This is a special topic article in a history book written centuries in the future, at a time when humanity has gone through a great crisis and found a more life-centered way of life. It’s meant to inspire and encourage questions. Follow the Long Journey Home tag for other entries in this book.
It’s written by AI with sometimes general and often detailed prompts from me. That means, in a sense, that it’s written by humanity as a whole since the AI is trained on material from many times and cultures.
This spotlight is on knowing and knowledge in a regenerative world.
Please share your thoughts below. What did this bring up for you?
Knowing and Knowledge in a Regenerative World
by Naira Iztacual
Introduction
In a time when the Earth breathes again, when forests are once more our teachers and rivers carry stories instead of chemicals, our relationship with knowledge has changed. No longer do we revere knowledge as an abstraction, a detached form of control. We live in an age where knowing is participatory, rooted in relationship, and in service of life. It is an age where the mind has rejoined the body, and where we know not only by observing, but by tending, listening, touching, and becoming.
This transformation did not happen all at once. It came through necessity, collapse, grief, and the long work of remembering. And at the heart of this remembering was a return to ways of knowing that were always there—ignored, dismissed, or buried by the culture of extraction and domination.
This article explores the different kinds of knowledge and knowing that guide our world today, with a special focus on knowing through doing—a way of engaging that has proven essential in the restoration of ecosystems and the perennial food systems that sustain us.
What is Knowledge? What is Knowing?
Knowledge is the map. Knowing is walking the land.
Knowledge can be passed on as information, recorded in words, diagrams, and formulas. It gives shape and orientation. But knowing arises through lived experience. It is what grows in the body, in the gut, in the skin, through the act of being in relationship with something—soil, wind, a tree, a community, a memory.
In this time, we distinguish between these not to elevate one over the other, but to remember what was forgotten. For too long, knowledge was elevated above knowing, logic above intuition, theory above practice. Now we hold them together as siblings, each essential in their own way.
Knowing Through Doing: The Heart of Regeneration
The regeneration of ecosystems has taught us something ancient: to know life, you must touch it, care for it, and be changed by it.
We do not learn how to regenerate a forest only by reading books or studying models. We learn by planting, by watching how a tree responds to rain, by noticing which birds return after a new understory grows, by making mistakes and listening deeply. This is not a linear path. It is cyclical, reciprocal, and humbling.
Perennial food production—the systems that now feed us with resilience and abundance—was reborn through such doing. When we returned to food forests, living terraces, and agroforestry systems, we found that the soil would not reveal its secrets to theory alone. We had to kneel. We had to dig. We had to observe patterns over seasons, and then over decades. We had to remember that the Earth is not a machine to be optimized but a living being to be in relationship with.
This kind of knowing is not efficient by the old measures. It takes time. It resists commodification. But it is trustworthy, because it is rooted in reality, in the complexity of life as it is—not as we wish it to be.
Other Forms of Knowing That Sustain Our World
Analytical and Scientific Knowing
We still use science, but we use it differently. It is one voice in the chorus, not the conductor. Science helps us understand patterns, feedback loops, and relationships at many scales. It helps us track water flow, measure soil microbiology, and notice shifts in climate. But we use it alongside other ways of knowing, never above them.
Embodied Knowing
Our bodies are wise. We have re-learned to trust the signals of our own systems as we interact with place and community. Embodied knowing includes how a farmer senses a shift in the wind, how a planter notices the feel of healthy soil, how our nervous systems resonate with the health of a forest. This kind of knowing cannot be taught in words alone. It must be lived into.
Relational and Emotional Knowing
Regeneration requires us to heal relationships—among humans, and between humans and the rest of life. Emotional intelligence and empathy are central. We listen not only to words but to silences, not only to visible needs but to the invisible threads that bind a community. Conflict is not avoided but engaged with care. This is how we build the trust needed to co-create and steward land together.
Intuitive and Subtle Knowing
Dreams, visions, gut feelings, and subtle sensing are not superstitions here—they are honored pathways of insight. When people engage deeply with land and community, they begin to sense patterns that are not always rationally explainable. These intuitions guide planting, healing, and community processes in ways that continue to surprise and nourish us.
Indigenous and Ancestral Knowledge
We sit at the feet of those who never forgot. Indigenous peoples who carried knowledge through colonization, displacement, and violence are now among our primary teachers. Their ways of knowing—rooted in stories, ceremonies, cycles, and deep listening to land—remind us that knowledge is not something we own but something that owns us, calls us into responsibility and care.
Collective and Participatory Knowing
We learn together. We sense together. Through circles, councils, and shared practice, we cultivate a field of knowing that no one could access alone. This is essential in ecosystem work, where no one person sees the whole. Together, we listen. Together, we respond. Collective intelligence allows us to navigate complexity and uncertainty with more grace.
Not-Knowing and Silence
Not everything can or should be known. Mystery is a vital teacher. When we meet the unknown with reverence instead of fear, we become more creative, more open, more wise. Silence is not the absence of knowledge but a fertile space where new insight is born. In this silence, the Earth speaks.
Knowledge in Service of Life
The old era used knowledge to dominate life. Now we use it to serve life.
We ask not just: Is it true? Is it useful? But also: Is it beautiful? Does it nourish? Does it contribute to the thriving of all beings?
We no longer separate knowledge from ethics, from place, or from responsibility. Knowledge is embedded in context, in community, in the web of life. It is dynamic and evolving, because life is.
Education and the Reclaiming of Learning
We no longer educate to produce workers. We cultivate whole humans.
Learning happens in gardens, kitchens, rivers, and workshops as much as in schools. Children learn from elders, from animals, from caring for others, from working the land. Education is intergenerational and lifelong. It balances reason and intuition, intellect and emotion, theory and practice. It honors both the feminine and the masculine ways of knowing, and all the diverse expressions in between and beyond.
Curiosity, humility, and wonder are the roots of this learning. And the fruits are wisdom, care, and resilience.
Conclusion
In this world we now inhabit, knowledge is not a trophy, but a thread in the weave of life.
We know because we care. We know because we participate. We know because we have returned to relationship.
And above all, we know that we are not separate from what we know. We are part of it. The forest grows through us, and we grow through it. This is the deep partnership that sustains our world.
About the Author
Naira Iztacual is a land steward, seed keeper, and community educator born in the highlands of what was once called the Andes. A descendant of the Muisca and Otomí peoples, she weaves ancestral knowledge with regenerative design and collective healing. Naira co-founded La Escuela del Maíz, a mobile school rooted in story, soil, and song, and serves as a council member for the Interregional Network of Ecological Memory.