This episode of Doomer Optimism has Jason Snyder (@cognazor) having a conversation with Richard Flynn (@Richard_Flyer) about building a sustainable global commonwealth of bioregional economies.

About Richard Flynn
Richard has been building local community and bioregional ecosystems for the last 40 years. He has integrated his lifelong experiences of spiritual formation with his love of nature; trained as a marine and evolutionary biologist, studying pilot whale and dolphin communication; and then applied what he learned to community development. Experiences of what he calls “Nature’s Web” led him to travel to Mexico in the 1980’s to apprentice with an Aztec Indian/Christian medicine woman, a curandara, where he experienced indigenous wisdom and followed with training in Tibetan Buddhist meditation.

He was a leader of non-profit organizations, having formed a neighborhood network in a low income, multi-ethnic area of San Diego, California. This was followed by leading the San Diego Food Bank, and to Reno to lead a statewide microfinance organization. It was then that he shifted focus to become an entrepreneur in the medical field of hyperbaric oxygen therapy, where he continues supporting therapy centers in the western US. Richard Flyer is back in the US after 6 months in Sri Lanka, where he was working with Sarvodaya, the world’s largest national bioregional network of communities. It was Mahatma Gandhi and his vision of a commonwealth of village republics, passed to the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka that inspired him to translate universal principles into an urban western community context. Currently, he is working on various regenerative community projects, what he calls “Symbiotic Networks” --- a syntropic food forest project in North Kohala, Big Island, Hawaii and a local food system network in Oahu, Hawaii. He divides his time between Southern Germany, and Hawaii. Richard is launching the Symbiotic Culture Lab in Fall 2022 to promote Symbiotic Culture and Community to support bioregions around the world that want to learn to activate their own Symbiotic Networks. His book on the birth of the Symbiotic Age will be coming out Fall 2022. Best to find him on Twitter or LinkedIn, as his website, Symbiotic Culture Lab is being launched soon.

About Jason Synder
Metamodern localist | homesteading, permaculture, bioregional regeneration | meditation, self inquiry, embodied cognition | PhD from Michigan State University, faculty Appalachian State University.