Regeneration: A Movement?

Increasingly, people are referring to the “regenerative movement”. I understand why. People likely see me as part of such a movement. And I want to be part of the movement if it’s a movement. We humans are tribal, so it feels good to “find our tribe”.

I fully believe we can and should find our tribes, build our islands of coherence, link them up and lift them up. And yet, a movement does not feel like what I’m working on or for. Let me explain why.

A movement typically has a goal: equal rights, voting rights, or justice for example. Yet in regenerative thinking, we emphasize “creating conditions” over goals. We seek to create conditions for the evolutionary process to do it’s magic. We may have goals, but we see them as conditional, subject to be changed as the context changes and as we learn more. Same for our metrics. Indicators to monitor in order to help us see, knowing we see but a fragment of the dynamic complexity at work. Metrics are dangerous, more often misleading than not when treated as ends in themselves.

A movement typically has a clear demand, or a concise list of demands. Equal pay for equal work, one person one vote, stop fracking, tear down that wall. I can create a list of demands for a regenerative economy, but a large group would have a hard time agreeing on them. And until there is a broad shift in worldview, perhaps even a broad shift in consciousness, the demands would not resonate broadly. Trust me, I’ve experienced this. And if the demands are not clear and if they don’t resonate, there is no movement. Should this lead us to dumbing down the demands using our go to “whirling blades of reductionism” to borrow from Nora Bateson in order to create a movement?

A movement typically has a goal with demands that can be achieved where success or failure is self-evident. A law is passed. A demand met may not guarantee success in the goal, but it is a tangible milestone on the journey. On the other hand, the time scale of regeneration should leave us awestruck, and breathless to contemplate. It is a continuous process that began with the Big Bang (or perhaps Jude Currivan’s Big Breath) and never ends. It’s an unfolding, filled with mystery and even magic. But it cannot be achieved, only facilitated and participated in. It has more “movement” than the expression can ever possibly begin to communicate.

Finally, a movement has a clear and focused identity. It lives within an agreed space such as democracy, or food, or health, or environment. These “spaces” are themselves often a product of the fragmentation enabled by the reductionist thinking that is precisely the reason we need an alternative worldview. This has two consequences. First, we would need multiple regenerative movements, from health to business, to education, to law, to economics—basically everything in modernity. So immediately the “movement” becomes diffuse. And second, we miss the opportunity to transcend our differences, rather than negotiate compromises which is our standard approach. This possibility space is where unseen potential lies. This is where the butterfly emerges, this is our “goal” even when we don’t yet know what the butterfly will look like. This too is where we may discover the simplicity of wholeness, the oneness, the harmony, and yes, even the peace on Earth that lies on the other side of all the complexity.

Is this talk of movement or other than movement just semantics? Perhaps. But I don’t think so. By seeing the work as a “movement” we conflate it with all the other vital problem solving going in the immediate temporal space. It’s easy to say to one another, oh it’s basically the same as XYZ, we have similar goals, we have shared values, let’s join together and strengthen our power. Let’s create a big tent where all ideas are welcome. This is of course very appealing and tempting.

But in the process, I believe, we make it too easy to lose track of the profound shift in paradigm that the regenerative process represents. Language struggles to communicate effectively, making the challenge quite difficult as anyone working in regeneration knows all too well. It is this shift in ways of seeing, thinking, being, and doing—it’s the active and intentional how—that defines the regenerative process. It’s not about the what. As Jane Jacobs liked to say, “It’s not how big you grow, it’s how you grow big.”

So if it’s not a movement, what is it? For me, it’s something that transcends movements. It’s meta. It’s about participating constructively—I dare us!—in the evolutionary process of the human project, a part of, not apart from the process we call simplistically, life. It’s a new story, for a new era, reconnecting—literally re-membering—with the remarkable intuitions all wisdom traditions share in common, but also extending in ways previously impossible thanks to our unique human genius. As a result, the promise is now beyond our collective wildest imaginations, a journey that continues into the future that has yet to unfold.

Regeneration is life. Nothing more, but critically, nothing less. Let’s treat it with the reverence it deserves.