More is unraveling than most people realize.

More is possible than most people imagine.

This site maps both.

OVERSHOOT · RECOVERY · REGENERATION

Scientists have been clear for decades: we are in ecological overshoot. Most of us can feel it. What's less clear is what to do — not at the abstract level of global policy, but here, in our bodies, our communities, our watersheds.

This site draws on evolutionary biology, ecological economics, neuroscience, and the hard-won wisdom of addiction recovery to map both the crisis and a concrete path forward.

The Situation:

The metacrisis isn't one problem — it's many reinforcing crises sharing the same root. These three are a way in.

Ecological Overshoot

Since 1970, humanity has been consuming faster than the Earth regenerates. We now use 1.75 Earths per year. The sixth mass extinction is underway. Ocean currents, glaciers, and coral reefs are crossing tipping points simultaneously.

Energy & Economic Limits

The cheap oil era is ending. EROI (energy return on investment) is declining. Our debt-based economy requires infinite growth on a finite planet — a mathematical impossibility. The gap between these two realities is now closing fast.

Fight, Flight, Freeze

Most people sense something is deeply wrong but feel paralyzed, or are pushing full steam ahead. This isn't weakness — it's neurobiology. Under chronic threat, the brain's fear circuitry overrides reflection. Understanding this is the beginning of working with it, not against it.

The Pattern

Extraction- Exploitation is an addiction. The recovery path is real.

"An addictive process is where the mind insists a behavior is helpful or necessary — while the behavior causes sickness, or even death."

Our economic system runs on a story: consume more, grow more, the market will solve it. That story has the structure of addiction — the short-term relief is real, the long-term harm is mounting, and the gap between what we tell ourselves and what's actually happening keeps widening.

Choices that drive deforestation, mass extinction, and inequality fit this definition precisely. We tell ourselves they're necessary. Meanwhile they're producing collective sickness at planetary scale.

The 12-step tradition has something direct to say about this: you don't recover by waiting for the world to become less addictive. You recover by changing your own relationship to the pattern — one decision at a time, with support, accountability, and honesty. Programs like Debtors Anonymous, Underearners Anonymous, and Workaholics Anonymous offer concrete tools for exactly this kind of change.

The recovery path draws on everything that actually works: the hard science of how ecosystems and economies collapse, the evolutionary biology of how humans cooperate, the regenerative agriculture practices that rebuild soil and local food systems, the trauma tools that help people metabolize grief and fear rather than freeze in it, the body practices that regulate an overwhelmed nervous system, the group structures that turn isolation into shared action, and the ancient-but-proven recovery wisdom of people who have walked out of compulsive patterns and rebuilt their lives.

The Path Forward

Recovery begins in place.

For most of human history, people lived in intimate reciprocity with specific places — watersheds, seasons, soil types, local communities. That intimacy turns out to be both the antidote to domination and the foundation of genuine resilience.

Bioregional regeneration means organizing around ecological reality rather than political borders: watersheds, foodsheds, local economies. Regenerative agriculture rebuilds the soil and the relationships that sustain it. Direct democracy at human scale — the kind practiced in citizens assemblies and neighborhood committees — makes genuine cooperation possible again.

David Sloan Wilson's research shows altruistic groups outcompete selfish ones over time. Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize work identified the eight design principles that make a commons and cooperative governance work at any scale. These aren't utopian ideas — they're empirically documented patterns that work when implemented.

"The sacrifices we have to make to achieve sustainability are far less than you believe. We're sacrificing our wellbeing on the altar of endless growth and consumption."

— Josh Farley, Ecological Economist

The path forward doesn't require waiting for the system to change first. It begins with what is available right now, in the place where you actually live.

The Research — and the Path Through

These papers (accessed via the tabs at the top of website) draw on scientists, economists, systems thinkers, and healers to map what's actually happening — and what actually works. Each one goes deep.

Start Here: Ecological Overshoot — The Situation and Ways to Live in Harmony with the Earth The clearest account of where we are: ocean systems failing, glaciers crossing tipping points, minerals running short, energy declining. Not to induce despair — but because seeing clearly is where recovery begins. Includes a path toward bioregional adaptation.

Hitting Bottom: The Emotional Reality — and the Recovery Tools That Work Most people sensing something is wrong oscillate between pushing harder and going numb. This paper names what's happening neurologically — fight, flight, freeze, fawn — and offers concrete tools for moving through it, at both individual and community scale.

Collapse Clarity: Joseph Tainter on Complexity and Decline Why civilizations don't collapse from the outside — they collapse from the weight of their own complexity. Declining energy returns, the innovation trap, the math of diminishing returns. This perspective is necessary to understand the big picture.

Biophysical Limits: Energy, Metals, and the End of Business as Usual The clearest synthesis of what physics and geology are actually saying: oil EROI in decline, minerals insufficient for a like-for-like renewable transition, no true energy substitution in history — ever. Seven thinkers from different disciplines converging on the same conclusion. Not a counsel of despair — a map of what is actually available, and how to design from there.

Inequality Explained: How the Economy Transfers Wealth from the Many to the Few The petrodollar, unequal exchange, debt-based money, and ecological economics — explained plainly. Why the system feels rigged, because it is, and what a different economics would look like.

The Inner Work: Trauma-Releasing and Attachment-Strengthening Practices Step-by-step practices drawn from leading trauma therapists — for eco-grief, overwhelm, and the particular pain of watching the living world decline. Includes somatic work, parts dialogue, and attachment exercises for deepening bonds with people and place.

Built to Cooperate: How Cooperation Wins When We Design for It Evolutionary biology shows we are not inherently selfish — we are designed to cooperate in the right conditions. Multilevel selection, the super-chicken problem, Elinor Ostrom's eight design principles. The science of building communities that actually work.

Twelve Steps: Toward Personal and Bioregional Recovery The most proven behavior-change model in history, applied to the metacrisis. Visioning meetings, action steps, sponsorship, and global learning networks — adapted for individuals and communities making the transition from extraction to regeneration.

Bioregional Regeneration: Organizing from the Watershed What it looks like to root life in a specific place — a watershed, a foodshed, a local community. The practical and psychological shift from alienated consumer to participant in a living system. Where the path forward becomes concrete and local.

Written from inside the question

This site is not written from a safe distance. It comes out of years living in the Amazon with a Shipibo shaman and his family — witnessing firsthand both the destruction of the living world and the depth of what humans are capable of when organized differently. The research here is confirmation of what that experience revealed.

We don't write from certainty. We write from clarity about what the data says, honesty about where we still live inside the system we're describing, and genuine belief that recovery — personal and collective — is possible.

Evolutionary biology · Ecological economics · Complexity science · Bioregional regeneration · Regenerative agriculture · 12-step recovery · EMDR & somatic therapies · Sociocracy · Indigenous land relationships

This site is a working draft, shared first with people who already understand the territory — permaculture practitioners, systems thinkers, regenerative community builders. Your feedback shapes what comes next.

Overshoot & Recovery · Written by Jeff Gilbert in collaboration with research and editing by AI