From murky waters: The return of matriarchal stewardship

When regeneration meets the real world

There is something rather absurd about much of the modern impact economy. We spend decades ravaging ecosystems, weakening communities, hoarding wealth, and treating the living world as though it exists solely to fuel our obsession with endless growth and accumulation. Then, once the consequences become impossible to ignore, we begin speaking about regeneration.

The growing interest in regeneration is, in many ways, encouraging. The fact that more people are questioning the consequences of economies built on exploitation, extraction, and endless accumulation is both necessary and overdue. What remains largely absent, however, is a deeper examination of the structures and systems that made those outcomes inevitable in the first place.

The assumption seems to be that biodiversity loss, ecological decline, social fragmentation, and economic inequality can somehow be addressed independently from the systems that created them. We discuss restoration, sustainability, impact, and resilience, yet far less attention is given to how power is organised, how value is defined, who benefits from extraction, and who carries the consequences when disaster begins to unravel.

This matters because ecosystems do not collapse in isolation from governance. Communities do not become fragile by accident. The conditions surrounding us today emerged from particular ways of organising ownership, responsibility, and economic activity. Since those underlying assumptions remain largely untouched, it becomes difficult to understand why different outcomes should be expected.

The longer I work with living systems, the more convinced I am that the greatest challenges facing regeneration are rarely ecological. Land responds well when pressure is reduced. Soil begins rebuilding. Biodiversity returns. Water systems recover. Communities engage when they are treated as participants rather than beneficiaries. Again and again, nature demonstrates an extraordinary willingness and capacity to heal and revive when given the opportunity, mainly when left alone.

What struggles is everything surrounding the ecology. Regeneration unfolds according to biological cycles, while economic systems remain obsessed with acceleration. Ecosystems recover through continuity, while markets reward expansion and fast growth. Living systems adapt, fluctuate, and reorganise, while institutions continue demanding predictability. The conflict that emerges from these unmatched realities sits at the heart of many regenerative efforts, and it is impossible to understand that tension without talking about governance.

The intelligence we forgot to value

One of the most curious features of modern society is the way it rewards certain forms of intelligence while overlooking others.

We celebrate the intelligence required to build companies, expand markets, develop technologies, and generate wealth. These achievements matter and have undoubtedly transformed human societies. Yet we pay little attention to the higher intellectual power required to maintain continuity. We rarely celebrate the people responsible for preserving relationships, transmitting knowledge across generations, maintaining community cohesion, safeguarding food systems, or supporting societies through periods of uncertainty and change.

Perhaps this happens because continuity is far less visible than growth. Growth produces numbers, headlines, valuations, and measurable outputs. Continuity often goes unnoticed because its success is expressed through the absence of collapse. We notice when systems fail. We rarely notice the countless acts of stewardship that prevent failure from occurring in the first place.

The irony is that every civilisation depends upon these forms of stewardship. No society survives for long without people capable of maintaining the ecological and social conditions life and prosperity depend on. Yet modern economies have consistently assigned greater prestige, authority, and reward to activities associated with extraction, accumulation, competition, and growth at any cost.

Over time, this creates the profound imbalance we're experiencing today. Societies become increasingly sophisticated at generating wealth while simultaneously becoming less capable of protecting the conditions that make wealth possible. They become highly efficient at extracting value while paying very little attention to the systems responsible for renewing it.

The forgotten governance of continuity

One of the most curious features of modern societies is the way they define governance. The term is usually associated with political institutions, legal systems, financial markets, corporate structures, and formal authority. These things undoubtedly matter, yet they represent only part of the picture.

Every society depends upon another layer of governance that receives far less attention. Someone must maintain the conditions that allow communities to endure across generations. Someone must preserve knowledge, sustain relationships, safeguard food systems, care for the vulnerable, transmit culture, and ensure continuity during periods of instability. Without these functions, no amount of economic growth or institutional sophistication can prevent eventual fragmentation.

Despite their importance, these activities have rarely occupied a central position within economic thinking. Modern societies tend to reward activities associated with expansion more generously than those associated with maintenance. We celebrate growth more readily than continuity. We allocate prestige to accumulation while paying comparatively little attention to the work required to sustain the foundations upon which accumulation depends.

This imbalance has profound consequences. A society can become extraordinarily sophisticated at organising production while remaining remarkably poor at protecting the ecological and social systems that make production possible. It can become highly effective at generating wealth while simultaneously eroding many of the conditions required for long-term prosperity.

The ecological and social instability surrounding us today reflects this contradiction. The problem is not that humanity lacks intelligence, innovation, or technical capacity. The problem is that particular forms of intelligence have been rewarded while others have been systematically undervalued.

Women, land, and the work of continuity

One of the parallels difficult to ignore is the historical relationship between the treatment of women and the treatment of land. Both have been exploited, depleted, and deeply abused.

Both have frequently been valued according to what they produce rather than the continuity they sustain. Both have been expected to provide continuously while absorbing the consequences of decisions made by half-baked men. Both have remained essential to the functioning of society while receiving far less authority than the devastating systems depending upon them.

The language used to justify this relationship has changed across cultures and centuries, but the pattern itself remains very familiar. Land is expected to remain productive regardless of pressure. Women are expected to continue carrying care, cohesion, emotional labour, caregiving, knowledge transmission, and social stability, all at once and in most cases, for free. Furthermore, some men frame this abuse as "the luxury of staying at home", what a joke. They would not want that luxury for themselves if given the chance though. When either land or women begin showing signs of exhaustion, the response is often focused on restoring productivity rather than questioning the conditions that created the exhaustion.

What makes this observation particularly important is that both land and women have historically occupied a similar position within extractive systems. They remain indispensable to continuity while existing largely outside the centres of power that shape economic and political decisions.

At the same time, both continue performing the work that allows life to endure. Ecosystems regenerate the biological foundations upon which societies depend. Women have carried an extraordinary share of the work associated with maintaining families, communities, cultural memory, social resilience, food security, health, and intergenerational continuity.

The more I observe the ecological and social collapse unfolding around us, the harder it becomes to dismiss this parallel as coincidence. Women+Land is the biggest untapped potential of our time, assisted by science and supportive technology.

Why matriarchal stewardship is returning

The growing conversation around matriarchal stewardship deserves serious attention.

The term is often interpreted through the lens of modern political conflict, as though it implied replacing one hierarchy with another. Such interpretations miss the deeper point. The significance of matriarchal stewardship lies not in female domination but in a different understanding of governance itself.

Stewardship begins from the recognition that decisions cannot be separated indefinitely from their consequences. It assumes that future generations possess a legitimate claim on present actions. It recognises that economic systems remain dependent upon ecological systems and that prosperity ultimately depends upon maintaining the conditions that make prosperity possible.

These assumptions were once relatively unremarkable. Today they increasingly appear radical because modern economies have become organised around very different priorities.

As ecological instability intensifies, the limitations of those priorities are becoming more visible. Supply chains become fragile. Resource systems become vulnerable. Communities become polarised. Institutions lose legitimacy. Under such conditions, the capacity to maintain continuity becomes increasingly valuable.

What is beginning to emerge is not a rejection of science, markets, enterprise, or innovation. Rather, it is a growing recognition that none of these can function sustainably when detached from stewardship. Scientific knowledge remains essential, but science alone cannot determine what should be protected. Markets remain essential, but markets alone cannot define long-term value. Innovation remains essential, but innovation alone cannot guarantee continuity.

The growing interest in matriarchal stewardship reflects a recognition that governance must once again concern itself with the maintenance of life rather than merely the expansion of production.

The return

The murky waters surrounding us today did not emerge overnight. They are the result of generations of decisions that rewarded extraction while treating stewardship as free and marginal. They emerged from economic models that celebrated growth while paying relatively little attention to the ecological and social foundations supporting that growth. They emerged from governance systems that gradually separated power from responsibility and ownership from consequence.

What may be returning now is not a nostalgic vision of the past. It is a growing recognition that no society can continue extracting from the foundations of life indefinitely while expecting those foundations to remain intact.

Land, women, science, governance, and economic activity have never been separate conversations. We simply spent a long time pretending they were. We created useless indicators and profoundly disconnected goals, because we forgot the law of relationships. As ecological and social instability deepen, that illusion becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. The challenge before us is therefore not simply how to regenerate damaged ecosystems, but how to rebuild our intellectual capacity, rather than entertaining the emotional mind, and redesign systems capable of valuing continuity before collapse forces the lesson upon us the hard way.

If matriarchal stewardship is returning, it may be because reality itself is reminding us of something we should never have forgotten: life persists not because it is extracted, but because it is continuously cared for, renewed, protected, and carried forward by those willing to think beyond themselves.

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