MONDAY, FEBRUARY 5

The 7-Generation Bioregional Earth Summit will be opened by The Honourable David Crombie, former Toronto Mayor and federal cabinet minister, and author of the seminal 1992 Regeneration report which originally defined the Toronto bioregion.

Then…

"If you believe that human connection is necessary for human evolution, then the [dinner] table does it better than almost any place." Michael Hebb

The Cedars, on the Oak Ridges Moraine at the headwaters of the Beaver River in the GTB (Greater Tkaronto Bioregion), is the main hub of the GTB Bioregional Learning Center (Toronto, Canada). The heart of The Cedars is the Legacy Table, handcrafted from Heritage Maple and designed to evoke both a spout of water and a tree. The Legacy Table is a place to discuss "the big stuff."

Grab a cup of coffee or cocoa, and join us around the Legacy Table for two provocative discussions that set the stage for the entire week.

Can we #ChangeTheStory? We'll explore ecological and cultural overshoot, life questions, nested stories (your life story in the story of other lives/life on the planet in the even bigger story of lifetimes across generations), existential perspectives, truths and deceptions. This will be the start of a story to start a story that starts a story…

Recommended: Watch the short documentary David Crombie: Championing the Bioregion, and listen to a Message to the Generations in the GTB from Joe Brewer.

SPEAKERS:

• The Honourable David Crombie will share his experiences and insights from his decades of work on the Greater Tkaronto Bioregion.


• Red Sky Performance Founder Sandra Laronde, author of She Holds Up the Stars, will join Joe Brewer and Susan Bosak at the Legacy Table for an intimate discussion about her own life story and how it's woven into her book, as well as how she experiments with storytelling and pushes boundaries as she reflects Indigenous ways of knowing in a Western world.


• Design School for Regenerating Earth Founders Joe Brewer and Penny Heiple will join 7-Generation GTB core team leaders Susan V. Bosak, Founder of the Legacy Project, and Executive Director Brian Puppa around the Legacy Table. They'll share some personal stories and then frame the global challenges, discuss the problems with the current climate change narrative, dance with complexity, all the while shining a light on the pathway forward to #ChangeTheStory. You'll get to know these four people in a way you haven't seen them before.

"The [Bioregional Learning Center] collects, makes sense of, and disseminates information about the resources of the bioregion, and about the welfare of the people and of the ecosystems… [It's] able to see things as a whole, to look at long-term consequences, and to tell the truth." Donella Meadows

Bioregional Learning Centers are keystone structures – a community-facing learning lab for real-world resilience and inspiration. It can weave together holistic Indigenous knowledge systems with the best of Western scientific thinking to become a place of convergence, co-creation, and innovation across worldviews.

In a changing and uncertain world, how do we (re)learn how to live in our place? What does that mean in practice? How can we be guided by the principles of the Earth Charter while being grounded in a specific place/bioregion? How can we create interconnected stories of place?

Recommended: Check out the GTB: Past, Present, Future video, and read about the GTB Bioregional Learning Center.

SPEAKERS:

• Global regeneration leader Joe Brewer offers a sneak peek of the Bioregional Learning Center six-month learning journey starting in March in the Design School for Regenerating Earth. He believes that one of the most important dimensions of bioregional regeneration is organizing a learning ecosystem that coherently integrates everything taking place in the bioregion – and then connects the bioregion into learning from and with other bioregions.


• The core team from the Cascadia region, Brandon Letsinger and Clare Attwell, share some learnings of their place on the west coast.


• A group of local experts share perspectives on the GTB. Managing Director, Finance and Resilience at the Intact Centre (University of Waterloo) Kathryn Bakos talks about climate risks. Jenn Pfenning, family owner at Pfenning's Organic Farm and NFU President, sketches a picture of agriculture and food security. Brock University earth scientist Francine McCarthy talks about GTB's tiny Crawford Lake being chosen as the global ground zero for Earth's most recent geological time period, the Anthropocene.

An informal opportunity to meet members of the Design School for Regenerating Earth and other 7-Generation Bioregional Earth Summit participants – get to know each other and discuss topics of interest. The Summit Lounge is hosted by Roberta Hill, Bioregional Coordinator at the Center for an Ecology-Based Economy in Maine.


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