This word is now in ‘primetime’ all over social media. Environmentalists have changed their tune from living sustainably to living regeneratively. What is the difference?
According to one of my favourite environmentalists, Holly Rose, being sustainable is taking and giving back what we want to take again. To me, sustainability has come to a point where it is so ‘greenwashed’ and upholds the capitalist system – we have come to use sustainability to SUSTAIN THE CURRENT DEGENERATIVE SYSTEM. Being sustainable is suppressing the symptom instead of fixing the root cause!
Being sustainable is like recycling waste but still buying that plastic or tin to be recycled in the first place. (The recycling industry is something we will get into in the future.) Sustainability is like creating a ‘diversity and inclusion department’ in a company but not addressing the inherent and implicit racism that exist in the first place.
Regenerative living on the other hand is a reciprocity model. One where we give more than we take. One where we ensure everyone thrives. Regeneration restores. As an example, think back to how our grandparents or great-grandparents lived, or even what we were taught in schools. When they farmed, they rotate crops seasonally. This is to ensure when one crop has taken a certain nutrient from the soil, the other crop restores that used up nutrient in the soil. When we live regeneratively, we acknowledge that everything is living, a life force, the divine energy, and we need to restore them. In this model, everyone thrives.
Unlike the hierarchical capitalist system, regeneration is circular, functioning with the world. It is a world where we live in symbiosis with nature and with each other.
Living this way is going back to how our ancestors lived and how Indigenous peoples live. This idea is based on their ecological knowledge. To be able to truly live this way, we need to move away from the very system that created this and oppresses. We need to transfer power from central governments and big corporations to communities. In Bangsar, we have Kebun-Kebun Bangsar where you can buy your produce from and slowly shift power away from the corporations. They may not have the organic certificate but it is certainly pesticide and chemical-free.
To me, it makes sense in Malaysia. Based on our political system, we vote for someone to represent our constituents. Instead of the power going back to the federal government, our Member of Parliament should be given the autonomy and budget to manage the constituency. Those living in the constituency play a more active role to ensure that it can live off its land. They can shape the policies that enforce regenerative living, create community farms & shops, manage its resources well, and care for all the people. Basically creating a thriving community.
If you notice, everything in this capitalist system is set up in a way prevent us from being regenerative. It is a highly degenerative and destructive system. A simple example is composting. When we compost, we restore the soil, enabling us to grow our own foods, giving us food autonomy. When we have autonomy of something, the system slowly breaks. They do not want you to plant your own food, then who will buy their genetically modified, pesticide filled food. Fine, even when you buy only organic, you are supporting the very same system. To get the organic certificate is expensive and the cost gets transferred to us. When we industrialise and commercialise agriculture we have monocultures, we use chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and we kill the very foundation of life – biodiversity. We kill the soil, we kill the oceans, we kill the marine life, we kills the animals, and in turn, we slowly kill ourselves. This will then create a demand for drugs – AHA BIG PHARMA… and it goes on and on. It is a constant cycle to keep the money and power within that small group of people while the rest suffer. This is the very system that oppresses people, animals, and the environment. This is the very same system that make us feel ugly just so we will buy more cosmetics or more clothes to feel beautiful while implicitly supporting the oil industry. The same system that profits from our insecurities. The system that promotes ‘otherness’ and created inequality, deforestation, extinctions, and climate breakdown.
How did we get to the degenerative reality that we live in? It all comes down to hierarchy. With hierarchy and supremacy, capitalism was born. Based on my reading from Holly Rose, the word ‘hierarchy’ was first recorded in the 1610s – this is the same decade colonisation of the ‘Americas’ expanded as European colonisers competed for power and control of Indigenous lands. The first permanent occupation town, ‘Jamestown’, known to be the Powhatan territory, was settled in 1607.
Jamestown is named after King James VI / I who ordered the first Latin-to-English translation of the Christian Bible, to further expand and strengthen the church’s power and influence. Before the ‘King James Bible’ (1611), only those with the privilege to learn Latin and could read the Bible.
This brought about the witches’ trial England in 1612, which quickly spread across Europe and later to the ‘Americas’. Over 200,000 people were tortured or murdered, majority being female community leaders and medicine healers. Again with this doctrine, we were conditioned to believe the witches are bad and evil, further being reinforced by fairy tales. There were only practicing their own beliefs (Pagan, Wiccan, Celtic, Norse) which is basically the worship of and living off the Earth, in harmony – again, opposing this colonialism/ imperialistic (capitalist) system.
This decade of hierarchy and supremacy ended with the first African slaves brought to America in 1619 to serve the Jamestown colony. This kick-started the cross-Atlantic slave trade’s relationship with the land soon to become known as America.
In this period, with the help of the church and its monarchies, supremacism gained force. Christianity was used as its weapon – ironic isn’t it? Isn’t this against the Bible, are we not all equal? Hence the notion of darker skin means some sort of genetic deficiency was indoctrinated, and thus justified the White men’s actions against their darker counterparts. As mentioned above, the church and monarchies fortified supremacy, intensifying the psychology of ‘otherness’ which had been born in Europe a few hundred years before.
Capitalism and its policies and laws are justified by supremacy. This system oppresses and capitalises on people based on race, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, social class, culture, ideology, or country. This is the same mindset that destroys our relationships with nature – animals and the Earth herself.
By understanding the origins of supremacy, hierarchy, and capitalism, we understand that this is all propaganda to gain power and control. The sad part is it an exclusive system, only to the 1% of the world. There are more of us outside of this. We have the power to dismantle the system. Let’s start slowly, creating new habits slowly. Maybe start by only buying from small regenerative farmers, or buying clothes from shops that practice regenerative farming, or maybe start to compost. All these small actions are acts of rebellion against this very system that wants us to constantly fight and put each other down. Even changing our mindset that if one thrives we all thrive is an act of rebellion. We are all one and connected. We are whole. We need to see through whatever that has been fed to us. We need to uncondition and unlearn. We can start by just believing we are all one – the soil is living and part of us, the trees are living and part of us, the oceans are living and part of us, so are the rocks, the animals, the air, and each and every other human being.
