Our Lady is still burning! Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, … the reGeneration is rising!

Of course I am deeply saddened by the catastrophic fire that destroyed so much of one of the most emblematic — and beautiful — buildings in the world.

Notre Dame burned for one night, but ‘Our Lady’ — Gaia, Pachamama, Mother Earth — has been buring for centuries and millennia! … and what’s more, our species has been the arsonist for all that time!

I am also deeply confused and disturbed seeing how quickly politicians, billionaires and corporations around the world can pledge vast amounts of money to restore a building, yet continue to ignore the fact that dozens — possibly hundreds — of species are going extinct every day!

The world’s press is covering how the roof for the cathedral was know as ‘the forest’ but seems criminally silent on the fact that in 2017 the world lost 15.8 million hectares of Tropical Tree Cover Loss. Over the last 5000 years we have denuded the planet of 1800 million trees!

Greta Thurnberg invited delegates at the European Parliament this week to “panic” and act “as if our house is on fire” in response to climate chaos. In reference to the Notre Dame fire she reminded them that it will take ‘Cathedral Thinking’ to respond to our planet’s emergency.

Yes! It will take Cathedral Thinking to “redesign the human presence on Earth from being degenerative to being regenerative and healing”. It is a job all of us who are alive today have to do together — as one mature human family! It is a job we will start, but Greta’s generation’s children and grandchildren will have to finish.

I was moved to tears when I joined one of the ‘Friday for Future’ marches in Palma de Mallorca last month. Thank you Greta for your outstanding leadership! Thank you for waking up so many to the immanence of irreversible climate cataclysm and for mobilising school children around the world. As one of the signs read: “You know you are in trouble when children act like leaders, because leaders are acting like children!”

Healing the Earth and her people is an inter-generational commitment to the future of humanity and the potential thriving of all life on Earth. It is our rite of passage to step into mature membership of the community of life.

The ‘Fridays for Future’ movement, the ‘Extinction Rebellion’, the calls for ‘Deep Adaptation’ and an ‘Ecological Cililization’ are all signs of an underlying process, a confluence of movements and people. The reGeneration is rising! We are moving into the ‘Planetary Era’!

People are coming together in many places around the world to explore what it would mean to create regenerative cultures carefully adapted to the bio-cultural uniqueness of the places they inhabit.

People are forming networks to explore what regenerative bioregional economies could contribute to healing the Earth and her people. Bioregional regenerative development is offering a resilience building streatgey in the short- to mid-term and an effective global warming reversal strategy once we start to employ ‘Cathedral Thinking’. We can reforest, restore grasslands, wetlands, and ocean ecosystems. We can heal ecosystems and the biosphere. The commitment is rising to do so before it is too late.

Change is afoot! The UN is calling a Decade on Ecosystems Restoration. The Planetary Health Alliance is speaking up about the intricate link between planetary health, ecosystems health, population health and our individual health and wellbeing. We are making the links between social and ecological regeneration and planetary health.

If we watch not to create and ‘other’ with all these impulses and unite behind their shared intentions to be of service to the Earth and her people. If we keep building the ‘us’ in ever broader alliances, then this can be the dawn of the Century of Regeneration and future generations will continue the planetary healing we are called to start — TODAY!

The reGeneration is rising and the vision of regeneration is hitting the mainstream. The regenerative (r)evolution is beginning to find new expressions in art, music, theatre, film, dance, as cultural creatives are taking the call for humanity to come together as life and on behalf of life into all forms of cultural expression. We need much more of that!

Join the reGeneration!

We are ‘here to love’ we are ‘here to heal’ — the planet and ourselves!

Yes, it will take ‘Cathedral Thinking’ and sustained commitment for this and future generations, but we have to claim the truth that as life we are capable of creating conditions conducive to life and act accordingly for the sake of future generations and life on Earth.

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First published on my Medium blog

Daniel Christian Wahl, Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures

Twitter: @DrDCWahl

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