Restoring Rivers, Re-entering Futures

Several months ago, during One Resilient Earth’s Learning Journey, I gave a talk on decolonizing foresight with young and aspiring climate leaders. We also held a rapid-fire Rivers of Tomorrow workshop. The Rivers of Tomorrow is a novel adaptation of the Dreams and Disruptions Game. I asked a simple but deeply reflective question: How do we see rivers today, and who are they to us?

Many participants spoke of rivers as:

• places of childhood memory

• spiritual gateways

• sources of leisure and connection

• hidden under buildings — now strangers to their own communities

• once free, now monetized, extracted, and privatized

• made dangerous not by pollution alone, but by extraction

• symbols of ecological grief — the loss of biodiversity, wildness, and safety; the bringers of flood and drought

• the veins of the land

The following conversation made me think that if we often treat the future the same way we treat rivers — like a quarry, a resource to extract. We may end up acting or perhaps we've been acting as if the future is something to mine dry. The epistemology for me feels identical.

Beneath their reflections was a longing to repair a nature–human relationship altered by greed, indifference, and short-termism.

But what stayed with me most was the inversion one participant offered: perhaps we only remember the river when we fear it… but perhaps the river fears us. This unsettled a default human-centered lens. It reframed the river not as an object to control, but as a being in constant relationship with us — vulnerable to our extraction, our neglect, our short-termism.

Here, the conversation moved beyond climate risk into something deeper: climate responsibility, reciprocity, community, and the kind of ancestors we are becoming.

The Rivers of Tomorrow is a novel adaptation of the Dreams and Disruptions Game.

So, I’ve been sitting with a few questions since:

• Is fear a weak signal or a strong signal of collapse?

• Is grief a form of anticipatory wisdom?

• What relationship do we want to cultivate with our rivers and with our future if both are treated as living entities (we've seen the results when we treat them as mere resources or channels to extract)?

• What if river clean-up and restoration are forms of working meditation?

• What if making our rivers swimmable again is also a form of inner development work?

• What if acknowledge the different emotions that come up when we imagine the future?

It reminds me that regenerative futures aren’t simply designed. They are re-entered.

Gratitude to Laureline Simon and the One Resilient Team for creating a space where young climate leaders could reflect and speak from somewhere deeper. Spaces like this don’t just produce ideas. They restore relationships with place, with each other and with the future.