The Path Ahead

--- Based on Dr. Eduard Muller’s Regenerative Development Talks.

“Look around you. 

Pause again. Take the time to analyze what's happening around you… in your neighborhood, your city, your country. The world. Are you happy?

According to most scientists, our civilization is at a tipping point where it has no more than 3650 days left to change the whole system. 

We don’t have to go over all the problems that the systems in place have caused… The results are all over the news… rising sea levels, change in climate patterns, mass migrations, civil unrest, lack of opportunities along with an increasing sense of scarceness. You know the picture. When instead… after so much evolution and development, we should be living in abundance and peace. Right?

So where does our hope rest? It’s not on our governments… Big data is being manipulated to get people elected, dismantling democracy and institutionality all together—the environmental and the social and future challenges that we built up over the last decades are at risk under the helm of corrupt leaders.

Is it all lost then? 

No! There is hope in each one of us and on how fast we can update our personal mental operating systems. Just the way we update our phones and laptops, we need to update our own operating system. Renew our wording, conceptual association, and metrics. Meanwhile, we must continue to further support the empowerment of new generations forcing the older generations that are in power to make better decisions, now! We have to oblige them to save the rainforests, to restore all degraded ecosystems, to clean the oceans. 

But what is the value of this information if we aren’t capable of turning it into wisdom?

Now, more than ever in human history, we have access to an infinite of information. But what is the value of this information if we aren’t capable of turning it into wisdom? The scientific facts should be enough for us all to take immediate action to tackle the pillars of our planetary degradation, however, we are so wired with the current way of thinking that we continue to promote agricultural pesticides, monocrops, social injustice, gender inequality, every time we feed this broken financial system.  

What should development look like then? For a growing number of people and companies such as DWE, the answer relies on Regenerative System Thinking. 

When we look at Regenerative Development, we don’t measure success from a single economic metric. We must integrate at least five areas at the bottom line. Economic, Environmental, Social, Cultural & Spiritual. Every endeavor we undertake must aim for the environment to thrive no matter if this is rural, urban, productive, or conservation landscapes or marine landscapes. 

The ecosystems have to provide the services needed to ensure planetary safety. We need to restructure our society; we need to regenerate our communities to move away from electoral democracy to a real democracy where people participate in the decision-making process for their future and with a particular focus on local development. 

We need regenerative economics. Our political structures have failed; we need to create decentralized systems to get young people involved in politics. We need to empower them to move into the decision-making process at a country level and at a local level in every sense. 

Culture is what makes us bind as communities; it's the fuel of cooperation that allows us to move forward as a unity. We must explore the new mechanics of regenerative cultures and sub-cultures, where we are all participants in the creation of a new global narrative. 

We need to create new indicators for development, based on territories. We must go to an area, start working on the landscapes, get the productivity back up, work on social economics. We put all this in layers and we start to have a picture of what regenerative development looks like. but we don't work on these layers through the disciplines. We work across these disciplines at a multidisciplinary level. We need multi-taskers, people capable to navigate across multiple disciplines and weave them together into the landscape. 

And to stop the old system from taking over again, we need to redesign education, reevaluate what we want to teach our children and how. New generations require new skills to be ready for a shifting climate emergency scenario. 

And it's all happening now. This system downfall is shaking the foundations of humankind; people were taking on the streets and raising their voices. We're shifting the way we eat, the way we consume, the way we support each other and rebuild our society. It’s time we become radical in updating our operating systems. 

The road is long, but there's still hope and a clear path. And as long as we have a burning desire to save the complex networks of species of our common home, anything is possible.”