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.

What’s different about this site is our position on what comes next. We draw from history, ecology, a systems perspective, psychology, and 12 step addictions recovery. Our experience is large numbers of people can heal from the root causes of overshoot — and recover alongside the ecosystems and bioregions they inhabit. This is not reassurance. We acknowledge what scientists are telling us: the numbers are well beyond what Earth can sustain, and there are challenging times ahead. We are offering something more specific than hope: a clear-eyed and practical account of how we got here, and a recovery path that some people are already walking.

How to use this site

There are different ways to engage with the material here — and inner work tools to support all of them.

We can run a Global Solutions Game™ (GSG™) — a structured conversation with people who are willing to look as honestly as possible at what's happening. This isn't a conversation a lot of society is having. Sitting with people who don't want to talk about it, even if they're family or close friends, tends not to work. Better to gather people who are open, even if the group is smaller. These topics can bring up a lot, and many people have nowhere to talk about it. The GSG is a place for that.

The current global situation is a predicament rather than a problem. Problems have solutions; predicaments are ongoing and navigated. There's no completion here, no fix that returns things to normal. What the Global Solutions Game offers is shared, grounded understanding — not from beliefs or news cycles, but from decades of systems science. The Limits to Growth study, run on early computer models in the 1970s, projected where the current trajectory would lead: ecological degradation, water scarcity, extreme weather, crop failures, and rising conflict over shrinking resources. That trajectory is now visible everywhere. Top scientists differ on specific timelines and outcomes, not on the direction. Running scenarios moves the information from our heads into the room, into our bodies. It becomes real.

We see much of the predicament as an addictive process (more on that below), and trying to change it while swimming in it can feel exhausting — not unlike trying to live a grounded life inside a family or community with a lot of dysfunction. So instead we start with fresh eyes, drawing from Marshall Rosenberg and Nonviolent Communication. Rosenberg said: "Perhaps the most important human need is the need to contribute to life, to enrich life, to make life more wonderful for everyone." He came back to this repeatedly — that this is the real game, and once you feel it, nothing else is the same. If we’re immersed in making ends meet with food and rent, this can sound idealistic. The 12 step tools on this site are the concrete steps toward recovery, workable from wherever we are.

Before the group meets, participants read the sections of the site that draw them. Ideally the key sections get covered across the group, so the conversation has the full picture — but people and groups already familiar with a topic don't need to revisit it.

The innerwork and 12 Step sections add another dimension to the GSG. The research tells us what's happening; those tools help with the recovery and the living-through-it part. It's extremely useful to use the innerwork tools in the GSG, to help ground, track what's happening, and process emotions.

This site was written as I had a psychotherapy practice in the U.S., spent years apprenticing full time with a Shipibo Shaman in the Amazon, doing shamanic plant medicine dietas, and living with him and his family. In those processes I worked through a lot of denial about the level of destruction happening on the Earth. I was also shown bodily that I was participating in life-deadening ways of living — with plastics, fossil fuels, and food grown and clothes made by people treated as indentured servants. I also witnessed clear cutting of old growth forests that I love dearly and that had brought me back to life, and escalating extinctions, and was shown my own patterns of extraction reflected back to me. I have over three decades of meditation, yoga, and mind body practices, with extensive training and work with trauma and addictions, and it was all I could do to not dissociate, and to stay in my body. I lived over a decade in South-Central America, with increasing corruption, poverty, drugs, crime, and extreme violence. Part of that process was doing years of extensive research. This site offers the distilled research and tools for others to use.

The Inner Work section runs through everything on this site. Whether you're doing a Global Solutions Game, working the 12 steps, reading the research alone, or exploring with friends — this material is more than most of us can take in all at once. That's not a personal failing; it's the honest size of what's happening. Most of us have nowhere to work with it — even many therapists don't want to talk about it. The Inner Work section offers distilled tools for grounding and working with emotions, including trauma processing and release. These tools are also valuable for eco-grief, and for witnessing destruction to ecosystems and places we love. The site is meant to be used interactively: read a section, do a grounding exercise, read more, do some parts work, etc. This is how we metabolize what we're learning rather than getting overwhelmed — or going numb. The section also covers attachment, the addictive process running through society, letting go of shame, and ways to move forward. This work is foundational — both for navigating what's ahead and for real transformation.

Many of us feel we already know. I know, I know — it's bad. But knowing about something intellectually and being prepared for it are different things. Some questions worth sitting with: Do I have a basic understanding of what's happening scientifically? Am I connected to how I actually feel about it, or am I still holding it at a distance? If I understand it and feel it — what's my plan? Do I know where my food comes from now, and where it might come from as supply chains tighten? What might happen to my local social structure?

If you're clear there's a problem, feel it, and want structured support to actually change — the Regenerative Recovery™ Path is a 12-step program adapted for this transition. Group support, visioning meetings, simple action steps. It doesn't take years, people can get started right away.

The research sections are there for those who want to go deeper. Read any section independently, or use them to prepare for a game.

The Situation:

The current predicament 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

Many of us 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 can sometimes override reflection. Naming this is the beginning of working with it, and people do — every day, in every recovery tradition.

The Pattern

Extraction-exploitation is the taking of more than is given back — from land, from labor, from time, from each other. It can show up at every scale: a person, a household, a company, a civilization. A certain amount exists in any society. What turns it into the pattern this site addresses is when it becomes an addiction — when the behavior continues against mounting evidence of harm, and the story told about it stops matching what's actually happening.

Extraction addiction is real.

Recovery is real.

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

The dominant economic story tells us: consume more, grow more, the market will solve it. Enough of us live inside that story that the pattern continues — and the story has the exact 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 might 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: we don't recover by waiting for the world to become less addictive. We recover by changing our 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.

Admittedly the pattern is embedded — in the food, the clothes, the housing, the transport, the money itself. Recovery means seeing that clearly and taking the next honest step from wherever we actually stand.

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 us 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 us waiting for someone else or a government to change things first. It begins with what is available right now, in the place where we actually live.

The Research — and the Path Through

These sections (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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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. How Extraction Addiction drives runaway complexity — and where recovery begins.

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. Many of us sensing something is wrong oscillate between pushing harder and going numb. This section names what's happening with neurobiology — fight, flight, freeze, fawn — and offers concrete tools for moving through it, at both individual and community scale.

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 Wealth Gets Transferred from the Many to the Few. The petrodollar, unequal exchange, debt-based money, and ecological economics — explained plainly. Why it's unjust, how we might participate — in extracting, or in being extracted from — and what healthier societies would look like.

We write from clarity about what the data says, honesty about our own place inside what we're describing, and the belief — earned by watching people do it — 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

Overshoot & Recovery · Written by Jeff Gilbert with editing by AI

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