Regenerative Cultures
Daniel Christian Wahl on Inside Ideas
On the iconic BBC radio show Desert Island Discs guests are asked for one book they would take with them if they were cast away on an island. Anyone choosing Designing Regenerative Cultures by Daniel Christian Wahl would return to their real world, with it and them, changed forever.
Just as Stephen Hawking’s ‘Brief Answers to the Big Questions’ continues to deepen peoples understanding of our complex universe, Wahl’s book shows how lives can be lived in ways which can provide answers to the biggest existential questions of our time.
I am delighted to welcome the multi-award winning author onto the Inside Ideas podcast this week, to delve into a book — so far translated into eight languages, that is helping to define the field of regenerative design.
“The western mind likes to think in terms of the Kantian dialectic of thesis, antithesis,” Wahl tells me. “Like, to bring in something new, it has to be the opposite of the old. It’s a bit like the paradigm shift and so on. It sets us up tragically when we bring in something new to not learn from the past, and throw the baby out with the bath water.”
In Designing Regenerative Cultures, now a core text in university programmes, Wahl weaves a holistic thread between the extremes and complexities to show where subjects like quantum theory, biomimicry, systems theory and the circular economy can shape an evolved experience of living on this planet that is more symbiotic with nature.
A trained biologist, with a PhD in Design on Design for Human and Planetary Health, Wahl says “we need to re-envision how we collaborate and how we relate to each other and the natural world” if we want to meaningfully and effectively answer the biggest questions.
“Once we understand that life is a planetary process, that we’re not individuals, that there are more non-human cells in us and on us than human cells, that we are literally walking ecosystems, that life and even matter shows up in relationship and through participation of consciousness, it just fundamentally shifts the nature of reality.”
The ideas are resonating with a new and exponentially growing reGeneration — and Wahl, winner of the 2021 RSA Bicentenary Medal for applying design in service to society, is a big reason that this holistic worldview is gaining ground. Find out why on the podcast.
Article from INNOVATORS MAGAZINE.
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