I think I have a new hero. Chris Dixon has been observing a bit of land in north Wales for over twenty years, and the way he sees it makes me grin. Read this about a piece of land regenerating. He talks about the surging power with which land reclaims its complexity, and I get excited because that is possibly my favourite thing in the universe: it is why I adore pioneers and flux and change and spotting new species and new interactions. He has massive esteem for gorse and bracken and brambles and thickets and untidiness and weeds. An idea which has been living somewhere within me for a while is that ‘regeneration’ in nature is not a temporary state between something managed and something wild or a period of flux between stable systems, it is actually the wild. There is not a stable wild. I will say more about this in future posts, but it is relevant to mention here because Chris Dixon looks at the ridiculously large harvests of useful things you can make from a regenerating piece of land, and how every action within it is an act of gardening. I think that a piece of land actually wants to continually change and ‘regenerate’ and that any kind of enforced, managed stability is not healthy in the long term (and usually the short term) and it would not surprise me in the slightest if the most ‘productive’ land is actually land that is allowed to change.
So I was reading his description of regeneration, all happy and thinking about land, and then he threw this in, and it blew my mind and made me laugh with joy at the connections he makes:
“In all the above, that is, the observation of a regenerating eco-system, we are dealing with a holistic system which includes both matter and consciousness (us as observers/interactors). In the same way that environments and soils have become eroded and degraded, so too have we as individuals and communities suffered erosion and degradation. I would suggest that the regeneration of individuals and communities can be approached in the same way as that of environments; that is, we can think of ourselves and our communities as having similar tremendous powers of regeneration, able to recover from enormous damage, heal ancient wounds, re-create our natural diversity and abundance.
Also, as with regenerating environments, this process is both easy to initiate and entirely appropriate. Like land we are dynamic and will inevitably move in the appropriate direction as limits are peeled away. Like land, the identification of the key limiting factors operating on individuals and communities is essential. These limits need to be approached in a specific order if they are to be successfully resolved. I believe that as with land, what I have called here regeneration is part of our very nature and requires only the briefest opportunity to begin to grow and flourish.
When we consider ourselves and our communities, the primary limits to yield may well be found within the very patterns of our thinking and the closely coupled patterns of our behaviour. These may manifest themselves as, for example, addictions or habituations to substances and events. As at Argel, it was necessary to erect a fence in order to exclude the primary limit to yield, grazing animals. Given time, those same animals can be allowed occasional access; Argel is now so powerful it would take considerable effort to reduce it to degraded grassland. We could consider that we may have individual and cultural needs to erect fences and boundaries, in order to allow regeneration to take hold. Some of these may turn out to be temporary.”
Tags: dixon, regeneration, vitality
