Abdul Semakula
The climate crisis is a listening crisis. We’ve lost the human capacity to hear what the web of life in our places is telling us. A community in Kampala is rebuilding, in an urban context, the cultural infrastructure through which listening to place becomes possible — and through which the capacity to care for place can grow.
This article was first published by Re-landing with Obuntu on 14 April 2026.
What makes a living system alive is not primarily what it is made of, but what it does.
It engages in processes that transform energies — sunlight into food, waste into soil nutrients, experience into meaning.
It builds systems that keep those energetic processes cycling and coordinated — the way a healthy wetland absorbs floodwater, filters it through roots and soil, releases it slowly into streams, and in doing so sustains the very conditions that keep the wetland alive.
And it structures itself to sustain all of this as a continuing whole. It holds its shape — the way a tree grows roots deep enough to survive drought, or a clan system keeps its stories alive across generations.
A forest does this. A wetland does this. A cell or organ does that. A human community does this — or it used to.
The living systems that thrive across generations are not simply the ones with the most resources or the most sophisticated structures. They are the ones that can listen to the intelligence of the larger field they inhabit and respond to what they hear.
Without that capacity, the processes become extractive, the systems become rigid, and the structures become walls rather than scaffolding. Listening — genuine listening to the web of life — is the foundational capacity from which all healthy relation flows. You cannot tend what you cannot hear.
This is what the crisis of our time is actually about. Not a surplus of carbon, nor a deficit of technology or funding or political will. What we are living through is a civilisational failure of listening — and therefore of caring — for the web of life that we are part of.
And if that is the diagnosis, then regeneration cannot be achieved by deploying more sophisticated instruments on the same pattern of listening — to capital, ego, political party priorities, glory — and other such peripheral things we’ve brought into the centre of how we inhabit earth.
It requires something harder: recovering the capacity to listen to the web of life.
Place as a living being
Before we can talk about listening, we need to settle something that modern thinking has made surprisingly difficult to hold: that a place is a living being, not a container or machine.
The Regenesis Institute’s monadic thinking practise invites us to approach place not by assembling information about it but by accepting it as a whole.
As Ben Haggard describes, you cannot come to know a living system by fragmenting it into categories and putting it back together.
A one Sadhguru makes that concrete, he says, scientists prefer to understand a frog by dissecting it. Only, after dissecting it, you don’t have a frog.
You must start from the whole. A place has, in this sense, something like a DNA — underlying geological and ecological processes that shape its characteristic way of being, its essence, its particular contribution to the web of life.
Pre-colonial Buganda understood this without needing a framework to name it. Before the 1900 Buganda Agreement introduced measured land in square miles, our ancestors navigated their world through Emitala — a word that a colonised mind would translate as “estate” (something to own and extract from), but which ancestral wisdom understood as bioregion: the living territory defined by rivers, hills, wetlands, and forests. Not a unit of measure. A living being. The wetland was not a resource the community used. It was an elder who had lived longer than any of them and knew things they needed to hear.
A modern Buganda writer, catching himself suspended between two worlds, wrote: Omuntu yasigala tategedde nti ensi kwaali, naye muntu — “Man remained unaware that the earth he inhabits is also a living being.” The surprise embedded in that sentence marks the loss. There was a time when this would not have needed to be said.
Among the Bagungu, a Ugandan people who have spent the last decade on their own journey of decolonisation and cultural revival, sacred sites are understood as places where custodians seek guidance from nature on behalf of their communities — creating dialogue with species and negotiating with the wider community of life.
These were not symbolic acts. The wetland, the sacred grove, the fish-spawning stream — these were governance partners. Their voice had weight. Seeking their counsel was not optional; it was how decisions got made well.
This is the order of listening that has been lost — not listening as reception, but listening as relation. The kind that changes you by generating responsibility.
How indigenous Bantu practiced listening to the web of life
Over 30 months of listening to the land, people, and future of Kiwaatule — a suburb of Kampala nested around Nalubaaga wetland — we gradually rediscovered a set of cultural commons through which the capacity to listen to place was once maintained, practiced, and transmitted.
They were not five separate concepts. They were five dimensions of a single system — a living whole whose terms only make full sense in relation to each other.
Emitala — the bioregion as homeland. The Bantu world was organised around the natural boundaries of the living place: the watershed, the wetland, the forest, hill or lake. Before money drew the boundaries of social consciousness, the land itself did. This was epistemology. In Buganda, every person belongs to a clan, and each clan carries a totem — an animal, plant, or element of the living world they are responsible to care for and never harm. This totemic knowledge was passed from generation to generation through mythology, song, and ritual, ensuring that knowledge of the living world stayed alive in the body of the community, not just in the minds of specialists.
Emiziro — totemic kinship with all life. The totemic system was not merely symbolic; it was a governance operating system. Hunters were forbidden to kill an in-calf animal or one caring for its young. A particular small bird, the Nnamunye, was never to be killed by anyone. These were not rules imposed from outside. They were the expression of a listening relationship: the community had heard enough of the living world to understand that certain boundaries must be held. To break them was not just a moral transgression — it was a failure of kinship. Strong kinship, as the cultural commons diagram we’ve developed below puts it, makes strong stewardship. You cannot feel called to care for a wetland you have no relationship with.
There is an expression we used to sing as kids in Luganda that captures this perfectly: Ssekanyolya gwe muwaanvu, tubulile ebyekibuga — “Hey Heron, you’re the tall one, tell us news from the city.” The heron was not a metaphor. The heron was kin — someone who knew the condition of the wetland, who could see things from the water’s edge that people on land could not. Asking the heron was governance. It was also epistemic humility of the deepest kind: an acknowledgment that the community’s human intelligence alone was insufficient, that the web of life held knowledge the people needed, and that the relationship required for that knowledge to flow had to be actively maintained.
Obutaka — land-sourced calling. Obu connotes plurality of life; taka means land or soil. Your Obutaka was not what you owned. It was what owned you — the land-sourced belonging, authority, and calling to care for all life in your place. Not “I own this land” but “I belong to this land, and this land has given me a responsibility.” This calling was not abstract. It was specific: your particular piece of the web of life was yours to listen to and tend. And the more you answered that calling, the more capable you became of hearing what it needed next.
Obuwanika — the ongoing practice of caring. The spirit, art, and science of stewarding life in place. Not using land as a resource, but caring for land as a source of life. This was not a separate activity that happened alongside normal life. It was the content of normal life — the practices through which people participated in the vitality and viability of their place and were themselves replenished by it.
Obuntu — the nested interdependence of all life. Obu (plurality) + ntu (individuality): my unique essence is a source of potential, and I am because everyone — human and nonhuman — participates in right relation. Not “I think, therefore I am.” I am because we all are. The individual and the whole were not in tension. The health of one was the measure of the other — right from the cell, to the organ, to the community, to the soil, to the air, water, climate.
Being one with our place: what the system was actually doing
When we began mapping these five cultural commons onto the Regenesis Being Pentad— the framework developed by John Bennett and later applied to place by Regenesis — something clarified that had been implicit in the 30 months of listening but not yet fully named.
The Being Pentad describes what every living being needs in order to sustain and grow its viability: its unique identity (Ipseity), its source of nourishment and origin (Nourishment/Source), the ends it exists to serve (Master/Mastery), the lower nature it must maintain to remain coherent (Lower Nature), and the higher nature it is always reaching toward (Higher Nature). These are not five separate things. They are five limits that bound both the significance and the potential something can attain.
What the Being pentad reveals is how an entity’s inner and outer life — its life for itself and its life for others — must be held together in dynamic relation for it to grow toward its full potential rather than fragment away from it.
Mapped onto Buganda’s the cultural commons above, the fit is exact:
Obuntu — Oneness — sits at the apex as Ipseity: the intrinsic limit, the unique identity of the whole system of life in place. I am because we all participate in right relation. This is the center of gravity around which everything else turns. It’s who the individual is (or not) in relation to other life in place.
Emitala — Homeland / Bioregion — occupies the lower outer limit, the position of Nourishment/Source: the world or land as source from which I arise, my geographic and cultural root that makes me who I am. Your calling to care grows stronger the more you know and love the land you come from. The land flourishes when those who belong to her answer her call.
Obutaka — Calling — occupies the upper outer limit, Master/Mastery: the ends the whole system exists to serve, the destination toward which its life goes. Our kinship web is what makes our calling real. You cannot feel called to care for a wetland you have no relationship with.
Emiziro — Totemic Kinship — occupies the lower inner limit, Lower Nature: the minimal state the system must maintain in order to sustain its coherence of being. We can only care for what we are in kinship with. If we lose our bond with the land, the animals, the plants, the water — our caring becomes weak.
Obuwanika — Caring — occupies the upper inner limit, Higher Nature: the ableness to be in terms of higher potential, what the system is always reaching toward. The more we live as one, the better we can care for our place. And the more we care for our place together, the more we feel like one.
The connectivities between these terms — the flows of reciprocal exchange that the pentad traces — describe the actual dynamics of listening to place.
Kinship feeds calling: you can only hear the call of what you are in relationship with.
Calling deepens kinship: when you answer what place is asking of you, you grow closer to it.
The homeland — Emitala — nourishes both: the more intimately you know the land you come from, the more distinctly you hear your particular responsibility within it.
And all of this cycles back to Obuntu — to oneness — which is not just the premise of the system but its ongoing product. Oneness or wholeness is what the practice of listening continuously regenerates.
This is what the five cultural commons were, together: a living system for sustaining and developing the human capacity to listen to place, structured in such a way that each dimension nourished the others.
What colonialism actually took
In March 1900, Queen Victoria’s decree was implemented in Uganda, converting land from commons to private property. What the historical record tends to record is the dispossession. What it rarely names is the epistemological wound.
The colonial system did not only rearrange land ownership. It systematically dismantled the cultural commons — the practices, the gatherings, the clan systems, the sacred sites, the totemic responsibilities — through which communities had sustained their capacity to listen to the living world.
Elders who still held deep knowledge of how to care for nature were called witches and had to hide away. The kinship between people and the living world was pathologised as superstition and backward.
The governance structures that kept the listening alive were replaced by ones that didn’t need it — five-year electoral cycles where decisions were made in distant offices by people who had never sat beside the wetland, never heard what the heron knows. Land registries, planning permits, environmental impact assessments. Structures designed to manage places, not hear them.
In the physical realm Ssessangas — men of the Elephant Clan were forced to kill their totem for ivory and carry it as slaves — severing consciousness of totemic kinship.
Caring for the commons became nobody’s spiritual calling. The spiral began: my plot, my survival, my fence. Why should I care if others don’t? And when no one feels called to care for the whole, the commons begin to die — not because people stopped caring, but because the cultural infrastructure through which caring was practiced, transmitted, and renewed had been broken.
This matters enormously for the regenerative development field. Because what we are doing, in most of our work, is operating with the same pattern of listening that the colonial system installed — and dressing it in different language.
We assess problems. We design solutions. We fund proposals. We measure outputs. All of this proceeds from a position outside the living place, directed at the living place, confident that we know what the place needs.
The listening is to our own ‘colonial’ frameworks, not to the intelligence of place. The colonial mind did not only colonise land. It colonised the capacity to listen.
Which means that regeneration — genuine regeneration — requires reclaiming that capacity first, before any strategy, any funding, any well-designed intervention.
The Obutaka Gathering Cycle: the practice of listening at scale
What we have been developing in Kiwaatule over 30 months is not a project design or a community programme. It is an attempt to rebuild, in an urban context, the cultural infrastructure through which listening to place becomes possible — and through which the capacity to care for place can grow.
At the heart of this is what we are calling the Obutaka Gathering Cycle: four stages of collective gathering that do, deliberately and consciously, what the cultural commons once sustained as a natural way of life.
Knowledge Gathering
The cycle begins with the Knowledge Gathering — generating a pool of shared understanding.
This is not a data-collection exercise. It is a practice of perceiving the living system together, holding the bioregion as a whole rather than as a set of fragments to be assessed.
In the Regenesis tradition, a critical distinction is drawn between an imaging mind and an analysing mind — one that can hold a living whole present in consciousness, versus one that immediately breaks it into categories and parts.
The Knowledge Gathering is designed to cultivate the imaging mind in a community: to help landstewards, the wetland, and future generations see themselves as participants in the same living system rather than owners of separate plots.
Kin Gathering
The second stage is the Kin Gathering — generating a pool of shared meaning. This is where humans listen to not just themselves but also nonhuman kin.
The word Buganda carries this in its bones. Nda is the womb; ganda is what emerges from it — kinship, the bond between those who came from the same source. Buganda means, at root, a bringing-together of what belongs together. And through the totemic system, that kinship was never limited to human bloodlines. It extended outward to the living world — to the animals, the plants, the waters that each clan was responsible to hear and to tend. Kinship, in this understanding, is not sentiment. It is the precondition for listening. You can only truly hear what you are in genuine relation with.
Which is why the Kin Gathering is structured the way it is. The wetland attends — not as a concept, but as a governance participant with a formal voice, whose obutaka (land-based authority) carries weight in the deliberation. This raises an immediate question that modern governance has no framework for answering: how does a wetland participate in a decision?
The Regenesis tradition offers a useful distinction here. When someone joins a governance process, they can either represent a constituency — carrying its interests into the room and defending them against other interests — or they can reflect it: holding its perspective as part of a whole, in service of the whole’s continuing evolution. Representation generates competing interests. Reflection generates integration. The wetland’s voice in the Kin Gathering is structured as reflection — the humans who carry her perspective into deliberation are not advocates for the wetland against the landstewards. They are trying to make the wetland’s intelligence legible to the whole, so the whole can make better decisions.
This is a profound inversion of how modern development works. In the dominant paradigm, a forest doesn’t charter a logging company. A landowner does, or a government agency does, and the forest is the object of the charter — the thing to be managed, extracted from, or at best conserved. But what if the question were reversed? What if the Nalubaaga wetland were the charterer — the whole doing the chartering — and the community of landstewards were the entity being chartered by the wetland to steward her renewal? The entire logic of the governance process shifts. The question is no longer “what do we want to do with this place?” It becomes “what is this place calling us to become?”
Future generations attend the Kin Gathering on the same terms — not as an abstraction, but as a structural presence. The Council of Future Generations brings the long view into present decisions, ensuring that the temporal horizon of the deliberation extends beyond what any living landsteward can see. Together, the wetland and future generations ensure that the gathering is a holographic reflection of the whole — that when the community sits down to decide, the full living system it is part of is genuinely in the room.
This is the stage most foreign to modern governance — and the most essential. You cannot restore the capacity to listen to the living world if the living world is not present when decisions are being made.
Decision Gathering
The third stage is the Decision Gathering — generating a pool of shared intent. Here the community uses quadratic decision-making, where each landsteward allocates their Obutaka (their land-based stake) to prioritise which broken relations heal, how.
The decision unit is not a mechanical aggregation of preferences. It is a governance ceremony — a moment in which the community practices the ancient skill of deciding together what place needs, informed by what they have heard in the previous two stages.
The Nalubaaga wetland’s obutaka serves as structural counterbalancer, ensuring that the voice of the living place cannot be overwhelmed by the accumulated weight of human land-holdings.
Action Gathering
The fourth stage is the Action Gathering — generating a pool of shared actions. This is where the community commits to the concrete relational healing work they will carry forward. But the commitment is not to a project plan. It is to a relation — a specific, named broken relation in their place that they have decided together to begin healing.
And then the cycle begins again — on another relation, and another.
The purpose of this cycling is not to produce outputs. It is to rebuild, gathering by gathering, the cultural muscle of listening to place as a living being — and responding to what you hear with collective care.
Each time the community goes through the cycle, the pool of shared understanding deepens. The kinship with the wetland, the underground springs grows more tangible. The calling becomes more specific, and more alive. The caring becomes more skilled. And the sense of oneness — Obuntu — grows, quietly, as the product of a practice faithfully repeated.
Obuntu bulamu — in Buganda, this is the measure of how alive or healthy one’s relation with place and its inhabitants is. And the gathering cycle implies what is rarely said plainly: there will be no Obuntu without gathering. How often, and how well, we gather to listen to place together is the measure of how alive our place will remain.
A closing question
The regenerative development field has rich theory about living systems. It has increasingly sophisticated frameworks for perceiving place as a whole, for understanding evolutionary processes, for designing with rather than against the intelligence of life. Yet there is still a fairly wide gap between theory and practice — at least as it relates to whole place evolution.
Better frameworks for thinking about the web of life are vital and now is the time to make that leap and harness them to develop the capacity to listen to the web of life. The capacity has to be exercised, repeatedly, in actual relationship with an actual living place, in the company of others who are practicing the same thing.
The Obutaka Gathering Cycle is not the only way to rebuild this capacity. But it is a specific, culturally grounded attempt to do exactly that — in one of the most challenging urban contexts imaginable, with landowners who have every economic incentive not to listen to their place and every human reason to care about it.
The question we are sitting with, and that we think deserves to sit with anyone working in the regenerative development field, is not whether the theory is right. It is this: what does it take to rebuild the practice of listening to the web of life in places where it has been broken — and are we, ourselves, willing to be changed by the listening?
What Next!
Over 30 months of listening, something has shifted: 92% of engaged landowners have said yes to stewarding their place together. The community is ready. What is missing is a funding architecture and culture that can move with that intelligence (listening and caring) rather than against it.
But the highest order of value this initiative could create — not for the project, but for the living place it is nested within and, through that place, for the world — is rooted in four conditions that emerged, inviting diverse actors to birth a life-centric economy:
01 A Higher Calling
The polycrisis is, beneath the surface, a relational crisis — a breakdown in our collective capacity to care for our places. This calls for a new discipline of gathering residents towards healing broken relations through Relational Design – enriching the web of life’s relations in a place.
02 A Process – for Listening to care for place
Obutaka — Buganda’s land-sourced governance wisdom — reconstituted into a modern gathering cycle: rebuilding trust, shared understanding and meaning, collective intent, and coordinated action among landstewards, the wetland, and future generations. See the Obutaka Gathering Cycle.
03 A Practice of Caring for Place
30 months of listening was essentialised into nine broken relations — not problems to fix, nor products to deliver but relations to heal in our place, one Obutaka Gathering at a time. See these relations here.
04 A Funding Architecture That Can Learn
This is where Funders Learning Journeys come in: inviting funders to ko-design — by funding, by listening to life in place — a new way of moving money. Not evaluating proposals from a distance, but responding (listening) to what communities of life have already decided.
Abdul Semakula is a Ugandan Regenerative Community Innovator who has started foundational works to restore a reclaimed wetland and stream while building a commons-based economy. He is transitioning political-ego development to bioregional development. He is prototyping a community engagement process for unbuilding colonial structures and narratives and rebuilding development on a living systems foundation by convening neighbourhoods to weave individual with collective dreams.