White regeneration is standard colonial ecofascism

Samantha Suppiah
POSSIBLE FUTURES
13 min readJan 11, 2025

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Kiss The Ground movie poster; 2020 storming of Capitol (Democracy dies in darkness, Washington Post, 2021)

6th January 2025 has come and gone.
Capitol no longer needs to be stormed, because white supremacy has successfully captured the West.

Now synonymous with what is widely known as Nazi America, or Fascist America, 6th January this is what the progressive establishment has identified and defined as “white supremacy” within the context of a white supremacist world order.

The progressive establishment in the West does not acknowledge itself as white supremacist, despite literally openly conducting military invasions and geopolitical coercion missions around the globe to maintain a white supremacist world order.

This is a world order that has created white supremacists of every skin tone, of every culture, of every socioeconomic class. You absolutely do not have to be white to be aligned with white supremacy. This is where we have arrived at after centuries of European colonisation’s extremely effective ethnocidal propaganda mechanisms. This is indeed what the term “global society” refers to: a globalised monoculture that worships Western knowledge, philosophy and structures.

Why don’t white supremacists like to be called white supremacists?
It’s actually very straightforward:

  • They feel misidentified.
  • They don’t know what white supremacy is.
  • They are unaware that can opt out of white supremacy.

And then, there is the even more sinister

  • They don’t want anyone to know that they are white supremacists.

This last point is accurate for the white “regenerative agriculture” movement in an extremely public and blatant way. In this piece, I’ll show you how I know they know.

Once you can see this, you’ll start to spot the exact same patterns across “regenerative leadership”, “regenerative business”, “regenerative regeneration” — right the way across Regeneration, Inc.

Here is how I know.

In November 2020, I wrote two pieces: An Open Letter to Kiss The Ground and Regeneration : Recolonisation.

The first was a request for Kiss The Ground — the movie — to quit being promoted around the world, because of its white supremacist narratives, right down to its portrayal of only white scientists, white farmers, and white celebrities talking about soil and health and “regenerating the Earth”. Non-white people are shown only in passing shots.

At the time, I had no problem with the film being promoted within the white world. (This is something I now have a problem with.)

After my Open Letter was published, the comms/outreach team at Kiss The Ground wrote to me requesting a meeting. So I met with them. They were so nervous they were shaking and fidgeting while struggling to introducing themselves in what they probably thought were racially-appropriate ways. This indicated to me that they were fully aware of how guilty KTG was of precisely what I was pointing out.

They assured me that they had read my Open Letter and wanted to take it seriously, because they themselves had similar concerns. They first tried to explain that KTG the movie and KTG the NGO are “not the same”, even if there is “some overlap”. This is the logic by which it is claimed that KTG the NGO is not fully responsible for KTG the movie, even though key members of KTG the NGO were involved in the production of KTG the movie, and the branding, logic, and message for both is exactly the same.

They told me that they were aware of the over-emphasis on white narratives, and said that the movie had actually already been edited to include more diverse depictions because of initial feedback to the studio that made the film. This was the second indication that they were fully aware of the white supremacist narrative they were guilty of peddling.

I took a step back and reframed the conversation. Here we are, three women having a conversation about some very deep problematic issues within sustainability and regeneration. Three women each with our own power, privilege and access. Three women with similar concerns around racism and white supremacy.
I asked them if they considered themselves to be activists. At the time, I wasn’t sure if I considered myself to be an activist (spoilers: I am still unsure).

There was a pause, then it finally landed.

“YES,” both of them went. “I AM AN ACTIVIST.”

This was the foundation upon which the masks were discarded, and we were able to begin talking strategy. What can we do as three women with our power, privilege and access to address white supremacy in KTG, given the webs of relationships that must be navigated within this colonial ecosystem.

Fast forward to the first week of January 2021. We had met several times. I won’t disclose details here, but it became very clear to all three of us just how deep all this ran. Folk heading Kiss The Ground, folk amongst the board, and their advisors… All of them grew up together in “Nazi America”.

They were lifelong friends and the entire culture was entrenched in whiteness and racism inherited from a uniquely American settler coloniser ideology based upon ecofascism.

Within this ideology, ecocide is something that is done for the purposes of genocide. And now, ecological regeneration is something they are attempting to reframe, promote and take credit for while continuing to neglect, silence and appropriate the very indigenous people they genocided.

On 6th January 2021, one of these close family friends, who happened to be on the advisory council of KTG, participated in the storming of Capitol. I can only assume that they did not participate alone, that there were likely others in their group of close friends who were also participants.

One of the two women I had been talking with, KTG marketing and comms director, pushed through the release of a public statement to formally acknowledge KTG’s association with this violation.

She then quit KTG.

This was the message KTG posted on its official channels on 13th January 2021:

Screenshot of the 13th January 2021 post addressing Willis’ involvement in the 6th January storming of Capitol on Kiss The Ground’s Instagram page (screenshot taken 17 hours after it was posted).

This post was removed some time later, I am not sure when. It could have been weeks or months after. It is nowhere to be found today.

Today, KTG does not publicly or formally acknowledge any involvement in the storming of Capitol, nor any concerns about white supremacy in their messaging.

Since 2021, they have prioritised rainbow-washing their external communications, while their organisation structure remains dominated by privileged white folk in precisely the same circles with the same white supremacist ideologies this all started with.

Kiss The Ground are today still a prominent proponent of “regenerative agriculture” in North America and the West, who still garner a global audience in order to generate profit for both the movie and the NGO. It continues to appropriate non-white people, histories and cultures under its banner of white regeneration.

It does this because it is normal in the white regeneration movement to do so.

Since 2021, the white regeneration movement centring on “regenerative agriculture” has only accelerated, with MNC heavyweights like Danone and mainstream “progressive” or “green” politicians across the West getting in on the action.

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Meanwhile, within the establishment…

Behind closed doors, far more powerful forces within the Western establishment continue to consolidate efforts behind white supremacist “regenerative agriculture” in order to advance colonial sustainability. This culminated in the United Nations Food Systems Summit that took place in September 2021, centring Big Ag and Big Philanthropy, and rightly boycotted by the global indigenous and peasant movements.

In June 2021, I wrote The UN’s Imperial Food Systems Summit is the #worstfilmever, exposing the colonialities of the “development” narrative surrounding the UNFSS. This piece was a necessary outlet following my disturbing but not unexpected experience engaging — and then being gaslit by — leaders of Action Track 5: Build resilience to vulnerabilities, shocks and stress.

I happened to be in direct contact with the person who had been appointed to lead Track 5. This was because I was the token “youth climate activist” their organisation had invited to a previous international summit, despite never having actually done standard “climate activism” in the three decades that I had existed. In my “democratic” home country, it is illegal to protest — that governance system had trained me well for absolute obedience. Unfazed, their organisation paid for my intercontinental flights and luxury hotel stay so that I could speak on their main summit stage for six minutes. The old white male moderator had apparently decided that the other old male speakers on my panel were better at using the other 14 minutes of my time than I could. Heck, he didn’t even remember that I was on the panel. Am I bitter? Honestly, it doesn’t bother me at all. I was trying to stay awake throughout most of it; barely remember it.

Anywho. The lead on Track 5 was a European politician and lobbyist campaigning on a platform of colonial sustainability. Net zero, renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, “leave no one behind”, the works. As far as I understood, the position was pro-bono and so was the team they had assembled — a respected climate scientist nearing the end of his career, with extensive networks across peasant and grassroots movements, and a coordinator working in the international establishment’s climate policy space.

The global peasant movement had come together to boycott the UNFSS, holding their own events in opposition.

I was appealing to Track 5 to acknowledge, respect and take action in solidarity with the boycott.

In my meeting with them, it was clear that the politician was in charge, they were the ones calling the shots. They nodded and listened and made positive indications, appearing interested find ways to align with the boycott.
But immediately after the meeting, I was shunned.

Eventually I found that Track 5 was all about promoting “regenerative agriculture” amongst the establishment’s political and corporate circles. Would you like to guess how many people in these circles were not white? UNFSS was after all a closed-door event initiated by the World Economic Forum and the Gates Foundation. No mention was made whatsoever about the peasant boycott, or even about generic concerns raised by Global South peasants.

The global peasant movement simply didn’t fit in those conversations, and it didn’t matter. We are not to interrupt the adults talking at the big table.

UNFSS in effect was a private strategy meeting for the global ruling classes to consolidate power and coordinate the grabbing of global food systems for their own profit agendas, while rainbow-washing the event in its external communications. Surely this is the height of colonial white supremacy, deftly bending global power structures to its will.

Simply for confirmation, I asked folk within the politician’s professional circles what was the logic behind the hypocrisy dealt to me personally.
The response came that they were merely using the UNFSS role leading Track 5 as a way to secure their position within the political establishment.

Financing regenerative agriculture

Let’s notice that colonial and white supremacist patterns are everywhere in “sustainability”, “regeneration” and of course, the oldest of the three, “conservation”. The same racist and genocidal narratives make it sound as though the Global South is naturally degraded — even if it were degraded by colonisers — and that white people can just walk in and implement their ideas if they can get together the money, land and labour to do it — which they can, with the colonial wealth that was looted from the Global South.

Episode 202 of Koen van Seijen’s Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast

Dutchman Koen van Seijen has for years hosted a weekly podcast on “regenerative agriculture”. The whole podcast is a treasure trove of white supremacy and overt colonial patterns. To be fair to the host, this also describes dominant and racist white culture in the Netherlands.

But here I would like to focus on specific conversations on “implementing regenerative agriculture at scale” across the Global South, especially when these conversations are held by white Western men with no apparent conceptualisation of the dangers, harms and long-ranging impacts of colonisation.

In episode 202 of the podcast, the host interviews Sven Verwiel, a white man who grew up in Dutch Kenya, to evangelise syntropic agroforestry, a methodology developed by Swissman Ernst Götsch, who moved to Brazil to practice his methodology in his late 30s.

Verwiel talked about the “potential of syntropic agroforestry in Kenya, and what we can learn from the over 40 years of experience in Brazil, what is needed to apply it at scale in the local East African context”.

At no point was there any talk about how this land became degraded in the first place. This is the first erasure of colonial history — the colonial ecocide and contemporary industrial agriculture that must be ignored in order to power the first delusion of “regenerative agriculture”.

At no point was there any talk about why the indigenous inhabitants of the land in question could not themselves restore health to their lands.
This is the second erasure of colonial history — the colonial genocide, displacement, enslavement and ethnocide that was systematically conducted by Omani Arab and British colonisers that disrupted healthy relationships between land, ecology, and human societies.
The third erasure of colonial history appears here as well — the looting of wealth from the land and the people, which continues to prevent them, centuries on, from being able to finance their own recovery.

At no point was there any talk about the ethics of scaling white solutions across the Global South. This is the fourth erasure of colonial history — erasure of cultural diversity and sovereignty. The white saviour deems it so that if it worked here, it will work there. We can override landscapes and cultures by simply applying the same methodology with small tweaks here and there. Because these places are all the same.

Let’s do an exercise.

It’s not often that we get to do a simple, free-of-charge one-hour exercise to understand just how white supremacist a field or an industry is, and to interrogate why that is. So when the opportunity comes by, take it seriously and be grateful for the author’s magnanimous generosity and benevolent humility.

Step 1: Make a list of regeneration leaders.
List 10, 20, or even 50 people you know who call themselves leaders in regeneration.

If you can’t think of 10, 20 or 50 people who identify or market themselves as leaders in regeneration, add to the list people who identify or market themselves as leaders in sustainability.

If you’re still struggling, add to the list people who position themselves as experts in sustainability or regeneration. Maybe they had written a bunch of papers in respected journals, maybe they had written a few best-selling books, maybe they are an influential podcaster or columnist in the field.

Have you got your list?

Great, looks like you’re ready for steps 2, 3 and 4 — data gathering.

Step 2: How many of them are not white?

Step 3: How many of them are not in the West?

Step 4: How many of them are openly or vocally critical of colonisation or modern Western civilisation?

And now we have the base data upon which we can start to interrogate Regeneration, Inc., simply by asking —

Step 5: Why don’t they seek to research, acknowledge or understand just how human activity on planet Earth became unsustainable in the first place?

Let’s not act like “sustainability” or “regeneration” are inventions of modernity, or that our blind and puny technology can save us from our gross immorality and pardon us of our colonial sins.

We’ve already had in place living systems that were plural, regenerative, agile, iterative, holistic, interdependent, spiritual, mutual, innovative and self-replicating.

We had these peoples about, with thriving diverse worldviews coexisting within ecological laws.

We killed them, and we’re busy hunting down their survivors.
♠️

The above is an excerpt from On invisibilised intersectionality: We are not the same, a piece I wrote in May 2021.
And below is an excerpt from Regeneration Central: Colonisers gonna colonise (December 2022).

Obviously,
coloniality is the parasite that puppets white regeneration to consume, co-opt and poison vomit concepts such as
#paradigmshift, #raisingconsciousness, #systemschange and #planetaryregeneration.

This effort seeks to consolidate what remains of life on Earth into a one world order by completing the twin tasks of colonial ecocide and ethnocide. It is funded by Old Money and New Saviours, desperately attempting to control civilisational collapse — such that the chips continue to fall in their favour — by riddling resource-consuming initiatives with hypocritical ignorance, to manufacture justifications for (and to forgive) violent oppression.

It is not propagated only by white people — but rather by the white culture dominant in our modern Western civilisation, a culture highly successful at transcending race due to widespread ethnocide as an outcome of European colonisation. Add political and economic power to the mix, and this is what we call the One World.

And finally, to close, an excerpt from Colonial Sustainability: Tracing the sustainability industry’s ecocidal lineage from the Doctrine of Discovery

(Sayson et al, 2024)

POSSIBLE FUTURES is a decolonial collective led by a Crew of Global South women. We intervene in Sustainability, Inc. and Regeneration, Inc., and offer events, workshops and courses to help folk understand their roles in colonial hegemony with clarity. Our flagship course for professionals, Intro to Decolonial Sustainability, is currently closed for registrations until later in the year. The Worldeater Series remains open for asynchronous engagement, and we are imminently piloting a self-led inquiry-based course format, Mechanisms of Ongoing Colonisation. For updates, newsletter subscribers hear first.

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POSSIBLE FUTURES
POSSIBLE FUTURES

Published in POSSIBLE FUTURES

a global south decolonial collective disarming colonial narratives

Samantha Suppiah
Samantha Suppiah

Written by Samantha Suppiah

Southeast Asian trickster. Design strategist for decolonial sustainability & regeneration. www.possiblefutures.earth/crew#samantha

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