The ‘Deep Holism’ storyline in regenerative agriculture

There are nine different stories of regenerative agriculture that I identified in my PhD research. These stories impact the way people interpret, talk about and practice regenerative agriculture. They are consequently important for understanding debates about how regenerative agriculture should be defined and measured. Each story comes from a different agricultural lineage (e.g., organics, holistic management or permaculture) and subsequently emphasizes different things when defining regenerative agriculture. This blog post is an extract from my recent publication in Sustainability Science. You can read the paper here for more information: Regenerative agriculture: a potentially transformative storyline shared by nine discourses

Artwork by Hannah Cox of Nanny Potts Illustration. Deep Holism invites ecosystems into a farmer’s sense of self. In this artwork we see a woman who is totally integrated with her environment. There is no separation between her and the ecosystem.

In the Deep Holism storyline, regenerative agriculture is a pathway for empathising with and experiencing ecosystems as inseparable from yourself

The Deep Holism storyline emerges from deep ecology (Naess 1988, 1989). Deep refers to an embedded way of experiencing nature, compared to a flat experience that observes nature from the outside (Valera 2018). It also refers to the view of holism as outlined by Bortoft (1996) and Goethean Science (Wahl 2005), which goes deep into the parts to see the whole, rather than looking at the ‘big picture.’ Bortoft (1996, p. 22) explains that “the universal is seen within the particular, so that the particular instance is seen as a living manifestation of the universal.” Adherents believe Big Picture Holism uses analytical consciousness to see all the parts together—viewing the totality but not the whole (Cochrane 2019).

Adherents to this type of regenerative agriculture participate in a broadening or widening of personal identity, which invites the ecological community into a person’s sense of self. As such, “the self to be realised extends further and further beyond the separate ego and includes more and more of the phenomenal world” (Naess 1988). As participant 17 said, “ecological identity is the experience that the social identity that we’ve all grown up to identify with is merely the flimsiest film on top of our larger identity, which stretches back to the beginning of everything, and relates us to everything.” This is called the ecological self (Naess 1988).

Participant 7 referred to ecological identity as “an indivisible connection with your whole environment, which is cognitive, it’s emotional, it’s deep psychological, it’s probably stuff we’re not even aware of; it’s in our ancient brain.” He adds that it is “not just a paradigm; it’s a complex, social-environmental interaction that’s like a universe.” This opens adherents up to the idea of Gaia, that earth is a self-regulating system made up of the interactions between organisms and their inorganic environments (Lovelock 2016). Participant 19 said that spirituality and ecological practice should be combined and that this is the “real issue for integrating ecology with self.” Participant 2 felt connected to their environment through deep time saying, “the piece of corn I can see in the distance, that’s a living organism and so am I, so we have a connection in history.”

This perspective is supported by the use of second person pronouns (you, your, yours, yourself/yourselves) to connect with nature. The second person perspective creates “the capacity to have an I/thou or ‘we’ relationship with someone or something” (Cochrane 2021, p. 113). Through this way of talking, there is no completely isolatable ‘I’ and adherents experience themselves as a genuine part of all life—the ‘thou’ (Valera 2018). If people can “express their second person relationship with the world … it strengthens the bond between them and the environment, rather than looking at something, they’re actually taking that something inside themselves and putting it into their imagination” (participant 2). This differs from the dominant I/it attitude towards nature (Buber 1970; Kramer and Gawlick 2003).