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

In the age of climate change, food scarcity, and increasing industrialization, can a few visionary farmers find global solutions through technology and create networked, open-source regenerative agriculture at a truly transformative scale?

In The Great Regeneration, farmer-technologist Dorn Cox and author-activist Courtney White explore unique, groundbreaking research aimed at reclaiming the space where science and agriculture meet as a shared human endeavor. By employing the same tools used to visualize and identify the global instability in our climate and our communities—such as satellite imagery—they identify ways to accelerate regenerative solutions beyond the individual farm.

The Great Regeneration also explores the critical function that open-source tech can have in promoting healthy agroecological systems, through data-sharing and networking. If these systems are brought together, there is potential to revolutionize how we manage food production around the world, decentralizing and deindustrializing the structures and governance that have long dominated the agricultural landscape, and embrace the principles of regenerative agriculture with democratized, open-source technology, disseminating high-quality information, not just to farmers and ranchers, but to all of us as we take on the role of ecosystem stewards.

In this important book, the authors present a simple choice: we can allow ourselves to be dominated by new technology, or we can harness its potential and use it to understand and improve our shared environment. The solutions we need now, they write, involve a broader public narrative about our relationship to science, to each other, and to our institutions. And we all need to understand that the choices made today will affect the generations to come. 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.

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.

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.