Doing more good
Why regeneration could be the “once-and-future” cultural story we have been yearning for
If you know me or my writing, you likely already know that I am really interested in the deeply seeded stories and language that frame how we think about who we are and how we ought to live. In my research, every case I’ve encountered of communities achieving win-wins, where people and nature thrive together, are outgrowths of their deeper personal understandings and values for living in partnership with the rest of the living world.
But that is not how western culture has come to think about humanity’s relationships with nature. Many of us now have learned to treat nature as either disposable, or invulnerable, and the environmental calamities we’re presently saddled and struggling with are the outcome. Fortunately, though, this way of thinking is falling out of favor, and not a moment too soon.
To that point, my colleagues and I have just published a new paper exploring the notion of regeneration, and what it means not just as an approach to food production but as an alternative, nature-based philosophy for designing our practices, livelihoods, and technologies. In the simplest sense, regeneration describes any process or system that restores and renews. But as we detail in the paper, the concept is taking on new life in recent years, appearing in disciplines as varied as agriculture, economics, engineering, and even fashion.
More than just a buzzword, we argue that regeneration is shaping up to be a boundary concept — an idea that resonates across disciplines and cultures and helps facilitate collaboration on complex challenges. At its core, regeneration embodies an ethos of holistic thinking, proactive care, and “doing more good.” We believe it is a truly radical departure from the “do less harm” mindset that has dominated environmental and sustainability thinking for decades.
In regenerative agriculture, for example, farmers aim not just to sustain yields but to actively enhance soil health, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration. Regenerative economics envisions self-renewing, circular flows of resources and capital. Even in medicine, regenerative therapies focus on stimulating the body’s innate healing potential. Across all these contexts, regeneration prioritizes life, resilience, and abundance over stasis and harm reduction.
As a boundary concept, regeneration’s power lies in its flexibility. It maintains a core essence while adapting to the needs of each field. This conceptual fluidity enables knowledge sharing and place-based solutions tailored to unique social and ecological contexts. A regenerative farm in Minnesota will necessarily look different than one in Colombia, but both can draw from a common ethos.
Of course, regeneration’s growing popularity also brings risks. Some worry the term could get diluted, co-opted, or reduced to a corporate marketing ploy. Agribusinesses and financial institutions are increasingly jumping on the regenerative bandwagon, often without fundamentally altering their extractive business models. Meanwhile, much of the traditional ecological knowledge and practice fueling the regenerative movement is arguably lifted from Indigenous and peasant communities; this colonial appropriation of this wisdom remains a serious concern.
To retain regeneration’s transformative potential, we propose a treaty or covenant model over rigid standardization. Treaties create ethical spaces that facilitate pluralism within agreed-upon boundaries. Indigenous treaty frameworks like the Dish With One Spoon offer instructive examples for upholding diversity while affirming mutual responsibilities of respect and care. Regenerative covenants, developed through anticolonial partnerships, could similarly enshrine core tenets while nurturing context-specific solutions.
Regeneration is still an emergent concept, but its promise is undeniable. In a world of compounding crises, shifting beyond harm reduction to healing and enrichment has never been more vital. Whether in a field or a factory, a clinic or a classroom, regenerative thinking invites us to embrace the broader networks and communities we are embedded in — to regenerate the underlying state of relations between people, place, and planet. It won’t be easy, and many open questions remain. But if regeneration can hold space for difficult conversations across boundaries, it just might help us write a new story — a “once and future” mythology for a world where all of life can thrive.
