Regenerating Relational Ecologies: A Global Action Inquiry for Living Systems Resilience

The Regenerating Relational Ecologies Global Action Inquiry integrates regenerative land custodianship, relational resource systems, and community-centered engagement to address the intertwined challenges of ecological degradation, social fragmentation, and cultural disconnection.

This initiative builds upon the relational energetics framework being developed by the Institute of Relational Being (IRB), placing emphasis on multispecies, bioregional collaboration. The effort will attempt to better respect and embrace the rest of nature’s rights as relational beings. Part of this tentacular approach will be through introducing Relational Resource Departments (RRDs) within diverse communities, organizations, and ecological contexts.

Through participatory inquiry, art, education, and collaborative action, we are in the early stages of exploring how locally-adapted, place-based systems of regeneration, in both ecological and relational ways, can be cultivated in tandem. Our work centers on relational and mutual flourishing, rather than extractive outcomes, and is grounded in the practices of co-design and co-implementation, whether this be with farmers, community members, or by communing and engaging with the ecological multispecies companions like the Trees, Plants, Rivers, and beings we live with and amongst. This initiative supports site-specific, bioregional actions that serve as living case studies to develop accessible methodologies for tracking and evaluating emergent systems using both quantitative and qualitative processes.

By mapping and engaging stakeholders at all levels of the relational network, from soil microbiomes to cultural memory keepers, our goal is to cultivate decentralized, distributed processes of shared governance and emergence. Communities by necessity will then play a central role in imagining, enacting, and evaluating restorative practices, guided by principles of equity, ecological reciprocity, and cultural relevance. Many of these already exist, and have since long before places like the United States were a glimmer in the eye of Empires of yore.

This framework will in part draw from and expands on ESG’s aspirations, but importantly, it will work to move beyond compliance and metrics towards what we’re calling RREGEN (Regenerative, Relational, Ecological Governance & Emergence Networking). This is a qualitative and process-based method for welcoming in emergence without placing so much importance on pre-defined impacts, indicators or known and anticipated outcomes. Radical, huh?

The initiative supports the co-creation of Relational Resource Departments across sectors, serving as decentralized support systems for ecological belonging within schools, companies, land-based projects, and municipalities, that provide resources, facilitation, reflection, and regenerative planning in ways that center ecological and social wellbeing. Wellbeing for humans of course, but it is crucial that the wellbeing of the rest of nature is integrated into the whole process. The vision is for these RRDs to operate through relational energetics principles, acknowledging the dynamic flows of value, vitality, and interdependence in each setting.

This alive, and fluidly emerging exploration emphasizes context-sensitive, relationally-embedded regenerative work, catalyzed by practices such as storytelling, participatory observation, biomimetic design, and eco-cosmic literacy and awareness. Participatory action through inquiry will guide ongoing learning and engagement cycles while tracking indicators of soil and water health, biodiversity, human wellbeing, and the quality of relationships within each bioregion.

Through this initiative, we aim to demonstrate how relational energetics, when guided by co-flourishing and care, offers scalable, replicable, and transformative alternatives to dominant paradigms. The integration of scientific, indigenous, artistic, and community knowledge systems will further help to cultivate new (and old) pathways for climate resilience, food sovereignty, ecological restoration, and cultural renewal. This can be done through place-rooted networks, or meshworks, which evolve independently while supporting the collective work, and remain dynamic, existing within living wisdom and shared purposes and stories.

The Regenerating Relational Ecologies Global Action Initiative is still a germinating seedling which requires robust, mycorrhizal rich soil to grow in, we welcome you to become a part of the humus as a relational human if this resonates. It is an initiative being cultivated by the Institute of Relational Being, in collaboration with the Schumacher Global Network, and allied regenerative, educational, and cultural partners worldwide. Please do get involved if you have the energy, creativity, desire, and any rad ideas you’d like to share. We surrender to the not knowing of this process, we simply realize we’d like to be of service to alternative versions of reality where relationships with the rest of nature and this living world is where we begin, and from there, with as much care and love as we can muster, we can ideally better appreciate that we belong to and are part of a pretty incredible cosmic journey.