In Conversation with Daniel Christian Wahl – Part 2: Hope or Despair

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Fifty thousand people flew to Egypt for one climate summit, and days later another gathered to put a price on nature so that we might save it. Daniel offered both as symptoms. The meta-crisis, he said, is not a stack of separate emergencies in water, energy and climate; it is a crisis of thinking, and the carbon-myopic response that treats a living predicament as an accounting problem is part of what ails us.

I asked how that thinking actually works, and he traced the machine. We take a problem, abstract it until it is the same everywhere on the planet, convene fifteen disciplines to define it, bring in the financiers, run a hackathon, fund the best ten answers and force them onto every place at once. What he learned from Carol Sanford and the Regenesis group across twenty-five years is the contrary instinct: come home to place. Ask who lives there, who is for the thing and who against it, what they had for breakfast and where it came from. Hunger and brittle supply chains show up everywhere, but differently in every ecosystem and every history, and that specificity is the only honest way to meet complexity without killing it.

We turned to agriculture, which is my own ground. I work with Allan Savory’s Holistic Management, where context is everything and nothing gets solved without an outcome held in mind, and I put it to Daniel that this still leaves open what a healthy relationship with nature could be, given that the question already sets nature apart from us. He answered through the plough, which let us settle and began the long story of power over, and through Cook in Australia, who mistook an agriculture more advanced than his own for wild forest. The real outcome of good work, he argued, is the capacity of people in a place to do it again and to break the rules, because the rules are written by the place. Ethan Soloviev had taught him to hold regeneration as a continuum rather than a definition, since the moment it hardens into a certification scheme it becomes a corset. Food was another door into the same room: we study the food system and the energy system and almost never the observer, the narrative beneath them all.

Then the hard question. I wanted to know where he stood between hope and despair, and reminded him of his own interview with Dennis Meadows, who no longer believes a sustainable utopia waits ahead of us. Daniel did not flinch. He sat with James Lovelock, who taught him Gaia theory and once foresaw five hundred million human beings by the century’s end, and with what it would take to live through that unravelling and still tell a story worth telling. He is more pessimistic than he was. He distrusts the self-congratulating race to zero and the fantasy of a world where everyone simply drives a Tesla. What he trusts is grief let fully in, and Joanna Macy’s turn from the Great Turning to the Great Unravelling, accepting collapse in order to move from there.

Part two of three. Back to Part 1: A New Way of Seeing, on to the Extra: Plato and the left hemisphere.

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability from the recording. Any passage that could not be made out is marked [unclear].

One phrase that we might use in order to describe the situation we are now in is meta-crisis. Meta-crisis, meaning that there was a large number of individual crises occurring in parallel, and we recognise that we cannot solve them at the level we created them, which almost feels trivial to say like that now. There is something that connects all of these crises, and that ultimately is summarised, maybe, in the way we think needs to rise to the challenge. So we lump them all together, we call it a meta-crisis, and we address the shift in thinking.

And then you quite nicely, just in the last answer, talked about the differentiation of your view of regeneration from the view of Carol Sanford and Regenesis, Pamela Mang and so forth. If I understand correctly, here’s my first question. You’re saying that there is a certain idealistic assumption in the work of Carol Sanford, where a system has a certain state of health that we can get back into, as opposed to seeing the system itself as in development. Have I summarised that correctly?

No, I don’t think they would feel fairly represented. The understanding of what health is about is that health is this falling back into a perfect state, rather than understanding health as dynamic, evolutionary and regenerative. But everything else they do, even, and to finish your question with regard to the meta-crisis, they have a very powerful response to this crisis, a problem-based approach, but, yeah, please, please continue your question.

So I’m very interested in their work, and also in yours, and for me there’s a tension between the two that I haven’t yet managed to resolve for myself entirely. I feel that whenever I get into a situation like that, there has to be another level of integration that allows the duality to exist, if that makes any sense. But, speaking of many different aspects, what for you are the hallmarks of the meta-crisis we live through at the moment? I said it’s a crisis of thinking. How would you describe it?

Well, people have all sorts of, we have a water, energy and climate crisis problem, in the framing of a lot of people. We have lots of well-meaning people working really hard, day in day out, to race to zero carbon, seeing the world through a carbon-myopic climate change response, and they’re all good people, they all mean well. And then we have one COP, where we have fifty thousand people descend on Egypt to talk about the climate, and then a few days later we have another COP to talk about nature-based services, and quantifying and monetising nature so we can save it.

What happens there is that an approach to crisis, or problem, or situation plays out. And that’s what I learned through Carol Sanford and through the Regenesis group, and why I’m so deeply indebted to their twenty-five years of regenerative practice in all I do. I don’t really disagree with them on most things, many things, but that issue about health is a specific one that we simply don’t seem to be able to evolve together, which I’ve been trying for a long time. But what I’ve learned from them, that Carol Sanford points out so clearly, is we have all been trained through education to look at the world through problems that we then have disciplines, and the might of experts in disciplines, take perspectives on the problem, and then we bring them all together in large conferences. And once they’ve defined the problem in the abstract, from fifteen different disciplines, in all detail, and shown how it shows up in every place on the planet, so it’s a globalisable problem that we all need to deal with, then we bring in the financials, who say, yes, let’s do a little competition with the designers and the technologists and find solutions to this problem. Let’s bring them all together for five days and do a hackathon, or a sandbox, or a design sprint, or whatever you want to name it, and then the best ten get our funding to do a startup, and we launch it, and then we’ll have the solution. And then we bring more funding in, and then we force it on everybody on the planet, because it’s the solution. And that’s the pathway that happens when you take everything through problem, abstraction of problem, find solution, and then bring the solution back to the specific.

What Carol Sanford and Regenesis have been about, and all their work, is to remind people, and to bring the dialogue to the group of people they’re working with, to say, okay, well, that was a little bit abstract and it doesn’t make sense to me, can we go into the specific? Where do you live? Who do you talk to? Who’s against it, who’s for it? What have they had for breakfast, and where did it come from? In the sense of, what is the specific of the place that you’re trying to have agency in, and that you’re actually capable of having agency in, because you are in that place. And then suddenly you have two ways of reducing complexity here. Either you look at it as abstract problems, or you reduce complexity so you can respond to it, through specificity. Suddenly hunger, energy crisis, food crisis and brittle supply chains, pandemic response, all shows up in every single place, but it shows up differently in a different ecosystem, in a different culture, with a different history, in response to all these things, and so on. And what they’re saying is, if we want to have a snowball’s chance in hell to respond to the polycrisis, let’s not think of it as a polycrisis. Let’s come home to place. Let’s understand that we all, in a cosmopolitan bioregionalism, need full awareness that everybody needs to do this in their place, and that it’s not about, are we Western privileged people who can afford to do this here, and let’s forget about Africa and the other people, that they better sort out their region and then we’ll all be fine. We need to address past colonialism problems, and economic injustice, and help people everywhere to start the process of meeting what you call the polycrisis in place.

And you named [unclear], which is interesting, because when you actually sit in place, in my book I call it living the questions together, you don’t look at the solutions. It’s not about solutions, of course you need them, and somebody needs to propose them, and you need to experiment with them, but at a scale where the feedback from the impact of those solutions is quick enough that we can course-correct them, or actually abandon them. And if we don’t look at them as final products but understand every solution as a stepping stone in learning, and we live the question continuously, whether our past solutions are still fit for today, then we look at the fact that we can’t avoid but live in the world that our answers, or our predecessors, designed for us. And we either accept that world or we transform it, and some of it is worth transforming, and some of it is worth accepting, and some of it is worth recovering, because we’ve thrown out the baby with the bathwater more than once in human history. Yeah, I could go on forever, but I don’t have these endless monologues, sorry.

It’s fascinating to hear you explain the background to your thinking a little more. I want to take this conversation about health and move it into the particular space of our relationship with nature. I am involved very much with agriculture. For me, one of the arenas in which the tragedy of being human plays out is the engagement with nature, but through the production of food, and what we think about that. There’s a lot to the approach that I’ve developed, but one aspect that is very central to it is that we work with Allan Savory’s Holistic Management approach, where context is everything. Context is, every problem, as you say, is first and foremost a question of the holistic context, and the holistic context always requires that I bring myself to it. I will not find a solution unless I have an outcome in mind. This is part of my approach to regeneration, that regeneration is ultimately tied to outcomes. We cannot have a standard operating procedure that pursues an abstract goal. We have to have something that we are pursuing in the field underneath our feet, with the people that are part of the local community. But it still begs the question, what actually is a healthy relationship with nature? And that question deliberately sets up nature as separate to humans, because that’s one of the core dualities we’ve got at the moment. So I’m wondering, what do you personally see as a healthy relationship to nature?

The thing is that you always mention so many interesting things to get into, so I will get there eventually, but just briefly. Of course, agriculture, I think, has a lot to do with the place where we started to create the conditions, through the technology of the plough, that allowed us to be sedentary, and therefore begin a different relationship with resources, that ultimately led to constructing sort of power-over type situations. And so, in many ways, if you look at Cook arriving in Australia and saying the Aborigines didn’t practise agriculture, they actually practised an agricultural system so far advanced that it was indistinguishable from what Cook thought was just the wild forest. And they did so over vast distances, divided into eight seasons, where they knew when to burn and disturb, and how, in order to make that place more abundant. And you’ll recognise this from how Holistic Management works, in terms of disturbing, and rotational grazing, and all those kinds of practices. And they mimic the natural regeneration process, that is both in all of the larger, transforming whole that we are part of, where we’re not separate from what we call nature, but we’re fundamentally participants in it, emergent properties of it.

So, outcomes, yes, but I always liked, in a conversation with Bill Reed, the Regenesis approach to working with people in place, in context, on a specific project that does get executed and does get built, or co-created, is to, at all the steps of the way, be aware that the process, coming back to Whitehead and participatory knowing, the process by which we co-create these outcomes creates the most important outcome, which is capacity. The capacity of people in place to do it again, or to tweak it, or to transform it when it needs transforming. If the outcome is delivering what the design brief asked you to deliver, and give them the key and say, here, and call us, or here’s a maintenance contract for the next ten years, that’s a solution. That’s not the solution. That is a prototype that has been co-developed with the people, to say, you’ve learned a lot on this, we learned a lot on this, we’ve actually ended up implementing something completely else to what we started doing when we first started talking to each other. And I think you’ll recognise this also from Holistic Management, that then you need that flexibility in the system, and that ultimately the outcome is learning to learn the questions together, even better, is continuous awareness of how our participatory, unavoidable interference with a place is either degenerative or regenerative, and we need to pay attention to this. And now, you might want to repeat the final question you got to, because I think I took a detour.

No, you’ve, so, one individual that helped me open this phase that you’ve gone into a little bit more is Ethan Soloviev, another Carol Sanford student, or master pupil, whatever you want to call him. He says that we are going to struggle if we define regeneration, because we’re only going to be able to do that now, with the knowledge, language, etc. as we stand here. So rather, we need to understand it as a continuum, and open ourselves up to the ever greater seeing, ever greater understanding of what regeneration might mean. It’s an evolutionary process.

Absolutely. Ethan is so spot on with this, particularly with regard to this, because the current rapid take-up of the meme, regenerative, everywhere, means that the usual suspects run the usual programme in the usual way, with a new adjective in front. And they’re not meaning badly, they are professionals trying to feed their families, they’re doing what they’ve always done. They just close the file on Lean and on Integral and on Smart, and they open the file that says Regenerative, and they dump lots of stuff in. I don’t want to know how many of my Medium blogs are in there, and they don’t read them, unfortunately. But the issue is that we will now, and this is where, again, dancing with Carol, I hope I get to speak to Carol, we’ve never spoken, can you believe it? But I have spoken a lot with Pamela and Ben and Bill and all these people. We can either say, you don’t get it, if you’re trying to create a regenerative agriculture certification scheme you’ve already lost the plot and you’re not being regenerative any more, and they’re absolutely right, yes. And there’s a skilful means that says, don’t hit them on the head and say, you bad students, and then [unclear], boom. Say, okay, if you hold your certification scheme lightly enough, we can learn something from it. But the danger, of course, is the minute it then just gets put into businesses, usually, and invested into, then it actually becomes a corset, and it avoids exactly what Ethan was pointing to, the ability of the system to be meaningful in context and break the rules. Because the rules are written by the place and not by us, and the rules emerge in the dynamic relationship between climate, as the place, water availability, people moving in and out, you name it. It’s a complex, dynamic, fundamentally uncontrollable and unpredictable system. The best thing we can do is aim for appropriate participation. That’s what I learned in the Masters in Holistic Science from Brian Goodwin, and it’s different from the kind of holistic notion of building the perfect whole, which permaculture sometimes likes to do. It’s participatory, it’s paying attention to the whole, the role that we have in it.

And I love Ethan’s work, and I think regenerative agriculture will somehow play out this field of, how do we keep people engaged? For example, you can run a classic questionnaire on, is your farm regenerative, and it is living the questions. But if you do it just as an exercise to put another label on your produce, then you’ve missed the plot. But if you use it as a, whoa, that’s a whole different way of doing agriculture, okay, we’ll plant trees, okay, let’s plant trees, and agroforestry, all these different tools, the toolbox is growing every day, particularly as we’re acknowledging we’re not the pioneers, we’re the quick learners who finally realised that the pioneers have been among us all the time, and we had the arrogance to call them primitive cultures. That’s as embarrassing as it got. And in seeing that, we see that some of these cultures have developed beautiful place-based adaptations, like growing underground, in sunken greenhouses, in dry conditions, which is something I want to try out in the food forest I just planted here, because I’m 280 kilometres from the north coast of Africa, it’s going to get hot anyway.

But the notion that I found very helpful here is to see, let thy food be thy medicine. But as I explored that more, I recognised so much that we try, in our life, to break things down into, say, moments, or little packages, like the food somehow transports health, right, I imbibe health and then I’m healthy. But what I recognise is that actually this whole thing is not just the doing, and it’s not just a being, it’s, as Claudius in the introduction was pointing to, there’s actually a dual evolution, a co-evolution going on, of the world that I am looking at and the world that is looking at me. We are becoming together in the process, and I have active agency in that, not a special kind of agency, just a relevant kind of agency. I am relevant to the system, and I can influence it, and it influences me. Which, so, I’m in danger of going off-piste. Having said that, I was going to bring it all back, but the important point for me was that food is just another angle, agriculture is just another angle, on the particular problem of a regenerative mindset. And what we eat is related to what we think. And I just wondered whether you had a comment.

Absolutely. There’s the problem of the problem again, of seeing things as a problem. But what you pointed towards, for me, is this Wendell Berry quote. The problem is that we have a food system that has no idea about the health system, and we have a health system that has no idea about the food system, or something along those lines. And even now, in the space of regenerative agriculture, the world has picked up quicker than in a lot of areas, and even these large incumbents are seemingly moving into that space, in a way that, well, makes my fingernails roll up a little bit. But this understanding that we need a new food system is now everywhere. And there are a hundred and one, UNDP, you name it. I’ve been invited to some, even some sitting at [unclear] inspired consultants running a kind of Conscious Food Systems lab inside the UNDP. Lots of interesting conversations going on. And we’re still looking at the food system, and we’re looking at the water system, and we’re looking at the energy system, and we’re looking at the health system, and we very rarely look at the observer. We rarely look at the narrative that informs all of that, and all of them are connected. And then when you try to bring that into the room, people kind of go, that was a really inspiring talk, and that was really interesting, but let’s get practical now, so what will be with our food systems thing, we need to get this stuff done by 2024 because then we run out of funding. And then they publish a report, and nobody reads the report, and they’ve wasted so many wonderful people’s time who are actually trying to make a difference.

And how do we overcome that? How do we make a food, I think that food, one of my, if you haven’t seen her work, if you’re working in agriculture, the work of Helena Norberg-Hodge and the International Society for Ecology and Culture, and even her wonderful, by now quite old, book Ancient Futures, it’s really, when I studied at Schumacher College in 2001, she was the one that actively, locally campaigned for a local food economy, and a relationship of people with their place through the food they were eating. And then the big [unclear] and so on started putting food miles on the stickers and stuff, but she really got that conversation going. And this entry point of food took us to place, to water, to watershed, to our health, to the fact that we are a walking ecosystem with more non-human cells than human cells. The ones you’ve got in my gut are full of an ecosystem without which we wouldn’t have health, which critically depends on what food we put inside of us, in terms of what ecosystems we have. And this is, again, having you on the call, the Asian cultures always knew that you need to eat kimchi and those things to get the microorganisms to build health. We need to bring those kinds of deeply lived participatory engagement with place into modern culture. How do you make kimchi and those Zoom calls and real food forests and still make a living for your family? That’s new ways of living together.

Remember the interview you did with Dennis Meadows, I think two years ago, something like that, you asked him in that interview, do you still see a potential for us as a species to respond to the reality that we are heading for collapse, where he actually responds that the notion that there is some sort of very attractive sustainable society ahead of us, if we can just find it, is now a fantasy. The global population, its use of materials, its generation of waste, has grown so far above the sustainable capacity of the planet, that there’s nothing ahead that looks like this sustainable utopia people talk about. And then you seem to be much more optimistic in this interview with Dennis. And I’m just wondering, also based on the comments that you made today, where are you today with hope and despair, optimism?

Well, it’s a wonderful question. I think it fluctuates, I think, probably for all of us. And for a long time, and I still, there’s a wonderful conversation, talking about different conversations on this topic, definitely this one with Dennis was eye-opening for me, also to have an elder like him speak quite so clearly, it was a really interesting experience. But there’s another conversation. If you look up [unclear] optimism, and you put Nora Bateson and Gateway with Joe Brewer and Daniel Wahl into a search engine, it’ll pop up. In this conversation with Kate and Nora and Joe, Joe always takes this approach of, I’m only going to work with people who take collapse for granted and start from there. And I never sit very comfortably when somebody leads with that, a bit like one of my mentors earlier. I had the pleasure of actually being taught Gaia Theory by James Lovelock twenty years ago, and even twenty years ago I disagreed with James Lovelock on some of his views regarding nuclear energy and growing food in test tubes, and so on. But he’s definitely demonstrated that he’s brilliant, and that his scientific predictions have more than once come true and started whole fields, like the whole field of Earth system climate science is basically coming out of an insight that he had in the 1960s, that life creates conditions conducive to life, as Janine coined it, but really his understanding that the reason why we have a chemical disequilibrium in the atmosphere of the biosphere is because life itself drives this chemical disequilibrium, and through that allows more life to flourish. None of the other planets have that chemical disequilibrium, and so he said to the first Mars mission, you can waste all that money and go to Mars to try to find life, I can tell you there is no significant life there, because look at this planet, that’s the footprint of life.

And so this guy is a genius. The reason I’m bringing that up is that James says, the end of the twenty-first century we will have five hundred million people on planet Earth. Sit with that for a bit, and then talk about hope and despair. Growing up to nine billion, and then eight and a half billion people disappearing off the face of the planet within two and a half generations, two generations living with that trauma, finding a story powerful enough that says, and still we can go beyond that meaningfully as a species. And what, all these kinds of race to blah blah blah, and now we’re going to inherit, self-congratulating white middle-class men solving the world, me included, I don’t know. I honour, I know enough of these people to know that they really care, and they really want to make a difference. And I also can see that we need these gradual, stepping-stone, Horizon 2 minus conversations, so something moves, and we can sometimes co-opt the system into a Horizon 2 plus stepping stone towards a transformative world. But Dennis was right, I think, that desirable, equal society is not going to be an Elon Musk, everybody-drives-a-Tesla type world. That is just a techno-fantasy, that is actually surprisingly primitive for somebody who is clearly intelligent.

And this is also, to come to a quicker point with an answer, where am I with all this? Because my daughter’s been in school for the first year and all of that, I just got every virus that came my way, and was ill for three months in a row earlier this year, and with that came a wash of neurotransmitters that are normally not quite so abundant in my system, and suddenly I was much more pessimistic than I normally am. And in many ways that pessimism had an effect on me, and it finally pushed me to this, okay, maybe you’ve been a bit too hard with this. Like Kate in this conversation says, well, you need all the roles, you need the people saying, there’s an iceberg, there’s an iceberg, we’re going to crash, we’re going to crash, and you need other people. And she herself says, I’m just not the iceberg pointer, I do other things, I do local doughnut economy, community participatory action to create capacity. And I think both are important. But where I’ve come to on this question is, more and more, taking what James Lovelock has described as one scenario for the end of this century, maybe it’s not going to be that extreme, but it’s going to be pretty extreme, how do we come together as one species and use every single bit of energy and material resource we have really, really wisely?

How do we have the mature conversation about the use of technology, to then say, yes, we love this, it’s amazing that we can have a kind of almost council-like sharing via Zoom in different places, but this has a footprint, and that means we cannot consume all this other stuff. We need to somehow more wisely regulate how much access we have to this technology. And how do we do that without some kind of top-down ecological civilisation, big brother is watching you and giving you your allocated little bit of this and that, and you just become a cog in a big bureaucratic machine? I don’t think that that’s the emergent, living, life-through-us, flowing-through-us way of becoming expressions of place again. And so this whole ecological civilisation conversation that Jeremy Lent, I love his work, and he makes the point that it has to be through local, but the meme is so dangerous, to talk about an ecological civilisation. It’s very distinct from the plural, regenerative cultures that are sourced in place, place-based. They are two fundamentally different ways of approaching this.

And again, I keep doing loops over this question, I’m coming back and back to this point of saying, how would we act differently if we accepted that collapse is inevitable and has been going on for fifty years, that pretty much all of us lived through a collapsing system in its final throes of resilience, and it’s unequal and more destructive, not better, even if the dialogue has picked up and the awareness has picked up? What would we do if we just hit the button back and said, okay, can we stop this and become human again, to the point of saying, how do we support people if we know it’s all going to crumble? Because there’s deep wisdom in this, the outcome, or deliverable, is capacity, not the solution. Because if you assume that you might be moving into a future where every single solution you’re currently basing your daily life on will come into question, then you’re going to focus on, well, what capacity do I have in my community to make decisions and come together to respond to unforeseeable, unpredictable novelty? And it’s a very different way of being. And yeah, we’re going to have an argument of, yes, yes, but there are these beautiful virtual communities, and we could form one, we’d get on. Yeah, but how do we live that tension of saying how wonderful the whole is becoming conscious of itself through each and every one of us, and at the same time we are connecting as cells in this larger body to reflect the Jewel Net of Indra onto each other, to make sense out of this participation?

I love it, that’s why I spoke to you, that’s because I love these conversations. And ultimately what we’re talking about when we’re with hope and despair, I’m not sure where our role is, in the spectrum between local action and knowing your neighbour and working with your neighbour and your community, and listening to the guy at the exact opposite end of the spectrum, and understand that when push comes to shove you’re in the same boat, and that boat is your bioregion, and you better find ways of taking care of that place together from the outset, in the understanding that you will never agree with each other on everything, and that that’s wonderful, because that diversity is part of the creativity of life coming through us to help us find solutions. But we need to want to find the solutions together, and we need to understand the original instructions, that life forgives an immature species five or ten thousand years of agriculture, but not a hundred thousand. And if we don’t get it, we don’t get it, and it would be a shame.

Yes. Wow. Not the guy who brings in the positive at the moment, but there is a positive in there somehow.

Yeah, well, as everything has a positive and a negative energy, I can tell you the positive from my side, which is that I think the magic will happen when we sit so deeply with the grief that you’re now feeling, and that I feel with a five-year-old in the next room, that we understand that through letting go, and knowing that we don’t matter that much, through not taking ourselves too seriously, we might just find the way of being and living together through what’s coming, that somehow will turn into what we’re meant to do. And that whoever comes through it will come through it with a narrative strong enough, a bit like the ancient great flood narrative, that we restarted, and life was worth it, and we found a new relationship to place, through life, through this mystery. And I think it’s maybe precisely that grief. It’s like Joanna Macy, before she called it the work that reconnects, to make the loop with the earlier conversation about the nuclear holocaust and all that, she actually called her work, originally, Despair and Empowerment work. And it was all around confronting the horror of a nuclear holocaust, and the confrontation between east and west. And then when that dissolved, she took that work into what is now the work that reconnects, and she called it the Great Turning for a long, long time, and then started to question that herself for two reasons. For the one reason that the Great Turning still does what Marcus was pointing to, this progress idea that the solution is always around the corner, like if we only create this utopia of regenerative cultures we will all live happily ever after. No. Find the regeneration in the culture that you’re in the middle of, and see that it’s already there, it’s life getting through them, but we need to make it visible, we need to connect it, we need to fan those embers, and see that in our imperfections, it’s here right now that we can make the difference, not tomorrow. And so the Great Turning is still a bit of a progress-based framing, of one day we’ll have a better world. No. And the other bit is that she’s not calling it the Great Turning any more, she’s calling it the Great Unravelling, and that’s accepting collapse in order to move from there.