 Once we understand that life is a planetary process, that we're not individuals, that like they're more non-human cells in us and on us than they are human cells, that we're literally walking ecosystems, that life and even matter shows up in relationship and through participation of consciousness. It just fundamentally shifts the nature of reality and it creates an understanding that to build an image like competition exists in nature but it is the waves on top of the ocean, they're loud, they crash together, they're impressive, so you focus on them. But the water underneath, like all that depth all the way down to the Marianas trench is symbiosis, collaboration and life-creating conditions can use after life. Christian Wall is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media Innovators Magazine and sponsored by the Aloha's Regenerative Foundation. Daniel is one of the catalysts of the rising regeneration and the author of Designing Regenerative Cultures. So far translated into seven languages, he works as a consultant educator and activist with NGOs, businesses, governments and global change agents with degrees in biology, holistic science and a PhD in design for human and planetary health. His work has influenced the emerging fields of regenerative design. Winner of the 2021 RSA Bicentenary Medal for Applying Design and Service to Society awarded a two-year Bolans Fellowship in 2022. Daniel holds all these degrees and does numerous work all around the world. He lives in Mallorca where he helped to set up SMART UIB and works locally and internationally as a consultant educator and activist among his clients who have been ECOVER form for the future camper, police, Belarus, what was that again, Daniel? Baliarist. Baliarist. It saved the med, lush, Unitar, UK, foresight, cloud burst, foundation and many universities and NGOs. He has been on the academic working group of the Global ECO Village Network, GEN and has been linked to GEN for almost 20 years. Daniel has worked closely with Gaia Education since 2007 and contributed to the design and development of the SDG Multiplier Cards. So I have those cards here. These are the SDG Multiplier Cards. They come in a big set of multiple cards, beautiful colors, wonderful work done through Gaia Education. We're gonna talk a little bit about those. Daniel's book, Designing Regenerative Cultures I have right here, I've read it numerous times and I'm just so excited to have you on the show, Daniel. I've recently saw you, luckily, in Lapund, Switzerland at your 2040. I have to tell you honestly, this was the first time that we physically spoke and met. We've been speaking since well before 2018, emails and had different chats, tried to collaborate and work together over the years. A lot of our fellow mentors and friends and people kind of cross-collaboration are people that we both know and have interacted with, you much more than I. And I was nervous as hell because I revere you as a wonderful human being, a mensch and a mentor. I love the work you do. I love the type of human being you are and interactions you have with people. And I'm so humbled and honored that you take the time to speak to me right before you go on your digital detox and kind of break for the year to go in and get a rest and regenerate yourself. Thank you so much. Well, thanks for, well, what an introduction. I feel humbled just by that introduction, but yeah, lovely to be on this show with you and it was great to meet in person. It always just creates a deeper connection. So, and what a beautiful place to meet as well. Yes, it really is. And we had a fabulous experience, or at least I did. I mean, regardless of heat and weather and environment, there was just such, probably one of the most beautiful places in the world and it's kind of a hidden secret where we met with great people, kind of all hoping and desiring better futures and around the theme of regeneration. We were really fortunate to have those times and then enough time in between to stop and pause and have conversations amongst each other. And I really appreciate some of those deep dives that we were able to get into and to discuss. I have to tell you that I have to apologize regardless of the great accolades that I gave you. I could read your biography for an hour because of all the things you've done over the years. You are a graduate of Schumacher College. You were a Schumacher College, did different things with them. You've done things with Gaia educations. You've done things with Fritz Hof Capra and not just the Capra courses but had him on your podcasts and different things. And I want to get into those relationships and those things that you've had over the years. But I used to say and openly, very openly in all my talks and discussions, I'm looking for the university course, the cumulative breadth of knowledge and wisdom out there where I can combine systems thinking, symbiosis, regeneration, where I can think about futures and cultures and our regenerative ancestry where there's one cumulative place to find that. And when Jeremy Lent came out with his book, The Web of Meaning, I was like, oh, finally there's kind of a synopsis that talks about all these wonderful things in one book. And I honestly used to tout that as the number one book for people to go to and to read but I have to apologize because I was totally wrong. I've read your book 12 times. I go to it all the time. It's much more depth, much more rounded, more systemic thinking, also thinking about the terminology, the languages we use when we're thinking about our world and designing cultures and how, in Jeremy Lent's book, he uses ecological civilizations. That's a mememic term that probably we should also discuss on this call. But you synthesize those and you've connected to all these experts and thought leaders around the world to synthesize a beautiful work here that is something that I wanna ask you. Do you see this as a manual, a handbook or as a source, a resource to guide people on these new thoughts? Or how did this emerge? And what is your hope for those who read it? What they take away from what you've created with your book here? Thank you. That's a lovely place to start. Well, you mentioned Schumacher College and that incredibly formative period in my life which was after having dropped out of academic research in marine mammal biology and wanting to be a field ethologist in marine mammal science. And then a short time as a diving instructor traveling around the world, I spent some years somewhat idealistically trying to set up an eco village and environmental education center in Southern Spain and then realized that there was so much more than I needed to learn in order to do that successfully after trying for 18 months. And that's when I went to Schumacher College in early 2001. And in those 18 months there, I had an opportunity to meet really pioneers of this environmental movement. Like John Todd wrote the briefing paper for the 1972 conference on the environment in Stockholm. He later became a second PhD supervisor and a friend. And another person that I met, there was Henry Bortoft, a physicist and author of a book which is remarkable called The Wholeness of a Nature, a Gertian way of science. Really paying attention to the dimension of mind in how the world shows up to us when we look at anything. Like when we create a narrative, when we form pictures of reality and our significance in it. And Henry gave me back then, I jokingly said, when I grow up, I want to write books like Fritjof Capra. And he said, why would you want to write another book? There are too many books published every day. Most of them don't sell more than 400 copies. And it's a waste of paper and a waste of human effort unless you really set yourself a deep reason and make it a work that works. And that notion is an alchemical notion like a touchstone, something that at the highest intention, it is that somebody is not the same anymore after they've read the book, that they've literally been transformed in the process of reading it. And that comes to your question that how do I see the book? Like when I started to structure it and start to think about it, I very quickly ran into what I think is part of the, what bioakomalafis beautifully puts into a question. Maybe the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis. And the way we respond to the crisis is to find problems, define them in the abstract. And then with very abstract, globalized problem definitions, this is how this problem shows up everywhere and it is a wicked problem and da, da, da, da, da, we then bring in the innovators and the designers and the engineers to find solutions to that problem in the abstract. And so we get relatively abstract solutions to an abstract problem that haven't grown out of the cultural conversation in a particular place that haven't been from the beginning adapted to that place and even questioned whether it is the right solution for that place. And therefore we then get surprised when these solutions don't fit into particular localities. And that pattern, which I think is central to shift, I tried to shift by realizing early on that if I made a long list of interesting people I met that I had personal interactions with that I learned a lot from and that offered me solutions to certain aspects of this global problematic or wicked problem. I would quickly write a book that would lose relevance after five or six years because there's always new solutions and other people compete that that's a better solution and so on and so forth. And I suddenly realized that most of the solutions of the past have become today's problems. And so it will be arrogant to assume that that pattern is just suddenly gonna stop with us and that all our solutions are gonna be forever the right solution. And so I in the book flipped the solution thinking around towards we need to ask the right questions and we need to keep asking the right questions and we need to see solutions, prototypes, outcomes as prototypes as something that is good enough for now but if we've implemented it well in a way that included and engaged the places where the implementation took place and the whole supply chain and all the users and the patrons, the people paying for it then it's less the outcome, the solution but the capacity and learning and capacity to work with each other and human relationship and trust that we generated through the project that outlives the actual project. And that's I think the key flip between working on sustainability and a sort of solution and hearing problem solving mindset and working on regenerative development which is it's not regenerative if it's an abstract thing it has to be born out of the specificity of place and its culture. And so a book that has 250 questions in it at least in theory says I'm not telling you what to do but here's a lot of wise people that are learned a lot from and if I abstract what I learned from them and flip it rather than hear the 10 principles here are 10 questions that might be worth asking in your context and then people take it on themselves to say is that a question that stimulates meaningful wise action in this place or not and that's how it is meant to be used. It's meant to be used as a book that people just have an opportunity to reflect individually or collectively how these questions land with them their working group, their community, their bio region and that's how it's being picked up as well apart from academics like the more and more universities are now using it as a textbook as well. I absolutely love it and I use it as a textbook. I think the way you framed it with living the questions and the 10 questions and then tying in these great people and places of wisdom that you've collected over the years and that you've researched and studied and met and spoken with is exactly what I was looking for. There's another factor that comes into that so I ask a lot of questions I've been doing that my entire life besides just the big why question and it's really something that I've learned over time and I'd like to know what your thoughts are. Are all the answers already within us? Do we already as we're born as we're emerged out of this primordial soup as we're human beings do we have the capabilities? Do we have those tools already within us to answer all the questions that basically the answer is already there within us even though we're kind of out there asking the questions and in this search of the big meeting and what is regeneration? What does the world that works for everyone are the answers already within us? I mean one of the key anchor points of this question focused living the questions and community approach for me has been a deep practice in the way of council which is an ancient practice that is found in a lot of indigenous cultures around the world of sitting in a circle with a talking piece and listening to each other from the heart while we speak from the heart and we keep it to an essence and we don't have an internal dialogue going on when we're listening but we're actually listening so we don't pre-formulate what we're gonna say with paying full attention and in that process you do get an experience of being able to voice insights that aren't coming out of the individual but come out of the collective or even the wider context in which the group is sitting and it's all and so I did a lot of work with that with young people in kind of European leadership trainings and so on and we always came no matter what question we used as the starting question of the council circle quite often this notion of living the question came up and this is actually related to the Raina Maria Rilke quote I used at the beginning of my book which says he wrote this in a letter to a young poet in which he said, don't try to find the answers too quickly they might be written in books the language of which you don't know yet you have to live the questions and then one fine day you will live into the answers and so I the question who we have the answers within us I think we have the capacity to keep questioning within us and we have the capacity to keep evolving and make meaning individually and collectively and how we make that meaning affects how the world shows up to us how we actually see ourselves and see the world but it's a dynamic process I think that our Western understanding of who is the do we, the us in your question is also limiting there because the council from the beginning understands that a bird flying from east to west or a noise in the forest while you're sitting in the circle has significance and it also in the ritual of setting up a council you invite the presence of past generations sitting behind you in long lineages of men and women behind your left and your right shoulder and you have a fire or a candle in the center which is the future generations and by creating that kind of awareness space you can take people into an embodied experience of understanding that insights, answers, ways of making meaning don't come out of what we normally identify as us which is the skin-encapsuled ego that has a body and dies at some point and so I think that the question should be does life already have the answers and that's the beauty of life it doesn't want to have the answers it just wants to keep exploring new possibilities and that's what life is really good at that's the regenerative impulse of life itself that it keeps, it's good to put it, it keeps renewing the actors like the death is life's ingenious way to create plenty of life and similarly I think the answers are really simple which is once we get out of the way and let life work through us we have the capacity to work in full alignment with life's regenerative impulse because we evolved as regenerative keystone species expressing the ecosystems that we emerged from not owners of regions or territories and in that evolutionary journey we made ecosystems more abundant, more bioproductive, more diverse and we're only now beginning to see how extremely well Indigenous people all around the globe have played roles in this generating abundance and I think that's basically what we need to reintegrate into and it's not in the spirit of we've got the answers but it's in the spirit of we've learned how to dance with complexity and uncertainty and not knowing enough and we know how to be part and expression of this system at the right scale, predominantly local and regional that we can actually re-inhabit Earth as living parts of our participants in Earth and so that's for me the more relevant question whether we have the answers in us we have the capacity to generate conditions conducive to life and live the questions I absolutely love that creating conditions conducive to life you also at your 2040 and I've heard you say this before but you talked about regenerative or regeneration ancestry our ancestral structures can you go in a little bit more, what you mean by that? Well I think it's critical when we talk about regeneration particularly now that more and more people are picking up that meme and it is following the kind of pattern that happens when something gets popular that consultants and advisor and strategy and futurist types because it's new to them, they kind of go oh this is the new thing and then they sell it as oh are you still doing sustainability or are you still doing circular, are you still doing lean or whatever, I'm already doing regenerative and that's so fundamentally misunderstanding what regeneration is all about but that in itself everybody has the right to misunderstand something isn't the problem the problem is we're burning a key meme or key understanding that goes so much deeper that is actually about re-anchoring ourselves in life and in a shared human story at this point of extreme polarization so inadvertently all these people who just sell regeneration as the next thing already in the kind of mindset that let's see how long this one lasts I've gone through five waivers this as a consultant and so they're already hedging their bets in their communication by using flourishing and thriving because they have this sense maybe that's the next big thing in a couple of years and that's unfortunate because what I mean by really wanting to work regeneratively is to understand that this is aligning with a core pattern of life itself there's a beautiful conversation I had earlier this year with Fritjof Kapra on YouTube if you put my name in his name it'll pop up and Fritjof gave this conversation a title which was regeneration the essence of life's capacity to self-organize and that's a nice way of putting defining regeneration because it shows that has been the case from the very beginning like we talk about Prigogen and the early kind of cellular assemblies of RNA, DNA and so on into protocells and then cells with the nucleus how there is this evolutionary capacity of exploring diversity and then reintegrating that generated diversity at higher levels of complexity through new acts of collaboration and cooperation and this is like throughout life endosymbiosis the evolution of social mammals all of that and we see this over and over again that life has this tendency towards complexification and diversity and vitality and bioproductivity and that is regeneration and so that's the first anchor life is regenerative and when we work regeneratively we're trying to align with a natural impulse the second anchor is we are not the cancer on the planet the current industrial growth society and the capitalist model of extraction is a cancer on the planet but we as human beings are capable and actually wouldn't be here have evolved as cooperative regenerative species our evolutionary advantage has been to a be cooperative amongst each other more than competitive competition existed but cooperation is the core and we also learned how to take our role as disruptors within the ecosystems that we emerged from in a creative way and learned how our disruptions if timed correctly with natural processes were actually creating more abundance rather than destroying so and once we do that those two anchors then the whole conversation about regeneration shifts because we are realigning with a pattern instead of creating some kind of future utopia and the big mistake that is currently being made when we talk about regenerative business and regenerative economics and this is to put it always into the future as something utopian that hasn't been created yet instead of looking at the future potential of the present moment of how caring loving nurturing shows up everywhere in every community at every bioregion and found those ambers see that other side the half the glass half full and and say life's regenerative pattern is all around us we just need to revalue it and value that over the extractive economic monetarized system absolutely and I was like yeah I absolutely love how you give us the sense making and the depth and substance on those and you brought up Fritz Hof quite a bit and and that's great I'm also an alumni of the Kappa courses and a Fritz Hof and he's written a section in one of my books and we've had a podcast as well you do a couple podcasts I believe you do one for yourself and then you do one for RSA as well and and MOOC courses for the ETH and that but I want to go in specifically with Fritz Hof and the systems view of life matter of fact to have his his book right here next to to yours and to Lynn Margolis's you know the systems view of a life academic course yeah fabulous one and then the other one is symbiogenesis this is actually from the Russian before Lynn Margolis that Lynn Margolis translated that fell off the shelf but I wanted to talk more so Fritz Hof and you and he also talked about it on my podcast he said you know this isn't a meme this regeneration isn't something new the first scientist that he is a big student of or studied and researched and wrote about as 500 years ago Leonardo da Vinci who who talked about regeneration and in ways as as a scientist and polymath but as you said it's pretty much inherent in the way life has always worked it's always been around that's how we emerged onto the scene were there others besides Leonardo da Vinci who talked about regeneration beforehand are there known accounts and and civilizations or in wise people the world where they talked about how how life works and and regeneration in different forms before Leonardo that you have talked about or researched and and why is that important or why do you think that would be important to kind of have that grounding that it's not a new meme or trend it's just how it's always been and kind of what learning lessons can we take out of that deep history of this that we really don't get taught in school well I mean it's interesting there's such a bias in the way we talk about history and even like Leonardo in this context like basically western science from the Renaissance to now has been on the journey of actually trying to rediscover our participatory wholeness and and relatedness to the whole universe but it has done so increasingly through a story of separation and and and objectifying and like even Galileo and and Giordano Bruno and all those early scientists have on the one hand helped to create something that is now becoming a science of the dynamic earth system and and and understands the the whole better but at the same time it created a particular worldview that is somewhat blind to the fact that it's never been separate that the way of seeing that we used to build this powerful science is making the world show up in this object kind of way and that there are many many participatory worldviews in indigenous cultures all over the globe that actually were there all along I mean they didn't have the data and theory and the peer review journals but they were there in terms of understanding how to dance with complexity at a scale where mistakes would be visible and systems into higher states of abundance the basic understandings of values that like you need to feed the system in order to feed yourself and that that like self-expression and and and abundance for self is best generated by caring for the collective human or more than human and and so I think that that kind of regenerative impulse is just written deeply into the human story like I mentioned the examples earlier I recently had Lila June on a recording that we're doing for the second series of the RSA podcast and Lila June is a wonderful poet, singer songwriter, scientist who's just finished her PhD on basically how mainly focusing on North America native First Nations people in North America created the biodiverse system that we find there now like their entire like the big oak chest chestnut forest in the eastern United States a lot of them were purposefully cut down because they provided long-term food security to the people living in these areas. Similarly the the forest gardens of the Pacific Northwest they have higher species abundant higher bioproductivity 200 years after the tribes that live there have been forced to leave 150 years and there's so many examples Terra Praeta and the Amazon like that the the fertile soils below the Colombian Amazon have clear signs of being generated by a practice of biochar vegetable carbon, mushroom, mycelium and chips of of clay and broken tiles kind of pottery mixed into the soil in order to create a self-perpetuating dynamic soil ecosystem that supports the the fertility of of those forests so we really need to reattune to what these indigenous cultures already understood and then in a humble way bring science side by side to that because of course it is useful to have geospatial data about soil humidity and and species distribution and all of that and it's but but right now our western mindset is so arrogant towards the analytical thinking mind that generates data and classifies object being the the one real access to reality and truth and and denies the core three other ways of knowing based on Jung's for the dynamic ways of knowing that has precisely the ones that indigenous people used which is sensing feeling and intuitive they're all paying attention to relationship and being in right relationship with nature or more than human nature and humans as nature we need to recover our human skills in these three dimensions they we have them in our lineage if we want to be able to manage the risks of the future by reintegrating human affairs at the local and by regional scale in ways that we actually become gardeners again we we bring soil fertility water like clean water and standing forests healthy grasslands and shrublands mangroves or wetlands back to life because we we do have science and what we need is the wisdom and the value that indigenous people have held for a long time and also the understanding of long-term cycles of ecosystems that that we're only now getting to in in western science there are um this is probably we'll tickle again on first health again but this is probably one that will wrap up um leading into many other fabulous people so he he also you know did the system's view of life the towel of physics I have here um and a few of his other books um the web of life you said before a work that works that's kind of was your purpose you know do do do a book a work that works um type of a of a creation that people can use that they can go out and live the questions that they can embody it and in that process you said I want to write a book like you know like Fritov how did that influence and is the system's view of life is the systemic view of how you set up the book a work that works addressing in the 10 questions in the 10 that you've set up the book the way you've done it is it addressing all the facets of a complex system helping us in that process did that play a role or a part in how you design the book because when I read it and the reason I go back to it is I see and there might be something missing and maybe this is the question that I'm asking you now that it's been out a while you've spoken about it uh to many people is there anything that you left out in this this kind of structure and the way you've done it that that you'd say oh if I were to do it again I'd probably add add this question or this section because when when I read it I see all the facets of a complex system kind of addressed in one one form or another there's there's people that you discuss things that you ask in the book that just touch on for me this complete view of of life and and where we need to go and the questions as well so I wanted to kind of ask what the influence and and how you feel about the framing of that and if you feel over the time if there's anything missing I mean first of all like um those days when when I first set the intention to write a book I mean that's 25 years ago and then um writing this book really started um in a conversation with David or um after I had finished my phd and and much of the the kind of complexity research um was in my masters in my phd work and I mean my phd was much much bigger than this book is 750 pages and um try to already create this sort of using this idea of the scales of design which I build on on a piece of work that jenice bergland did many years ago um and using them as a way of going from the small like material science all the way to planetary collaboration via um material science product design um architecture community planning industrial ecologies urban design and bioregional planning and then um supra bioregional national and international collaboration and and that gave me a sort of framework in which to look at all of these how do we put Humpty Dumpty back together again using the power of design and and then I also created a number of sort of scale linking issues like water energy and and so on but importantly and this is also part of what is so to my mind this dual need to bring into people's awareness is is this how powerful science is if we use science as a tool and how dangerous science is when it stops being science and it becomes scientism meaning it becomes dogmatic in its claim on reality and um the only truth and nothing but the truth that doesn't mean that it's not probably the best intersubjective consensus making activity we've discovered as humans come to some kind of agreement on the nature of how certain things behave so power it's extremely powerful but but we um for me in in my book and in my phd research the phd research I called it because it's academic and I needed fancy word I called it meta design um but really it's the organizing ideas the mental scaffolding the key narratives the um fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality our epistemology and ontology that fundamentally shape how we see the world and what we even identify is needs or problems or stuff to work on and it will inform how we then design solutions and at what scale and so I began to realize that that we really need to always not just talk about solutions and the stuff that is out there and and and good ideas but we need to actually question the organizing ideas that put us give us our massing marching orders that inform our practice so this false dualism of theory and practice I also had addressed in the book that that um like design follows world view but then church was also right first we shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us so world view follows design and we've created a world that is all around the notion of separation instead of collaboration and and and and into being so to come to the to your question of is there anything that I would have added to the book or highlighted more and we already spoke about that I could have somehow people picking up the regenerative culture meme as a utopian thing that should be created in the future and it's nice that they're picking it up and they're saying this is worth this is a worthwhile proposition for the future of humanity but I think I would be more stressing this notion of how even the mental framing of past present future is ultimately emerging out of a particular way of seeing and that there is real agency only in the present because it's like we've you've been around the block for many years how much time have we lost because we were talking about future visions if we had if we had understood more than what we need to do is activate the future potential in the present moment how would our movement be different like how many meetings about strategies and implementation are all blinded because we actually believe the prediction and control and and implementation and key milestones and all of all of that will lead to ultimately some form of phatomorgana destination sustainability destination regenerative culture and when we only get there then everything will be fine forever after and that's mistaken we need to build our capacity to keep journeying and we need to work on what we can do in the future through the future potential of the present moment and the only way that we'll find out where that potential lies is by activating the huge potential in each and every human being who wouldn't be here if they didn't have a unique contribution to life as a planetary process and the same for every other species on the planet but we can't do it with it we can't hold that complexity in some sort of global way that's why we invented abstraction and analytics and data collection on some abstract picture of that but if we flip it and we go into that complexity through the uniqueness of place and the uniqueness of people in place and we meet each and every human being as hello what do you have to what role do you have to give to it like how can you flourish and be the most highest expression of yourself in service to your community and your context and ecosystem and if we created education systems and communities and narratives that did that at the local and bioregional scale then all these problems would just dissolve because we'd be living into the solutions and at the right scale and that for me somehow the book because I tried to build a bridge some of the language when I read it now is still kind of a bit solutioneering oh look at that we have all these fancy things and biomimicry and then product design and architecture and and but because people want examples but the danger is that the minute then people see examples and then they get into cut and paste or I want an Eden project in my town that's not how we create regenerative systems and maybe that's where I would if it's in the book but I would have cranked up the contrast on that more and the other thing that's also in the book is the deep root of regeneration in indigenous knowledge but again I feel like I could have cranked up the contrast on that a lot more throughout the book so the like the two anchors anchoring regeneration deeply in life and anchoring humanity as a keystone regenerative species in the ecosystems that we emerge from those I say a lot more clearly now than I did when I wrote the book I love it I love it and it's always a sheer pleasure to listen to you speak about us like you wrote the book yesterday as you bird this baby and it's still there and it's not only of all but it's really you live in and breathe it and live the questions I love that because those insights that sense making is really what we need to get where we need to go to to get that understanding of how this journey looks like and in that process is interesting because you did touch a lot on the sustainable development goals and you worked on these flash cards for Gaia education and and really wonderful beautiful cards can you tell us why you decided to get involved in that and how this project look why you you find that so fitting and tying do you still have the same feelings you do about the stg's that you did then and also you you just touched upon it just basic barely we wasted a lot of time talking about it discussing it instead of getting into that action into the work and I'd like to know your thoughts about that I mean it's a perfect example of the pattern that I was just speaking to the stg's basically you mentioned my long-term connection to the global ecovillage network and Gaia education like in my own journey I had this like many inspired in the 20s this idea that could I just get my best friends together and form an intentional community and live as part of the solution rather than part of the problem that was sort of the early motivator of and then we could use that as a kind of demonstration site so I had this idea of blending the Center for Alternative Technology Finthorn and Schumacher College into one dynamic community in southern Spain through this like journey into like working with Gaia education and the global ecovillage network I also somehow ended up being close to the UN process because Finthorn had a permanent representative at the United Nations and was involved in setting up the spiritual caucus in the United Nations the group that meditates when there's meetings of the security council there's actually a meditation chamber under the main hall and and people from all faith groups come together to meditate for positive outcome and Finthorn was involved with that and through that there was an open door that made the global ecovillage network become a eco-soc NGO so a consultative NGO to the economic and social council of the United Nations and through that like the UN Habitat Award to Finthorn and then to Gen and the involvement in Rio plus like the first Rio conference and then the involvement in Rio plus 20 and all the other ones in between meant that when the SDGs were proposed Gaia education was involved in the consultatory process the one that kind of included over a million people in every country on the planet and so it was obvious that when they came out that we should somehow create a program related to them because the all the other one the Gaia education design ecovillage design education face-to-face 125 hour course that that is a sort of whole systems designed for the sustainable communities curriculum and that was from the beginning part of the UN decade for education for sustainable development and and so was the online course and I had just written my book but it was with the publishers when like the book was finished 2015 and it was a year with the publishers and it was exactly in that year that May East the then CEO of Gaia Education asked me can you develop a short because we all had these long courses either month face-to-face or like of course there was 12 12 months of studying online and they wanted a short course and so I inspired by the cards that people were using in the transition town training as a facilitation tool asked myself could we create a set of cards that would introduce people to the the different SDGs and May East was also using just printed out the 17 SDGs in a kind of early workshop that the cheat started running and so building on that I combined it with the approach in my book of saying um how do we get people engaged through questions not by telling them what to do and how would we get people to think more strategically and more systemically about each and every one of these 17 SDGs well let's just take the lens that Gaia Education developed and actually I believe has fundamentally influenced the UN discourse with this lens because we were the first in 2005 to create a four-legged stool of sustainability everybody was walking working on the three-legged stool of social economic and ecological and Gaia Education actually wanted to bring the fourth-legged stool spirituality in but then it was a memetic decision in terms of effectiveness to call it worldview to be less triggering for people and the UN now calls it cultural but the UN now works with the four-dimensional understanding of sustainability and what what it's actually trying to do say is what I just earlier said about meta-design it's bringing in the way that we see the world as a key contribution to how we even think of social ecological and economic issues and the solutions to them and the scale at which they need to be solved and um so with these cards I was already skeptical about the SDGs how they turned out I was particularly skeptical about what I would call the Trojan horse in the SDGs which is SDG number eight good work in continued economic growth and that at the very least would have to be reframed as good work and qualitative growth to be able to do a compromise and like either with it but the way it's actually naming the dogma of continued economic growth as a necessity otherwise the capitalist economic card house crumbles if it doesn't grow at three percent per annum that's doubling of the economy every 27 years and that's about that that can only run against the wall and and so even in the icon it shows it shows the growth in the icon logo it shows you know growth and growth growth yeah so so and and um Tristan Felber also calls it the Trojan horse and so there's other people who've called this out but anyway in that context I I said yes to the job of building these cards so these cards for me are what I would call um positive subversive aikido with the system they are have all the questions that you can see in the in the colorful boxes there you can see that they approach every SDG from the four dimensions and in the colorful boxes there's a little bit of information about what's a social take on no hunger what's an economic take on no hammer what's a worldview take on no hunger what's an ecological take on no hunger and then in the white boxes that that are above these colorful boxes in the back um there are sets of questions and so what these cards are for is that people in place can with the help of a facilitator create small group processes in which they sit around the table like well cafe style writing on on on the napkins or the other tablecloth and how is this SDG relevant to us in this place what do we already know in this region that is working on this even if they don't use the SDG framing and how could we use three or four of these SDGs and bring them together and create a fascinating new community project in our region these are the kind of questions that that people are invited into so it's it's literally a process that says the united nations were a massive consultant story process has come up with 17 goals for humanity and has called them the global goals how do we implement them by making them our local goals and we won't take it for granted that they got it right the first place so we're now in a process here locally to look at these 17 goals and make them our own and look at how we can implement them right here right now and how they're already being implemented by people who don't even know the goal exists and that process would have been it rolled out globally and focused on for the first five years of the SDG a powerful process of leading with implementation and local anchoring of these goals but what did we do we spent umpteen conferences and huge amounts of carbon emissions to do national scale and continental scale or city level reporting on progress when we hadn't even started projects to implement yet like the people went straight into a massive machinery of reporting on where are we and where do we want to be like the kind of benchmarking at the beginning and it's so the wrong mindset and it burned people out on them because it was very bureaucratic and it even diverted and I saw almost sort of predatory delay type of way I saw this like people that I'd been working with that had previously been traveling but using those carbon emissions to actually land in a place and then spend 10 days capacity building with 200 people in Bangladesh and then go off to Senegal and do the same thing again those people suddenly went to meetings in whatever fancy place in the world to spend three days hanging out with bureaucrats working on documents that were like reporting on sub points whatever of the 169 sub goals and it it was just the bureaucrats taking it over I agree with you it's such a bureaucratic process and and those documents and the reports and the meetings the reports that they generate are so thick and overwhelming there's no action behind them it's just all about data statistics what's happened where stock takes where are we at and there's no actual action that gets gets put into practice there's no living the SDGs you know if we want to reframe you know living the questions there's no living the SDGs there's no putting it into community culture or place of the SDGs now we have seven years left to go to get there before this decade's out December 2030 and it's really interesting because you say you know kind of the Trojan horse the skeptical aspect of it I'm with you there as well even though you know I wrote the SDG manifesto for the UN and I still talk about them it's the world's first-rever earth shot it's its own ecological economy economic model the sustainable development goals but the skeptics that I'm hearing now and I'd like to see what you think about that is the SDG woke or the ESG woke or that it's a clousy swap conspiracy theory that everything that kind of helps me that you have just said is no actually this is a real legitimate process that occurred in a side meeting in Bogota, Colombia and then it transitioned and was ratified at Rio plus 20 and they were talking about sustainable it was ratified that they're not ratified that they would ratified that they would work on it there's I think there's even another term they decided they decided in 2012 at Rio plus 20 to make the MDGs which was like the MDGs also millennium development had it's sell by date and that was Rio plus 20 and so they said when do we come what's coming after the MDGs and they decided that we need to develop them further and include the whole climate change and sustainability and biodiversity dimension into them because the MDGs were very socially focused and community focused and what was ratified in Rio plus 20 was just that we will now work on the SDGs and they will be presented to the world in 2015 and in September 2015 they were launched and yeah I mean the discussion that you you mentioned you know that even Finthorne and and others were working on this before is not anything that ever anyone hears about the development and how that happens but what we're hearing now it's not only you know people want to adopt a new SDG they're talking about the SDG whoa they're talking about conspiracy theories and still the the biggest thing that we've kind of synthesized so far is we're not putting them in the action we're talking about the wrong things to even get get started and we have seven years left to go but there are already other set of goals after the SDGs so that we know have begun begun and 2019 and so it's just interesting to see your connection and how how you've dealt with that and how you also feel and have legitimate concerns as I do or anyone else does but that you take a different lens on how to approach it and what they mean I believe you've also said this before and I'd like to hear it from you instead of me trying to repeat what you've said how do you feel regeneration ties into the sustainable development goals or sustainability ties into regeneration and how how do you normally frame that as well as resilience well I I never like that pattern that we already talked about that you that the western mind likes to think in terms of the Kantian dialectic of pieces antithesis like to bring in something new it has to be the opposite of the old that's sort of the bit like the paradigm shift and so on it it it sets us up tragically to and when we bring in something new to not learn from the past to throw out the baby with the bathwater to and so for me there's a there's a real opportunity to still work with the SDGs in the next seven years like for example like these cards that we just talked about they have pretty much all the questions that are in my book written into a educational system that is hinged around the SDGs they also have written a critique on the insidiousness of the UN development agenda and it's developed versus non-developed nation framing that created a lot of like we are not worthiness in nations of the global south where they were actually still much more living within the sweet spot of planetary boundaries and social foundations so in I think we could use these cards if they if these cards were used in schools and and community local participation processes led by town halls led by universities led by local regional businesses they would talk about the SDGs and go beyond them through these cards so because right now like with everybody just bringing out reports that it's dead in the water and will never reach the golds and so on it's kind of killing the impetus behind them instead of saying let's use this in a kind of positive Aikido way and make it make it local and make it a process in which the localities the ruralities the regions feed back about we try to implement them make them up on and this is what we came up with and then use that as the basis for whatever the next version is rather than now bind the energy of lots of people in in formulating the thriving or the inner or the flourishing or the regenerative development builds more it's it's but yeah in what was the other part of your question just really I mean how you relate because you feel the sustainability and regeneration similar that's why I went into the whole kind of Kantian dialectic bit it's a danger to dismiss everything sustainable just because everybody now works about or wants to work on regeneration but there is like we talked about all of this already like the problem-solving mindset from abstract problems and the kind of war on climate change or war on loss of biodiversity or whatever we do do wars on the the big global problems that we just try to create big global strategies to counter that's to my mind not a very a good way of actually getting stuff done the important issues but we need to work through the potential of people and place and work on these solutions and enabling these solutions at local and bioregional scales that for me is is a shift away from a of a way of doing but that doesn't mean that there aren't lots of really good people having done really good work working on sustainability for the last 20 30 years there is a little bit of an issue that sustainability in its early roots like the German Forester Karl von Kalowitz or whatever already had a utilitarian value of nature in mind when he was talking about sustaining the forests and creating a sustainable forest the forestry practice so one could say that there are issues with sustainability from the get go because it has this very human centric nature as value for us perspective and the regenerative perspective as an ancient perspective on life's regenerative impulse handed down the millennia by indigenous cultures all around the globe has a very different valuing of nature it understands the intrinsic value of every species but but I think we need to like it's will be really wrong to torpedo all the good work in sustainability just because now people are waking up to talk maybe we should move on to regeneration and then that's just ridiculous then resources get get put into teams trying to even understand is it different or is it not and what what ends up happening is that there are lots of people sell old wine and new wineskins like so many of the recent people jumping on onto regeneration like great that the BMW Foundation is talking about it but so shallowly great that systemic IQ a bunch of ex-McKinsey consultants now want to take regeneration into business but maybe be humble enough to say how is this different from what we've done all the time no they just use their old methods and slap a new wine skin or a new label on on the the wine skin and that that's what's frustrating so thank you so much and I really appreciate that there's two things that came out of out of that I just wanted to ask so I know Helena Norbeg Hodge you've had her on you've spoke to her again is what she's doing with local futures local economies and world localization thing is that one of the better solutions that that we're seeing to kind of bring things back to the right by a regional place and and working on that or are you seeing other better solutions out there for really implementing the stgs locally regeneration locally that also ties into kind of the practice of living the stgs of putting into practice getting out of all the negative things that that you just discussed is that one big solution that popped up in my mind as you were discussing that as well so that's why I'm asking well fundamentally like if we understand our regenerative nature our lineage as a species then we build into that is a local stroke by regional embeddedness that is necessary for us to even understand ourselves as part of a dynamic system and take our role as gardeners or generators of abundance serious because we understand that we depend on that and so I've known Helena for by now 23 years and and she's been remarkably consistent in highlighting that it's not enough to just localize but we also need to understand the structural violence and the corporate superstructures that actually have been rigged against any form of local and regional production and consumption like we're actually living in a world where while we believe that there is national sovereignty each nation or most of the nations have bought into and signed up to international terrorists on trade and and all those trade rules that during the 90s have showed up the system for transnational global corporations to act outside of the jurisdiction of nation states and and that's what she keeps highlighting that we are up against less so kind of too much nationalism and national structures the nation states are also kind of beholden to this like a simple example here on Mallorca if we convince the regional government that it should create a law that the hotels on Mallorca need to try to get to whatever 40 or 50 percent local provision in the next five years and to 60 to 70 in the next 10 years that could easily be challenged by anything from Coca-Cola to whatever to say no no no no that's unfair you know now you're biasing the market and saying we can't sell our product there anymore that's protectionism and you signed up to a treaty that that makes that illegal so that's the kind of work that I really appreciate about Helena's work that she she highlights that but she then has a little bit of a take that lately she talks about regeneration being a planted meme like another kind of Schwab theory conspiracy theory haha yeah and and I completely aligned with her on the need for local economies and and increased locals community resilience and increased self-reliance but I think what we need is a very nuanced conversation of how to support that and and that a means that local only makes sense in a bioregional context it's not small individual villages it's cities villages and a region working on a bioregional scale to increase provisioning to the local regional population through regional production and consumption in a way that drives increased ecosystems regeneration as the basis of that local economy or regional economy there is a conference coming up in Bristol called Planet Local and and Helena has because she's done such amazing work and highlighted so many important things with also her work from her lessons from Ladakh and ancient futures and all that it's a remarkable group of people that is coming together for that conference and I'm I'm I don't go to conferences anymore because I like to stay local but but I am going to that one because it is like the degrowth people and Charles Eisenstein and Biocomilafi and local food Russell Brand I think as the host isn't he yeah that one I yeah if that's a good thing or a bad thing but I had supposedly gets media coverage but but it's like Leila June and her mother Pat McCabe and the guy who wrote the book on like what's his name Perkins that wrote the book on Richard Perkins Regeneration yeah regenerative agriculture I think it's a great book anyway I feel we could really have a nuanced conversation there around how regenerative cultures by a regional regeneration localization circular local economies regional economies how they could all interact how that links to transition towns how that links and we could really build a movement my fears that that Helena because I had two days ago had a long conversation with her about this of the record and and it's we keep getting into yeah but don't you see like we need to use local and we need like she just gets stuck on two or three must do it this way and that normally creates not a space where where such a diverse group can then co-create and so so I hope it's going to work out and I think that the push towards localization is definitely something that I would say is a lived trend at the moment I find the manifestation of people at the regional scale trying to have a more nuanced approach that is local that is global and local that that that asks can what technologies and to what extent powered by what renewable energy source can we still use in the future to give our local population not just provisioning of basic needs but global connectivity and collaboration and so on and that's when it's not a black and white thing towards sort of ultra local only biomaterials based economies if we want to have a communications infrastructure we probably will have to do some mining and some energy use dedicated to that but we need to ask ourselves how much energy and mining do we waste on things that really have no significance to the well-being of humanity and we simply need to ask questions of if in 10 years time we'll only use a fifth of the energy and a fifth of the material throughput how we deploy that energy in that material throughput in a way that it would give the most amount of people the best quality of life and that's a question that addresses both international inequality like between nations and international inequality and then also the the obscene cast of 2,000 billionaires on the planet that supposedly are saving the planet and they're the structural like the existence of a billionaire is a structurally dysfunctional structurally violent process so no matter how much they deploy their billions in the right way their manifestation of a dysfunctional extractive system put a cap on what kind of financial power can even be in the hand of one person or one corporation because it's not the governments that pulled shots anymore it's a few corporations and the individuals that own them so you with World Localization Day Helena Norberg-Hodge and this kind of local futures local economies and things I appreciate you going more into that depth and you know I hope the right people will go to Bristol and see that that was just one of many people that I know that it's also been on the podcast that we've seen but there's been numerous works that have popped up speaking about regeneration speaking about place and local solutions getting into how we answer the questions how we live the questions how we create place regenerative leadership from Laura Storm Giles Hutchins leading by nature by Giles Hutchins he's done five fabulous books and then he did that with Laura Storm regeneration from Paul Hawkin came out after the drawdown then we have a wonderful book from Satish Kumar regenerative leadership the regenerative learning sorry not leadership that was Laura Storms and Giles Hutchins regenerative learning we have another book regeneration as well so obviously we're seeing don't forget the people who come on Carol Sanford regenerative book Carol Sanford and she has a regeneration series right one book is called regenerative business all the other ones have don't have regeneration in the title but basically I think the title of the one following regenerative no they're two there's regenerative business and living a regenerative life and then the and then the next one is called indirect work and there's one coming out now and indirect work for me actually summarizes really beautifully how regeneration is actually done best so I think they are great books to start with as well yeah I've read them all I've got them here on the shelf I didn't pull them off to show at this time there's another one right here that I have is fairly new yeah that one I don't know how you think about this have you read it I would like I'm trying to have a conversation with Christian after the summer I did read an article that summarizes all and it felt like it was just very polarizing and it's like it it sort of tried to establish this is regeneration this is resilience this is sustainability this is green and it was just typecasting and misrepresenting and it feels to me like one of those wow must position myself as the guru in the marketing and regeneration corner and must have a book to beef up my consultancy offer on the back of that and that doesn't mean that the guy isn't doing wonderful work and hasn't done wonderful work and I just wish that they would all it be a little bit more aware that in order to understand what this regenerative approach and regeneration is out and really and fully comprehend the depth of change in worldview and participation that it actually entails when we come back to that we need to do a shed lot of unlearning and people who all have learned stuff and got feedback that everybody thinks that they have a lot of important things to share find it really hard to unlearn and me included probably but but I feel that unfortunately what is now happening is that people in the best of intentions say how do I blend all the cool things I know how to do and put them in service of this thing regeneration that I want to be part of but they don't spend spend enough time on of understanding how that thing is actually challenging to fundamentally look at themselves look at how they relate look at how they approach problems how they work in what they work and how yes their skills might be super useful but how they also need to be looked at carefully how the core memes and organizing ideas they use in language have agency in and of themselves so they need to be questioned and for me that book is is kind of close but no cigar like it and I haven't even read it yet I'm just concerned that it will contribute to the noise rather than the signal around regeneration so hopefully I'll find time over the summer to take a closer look at it because I don't want to diss it based on that one article then hopefully I find time to talk with Christian about it but yeah now it's out people will read it and now it's out now people are going to read it I also got the exact same feeling and when I read it so I think you're spot on I'd like to hear after you read it if you still feel the same way I feel the same way that you just synthesize it on regeneration from Paul Hawken do you think that was spot on do you think there was also a mismatch did you help with that at all is how do you feel about that book coming out and the website and the kind of I felt there was a lot of ways to bring it back to place and that in the book as well but I'd love to hear your view and your take on it as well I mean Paul's done a lot over the years to stimulate a dialogue and I remember that I think it's in 2009 that he gave a talk at Bioneers on regeneration and so it's also for him to put his kind of meticulous way of working and knowing how to launch a book and position it with to be become a bestseller and all of that he's created an industry on how to write his books and make sure that they become bestsellers and it's wonderful that's an elder in this environmental conversation puts their name also behind this regenerative impulse I find that the way that it is presented in the book regeneration and the website still edges a little bit on this kind of here's a catalog of solutions and now just go out and copy paste them and everything will be fine and it is a little bit technologically biased as like if we just use the right technologies then it doesn't fully go into the structural functionality of the current energy and material use on the planet and it's wonderful like it's and as was drawdown because there's so many people that really needed more education on already functional alternatives to business as usual that would at least buy us some time as a technological stop gap and a lot of them yeah it's a great way of approaching them and then then he also does go into the more systemic things like educating children or women in particular having a huge effect or looking at localizing food economies or I mean so I think it's great work it it could have been more powerful if he had taken a sort of Savodaya Gandhian approach rising of the all like used his thing to lift a a whole tribe of people working globally on this I mean this is what like what regeneration rising and voices of the regeneration and like this kind of and mean that that I've put out there around we are the regeneration and when are you going to join us we are the generation that has to fundamentally redesign the human impact on earth within the lifetime of generations alive right now from being by and large degenerative and exploitative and destructive to being by and large regenerative restorative and collaborative and had he done that like that's what he's doing with both drawdown and regeneration but had he done that even more so highlighting the people that helped him build those two platforms highlighting individuals and their stories rather than technologies and I think it would have been more powerful so so I more power to him but I think he comes from a generation that has a slight kind of narcissistic way of working as a change agent and and that often means that when larger collaborations are building Paul isn't the best key player of it where he would have so much to offer and is such a brilliant communicator in mind and so deep respect and then and a little like compassionate regret that says if you got your ego out of the way a little bit more you your work would be even more powerful and and impactful that possibly also feeding a lot more into the old way of doing business the old formats of business what what what our business is going to pick up on and see that they can use them the memes the wording the immediate solutions okay now we've got a book that lists all these solutions we can just go in and plug them in and and it's going to work I kind of get that sense as well a little bit and it's important work like it's basically it's just at different levels of the funnel and we and and some people will take that as the be all and end all and that's the downside of of that approach but most people have inquisitive people and they will start there and and dig deeper and find their own way like if he had provided more places to dig deeper in in a wider community sense way then then that would have probably sped up the process but similarly I mean you mentioned the the kind Volans fellowship that I got from John Elkinton and the people in London at at Volans and I mean John Elkinton's book Green Swans The Coming Age of Regenerative Capitalism also clearly I mean listen to the subtitle it plays into wanting to transform the incumbents and in doing so it is maybe not the philosophically the most grounded and kind of transformative book in that series of books on regeneration but for John Elkinton one of the wise elders of the sustainability movement to write a book on regeneration and the need for business to move in that direction and to put his effort in in the sort of like whatever how many stages of careers he's had in his life but he's he's putting his probably you could say the main brunt of his remaining creative power as a professional into building up a young consultancy with together with Louise that that that brings in a group of people that that will take this into business more power to him for me that it's it's always just to double check with all these consultancy approaches when you go into the very often heard phrase that's as far as I can take my client and for me to be regenerative means and to be in an integrity means that if you hear yourself think that that's exactly where you have to go with your client and and any kind of consultancy that doesn't go there is somehow slowing down the process and actually somewhat part of predatory delay and I find that that happens with most of the larger kind of sustainability and whatever consultancy is that of course they they love the people they work with and they have an overhead and they need to bring enough money and to pay the payroll and so they're not as independent as small individual consultants who basically can say I'm going to be an integrity say what I think use it or don't use it but I'm not going to sell my soul and and that's much more possible possible with a small consultancy business than with a with a very large one but yeah I that said I really hope that what they're building right now with the young team at Volans is is a young dynamic team that will use that the springboard that clearly is John's amazing legacy and life's work in in the business arena and and take that conversation really deep and that that would be wonderful John and Louise they've both been on the podcast they're do great and I think they are wise elders and and I see the new young team emerging with some real positive things I appreciate your input because the value your your your thoughts and and not on the direction because trying to make sense and gain wisdom out of what's out there what people are hearing how how to interpret a how to use the tools here but we've talked a lot about place and and all of this and a thought that that comes up to me I'm a big fan and mentor so or mentor of mine was and form of reference for me was Lynn Margolis and she basically you know said human health our health your health my health is a micro cosmos of the earth around us in more respects and talked about symbiosis and that this this microbial health about the place where we live is really dependent upon our health and what what we're like in our world she you know she wrote numerous books that the symbiotic planet is one or or the micro cosmos you know and Carl Sagan was her first husband I was like to say that way instead of she was the first wife of Carl Sagan I like it that way a lot better and he did the cosmos and and and they call collaborated with you know James Lovelock and many other greats around the world but how much is her formulating and turning the scientific community on its head saying we've misunderstood Darwin's meaning of natural selection and survival of the fittest um that that's never how the world's worked with neoliberalism neo Darwinism to our world works in symbiosis and and cooperation and collaboration and this tie to regeneration how does that tie in to to your work and your thoughts and feelings on regeneration and how how has it helped us to kind of shift that misunderstanding of natural selection it's central to it for the western world I mean indigenous world views understood that kind of perspective before but now we have a science about it I mean I was taught by James Lovelock in in the early 2000s at Schumacher College and unfortunately I never met Lynn but she was a key contributor to Gaia theory and the role of micro biota in Gaia is what she contributed into James Lovelock's thinking about it and it's important to understand that scientifically we can look at life either through organizing ideas that are about species and individuals and that that then makes us formulate a particular theory of life that is based on these individual agents in the system interacting but we can also look at life as a planetary process in which sort of a bit like the fruit bodies of mycelium the the mushroom just pops up but that the bigger system is invisible underneath it and so if each individual and each species is just a temporary manifestation of a dynamic planetary process which is called life then the whole theory of how that process self organizes becomes different because you start from the whole you don't start from the parts and try to create a counterfeit additive whole but you you start from a dynamic whole that you're actually participating in and that's how life works like even the the physicists counter or proof of lack of abundance and therefore scarcity is is the second law of thermodynamics and the timeframes of physics are such that they're billions of years but the timeframes of life localized on one planet recent hearings and the US Congress seemed to suggest that we now know with more certainty than that life also exists on other planets that's quite big news and I'm surprised that we're still not processing it as as a culture because it's fundamentally like for for decades we've said how would that change how we see ourselves and I watched some of these hearings and it's pretty surprising anyway I'm veering off here so coming back to the symbiotic nature of life I think it's the core understanding once we understand that life is a planetary process that we're not individuals that like they're more non-human cells innocent honest than they're human cells that we're literally walking ecosystems that that life and even matter shows up in relationship and through participation of consciousness it just fundamentally shifts the nature of reality and it creates an understanding that to build an image like competition exists in nature but it is the waves on top of the ocean if they're loud they crash together they're impressive so you focus on them but the water underneath like the all that depth all the way down to the Marianas Trench is symbiosis collaboration and life creating conditions conducive to life just as we had earlier with the the system of like a city is a living symbiotic organism and the fact that in a 20 a million people city there are only 15 murders a day is actually not making that city the murder capital of the world but it's actually a proof that fundamentally human beings are capable of coordinating and self-organizing in such a way that 20 million people can live together and there are only 15 murders we're just shifting the perspective too much towards the way that competition and violence sometimes is used in the system to either disruptive or to fine-tune it in some way but the fundamental processes that actually create healthy ecosystems healthy societies healthy families healthy bodies are collaborations of on multiple levels and in your question you mentioned health and for me health that's why my PhD designed for human and planetary health was called that I still think that this deepening the regenerative approach through creating a dynamic understanding of transformative resilience and a dynamic understanding of a solutogenic approach to health of improving the capacity of individuals or a community or a system to this to meet disruption and uncertainty as a dynamic way of understanding health is actually how we can integrate a lot of what what we're doing and also find a qualitative assessment of whether we're on the right track because the problem right now again with regeneration is that everybody's trying to create indicators so we can quantify regeneration but we need qualitative indicators that are ultimately about multi like perceiving systemic health as an emergent property from cells to organs to individuals to families to communities to bioregions to ecosystems and the planet as a qualitative feedback on are we participating appropriately or not and and I think that's where we're going to some extent like the merging the sustainability and the ecosystems restoration and the planetary health and the one health movements into a global conversation that is actually talking about the same thing that if we want to redesign our impact we have to do it at the scale of communities and bioregions how you formulate that so beautifully you are wonderful and I thank you we're coming to an end of our discussion here and it's really just a few more questions I want to tickle because I've personally attended your first ETH MOOC course online with Tobias Luta and watched it participated and got the certificate and there's more coming I would like you to tell us a little bit about that collaboration and I hear there's a certificate of advanced studies and probably even a master's coming out of that as well would love to hear about that that you're working on so yeah that basically I met Tobias who's a brilliant young professor at various universities in Oslo and at ATR Zurich and Polytechnico de Milan and has always worked in this intersection between systems science and design and also his personal passion as a mountain guide and and outdoor leader in extreme sports fanatic and and he through that he's created a very effective pedagogy that that blends very well with the pedagogy I use when I create courses for the universities which is and then like including and embodied like my entry point would be more through Joanna Macy's work that reconnects like embodied exercises in nature and and and council like like I mentioned earlier or or mini vision like solos or threshold walks and his path is more taking people into physically exhaustive experiences out in nature and through that bringing them into their body and then relating that to the intellectual dimensions of of systems mapping and and and working on regenerating whole systems and so we met in a auspicious place in Delphi in Greece and at a conference and he then asked me to help him cook curate the system of four massive open online courses and they became so successful that normally the first run of a massive open online course has like 50 friends of the people organizing it better testing the material and we put it out there and before we knew it we had 2500 people from 101 country doing the first one that you were on and by now the designing resilient regenerative systems mighty networks platform that has various cohorts on it is over for 4500 people strong and all of this in in a year and a half and built on that success it the hard woke up to oh they must be onto something if there's that much resonance and so Tobias had it easier to then convince them that that it was an option for it to how to build on the kind of free and open and accessible global offer of the MOOC a of course much more expensive leading university of Europe certificate of advanced study and the first one is now starting in September that I think they're still taking applications and there's a wonderful global cohort of professionals doing this course so people will learn a lot just from each other and great people invited as guests like Fritjof Kapra Nora Batesen and very interesting live guests on the course and these certificates of advanced studies that will match the MOOCs so the MOOC is part of delivering the material but then the certificate of advanced studies has a smaller group and more face to face time they collectively will then build something which is an executive masters in advanced studies on from sustainability to regeneration and it beautifully blends like what Tobias and I actively trying to do is to within one of Europe's leading engineering and science universities one of the four universities in Europe that are in the top 20 in the world to establish a pathways practice and embodied practice of working on regeneration and resilience that values the contribution of science and technology but brings science back to science and not to scientism because they're good scientists in Etihad they can actually be addressed at that level and so we're building that bridge of saying there are ways of bringing intuition sensing and feeling into this way of working on community and regionally led regeneration and we need to exactly have that conversation between how can we be informed by different ways of knowing how can we include qualitative feedback and not just quantity to feedback and how do we put science and technology in its place as servants not as don't you see these processes just drive us along like the whole kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of exponential tech that everybody in the Bay Area has bought bought into we can choose to say no we can't use that much energy and that much material and and so for me it's been a really wonderful dance because Tobias has brought me closer back into the research sciences and the importance of science and engineering because I'm a bit of a Luddite and I have helped Tobias move more into the software side so we've had a beautiful learning and unlearning and learning together as we were developing the course and it seems to be landing really well with people so I think it's I mean of course I would say that because I'm involved but I think it is one of the most groundbreaking academic courses that are offering material regarding regeneration on the planet at the moment not just in terms of content but also in terms of pedagogy and in terms of the network it's in connecting people into I love the course it was so super and we did a little bit of a mini course teaser workshop when we were at your 2040 in Lapland Switzerland which is very nice for people who hadn't seen that they really enjoyed it and talked about that and I I'm excited to do the other ones I missed the second version of it because I had conflicting times but I'm definitely going to complete all of them and I'm actually thinking about the certificate advanced studies I actually was speaking to you about some good mentors for my PhD in ecological economics that I want to do coming down the line you have already several of your versions of your book and other languages I think it's five or four eight eight eight wow and you're currently thinking about gaining help talking about other local versions and things what exactly are you working on in the future of other languages other local versions and things possibly an audio book that you want to tell us about yeah definitely I mean I've realized that there's a lot of people who don't read anymore but do avidly listen to podcasts and audiobooks and so I realized that just in terms of reaching more people creating an audiobook is really important even if the book is by now a few years old but I think because of how it is structured it continues to grow in relevance rather than like some people make the mistake of looking at the cover and saying oh it's published in 2016 I'll read a more recent one on this field but so yeah the very fact that it's still being translated means that people see that value and it's first came out in brazil and then it came out in in spain and it's out in italy under a different title the art of regenerating the world it's called in italian and then it's there's a portuguese version that is the portuguese portuguese of portugal there's a version in slovak that is still not out in book form but only digitally people are talking about a creation version that danish version is already translated and come out and no no not a turkish a norwegian and a swedish version but the and then there's the possibility that aksa climate who've just recently started a course in engaging their business clients in regeneration which is called the butterfly program that i contributed to and they are looking at helping to translate a whole bunch of the books we mentioned earlier into french and um maybe my book will be among them like along with gilesis and and laura's book and so on so that's the french version i'm particularly keen on finding like there are people in india who are trying to explore how it could be produced in hindi and there's some people in taiwan working on a chinese version or a whole but but any kind of links people to publishers or people foundations who would support versions in india or in japan or in in china i'd be really interested in hearing from people because i i still feel it has potential of creating a more global conversation if they're like just like transition towns popped up in in every place if the this conversation around regenerative culture and our global brotherhood as one species linking into our indigenous regenerative past can be brought to the forefront in these that like divisive times of of cancel culture and and global power block thinking i think that could be really healing and and necessary so i'm i'm still looking for to bring it out in other languages and we'll see how many languages we get well we're definitely going to blast this podcast out and and everything in the show notes of of the podcast we'll put the links to your podcast to your medium where you do fabulous things every week on medium you're very active and list all your social medias and everywhere where people can find you and we'll we'll help promote you as much as possible the last question i have for you is my standard question that you know and i also know the hesitation through our discussions and others will know as well now if they've listened this far the old but minister fuller question what does a world that works for everyone look like for you and how would you answer that question as a closing statement for our podcast diverse regenerative cultures that find it in themselves to become expressions of place again not owners of place that become healers and restorers of biodiversity of bioproductivity of of abundance and that in finding their kinship with all life and understanding their own eternity as life take themselves a little less serious with regard to having to survive into governments how many more millennia and through exactly that through taking themselves less serious they would probably end up more capable of living into maturity because I think we have a role to play as a species but if we think that our role was to outperform biology and become a kind of silicon based robot based consciousness downloaded into a chip like the kind of singularity university Ray Kurzweil XPRIZE version of the future then I think we've lost it but if we if we steer back towards life and we create a diverse human culture that expresses multiplicity and unity that that sees itself united as one species and as life but allows diverse ways of interpreting and being in the world to manifest in each place as an expression of that place because it understands that our diversity of opinion included is part of where life draws innovation and new ways of bringing about more life from and so I'm still hopeful that we will get to that future I'm just not sure how hard we will have to suffer and how traumatic the the transition will be Daniel Christian Wall thank you so much for letting us all inside of your ideas and talking to us about your fabulous book it's always an arm's length grab from anywhere I'm at in my office I love it and we're gonna talk about it and promote it a lot more I hope we are pass cross much more in the future and that you have a great time in Bristol on a nice detox digital detox now for the next little while as you go into your break thank you so much love lovely and it's also lovely to make this my final kind of online session before my break so really lovely to talk to you and thanks so much for supporting getting the word out there because I know you're real genius and putting important information to more people so thank you for that it's gonna happen we'll work together a lot more in the future and we'll hope that all your all your visions for this work and what you do gets out there to everybody thank you so much thank you have a wonderful time