We’re planting seeds in 2025
Without requiring the services of a crystal ball, there are a few things we already know about 2025: We know that it’ll have 12 months and 365 days in it. We know our global political landscape has shifted. We know we’ll be at the whims of an increasingly unstable climate, no matter where we live or our socioeconomic status. And we know, despite it all, that so many millions of us will spend the next 12 months planting seeds in the hope they might one day bear branches strong enough to hold our visions of a better world. Here, Regen Melbourne CEO Kaj Lofgren reflects on why these seeds matter now more than ever.
“We are now in the long emergency, the transition, the failure of the system. And this means that the status quo is holding on grimly.”
This reflection closed out 2024, when, on a call with Nicole, Alison and our mentor Mark Cabaj, I asked Mark how he’s feeling about the world. Mark has a lifetime of experiences working with communities in Canada and around the world navigating complex challenges in empowered and regenerative ways. Mark was Vice President at the Tamarack Institute for many years. He is a sage, offering potent and powerful reflections on our work.
I have also felt that the economic systems that hold us today are already in a long transition. Previous economic transitions like the emergence of Keynesianism after the Great Depression and then the Second World War, or the total take-over of neoliberalism in the 1980s, were seeded and started much earlier than a coherent public narrative took hold. When the story of our current transition is written, with the climate emergency, social inequality and rapid polarisation as its backdrop, I suspect the origin story will go back past this point, perhaps to the early 2000s and the GFC when the logic of neoliberalism started to comprehensively fail. While living through our messy, complex status quo may make us feel stuck and hopeless, I agree with Mark that this mess is in fact an indicator that we are already in transition. Of course, transitions aren’t inherently positive or negative, so the work remains in guiding this shift towards a regenerative future.
The second half of Mark’s reflections on 2024 were more unexpected and stayed with me over the summer break. He reflected that “in this context it’s no longer clear what it looks like to win. The stakes have never been higher, but with a population-level lack of agency and fragile change-making ecosystems, it’s time to plant, without knowing when we will be able to harvest.”
It’s time to plant, without knowing when we will be able to harvest.
I started my working life at Engineers Without Borders Australia (EWB), back in 2006. EWB was an early-stage non-profit, and with a small group of absolute legends we built a powerful movement of engineers who sought to put a humanitarian heartbeat at the centre of a conservative and all-too-often destructive industry.
EWB did great work and continues today as a potent force for positive change. In those early days we were inspired by a bunch of impact movements including Make Poverty History, Reconciliation Australia, YGAP and many others. The tone of this period was that together we could win a better future. We could end poverty. We could reconcile a divided country. After the calamity of the administrations led by George Bush, who oversaw the second Iraq War, and locally John Howard, punctuated by the Tampa crisis, we had the hopeful cries of “Kevin 07” and “Yes We Can”.
In hindsight, an unsophisticated reflection would be that we were simply all naïve. Perhaps we were. There were certainly those who felt cynical the whole way through, who didn’t get caught up in hope and could see how entrenched the degenerative system was. But I suspect it’s more complex than this. In darkness, as Rebecca Solnit wrote at the time, hope remains a critical ingredient to sustain energy and build new movements for positive change. Importantly, Solnit also offers up a distinction between hope and optimism:
“Optimism is a form of certainty: everything will be fine; therefore, nothing is required of us, which is really the same as cynicism and pessimism and despair. Hope is recognizing that the future is being decided to some extent in the present, and what we do matters because of that reality.“
Often nowadays, optimism seems in short supply. Perhaps for the better, for now is a time for recognising the realities we are in, and shaping it as best we can each day. How sticky these movements are, and how long-lasting the change becomes, is our life-long work.
I also prefer to think of this time at EWB as the training ground for a generation of leaders of change. I look around and I see many EWB alumni in positions of influence today. I see them in the Regen Melbourne team, and I see them leading many of our partner organisations. In a direct way, EWB’s founder Danny Almagor then co-founded the Small Giants Academy, which incubated Regen Melbourne into existence. What we have learned in the intervening years is the wicked interconnections that bind our systems in place, entrench power and prevent holistic transformation. Perhaps more than ever we can now see the realities of these interconnections.
Most recently we saw the reality of this poly-crisis in graphic and tragic ways in the California fires. For us in Melbourne the memories of Black Summer were vivid, with the new realisation that urban environments and cities are not exempt from the flames. The interconnections between the realities of the climate crisis and the political polarisation and vicious fragmentation that is still playing out in LA, has been further punctuated by the reality of economic inequality in southern California. Our social and economic systems are bending to breaking point in real time. For change-makers interested in economic systems change, it is no longer possible to rely on single-point solutions, individual campaigns, linear theories of change or simple impact metrics.
And yet, we keep planting without always knowing when we will be able to harvest.
For Regen Melbourne, the work we’re doing doesn’t provide short feedback loops or follow neat and simple impact logic. Our transition towards systems that have new purposes and functions, that are built for adaptation, resilience and life, are represented by long and sometimes undefined signals of change. While we’re hard-wired to chase instant gratification and for our progress to be clearly visible, it may be helpful to think of our work as generational, and the seed metaphor provides ample space for that. Untangling broken systems takes time and fixing them takes longer. And while our work in this moment remains urgent, and we should treat it as such, this urgency will outlive all of us. The seeds will outlive us, too.
And so, we need to sit in the epic challenges of this moment while retaining faith that together we will create valuable pathways forwards. At times when this feels shaky, I retain faith by believing that agitating at the underlying systemic conditions, not only the symptoms, matters. And of course, I find my faith renewed when working with humans who I’m inspired by, who I trust deeply, and who I can laugh with along the way.
While we may not control when we can harvest or who will do the harvesting, we’ll keep planting seeds with our community in 2025. And together we’ll nurture the conditions so that those seeds can ultimately grow into a healthy, safe and regenerative Melbourne.
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