3 Questions to Guide Regenerative Decision-Making
How can we live a more regenerative life?
Many of our daily actions and personal decisions are economic and political, with consequences that ripple outwards into the wider society, community, and economy. From where we buy our food, to how many times we shower a day, to how long we spend on social media, many things we do on a daily basis help build the social and environmental reality we live in. As a thought experiment, let’s see if these 3 questions help us make different decisions, towards living and building a more regenerative way of life.
What impact does this decision have on the next seven generations?
For most of us, our imagination brings us at most to the generation of our grandchildren. Seven generations from now in the time of our great-great-great-great-great grandchildren (if we were alive, we might be 180 years old!), what would the world look like? Our society teaches us to plan ahead and save up so that we retire with a pension; should we not do the same with the environment? Wealth doesn’t exist in banks, but out there in nature. How can we save that up for all humans’ and non-humans’ future generations?
Our short human lives can sometimes be limiting to our imagination — it’s difficult for us to understand the lives of the 1,000-year-old sequoia trees that witnessed human’s destruction of their forests, or the 400-year-old Greenland sharks that now live in too-hot oceans, or the millions-plus-year-old living rocks that grow only 4–5 centimetres every 1,000 years. But let us try.
Who gets impacted by this decision and what is my relationship with them? How can I transform this relationship into that of reciprocity?
Let’s say we buy a milk chocolate bar from a widely marketed, commercial brand. Who gets impacted? We can start from where the cacao was grown to the retail store we bought it from, to the landfill the plastic wrapper will go. And let’s not forget about our health.
So here goes the (not exhaustive) list:
- Cacao farmers and processors, sugar farmers, dairy farmers (Did they get ripped off? Is their health negatively affected by pesticides and chemical fertilisers?)
- Plants, insects, and other animals that lived on these farms (Did they get sprayed with and killed by pesticides and chemical fertilisers, antibiotics, etc.?)
- Fossil fueled transporters on land, air, sea to get the cacao to the chocolate manufacturers
- Chocolate manufacturer factory workers; retail store workers; trash collecting or recycling workers (Are they being paid a living wage?)
- Land on which the landfill sits (Surely one plastic wrapper doesn’t make that much of a difference?)
- The chocolate brand that belongs to a larger multi-national corporation that also sells shampoo, detergent, and cereal (Do they need more money?)
- Us! (Is all that dairy and sugar so great for our health?)
I know, I know. It’s just too cumbersome to go through this for the simple decision of buying a chocolate bar. It is. But it’s also what is needed now because our planet is on the verge of collapse without changing the way we think and act.
Now comes the hopeful part. How can we transform our relationships with the ‘who’ on the list into those of reciprocity? Nature is the gift that keeps on giving and humanity just keeps on taking. What can we give back? A good place to start is to ask ourselves what we’re good at and what we’re interested in learning more about — planting, saving seeds, composting, re-using and re-purposing, educating others, etc.
I admit that I have a serious chocolate craving and I’m lucky enough to live in a country where cacao is naturally grown. My way of satisfying my craving is by buying 80% dark chocolate bar from local chocolate makers that don’t use plastic wrappers and compost the paper wrapping once I’m done with my guilty pleasure. I also recently became interested in how to make chocolate at home and have bought fresh cacao fruits from agroecological farmers and farmers’ markets.
Are the processes involved in service of all life?
“We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earth’s beings.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
How we think about processes requires a bit of imagination and investigation. If it’s an item or a thing, imagine the conception of its life to its end — how did it come about? Was it grown, mined, made? How did it get to your hands? How, where, how many times will you use it? After your use, where will it go? If it’s an experience, how did it come about? What’s the story? What steps are involved? If you had to justify it to someone, what would you say? Did anyone, human or non-human, get harmed along the way?
Everything is alive (even rocks, I recently found out). How can we and our decisions be in service of all life? We are the amalgamation of our thoughts and actions. As indigenous peoples have shown, when humans see ourselves as a part of nature, we can be constructive and regenerative, living in harmony with the rest of nature. Let’s choose thoughts and actions that serve all life!
If you used these questions as your own thought experiment for your next decision or would like to add another question to the list, please leave a comment!
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