What does 4D Literacy mean?

This text was written by Daniel Wahl as an introduction to the 4D Regenerative Design Literacy online course.

The year 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of Gaia Education, as well as, my 20th anniversary of working with Gaia Education. So it is my great pleasure to invite you to the 3rd edition of the 4D Regenerative Design Literacy learning journey.

We live in turbulent and uncertain times, of rapidly deepening polarization and social, ecological and economic degradation, where are culture of othering has both the old and the young alienated from true political dialogue and civic participation, where despite ever more people calling for an end to our madness, we continue to destroy the world's soils, forests and oceans, and where globalization has made the tech-billionaires more influential than nation states while local and regional economies have been eroded to the detriment of the many for the benefit of a few.

We will structure our 6 weeks together using the simple 4-D 'whole systems design' framework of approaching the nurturing of community resilience and bioregional regeneration through a process that aims to pay attention to and integrate social design, economic design, ecological design and a heightened awareness of simultaneously operating diverse worldviews are affecting how we participate in the nested complexity of life's regenerative impulse.

Each session starts with the direct experience of a 'poem' to bring us together beyond the treachery of mental concepts and talking about and connect us to our capacity of sensing, feeling and intuiting, as poetry is the experience. We will spend some time in pairs giving each other 'deep listening'.

I will then frame the topic of the session and highlight some important learnings I have had along the way, for about 20 to 30 minutes, to stimulate reflections, questions, comments of the participants of our international, multigenerational, diverse community of learners, and we will spend more than an hour in a question and answer format.

In addition there is some written material and a few recommended articles which will be shared with you each week, and there will be a second Zoom session of an hour in which the Gaia Education team will facilitate and open space for people to reflect on the topic of the week, their own work, and what came up in our 2 hour session together.

We know from the experience of the first two editions how nurturing, stimulating and reaffirming this 6 week programme can be for people, and I look forward to running this 3rd edition of the programme in Gaia Education's anniversary year.

Please accept this heartfelt invitation to join us this November in our exploration of regenerative practice not as 'systems designers' but as integral participants of a living world in constant regeneration.

Warm greetings from a small regenerative agro-food forest on the island of Mallorca,

Daniel C Wahl

Join the course here!