Faith, Regeneration & Ecology

For a while now, I’ve been becoming a firmer believer in the idea of Bioregionalism, including from an economic and production perspective, as a major response to the climate crisis.

A good read here : https://kirankashyap.medium.com/what-does-it-mean-for-societies-to-be-bioregionally-self-sufficient-5aad49f88b3e

This pic (from the article above) gives a quick overview of the approach and changes needed :

I’ve also been saying that our answers need to come more and more from our biology and ecology around us. It’s indeed smarter from a local economy pov, but also great for health and nutrition, biodiversity, climate smart production and existence, local knowledge systems and all of this adds up to resilience. Given the overall shortening of procurement and supply chains, and lowered need for storage, packaging, warehousing etc, this also represents massive levels of mitigation in the medium to long run. It’s just the smart thing to do. The brain, and logic, just buys into this seriously deeply, even as one struggles with figuring out the how.

HOWEVER

I started introspecting on my own journey, and where I am on this. Do I truly believe in biology and ecology, and to what extent?

All my education, upbringing, messages from the market, 10000+ years of civilisation has honed the instinct for hoarding as the method to create security — money, resources, food, everything. My sense of security comes from my investments — in the stock market, in other instruments. My sense of immediate comfort comes from fuel in the cars, the reliability of electricity and how much charge the devices have. All of this largely depends on extractive mining.

The more you depend on hoarding and “banks” of everything, the less confident you become about the regenerative capacity of the planet to take care of your needs.

Over the last decade, some of my concerns and reactions to the same have shifted some of this — I now do think of the farm and the wells, and my ability to grow food, forage the wild and create a seed bank, as well as my skills around doing all this, around repair etc as assets and invest in them consciously.

But I’m still a long way off what one might define as a deep belief — at an emotional (not just logical) and belief level — in the biology and ecology around me. I’m still largely a function of all I learned as I grew up. I’m not indigenous by a fair margin, in that sense, even if I see the value in it and possess a strong desire to get there.

It’s not just a journey for the economy, governments and society, but a personal one. We’ve gone way too far in the other direction. Our faith and trust in the planet is nearly zilch at this point.

It’s a life goal (of whatever is left) now — to move as close to rebuilding this trust in my own planet. There’s a ton to unlearn, to do, and to then learn.