Regeneration
The Resources Behind This Work
I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to make something in a world where almost nothing is actually weightless.
This website may look immaterial.
It isn’t.
The writing here required a body. It required food, shelter, electricity, time, attention, computers, networks, data centers and the enormous physical infrastructure beneath the digital world.
Some of this work was developed with artificial intelligence. That means it has also used computational resources whose material costs include electricity, cooling systems, water, manufactured hardware, minerals, land and human labor.
I cannot tell you honestly that this page consumed exactly this many gallons of water or this many grams of carbon. The infrastructure is too distributed, and the information available to individual users is not precise enough to make those claims responsibly.
So I won’t pretend to know.
But not knowing the exact cost does not mean there was no cost.
Digital work still comes from the Earth
The machines that allow me to think, write, research and build did not appear out of nowhere.
Their materials came from somewhere.
Their energy comes from somewhere.
Their heat has to go somewhere.
Their waste eventually goes somewhere.
Nothing simply disappears.
That recognition has changed how I want to make things.
I do not want to use increasingly powerful tools simply to produce more information, more content or more things for people to consume.
I want to ask a different question:
Can the resources used to create this work increase someone’s capacity to regenerate rather than simply consume?
For me, that is part of symbolic literacy. A symbol should not merely tell us what something means.
It should increase our ability to notice.
To discern.
To metabolize experience.
To make meaning without handing our agency away.
To receive something without merely passing it downstream unchanged.
Mental alchemy
I sometimes think of this as a form of mental alchemy.
Not magic in the literal sense.
Transformation.
Something enters us:
an experience
a story
a loss
an image
a belief
a piece of information
a pattern
And rather than reacting immediately or repeating it automatically, we develop the capacity to hold it long enough for something to happen.
We examine it.
We feel it.
We distinguish what is ours from what was inherited.
We learn the mechanism beneath the metaphor.
And sometimes we return something different to the world.
That capacity to transform may be one of the most regenerative abilities human beings possess.
Regeneration instead of extraction
I am trying to build my work around a simple principle:
Take less blindly.
Notice what is being used.
Create something worthy of the resources that made it possible.
Return something where I can.
That does not erase the environmental cost of technology. It does not make the work pure.
There is no purity here.
There is participation.
There is awareness.
There is responsibility.
And there is the possibility of building new capacity inside the systems we inherited.
Returning something
As this work begins generating income, I intend for a portion of what it earns to move back toward environmental regeneration.
Not as a carbon-offset claim.
Not as permission to consume without limit.
Simply as part of the exchange.
Some of what this work receives will be returned to the living systems that make the work possible.
Those funds go to the Wildwood Acres Education Foundation — the nonprofit behind a farm and forest school where children learn with the land itself. What has been contributed will be recorded here.
Everything we do here uses resources: land, water, food, fuel, electricity, building materials, human labor, attention, and money. We don’t want children to learn sustainability as an abstract subject while the institution itself hides what it consumes. So we try to make the exchange visible: what we use, what we regenerate, what we cannot yet replace, and what we are working toward.
— The Wildwood Acres Education Foundation
A small experiment
Much of what I am building here is an experiment.
Can technology help people become more attentive rather than more distracted?
Can symbolic tools increase agency rather than dependence?
Can digital work teach us to look back toward the physical world instead of pulling us farther away from it?
Can something generated through enormous technological infrastructure ultimately help human beings become better receivers of one another, their own bodies, and the Earth beneath them?
I don’t know yet.
But I think the question is worth asking.
And I want the way I build the work to remain visible enough that we can keep asking it together.
Want to work together?
Everything on this page is part of how I work — there’s no separate booking for it. We begin with an Orientation: ninety minutes, by video or in person, where we talk about what’s bringing you here and decide together whether there’s a useful way to continue.
Book an OrientationI’ll send a short note beforehand asking what you’re hoping for, so we can use the time well.