Regenerative Ventures

Out of the Trimtab Space Camp course with the Buckminster Fuller Institute in which we were exploring world building with Tony Patrick, Langdon Roberts, Jeremy Lubman, Elsie Iwase, and I gathered to think about how we could become involved in regenerative ventures. This was our initiative, in which we met weekly to think about how we manifest who we are as a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. The thought was that architecture grows out of values, principles, and intention.

The same topic is covered by Anand Giridharadas in Winners Take All and by Amy Westervelt in her podcast Drilled exploring the history of public relations.

We had the privilege of interacting with Vandana Shiva in the Trimtab Space Camp course, focused on regenerative agriculture, offered by the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

Vandana Shiva, a world-renowned environmental thinker, activist, feminist, philosopher of science, writer, and science policy advocate, is the founder of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology in India and President of Navdanya International.

The recipient of many awards, including the Right Livelihood Award, (the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’) and the Sydney Peace Prize, she has been named among the top five “Most Important People in Asia” by AsiaWeek.

She is a prolific writer and author of numerous books and serves on the board of the International Forum on Globalization, and a member of the executive committee of the World Future Council.

I met Flávia Macêdo in a Trimtab Space Camp course. She invited me to participate in Holoptic – Global collective intelligence platform.

I suggested to the Stop Reset Go team that if we are focusing on connection, this might be a useful approach.

Sallie McFague

The World as God’s Body

I was watching a video in a Trimtab Space Camp on regenerative agriculture featuring Vandana Shiva. She said, “It all begins with food, because food is the currency of life.”

I connected this thought to Sallie McFague, who writes in The World as God’s Body about embodiment and incarnation.

Jesus’ eating stories and practices suggest that physical needs are basic and must be met — food is not a metaphor here but should be taken literally. All creatures deserve what is basic to bodily health. But food also serves as a metaphor of fulfillment at the deepest level of our longings and desires. The Church picked up and developed the second metaphorical emphasis, making eating imagery the ground of its vision of spiritual fulfillment, especially in the eucharist. But just as the tradition focused on the second birth (redemption), often neglecting the first (creation), so also it spiritualized hunger as the longing of the soul for God, conveniently forgetting the source of the metaphor in basic bodily needs. But the aspects of Jesus’ ministry on which we have focused — the parables, healings, and eating stories — do not forget this dimension; in fact, Jesus’ activities and message, according to this interpretation, are embarrassingly bodily. The parables focus on oppression that people feel due to their concrete, cultural setting, as servants rather than masters, poor rather than rich, Gentile rather than Jew; the healing stories are concerned with the bodily pain that some endure; the eating stories have to do with physical hunger and the humiliation of exclusion. None of these is primarily spiritual, though each assumes the psychosomatic unity of human nature and can serve as a symbol of eschatological fulfillment — the overcoming of all hierarchies, the health and harmony of the cosmos and all its creatures, the satiety of the deepest groaning and longings of creation.

(The Meaning of Life in the World Religions, page 296)

A conference connecting planning, landscapes, architecture and people

I learned about this book during the orientation meeting for the latest Trimtab Space Camp offered by the Buckminster Fuller Institute focusing on regenerative agriculture.

This idea of family orchards is featured in Rupert Sheldrake’s book, Science and Spiritual Practices: Transformative experiences and their effects on our bodies, brains and health.

The latest Trimtab Space Camp offered by the Buckminster Fuller Institute is focusing on regenerative agriculture.