Regeneration

Why Regeneration?

“The coming decades will witness a fundamental transformation of the human presence and impact on Earth. We are at a bi-furcation point in our species evolutionary trajectory. If we continue on the path we are on, we will create an increasingly technologically dependent species that aims to solve the problems of its own making by doing more of the same, thereby only exacerbating them until we hit the bio-physical limits of rising energy and materials demand.” (Daniel Christain Wahl)

“The challenge is to fundamentally redesign the human presence and impact on Earth within the lifetime of the generations alive today — from being exploitative and degenerative to being regenerative and healing. The second pathway into the future at this bi-furcation point is to refit our species to the scale-linking cycles through which life creates conditions conducive to life.” (Daniel Christain Wahl)

What is Regeneration?

“Regeneration is what all living systems do as they create the conditions conducive to life.” (Joe Brewer)

“Regeneration is the capacity of any living system to continue its dynamic existence as being alive. It is the feedbacks and circulations that give nutrients to all parts of what is living. And it is how humanity must learn to think, feel, and act as part of the world from which our livelihoods spring.” (Joe Brewer)

Example

“Every skin cell in your body dies within thirty days. When you look at another person—no matter how youthful, sexy, or vibrantly alive they appear—all of the skin that you see is dead cells. This is because the fatty subcutaneous tissues below the skin surface are continuously producing new cells that push upward and become layered into a substrate that is comprised solely of dead skin cells on the outer surface.

Skin is a membrane that regulates temperature, transports water and other nutrients, and is fundamentally involved in your survival every moment of every day. Yet it is continuously regenerating itself on a thirty-day cycle. You take in energy and nutrients through the food you eat and water you drink to enable this process to continue for the entirety of your life—from the moment you are born to the moment you die.” (Joe Brewer)

Key Concepts

“If humanity is to continue existing as part of the Earth, it is because we live out our expressions in a manner that creates the conditions for our aliveness in every moment as this existence persists.” (Joe Brewer)

“Regeneration for the Earth is about scaling up all of our local efforts in a sufficiently integrated way that we restore and maintain some shared sensibility about what it means to have planetary health.” (Joe Brewer)

“The design pathway [for earth regeneration] must be an expression of autopoiesis embodied as biomimicry for human economic, political, and social activities.” (Joe Brewer)

“A holistic approach to Earth regeneration [ ] is all about the intentional design of social niches that scaffold the formation of regenerative economies. These regenerative economies are structured around functional landscapes like watersheds, mountain ranges, and coastal estuaries. The landscapes are managed holistically with regenerative designs that link the ecological dimensions of local environments to planetary boundaries that must be honored to safeguard humanity’s future.” (Joe Brewer)

Principles of Regeneration (from John Fullerton)

In Right Relationship: Every living being is part of an interconnected web with all other life. Maintaining the capacity to remain as part of a community in the web of life requires every living being to be in right relationship in terms of size, pace, and function so that the web remains harmonious.

Views Wealth Holistically: Wealth should be understood and measured in terms of the overall health and well-being of the whole, achieved through the harmonization of various kinds of capital such as social, living, and experiential. The health of the whole is the source of wealth for the parts.

Innovative, Adaptive, Responsive: In a world that is ever-changing, living economies must be innovative and responsive. The concept of fitness is about having this ability to adapt to changing contexts in intelligent and effective ways.

Empowered Participation: All parts of a living system are empowered to functionally participate in a manner that supports the health of the whole system while also ensuring that the parts are able to maintain health at the same time.

Honors Community and Place: Each human community is a mosaic of peoples, traditions, beliefs, and institutions uniquely shaped by long-term pressures of geography, human history, local environments, and changing human needs—thus the focus on cultivating health and resilience appropriate to living in place.

Edge Effect Abundance: Creativity and innovation flourish synergistically at the edges of systems, where the bonds holding the dominant pattern are weakest. Guide coevolutionary processes in these “edge spaces” to cultivate adaptive responses to changing conditions.

Robust Circulatory Flow: Just as human health depends on the robust circulation of blood, oxygen, and other nutrients; so to do economies depend on robust circulation of money, information, and other resources in order to maintain systemic health.

Seeks Balance: Regenerative systems are always in a delicate dance in search of balance. Achieving it requires that they harmonize many variables instead of optimizing for one. They never achieve equilibrium, yet continual flow toward and around harmonious arrangements.

Design Pathway For Earth Regeneration

“The only viable pathway to Earth regeneration is to replace all existing economies with regenerative economies that organize themselves as bioregional networks. A bioregion is the intersection of key ecological functions of landscapes (think of a watershed, for example) with a shared cultural identity of people who all know how to live in their particular environments. [For example,] a famous bioregion is the Cascadia Bioregion located along the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.” (Joe Brewer)