On Becoming a Regenerative Practitioner

Excited, intrigued, confused

My first comment to my colleague, Bill Reed of Regenesis, was: I love what you’re showing us, but how can this idea of regeneration be implemented in an urban environment?  I was intrigued by the stories he was telling and the work he was showing integrating all of life’s systems in beautiful, inspiring ways, but I couldn’t see how I could use the ideas on my projects.  

Bill’s work was different from much of what I was doing, and it also appeared to be generally rural.  He showed images of degraded environments that had become verdant ever-evolving watersheds.  Presumably that had been their state until human intervention had caused them to dry up or become polluted and ugly.  The closest he came to showing something I could relate to was a project with the Brattleboro Co-op in Vermont.  I could easily imagine working on that project – the owners wanted a LEED Gold grocery store, and I was good at facilitating LEED projects.  But for Bill, one of the developers of the LEED rating system, that was not sufficient.  He asked the client probing questions about the products in the co-op, like where do they come from?  As the community came to the realization that a trucker’s strike could put them out of business, it became clear that for this project to be “sustainable,” it needed to be more than just a grocery store.  It needed to embrace the inherent wealth of the overall community, including the surrounding farming community and the backyard gardens of the people living in town.  Only by becoming more nutritionally self-sufficient could it also become more sustainable.  And only by embracing its and the town’s ever-evolving potential could it become regenerative.

For me, this understanding was just a first step, and it still seemed abstract.  I could grasp that there was something behind Bill’s work that was deeper than my work with integrative systems thinking and LEED and profoundly more effective for improving the health of our communities, eco-systems, and the planet.  My intentional journey towards becoming a regenerative practitioner  began over 10 years ago with Regenesis courses (www.regenesisgroup.com) and workshops with Carol Sanford (www.seed-communities.com).  

It was challenging.  There were many frameworks and different ways of addressing problems (that I came to realize weren’t even problems but were opportunities for seeking inherent potential).  I came to see that becoming a regenerative practitioner was indeed a life-long journey of becoming and that it is relevant to all of life, including our urban areas.  There is no end point, just a constant evolution, and that’s the point.