Suggestions
Dan Burgess
Regenerative Futures Advocate and Life-Centric Cultures Expert
Dan Burgess is a seasoned professional with 25 years of experience in creative engagement, culture, brand, communications, insight, and human behavior.
His expertise extends to sustainability, eco-innovation, living systems, life-centered design, social innovation, creative activism, co-design, and collaboration culture.
He has worked with grassroots innovators, artists, social entrepreneurs, scientists, activists, global brands, NGOs, and communities to address complex ecological, climate, and social challenges.
Dan now partners with various organizations, including for-profit, non-profit, startups, NGOs, and foundations, to inspire regenerative cultures, brand activism, and civic creativity.
He serves as a strategist, designer, co-designer, writer, speaker, and podcaster, focusing on designing products, brand stories, communications, and collaboration spaces fit for a planetary context.
Dan is deeply interested in care, connection, responsibility, ethics, creativity, participation, and collaboration during these challenging times.
He advocates for practices rooted in care, love, empathy, responsibility, generosity, and co-creation as vital disruptive innovation practices.
Dan is dedicated to exploring courageous responses to ecological, climate, and social issues, aiming to redesign industrial growth systems and foster ecological cultures.
His vision emphasizes civic participation, social justice, human dignity, flourishing ecosystems, and regenerative cultures as cornerstones of success.
Dan's educational background includes a program in outdoor environmental education and a Master's in Sustainability and Responsibility.
He has held roles in various organizations, such as Founder/Consultant at The SpaceShip Earth, Co Pilot at Wildlabs.is, and more, showcasing a diverse and extensive professional journey.
Highlights
Stories are powerful technologies.
They have consequences.
People are starting to notice this.
Here’s a few to start…
- Stories of infinite economic growth on a finite planet.
- Stories of accumulation and productivity as measure of success.
- Stories of 'nature' as resource to human progress.
- Stories of war and violence as the only way to protect freedoms and keep us safe.
These stories are decaying, exhausted, falling apart, more of us are recognising this.
They may be real, but they’re not true, as Jay would say. They’re not rooted in life itself, they are rational stories. Selfish stories one might say.
One of the biggest illusions in these stories, that have dominated the shaping of westernised cultures and systems, is that they all all assume separation.
That there is no consequence to living by these stories.
There isn’t a bigger story ( in my view) right now that is coming apart than the foundational story of separation.
A duality of existence, that we exist outside, separate of everything else.
Because we’re not separate selves - I mean over half of our body is non-human cells and we’re carrying trauma and intelligence in our bodies today from a long line of ancestors who lived before us.
We’re not separate from each other - if we were why are so many experiencing overwhelming grief for the ongoing violence and suffering in Gaza right now ?
We’re not separate from Nature - I mean look at climate and ecological breakdown - we are the weather.
Stories are relational, how we relate to life within us and around us determines the stories we decide to carry, navigate by and shape our realities.
Stories live through us.
If we want to bring new stories into our cultures
- That connect us in new, imaginative and regenerative ways
- That bring care, love, diversity and joy for life to the centre
- That put life at the centre
Then we need to (un)learn to relate to life in new ways. To bring new stories through us. From a wider intelligence of life entangled with us on this living Earth. We need to Remix.
We have just opened applications for Year 2 of The Remix, a 6-month creative adventure of (un)learning & radically reimagining this dominant story of our times: the story of separation.
As Guest teacher Bayo Akomolafe said to the cohort last year
“We need new stories, but new stories are not entirely left to us. The invitation as we depart on The Remix is to listen and to be in touch with things that are not yet storied. To open ourselves to strange encounters. Maybe then the terms and the words and the sentences for new stories will happen to us.”
Maybe you're ready to join us ?
https://lnkd.in/evFERFUc
#polycrisis #climateaction #creativity #regeneration #becomingcrew #storiesforlife
Travelling at the speed of bread *
Over the years, carving out weekly time for making bread has became a barometer for my busyness.
No bread in the house this week ? Too much busyness. Slow down.
As February begins, and trying to honour winter’s stillness, (where my body still wants to be) - my mind, diary and task lists are filling up and accelerating at pace.
Add into the mix paying attention to my family’s needs, preparing food, house chores, life admin and I’m out of time before I’ve barely started.
The speed of modern lives is insane.
And not just the impacts on human health and wellbeing.
The faster and more complex civilisational systems become, the more energy and materials they require, all extracted from a finite Earth - inputs.
These growing complex systems inflict more damage and impacts on the living systems of the Earth through their functioning - outputs .
All of this accelerates instability in climate and the Earth’s system (that humans are nested within)… well you can see where this is taking us.
The entangled crisis of climate, ecology and human health is partly a speed crisis which requires a massive slowing down, a synching back into Earth's rhythms.
Can you imagine a world where we subsidised slowing down ?
Supporting citizens and communities to co-create regenerative systems and infrastructure that serves life itself, instead of subsidising extractive infrastructure and industries to make us go faster and destroy life.
*(proper slow sourdough bread)
#regeneration #climatechange #sustainability #polycrisis #becomingcrew #No4thFloor
