omniharmonicBioregional Learning Centers
Bioregional learning centers are the “learning ecosystems” described in Joe Brewer’s Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth: place-based institutions that support the emergence of regenerative bioregions during and after civilization-scale collapse. The book’s central insight is that all truly sustainable human cultures in history were organized as bioregional economies — social and economic systems scaled to the ecological and cultural boundaries of a place — and its pathway calls for a planet-wide network of learning ecosystems that can support their re-emergence.
Brewer’s work with his partner Penny Heiple on the Design School for Regenerating Earth has seeded a planetary network of these centers. The approach combines a pedagogical dimension — education as a radical, liberatory, and necessary precondition of bioregional economic formation — with local community-organizing methodologies that mirror how living systems function. Metabolic, a global think tank for the regenerative economy, drew on this vision in a 2026 report on biohubs, a similar concept with additional economic infrastructure.
In the layered lineage of regenerative economics, bioregional learning centers occupy the level of place-based economies and liberatory pedagogy — the schools of the next economy, seeded before its body has formed. See bioregional economics.