Why This Work Matters

We live with the unprecedented spectre of more people impoverished and homeless than ever before, along with an immense and growing chasm between the rich and poor. As Rachel Morello-Frosch wrote,

“Skin color and wealth remain pervasive fault lines in U.S. society, as best proved by the persistence of economically and racially segregated communitites. People living in these places face excessive stressors, including poverty, substandard housing, malnutrition and lack of health care. Environmental burdens – notably pollution from power plants, freeway corridors and chemical manufacturing plants – are also concentrated in the same neighborhoods.”*

At the same time humans are consuming our planet’s resources at a rate 25% faster than Earth can renew them, with every ecosystem on Earth in decline at once. Our own economy recently received the closest thing to a life threatening diagnosis since the Great Depression.

We are overdue to recognize, as Thomas Berry has said, that “the earth is the primary system, and all human systems are secondary and derivative.” Since we can no longer enhance the secondary systems – our human systems – at the expense of the earth system, the question is how do we align our human systems with earth’s systems? How do we put back together the world we’ve taken apart? How do we become a mutually enhancing presence on earth? How do we love one another and live aright with the world? These are the questions and the impetus behind the Center for Regenerative Society and what we are trying to address in the largest sense.

The programs we offer feature secular and spiritual leaders of national stature who help us deepen our public conversation about the patterns to our problems, and how we might together go about “solving for pattern” more effectively within the framework of a socially just and ecologically sustainable culture and economy. In doing so we work with people of all faiths and none, and with each program encourage collaboration across all sectors of our society and economy.

By intentionally supporting the development and interaction of transformative leaders in our region, who have the greatest capacity of advancing the pace of change in this direction and motivating others to join them, we are fostering a broader movement for regenerative society in which more and more people feel empowered to become effective change-makers.

Who attends our programs? Read more about who we serve.

Among other things, our Resources and Archives page offers some links to kindred organizations who are also tending to these big picture challenges through leadership renewal in other regions of the country.

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*From a June 2009 article in Scientific American Online entitled “Saving the Disadvantaged from Pollution” by Rachel Morello-Frosch, Department of Environmental Science in the College of Natural Resources at UC-Berkeley

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