American integrative scholar and practitioner in the field of culture design. Co-founder (with Penny Heiple) of the Design School for Regenerating Earth, organizing bioregional learning ecosystems and Bioregional Resource Hubs globally. Founder and executive director of the Center for Applied Cultural Evolution.
Contribution
Brewer brings insights from complexity science, the cognitive and behavioral sciences, and study of the dynamic Earth system to strategy formulation, policy creation, and community development efforts. He has worked with nonprofits and social enterprises on three continents over fifteen years. Previous affiliations include research director for /TheRules, co-founder of Evonomics Magazine, and coordinator for the creation of the Cultural Evolution Society.
Brewer started Earth Regenerators, a study group and community of practice around the restoration of planetary health while safeguarding humanity’s future. His work on the rigorous study of social change identified key structural limitations: the complexity of social systems, the centrality of values (which resist quantification), the influence of power dynamics on outcomes, and the principle of hysteresis and thermal inertia, which holds that a modified system does not easily return to its original state. He compares this to climatic changes where extreme weather events experienced today were created by an ocean that absorbed heat in the early 1980s.
Quotes
“The idea that human economic systems can ignore the laws of physics comes out of dualistic ways of thinking and anthropocentrism in particular. This gives rise to things like measuring GDP, even if you destroyed an entire forest to create GDP. The ways that this dualism, this way of separating the world out into metaphysically existing different realities, is just absolutely absurd, and it plays out in so many ways: with a theory of rational action, acting as though emotions aren’t part of reasoning, acting as though ethics and morality are in the realm of moral philosophy and aren’t part of economic theory. It is these dualities and dualisms that give rise to many different forms of human exceptionalism. So you could say, basically, anthropocentrism is the pathology and it is expressed through these dualistic ways of thinking through our economic systems.”
Digital library
Related pages
Provenance
Extracted from the BioHub Glossary CSV export (Notion, August 2026). Enriched August 2027 from the Roam Research graph (MichaelHaupt): biographical detail, quote, digital library PDF, and cross-references added.