Regenerating Life: Film & Guide
Explore how biodiversity and ecosystems regulate climate
Regenerating Life
Regenerating Life explores how living systems regulate the climate through interconnected cycles: photosynthesis and the carbon cycle, the water cycle, the dung cycle, and the vast underground networks of soil organisms, fungi, and plant roots.
The Guide
An Earthling’s Guide to Planetary Health is the official study guide to Regenerating Life.
Designed for anyone interested in a holistic understanding of the climate crisis, the Guide follows the film chapter by chapter—expanding on its ideas with references, citations, and additional context.
It clearly explains how life on Earth regulates the climate, offering deeper insight into the systems explored in the film and helping readers connect the pieces into a coherent whole.
The Guide is a practical resource for teachers, discussion groups, and individuals. It also includes additional tools such as the Soggy Manifesto and a Troubleshooting Guide to help translate ideas into action.
Start with the Film. Go Deeper with the Guide.
Building on his groundbreaking film Symbiotic Earth, filmmaker John Feldman’s Regenerating Life takes an ecological approach to understanding the climate crisis. It looks beyond carbon emissions from fossil fuels to a deeper cause: the widespread degradation of nature across the planet.
Together, the film and guide offer a new way of seeing the climate crisis—one that centers life itself as the driving force behind Earth’s stability.
The film also examines the economic and political systems that have driven the destruction of these living systems—systems shaped by a relentless pursuit of wealth and control over nature.
Across the world, people are working with nature to reverse this damage—restoring forests, wetlands, grasslands, and oceans, regenerating soil, growing healthy food, and rebuilding resilient communities pointing toward long-term, life-centered solutions to the climate crisis.
To address the climate crisis, we must regenerate life.