The lineage behind the work: the foundations it grew from, the frameworks that shaped it, and a short shelf worth your time.
Why this page
The work did not begin with a theory. It began with a pattern: traditions separated by centuries, continents, and worldviews keep arriving at the same few truths about what makes a life that increases life.
Tend the inner condition first. Act in nested fields, from the self outward. Measure success by what flourishes, not by what accumulates. Stay in relationship with the consequences of your work over the long horizon. What follows traces that lineage. None of it is required. All of it has moved someone.
Foundations ยท in the founder’s words
I came to this work through two disciplines that rarely share a table: philosophy and systems engineering. At the University of Washington I studied philosophy and industrial & systems engineering; at Purdue, Interdisciplinary Engineering and Leadership. I offer these as lineage rather than credentials, the ground my way of seeing grew from: philosophy’s habit of asking what a life is actually for, and engineering’s habit of seeing the whole system rather than its parts.
I have sat in the sweat lodge with an Ojibwe lodge keeper, in a lodge that gathers regional tribal members and Armed Services veterans. I share this only in respect and gratitude, as personal inspiration and not as anything Regenerative Men teaches or reproduces. What I carried out of it lives quietly in this work: the practice of witnessing, being truly seen and bearing honest witness to others, and the experience of wholeness, of returning to an integrated self in right relationship with the people and the living world. The Ojibwe tradition of the lodge is far older and deeper than anything I could say here, and I name it with humility.
I write at The Wholist, an ongoing exploration of wholeness, regeneration, and what it means to live and lead from it.
David, Founder
Frameworks & programs
A handful of traditions do the structural work. Each shapes a different joint of the framework.
Donella Meadows’ leverage points give the diagnosis its spine; Peter Senge’s iceberg gives it shape; network science (Barabási, Newman) explains how small groups, not broadcasts, spread durable change.
Otto Scharmer’s Theory U and the Presencing Institute’s u.lab teach “presencing”: sensing and acting from the emerging future. It is why this work is held as a prototype to sense into, not a program to deploy.
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s reciprocity, Daniel Christian Wahl’s regenerative design, and the regenerative-agriculture movement: a few principles, applied across nested fields, producing more life than the inputs predict.
The Confucian Great Learning’s nested order, Aristotle’s eudaimonia, and Stoic inner discipline underwrite the tenets and the five fields. Indigenous reciprocity traditions are honored as origin, not method.
Richard Reeves and the American Institute for Boys and Men name the quiet middle; Richard Rohr names the second-half-of-life questions this work is built to hold.
David McRaney and Robert Cialdini on how minds actually change; the Englers on what makes movements last. Why this grows through conversation and invitation, not broadcast.
The shelf
A short, practical selection, organized by the question it answers. Pick the one that meets you where you actually are. The fuller list lives in the Group Guidebook.
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer. The book that gives the word regenerative its weight: the clearest case for why the living world is kin rather than resource.
Designing Regenerative Cultures, Daniel Christian Wahl. A working translation of regenerative principles into the design of human systems.
The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf. Recovers Alexander von Humboldt, the naturalist who first described nature as a single interconnected web and shaped the ecological thinking that followed.
Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake. Underground into the world of fungi, where the boundaries between organisms turn out to be far more porous than modern biology assumed.
The Light Eaters, Zoë Schlanger. The new science of plant intelligence: how plants sense, communicate, and act in ways that strain the language we have for what intelligence is.
Biomimicry, Janine Benyus. The case for nature as model, measure, and mentor, solving human problems the way living systems already have across billions of years of design.
Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart. A blueprint for making things the way nature does, where waste becomes food and materials cycle endlessly rather than ending in a landfill.
Regenerative Leadership, Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm. Applying the logic of living systems to how we lead, toward life-affirming organizations rather than depleting ones.
Notes on Being a Man, Scott Galloway. A modern, first-principles take on healthy masculinity, told as a memoir of hard-won learnings.
The Comprehensive Man, Jason Wilson. First principles and lived experience from a man who came up through a hard life to become a teacher and mentor to other men.
Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl. Short, direct, unforgettable. Meaning is not optional, which is why every man arrives with a project.
The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk. How difficulty lives in the body long after the mind has moved on. For the man whose work is not just thinking differently but living differently.
A General Theory of Love, Lewis, Amini, and Lannon. Why men in a room together do biological work beneath conversation. The science under the group’s form.
The Overstory, Richard Powers. A novel that rearranges how a man sees the trees in his own neighborhood, and the time horizon his decisions live in.
Clock of the Long Now, Stewart Brand. The case for thinking in centuries instead of quarters, and why lengthening the horizon is itself a regenerative act.
How Minds Change, David McRaney. Minds change through feeling understood, not through information delivered. The basis for every invitation worth having.
This Is an Uprising, Mark and Paul Engler. What makes social change durable across decades, for the man who starts to see the group as part of something larger.
Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows. Slim and powerful: why fixing symptoms never works, and where the leverage in a system actually lives.
Theory U, Otto Scharmer. Denser than the rest, but worth the climb for the man drawn to leading change inside institutions.
A man who reads everything here and never starts a conversation has missed the point. The books are servants of the practice, not substitutes for it.
Stand by what grows.