by Dr Demeter (Emily Samuels-Ballantyne)
Everyday Life Series; Piece 1
Synopsis:
This article examines the limitations of contemporary Green politics, particularly its propensity for urgency, reaction, and spectacle, which often disconnects it from the ecological wisdom it seeks to uphold. Drawing on Arturo Escobar's concept of the pluriverse, it advocates for design practices rooted in autonomy, emergence, and care, emphasising the importance of Indigenous knowledge systems in shaping regenerative futures.
Thank you to Ness Vandebourgh Photography for collaborating with me, for serveral years now.
The discussion delves into the physiological and spiritual significance of breath, referencing Rudolf Steiner's view of imagination as a spiritual organ of perception and the role of the vagus nerve in fostering relational awareness. It critiques the commodification of crisis, as analysed by Naomi Klein, and underscores the necessity of addressing the underlying spiritual wounds that fuel societal polarisation.
By integrating insights from thinkers like Vandana Shiva, Tyson Yunkaporta, David Abram, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, the article calls for a reimagining of activism and governance, one that prioritises soil over slogans, ceremonies over campaigns, and listening to life itself. It culminates in a series of regenerative scenarios that envision systems designed for reciprocity, relationality, and belonging.
This piece is particularly relevant activists engaged in environmental campaigns. It invites a reflection on how activism can evolve beyond reactionary modes to embrace practices that are deeply rooted in ecological and spiritual consciousness.
Breath as the Seed of Imagination
Breathe.
Not the scroll-breath of panic,
but the slow breath of soil,
deep, rhythmic, remembering.
This isn’t just a paper.
It’s a seed. A signal.
A call back to what we already know
but forgot how to carry.
The world is shouting.
But wisdom is quiet.
Roots do not grow in noise.
True activism is not reaction.
It is human.
A sacred belonging
to the human spirit and the living earth.
Let your body read this too.
Let your grief have space.
Let your breath find its rhythm.
We are not here to perform.
We are here to re-weave.
To root.
To remember how to live.
The Performance of Protest
I have stood inside campaigns. I have crafted some observations. What I witnessed, time and again, was a pattern:
A crisis emerges.
Campaigns react.
Politicians gesture.
The system absorbs the outrage.
And the root remains untouched.
There is rarely room for the root causes: global economic entanglements, industrial legacies seeded in war, and extractive models that reproduce suffering. There is rarely space for social imagination, that precious power to see and seed a world beyond reaction.
Instead, activism itself has become enmeshed in capitalism. As Marx warned, capitalism absorbs its own critiques to perpetuate itself. Resistance becomes a brand. Dissent becomes a product. What begins as a movement can easily be co-opted as a marketing mechanism.
The capitalist system thrives on crisis. It commodifies unrest, turning rebellion into spectacle and symbols into products. As Guy Debord warned in The Society of the Spectacle, even our dissent becomes something to be watched, consumed, and sold back to us. We march, tweet, and purchase in a cycle that often reinforces the very systems we aim to dismantle. Activism, stripped of deeper relationality, risks becoming performance, loud, visible, but ultimately absorbed by the machinery of branding.
Activism as Echo, Not Emergence
We now wear our identities like merch. Follow hashtags like liturgies. Perform concern, retweet rage, and call it change.
There is a commodification of dissent, the monetisation of suffering, and the branding of belonging, which have all distorted the deep purpose of activism: to reweave the social fabric. We are called to move beyond campaigns that perform change, toward cultures that become change.
The War in the Soul
The protest signs are louder. The camps are multiplying. The online declarations, more urgent than ever. But somewhere between the slogans and the solidarity posts, something quietly slips away: our humanity.
I write not from above, but within. Within the contradictions of activism, the ache of injustice, the mess of trying to live with integrity in a collapsing world. I know what it means to want to scream, to be furious at the systems that break bodies and silence truths. I’ve been there, policy rooms, protest lines, quiet kitchens where grief is folded into dinner.
And still, I offer a question:
What if the real war isn’t over there?
What if it’s in here?
What happens when the performance of suffering becomes part of the economy? When does conflict itself become a funding model? When causes become currency?
Campaigns Without Culture
What I have seen missing, over and over again, is a cultural substrate that holds space for dreaming. For visioning. For emergence. As Joanna Macy writes in Active Hope, we are called not to optimism, but to participation in the great turning, an active stance of courage and imagination in the face of uncertainty. Without this deeper orientation, we risk reproducing the very crises we seek to transform. Activism becomes reaction instead of relation. Movement without ground. Sound without song.
Well-meaning people within the system are often bound by its architecture. The political cycle does not lend itself to soul repair, soil restoration, or long-form healing. As David Suzuki has long warned, these systems are wired for short-term gain, not ecological wisdom. They reward control over care, and performance over presence. They cannot easily direct hundreds of millions to the commons because the system was never designed for nourishment, it was designed for extraction.
In contrast, Masanobu Fukuoka’s life work reminds us that true transformation arises not through domination, but through a radical trust in nature’s own intelligence. His “do-nothing farming” was not laziness, it was rebellion. A refusal to conform to systems that seek to control what is meant to be sacred.
We need a different foundation, one that roots in relational time, not reactionary cycles. We need to reorient toward the long time: the wisdom of seven generations forward and seven generations back. As many Indigenous knowledge systems remind us, true governance is not about immediate gains, but the continuity of life.
Without foundational investment in cultural imagination, ecological belonging, and social repair, we simply replicate trauma through new slogans. We must break the loop not through more data, but through deeper dreaming.
Reclaiming the Priestess Path
Before we had parliaments and party platforms, we had vision keepers. In ancestral and First Nations cultures, dreaming councils were held. Wisdom was gathered by listening, not just to the people, but to the stars, the soil, and the spirits of place. Not activists, but oracles. Not campaigners, but weavers of what was needed seven generations ahead.
Marg O’Neill reminds us that the First Nations imagination is steeped in thousands of years of sacred observation of plants, fire, astronomy, law, design, innovation, and Country. These are not abstract ideas. They are living technologies, rooted in ritual and place. This is politics not of identity, but of lore. Sacred lore.
This is not about returning to the past. It is about remembering your presence. The priestess path is not a role, it is a rhythm. It is the ability to midwife culture rather than demand policy.
Regenerative Activism as Social Imagination
As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world.” We must dare to imagine again. Not simply as an escape, but as a method of survival and renewal. As John Lennon dreamed, "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."
We propose a new kind of activism:
One rooted in long rhythms, not click cycles.
One that composts conflict, not monetises it.
One that weaves policy with poetry, land with law, economics with myth.
Let us fund scenario weavers, not just frontline warriors. Let us protect imaginative space, not just reactive media.Let us reallocate philanthropy toward the roots: storytelling, ceremony, scenario, soil.
Because without a culture that knows how to dream, we will keep mistaking movement for meaning. And yet, this isn’t only a systems crisis it’s a soul crisis. Beneath the policies and protests, something deeper stirs: the war within. To change the world, we must begin with the terrain of the heart.
Underneath the Outrage:
“The spectacle feeds on our attention. But healing asks for our presence”.
We are living through a time of extreme polarisation. Of moral theatre. Of trauma played out in headlines, memes, and movements. As Naomi Klein has powerfully shown, crisis has become currency in the capitalist machine. But what her analysis doesn’t always hold is the spiritual wound beneath the spectacle. We think we’re choosing sides, but often we are just reacting. We mistake intensity for depth. We confuse performance for presence. We inherit rage, but not the rituals to transform it, which is deeply saddening. We must have the courage to transform this reactionary cycle.
As Thomas Hübl writes, “trauma is frozen life force.” Without practices to metabolise this energy, we remain trapped in cycles of reactivity reenacting, reposting, raging without healing. What we need now is not just analysis, but integration. Not just resistance, but renewal. It’s not that the causes aren’t important. They are. But something essential has gone missing. Something relational. Something sacred. Something real.
Many of today’s changemakers are brave, fierce and intelligent. And also, often, exhausted, reactive, and spiritually malnourished. In the rush to protest, we’ve forgotten to process. In our fight for justice, we’ve sometimes lost our joy. We know how to dismantle, but not always how to regenerate.
To the rebels: your rage is not wrong. But rage alone is not revolution. Burnout is not a badge of honour. What if the bravest act now is not destruction... but deep creation? What if activism wasn’t just about opposing something, but proposing something? What if peace wasn’t a stance, but a practice?
What if the bravest thing was to remain present with the paradox, not flee to clarity?
What if transformation meant turning toward the complexity, not away from it?
This is a call for a different kind of activism. Not soft. Not passive. But rooted, rhythmic, and real. It draws from soil and story, ritual and repair. It understands that the true work is not just political, it’s spiritual. That healing the land and healing the inner world are not separate paths, but braided trails of becoming.
Breath: The Architecture of Becoming
When the breath is fast, we react.
When the breath is slow, perception changes.
The nervous system steadies. Imagination opens.
This is not performance. It is pattern recognition.
As Steiner taught, transformation begins in the etheric where breath, rhythm, and life-force shape what becomes manifest. This is activism as an organism. Alive to the seasons. Aligned with time. Rooted in moral imagination as a force of evolution.
In an age of outrage and fragmentation, the breath is revolutionary not metaphorically, but physiologically. The vagus nerve, the core of our parasympathetic system, connects brain, heart, lungs, and gut. It governs our capacity to rest, relate, and respond with presence. When we regulate the breath, we activate the body’s innate intelligence, its ability to discern, to digest, to connect.
Both Zen Buddhist practitioners and contemporary neuroscientists have arrived at the same insight: conscious breathing opens the gateway to awareness. Zazen, the practice of seated meditation, invites us to return to the breath not to escape the world, but to enter it more clearly, without illusion.
Rudolf Steiner, often miscast as merely esoteric, was in fact a trained scientist, a chemist and philosopher of deep empirical rigor. His understanding of the rhythmic system, the interplay of breath and heartbeat positioned this middle realm as the seat of human balance. When breath becomes conscious, the etheric body is strengthened, and the self becomes anchored in life. He recognised that in slowing the breath, we move closer to carbon, the element that connects us to the plant world. This isn't a poetic suggestion, it’s biochemistry. And it is sacred.
When there is fear, reaction, and outrage, the breath becomes short and shallow anchored in the chest. But when there is love, courage, and knowledge, the breath deepens. It moves from the belly, from the soil of the body itself. This shift is not just emotional…it is biological. It is the difference between surviving and regenerating. To breathe with awareness is to refuse the pace and violence of a system that thrives on disconnection. It is a radical act of remembering: that we belong to the soil, the body, and the living field between.
Beyond the Spectacle: Reclaiming Green Politics from the Hollow Centre.
And here lies the great irony: we call it Green politics, yet so often it is driven by urgency, reactivity, and spectacle detached from the ecological wisdom it claims to honour. It speaks of the Earth but forgets to listen to her. It campaigns in weeks and quarters, while the land speaks in seasons and centuries.
Here I offer a woven basket of ideas in offering to change and decision makers from wise ones from all around the world:
As Vandana Shiva has long warned, environmentalism that fails to ground itself in soil, seed, and sovereignty risks becoming another expression of control. When Green politics aligns with corporate interests or trades spiritual depth for marketable messaging, it drifts from the Earth it claims to defend. Shiva reminds us that true regeneration begins beneath our feet with biodiversity, local knowledge, and reverence for life.
Tyson Yunkaporta pushes us further, exposing how even well-meaning activism can reproduce the logics of empire. In Sand Talk, he challenges the binary thinking of left and right, and instead calls us into pattern, relation, and kinship with land and time. “Real change,” he writes, “doesn’t look like slogans. It looks like a ceremony, like sitting still long enough for a tree to call you kin.”
David Abram, too, asks us to slow down and feel the pulse of the living Earth through our own bodies. In The Spell of the Sensuous, he reminds us that ecology is not a field of study, it is a field of perception. That the breath, the wind, the scent of soil—these are our first languages. To speak of green futures without recovering our sensual, embodied relationship with the more-than-human world is to speak in abstraction.
And Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, with luminous clarity, invites us to move not through reaction but through resurgence. For Simpson, real transformation is not policy reform, it is a return to Indigenous relationality: to land-based knowledge, to stories encoded in place, to ancestral time. “Our theories,” she writes, “are in our practices. Our practices are in our bodies.”
So what might Green politics become if it truly centred ecological systems and the worldviews of First Nations peoples?
It would move at the speed of trust. It would prioritise soil before slogans, ceremonies before campaigns. It would honour the migratory memory of whales, the slow language of fungi, the fire cycles held in Country. It would resist the performance of progress and listen, instead, to life itself.
Let us build peace like we build compost: with what we’ve lost, with what’s rotting, with what still holds life. Let us remember that true transformation is not viral. It is relational. It is embodied. It is slow.
Imagination as Organ of Design
True imagination is not escapism, it is the seedbed of form. As Rudolf Steiner taught, imagination is a spiritual organ, capable of perceiving and shaping reality through inwardly active pictures. In this sense, design becomes a moral act: not merely arranging matter, but expressing meaning, relationship, and intention.
As Arturo Escobar suggests in Designs for the Pluriverse, we must design “for the real and possible worlds envisioned by those who struggle for autonomy.” Not through domination, but through emergence, reciprocity, and care.
If the current architecture is built on control, we must imagine new foundations, an architecture of belonging. One that centres care, culture, and the commons. Where governance is relational, not extractive. Where food, energy, housing, and health are stewarded as sacred responsibilities, not commodities.
This is not utopianism. It is what Masanobu Fukuoka called “the path of return”, a remembering of our place in the web of life. As David Suzuki warns, systems built on short-term gain cannot regenerate long-term life. And as Joanna Macy teaches, Active Hope invites us to move not from optimism, but from the courage to participate in the Great Turning.
Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that true regeneration is rooted in reciprocity: with the land, with each other, and with time itself. To plan for seven generations is not a poetic gesture: it is a practical, necessary act of love.
And so, offered here are these 16 scenarios not as blueprints, but as seeds. Not as forecasts, but as invitations.
Each one asks:
What if our systems were designed for reciprocity, not extraction?
What if policymaking began not with profit, but with place?
What if we remembered how to belong?
16 Scenarios for Regenerative Rebellion
These are not prescriptions. They are seeds.Sketches of a new spiral. A vision for seven generations forward and seven generations back, held in the palm of now.
These are the kinds of futures we must fund, not as utopia, but as necessary departures from collapse.Not from blueprints, but from living designs. To imagine differently is not indulgent…it is urgent!
Design, in this context, is not aesthetic. It is cosmological. It is the courage to enter unknown morphic fields. To follow the intelligence of mycelium; decentralised, adaptive, relational. To let forest thinking shape our policy making. To let imagination root into governance like compost into spring soil. This is not fiction. This is what ecology has always known.That regeneration begins in pattern, not just in protest.
1. The Listening Feast
In a peri-urban eco-village, disillusioned activists host a seasonal meal with farmers, elders, and teenagers from opposing views. Each guest brings a story, not a solution. The feast becomes an act of rebellion against the algorithm.
Dialogue becomes resistance.
2. The Seed Library at the Edge of Town
An abandoned petrol station is transformed into a solar-powered seed and tool share. Once a site of extraction, now a sanctuary for regeneration. Graffiti becomes mural. Concrete cracks give rise to calendula.
The commons rise again.
3. The Spiral School
Children learn maths through moon phases, history through ancestral songs, and ethics through compost. Parents attend too, relearning what it means to relate, not just regulate.
Education becomes initiation.
4. The Boat with No Flag
A hand-built wooden boat sets out not with slogans, but with musical instruments, soil, and stories. It docks in coastal villages, offering healing songs and seasonal seeds. It follows the whales, not the war.
Movement without conquest.
5. The Mourning Hut
On the edge of a burned forest, people gather in silence. No phones. No speeches. Just grief, held by song and smoke. Activists light beeswax candles for every extinct species remembered.
Grief becomes a ritual of repair.
6. The Rewilded Union Hall
Former labour organisers, artists, and healers reclaim a derelict building and declare it a Rewilding Hub. Pay is in harvest. Power is by consensus. Strikes are sacred days of planting.
Solidarity with soil.
7. The Pomegranate Tree Circle
In a courtyard between histories, a pomegranate tree grows. Once a site of tension, the land becomes a threshold. Elders from many lineages—Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druze—sit in a wide circle beneath its fruit-heavy branches. They bring stories, recipes, lullabies, seeds. Children play between the roots. The tree holds their silence and their singing. No slogans, no sides—just the slow weaving of soil and soul.
Peace here is not a treaty, but a tending. A return to what was once shared: water, land, song, shelter.
8. The Whale Choir
A circle of intergenerational singers gathers under the full moon near sea cliffs. They mimic whale calls, transmitting them across radio waves, into homes and hearts.
The ocean sings us home.
9. The Ghost Office
Former public servants, burned out by bureaucracy, form a shadow working group to write visionary policy from the margins. They channel the future in poetic briefs.
Governance with soul.
10. The Temporal Embassy
A bus painted like a mycelium network travels town to town. Inside: a listening booth, a tea station, a storytelling couch. People offer memories and visions to a growing archive.
Time becomes terrain.
11. The Ex-Banker’s Garden
In Berlin, a former hedge fund manager turns his villa into a permaculture site. He hosts underground salons where whistleblowers, economists, and Earth stewards plot financial transitions.
Capital composted.
12. The School Beyond Sanctions
On the edge of a war-torn zone, women and elders build a bilingual school from the rubble. They teach literacy, herbal medicine, solar cooking, and peacebuilding rituals.
Education becomes sanctuary.
13. The Desert Treaty
In North Africa, nomadic farmers displaced by climate collapse gather under tents. They trade seeds, stories, and seasonal wisdom. Enemies become allies through legumes.
Food becomes diplomacy.
14. The Underground Orchestra
Beneath a global city, youth form a rebel orchestra in a decommissioned subway. There are no lyrics, only drums, strings, whale-song and rhythm.
Culture becomes counter-infrastructure.
15. The Spiral Embassies
In global capitals, Spiral Embassies arise, hosted by elders, peacebuilders, and ecologists. They hold ritual, dialogue, and belonging for displaced people and dreamers alike.
Borders dissolve into being.
16. The Earth Council Rebellion
In a forest clearing, under planetary transits, a group gathers, scientists, mystics, farmers, coders, and storytellers. They plot not a protest, but a planetary council. A parallel framework.
Realignment with Earth law.
These are not fantasies. They are frequencies. They hum in the soul of those who remember what it means to belong to Earth.This is not a return to the past. It is a return to presence. A rebellion not just against injustice, but against disconnection.
In the words of Steiner, “Imagination is truth.” And in the whispers of ancestors and starlit seeds alike: We are already becoming the future.
Let us meet war in the soul with warmth in the soil. Let us compost the empire with ritual. Let us become the force we’ve been waiting for.
May we rage into ritual.
Grieve into growth.
Rebel into renewal.
Dr Demeter
Magical Farm Tasmania and Regenera Commons
Dr. Demeter | Emily Samuels Ballantyne is an eco-philosopher, regenerative designer and farmer, and founder of Magical Farm Tasmania and Regenera Commons. She is the author of the forthcoming series Soil & Soul. Since the age of 11, Emily has been active in the global peace network Asian-Pacific Children’s Convention, serving as a Junior Ambassador, later as a Peace Ambassador in her twenties, and as a chaperone for children in her thirties.