For this article, Renegade Inc. went on the road to the Port Eliot festival in Cornwall. The aim was to search for new ideas, great speakers and those people who are thinking differently.
One of the people Renegade Inc. met up with was the pioneering writer and, campaigner, Rory Spowers who is also founder of The Re-generation, a movement that highlights role models for systems change.
After many years thinking deeply about food, health, economics, community, culture and consciousness, Rory is now bringing together the best minds in the world to address our most pressing environmental and social issues. Renegade Inc. caught up with him to hear his ideas on how we really reconnect with nature and each other.
Arguably, never has there been a more pressing time for a regeneration movement than at present. The inspiration behind Spowers’ founding of The Re-generation can be traced back twenty years ago after the writer and campaigner read the book Rising Tides which focuses both on the rising tides of world sea levels and the rising tide of public opposition to an economic system in which runaway climate change and the destruction of the planet are its logical corollary.
Spowers was one among a group of writers who were ahead of the curve in terms of making these connections. Buckminster Fuller’s quote that ‘you never create change by fighting the existing reality, you have to build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete’, appeared to be a particularly inspiring moment for Spowers. “It really struck me”, says the writer and campaigner, “that this has been an ongoing tussle within the environmental movement. I don’t believe we can incrementally optimize these existing systems to make them sustainable because they are built or predicated on parameters that are just not synergistic with ecological parameters.”
Spowers points to the obvious irony of this approach:
“Economics and ecology actually share the same Greek root, oikos – meaning house – and they both refer to the management of the household for the mutual benefit of all. But, of course, when we’ve created an economic system that is completely out of step with natural systems, we’ve become the first species to generate waste and create linear systems when nature is obviously inherently cyclical and regenerative by design. Some people would say we can, in theory, then design our way back in but what we’ve got to do is turn these linear systems back into cyclical ones.”
Spowers posits that a paradigm shift is required in order for this to be achieved because, [following Buckminster Fuller], “we have to build new models that make these existing models obsolete. I think we can build these new models within the collapse of the existing ones.” Indeed, in Spowers view, “this is how big social and scientific change always happens – the scientific paradigm changes when the weight of empirical evidence becomes so overwhelming that everybody has to jump ship.”
Spowers’ Buckminster-inspired ‘new models’ thesis is indicative of an ongoing debate centred on an awareness of a transitional stage leading to the notion of a future paradigm shift in science that follows on from the Copernicus revolutionary tradition of the late 15th century. Whilst Buckminster appears to have been the initial inspiration for Spowers regeneration philosophy, the writer and campaigner also acknowledges that in order to reach the next level requires the additional input of others attuned to what he terms the three horizons:
“There’s the people working right here right now, there’s the sort of visionary step change thinkers like my brother and his car project which I believe is complete whole systems change across the board and then there’s the people in between who have got to help us get from here to there.”
In addition, Spowers points to a combination of other factors that have been crucial to the development of the regeneration concept. Spowers, for example, highlights “the ability for regenerative farming techniques to not only give us healthy, nutritious food, rebuild topsoil and biodiversity, but also mitigate climate change. It’s probably the most overwhelming systemic solution that we have across the board”, says Spowers.
However, this kind of systemic solution runs up against the kind of rapacious capitalism identified by people like Colin Tudgewho Spowers cites. Tudge, who coined the expression “enlightened agriculture”, recognizes that the purpose of contemporary agriculture within a neoliberal economy dependent on the market, is not to satisfy hunger needs, but rather, it is obliged to maximize the profits of farmers. It does this in ways that are incompatible with the notion that agriculture produces good food, that it’s sustainable, reliable, resilient, good for people socially and for the biosphere.
Under capitalism, agriculture becomes a dehumanizing process separated from nature. This form of dehumanization is indicative of the growth of the GM sector, the regulations around which UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has recently proposed to relax. Conversely, a traditional farming system is the epitome of a notion of humanity that engages directly with nature.
It’s the latter that lies at the heart of Spowers regenerative farming concept which his critics say is a well-meaning, but Utopian fantasy. Spowers rejects such notions as disinformation-driven that don’t stand up to scrutiny. “There’s no need for genetic modification, we’re growing twice as much food as we need to feed the current world population. These technologies and industrial mono-cultures are unbelievably inefficient when you factor in the fossil fuel use. More energy goes into producing the food that’s in the food itself. It’s a zero sum game.”
Spowers says that opposition to all of these things, as well as public awareness of viable alternatives, is growing enormously. “That’s really what I wanted to do 20 years ago. In the wake of Rising Tides, I started an initiative called The Web of Hope which was billed at the time as the world’s first comprehensive database of a sustainable lifestyle solution which was trying to flag up all of this kind of stuff. This doesn’t get covered by mainstream media”, says Spowers, who adds:
“Because the media is obviously corporate driven, they seem to be much more interested in geo engineering schemes, for instance, than the ability for regenerative farming to sequester carbon through photosynthesis. The regeneration project is a sort of updated version of The Web of Hope. I think it’s much more pertinent now. There’s a much readier receptive audience for it. I’m trying to place myself alongside something like Extinction Rebellion which I think is absolutely crucial, to rattle the cage and have this civil disobedience. As Martin Luther King said, ‘civil disobedience without dissent is consent.’ So we do need that going on.”
“But I also do think”, adds Spowers, “we urgently and critically need – just as much and if not more – a platform that puts across the viable, workable solutions to all of these problems. What connects all of them, I believe, is that they are based on deep systemic change rather than incremental change. They are about building the new model which shares many aspects of traditional farming, but is also informed by modern notions about soil biology, inter cropping and all sorts of things. Most of the carbon up in the atmosphere where it’s not supposed to be, has come from farming and not from fossil fuel use. There are so many complex, nuanced aspects to this.”
One of these aspects are the issues related to veganism. Spowers believes that rejecting meat in order to justify doing away with livestock and dairy farming, is misguided. “We actually fundamentally need livestock within an agro-ecological system if we’re going to rebuild topsoil and all of the biodiversity to thrive. Most people nutritionally within their diets probably need some aspect of those things. When you look at people’s vegan diets these days, some of these products are assembled from 50 different ingredients, sourced from around the world and they’ve got a carbon footprint, way in excess of eating well reared, grass fed meat that’s come from a local farm. Of course we’re eating 90/95 percent too much meat on average in the West. We need to radically down scale that but the fact that the notion we should get rid of it in entirety I think is crazy because there is so much proof now that the fastest way for us to rebuild topsoil, is through the well managed intelligent use of grazing livestock.”
The contentious nature of the above issues would appear to illustrate that regeneration is fraught with communication challenges. However, as Extinction Rebellion proves, when they are explained in clear and rational ways, these challenges are not insurmountable. The headlines Extinction Rebellion receive create their own momentum. “It’s the perfect opportunity for us to come together in mass mobilizations but also to present and raise awareness about what the potential solutions are”, says Spowers.
The writer and campaigner recalls a quote from a late Roman poet that the true sign of the age of decadence is when the chefs become the celebrities. “I think we’ve seen that happen. We are now in a phase where we have the potential to emerge out of this age into something regenerative, sustainable and long-term viable. People are realizing that the current way of doing things is not sustainable.
The potential regenerative remedy proposed by Spowers is centred on six areas – food, health, economics, community, culture and consciousness. “It starts with food” says Spowers, “because this is the area that wakes people up first in a sense to what’s going on. When people start to realize that the food they’re giving their children might actually not be very healthy, that takes them much deeper. It’s our most direct, immediate connection with nature on a daily basis usually two or three times a day.”
Spowers continues:
“I think what’s happening now is people are waking up to nutrition and making that connection back to the land as well as the impact of the food on their bodies, how that food is managed, reared and produced. And so for many people that’s the starting block. That then leads to health within the human body, family, community and the ecosystem at large. Economics is absolutely fundamental to all of this. Community, culture and consciousness is obviously looking at these much wider issues and how we can get more proactive within the community to embrace all of these things. When we start working collectively everything becomes much more tangible.
For Spowers, consciousness is potentially the most esoteric of all six areas, encapsulating everything. “We have become incredibly effective at changing the world we see out there”, says the writer and campaigner, who asserts that humans haven’t been very effective at changing the world in their heads. “We really need to look at what’s going on [in the brain] to work out where we have gone wrong.”
Spowers subscribes to the notion that the outer world that we see is actually a reflection of the inner world of society – philosophically, metaphysically or spiritually. “I have for many years now been very much informed by the traditions of nondualism within India and China. But also there have been nondualist traditions within the Western mystical tradition too and you can find evidence of it in the Old and New Testament in the Bible. Aldous Huxley wrote this fantastic book in 1945 called The Perennial Philosophy where he tried to trace and outline this single strand of truth that runs through all of these traditions.”
Spowers says that this singular truth points to one conclusion which is that consciousness is ultimately all there is. “But the problem is”, says Spowers, “we’ve identified ourselves, metaphorically, with the figures on a cinema screen but maybe what we actually are is the screen itself. And when the images stop rolling, what’s there? The screen. It’s the place we are in deep and dreamless sleep where we believe that consciousness is completely absent. But of course there’s something still there because you wake up and know that you’ve slept well or badly. I mean where have you gone? And that’s why the Indian traditions draw this parallel between the sort of state of the sage and the state of deep and dreamless sleep.”
Spowers continues on this theme:
“I think what the human condition is becomes such that we identify ourselves with our thoughts, words, actions and deeds and we believe we’ve identified ourselves with this three dimensional psychosomatic apparatus. What these traditions are saying is that what you really are in essence is that which precedes and underlies all of that. We’re so consumed with language and framing everything within language, that we are forgetting about the canvas of the mind and what was there before language arose. That’s what meditation and mindfulness are always pushing people towards – the witnessing and observing state that provides the portal to your thoughts, words and deeds.”
In Spowers’ view, “the sage of the sage is never absent from all of us. But by focusing all of our attention on the small details of the picture in the foreground, we’ve overlooked the huge spaces of the background. To use Spowers’ analogy, humans have forgotten that they are the ocean. “We’re so identified with being a separated wave or a bubble when in fact when the bubble bursts you recognize that you’re the ocean. You could only ever have been the ocean.”
But one of the principle ideological constructs pertaining to Western consumer society is the tendency to underplay the philosophical aspects of what it fundamentally means to be a human. This is because the idea that humans identify with the ocean runs counter to the economic imperatives associated with capitalism. Western society, through the medium of advertising and mass consumption, encourages humans to dedicate themselves to their outer bodies rather than to the inner canvas that contains the bigger picture. The awakening of humanity to possibilities that transcend the Self emerge from a struggle that pertains to the inherent contradictions of capitalism embodied in commodity fetishism.
Spowers experienced this struggle from an early age. He realized that the accumulation of money and ‘things’ did not correlate to happiness and that ultimately success in life was about being happy rather than being rich. As a result of his regeneration manifesto, he was also able to understand the illusory nature of a banking system in which money can be created out of thin air and thus be in the position of identifying, not only the difference between money and wealth, but the concept of real wealth which is not money.
By separating these two things, we’ve created a confusion in the West which has led to feelings of atomisation and alienation between people and from nature itself. However, enlightened humans have realized that this paradigm isn’t sustainable and does not serve the community well. Spowers cites the Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, who talks about moving from this end of the age of separation into the age of inter-being. Thich Nhat Hanh recognizes that real wealth and happiness comes from having strong family and community relationships and a strong connection with nature.
Spowers posits that Johann Hari’s recent book about depression comes to the same conclusions. “The notion that depression is largely a chemical imbalance in the brain that can be rectified by the administration of drugs, is actually proven not to work.” On the contrary, “the epidemic of depression in our society”, says Spowers, “is largely due to the disconnection from nature, from meaningful work and from family and community. It’s all about these lost connections.”
Spowers continues:
“What we’re realizing now with the advent of ecological and systems thinking and whole systems thinking, is a recognition that life is built upon relationships and networks and reciprocity and all of these things. And we’ve alienated and separated ourselves into this very linear, separated narrative. What’s increasingly emerging – and this feeds directly into this sort of metaphysical or spiritual component – is the notion that we are deeply interconnected and interrelated with each other, the rest of nature and the rest of the universe itself. We cannot not be.”
The speed at which Extinction Rebellion has spread across the globe and the extraordinary rise in interest in yoga, mindfulness, self-help and the like, illustrates the extent to which people are searching for alternative paradigms. Spowers believes that the common thread between the various groups is their willingness to come together to share ideas and get rid of systems “that are inherently degenerative and destructive by design and replace them with ones that are inherently regenerative.”
Instead of rewarding pollution externalizing corporations by means of public subsidies – which is what we are currently doing – it’s perfectly possible to reward clean and green ones that are helping to regenerate the planet. “There are some very simple economic tweaks that can be done to shift the goalposts. But while the goalposts remain as they are, then all of this stuff will remain a pipe dream because you simply can’t make it fit within that model”, says Spowers.
The Re-generation project, founded by Spowers, is focused on trying to assist in the shifting of the said goal posts by moving the conversation forward and opening up spaces to enable systemic regenerative solutions to our problems that encompass areas such as food, health, economics, culture and our very notion of consciousness itself.
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