A blossoming of practice: Launching our guide to Tools for regenerative practice

“Come queen of months in company

Wi all thy merry minstrelsy”

– John Clare (1793-1864), May (from The Shepherd’s Calendar)

As I write this in York, England, the queen of months is well underway, and filled with blossom and birdsong.

We might take it for granted, but spring is a powerful reminder of the regenerative power and cycles of nature. Regenerative dynamics take place all around us and within us, in cells, organs, individuals, communities, ecosystems, and at the planetary scale. They underpin life’s innate ability to sense, build, connect, maintain, repair, reproduce, adapt, innovate and evolve itself – in ways that in turn create conditions for more life to flourish.

For the vast majority of our evolutionary history, humanity has lived in alignment with this regenerative impulse of life. Such ways of living are maintained by Indigenous cultures across the world; to this day, many of the world’s remaining biodiversity hotspots are under the stewardship of Indigenous peoples.

But particularly since around 10,000 years ago – at a time of major climate change that sparked the Agricultural Revolution – many of our societies have strayed far from this kind of mutualistic relationship. Our collective journey from this point has been characterised as one of separation in multiple aspects of our identity, including a sense of humans as separate from and superior to the rest of nature.

This separation is a critical factor underpinning humanity’s systematic destruction of the natural world and Earth’s life-support systems. A destruction that now deeply threatens our own wellbeing and survival.

This leads to possibly the most important question of the Anthropocene era: How can we realign our societies with the regenerative dynamics of life?

We think that the answer can begin even in some of the simplest of practices, both personally but importantly also collectively. Practices of how we frame conversations. How we design and imagine futures. How we strategise and plan for transformative action.

Regenerative practice for us means a continuous, iterative journey of design, experimentation, adaptation and learning that is led by the intention of allowing regenerative systems to emerge and flourish at multiple scales. It involves not only striving for regenerative societies and cultures more widely, but also trying to embody regenerative qualities and dynamics – including mutualism, reciprocity, circularity, diversity, reflexivity, adaptivity, a complexity-informed worldview, and a deep honouring of place – in the work that we do.

Our guide to Tools for regenerative practice shares some of these examples of practice that we’ve found inspiring and helpful. We hope that it supports you on your own journey of using and engaging with ideas of regeneration.

You’ll find tools for framing conversations in terms of regenerative systems or for sensitising people to what it feels like to be regenerative. You’ll find tools that push the boundaries of your understanding, scope, ambition, and imagination. You’ll also find tools that help you move into action.

We invite you to give them a try, adapt them to your own context, experiment with them, get creative with them – and join a growing movement of people striving to revitalise patterns of life where people and planet can flourish together.

Our guide has been germinating for over two and a half years – shaped by lots of workshops, trialling and experimentation by members of Ecocentric Futures and FixOurFood’s Regenerative Futures Group, and input from many other people and organisations. As May unwraps its flowers, we too are ready to support a blossoming of regenerative practice.

Sam Buckton (sam.buckton@york.ac.uk), Ecocentric Futures, Department of Environment and Geography, University of York

Explore further in our Tools for regenerative practice: 30 frameworks, exercises and methods in service of human and planetary flourishing.

AI use statement: AI was not used in the writing of this article.