Regeneration is the Future

Not long after dawn on New Year’s Day 2019, I was paddling a stand-up board across the glass-smooth Lake Norman near Charlotte, North Carolina, thinking about what I wanted to accomplish in the year ahead, when I saw a plastic bottle floating in my path.

As I knelt down on the board to fish the mossy plastic out of the lake, I had a series of thoughts that combined to form something like a Eureka moment:

1. We have royally messed up the planet.
2. I believe that we, using our combined, globally networked ingenuity, can fix it.
3. Almost all of the futures currently being described are bad and scary ones (fair enough, people need to understand how serious the situation is), but what are the detailed scenarios we actually want to bring about?
4. I’m in the business of creating future scenarios.
5. Let’s create future scenarios in which we have actually fixed things and talk about how we got there.
6. I don’t have the domain expertise to create those detailed scenarios (yet!), so I’ll start collecting the visions of the people on the front lines of what I’ve since learned is being called Regeneration, a term that strikes me as more expansive and proactive even than the concept of a Circular Economy.