“ It is undeniable that maximising one service or function, such as productivity, involves sacrificing others in some ecosystems and for some combinations of services. An important case involves the trade-off between resilience and productivity in many intensive agricultural and aquacultural systems. ”
Our food systems are the nexus of our collective relationships with the environment and with one another. How we harvest, eat, share, and celebrate our food each reflects different facets of our broader cultural story.
Contemporary industrial and globalized approaches to food production are both directly and indirectly implicated in the many different environmental crises that our societies face. It is not the goal of this website to detail the various problems with and myths about industrial agriculture; this is ground well covered elsewhere. Suffice it to say that we cannot continue to produce food as we do, nor can we continue on this growth-quest to endlessly increase food production.
While there seems to be widespread agreement that our food systems need to change, few agree on quite what that change ought to look like. Regeneration and regenerative systems is an important emerging design principle in this conversation. In the simplest sense, regeneration describes any process or system that restores and renews. As a design principle, regeneration entails working with the patterns and processes of nature, what I call the conservation of change, comporting ourselves such that we maintain or even enhance these processes of healing and renewal rather than undermining them.
In regenerative agriculture, for example, farmers aim not just to sustain yields but to actively enhance soil health, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration. Regenerative economics envisions self-renewing, circular flows of resources and capital. Even in medicine, regenerative therapies focus on stimulating the body’s innate healing potential.
From Doing Less Harm to Doing More Good. From Paolini et al 2024.
Across all these contexts, regeneration prioritizes life, resilience, and abundance over stasis and harm reduction. Which brings us to the most important way that regeneration moves us forward from the notion of sustainability. Sustainability, generally, means “doing less harm”—finding ways to reduce our footprint while still getting what we need from the world around us. But regeneration moves beyond this notion that people can only have a harmful footprint, and opens the potential for us to use our footprint to “do more good.”
When it comes to food systems, definitions for regenerative agriculture vary and consensus is rare, so I’ve suggested one possible way of thinking for regenerative food systems based on the conservation of change principle. Published in Agriculture and Human Values, the paper argues that the regenerative potential of food systems is linked not to specific technologies or practice, per se (though they do matter), but instead is driven by how our food systems are organized.
I’ll get into the framework in a moment, but first some additional thoughts on what people mean when they say regenerative agriculture. In a nutshell, regenerative agriculture refers to a collection of integrated practices for food production that emphasize soil health, carbon sequestration, ecosystem resilience, and nutrient-dense foods. At the heart of regenerative agriculture is a commitment to improving the ecological (and sometimes social) outcomes of agricultural practices, usually starting with soil health as a foundation for addressing issues related to climate change, water quality, land productivity, and biodiversity conservation.
John Ikerd argues that at the heart of regenerative systems is a question of energy. He rightly notes that whenever we use energy, for example eating food, we are transforming that energy from more useful to less useful forms. Living systems are adapted to return energy from less useful to more useful forms, so whether our food systems are regenerative depends on whether our food systems are organized in a way that works with, or against, this capacity.
Flexibility and diversity are two of the most important organizational features of food systems. In this paper I present a framework for making sense of the various possible configurations of food production systems based on the intersection of these features. I identify four archetypical food system configurations: degenerative, impoverished, coerced, and regenerative.
Degenerative regimes are rigid in that they focus on only one or a few resources until they’re overharvested. “Fishing down the foodweb” is a degenerative pattern well known in fisheries
Impoverished regimes are often left in the wake of degenerative ones, for example where colonial settler states come in, degrade resources, and move on, leaving local people to contend with the impoverished and marginalized conditions left behind.
Coerced regimes are among the most common, I think. These are systems like monocultures that actively favour and cultivate one or a few highly valued resources. They can seem sustainable, but in fact require high levels of subsidization and they can become very vulnerable.
Finally, we have regenerative systems, where people are flexible and work with a diversity of resources and accept natural cycles of variability and change. Many regenerative systems, like swidden agriculture, regenerative ranching, and Indigenous fire management, are designed to mimic, or even enhance, the natural cycles of regeneration on the landscape.
Making Sense of It All
As a boundary concept, regeneration’s power lies in its flexibility. It maintains a core essence while adapting to the needs of each field. This conceptual fluidity enables knowledge sharing and place-based solutions tailored to unique social and ecological contexts. A regenerative farm in Minnesota will necessarily look different than one in Colombia, but both can draw from a common ethos.
Of course, regeneration’s growing popularity also brings risks. Some worry the term could get diluted, co-opted, or reduced to a corporate marketing ploy. Agribusinesses and financial institutions are increasingly jumping on the regenerative bandwagon, often without fundamentally altering their extractive business models. Meanwhile, much of the traditional ecological knowledge and practice fueling the regenerative movement is arguably lifted from Indigenous and peasant communities; this colonial appropriation of this wisdom remains a serious concern.
Regeneration is still an emergent concept, but its promise is undeniable. In a world of compounding crises, shifting beyond harm reduction to healing and enrichment has never been more vital. Whether in a field or a factory, a clinic or a classroom, regenerative thinking invites us to embrace the broader networks and communities we are embedded in — to regenerate the underlying state of relations between people, place, and planet.