February 19, 2025

Many of us think of sustainability as finding equilibrium. Let’s be carbon neutral. If we take stuff, we need to make sure to replenish materials. Let’s leave the planet in as good condition as we found it. Sustainability often means shooting for zero. The Brundtland Commission’s 1987 report Our Common Future, popularized sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” which set us on a course to think of sustainability as balancing economic growth, social equity, and environmental protection. The report heavily influenced the drafting of the Millennium Development Goals, which were themselves the precursors to the Sustainable Development Goals. When sustainability and development are conjoined twins, we entrench values of linearity, reductionism, and anthropocentrism. 

We often approach sustainability as a quest for zero: zero carbon, zero waste, zero net deforestation. Or something like that. Sustainability to keep things as they are. Just wait! We will get there soon: Green technologies are just around the corner, with the price of solar panels plummeting, electric car re-charging stations everywhere, and carbon capture installations becoming more efficient. We talk (and teach!) about circular economies, planetary boundaries, and carbon offset schemes. We set up recycling bins, compost heaps, and campaigns to turn off the lights. Sustainability means keeping things from getting worse, zero is great, anything positive is a bonus. 

Nothing wrong with that and lots of good work done here! Certainly a step in the right direction. But it’s just a step. 

Trying to keep things at zero runs into a fundamental problem: entropy. 

Entropy eats sustainability for breakfast. 

Entropy is the inevitable process of going from order to disorder. It is why you can’t unscramble an egg, why your living room gets messy, and of course why your drink moves toward room temperature whether it’s hot or cold. The universe inexorably moves toward maximum entropy, at which point all energy will be evenly distributed across spacetime, leaving no usable energy for any processes to occur. It might take 10¹⁰⁰⁰ years to get there, but it will happen.^[1] Unless of course this universe ends with the Big Rip (the universe tears apart due to accelerating expansion), The Big Crunch (the universe bounces back and crashes into itself), or Quantum … Continue reading

That means that we can’t keep things at zero, anywhere. This won’t happen on the scale of the universe, the subatomic particle, or even the recycling center. Entropy always wins because open-systems (that can receive energy from outside sources, e.g. the earth, a lake, a cell) are nested within the closed system that is the universe.

Sometimes, without even considering entropy, we say that it’s not enough to sustain, we want to heal the planet. We want regeneration. Regeneration becomes souped-up sustainability, beyond trying to keep things as they are or making sure we don’t take too much. Rather we want to create systems to repair damage: by reforesting, restoring ecosystems, and revitalizing economies. We want to act to make things better. 

This is so important and another step in the right direction! But it’s just a step and fraught with dangers. 

Education doesn’t become regenerative by slapping a title next to it. Nor does a course or a business. Regeneration is a verb, a practoce, a process of becoming that cannot be captured and transported to other places. It is an energetic flow that materializes and re-materializes through interactions that are spatially and temporally unique. If we think regeneration is something that can be duplicated, scaled, and achieved, we commit an ontological misdirection and we risk losing our way.

Regeneration ‘starts’ when we are “being alive to the possibilities of becoming.^[2]Barad, 2007, p.396.”

If we privilege indicators that perpetuate extractive systems, we will increase entropic degradation of the regenerative practices we’re trying to nurture. These indicators could be: how much carbon we’ve offset (to forgive our unnecessary consumption); how much the green economy has grown (which still thrives on consumerism); or how we can fit “eco-“ into a course that exists in the dead pages of a textbook (and continue to participate in high-stakes exams that lead to stress, meritocracy, and zero-sum competition). 

Regeneration is not the mere act of healing. It would be as if Paley’s Cosmic Watchmaker were replaced by a 21st century Cosmic Pharmacist, dispensing as many band-aids as he does anti-inflammatories, without addressing the roots of the illness. Climate breakdown isn’t the disease, it’s a symptom. 

For instance, circular production processes—ones that eliminate waste and pollution by reusing materials and energy—aren’t regenerative simply because they don’t directly contribute to landfills. If a company produces and distributes TVs with zero waste or carbon emissions, but that TV serves to broadcast shows (stored in data centers with huge environment footprints) and commercials that promote competition, social hierarchy, and consumerism, that is not regenerative.

The pharmacist embodies the concept of the pharmakon, which represents both remedy and poison. No-thing can be categorized as either helpful or harmful, as everything exists within complex, dynamic networks of human and other-than-human actors. Contradictions and tensions are everywhere and we hold them simultaneously. This requires nuanced approaches that take into account infinite interconnections across space and time. These approaches impose humility and tear us away from our heroic (and humanistic) ambitions. 

Be careful not to confuse complexity (theory) with the many different ways actors(/actants) are connected. This is about the relational processes that temporarily stabilize actors themselves. It’s not how many things are connected, it’s how actors emerge from agential relationships. Entities materialize through networks of relationships, where matter and meaning are intertwined, and they de-materialize and de-compose through other relational becomings. In other words, we cannot isolate anything because no-thing can be isolated. Stuff comes up based on how we approach the world. There is no closed-loop system; there is only entanglement.  

I know this might seem weird and woo woo, but it’s hard western science and it’s also part of non-Eurocentric scientific traditions.^[3] ​​I won’t use Traditional Indigenous Knowledge because that would require a lengthier discussion, but I am alluding to it. ​​I won’t use Traditional Indigenous Knowledge … Continue reading 

We are biologically wired to make distinctions between an incomprehensibly large whole. Your brain is bombarded with around 11,000,000 data points every second, but you only process around 40. We see less than 0.0035% of the total electromagnetic spectrum. We categorize things, but these categories are neither real nor permanent in themselves. If our sensory organs were designed differently, the constructions we make of the world would be different. Other-than-humans’ constructions of reality are different from humans’ (most birds see the world in tetrachromacy—four primary colors^[4]But even when we do share the same senses, we don’t see the world the same: animism, totemism, analogism, naturism are four different ontologies that Philippe Descola explores in such fascinating … Continue reading). 

We are expressions of energy, events within quantum fields, which interact and fluctuate according to the principles of quantum mechanics. There is no such thing as empty space, only these quantum fields, according to the standard model. Yeah, it’s not woo woo.

If we consider regeneration as a process of healing without recognizing our entanglement in and as the world, we commit ontological and epistemological misdirections. 

Regeneration is not about setting up systems so that we can find better ways to recycle. It’s not about turning into planetary pharmacists. It is not about acting on the world so that we might heal it. 

All living be(com)ings succumb to entropy eventually and die. Life emerges as a process of offsetting entropy, what Erwin Schrödinger called negentropy. Negentropy is the consumption of energy to sustain complex, organized structures that would otherwise degrade more quickly due to entropy. Processes like metabolism, photosynthesis and reproduction are examples of negentropy.

Hence why death is necessary for regeneration. This is creative destruction. We are all made of stardust past and future, but in the more immediate, we are also future worm food. As soon as a living be(com)ing dies, it can be consumed for energy by animals, plants, fungi, bacteria. Death is nutritious. The food we eat is made of the recycled nutrients of the dead. Rather than macabre, it is a celebration of and for life: even in death, we (all that live or have lived) participate in the thriving of life.

Regeneration asks us to participate [in/as] the world in ways that contribute to the thriving of life (even in death). We are not separate, we are entangled. We constantly world and re-world worlds, not as individuals, but as participants distinguished from other participants only by the ephemeral and aleatory porous boundaries we draw. 

Put another way, we are not fixed biological entities, but rather emergent embodiments. We are co-constituted and relational: with water, the sun, iron, or the little critters that live on and inside “you” and that outnumber “your” cells by a ratio anywhere from 2:1 to 10:1. We are co-constituted and relational with the events over the past 13.8 billion years that have brought us to this moment, through the Paleozoic Era era where oxygen levels supported an explosion of biodiversity, through coal formed from the remains of plants and dinosaurs that fueled the industrial revolution, to the rare metals that enable me to type these words that you read thanks to the same metals. 

We are shaped by our specific environment, relationships, and material conditions, and everything that has led to this point since the Big Bang. This is our situatedness. 

In our situatedness we are confronted with ethical response-abilities.  If we emerge as unique spatial and temporal expressions of our situatedness, how might we participate [in/as] the world to ensure life thrives, knowing that this participation is itself situated? If we do not act on the world as separate entities, how might we be accountable [to/with] for the ways we are entangled? 

Indeed, I have led us astray myself. By separating ontology, epistemology and ethics, I may have reduced the problem to separate parts when indeed they cannot be separated. They too are entangled. None of them precede or follow another. 

Regeneration is an ethico-onto-epistemological^[5]From Barad process, a process of participation in ways that is deeply intertwined with ways of knowing, ethical response-ability, and the very being of all entities involved. 

By the simple act of living, we participate in the process. Living is regenerative in itself. The quality of our participation diminishes when our responses to the dynamics within relational entanglements hinder the thriving of life and favors non-creative destruction and suffering. 

Adding regenerative to education, a course title, or a business doesn’t make it regenerative. Regeneration is the process of negentropy, the continuous flow of energy necessary for life to thrive. It is not captured in empty goals (beware of the goal!) for “no waste” and the replenishing of the soil to help us produce more food. These are noble ambitions, but until we re-consider our approaches [with/as] the world and de-privilege production and consumption through an ethico-onto-epistemology that constitutes our participation as distributed, relational, and emergent, constituted through the complex entanglements between all living be(com)ings—humans and other-than—humans—and the material world. 

In other words, heal the planet, but don’t think you’re some cosmic pharmacist separate from the world who can administer a good dose of medicine to make things better. Rather, appreciate we are participants in the web of life who can respond [to/as] the world in ways that contribute to the thriving of life. And we do not do so with impunity. The marks we leave are agential and beyond good and evil. 

Putting nutrients back in the soil is great, but it becomes a regenerative process when we acknowledge we are all embedded in (other, greater and smaller) systems that corrupt and contaminate, infect and infest the earth’s negentropic processes. We cannot escape our implications in degenerative processes. Putting nutrients back in the soil becomes regenerative when we approach this with humility and the awareness of our situatedness.

This is more than nuance. This is a shift in our ethico-onto-epistemology.

If you’ve read this far, you might be asking yourself how this looks on the ground. Enough with the big picture stuff. How does this translate in schools (or anywhere)?

We begin by knowing that regeneration is not something we tick off or accomplish. It is not a goal (linear, causal, pre-determined), but rather a practice (messy, clumsy, full of errors and intentions). 

And we do what we can in this moment, right here, to cultivate relationships with all that is alive. We take care of our home, the earth. We accept that we won’t always get it right—there is nothing to get right—but we practice over and over again with humility and awareness, and therefore forgiveness. 

It wouldn’t be very regenerative if I gave you a to do list. You have to feel what that means for you and your moment, in your place. 

No more drawing from our bag of tricks (“out of the bag thinking”). No more scalable solutioneering. No more dispensing of anti-inflammatories. 

Regeneration is an approach, it’s a practice, it’s not a destination. Regeneration comes not from actions but in the awareness of our participation in entanglements, within which our responses are such as to help life thrive. 

It is our ethico-onto-epistemological response-ability.

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You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Benjamin Freud, Ph.D. for Intrepid Ed News.