This article was first published on LinkedIn by Zlatina Tsvetkova. Read her original post here.
One of the beautiful things about the Climate Carnival has been its intention to take the conversation beyond carbon credits and energy efficiency. We talked about resilience, ecosystem restoration, and nature-based approaches—not only to addressing the direct climate challenges we are facing, but also to navigating the intertwined complexity of transitioning towards a regenerative economy in a socially just way.
We talked about food and the powerful impact it can have on our livelihoods, health, quality of life, and carbon footprint—and how it is currently a major part of the problem but has the potential to become part of the solution.
We talked about the oceans and how their transformative power can not only draw down carbon but also connect us across lands.
We experienced culture and the inspiration that music, poetry, comedy, literature, and art can bring to the work we are all doing to restore nature and lands. Culture seems to be the forgotten secret sauce that attracts us towards a movement, pulls us in, and invites us to engage as full human beings, driven by passion, curiosity, creativity, and awe. This stands in contrast to the dominant climate narrative, which emphasises fear and transforms us into mere shadows of human beings, focused on survival and desperation.
And, of course, there was the Habitats Stage, curated by Commonland and driven by the idea that all of it converges in a place, an ecosystem, and a community. We may think about the economy, climate, food production, culture, social justice, education, and health as completely different topics, separating them at the policy level into their own ministries, NGOs, initiatives, and so on. But they all collapse into one in the human experience of a place, on the ground, in our daily lives. So even if we view them through separate lenses, put them in different boxes, and steer them in different directions, they remain one in our lives and in the ecosystems we inhabit.
Habitat is the place where we live, where life in all its shapes and forms gets to thrive or dies out. If we don’t acknowledge the tangled threads of life on the land, we can’t understand that transformation requires a holistic, systemic, complexity-informed approach. We have all the technical and discrete solutions, resources, and tools needed to solve the biggest challenges the world is facing, but implementing them requires engaging with people—with ourselves and with each other—in a different way.
The themes that emerged through the conversations on the Habitats Stage at the Climate Carnival and that stay with me:
- Transformation requires a collective space where we can work together, connect, deepen, wrestle with ideas, be creative, and shift mindsets. Such a space requires building a container in which the right people can come together and have conversations they’ve never had before. This container consists of a physical place—land, nature, habitat, shelter, calm—as well as a cultural and psychological space that builds trust, makes room for a variety of perspectives, and encourages boldness, deep reflection, human connection, playfulness, and experimentation.
- Transformation requires a systemic approach: acknowledging the interconnectedness of life and its non-linearity, and recognising spaces where different layers and silos dissolve into one complex and full experience of humanity, life, and nature.
- Coherence is not only horizontal—across fields, disciplines, and industries—but also vertical: from abstract, conceptual policies to work on the ground and at the community level, all the way to the involvement of future generations and potentials that are yet to be born.
- Systems change doesn’t happen without human change. We live under the assumption that when people know better, they should simply do better. Yet having the right information is barely a prerequisite for transformation. Changes in relationships, power dynamics, resource flows, and mindsets are the source of long-term transformation. This can happen only when the right people are brought into a generative container where they can dig into what lies beyond the surface and change the way they relate to themselves, each other, and nature.
- Degradation is largely caused by dehumanising nature and people. In traditional wisdom, nature and human existence were animated by spirits, ghosts, and anthropomorphic creatures that allowed us to have not only a spiritual but also a deeply human relationship with the environment we inhabit. The more we have dehumanised it, the more likely we have become to extract from and exploit it. Not to mention the extent to which we have already dehumanised other human beings—including ourselves, imagining that we are efficiency and productivity machines rather than living beings. We have a great deal to learn about bringing humanity back into all aspects of our lives.
- Stress, anxiety, overwhelm, and burnout shape the experience of regenerative leaders across the movement. Living in a state of constant nervous-system overdrive takes us from a connected, humane, empathic, collaborative, and creative mode into an extremely narrowed focus—a state of survival or freeze. Dysregulated people lose the capacity to listen and empathise. When we help people land and calm down, they become able to connect and have a real dialogue. When we are stressed, our brains laser-focus on survival; in a calm environment, we can see abundance, connection, and relationships.
- Unless we can pull ourselves out of that state, we cannot expect others to approach the conflicting topics we need to tackle with calm presence and rational thought. Regeneration starts with ourselves—with humanising ourselves first. Laughter, art, rest, movement, breath, in-person connection, physical touch, time in nature, and any form of purpose, meaning, or spirituality can help us do that.