What qualities would characterise a regenerative economy?
A Conversation between John Fullerton and Daniel Wahl
[Thank you to Rhonda Fabian and Kosmos Journal for helping with the transcript and editing of this interview.]
Daniel Christian Wahl:
I actually like to start with inviting people to really take the time to tell a little bit their own story. What is the point where things started to shift for you? How did you grow into this realization that we can create conditions conducive to life and that regeneration is really our job if we want to reconnect to the wider family that we’re part of and that we depend on?
John Fullerton:
The short version is I spent nearly 20 years at what I always like to call the old JP Morgan. And I was completely ignorant of any of these issues, like I think most people, even today who work in big finance. Even with the rise of all of the ESG (environmental, social and governance), and sustainability conversation, the understanding of this issue, particularly a regenerative system is still missing from Wall Street, by and large. But I worked in a different time at Morgan. It was a very different culture. It was a very positive experience for the most part. And I left in 2001, really in response to a nagging itch that I had that started many years earlier.
And so I chose to do that just on an intuition that I needed to find a different purpose in my life. And things started to happen very quickly after that, and probably the highlight or the low light, but the most impactful was that the first day I went back to the city after taking the summer off to begin “what’s the next part of my life?” happened to be 9/11. And so I experienced that. Ironically, I had a meeting with a charter school CEO downtown at 9:30 in the morning, (I was doing impact investing already), and I was thinking about getting involved in the education challenge. And with a meeting at 9:30, that means I was in the subway at 9:10. And I got to the street in lower Manhattan at the moment when the second plane hit.
That forced me into this deep think period. And so to answer your question, I spent the next several years dabbling in various entrepreneurial projects, but mostly sitting in this building, which is a converted barn, set up as a home office, reading books. And I’m not an academic by background and I just started reading stuff somewhat randomly. I was sort of a self-select, self-taught PhD in truth, and discovered the environmental crisis. Read Limits to Growth, read Kirchhoff’s work on systems. And it was mind blowing because I came to this rolling understanding that everything I thought was true was not possible physically. The physics of exponential growth on a finite planet don’t work. And as a finance guy, I know that the economy is driven by finance and if the economic premise of our entire global economy is in conflict with the laws of physics, we have a serious problem.
And so that’s essentially how… It was just this search for, not an answer to that question, but a pathway to navigate away from that conclusion that brought me onto this path of living systems and ultimately the regenerative paradigm.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Were you already sensing that there was something amiss with that system, or was it only once you took the time out and stepped back and had the time to read, that you grew into that insight?
John Fullerton:
I knew there was something wrong with the system from a personal fit point of view. Believe it or not, I went into Wall Street with a fairly idealistic view that finance was the engine of economic prosperity. And so I was going to learn about finance, and then I had this idea that maybe I’ll work for the World Bank someday and save the world. And I got into derivatives at the beginning and suddenly the purpose of my career was career success and making money as opposed to doing something productive in the world. And so I got tired of that. I remember one morning, literally looking in the mirror as I was getting dressed and not liking the person I was becoming.
And I remember one day I was managing capital markets businesses and the big event is when you get your bonus. And I remember handing this trader his bonus, and yeah, it was a big number and it wouldn’t sound like a big number today, given how much people are making, but it was a lot of money. And the guy looked at me and he said something to the effect of, well, something I wouldn’t say on your recording. He told me where I could go. And I just said, my life is not about dealing with little shit head traders who tell me where to go when I hand them a big check at the end of the year. And so I just recoiled against the money culture that Wall Street had become. But that’s completely different than understanding that economics and finance are in conflict with physics, that’s a whole different level of realization. So it was more a personal crisis of consciousness, I would say.
It was years of doing impact investing, but wandering in the dark, really, it was a search. I guess it was my quasi ‘dark night of the soul’, where I was really questioning who I was and what my purpose was, and then the financial crisis happened. Suddenly, my friends who I’d been sharing this with didn’t think I was crazy anymore. So I created the Capital Institute — I was working on it in 2009 and launched it in 2010 — really as a place to ask these questions. And I had, by then, discovered Herman Daly and ecological economics, and was wrestling with this growth issue. But only through some of my investment projects in agriculture, did I discover regenerative thinking.
The first piece was discovering holism. And I learned that through Allan Savory and his holistic land management. We actually created a company together called Grasslands, and I’ve been on the Savory board for 10 years. And so I learned about this distinction between reductionist thinking and holistic thinking from one of the true practitioners of that in the world today. And Alan introduced me to Jan Smuts, who is essentially the theoretical master of this. And it blows my mind that Smuts’ work is still barely even recognized by folks.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Smuts was such a fascinating character. He is the only the person who signed the armistice of both the first and the second World War.
John Fullerton:
Yes. He wrote Holism and Evolution maybe in six months between Wars. And he apologized in the forward, saying, “I didn’t really have enough time to work on this, but here you go.” And it’s extraordinary.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
The work that Patrick Geddes did afterwards was very deeply influenced by Smuts. Patrick Geddes was the founding father of bioregionalism.
John Fullerton:
You learn something every day.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
He lived in Scotland around the turn of the century, as a biologist and also recognized as a founder of town planning sociology, and the Edinburgh festival, something that grew out of the Edinburgh summer school, where Geddes brought people like Le Play and Haeckle and Kropotkin, and all these thinkers together to explore, basically inspired by Jan Smuts, more holistic perspectives on our participation in the world.
John Fullerton:
I think it’s worth drilling down on this point for a second. So he’s known for being this guy who says cows are going to save the planet and that’s obviously a very controversial thing to say. And I think he probably could have said it better, and I think he was misinterpreted by what he actually meant. But in getting to know him deeply, I remember I was on a walk with him once and he said, “My real contribution to society is holistic decision-making and has nothing to do with cows and nothing to do with ranches.” And I remember it was sort of early in my relationship with him, and of course those words are pretty abstract, and so I remember thinking to myself, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, but just tell me about this cow thing. How does that work?” And I think we’re in the same place in economics and finance and everything else. This issue applies to every field of knowledge.
And yet it’s something that we naturally don’t want to tackle because it’s abstract. And so if you think about holism in reductionism in finance — there’s nothing more reductionist than finance. We, by design, optimize risk-adjusted return on capital and use terms like internal rate of return, which means internal to that project and external to the whole system or ignoring the whole system. So the things we are taught, and beliefs, our self-evident truth are actually in conflict with a holistic worldview. And it’s pretty hard to change someone’s belief system once it’s wired in. And all of the conversations we’re having about shifting the economy and shifting finance always then fall back into that reductionist logic. And you wonder why we’re just making incremental change and not transformational change.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
I’m completely aligned with you because I have been counter-brainwashed at Schumacher College in the masters in holistic science in 2001, 2002, with the antidote to something that runs so deeply through our society, that we don’t even notice how often we thrown back into reductionist frames.
John Fullerton:
Which we need, we just need to know when we’re using them.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Exactly, that’s also a really important point because that was one of the things that I started to even kick back against at Schumacher at the time, because one of the traps we often fall in, when we tried to speak about the value of reductionism and holism next to each other, is to do the whole pendulum swing, paradigm shift.
John Fullerton:
Right. Good/bad.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Old bad, new good — rather than get the integration. But I think that needs to be excused partially by the structure of language, because even language has a somewhat either/or reductionist framing in it, at least in our western language.
John Fullerton:
In a western language. Yeah. Yeah. Wes Jackson has a great saying. Wes is one of my real teachers and he says, “There’s nothing wrong with the reductionist method so long as we don’t confuse the method with the way the world actually works.”
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Absolutely. That’s brilliant. And I think that’s part of holding that balance, as people wake up to the negative side effects of overly reductionist-focused world. In particular, you were saying earlier with finance being reductionist, the danger that we see even now among the regeneration movement — of building the structures, on the one hand, yes, we need to value things beyond financial capital, but I often find that the framings around ecological capital, social capital, or living capital…the minute you create a tool where you can convert one of these capitals to the other, even in the process of trying to open that umbrella to say, “We need to go beyond just valuing financial capital and return on investment, we need to talk about these other things and value them. The only way that we seem to be able to value them is to bring in financial economy.
John Fullerton:
Bring them into dollars.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
And I truly believe that many of the people working on this aren’t doing it with a subversive intent to create the vehicle for the largest enclosure of the commons yet…but if we don’t watch out, that’s exactly what it’s going to be.
John Fullerton:
Yes. There’s another challenge that I’ve only recently come to appreciate. This is a very practical issue, but it’s a very, I think, significant barrier to real progress. I would argue that converting natural capital into a monetizable measurable thing, means you work in the current paradigm. And so if you happen to like having a job and making a living, you’re forced to do that, even if it’s subconsciously, because you can then get invited to the parties, you can get invited to give talks, you can invited to be a professor.
But if you reject that, it’s hard to find a job.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Tell me about it. You have to just create them.
John Fullerton:
But that’s easier said than done. It’s easier for a guy like me to say that who spent 20 years on Wall Street, than my kids who are trying to figure out how to build a career. And so I think we need to understand what’s at work here, even if it’s at a subconscious level. And so people naturally are going to gravitate toward what ultimately is a subversive hold that the reductionist paradigm has on our thinking.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Absolutely. And the economy, I see this every time when we try to create the meta collaborative networks between different organizations, where each organization that we’re trying to bring together is a really valuable organization doing really beautiful work. The potential that they could unleash if a number of organizations really started to work on synergy and transformative systemic work is enormous, but very often being stuck to some degree in that degenerative economic system pushes each one of these organizations, understandably, to some extent, to first look after their own tribe that has been doing good work to enable them to continue to do the good work. And when that’s sure and safe, then they might be able to invest some extra time into the bigger story. But if they’re struggling financially, they’re not going to spend a lot of time looking at the larger picture of collaboration across organizations. And it’s not merging them, it’s working with the diversity of these organizations, and bringing them up to that next level of complexity where they can really have a transformative effect.
John Fullerton:
You and I’ve had this conversation before, but again, getting back to the too powerful role finance plays in this, if you’re talking about the nonprofit sector, the fuel there is funding from foundations. And I was in a meeting last summer, I probably shouldn’t be putting names out, but I was in a meeting convened by a philanthropy advisor among a number of large brand-name foundations. And everyone else invited was a foundation, and I was there as a provocateur who was a systems thinker. And the purpose of the meeting was to help foundations begin to think and behave and operate in a more systemic way.
There is a desire within the foundation world to do more systemic work. Again, easier said than done. And it was quite eye-opening and honestly, a bit depressing to realize how stuck the foundation model is in reductionist problem solving. Show me your problem, show me your theory of change, show me what you’re going to do, and then show to me in three years that you fixed the problem. And that’s completely different paradigm than transforming systems, as you know. And yet that’s where the fuel goes in the nonprofit world. So surprise, surprise, that’s what nonprofits primarily are resigned to doing in order to keep the fuel.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
I had a very similar experience, also last October, where again, maybe not naming a name, but I was in Switzerland with a large philanthropic organization who is really doing wonderful work in Africa and in other places, financing community-based regeneration work. And they brought a number of ‘doer’ foundations like Common Land and Renature together with a number of donor foundations. And again, the donor foundations all had their pathway to success, like ‘how do I apply what I learned, being a clever guy in the.com industry in Silicon Valley to gaining impact on positive things around the world’? Really well meaning, but driving small organizations on the ground to apply some kind of California standard of key performance indicators to their work in order to be more effective and scale up more quickly. “Scale up”, is what they always say. That distinction alone that bigger is better rather than place- sourced, working from the uniqueness of place, not copy/pasting solutions, but really adapting solutions to place. It’s so vital if we want to work regeneratively. And none of these foundations get that, unfortunately.
John Fullerton:
Not only do foundations not get that, the entire capitalist paradigm is essentially designed to dispense with that, because that’s all inefficient. And economics is about efficiency. And so if we can do a cookie cutter McDonald’s and roll it out, that’s super-efficient. And if we can get everyone on the Facebook platform, that sure is efficient. And we can’t be naïve, because that actually works in that old context. And so it’s just the unintended consequences that the chickens then come home to roost. But this to me is why, kind of going back to first principles is the only pathway that I know of to not make those mistakes. Because if you can get clear on the principles of a healthy system, then you have a roadmap. And without that, you have your opinion and my opinion, and Joe Blow’s opinion.
You may have great progress in a timeframe that’s irrelevant, like three to 10 years, but ultimately become the source of future problems that are exponentially worse. And if you need an example of that, look at the Green Revolution. I mean, it was a brilliant solution to a problem that lasted decades. And now we realize how profoundly misguided it was. And yet think about the probably billions of dollars of foundation money that went into the Green Revolution, and are still going into the Green Revolution.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
I’m not so sure if it ever was really brilliant, because it’s always been more than half of the world’s people are being fed by small -scale peasant farmers. Most of them are women. And so sometimes there’s a big oversell of what the big agri-industry actually does in terms of feeding the world.
John Fullerton:
I’m being polite.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
I think you are on that particular one.
John Fullerton:
But you ask the man on the street, or the informed man on the street, or woman on the street, about the Green Revolution and most people would say, “Yeah, that saved billions of people from starving to death.” And there’s some truth to that, right? So it’s not an absolute, at any rate.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
But I would love to come back to two things actually, because I’m just imagining you sitting in the room that you’re sitting in right now, reading all these books and doing your deep dive. And I must say you did an excellent job, because I had a moment, before I knew you, when I was reading through the pre-final first draft of my book. And I did another search, and suddenly there’s this white paper that pops up from the Capital Institute…
John Fullerton:
Well-hidden.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Well, I know how to search.
And I started reading it, and I had this brief moment, “I can’t believe that somebody’s put out something where they’ve mapped out what I’m trying to map with my book, but they got it out before me!” And then I thought, “well, wonderful. I’ve just been corroborated, that the map’s worth mapping, by somebody else. And somebody else has found the same pieces on the map.” And then I realized that you had some, and I had some extra.
John Fullerton:
Competitive instincts kick in.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Yes. And I immediately kind of applied mudita and celebrated what you’d achieved. And in that initial white paper, you were moving your way towards these principles that you’ve established for regenerative economics. And tell me a little bit more about what the principles are.
John Fullerton:
Well, first, thank you for your compliment. Coming from you, that means something, because you’ve obviously thought as deeply about this as anyone. And I would just throw a little cold water on it by telling you a quick anecdote.
I was at a regenerative conference once, and I was up given my spiel about my principles, and my paper, and blah, blah, blah. This very thoughtful, smart academic guy said essentially, “You know, John, there’s nothing really new here.” So I think we’re all regurgitating stuff that probably is all rooted in indigenous wisdom. If you really go down to it, what we’re all saying is what the indigenous cultures understood and have been saying, but in a language that is hard for us to translate into a Western kind of understanding. I don’t think there’s a lot ‘new’ in my work. If I take pride in it, it’s that it’s a synthesis and an integration that is put into a contemporary context for the contemporary challenges we face.
As I wrote it, I was always thinking of a friend of mine. His name is Duncan. He’s a real person, who is a Wall Street guy. And I’ve always wanted to write in a way that my friend Duncan wouldn’t be able to eliminate and reduce or ignore without going further. I try to make it sort of something that the current paradigm can’t simply reject out of hand. And so my language is such that it will be acceptable. And that limits it to some audiences, probably. For example, the choice of the word capitalism. You know, what I mean by capitalism is some integral or integrated understanding of multiple forms of capital. But I chose the word capitalism, so that my American audience wouldn’t dismiss it as socialist.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Yeah. I’m glad you’re saying this, because before I heard you say this, I’ve actually just justified and defended you for making that choice to a number of people, because I knew a number of people who we’re quite excited about the initial white paper that was originally called Regenerative Economics.
John Fullerton:
Yeah.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
And then when it came out as Regenerative Capitalism, they almost felt betrayed-
John Fullerton:
I know.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
… for you having used that word. And I said to all of them, “But he’s not talking to you. He’s not trying to preach to the choir. He’s trying to build a bridge into a group of people that really need to start a conversation around this.” And just yesterday, I was talking to Allan Combs, who, together with Ken Wilber, has developed the Wilber-Combs matrix and the different levels of human value clusters looking at the world. And he, again, made that point. We’re not going to shift everybody to a consciousness of interbeing and understanding, in two years time. We all are in a developmental journey. We need to have language that addresses that whole spectrum…and help people move on the spiral.
John Fullerton:
I partially used the word for the reason you just mentioned, and partially, if I were to be more accurate, I would have called it multi-capitals-ism, but that, obviously, is a mouthful. But, actually, I think regenerative economics, that is the core, that’s home base for me. But there are attributes of our, I prefer to use the term free enterprise system, that too often get either dismissed or not even comprehended by folks in the, let’s call it, the do-gooder world, who’ve never worked in the private sector. And some of those are very aligned with regeneration.
For example, innovation and adaptation is probably at the heart of the capitalist system. And that is not enough on its own, but it’s pretty easy to flush the baby out with the bath water if we’re not careful. And so I do try to have this one foot in both camps and not as many friends in either camp as I might have if I went one way or the other.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Yeah, I know that dynamic quite well. But I think that’s what we need to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. We need to build bridges between these camps and make people see these different arguments.
I remember working with Gaia Education and writing their online curriculum, and particularly I’m writing the second version of the economics online curriculum. When it first came out and Jonathan Dawson wrote the first version, and we had a critique on the growth economic system, the growth imperative in the system, and basically suggested that structure drives behavior. If you don’t change the structure of the economic system, we will continue to exploit each other and the planet, and therefore we need to redesign economics.
That was extremely radical in 2008. I mean, not that that was the first time when it was said, people have been saying it for much longer than that. But now, you have the founder of the World Economic Forum, as early as 2012, ’13, saying capitalism is broken and needs redesigning. And you even get the IMF or the WTO. And it’s not a taboo topic anymore to say something is fundamentally needing a shift, but then of course you get the camps again, of some people saying we can redesign capitalism, or rescue the world capital, if we apply it in a more nuanced way. And others say, no, no, no, capitalism is the problem. We’re just getting stuck with language here again.
John Fullerton:
It’s funny. I think most people would think that I’m like deep in that conversation because I’m out of that world. And the truth is my phone doesn’t ring from the folks that are rethinking capitalism. I’m viewed as way too radical, and probably way too theoretical. And I’m frustrated by this. And I kind of roll my eyes when I see the great capitalists now talking about corporations needing a purpose, for example. Well, what a brilliant idea. The business round table last summer came out with this new statement, “Hey, how about if corporations had a purpose?” And of course that’s the same statement that the business round table had as its premise in 1982, when I started at JP Morgan. And it was only in the, I don’t know, early nineties, I think, that the Milton Friedman school sort of took over, and they said the purpose is to maximize shareholder value!
So, we’re now back to understanding what was the baseline in the early 1980s, which probably goes back 50 years before that. And there’s a lot of new energy around ESG, and impact investing, and blah, blah, blah. With all due respect, I mean, these folks, and most of them are guys, are very smart. They’re very competitive. They’re very successful. And because of that, in our culture, they have a very big megaphone. And so when they get up and say, “We need to reinvent capitalism,” everyone says, “Yeah, we need to reinvent capitalism.”
But they haven’t sat over there and read 100 books to think about this in a deep way that you and I have. And so there’s a lot of well-meaning and good intention, but I think this gets back to this issue of not really getting your head around the fundamental profound disconnect … It just boils down to exponential growth on a finite planet. And how many people that work in business and finance actually understand what the second law of thermodynamics says, and why it’s relevant to our economy? I would bet you, if you put a hundred CEOs in a room, and didn’t count people that worked in a business that require a physics degree, half of them wouldn’t know what the second law of thermodynamics is. And 95% of them wouldn’t be able to tell you why that’s relevant to economics and business.
And so until people get their head around that issue, we’re sort of moving deck chairs around. And so I do wish that my voice was in that conversation. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. But that conversation about the future of capitalism, it’s pretty locked in… At best, it’s ‘we need to internalize externalities’, which is a reductionist way of putting the problem in the old paradigm. And that’s progress, so that’s good.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
And I mean, it’s a massive step. And maybe it’ll buy us some time, but that design won’t be the final design.
John Fullerton:
My interest is sort of ‘who I am’, to get in my little rowboat, and row out into the fog, and try to make sense of all this, and then sort of report back. And I’m not trying to build a career or build fame being the leader who speaks at World Economic Forum and gets the most applause. I’m truly searching for truth in what’s the ultimate crisis and challenge of humanity at this moment in time. And I’m not going to find it, but that’s what drives me.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
I do want to invite you to come back to the principles. I love that you said from the beginning, like, this is nothing new. I’ve always said this about my work. I synthesize, I bring things together. Sometimes, as Arthur Koestler says, innovation happens when you connect two things that were previously disconnected. So when you do synthesis, every now and then there’s a spark of something new that is also worth sharing. But as you were saying, other people have said this before. I thought of one of my mentors and elders, John Todd, and his friends when they started the New Alchemy Institute in 1969.
John Fullerton:
Yeah, I know John. Wonderful man.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
If you look at the statutes of the New Alchemy Institute, what they set out to do, it’s absolutely 100% relevant … Like if I set up an organization, I would probably use the same statutes, that’s what the marching orders are. But you homed in on eight principles. Could you just sum them up briefly?
John Fullerton:
Sure. So I think the most important thing about my eight principles are really not my eight principles, but the idea of principles. And one of the things I learned about complexity science and working in complexity is that we… and this is, again, something that is sacrilege in the business community, but we need to accept that we cannot manage complexity. Allan Savory likes to say, “We need to learn to dance with complexity.” And of course every CEO believes that their job is to manage their company in a complex context. And so we set up KPIs, and we set up all this stuff, and we end up failing to actually manage complexity. And it comes back and bites us in the form of a black swan event or whatever.
The idea of principles is that there are patterns and principles of living systems, that the giants of living system science… It’s not like they’ve all agreed that here are these eight principles, but if you were to show them my eight principles or whatever eight principles you would come up with, there would be this broad consensus that yes, these patterns and principles roughly describe our understanding of living systems.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
I’ve probably got about 50 lists of principles, and yes, they do all pretty much converge on what you distilled out with the eight principles.
John Fullerton:
So the first thing that came to me was this need for principles. It’s a North Star, it’s a roadmap. Maybe the word qualities is more accurate. Qualities doesn’t challenge people… It doesn’t have this meaning of I’m declaring what truth is. It’s a less aggressive term.
But there certainly are qualities, like the fractal patterns of living systems, and like the symbiotic relationships that are at work in living systems, that anyone who’s studied living systems will say, “Oh, yeah, that’s right.” And so the real issue is to contextualize them for your purpose. And here’s where, as much as I’m a believer that there are universal principles, for some reason, those universal principles show up differently in different contexts.
As a friend of mine says — I think it comes from Buddhism — there are all sort of fingers pointing at the moon. My eight principles are my fingers pointing at the moon, but we can’t confuse the fingers with the moon. And so what we’re really trying to do is reduce, using reductionist method, to as few as possible, the patterns, principles, qualities, whatever word we want to choose, that allow us to see things through this regenerative lens.
Each of these eight principles, I can spend an hour talking about each one, because they all operate at many, many different levels.
So for example, one of them I use is called in right relationship, which is a Quaker term that I got from Peter Brown. He actually wrote a book called In Right Relationship. That relationship point operates at a planetary scale, the right relationship between planet Earth and the Sun is the reason why we have life on this earth. And so that’s a quality that is, I think, manifestly true. And yet it also operates certainly down to the micro scale, the cellular level, the relationship between the cells in our body are essential to our health. And if that relationship is not symbiotic and healthy, we can’t be healthy. And if we’re living systems, and the planet is a living system, why wouldn’t the human economy also be a living system? And why wouldn’t that same quality of symbiotic relationships operate at the level of the human economy?
You can kind of drill down on each of these principles individually for hours, but the real power of the principles is not each of them individually, but when they’re all operating at the same time.
But if we can align our economies and our businesses with all eight of these principles at all levels of their meaning, then we unlock immense potential that exists that we can’t see today. And if I have a big idea, it’s that exponential growth on a finite planet as an idea, has ended, no longer works at seven billion people going to 10 or 12, and the footprint of the global economy being what it is, and we being in this state of overshoot that we need to shrink back from. We need a new source of prosperity. And the reason that people won’t accept the idea of limits to growth is because they know subconsciously that means depression.
So if we’re going to transition the global economy and survive as a species, we need to find ourselves a new source of prosperity for not just humanity, but all living beings. We need to figure out a way for humans to coexist on this planet and be prosperous, however we define that. And the kind of, I would say traditional left-leaning etiology, says, “Oh, well, we just need to redistribute wealth and everything will be good.” But it’s not that simple. We actually need an ongoing source of new prosperity, which is the way living systems work. And I believe with all my heart, and I’m dedicating my life to this idea, that if we can shift the human economy into alignment with these eight principles, or something that looks like these eight principles, we will unleash immense potential that we don’t know exists today.
And it’s already happening. This isn’t like some theoretical thing. And so one of the principles is circulation. Any living system has a metabolism and it needs to circulate. And this is very different than just the circular economy, which of course it’s important to efficiently use our scarce resources. This is circulation meaning healthy inputs into the system, robust circulation into all parts of the system from the top to the bottom, and then an ability to emit our wastes in a way that don’t pollute our nest. That’s how a metabolism works.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
For me, that circulation also has a level of this the fractal pattern of cascading circulation, like what circulates at what scale. And that’s one of the conversations that I find the circular economy people aren’t paying enough attention to, despite the fact that their elders, which are really the industrial ecologists, paid a lot of attention to that. If you read the early books on industrial ecology, they say the biggest punch, bang for your buck, so to speak, if you want to use the old language, is by re-regionalizing the cycles. It becomes less efficient and more wasteful the minute the cycles gets long. And that’s where that meets with also the Capital Institute’s call for more bio-regional economies.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
You were going through the principals. We can also tell people where they find the white paper, so they can look at the principals in more detail.
John Fullerton:
The paper’s on our website, on the landing page, called Regenerative Capitalism, How Universal Patterns and Principles Will Shape the New Economy. And there’s another paper that is also up there called Finance for A Regenerative World, which is my attempt to sort of apply these principles to our financial system and let them lead us toward what we have to do to change our financial system so that it’s in service to a regenerative economy. Soon I’ll have this all in a book, I hope by the end of this year.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
That would be wonderful. I’ve always felt like the white paper is great, but we need your book.
John Fullerton:
If I was a real academic I’d have a book out by now. It’s hard to write a book.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
I wanted to just briefly come back to two things or three, three things actually. You started with how complexity has become a household term, and particularly people in leadership positions love to talk about managing complexity and even emergence and all these kinds of things have become popular in language use. But I don’t think a lot of people understand it very well. And unfortunately, even to my mind, the complexity science community, when it first formed, where kind of the old systems theorists met insights from chaos theory and created something deeper and more dynamic with complex adaptive systems as a thought form, one of the key insights of the early people working on this was that complex dynamic systems are fundamentally unpredictable and uncontrollable. And I learned these things from Brian Goodwin, who was one of the co-founders of the Santa Fe Institute.
John Fullerton:
Brian was a wonderful, wonderful man. He was the highlight of my visit to Schumacher College. I need to go back and reread his book.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
All of them actually. But the early biological ones are quite hard reading if you’re not a biologist. But starting with How The Leopard Changed His Spots and Nature’s Due, they’re really wonderful books.
But Brian always said that what we need, and in a way that’s his framing we’re talking about, reductionism and holism earlier. And he had another nuanced way of framing this way. He said, “We have developed a science of quantities. And economics, if it claims to be a science, is also a science of quantities.” And only like the old adage that you hear ad nauseum, only what gets measured gets managed.
Yes, it has a point, but it’s limiting. Like you mentioned the word qualities. What we actually want to regenerate and what sustains the web of life is the quality of the relationships of the whole, optimizing for all, nested wholeness. And so Brian always said, in order to shift from the deep insight of complexity theory is that the scientific endeavor of trying to predict and control the world was a mistaken one, and that we need to be humble enough to accept our not knowing and uncertainty as something that will never go away. And therefore to be truly generative and regenerative, we have to keep learning, keep responding. Because we’re of the system and everything we do, as my friend, Gerald Midgely, professor of systems science at the University of Hull, says, “Everything is an intervention.” We’re in this mess as participants, and what we do or what we don’t do, each and every one of us, changes the whole.
But to guide our, what Brian called appropriate participation in that wholeness, we need a science of qualities as well as a science of quantities. And so I really like you reframing the principles, which for me have always sounded a little bit too hard, to something much softer, but actually much deeper. You’ve read some of my work and you know that I’m a bit obsessed with questions much more than answers. Have you seen, in my book, I do Akido with your eight principles, and I honor them, but I turn them all into questions.
John Fullerton:
I think it’s terrific — it’s a tool to enable a genuine conversation to take place as opposed to, I don’t know what the word is, a competing idea-fest or whatever. But I say wherever I can that the important thing about “My principles,” is not that they are right, but that they are one man’s best effort to reduce to as few a number as possible a pattern that we need to get into alignment with. And that none of them are my ideas. They come from my research and my experience in working in the real world. And I think the reason I’m so passionate about them is that I’ve actually seen, and I could go through each and every one of these and give an example, and I do in the paper and I’ll do a better job in the book, but I’ve seen them not only operate in projects that I’ve been involved in, but I’ve seen them in operation in 50 projects that we’ve told the story about where they’ve just happened organically or the leaders of the project have intuited them, and certainly never read my paper, but never even thought of them as principles. It’s just what they naturally do in response to the pressures that they’re dealing in.
And so it’s further evidence that this regenerative economy is an emergent phenomenon in response to the pressures of the old system. And something as simple as a farmer’s market and the whole local food to table movement, are in alignment with these principles. And that’s not because some folks read John’s paper. That’s because they’re responding to the pressures and the context that’s destroying our food system. And so to me, the proof that they’re real is that they’re already emergent in the real world. And for me, the value of trying to reduce them to language is to help us all to see this source of future prosperity and the direction we need to go, and to show where our current paradigm is completely in conflict with these principles. And so it tells us where we need to focus our attention to change things.
And then the final point I’d make about them is that it helps us in our diagnosis. So for example, the entire “Sustainable finance industry,” is largely centered around this idea that John Elkington put forth 25 years ago called triple bottom line. The idea of we need to shift from a single bottom line profit and loss statement to a triple bottom line where we value planet and people. And it was a brilliant insight, and it still holds truth. Interestingly, John issued a product recall on the idea-
Daniel Christian Wahl:
I was just going to say that.
John Fullerton:
About a year or so ago because he essentially realized that it wasn’t working. But the entire sustainable finance industry, as long as you’re organized around that idea, and it’s now morphed into big corporations and impact investing and ESG measures in public companies. And, of course, that entire analysis is absent sort of a check against principles. And if we checked against principles, and now I’m talking specifically about the problem of the public corporation and public capital markets. So the premise of ESG is that if we make the E in environmental and social and governance issues transparent, the markets will solve this problem. Because we believe in a market system, and if markets have the right information, they do their magic, Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Well, there’s all kinds of unquestioned assumptions in that theory of change. I would argue that markets are tools, markets aren’t the source of our truth. And some tools work better than others in different contexts.
But the problem with the multinational corporation today, if you look at these eight principles, well there are many problems, but probably the fundamental one is that we have severed the most important… In a capitalist system, the relationship between the owner of capital and the enterprise is fundamental. It’s as fundamental as the relationship between the company and its customers, perhaps even more fundamental, because you always get new customers, but you do have an owner. And that relationship of the owner of capital and the enterprise is fundamental to a capitalist system that’s going to be functional. And so, for example, if you have buildings owned by people who don’t care about fixing the roof, you’re going to have leaky buildings and bad housing.
Well, what about a multinational corporation? The, the efficiency of capital markets has essentially separated the relationship between the owners of capital and the enterprise. So now, instead of an owner showing up and saying, “Boy, we need to shift our business model because we’re destroying the planet,” you have anything from a hedge fund who’s in and out of the stock in a second, to a passive mutual fund who’s trying to beat the S&P 500 with his stock selection or her stock selection, to an ETF, which is essentially a technology platform that owns a sector of stocks. But you don’t have a relationship between the actual owner of the capital and the enterprise. And you wonder why ESG isn’t actually able to change the behavior of corporations the way we need it to.
And so we’ve spent 25 years, we built an entire industry around ESG, and it’s made incremental progress, don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of ESG, but it hasn’t dealt with the fundamental issue that we don’t any longer have a relationship between the owner of capital and the enterprise. The most powerful and destructive, both constructive and destructive enterprise in the history of humanity, and there’s no relationship between the owner and that enterprise. And we wonder why capitalism isn’t working.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
I think you’re putting your finger there on something that is really important. And honestly, I haven’t heard it quite so clearly expressed before. But what it makes me think is two things. On the one hand, I was just reminded of, because you mentioned John Elkington doing a product recall on the triple bottom line, maybe at some point we should have a conversation between the three of us. I would love to. That would be really interesting to talk to the two of you together.
John Fullerton:
John’s on the regenerative bandwagon now.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
I was really surprised because he actually reached out to me and we had a couple of conversations in the last year. And wonderful man. But where I was going was I first heard him say that at Reporting 3.0, who seemed to be very aligned with a lot of what the Capital Institute is proposing.
John Fullerton:
Those guys are doing great work.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
And last year I saw Nora Bateson also at Reporting 3.0, say something to a group of people that all celebrate themselves as positive mavericks. And they’re all really well-meaning people who are trying to work on shifting the reporting industry and now even going beyond reporting in order to affect this conundrum that we’re talking about. And she said something that, as Nora just knows how to do, everybody had been talking about, “Wait, we can’t do with incremental change anymore. We need transformative change.” And then at the very end of everybody proposing their transformative changes, it was Nora’s turn to ask everybody in the room to say, “Are we double checking that what we’re calling transformative innovation is going to make sure that we end up with butterflies and not with caterpillars with wings?” And I think that that image just brings it down so deeply.
And now bringing that back home to what you just said, I would like to end, because otherwise we’ll probably end up having a three-hour recording, with coming home to the question of bio-regionalism. Because what I heard you say earlier is that that kind of divorced multinational corporation, where the owner has nothing to do really in guiding the purpose of the enterprise anymore, the owner becomes this fleeting intangible financial market, is there not something about applying… These principles are wonderful…
John Fullerton:
Let’s call them qualities.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
… these qualities, I prefer that. In right relationship, (and even the image of that in right relationship on what’s on the screen right now, kind of speaks to that nested wholeness), and I think that if we are to redeem the word capitalism and redesign our economic system in a way that it shifts from being exploitative and degenerative to being healing and regenerative, I think we need to pay attention to scales. And I was really delighted when I read in with Regenerative Communities Network and all the wonderful network that the Capital Institute has helped birth with these initiatives around the world, where people are committing to trying to regenerate economic activity at the bio-regional scale, and trying to look into providing basic human needs and a new kind of prosperity to people in place, sourced out of place at that kind of watershed scale. Because for me, after spending a lot of time looking at the community scale and intentional communities and little experiments of how do we walk our talk, I realized that you need the bio-regional scale, you need a city in there, you need small communities, you need ecosystems. It’s a larger scale at which the whole system’s designed where these kinds of principles can really come together to transform something. It happens.
So I would love for you to just reflect a little bit on why you think that bio-regional scale is important, and also how would you envision this new economic structure to be fractal just like nature is in its dimension, where of course we will have global trade and we will have a global economy, but how can we heal that global economy by re-regionalizing and re-localizing it?
John Fullerton:
So of course the idea of local is not a new idea. But local, it does a disservice to the profound importance of this shift away from global, national to bio-regional. Because bio-regional, it’s where the geological facts, a river system, a mountain range, an ocean, a coastal plain, geological facts that are not changing anytime soon, well, hopefully not, come into contact with human culture. So the context here is human economy and geological facts and the nature that they enable. And human culture comes into contact at a bioregional scale. And I think when people think about it, wherever you live or wherever you call home, you can get a vision of what’s unique about that place that is different from other places. And if people have a choice, they tend to move to a place that is either what they know, because that’s where they grew up, or what they are attracted to for some almost spiritual reasons. Some people are attracted to mountains, some people are attracted to the ocean, etc.
And so to me, it is the sort of self-evident truth that it is where living human systems are grounded. And our global economy and our global capitalism and our pursuit of efficiency has run roughshod over that reality. And so even the idea, and I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but the idea of a nation state grew out of a different paradigm that has nothing to do with how do we operate in right relationship with this living planet.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Most of us can do this, to just close our eyes and imagine the map of the world with the nation states, and it’s all straight lines by some colonial power, literally done with a ruler, saying, “This is mine, this is yours.” It has no biophysical reality, though.
John Fullerton:
We have the Regenerative Communities Network, which you can find a link to it on our website, but also just google it. We use a visual of a beautiful color. If I was good, I could pull this up quickly, but it’s a beautiful color visual of a watershed map.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Robert Zuks. I can probably pull it up quickly.
John Fullerton:
Okay. While I’m chatting. But anyway, it’s brilliant because you can see the watershed context of the whole planet and where it aligns with nations and where it doesn’t. And so, anyway, to answer your question, one of our principles is this idea of honoring community in place. I use the word honor by intention, obviously, and again, this is humans being humble to the greater essence and nature of place that exists, whether or not we’re there. And Wendell Berry has his beautiful expression, as he only he can do. He says, “There’s no such thing as a unsacred place. There’s only sacred places and desecrated places.”
And so, I think, partly as a practical way to get our hands around this challenge, if we try to operate on a global scale or a big nation scale, it’s too much for me to hold in my head. But if I work, and we now have, I don’t know, there’s probably 15 active bioregional initiatives, and I’ve been around to most of them, I see all these same patterns and principles showing up. I see the same quality. So whether you’re on an island off of Newfoundland in Canada, or in the rainforest in Costa Rica, they all look the same to me now. This emergent regenerative community, regenerative culture is the same in these different contexts, but it’s not the same as a practical reality.
John Fullerton:
Obviously, a tropical culture is going to feel very different than an Arctic culture, and an Arctic economy, but that’s why the qualities, or the patterns, are so important. And if you look at each of these initiatives through a regenerative lens, you see these same qualities appearing in their own unique context. And so, I like to say every snowflake is unique, but every snowflake looks like a snowflake. And what my hope is, in linking these initiatives together… And by the way, you could… Probably, if someone wanted to write a PhD thesis, they could write a paper or a book on thousands of bioregional communities that are emergent and expressing these regenerative qualities. They’re all over the place. I just looked up one in Egypt called SEKEM.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
SEKEM, yeah. I mean, basically, just within the global eco village network and the influences that each one of these older eco villages have on their region, whether I’m thinking of the Morayshire region around Findhorn, or the region in Pondicherry around Auroville in India, or even the region around Tamera in Portugal. They’re transforming, having had that nucleus where people are exploring this different way of being with the world, has had influence in the wider region, when they’re there for long enough.
John Fullerton:
Exactly. Now, the problem today, is that they’re all largely diffused and disconnected, and therefore, invisible, to quote the mainstream, who’s going to Davos and talking about economic growth and doing all the stuff that we do. And this is my hope and dream, it may or may not be a good idea, but following Margaret Wheatley’s work. The way living systems take change to scale is through this networking, through scaling out and replication. And she’s got a brilliant little short paper. I don’t remember what it’s called, but she wrote it with Deborah Frieze. And it talks about naming this thing. So we’re naming it The Regenerative Communities Network. You can come up with a better name if you like. Connecting it. So, make sure that these initiatives are connected, and so, that there’s this shared learning happening. Illuminated, so shine a light on it. Tell stories about it. Show that it’s a thing, as opposed to a disparate group of projects. It’s actually one thing.
And then, nurture it and illuminate it. So, it needs care and feeding. And so, our hope is, that each of these initiatives will… And here’s where capitalism comes back. The transformation from degenerative extractive economies, to regenerative economies, will require investment of real money, real stuff, real projects from solar panels, to regenerative agriculture, to you know buildings that house cool little startups, et cetera. And imagine if we can create… And again, shifting back into old finance language and asset class, where the projects are de-risked because they emerged out of the right relationship in a bioregion. And the capital, then, once it understands that this is the future, will understand that their current investments are at dire risk of collapse. Certainly, the obvious example, is in fossil fuels. But it’s happening… The entire capital markets are priced to exponential growth. And when the world wakes up that, that game is up, the entire capital market paradigm is going to have to collapse, I’m afraid.
And so, capital will be looking for… Let’s, again, in old language, low risk, low return places to deploy capital, to create real value, and to preserve capital for the investors. And our hope is, within Regenerative Communities Network, that by then, this network will have matured from 15 initiatives to 1500 initiatives, and that they will have scaled out in their bioregion, so that they’ll have critical mass, and that they’ll be able to tee up all of these projects that will help transform them into a regenerative paradigm, and capital will be hungry to find such projects.
But if we do it in a disparate way where everyone’s doing their own thing all over the world, unfortunately, these pools of capital are highly concentrated. And so, you have the problem of, “Well, that’s a really nice little project there, Mr. Fullerton, but, I’ve got $4 billion, and if you want me to invest $40,000, it’s not worth my time to read your memo.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
This was so fascinating. Thank you for this, because I now really understand the deeper strategy behind the Regenerative Communities Network.
John Fullerton:
The method to our madness.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
No, thanks for that. And I’ve also realized that there’s this parallel, because I mean, the Capital Institute is involved in this as well, this initiative that I started to birth out of the frustration of the Lush Spring Prize judges, who have come together for a number of years, always having to choose out of 50, 51 finalists from all over the world. Small, wonderful projects, place sourced projects, doing real regeneration. A lot of them, ecological, some of them social, all around the world. And we had, I mean, wonderfully generous from Lush. We had 210,000 pounds to give away to 11 projects, which is a nice thing to be able to do, but it’s peanuts of money. And the frustration of choosing out of these 50 was always extremely high. And what was born out of that, was the conversation of how do we give more value to all these runner-ups that have already gone through a due diligence processes and have been checked on by the people from the Ethical Consumer Magazine, the Lush stuff, then the judges? And how do we, A. showcase them to the world, make them visible to each other, so they don’t feel alone in their struggle, and showcase them to possible funders. And in that conversation, which has matured with now, the Buckminster Fuller Institute, and the Capital Institute.
John Fullerton:
Yeah, Buckminster Fuller has the same story, with the Bucky Fuller prize.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Yeah, exactly. I said to Lush, “We’re not the only ones who are running a prize where the front end is cheaper than the back end, so it costs more than we give away. And then, we end up with all these runner-ups that have been vetted, but nobody’s giving value to that.” And so, that’s why I suggested let’s talk to Buckminster Fuller. They must have exactly the same problem. And now, this has evolved into the regenerosity platform that, hopefully, will be launched soon.
John Fullerton:
That’s brilliant. And what we need to do is, so there’s going to be interrelationships between all of those projects. And let’s say, there’s got to be, let’s just put a number. There’s got to be a hundred projects in those databases that are a viable, thriving things that should be scaled out and replicated. And maybe it’s a thousand, but it’s probably at least a hundred. And imagine if then, they were the flywheel or the engine to build co-benefits within each of their buyer regions. So that there, again, not isolated projects working in a great, big, wide world on their own, but we harness the energy that they’re throwing off already, into Bioregions, so that we get this amplifying effect at a bioregional scale. That, to me, is the… The hard thing is to build a flywheel. Once you get a flywheel going, it gets much easier to build on it. And flywheels usually take courage, and creativity, and capital, and guts, and sweat, and tears to get going. So what we need to do is, find the flywheels that are regenerative, and then, throw energy at them, which is people, and money, and expertise, and help them to spread that energy in their bioregions.
And then, the bioregions start exchanging with each other. And then, you essentially, before you know it, you’ve reinvented capitalism. You’ve got a regenerative economy that’s operating at a bioregional scale. And then, the politicians will wake up and say, “Huh, there’s something good going on over there. Why don’t we, instead of policies, support that stuff, rather than supporting subsidizing fossil fuels?”
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Man, I had this conversation with James Quilligan, who has been advising, we, on one hand, did this wonderful study of the bioregion of the San Francisco watershed, but as a political advisor, I mean, he’s been advising governments all over the world for his whole career. And he’s also had some work with the IMF, and even in the corridors of the IMF, I won’t say who, people have actually said, “Show me the example of a viable bioregional economy, a vibrant bioregional economy and its patterns, and we need to shift to support this. So we need to just create to make these things visible.
If you’d stop sharing your screen, then I’ve just had, while you were talking, a bit of a fiddle and lost control of my computer, briefly.
…Very well, that’s Robert Zuks, he’s a geographer, and this is real scientific data of, basically, the worlds watersheds and you can see the Mississippi watershed here, the Amazon watershed here, and the Nile. This green thing is the Nile watershed. And of course, they’re very large, some of these. My sense is that some of these mega watersheds might feasibly be divided into sub-bioregions within the watershed.
John Fullerton:
Yeah. I mean, bioregions is a loose term, as I understand it. It doesn’t have a firm definition. You know it when you feel it kind of thing, but if you go back for a second, one thing I’d like to point out about the United States, and the Mississippi River bioregion, or watershed, which is massive. If you think about what we’ve done as an economic model in that bioregion, it’s essentially extracting… it’s an agricultural extraction economy. And it has been transformed to industrial agriculture. And I’m making generalizations here. It’s not totally true, but broadly speaking, that’s the bread basket of the United States, because that’s where the plains of the Mississippi River system are.
And we’ve, by design, converted that into industrial extractive agriculture. And I have it, when I give talks, sometimes I have another map, which shows the red state/blue state split in the United States. And the red states line up pretty much, not to the tee, but pretty much up against the Mississippi River watershed.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Wow.
John Fullerton:
So why is it a surprise to us that the red state, which to me, has nothing to do with conservatism and liberalism, it has to do with desperation, subsistence living under a very extractive system that has gone, all the profits have gone to a very few massive agricultural companies, and destroyed communities and the environment systematically in the process, on a massive scale. You wonder why that’s all now, Trump country. So, this is not a joke. This is what happens when you systematically turn a region, a bioregion into an extractive project.
Now, the reverse is also true. Imagine if that entire bioregion, it was converted to regenerative agriculture. That would mean that the Great Plains, which are this massive carbon sink, but have been converted to a carbon source, it would be reverted to a carbon sink. And we’d have healthier food, and healthier people, and sequestering carbon, and less floods. It would transform that entire region, which would intransform the politics of the United States, which is one of the biggest problems of our world right now.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Yeah. And I think the idea of rewilding in that area would also have a lot of power, particularly, getting Ted Turner involved. And rewilding some of the Great Plains.
John Fullerton:
Absolutely.
But you know, people don’t realize, what we did to the Great Plains is as bad, perhaps… I’m not an ecologist, to judge, but it’s certainly of the comparable scale of badness as what we’re doing in the Amazon right now. We’re tearing down the Amazon to make room for industrial meat feedlot systems. We’ve already ripped up the Great Prairies, which are these massive perennial carbon sinks, and converting them to corn and soybeans to feed cattle. So, what’s the difference? And then, why aren’t we up in arms about what we’ve done in the Great Plains, the way we’re up in arms about burning down the Amazon? We should be.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
We should be. Well, this has been super rich, and I feel like we could easily continue for another hour, but I know that if we post a video, that is two hours a long, nobody will watch it. And I won’t have time to get into editing it into nice bite-sized chunks, as people like to feed on these days. But this has been really nice, and maybe we can do it again, because there’s just so much more to talk about.
John Fullerton:
Oh, I’d love to. We need to come over to Majorca and set up a regenerative community there to join the network, because I know that’s what your passion is.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
I mean, I’m still, very much, working on that. I just don’t feel… I mean, in a way, I’ve been working on that before the Capital Institute was… Or around the time since the Capital Institute was formed, and before the Regenerative Communities Network was formed. But it’s interesting, because just a couple of weeks ago, I had a public talk here in Majorca, where the topic was the potential for Majorca to be an example of bioregional regeneration, and how islands are special cases within bioregions because they’re even better defined boundaries. And that, actually enables a lot. And then, of course, Majorca is a sub-case, where the economy is so dependent on tourism, that you have to do a… turning the problem into the solution, I keep with the system. If you want to change anything in Majorca, you have to also ask the question, what would regenerative tourism look like? How could tourism give back to a region?
Daniel Christian Wahl:
But then, suddenly, that idea that it’s already nice to have a case study of this size, and that has global significance, but when you put it into the context of using this as an exploration of how tourism can become the flywheel, the motor for the transition. Not for the final output, but for the transition of re-regionalizing production and consumption, and building the healthiest structures at the local scale, and doing ecosystems restoration work, then this little island suddenly could have global significance.
John Fullerton:
Totally.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Because that’s what’s needed in so many paradises around the world. And on top of it, because Majorca once exported one level, one model of tourism, all-inclusive mass tourism to the world, and Majorcan families own five of the 20 largest tourism companies in the world. They’re family-owned businesses by Majorcan, that still have a patriarchal structure, basically, it’s five guys you need to convince that they should do it again. They should, in their age, explore the new model of tourism, called regenerative tourism, to the world, to redeem the sins of the first-
John Fullerton:
Yeah, beautiful.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Expansion that they… And that’s the narrative that I’m trying to seed. And at this meeting two weeks ago, we just realized that there’s so many pieces in the puzzle, and so many players that, some of them, before I even came to this island, I mean, there’s a lot of beautiful local leaders who’ve done amazing work already. And I’m just teaming up with a filmmaker, to begin to tell this story and make it visible to itself. Because I think that’s so much of the work that we need to do at this bioregional scale, is coming back to complexity. If you can’t predict and control the system, and you have to have the humility that you’re interacting with it in your own ignorance, and then your own best intentions, guided by the qualities that he distilled, and then you can really understand that working with complexity, and trying to nurture positive emergence, is about who speaks to whom. The relationship of that conversation, the quality of that conversation. So basically, how is the system connected to itself? The quality of the relationships, and the quality of information flow-
John Fullerton:
Yep.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Already changes everything.
John Fullerton:
Totally.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
After that, then comes the financial flows, and the resource flows, and all that. But that’s what we need to do, at both in the fractal of the bioregion, and then also, bioregion to bioregion. So, anyway.
John Fullerton:
That process you just described, is very much the process that we… we don’t enforce it, but there is a cycle of engagement that each of these regenerative community networks, in a sense, sign up to do. And the first one is to convene and learn how to see itself as a system, the way you just described. So, there’s stuff we can learn. Again, every snowflake is unique, but every snowflake’s a snowflake. What they did in Fogo Island on the north coast of Newfoundland, is totally relevant to what you’re doing and talking about.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
We’re actually thinking about running a Ted Talk-like event where we invite all the people who hold a piece and have done good work, transformative work on the island, to present their little piece of the puzzle, and then, keep them for another day, to have a conversation of how do we put our pieces of the puzzle together? And then, that could be the final thing.
John Fullerton:
And I guarantee you, if you convene that meeting, you will be introducing people to each other who are already working in this paradigm, but never knew each other. I never knew that what you’re doing is sort of like what I’m doing.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
That’s been part of my weaving over the last 10 years. I think the time is right, now, in Majorca, to take that next step, but I have to sync it also with my own personal, not wanting to be away from my baby too much. Anyway, in that I need to go and put my daughter to bed now.
John Fullerton:
That quality is called in balance.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
So, thank you so much for this time. It was really nice.
John Fullerton:
Thank you, Daniel. Thanks for all the work that you’re doing in the world. It’s very important, and you’re doing a great job in synthesizing this and getting it out into the world.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Well, likewise. Takes one to know one. Regeneration rising, Trimtabs unite. Let’s do it!
John Fullerton:
Be well.
Daniel Christian Wahl:
Bye.
—
If you like the post, please clap AND remember that you can clap up to 50 times if you like it a lot ;-)!
Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.
Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures
