What does living in an unfolding apocalyptic reality look like? Emergence Magazine

Welcome to Regen Notes - joining regenerative dots and spaces between.

Fairsnape Fell (Wainwright: A Bowland Sketchbook 1981)

Subscribe now

Witnessing how humanity is tearing apart the web of life, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee reminds us - in this captivating article “Where the Horses Sing” — of the deep ecology of consciousness we once held—a threshold open to the place where the land sings—and calls us to return our awareness to a fully animate world.

Have we wandered so far from the source that we cannot return?

What has happened to our consciousness, now divorced from the multidimensional existence that used to sustain us? Did we need to exile ourselves from this primal place of belonging? And now, as we tear apart the web of life with our machines and images of progress, is there a calling to return, to open the door that has been closed by our rational selves?

Why Fairsnape?

Fair Snape Fell, (53°54’57.2″N 2°37’27.8″W) is visible from my base, located in the south west of the AONB Forest of Bowland in Lancashire, England. ‘Snape translates as ‘pasture’; hence FairSnape Fell is the ‘fell of the fair (beautiful) pasture’. With a 360 degree vista it is an impressive place in all seasons.

Fairsnape as a name was adopted to reflect the ‘thinking like a mountain1’ required to address our climate and ecological crisis, and the necessary awareness of nature, of time and place, and of long term impacts from our short term thinking.

Share

Another COP

Alongside the IPCC climate COPs (as we are, between 26 and 27) there is another important convention focusing on biodiversity with COP 15 scheduled to take place later this year in Montreal, under the umbrella of the IPDES (the equivalent of the IPCC for biodiversity)

A recent assessment by 82 leading scientist highlighted that taking into account the benefits of nature is essential for life to be sustainable on Earth. (Decisions Based on Narrow Set of Market Values of Nature Underpin the Global Biodiversity Crisis) This means truly valuing the spiritual, cultural and emotional values that nature brings. The review highlights four general perspectives that we should take into account, perspectives that provide us with a sound framework for connecting with nature ...

Living from nature, the ability of nature to provide us with resources essential to our lives,

Living with nature the right of non-human life to thrive.

Living in nature, peoples rights to a sense of place and identity in nature,

Living as nature, reciprocity, treating the world as a spiritual part of being human.

Solastalgia

Coined by Glenn Allbrect, Solastagia describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change. It is best described as the lived experience of negatively perceived environmental change. A distinction can be made between solastalgia linked to distress about what is in the process of negatively perceived change and eco-anxiety linked to what may happen in the future. (wiki)

Solastalgia - Our Earth Was Once Green slide used in many Fairsnape talks.

Solvitur Ambulando

It is solved by walking.

In the 19th century, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” From Alpkit newsletter

How To Stay Sane In Sustainability

How to keep positive as the climate crisis unfolds in real time. Solitaire Townsend addresses this head-on with a wonderful post on LinkedIn. It is a must-read for all in ‘sustainability’ for all who are asking the question, how do I remain positive in light of the climate crisis around us.

I firmly believe that a better world is possible and even likely. It will happen because of people like you, doing the work, and hopefully a few positive wildcards we don’t expect. But I don’t expect to see that it. Even if things get worse, I’ll keep working for them to get better, never losing hope that it’s possible. As I’ve said before:
Most of the suffragettes never got to vote.
Most early LGBT+ activists never got to marry.
Most civil rights activists never saw the first black President.
Inventors of electricity died by candlelight.
These people dedicated their lives to a better future they never lived in.
This service mindset is the most healthy, resilient and sane one in times of crisis.

Solitaire’s focus on “being in service” to others, has strong resonance and echoes of SEVA (as in EGO, ECO, SEVA, see here for explainer, leaving our egos behind, moving on from our failing eco era, to be in service to others and nature),

and with echoes of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s treaty on The ServiceBerry As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange?

Retrofit Reimagined.

“What if *retrofit* meant more than insulating homes, but how our streets could recover biodiversity, grow food, compost food waste and create spaces to meet & connect with neighbours?”

With the intense heat in the UK and across Europe in recent days, the question of our homes and buildings being fit for a climate future has been brought into stark reality. The retrofit reimagined event in Birmingham recently tackled this question with a myriad of speakers from different perspectives to reimagine reinterpret imaginatively creatively and resourcefully. The notes accompanying the event summarised on the Notion platform with lovely thought-provoking what if’s

F U T U R E G E N E R A T I V E

A sequel?

FutuREgenerative is picking up from where FutuREstorative (review) left 6 years ago - a short period in the scale of things - but the dials are still moving, even faster, in the wrong direction. Sustainability as we know it, as we apply it today, is not sufficiently deep or meaningful enough to address climate and ecological issues, not only those that we face in the immediate future but those we face around the world, now, in real-time.

Books can take many months to come together, and in the case of climate, texts can quickly become dated, so the plan here is for FutuREgenerative to be serialised through a dedicated subscription based substack. Subscribers will be able to follow the development and contribute with comments. As the book develops, the structure may and most likely will change and adapt. That said, the structure at the moment looks like this:

2022

The first half will pick up from and push further than FutuREstorative did, covering the Regenerative Self, (it is not what we do but who are are) Literacy (what do we not understand about climate, place, impact, time ), Nature, (we are surrounded by her but ...) Eco-Nomics, (rewarding regenerative, not degenerative) Agency (something we all have). And, yes Carbon, as that is the litmus or lighthouse focus of the moment, but with the awareness that we cannot solve the carbon issue with a tunnel vision, by placing band-aids on our problems from the past.

We created those problems, so we can uncreate them through harnessing the potential we have.

2030

The second half will pick up from part one, from interviews, events, Regen Notes and other writings along with comments on FutuREgenerative instalments. Asking, exploring, and addressing 2030 What If’s.

What does living in an unfolding apocalyptic reality look like?

In 2030, what will the day in the life of a client, the quantity surveyor, the designer, the specifier, the project manager, the manufacturing CEO, the investor, the retailer, the sustainability practitioners, the floor layer, the housing maintenance surveyor, the apprentice look like?

Watch this space for news on how you can read and contribute to FutuREgenerative. And please do leave a comment if you would like an alert as to when the first instalment is scheduled.

As this playbook shows, (regenerative) means asking different and better questions, ones which can help us to recognise and work with the true interdependencies of our living world; it means nurturing the potential that all people and communities already have to be sources of health for all life on earth and giving that potential space to grow and be realised; and it means working not only to change ‘out there’ but also to change ‘in here’, our own mindsets and behaviours, and those of our organisations. Josie Warden

Upcoming Events

Zoom Regenerative re-zooms on the 13 September, 8pm

Living Future Europe Biophilia Camp - Italian Dolomites Sep 30 - Oct 3 2022

The Living Future Europe 2022 Masterclass. Regenerative + Agile will take place between September 19th and December 14th,

1

Thinking Like a Mountain - See Aldo Leopold Sand County Almanac

Regen/ Notes

Living in an unfolding apocalyptic reality