Happy Friday Regenerative School Community!
We hope that your December is unfolding beautifully, filled with deep breaths, curiosity, and gratitude. As yesterday was winter solstice, we sit—wrapped tightly in blankets—looking forward to the days becoming progressively longer and brighter again. 2024 will surely hold a lot of releasing and rooting for Rē, and we plan on making space for deep rest next week to greet the new year.
Thank you to everyone for making 2023 this newsletter’s biggest year yet! We have more readers than ever (485 to be exact) and we are so grateful to each and every one of you for supporting our reading lists and monthly updates.
In case anyone is in need of some last minute holiday gifts for loved ones, we would love to offer up a gift experience! Why not gift tickets for our Regenerative Farm to Table Dinner on June 2nd, 2024! Sounds delicious to us!
Now on to our final reading list of the year. Keep scrolling for the latest in regenerative headlines of the year!
We hope everyone is safe, cozy, and taking care.
Best,
The Rē Team
Lisa Held’s thorough reporting on Walmart’s “Regenerative” goal setting and foodscape for Civil Eats. Held documents how Walmart’s efforts to redefine itself as a regenerative company are at odds with its low-cost model. The Walton family’s vast investments in regenerative agriculture have the potential to remake the marketplace, but will they? Click here to read.
“How can nature be de-mined?” This is one of the many questions Ukrainian conservationists are asking as they persevere to restore the Danube Delta, one of Europe’s most prized ecosystems. Click here to read “Fighting for Wildlife in a Time of War” by Adam Robertson Charlton for Hakai Magazine.
Restored floodplains in the California’s agricultural heartland are fighting both flooding and drought. Click here to learn about restoration projects and river coalitions that are working fix the state’s distorted water system in an era of climate change. Jake Bittle reports for Grist in “How can California solve its water woes? By flooding its best farmland.”
We love every bit of interactive reporting offered up by The Washington Post’s Climate Desk, and “Ancient Warning of a Rising Sea,” is no exception. Curated by Sarah Kaplan, Bonnie Jo Mount, Simon Ducroquet, Emily Wright and Frank Hulley-Jones, this is a story of how fossilized coral are telling a 125,000 year old story of sea level surges. But modern sea level rise may not exactly mirror what happened last time… click here to read more.
To learn more about the many, many intersections at the core of our many ongoing quests for liberation, we recommend tuning into the the following recording. This rich one-hour discussion includes social justice advocates, immigration experts, historians, professors, gender experts, educators, and policy strategists. Click here to watch “Inextricably Linked: The Interwoven Liberation Struggles in Palestine, Congo, Haiti, and Atlanta.”
“Your 2023 Climate Wins, Wrapped" by Katarina Zimmer for Atmos. Turns out, we not only broke climate records this year, but we also broke climate action records. Click here to read about some global wins! Yay positive news! Who knows, maybe we can fend off calamity with compassion and creativity.
Colombian president Gustavo Petro has just declared a one-month economic, social, and environmental emergency in the country’s La Guajira region. To learn more about Petro’s Colombia, this new green initiative, and how it plans to improve Indigenous benefits and rights, click here to read Kurt Hollander’s reporting for Progressive International.
In New Republic’s “The U.N. Climate Talks Hung Poorer Nations Out to Dry.,” Kate Aronoff has the best take on COP28 we have read so far. Click here to read about how nearly 200 world leaders “have finally agreed to call fossil fuels a problem they have no plan for solving.” Oof.
The desire for a better quality of life is pushing Black people toward the epicenter of climate disasters and racism. Adam Mahoney follows some stories that texture this increasing trend in “Moving South, Black Americans Are Weathering Climate Change” for Capital B via Inside Climate News. Click here to read.
Thousands of miles from home, Somali refugees in rural Maine have begun to thrive thanks to a cooperative community farm. To learn more about their unique growing system, community gardens, and beautiful success, click here. We cannot recommend “Finding Liberation Through Farming” By Kirsten Lie-Nielsen for Ambrook Research enough! Great piece!
Well that’s all for this YEAR, friends!
We will be back in your inbox on Friday, January 12th, 2024 with some new year Rē School offerings!
What have you been reading? What have you been loving? Write to us at admin@regenerativeschool.org and let us know!
Thank you and see you in 2024!