Sustainable means not making it worse. Regenerative means making it better, and being able to show it. On Spiritual Land the test is simple and annual: does the land hold more life than it did a year ago? More topsoil, measured. More water kept on the land through the dry months. More trees, planted by the people who come, and more of them surviving. More birds, insects, fungi, counted by whoever can count them.
The tools are known: food forests instead of lawns; water caught from roofs and slowed in swales and ponds; compost from the kitchen and the toilets returned to the soil; no chemicals; grazing, if any, moved often; corners that are simply left alone. None of it is exotic. What is rare is doing it on a place that also hosts a few hundred people at a time, and letting the ecology set the limit on how many.
The numbers will be public to the circle every year. A regenerative claim without numbers is just a nicer word for marketing.
Related words
- PermacultureA way of designing land and settlements so that water, soil, plants, animals and people support each other, modelled on how a healthy ecosystem works.
- RewildingDeliberately leaving parts of the land alone so that wild processes, and wild species, return on their own.
- StewardshipCaring for a place on behalf of those who come after, rather than owning it for what it can yield now.
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