The R-Force: Why Truly Regenerative Agriculture Is Our Best Hope for Climate Change

The amazing ecosystem recovery after the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens inspired Bob Rodale's concept of regeneration.

Regenerative agriculture has been the hottest “buzzword” in the alternative ag movement since about 2019. Before that, all the focus was on “sustainable”—a word that’s often criticized as meaning nothing because everyone defines it differently. Regenerative, I quickly discovered, was suffering the same fate. Some define it as soil health or sequestering carbon. Others define it as socially just, anticolonial, or Indigenous agriculture. Still others define it as feeding the world with status quo conventional agriculture. To be completely honest, though, “regenerative” isn’t the best word to describe any of those things. Sustainable, with all its flaws, is still more accurate.

That’s why I got so excited when I finally found the original definition of regenerative agriculture. It was coined by Robert Rodale in the 1980s, and his original definition of “regenerative” actually meant—gasp—regeneration. Or, as he termed it in the manuscript of his last, never-published book, “The R-Force.”

Regeneration, as Bob Rodale defined it, combined two meanings of the word: “to become formed again” and “to change radically and for the better.” The R-Force, Bob explained, was part of all living things but was usually latent. It was only when some major destructive catastrophe hit that regeneration sprang into action, causing a surge of growth, life, and healing that never happened during peaceful, good times. Regeneration couldn’t happen without disturbance.

“This ‘violent world view’ I’m describing may come as a shock to those of you already familiar with Rodale Press,” Bob admitted. “It may appear somewhat at odds with the ‘pastoral’ view we tend to express, especially in our gardening publications. But my world of disruptive violence is the same world that inspired ‘organic gardening and farming'….You simply have to realize that the perfectly-managed natural world in which we all live includes hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, lightning, tidal waves and glaciers. And that Nature’s perfect system of resource management occurs as a result of these destructive forces, not in spite of them.”

Bob provided many natural examples of regeneration. Just look at how fast nature recovered after the explosive 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens, or the terrible 1988 fires in Yellowstone! And in regenerative agriculture, humans could harness the R-Force to recover from any kind of disturbance, stronger and better than before.

Bob was also inspired by how quickly the forest in Yellowstone National Park regenerated after the devastating 1988 fires. These two pictures of the same location were taken 25 years apart.

Reading Bob’s book was an eye-opener for me. I know the R-Force is real and powerful—as I’ve mentioned before, we wouldn’t have any trees at all in Michigan if the forests hadn’t regenerated after being clearcut and burned—but I didn’t have a good word to describe it. And then I realized that the R-Force is the key to adapting to the disturbances caused by climate change. It’s the missing piece in the models that predict that the “climate emergency” will inevitably cause mass extinctions and leave half the world a barren desert and the other half a constantly flooded disaster zone. That’s not accounting for the power of the R-Force.

So now I think there actually is a place for the phrase “regenerative agriculture”—as Bob Rodale intended it to be used. Yes, we need soil health. Yes, we need social justice. But call them soil health and social justice. Regeneration—the ability of life to recover after a disturbance and come back stronger than before—is more than that. And it’s the reason why climate change does not have to be the end of either the world or our civilization—if we work with nature’s R-Force.