Reflections as I learn about regenerative processes
I remember a moment of clarity during a hike through one of my favorite trails. The serenity of the trees, the crisp air, and the quietude that can only be found in nature were everything I loved. And yet, in that same space, I was struck by the deep realization that much of what I did, professionally and personally, contributed to the very systems that destroy such beauty. The businesses we celebrate, the products we consume, and the economic systems we support are too often entangled in the degradation of the environment we claim to value. It was a chilling feeling, being so happy out on a hike and having my work feel so unaligned to the planet I wanted to live on. It set me on a path of questioning how we can change things, especially in the face of a global capitalist structure.
As I started to dig deeper into sustainability, it became clear that our traditional models of capitalism are fundamentally misaligned with regenerative values. It’s not just a problem of bad actors or isolated incidents — there are deep, systemic issues that incentivize behavior counterproductive to regeneration and sustainability.
Capitalism’s Incentive Structures
Western culture thrives on consumption and endless growth. Under current systems, incentives to avoid externalities are weak — environmental damage, social inequity, and other byproducts of economic activity that don’t directly hit the bottom line. Worse, we often reward behaviors that exacerbate these issues, like excessive consumption and unsustainable resource extraction. As individuals, many are incentivized to pursue wealth at all costs, even when it often leads to a higher carbon footprint or reinforces harmful production cycles.
For example, while there is growing public awareness about climate change and environmental degradation, the average consumer is caught between wanting to live sustainably and wanting convenient, cheap goods (that are often unsustainable). The incentive to “do the right thing” is often overwhelmed by financial or convenience-based incentives pushing in the opposite direction.
Regenerative Work: A Growing Movement
There is a growing movement of people and organizations who are trying to rethink these incentive structures. A few of these efforts have coalesced into what I’ve seen called “regenerative” movements. Regenerative work focuses on restoring, renewing, or revitalizing sources of energy and materials, rather than simply depleting them. This thinking has influenced movements like B Corps, which are businesses that prioritize both profit and purpose. They are part of a broader mission to realign business goals with societal good.
It’s exciting to see this momentum building. Companies like Oneka, with their autonomous desalination system powered by ocean waves, offer a glimpse of what this regenerative future could look like. Their technology not only addresses water scarcity in a sustainable way, but it fundamentally challenges the idea that industries have to consume more than they give back. Similarly, Fairbnb’s platform reinvests value directly into the communities it serves, offering an alternative to exploitative short-term rental models that often push locals out of their neighborhoods.
These examples, and others like them, feel like a breath of fresh air in an economic system that too often feels suffocating. But they live in the outskirts of our awareness and society instead of the center.
The Gap Between Principles and Practicality
The principles are sound — learning from nature, reducing harm, regenerating systems — but I struggle to see a clear path from here to broad adoption. For example, we talk about regenerative agriculture and circular economies, but those efforts remain small in scale compared to the vast systems that drive modern industrialized nations. Even the term industrialized to me is close to destructive systems as we haven’t figured out regenerative systems at scale yet.
Even within the regenerative movement itself, much of the discourse stays abstract. Take the example of a friend of mine writing about regenerative business. They created a thoughtful piece, outlining the major goals and aspirations of regenerative business. Yet it stayed at a 30,000-foot view. I wanted to know more — how do we transition from large industrial systems to regenerative ones? What are the specific steps we need to take to restructure supply chains or adjust financial incentives? Yet, the answers to these questions often remain elusive.
The same is true for many of the showcase projects that highlight regenerative technologies and approaches. Websites like Regentech.co are inspiring, but they also keep things at a high level, emphasizing ideals over actionable steps. I often wonder what these projects would look like if they were scaled up, or put into context within existing industries. How quickly could they grow, and what would it take to make them the norm?
The Mismatched Incentives Problem
Beyond painting a clearer picture, or perhaps one challenge to creating a clearer picture of an attractive path towards change, a significant challenges in expanding the regenerative movement lies in the mismatch between its goals and the incentives currently in place within capitalism. For example, Fairbnb may reinvest into communities, but its growth is smaller than AirBnB so Fairbnb has less resources to invest in its plan. I don’t know, but it is also possible by reinvesting Fairbnb makes less profit to reinvest in itself and will never hit a scale of AirBnB. How can regenerative businesses compete when the primary incentives in the marketplace reward short-term profit over long-term sustainability?
And more importantly, what would it take to change these incentives? One question I keep coming back to is how we can make it more attractive, economically, to build regeneratively rather than destructively. We know that consumers are increasingly concerned about the environment, and we see growing interest in sustainable business models, but how do we transform that interest into a dominant market force?
Where Do We Go From Here?
The good news is that these questions are starting to be asked in more spaces, but I still feel like there are too many gaps. What we need is a next layer down — a way to take these high-level principles and translate them into tangible actions that can be understood by average people and applied by businesses at scale.
Who is leading that charge? Who is working to develop this more specific, practical layer of information and guidance? Are there people tackling the challenge of realigning capitalist incentives with regenerative values?
I suspect they’re out there, but they’re not always easy to find. If you know of people or organizations exploring these questions in depth, I’d love to hear about them. Because the more I look at regenerative work, the more I believe it holds the key to a more sustainable future — but only if we can figure out how to make it grow.
— -
This is an attempt to delve deeper into regenerative work in the context of capitalism, where I find excitement but also frustration at how abstract many discussions remain. What do you think it would take to make regenerative models scale in a system that is so deeply rooted in profit and consumption? And who is out there bridging the gap between ideas and implementation?
