ABSTRACT
For one thing has become clear, the ecological worldview and the associated regenerative paradigm is a collective effort: the emergent product of many people independently working through the same questions; delving deep into the collective unconscious to come to similar conclusions; hybridizing and honing each other’s work, always pushing to go further, delve deeper, include more. No one person can claim ownership of the concepts and insights that emerge, despite the proliferation of trademarked phrases that is a product of the late 20th century’s colonization of the intellectual commons by the business sector. But this is a passing phase as practitioners struggle to reconcile a planetcentric worldview with the StriveDrive entrepreneurial altitude of the societies in which they work, until they realize this is the wrong impulse. That, as Charles Eisenstein puts it:
The desire to own, to control, is the desire of the self of separation, the self that seeks to manipulate others to its own advantage, to extract wealth from nature and people and all that is other. The connected self grows rich by giving, by playing its role to the fullest in the nourishment of that which extends beyond self. 2
With that comes the understanding that we not only have to change ourselves and our practice as built environment professionals and other designers, but we also need to create “the economic structures that support the connective self living in co-creative partnership with earth”.3
