A primer on Regenerative Practice

Tyler Key

Tyler Key

— 3 min read
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A primer on Regenerative Practice
Photo by Stephen Irwin / Unsplash

Imagine one of your following relationships:

long term romantic life-partner
a best friend
your dearest family member
parent/guardian
pet

If someone asked how your relationship is going, and you say

“it’s sustainable”

It would set off alarm bells.

No one wants a relationship that is just sustainable, I hope.

I want relationships that are beautiful, expansive, vibrant, nourishing and reciprocal.

Relationships may not be like this all the time,
but,
aiming for only sustainable in our relationships
doesn’t make much sense.

Whether it is the relationship with ourself
Our colleagues, parents, siblings, co-workers, friends, the neighbour across the road,
the parklands, the forests, the oceans, our planet

Why are we just aiming for sustainable?

REGENERATION


A process that creates more life

A value-adding process that creates the conditions & catalysts for the ecology of a living system to be increasingly able to be vital, viable and evolve through cycles of decomposition & recombination

Process

Paradigm

System health

Forestry Example

Degeneration

Extraction

Do Harm

Value-Extracting

Cutting down trees for profit. Mostly turning them into woodchips for exportation.Exploit your workers as you do this, pay upper management exponentially more than you do anyone else. 

Crisis Management

Arrest Disorder

Value-Neutral

Cutting down trees but having a carbon offset program. Have an employee assistance program and award level wages

Sustainability

Do Good

Value-Added

Cutting down trees, but planting new ones as you do. Measuring your scope 1, 2, 3 carbon footprint and having a carbon offset program. Pay above awards. 

Regeneration

Regenerate Life

Value-Adding

From understanding an ecosystem, criteria is created to be selective of which trees are cut down entirely, mostly taking large branches.


Care is taken to ensure that any human activity is contributing to the overall health of the ecosystem rather than disrupting it.


As the ecosystem is being cared for, diverse species of plants are seeded that include edible plants which home diverse species of animals. 


In addition to trees being harvested appropriately at a rate that allows the forest to continue growing other resources are collected such as materials for weaving, food.

The organsiation is a co-operative that pays above award, employees see mutual benefit to contributing to the health of the ecosystem and the organisation. The organisation redistributes funds to First Nations communities - local Elders are on the board and have veto for decisions that effect the land. 

Reflexive Practice Question:

Looking back on a recent moment, event, or interaction.

How would you describe the quality of that interaction?

  • regenerative? (reciprocal mutual benefit, which increases in quality and meaning over time and evolves the relationship and entities in the system over time - vitalising AND viabilising AND enabled evolution?)
  • sustaining? (there was a degree of reciprocal benefit - it was vitalising AND viabilising?)
  • extractive? (within an interaction value was exchanged, with no value-adding reciprocity within the large system - there is a degeneration in the whole system)

You may do this on an interaction from the past - this would be reflection

Over time, the aim is to make this reflexive, building the capacity to sense this within the moment, and calling on inner resources e.g. your vocation, to shift the interaction

How the "Regenerate Life" paradigm organises life to higher orders of complexity

Regeneration enables a whole living system to continually increase its vitality, viability and evolution - the system is able to exchange with higher orders of complexity. 

The Regenerative Life Tetrad - Carol Sanford 

Think of the diversity and vitality within a rainforest compared to someone’s well manicured front lawn. 

By understanding the culture of an ecological system (e.g. native plants and animals, and they type of "place") you can create the conditions for it to evolve towards higher orders of complexity.The difference on the overall ecosystem between planting some non-native trees together so that we have more of them, vs "Re-wilding" / restorative / regenerative processes for native ecosystems where you create the conditions for the system to evolve itself. 


Sustainability Paradigm -
Value-added Monocultures


Regenerative Paradigm -
Value-adding diverse, thriving ecologies

Watch this video to understand how creating conditions and catalyst enable regeneration How Wolves Change Rivers - YouTube

Written on Kaurna Yarta.
This land was stolen and First Nations Sovereignty was never ceded. I pay my respects to Kaurna Elders past and present. I acknowledge the continuing connection of First Nation's communities across the Earth to land, river, sea and sky.

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