Reimagining Wealth: The Mycelial Economy on the Ubuntu Stage

The Invitation

At Be The Earth Foundation, we hold a concept we call Wholesome Capital – a reorientation that invites us to recognise the social, natural, and spiritual value already flowing between us, often not noticed.

What if value were not measured solely in financial returns, but in the restoration of trust, the deepening of relationships, the healing of a landscape?

What if capital moved as energy does in nature – circulating, regenerating, and returning?

The Ubuntu Stage at Reforest Fest 2026 became a living inquiry into these questions.

Grounded in the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu – “I am because we are" – the stage went further, expanding that “we" to include the soil, the fynbos, the rivers, the forest. Ecological Ubuntu. It was a space where restoration science met African wisdom, where contemporary African voices and systemic thought leaders were given a platform, and where participants were invited to move from observers of nature to conscious, informed participants within it.

We were honoured to support this space at Reforest Fest – a festival that Greenpop has stewarded for fifteen years, and that continues to experiment with a different way of being in the world.

Day 1: The Story of the Land

Before the first tree was planted, an essential grounding in the history, ecology, grief and possibility of the Uilenkraal Valley was needed. The stage was opened with the ritual burning of mpepho and a musical offering. Then the stories came.

Gerhard van Deventer of Sandberg Fynbos Reserve explained the science of the fynbos-forest mosaic, why the Agulhas Plain holds one of the world's most extraordinary concentrations of biodiversity, and why these two ancient ecosystems coexist in this particular place. Francois Krige of Platbos Forest Reserve, custodian of Africa's southernmost indigenous forest, spoke about fire and the inextricable link between forestry and flame, speaking to the recent fires that ravaged the valley.

Then there was Eri-kah van Breda, a botanical fine art photographer from the Overberg, who described the slow realisation that she had been living in one of the most biodiverse places on earth and for years had not known what it was called, had not known the stories carried in its soil.

Day 2: Bridges to Environmental Action

On Saturday, the stage shifted gear, and bridges to action were formed across disciplines – permaculture, planetary health, finance, faith – revealing that ecological restoration is not a niche concern, but a foundational thread running through all systems of life.

Kevin James of Global Carbon Exchange opened with a provocation born from personal frustration. Tired of watching businesses perform sustainability without practising it, he built a company that could track, monitor, and actively encourage genuine regenerative action from corporations.

Carina du Toit of WWF South Africa showed what it looks like when a retailer's sustainability commitment reaches all the way to the soil. Through partnerships with major supermarkets, WWF has placed coordinators directly in the Western Cape's farming landscapes, working alongside wine and fruit farmers on water management, alien clearing, and soil health.

Our own Renata Minerbo spoke about the stories we have inherited about money, and how quietly those stories shape what feels possible, reasonable, or even inevitable.

Before we can move the needle, she suggested, we must first tend our relationship with money itself – something originally meant to facilitate human exchange, but which now governs so many of our relationships and choices. She offered a spectrum of capital moving from extractive to regenerative, and asked what it might mean to let money flow the way nature moves energy: not hoarding, but returning.

Day 3: Bringing Nature to the Table

Sunday invited participants into the structures that shape our collective decisions – governance, law, power – and asked the question: how might these evolve to include the living world more fully?

Lesai Seema, a director at South Africa's oldest specialist environmental law firm, asked the room to sit with something unsettling: nature is already at every table we gather around. We have simply classified it as an object – something to be weighed against commercial interests and is routinely found lighter.

His work reaches toward a different legal reality, one in which the Earth is not property to be managed but a subject with inherent rights. He is currently involved in efforts to recognise Table Mountain as a legal person. Every interaction, he said, is a negotiation table. The only question is whether we choose to listen.

Ina Wilkie, who directs a permaculture and education project for communities in Namibia, offered a counterweight to the impulse toward scale: it is not only large interventions that overhaul an economy, but small, community-led projects, rooted in place and in relationship, that often carry the most transformative power.

Forest therapy practitioner and green placemaker, Orlando Vincent Truter, brought the conversation inward. Our ability to listen to a place is directly linked to our capacity for presence and presence is not something we can offer from an empty vessel.

In a room full of people doing restoration work, this may have been the most necessary message of all.

What Remains

More than 8,000 trees were planted in the Uilenkraal Valley that weekend. And yet the deeper work extends far beyond the act of planting. It lives in the conversations, the questions, and the quiet shifts in perception that began to take root.

Like mycelium, the intelligence of the weekend was not held in any single speaker or idea, but in the connections between them: between science and story, between policy and practice, between inner and outer landscape.

What became visible was a different way of understanding value – one that does not begin with extraction, but with relationship. One that recognises ecological restoration, social cohesion, and inner transformation not as separate pursuits, but as interdependent expressions of the same living system.

What remains is the question of how we carry this forward – how we begin to shift, in practice and in perception, from an ego-centric economy to one that is truly eco-centric.