Regeneration

Kristin Veel

 Related terms: resilience, reproduction, repetition, generation, care, slow science

At the age of 86, my dad broke his femur. It was a matter of a chair that reached its tipping point as he was trying to stand up. The nursing home staff was aggravated that he had attempted to get up at all, having repeatedly urged him to press the little button on his wrist to call for assistance whenever he needed to move around his room. But at 86, his patience is as brittle as his bone structure. As a pilot, he has spent most of his working life pressing little buttons that would immediately make fossil fuel engines spin and the aeroplane roar towards the sky. To him, waiting for the slow machine of the understaffed nursing home to assist him feels more challenging than bringing his own Parkinson ’s-affected body to move in staccato. So, he gets up briskly, attempting to get enough momentum in the skeleton to take off. In that sudden movement of elevation, exposing himself to the unreliable support that air can offer, I imagine him swaying for a moment as his blood pressure drops from the sudden change in altitude, reaching for the armrest that is not there, and then plummeting to the ground, femur fractured, immobilized until found by the care personnel.

Broken bones can heal at all ages if given the time and care required – immobilization, nourishment, and slow, incremental rehabilitation. Just as ecosystems require time and nourishment to recover from depletion, the body's ability to regenerate diminishes over time. My father's fracture, then, is not just a personal event but an entry point into a better understanding of regeneration as a process with biological and ecological limits. Bones, like coral reefs, or soil and forests, are living tissue – dynamic, and resilient, yet finite in their capacity for renewal. Just as ecosystems experience thresholds beyond which their regenerative capacities are overtaken by loss, human bone regeneration reaches its tipping point already around the age of 30. At 86, my father’s brittle bones, struggling to rebuild, evoke landscapes that can no longer recover from extraction at the pace they are depleted, becoming increasingly vulnerable to fracture.

In recent years, ‘regeneration’ has emerged as a central concept in environmental discourse, highlighting the tension between natural cycles of repair and the pressures of human extraction. From soil restoration to rewilding, from climate adaptation to forest regrowth, regeneration represents a necessary counterforce to entropy and depletion. Jeremy Walker, in More Heat Than Life: The Tangled Roots of Ecology, Energy and Economics (2020), explores the tension between economic models of endless growth and the physical reality of energy systems that cannot sustain infinite extraction. Neoclassical economics – much like my father’s impulse to stand rather than wait – assumes a frictionless world where energy, whether in bodies or markets, flows without loss. But entropy is real, and the biosphere, like ageing bones, reaches a limit where extraction outpaces the slow work of renewal.

In this regard, it is worth considering the temporal implications of regeneration. Etymologically, the original sense of re- in Latin is ‘back’ or ‘again’ (OED). The prefix thus suggests a return to something prior – even a repetition. I am reminded of Freud, who in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, describes the repetition of compulsion as a biological instinct, linking it to the regenerative capacity observed in other animals: “A power of regenerating lost organs extends far up into the animal kingdom, and the instinct for recovery to which, alongside therapeutic assistance, our cures are due must be the residue of this capacity which is so enormously developed in the lower animals”  (Freud, 1933, 106).

When my daughter was three, we often had to redo things when they did not unfold as she had intended. She would insist we backtrack our steps to the exact spot where things had taken a wrong turn – firmly believing that placing ourselves five meters back in the direction from which we had come would somehow rectify the situation. It often left me feeling like Nick in The Great Gatsby, gently noting, “You can’t repeat the past,” while she, like Gatsby, would cry incredulously, “Why of course you can!” (Fitzgerald, 1926, 117) and refuse to move forward until we had retraced our steps. Over time, I came to understand that what she sought was not an exact repetition but a repetition with a difference – a chance for a different outcome. As Ranjani Mazumdar, professor of cinema studies, succinctly puts it in her discussion of the notion of repetition and difference in Deleuze (1994) and Appadurai (2019): ”It is the present that triggers the repetition, which is then poised to move into an imagined notion of the future.” (Mazumdar, 372).

This, at its core, is what ‘regeneration’ speaks to. It is not merely about repetition but about bringing forth something else – imagining an alternative future. The example with my daughter shows how thinking about temporality in geographical terms can illuminate a sense of futurity in going back – something that also lies at the heart of ecological regeneration. Seen in this way, regeneration is not just a return but a reprogramming – reaching into the future to envision things differently. And sometimes, that requires retracing your steps a few meters (or more) on the pavement.

It may seem that it is the generative part of re-generation that is infusing the situation with a needed change that in turn opens the possibility of bringing about a different future. So, let us dwell for a moment on the notion of the ‘generative,’ which is a word that has taken an upward leap in frequency use in recent years, not least with the proliferation of generative AI. I’ll get back to that.

‘Generative’ implies renewal – an infusion that enables creation and procreation. That which is generative “produces or gives rise to something” (OED). It represents the emergence of something that did not previously exist and appears to follow a distinct forward-moving logic, not unlike the growth model that Walker critiques. If regeneration follows the rhythms of care and restoration, the generative suggests an alternative mode of production – one that operates at a different tempo, driven by acceleration.

In this sense, there is a striking contrast between regeneration and generation, between slowness and speed, and between the labour of repair and the production of output. The regenerative processes that sustain life – whether in bodies or landscapes – require pauses, cycles, and patience. Generative AI, by contrast, is named for its ability to endlessly produce – to generate text, images, and solutions at a scale and speed unimaginable in human time. Unlike the slow and careful processes of regeneration – of bones mending, forests recovering, or soils healing after depletion – generative AI is extractive, consuming vast datasets and energy to sustain its output. Where regeneration restores, automated generativity risks depletion. One might say that the relentless generation of content mimics life but does not necessarily nourish it; it accelerates production and performativity but risks bypassing repair.

Like my father’s refusal to press the button on his wrist and wait for an overburdened system of care to respond, generative AI thrives on impatience. It satisfies an imperative to produce and perform faster and more efficiently, automating the creative thinking that goes into generating, for example, texts like this. Language models may produce outputs that are just as eloquent – if not more so – than those of human writers and thinkers. But my concern is not merely with the output; it is with the erosion of cognitive resilience within this process. What mental bone density will we lose, much like how my ability to navigate without my phone has weakened since my first encounter with GPS? If these faculties deteriorate, how do we regenerate them?

As bones remind us, fragility often emerges where regenerative capacity is lost. Ecosystems erode, minds burn out, and the structures that sustain life – both natural and human – teeter at their limits. Regeneration, whether of bones, ecosystems, or thought itself, requires time, attention, and a different kind of engagement with the world (Puig de la Bellacasa 2019; Stengers 2018; Hesselberth and de Bloois 2020). To regenerate rather than generate demands a different relationship to time – one that resists speed allows for rest, and recognizes that growth must be balanced with care.

As Stefania Barca’s Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene argues, regeneration is about the labour that makes life possible in the first place. It is the work of caregivers, subsistence farmers, and ecological stewards – the often invisible forces of reproduction that sustain the conditions necessary for regeneration. Ultimately, regeneration is not just about natural processes but about who and what enables repair in the first place.

My father’s fall is not just about bones failing to regenerate but about a system of care that has itself been depleted – understaffed and stretched beyond its ability to sustain those it is meant to hold. To regenerate is not merely to replace what was lost (such as bone healing) but to embrace a full rehabilitation that involves reimagining how we move, how we stand, and how we care for the fragile structures that support us. My father’s fall – caused by an imbalance and a missing support structure – mirrors the fragile ground we now stand on. As we embrace tools that generate, we must also ask: What are we regenerating? What are we restoring? And can we slow down enough to repair the very systems we risk breaking – our bodies, our minds, our communities, our ecosystems? 

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 2019. “The Ready-Made Pleasures of Déjà Vu: Repeat Viewing of Bollywood Films.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 6 (1): 140–52.

Barca, Stefania. 2020. Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.

Scott Fitzgerald. 1926. The Great Gatsby. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Freud, Sigmund. 1933. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. New York: Carlton House.

Hesselberth, Pepita and Joost de Bloois. 2020. Politics of Withdrawal: Media, Arts, Theory. Lanham, Maryland, US: Rowman & Littlefield.

Mazumdar, Ranjani. “Repetition with a Difference: A Response to Arjun Appadurai.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 6.3 (2019): 371–376.

Oxford English Dictionary. n.d. “Re-” Accessed March 13, 2025.

Oxford English Dictionary. n.d. “Generative.” Accessed March 13, 2025.

Oxford English Dictionary. n.d. “Regeneration.” Accessed March 13, 2025.

Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. 2019. “Re-animating soils: Transforming human–soil affections through science, culture and community.” The Sociological Review, 67 (2): 391-407.

Stengers, Isabelle. 2018. Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Walker, Jeremy. 2020. More Heat than Life: The Tangled Roots of Ecology, Energy and Economics. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.