Hopeful
A walk through the woods on a journey to better systems
Hopeful is a word we don’t hear much these days.
It’s hard to be full of hope when you’re full of uncertainty. Somehow, we’ve wired the two together. Somewhere along the way, our species became obsessed with roadmaps, blueprints, and wristwatches. We love directions. We need plans. We always want to know when.
But explorers don’t use maps.
They use compasses.
I’ve been an explorer my whole life. I grew up across the street from a protected watershed…400 acres of wild Connecticut land. It stretched across stream belts, forests, wetlands, meadows, and brush. It was home to an incredible array of wildlife, and to us, it became something more than land. It became our proving ground. A place for epic childhood adventures, the kind that would happen if the movies Stand By Me and RAD had a baby.
We were trespassers, sure. And yes, the watershed patrol knew us by name. But this was the 80s. Gen X kids ran wild on go-carts, rode dirt bikes, and built tree forts. We didn’t just pass through, we inhabited that place in our full 1985 glory, broken bones and all.
Today, that land is open to the public. You’ll find hikers, mountain bikers, cross-country skiers, anglers, and horseback riders tracing the same trails. But back then, it was Shangri-La. A forest of freedom. A place cut off from modern life, where we learned to explore, build, and imagine something more.
And maybe that’s the point.
Exploration trains us to notice.
To connect dots.
To ask better questions.
To think beyond what’s right in front of us.
Because hope doesn’t come from certainty.
It comes from choosing to care, even when we don’t know exactly how things will turn out.
That forest taught me something I didn’t have words for at the time: systems.
Everything was connected. The flow of the stream shaped the trails. Fallen trees became bridges. The shade made some paths cooler than others. Deer grazed where the meadow met the woods. You didn’t need a teacher to explain balance or interdependence because you felt it.
Years later, I found a word for that kind of awareness: regenerative.
Regenerative systems don’t just sustain what’s already there. They restore, replenish, and improve over time. They recognize that inputs and outputs are part of the same loop. Waste becomes a resource in the wrong place. The right design reduces the need for constant intervention.
This isn’t just a philosophy. It is a framework.
I like to think of it as scaffolding.
A temporary, but important system that helps us construct a more complex system before we take it down and reuse it. We can apply this to how we build, how we eat, and how we live.
In construction, it means choosing materials that absorb carbon instead of release it. It means selecting sites with existing infrastructure or ecological logic, rather than clearing and conquering. In our communities, it means creating housing that supports health, access, stability, and mobility. Not just shelter.
In food systems, it means recognizing that the health of our soil, water, and bodies are reflections of one another. What we put on our plate is more than a personal choice. It is a signal to the system. We have to recognize the true cost of convenience.
Technology can help. It can track, measure, and reduce complexity.
But it cannot automate awareness.
It cannot replace care.
Regenerative thinking begins when people choose to pay attention. When they decide to explore not just what’s visible, but what’s underneath. Not just how something works, but who it serves and what it leaves behind.
So what does it take?
Better Building Science & Smarter Design
There is no better use than reuse - especially when we repurpose it. If we're serious about regenerative systems, we have to rethink how we build. Most buildings today are designed for speed and short-term cost savings, not for health, durability, or climate logic.
Passive building approaches, like those supported by Phius (Passive House Institute US), flip that script. They prioritize the building enclosure to reduce energy needs from the start. This provides standards and certification pathways that help guide teams toward buildings that work with their environment, not against it.
This is not just about efficiency. It's about resilience. A well-designed building can stay comfortable during power outages, reduce utility burdens over decades, and support occupant health across generations. We need to stop asking what it costs to build something and start asking what it costs to live in it, maintain it, and pass it on. Psst - it doesn’t cost more to build this way.
Better Food Systems Through Soil Health
You are what you eat. But more importantly, your community is what it grows and how it grows it.
Regenerative agriculture reconnects us with the original systems logic of the planet. The Rodale Institute, one of the leading voices in organic and regenerative farming, has shown how practices like cover cropping, composting, and rotational grazing rebuild soil health, sequester carbon, and protect water.
Our digestive systems are not separate from our ecosystems. The same nutrients we rely on are shaped by farming practices, climate, and microbial life in the soil. When we fix our food system, we fix more than the supply chain, we repair the literal ground beneath our feet and the biome in our gut.
Longer Term Thinking
If buildings and food are the inputs, thinking is the operating system.
Buckminster Fuller once said, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete." His approach to systems design wasn't limited to domes and geometry, it was about seeing the planet as one interconnected organism. Psychology and Physics.
The Long Now Foundation picks up that thread by encouraging deep time thinking. Their work helps us stretch our imagination beyond quarterly reports and election cycles. They ask: what could it mean to build something that lasts 10,000 years?
When we combine long-term perspective with grounded local action, we begin to build a future that is both ambitious and attainable. Why not set a higher bar?
So maybe the compass today looks different.
It isn’t made of iron or magnets, but of better questions. How does it work? Who benefits? And for how long? These are the questions we should be asking of everything we touch…our buildings, our food, our systems, our stories. We’ve spent decades using tools that reward recognition, speed, profitability, and scale. But those tools weren’t built for long-term care. They weren’t designed to value what lasts. It’s time to apply new tools, including technology, not just to optimize what exists, but to imagine what should. The work now is not to map the next quarter. It’s to explore new ways of seeing, building, and belonging.
Regenerative thinking isn’t a trend. It’s a return to awareness, intention, and the courage it takes to do better for longer.
I’m Chris Moeller, and I help build #ResilientCommunities. Ask me how.
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