'your planet thanks you' …

musing on sustainability and regenerative messaging

Welcome. Recent Pyrenees cycling, hiking and train journeys gave time for musing, reflection and note scribbling, on where we are, where I am, in the regenerative space. Particularly around why positive traction and progress remains slow. This is a vital question that Regen Notes and Zoom Regenerative have been addressing over the last year, seeking and exploring the essence of regenerative, of biophilia.

Here I share my notes and scribbles, weaving and making sense of many threads, moving closer, in my mind at least, to an essence …

Are our regenerative messages too complex, too nuanced, too multi faceted? Enabling life to thrive is a wonderful expression … yet limitless in its reach - and what does that mean in the decision I am making right now, whether that is personal, in design, in material procurement, in construction technique or any of the multitude of decisions we make.

In the Do Build “How to make and lead a business the world needs’ Alan More suggests we should ensure that every desicion we make ‘be the most beautiful one possible’. Beautiful for us, our organisations and the planet.

Your Planet Thanks You.

I am not sure where these words came from, maybe something I saw, read, abridged, fomulated, collated, created, but four words meandered around my reflections. And the more they did so, the more I unpacked them, the more they made sense as an alternative to the more common ‘instructional’ messaging we see in the regenerative and sustainability space.

Even after decades our sustainability policies are anchored on a set of do less, do more, reduce this, minimise that, oh and eliminate something else. To such an extent this may have become a meaningless background whitewash - the nice words in our governance documents but on the ground ...?

With thoughts from previous Regen Notes posts and ZR conversations - is our messaging too left brain, locked into McGilchrist’s left-hemisphere domain: abstract, categorical, instrumental. Climate change, carbon footprint, sustainability metrics, are all the Emissary’s tools, reducing the complex, beautiful living world to data points, problems to be solved through technical management. This increases our view of environmental issues as external challenges requiring systematic intervention, breaking down complex ecological relationships into manageable components. Even completly eroding any sense of interconnectedness.

Whilst pulling my musings together and writing this post, I have being reading Kelli Rose Pearson’s brilliant thesis based on a number of propositions, including. “Mechanistic metaphors hinder our understanding of complex systems by framing them as overly structured and predictable”. In the introduction she cites Buckinster Fuller’s spaceship metaphor and then compares to planet earth’s wetlands ... A spaceship, in this case is a machine: complex in its engineering but ultimately controllable, designed with a blueprint, and responsive to its operators. Earth, by contrast, is a living, breathing system—a realm of emergent complexity.

Here, countless interactions ripple across scales, creating outcomes no single plan can predict or control.

(resonating with the recent Regen Notes Is a Building Alive? … as active participant, rather than as a passive container for life?)

Your Planet Thanks You

Could “your planet thanks you” give a different and psychological lever to challenge our environmental consciousness? Activating something different, addressing McGilchrists right hemisphere’s capacity for relationship, embodiment, and living context. A shift from managing environmental problems to participating in ecological relationships. The planet becomes a living being, not a only resource but a partner capable of recognition and response.

With the right hemisphere understanding through relationship rather than analysis, through metaphor rather than measurement, when the world can thank us, as a being, we move to a consciousness that see in wholes, feels beauty in the everyday, feels connection and feels pain of separation.

I Have Felt - did Wordsworth get this? (Regen Note March 2025)

‘Your planet'“ rather than “the planet” or “our planet,” could create personal ownership. It sidesteps the weakening of responsibility that all too often paralyses environmental action, the what about (insert distraction country, company, person....) When it’s specifically my planet, you can’t delegate responsibility to others. This possessiveness transforms the Planet from distant abstraction into something as personal as your home or family.

Further, the direct address of “you” creates immediacy and recognition. The planet isn’t speaking to humanity at large; it’s having a one-on-one conversation, suggesting ki knows you personally and appreciates your specific contributions. Could this break the barrier that makes individual actions feel insignificant against planetary challenges?

We are now all too aware that when we receive thanks our brains release dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. We feel good. Could this work from an imagined planetary consciousness? What is the planet thanking me for today? may well be pulling up good deeds in our minds, reinforcing all the feel good chemicals.

Further (I did mention these are musings?) could “your planet thanks you” help understanding of the conceptual framework for rights of nature. When we give the Earth a voice expressing gratitude, we’re preparing for legal systems where rivers and natural entities file lawsuits and forests own property.

This isn’t fantasy, but happening, as Robert Macfarlane wonderfully explores in his latest book ‘Is a River Alive’. Ecuador grants constitutional rights to Pachamama. New Zealand recognizes rivers as legal persons. Colombia’s Supreme Court grants rights to the Amazon. River Ouze in Suffolk has rights of nature recognition ... and more. If the planet can thank us, it can presumably object to harm legally?. (All that greenry we brought into the biophilic office and then neglected caring for?)

Tipping Towards Reciprocity

“your planet thanks you” transforms environmental action from one of duty or policy based obligation to relationship based reciprocity. We act not because we are told we should but because we now sense and feel it is the right thing to do. With the planet thanking us through breathable air, a stable climate, vibrant and beautiful biodiversity, it could become a gratitude requiring ongoing reciprocal response. This surfaces and resonates with all the wonderful work from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the Honourable Harvest, and the Ego-Eco-Seva paradigm.

“your planet thanks you” points toward a consciousness that includes both the individual psyche and planetary processes as aspects of larger wholeness. Environmental healing and psychological soul-centering become the same process from different angles. This is illustrated by Satish Kumar in his film and books. If one palm respresents the self, the other the planet, by bringing them together to the namaste or thank you salutation, we are simultaeously greeting and thanking the interconnectedness of the invidual and the planet (... the cosmos as Satish refers to it).

The more I muse “your planet thanks you” I feel this is more than slogan marketing, yet possibly opening a new human-nature relationship, ‘one grateful thank you at a time’. It suggests we’re evolving from seeing nature only as commodity to recognising it as community (as Aldo Leopold is famously quoted) in the ongoing conversation about how we enable life to thrive.

What does your planet thank you for today?

Further musing - and this will for sure lead to a wider conversation on a ZR or Regen Notes - what if rather than the myriad of sustainable or regenerative accolades and certifications for projects and organisations, how better to have the planet thanking us? (‘your planet thanks you’ posters on construction sites?)

Sustainability certifications and regenerative badges are fundamentally products of the left-hemisphere Emissary brain, reducing the beautiful complexity of ecological relationship to check-boxes and point systems.

Using nature’s own voice to shape standards and certifications rarely / never enters the conversation, despite encoragement from certification/consulting/education entities to listen to and act on the ‘voice of nature’.

Worse, could they be maintaining the fundamental separation between human systems and natural systems. As humans, with our other-than-nature perspective, we remain the judges, the certifiers, the ones who decide what counts as “good enough.” Nature remains silent, objectified, spoken for but never speaking.

In audits I have been known to ask the question if nature had a place on your design team, how would you listen, what would you hear, and would you comply? From previously being politely ridiculed, this is now more accepted. The Voice of Nature is increasingly having a seat at top management, on boards, advisory groups and design teams. The LFE Biophilia Playbook prompts for similiar attention ‘if nature were to audit your project how would it fare?’

If we took the idea of the planet thanking us seriously, we’d need to develop entirely different forms of feedback and validation, ones that listens, has the voice of natural systems themselves rather than imposing human metrics upon them.

Now, what would that feel like?

Future Regen Notes.

A huge thank you for those who are paid subscribers to this newsletter. You make it possible. As many others concerned with social media organisations supporting politics, particulalry American politics at the moment, and those being politcs I would not subscribe to, I am exploring the move from Substack to Ghost. This won’t be immediate and I am looking at making the transition as smooooth as possible. It may mean that Regen Notes becomes a paid subscriber newsletter. Watch this space and Thanks.