Menno Lammers'
Regenerative Reading List
These are the books shaping how I think and work as a regenerative urban strategist. Some are foundational to Regenerative Wayfinding Architecture™; others opened doors I'm still walking through. This is a living, curated list — not a bibliography — reflecting the lineage I draw on daily, from Carol Sanford's four-level paradigm to living-systems and Indigenous thinking.
Menno's favourites (July 2026)
📗 Green Swans – The Coming Boom of Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington
Elkington argues that market forces can flip from breakdown to breakthrough, delivering exponential regenerative value rather than incremental "less bad" improvement. It gave me the language to move clients past sustainability-as-mitigation and toward the possibility that regeneration is an economic opportunity, not a cost.
📗 Let My People Go Surfing – The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard
Chouinard shows that a company can treat ecological responsibility as its operating premise rather than its marketing, building the business around values instead of bolting values onto the business. It's my touchstone for what steward-ownership and purpose-lock look like in practice, not just in governance documents.
📗 Regenerative Leadership – The DNA of Life-Affirming 21st Century Organizations by Laura Storm and Gilles Hutchins
Storm and Hutchins map how organizations can operate as living systems, weaving together inner development and living-systems design into a coherent leadership logic. I return to it when helping leaders see that regenerating a place starts with regenerating how they lead — the DNA model underpins much of how I frame The Threshold mentoring.
📗 Regenerative Design and Development – A Framework for Evolving Sustainability by Pamela Mang and Ben Haggard
The Regenesis framework here is foundational: it insists that we work with the unique essence and potential of a place rather than applying generic best practices. This is the intellectual bedrock of Regenerative Wayfinding Architecture — the discipline of reading a living place before you ever intervene in it.
📗 Regenerative Economics – Revolutionary Thinking for a World in Crisis by John Fullerton
Fullerton builds an economics on the premise that an economic system should emulate the patterns and processes that define all living systems, naming the "unseen fatal error" in our current model as the root of the polycrisis. It's my reference point whenever I'm designing fund architecture or multi-capital frameworks — the reminder that economic structures either follow life's patterns or work against them.
📗 The Regenerative Life – Transform Any Organization, Our Society, and Our Destiny by Carol Sanford
Sanford reframes regeneration as a shift in how we develop the capacity to see and work at deeper levels of a system, rather than as a set of techniques to apply. Her four-level paradigm is the central analytical lens in almost everything I do — it's how I diagnose whether an intervention is treating symptoms or evolving the whole.
For Your Inspiration (in alphabetical order)
📕: Abundance - How We Build a Better Future by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
📕: Braiding Sweetgrass - Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
📕: Brave New Capital - Shifting Power, Sharing Ownership, Rewriting the Rules of Finance by Aunnie Patton Power & Erinch Sahan
📕: Designing for Hope - Pathways to Regenerative Sustainability by Dominique Hes & Chrisna du Plessis
📕: Designing Regenerative Cultures by Daniel Christian Wahl
📕: Enchantment - Reawakening wonder in an exhausted age by Katherine May
📕: Generation Regeneration - co-designing the Future of Cities through Regenerative Placemaking by Tony Cho
📕: Generation Restoration - How to fix our relationship crisis with nature by Tim Christophersen
📕: Half Earth Socialism - A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Drew Pendergrass Troy Vettese
📕: History for Tomorrow - How The Past Can Inspire Our Future by Roman Krznaric
📕: Just Enough - Lessons from Japan for Sustainable Living, Architecture, and Design by Azby Brown
📕: Less is More - How degrowth will save the world by Jason Hickel
📕: Lo-TEK - Design by Radical Indigenism by Julia Watson
📕: NI - Building the Future of Innovation on millions of years of Natural Intelligence by Leen Gorissen
📕: Net Positive - How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving Back More than They Take by Paul Polman and Andrew Winston
📕: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by Buckminster Fuller
📕: Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution by Marjorie Kelly
📕: Rebuild the Economy, Leadership, and You - A Toolkit for Builders of a Better World by Graham Boyd
📗 : Regenerative Business - How to Align your Business with Nature for more Abundance, Fulfillment, and Impact by Samantha Garcia
📕: Regenerative by Design - Creating Net-positive Buildings and Cities by David Cheshire
📕: Restoring the Kinship Worldview Indigenous - Quotes and Reflections for Healing Our World by Wahinkpe Tope & Darcia Narvaez
📕: Sand Talk - How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta
📕: Small Arcs of Larger Cycles - Framing Through Other Patterns by Nora Bateson
📕: Small is beautiful: A study of Economics as if people mattered - Schumacher E.F.
📕: Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein
📕: The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth - For Regenerating Earth by Joe Brewer
📗: The Good Ancestor - How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World by Roman Krznaric
📕: The Nature of Our Cities - Harnessing the Power of the Natural World to Survive a Changing Planet by Nadina Galle
📕: The Nature of Order – An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe by Christopher Alexander
📕: The Web of Meaning - Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe by Jeremy Lent
📕: Thrive - Fundamentals for a New Economy by Kees Klomp & Shinta Oosterwaal
📕: Land Power - Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies by Michael Albertus
📕: Sacred Nature - Restoring Our Ancient Bond with the Natural World by Karen Armstrong
📕: The Earth Transformed - An Untold History by Peter Frankopan
📕: Thinking in Systems - A primer by Donella Meadows
📕: Think Long Term - Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time by Richard Fisher
📗:Thriving - The Breakthrough Movement to Regenerate Nature, Society, and the Economy by Wayne Visser
📕: Urban Acupuncture - Celebrating Pinprick Changes that Enrich City Life by Jaime Lerner
📕: The Wayfinders - Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World by Wade Davis
📕: More to come soon..
Which book do you recommend reading and adding to this FYI list?