Sensemaking a Planetary Ecological Commons – San Francisco 2025

my name is Sarah baxendell it is my great privilege this afternoon to be joined by Stuart and Marco to attempt to sense make a little bit more about planetary ecological comments we start our unfurling this morning by first acknowledging the extraordinary poly crisis that we collectively face there are many interconnected crises that we're simultaneously facing that the commons that we all refer to and the ecological Commons are in fact our best attempt at a interconnected design response to steuart I know that the poly crisis is very core and fundamental to a lot of Buckminster Fullers thinking I'm wondering if you could start us today by grounding your work at The Institute and how the poly crisis affects this work thank you thank you Tony that was beautiful it's wonderful to be here I'm Stuart Cowen I'm the executive director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute May me put it closer to you is this better can you hear me now we got you okay great hi everybody steuart Cowen I'm the executive director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and the poly crisis The Meta crisis the the challenges uh moving from separation to reconnection from extraction to Regeneration these are all themes that this extraordinary Visionary Buckminster Fuller was addressing really starting almost 100 years ago and the range of his work his creativity addressing this throughout a long productive life was incredible so one of the ways he thought about what we now call the poly crisis he called the world game where where you literally could bring together dozens of people in a large room sometimes for 10 or 12 days at a time and actually gamify roleplay simulate you know create possibilities around Cooperative exchanges really a common based approach to simulating possible regenerative Pathways forward so you might play this with a a huge map rolled out on the floor and people would assume uh a place on the map representing that share of the population and then work from a position of Commons and shared abundance and creativity or he called it the world resource Simulation Center where you could have all kinds of real-time live feeds of maps information data around ecological conditions where are minerals what's being manufactured what's happening with the global economy and again begin to cooperatively play with that so was it was this absolutely fascinating series of interventions already in the 1960s to say let's work together to sense make and playfully imagine potential Futures Marco and how does the poly crisis affect the work that you do in your commments research I think you come at this from a little bit different of an angle yeah can you hear me okay perfect yes um so first of all I want to make sure that I'm speaking about a bit of a um of a smaller common so when we speak about the commons Commons exist at all scales at all levels um and also in a lot of different Realms so we are speaking a lot about environmental Commons here which is the atmosphere the oceans but it can also be a small pasture or a lake um and then we also have more and more develop the digital Commons and I think we are witnessing one of these digital Commons here in the internet archive which is a wonderful location to be in but so where I want to Anchor this with my example is the uh the climate Commons the atmosphere um so in 2015 we had the biggest political achievement of probably all time um with the Paris agreement where almost 200 countries came together and signed and committed to make their best commitments their best contributions to solving the climate uh poly crisis or the the climate crisis which is part of the poly crisis um in 2024 these countries for the first time came together and reported on their process and of for for some for some reason we we failed which is not really surprising but what I want to highlight is the process we we reported on on our um on our action which is um we submitted 170,000 pages of PDFs to 50 to 100 poor experts sitting in the UN and having to make sense of all of this and my work um is focusing on at least working on how we work on a more efficient process so thinking about data standardization and I I've spoken today and yesterday to a few of you who are in this realm so I feel sorry for for the immense test that you that you're working on um so working on data harmonization data standardization and the digital infrastructure that is needed to make this data flow more automatically and then the second step is to make sense of data because humans are very bad at dealing with numerical data like if if we were to magically create a magic dashboard that gives us the state of our climate crisis at the moment it would still be really hard for decision makers to act upon that because we see numbers and we see oh we're we're this far off Target but thinking about how do we make this actionable is something we don't spend much effort on and I think that is one thing I want to highlight here for this audience as well um but I also have to confess that I have been way way too problem focused with what I've been doing the last six years and I think we have to be very mindful what we are giving our energy to do we work towards a positive future and Design Systems that we really care about or do we just want to try what is wrong in the existing um in the existing systems and so today I heard this talk from um from amember case where she was speaking about design is governance and I think we have to be a lot more mindful of the design processes that we are engaging with and where we are putting our energy in the design process so I think Sarah that is something really in your ballpark yeah absolutely and my favorite poem is by Juliana Spar it's this uh beautiful breathing into something called this connection of everything with lungs and at arcology we try to sense make into place in a way where we're giving breath to that place when we're working within it because design is really a prayer that comes from a place-based knowing and steuart I know a lot of the work that we have that overlaps between our studio and Buckminster Fuller is our support of samanth power and the BFFs that are emerging the bi Regional financing facilities movement how is B regionalism sitting at the heart of the way that you're architecting your current work well as we think about planetary thriving which is what Fuller was constantly thinking about for decades plan planetary thriving it doesn't mean that you're sitting in a small circle trying to technocratic decide what to do for the planet it means you're working in this decentralized way Watershed by Watershed life shed by life shed if bi region is a new word just think of the integration of cultural integrity and ecological Integrity it just sort of it fits it's like looking out this place makes sense as something we can connect to and love and and be with so that's your bio so at a bional scale you're mutually entangled with other species other beings my friend David Abram calls it the more than human world so bior region reminds us the other species and also the other living processes connects us to waterf Falling uh the planet breathing as we saw so maybe in our region we have these incredible atmospheric Rivers so really when we're talking about supporting a planetary ecological Commons it's recognizing that we're starting as humans but we are actually connected to the more than human world and most readily the place that lands most directly is at B Regional scale where we could imagine a bank that is based on a currency that's backed by a bundle of ecological credits tied to the health of that place for instance but then B regions are interconnected and mutually entangled as well out to this vast living process we call Gaia the entire planet as a living process and that's extending into deep time extending out to biogeochemical cycles so that all those living species are also interacting with Rock and Ocean and the fundamental living processes and now this new dimension that it's Gaia and it's gaia's web it's digital Gaia it's all the sensors that you're working with at different scales sensing what are the species singing right what's the water flow in that River and rolling that up and down scale like you're doing for climate data and also then wondering what's the role of artificial intelligence to support common space decision making within that vast imated Gaia I know that one of the things for me that first helped me to presence into this was um when I was becoming an herbalist and my 20s I remember sitting at a field and there are these moments where I I suddenly felt the plants and then I disappeared and I became them and it still happens it happened in a park down the way where I I smelled the lavender and I I just felt like I Disappeared into becoming the lavender and there is this sort of multi-species awareness that I feel that from an ecological Consciousness perspective we're we're breathing back into and we're sensing and sort of breathing in this cycle where we're being reminded that the owner ERS ship components of the commons from a human to human perspective are are not quite acknowledging all of our peers um and I think we're finding a lot of this is actually starting to be showcased using AI um in some of our work at arcology we had the great privilege last year of working um on a nature preserve on the island of Barbados called Walker's Reserve which is a beautiful transformation of a sand Quarry into a very ecologically rich space and it's a 10-year-old regeneration process and we were finding as we were going through all of the species information that one of the means by which we were most able to tell the health of the ecosystem um looking at it from an umbrella species perspective uh using the framework of er Brazil's umbrella species biodiversity methodology was looking at the responses of the bird net AI sensors and how many voices of the birds that we were finding were coming and when those birds were concentrated reflected the uh bird flyways up the American continents and so when you're in places like this there's this vast sense making that happens with these data sets and um a great colleague of ours uh Austin weight Smith has coined this framework ecological institutions that starts to say how do you take technology to sense make the breath of place and there's this technical weaving between the ability for a steward on land to take an app like an ey naturalist take a picture of a plant have that sense make into an ecological Oracle hidden abs like what we're building at layer be able to then talk to an AI agent that has a deterministic policy that then says oh Stuart did you know identify a plant that's part of the monting plan we should distribute rewards so all of these layers of the ways in which we're using AI to become deeper sensemakers into ecological spaces themselves that are starting to alliterate a Consciousness layer that from a flat data perspective or you know sifting through databases we can't quite reach and there's also some of our creative colleagues um an artist Doo called cross Lucid that are taking this same biological Botanical data sets of this Nature Preserve and pushing them into a visual ental model that is actually showing you what the biological evolution of those plants might be a thousand years into the future and there's all these edges that I as an ecologist never quite thought technology could do that I'm starting to see and I wondering if the two of you in your work are seeing other examples that are really pushing the edges of our technical relationship and emotional relationship to oology well we think of it in terms of the cycle of steep sensing mapping planning governance Finance fractal all different levels of scale from neighborhood City B region continent out to vast living processes like imagine the Himalayan glaciers as a single Commons what would a governance instrument look like that or things that are truly planetary scale you can't manage greenhouse gases at anything less than that scale ultimately it has to roll up to a real response so a lot of our focus at Buckminster Fuller Institute is supporting amazing projects in our Global Innovation lab software projects Finance projects uh stewardship projects that are playing with these Cycles all the way you know sensing all the way to governance at different levels of scale always common base so giving it back so anybody can work with this so opening a creative space designed for the commons always with the more than human in mind a lot of humility uh recognition that indigenous people know how to do this work best so learning together valuing uh traditional indigenous knowledge systems and connecting it all together at different at different scales yeah Sarah when I hear you speak and describe the bird songs and really the the the being alive of the forest um it's a very different approach from one I'm used to like normally I read an NDC report from a country or um other text documents like ESG reports from companies and it feels very much dead like you're describing something that is that is not really alive anymore because we are just focusing on putting numerical quantitative numbers out there and trying to make make sense of it so I think what we can really illustrate with with this is that technology and specifically Ai and other sensors that we are interacting with um enable us to connect absolutely different um to Nature and really bring it um alive and um I had a conversation yesterday that it reminds reminds me of which is that like when you want to argue why a forest should be alive you shouldn't be focusing on kind of like just making the sole services that the forest provides like cleaning water providing biodiversity or something you're fragmenting something that is alive into like like a service and it's the same as if you would ask a parent like why should you be a good parent like you you should feed your kid so um so you don't go to jail and that it can take care of you when you're old so I think the way we are relating to this and the way that we're using tools designing tools to relate to this this is the spirit we need to keep in mind um so yeah I think Tech is an absolute enabler if we design it right and unfortunately in this multi-dimensional world we're discussing we've run out of linear time and have to leave you all but I do want to thank both Stuart and Marco for your sens making and all of your work in the world uh I look forward to seeing us all weave into the new edges of our New Horizons together so thank you thank you thanks every everyone thanks everyone [Music] [Applause]