Portfolio Update: 6 September 2026
This post documents the past month of work across my portfolio. It is not content for its own sake, but a record of what is actually happening, offered to those supporting or following this inquiry. I welcome corrections, additions, and disagreements from anyone working in this space.
The Chalk Rivers Festival: Strategy and Retrospective
The central event of the past month was the Chalk Rivers Festival, held on 25 August at The Quadrangle in Shoreham, Kent, in memory of Mark Lintell. My own contribution centered on strategy, design, and network weaving. Among attendees who left a review, the festival averaged 4.7 out of five stars. My colleague Richard Coates of Living Thames has already written a thorough account of the day, which I recommend reading for the full texture of who came, what was made, and what was said. What follows is the strategic reasoning behind it and where it points next.
There are only about 210 chalk rivers and streams in the world, and southern England holds the majority of them. A chalk river is downstream evidence of an aquifer. Rain falls onto porous chalk and percolates into the ground. The rock filters the water as it travels through bedrock before emerging lower on the slope as a clear flow. This is a single hydrogeological system that pays no attention to administrative boundaries or the distinction between one water company's franchise and another's. Stewarding it properly forces the multi-scale governance question I am building toward through the Wealden Dome work, since the ecosystem we are trying to protect is a continuous body that no single-mandate institution can hold end to end.
Chalk rivers are effective organizing lenses. The health of a stream, including its flow, its clarity, and the life it supports, works as a proxy that anyone can observe. These reference points reveal whether upstream land use, abstraction licensing, and sewage discharge across an entire catchment degrade the ecosystem beyond its regenerative capacity. The river gives people something concrete to attach identity and obligation to, while the geology explains why town, catchment, and Dome sit inside one system rather than three separate ones.
Another critical perspective considers the role of such rare ecosystems in indicating the trajectory of human civilization. Indy Johar and Dark Matter Labs are developing a framework of civilizational optionality, the durable capacity to generate and choose among viable, regenerative futures under constraint. Chalk ecosystems form under specific geological and climatic conditions that cannot be recreated once lost. Losing one is not a fungible loss in the way losing generic wetland acreage might be, in principle, replaceable elsewhere. It is a permanent narrowing of the ecological forms available to future generations.
Over-abstraction, the removal of water faster than an aquifer can recharge, is the local instance of the exact pattern this framework warns against at civilizational scale. The extractive use trades future option-space for present throughput. This summer's drought and hosepipe bans made that case evident. It is also precisely what makes chalk streams a workable pilot for the transferable systemic capability this work is ultimately trying to build, including monitoring commons, rights-of-nature instruments, and bioregional governance. Given that England holds the overwhelming share of a globally rare ecosystem, the stewardship sitting in the Darent Valley is not a parochial amenity question. It carries a disproportionate share of the responsibility for keeping one whole category of viable future open at all.
The festival itself wove together two complementary threads of knowledge. From an ecological perspective, the Darent River Preservation Society (DRiPS) and the South East Rivers Trust, alongside the North West Kent Countryside Partnership, brought decades of programmatic knowledge and analysis. From a cultural perspective, willow weaving, print-making, and a singing workshop by Helena Day invited people to listen to and connect with the river, alongside a strong intergenerational dynamic connecting children, parents, and elders.
Councillors Laura Edie and Laura Manston spoke in the evening program about the ongoing effort to secure legal rights for the River Darent. The campaign in Dartford builds on the Sevenoaks motion already passed and is working toward similar legislation for the lower Darent to cohere rights for the entire river. Attendees traveled from as far as Oxford, Winchester, Dover, Brighton, and the Isle of Sheppey, a reach worth noting given that approximately 21% of the UK's chalk streams sit within the Thames catchment alone.
Credit for pulling this off belongs to Sarah Newman, who co-organized the festival with me and led on workshops, food, and volunteers, and to Jessie Teggin and family at The Quadrangle, who handled ticketing and the venue itself at no charge. Funding came from the South East Rivers Trust, matched with existing funds from the Shoreham Midsummer Festival.
Next year, I want to widen the invitation to other chalk-focused groups such as Big Chalk and the Geopark Transmanche, lift attendance beyond this year's cap of 150 if possible, and build in more action-oriented sessions on water security through deeper engagement with the Darent and Cray Catchment Partnership. One immediate way to carry this momentum forward is an invitation. Everyone who came to the Chalk Rivers Festival is warmly invited to the Living Thames Bioregional Convergence on 16 and 17 October in Pangbourne (see below). The Chalk Rivers Festival introduced people to the Darent as a living system, and the Convergence is where that same thinking scales up to the whole Thames catchment, giving Darent-based groups and individuals a direct way to plug into a wider bioregional network.
Deep Code Conversations: A New Monthly Salon
I am launching a series of eight monthly salon-style conversations designed to bring systems change concepts to a genuinely general audience, something I wanted to do for a while but struggled to make accessible without leaning on academic language. The format borrows Dark Matter Labs' Deep Code Cards, a discussion tool that surfaces the deeply held, largely invisible assumptions embedded in our economic, legal, and social systems and asks whether they still serve us.
Each session takes one card as its theme. The first session will address the psychological code of Zero Sum Lives, questioning the logic that one party’s gain is another party’s loss. It will take place on 1 October, 19:00 to 21:00, at the Oak Tavern in Sevenoaks. It is free, requires no prior expertise, and is deliberately local rather than London-facing. If you live in or around Sevenoaks and the Darent Valley, come along, and bring anyone you think might be curious. The goal across the series is threefold: build community, raise awareness of the dominant logics running beneath everyday decisions, and create a pipeline connecting participants to local grassroots action.
Other Upcoming Events
Bioregion East Kent Gathering (11 September, 13:00 to 17:00, Friends Meeting House, Canterbury): I will attend this gathering to connect with Bioregion East Kent CIC and others organizing along the River Stour, whose catchment overlaps part of the Wealden Dome. The event is currently sold out, but if you live in the Stour catchment or an overlapping area, it is worth contacting the organizers directly since they may be able to find space.
Places for Life: The Power of Imagination with Rob Hopkins (19 September, 09:30 to 16:00, Weald & Downland Living Museum, Chichester): Hosted by Really Regenerative at Weald & Downland Living Museum, this session brings Rob Hopkins to West Sussex for a day on collective imagination as a practical tool for regeneration. I am attending to meet Jenny Andersson, gain insight into how Really Regenerative approaches place-based coalition building, and learn more about Weald and Downland ecosystems.
Kent Biodiversity & Regenerative Food Festival (3 October, 10:30 to 16:00, The Vine Gardens, Sevenoaks): A free festival celebrating regenerative growers, producers, and food security work across Kent. I am attending to connect with people working in the local food system and to learn what regenerative solutions are already being applied here.
Living Thames Bioregional Convergence (16 to 17 October, Pangbourne): I am co-organizing this two-day gathering with the rest of the Living Thames group, bringing together organizers from across the Thames tributaries, the UK, and abroad to share knowledge on bioregional infrastructure. Joe Brewer and Penny Heiple of the Design School for Regenerating Earth will join at the close of their bioregional pilgrimage through North Africa, North America, and Europe to share their vision for a thousand bioregional learning centers worldwide.
Sevenoaks Imagines Preliminary Gathering (24 October, 11:00 to 16:00, Sevenoaks Unitarian Meeting House): Theo Silberston of Shared Horizon and I finalized the date for the preliminary gathering ahead of the larger, town-wide Sevenoaks Imagines event planned for late January. We will test the Open Space format with light structure around the question “How are we going to talk about the future in Sevenoaks?” Phelim McDermott of Improbable and Devoted and Disgruntled will co-facilitate.
This is a deliberately small 30-person test run to find the right words and shape before we extend the invitation to the whole town. If you sense something shifting in Sevenoaks and want to help us find the language for the bigger conversation, get in touch to reserve a place.
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