Resonances: A Global Impact Essay

RESONANCES

The Potential of Regenerative Practice and Indigenous Ways of Being in Relationship to Place

A Global Impact Essay

By Mary Casey

Acknowledgements

I would like to begin with an Acknowledgment of Country.

I live on Gadigal land, in the Eora nation. I acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land, and their continuous connection to Country, lands, waters, and sky, and pay my respect to Elders past and present. I extend that respect to the lands on which you live and their traditional custodians as you read this essay. I also wish to deeply thank all those who have shared their knowledge and wisdom with me on this journey which I embrace as never-ending.

I would also like to acknowledge Introba’s sponsorship of this essay, which has been made possible through the Impact Fund.

The Impact Fund is an internal program aimed at supporting thought leadership initiatives around sustainability and digital innovations for the built environment. It runs on an annual basis and funds projects, studies, essays and advisory pieces that provide new insights on how we perceive, design and build our human environment. It is an opportunity to reflect, question, think big and offer solutions to make our world more resilient, just, and regenerative. Essays created as part of this Impact Fund form part of our book collection: The Global Impact Essays.

I would like to thank Robin Hawker, my thinking partner in the writing of this paper, and the following people for their contributions to this paper:

Bill Reed, Joel Glanzberg, Dr Dominique Hes, Dr Anne Poelina, Louise Hamot, Rachel Lieberman, Richard Palmer, Anika Bell, Keeley O’Reilly and Elisa Thomson.

Mary Casey

Principal, Sydney, Australia

Artist Acknowledgement: Lani Balzan

Title: Coming Together

The cover artwork was created for Introba, representing their journey paths and commitment to helping close the gap between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and Non-Indigenous Australians.

Scan the QR code to learn more about the artwork.

Scientists are suggesting we call this geologic age the “Anthropocene” in recognition of humanity’s impact on living systems. Unfortunately, the character of the impact is harmful. We see it in things like species loss and increasing severity of weather events. The Earth is signalling to us that we are approaching a threshold.

We are at a Kuhnian crisis1, where we can see that our current worldview is creating serious issues, and this is not a one-off but a pattern. It is time to consider other ways of looking at how we have framed our understanding of the world and develop some new perspectives that better fit the reality we are observing. Rather than thinking the world would be better off without us, we could begin to see that we are not only necessary to Nature, we are Nature.

Seeing things in this way, as inextricably linked, dynamically entwined and continuously unfolding is the basis of the epistemology known as Regenerative Practice.

We see strong parallels between the worldview of Regenerative Practice and Indigenous ways of being and being in relationship to living systems, and we are curious about what those resonances could produce if we looked at combining them more intentionally.

As practitioners in the built environment, we’re specifically interested in how the application of these ideas to our work can support and enable a thriving world.

Through this essay, I will take you through my reflections about:

• The Law of Three Framework

• The Regenerative Practice Approach

• Our Threshold Moment – How Indigenous ways of being can inform our shift

• Implications for Our Practice – Where to from here?

Image: Australian Native Billy Button Flowers © Karen H Black

Foreword

The

Law of Three as an Organising Principle

One of the key frameworks in regenerative practice is The Law of Three. It expresses the idea that in any interaction, there are always three components:

• an activating force, such as the desire to create something new

• a restraining force, such as the limits of the current system or the inertia of the existing way of doing things

• and from the interaction of these two forces, a third will emerge which will either be: compromise, in which both parties agree to lose something of what they want so that all are equally disappointed; or a reconciling force which harmonises this tension into a third way forward in which some previously unseen and unrealised potential is revealed, and which activates the will of the whole. This third component is not visible prior to the interaction because it is generated from the interaction. The willingness of the parties involved to hold in that tension until that moment is the key. It requires us to not rush to the comfort of ‘an answer’, but to patiently continue to ask questions until that harmonising potential shows up.

We’re using the Law of Three in two ways here:

• In the relationship between theory and practice: I am using this framework to help introduce a key premise of regenerative practice which is about the creative, iterative relationship between theory and practice which characterises the seeking of understanding rather than the acquisition of knowledge. This essay is just the start of a conversation which will develop ourselves, and you, too, as you engage in it with us, building and harmonising understanding as we iterate.

• In the possibility of the ‘Third Archive’: This particular framework provides a structure within which to hold some questions and observations about the unrealised potential in the relationship of engineering and design disciplines and Indigenous ways of being/ knowing/relating to Country. This possibility of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous people coming together to generate insights of how to be in relationship to the land and to each other is alluded to in the Australian context in the book Songlines2 as ‘The Third Archive’. It theorises what might be made possible through the marriage of Western science and Indigenous knowledge. This potential is compelling, as it offers: for Non-Indigenous, or ‘colonised’ minds, a path back to being enfolded in the living world; for Indigenous peoples, a restoration of recognition of their authority in their stewardship roles over the lands they have inhabited for thousands of years; and for all living beings, a path back to thriving. As practitioners in the built environment, we’re specifically interested in how the application of these ideas can support our work to enable outcomes that support a thriving world.

Holding Uncertainty and Iterative Application

It is another key principle of regenerative practice that you do not accept or reject any idea without testing it against your own experience, so this is also offered as an invitation to you to step into this exploration and see what you observe.

I recognise that if another person is also engaged in this work, undertaking this learning process together can assist in development.

As part of an ongoing conversation and process of developing insight, in this essay, I will sketch the rough outline of what I am starting to sense/see. I am sharing these specific stories and experiences in the hope that something here will resonate with you and your experience of place.

About the Author

Mary Casey

I am a fourth-generation American, first-generation Texan of Mixed-Euro-mostly-Irish descent. Although I came to Australia as a visitor, I have lived here for 20 years and call Australia ‘home’. In saying that, I am aware of a sense of confusion: firstly, surely ‘home’ can always and only ever be the big skies and endless horizons of Texas; and secondly, how can you have two ‘homes’? But even as that thought occurs, I know these binaries are not real. What is real is far more mysterious – like the first time I set foot in Ireland and felt my DNA say, ‘Thank you for bringing me home.’ What is that? Is it possible for me, as a ‘blow-in/visitor’ to feel that kind of connection in Australian Country? I asked that question to an Indigenous Australian woman and in reply, she asked it back to me: ‘That’s a good question,’ she said, ‘How might you be open to feeling that, on this Country?’

As I’ve been learning regenerative practice, I feel the whisper of how I might do that. In listening to the worldviews and insights of members of the Australian, Torres Strait Island and New Zealand Indigenous communities and their experience of belonging to their places, I have heard that the invitation to belong to the Land is there, for everyone, always, because that is Reality. For me, habituated to a way of being in the world that pulls me away from that, there is work to do to hear that invitation, and then some more work to do to be able to respond to it, in my way, through my embodied experience. I’m stepping into this humbly, knowing that I’ll never ‘get it right’, because that’s not how relationships work. This is not a ‘problem’ to be ‘fixed’, it’s about transforming my way of being in relationship with the living world.

Having worked in sustainability in the built environment for the last 25 years, I have seen that our focus on efficiency and an attitude of ‘improving’ has gotten us a certain distance, and it has indeed been important work. However, the urgency of the times is powerfully tempting our colonised minds towards ‘certainty’ and familiar ways of operating, desperately hoping that simply increasing the intensity will change our trajectory. Part of that desperation is that we know that doing more of what we have done will get us more of what we have got. The resistance to the awkwardness and clunkiness of the work to change and find another way is strong, but it’s also the signal that this is the work asking to be done.

So, in a spirit of willingness to not know (and not ever ‘know’) but to begin anyway, there is the opportunity to embrace this developmental work and move towards the next phase of our being. A growing chorus calls us to this work, to re-learning to listen and hear the invitation to belong to our home, as a necessary step to thriving as a species. And Earth needs us to do our part because unless we do this work, she will not thrive either.

Right:

Sydney, NSW, Australia Gadigal Land, in the Eora Nation

Sharing our insights as work in progress

It is a fundamental principle of regenerative practice that relationships and patterns are revealed over time. We develop an understanding of a system by observing it in great detail, to get to an intimate knowledge of its working, under a variety of conditions. Only when this intimacy is established can we begin to see how to work with the system. As an example, if you went to the doctor and the instant you walked into their office they recommended a course of treatment, you would legitimately wonder what was going on. Perhaps a consultation first? At least take my pulse, right?

This observing is paired with reflection, crossing back and forth between being in the experience and processing of the experience to build this understanding. This is very different to acquiring knowledge, which is more about ‘getting’; once ‘got’ the information can be filed away for future reference with no more engagement needed. Because living systems are alive, they are constantly changing and evolving, so they can’t be ‘fixed’ or ‘held still’ to be understood. If we seek understanding, we must align our way of being in relationship with the system with the character of the system. For this reason, the regenerative way of engaging with systems is implicitly iterative, ongoing work.

Building this habit of seeking first to understand, and doing so as a practice over time, we can start to derive principles or premises that arise from this experience. This can help us to recognise when we are working in this way, as well as when we have fallen out of this way of being. The distinction is all about what is being sought in this observing – it is not validation of a perspective, but instead going in always with ‘Beginner’s Mind’, holding to the side any sense we might have of ‘knowing’ and intentionally seeking to disrupt our habits of mind, to stay awake and engaged. As an example, when I was a teenager, I was developing my skills in sketching, and noticed that I had a difficult time drawing hands. I asked my uncle, who is an artist, for some guidance. He said, ‘Stop seeing it as a “hand”, and just be interested in that shape.’ Boom. I have never had an issue since, unless my brain labels what I am looking at as ‘hand’, and then I get this blobby, cartoony thing and I know I have stepped away from observation of a particular and into a mental abstraction - and perhaps more importantly to be aware of – into a projection of my idea of ‘hand’ onto the particular hand.

With that introduction, let’s get into this worldview in more detail.

Image: Earth from Space

© 19 STUDIO

Regenerative Practice - the approach (thinking/being)

To begin, let’s reflect briefly on how we got here, and how the stepping out of our current worldview needs to happen as a first step.

The Journey: as we have been on it

In the early days of my involvement with ‘sustainability’, it was very important to be clear about what we meant when we used this term. I recall a heavy reliance on the Brundtland Commission definition, which is:

‘meeting the needs of the current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs’.3

Back then, I thought that was pretty good but reading it now, it leaves me feeling very flat and constrained. That’s not to say there has been no merit in it – on the contrary, it’s a very good picture of where we were on this journey at the time. We should absolutely be conscientious in our use of resources and not create problems for future generations to solve because of our greed and overconsumption.

But now it prompts questions: what is the worldview of this definition? What is the experience of living by this definition? Or to ask it another way, what has this definition enabled?

What I see in it as limiting now that I didn’t see before are four key issues with how it can be read. This definition:

• Is based in a worldview of Earth as a disconnected collection of ‘things’ humans ‘use’ to ‘meet our needs’;

• Is framed around ‘need’, as being about survival, rather than health or thriving;

• Is implicitly human-centric;

• Includes the word ‘compromise’, which implies that a harmonising path to thriving for both now and future generations is not available.

To unpack this a little more, let’s contrast the worldviews that seem to be bumping into each other here: we’ll call them the Mechanistic View and the Regenerative View.

The Mechanistic View: ‘Earth is a collection of things’

In a sustainability context, early adopters worked out how to maximise the efficiency of our current ways of doing things, and not surprisingly, this approach has not been able to get us to the outcomes we really need. This is because this approach to sustainability has come from this same paradigm that created these issues. We are working from Mechanistic thinking when we seek to ‘make the problem smaller to solve it’ or using the pattern of ‘by understanding the components, we will understand the whole’. It is seen in the way that early sustainability tools and frameworks were structured, as ‘menus’ of ‘actions’ that could be taken to mitigate specific undesirable outcomes (like high energy use) or encourage the adoption of desirable outcomes (like the use of certain technologies). Targets were set and expressed as reductions as compared to a baseline or a benchmark, and projects were free to select or ignore various elements.

There are many reasons this approach is not aligned with reality, but let’s just take one: if you start from the premise that our greatest contribution to a thriving world is ‘to be less bad’, then maximising the efficiency of that idea means that the best solution would be that humans were not here at all.

Well, that’s not very inspiring. It is also, as it turns out, not aligned with any cultural tradition4. All around the world, our stories say that we have a part to play – we are part of creation. Things started to go awry when we tried to set ourselves apart from Nature; when we created what Janine Benyus 5 calls ‘the lonely myth’ that humans are separate from Nature, and that we are somehow not included in the deep hum of mountains and stars and oceans or the majesty of a butterfly wing or the curving elegance of an eagle’s beak. It’s not the first time we have gotten lost – there are stories about that, too. More on that later.

‘Something that has always been a rhetorical quagmire for me is the fact that when I talk about learning from nature, I sound as if we humans are outside, something other, something alien. I don’t believe that for a moment. I believe we are as ingenious, as fragile, and as beautiful as any of these creatures that enrapture us when we practice biomimicry. It’s time to shed that lonely myth; the truth is we ARE nature.’

- Janine Benyus

The Regenerative View: ‘Earth is a living system’

In contrast to the mechanistic, left-brain worldview, the regenerative worldview sees living systems as composed of nested entities who have sentience and agency. For example, the Gaia Hypothesis6 states that is not only true for the beings on Earth, but for Earth as a meta-system. Within this system, everything is interconnected, and what affects one part and/or level of the system affects the other parts and/or levels.

In contrast to the Bruntland definition of sustainability, here’s an articulation of an aspiration from a living systems worldview, from Buckminster Fuller:

‘To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.’7

There are still some issues with that one, but we’re getting a lot warmer. Let’s start with this: How would you know if the ‘world was working’?

Let’s bring this into our immediate experience with an example. If I were to look at my health by looking at the operation of the individual organs of my body, this might help me understand that I have a stomach that digests food. It secretes chemicals to break it down into something other organs can absorb, etc. However, my stomach also has a role in signalling fear - highly valuable information in the system of my body that I can’t see if I am looking at the pieces. I also lose sight of the idea of a person being here at all: What does she do when sad? Happy?

Human female called Mary, seen as a system

Choose your context, choose your outcome

The diagram to the right illustrates these two worldviews, and what is enabled in each. On the left, we have the current, machine-based view of the world, in which we stand apart from and manipulate the resources of the Earth to achieve objectives set by us. We are focused on analytical targets, maximising the efficiency of things we can put a numerical value on, aggregating meta-, one-size-fits-all ‘best practices’ to apply globally from successful individual projects, and ‘problem-solving’ within the accepted boundaries, with an ethos that can be summed up as ‘being less bad’.

On the right, we have the regenerative view, which acknowledges that we are made up of and nested within living systems, fully integrated and entwined at ever-increasing scales. We are interested in ‘what good looks like’, perceiving Life’s patterns and looking to align with them. We seek out what is effective through observation in a specific context and develop overall premises that will allow for the unique expression of every particular place or community, because ‘what good looks like’ is never the same from one place to another, just as it wouldn’t be from one person to another.

Coming back to the limitations of the Brundtland Commission definition of sustainability, the regenerative view opens up two significant areas of potential:

• Turning towards ‘what does good look like?’ reconnects us with a value-based way of looking at our relationship with the land and other living beings rather than a things-based, extractive way of looking at it. It allows you to image what is the value-add for you, and for the systems within which you are nested, now and into the future. Suddenly, this is alive, and about relationships and connection.

• It frames this as an abundant conversation based on the premise that we are here to be a contribution. It is an invitation for us to evolve, to discern our place and our role, and work on becoming that. What are the systems I am nested within? What do they look like when they are thriving? What do they want to express/be more of? How might I support that? Perhaps even become essential to that? What am I uniquely able to contribute, so that in making this contribution, I also become more capable, more able to thrive/express/be more of for myself?

Suddenly, rather than thinking the world would be better off without us, we are able to see that we are not only necessary to Nature, we are Nature. What happens to the system, happens to me, because it is all connected.

“It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.”

- Rene Descartes

Trajectory of Environmentally Responsible Design

Less

Regenerative Systems

Living Systems Undertanding Whole System

More

A Threshold Moment

I won’t list all the evidence here, but we can see the unraveling of our world all around us: climate change, species loss, increasing social issues like violence, homelessness, pandemics, and increasing economic volatility – there seems to be no end to the list of problems. This is because we see them as problems to be ‘solved’. The approaches we take from this perspective can only ever be a temporary balm at the location of application, and then the issue morphs into another form and/or pops up again somewhere else, and the cycle goes on while the overall system health declines. As an example, COVID lockdowns provided us with dramatic evidence of nature’s ability to recover from our inept, ‘whack-a-mole’ meddling if we just gave her a window of opportunity – and we’re not talking about years, but weeks. The film ‘The Year the Earth Changed’ 8shows images of air quality in several major cities improving so dramatically that vistas shrouded in smog for generations were once again visible. But then, the social and economic consequences of that approach became seen as too great to be sustained, and we have snapped right back into our previous habits, with severe weather events and new strains of COVID continuing apace.

We are at a Kuhnian crisis, where we can see that our current worldview has some serious issues, and this is not a one-off but a pattern. It is time to revisit the data and consider other ways of looking at how we have framed our understanding of the world and develop some new perspectives that better fit the reality we are observing.

One perspective, from psychologist and philosopher Ian McGilchrist9, is that humans are such an efficient manipulator of our environment that we have literally shaped our world to match our left-hemispheredominant worldview. This narrow focus, grasping form of intelligence is what enabled us to develop tools. It has created a view of the world as disconnected pieces to be used (you have a hammer in your hand, you see everything as a nail). Fitting a utility-focused lens over the living world turns out not to be a good match, which is why we are seeing these system-level signals that something is not right. McGilchrist suggests that this imbalance can be remedied if our right brain is brought back into its proper place in the process. This is our pattern-seeing, broad-focus awareness that is capable of spontaneous response and creativity, and which has traditionally been regarded in Western science and medicine as the ‘weaker’ hemisphere.

These very different modes of processing experience have co-evolved to occupy the same skull with sufficient separation to do their independent work, integrated by a core connection between them. From an evolutionary design perspective, this is because they are both necessary, and it is necessary that they be separate but entwined in dynamic relationship.

McGilchrist’s research10 indicates that in some ways, the right encompasses the left in a healthy brain – the right takes input from the left’s perspective, but the right integrates both its and the left’s perspectives and chooses the path forward.

What we most need to do is to hear within us the sound of the Earth crying

- Thich Nhat Hanh

How might we shift?

The right brain holds our capacity to engage with the world through seeing wholes, connections, patterns, and nested systems, seeing things as alive and unfolding. For those of us habituated to a left-brain mode, restoring the right-brain to its proper role in the brain would be an important first step to bringing humans back into proper relationship with themselves, each other, and our environment.

To give that exercise some guiderails, I refer to two definitions of regeneration from Carol Sanford. The first describes how we observe regeneration operating in living organisms and systems:

‘Regeneration is always about going back to base material and regenerating from what is at the core. The regeneration process bypasses the existing problem, a missing limb. It doesn’t try to sew it back on or build an artificial replacement or teach the animal to adapt to its loss. It generates the limb anew, from the same base that created the original one. As it does so, it takes account of changes over time, the evolutionary capacity of natural systems, and adapts the new limb to the starfish or salamander’s current age and habitat.’11

This second one describes regeneration as a worldview and a way of acting in the world for humans:

‘Regeneration is a paradigm and accompanying set of capabilities based on the awareness that every life form is unique and nested within other, larger living systems. Every life form grows and expresses itself in order to benefit the living wholes within which it is embedded and receives benefits from these wholes in return. It is capable of regeneration only to the extent that it is part of a larger, value-adding process.’12

From a western scientific tradition, this is aligned with quantum mechanics, and reading the work of some of the most brilliant scientists of our age – Einstein, Bohm, Hawking - the boundary between scientist and philosopher gets muddy. There is a spiritual dimension to their writing, a clear sense of their wonder and awe because of their deep observation of the workings of the universe. They also experienced, over and over, the limitations of an approach that seeks to pin things down, put them into categories and define them in a fixed way: is light a particle or a wave? Yes. For a Western, colonised brain to accept this duality, it must shift its intention from seeking to know in order to manipulate, to seeking to understand in order to be in relationship.

For us as consultants, many from engineering backgrounds, this has opened an access point to a different way of thinking about our work. We can see the opportunity to step into this other way of understanding, bringing with us the technical skills to analyse and predictively model outcomes. While we are quite practiced at this second part, we are very much embryonic on the first. We will need time to build this capability from our own base material, generated anew as an evolution of ourselves and our role. Because this way of looking at the world is based in wholeness and connectedness, Indigenous epistemological models have arisen as something to consider for guidance in this capability-building.

In this section, to illustrate some of the parallels between the Australian Indigenous worldview and regenerative practice, I have selected some ideas from the published record to broadly outline these parallels. However, I want to acknowledge that taking a few lines out of context is highly problematic – I’m taking the bits that support what I see as resonant, today, but that will not be the same the next time I read, hear or experience this content. Hopefully by then I will be able to see and understand other levels that are not yet available to me. Invoking one of the premises of regenerative practice mentioned in the introduction, I encourage you to refer to the references section and read these pieces in their entirety, treating these excerpts I have selected as a teaser only.

Seeing the Earth as an ‘it’, as merely a pile of resources, strips her of her life, and takes away some of ours, resulting in a sense of disconnect, of emptiness. There is no circuit through which energy can flow back and forth. However, if we remember that Earth is a living system, we can see that our relationship with it is a dynamic, and that within this connection is the possibility of a harmonising outcome which lifts both parties.

In Australia, traditional custodians see humans’ relationship with the Earth as a partnership. The earth is a ‘thou’ not an ‘it’ – she is in a constant state of evolution and she wants us to be an engaged participant in that process.

‘Country is living, constantly changing, and evolving…Country has purpose, operating at multiple scales from the cosmic to the molecular and everything in between.’13

‘Although Mother Earth is a living system that can transform and heal, she will be lonely without the vibrations of her human family.’14

In this worldview, Earth is a system whose desire is to develop increasing levels of sophistication in the expression of carbon-based life. Humans are one expression within that system, not higher or better than any others (as per the diagram on the far right)15.

In this perspective, humans have a specific and very important role to play: our particular alchemy of selfawareness, creativity and ingenuity exists because Earth has a desire to reflect upon and express herself. There is a joyful possibility here, a dance, a celebration. Far more is available to us through this invitation than simply striving and surviving. However, being in this way requires us to maintain an active connection to living systems, because we understand that it is the belonging within this community, not our ego, that is the source of our creative impulse, and is seeking expression through us. As I’m sure you know from experience, creative work is something which is invoked and surrendered to; it cannot be commanded.

Connecting to the land as the source for the creative impulse gives us guidance on how to act appropriately.

‘The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence.’

- Thomas Berry

‘Earth is a thou, not an it’: Indigenous ways of being in relationship with living systems

Above: Ego-centric v Eco-centric diagram adapted from Art Tawanghar, Designer, San Diego Source: Designing for Country Paper

‘Because the land brought us into being and continues to keep us alive and protected, we’re forever obliged to look after it, but it is more than a duty, it’s brought us into the sacred relational, the embedding of ethics, morality, empathy in us, that is, acquiring the condition of being worthy of what is proper.’16

And this isn’t just a ‘thou shalt’ situation, it is a reciprocal arrangement. This is a path to our thriving as well:

‘If we care for Country, it will care for us.’17

In this worldview, then, the land has a threefold importance: it is source, teacher, and path. We owe our being to it, everything that was needed to bring us about was provided by the land; each of the myriad relationships it offers teaches us something about ourselves and this complex mystery of being alive; and living in accordance with this awareness is the mark of a fully realised human being. It is therefore from this relationship that humans derive our identity, physically, philosophically and spiritually:

“Country” (capital C) has a specific and significant meaning for Aboriginal peoples. In the Aboriginal sense of the word, Country relates to the nation or cultural group and land that we belong to, yearn for, find healing from and will return to. However, Country means much more than land, it is our place of origin in cultural, spiritual and literal terms. It includes not only land but also skies and waters. Country incorporates both the tangible and the intangible, for instance, all the knowledges and cultural practices associated with land. People are part of Country, and our identity is derived in a large way in relation to Country.‘18

‘I am emplaced, therefore I am.’19

Our perspective is both constrained and enabled by this context because we are nested within and inseparable from this system. Who we are being in relationship to the living systems that support us is the first and most important factor, which then determines what we are able to understand, and that understanding then determines how we are able to act. Doing so from a cultural context helps support the human community in operating as conscious, intentional beings, because it keeps our role front of mind:

‘What we can know is determined by our obligations and relationships to people, Ancestors, land, Law and creation. What we know is that the role of custodial species is to sustain creation. The way we know is through our cultural metaphors. The way we work with this knowledge is by positioning, sharing and adapting our cultural metaphors.’20

Cultural stories are a way to educate and bring alive methods for discerning this role, not as an ‘a-ha! Got it!’ one-off, but as an iterative, interactive, co-evolutionary relationship. They are shared through performance –storytelling, song and dance - so as to be experienced as embodied reality, able to be accessed when needed to keep us participating in this relationship.

“The Universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.”

- Thomas Berry

‘These stories and ways are ancient, always renewing, always inviting, always ready: remembered.’21

‘We are in dialogue and constant conversation with nature. We understand that nature can teach us. The land – Country – is alive, it holds memory.’ 22

‘Your Country, where you live, is a memory palace. It is only by experiencing the landscape in this way that you can glimpse the Indigenous connection to Country.’23

The information in the cultural stories is embedded in the landscape, and this entwined relationship between content and context, between story and place, is referred to by Australian Indigenous peoples as a songline. These songlines are not ‘composed’ or ‘created’ by a person through an egoic process. They exist within the landscape; they are the land speaking to us, and through us. They lie waiting for humans with the appropriate knowledge to join in the singing.

Again, nothing needs to be invented or ‘added in’ here, everything we need is inherent in the patterns of life and needs only to be uncovered and then worked with/within. Humans are then not the authors of this content, but interpreters:

‘Land has intrinsic moral and spiritual integrity – Land is the central source of the Law/ Lore’24

If this is our key source of information about who we are and how we are meant to act, then significant changes to the landscape, if undertaken without regard to songlines, disrupts these sacred connections for all living beings. These connections to our identity exist, even in substantially altered landscapes:

‘So caring for Country is not only caring for land, it is caring for themselves/ourselves (Hromek 2019). Country holds everything including spaces and places. Spaces and places, even those in urban centres, are thus full of Country (Hromek 2018), and therefore need appropriate cultural care to ensure healthy landscapes.’25

From this it seems that making interventions in the landscape from this perspective, which Australians call ‘Designing with Country’, would be a regenerative practice, because it uses the songline as the source material and builds anew:

‘[Designing with Country] is a conceptual scaffold around which people can gather. It’s a way to make the unseen seen, to connect the fragments of memory that sit in the fractured hydro-ecological system that we have in a place like Sydney, and also some of the memories that we’ve lost... the idea of the grid is a scaffold, on which we can start to make new ways of working on the same thing together.’26

Weaving this kind of awareness into our work would be a powerful enabler of a shift to the regenerative way of being engaged in the world. If we were to accept the invitation of this way of being, we must consider the influence this would have on how we approach what we do: What does it require of us to move into this way of engaging with people and places?

What does this mean for people working in the (built) environment?

Clearly, the level of responsibility upon people shaping the built environment from this context is significant. For starters, I’d love to see us desist in this distinction: we work in the environment, full stop. To add the modifier ‘built’ implies a separation that does not exist.

Placemaking, which is currently much discussed in planning, is then not about ‘what I think would be desirable (or commercially viable or insert your favoured indicator here) in this location’. Rather, it is about connecting to the larger patterns of what has been here before, what is here now, for all life, not just humans. What is the desire of this system as a whole? What is its specific trajectory for its next iteration/ evolution of its unique expression, how do I align the design team around that? From here, then, how do we come up with a design that supports that evolution/expression?

To connect into a place at this level requires an emotional aspect to be engaged. The capacity for deep humility, care, regard, and wonder, is needed to be able set to aside my ego and what I personally consider to be right or good and become interested in uncovering potential within the system, and letting what arises from that inquiry set the direction. The colonised mind resists this as invitation to chaos because it doesn’t see that it is not ceding control to nothing; it is returning control to something larger than me, to which I place myself in service. If the community can align around this, it is a powerful driver for successful projects.27 One Indigenous expression of that would be:

‘This relationship creates empathy and a lifelong relationship through practicing the ethics of care. This teaches traditional owners about the ecological balance between humans and nature…First Law embodies the concept that is known regionally as Liyan – the feeling of a deep personal relationship with all living and non-living things. This relationship is a logical, personal understanding of how to do the right thing…First Law is about creating positive energy and being true to ourselves, so that our spirits are at peace. 28

‘The earth does not belong to us, we belong to it.’

- Chief Seattle

Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park, Northern Territory, Australia

© Stanislav Fosenbauer

What is the potential?

In his book The Great Work: Our Way into the Future29, Thomas Berry describes what he sees as our necessary ‘reinvention of the human at the species level, because the issues we are concerned with seem to be beyond the competence of our present cultural traditions, either individually or collectively. What is needed is something beyond existing traditions to bring us back to the most fundamental aspect of the human: giving shape to ourselves.’30

What if our new aspiration, building on Fuller, was something like:

‘To enable the world to work for 100% of life in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of any living system.’

To work together towards this transformation, we would need to find the harmonising potential of Indigenous ways and Non-Indigenous ways. How might we derive the shared value(s) here and understand what would add vitality, viability and enable the system to evolve?

If we look at what is enabled through various ways of interacting, the only one that creates the potential for transformation is the Law of Three mode (right):

This is because there is creative tension in the Law of Three – there is an activating force which seeks to create and says, ‘there is something not unfolding as it should; we want to try another way of showing up’, and there is a restraining force of what currently exists which says, ‘this is the way it has always been done, change is risk’. If these two forces simply butt heads, then one must win and the other must lose (zerosum). In dialogue, there is an interest in broadening one’s understanding, but no commitment to changing anything. In the Law of Three, the larger whole of the system provides the activation of the creative impulse as well as the restraining force of the current context, which gives rise to the potential insight of: ‘what does the system want?’ In the iterative working back and forth around what matters to the system, harmonising around something larger than the individuals is possible. Alignment around a desired end state, as something the parties can place themselves in service to generates a sense of commitment to work together to bring that into being.

This process is a reflection of McGlichrist’s description of the brain: designed as two separate hemispheres but one organ because duality is needed for us to function. This coincidence of opposites is the ground from which creativity arises.

So, as regenerative practitioners, we are in some ways committing to being that activating arrow. Nothing needs to be added into a system, but it might need an invitation to come out and play. The restraining arrow has been too dominant, so one part of our role might be helping to bring balance to the discussion of aspirations and how the design might support that expression.

It takes two to speak the truth — one to speak and another to hear.

— Henry David Thoreau

Modes of Interacting

Debate Dialogue Law of Three

This is a zero sum conversation – the aim is to win. No understanding being sought, apart from using it to dismantle and ‘disprove’ the other person’s perspective.

Here we are playing an infinite game of seeking to understand the other person’s perspective and maybe gain some insight for ourselves. We might or might not be aligned at the end of this process. It’s not the aim – the mutual exploration is the intention.

Here, we have gone a step beyond understanding each other’s perspectives to harmonising around potential. It is because the interaction is based in a shared interest, which requires both parties engaged participation to succeed. The aim of this is to not just understand each other’s perspective, but to base that understanding in shared value – what is important to both parties that wants to be realised. What matters here? And to continue to work back and forth until something emerges which is activating for both parties. It is palpable when this occurs. There is a sense of commitment which accompanies the described desired end state.

Conclusion

Summing up what is alive and vibrant for me as of November 2022

Premises:

• Remember to have care and regard for the Earth as a Thou, not an It. As a sentient system, it has a will and a trajectory of development, and a right to exist and to do its thing.

• Remember that humans are nested within and embedded in this larger whole, as one player in this living system, not higher or better or more important than any other.

• Remember that we have a part to play, a contribution to offer to the living systems within which we are nested.

• Believe in the unique genius of each human being – every one of us has an essential role, a necessary contribution to make in this whole. It is the great and sacred work of a human life to discern that role/contribution, and act in accordance with it.

• Support each other in developing the capacity to engage with the world from this awareness.

• Discerning the role of engineers and consultants in this space is not about creating something ‘new’ but about uncovering what is already here.

• Collaborating from the shared belief that we are nested within/belong to our places could unlock powerful unrealised and transformative potential which would benefit all living systems, humans included.

Because we are habituated to the left-brain, mechanistic way, and we swim in a world that has been constructed according to that perspective, it takes conscious, intentional effort to show up from a regenerative point of view, and not lose our shape and bend to match what’s around us.

As we work to build these new capabilities, it may be helpful to note that it is called regenerative ‘practice’. Like painting, or roller skating or cooking, you will have to find your own way, and you’re not going to get it right the first time, it will take time. And also like those things, understanding only comes from experiencing it. And it is worth the effort because it’s thrilling – these experiences blow our hair back. Walking along a footpath, and nearly walking into a kookaburra in a low tree branch - I was startled, but he just looked at me like, ‘ ‘Sup?’ Feeling the forward pull of wind and water on a sailboat while crewing with friends and laughing with exhilaration as we heel over in a strong gust. Watching the sun rise behind Uluru from Kata Tjuta and feeling the silent hum of the dawning day. This is the stuff life is about, right?

Where to from here? If we were to summarise, it might be:

1. Generating ourselves anew in a value-adding process: leaving behind the mechanical worldview and connecting into the regenerative one means shifting our attention from one of grasping to one of observing. This is transformational work. Nothing is going to be the same as it was, and some things will have to be shaken up and broken for this to happen. This is not just work for our benefit, but for the systems we are embedded within, and to realign with the overall trajectory of place – for now to some extent, but more for what will be enabled for generations to come.

2. We need some help with this, and our mentors are all around us. Our fellow living creatures, and the land itself. The Source material lives within them, everywhere, waiting to be uncovered.

3. Indigenous and Non-Indigenous peoples can find the next iteration together, from a common basis of care and regard for this place on whom we depend, and who is depending on us to remember Her. From here, we can act with integrity – aligned with and nested within. Working in the built environment is a fantastic, highly participatory, highly visible, both large-scale and fine-grain communal interface to practice this remembering.

4. It is essential that we do it. As we say in Texas, ‘You can’t get there from here.’ Without this shift, it is clear what the outcome will be. If we want to be on a different trajectory, this is necessary work.

‘To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering both human and otherwise… we all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love anyway, to let it crack me open.’

-John Green

What does this mean for community practitioners?

For me, the reassuring thing is that what we need to make this shift is already within us. We can remind our left-hemispheres that we are not stepping into the unknown. We are stepping into remembering. As an Indigenous man said to me, ‘Country is always talking to us; we just have to be quiet and listen.’ The invitation is always here. All that is required is for us to open up to it and move into it. We are not separate, we are not alone, we are not doing this for the first time. This has always been the way: we have stepped off the path and we can find our way back.

As one example, and to bring this back full circle, at the start of this paper I mentioned a story about this forgetting and remembering. The story I had in mind is from my cultural memory, a medieval Irish text called ‘The Settling of the Manor of Tara’31. In the story, it’s time for the annual feast where the nobles come to Tara to pay tribute to the High King, and the nobles have refused to come. The High King consults with his Druid, and they agree they have sensed a disturbance in the Great Peace and that the land and their souls are troubled. The High King sends for the wise storyteller, Fintan. Everyone agrees to come together to hear what Fintan has to say. The High King explains that all these human relationships are disrupted, and they can’t resolve it amongst themselves because it is ‘as if their minds were in a mist’. So Fintan reminds them of what they have forgotten – that the guidance they seek is embedded in the land. This re-establishment of that essential – literally ‘grounding’ – connection gives them clarity:

‘When Fintan finished retelling the ancient story, the nobles looked at the High King with new eyes of understanding. They knew he was fit to be their leader. The High King looked at the nobles with new eyes of compassion. He knew that all of them, himself included, had been under the sway of a profound forgetfulness. With the account of the mysterious spirit-man, the living wisdom of the [spirit] wheel, and the sacred knowledge of Mother Ireland in each of the [cardinal] directions, something long cherished and vital had been restored in all of them. They remembered who they were.’32

Going back to the distinction between acquiring knowledge and observation, this shift is not about borrowing someone else’s robes, it is weaving your own. It will come about from looking inward, and connecting outward, in a way that is unique to you, informed by your place. From the Australian context, Tyson Yunkaporta puts it this way:

‘I have previously talked about civilised cultures losing collective memory and having to struggle for thousands of years to gain full maturity and knowledge again, unless they have assistance. But that assistance does not take the form of somebody passing on cultural content and ecological wisdom. The assistance I’m talking about comes from sharing patterns of knowledge and ways of thinking that will help trigger the ancestral knowledge hidden inside, the assistance people need is not in learning about Aboriginal knowledge, but in remembering their own.’33

We can see now how this also connects to Carol Sanford’s definition of regeneration: we are looking to generate anew from what is core, from the original source content, informed by our current context.

‘We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension. But this energy, in an ultimate sense, is not ours by domination, but by invocation…we need only summon these forces to our support in order to succeed.’

– Thomas Berry

This is not unchartered territory. We have been here before

Back to the Law of Three and the potential of the Third Archive

We are left with the profound question: what could be possible if we were to engage in the design of human spaces from a perspective which is enervated and informed by such ‘long-cherished’ ways of being in relationship?

One idea to answer this question is suggested in the book, Songlines, in the idea of the ‘Third Archive’, which weaves Indigenous cultural wisdom and western science into a powerful partnership. Work would be led by Indigenous knowledges of being on Country to guide the choices about what to do, which would then be supported by western scientific data to communicate the intended result and monitor, verify and demonstrate the benefits of these approaches over mechanistic ones. This growing data set could, in turn, help deepen the collective understanding and appreciation of how our living systems work, which would give us more options on how to support their thriving. It could be a weaving of scientific and traditional knowledges similar to what is happening in medicine – but applied to the body of Earth.

The character of this work would be of deep care and regard, of enacting stewardship. It would be a partnership, a relational way of being, connecting individuals, human communities, non-human kin, and our places, rebuilding the web of Life so that all are able to thrive within its embrace. In the words of Maori architect Whare Timu, ‘In any development, we should be able to see that love has guided the outcome.’

If we shifted ourselves to act from this worldview, what might be enabled if we were to work on co-creating the next iteration of indigeneity, together? Who might we become through this work, and what would it enable Earth to become?

There is limited time. We need to be clear about what we are committed to so that we can be intentional about how we show up and do it. For ourselves, for our profession, for our species, for our living world – we believe this is the direction we need to go.

I am interested to explore this in greater detail through application in our respective places and look forward to continuing to develop my understanding through collaboration with others on this journey. If you’re interested to join this effort, please let me know.

Looking forward to the next iteration, Mary

References

1 Kuhn, Thomas (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

2 Neale, Margo and Lynne Kelly (2020) Songlines: The Power and Promise

3 Brundtland Commission Report: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5987our-common-future.pdf

4 Campbell, Joseph (1991) The Power of Myth

5 Benyus, Janine (1997) Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature

6 Lovelock, James (1995) The Ages of Gaia

7 Fuller, Buckminster, https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/big-ideas/world-game/

8 Attenborough, David (narrator), Beard, Tom (director), 2021 ‘The Year the Earth Changed’ Presented on Apple TV

9 McGilchrist, Ian (2019) The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

10 McGilchrist, Ian (2021) The Coincidence of Opposites lecture, Ralston College YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=N4AFdNxLmb4

11 Sanford, Carol (2019) ‘Regenerative Business, “Part 1:The History and Practice of ‘Regeneration’”, posted at https://sustainablebrands.com/read/leadership/regenerative-business-diving-into-the-history-etymology-and-practice-ofregeneration

12 Sanford, Carol (2019) ‘Regenerative Business, “Part 1:The History and Practice of ‘Regeneration’”, posted at https://sustainablebrands.com/read/leadership/regenerative-business-diving-into-the-history-etymology-and-practice-ofregeneration

13 Connecting to Country paper: https://www.governmentarchitect.nsw.gov.au/resources/ga/media/files/ga/discussion-papers/draftconnecting-with-country-framework-2020-11-12.pdf

14 Poelina, Dr Anne et al (2020) ‘Indigenous Natural and First Law in Planetary Health

15 Designing with Country paper: https://www.governmentarchitect.nsw.gov.au/resources/ga/media/files/ga/ discussion-papers/discussion-paper-designing-with-country-2020-06-02.pdf

16 Graham, Mary (2014) ‘Aboriginal Notions of Relationality and Positionalism’, (Global Discourse. Vol 4. 2014), from Greenprints website, https://www.greenprints.org.au/knowledge-base/relationist-ethos/

17 Broun, Jodi and David Kennedy and Dillion Kombumerri et all (2020), https://www.governmentarchitect.nsw.gov.au/resources/ga/ media/files/ga/discussion-papers/draft-connecting-with-country-framework-2020-11-12.pdf

18 Kennedy, Broun, Jodi and David and Kombumerri, Dillion et all (2020), https://www.governmentarchitect.nsw.gov.au/resources/ ga/media/files/ga/discussion-papers/draft-connecting-with-country-framework-2020-11-12.pdf

19 Graham, Mary (2014) ‘Aboriginal Notions of Relationality and Positionalism’, (Global Discourse. Vol 4. 2014), from Greenprints website, https://www.greenprints.org.au/knowledge-base/relationist-ethos/)

20 Yukaporta, Tyson (2019) Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

21 Poelina, Dr Anne et al (2022) ‘Regeneration Time: Ancient Wisdom for Planetary Wellbeing’

22 Poelina, Dr Anne et al (2021) ‘Forging the Forever Industries How ancient wisdom can guide the transition to new economies’, https://stories.acf.org.au/forging-the-forever-industries

23 Neale, Margo and Lynne Kelly (2020) Songlines: The Power and Promise

24 Graham, Mary (2014) ‘Aboriginal Notions of Relationality and Positionalism’, (Global Discourse. Vol 4. 2014), from Greenprints website, https://www.greenprints.org.au/knowledge-base/relationist-ethos/

25 Hromek, Dr Daniele and Dillion Kombumerri et all (2020), ‘Designing with Country’, https://www.aidr.org.au/media/7760/ designing-with-country-discussion-paper.pdf

26 Designing with Country paper: https://www.governmentarchitect.nsw.gov.au/resources/ga/media/files/ga/ discussion-papers/discussion-paper-designing-with-country-2020-06-02.pdf

27 Mang, Pamela (2017) Regenerative Development video series, https://vimeo.com/222688050

28 Poelina, Dr Anne et al (2020) ‘Indigenous Natural and First Law in Planetary Health

29 Berry, Thomas (1990) The Great Work: Our Way into the Future

30 Berry, Thomas (1990) The Great Work: Our Way into the Future

31 Scott-Thompson, Christopher (2020) ‘The Settling of the Manor at Tara’ https://abeautifulresistance.org/site/2020/2/12/ the-manor-of-tara

32 MacEowen, Frank (2007) The Celtic Way of Seeing: Meditations of the Irish Spirit Wheel

33 Yukaporta, Tyson (2019) Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

“The rule of no realm is mine, but all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail in my task if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I too am a steward.”

- Gandalf/The Return of the King/J.R.R. Tolkien