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28 D aniel Christian Wahl is a biologist and works locally and internationally as a consultant, educator and activist. Daniel teaches courses within the Master in Ecological Design Thinking and Master in Regenerative Economics graduate programmes, both at Schumacher College. Author of the cult book Designing Regenerative Cultures (2016), currently published in eight languages, he is now a major thought leader in the bioregional regenerative development sector, to the extent that, in 2021, the Royal Society for Arts, Manufacture and Commerce –a society that for almost 270 years has been supporting and empowering leadership that instigates action that can change the world– awarded Daniel the BicentenaryMedal for "an outstanding and demonstrable contribution, through the practice of design, towards an equitable and regenerative world". Regeneration versus degeneration, Is sustainability no longer enough? Sustainability remains a major achievement for humanity. It is a bridge we should still cross. At the same time, doing no more damage can no longer be the ultimate goal. After the damage caused by thou- sands of years of deforestation-based agriculture and subsoil degeneration, and centuries of industrialisation and exploitation of non-renewable resources, we must heal the ecosys- tems we inhabit and, in the process, regenerate the social cohesion and resilience of our communities and the mutually supportive fabric of our local and regional economies. It is not just a matter of changing a fashionable adjective and replacing "sustainable" or "circular" with "re- generative"! Regeneration is a fun- damental pattern of life itself and its evolution over 3.8 billion years. Our own species, for much of the last 300,000 years, evolved as custodians of the ecosystems in which we live as "expressions of" rather than "owners of" the places we inhabit. As partic- ipants in the process of life itself, we have the capacity to create con- ditions conducive to life and reinte- grate ourselves into the regenerative community of a living planet. Humanity's great challenge now is to transform the human impact on social-ecological systems and the biosphere from the current degen- erative pattern, which has taken place over just the last few thousand years, to a regenerative pattern. It is a homecoming to the community of life. It is accompanied by a profound change in our view of the world and of ourselves. Human health and the health of eco- systems and the biosphere are pro- foundly interdependent! We should both revalue the ancestral wisdom of indigenous peoples who knew and still know how to sustain life, and si- multaneously evaluate in a nuanced way which technologies should be used at what scale to support biore- «The creation of regenerative systems is not simply a technical, economic, eco- logical or social change: it has to go hand in hand with an underlying change in the way we think about ourselves, our relationships with each other and with life in general (...) Regenerative cultures safeguard and grow biocultural abundance for future generations of humanity and for life as a whole ». gional regeneration. A regenerative circular economy is based on a return to regional production for regional consumption, and on national and international collaboration to sup- port this process in each bioregion. You often refer to "regenerative cul- tures or economies" in the plural, why? One way to check whether we are re- ally working in a regenerative way is to stop talking and working abstract- ly on global problems and general- ised strategies that should be scaled up and implemented on a site-spe- cific basis. Only if we work from the bio-cultural uniqueness of a specific place with its culture, history, eco- system, climatology –with its specif- ic challenges and potential– can we strengthen the regenerative patterns born from the place itself. Regenerative cultures are expressions of the specific potential of a place and its people. This is why I use the plural. Obviously, there are common pat- terns among them, but reflecting the biodiversity of life itself, regenerative cultures are also diverse in their "ad- aptation to" and "expression of" the unique conditions of each place. Can all business sectors apply a re- generative development approach in their processes? Not at all, but this requires paus- ing and evaluating patterns of work, questioning basic assumptions, and creating the capacity to understand nested complexity in order to weave each business into the trans-sectoral fabric of the entrepreneurial ecosys- tem of its specific bioregion. Decen- tralised production and business col- laboration to supply the basic needs of the regional population within the ecological and energy limits of each region is the most direct path to re- generative economies that support social and ecological regeneration. The challenge for multinationals and large companies is to transform themselves into collaborative net- works of many regionally rooted companies that - for the most part - produce in the region, for the region. We obviously need national and in- ternational trade to maintain many of the high technologies that can sup- port this process of re-regionalisa- tion of production and consumption. Decentralisation and the reducing distances in supply chains increase the resilience of our communities in the face of climate change, geopoliti- cal and economic instability. Another deep pattern that needs to be re-evaluated is our habit of working with a generalised problem approach instead of revealing and strengthen- ing the unique potential of a specif- ic place with its specific culture. The abstraction of problems dealt with in siloed channels of expertise and dis- ciplines to be defined in a globalised way, and then asking engineers, inno- vators and designers in a hackerthon or design sprint to create globalised solutions, which in turn are pre- sented to impact investors and then scaled up, only to be surprised that implementing them in specific places that do not fit the social, cultural and ecological uniqueness is a large part of this degenerative pattern. We need deep collaboration between the public and private sector and civ- il society in each place to display and reconnect the fabric of existing re- generative enterprises and projects in specific locations. Regeneration starts with a focus on the potential of the place and its people. Obviously, we need solutions to problem – but working from a point of specific po- tential rather than focusing on gener- alised problems. This allows us to see solutions as prototypes in an evolu- tionary process, as opportunities to learn, rather than products to sell. Regenerative development creates the capacity to evaluate, adapt, and transform yesterday's solutions that have become today's problems. This is impossible in the abstraction of the planetary and civilisational mul- ti-crisis. We will only be able to face the global challenges of humanity if we learn to make community for community’s sake, working with the regenerative potential of places, com- munities, and life itself. It is not about saving the planet. Life is capable of continuing without humanity, but by saving and healing places we can re- generate the earth and thus save the lives of future human generations. How important is the concept of "community" in regenerative devel- opment cultures? Seen from the complexity of scienc- es like ecology and evolution, we can understand life as a regenera- tive community that we are a part of. Regeneration is the essence of life’s own capacity for self-regulation and self-creation. By supporting and championing regenerative cultures we will re-live humanity as mature mem- bers of the community of life. Daniel Wahl by Daniel Wahl “It is not about replacing ‘sustainable or circular’ by ‘regenerative” 29