Our only meaningful way forward is to regenerate. Nothing less will be enough.

By Damon Gameau, actor, writer and producer.

A few weeks ago, my close friends lost their beautiful nine-year-old daughter. She loved and cared for more life in her nine years than most do in 90. She swam with turtles, spoke with magpies, cuddled lizards and could have effortlessly assumed David Attenborough’s mantle. Her brief, but radiant visit, was a lesson in how to live.?

Her passing prompted some big conversations with my own nine-year-old daughter. She sat with her friend’s body in the days following and reflected on how precious and sacred life really is.

What became clear for me in those conversations is just how little value we give life in our current system. We are so flippant with it. We extract and exploit life, we demean and ridicule life, we commodify it and reduce it to data. The way many of us treat our loved ones, the way we treat each other online, the way we treat the living world, completely demotes life and ignores the sacredness of what it truly is.

This disregard has now taken us to the brink of an unimaginable crisis. Our planet is on life- support and yet it is failing to receive the treatment it actually needs.?Our ‘first responder’ approach has been to smother the planet in solar panels, EV’s and other new technologies, yet deep down many of us know that this won’t be enough. Because we will still inhabit a system that destroys and undervalues life – it will just be using pre-fossilised sunlight to delay its demise.

Our only meaningful pathway forward is to regenerate. And to regenerate means to prioritize life. To place life at the very centre of our governance, our economics and our education. To prioritize life is to prioritize love and care for each other, and for the natural world. Nothing less will be enough.

So what might a regenerated system that prioritizes life look like?

Well, your day would be filled with a lot more genuine human interaction.

The regeneration of your community through the localisation of food, energy and material production would instantly create stronger networks between you and your neighbours. The rise of participatory democracy and budgeting would also bring people together to allocate significant funding for local projects and make important decisions.

You would no longer start your day hijacked by social media algorithms. New platforms would incentivise mindfulness, collaboration, problem solving and consilience – you would be rewarded for spending less time on sites.

You may only work 4 days a week - this would free up more time for play, learning, or deepening connections. Most importantly, this would be a crucial step in the process of effective decarbonization - slowing down the rapacious growth machine that is driving increased energy and material demand – and thus climate change.

This slowed down world would significantly reduce anxiety and improve mental health. Basic needs of health, housing and education would be regarded as a human right and provide many with a renewed sense of security.

Your trip to work would be a very different experience too. Towns and cities would contain abundant wildlife, eco corridors, rooftop food gardens and underground tanks that capture rainwater water and re-use it.?

Many advertising signs would be removed or replaced with artworks and clever displays of your region’s soil health, species loss, water quality and atmospheric pollution – these would become the new measurements of our system’s success.

Perhaps you no longer simply work for your organisation but are also a co-owner of it with your other colleagues. You would now have some say in its direction, governance and environmental impact. ?

If you have children, you would be comforted knowing that they are learning the skills required for a regenerated future – they are being taught to see the world as a living system, not as a machine full of stocks and commodities, so they understand the sacredness of life from an early age. They would also be taught about their own life force, their emotions, and how to meaningfully interact with others.

This new system is not a perfect system, but the values at its core have shifted, and these values are now informing everything from city design, to democracy, to how we interact with each other and the living world.

The last few years have highlighted the fragility of our current global system. A system built with an abundance of cheap, efficient energy during a time of ecological stability, endless available finance and access to unlimited materials. A time that has now passed.?We are watching that system unravel before us, and it will continue to do so in the years and decades ahead as we move deeper into ecological vulnerability, crippling debt and breached material boundaries.

There are many who will be fearful of this unravelling and will want to grip on even tighter. But there is another choice available – our only real choice. The leadership we require in this moment is from those that can begin to let go of the current system, to reassure others of the better system that awaits, and to nurture and encourage the shoots of that system that are now breaking through everywhere, right across the world. The shoots of a new regenerative system that Paul Hawken tells us will ‘heal the future, not steal the future’.

It is a system that simply prioritizes and values life. A system that my daughter’s beautiful nine-year-old friend not only knew, but showed us, was possible.?