I see multiple threads of common interest between you and Gabriel, primarily around what it's going to take for humans to live their lives differently, into a future that looks a lot more like indigeneity than modernity. You might check out his books (many to come in the next 5 or 6 months): https://restorativepractices.com/our-books/
Also, you might be interested to take the "month free trial" offer of access to the library of practices available on the above-linked site.
This so banal of a comment, but a board game might be where to explore the new words and concepts and some of the cards or the cover of the box must have that picture of your face among the dopamine producing things! Great thinking, Nate! Your work makes my days, weeks, months, years more interesting!
Great idea. Similar to how Monopoly was originally designed to have two versions. One was the current version, but the other was one when equality gave some to everyone. Your idea could be a game that kills or supports the ecosystem, and thus players live or die.
Ooooo! Everybody wins by achieving enough coordination in the context of a commons to create a sustainable humanity. Failing sufficient coordination, everybody dies, that is, loses the game. The players have to come up with a system of governance that evades multi-polar traps such as the tragedy of the commons or the prisoner's dilemma. There also must be ways to eliminate sociopathic players before the game is over. Individuals could draw cards or roll dice (like in Dungeons & Dragons) at the start of the game to determine their character. Dedication to Elinor Ostrom.
I think we need one name for the movement but many actors and archetypes. Some archetypes may need to be reactivated as they lie dormant in our ancestral memory. And I think that's exciting.
I write about some of the key roles in the regenerative movement here.
Meander Magazine exists to give momentum to this movement and speak about it in a way that resonates with a broad audience. We invite people to this see this world of potential and be part of the movement in way that we hope counters the stigma of "wacko".
Words are the interface between our brains and the world as experienced, aka reality. They are the framework that determine how we see the world, but also what we see and what we don’t. Language and the words are always a great simplification of that reality. Perhaps more important than the words is how they are used to communicate, particularly within the human social context. Social discourse has been degraded and language so devalued that much of society – particularly at the higher levels, i.e. politics, mass and social media -- has become fundamentally broken and spiritually dead. In a world awash in the most horrendous physical violence, hate and exploitation, writing and language have become weaponized as violence by other means. Truth force is the practice of nonviolence as expressed in words. It is an affirmation that another world is possible as well as the pathway to a new culture and society of nonviolence and love.
It would be interesting to tie this exercise in with John Fullerton’s work on a regenerative economy. Every concept described in this post that needs a new word does not support the existing extractive economy. It would be great to have these
new regenerative words created and adopted,
And even better to not have them co-opted by the existing system to be seen in some negative light or weakness, like what was done with words like ‘woke’.
One way to understand and identify frent ideas is to recognize appropriate boundaries between our individual selves and what is around us. A person thinking frentically is someone who is seeing everything in terms of their needs. Does a molecule have a need? A plant? An animal? A human being? In terms of what allows them to exist, each of these have needs.
Frentic thinking only sees needs in terms of itself, not what is around it. (Note how inadequate the word "itself" is in this context. We don't have a word for something-in-itself). In my lexicon, frentic thinking is Egoic thinking. Non-frentic thinking is Non-Egoic thinking.
Scientific, philosophic and spiritual best practices must be Non-Egoic, (Non-Frentic), if our species is to survive technology.
“This would be a word that points to deep seeing – to knowing the stakes, the patterns, the dependencies – and choosing to act anyway. “
Maybe the word for seeing the destruction and understanding the problems could be
Seears or Beears.
Maybe the word for being content, knowing the full joy of enough , could be an abbreviation of
“Here And Now”. Han
That being here and now , is freeing and in tune with everything,
as Thich Nat Han showed us, a true contentment, in many moments.
But I also think that people that have HAN also have a Glow , glowing with balance .
You have interviewed many people who have glowed, & it is an utter delight.
I’ve wondered about people who understand a fairer, sharing during life, would be one, of living on an ARC life, and that one would midlife, prepare for having less material demands, more spiritual and cognitive, therefore enabling more sharing for younger people who are finding their way. Committing to Arc.
The ecological sacrilege, could use your word Frent as Frentted. As it is ecologically unsustainable, As the physics Degrowth Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, said, that each new, virgin use of a material, will often leave, it to never be the same again. That freedom of being many futures for many beings, is over, for us in relationship to it.
Also on human use, increases chaos, like a form of human made entropy, as a muddling more quickly creating chaos, and reducing choices. I liken this to muddling of Rubik’s cube, and wonder if we could make a word of robbing those chances of natural order, which can and wants to exist. Therefore
Robiks, is any increase of man made chaos, which includes all waste, bs jobs, all high energy thoughtlessness, in our world, to allow Robiks.
Rubiks is the paths natural cycles want to take, being in order.
Robiks is the man made muddling of natural cycles, on purpose for sake of money making, and no purpose in ignorance.
This essay reminds me of Robert McFarlane's book, "The Lost Words," about words relating to the natural world that are being cut from modern usage. Poignant and so on-point that the language which connects us with our environment is quietly disappearing, and being replaced with tech and machine references.
Words have meanings, language as the whole system of words and the rules of relating them symbolizes the complex set of interrelated meanings. The verb “to symbolize” means a relation between language and reality. Missing words then symbolize the missing pieces of reality.
In real time communication we don’t directly use words, but terms. Terms are related to both words and actual context they are used in, so the relations between terms and words vary depending on the context. “The great simplification” is an example of the preset context expressed in words.
My comment is intended as just the voice in the discussion, however as my native language isn't English I can also offer a meaningful example. In Slavic languages we have the word symbolizing singular of the word "people", in English used only in plural. Isn't it missing in English?
Person is the formal word in formal English. It meant something different in Latin. It didn’t exist in Greek. In Polish the singular of people (czlowiek) and “person” mean different things.
My comment was intended as a question. Does it make sense to discuss missing words? Or should we rather rethink the literacy and numeracy rooted in the past in the present context of human predicament? Missing words "say" something about the language as a whole - system of communcation.
Your reflections on the power of language and words is very important for our challenge of a conscious evolution, we need new words as well as a new mind and cultures. I recommend the work of philosopher Richard Rorty and his proposal for the contingency of language and our desires for better liberal societies. As Rorty would say, we need a new vocabulary. Manuel Manga
We have the words. They not the problem. Our words could expose a fundamental contradiction at the core of modern food policy: the effort to combat hunger by expanding food production ends up reinforcing the very problem it seeks to solve. As food availability increases, so does population size, which in turn drives the demand for ever more food. This positive feedback loop pushes human systems beyond ecological limits, creating a trap where short-term fixes deepen long-term risks. The widely accepted view—that hunger is primarily a distribution issue solvable through increased agricultural output—fails to account for the thermodynamic and ecological boundaries that define sustainable existence on a finite planet. Pogo got it right. The problem resides within us alone: our self-interested thought, grandiosity and desire for power over all. See the late Gary Gripp's wondrous book, The Culture Trap.
One of the blindnesses of "increase food production" is that it tends to promote poison-based, genetically-modified monoculture, ignoring the many forms of damage this elicits.
Yes, the GMO monoculture is damaging. The type of blindness to which I want to draw attention regards seeing human population numbers as the independent variable. The best available science is crystal clear: human seem to be blind to the well-established fact that food is the independent variable. Not seeing this fact has profound implications for the future of life as we know it in our planetary home.
Yes, human population dynamics is essentially similar to, not different from, the population dynamics of deer and rabbits and other species within the web of life of earth. For all our exceptional traits, Homo sapiens sapiens is not exceptional in terms of its population dynamics.
Human population dynamics is incontrovertibly governed by the availability of food—a causal relationship too often overlooked or inverted in contemporary discourse. Evidence demonstrates that increases in food supply precipitate corresponding expansions in human populations. Experimental and correlational studies reveal that, analogous to other species, human reproduction and population size rise as food availability increases. This framing positions food supply as the independent variable, not a mere response to demand, and compels a reorientation in how we conceptualize demographic trends and their ecological consequences.
Paradoxically, many scholars in demography, economics, and environmental science remain resistant to this straightforward inference, often reversing cause and effect in their analyses. This conceptual inversion undermines analytical clarity and obscures the role of food supply as a driver of population growth. What is widely treated as conventional wisdom—that human population growth necessitates constant expansion of food production—is, in fact, a cultural meme with little grounding in empirical reality.
Data from multiple disciplines underscores that the trajectory is not population driving food supply, but food supply enabling population growth. Longitudinal and cross-species studies consistently support this conclusion. Moreover, ecological overshoot—where humanity’s resource consumption exceeds Earth's regenerative capacity—is driven substantially by population expansion, itself enabled by abundant food supply.
Our collective failure to recognize food supply as the causal variable has profound implications. It perpetuates unsustainable practices that degrade ecosystems and accelerate biodiversity loss. Institutional endorsements of continuous yield expansion—often without consideration of limits—have blinded policymakers to the ecological toll of food overproduction and the resulting demographic momentum.
Recognizing food supply’s causative power allows for a clearer, kinder, and more sustainable approach. Equitable redistribution may temporarily elevate population, but curbing overall consumption and production eventually realigns human numbers with ecological capacity. Honest policy must therefore balance immediate human welfare with long-term sustainability, supporting both ethical population management and biodiversity conservation.
In sum, the primary step toward ecological realism—and humane demographic policy—is to recenter food supply as the independent variable in population studies. Only by embracing this reality can we escape the illusion that our attempt to feed a growing population in the present will secure the future for our children and those yet to be born.
Yes, it's a positive feedback loop. But it is not, definitely not, a chicken and egg situation. Food is the one and only independent variable. Please see,
Hopfenberg, Russell, In Pursuit of Sustainability: The Root Cause of Human Population Growth. JPS, 2025. whp-journals.co.uk
Hopfenberg, Russell, and Pimentel, David. “Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply,” Environment, Development and Sustainability, 2001.
Food surpluses were created. The surpluses served as the catalyst for human numbers to grow. Human numbers have been growing ever since. Slowly at first and recently (since the onset of the Industrial Revolution) in a spectacular way.
Great post, and I'm kinda surprised there haven't been more suggestions for words to capture these ideas. I'll offer up one: "biognizant" as in someone who is deeply aware that all life forms are entangled and in a constant dance with one another.
I kept reflecting on how many concepts and practices in Buddhism sound very similar to me to what you described that we need to either do and/or have words for. A couple of examples: cultivating a sense of joy in others fortunes instead of envy 'mudita' (sympathetic or appreciative joy) or finding balance and contentment 'upekkha' or 'upeksha' (equanimity). There were many more. It's nice to see how buddhist practices and thought can be so relevant in these challenging times. No doubt there are other practices and philosophies or religions that have already found useful paths in response to our self destructive tendencies.
Here's a book about words missing from the English language:
https://restorativepractices.com/product/keywords-hardcover/
thank you - hadn't seen that!
I see multiple threads of common interest between you and Gabriel, primarily around what it's going to take for humans to live their lives differently, into a future that looks a lot more like indigeneity than modernity. You might check out his books (many to come in the next 5 or 6 months): https://restorativepractices.com/our-books/
Also, you might be interested to take the "month free trial" offer of access to the library of practices available on the above-linked site.
Or start from https://www.hearthscience.io/
This so banal of a comment, but a board game might be where to explore the new words and concepts and some of the cards or the cover of the box must have that picture of your face among the dopamine producing things! Great thinking, Nate! Your work makes my days, weeks, months, years more interesting!
Great idea. Similar to how Monopoly was originally designed to have two versions. One was the current version, but the other was one when equality gave some to everyone. Your idea could be a game that kills or supports the ecosystem, and thus players live or die.
Ooooo! Everybody wins by achieving enough coordination in the context of a commons to create a sustainable humanity. Failing sufficient coordination, everybody dies, that is, loses the game. The players have to come up with a system of governance that evades multi-polar traps such as the tragedy of the commons or the prisoner's dilemma. There also must be ways to eliminate sociopathic players before the game is over. Individuals could draw cards or roll dice (like in Dungeons & Dragons) at the start of the game to determine their character. Dedication to Elinor Ostrom.
The words Nate’s is pondering could be emergent from the process of designing the game. 😎
I think we need one name for the movement but many actors and archetypes. Some archetypes may need to be reactivated as they lie dormant in our ancestral memory. And I think that's exciting.
I write about some of the key roles in the regenerative movement here.
https://meandermagazine.substack.com/p/a-regenerative-movement-is-happening?r=5jvokf
Meander Magazine exists to give momentum to this movement and speak about it in a way that resonates with a broad audience. We invite people to this see this world of potential and be part of the movement in way that we hope counters the stigma of "wacko".
https://www.meandermagazine.earth/
Thanks for your insightful and thought provoking work Nate 🙏
Words are the interface between our brains and the world as experienced, aka reality. They are the framework that determine how we see the world, but also what we see and what we don’t. Language and the words are always a great simplification of that reality. Perhaps more important than the words is how they are used to communicate, particularly within the human social context. Social discourse has been degraded and language so devalued that much of society – particularly at the higher levels, i.e. politics, mass and social media -- has become fundamentally broken and spiritually dead. In a world awash in the most horrendous physical violence, hate and exploitation, writing and language have become weaponized as violence by other means. Truth force is the practice of nonviolence as expressed in words. It is an affirmation that another world is possible as well as the pathway to a new culture and society of nonviolence and love.
It would be interesting to tie this exercise in with John Fullerton’s work on a regenerative economy. Every concept described in this post that needs a new word does not support the existing extractive economy. It would be great to have these
new regenerative words created and adopted,
And even better to not have them co-opted by the existing system to be seen in some negative light or weakness, like what was done with words like ‘woke’.
One way to understand and identify frent ideas is to recognize appropriate boundaries between our individual selves and what is around us. A person thinking frentically is someone who is seeing everything in terms of their needs. Does a molecule have a need? A plant? An animal? A human being? In terms of what allows them to exist, each of these have needs.
Frentic thinking only sees needs in terms of itself, not what is around it. (Note how inadequate the word "itself" is in this context. We don't have a word for something-in-itself). In my lexicon, frentic thinking is Egoic thinking. Non-frentic thinking is Non-Egoic thinking.
Scientific, philosophic and spiritual best practices must be Non-Egoic, (Non-Frentic), if our species is to survive technology.
https://noegoodyssey.com/
As well as the words we need, there are the words we've lost, especially nature related ones. Here in the UK, "The Lost Words" has had a huge impact: https://www.thelostwords.org/lostwordsbook/. Robert Macfarlane's latest book, "Is a river alive?" might also be of interest: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/455147/is-a-river-alive-by-macfarlane-robert/9780241624814
“This would be a word that points to deep seeing – to knowing the stakes, the patterns, the dependencies – and choosing to act anyway. “
Maybe the word for seeing the destruction and understanding the problems could be
Seears or Beears.
Maybe the word for being content, knowing the full joy of enough , could be an abbreviation of
“Here And Now”. Han
That being here and now , is freeing and in tune with everything,
as Thich Nat Han showed us, a true contentment, in many moments.
But I also think that people that have HAN also have a Glow , glowing with balance .
You have interviewed many people who have glowed, & it is an utter delight.
I’ve wondered about people who understand a fairer, sharing during life, would be one, of living on an ARC life, and that one would midlife, prepare for having less material demands, more spiritual and cognitive, therefore enabling more sharing for younger people who are finding their way. Committing to Arc.
The ecological sacrilege, could use your word Frent as Frentted. As it is ecologically unsustainable, As the physics Degrowth Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, said, that each new, virgin use of a material, will often leave, it to never be the same again. That freedom of being many futures for many beings, is over, for us in relationship to it.
Also on human use, increases chaos, like a form of human made entropy, as a muddling more quickly creating chaos, and reducing choices. I liken this to muddling of Rubik’s cube, and wonder if we could make a word of robbing those chances of natural order, which can and wants to exist. Therefore
Robiks, is any increase of man made chaos, which includes all waste, bs jobs, all high energy thoughtlessness, in our world, to allow Robiks.
Rubiks is the paths natural cycles want to take, being in order.
Robiks is the man made muddling of natural cycles, on purpose for sake of money making, and no purpose in ignorance.
This essay reminds me of Robert McFarlane's book, "The Lost Words," about words relating to the natural world that are being cut from modern usage. Poignant and so on-point that the language which connects us with our environment is quietly disappearing, and being replaced with tech and machine references.
Words have meanings, language as the whole system of words and the rules of relating them symbolizes the complex set of interrelated meanings. The verb “to symbolize” means a relation between language and reality. Missing words then symbolize the missing pieces of reality.
In real time communication we don’t directly use words, but terms. Terms are related to both words and actual context they are used in, so the relations between terms and words vary depending on the context. “The great simplification” is an example of the preset context expressed in words.
My comment is intended as just the voice in the discussion, however as my native language isn't English I can also offer a meaningful example. In Slavic languages we have the word symbolizing singular of the word "people", in English used only in plural. Isn't it missing in English?
Person?
Person is the formal word in formal English. It meant something different in Latin. It didn’t exist in Greek. In Polish the singular of people (czlowiek) and “person” mean different things.
My comment was intended as a question. Does it make sense to discuss missing words? Or should we rather rethink the literacy and numeracy rooted in the past in the present context of human predicament? Missing words "say" something about the language as a whole - system of communcation.
Nice timing... I have re-stacked... already some feedback along my web... the portal is open... Smile.
Your reflections on the power of language and words is very important for our challenge of a conscious evolution, we need new words as well as a new mind and cultures. I recommend the work of philosopher Richard Rorty and his proposal for the contingency of language and our desires for better liberal societies. As Rorty would say, we need a new vocabulary. Manuel Manga
'Philosophy as Poetry'... reclaim natural philosophy (Boethius) and I would add natural history (White), while there is time.
'Afterword' by Mary-Ann Rorty https://web.stanford.edu/~mvr2j/docs/afterword.pdf
She says he was 'logocentric' man.
We have the words. They not the problem. Our words could expose a fundamental contradiction at the core of modern food policy: the effort to combat hunger by expanding food production ends up reinforcing the very problem it seeks to solve. As food availability increases, so does population size, which in turn drives the demand for ever more food. This positive feedback loop pushes human systems beyond ecological limits, creating a trap where short-term fixes deepen long-term risks. The widely accepted view—that hunger is primarily a distribution issue solvable through increased agricultural output—fails to account for the thermodynamic and ecological boundaries that define sustainable existence on a finite planet. Pogo got it right. The problem resides within us alone: our self-interested thought, grandiosity and desire for power over all. See the late Gary Gripp's wondrous book, The Culture Trap.
One of the blindnesses of "increase food production" is that it tends to promote poison-based, genetically-modified monoculture, ignoring the many forms of damage this elicits.
Yes, the GMO monoculture is damaging. The type of blindness to which I want to draw attention regards seeing human population numbers as the independent variable. The best available science is crystal clear: human seem to be blind to the well-established fact that food is the independent variable. Not seeing this fact has profound implications for the future of life as we know it in our planetary home.
St. Matthew's Island, https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/st-matthew-island/
Yes, human population dynamics is essentially similar to, not different from, the population dynamics of deer and rabbits and other species within the web of life of earth. For all our exceptional traits, Homo sapiens sapiens is not exceptional in terms of its population dynamics.
Human population dynamics is incontrovertibly governed by the availability of food—a causal relationship too often overlooked or inverted in contemporary discourse. Evidence demonstrates that increases in food supply precipitate corresponding expansions in human populations. Experimental and correlational studies reveal that, analogous to other species, human reproduction and population size rise as food availability increases. This framing positions food supply as the independent variable, not a mere response to demand, and compels a reorientation in how we conceptualize demographic trends and their ecological consequences.
Paradoxically, many scholars in demography, economics, and environmental science remain resistant to this straightforward inference, often reversing cause and effect in their analyses. This conceptual inversion undermines analytical clarity and obscures the role of food supply as a driver of population growth. What is widely treated as conventional wisdom—that human population growth necessitates constant expansion of food production—is, in fact, a cultural meme with little grounding in empirical reality.
Data from multiple disciplines underscores that the trajectory is not population driving food supply, but food supply enabling population growth. Longitudinal and cross-species studies consistently support this conclusion. Moreover, ecological overshoot—where humanity’s resource consumption exceeds Earth's regenerative capacity—is driven substantially by population expansion, itself enabled by abundant food supply.
Our collective failure to recognize food supply as the causal variable has profound implications. It perpetuates unsustainable practices that degrade ecosystems and accelerate biodiversity loss. Institutional endorsements of continuous yield expansion—often without consideration of limits—have blinded policymakers to the ecological toll of food overproduction and the resulting demographic momentum.
Recognizing food supply’s causative power allows for a clearer, kinder, and more sustainable approach. Equitable redistribution may temporarily elevate population, but curbing overall consumption and production eventually realigns human numbers with ecological capacity. Honest policy must therefore balance immediate human welfare with long-term sustainability, supporting both ethical population management and biodiversity conservation.
In sum, the primary step toward ecological realism—and humane demographic policy—is to recenter food supply as the independent variable in population studies. Only by embracing this reality can we escape the illusion that our attempt to feed a growing population in the present will secure the future for our children and those yet to be born.
It's a loop. A causes B causes A.
Yes, it's a positive feedback loop. But it is not, definitely not, a chicken and egg situation. Food is the one and only independent variable. Please see,
Hopfenberg, Russell, In Pursuit of Sustainability: The Root Cause of Human Population Growth. JPS, 2025. whp-journals.co.uk
Hopfenberg, Russell, and Pimentel, David. “Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply,” Environment, Development and Sustainability, 2001.
How do you account for the agricultural revolution?
Food surpluses were created. The surpluses served as the catalyst for human numbers to grow. Human numbers have been growing ever since. Slowly at first and recently (since the onset of the Industrial Revolution) in a spectacular way.
French use the word "sobriété" which closest translation is "frugality".
It is a good reminder that energy consumption can be considered from the supply side but also from the demand side by economists.
Great post, and I'm kinda surprised there haven't been more suggestions for words to capture these ideas. I'll offer up one: "biognizant" as in someone who is deeply aware that all life forms are entangled and in a constant dance with one another.
Any other suggestions?
Ecosophic?
I kept reflecting on how many concepts and practices in Buddhism sound very similar to me to what you described that we need to either do and/or have words for. A couple of examples: cultivating a sense of joy in others fortunes instead of envy 'mudita' (sympathetic or appreciative joy) or finding balance and contentment 'upekkha' or 'upeksha' (equanimity). There were many more. It's nice to see how buddhist practices and thought can be so relevant in these challenging times. No doubt there are other practices and philosophies or religions that have already found useful paths in response to our self destructive tendencies.