This conversation with Michael Haupt gives you some answers, insights and real experiences of how our next stage of evolution is being realised. Ideas on how you can move from collapse awareness to regeneration and possibilities.
Michael, lives in a valley of about 30,000 people, 90 minutes outside Cape Town. He once called himself the joyful collapsologist. These days he’s walking away from the word “collapse” altogether. Partly because he kept hearing it as an ending. Mainly because he’s watching something better emerge and happening.
Either listen to the conversation or read the main points below. I trust you will find this conversation as rich and rewarding as I did.
Michael is clear, optimistic and confident that all is going to a necessary evolutionary plan.
The bold claims that hold this belief together.
I asked Michael how do we make this evolutionary leap when we are all so conditioned in the old system ?
“The system determines behavior. I’m no longer convinced that there is such a thing as human nature”.
This was Michael’s response, in other words we change the systems and our behaviours change.
The debates in this space usually circle around whether humans are altruistic or greedy. Michael’s answer is neither. He thinks we’re neutral, and the system we’re dropped into decides how we show up. We built a competitive system to climb a steep curve of growth, then placed ourselves inside it and called the result “human nature.”
That growth curve is the other frame. Every living system grows in the same shape: slow, then fast, then slow. The steep middle was driven by what he calls material consciousness, a way of organising information around separation, competition, survival of the fittest. It worked, it got us here. And now, Michael argues, the curve is bending, and something he calls ‘mycelial consciousness’ is rising alongside it. This is inevitable and necessary,
The difference isn’t a mood. It’s a shift in how information is stored and shared, from separation to connection, from competition to collaboration. His point is careful: this is not one thing replacing another. It’s the balance tilting.
Michael’s other claim is we still need the ‘old extractive ‘system to keep functioning and perhaps it always will. This is why the stop oil actions and many green policies especially around control are misguided.
The uncomfortable part
I mentioned Eugenia Bone’s caution that we overuse the Mycelium metaphor on cooperation, networking and supporting. That fungi are also opportunistic, competing and trading.
One of Michael’s teachers was the evolutionary biologist Elizabeth Sahtouris. She was adamant that competition and collaboration run side by side in every living system. A fungus will aggressively hunt for resources, then flip automatically into collaboration once it has enough. The mushroom above the soil and the mycelium beneath it are the same organism behaving differently at different moments.
It’s when we get them in perfect balance that we will genuinely live in abundance.
That’s the line I keep coming back to. Michael refused, several times, to make extraction the villain or ‘othering’. He said the extractive system must and should continue, because we rely on natural resources to hold up the highly functioning societies we have.
His objection is simpler: we’ve overshot the limits of the natural world, and the answer is to grow the regenerative side, not to pretend we can switch the other side off. “You’re never going to get rid of extractive behaviour. Extractive behaviour happens in all living systems.”
Which brings me to the language he used right at the end.
“I don’t believe we’ve lost our way”.
When the audience started reaching for “we got lost” and “we forgot,” he pushed back gently. From a living-systems view, we had to go through that steep rapid growth. We didn’t get lost. We completed a phase. “We’re remembering as much as we’re learning.”
Why the 2030s will be a decade of dramatic disruption.
Michael builds on David Ronfeldt TIMN model, which maps how coordination has evolved from tribes, to institutions, to markets, to whatever is emerging now.
The Promise Theory
Each form worked because it made a promise: tribes promised safety, institutions promised order and salvation, markets promised freedom. Each form eventually stops being able to keep that promise.
A tribe becomes a cult that won’t let you leave. An institution becomes a municipality that can’t deliver services. And the market, Michael argues, is now overextending its promise and defending itself with surveillance.
That’s what Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism describes. It isn’t the market growing. It’s the market straining. People start leaving a system when its promise turns extreme, and Michael sees that happening this decade. He compares it to the 1930s, when the 1929 crash set off roughly a decade of the old order trying to restabilise before something new settled in.
It’s a guess, and he said so. It’s also why he spends his energy on building the systems that come next rather than arguing with the systems that are fading.
The Valley of Grace is showing us how
This is where we moved from theory to what is happening where Michael lives with Bioregions.
Michael’s valley sits downstream from the dam that supplies most of Cape Town’s water. The national government is legally obliged to release water through the river that runs past their valley, even when the city is desperate.
The mountain behind the valley, long understood by indigenous knowledge as a far better store of water than any dam. This just needs stewardship: work that holds rainwater through the wet season and releases it slowly through the dry.
The state or the market can’t do that work alone. It also requires a remote rural community coordinating along the length of a river, measuring what’s happening to the water as it moves.
And the money to start it exists now. A South African merchant bank, Rand Merchant Bank, issued a $135 million water bond, backed by companies whose survival depends on water (Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Caterpillar among them). The funds sit there, waiting for civil society to find ways of improving water security.
The entire coordination mechanism happens in cyberspace now. Whereas bioregionalism is coming back to place.
For a long time, Michael says, bioregional work was radical activists running around doing their best. The field has matured. Now it has nodes, the way tribes had campfires and institutions had cathedrals and markets had ports. These nodes are biohubs: learning centres where you can see who’s organising a bioregion, what data they’re tracking, whether things are getting better or worse.
Guinnen MacRath asked what city people should do, and it’s a fair question. Most visible bioregions are rural. Michael’s answer was honest…cities are still the market’s node, so a city’s first instinct is to buy itself out of a problem with a wind farm or a desalination plant. That’s why cities, so far, host so few bioregional efforts. But platforms are emerging to make bioregions visible, and the movement is maturing fast.
The golden thread and Mycelium Consciousness remembered.
Listening closely to Michael’s summary of his own work and thinking about the potent writings of Sophie Strand on mycelium consciousness always being available to us. This was and is known by indigenous people, it’s not something we discovered .
“They didn’t sort of go, oh, let’s think about mycelial consciousness. They lived it”.
Michael response was that indigenous knowledge is collaborative by nature. That’s exactly why it couldn’t drive humanity up the steep competitive growth curve, and it’s exactly why we need it now that the curve is bending. Michael’s phrase for it:
Indigenous knowledge held the golden thread the whole way through, and we’re coming back around to pick it up.
The word itself ‘indiginous’ , he notes, doesn’t mean a different culture. It means someone rooted in place, carrying generations of knowledge about what happens in that place.
What I’d like you to take away
Michael’s closing was an invitation to those who would like to or are doing any kind of regenerative work.
The next step of this, he said, is economic exchange between bioregions. Not just knowledge sharing on Zoom calls, but actual resources flowing. And the status of bioregions is about to change: instead of standing with a hand out, struggling to fund the work, organised bioregions become the service provider, and the state becomes the client. That shift, he said, unlocks significant economic activity.
So his practical suggestion was simple. Spend time with the bioeconomy wiki. Look at what it takes for a bioregion to register within the emerging network. Few have done it yet. Michael’s valley is one of them trying so do this so subscribe to his substack (link below) to keep up with developments. Michael also dives deeper into all the background and theories that support this work.
This was such a nourishing exploration of possibilities and of course none of us have absolute answers. This conversation is precisely at the point of asking what comes next while the future is still ours to create.
Collapse awareness is like the base camp, we are in the foothills of what comes next . If as Michael claims what is happening is all part of the pattern of evolution then the role you play is part of that.
Thank you for reading or watching this courageous conversation share your thoughts and experiences in the comments. Let’s keep this important conversation going….
With Love and Solidarity,
Resources
Elizabeth Sahtouris , on competition and collaboration in living systems
Shoshana Zuboff , The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Sophie Strand on Mycelium Consciousness most is behind a paywall.
On cooperation is possible by Will Ruddock
Thank you Graham Stewart, nina allchurch, Paul, Chloe Goodchild and many others for tuning into this live video with Michael Haupt! Join me for my next live video in the app.
