Regeneration
Description
Austin Wade Smith:
"We need to formulate a notion of prosperity which does not rely on a dualism of ecology and economy. What might we call that which stands outside this opposition?
Regeneration, as a philosophy and broader practice of systemic interrelation, offers a conspicuous path out. Long held as a core tenet of land stewardship and commonsing, the notion of regeneration has gained significant interest in the recent past among economic and decentralized finance circles. This movement, as well as the arguments of this piece, braid many lineages together, most notably the basic tenents of ecological economics. Regenerative Finance, or ReFi as many call is an attempt to reformulate our essential notions of value in order to leverage economic and market-based processes to heal a damaged planet.
We need to be talking about whether this is possible at all. If it is, we don’t have many chances to get this right."
(https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/1wdm8BNkLJWnnzwshtYEmHYlHaXxRF3bLEt4y4-9OE8)
Discussion
What are we talking about when we talk about regeneration?
Austin Wade Smith:
"Let’s start with how the Regen Economics Whitepaper defines it:
“Actions that increase the capacity, viability, and vitality of both the agent and system being acted within or upon.“
Framed in relation to humans and the planet, regeneration are those actions and processes which bring both human and the world which sustains us into greater capacity and vitality, in a reciprocal fashion.
Regeneration posits that individual / communal well being emerges through environmental stewardship. It is the opposite of extraction. Inasmuch as legacies of land management are reflected in our lexicon, it is telling that American english has a limited vocabulary for such a behavior. “Co-capacitate”, isn’t a word but incapacitate is. The analogous terms at hand stem largely from important work in feminist and decolonial thinking. Here are three.
Donna Haraway’s definition of sympoeisis.
Sympoeisis - a simple word; it means “making-with.” Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing … Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it.
It closely resonates with the belief of reciprocity outlined by Robin Wall Kimmerer when describing the diverse practices of gratitude and kinship of the first nations of Turtle Island (North America).
“Reciprocity — returning the gift — is not just good manners; it is how the biophysical world works. Balance in ecological systems arises from negative feedback loops, from cycles of giving and taking. Reciprocity among parts of the living Earth produces equilibrium, in which life as we know it can flourish.”
As well as notions of care work, as typified in Matters of Care, Maria Puig Bellacasa’s evolution of Bruno Latour’s “Matters of Concern”.
“Matters of Care - contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world.”
These definitions emerge through narrative and practice. The above authors situate their stories closely to different patterns of co-dependence and symbiosis between human beings, and “Nature”, (what I refer to as the “living world”). Spanning pollinators, soil microbes, and Douglas Firs, regeneration is co-authored between humans and the numerous lifeworlds we are embedded within.
This interrelation makes sense at a base level. We intuitively understand that to live on earth is always a double action. The separation of social and planetary prosperity is counterintuitive to our lived experience. Common sense tells us that deterioration in the health of “land”, is simultaneously a depreciation in its value, but we often struggle to acknowledge the inverse…that the remediation of damaged earth is a profound source of value. Where our current paradigm of neo-colonial extraction exacerbates the rift between Society and Nature, regeneration closes it. In fact it nullifies the distinction in the first place."
(https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/1wdm8BNkLJWnnzwshtYEmHYlHaXxRF3bLEt4y4-9OE8)
Characteristics
Undualing
Austin Wade Smith:
"Regeneration is a practice of undualing. Undualing isn’t really a word, I made it up to emphasize that the separation between ourselves and the world which sustains us has never existed. The dualism of Society and Nature is in turn, also the separation of economy from ecology. This is the creation myth upon which Modernism is built. [6] We’ve embedded it into the policies, infrastructures, and algorithms which run much of contemporary life. The separation of ecology and economy is synonymous with extraction inasmuch as the world beyond the human is considered a resource to be managed. Our default conflation of economic wealth with ecological extraction fundamentally drives the climate crisis ; and is a manifestation of the incredible narrowness of our definitions of wellbeing. Rather than a world co-created by a multitude of players, locations, and timelines, the dualism at the heart of modernity is a retreat from a diverse set of “worlding” practices to one universal world, centralized across time and space.
In contrast, undualing is the invitation to thicken the cast of characters which create value and sustain planetary livelihood. It is the practice of reanimating lifeworlds against forces of singularization. It resists the collapsing of many to the few. How might we nurture this pluralism in the infrastructures, organizations, and technologies we build? Through what scales and systems does regeneration offer a way out?
A start might be to develop and organize systems of value at a meso-scale, one which tethers the individual to planetary and upstream to downstream. A scale whose boundaries are already defined by the living world: the bioregion. Regeneration is a bioregional endeavor and in order to undual ecology and economy, our definitions of prosperity must be re-scoped."
(https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/1wdm8BNkLJWnnzwshtYEmHYlHaXxRF3bLEt4y4-9OE8)