What if a landscape's deepest infrastructure is our capacity to love, grieve, and imagine its future? What if we built economies around that?
The shift from an extractive to a regenerative economy requires supporting the people leading that change. Building healthier landscapes takes time, and those working to restore them must often continue despite uncertainty, slow progress and competing short-term pressures. While financial systems tend to focus on immediate returns, regeneration depends on patience, trust and the ability to work towards benefits that may take years to emerge.
This session explores the human qualities that make long-term stewardship possible. Drawing on both Asian and Western traditions of systems thinking, it examines how values such as belonging, care, imagination and resilience help communities remain committed to the future of the landscapes they depend on. It also recognises the importance of the acknowledging loss of ecosystems, species and cultural knowledge as part of building hope and motivation for renewal.
The discussion asks how these often overlooked human capacities can shape the way we design leadership, governance and investment for regeneration. It argues that lasting change depends not only on better financial models and stronger institutions, but also on people who are equipped to sustain relationships, make decisions across generations and care for the living systems that support us all.
