OUR STORY
HOW DO WE LIVE IN THIS LAND WITH JOY?
“How do we live in this land with joy? To answer this question, we have to go back to where we made our mistakes, learn from that and then move forward.”
Uncle Phil Bligh, Darkinjung Elder, Co-founder,
Beyond the Campfire
Aboriginal people have been living, loving, understanding and upholding the Lore of Sydney for countless millennia. Engaging with Indigenous ways of thinking and understanding helps us grow our awareness of how cultures work, through the values and beliefs that ground a person’s thinking and their motivations.
Regen Sydney is generously guided by the wisdom of First Nations elders and allies, including Uncle Phil Bligh and David Beaumont.
With grace and permission, we warmly share the invitation to walk together with First Peoples, that has been so generously extended to us, to the whole of our network.
WHY REGEN SYDNEY EXISTS
Greater Sydney is a globally interdependent city. The way we live - the goods and foods we choose - relies on and affects people, landscapes and habitats across Australia and the world. Yet, we have few ways to account for and understand the impacts of our everyday decisions in ways that show the discrepancy between how we live and what we truly value as a society.
Regen Sydney formed in early 2021, immediately following the catastrophic bushfires of 2019/20, which saw over 5.5 million hectares of land burnt, 26 human lives lost in NSW, and countless wildlife perish. During this time, Australia was also coming to grips with the Covid-19 pandemic, reported to cost Treasury $291 billion by May 2021. Several tens of thousands of Australian have died due to the virus.
These events made Sydney’s entanglements as a globally connected city increasingly apparent as supply chains were disrupted, supermarket shelves emptied, transport and shipping slowed to a halt and national and state borders were closed. Since then the devastation of the floods in 2022 similarly highlighted our geographical disparities when faced with the effects of a changing climate.
The intensifying effects of human-induced ecological disasters have only been amplified by the increasingly hostile domestic polarisation and geopolitical dynamics at play over the last few years. The failure of the Indigenous Voice referendum further divided our society. Globally, wars, authoritarianism and expansionism have taken greater foothold, and our misshapen political economies have been unable to respond to (let alone prevent) the housing and cost of living crises.
Of course, this situation is not unique to Sydney. Globally, countries and cities around the world are realising that relentless economic growth sets us on a course for far greater social inequality into the future, and risks nothing less than the destruction of the everything that gives us life: clean water, healthy soils, biodiversity and a safe, stable climate.
our purpose
Regen Sydney has a big vision for regeneration on a citywide scale, tied into a fast-growing global movement. It’s about nothing less than rewilding and rewiring everything that makes us who we are and how we view the world.
Cities have always been experimental sites of collective social change, from the era of the city-state through to the contemporary urban megalopolis. Today, the twin challenges of climate change and rocketing inequality create an increasing need to ‘think big’, imagining systems-level and transformative change. The scale of cities provides a generative place for this kind of creative work, opening exciting opportunities for research, advocacy and storytelling that can contribute to systemic change at both local and global levels.
Tapping into the transformational power of cities, we seek to bring Greater Sydney into the ecologically safe and socially just space of the Doughnut within a generation.
“In nature's economy the currency is not money, it's life.”
- Vandana Shiva