Regenerative & Emergent - What Is It?

Let me set something straight for the record - I am not a Web 3 person. I am not really into crypto. I am not really into disembodied network societies. And presently, I am not very interested in video games, gamification, or virtuality.

It's also probably good to mention that I really love the work being done by these good people. I see the virtues and the transformational capacities inherent in these novel cybernetic advancements.

At the end of the day though, I am more of a person who likes to smell fresh air on a mountain top at the crack of dawn. I like the heat of a dancing fire on my face warming my eyelids. I feel rebirthed every time I jump into the cool waters of a wild creek bed. Sitting in a zendo for long periods of time, with my eyes closed in a state of awareness, provides me with something akin to pleasure. I like to drink tea and absorb works of art, literature, philosophy, history, and religion.

Regardless, of my preferences, I'm also a postindustrial incorporeal free agent, helping facilitate in the most meaningful way I know, the birth of a new paradigm of planetary civilization. In this new paradigm, the embodied praxis of actually stewarding and sustaining a benevolent Earth System is fundamental, along with the development of an optimized Information and Communication Technology (ICT) framework.

While the majority of the people in my network are 100% aware of what I mean when I write, "a new paradigm of planetary civilization", I'm also sure that this network (what I've previously referred to as the Global Meta Village), probably comprises less than 2.5% of the global population.

It's my estimate, that this less than 2.5% represents the vanguard of evolution for H. Sapiens. This is because, this less than 2.5% are those who have accepted the nature of the planetary compounding of crises, and realized the profound significance of what it means to enter a new paradigm of human understanding. This new paradigm is potentially as significant of a development for H. Sapiens as the discovery of heliocentrism. Probably more significant, because our evolution in human understanding - the remembrance of our place in the cosmos - will potentially be one of the key reasons we avert terrestrial destruction and self-termination.

The 2.5% number I selected is not arbitrary. It's based on my hunch that the vanguard of the new paradigm is still in the innovator stage of the Innovation Adoption Lifecycle.

The critical mass is forming, and the more we are able to increase our coherence and correspondence with the emergent property of the present, the sooner we will overflow our ideological echo chambers, and the sooner we will spread to the early adopters and the early majority.

Considering this, I think it would be helpful to detail the two cultural modes which I see sitting in the helm of the planetary vanguard - the Regenerative and the Emergent. Furthermore, I'd like to propose the need for their synthesis.

First Off, Popping the Echo Chamber

A half-year ago in Amsterdam, there was an event called the Network State Conference based on the works of Balaji Srinivasan, PhD . They posted the full livestream which is nearly 8 hours in length, you can find that here. I skimmed the recording and for some reason had the luck to watch the speech given by Codie A. Sanchez . She highlights something which I think is super important for our work in the new paradigm. Watch just these last five minutes from her talk which start at hour/minute 6:40:09 of the live stream. Below I highlight the key lines:

My only thought that I want to leave this group with is: what if the most intelligent among us can speak the simplest and not the most complex [...] It's really, really important how we name things. [...] We've got to be careful who we name and ostracize because they may be the future of determining who outlines or outlaws this movement and who doesn't. I have a theory that the winners will be those who have really big ideas, really simplified, and they bring the hard workers. Because, I think freedom comes when we own our communities, we own our income, and we own the ideological future.

While her identification with the need to win and own may reflect the Game A patterns of the old paradigm, she is identifying a practical grain of truth.

With this in mind, I want to extend an invitation. As you read the rest of this article, take notes on all of the words that you do not understand. Add these in the comments and we'll use them to collate an encyclopedia.

That being said, in the rest of the article, I describe the following: (1) What is Regenerative? (2) What is Emergent? and (3) the Pressing Need for their Synthesis.

(1) What is Regenerative?

According to Dr. Stuart Cowan 's interview with Samantha Power on Ma Earth - Earth Commons: Bioregional Financing Facilities (BFFs) - Buckminster Fuller was explicitly discussing regeneration in the 1960s. It's probably also safe to assume that the same can be said for figures such as E.F. Schumacher (Small is Beautiful) and Gregory Bateson (Steps to an Ecology of Mind).

The term "regenerative" has gained prominence more recently in environmental and sustainability circles, emphasizing restoring, renewing, and revitalizing modern society's relations with the world. Those relations are just as much natural (relations with ecosystems, energy, and resources), as they are cultural (related to individuals, systems, and ancestry). Regenerative principles aim to go beyond sustainability — creating societies that are embedded in the complete cycle of life.

It's important to reflect upon where the early and late majority are as regards the ecological relations of modern society. Most still think that climate change, sustainability, and pollution are the pressing needs of our times. This is reflected by the way in which Climate Finance, ESGs, and Green New Deals are the buzzwords in institutional, financial, political, and lay circles. Furthermore, this majority is yet to comprehend that the way in which we have treated the Earth System (Pachamama, Gaia), is also how we have learned to treat one another and ourselves.

Regeneration is lightyears ahead of these superficial understandings of the profound nature of the ecological crisis. The Regenerative is a transformation in human relations which works to foster and nurture an integral process of bi-directional flows at the interstice of socio-ecology.

Let me take a further moment to explain regeneration both essentially and practically.

(P.s. In what follows, know that I'm exchanging existenz for "practice". For a rich discourse on the relationship of essence and existenz, I invite the reader to review the famous 1946 exchange between Sartre and Heidegger).

Essentially

Regeneration is the understanding that life cycles generate, degenerate, and regenerate. This means that as a civilization we cannot only invest our energies in extraction (degeneration) and production (generation), but that we also must invest in reciprocation. Regeneration means that whatever is taken, is also restored. This means that all balance sheets which want to exist in a flourishing and harmonic Earth System, need to balance all extraction with equal parts, giving back to the earth to complete the virtuous and symbiotic cycle. Without an active life dynamic of regeneration, we are simply death mongering parasites.

Practically

The essential meaning of regeneration is far less meaningful than its implementation in practice and experience. What we're learning (which traditional societies have generally not forgotten), is that regeneration is a cultural and natural process. To be regenerative, we have to be literally integral and embodied beings. Regeneration cannot be accessed through formal knowledge, financial portfolios, or permaculture designs - it has to be totally existed. Regeneration means living slowly, resting deeply, sitting in the soil, working with the elements, existing as a psychological body, and remembering the stories of the ancestors while looking 7 Generations down the line.

It's from this profound understanding of the rhythms and flows of nature, what I like to call existential ecology, from which regeneration flows forth abundantly. It's from this state of being, that agricultural, architectural, and economic principles are birthed - not the other way around.

This is why regeneration is light years ahead of the reductive notions of climate change, climate finance, sustainability, or resilience. These modern adaptations are superficial and don't actually lead to fundamental transformation. They maintain, deepen, and entrench the modern separation of society and ecology, limiting the possibility of an authentically harmonious mode of planetary flourishing - the ecozoic era.

Listed below is a half-baked list of a few organizations and individuals I'm familiar with doing advanced work through this lens:

• Daniel Christian Wahl
• Nora Bateson
• John Fullerton
• Dr. Stuart Cowan
• Kalliopeia Foundation
• The Gathering
• The Weave
• Schumacher College
• Barbara Lima
• Victor Vorski ??

This list is limited to my own knowledge, experiences, and network. Please add your own favorites in the comments.

(2) What is the Emergent?

While the Regenerative and Emergent cultures dovetail one another, their direct correlation isn't clear. I would actually even say that while Regeneration has crystallized into a cohesive movement, the Emergent culture has not identified itself explicitly in the same way. This is perhaps appropriate considering its namesake.

Emergence is a philosophical property similar to synergy. Emergent Properties are complex systems with traits which are not found in any of the parts of the system. So, Abiogenesis, the transition from non-living matter to living matter is a great example of this, and so is the nature of consciousness.

The Emergent movement is mostly led by public intellectuals, researchers, influencers, and metatheorists. The Emergent approach is key because it resolves one of the great antagonisms of modern culture.

Due to the nature of the modern paradigm, today, human and knowledge systems are extremely fragmented. This has been well noted for a multitude of reasons, but a significant one is the sheer volume of knowledge which now exists. If anybody wants to understand any field completely, even if they dedicated their whole life to one field of study, they could not complete it.

The history of a single ethnic group, the nature of communication, the process of politics - when taken to the planetary scale and disciplinary multiplication of relations - the process is for lack of a better word, infinite. While fragmentation is often viewed from the lens of historical materialism as the division of labor, or the organizational mode of capitalism and bureaucratization - it's my intuition that these are all part of the same puzzle, which center around the modern mode of understanding.

This modern mode is largely predicated upon modern natural science since the turn of the 18th century, with modern natural science in turn being predicated upon the tradition of reductionism (as E.O. Wilson writes in Consilience, "Reduction is the cutting edge of science").

The tradition of reductionism has a made an overly-analytic people (how many times do I have to read Analytic Thinker on a resume or job application?). It's precisely because of this overly analytic mode, that our systems of knowledge or governance are becoming overburdened by complexity, with agents constricted to limited lanes of bounded logic.

As a response to this, we increasingly require the need of Synthetic Thinkers, or what I've also seen referred to as Generalist-Specialists by Vladimir Mokiy's Institute of Transdisciplinary Technologies or Expert Generalists by Rowson & Bjorkman's Perspectiva.

The Emergent Mind is the beautiful mind, and represents the ideal of what is needed in society today. Emergent thinkers are able to smoothly integrate many fields of knowledge into a cohesive whole and flow. Economics, Philosophy, Geopolitics, Ecology, Big History, Physics, Literature, and Spirituality, are all brought together in a unity of being.

This Emergent Mind - most masterfully provoked by the rhetorical displays of Daniel Schmachtenberger, and the writings of Zachary Stein and Jonathan Rowson - is what lies at the contemporary synthesis of human evolution and human knowledge.

This Emergent Mind finds its social reflex in the becoming of Emergent Civilization (and most likely the reason why Daniel Schmachtenberger titled his website project "Civilization Emerging").

What are we if we don't identify as American, German, Brazilian, Indian, or Thai? Who are we if we are of no tribe or cult? What is our specialty if we study the general field of knowledge? What is our trade if we wear many hats and operate in many fields? What type of a person can truly represent a planetary and cosmic awareness, transcending local intuition?

This free being in a sense, and the civilization which represents these free beings, is Emergent, and this is what the Emergent Movement is all about.

It has no dogmas, and is interested in using the totality of human knowledge for appropriate outcomes in given circumstances. In a sense it is somewhat divine and transcendent. The emergent being places itself at the synthesis of the universe, and allows the full forces of totality to express themselves as a universal exponent.

Here is another half-baked list of a few organizations and individuals I'm familiar with doing advanced work through this lens:

• Daniel Schmachtenberger
• Zachary Stein
• Jonathan Rowson
• Civilization Research Institute
• PERSPECTIVA
• Nicholas Hedlund, PhD

This list is limited to my own knowledge, experiences, and network. Please add your own favorites in the comments. Apparently there exists a "digital archipelago" of such thinkers who label themselves as the Metamodern or Liminal Web (see Brandon N?rgaard 's on Liminal Web Projects).

The Union of Heaven & Earth

In both Ancient Chinese and Native American traditions, there exists a primordial relationship between heaven and earth. Zhuang Zhou writes, "Heaven, Earth, and I are living together, and all things and I form an inseparable unity." Complementarily, the Diné and Haudenosaunee First Peoples share stories of the cosmological relationship between Sky and Earth.

The Regenerative and the Emergent movements similarly have an incredible potential to fuse together as the planetary vanguard of the ideal of being. Just like Yin and Yang, they in a sense complement and complete each other.

White in Black

For instance, the regenerative approach usually approaches life through the intuitive and localized mode of being to form a bit of a small-village mentality. It endorses emotion, moving slowly, and operating withing boundaries and limitations. The especially anarcho-primitivist of this movement leans into intensive local autarky, which sometimes can remind one of an ostrich with its head in the sand. This position is understandable in terms of fundamental resilience, but doesn't seem to accommodate for the global nature of human action.

Additionally, the re- in regenerative usually implies a pre-modern ideal yearning for the garden of eden (the womb). This entanglement with the fables of the past often times creates conditions of re-activity, rather than healthy activity or proactivity.

This reactive approach stuck in the past and confined to the immediate, is well complemented by the cosmic rationale of the emergent mind. The emergent mind tapped into the most advanced science, technology, and trends, but endowed with a yearning for cosmic harmony provides an extremely meaningful catalysis for the regenerative approach.

It's the white in black which is able to embed regenerative values in the social architecture of the future.

Black in White

The Emergent as well has drawbacks. It is overly masculine, humanistic, and super-modern. In a sense it appears as a disembodied talking head which is more digitally absorbed than naturally in-tune. The blind faith in progress which comes with the humanistic bend seems to be totally consumed by the unlimited bounds of human thought which have brought us here in the first place.

The Emergent in a sense is hooked up on fast thinking, breaking the mold, and trying to keep up with the pace of Moore's Law and Artificial Intelligence.

This yang side of the vanguard needs to integrate the deep healing and learnings of the regenerative movement. Becoming an actually ecological species isn't an idea, a concept, or a variety of knowledge - it's an embodied practice. It means moving at the cadence of our nature and not trying to keep up with the pace of machines. If humans are the bridge between the natural and the artificial, it is those blind with the fast-paced forward movement that are exacerbating the unstable conditions of the Earth System. The Regenerative steps in here, able to reel in the head over heels bend of the Emergent Mind.

Stewarding the Anthropocene, Entering the Ecozoic

If there is one thing both the Regenerative and the Emergent have in common, it's the entrance of a new paradigm of human understanding. New is a bit of a trite term and I don't even think it's historically very accurate. Things tend to emerge gradually over long periods of time and are never truly new or original phenomena. Like AI - when ChatGPT launched, it appeared like a totally new product. But really, it's part of a process that has taken roughly a century to become as well developed as it is today. The same can be said for economic systems, the formation of nation-states, and even the birth of a child, it's all a series of gradations laden with trigger-points and crises.

So this new as well is not really a new thing. We are indebted to entire swaths of visionaries, innovators, and vanguardists across the many generational span of time and human evolution. It's not even just a human thing, but a physical, chemical, biological, sociological, and more generally speaking, cosmic process which has brought us here today.

What we do know though, at least what us in the vanguard are becoming increasingly clear of, is that the old system predicated on the modern post-renaissance view of the world is becoming increasingly incoherent and incorrespondent with Emergent Property of the Present.

So, what do we move into? What do we become? How do we enter this novel moment of the planetary phase shift?

In my opinion, and in the opinion of many others, it's the fusion spot between the Regenerative and the Emergent which has been doing the most profound work and is in prime position to increase the rate and volume of social experimentation and integration. The Regenerative Movement makes our actions correspondent with our moment in the procession of life, and the Emergent Mind brings coherence into the contemporary zeitgeist.

In the comments below, I'll mention everybody who I see as being primed for this fusion. Make sure to add anybody you feel is missing - we are actively movement building.

Final thing.

Let me close by saying, I don't often like to play the position of cultural critic. The "Regenerative" and the "Emergent" are heuristic devices which provide a short-hand of identifying the types of people, projects, organizations, networks, philosophies, technologies, approaches, values, etc. which are working with a certain degree of social cohesion (i.e. a cultural milieu). In this article, I'm playing the role of cultural modulator, so that we can gain self-awareness and begin working together with a higher degree of social consciousness. Please comment on and repost this work if you think it's meaningful. We'll soon be organizing Town Halls for the Global Meta Village. Stay tuned by subscribing to our newsletter at the New World DAO.