Regenerative Culture for a Sustained Future

A fabulous international conference is coming up in Liverpool, organised by the International Council of Museums on Regenerative Museums for Sustainable Futures. I know it will be fabulous because Lucimara Letelier has helped to curate it — see her research on Regenerative Museums.

Unfortunately, I can’t go, but it’s so interesting that I want to write about it. This is what I’d say if I were there, or what I’d hope to hear.

I’d want to bring everyone up to speed on the experimental museum I founded, Climate Museum UK — and our work to engage people creatively with the Earth Crisis, including the Earth Talk programme. I’d also highlight some of my paper on The Roles of Culture in Response to the Earth Crisis.

But mostly I’d love to find out what people think and provoke them to think about the possibilities of Regenerative Culture to help sustain livelihoods in the context of the challenging constraints of the Earth Crisis. My key provocation is that it is not enough to be regenerative. This has to go hand-in-hand with being collapse-responsive.

Sidenote: When I use a big ‘C’, I’m referring to the institutions and practices of Arts, Design and Intangible & Tangible Heritage, rather than the broader meaning of social frames and discourses.

Sidenote: Also, when I make the tough provocation, I’m not aiming at individual Cultural practitioners, as we have limited capacities alone. I’m aiming at collectives, institutions and power-holders, and suggesting that collective solidarity is more important than ever.

What does it mean to be regenerative?

There are different lenses on ‘regenerative’

For example:

• A personal lens, doing ‘inner work’, taking rest in order to regenerate
• A land-based lens, for example, farming in ways that allow nature, especially soil, to recover
• An urban lens, regenerating places that are in decline to benefit their environment, economy and society
• A ‘salutogenic’ or health lens, focused on wellbeing (with some lenses focusing on human health or perhaps another species)
• A climate lens, applying nature-based and circular economy approaches for climate mitigation and adaptation
• A future lens, enabling adaptation and transformative innovation, aiming towards a Third Horizon for civilisation
• And, a Regenerative lens, an expanded and holistic approach that embraces all the above and more, drawing on indigenous perspectives in which life is sacred, seeing humans as enmeshed in its web, and people using their wisdom to allow the regenerating capacities of the biosphere.

I think we should hold this expanded holistic lens in mind together as a guiding star. The reason? We’re in an Earth Crisis.

Being regenerative means making an Earth Crisis response

What does this look like using the three values of Truth-telling, Caring and Change-making? (These come from Culture Declares Emergency, in the framework & toolkit I developed.)

TRUTH-TELLING: This means acknowledging the urgency, severity and complexity of the Earth Crisis. This is the moment when, on a global scale, the normal becomes impossible, and the survival of humanity and biodiversity depends on systemic changes that we must imagine and enact. On the one hand, this is about more than climate: it’s about a much bigger picture of the overshoot of multiple planetary boundaries, the shortfall in human needs, and the authoritarians and pollutocrats riding roughshod over laws and morals. On the other hand, climate change is the major threat multiplier, worsening all other aspects of the crisis. We are now at 430 ppm of CO2, higher than it has been since 3 to 5 million years ago, before humans existed. The necessary response is not small, partial or independent. It means scaling up regenerative and collapse-responsive action as rapidly as possible, being holistic, and collaborating across places and sectors.

Cultural practitioners might consider how they can acknowledge and raise awareness of the Earth Crisis:

• Declare a Climate & Ecological Emergency, for example, with Culture Declares
• Be bold in establishing clarity on your language, so that you are not using ‘climate’ as a stand-in for all other environmental problems. Use terms that help people understand the major systemic causes of the global crisis (the acceleration of extraction and exploitation of nature and people for profit).
• Enable pluricentric dialogue, bringing together diverse voices and perspectives, including the colonised, indigenous and more-than-human.

CARING: Responding to the Earth Crisis means seeing how social shortfall is entangled with ecological overshoot, due to the extractive capitalist system that profits from harming and othering bodies and places. The meta-challenge is to meet the needs of people and their biodiverse kin with justice while restoring Earth systems and dealing with the impacts of 6+ planetary boundaries being breached. So, an Earth Crisis response requires paying more attention to risk assessment and community care in the face of impacts.

Sidenote: The usual formula is: to meet human needs within the limits of the planet, but I’ve made three additions to this. i) To include meeting the needs of more-than-human persons, and also rivers or forests that are not conventionally considered to have rights ii) To meet needs with justice: for example, reparations offered for climate loss and damage are financial, but justice for most affected and displaced people would mean providing common access to land, democratic voice, and peace. iii) To deal with the impacts of breached planetary boundaries, making nature restoration, climate action and social justice efforts increasingly challenging. This multiple overshoot is a whole new kettle of weird fish. None of the precedents and planned actions (e.g. as laid out in Sustainable Development Goals) accounted for the radical uncertainties of this new reality.

Cultural practitioners might consider how they can increase care by:

• Developing projects and decision-making processes that recognise each more-than-human species as being as valid as humans, and more vulnerable
• Integrating environmental impacts into their risk assessments, considering how these affect lives (where some communities and species are more vulnerable) and defining ways that these threats affect the continuity of their work
• Being the change by modelling caring, compassionate and giving behaviours.

You might look at Manchester Museum’s care-centred mission and values

CHANGE MAKING: If extractive capitalism is the main driver for the systemic causes of degenerative culture, then perhaps the alternative is ‘intractive commoning’.

• Being intractive (my invented word) is refusing to extract, restoring places where extraction has caused harm, and reducing consumption. Intracting is also interacting kindly with the more-than-human world, seeing soul in everything.
• Commoning is building social and economic systems where resources (or the means to thrive) are shared by a community. People (with more-than-people) act as stewards deciding how resources are used, produced, and distributed. If everyone has a common interest in their means to thrive, they are more likely to take beneficial actions that sustain resources in the long-term future.

Cultural practitioners might consider how they can help people imagine and build regenerative systems:

• telling stories of a flourishing world and activism for change
• being that change by becoming less extractive and consumerist
• actively focusing your mission on effective restorative acts e.g. the Greenpop ReforestFest is a music & theatre festival that aims to plant 5,000–10,000 indigenous trees.

You might look at Life-Ennobling Economics as a guiding vision.

Being regenerative and collapse-responsive go hand in hand

They are about Hope + Acceptance

Regenerative actions bring hope because they make clear what people can do, they increase the supply of resources and have multi-solving benefits (including climate resilience). Regenerative action examples include:

• Community Supported Agriculture
• Biophilic Cities, with wildlife corridors, food forests and local construction materials
• Rewilding oceans to increase phytomass
• ‘One Planet Living’ eco-communities (e.g. using permaculture)
• Circular manufacturing that aims for zero harm (zero waste, carbon, animals killed, people exploited etc.)
• Agroforestry
• Allowing rivers to meander.

Many are based on indigenous traditions, or are innovations inspired by nature. A regenerative approach is about responding with relevance to that bioregion or context.

Being collapse-responsive means acceptance that the forecast impacts of ecological overshoot and social shortfall (combined with the violent and chaotic actions of some governments) are causing the breakdown of stable social, economic and natural systems that have sustained a growing human population. This means prioritising safety and survival.

It is also known that global temperatures in 2023–2025 have shattered all records, beyond 1.5C. In addition to sharing such facts, I also share emerging models from scientists, which are less certain but their warnings must be heeded. For example, sea level rise will become unmanageable at just 1.5C of warming. And James Hansen warns that Earth’s climate could be 50% more sensitive to CO₂ than previously estimated by the IPCC. That would mean all current climate models severely underestimate how bad things could get.

Below, I set out a Collapse-responsive path for any civic or cultural group or network aligned to the process of Truth-telling, Caring and Change-making:

• Accept truths and declare emergency, recognising with humility that the time to declare was 40 years ago
• Anticipate a wide range of uncertainties, risks and vulnerabilities
• Protest and act to stop harm at the source e.g. support the Ecocide Law and the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
• Connect and collaborate to build an inclusive community
• Take action to protect vulnerable people, species and assets
• Call for, set up and learn about early warning systems and refuges
• Redistribute resources to give aid and ensure needs are met
• Recovery and repair of harmed places and ecosystems.
• The collective ongoing mission throughout all the above is to change systems to ones that regenerate and sustain life.

Adaptiveness is key

Regenerative approaches apply human insight, compassion and innovation to enable the flourishing of the biosphere, which increases long-term provision for humans and their biodiverse kin. Other species can also be great stewards, but humans have been exceptional at it.

Over the millennia of human history, Culture has ultimately been about optimising the flourishing of humans amidst the kinship of plants, animals and land. This flourishing has been a process of adaptation, with species responding in slow, emergent ways to change and challenge. The ways that museums have collected and displayed things, and the kinds of Culture most highly canonised in the Global North, reflect the opposite story, that of domination over nature and people. These kinds of Culture may appear spectacular and beautiful but reflect or conceal processes of violent control and extraction of materials and people from indigenous environments, rather than adaptive integration.

A key task for human civilisation, if there is to be survival (in refugia or ‘islands of sanity’), is to adapt to a drastically and rapidly changing environment. This task includes rediscovering and evolving local systems of ‘intractive commoning’ to dismantle extractive capitalism. A current feature of the Earth Crisis is that the extractive capitalists have gained so much wealth and power that they are using culture and media to manipulate people, to sell them the story of human domination, to demonise those who work for ecological and social justice. (I call them ‘wetikicians’, agents of wetiko, the ‘spirit of greed’ or ‘cannibal giant’ from Cree and Anishinabek stories.)

The task of adaptiveness should rightly be one of slow emergence, trusting the regenerative capacities of the biosphere to show us the way. However, there are at least two major barriers to this:

• the wetikicians are working at speed to grab more land, more licence to pollute, to undo environmental laws, to control data and knowledge, making regenerative organising so much harder. The wetikicians are also making it much harder for many cultural and educational institutions to operate freely or be informed by universalist science-informed values.
• the impacts of ecological overshoot and social shortfall pose real threats to security, peace and freedom, which place great strain on groups aiming to create flourishing environments that stabilise the climate while meeting the needs of inhabitants.

Regenerative and collapse-responsive efforts will need to be well-resourced and advocated. Cultural organisations (such as museums) could support these efforts in interdisciplinary ways, collaborating with activists, researchers, ecologists, health workers, educators, artists or citizen organisers. They must identify their unique role, fitting into an ‘ecosystem’ of people working for restoration, stability and safety.

This unique role might be stimulating imagination, offering inspiring and safe spaces, or illuminating regenerative lifeways and adaptive strategies from history. They may want to do this work with humility, authenticity and care, and they should avoid greenwashing, giving license to extractive capitalists, or compromising their values with extractive behaviours.

Finally, the Regenerative Cultural organisation could shift from seeing its public as audiences or consumers, instead to see them as planetary citizens, as inhabitants of a biosphere in trouble. A key role can be to develop the regenerative capacities of citizens to work in places, in response to the Earth Crisis. The compass below provides some possible roles people might play in stewarding life, tending to people, imagining futures, and activating change. (I developed this having been inspired through my work with the Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice.)

If you appreciated this story, you can read my paper on The Roles of Culture in Response to the Earth Crisis.

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