This piece follows on from What is the Sparks of Regeneration Incubation Journey?, which introduced the Sparks of Regeneration cohort and Unearthodox's approach to alternative incubation. Here, we ground that thinking in three stories from within the cohort itself.
In our work exploring regeneration at Unearthodox, we have come to understand it not as a single definition but as a living practice; one rooted in place, carried by relationships, and resistant to tidy frameworks. Our Anthology of Regenerative Futures describes regeneration as holding "memories of abundance, survival, hope and trauma." It is, as contributor Nisha Mary Poulose writes, an embodied way of being, "deeply tied to the land it co-evolved with over millennia" (Nisha Mary Poulose, Anthology of Regenerative Futures, Chapter 1).
As we walk alongside the eight initiatives in our Sparks of Regeneration incubation cohort, one pattern keeps surfacing:
The conservation sector has developed many powerful tools, from reforestation strategies, prescribed burns, carbon offset programs, to sustainable agriculture certifications. We are no strangers to technical solutions - but what if we've been approaching regeneration all wrong?
In conservation work, land is often discussed in terms of acreage, biodiversity metrics, and ecosystem services. But listen closely to the people doing this work on the ground, and you'll hear something different.
In Senanga, Zambia, a 500-hectare former forest reserve isn't measured only by the number of trees regrown. For Women's Paradise - a sanctuary supporting young survivors of gender-based violence - it's measured in dignity reclaimed. Mpulu Kabani, Mapalo Mitti, and Charles Chilufya don’t just relocate vulnerable women; they give each person two hectares to cultivate, using Lozi ecological knowledge blended with agroecological practices.
Today, 68 women work together on roughly 60 hectares. Trauma-informed care isn't an add-on layered onto agricultural work - it's woven into the same fabric as soil regeneration, food security, and forest cover restoration. As the team articulated it partway through this incubation journey:
"One important lesson so far is that regeneration takes time. For the women we are supporting, healing must come before productivity."
Access to land, culture-rooted practice, and ecological healing aren't separate threads. They are the same thread.
Similarly, in the unceded territories of the shíshálh and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nations in British Columbia, The FireCircle Collective is working from a similar premise - that fire isn't an enemy to defeat. Displacing Indigenous lifeways severed relationships with species and cycles that nurtured regenerating landscapes for millennia. The result? A world that's become more flammable and fragile.
The FireCircle brings together Indigenous and ecological sciences, cultural and restoration practices to explore regenerative pathways for wildfire mitigation and post-fire recovery in British Columbia. They advance the narrative that true safety comes from healthy ecosystems, healthy relationships, and healthy communities. As such, the FireCircle Collective’s approach doesn't start with fear-based risk management; it starts with reciprocity: replacing othering with belonging, fragmentation with mutual flourishing and control with relationship.
There's another pattern emerging — one that won't surprise anyone familiar with marginalised communities but rarely appears in mainstream conservation literature: every one of these initiatives operates outside conventional systems, and every one has faced the quiet question: Is this work considered 'real’?
In South Africa, Chévanni Davids works to reimagine education as a relational practice rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing. Through gatherings, storytelling, and land-based practices, he's invited over a thousand people — many labelled failures or dropouts by rigid institutional frameworks — to remember interdependence, grief, and reciprocity with the more-than-human world. Part of that work, he says, means resisting the pace institutions expect:
"Rather than rushing from one experience to the next, we are allowing more time for reflection, journaling, prompts, intimate sharing, and embodied integration."
Even within progressive spaces, there's pressure to conform to established recognition pathways. Yet the most transformative work often happens quietly, sometimes carefully — in spaces where challenging dominant structures still carries real consequences. These groups don't wait for permission. They carve space for work that institutions don't yet fully recognise as essential.
Perhaps the hardest truth in this entire conversation is that you cannot regenerate what you have not first healed.
This applies at every scale, from the individual survivor building a life on restored soil, to the educator teaching children to grieve alongside their land, to the nation grappling with wildfire seasons that grow exponentially worse each year.
And healing requires something the conservation sector doesn't always centre: honest reckoning with what colonial disruption took beyond the land, including entire knowledge systems and ways of relating to place developed across generations, encoded in stories and practices handed down orally.
Recovery means standing on the shoulders of those who resisted that disruption for centuries. It means recognising that ecological restoration must travel alongside cultural restoration and personal healing.
While it is essential to speak about conservation solutions, they remain incomplete without addressing the ruptures beneath them, the severed relationships between people and place, between knowledge holders and institutional power, between human well-being and ecosystem health.
What these initiatives teach us is simple and profound: before we can regenerate ecosystems and communities, we must remember what was taken. Recover what was severed. Heal what was harmed, both in ecosystems and in people.
Because in more than one way, regeneration is healing — for humans, our systems, and nature itself.
Next in this series: what happens when regeneration begins not with an individual healing, but with relationship to people, land, and knowledge systems.
