What is a Regenerative Culture?

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A regenerative human culture is healthy, resilient and adaptable; it cares for the planet and it cares for life in the awareness that this is the most effective way to create a thriving future for all of humanity.

Regenerative Culture means improvements year on year, taking small steps to heal and improve, on all levels, including individuals, communities, our soil, water and air.

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More than being a network of “activists”, we seek to find ways of being and doing that support positive change. THis can include ceremony and prayer (in ways that are neither dogmatic nor expected) to find inspiration from things bigger than ourselves. We need to reconnect with our love for ourselves, our country and our people alongside wider neighbours; people and the natural world.

Regenerative Culture seeks to bring a different approach to climate and other activist movements. It is about how we move towards practicing and demonstrating the change we want to deeply experience in life in all society.

Its purpose is to nurture a new culture that is resilient and robust and which can support us all through the changes we must inevitably face together.

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Regenerative Culture precedes, holds us through and lasts beyond the actions that we take as part of our rebellion.

In Extinction Rebellion, we recognise that we have much work to do so that we can truly embody a Regenerative Culture within our movement. It is a necessary way to generate meaningful and lasting change in our shared world. THere is no singular definition, but a framework based on natural principles allows each of us to develop our own approach to practicing a regenerative way of being.

At its simplest, this means putting a little bit more in than we take out.

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The strength of any community depends on good relationships built on trust, cooperation, caring and resilience. Extinction Rebellion recognises that discrimination and lack of awareness based on gender, ethnicity, religion, class, ability and sexual orientation operates systemically to divide us.

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Extinction Rebellion’s core principles and values include welcoming everyone and creating a regenerative healthy culture together. We recognise we all have work to do to deepen our understanding of how to really have each other’s backs and understand mainstream culture can unintentionally side-line some people’s voices and participation. We also need to be developing capacity to shift conflict together. 

Extinction Rebellion’s Regenerative Culture Group aims to help the movement grow into a community that is increasingly diverse and self-aware. Such an Extinction Rebellion community can support other communities to overcome the effects of living under social systems that have divided and pitted us against each other for centuries. Extinction Rebellion is committed to addressing the links between ecological and climate collapse, and social and economic injustices. We recognise that it is marginalised communities who are consistently on the frontlines of fossil fuel extraction, climate change, and ecological crises. When Extinction Rebellion speaks of collapse and catastrophe we acknowledge that this is already a daily reality for many people, particularly in the Global South where the majority of the world live. We name this for what it is – an emergency. We keep this reality in mind and heart in designing our movement and our political and action strategies. 

We aim for the Extinction Rebellion movement to be enriched by the learnings and un-learnings that come from building alliances with different communities who have long been working on anti-oppression, environmental, ecological and other social justice issues internationally. Extinction Rebellion will continue to be a volunteer-led movement based on funding from a wider pool of inkind and other financial donations that fit our values and do not distract us or dilute our courage to demand systemic change.

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What is Regenerative Culture? (from XR Australia)

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