Sarah Queblatin is a regenerative design and development specialist who has been weaving collective experiences in peacebuilding, biocultural heritage, mental health, and humanitarian innovation for more than 15 years. She founded Living Story Landscapes, which works with cultural memory and imagination as a response to the polycrisis. Previously, she founded Green Releaf Initiative working with regenerative solutions in disasters and displacement. She is also an artist working with the arts for personal and collective healing. In this conversation she shares insights on bioregional wisdom, scaling deep, and the role of creativity in transformative change.
The general understanding of sustainability is that it's about reducing harm, but regeneration is about doing more - doing better. Sustainability often focuses on security. Whereas regeneration is committed to sovereignty. It is life-giving and constantly evolving. It’s not growth for the sake of growth. It imitates life, is inspired by life, and gives life. For example, in post disaster recovery, we do not promise that the supertyphoon will not happen again, but we say that if we design from life, we can co-create ways to reduce impacts or have enough means to recover easier. Sustainability meets the needs of being a survivor. Whereas regeneration creates the conditions for people and habitats to become thrivers.
Yes, I've worked with creativity in different ways. I work through two stages in applied creative practice: from illusion to intuition, and from intuition to imagination.
From Illusion to Intuition
In the first stage, we discover and understand loss, and regenerative design invites us to be trauma-informed at this stage. Illusion is the experience of realising that something we once thought was true is no longer valid, like the current system, once seen as self-sustaining and that is now falling apart. In this stage, we confront the loss of the world we once knew—not just a home, a belief or a system, but a familiar way of being. This is where healing arts come in, such as art therapy, ceremony, and ritual. It’s a space where I often work with people who have lost homes, family, or the familiarity of a belief or system they once relied on. These practices help individuals and communities recognise their loss and begin the grieving process. Rituals help bridge this gap, guiding us back to intuition—our deeper knowing, the wisdom we already carry—which is where healing begins.
Intuition is remembering our resilience, what we already know—what’s within us and around us. This is where I work with tools like mandalas or community maps. These help people piece together the parts of themselves or their communities, making visible what’s already present. In bioregional storytelling, for example, we map what is sacred, what is valued, and what narratives are held in a place that holds meaning to people. It’s a process of remembering—reclaiming what was always there, despite loss. These creative tools resonate deeply, especially since not everyone is literate; using symbolic methods cuts across language and meaning.
The transition from illusion to intuition invites us to engage in solutions that support immediate assistance in the short term but one that has long term continuity. For example, when it comes to food security, in our work with permaculture in disaster zones, we offered not just immediate food packs but we sourced from nearby farms, encouraging people to donate to these farmers to support our community kitchen partners. In camps, people cook these through appropriate technologies we demonstrated through rocket stoves and water harvested from roofs. Seeds saved and cuttings were used to grow gardens, creating a regenerative cycle of food abundance. This sovereignty allows communities to be self-sufficient, with autonomy, through local solutions.
The next phase is moving from intuition to imagination. Once people reconnect with their resilience, they can begin to envision new narratives from a place of wholeness, where whole systems design aptly enhances this process.However, I often caution that imagination without a grounded understanding of what we need to let go of — such as old beliefs and illusions - can feel disconnected. True imagination emerges when we know we are whole and have the resources to create something new. While imagination involves creating what doesn't yet exist, it also requires a foundation of resilience. It is vital to be trauma-informed about imagination. In communities experiencing historical trauma, imagination is a privilege. I cannot count how many times I’ve heard how “young people do not dream anymore,” given the extreme experiences they have been through. This is why the journey to regeneration requires meeting capacities for resilience — reclaiming memory, how people and habitats can recover what they have lost. I love using mapping tools to bring parts of a whole together. Bioregional maps, for instance —which help communities identify what is sacred, valuable, and invisible in their landscapes offer more meaning when we make the invisible, visible. In the next stage of imagination, we work with visioning and planning tools. I especially love using community vision mandalas for this. We then translate this vision into an action plan. In one exercise we used a tree map, where the fruit represents the ultimate project outcome, the flowers are the outputs, the branches are the activities, and the trunk and roots symbolise the objectives and resources. This approach allowed the community to visualise their goals in a way that was both cyclical and life-giving before converting it into a more linear design to meet donor requirements.
I used to work for a museum earlier, I quit to focus on environmental education, but in doing so, I lost track of my creative life. Recently, I’ve been trying to marry my soil work with my soul work. Over the years, we have helped people rediscover their traditional ecological knowledge through their food, recipes, and local biodiversity. But now I’m working on how we can make these visible, where bioregional learning centres can also serve as museums—places where people can plan, design and integrate their cultural memory and imagination.
After closing my non-profit, I continued this work through my passion project called ‘Living Story Landscapes’, where I work with wisdom keepers of the land, as well as artists, wisdom keepers, and ecologists.
I can't speak for all Global South countries, but we've faced challenges in the Philippines where we collaborated with international organisations that introduced western concepts of regenerative culture and innovation.
Our design innovation aimed to listen to the land and communities, but the institutional pressures to deliver outputs and reports — often with limited and delayed funding — constrained our ability to engage meaningfully. The old, colonised model of development often dictates that an international office instructs local partners to implement and localise approaches, reinforcing a top-down structure.
While we strive to engage people in collaborative design, inherited development plans — shaped by old models and dominantly western agendas — limit genuine representation. For instance, while designing training for bioregional governance in Asia, I initially felt sad by the lack of references from the region. However, I eventually realised that many practices were already in place, rooted in earth wisdom-based systems and practices. This highlighted that the principles of bioregional governance are already deeply embedded and embodied within communities.
Instead of imposing a new framework, we need to draw from what already exists. Capturing and understanding these existing narratives and wisdom can be daunting, given the emotional and material complexities involved. The challenge lies in defining and articulating these practices in ways that resonate with local contexts.
The Philippines, my country, ranks first in the World Risk Index for facing the most disasters and hazards. Working in such an environment requires working with emergence and emergency. While an emergency demands immediate action, it also paradoxically invites us to slow down, allowing innovations to come from emergence.
It’s not just about scaling up for influence or scaling out to replicate, but also scaling deep—to deepen relationships, to strengthen cultures of trust, wisdom traditions, and connections to local heritage and knowledge. These locally rooted practices — already being carried out by many first nations and global south efforts — are what make regeneration impactful.
When we introduced a tree-planting initiative in a supertyphoon-affected community, people were hesitant—past experiences with falling trees had caused serious damage and loss of life. But our team explained that, planted in the right places, trees act as natural barriers. We shared the importance of using native species, whose deep roots stabilise the land and reduce risk. It reminded me how deep roots strengthen trees—just as deep connections to land strengthen communities in difficult times.
I believe we need large-scale institutional change woven with smaller, deeply rooted efforts. Without the latter, meaningful or lasting change isn’t possible—they fill the cracks as weavers and bridge builders.
Imagining a future is challenging, especially for nations in the frontlines of the polycrisis, but I think the wisdom we have already gained from thousands of years of evolutionary learning is urging us forward. We can tap into that wisdom to move from chaos to creativity, to co-create new narratives for a regenerative future.
Of course, this future must be a thriving, equitable world. I believe we are also recognising the deeper awareness that spans across seven generations which indigenous worldviews base decisions on. Wisdom keepers speak of a sense of belonging to something much larger beyond time, and I believe the decisions we make from that place will guide us to a more regenerative way of living.
