The Great Regeneration: Ecological Farming, Open-Source Technology, and a Radical Vision of Hope

In the age of climate change and the ongoing battles around how we use land to grow food and rear livestock, can an emerging group of visionary farmers utilise new technology to help create a truly communal vision of regenerative agriculture that is networked, engaged, and transformative – and ultimately a force for good in the natural world?

In The Great Regeneration, farmer-technologist Dorn Cox and author-activist Courtney White explore this unique, groundbreaking research which is aimed at reclaiming the ground where science and agriculture meet as a shared human endeavour.

The Great Regeneration explores the critical function that open-source technology can have in promoting agroecological systems, through data-sharing and networking. If these systems are brought together, there is potential to revolutionise how we manage food production and natural systems around the world, decentralising and deindustrialising the structures of production and governance that have long dominated the agricultural landscape.

In this important book, Dorn Cox and Courtney White present a simple choice: we can allow ourselves to be dominated by this new technology, or we can harness its potential and use it to understand and improve our shared environment. The choices made today will affect the generations to come, and The Great Regeneration shows how, together, we can create positive and lasting change.

Dorn Cox is the research director for the Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment in Freeport, Maine, and farms with his family on 250 acres in Lee, New Hampshire. He is a founder of the farmOS software platform and Farm Hack, and is active in the soil health movement. In 2018, he received the inaugural Hugh Hammond Bennett Award for Conservation Excellence given by the National Conservation Planning Partnership. In 2019, he won a GroundBreaker Prize from FoodShot Global for his leadership in developing the Open Technology Ecosystem for Agricultural Management (OpenTEAM). He speaks regularly about participatory science, open agricultural-knowledge exchange, and regenerative agriculture. He has a BS from Cornell University and a PhD from the University of New Hampshire in natural resources and Earth system science.

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Courtney White is a former archaeologist and Sierra Club activist who dropped out of the “conflict industry” to cofound the Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit conservation organization dedicated to building a radical center among ranchers, conservationists, and public land managers around practices that improve resilience in Western working landscapes. In 2005, Wendell Berry included Courtney’s essay “The Working Wilderness” in his collection titled The Way of Ignorance. He is the author of Revolution on the Range; Grass, Soil, Hope; The Age of Consequences; and Two Percent Solutions for the Planet; and coauthor of Fibershed with Rebecca Burgess. He is also the author of The Sun, a mystery novel set on a working cattle ranch in northern New Mexico. He lives in Santa Fe.

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David Bollier is an American activist, scholar, and blogger who explores the commons as a powerful paradigm for re-imagining economics, politics, and culture. He pursues this work as Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, and as cofounder of the Commons Strategies Group, an international advocacy project.

Bollier has been an author or editor of ten books on the commons over the past twenty years, including Think Like a Commoner, now translated into six languages, and Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (with coauthor Silke Helfrich). Bollier’s blog, Bollier.org, is a widely read source of news and commentary about the commons, along with his monthly podcast Frontiers of Commoning. He co-organizes international conferences and strategy workshops, and consults regularly with diverse activists and policy experts in the US and Europe. Bollier lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.