The Regenerative Imagination
Increasingly, we are hearing conversations in some of our circles about how our imagination — as individuals, and as a society — is stifled by the ways our world is structured. Our economy, our political system, our collective anxiety about the numerous crises we are living through and into, our culture of disconnection and isolation: all are contributing to the death of the imagination.
But, at the same time, we have also been hearing about how important and beautiful a healthy, vital, expansive and inclusive imagination is for creating social change. The New Constellations project are thinking about how sound and audio can spark and ground our collective imagination; Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Towns network, has started a podcast titled ‘What If’, an informative and engaging call to action to imagine better futures; the National Lottery Community Fund are thinking through what it means to build an imagination infrastructure; funders, Farming the Future are inviting us to engage in radical imagination — everywhere we look, it seems, we are being invited to open the doors to our imaginations, to let out the wild wonders that lie within.
But what does any of that have to do with regenerative agriculture, or Farmerama?
To us, it seems that the project of revitalising the imagination and the project of regenerative agriculture are in many ways the same project. Regenerative agriculture imagines — both in theory and in practice — a fundamentally different way for people to relate to the land, and to each other. It does this using new technologies and insights, as well as long-standing, ancient ways of doing things. It brings together different kinds of knowledge in new and interesting ways: indigenous plant knowledge with Western ecology, political protest with land-based healing, alternative economic practices with movements for new grain systems. All of these different ideas and kinds of wisdom combine to produce emergent practices and more holistic understandings.
Imagination, too, involves devising and sparking new relationships, new practices, new principles and values. Just like regenerative agriculture, it draws on a range of time-scales, from memories of both the deep and recent past, to understandings of what we’d like to change about the world today, and yearnings for the directions the future might take.
Additionally, both regenerative agriculture and the imagination deal in complexity. They recognise that the world is a tangled web of relationships, with very little ability to discern simple, linear stories of cause and effect. They give us the tools to sink into and learn from that complexity, rather than running from it, or trying to simplify and control it. In doing so, they help us devise new ways of relating to and making use of that complexity, finding solutions that we might never otherwise have been able to see.
So, given these similarities, we think there’s a case for talking about what we do at Farmerama Radio as developing the regenerative imagination. We’re still figuring out exactly what ‘regenerative imagination’ might mean, but we think there are three possible ways it could be understood.
- In a very concrete way, we could understand it to imply Farmerama’s role as a piece of imagination infrastructure — as the jungle gym on which a more imaginative vision of the future of food, farming, land, and relationships can play and develop.
- It could also take on a more abstract meaning, referring to a particular approach to the imagination, the specific goal of which is to regenerate relationships; imagination starting from the perspective of equity and inclusion, ecosystems and ecology, community and relationships.
- It could also mean, very broadly, the regeneration of our (collective) imagination.
We don’t necessarily have a particular definition in mind here, and we think that all three meanings actually complement each other rather nicely. We would love to hear what other meanings you think this phrase might have — this is, after all, an exercise in collective imagination!
Why does it matter?
We need new tools to be able to figure out how to live in and through these troubled times. Not just live, but flourish: how can we collectively thrive in a world that is breaking? We think regenerative imagination might be one of those tools.
As an imagination infrastructure, regenerative imagination is something we really care about at Farmerama — that is, sharing the stories and voices of regenerative farming already happening on the ground. Radical geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham talk about a similar thing with their concept of the diverse economy. They say that a different world is already here, if we only look for it. Like an iceberg, what we can see above the water are the systems we’re trying to change, like industrial farming, or racial exclusion in rural spaces. But below the surface, there is a much more diverse set of relationships, practices and institutions already in place, but hidden.
Perhaps in our case, the metaphor of a tree would be more apt, with its root system and all the fungal hyphae it is entangled with already working away, just as real, just as important, as the trunk and branches and leaves. By paying close attention to what lies beneath the surface, we can help nurture those neglected realities, making them visible, connecting them up, amplifying them until, in time, they might replace what we think of as ‘dominant’ or ‘mainstream’.
As a piece of regenerative imagination infrastructure, then, Farmerama amplifies and connects the stories of regenerative farming, often overlooked in mainstream narratives about both climate and biodiversity catastrophes and solutions. By doing this work, we are part of a movement to bring regenerative farming out of the shadows and obscure niches and into the mainstream, helping to change the food and farming system from the soil up.
As an approach to the imagination more broadly, regenerative imagination helps to reimagine what care looks like and where care happens in our societies, and in our relationships with the land. Care is a complicated topic — one that many philosophers and political theorists have written about over the past 30 years. Joan Tronto and Bernice Fisher, two of the leading thinkers in the field of care ethics, have defined it as any activity that we do “to maintain, contain, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment.”
In the case of farming, for example, the regenerative imagination might help us shift the our care for the land from a relatively narrow, transactional, even extractive form of care that might see caring for our soils purely as a tool to maximise our yield, to a much broader, nourishing and reciprocal form which might see us care for the soil as a respected partner in our work, as an ecosystem worthy of care in and of itself, as kin.
Of course, care, however well-intentioned, isn’t always positive — for example, when assumed to be ‘woman’s work’, it can place the burden of caring for people and the planet disproportionately on women. But when coupled with the regenerative imagination, care can entail a regeneration of the relationship between the carer and the cared-for. It can reimagine the dynamics of power at play in relationships of care, recasting care as a gift, not a service; a mutual act of world-building, not a burden.
Of course, it’s important to be clear about what the imagination in regenerative imagination is, and what it isn’t. For example, it isn’t what Arjun Appadurai refers to as ‘fantasy’, which seeks escape, rather than transformation, a lament for a ruined world rather than a search for all the ways in which we can still live well. Furthermore, if we fail to imagine regeneratively, if we imagine the future using the same, degenerative tools we already have, it’s unlikely to take us anywhere new. We’ll end up producing the same system with a different face — industrial oat mylk instead of industrial dairy, lab-grown meat produced by the same, exploitative companies that already own large parts of the countryside and control huge portions of the global meat industry.
Farmerama as a site for regenerative imagination
Farmerama Radio is doing the work of the regenerative imagination in all three of the senses outlined here. As mentioned, we are a regenerative imagination infrastructure, sharing the work already happening on the ground, creating a place for new learning and understanding to develop and helping forge new connections and entanglements between different parts of the system.
In our approach to storytelling we work hard to exercise our own imaginations and encourage others to do the same in a way that regenerates our relationships to each other and to the land. For example, our recent series ‘Landed’ led by Col Gordon calls for a deep re-think of how we relate to land in the UK. Some of our core communication principles reflect our commitment to regenerating relationships: we believe that we have something to learn from everyone, and that everyone has a reason for believing what they believe, regardless of whether we agree with them or not. We recognise that there is a world beyond dualities, and that attributing blame or seeking to shame others entrenches divisions. We hope to convey this open, heartfelt approach to relationships to our listeners, too. We share stories of those who have been marginalised in mainstream farming (and the regenerative movement, too), and we share new (and old!) thinking on different ways we could relate to the land and to what Farmer Rishi calls ‘our body,’ or what we more commonly refer to as ‘nature’.
Finally, we hope to foster the regeneration of the collective imagination. We hope that by sharing the voices behind regenerative farming, and by helping to forge new connections between them, we can contribute to the collective ability to imagine positive ecological futures for the earth and her people. By creating a place where the farmers of the world can share their stories, we hope to rejuvenate the confidence and vibrancy of regenerative farmers and rural communities, demonstrate how their decisions affect us all, and trigger a collective, regenerative re-imagination of what it means to live well on this earth.
