Transcript: Urban Flourishing with Michael Pawlyn and Sarah Ichioka

Series 1 Episode 3

Hosts: Daniel Christian Wahl and Josie Warden

Josie: Hello, I'm Josie Warden, head of Regenerative Design at the RSA.

Daniel: And I'm Daniel Wahl, author of Designing Regenerative Cultures.

Josie: You are listening to the Regeneration Rising Podcast. In this series, we look at how regenerative approaches can help us build thriving communities and ecosystems and provide a better life for all on our planet.

Josie: Hello, and welcome to episode three in our seven part series. From our cities to our homes, to our public buildings, the spaces we inhabit determine how we live our lives and interact with the world around us. But what if our built environment is actually fuelling our destructive lifestyles and furthering our disconnection with the living world? How can regenerative principles help us design buildings and communities that put life — all life — at the centre and respond to our needs in the 21st century? It's precisely these challenges that urban designers, Michael Pawlyn and Sarah Ichioka address in their new book, Flourish: Design Paradigms for our Planetary Emergency. Sarah Ichioka is an urbanist curator and writer based in Singapore. She currently leads Desire Lines, a strategic consultancy for environmental, cultural, and social impact organizations and initiatives. In previous roles, she has explored the intersection of cities, society, and ecology within leading international institutions of culture, policy and research. Michael Pawlyn is an architect and biomimicry expert. He established architecture practice Exploration in 2007, and is a co-initiate of Architects Declare, a network of architecture studios that have pledged to help tackle the global climate and biodiversity emergencies. Welcome Michael and Sarah, and thank you for joining us today. Your new book Flourish looks at how regenerative practice could transform the places that we live and work in. What led you to write this book together?

Michael: Well, it was triggered by the October 2018 report from the IPCC, and that made it clear that 30 years of sustainable design had not got us anywhere near to where we need to be, and we were concerned that there wasn't enough radical rethinking going on. So we reread one of our favourite essays, which is “Leverage Points” by Donella Meadows, and that led us to think about how we could articulate more clearly what “regenerative” would mean. And clearly some people had been already talking about regenerative, but we felt there was an urgent need for the broader field of architects and built environment professionals to make that shift from sustainable to regenerative.

Sarah: Indeed. And those of us who are involved in the built environment have an essential role to play in this necessary transformation to meet the crisis of our moment. I think it's fundamentally important to realize that when we're advocating for regenerative design and development, we're not doing this as a purely technical approach. It entails a holistic cultural shift in how we humans see ourselves in relationship to the rest of the world.

Daniel: That's, I think, precisely the place to start — with the humility of all of us, having to relearn how to be regenerative in the world, how to fit back into life's regenerative pattern, how to put life at the centre as your definition puts it. And, what we would love to hear from both of you maybe, Michael, as the architect focused on the built environment at the building scale, and you as somebody who's worked with cities and urban design strategy for years, Sarah — do you see any examples, at least on the aspirational side of architects and cities taking on the regenerative paradigm?

Michael: Well, what I've found is that, there are relatively few, if any, projects that are doing regenerative design in a really comprehensive way. But encouragingly, there are lots of projects that are doing specific aspects of regenerative design showing that we actually have nearly all the solutions and new mindsets that we need to really make rapid progress in this new way of thinking.

Sarah: Interestingly, I think that when we were searching for examples for Flourish, Michael and I found quite often that there were examples from outside of kind of the traditional architecture and design fraternity that offer fantastic examples of clienting regeneratively. So part of it is looking slightly at the fringes. But I think there are, at a local scale, particularly where communities are working in close collaboration with holders of Traditional Knowledge, and Indigenous communities in particular, I think there's very strong potential for a pretty rapid, as Michael has said, a pretty rapid change in how things can be done. But we're still not seeing it at the mainstream.

Josie: I think that's what we are finding also, that regeneration is rising around the edges of lots of different sectors, but that we still have a long way to go to get these ideas really into the mainstream, particularly when some industries are only just making the shift to a more sustainable way of operating. So I wonder, could you explain the difference between a regenerative and a sustainable mindset?

Michael: Sure. So I think there are three kind of key differences between a sustainable mindset and a regenerative mindset. When I think particularly about the built environment and firstly that is, in conventional sustainability, it's too often just about mitigating negatives. And we need to get beyond that into a realm of optimizing positives. We're still in a rather mechanistic mindset in the built environment, particularly in our use of environmental design tools. And so we need to move to a much more systemic approach that embraces complexity, and then also we need to move beyond an anthropocentric view. And, you know, if you look at the definition that came all those years ago from the Brundtland Commission, it was really just about humans. And so we need to move beyond that to a bio-inclusive perspective that really embraces the whole planet and sees the whole of the living world as something that we need to engage in.

Sarah: One other thing I'd add to what Michael said is that fundamentally, we as built environment practitioners, as the vast majority of professionals, you know we're trying to pursue right livelihoods, but currently we're constrained in our abilities to perform in that capacity, to be truly ethical in our practices, simply because of the dysfunction. Because, you know, our professions are situated at the heart of this incredibly dysfunctional unidirectional economic system that is prioritizing exponential growth as, you know, the ultimate driver or raison d’être for everything. And so this is why one of the mindset shifts that Michael and I outlined in Flourish is the idea of reorientation of the purpose for our economy and societies towards, you know, more diverse metrics. But in particular, we highlight planetary health, uh, that concept as developed by the Stockholm Environmental Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation instead of pure growth. Uh, but so often we are — you know, I see this with my clients and my collaborators all the time — we are still operating within the confines of a late capitalist growth orientated system. And until we can break that, you know, with the great assistance of wonderful guests like Kate Raworth, who I know you're going to have on this program as well, visionaries like her, I frankly feel the rest of us are going to struggle.

Daniel: It's wonderful that you mentioned Kate, because while you were speaking about urban development, I thought that maybe the most advanced work in regenerative urban redevelopment is not necessarily coming from architectural or planning professionals, but for example, through processes like the Thriving Places program that the Donut Economics Action Lab has started. And that brings me to this question in general that I think we're dancing around scale here a lot with regard to at what scale can we actually affect this transformation in a way that is really adapted to place.

Sarah: I'm so glad you framed it that way, Daniel, 'cause I think it's particularly timely given that we're recording this now at a time when, you know, most of the many governments around the world have decided the pandemic's over, but we still very much have the mindset of the pandemic with us. And I think that it's been notable, and many others have observed this, that there's been a real re local- localization of awareness. Um, and I think a resulting move towards a reappreciation of that localized scale, you know, whether it's from supply chains through to the 15 minute city. Suddenly there is that contraction, which can be positive and negative, but I think it opens up this real potential, to rethink how we can embed or really re-embed our human systems within the parameters of their local natural systems.

Michael: We also talk in the book about the importance of starting at a sort of planetary level with an understanding of Gaia Theory based on Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock's work. And, given that ultimately what we've got to do is integrate everything we do as humans into the broader web of life, there's so much that we can learn from the way that life has evolved. And starting from that planetary level and working back from that gives us some very useful clues, for instance on what materials we should be using first of all. So we refer to Janine Benyus' work and the way she talks about how nature builds from a very limited and safe subset of the periodic table. And then we can learn further lessons about how to put those materials together in ways that facilitates the long-term stewardship of materials in cyclical systems. And then also we talk about the importance of a really key question for all designers when approaching a new project is to ask themselves what solutions already exist in this place? And we're referring to the solutions that have evolved through the ingenuity of humans as well as the adaptations that exist in biology and ideally looking at those in non-binary terms. So looking them all as evolved ingenuity.

Sarah: And I think Daniel, you know, there's this concurrent possibility now for us to not just, you know, completely reimagine systems as fully embedded within the web of life that sustain us, but also to think about how that breaks down say colonial ways of thinking, right? Because so often this idea of conquest of nature was wedded to an idea of subjugation, of specific other categories of humans. And you can see that with you know, the imposition of arbitrary national boundaries, for example. That's the mindset that informs that sort of intervention, and that we're now dealing with and trying to repair the legacy of, and is also the same sort of mindset that would drive one to build a massive dam that then completely destroys, you know, a watershed that's existed for tens of thousands of years. So I think there's a really interesting opportunity here. And I'd love to hear examples from you, Daniel and Josie, as well, where you see this possibility for rethinking our relationship with nature to also rethink our relationship with one another and what sort of systems we need to create to make that new interrelationship possible?

Daniel: Well, this is exactly why I asked the question about place and scale after you mentioned that we're stuck in a degenerative economic system that has been blinded by the opportunities of globalization to the point that we made a way made redundant local resilience infrastructure in every country in the world and created these brittle supply lines that you also mentioned earlier. And so for me, this reintegration of humanity back into life's regenerative patterns is all about understanding how do we dwell in a place as expressions of that place? And the regional watershed bioregional approach is a real biophysical boundary that was shaped by the geophysical and biological ecological patterns over eons. And to fit humanity back into life's regenerative patterns is also to fit our processes of meeting our needs back to the right scale. And, um, I also seem to concur with you that the boundaries of countries that we are used to are socio-political boundaries of the era of power over, of empire, of colonialism. And while they also now created history and culture over the long run, in order to make this refitting into life's patterns happen, we probably will find that regions become more important — city regions and regions in general — rather than national boundaries.

Sarah: Absolutely. And actually, in terms of reasons for looking for areas for hope or optimism, which we all need right now, I think I am really struck by the recent reporting by advocacy groups about the scale of our landmass that is still stewarded by Indigenous and local traditional place-based communities. At minimum it's 20%, right? Some numbers put that at over 30%. So just think, you know, if even a fraction of our corporations and our elected representatives decided to turn away from that extractivist colonialist mindset, then there could be this amazing potential to return a much larger percentage of landmass to that custodianship and stewardship model, which in a way runs counter to many of our more modern ideas of conservation. Which again reflects that point that we've referenced already about seeing human culture as separate from natural systems, right? We conserve the thing that's over there and I think Michael and I see huge potential to instead think about how is nature something that we engage with.

Josie: It's really interesting hearing you speak about this because I think that relational aspect is something that's really been missing from the sustainability discussion to some extent, especially when it comes to design and the built environment. And I wonder, Michael, if you could talk a little bit about what it means to really connect back to nature. What are some of nature's ways of working that we are part of, but perhaps we've forgotten, and how can we use these to adopt a more regenerative design approach?

Michael: There's a particular idea that we draw on from an environmental philosopher called Freya Matthews. And she describes this idea which she refers to as conativity, and that's the impulse for all living beings and living systems to maintain and increase their own existence and to do so in a way that actually enhances the system as a whole. And since the rise of Agrarian societies, the tendency has been to not engage with broader living systems. And what we're proposing is that there is much to be learned from applying this principle to designing the built environment, asking ourselves how can we inhabit places in a way that engages with the conativity of the whole system or to use more straightforward terms, how might we design the built environment so that we have a net positive impact and we get to the point where we are actually co-evolving as nature.

Josie: Just building on that, in your book, you talk about the importance of language and how the stories that we tell ourselves about the world and about our place in it can either enable or be a barrier to change. Could you elaborate a little on this?

Michael: Yeah, sure. So we talk about the importance of identifying maladaptive frames and metaphors and articulating new ones that are more regenerative. So for instance, you know, if we continue to tell ourselves a story about humanity, that humans are inevitably selfish and self-interested and savage and so on, that leads to a particular form of urbanism. Whereas if we actually open our minds to some of the new social science that shows that actually there's a lot about humans that is amazing. You know, we are remarkable in our capacity for empathy and collaboration and cooperation, and that would lead to a very different model. And another one that we draw on is the idea of progress. And there is a dominant story of progress in industrialized nations, which suggests that the past was a bleak and savage place and that the future will continue to get endlessly better.

But I think increasing numbers of people are unconvinced by this narrative and starting to ask the question, ‘progress towards what’? And so we propose a much more discerning idea of progress, which recognizes that, of course some things have improved, such as human health and longevity, but there's also much that's been overlooked. And in many ways, the fossil fuel age has been a massive distraction from ingenuity. And one of the most exciting things about the age we're entering, the age of regenerative design and development, is that we are going to see an amazing reawakening of that kind of ingenuity, and particularly some of the ideas that we have perhaps lost from Indigenous thinking and Indigenous solutions.

Daniel: I think that exactly the arch that we just went through shows something really important — that if we want to redesign our human presence on earth in ways that create conditions conducive to life, and we want to learn from nature, we have to first recognize that we are nature. And so it's both learning from other biological forms and the ecosystems at large, how they are patterned, but it's also, as you were bringing in Sarah, it's also to recognize that our ancestry as human beings is in regenerative cultures all over the world. We wouldn't have evolved as a species of collaborators, which we are, had we not been regeneratively living in the ecosystems that brought us forth. And the fact that 80% of the biodiversity hotspots on the planet are under Indigenous management shows us that there are still remnants of the ancient ways of how to be on the land that we can now bring into the 21st century.

And there are pioneering businesses even that have understood this. For example, Guayakí Argentina cultivates shade-grown, rainforest-grown yerba mate in Argentina and Paraguay. But it doesn't do so on its own land, but on community-owned land of Indigenous forest dwelling communities that have now got an economic way of building the education and the whole system for their community that they want with their own sovereignty. And they're doing work on their own land that is then supported by a supply chain that allows them access to market. That's a new way of working with Indigenous landowners: rather than pushing them off their land and buying it cheaply to grow monocultures, work with them to be the custodians of it.

Sarah: That's such a wonderful example, Daniel, and it brings us back to the point that you made earlier about how we need to think about regeneration, the scale at which we can start. And I think it is often a case of just starting where we are, right? And engaging with the communities who are where we are. One point I just want to clarify. What I would say is my position, or I'm pretty sure Michael's and my position about the relationship to Indigenous communities and Indigenous Knowledge. Um, I think it's very important that these terms and the communities they might represent, not be co-opted. I think sometimes there's a risk of using shorthand in that way and it's much better instead to think as Daniel's presented it, in terms of this is all of our histories, some of us are just further removed or further estranged from that experience of having been able to live more harmoniously in concert with the land.

I also think it's very important that we hold accountable those who adopt quote regenerative terminology to describe their businesses or services, which you see happening more and more every day now. You know, can we hold them accountable? Are they truly making a net positive impact to the web of life? And I think this is why the work you're doing, Josie and Daniel, the work that centres meaningful examples of what regenerative culture looks and feels like in practice, is so important.

Daniel: Yeah, I mean, I think where we started with the humility of saying, we're still learning into this — that's, for me, a good measure of if somebody's selling you regenerative as the new thing on the block, just as they sold circular or smart or lean or sustainable before. I would always be careful. And the issues around sustainability and how that has been co-opted and even the mixing of the somewhat insidious UN development agenda of dividing the world into underdeveloped and developed nations and setting up a whole context for economic globalization. I think it is important that we see that this co-option will take place, has always taken place and is taking place right now with regeneration as well. But in that learning, we can also see that there are people out there who've spent 30, 40 years using the word “sustainable development” working on the SDGs in the last 10 years or so, or five years. And I'm concerned that by jumping from one end of the pendulum swing to the other, from sustainability to regeneration and saying, oh, it's not fashionable anymore to talk sustainability, we are actually alienating the closest allies we have in the work that now needs to be done — which are, people who sometimes spend a lifetime working under the label sustainability, but actually in a regenerative way. And so it's more keeping the conversation alive. What is truly serving life? What is truly aligned with the deeper practice of regeneration, which actually does have an Indigenous culture and thousands of years of practice, but in modern culture also 30, 40 years of really developed practices, and particularly through the Regenesis Group and Carol Sanford's work, there's a global cohort of practitioners that work in a much deeper way on regeneration than the current mainstream is now waking up to.

Michael: Yeah. Such good points, Daniel. And, Sarah and I are very conscious in our book that we're standing on the shoulders of giants. And so what we've tried to do is to integrate a lot of that thinking that's gone on over the last 30, 40, 50 years into a form that is easily readable by us environment professionals. And, some of the other things you were saying there were making me reflect on some of the differences between a sustainable discussion and a regenerative discussion. And Sarah and I stress that, in most of these shifts, it's really not about a vault fast of, you know, going from one thing to its extreme. Generally, it's a case of transcending and including, of widening perspectives that include all the important work of sustainability, but in a wider context. And often I've found that the discussion in regenerative conferences and so on is much more about cultural shifts than technological shifts. And very often it's about articulating a degenerative way of framing things and reframing it in a way that is more regenerative.

Josie: And I think that's why regenerative thinking is resonating so deeply with people across different sectors. As you said, it widens the conversation and it allows us to consider those deeper questions like, what kind of future do we want? What is our role on this planet? I wonder if you could perhaps give us some examples of what this approach could look like in practice.

Sarah: I could cite one example that I spent two days after encountering it, just like beaming. It's a private project in northern India, in the northwest part of India, which is a quite deserted area. And, a family-owned business have been over time assembling pockets of very ecologically and socially low value land and restoring the landscape there in diverse ways. Including different models of regenerative agriculture — a combination of both longstanding traditional methods, as well as more, you could say, contemporary regenerative methods of agroforestry, for example. And they've also assembled a traditional rainwater harvesting infrastructure across the site.

And, as in other regenerative landscape projects that I can think of — for example the Sahar Greenhouse project that Michael might want to share about later, that he was closely involved with — you've seen this massive return of diverse life to the site, from the farmers who are there engaged in regenerative agriculture through to all of the other species who have come to enjoy this newly captured, retained green water. And now many years onwards they have worked with consultants to measure what that restored landscape could actually regeneratively support in terms of human life. So they've looked and they've measured, for example, what the level of clean water will naturally be regenerated on the site if it's used. And that is going to be the basis for a new human community on the site. Whereas if you think about that in contrast with the example of how most suburban and residential developments might be gone about under a degenerative paradigm, it would be building roads, building the houses, and then maybe tucking in a few gardens or landscaping brought in from elsewhere around the edges. And I thought that this was a really positive example that you could imagine being localized at scale in many deserted areas of our Earth.

Michael: And some other good examples of where I think this thinking is already happening is examples like intentional communities, which Sarah studied and also the 15 minute city. And these are based on a much more generous and enlightened idea of human nature, really. And it's important to realize the extent to which the built environment is often unintentionally a reflection of the way we see ourselves as humans. And so if we see ourselves as separate isolated individuals in a competitive zero sum game, that leads to cityscapes of very isolated buildings. And the opposite to that is seeing ourselves as uniquely cooperative with amazing powers of empathy. And actually, if you follow that through to an urban model, it would lead to something like intentional communities or the 15 minute city where people can enjoy a much better quality of life with much higher levels of social cohesion without needing to own a car, and in a way that is much easier to align with the limits of planet Earth.

Daniel: What you were just saying, Michael, reminded me of another example that I learned of just a couple of weeks ago, which was on the Transition UK conference. And one of the people that I shared the panel with has set up Mercato Alimentare in the city of Liège in Belgium. And the whole process of how they created a bioregional food system that connected farmers in the region around the city with the people living in the city, both as consumers, but also as potential producers, helping them grow on weekends and so on, and creating not just one, but 20 or more localized cooperatives that were holding this as a new form of legal structure. And it got picked up by the local government. They created a festival around it that, that, um, brought music into it and actually invited bands to, to tell the story in music. And so suddenly it became a culturally creative process that went far beyond just food, but created community, created local economy. And it's those kind of trans-sector, like, taking it all out of the boxes. We have a water problem, we have a food problem, we have an economic problem, we have a climate problem, and saying, no, wait a minute, we can respond to this in an integrated way.

Michael: Yeah. And that picks up on an idea we talk about in the book. And I wonder, Sarah might want to come in here and and expand on the idea of symbiogenesis.

Sarah: Yes. I think that the idea of symbiogenesis, which is one of the five regenerative paradigm shifts that we outline in Flourish, is arising in contrast to our kind of old, tired, inherited metaphor of a very simplistic understanding of natural selection through competition — you know, nature red in tooth and claw. And, instead, look at all of the more complex learnings we can see from the study of natural systems about how many other non-human forms, if we look in turn, you know, in our own microbiome and then other non-human forms of life that make up broader ecosystems, are actually working together in much more complex interrelation than simply the idea of competition. So symbiogenesis is our tribute to the amazing thinker, Lynn Margulis, and essentially what is now commonly understood, but at the time she introduced — it was seen as quite controversial — the idea that new life forms could actually arise through the collaborative intersection of simpler life forms.

Um, and so Michael and I feel that that competition paradigm still has a very, very strong hold on mainstream architectural and built environment practice, um, that influences education. It influences the way projects are procured and is all incredibly extractive and exploitative and is really, we feel, holding back that community of practice from making the jump to, uh, well, a regenerative way of interrelation and co-creation, um, to deliver on the scale that our crisis demands. So we've tried to highlight examples often from urban examples, from the urban eco village movement, or from examples of collaborative consultation, sometimes enabled by technology in Asian democracies, such as Seoul in South Korea, or Taipei in Taiwan. And I think I'd really love to come back to the example that you raised, Daniel, because I think we're sort of dancing around this point and it's important to emphasize that it is gonna be absolutely essential that we find ways to creatively retrofit our existing built environment, right?

And this is super applicable in the context of Europe, um, in the context of North America, certainly all of our existing urban centres. Uh, but if we look at population projections and rates of urbanization, I think that those of us working in regenerative practice are really going to have to engage with positive alternative examples of how population growth in other areas can be accommodated, not necessarily within existing urban structures. And I think right now, um, we really valorise cities as a technology, and I think that it's, or as a form, perhaps at the exclusion of thinking about other forms of human settlement. But at the moment so much is framed in terms of urbanization and urban systems. So I'd love to hear your thought about, um, other regenerative forms of practice that might manifest outside of an urban context.

Daniel: Well, I mean, in your book, you, you also speak about the importance of long-term thinking. And, and I think the answer to that is what century are we talking about? Um, in terms of, obviously we now have so many people living in cities and the transition to other models of settlement and maybe also to different numbers of human beings on the planet, which probably environmental change will force upon us in, in the coming decades. And also sea level rises will mean that we will have to abandon some really large mega city areas because it's going to be too expensive to try to fight the elements — the sea or typhoons or whatever is coming at them in their current location. But that doesn't mean we don't need to, all over the world, still work with cities and work on urban agriculture and repurposing the structure.

The big fault of eco architects and eco urbanist has always been that they prefer to kind of draw up something wonderful as a master plan, um, on a greenfield site instead of doing what the living building of Living Futures Institute has so rightly put as the forefront: don't develop on greenfield sites, develop only on brownfield sites; don't always redevelop places that have already been damaged rather than damage places that are still relatively pristine or healthy. But it also links to this, like you mentioned earlier, the whole planetary health issue. Like I wrote a PhD on designing for planetary health in 2006, which was a good decade before the Rockefeller Commission, but it was all about, um, how do we fit us back into these patterns? And it has to happen at the scale of product design, at the scale of architecture, at the scale of industrial ecology, at the scale of urban planning, bio regionalism, and it needs global collaboration in this.

And so for me, I think we will, I guess another way of answering it is I had a conversation with Tyson Yunkaporta from Australia who's working on a project that has a 300 year time span and is asking, what can nomadic cultures like aboriginal culture and the cultural patterns of not being fixed to place, but moving across a living landscape as part of that landscape, disrupting parts of the landscape and then moving on, leaving areas be in important moments in the ecological cycle of reproduction of species. What can these patterns teach us and how do we not lose them in the next century? So human beings, maybe a lot less of us in the 22nd century can still run on these patterns. So, um, it's not a direct answer, but it's less, we need to work on cities for the next 30, 40, 50, a hundred, 200 years, but we also need to work on new patterns of living in landscape that aren't based on, on city patterns or at least mega city patterns. I think the main issue is they're simply cities that are too big not to fail, and we need to work with them compassionately. We can't just abandon them, but we need to somehow work with that issue. What do you think, Michael?

Michael: Yeah, Tyson Yunkaporta asks some really provocative questions that I enjoy, and it also makes some, some very provocative comments like, um, yeah, he said, oh, well, you know, the, the dig in, in the scale of deep time, the, the digital revolution will, will just be a blip followed by a 1000 year cleanup operation. And that, you know, that really helps to deflate the sort of self-importance of, um, the sort of story of progress that we, we hear so much of from, uh, Silicon Valley. And, you know, I think he's got a really important point. You know, we, we've got a very urgent 1000 year, uh, um, task ahead of us. Uh, and we need to get on with that, uh, very quickly and do it with, with a long term purpose in mind about planetary health. And in, in chapter five of Sarah's and my book, we take on the whole subject of growth and, and we look at claims for sustainable growth and green growth and, and also the, uh, persuasive cases made for degrowth. And our conclusion is that, you know, neither growth nor degrowth are good purposes to drive an economy. And what we should really be doing is, is aiming for the maximum — long-term maximization of planetary health.

Daniel: Um, Michael, you co-founded Architects Declare, and what we've sort of been skirting around a little bit, Sarah mentioned it in a couple of comments, is the degree of urgency and the degree of realism of what kind of collapses of systems around us we will now go through, because we've basically committed to it in terms of climate change and cascading ecosystems collapse and so on. Um, how do you dance with this, uh, is ever louder voices that it's too late and that, that we can't do anything about this anymore? And at the same time, you're both clearly still very committed that we can, um, navigate through the eye of the needle?

Michael: Well, I guess it's in some ways it's too late and in some, in many ways it's not too late. I mean, it is too late to prevent all the, the damage that is coming our way, but it is never too late to, to mitigate that and, and it would be just recklessly irresponsible not to do everything we can, um, you know, given what we know. And, um, I, you know, I think one really promising thing that we've seen over the last three years since we started writing the book is, is people and groups getting much more purposeful. And by that I mean actually thinking really much more clearly and deliberately about theories of change and, you know, it's no longer enough to just think, well, you know, if I just focus on making this building low carbon, maybe we'll get there in the end without defining what there is. Um, and so I think that is the age we are now definitely in it is about deeper purpose and, and looking about looking at how we really maximize our agency.

Sarah: In addition to that, I think that there's a very, very strong role to be played by those who are working on the political advocacy side of things and, um, trying to resist the degenerative forces that are currently dominant in the world. But I think that it's equally that work needs to be complimented by the work of many others who are working to birth the new systems, um, that can come and that can rise up to take their place. Um, there's, I was recently incredibly moved, um, by a quote from one of the founding members of the gesturing towards Decolonial Futures project, Vanessa Andreotti who I referenced earlier. Um, and she has shared a Brazilian saying about conditions of flood, uh, which to paraphrase is only when the water reaches the level of your bum do you have the possibility to swim. And I think that there's this, um, as we reach these tipping points of understanding the scale of the changes that we, or dominant systems within our cultures have unleashed, that we will — that will suddenly be this new opportunity for all of the amazing work that people like you Daniel, are doing, or, um, that, that the RSA is building a community around, um, will suddenly just become the evident thing to do.

And I think that, that if we, if we go back to the idea of a longer term perspective, um, I'm really grateful to scholars like David Grabber, he's an anthropologist, or David Windgrow who's an archaeologist who've helped, you know, recently it's, it's so wonderful that so many people are reading this book, The Dawn of Everything, of giving these insights to many alternative ways in which we, throughout human history have been that we've just kind of become inculcated in this one story of progress that Michael referenced, right? That, that we had settled agriculture and then that moved to cities and then naturally capitalism arose from that. And that's just the way things are. Um, but actually we do have this tremendous capacity as a species to imagine different ways of being and then inhabit them.

Daniel: It's been just wonderful, um, to have this conversation and I want to really commend you for your wonderful book because it's simply beautiful and it, uh, means that a lot of people will find an entry point into this exploration. We've just spent an hour taking deeper. And once you have the entry point, you can spend the rest of your life joining the regeneration rising.

Josie: Thank you, Michael and Sarah, and thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed episode three of our seven part series Regeneration Rising. If this episode has inspired your thinking, please check out the show notes for links and resources and to find out how you can be part of the regeneration.