In this opening monologue for the ReGeneration podcast episode, Virginie Glaenzer reflects on the COVID‑19 pandemic as a moment to discuss regenerative practices with a broader audience. She critiques the last two to three centuries of industrial, fossil‑fuel‑driven civilization, highlighting materialistic success, wealth concentration, and environmental and social harms such as deforestation and child labor. She argues that the pandemic is accelerating already‑underway shifts like gig‑economy work and technological displacement, creating a need for regenerative culture. Glaenzer defines regenerative culture as a local ecosystem’s expression that cultivates soil and resources in harmony with nature, and extends this to regenerative economics, where the Earth is recognized as the primary capital asset. She envisions a future built on interdependence, local food systems, fully recycled products, and new skills like improvisation, co‑creation, and compassion. Concluding, she poses the central question for the discussion: how can we move the collective narrative from separation to a regenerative culture?
Chapters
If we were having this discussion 6 months ago, when I first read the book Permaculture, which introduced me to this field, I would have invited you, a brilliant group of complexity thinkers, to expose your theory, your knowledge, and explain why or how these practices can create a better future. But today, in the context of this global pandemic, when almost everyone is being asked to stop their lives and stay home, I think it might be more important to talk about the present. And it is heartbreaking to know that some people are losing their loved ones, others adjusting with balancing work and kids, for a lot also feeling the hardship through the lack of money, the lack of food, or even struggling with emotional and physical abuse. But I hope that our discussion will offer beautiful, beautiful simple idea that can be heard and used by regular people while being in the middle of their own personal chaos. So in that spirit, before Danielle leads our conversation, I'd like to share my own understanding as an outsider of this field, if that's okay with everyone. So, and it's most likely for the rest of the conversation I'm going to be more listening than anything else. So here's my understanding of this regenerative practice. For the last 200 to 300 years, we've been part of an industrial, globalized fossil fuel civilization, which we see as our normal. And we got caught up with our amazing capacity to produce. It led us to value materialistic success, to create money-driven organisation, and it resulted in a very small number of people actually owning the world and huge inequalities. Along the way, we forgot the relationship that one little action has on the entire ecosystem, and for example, how some materials used to build product can damage the rainforest, or how buying cheap labor to drive price down sometimes resulted in child labor. And while many people think that the coronavirus is disrupting our way of life, which we've earned by working hard, we're actually already in the midst of profound change. Just look at the lifelong jobs being replaced by short-term freelance work, and I'm in it, or technologies driving people out of their jobs, and then nature acting out with catastrophic behaviors. And that's when regenerative practices come into play. So my understanding is that regenerative cultures are the unique expression of a local ecosystem that has found a way to cultivate the soil in harmony with the rest of nature, And applied to business, which is really what I'm interested in, regenerative economics is an economic system that works to regenerate capital assets by recognizing that the Earth is the original capital assets. So to me, the future looks a lot like interdependence, using local communities for food, building products that have not only a positive impact on nature, but also that are 100% recycled. And perhaps, and I'll finish with this, learning to use skills that we barely know, such as improvisation. We had a podcast on that. Co-creation and compassion, because really regenerative practices go beyond our education and current way of thinking. So with that said, and that's my way of dumbing down this field that I find fascinating but really complicated to understand. I'm going to turn it over to you, Daniel, and let you drive the discussion, and hopefully we'll get some answers to the following main question, which is: how do we move our collective narrative from separation to regenerative culture?
