#regenerativeanthropology — Public Fediverse posts

#RegenerativeAnthropology I did not do the work i had planned to do today, but (just realised) spent the whole day organising events that, in different ways, all constitute regenerative anthropology in practice: a university workshop on this very topic; multicultural harvest celebrations with my local #GreenParty, and a community heritage workshop in southern Nigeria for the museum i work for there. No progress with writing, again, but happy these events are taking shape.

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 101/n Sitting in pub garden after Eastbourne #GreenParty meeting this Thursday, Rachael said to me:

“I just want to make a living”.

I suddenly realised that this one sentence contains everything I have been trying to say here in the days before, and indeed throughout this 🧵.

We want a world in which everybody can make a living, not one in which a few can make a killing.

#RegenerativeFinance #RegenerativeAnthropology

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 100/n Happy the 100th (!) here is about something positive and exciting - #RegenerativeFinance. This episode of Nate Hagen’s rather wonderful “The Great Simplification” really chimes with last two posts: Matthew Monahan talking about his Ma Earth project financing regenerative projects, about “How Money Can Serve Life”. Enjoy! #RegenerativeAnthropology

https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/226-matthew-monahan

#FollowTheMoney 🧵 98/n In my attempts to launch #RegenerativeAnthropology a bit, i am interacting with so many amazing, creative, brilliant people working in #Regeneration. It is nourishing, exciting, inspiring. But all of us, all of us, are scrambling around for sources of funding all the time. So little money in these spaces! This has made me think again about how money doesn’t go towards life, it goes towards death, dead things.
Or, to put it differently:

This is a lovely, hugely inspiring clip about how the botanist Hugh Wilson revived an Aotearoa, New Zealand landscape destroyed by farming, simoly by letting gorse be and do its own thing. #Regenerative #RegenerativeAnthropology

https://youtu.be/ncl8zknx2T8

#RegenerativeAnthropology 2/2

It is pretty telling that “profit” ever made it there, accepted by everyone for so long as equal to people and planet in importance. A more regenerative approach, I suggest, is to remove profit completely and put in PLACE instead: place-based thinking, thriving communities, bioregions, ecologies. #Regeneration #Bioregional #Sustainability

Ok so this is the last #RegenerativeAnthropology illustration for now - I don’t know why, but these four Venn diagrams all just popped up in my head!

This one is an attempt to think through and apply the ideas of #RegenerativeAnthropology in wider contexts. It’s an adaptation, of course, of the famous “triple bottom line” of sustainability (first coined, I believe, by John Elkington): planet, people and profit. 1/2

#RegenerativeAnthropology 3/n

C) Solar Punk for an imaginative eco-socialist vision of the future. For palm oil, this could involve moving much more again towards small scale production and intercropping, or other ideas - i don’t know yet!

I find the combination of all three fruitful, nourishing, and yes, regenerative! 😊

https://www.tc.columbia.edu/sustainability/news/stories/2022/solarpunk/

#RegenerativeAnthropology 2/n

B) Historical Ecology for knowing, and reconnecting to, the many alternative, symbiotic nature regimes humans have created across the world – eg the long history of semi-wild palm oil groves in West Africa and the intimate relations between oil palm and humans.

Here an older 🧵 with lots of examples throughout world history!

https://mastodon.green/@pvonhellermannn/109410840331192595

Today a post on my own personal #RegenerativeAnthropology: in the combination of #PoliticalEcology, #HistoricalEcology and #SolarPunk. This may need more unpacking for people unfamiliar with these, but for now a brief explanation, focused on #PalmOil as an example
A) Political Ecology for understanding colonial-capitalist nature regimes – eg global palm oil agribusiness, how it arose, what it means for all of us entangled in it in different ways across the globe, plantations and all. 1/n

#RegenerativeAnthropology 3/n

taught at universities, it is firmly rooted in Western academic traditions, geared towards analysis, critique, competition, ‘cleverness’. Drawing on the many insights of the communities we research and write about, we need to centre wisdom, healing and well-being in our teaching, so that our students truly learn from societies and communities around the world, thrive as individuals and take these insights beyond the classroom.
#Anthropology

#RegenerativeAnthropology 2/n
But our students also need;
B) Practice. For us, this includes students learning throughout their degrees how to apply the insights of anthropology in jobs outside academia, in practical ways; but also learning practical skills such as basketry, repairing or gardening. And they need:

C) Wisdom. There is currently a kind of contradiction in Anthropology: it is full of alternative ways of being in the world, full of wisdom; yet as an academic discipline

#RegenerativeAnthropology

Teaching is a prime site for practicing and thinking through what #RegenerativeAnthropology might look like. For us, #RegenerativePedagogy has to be about the whole person, and include critique, practice and wisdom.
A) Critique. Fostering critical thinking is the mainstay of anthropology and university teaching as a whole, and indeed, it is more vital than ever: the world needs people who question the status quo and understand power. 1/n

#RegenerativeAnthropology #Extractivism 3/3 Resharing link to article itself, if anyone missed it before

https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/saas/34/1/saas340101.xml

#RegenerativeAnthropology 2/3
But equally important is
C) The person - regenerating ourselves, our students, our research interlocutors. So much of anthropology and academia as a whole is based on #Extractivism- exhausting extraction from our interlocutors, from ourselves. But jt really doesn’t have to be that way. We can research, teach, practice anthropology in nourishing, positive, healing ways.

#RegenerativeAnthropology OK so for next few days I will share some (visually highly sophisticated! Don’t laugh!) images to illustrate what #RegenerativeAnthropology can mean. Today is about WHAT we hope to help regenerate:
A)The world (modest, I know!). Contribute to regeneration, (re)finding pathways to regenerating the world we live in
B) Anthropology itself, and higher education as a whole, is in dire straights - we need to change, regenerate so much here 1/3 #Anthropology #AcademicChatter

#RegenerativeAnthropology Really looking forward to co-leading a Waterlevels walk through Pevensey Marshes today! I will be talking about how environmental anthropology helps us understand how we live in landscapes; loss, regeneration and connection to plants and place; and the historical ecology of these grazing marshes - a wonderful place to think through human-nature relations over time.#Sussex #ecology

RE: https://mastodon.green/@pvonhellermannn/109410840331192595

#RegenerativeAnthropology So this 🧵 from 2023 is about “possibilities”: a global tour of how societies throughout history have successfully managed their local landscapes and increased biodiversity. There is SO much #permaculture and others can learn from the past - all already there! Also about how there striking similarities btw different locations; “the West” has only ever been about colonial-capitalist extraction, many “possibilities” here too

#RegenerativeAnthropology 3/3
Finally, for today, a note on why I chose this photo to illustrate Regenerative Anthropology

Taken during a walk in Pevensey Bay it symbolises all this for me: ancient wetlands, managed over thousands of years; the swamp reminding me of all the heaviness of being trapped in “the system” (always “swamped” by work, so difficult to create new things); but all the different Greens symbolising regeneration, too.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pauline-von-hellermann_regenerativeanthropology-anthropology-transition-activity-7473252425831972864-o1m9?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAAIt0BkBUaNgLl_2JLMYW8cY32uxAbZO8FY

#RegenerativeAnthropology 2/3 I want to reshare here a 🧵 i did a while ago - many of the ideas in the piece were already in there. Above all, always, Possibilities (forever thank you to David Graeber for this) @DGI @nika

https://mastodon.green/@pvonhellermannn/112144067417740154

#RegenerativeAnthropology
So with our piece finally out, it’s time to put regenerative anthropology into practice: bring the insights of anthropology not just to the #TransitionMovement or #ClimateAction but to everything you do, everyone around you. I will be posting about this along the way - but everyone, please chip in, ask questions, give me ideas of what I could do next, and please use the hashtag if you feel like it! 💚1/3

https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/saas/34/1/saas340101.xml

@urlyman @RadicalAnthro @alx @kate @inquiline @nika

i really have to thank you, Jonathan: you have inspired me to, indeed, keep using #RegenerativeAnthropology as a hashtag. For some reason, it had not even occurred to me, but it is in fact a key part of next steps, ie thinking through and practicing it! Also: something to feel positive about! 💚

@pvonhellermannn thank you Pauline. Am reading it and now following #regenerativeAnthropology :)

@RadicalAnthro @alx @kate @inquiline @seachanger @nika @DGI

#ClimateDiary #Regeneration 4/n I forgot to tag people - no doubt I am forgetting many but @RadicalAnthro you were part of the gestation of this, @alx you are cited 😊, @kate and @inquiline @urlyman @seachanger
maybe you are interested!

And of course David Graeber, who was my colleague for a while at Goldsmiths, inspired this piece in the first place ⬆️-@nika @DGI

#RegenerativeAnthropology

@adamgreenfield well that is wonderful to hear! Thank you so much for sharing! And I just did a beautiful walk with some very nice thinking, feeling people, and am feeling much more optimistic myself. I think i had a real low point this morning - bad timing! 😊 #RegenerativeAnthropology

#ClimateDiary #CollapseDiary

“Now is the time of monsters”

So my #RegenerativeAnthropology piece, co-written with Peter Sutoris and Tobias Muller, is finally out. It is about the role #Anthropology could and should play in addressing the Metacrisis. It is written for an anthropology audience, but i wanted to share it here as it resonates strongly with discussions here on #ClimateDiary over the last 3 years. 1/n

https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/saas/34/1/saas340101.xml

#ClimateDiary #CollapseDiary

This piece by Ernesto van Peborgh is more or less where I am at on all this - #RegenerativeAnthropology and all. One particular point I liked: he uses the term #Metacrisis instead of #polycrisis, to capture that it’s all one big crisis. I agree, it’s better. Will use it too from now on

(And yes, it’s on Substack. I didn’t put it there. I am aware Substack is part of the problem. Feel free to just not open it).

https://open.substack.com/pub/ernestopvanpeborgh/p/can-we-confirm-we-are-in-collapse?r=4ug8&utm_medium=ios

#AcademicVenting 🧵#Redundancy But by yesterday afternoon I somehow turned a corner; I am beginning to work out strategies for being an environmental anthropologist in my own right, even without institutional backing. I may have a new book contract; a small consultancy for the RSPB; and some teaching for the wonderful New School of the Anthropocene. No huge earners but all really helping psychologically right now. Here’s to #RegenerativeAnthropology!
#ClimateDiary

https://www.nsota.org/

#AcademicVenting Surreally, I am on my way to a big conference, Anthropology and Education. Doing a panel on regenerative anthropology. But the conference cost an obscene £320, that I only secured at the last second - we don’t have a research budget anymore, but suddenly we did get one now (in June). Meanwhile of course also #redundancy looming. We so desperately need a new everything. #RegenerativeAnthropology, #RegenerativeAcademia, everything.

@natureworks I can't thank you enough for this. Yes, 100% applicable to a #ForestGarden. In fact, your reply made me realise that my whole understanding of anthropology is, actually, centred in forest gardens; that's what I do, basically! and forest-garden centred thinking is core to my idea of #RegenerativeAnthropology, Yesterday I mentioned this in a talk about #RegenerativeAcademia and someone said: so we need Forest Universities, like Forest Schools 💚. Wanted to share that with you!