Transcript: Regenerative Cultures with Daniel Christian Wahl

Series 1 Episode 1

Host: Josie Warden

Daniel: Life on planet Earth has sustained itself for billions of years through its fundamental regenerative impulse. Every second of every day, our cells are fed, nourished, and regenerated by the living systems around us. And our presence in turn enables other species to thrive. But our current way of living is interfering with these vital processes and undermining the very systems that enable all of us to survive. Communities around the world are grappling with the converging effects of climate, emergency, and cascading economic, social, and ecological crisis, and even collapse. It's increasingly clear that we need to rethink who we are as a species and our role on this planet. We urgently need a new collective story for humanity, one that celebrates the diversity within the human family and recognizes our interconnection with the rest of life on earth. A story that galvanizes collaborative action towards regenerative futures. I'm Daniel Wahl, author of Designing Regenerative Cultures.

Josie: And I'm Josie Warden, Head of Regenerative Design at the RSA. In this series, we explore how regenerative practice is helping people in place collectively redesign their communities, cities, and economies, and create a thriving home for all on our planet.

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Josie: Hello, and thank you for joining us for this first episode in our Regeneration Rising Podcast. In this episode, I'll be asking Daniel what it means to think regeneratively. Daniel, you've been a mentor to me on my own regenerative journey and no doubt to many others. Can we start by hearing a bit about your background and why this work is so important to you?

Daniel: Yeah, gladly. I mean, I've started off wanting to study biology in the spirit of Humboldt, of how does the cosmos fit together, how does life as a whole function to create conditions conducive to life as Janine Benyus so beautifully said. And on that journey, I realized that the greatest impediment for the future of the species that I was studying was my own species. And so I left science in part because I got disheartened by seeing the impact that we have on the living world and the web of life. And then ended up studying holistic science a few years later because it was addressing all the shortcomings of a reductionist lens on the world of taking things apart into smaller and smaller categories and losing sight of how it's all interconnected. And while studying holistic science, I met some amazing mentors like John Todd and David Orr, who opened up a window that showed to me that the practice end of this interconnected, holistic, dynamic complexity worldview that we were exploring with earth system science and the things that are taught at Schumacher College in the Masters of Holistic Science were actually being put into action by what at the time was called ecological design.

So I ended up shifting towards design as the means of implementation of a new way of being in the world that was connected with the patterns of life itself, what I would now call life's regenerative impulse. And that took me on a journey to do a PhD in design for human and planetary health in 2006. And then I left academia again because I couldn't find funding for that kind of interdisciplinary work. The funding councils hadn't caught up yet. So I ended up working at Findhorn College in a village in the north of Scotland as the core director bringing universities to this ecovillage as a living laboratory of sustainable community and living differently on the planet. And what I learned doing that work and working with the United Nations Training Institute that we set up there and working with many universities is that we really need to change the way people think about their relationship to the natural world and their agency in bringing about a better future.

And on that journey, I came across Bill Reed's work. That was the first introduction to the whole school of regenerative development based on Carol Sanford's work. And Pamela Mang's work is coming up in this series. And as soon as I heard the word regeneration in the context that they were framing it, it just made perfect sense to me because it speaks to the evolutionary capacity to keep on learning and co-evolving with changing context with the web of life and social dynamics. So it's not solution focused, but a learning focused. It's more focused on the journey of continuously responding to changing context rather than arguing what the perfect solution is. And that's so much more aligned with how life operates. So yeah, that led me to write a book Designing Regenerative Cultures, which came out in 2016. And it just came out at a time where, anyway, not because of my book, but because of other people's work over decades, this shift beyond sustainability, towards regenerative thinking was suddenly gaining a larger and larger audience.

And then my social media work and the way of promoting these issues helped build a bridge for a lot of people — through the deep work that is done by Regenesis Group and Carol Sanford and so on. So for the last five, six years, I've been in many ways a public communicator of some of the insights that they developed over 20 years and blended that with my own journey, particularly that approach to design for human and planetary health where health is understood as that dynamic capacity to evolve and to keep learning and to keep responding to uncertainty, which is what we are now facing in this hyper complex world.

Josie: So at a basic level, what does it mean to live and work regeneratively? And why do we need regenerative cultures?

Daniel: To answer that, I have to say that it's really important that when we think about regenerative cultures, that we shouldn't think of them as something new that is coming over the hill at some point in the future, some utopia we need to build. It's actually a returning to the core pattern of humanity. Human beings would not be alive today simply because of the evolutionary process — if we had not been regenerative place-based cultures that were custodians of the ecosystems that brought us forth in different places for millennia and for the large part of the human story, the 95%, 99% of the human story. So to be regenerative is to align with life as a planetary process, with life's pattern of creating conditions that help more life to flourish and to understand that the only way that we can contribute the best of our own potential to that larger context is in service to that larger context.

So the paradox is that to manifest our individual potential, we have to be in service to the collective potential, both in human communities and in the modern human communities of life as a planetary process. And that's really it. Like, how do we align ourselves to this core pattern of life and keep living the questions, keep checking in with us whether yesterday's solutions are in danger of becoming tomorrow's problems. So we need to let go of patterns that no longer serve in order to build the patterns that are now appropriate. And that's, I think, what we're all experiencing in our individual lives right now. That the old certainties are breaking away and, and lots of changes are happening. And so we need to repattern ourselves and how we relate with work and our communities, but also in the collective level. We now have the writing so clearly on the wall that we've overstepped planetary boundaries and are in danger of endangering life itself on the planet and certainly a human future on the planet, that it is time to deeply repattern our human patterns. And regeneration would suggest that that has to happen in a way that is place sourced coming out of the uniqueness of place and the people in that place. So it's not a global solutioneering, it's a local manifesting of the potential of people and their places.

Josie: To me, pattern suggests this idea of something that repeats over time. Could you give us some examples of a pattern that doesn't align with life and then a pattern that does align with life?

Daniel: Clearly we have, if we pay attention, seasonal cycles and diurnal cycles — the cycle of day and night. And if you have the opportunity to engage with more than human nature outside a city, you'll see how all of life responds to these patterns constantly. And there are periods of abundance generation and periods of conservation. There are periods of collapse or seeming breakdown that actually enable the nourishing ground for new sprouts to come forward. It's these cyclical patterns that over time build a systems optimization in nature, in ecosystems beyond the human design system. And what we've done by beginning to tell a story that somehow took us out of this pattern that we actually can never leave because we're part of nature is to create patterns that don't align with life itself, with the necessary patterns of abundance generation and ecosystems. And so we've over-extracted: we're in this brief period of human history, which some people have called the carbon pulse, where suddenly coal and oil and fossil fuel and fossil resources were released that had been built up over eons in the Earth's crust and enabled us to build a civilization on an energy need that is just simply not compatible with the size of our planet and the solar system we live in.

So we're currently at 19 terawatts of continuous use civilization. And most estimates suggest that if we had to run our current solar income on renewable energies, we would have to be a 5 to 10 terawatt civilization. So overall, the energy use that humanity uses at any given second has to be halved for us to re-enter that regenerative pattern of life. That's quite a challenge ahead of us.

Josie: In recent years, we've seen a shift away from the concept of sustainability. How is a sustainable approach different to a regenerative one?

Daniel: I always find that we need to do two things at once, which is to be critical with how sustainability has been watered down and misinterpreted and misused. But we shouldn't fall into the trap of now that everybody wants to use the new adjective “regenerative” to dismiss 30, 40, 50 years of work of good people really meaning well in the field of sustainability. And we should be more nuanced in understanding that some of these people, while they might have used the adjective sustainable, have actually worked very much regeneratively in this field. So it's let's not dismiss sustainability, but yes, let's be nuanced on how in the general observable patterns working on sustainability is very different with working regeneratively and isn't just a, okay, I'll do what I've done before, but now I call it something else, which is what is happening in many, many places right now.

So to distinguish that, I would say that one of the things that I've already alluded to is that sustainability tends to be about solutioneering. It's like we have a problem, let's find a solution and then move on to the next problem. And it tends to be done in silos rather than a holistic sense. That pattern in itself of abstracting a problem and then finding other places in the world where the same problem exists, and then having discussions with more and more experts around defining the problem in a more and more abstract way to then bring together designers and engineers to hothouse solutions for this very abstractly defined global problem that we observe everywhere; let it be climate change, let it be inequality, let it be ecosystems collapse. What then happens is that the kind of solutions that are being offered are generic in type with the intention of a great solution.

Let's scale it up and implement it everywhere — that's not regenerative. That's exactly what when Bayo Akomolafe said maybe the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis I think he's speaking to — if we try to deal with symptoms like climate change and we see it as a problem and then we declare war on climate change and deal with that problem, we're not working with the core patterns that create vitality, resilience and the capacity to evolve and regenerate. And so regeneration works with potential rather than problems. It works with the uniqueness, the specificity of unique individuals and unique groups, communities and ecosystems.

And by not abstracting into the global, into the generalization, but by going home upstream into the real world of a specific location and its people, you do one thing: you manage complexity. You still allow the interconnectedness of the system, you allow the complexity of the wicked problem, if you want to frame it that way. But you actually begin to see that wicked problem as wicked potential because you see unique individuals and unique situations. And by looking at all their problems, quote unquote, you then begin to see in between these problems that we're naming is actually real human potential and the potential of a place and the opportunities that are being missed right now. And if we begin to create a field and have a conversation locally around how would we make this place more able to evolve into an uncertain future — both the humans and the natural community — that precisely activates life's regenerative impulse because we're becoming the reflective capacity of that place and its people. And we're trying to fit in rather than abstract, define problem, create solution, and then scale up solutions with disregard of the uniqueness of place and disregard of the cultures where we're trying to implement those solutions. That's one of the differences. There are many.

Josie: Is that related to one of the things that you say in your book — “humanity’s tendency to see themselves as separate to nature”? Could you talk to us a little bit about this?

Daniel: Absolutely. I mean, there's a historical reason for that without starting with Adam and Eve. Let's start with the scientific revolution, which is long, it seems long ago. But basically after the Reformation wars, when suddenly two Bibles had appeared in the Western world, and the arbiter of ultimate truth was no longer the Pope because there was now a Protestant church and a Catholic church, Descartes, who had fought in the 30 year war, tried to create new terrafirma with the "cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"), with the foundation in the Discourse on Method where he built the foundations of modern science. And by doing that, he separated the thinking mind from the body and the self from the world and humanity from nature. And then we gained more and more capacity over nature through the power of science. And even the language of the early scientists was, it was language that was literally coming out of the witch burnings like “bind” nature and “torture her secrets from her” and those kind of… This is Francis Bacon talking. And so of course they're very related.

If we are a culture that understands that we're not owners of the places we live in, but expressions of them, that the ecosystem that we were born into brought us forth and we're one of many living expressions of a living planet, we will relate to life in a very different way like Native Americans have done for their entire cultural history. All my relations. Awareness that all of life is sacred, all of life is interconnected, and all of life is somewhat a reflection of the larger body that I am part of. So I'm part of this larger thing that I'm looking at rather than separate and individual from it. And of course, the minute you tell a story of separation and a narrative of there's a nature red and tooth and claw out there, and it's all about competition and I have to get my elbows out and get ahead, you will bring that reality into existence by your behaviour — your competitive behaviour will create more competition.

And that narrative is self-perpetuating. So it's literally understanding that the universe is benevolent not out to get us, and life is evolving towards higher expressions of complexity, diversity, vitality, and abundance, and has so through 3.8 billion years, and it's a blip that we tend to call history where one species decided to take on practices like agriculture and early technology, and then with the scientific revolution very recently, lots of powerful technologies that allowed us to create a fantasy that somehow we stand above all that. Somehow we will go and conquer Mars or mine asteroids. And that is a biophysical nonsense of utmost dimensions. And we need to become real again and understand that the only way to have a humane future is within the limits of a living planet as a living planet.

Josie: Of course, these ideas are not new, but really have been at the heart of Indigenous worldviews for tens of thousands of years. And in our next episode we'll speak to the wonderful Professor Anne Paulina, a traditional custodian from the Fitzroy River in Western Australia. And she talks about the rise of regenerative thinking really being a return to our ancestry and a way to connect with life's principles. Can you tell us a bit more about this without giving too much of the episode away?

Daniel: What was for me deeply gratifying in the conversation that is coming up with Anne was that I had an opportunity to ask an Indigenous elder something that I as an overeducated, overprivileged Westerner had just intuited — which is that ultimately the notion of Indigeneity and non-Indigeneity is another means of separation, another one of those “the way we approach the crisis is part of the crisis”. We are all indigenous to life. We are living expressions of a living world. And all our ancestors in Europe and Africa and Asia and everywhere else have known how to live these regenerative patterns in the past. And so yes it's a return to these core patterns, but with the distinct difference of we have triggered runaway climate change, we have rapidly depleted the world's abundant resources like we've denuded the planet. There's less than half the amount of forest than there was 150 years ago.

And we are 8 billion people, so how do we bring Indigenous ways of being in right relationship with the living earth into the 21st century? And the only way we we can do that is if we have a very nuanced conversation about the role of technology and how it can serve us and can also create futures that defuture — that actually won't create a humane future for humanity or life. And that's still a very real conundrum we have because we think technology is gonna ride over the hill and save us. But what in the conversation with Anne Paulina comes out so beautifully is that all Indigenous cultures have very advanced, highly refined technologies of the sacred that evolved over tens of thousands of years and helped to transmit this deeper wisdom throughout these lineages. And these are things like sitting in council with a talking stick, their rite of passage for youngsters to understand their connection to community and life on earth.

They're visiting and revisiting places as aware participants in web works of relationship that you hand on from one generation to the next. And it's these technologies of the sacred, that aren't all blingy Elon Musk type things, that we need to reintegrate into human culture if we want to build our capacity to weather the very difficult decades that are ahead of us in terms of transformation. It's necessary collapse and necessary transformation, but that doesn't mean it's not going to be unsettling and difficult and traumatic for many people. And precisely because of that, we need these technologies of the sacred to give us a way of making meaning after cataclysm and moving forward together after cataclysm rather than fission our society even further if we get more and more climate or politically based catastrophes in the world.

Josie: I think the idea of the sacred could be challenging to some people. Why is it so important that we look at those deeper aspects of humanity as part of this journey?

Daniel: You are absolutely right. I mean there are these trigger words in our culture, whether it's sacred or spirituality that can make people uncomfortable and even switch off their hearing and capacity to take on board what is being talked about. And I think for a while it was a skillful means to then talk about these terms using other proxies so we can talk about collective meaning making and worldview in a more neutral way maybe. And ultimately we have to understand that human beings are meaning seeking creatures. From the very moment that we spat a bit of paint against the hand on the wall of a cave, we were asking these deep questions that Gauguin summarized. Who are we? Where are we going to? What are we here for? And it's the technologies of the sacred I was referring to, is very often a place where community comes together to revisit those deeper questions, revisit the why, the how do we relate, who are we obliged to in order to act more wisely in day-to-day living, both with regard to how we treat each other and how we treat the modern human world.

So I think it doesn't matter whether we call it spirituality or sacred or whether it's clad within the belief system of a particular world wisdom tradition — Christianity, Islam or Buddhism, Hinduism, you name it. You find particularly in the mystic lineages of all those traditions that deeper awareness of interconnectedness, interdependence, and the need for the only way to be well is collective wellbeing. You cannot separate your own selfish wellbeing from the context that you depend on. So I think that if we don't have these conversations that we somewhat put on hold as we built that powerful secular society based on technology and hard science… Like even science is beginning, science has admitted that there is no predictability and controllability beyond limited bounded, artificially reduced spaces. The world is unpredictable and uncontrollable. The world is unknowable in its totality, therefore we have to act with limited decision-making information and big data.

And AI is only looking at a very thin slice of that whole. It's looking at the slice that can be captured by quantitatively analyzable data of a certain type. But what Nora Bateson, Gregory Batson's daughter, calls “warm data” — that human interrelationship, transcontextual data that is in between the silos of different sciences and their data collection systems — is actually what makes meaning, what creates vitality, what creates health. And so that's what we need to somehow pay more attention to again, that we have to find ways of humbly living into an uncertain future, accepting the limits of our knowing and making steps in such a way that we get feedback from them more quickly. And that's another argument for re-localizing and re-regionalizing the core patterns by which we meet human needs in ways that actually heal local communities and local ecosystems.

Josie: We've chosen to call the podcast Regeneration Rising because we've both seen this way of thinking start to emerge across multiple disciplines and start to filter into the mainstream. How do you see the regeneration rising?

Daniel: One of our guests coming up, Sarah Ichioka in the conversation with Michael Pawlyn, said something that really struck me, which is, before you are able to swim, the water has to rise to your bottom. And I think that to some extent our comfortable Western world, that dominant exported — first through colonialism and then through globalization — culture that is now everywhere, the people who hold the power of the discourse and the power of money and finance were really comfortable and believed truly in that narrative of separation, of competition, of get getting ahead, of being the billionaire among the non-billionaires. And suddenly in the last decade, the warning signs from both social systems, ecological systems, economic systems around the world that are just becoming so much more brittle, so much more volatile. And we see collapse in our living room, not just somewhere else in the world, but just down the road from us.

Some people are homeless because of a flood or another wildfire. And I think that is activating for still very comfortable people like us, a sense of the water rising to our bottom and we're beginning to see that we need to learn how to swim and we need to enable everybody to swim in this rising tide. And also because of that alignment with a deeper resonance that is actually in ourselves as human beings because of our evolutionary process, regeneration strikes a note — a note in people that makes them feel, yeah, that seems sensible. You don't saw on the branch you're sitting on you, you support the tree that gives you food and shelter. And so it's that narrative that is also in a context where people are desperate for meaning and somewhat confused with the breakdown that they're observing around themselves.

Regeneration offers a hopeful narrative that life can quickly regenerate and much more quickly if we align with this. But it even wider embeds this in life as a planetary process to the point that even should we at some point in a hundred years time feel that we didn't act quick enough and we couldn't avoid ecosystems collapse and a degeneration of the planetary biosphere beyond the point where human life can be sustained on this planet, should it come to that worst case scenario from a human perspective, regeneration also offers a much deeper integration into life to say, okay, well this is the fate of every species on the planet to go extinct at some point. And at very least, if we do our best to appreciate life to do what we can, that life will, life's regenerative capacity will be better than if we don't do what we can.

Then what I'm speaking about is that at a deeper level, regeneration to more and more people is bringing them back to life in a deep way that they identify with life as well as with their own story as individuals and as humans. And if we create cultures that are deeply connected to life, then even should asteroid or our own stupidity create a situation where human life can't continue on the planet, we can relax into that more because we're also seeing ourselves as life and we know that life continues and I think that opens up a different attraction to people at the deep level to say, I'm aligning with a pattern that is ancient and because it's been around since the beginning of life, I trust that that pattern will continue and I trust that if I align with that, the conditions I create for myself and my community and the wider world will also create a more thriving, vital and abundant future. And guarantees we’ll never have. Whether that means that we are gonna be lucky on this journey, but hopefully I think that as more and more people align with the regeneration rising and do this place-sourced work, they're not only building their capacity to weather the difficulties that might come, they're also building the more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible, as Charles Eisenstein has put it.

Josie: I feel like I've grown up looking at the world as a whole, but in this conversation you've spoken a lot about the importance of place. Can you talk a little bit about why it's so important that we look at a local approach rather than starting from a global approach?

Daniel: I think one of the lessons that I learned at Schumacher College in the Masters Holistic Science is that if you step on a paradox, you're bound to have some truth on your shoes, meaning that paradoxes somehow open up a window of art. There's something important here and it's exactly that, on the one hand with science and technology, with the evolution of what then turned out to be Gaia Theory, James Lovelock's insights about how the whole planet is a self-regulating process, creating conditions conducive to life, science and the planetary view allowed us to become much more aware of that global planetary connection and our relationship with the biosphere. And it's wonderful. We all grew up with an awareness of countries. I mean, I was privileged enough to see five continents before I was 30, and I think that formed me as an individual and it was truly important for me.

But at the same time, if we think about it, what's the shadow side of being aware of everything that goes on around the planet, even just when we watch the news, is that we only have that much attention and learning capacity. And so we stop paying attention to the more minute and important little details in the physical places we live in. Like who actually knows or can name five migratory bird species and when they arrive and when they leave in their area, who knows when they walk through the forest which are the native trees and which are the imported trees. Even simple things like how many people, if you take them to a vegetable garden early in spring and the first little shoots are coming through the seedlings, maybe even in the greenhouse still, and you just point at the plants and they look at the first two leaves of that plant. Who can say, that's a broccoli, that's a basil, that's a potato?

And we don't have that core knowledge anymore because we have knowledge about so many things and to really fall in love both with the beauty and the potential of our places, but also to truly be aware of the capacity of the places we're part of, like the opportunities and the difficulties, is so vital in order to create a regenerative culture in place. And so how do we not become parochial and not care about the world but actually begin to value the specificity of place, the specificity of the community we live in, the different cultural narratives of the people who lived in that place for a long time and the people who have come in more recently and how they're blending. All of those things we need to be much more aware of if we want to create these place-sourced regenerative cultural communities that pull together rather than fission apart when the effects of climate change and the cascading collapse of an economic system that is no longer fit for purpose affect our communities.

Josie: Finally then, what would you like listeners to take away from this podcast series?

Daniel: At the very essence, what I would love people to get out of this podcast is a conviction that life is a regenerative process and we are part of that process and that it is in each and every one of our capabilities to play a meaningful role in bringing about a future that is conducive to life and that includes our children, our families, our partners, but it also includes our wider community, the local ecosystem, and the core responsibility to enable other people in other places to do the same thing in their place to regenerate the earth and her people.

Josie: I think that's a really lovely place to leave it. Thank you, Daniel, for this wonderful grounding, which will help us steer through the rest of our conversations. And thank you for listening. Please check out the show notes for links and resources and to find out more about how you can support the regeneration.