The Green Ages: Rethinking Our Relationship With Nature

From Nature as Resource to Nature as Relation

For most of human history, people saw themselves as part of nature, not separate from it.

But industrialisation changed that. As coal, chemistry, and capital reshaped Britain, the land became a resource to be managed, mined, and maximised.

Victorian “progress” brought clean water and sewers, but it also introduced a mindset that treated ecosystems as external. Something to fix, not something to belong to.

Tim Lang reminds us that this period defined how we still think about food, waste, and health today: systems designed for efficiency rather than ecology.

The Industrial Age made life longer but soils poorer.

The Second Green Age: The Age of Control

By the 20th century, “nature” had been engineered. Fertilisers replaced fertility, pesticides replaced biodiversity, and food became a product of industry rather than ecology.

Science, once used to understand natural systems, was harnessed to dominate them.

We fed cities but eroded the ground beneath them.

This is the age of control, where progress was measured in yield, not in resilience.

It built the food security we depend on, but also the crises we now face: depleted soils, rising emissions, and disconnection from the living world.

The Third Green Age: The Age of Consequence

The 21st century forced a reckoning.

We inherited the by-products of industrial abundance: climate change, biodiversity collapse, and mountains of waste.

Environmental awareness grew, but policy lagged behind. “Sustainability” became the buzzword of an era still running on linear logic.

We recycle plastic but still burn soil carbon.

The Green Age of Consequence is one of awakening, recognising that every choice, every throwaway habit, has a footprint.

This is where projects like Generation Soil come in: bridging knowledge and action, turning abstract responsibility into embodied regeneration.

The Fourth Green Age: The Age of Regeneration

If the last three ages were about extraction, control, and consequence, the next must be about regeneration.

Regeneration means more than sustainability. It’s not just reducing harm; it’s restoring systems so they can thrive again.

In soil terms, that means feeding the microbial networks that store carbon, support biodiversity, and grow nutritious food.

In social terms, it means redistributing power, returning stewardship to communities, not corporations.

This is the work of the regenerative generation:

• Composting waste into living matter

• Healing degraded land through circular systems

• Re-weaving our connection to nature through sensory experience and participation

The Green Age of Regeneration begins beneath our feet, literally, in the soil.

Building Living Systems, Not Linear Ones

Regeneration is circular by design.

It asks: what if waste became nutrition? What if every meal fed the soil it came from?

Through initiatives like the Bristol Living Compost Project, Food Forest Market Garden, and Soil Sounds workshops, Generation Soil is putting this philosophy into practice, linking behaviour change to ecological repair.

This model of local, living systems turns sustainability from an abstract idea into a physical, communal act.

Each compost bucket becomes part of a new urban metabolism, one that values decomposition as creation.

Why This History Matters Now

Looking back on the Green Ages helps us understand why our systems resist change.

They were designed for stability, not adaptability; for profit, not reciprocity.

But history also shows that transformation is possible when crises force imagination.

Just as the Victorians reinvented sanitation for public health, we can reinvent waste for planetary health.

So the question isn’t whether we can live sustainably, it’s whether we can live regeneratively.

The soil gives us the blueprint: cycle, renew, return.

The Green Age of Regeneration Starts Here

From Bristol to Brighton, compost hubs to councils, a quiet revolution is already growing, one shovel, one bucket, one community at a time.

At Generation Soil, we believe the next era of sustainability isn’t about doing less harm.

It’s about learning, once again, how to live as part of nature, not apart from it.

Let’s make this the century when waste becomes life again.