By Joe Mancini
Published March 2026
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s 2025 Reith Lecture is optimistically titled “A Moral Revolution”. His main theme is a call for a moral revolution, the kind of revolution that can only be sparked by small committed groups working to change the way people think and act on the serious issues that surround them.
While we live in the midst of tremendous wealth, it is undoubtable that growing inequality is a root issue. At the same time we live in societies where waste piles up, soils are degraded, the chemical balance of the atmosphere is altered, while fossil fuel use is still debated. The inequality of a housing crisis that is leaving people homeless on every continent is unconscionable.
Bregman fears cynicism and apathy. He worries that, “the old sources of guidance – faith, community, tradition are fading away. Yet nothing equally powerful has taken their place. We are a culture adrift, searching for meaning, but finding distraction.”
A culture adrift may also portent new ways of thinking that are struggling to be born. This is the exact right time to find the means of coming together to address environmental and social crises. More than ever, through the gifts of science and faith, this is a time to reflect and act on the emergent and self-organizing properties of complex living systems. Faith, community, and tradition can come back together in new shapes and forms that help society strive cooperatively towards the common good.
The books highlighted in this issue have Integral Ecology as their central organizing thesis, understood as the living systems that constantly combine, recirculate, and recreate. This is not the clockwork universe of scarcity. It is rather a new world where we can rethink how combining, recirculating, and recreating can evolve a new economy of abundance. We have the resources, we have the creativity, and we know how relationships and interconnections can help us envision such an economy. Robin Wall Kimmerer helps us understand what this means when she teaches us that, “wealth comes from reciprocity and the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency”.
The Working Centre has been developing its own practices of the Living Systems model. We see this as an emergent process that respects the intrinsic value and the interconnectedness of all living beings. How does such thinking effect the life of an organization? The books highlighted have been helpful guides to our process. Living Systems thinking is a discipline of hope that we are happy to share. In that spirit, we would like to share two of the practices that we are integrating into our work. All six practices can be found at: www.theworkingcentre.org/about-us/practices/
Follow Regenerative Practices
Regeneration suggests a life-giving process that builds and nourishes the natural life around us. It accepts what is, adding nourishment and new energy to foster a constant spiral of ever strengthening connections. Like nurturing the soil, we first work to minimize soil disruption, to add in nutrition on a constant basis, protect the soil throughout the year, nurture all the insects, mycelium, and worms that help the soil regenerate itself. This same kind of thinking is integral to building community. Like building soil, we help communities form, we support the process, we bring in new ideas and ways of doing things, and we do that in a way that builds new life and energy. When well-tended, each project reflects this regenerative energy.
Practice Intraconnected Wholeness
We are all one. Often, the message of society and the message we carry in our heads is that we are solo and isolated individuals. But this view of our lives is lonely, minimal, and highly individualistic. Intraconnection means that our whole self is ‘fundamental to the social systems and the natural world in which we live’. Our participation in the community mirrors how we think about ourselves. If we see ourselves as intraconnected, it takes us to a wider wholeness. Wholeness is not about sameness but about looking beyond diversity to recognize kinship with all living beings. It is from this wider ‘sense of broader belonging’ that we can turn to embracing the greater good.
It is through reflecting on our experiences and integrating social analysis and reflection that greater action towards living systems practices will continue to emerge.
