New Era Orbits

The words we choose shape the worlds we inherit.

An orbit is a field we keep circling. It's like a body of knowledge and practice with its own language, its own people, and its own live arguments. None of them is finished. Several of them contradict each other. All of them are describing some part of the same emerging era.

This is not a curriculum and we are not the authority on any of it. It is a library kept in public: what we are reading, who we are learning from, and what we are still confused about. Every space Seven Generations Africa hosts draws on these fields, and every conversation we have adds to them.

Find the one that is already yours. Then look at the one next to it.

The Haudenosaunee

The original custodians of the Seventh Generation principle. Honoring their gift without betraying its origins is a complexity I grapple with everyday.

There is a version of this where I quietly universalise them into "indigenous wisdom" and never say a nation's name. That version is theft with good manners.

We did not invent the seven generations lens. We borrowed it and we want to say from whom.

The Haudenosaunee are six nations (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora) who have kept a confederacy alive in what is now North America for centuries longer than any state I live under. They hold a body of law called the Kaianere'kó:wa, 'the Great Law of Peace'. It came, they say, through a Peacemaker who arrived among nations exhausted by their own blood feud. Clan mothers choose the chiefs. Clan mothers remove them. The constitution is not written on paper but woven in rituals and beads, read aloud by people trained to carry it in their mouths.

Inside that law is an instruction about time: that those sitting in council are to think of the faces still coming, the ones yet beneath the ground. Seven generations out. Not as sentiment. As a procedural requirement before a decision is taken.

We took the number because it does something to me that our own languages of ancestry also do, and because I needed a unit of time that made quarterly reports seem ridiculously obsolete.

Nature Positive

The field. Halting and reversing ecological decline rather than slowing the rate of harm. Emerged from conservation and moved fast into finance, mining and corporate reporting after 2020.

Its language. Nature positive, no net loss, biodiversity net gain, TNFD, natural capital, ecosystem services, the mitigation hierarchy, offsets, nature-related risk.

Who is in it. Conservation NGOs, mining and finance sustainability teams, the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, and the land practitioners doing the actual restoration.

What we are learning. Whether "nature positive" is a genuine reorientation or the same accounting logic applied to living things. Both are being built under the name right now, and the people building each often can't tell which they're doing.

Agroecology

The field. Growing food as an ecological and social relationship rather than an extractive process. Soil, seed, water, and the people who work them.

Its language. Regenerative agriculture, food sovereignty, soil health, seed sovereignty, agroforestry, permaculture, holistic management, cover cropping, minimum tillage.

Who is in it. Smallholders and commercial farmers, seed keepers, extension workers, and the researchers making the case in language funders accept.

What we are learning. Where regenerative practice stops being a set of techniques and becomes a different relationship to land and what it takes for a farmer under real financial pressure to make that shift.

Bioregionalism

The field. Organising economies, governance and identity around watersheds and living systems rather than colonial and administrative borders.

Its language. Bioregion, watershed, reinhabitation, terrain of place, ecological civilisation, downscaling, local-first economies.

Who is in it. Bioregional organisers, planners, catchment management bodies, and the growing number of people trying to make this legible to municipalities and funders.

What we are learning. How a bioregional frame survives contact with existing political boundaries and what it means to practise this in a landscape like the Magaliesberg, where the biosphere designation, provincial lines and traditional authority don't align.

Interbeing

The field. The recognition that nothing exists independently, and what follows from taking that seriously in how we organise, decide and relate.

Its language. Ubuntu, botho, ukama, interbeing, relational ontology, the web of life, kinship, mitákuye oyás'iŋ, entanglement.

Who is in it. African philosophers, Buddhist teachers, systems thinkers, ecologists, physicists, and practitioners of conflict transformation who arrived at the same place from a different direction.

What we are learning. What actually changes in an organisation, a contract or a piece of policy when relationship is treated as the fundamental unit rather than the individual.

Ancient Wisdom

The field. Knowledge systems carried through ceremony, initiation, oral law and lineage held by people, not archived in institutions.

Its language. Rites of passage, initiation, ceremony, cosmology, traditional governance, elders, custodianship, oral law, ancestral practice.

Who is in it. Elders and knowledge holders across many traditions, and the practitioners working out how to learn from them without extracting from them.

What we are learning. How to engage these systems with attribution, consent and reciprocity and how to notice when we're taking the aesthetic and leaving the obligation.

Economic Imagination

The field. What an economy is for, and what else it could be. Everything from doughnut economics to community ownership to the compliance architecture we already live inside.

Its language. Doughnut economics, degrowth, wellbeing economy, steady-state, commons, community ownership, gift economy, regenerative value chains, B-BBEE, ESG, procurement, just transition.

Who is in it. Heterodox economists, cooperative movements, community land trusts, and the people inside compliance systems trying to make them mean something.

What we are learning. Whether the existing machinery (procurement, compliance, supply chains) can be used as a portal rather than a tick-box, and where that strategy reaches its limit.