Why We Resonate with Regenerative
Listen to our audio narration with music accompaniment: Why We Resonate with Regenerative
Are you in rhythm with the deep roots of regeneration…recognizing that sustaining doesn’t go the distance?
“To distinguish both terms it is necessary to understand that sustainability is very focused on solutions. The regenerative gaze does not see things through problems, but through the potential of the specific place, the specific people, the specific ecology and the spirit of collaborative fabric in the specific bioregion; it is not looking for outcomes such as a new transportation system, sustainable agriculture, or a substitute for plastic. The focus of regeneration is not to deliver products, but rather that people learn from their place, that they are expressions of their place to weave into it.” ~ Daniel Christian Wahl
If we just sustain things, doing less harm, as we roll — it’s not nearly enough.
And yet, many ordinary citizens aren’t attuned to the significance of regenerative perspectives — let alone the terminology.
And many of us still use one or both terms…sometimes with clear grounded understanding of their meaning and interconnected relationship — often misconstrued and superficial…
Viable sustainability is dependent on and nested within the bigger regenerative imperative.
We’ve gotta ask, “What are we sustaining?”
Regenerative goes way beyond ticking boxes, superficial compliance metrics or satisfying the bare minimums to survive in the short run. Regeneration is not a thing. It’s not a trend or a concept.
Regeneration encompasses living interconnected processes that are the essence of all life — how healthy patterns are nurtured, deeply rooted and able to flourish over the long haul. This includes:
🌿 Attention to connectedness and relationships,
🌿 Understanding how all life, at every scale, is nested in relationships within (larger) ecologies and environments — places, communities and ecosystems — microcosms and macrocosms
🌿 Feedback loops to monitor effects and flows, enabling adaptation
🌿 Ability to adapt proactively and responsively, attuned to changing variables and needs
🌿 Learning and continuous improvement that’s built-in
🌿 Circularity — living systems with little to zero waste
🌿 Everything — the parts and the whole — in synergy, contributing to healthy life cycles
Nature does this brilliantly. There’s lots of complexity, and yet there is an underlying simplicity.
All living systems are subject to the immutable laws of nature.
“Nature is a totally efficient, self-regulating system. If we discover the laws that govern this system and live synergistically within them, sustainability will follow and humankind will be a success.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
Somewhere along the way, much of humanity lost touch with life. The implications and impacts are staggering! Learning how to restore, protect, nurture and sustain natural balance and flows, so that we can not only coexist, but thrive — is the big hairy challenge before us.
Rebalancing society toward regenerative flourishing capacity needs everyone doing their part.
Incremental tweaks here and there, especially when decontextualized from living ecological relationships, perpetuate a too-little-too-late trajectory. At this critical juncture, we’re all late adopters!
In some ways, ‘regenerative’ defies any description that tries to encapsulate it. Regenerative embodies grounded ways of living and being — that are context-based and place-sourced.
However and wherever we show up and function — our life purpose, is inextricably interconnected with regenerative. It means everything to us, and its not about us…
At the heart of all living systems — living and working in naturally interdependent and adaptive ways that are conducive to and in harmony with the flows and cycles of life.
Our world is so ecologically, socially and economically destabilized through degeneration on every scale. We are paradoxically challenged to go back and restore what’s been lost, (Indigenous ways,) and collaboratively adapt pathways forward, with the best scientific knowledge and enabling technology— living into regenerative ways — an ongoing deeply humbling learning journey…
Degenerative, reductionist patterns have contributed to a very divided and polarized world. Our organizations and institutions are not fit-for-meaningful-purpose.
Building bridges across all the (artificial) divides and designing regenerative ecosystems includes:
🌿 Shaping and fostering healthy communities, entities and governing processes
🌿 Honouring and enabling multicapital value flows — beyond financial
🌿 Enabling technology and work systems that set the context for regenerative ways of being and engender systemic trust
🌿 Reframing many things — leadership, governance, entrepreneurship, citizenship and more…
As we face (stages of) collapse of a spiritually bankrupt Industrial Age monocapital GDP driven civilization, we take on the unimpossible with deep love, humility, anguish and joy.
Exceeding the limits of a finite living planet, with escalating destabilizing damaging impacts, challenges us to find viable ways that might shift the trajectory. We excavate beneath polarizing labels such as degrowth and green growth in these three articles: Underneath the Labels…Billions of Stories, Holding the Tension of Less is More and Humanity’s Soul: Life or Growth, building on Gaya Herrington’s discussion with Nate Hagens, on the Great Simplification series.
Is the birthing of a life-affirming civilization underway?
There are growing numbers of us germinating seeds and tending the tender shoots that are emerging through the cracks and chasms of societal systems that must be transformed.
The Three Horizons Framework, developed by Bill Sharpe (International Futures Forum) as described by Daniel Christian Wahl in this excerpt from his book Regenerative Cultures sheds light on differing horizons, underlying drivers and ways to understand and navigate three future trajectories or pathways — in the present. Many of us reference this model as a way to reflect on our futures literacy capacity — our world views/orientation — and apply a very practical and strategic lens to guide decisions and leverage opportunities:
“The framework helps us to become more aware of how our individual and collective intentions and behaviours actively shape the future today. By mapping three ways of relating to the future from the perspectives of the three horizons we can bring the value of each of them to the conversation in a generative way that fosters understanding and future consciousness as the basis for collaborative action and transformative innovation.” ~ Daniel Christian Wahl
There are many more people in our world who, recognizing and feeling the failure of the old paradigm, are seeking, choosing and shaping regenerative ways.
How can we mindfully open up pathways that widen access, enabling individual and collective agency for people to get underway, wherever their journeys begin, with gifts differing, in a variety of ways? This is a key question that guides us as we navigate.
Learning from and with Indigenous wisdom keepers as partners — not misappropriating via colonization — is integral to this journey.
Vanessa Andreotti and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures [GTDF] collective share insights that might deepen our understanding of why and how pervasive entangled colonizing patterns persist, in this excerpt, ongoing research toward an upcoming book — Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity and Collapse With Compassion and Accountability
This vitally important research potentially helps us understand how deep layers of (un)learning and decolonization are essential to regenerative flourishing.
As we reflect and process implications, we’re exploring tender territory that warrants deep work and working through — with sensitivity, open minds and warm hearts…
This is all work-in-progress. Our understanding so far…
Industrial Age patterns of modernity programmed engrained ways of thinking, perceiving and relating that, over time, can become hard-wired — potentially affecting neurobiology.
The colonizing posture of cultural supremacy is not a distorted perception of the other. This goes beyond cognitive biases and blindspots. Cultural supremacy is rooted in separateness — “a distorted identity of self as separate.”
It manifests as “entitlements” with reinforcing loops keeping social/societal systems stuck:
🌿 Colonizing domination-oppression patterns emphasize individualism
🌿 Our interconnectedness and interdependence with all life and living beings became submerged under this fictional story of separation and dominion over nature
🌿 Compartmentalized left-brain leaning mechanistic ways seem to get stuck on repeat-rewind
This has led to more double binds with much to unpack and unlearn:
🌿 Understanding how this became so insidious and cyclical is essential to compost degenerative entitlement patterns
🌿 Inner and socially mirrored norms whereby distortion of self as separate, along with the tendency to relate via hierarchical ranking — won’t just shift with a flip of a cognitive switch
Reflecting on profound implications for social justice and wellbeing:
🌿 Altruism and shaming can also reflect and reinforce these false dualities
🌿 Surface-deep slogans and memes may reflect lingering signs of modernity
“We are nature” has deep ecological and epistemic roots. Deep shifts call for holistic re-patterning.
🌿 This can’t be accomplished from individual/personal enlightenment contexts that reinforce self-as-separate
🌿 Cognitively adopting diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) values doesn’t go deep enough toward an embodied sense of oneness
Many of us are working in a variety of ways to shed dysfunctional patterns — unlearn, relearn and restore regenerative relational ways of being that align with our interconnectedness and interdependence — deeply embodied with the sacredness of all life.
Healing pathways and every day relational learning are needed to nurture deep rewiring toward decolonizing shifts. Pathways toward interbecoming are a nonlinear mutually enlightening intergenerational, multi-generational pilgrimage.
We could say much more, but honestly words alone pale. Lots of folks talk about…regenerative — us too. At best, our words are clumsy tools. Navigating between worlds, we’re also navigating between words — wor(L)ds.
How we mindfully activate, living the questions — is perhaps what matters most.
🌿 How might this inform our ongoing work?
🌿 How can we open and widen pathways, bridging divides that keep domination-oppression patterns spinning — a disservice to all [bio]diverse cultures and a living planet?
🌿 What might become (more) possible when decolonization is explored and embodied toward deeper (un)learning, relearning and restoring of life-affirming pathways?
🌿 Can we address and transcend colonizing barriers and divides rooted in a distorted sense of self identity as separate, which in turn creates so many distortions and systemic injustices?
This excellent integrative 2023 paper crafted by 25 contributing authors stands out as a comprehensive holistic view of regeneration looking through a multi-dimensional lens — The Regenerative Lens: A conceptual framework for regenerative social-ecological systems.
“Our framework emphasizes that to be regenerative, a system — e.g., a person, family, community, or organization — cannot be regenerative on its own but only as part of a regenerative ‘‘ensemble’’ of interdependent social-ecological systems that are mutually supporting each other. To foster these dynamics and therefore the wellbeing and continued evolution of human societies and wider nature, a regenerative system would need the individual and mutually reinforcing contributions of five essential qualities: an embodied ecological worldview, mutualistic interactions, high diversity, agency, and reflexivity.”
When we pause and reflect, it is abundantly evident that most of humanity and our living planet are in a state of degeneration.
The shift to regeneration — is in itself an adaptive living systems process. This is good news…
There’s a blossoming and burgeoning of regenerative resources, material and (still fragile) initiatives. Encouraging — these are more than glimmers of inspiring possibilities.
We are also witnessing lots of early stage, superficial interest and virtue signalling, including the tendency to gloss over the deeper ongoing layered regenerative journey — warranted across all domains, dimensions and scales of society, life and work.
Every new iteration, article, book, case study and story can potentially help to inspire, mobilize and move in multiple ways and directions.
A testament to our creative force, is the drive to find, discern and shape meaning — zooming in…internalizing and zooming out with agency to interconnect and activate in new ways. This often manifests as new terminology, models and graphics that offer additional lenses — fractals of regeneration. Seems it’s in our inherent human nature to (re)invent, (re)construct and (re)discover myriad ways to map, iterate, portray and convey what nature knows— as the living, breathing dynamic properties and wholeness of all adaptive living nested (eco)systems.
Dancing with inherent paradox and tensions, we cannot encapsulate the whole livingness from any view, angle, vantage point, snapshot or even multiple dimensional representation — as we navigate in overlapping and differentiated ways, labouring and living into a life-affirming livable future.
Reminded time and again:
“The map is not the territory” and “The word is not the thing.” ~ Alfred Korzybski
“The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.” ~ Tao Te Ching — Verse 1
Our greatest challenge, perhaps: co-learning, embodying, accepting and interbecoming, the life-affirming patterns of nature — the living terrain — which includes us and the nuggets of wisdom (in various forms) that we unearth, carry around and bring forward.
There is no substitute for beingness.
Somehow, mindfully, hopefully we will make peace with the messiness of this journey, while also making progress, reframing and stretching our perspectives on what deep systemic progress looks like — the forms it will take and the diverse ways that people will describe it across cultures, lived experience and world views.
And so we look for intersectional points of collaboration and leverage, exercising some caution as we venture forth, and (gingerly) celebrating indicators of progress — we’re always learning and adapting.
In a world of 8+ billion we need it all. Part of our learning is layered (un)learning and (re)learning. Letting go of the (illusory) control that got us into this existential soup, is an ongoing tension that often continues to insidiously ensnare. Even those of us who reject the (old) degenerative paradigm — living in this world and impacted by it — can inadvertently, at times blindly, slip into those dysfunctional patterns, whereby righteous ‘regenerative’ ends justify the means — and whatever that all means.
Increasingly, more of us get that this is an ongoing journey — that the journey itself embodies a regenerative life-giving process conducive-to-life. We may understand this conceptually — in our heads. The being — navigating and behaving in ways that are (reasonably) congruent — is a deeply humbling learning adventure for us all.
Beingness is in the how we show up — moment-by-moment and how we connect and integrate those moments into coherent bigger HOWs…
Beingness is the alchemy that transforms, activates and combines our intentions and ideas.
Being ‘unstitutional,’ as we traverse a regenerative path — we aren’t heroes and we aren’t rescuers. We aren’t trying to be gurus nor are we trying to attract them. The challenges we’re all facing, to varying degrees, are the biggest commoning forces of all.
We are all ordinary— perhaps better described as denizens — and messy humans.
Any one of us can shine, at any time, without seeking a spotlight. Sometimes we lead; sometimes we follow.
Our unwavering focus is on regenerative-rooted ways, co-discovering, sharing and amplifying positive indicators and stories — as we collectively live into an inclusive pluriversal or omniversal life-affirming future.
Sahana Chattopadhyay’s writings and YouTube channel invite us to envisage and help birth the fullness and inclusivity of a regenerative pluriverse that does more than make room for diverse ways of knowing and being. So many life-affirming ways have been here all along — ignored, obscured, overpowered…
“The Pluriverse is a vision of a world where many worlds fit. We live in a stunningly complex and diverse world. It’s unmitigated hubris to think that one single economic monomyth can meaningfully hold our civilizational trajectory. Our current planetary crises, variously called the pluricrises and metacrises, is proof of the fallacious nature of this monomyth.”
A multitude of pathways across contexts and cultures and a wide range of collaborative commons communities, initiatives and coalition work can contribute, inspire and shape meaningful strides.
By bridging divides, co-catalyzing and working together in various combinations from the common space between, people across business, government and civil society, can help shift from current dysfunctional systems towards regenerative patterns.
Our unstitutional work aims for regenerative progress with ever-widening ripples that collectively support all of us who are advancing these efforts in a variety of ways:
🌿 Sound interconnected, adaptable strategy — emergent and strategic
🌿 Enabling governing frameworks — aligned with common purpose and game be operating principles and conduct
🌿 Adaptive evolutionary navigation — holistic and guided by recognizable and emergent patterns
🌿 Collaborative co-creative capacity and power — galvanized and amplified
🌿 Linkage to synergistic initiatives and coalitions — local, bioregional and worldwide
🌿 Messy humanness and monsters — challenges and barriers anticipated, recognized, addressed, humoured at times and/or overcome via sound strategy, creativity, relational human/social system evolutionary navigation and omni-partiality — relative subject and methodology neutrality
🌿 Learnings about the process and impacts documented and shared via articles and papers — (trans)contextual insights and active learning
🌿 Multi-modal storymaking, storytelling and storyliving — shared widely
🌿 Capacity to adapt and right scale — deep and wide anywhere in the world
🌿 Multiple funding sources attracted and accessed with living lab pilots demonstrating movement— advancing systemic investing and regenerative finance via shifting economics for societal value
🌿 Individual and collective coherent agency demonstrating how we all can contribute with gifts differing — little and big effects — wherever we are in the world
🌿 Adopting healthy balanced partnership ways and letting go of domination, centre stage patterns of leadership
In this September 2024 Great Simplification episode, “Bioregional Futures: Reconnecting to Place for Planetary Health,” Daniel Christian Wahl deepens the intertwined regenerative pathways of living, working and being — a collective quest to anchor simplification aligned with contexts and place — in kinship and living into ways that are conducive to life — now. He discusses bioregioning, as healing relationships to place and the essence of life, rooted in our inherent Indigeneity and diverse cultures.
Facing realities of degenerative collapse and opening/widening viable accessible pathways towards interdependent ecosystem layer regeneration, bring together many ways of knowing. Ancestral wisdom and science and enabling (not driving) technology and funding flows can nourish and inspire deep local work, education and mindful activation.
Perhaps we can inter-learn how to nurture (g)local ways — honouring and restoring (not misappropriating) what Indigenous cultures have always understood — what so many of us lost along the way…
Falling back in love with all life and place is (becomes) an integrative wholesome, heart-centred spiritual every day experience. It kinda defies labels and branding that maintain shiny consumerist, commoditizing patterns.
With gifts differing, (un)learning journeys are underway, taking many forms. Guided by and grounded in active hope, we’re becoming more comfortable being uncomfortable. Better to consciously choose (when we have some choice,) ways to be uncomfortable — together.
Tom Atlee’s latest book Co-intelligence: The Applied Wisdom of Wholeness, Interconnectedness, and Co-Creativity synthesizes decades of research and work, building from the wise democracy pattern language.
Co-intelligence illuminates multiple patterns and pathways available to expand our horizons, ways of seeing, understanding, widening and deepening regenerative possibilities.
Retrospective and forward-facing, we can enrich our learning and expand our relational and sense making capacity, co-activating as engaged participants in our wiser human evolution — within the contexts of ongoing every day work and life.
This is a time for radical humility and collaboration, heart-centredness and all our co-intelligence. Life-centric…
This is not about any one of us. It’s about all of us and an interconnected living planet.
We can all be ‘unstitutional’ — another metaphor that reflects this (un)learning journey, finding pathways that support what is sometimes described as a life-affirming (r)evolution.
Collectively and joyfully, we can be and do this — Dancing to the Beat of a (R)evolution.
Ordinary can become extraordinary, when we combine our differentiated and overlapping efforts in a wide variety of ways.
There’s a growing reservoir of publications, learning resources, pioneers, practitioners, scientists, bioregional, land and water regenerative restoration work, healing modalities and stories that are pointing the way. We celebrate, draw from, support, share and build collaboratively from these. On a planet of 8+ billion people, we need it all — widening the pathways for multitudes of initiatives to flourish.
A spirit of generosity, reciprocity and enabling value flows will lift us all, as we take on the most important work of our time, with far-reaching life affirming potential for future generations of our human and more than human kin.
Listen to our audio narration with music accompaniment: Why We Resonate with Regenerative
This article was updated again September 2024, reflecting additional perspectives, links and ongoing action research, as we continue to observe, listen and adapt.
Unstitution was birthed as a collective creative commons and nested ecosystem. We (co-)catalyze and support collaborative communities, initiatives and coalitions where people from across sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations and walks-of-life work together on mission critical issues. From readiness through to regenerative progress — moving beyond polarization — is how we roll. The links embedded throughout this article are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time. For more insights reflecting our ongoing journey, our suite of Unstitution articles are published on Medium. They reflect a small sample of the ways we are adapting and contributing among ever-expanding commons-based communities and initiatives inspired and fuelled by citizens — perhaps better described as denizens — anywhere in the world — living into the principles and spirit that govern our collaborative work. Each article is a fractal-like glimpse into the unstitutional ethos.
You can follow Unstitution and engage with us on LinkedIn. Many of our posts and perspectives also pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth.
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