Ask how long a plan should last and a spreadsheet answers in quarters. Ask the same question of many indigenous Filipino traditions and the answer stretches to generations not yet born. That difference in time is not sentiment. It is a different engineering tolerance.
When the future is a stakeholder
Among the Higaonon and other peoples, forests, rivers, and sacred groves are held in trust across generations — used, but never used up, because the descendants who will inherit them are counted as present. A decision that enriches this year but empties the next simply fails the test. Time itself is part of the design.
We do not inherit the land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
Regenerative design adopts exactly this horizon. A system is only regenerative if it leaves more possibility behind than it found — more soil, more water, more life, more options. Indigenous time is not the past. It is the long-term thinking a livable future will require, and it has been practised on these islands all along.