This book is a call to action to leave exploitative and exhausting systems behind and actively contribute to regeneration. Henrike Gootjes explores regeneration as a radical response to the crises we face. How can big systems change fundamentally, and how can regenerative processes come to lead the design of our future? Through lived experiences in places such as Australia, Jordan, Northern Ireland and Ukraine, Gootjes offers ten groundbreaking strategic principles to utilise power, stories, education and design to shape our actions towards a world worth living in.

‘Henrike Gootjes has written a thoughtful and challenging book to highlight the acute problems facing the world. These problems are environmental, social, economic and cultural. Henrike is asking the modern world to face these challenges honestly and bravely and find solutions so that future generations can live a better life and take good care of this precious and beautiful planet Earth. This is a timely book and we all need to read it and then act to protect the future of humanity and establish a harmonious relationship between people and the planet. Henrike is simply suggesting that the Earth doesn’t belong to us; we belong to the Earth. I hope this book will reach many people and inspire them to take action.’

— Satish Kumar, Founder of Schumacher College, England.

‘This gem of a book by Henrike Gootjes accomplishes something genuinely rare. Weaving together lived experience and systemic insight into a single, compelling inquiry, it takes the reader on an urgent journey beyond economic fragmentation, conflict, and war. It charts a path into a world where life itself becomes the highest value—and the central design principle shaping all human activity—transforming us from a degenerative burden into a regenerative force. And the best thing about that world? It lies within our grasp. As Gootjes so lucidly shows, we can—and must—move beyond the dystopian present by activating our deepest human capacities to reimagine and reinvent ourselves as a relational keystone species. This is surely the life-affirming counter-vision we have been waiting for: a powerful alternative to the supposedly inevitable techno-utopias and singularities sold to us by the extractive elites of the world.’

– Tuukka Toivonen, PhD (Oxon.), Founder of the Becoming Regenerative Lab (Loughborough University London, University College London and Royal College of Art) and Explorer of Total Being.

‘Amidst the avalanche of collapse and doom and gloom stories, Henrike Gootjes is providing a far more hopeful and energising counter-narrative that captures the enormous regenerative potential this Earth still holds in all its lifeforms, including humans. Without being naïve about what’s going on in the world, Gootjes outlines relational life-affirming pathways that are not utopian but already exist for some and within reach for most of us. If you are going to read one book on regeneration this year, you might consider this one!’

– Arjen Wals, Professor and UNESCO Chair of Transformative Learning for Sustainability, Wageningen University, The Netherlands).