Developing Capability as a Regenerative Practitioner.
Growing up on a farm in Zimbabwe, I was immersed in very active ecosystems and spent time in real wilderness landscapes. I couldn’t quite identify it at the time, but that was building within me a deep connection with and understanding of living systems and our dependence on them. As a child, the awe and wonder of it brought a lot of delight, that somehow has a way of being sidetracked in the busyness of modern life. A disconnection occurs and the magic of it is lost to some extent. The seed of that childhood experience led me to discover the field of regenerative development and I jumped at the chance to attend a course that our practice (Millar Howard Workshop) felt aligned with their trajectory and values as an architectural office.
I never imagined how deeply a course could reach into the depth of who I am and begin to shift how I see myself and the world in such a profound way. Perhaps that’s partly because the COVID 19 pandemic brought to light, in a very visceral way the reality of the world as a living system, of which we, as a species, are a key participant. We, as students, all left the last 3-day intensive round-up of the course deeply moved, with a shared sense of hope and purpose.
As humans, we have, in the globalised modern world, perceived ourselves as separate to the natural world and to date have only seen it as an objective resource to be used and capitalised on through a very competitive and mechanistic mindset. It has taken some time for people to collectively realise or acknowledge we are having a huge impact on the natural world. This has led us to ask how we reduce our impact on the natural world. But this logic implies the world would be better off if we didn’t exist, rather than transforming how we could live and participate in it.
If we can shift how we think, then we are able to have profound shifts in what we think about and as a result, what we do. It takes a lot more effort to change what we do if we haven’t changed how we think — especially if we are aiming not to make similar mistakes of the past. The trouble is we often focus on the doing part first and only, without understanding the what and the how we think: what is shaping our thinking; what unconscious and unquestioned assumptions and cultural habits are we working from? We fail to see ourselves and each other as whole beings separated by types and therefore fail to see the world as a whole of nested living systems interacting with each other.
If we, as a firm, are able to start shifting how we and the way those we work with think, towards seeing themselves and their part in the world and the way in which we all participate within living systems — there is huge potential for healing in a world crying out for it. This gives me hope and I’m hugely grateful that our clients and projects are starting to shift and explore some of these ways of thinking and working.
“Regenerative development works to align human activities with the continuing evolution of life on our planet, reversing ecosystem degradation while growing community well-being. As a practice, regenerative development is based on the premise that we cannot make the outer transformations required to create a truly sustainable world without making inner transformations in how we think, how we work, and who we are.” Regenesis Institute.
