Ikebana: Still Rising by Pamela Croci

“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation and we scientists don’t know how to do that…”
—Gus Speth, US Advisor on climate change and Yale professor

RE-GENESIS: A CULTURAL AND SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION

All over the world, we find communities seeking to plant and grow the seeds of a cultural and spiritual transformation away from the Old Testament Genesis story (V.1:26) of human exceptionalism, of being created in God’s image and given dominion over all of Earth’s creatures—towards a re-genesis: a different way of being, thinking and doing. Where we see ourselves as fellow Earthlings in kinship and communion with all of Earth’s creatures, in resonance with Earth as a living, breathing presence.

This view sits in marked contrast to the way Science operates, shaped by the scientific materialism of Newton’s mechanistic universe, a world of measurement, calculation and categorisation, superimposed on the Old Testament story of human exceptionalism. It is also the story of the superiority of ‘male’ reason over ‘female’ nature/emotionalism that underpinned the Cartesian philosophy that has shaped Western modernity: ‘I think, therefore I am’.

Shaped by the scientific materialism of the 18th century Industrial Revolution, the colonial settler culture that built modern Australia sees Nature as resource to be studied and exploited for human benefit—for economic productivity and human settlement, or pleasure and relaxation.

This way of thinking about the human-nature relationship sits in marked contrast to that of our 65,000 year Indigenous cultural foundations.  It is this epistemic conflict that lies at the heart of our unresolved relationship with Indigenous Australians. This is why scientists cannot make the required shift, as they are still largely driven by a materialist perspective about the nature of the world around us, particularly our human relationship with Nature.

Despite efforts by modern nature conservationists to be stewards of nature, in less than 250 years large areas of Australia are blighted by ecological destruction, wrought by industrialised agriculture and mining. Soils denuded of nutrients, rivers robbed of flow by irrigation, old forests clear logged, and animals and fish treated as ‘biological machines’ on which to grow meat.

We have been unable to deal with link between our dream of rational materialist progress and our destruction of the very biosphere that has sustained us. To face ourselves and recognise we are not just rational beings, but highly emotional ones—easy to manipulate.

We see this in our human vulnerability to The Seven Deadly Sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth, or what the Buddhists call Dukkha—the suffering that arises as unease, incompleteness or dissatisfaction in the face of the impermanent nature of existence.  Thus, giving rise to the negative/conflictual emotions of ignorance, pride, greed, anger, and jealousy that look for the ‘enemy’ to blame, or prideful religious ideas about the end times in which the true believers will be miraculously saved.

These are the very human qualities that provide the fertile soil of algorithmic capitalism in this age of hyper consumerism and rage harvesting, and for the ethno-religious and nationalist extremism that we see playing out across the world.

This re-imagining takes its cue from those Indigenous cultures of our world, such as our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who have retained an intimate kinship relationship with all of the natural world. Expressed in the all-encompassing idea of ‘Caring for Country’, this is encoded in a rich variety of mythic stories and sacred sites that express its ongoing potency and living spiritual agency from deep time to the ever-present.

As the Gundungurra and Dharug peoples of the Blue Mountains explain it: Ngurra (Country) takes in everything within the cultural and spiritual landscape—landforms, trees, rocks, plants, animals, foods, medicine, minerals, stories and significant places. It includes cultural practices, knowledge, songs, stories and art as well as Spiritual Beings and people, present and future. Ngurra has a deep meaning of belonging (Aunty Sharyn Hall).

The impacts of climate change, shrill divisive 24/7 media, economic precarity, the stress of living in congested urban areas, increasing awareness of ecological destruction and the near extinction of many species is challenging old assumptions about our right to treat the rest of the natural world as there for our ‘taking’, whether for economic gain or enjoyment.

More and more non-Indigenous Australians want to learn from our Indigenous cultures about how to discover a sense of kinship with nature. Increasingly fearful of the alienating impact of a screen-mediated existence and consumerist-economism, many of us long to experience the spiritual nourishment of feeling part of the natural world. Capturing this longing, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2013) has been called a ‘hymn of love to the world’.

THE REGENESIS ANTHOLOGY PROJECT

The Regenesis Anthology Project is our way of responding to this challenge, engaging our intellect and our emotions to explore new/ancient ways of being, thinking and doing as we re-imagine our relationship with the Natural world around us.

Since 2022, firstly as the Greater Blue Mountains Creative Arts Network, and since 2025 as the Enlivenment Network in collaboration with Resilient Blue Mountains, the Regenesis Anthology Project has engaged with our local community of creatives: visual artists, poets, writers, and in 2026 with musicians, to creatively explore various aspects of a regenerative way of being, thinking and doing that answers to Speth’s call for a cultural and spiritual transformation to meet the challenges of our time.

What does it mean to live in a thoroughly animated world where all of nature is experienced as alive with spiritual presence and agency?

This re-imagining is not just a matter of living sustainably, but a complete shift in our consciousness so that Nature is not just something to be better managed for our benefit, even when that is informed by ideas of conservation. Rather it is about experiencing ourselves as simply part of the natural world: not separate from it.

For the Regenesis 2026 Anthology, the theme is Our Kinship with Nature. We invited entries from youth (12-18 years) and adults (over 18 years) from across the Greater Blue Mountains, from Lapstone to Lithgow, in the form of visual art images, poetry, short stories and/or original lyrics with music to explore this theme of human kinship with the natural world.

Altogether we received 47 entries, of which 10 were from youth and across all creative forms. From these entries, panels of three local creative ‘experts’ assessed a first, second and third choice as the winning entry in each art form, with the winning entry chosen accordingly.

For our lyrics with music entries, the anthology provides a QR code that enables readers to go to the bandcamp streaming link, to listen to the music and readings of some of the poetry.

Such a project relies on the voluntary contribution of many people: the project team, the artists, poets, writers and musicians who submitted their entries, the fellow creatives who helped assess the entries, and most importantly the sponsors, particularly our major sponsor Bendigo Bank, the Blue Mts Councillors, and other prize sponsors: Gang Gang Gallery, Susan Templeman MP, and Trish Doyle MP.

The Regenesis 2026 project team of David Christie and Laurie Facer of Resilient Blue Mountains, and Barbara Lepani and Brad Diedrich of the Enlivenment Network, designed and managed all aspects of the project: promotion, sponsorships, submissions, assessments, publication and events, with thanks to Zac Quinn, Pam Vaughan, Robyn Catchlove, Lyle Diedrich, Michael Duffy, Winston Jones, N’gaire Howard, Pamela Croci, and Lona Sievers, for their contribution.

The Regenesis 2026 Anthology: Our Kinship with Nature will be launched at a free public event at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre (Seminar Room) on Sunday afternoon 18 October 2026, 1pm-4pm. Guests are encouraged to gather beforehand in the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre café where drinks and food will be available for sale.

During the launch event, the prize sponsors will present their prize to each of the 8 winning entries, who will then be given the opportunity to discuss/perform their work, including the two live music entry winners (youth and adult). This will be followed by an open Q&A discussion, with pre-ordered copies of the anthology available for collection, and others available for sale at the event.

To pre-order your copy of the Regenesis 2026 Anthology: Our Kinship with Nature, for collection at the launch event: https://resilientbluemountains.org/event/regenesis-awards-night/

THE COLLAPSE OF THE LIBERAL-HUMANIST PROMISE

This re-genesis re-imagining enables us to respond to our febrile political environment, which reveals our struggle as we grapple with the end of an era. This is the Western civilisational liberal-humanist idea of Progress as ever higher levels of consumption of material goods, pleasure, and human convenience through the superiority of our human intelligence and promethean quest as ‘masters of the universe’. A vision that Western culture exported to the rest of the world, firstly through colonialism and colonial settlement, and then through economic globalisation, including the hegemonic influence of the Western knowledge system through the internationalised university system of education and research.

We are now being forced to recognise that cleverness through the might of our science and technology is very different from wisdom.

Waleed Ali sums up the essence of economic and political liberalism for us: Liberalism defines almost our entire social and political order in the west. Much of this is institutional: a free press, an independent judiciary, the separation of powers, governments hemmed in by constitutions, the sovereignty of the people. Some of it reflects philosophical commitments: individual freedom as the foundation undergirding specific freedoms of speech, association, conscience, religion and trade; a belief that government rules by the consent of the governed and that all citizens are equal.. . . A world of choice, and ever-proliferating choices. And, taxes aside, it’s progress without sacrifice or serious restraint. Each individual person pursuing their individual dream would make life better overall. . .  the promise of expanding wealth and greater control over our lives.

This is not just the liberalism of the so-called Liberal Party in Australia, but the entire philosophical underpinning of Western civilisation culture as it evolved from Newton’s mechanistic vision of a universe of knowable natural laws, and Adam Smith’s idea of rational homo economicus – a free market of individuals pursuing their rational self-interest. Rationality increasingly defined reality as merely that which could be measured, extending its reach into our innermost feelings to become behavioural data for algorithmic capitalism.

When reflecting on the impact of objectification that arises from the Western techno-scientific gaze, the Dalai Lama has commented: “When rationality is split off from the affective dimensions of knowing, the domain of the ‘heart’, in search of a value-free objectivity, it leads to a kind of ‘insanity’, a profound split between the world of lived experience as a human being, and an intellectual objectification of one’s world, and oneself, as a way of valid knowing.”

The result? This self-regulating free market of individuals has created a culture that glorified the self-interested, the calculating and the competitive out for personal gain—epitomised by Wall Street, Equity Trading, London financial markets, merchant banks and their armies of corporate lawyers. And its more recent manifestation in the Mark Zukerbergs, Elon Musks, Peter Thiels and Jeff Bozos of the libertarian tech culture of Silicon Valley.

In his new book, The Nerd Reich, Gill Duran tells the story of how anti-democratic, anti-government, and aggressively anti-tax ideas were fused and incubated in Silicon Valley in the 1980s and 1990s, and how strange books like ‘The Sovereign Individual‘ (1999) inspired a generation of new tech entrepreneurs to build the technology to start undermining national governments and their currencies. The latest panic about Artificial General Intelligence leading to the destruction of humanity reflects increasing anxiety about this ‘brave new world’.

The Regenesis Anthology Project is our efforts at the local level to encourage our community to join the cultural and spiritual revolution, mentioned by Speth, to respond to these forces. Meanwhile the Australian government, through its Digital Duty of Care, is looking for ways to defeat these nefarious forces at work across all aspects of our society, as we grapple with the end of the Western liberal-humanist world order.