What is regenerative living?

As we are travelling around and exploring regenerative ways to live it is a term which might benefit from a bit of definition. Some readers might already have an idea of what constitutes something as being regenerative and like most subjects the deeper you go the more detailed the description and distinctions can become. Our aim here is to give a brief, easy access definition so that the term has enough meaning within our blog to make sense to the reader. I’ll set about defining the term with a bit of a compare and contrast.

The easiest place to begin is probably with what is not regenerative and in simple terms it is not extractive or destructive. Hopefully it helps to illustrate this with a real world example, that of regenerative agriculture. For the most part, in the modern era, we can view agriculture as being an extractive process. Over millennia our soils across the whole globe have been built up by a slow process of decay. Plants turning sunlight into organic matter which can either fall and decompose to form humus in the soil or be consumed by other creatures which in turn become part of the soil. The gradual processes of erosion breaking down rocks and bringing minerals into the soil. If we think of agriculture in a small example of growing annuals (wheat and other grains for example but also many of our vegetable crops) then we have a situation where we are constantly trying to recreate a specific ecological niche – one in which the soil has been disturbed. If you have ever observed such a landscape in nature (a landslide, soil accumulation by a waterway, etc.) you find that this freshly turned / deposited soil is a rich environment for the first plant to colonise it. The plants can grow taller and lusher at a greater density than they normally would, something which we sometimes try to recreate in a healthy raised bed system. This moment if disruption is in a sense what we try to recreate when we grow crops by tilling the soil. However, the result of this is extractive and degrading. If year on year the soil is disrupted and broken down in this way then it never reaches the next stage in its succession where the soil would naturally become stabilised by the roots colonising it and the kinds of plants inhabiting it would change over time. By growing the same plants in the same place (even using crop rotation the spectrum of nutrients being consumed is limited compared to a natural ecosystem) the same nutrients are constantly being depleted. Within a relatively small space of time the soil is robbed of its fertility and left degraded.

In recent years there has been an encouraging growth in the area of regenerative agriculture. To contrast this with the system described above, at its heart is the idea that we are building soil. If we accept that up to (and including) the present day humans have been extracting fertility from the soil then we are now at a point where we need to reverse that process. We need to start giving back. We need to become regenerative.

Agriculture is one of the best examples for a number of reasons. It is one of the greatest culprits for environmental degradation globally. Fortunately it is also one where the solution is probably a lot simpler than in other areas. We have the technology to build soil (composting) and we can actually increase our crop yields and nutrient content of them by doing so. If we look at other extractive industries such as oil extraction it is much more problematic to see how they could become regenerative practices.

What about sustainability?

Back at the beginning of the millennium when I left university and entered the world of work regenerative was not a term that was in use very much and not one that I heard until the past few years. The term in use then was sustainable. Sustainable construction. Sustainable development. These were both areas that Rachael and I ended up working in. I think that twenty years ago there was still a sense in which we could find some kind of equilibrium that allowed this idea of sustainability to survive. There was a general awareness that there were issues with the climate and with pollution but they were accompanied by a sense that things hadn’t gone too far, yet. That if we made a few behaviour tweaks (build with sustainable materials for example) that we could continue on more or less the same trajectory. Perhaps in more recent years with increasingly worrying reports coming from the IPCC amongst other things I think that this sentiment has lost the meaning that it carried two decades ago. I can’t recall exactly where I heard this now but I remember someone questioning this concept of sustainability by asking what exactly would we be trying to sustain? When you consider that the backdrop at the time was an increase in biodiversity loss, increase in deforestation, increases in atmospheric pollution, etc. you have to wonder what indeed we would be trying to sustain? To put it another way, if your doctor told you that you were really sick and on the verge of some of your critical life systems failing would you look to sustain that state or would you be looking to try and reverse it?

This would seem to me to be the fundamental premise of regeneration. Many of the essential systems which support life on earth have been compromised by a long period of extractive practices of all kinds. Now is the time when we have to find ways to give back and this is our goal in trying to discover regenerative lifestyles. Currently as we inhabit societies which are based upon extractive processes most of what we do for work, how we consume, how we travel, and so on are all linked back to destructive and extractive systems. Trying to find lifestyles which can go beyond sustainability (minimising harm) towards making a positive contribution to the regeneration of the planet is a huge challenge which needs to happen across scales – from the individual up to the societal. Finding out how to make this transition and what a regenerative life looks like is our primary goal here.