Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As a story teller and pot-stirrer and social innovator I am now on the hunt for what will put the soil and water and regeneration story on everyone’s lips, to have teenagers to grandmothers march for healthy soil, to have policies that transform degraded land into garden landscapes.
Human activities have degraded ecosystems globally to the point that Earth is now in overshoot-and-collapse. We need to restore ecosystem functions in the coming decades in order to safeguard our collective future.
The path of ‘deep adaptation’ to the imminent breakdown and the path to avoid short-term human extinction are one and the same: we need to restore healthy ecosystems functions and we need to redesign the human impact on Earth by engaging in regenerative bioregional development — everywhere!
Whenever you design and create anything, you deploy one or another conceptual framework. One or another way of framing and making sense of both what you start with, how to go about developing or changing it, where you are heading, and why you are even bothering. No matter if you’re aware of your conceptual framework. It is there.
Sparked into action by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring John Todd and his wife Nancy Jack-Todd, together with their friend Bill McLarney, founded the New Alchemy Institute (N.A.I.) in 1969 “to restore the land, protect the seas, and inform the Earth’s stewards.”
A bioregion is the integrated system of all human activities within a given area with all of the larger ecosystems on which they depend. It has a shared cultural identity expressed through love of place, shared values and worldview, and commonly understood modes of exchange.
The world’s first bioregional-scale regenerative hubs were launched in July of this year. A gathering of experts from more than 20 organizations gathered at the eco-tourism retreat center of Rancho Margot in the high mountain rainforests of northern Costa Rica.
We are facing a knife’s edge, between a future that is abundant of collaboration with [more than human] nature, or decades of decline and unspeakable, unthinkable situations that we want to avoid. The way to start navigating the path towards the positive is to be in love with life and each other every day a little bit more.
The speed at which the regeneration meme is spreading into all aspects of society and infiltrating the mainstream is breathtaking and faster than I would have anticipated when I told my colleagues in Gaia Education in early 2014 to take a closer look at Bill Reed’s article from 2007 ‘Shifting from sustainability to regeneration’.
“Designing Regenerative Cultures” by Daniel Wahl is an essential guidebook for our time that everyone should read, young and old. Through this book we come to realise deeply that there is a way out of the madness of our current societal systems in which so many people and non-human species have become trapped.
So what if the money was suddenly available to engage everyone who is holding pieces in the complex puzzle of redesigning and transforming the human impact on Earth in a concerted effort to enable this shift…
It is essential that as many local/regional “hubs” as possible be set up for regeneration of ecosystem functions that address the most critical planetary boundaries… namely geochemical cycles of nitrogen/phosphorous, land-use practices, and climate change.
