What is Life? — A Regenerative Community
Life — as a planetary process — is a regenerative community! In Janine Benyus’ words: “Life creates conditions conducive to life.”
For me, the word ‘regenerative’ refers to life’s inherent ability to express the unique essence of each place through elegantly adapted diversity. This diversity not only keeps constantly changing and evolving to higher levels of complexity and collaboration but actually contributes to making the place more abundant, vibrant, and conducive to more life over time.
When you start thinking of life as a planetary process you begin to see how “place” is fractal. The local, bioregional, and global scales are all nested in one fundamentally interdependent and interconnected whole.
Health is an emergent property of this complex dynamic system at the scale of cells, organs, individuals, communities, bioregions, biomes and the planet.
A participatory understanding of our role in the nested wholeness of life can make us more aware that everything is an intervention and we all have the ability to increase the health and value of the whole system.
Everything we do and don’t do counts and makes a difference! As life, we are perfectly capable of creating conditions conducive to life. To regenerate the Earth and her people we have to pay attention to this ‘co-evolving mutualism’, as my friends from the Regenesis Group call it.
Regenerative practice is about unleashing the potential of people in place by listening deeply into the story the land and its people want to tell. It is about finding ways to manifest the unique bio-cultural essence of each locality in ways that meet human needs while enriching and healing the wider biological community we are embedded in.
Life is a continuous exploration of novelty. To create diverse regenerative cultures everywhere we have to build the capacity of people in place to keep listing to each other and to the places they inhabit, to keep adapting and learning. We have to build our individual and collective capacity to co-evolve in mutual reciprocity and care with the community of life. That is what regeneration is about.
To live into an embodied and participatory understanding of the question ‘What is life’ we need to ask ‘What does life do?’ and emulate its patterns and processes. As life we can co-create conditions conducive to life!
That is my commitment to the future. That is my practice of repatterining the future in the now: to mindfully practice living as an expression of life as a planetary process; to bring daily awareness to conscious participation in life’s regenerative community.
—
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
