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    Cogito Regenerative: Our Nature, a Triptych, #3
    Cogito Regenerative: Our Nature, a Triptych, #3
    Cogito Regenerative: Our Nature, a Triptych, #3
    Ebook174 pages1 hourOur Nature, a Triptych

    Cogito Regenerative: Our Nature, a Triptych, #3

    By Charlie Hopper

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    About this ebook

    Our people, planet, and communities are more stressed than ever. These problems persist because we treat the symptoms, not the causes. Cogito Regenerative (I think; therefore I am regenerative.) takes an ontological look at our country, people, and planet and outlines a clear path for us to restore them all. With over 30 years of first-hand experience and extensive study, Charlie Hopper offers a vivid examination of our journey as people on this planet and the resources and responsibility we have to change course. We have the agency to regenerate our people, planet, and places and still be the people we are and want to be. This book is sure to give you the will.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCharlie Hopper
    Release dateJul 23, 2021
    ISBN9798201848903
    Cogito Regenerative: Our Nature, a Triptych, #3
    Author

    Charlie Hopper

    Charlie Hopper has over 30 years of successful landscape, community, and ecosystem design, emphasizing human, natural, and planetary regeneration. Charlie has a vast portfolio of built, digital, and living systems and designs helping people and places thrive throughout the Midwest, Southern, and Eastern parts of the United States. His work has been published in numerous print and online publications, books, and television shows. Charlie has spent his life planting trees for others to sit under. For the last five years, he has organized entrepreneurs, leaders, and communities to regenerate Kansas City, Missouri's Blue River Valley, the Heartland, and our country. With entrepreneurial success in private, government, and nonprofit sectors, Charlie's understandings of how things work and grow are experiential, vast, and in-depth. Learn more about Charlie at http://cogitoregen.com

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      Book preview

      Cogito Regenerative - Charlie Hopper

      Introduction

      It has been two years since I put down Growing the Renaissance. Donald Trump is no longer President. Asian Americans for Equality is selling Hardesty. The property is on its way to regeneration or gentrification with new owners, we will see. We have endured a year of a global pandemic and now have a vaccine. Joe Biden is leading the country as we try to recover from the Trump years, the divisions the pandemic exasperated, and the economic collapse it helped bring about.

      Most of the problems these catastrophic events exposed were systemic problems we have already explored in my first two installments of these writings, Growing and Growing the Renaissance. As predicted, and thanks to the pandemic, we have gotten sick enough that most of our society is beginning to evolve and recognize their inherited nature and move from sustainability to regeneration. For those who are not changing, the division grows as they try to sustain their status quos. Regardless, the world will continue to regenerate and change their perspective, one way or another. The goal of these writings is to avoid the another in that scenario.  

      The last couple of years have been a journey. The path has taken me back to when I started my first company in North Carolina, Cogito. One of my clients and mentors at the time told me that I really needed to try it on my own, that I would surely fail, and that someday the lessons would prepare me for the time to do it right. His words were fortuitous. It seems my mentors, friends, and journey have been preparing me for this time all along. Many people have put a lot into growing me for this.

      As my time at Hardesty was ending, the Kauffman Foundation stepped in. Especially Mark Beam and Katie Baker (both gone from Kauffman now), along with Bob Berkebile, who many know as an architect and a founder of BNIM and leader of sustainability and green building movements globally. There were others too: Mark Dehner, a local angel investor, Living Economy Advisors (while they lasted), Capital Institute and John Fullerton, and especially the food team from Hardesty, the core members of which were Tom Flood, Chef Michael Foust, Greg Garbos, Omar Galal, and David Brandt. Together, we all became a case study for Kauffman on approaching the formation of a public benefit corporation, a for-profit business with a community-driven mission, and a kill switch if it strayed from that mission. The mission was to design a way to accomplish the communities’ goals without the Hardesty property and let the property and food and education projects find their own courses to community ownership and reality.

      The premise made sense. Rather than developing a centralized facility and using a single property to generate the equity and secure the capital to rebuild our educational and processing systems, we designed modular and decentralized technologies so the financiers could have something to invest in. These new systems could occur wherever and whenever needed at whatever size was required locally. It made sense and worked financially, in theory, especially if we followed cooperative ownership models.

      The big hurdle was that it needed a new manufacturing system to build the technologies. The other was that the investors wanted the infrastructure to create the physical capital required for traditional financing - property. A financier or investor needs something to leverage and own. That is counterintuitive to a cooperative structure and created the problems we were trying to solve - consolidated ownership with a debtor system. As I believe I have said before in my writings, a design that does not change does not get used. The same is true about the business - Heartland P5 Holdings, the technology – Gaptainer, and Hardesty. Once applied, all needed revisions to work in reality. After all, reality is the place where metaphysical thought meets its physical incarnation.

      Because money had to be invested in doing this work, Heartland P5 Holdings (P5) shifted its model away from being a business to do the work to creating a fund to fund such work. The idea behind the fund was to use a 5-bottom line of prosperity in perpetuity for people, planet, and place to ensure regenerative behavior. In the metaphysical, it was beautiful. However, creating the fund forced the metaphysical to meet the physical reality. In reality, the original funders either could not afford or did not have the will to follow a genuinely cooperative model unless they got to be the financier, which they also could not afford to do.

      Once the fund became the core business, the businesses and goals the fund would invest in to create prosperity became secondary to the financial return, undermining the public benefit. That took us right back where we were at Hardesty, designing to the funder's needs at the expense of people, planet, and place. After a year of trying to get Gaptainer off the ground with P5, it had gone nowhere.

      The businesses that had come together to form the cooperative and had to move on without P5, which meant that I did too. As a result, I had to recuse myself from decisions and withdrew from the organization within a year. In 2020 and 2021, a series of butterflies would emerge from their cocoons. Of course, just like the caterpillar who builds the cocoon, many of them would have to go through a phase of unrecognizable cellular goo before emerging as butterflies.

      With the connections and networks of Beam, Berkebile, and Kauffman, experts from around the world descended on Black Sheep Diner in Kansas City (another victim of Covid), where Chef Michael Foust hosted a never-ending table to design the new world order to be fueled, fed and regenerated by Gaptainer. Much like the early Renaissance Era occurred in the cafes of Paris (most of which would close due to Spanish Flu), so did the renaissance in Kansas City, in a café that would close due to Covid-19. After a year of designing, philosophizing, prototyping, analyzing, vetting, and planning, the individual pieces and parts of P5 would start to form their cocoons. Components of Gaptainer are emerging today, especially the energy and food components. Much like Hardesty, when the metaphysical met the physical, the designs for each needed to change as well.

      In January of 2020, three months before Covid-19 shut down the United States economically; the USDA offered to help create and fund Gaptainer and the energy systems described in these writings as an agriculture cooperative. We were to deploy these new systems, just like they did the grain elevators that Gaptainer would hopefully augment, repurpose, and replace with these new systems. Parts of Gaptainer are emerging today. The energy components and decentralized nature of it remain, but the technologies would need to change for many reasons. First and foremost was the Gaptainer itself.

      Container adaptive construction is trendy, green, and uniform in shape and size, creating numerous possible uses and configurations. However, metal boxes are horrible to work in with noisy equipment. Secondly, Covid-19 suddenly shut down half of the food manufacturing infrastructure in the United States, in the form of restaurants and food service, where half of our food was already being prepared and sold in local communities. Gaptainer was created to manufacture and sell food to those very facilities. Suddenly these facilities and equipment became available to do the same things we set out to do in Gaptainers.

      Only people can make change, and Covid (Nature) was forcing people to change. Everyone suddenly needed to put their families and safety first due to the pandemic. With the restaurants closing, Chef Michael took a new job in Pittsburg to do this same work with Compass Foods, who had just seen their supply chain implode, in the very manner Gaptainer was designed to prevent. I was offered a position at the local Botanical Garden. We moved the education components from Hardesty there. Lincoln University and Powell Gardens have a promising future ahead. Before I could make that move, Covid-19 force me into a cocoon too. Things were still too unsettled, especially me.

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      Original Gaptainer Design

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      As I entered my cocoon, I would not do it alone. My wife and daughter are still with me. I guess that means that they approve of my journey. I was also reached out to by an old friend, Byron Webster, with who I had developed Botany Buddy, as I

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