Regeneration, in its modern avatar born in the Global North, often continues to reproduce and reinforce patterns and practices of coloniality despite its desire to break away from intentional socio-ecological harm.
We structured the previous chapters to spotlight communities and movements that intentionally and inherently manifest ‘Regeneration’ as a way of life. In this final chapter, we seek to take you beyond What to do?’ and into an understanding that embodying regeneration requires us to recognise and address the harmful heritage of coloniality that modernity imposes upon us all.
Thus, the idea emerged for a chapter that highlights some of the persistent and harmful actions (PHAs) that undermine the purpose of regeneration. More importantly, we invited the authors to go beyond to showcase ways in which regeneration in practice overcomes these harms and the gestures both in ethos and praxis. The chapter brief called for each segment to discuss such harmful paradigms, grounded within the gestures that break these patterns, behaviours, thoughts, feelings and ways of habitation.
As we designed this project, our mission was to break away from dominant narratives and ideas and facilitate a greater level of consciousness on the state of the system. To continuously discard what no longer serves us in our pursuit of regeneration, we must take a hard look and face the truth, even when our discomfort encourages us to look away.
Acknowledgement: Nisha Mary Poulose and Lua Couto contributed as project co-leads during the initial phases of the Anthology's journey. We honour their foundational involvement and vision in shaping its beginnings.
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The world is not fair to everyone. When I witness so much inequality, social injustice and willful blindness among people, my heart fills with pain, sadness and anguish.
How to position my uniquely storied body in a way that tells you where this work comes from and why… I am a queer East Afrikan woman of 3 lineages who have most recently also been in East Afrika.
I write from the United States and as a white woman, aware that the countries and systems dominating global discourse are not the ones that will lead the regenerative future we need. For too long, those most impacted by extractive and inequitable systems have been sidelined, while privileged perspectives set the terms of change.
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The world is not fair to everyone. When I witness so much inequality, social injustice and willful blindness among people, my heart fills with pain, sadness and anguish. Personally, I have mostly been a privileged human with sufficient access to wealth, education and social acceptance, thanks to my Khatri Punjabi roots and the money my family made through business. Yes, my father struggled with poverty in his childhood, but he made sure I had everything I needed as I grew up.
How to position my uniquely storied body in a way that tells you where this work comes from and why… I am a queer East Afrikan woman of 3 lineages who have most recently also been in East Afrika. On each of my lineages my people have experienced violent (is there any other?) colonial dispossession and displacement from land. On one of my lines I am of pastoral heritage. These ancestral wounds and ancestral healing inform my Being - my own explorations and intentions towards reweaving relationship with land and Life. My commitments are to Earth, Afrika and ancestrality. I am a process in reindigenisation exploring and experimenting in alternatives to coloniality mostly in how we un/learn as learning shapes the picture of the world we hold and delimits our possibilities. I do not speak from outside, I speak from a movement towards inside, a movement intending to recover, reclaim, re-member the violently dismembered. My writing is witness work, is grief work (and we have such grief debt in the world today), is Beauty work, where Beauty is a guiding cosmological principle. I storyweave for land, for Life, for my people, I invite you to listen and be moved.
I write from the United States and as a white woman, aware that the countries and systems dominating global discourse are not the ones that will lead the regenerative future we need. For too long, those most impacted by extractive and inequitable systems have been sidelined, while privileged perspectives set the terms of change. Regeneration requires plural, rooted, and diverse leadership that empowers people everywhere to shape the future. It also requires space for grief and healing, and I am grateful this work offered that in community. I am committed to opening space for a symphony of voices and ideas, reflecting practices already in motion around the world, often for generations and millennia.
I come to this work as a geographer, trained to study the intersection of humans and the environment and to attend to the essence of place. This lens grounds me in the realities of specific communities, ecosystems, and contexts, while attentive to broader systems. Much of my work has focused on the private sector, which too often accelerates destruction and harm to communities, Indigeneity, biodiversity, and the spiritual.
I recognise my relative security and advantage, and do not claim neutrality. Regeneration demands rebalancing, unsettling inherited comforts, and creating conditions for more just, life-giving futures. I aim to use the relative advantage I hold within existing systems to redirect power and resources away from structures that no longer serve, channelling them toward emerging alternatives, nurturing equity.