What is Regenerative Ecotheology?
By Christopher L. Fici, PhD
Regenerative ecotheology emerges from the creative communion of regenerative ecology and regenerative intimacy, from which further emerges our direct, immediate, and intimate awareness of the sacred embedded and embodied in every atom and element of creation.
“Regenerator 9” by Alexander C. Kafka.
Courtesy of the Creative Commons license. No changes made.
Regeneration refers to the capacities of any living ecological system to renew its life-giving capacities through creativity and relationship. Regenerative ecology emerges from processes of biocultural restoration in which we engage the “land not as a machine but as a community of respected non-human persons to whom we humans have a responsibility...reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants. It is medicine for the earth.” (Kimmerer 338) The journalist and climate activist Naomi Klein points out an important difference between practices of resilience and practices of regeneration. Both resilience and regeneration are important frameworks for our adaptive responses to our climate emergency, yet there is an important difference. Klein points out that certain non-extractive or non-exploitative ecological practices such as growing one’s own food with methods that restore soil fertility, and using solar, wind, or water power for energy use “are sometimes called ‘resilient’ but a more appropriate term might be ‘regenerative.’ Because resilience-though certainly one of nature’s greatest gifts-is a passive process, implying the ability to absorb blows and get back up. Regeneration, on the other hand, is active: we become full participants in the process of maximizing life’s creativity.” (Klein, 447) To participate in regeneration is to participate intimately with the matrix of inner (existential) ecology/social ecology/Earthy ecology/Divine ecology which holds our very existence together.
Regenerative intimacy is the key which unlocks our regenerative capacities. Intimacy is the energy which can draw down the dangerous potential of ecofascism and climate totalitarianism. The great historian of religion and mystic Thomas Berry teaches us that “intimacy with the planet in its wonder and beauty and the full depth of its meaning is what enables an integral human relationship with the planet to function. It is the only possibility for humans to attain their true flourishing while honoring the other modes of earthly being.” (Berry, The Great Work, xi).
“Regenerator 4” by Alexander C. Kafka.
Courtesy of the Creative Commons license. No changes made.
The ecotheologian must know of the care and cultivation of Earth. She must, most importantly of all, be filled with a deep yearning and overflowing desire to regenerate her own Earthiness and the Earthiness of all those in need around her as she is capable and called. The historian of religion Mary Evelyn Tucker remarks that “there’s a yearning for participating in something larger, more comprehensive, and more fulfilling...Young people say they’re experiencing a spiritual desert. I think it’s inevitable that some kind of transition of consciousness and conscience — of active responsibility is emerging. This can happen as we awaken to a deeper understanding of ecology as relational systems in which we are embedded. Humans are part of a vibrant, dynamic Earth community.” (Allegra Tucker) The brilliant scholar of religion Whitney A. Bauman adds that “we need new ways of becoming into the future that respect the multiperspectival reality of the becoming planetary community. We need to begin imagining with the whole planetary community in order to develop new ways of becoming into the future.” (Bauman, 62)
Planetary becoming is bioregional becoming first and foremost. The experience of becoming begins and continues and matures with the question of honoring, understanding, and participating in the repair of the relationship of Indigenous peoples to their land, to their space-time, and to the elements of creation. Descendants of settler-colonizer cultures have a solemn and sacred responsibility to serve their indigenous brethren in this reparative and regenerative great work. Included in this work is a constant return and recovery of what Berry describes as the cultural identity of the bioregion. In this description culture and its sub-components such as language and economy cannot be reduced to reductionist anthropocentric frames or aesthetics. To understand the cultural identity of one’s bioregion is to learn to understand the language and economy of the creatures, forests, watersheds, root-systems, microbes, fauna, etc., of the bioregion itself. In the context of regenerative ecotheology the community must function as a self-healing bioregional community. Such a community “carries within itself not only the nourishing energies that are needed by each member of the community; it also contains within itself the special powers of regeneration...The healing occurs whether the damage is to a single individual or to an entire area of the community. Humans, too, find that their healing takes place through submission to the discipline of the community and acceptance of its nourishing and healing powers.” (Berry Dream 168)
“Regenerator 6” by Alexander C. Kafka.
Courtesy of the Creative Commons license. No changes made.
Earthy entanglement is where regenerative intimacy is nourished, for “every species sustains itself in cooperation with others.” (Shiva) This is an intimacy which honors and nourishes the dignity of our unique, unrepeatable, mysterious, individual experience of selfhood. This is an intimacy which nourishes and honors the mystery of how our individual selves become entangled in another self/set of selves to create something new. Earthy entanglement contains the experience of our simultaneous, inconceivable oneness-and-difference with all other beings, creatures, Earthly elements, and the Divine reality. The mystery of this entanglement is a kind of quantum dance, of relations which move each other through the intimacy of mysterious communion. The kind of communion which can be observed, celebrated, but not mechanized, controlled, or commodified.
The nature of regenerative relations is the very code of the universe. It is the very code of the sacred design of the universe. The dance of regeneration is not linear, but fluid and rhizomatic. The dancer breaks the bonds which colonize our being. The dancer defiantly kicks down the walls which keep us from each other. The dancer transgresses borderlines (and the dancer always cares for the refugee there at the border). The experience of entanglement is where the sacredness of our identities flourishes (refusing destructive forms of identity politics). Yet this flourishing comes from the same soil, for “we are male, female, heterosexual, homosexual, bi, trans, queer, black, white, brown, latino/a, American, Japanese, Kenyan, and more generally of specific descents, yet we are also animal, biological, planetary, and ecological, inextricably bound within and to the planet Earth.” (Bauman 121)
The practice of regenerative ecotheology is always a seeking a queer hope and opportunity in the movements between homesickness and homegoing. It lives and moves with and within the unbounded yet still coherent rhythms of watersheds and ecosystems, of forest groves and People’s Shocks from below, from what the Black American poet/scholar Fred Moten and his colleague Stefano Harvey describe as the undercommons. The regenerators in the undercommons are the people who create “disruption and who consent to disruption. We preserve upheaval...to renew by unsettling.” (Undercommons 20) Moving to the Earthy rhythms of the undercommons is to move within and towards the faith, put into practice, that the impossible is possible. We drum out the possibilities of regenerated Earthy flourishing, hand-in-hand with a defiant Earth which is not our enemy, and certainly not our redeemer, but instead our fierce, mysterious, and motherly companion in this Great Work. Rooted again and anew in this Earthy body politic we become rooted and connected to everything and to everything which must change. As Moten and Harvey declare “we owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything.” (Undercommons 20)
“Regenerator 12” by Alexander C. Kafka.
Courtesy of the Creative Commons license. No changes made.
As the farmer and educator Shephali Patel teaches, regenerative intimacy “is a revolution back to the truth of things.” (Patel) This truth is underneath our feet at every single moment. This truth is embedded in every twist of our bones and muscle, every firing brain cell in the active life of the mind, every breath which utters a mantra. This truth is especially present in the seeds which give life, from the soil to the womb. Seeds contain the apophatic mystery of life, which then blooms in countless kataphatic qualities of being. Patel ruminates that seeds are “the immeasurable force of life. It cannot be seen, no matter how much you dissect it. And no matter how much we try, we cannot control it or predict it or understand it. It is the Mystery, in my humbled hand...Seed is sacred. It is what makes life possible and sustainable. And it belongs to the whole of the Earth, because it is the basis of our well-being, and thus our freedom.”
Patel understands her own experience of regenerative intimacy through the practice of bhakti (the yoga of devotion) and the lens of darshan (the vision of Divinity). Bhakti helps us to understand that “the whole world is a gateway to the divine. The relationship with the divine is immediate and constant and living. On the path of bhakti, love, service, and compassion are unequalled forces of revolution. Falling in love with the world will teach you the main precepts.” Restoring our intimacy with Earth is nothing more and nothing less than this. In these fractured and fracturing times this is easier said than done, but it is not impossible. The body of Earth is calling us to this Great Work.
For Patel darshan is “ the ultimate gift of love from the divine because it allows us to see and celebrate the divine outside of ourselves. In this light, everything is sacred and commands our respect. Everything is a manifestation of love; everything is part of you and me.” Regenerative intimacy is coming to experience again that Earth is full of sentient agency, full of sacred personhood, and full of reciprocating embraces. Earth is our active teacher infused with the active love of the divine, for “when you act with integrity, no matter how small, the Earth sees it and rejoices in it. The feeling that the Earth believes in me through what it sees in me bestows hope, power, and healing.”
“Regenerator 7” by Alexander C. Kafka.
Courtesy of the Creative Commons license. No changes made.
The practice of regenerative intimacy is the experience of regenerative intimacy (collapsing the boundary between means and ends). Intimacy, as the giving of one’s self in various degrees of fullness and the receiving of the beloved in their own various degrees of fullness, is always an act of creativity, of becoming into one’s sva-dharma (one’s flourishing existence). Intimacy is always weird, always precarious, always diving into the mystery of the sacred personhood of every personality we encounter, human, creaturely, and otherwise. To practice and experience regenerative intimacy is to dare, to insist, to ache, to demand, to argue, to exemplify that “to become your own house (oikos, eco-) is to make yourself at home in the earth-despite every force of normalization that would exclude or evict you.” (Keller Cloud 208) Against every pressure which would narcotize and make prudish the aches of our intimacies for each other, for Earth, and for the divine, the anticipator weirdly prophesies that the “Earth’s own sexuality, coarseness, charity, and equilibrium will be yours.” (Keller Cloud 207)
References
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate
Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future
Whitney A. Bauman, Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic
Vandana Shiva, “Everything I Need to Know I Learned In The Forest,” Yes!
Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
Shephali Patel, “Darshan,” Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth
Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement