforts in Colorado serve as a proving ground and example for similar initiatives worldwide.

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This is an early chapter in the fast-developing story of a serial entrepreneur who radically changed his work and his life in his forties. 

In 2022, Eduardo Esparza downsized his successful business to help repair Earth’s badly damaged natural environment.    

About Guest:

Eduardo, a Mexican-born U.S. citizen, ran a successful marketing agency for a decade. But he had grown concerned about the world he would leave to his family and to future generations. 

So Eduardo downsized his company to focus on reducing climate change. 

After a year of intense research, he decided his best contribution would to help heal the damage human activity has done to our planet. 

Now Eduardo works with impact investors and multidisciplinary teams. Their immediate goal is to finance projects and communities that regenerate nature. The ultimate goal is to provide resilient food supplies and a sustainable path forward by establishing a new relationship with the natural world.

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About the episode:

Some kind of collapse of our natural systems is imminent. Every empire and civilization in history has collapsed, and the current civilization is showing signs that it's well into collapse, states Joe Brewer. The planetary Boundaries framework identified nine self-stabilizing processes of the planet that maintain the Holocene period. However, we have crossed several of these interrelated boundaries. 

Sustainable human cultures are organized into entire landscapes, and they treat nature as sacred, personifying and having a kinship relationship with it. They honor relationships with non-human people and act pro-future towards the ecosystems they depend on for survival. The approach to sustainability is identifying bioregions and landscapes to integrate humans and form deep relationships with the ecological functions for survival. Being pro-future requires intimacy and familiarity with the landscape to know the health of the river, soil, and forest.

In this second episode of a two-part series, we discover a million-acre living laboratory, in Barichara Columbia, for watershed restoration, building of soils, protecting native species, building a local economy with indigenous traditional practices, preserving cultural knowledge, and building sacred relationships with the land and nature.

Joe Brewer

Earth System Science

Earth Regenerators

Planetary Boundaries Framework

Joe Brewer is a complexity researcher, innovation strategist, experience designer, and social entrepreneur who has earned three bachelor's degrees in physics, mathematics, and interdisciplinary studies and a master's in atmospheric sciences. He has extensive experience in promoting sustainable solutions at a cultural level. 

Joe has achieved many notable accomplishments in his career, including creating an undergraduate degree program in Earth Systems, Environment and Society, and being the founder of Earth Regenerators and co-founder of the Design School for Regenerating Earth. 

He was also an active member of the Center for Complex Systems Research, where he studied pattern formation in self-organizing systems. 

As a social entrepreneur and cross-disciplinary scholar, he brings together his expertise in open collaboration, interactive design, and empowered civic action to drive change toward greater resilience in our turbulent world. Joe's diverse skill set is an asset to any team focused on sustainability and social innovation.

About the episode:

The current rate of extinction of nonhuman species is at least 10,000 times faster than the natural background rate, caused mainly by humans destroying habitats and natural ecosystems. This leads to the breakdown and destruction of the Earth's biosphere, and planetary health, increases inequality, and difficulties with the ability to manage complexity.

Unfortunately, fragmentation of knowledge and the suppression of knowledge synthesis across fields have resulted in few places for holistic and integrative education, which can reveal how the planet and the globalized economy are functioning as whole systems.  

This episode 13 is a first of a two-part series wherein complexity researcher and innovation strategist Joe Brewer shares with host Dave Vranicar about his upbringing and his unique background in physics, math, philosophy, dance, atmospheric science, complexity research, and cognitive linguistics. He is the founder of Earth Regenerators, which is a group committed to regenerating Earth systems to mitigate climate change. 

In this episode, Joe is offering valuable insights into the challenging politics of climate change. Global warming skeptics are denying that carbon dioxide is causing climate change, but their claims lack credibility and they're often heavily funded and supported by corporate media infrastructure. Joe states that grasping the dynamics of climate change requires building out conceptual understandings to even see with the right eyes to understand how the planet works.

Mentioned in the episode:

Joe Brewer

Earth System Science

John Dewey

Stephen Jenkinson

Earth Regenerators

Hans Rosling

Steven Pinker

Center for Complex Systems Research

About the guest:

Joe Brewer is a complexity researcher, innovation strategist, experience designer, and social entrepreneur who has earned three bachelor's degrees in physics, mathematics, and interdisciplinary studies and a master's in atmospheric sciences. He has extensive experience in promoting sustainable solutions at a cultural level. 

Joe has achieved many notable accomplishments in his career, including creating an undergraduate degree program in Earth Systems, Environment and Society, and being the founder of Earth Regenerators and co-founder of the Design School for Regenerating Earth. He was also an active member of the Center for Complex Systems Research, where he studied pattern formation in self-organizing systems. 

As a social entrepreneur and cross-disciplinary scholar, he brings together his expertise in open collaboration, interactive design, and empowered civic action to drive change toward greater resilience in our turbulent world. Joe's diverse skill set is an asset to any team focused on sustainability and social innovation.

What did you do once you knew about the state of the world?
How do you make space for the grief that comes from understanding our current situation?
How to combat the fear of scarcity as a society?
How do organizations and businesses transition into creating thriving life on Earth?
How do we actually build regenerative businesses?

In this episode guest Ra James, a regenerative business revolutionary and co-founder of (re)Biz, FutureElders, and Pueo, ponders on these questions and argues that implementing a model of transition for businesses, that is future-ready and supports a sustainable future, will lead to business success.

Episode 12 is the second part of a two-part series and highlights the importance of new leadership and community. It discusses the topics of our flawed educational system, our current economic model that values nature more dead than alive, and the importance of ancestral wisdom, among others.

Ra also eloquently accentuates the concept of decomposition, kincentrism, and of biomimicry and how the latter involves observing and replicating patterns and processes found in nature to design sustainable and regenerative systems.

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