6 Lessons: Moving From Sustainability to Regeneration
Starting in 2015 with the discovery of the documentary The Regenerates, co-created by friend and mentor Dr. Dominique Hes, I started deep-diving into regenerative development, design and practice. Within 6-months, I was enrolled in The Regenerative Practitioner course with Regenesis Group, and in the inaugural cohort of the Centre for Living Environments and Regeneration (CLEAR) facilitator training for their Living Environments in Natural, Social and Economic Systems framework. I’ve been deepening my experience and practice of regenerative approaches to sustainability ever since, collaborating with others in the area such as Caroline Robinson of Cabal, Carol Sanford, the amazing folk at Regenesis Group, and many journey mates.
In 2020, I’ll use this platform to share my experiences and the lessons I’m integrating as I walk this exploratory path. This article provides 6 key lessons differentiating sustainability from regeneration, and upcoming articles will initially frame the concept of regeneration and it’s associated practices to give you, the reader, an understanding of how you can apply this on your projects, and why you might want to.
Following that, I’ll explore the diverse aspects and features of, as Daniel Christian Wahl puts it, a regenerative culture; In effect, the system of relationships, tools, processes and cultural protocols that we need to develop as communities, businesses, individuals and projects to enter into regenerative relationship with living systems.
Regeneration: A Big Idea
The idea of regeneration is spreading across the world (or at least the portions of it that I move in) quicker than you can say “new sustainability”. I suspect (and hope) the emergence of regeneration will prove to be pivotal in helping us shift from a society that degenerate living systems, to one that develops the unique potential of the living systems we touch.
In truth, I’ve been slightly unsettled for some time with the rise of regeneration (ReGeneration Rising, as Daniel Christian Wahl terms this emerging movement). As pointed out by Daniel in his article for The Transform Series, there is an inevitable loss of depth as concepts like regeneration achieve widespread usage. People are simultaneously using the language based on their current understanding of it’s meaning (which in many cases is “sustainability+”), while deepening their understanding through a lived experience of the deeper significant of regeneration as a practice.
There’s no two ways about it: This is a “messy” process. And that’s okay. Learning to be with that mess is essential to deepening our understanding, because regeneration requires an ability to release control in the face of complexity, and deepen our faith in the ability of living systems to self-regenerate.
Lesson #1: The journey to regeneration cannot be undertaken alone. This is a collective endeavor.
When I first encountered regeneration as a concept in 2015, via the documentary The Regenerates, I sensed that it was fundamentally from sustainability. It stirred something deep inside me that, at the time, I couldn’t put words to. In 2015 I was in the midst of working through some challenging patterns from my past, and I now realise that it hinted at my (and all other living beings) inherent ability to regenerate myself and my environment, something I had sensed all my life without having the language to describe.
It’s taken many years of practice and exploration to articulate what the difference is between these two terms, supported and guided gracefully and skillfully along the way by generous mentors Dominique Hes, Regenesis Group, Bill Reed, Carol Sanford, Caroline Robinson of Cabal, the indirect guidance of many others (like the aforementioned Daniel Christian Wahl), and journey mates too numerous to list.
Regeneration is a slippery term at the best of times, particularly when many individuals and groups from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds are all developing their relationship to the language and practice in real-time.
In 2018, J. Walter Thompson Intelligence (the research arm of J. Walter Thomson, “the world's best-known marketing communications brand”, according to their website) produced "The New Sustainability: Regeneration”. When I was forwarded the report (by Montréal based regenerative practitioner Michelle Holiday), I was immediately conflicted.
At one level I was excited to see that the term regeneration was starting to enter mainstream language, and among marketing and branding circles no less, who’s agencies tend to set trends followed by marketing and branding departments of large multinationals. Where they go, others follow.
At a deeper, perhaps more subtle level, it felt to me as though some fundamental aspects that differentiate regeneration from sustainability were missing. Or, rather, that differentiate regeneration from what sustainability has come to mean for many.
The report talked about regeneration as doing good. An important thing, no doubt, but it’s entirely possible for us to do good in a way that fundamentally degrades the capacity of communities and ecosystems to continue creating conditions that enable life to thrive. I’ve personally worked on building projects that did more good by generating more electricity than they used, and are now almost entirely disconnected from the patterns of the broader ecological system that, once upon a time, the site on which the building sits was in reciprocal relationship with. It had (and still has) a fundamental role to play as part of this system.
Lesson #2: Regeneration requires a new perspective, a new mind.
There’s another issue: Good according to whom?
There is a good chance that my definition of good differs from yours, and yours probably differs from an indigenous person from a remote part of the Amazon rainforest. Too often from a conventional Western perspective, we force ourselves into choosing a perspective that causes some people, ecosystems or communities to win at the expense of others.
We need to realise that nature is our nature, and nature doesn’t do compromises. Compromise has become the primary mechanism we use to resolve conflict in business and design. To me compromise demonstrates, at it’s core, a lack of sufficient creativity (and will) to identify and implement solutions that meet multiple diverse needs.
In a regenerative paradigm, it’s important to note that sustainability is absent from our communities not because we aren’t doing enough good (although it is important to do as create as much good as we can), but because we have lost the ability to align our development with that which develops health in the living systems that share Planet Earth with us. Too often we compromise vital, health-giving factors because it’s easier to compromise when the rubber hits the road, and that simply isn’t good enough in today’s world when there is plenty of support out there for those willing to step up.
Recovering our ability to develop our health and other health in parallel, by developing our capacity to design with the patterns of the living systems around us, and aligning the expression of our potential with that which nourishes the expression of life in our unique biocultural context, is fundamental to regeneration.
To do so we must learn to harmonise, rather than compromise, competing points of view.
Lesson #3: Regeneration requires a change of heart. A change of heart requires changing the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we share with others. It is as much about storytelling as it is about quantifying the outcomes of research.
I mentioned at the start of this article that the adoption of the idea of regeneration initially frightened me. I’ve had a change of heart.
As Daniel Christian Wahl points out in an article for The Transform Series:
“The meme ‘regeneration’ is a lot more robust than ‘sustainability’ as it carries the core message that life is a regenerative community — or as biomimicry elder Janine Benyus puts it ‘life creates conditions conducive to life’ — in its primary semantic.”
It’s reassuring to me that there is something fundamental to the term regeneration that may help avoid it’s corruption, it’s simplification to something that fails to deliver the promise of potential it holds. I also realise that my voice is key to avoiding that simplification.
This realisation leads me to another fundamental point of regeneration that the above article failed to address: It requires a change of heart, a change of narrative.
When I first read Daniel’s article noted above, my first response was fearful. I was afraid at the implications that the adoption of regeneration by the mainstream held for it’s authenticity. In the process, I realise, I was being guided by an internal narrative that I was a passive participant in the process by which our society adopts a new term into it’s vernacular. And that simply isn’t true.
Lesson #4: Regeneration requires our active participation.
We are fundamental aspects of the systems we are attempting to change for the better - whether we’re focused on a community, a family, a watershed or a forest. For them to fulfill their potential, we must fulfill ours.
I, like all of us, am an active participant in the continual, evolving and creative process that shapes our environment, our culture and our communities. That process of change will continue and persist, regardless of the extent of our involvement in it. Put simply, this transition requires all of us to find our voice, express it, and create spaces for the voices of others to be expressed, acknowledged and respected.
Lessons #5: The tools and practices we use either support, or degrade, our ability to act as regenerative catalysts. There are plenty of tools out there to support us in developing our regenerative capability; we need only be brave enough to put them to use.
Often, we don’t know how to generate the collective will to engage in a more whole design process, or we rely on out-dated conventions, frameworks, tools and practices that consider only parts of whole systems. This is a new challenge, but the tools and support are out there to help you make the shift. All we have to do is reach out and start using them.
A personal favourite practice to support this is regenerative development, as pioneered by Regenesis Group. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once said that “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think” . Regenerative development addresses this deep contributor to many of our challenges as, in effect, a system of meta-practices that allow us to work in a regenerative way, regardless of what we’re doing, by adopting a regenerative mind.
There are numerous practices that we can adopt to help maintain our integrity as we engage in this work. One of those is what Daniel Christian Wahl terms Living the Questions. Because living systems (which communities and businesses are) exist through a continual process of unfolding and becoming, ideally moving ever-closer to realising our potential through time, answers have a tendency to close us off to the collective, collaborative wisdom inherent in groups.
These collaborative answers leverage diversity of perspective and background, enabling us to see and consider more than we can in isolation, and are critical to solving systemic, wicked problems. The process of unfolding as we explore questions, rather than accepting incomplete, partial answers, also enables our design processes to continue to adapt and evolve in partnership with our environmental, social and economic context. When combined with intelligent design facilitation (and appropriate design processes), we can maintain a balance between needing full understanding and consensus (often incredibly time-consuming, perhaps mythical) and remarkably incomplete decision-making in design that leads to an avalanche of unforeseen consequences.
Lesson #6: Regeneration always starts with the whole. We can’t regenerate something in parts, so we must maintain an awareness of how our practices, approaches and knowledge fit together. The relationships are key.
With regard to the adoption of regeneration, I appreciate my role, and the need for my voice in that dialog. Hence this article, and the articles to follow.
Regeneration is a complex topic. When I first began engaging in this discourse and practice, working as an engineer, I realised the limits of my knowledge, and the extent of my ignorance.
That was a humbling process, and I’ve spent the last 5 years exploring topics from participatory leadership and group facilitation, to distributed systems of governance and finance, to alternative approaches to housing and development, ecological design and biomimicry, and much more.
A Regenerative Exploration
Over the coming year, it is my intention that this platform becomes a means to explore the diverse aspects and features of, as Daniel Christian Wahl puts it, a regenerative culture; In effect, the system of relationships, tools, processes and cultural protocols that we need to develop as communities, businesses, individuals and projects to enter into regenerative relationship with living systems.
There’s two reasons I’m doing this:
I believe another voice in the discourse can only serve to support meaningful dialog and more widespread adoption of an authentic form of regeneration.
This will be an incredibly valuable process for me personally, weaving together the diverse threads that I’ve been exploring for a number of years.
As humans, we have a tendency to get lost in the details, those fragmentary parts of the whole that we’re most familiar with. It’s critical to never lose sight of the whole thing, so that we consider all factors contributing to success. It’s also critical to remain connected to why we’re doing it in the first place, so that we remain purposeful and focused, as individuals and communities.
For that reason, I will produce these articles in a way that connects the topic at hand to the overall topic of regeneration, so that my individual and our collective understanding of this far-reaching and complex topic can deepen, and our ability to practically apply aspects of it can remain contextually linked to the whole point - regenerating our world.
Please feel free to get in touch or comment with your thoughts. Sharing this journey can only benefit us all.