Daniel Christian Wahl
on Designing Regenerative Cultures
“Regenerative practice starts and continues with personal development. It is not a tool, but a practice of conscious participation and co-creation. Living in the right relationship and practising the art of transformation, we realign with life itself. Working regeneratively is working in an evolutionary way.”
Daniel Christian Wahl believes evolution stands in revolution. A revolution that invites humbleness by catalyzing and revealing the potential of people as regenerative expressions of place. Humans have the potential to be “a keystone species that nurtures biodiversity and heals ecosystems.” By reinhabiting the places and ecosystems we live in as a regenerative and healing presence.
Daniel is one of the pioneering voices of the rising regeneration, writing about it frequently on Medium. He works as a consultant, educator and activist with NGOs, businesses, governments and global change agents and has been awarded a Volans Fellowship in 2022. He is the winner of the 2021 RSA Bicentenary Medal for applying design in service to society and regularly teaches MA in Ecological Design Thinking at Schumacher College.
He asked himself two valuable questions: How can we collaborate in the creation of diverse regenerative cultures adapted to the unique biocultural conditions of place? How can we create conditions conducive to life? Daniel put all the answers in his book, Designing Regenerative Cultures, a “Whole Earth Catalog for the 21st Century”, an impressive analysis and exploration of all the ways in which we can reframe and understand the crises that we currently face and explores how we can live our way into the future. Daniel systematically shows how we can stop chasing the mirage of certainty and control in a complex and unpredictable world.
That's why he dares us to temper our impatience and urgency to jump to answers or conclusions too quickly, as this tendency “to favour answers rather than to deepen into the questions is in itself part of the old story of separation.”
The art of transformative cultural innovation is “about making peace with ‘not knowing’ and living into the questions more deeply, making sure we are asking the right questions, paying attention to our relationships and how we all bring forth a world not just through what we are doing, but through the quality of our being. A regenerative culture will emerge from finding and living new ways of relating to self, community and life as a whole. At the core of creating regenerative cultures is an invitation to live the questions together.”
Leave the answers aside and start asking and living the questions that will bring your being to life, again and again.
Thank you, Daniel, for being a Regenerative Culture Designer!
#INSPIRATORS QUESTIONNAIRE
Name: Daniel Christian Wahl
Company / Institution: Daniel Christian Wahl
Title: Independent Advisor, Educator, Activist
Website: www.danielchristianwahl.com
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-christian-wahl-51a54616/
Country of origin: Germany
Country you currently live in: Spain
Your personal definition of Regeneration: Life’s inherent impulse to create conditions conducive to life and the essence of life’s capacity of self-organization at the cellular, individual, ecosystems and planetary scale.
In short, the pattern of dynamic health and scale-linking resilience by which life as a planetary process has flourished, which enabled our ancestors' evolution as regenerative expressions of place. Failure to reintegrate all of humanity back into this pattern and end the degenerative impact of a disproportionate few will result in immature extinction and failure to manifest humanity’s potential as a mature member of the community of life.
Main business challenge you face: Staying centred in my whole being as a father, husband, syntropic food forester, community member, catalyst of bioregional regeneration, blogger, video caster, activist, author, advisor, mentor, consultant, educator, hillwalker, dancer, swimmer SUPaddler, sea kayaker, diver, and lover of books and wild nature, to discern what to say yes to and what to help catalyse, or even say no to.
This discernment also relates to finding the right balance between income that subsidizes non-income generating activities and balancing pro bono work with rates that also financially reflect the systemic value I create through my life practice.
Main driver that keeps you going: My love for life in all its magnificent expressions and seeing the beauty and wonder that still surrounds us if we learn to see and love it, both because and in spite of the growing understanding of how fragile the thread of life’s and humanity’s future has become through the actions of a relative few and over a relatively short time of a few millennia.
I am aware that my entire being and cultural context has been enabled by the privilege I had due to this injustice and since I cannot fully disrobe from this privilege I hope to put it in equal service to self, community and life.
The trait you are most proud of in yourself: Weaver of people and organizations as well as ideas and narratives in service to the regeneration of human and planetary health.
The trait you most value in others: A compulsive passion to be in service to something larger than themselves.
Passions & little things that bring you joy: Healing and nurturing soil, increasing biodiversity and ecological complexity where I live, chanting mantras on my SUP board, a potluck with friends and community, spending time outside with my daughter, wife and friends, good local food and wine, growing herbs, fruits, vegetables and lots of trees, especially oaks, reading, writing, dialogue, finding joy in the mixed bags of everyday blessings and opportunities to unlearn and learn.
The #inspirators who determined you to take the regenerative path:
Prof. Seaton Baxter
Prof. John Todd
Prof. David W. Orr
Prof. Brian Goodwin
Dr. Stephan Harding
Henri Bortoft
Anthony Hodeson
Aaron Antonovsky
Buckminster Fuller
David Abram
Arthur Zajonc
Joanna Macy
John Seed
Gregory Bateson
Paul Stamets
Satish Kumar
Janine Benyus
Gigi Coyle
Lynn Margulis
James Lovelock
... and many more, but first and foremost the ancient regenerative wisdom of the Vedanta, the Dao, and Zen and many insights gained from listening deeply and in apprenticeship to the shared knowledge and technologies of the sacred held by our indigenous older brothers to this day.
A hint or starting point for companies or professionals that are taking the first steps in the regeneration journey: Ask yourself - “Where is our place and who are our people?” and start working on coming home to place by enabling decentralization and the expression of the unique potential of people in place through social, economic and ecological regeneration of that place, community, and bioregion.
If you are a multinational, consider devolution into a globally cooperative network of regionally - ideally cooperatively owned - companies in service to the regeneration of specific bioregions and ecosystems. Global problems can only be solved by healing places everywhere!
Most used and abused clichés in sustainability that bother you: “Oh, you are still working on sustainability, rather than on regeneration?”
The sustainability community’s tendency towards blindness of how its historical roots were already embedded in a worldview that assigns only utilitarian rather than also an intrinsic value to life and how this runs through the modern reworkings of the Brundland Commission and into the Trojan horse of the SDGs - Economic Growth and Good Work (Number 8).
An honest piece of advice for young people who lose hope: Understand that breakdown and breakthrough are part of life’s regenerative patterns.
If you don’t trust yourself or other people any longer, stay open to that change and trust in life and your innate capacity to be of service to life. In growing plants or helping other human beings you might just rediscover that hope is a verb rather than a noun.
Books that had a great impact on you:
Coming Back to Life - Joanna Macy & Molly Brown
The Wholeness of Nature - Henri Bortoft
The Nature of Design - David Orr
The Turning Point - Fritjof Capra
Gaia: the Practical Science of Planetary Medicine - James Lovelock
Dancing with Systems - Donella Meadows
The Passion of the Western Mind - Richard Tarnas
Original Instructions - Melissa Nelson
Must-reads for any regenerative professional:
Regenerative Business & Indirect Work - Carol Sanford
Regenerative Leadership - Giles Hutchins & Laura Storm
Designing Regenerative Cultures - Daniel C Wahl
The Systems View of Life - Fritjof Capra & Pier Luigi Luisi
Movies or Documentaries you would watch all over again:
Movies:
Night on Earth & Down by Law, Jim Jarmusch
Apocalypse Now, F.F. Coppola
Subway & Le Gran Bleu, Luc Besson
Battlestar Galactica (series), Larsen & Moore
Blade Runner, Ridley Scott
Docus:
Blogs / Websites / Podcasts you visit frequently:
I wish I had more time for that, too few, frequently.
https://designforsustainability.medium.com
https://systemicdesignlabs.ethz.ch/cassustainabilitytoregeneration/
https://www.thersa.org/oceania/regeneration-rising-podcast
Music that makes you (and your heart) sing:
Manu Chao, Bob Marley, Herbie Mann, Mercedes Sosa, Dreambeat, Michael Franti, JS Bach, Dead Can Dance, Velvet Underground, Tom Waits, Camper Van Beethoven, Violent Femms, Underground Resistence, Paul Oakenfold, The Orb, Lee Scratch Perry, Cosby-Stills-Nash&Young, Israel Kamakawiwoʻole, Chet Baker, Queen, Funkadelic, The Specials, Fehlfarben, Ton-Steine-Scherben, Deva Primal & Mitten, Ram Dass, Cesaria Evora.
Places you travelled to that left a mark on you:
Hogar Mountains, Central Sahara, Southern Algeria
Lake Nakuru, Kenya
Great Barrier Reef, Australia
Fjordlands, New Zealand
Miazaky, Japan
Bagsu, India
Koh Tao, Thailand
Roatan, Honduras
Liguria, Italy
Findhorn, Scotland
Patagonia, Argentina
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Patzcuaru, Mexico
Santa Cruz, California
Tysfjord, Norway
Alvaneu, Switzerland
Alpujarras & Mallorca, Spain
Global Regenerative Voices you recommend us to follow:
Carol Sanford
Pamela Mang
Ben Haggard
Joel Glanzberg
Bill Reed
John Fullerton
Nora Bateson
Jenny Andersson
Laura Storm
Giles Hutchins
Eduard Mueller
Ronald Sistek
Alex Pryor
Flor Casiragi
Pedro Tarak
Joe Brewer
Kate Raworth
Lyla June
Tyson Yunkaporta
Anne Poelina
Natalie Topa
Sarah Queblatin
Ruth Andrade
David McConville
Dawn Wood
Jason Twill
Fritjof Capra
Tobias Luthe
… don’t make me do this, as for however many I list, I will still offend so many others who also deserve to be mentioned!
Trends in Regeneration we should keep an eye on:
The increasing signal-to-noise ratio as big organizations and old silverbacks muscle in to have an opinion before going through the necessary unlearning and learning.
The mistake of presenting regeneration as a new trend, phenomenon, or utopia to be achieved.
The re-genwashing of players that hold fast to scaling-up, global solutioneering and the mistaken pattern of finding abstract solutions to abstract problems that never really fit specific places and cultures rather enabling place and culture-sourced learning processes that connect people in place through relationship to place and build their capacity for learning and evolving together.
Best places for business networking (online or offline): Sorry, I don’t do that much, but I do use LinkedIn more than Twitter or Facebook these days and prefer smaller in-person gatherings in a retreat-type setting to really meet people as whole beings and will start to facilitate these soon.
Events we should attend: The ones that inspire you and are in your neck of the woods or online.
Associations, business clubs, tribes you belong to – and why:
The global network and family of people working with or having gone through programmes of Gaia Education and the Global Ecovillage Network, because this has been one of my communities for over 20 years.
The Royal Society of the Arts, because I know many fellows who care deeply and they kindly gave me a medal and invited me to be a lifetime fellow
The International Futures Forum and h3uni.org because I have loved my learning with and from Anthony Hodgeson, Bill Sharpe, Graham Leicester, Andrew Lyons, David Adams, Bob Horn, Ian Page and others.
The Regenerative Practitioners Community in Europe (at least in spirit).
The Regenerative Communities Network as a loosely organized global network of people working in bioregional regeneration.
The Localization Alliance and the Systems Change Alliance
The European Biomimimcry Practitioners Network (informal)
Schumacher College graduates (informal)
Ecosystems Regeneration (small group focussed in community lead ecosystems regeneration)
The wider Beyond Boundaries and Council Guide network
Love the Bioneers community but have fallen out of touch as very US-centric and I am focused on my local bioregion.
The Commonland & Ecosystems Restoration Communities networks of regional/landscape scale initiatives
Sustainable Development or Regeneration courses, trainings, or certifications that really teach us how to have an impact:
Ecovillage Design Education & Design for Sustainability courses by Gaia Education
Transition Town Training, The Transition Network
The Regenerative Practitioner, Regenesis Insititute
4 MOOC series by ETH Zurich
CAS & MAS by ETH Zurich
Introduction to Regenerative Economics, Capital Institute
Regenerative Leadership Learning Journey, Laura Storm
Power of Place, Jenny Andersson
Warm Data Lab, Nora Bateson
Training in the Way of Council, Nature of Council, Vision Fast Guide
The Work That Reconnects, Joanna Macy
Reasons to feel optimistic about our future in 2030: Life’s regenerative patterns that create conditions conducive to life are on our side if we only aim to reintegrate into them by reinhabiting places and bioregions as healing expressions of place.
Reasons to feel pessimistic about our future in 2030: The nexus of water-food-energy demands rising until then while climate change affects the provision of them negatively will make us reach “the perfect storm” by then and we are not setting sails to prepare for it.
Regenerative Leadership qualities much needed today:
Humility, capacity to unlearn in order to learn transformatively, being able to take a second and third-order view (awareness of how we are aware and how our cultural/story context influences that awareness), capacity for deep listening and ability to suspend judgement, compassion and muditha, reconnecting with our biophilic nature, embodied practice of grounding in place and community, celebrating being plagiarized as a successful meme seeding, embracing uncertainty and paradox, being gentle with oneself and others, “trusting life beyond the knowing, by sensing, feeling and intuiting”.
The #inspirators you are endorsing for a future edition of the newsletter are:
Anne Poelina, Tyson Yunkaporta, Lyla June, Sarah Queblatin, Natalie Topa, Ruth Andrade, Flor Casiragi, Laura Storm, Jenny Andersson, Donnie Maclurcan, Thomas Hann, Glenn Page, Johnnie Freeland, Isabel Carlisle, Galen Fulford, Alex Pryor, Pedro Tarak, Eduard Mueller, Luis Alberto Carmago, Carlos Cobreros, Jason Till, India Hamilton, Samantha Sweetwater, Jodie Harburt, Anna Pollock, Surparna Diwakar, Bayo Akomolafe, Orland Bishop, Nora Bateson, Carol Sanford, Pamela Mang, Joel Glanzberg, Ben Haggard, Bill Reed, Nuno Silva, Ronald Sistek, Christian Tiscornia, Stuart Cowan, Joe Brewer, Manish Jain, Helena Norberg-Hodges, Taisa Mattos, Flavia Vivacua, Willem Ferwerda, Otto Scharmer, David Abram, Charles Eisenstein, Dayna Baumeister, Janine Benyus, Bill Sharpe, Anthony Hodgeson, John Ennis.
The quote that inspires you:
“The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.”
(Rabindranath Tagore)
Your own quote that will inspire us:
