Regenerating Health as the Pattern that Connects
Health is an emergent property of nested complexity that connects our cells, organs, bodies, communities, as well as the cities, bioregions, ecosystems and the biosphere we inhabit into a constantly transforming interdependent whole. Health is the pattern that connects. It is what we are trying to sustain when we speak about sustainability, and it is also at the heart of regeneration.
In The Ecology of Health, Dr. Robin Stott suggests that in order to create a more efficient health care system and to improve human and planetary health, we have to understand “that good health can only be realized within the context of true peace and security; and these are dependent on social and environmental justice.” He emphasizes: “The antecedents of both health and security are the same” (Stott, 2000, p.6).
Stott argues: “The scale at which decisions are made and implemented is of fundamental importance to this wider view of health”; and proposes that “individual and societal health can only be improved if decisions are taken and implemented by people who can:
i) relate to each other;
ii) understand the relevance of decisions to their lives;
iii) determine the size of the constituency which needs to be involved in the decision-making; and therefore
iv) practice human scale decision-making” (Stott, 2000, p.7).
In many ways Dr. Stott argues that to create the enabling conditions for good health to manifest we need people involved in the decision-making process and the active ‘design for health’ in their own communities and bioregions.
If regenerative practice is about adding health and value to the nested complexity of our community, region and planet, we need to create participatory process that build the capacity of people in place to actively contribute to healing their community and restoring their local ecosystem and watershed.
Prerequisites for Good Health and Health Care
- Recognition of the contributions that all of us make to health.
- Creation of partnerships based on valuing experience as well as scientific knowledge.
- Conducting decision-making on an appropriate scale.
- Allowing local communities to regain political pre-eminence vis-à-vis central and global authorities.
- Recreating a sense of meaning and purpose in our everyday lives.
- Acknowledging the importance to our health of the water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we eat, the changes in our climate and the amount of radiation we are exposed to.
- Acknowledging the health impact of the alcohol we drink, the cigarettes and chemicals we consume, the types of buildings we live in, the distribution of wealth, the size of our communities, the value systems we espouse, and indeed all aspects of our lives.
- Acknowledging, above all, that the health of humanity depends on the health of our planet. We need to be more prudent in the way that we conduct our lives to ensure that the fragile balance between humanity and the planet is not disturbed (Reproduced and adapted from Stott, 2000, p.7).
The practice of unveiling the latent potential in any place for health and wholeness to manifest as the primary state is a two-fold practice of co-creating the enabling conditions while removing the major blocks and constraints to health.
Some Major Constraints to Health
- Limitations of available and useful water, soil, air, energy, and complex biological environments.
- Disease: This is the obvious one, the simplest, and the one usually tackled first by ‘health’ agencies such as the World Health Organization. Yet, we may actually create ill-health by the way we attack disease.
- Powerlessness: This may be related to a whole variety of things from gender, age, and ethnic origin to land ownership and poverty.
- Poverty: Poverty per se may constrain goals, but often this is simply a reflection of powerlessness. It is possible for a community to be poor and collectively achieve a great many things.
- Limitations of cultural rituals, religions, music, poetry: Communities, which are impoverished in these aspects, will be unable to adapt well to changing contexts, and hence will, by definition, be unhealthy.
- Inability to see things systemically in their full eco-social dimensions: This does not mean that people need to understand everything, only to have a sense of that integrated reality. People and communities that are ‘single vision’ are highly vulnerable to change in their environment and thus are unhealthy
(Adapted & summarised from Waltner-Toews, 2004, pp.90–91).
I have been working on health and wholeness as the central intention behind design for nearly two decades now. When I initially suggested in my masters research at Schumacher College in 2002 that ‘ecological design’ was the way to put the holistic and participatory worldview described by holistic science and complexity theory into practice, I was already ‘Exploring Participation: Holistic Science and the Emergence of Healthy Wholes through Appropriate Participation.’
Later in 2006 I was awarded a suma cum laude for my doctoral thesis on ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health: A Holistic/Integral Approach to Complexity and Sustainability’ in which I developed a theory for scale-linking Salutogenic (health-generating) design.
My book ‘Designing Regenerative Cultures’, published in May 2016, was an attempt to reflect on more than 10 years of putting the theory developed in my PhD into practice through education, consultancy, futures work for local and national governments and my activist work with the Global Ecovillage Network and the Transition Town movement.
To optimise the health of the whole system from self, to community to world is the ancient practice of living well in service to life as a planetary process. In weaving ourself and our community back into the fabric of life and its life-sustaining patterns we are reconnecting with the ground of our being and the source of our essence and identity.
More on health:
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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
