The regenerative revolution is rising to transform business-as-usual profoundly, just in time to avoid a global cataclysm

Daniel Christian

<h2>'Irreversible cataclysmic climate change'</h2>
For many people achieving sustainability might seem already like a visionary goal that is difficult to reach. Yet, we need to do even better to respond adequately to the converging crises ahead.
Just looking at the situation with regard to climate change alone, we have to now face the reality that we are in the midst of dangerous run-away (self-reinforcing) climate change. The window of opportunity to avoid catastrophic irreversible climate change is closing.
In reality, there are already many climate catastrophes affecting people and biodiversity around the world. Maybe we should speak of &lsquo;irreversible cataclysmic climate change&rsquo; as that is what we are rushing towards if we do not fundamentally redesign the human presence and impact on Earth.
Figure 1. Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene
<img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/a5ee685f6a4558595e53c6555d7c42586ad9420a.jpg?" alt="Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene" />
Source: Steffen et al. (2018)
<h2>A framework for redesigning</h2>
Let me talk you through a framework developed by my friend and colleague Bill Reed, together with the team at Regenesis Group and in collaboration with Carol Sanford. It explains why we need to do more than just be sustainable and also why sustainability is still very important as a milestone along the road to regeneration.
As we move from business as usual &mdash; complying with minimum regulations enough to stay out of jail &mdash; to &ldquo;green&rdquo; we start to celebrate ourselves or our company for voluntarily doing a little less damage than we are legally allowed to get way with. It is true that this could be called &lsquo;green washing&rsquo; and yet it is also a step in the right direction, even if only in response to growing public demand for companies to become part of the solution rather than the problem.
When we reach being &ldquo;sustainable&rdquo; we have arrived at the neutral point. Bill McDonough likes to say: &ldquo;sustainable means 100% less bad&rdquo;. It means not adding any more damage, but after 250 years of industrialization and 5000 years of deforestation and agriculture that is no longer enough.
We need to do more than simply be sustainable. We have to begin to reverse the damage we have already done! It is also important to point out that there are many people working on sustainability projects who hold a deeper vision for sustainability that is very much akin to what this article describes as &lsquo;regenerative&rsquo;.
So the next stage on this spectrum in which one stage transcends and includes the other is to practice restorative design. That is to say, we reforest and engineer &mdash; often large-scale interventions in ecosystems. Yet, we do so from a mindset of humanity as master over nature. The result is, for example, large monoculture plantations of Eucalyptus in already water-stressed areas.
Only if we take the step towards reconciling nature and culture &amp; embrace uncertainty as being fundamental to the dynamics of the complex socio-ecological systems we participate in will we be able to chart our path into the future through appropriate participation in the way that life creates conditions conducive to life.
<h3>The regenerative revolution</h3>
Merely being sustainable is no longer enough, we need to learn to design as nature, engage in regenerative design and development, and create diverse regenerative cultures elegantly adapted to the bio-cultural uniqueness of place. Such cultures would design as nature understanding themselves as healers of local ecosystems and humble caretakers of the community of life &mdash; biodiversity &mdash; that shares a unique place with us.
Figure 2. The regenerative design framework
<img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/0b39d5bacfae2d9dbf413c0f3d0417e13a020769.jpg?" alt="The regenerative design framework" />
In the process of global-local (glocal) collaboration in regionally focussed and locally implemented regenerative development, we are matching people to their places again. Meeting the needs of people through elegant solutions that pay attention to the story of place, the uniqueness of local culture and local ecosystems, and the opportunity and challenges that arise from those.
This 90-second <a href="https://youtu.be/SpcDcmOiLZ0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">video</a> was recorded in March 2015 at the European Institute of Design in Madrid. There is a groundswell of activity around the planet bearing testimony that many of us have not given up yet nor are longer willing to let the shortsightedness and greed of a few put an early end to our promising but still young and somewhat immature species.
The regenerative (r)evolution is well underway. The re-generation is rising to transform business-as-usual profoundly, just in time to avoid a global cataclysm.
<h2>The way ahead</h2>
To shift in time we need to be greener, more sustainable, engage in widespread ecosystems restoration, reconcile nature and culture and change the guiding cultural narrative about who we are and what we are here for. Regenerative development works with and builds on all of the stages in the spectrum.
Just because the term &lsquo;regenerative&rsquo; is gripping people&rsquo;s imagination, we should not dismiss the need for more sustainable practices, we simply need to see them as steps along the way and integrate them into a regenerative regional development process that involves people in place.
There is a confluence of activities, frameworks, and initiatives that seems to agree on the need for bioregional transformation as the appropriate scale of implementation. We can improve planetary health bioregion by bioregion and ecosystem by ecosystem.
Figure 3. A river basin map of Europe by Robert Sz&uuml;cs. Watersheds offer good bio-physical integrity at a scale at which bioregional development can be focused and cities can be regeneratively reintegrated into their surrounding regions.
<img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/f1cee88123a82ebe65d7bd3c90ba997f31f901fb.jpg?" alt="A river basins map of Europe" /> Regeneration, planetary health, resilience building, and regional ecosystems restoration are activities that mutually reinforce each other and help us to both begin the process of reversing climate change and prepare for the decades ahead when despite our best efforts climate chaos will lead to localized breakdowns and catastrophes.
Figure 4. Regenerative resource compilation
<img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/c8bfbaee314c1c8280605ebb87cc554792fd9b77.jpg?" alt="Regenerative resource compilation" />
The promise ahead &mdash; if we unite in global solidarity and bioregional collaboration to redesign our impact on Earth &mdash; is that towards the latter half of this century, we will begin to see atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases decline. Climate patterns will begin to re-stabilize as global forest cover drastically increases, biodiversity loss slows down rapidly, and bioproductivity increases as healthy ecosystem functions are restored.
If we &mdash; our species &mdash; manage to not just prevail, but thrive and flourish in the 22nd century and beyond, if we pass through and grow wise as we undergo a species-level right of passage that lies ahead of us, if we co-create a thriving future by redesigning the human impact on Earth, if we become a mature species that creates conditions conducive to life, then we will look back at the 21st century as the Century of Regeneration.
A lot of &lsquo;if&rsquo;s? Allied with the community of life and committed to each other, we can achieve these transformations. It will be worth it. Let me be frank: the alternative will be a hothouse planet that is uninhabitable for higher life forms like us. It is time to come home into the family of life. Regeneration rising!
<blockquote>
&ldquo;Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting &mdash; over and over announcing your place in the family of things.&rdquo;
</blockquote>
&mdash; Mary Oliver
<div class="css-16rcf8n">
<div>
<div class="css-16rcf8n">
<div>
This article is also published on the <a href="https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/sustainability-is-no-longer-enough-yet-still-very-important-on-the-road-to-regeneration-57f5a37e05a" target="_blank" rel="noopener">author's blog</a>. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability &amp; Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

Why sustainability is no longer enough, yet still very important, on the road to regeneration

Are truly regenerative businesses actually possible within the confines of our structurally dysfunctional and degenerative economic system?

Can regenerative economics & mainstream business mix?

Regenerating and maintaining the biospheric health of the planetary ‘household’ that all life depends upon is a precondition for human thriving

Our current economic and monetary systems are structurally dysfunctional and at best serve a few (for a while) while more and more people share less and less. Under no circumstances will they deliver a healthy, meaningful and happy life for all. On a crowded planet with failing ecosystems, we have to learn that out-competing others while destroying the planetary life-support systems is not an evolutionary success strategy. Win-lose games in the long run turn into lose-lose games. Yet there is another way! We can transform our global economy to play a subsidiary and collaborative function as we embark on strengthening resilient regional and local economies as the foundations of thriving, diverse, regenerative cultures.
<h2>What to do</h2>
We need to urgently break out of the vicious circle of bad economic design decisions &mdash; they reinforce a perspective of scarcity, separation and competition that drives ecological and social degradation. Human beings designed this system and human beings can redesign it to serve people and the planet. Nothing about our current economic system &mdash; apart from the biophysical reality that you can&rsquo;t have infinite growth on a finite planet &mdash; is inevitable or unchangeable. Neo-liberal economics is a dangerous ideology that seems to produce mass delusion and collective suicidal tendencies oblivious to the biophysical reality and socio-ecological context.
<h2>Re-creating the economic system</h2>
Unlike biology and ecology, economics is not a science. We created our current economic system and we can redesign it, based on ecological insights, biophysical limits, and social values. A thriving economy will serve our common purpose: promoting the health and wellbeing of humanity and the community of life. To redesign economics from the ground up challenges us to design new monetary systems, trade policies and financial institutions, as well as scale-linked local living economies and regionally focused circular biomaterials economies. The role of the global economy should be subsidiary supporting global collaboration and resource- and information-sharing.
The regenerative processes that enable living systems to thrive must also characterise the economic systems designed to create conditions conducive to life. Local and global collaboration in the co-creation of regenerative enterprises and diverse bioregional economies that serve the thriving of regenerative communities and cultures can potentially unlock a very different future for humanity.
<h2>Need for regeneration</h2>
Healthy ecosystem functions form the basis for all agricultural productivity and all bio-productivity. This &lsquo;primary production&rsquo; is the basis of all value creation. Without this biological basis we cannot maintain communities and societies &mdash; let alone civilisations. Regenerating and maintaining the biospheric health of the planetary &lsquo;household&rsquo; that all life depends upon is a precondition for human thriving.
<blockquote>
&ldquo;Ecosystems form the basis of all wealth creation. [&hellip;] Ecosystems provide societies with soil fertility, food, water, shelter, goods and services, medicines, stability, pleasure, knowledge and leisure. [&hellip;] Today 60 per cent of the services provided by ecosystems are threatened. Economic activities aimed at achieving short-term wealth are destroying ecosystems worldwide and thus economies&rsquo; primary asset. Restoring damaged ecosystems is essential if we are to secure the livelihoods of future generations.&rdquo;
</blockquote>
- Willem Ferwerda 2012: 13
<div class="css-16rcf8n">
<div>
This article was also published on the <a href="https://designforsustainability.medium.com/regenerative-economies-for-regenerative-cultures-e3b248ffc281" target="_blank" rel="noopener">author's blog</a>. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability &amp; Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
</div>
</div>

Regenerative economies for regenerative cultures

Re-localization can support an economics of care — for people and place — that synergistically leads to positive social and ecological impact.

<h2>Introduction</h2>
If we want to create healthy economies that protect rather than destroy local ecosystems, we will need to rewrite international trade rules in ways that include the social and ecological costs of production and consumptions, as well as trade. We need to protect local economies from &lsquo;cheap&rsquo; imports made possible by hidden subsidies, externalising true costs, and outsourcing production (exploiting international inequality).
Re-localising and re-regionalising economics &mdash; while maintaining international collaboration and fair trade &mdash; creates jobs and community resilience. Re-localisation can support an economics of care &mdash; for people and place &mdash; that synergistically leads to positive social and ecological impact.
Neoclassical economic dogma would call this &lsquo;protectionism&rsquo; and oppose it because &lsquo;we need deregulation instead of regulation to ensure the free-market&rsquo;. What a pervasive myth this so-called &ldquo;free-market&rdquo; is proving to be! In a conditioned knee-jerk response, many intelligent people will defend an ideal &mdash; the free market &mdash; that simply does not exist and never has.
<blockquote>
&ldquo;The world is suffering from the perverse incentives of &lsquo;unnatural capitalism&rsquo;. When people say &lsquo;free market&rsquo;, I asked if free is a verb. We don&rsquo;t have a free market, but a highly managed and often monopolized market. [&hellip;] we have banks and companies that are &lsquo;too big to fail&rsquo;, but in truth are too big not to fail. The resulting extremes of concentration of wealth and political power are very bad for business and the economy (not to mention the environment, human rights, and democracy). One result is that small companies can&rsquo;t advance too far against the big players with their legions of lawyers and Capitol Hill lobbyists, when in truth it&rsquo;s small and medium-sized companies that provide the majority of jobs as well as innovation.&rdquo;
</blockquote>
&mdash; Kenny Ausubel (in Jay Harman, 2013:77)
<h2>Healing the planetary system</h2>
Every time we speak about re-localisation and re-regionalisation, it is important to emphasise that this path is not about simply creating the conditions that our bioregion can weather the storms of the next three decades of climate change and the many converging crises.
There will be no &lsquo;life boats&rsquo; on a planet in run-away climate change. The only way we can heal the planetary system is if we enable people in bioregions everywhere to uniquely express the potential of each place that they live in while engaging in ecosystems restoration at the landscape scale. The resulting carbon drawdown along with many other social and technological changes (see Hawken, 2017) will over the long run lead to the re-stabilisation of climate patterns, an increase in the planets primary productivity, and the regeneration of planetary health.
Over 90% of our species&rsquo; history is based on bioregional patterns of inhabiting the Earth in close reciprocity with the opportunities and challenges of particular ecosystems. Even today, indigenous cultures around the world still follow this living pattern. Whether during the many millennia of our Nomadic existence or among the early settled cultures, our patterns of living were closely matched to the uniqueness of the places and regions we inhabited. It is at the local and bioregional scales that we can transform our impact.
Often the most critically important question regarding the &lsquo;circular economy&rsquo; is not asked clearly enough: at which spatial and temporal scales are we cycling what using which renewable energy source? As we will have to stop drilling for oil and mining for coal or minerals to avoid cataclysmic climate change, there are great opportunities for innovation that will help us to create place-specific bioregionally focussed circular biomaterials economies. Re-envisioning and re-designing the metabolism of cities within the context of the bio-productivity of their local bioregions will be part of the transition towards diverse regenerative economies.
<h2>Allowing humanity to thrive</h2>
With more than half of humanity living in urban areas, the creation of bioregionally regenerative cities (Girardet, 2014) will be a critical contribution to the redesign of the human impact on Earth from being exploitative and degenerative to being regenerative and healing! Each city-bioregion has the potential of becoming a unique thriving regenerative economy.
The work of Kate Raworth&rsquo;s Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) with the city of Amsterdam is just the beginning of cities exploring how they can thrive while making the regional economies and ecosystems that surround them thrive.
Thriving economies will be based on an economics of belonging to place and culture &mdash; elegant expressions of the uniqueness of people and place manifesting their potential for co-evolving mutuality. The bioregionally reinhabitory economies of the near future are about coming home!
<blockquote>
&ldquo;Those who envision a possible future planet on which we continue [&hellip;], and where we live by the green and the sun, have no choice but to bring whatever science, imagination, strength, and political finesse they have to the support of the inhabitory people &mdash; natives and peasants of the world. In making common cause with them, we become &lsquo;reinhabitory&rsquo;.&rdquo;
</blockquote>
&mdash; Gary Snyder, 1976
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability &amp; Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Re-regionalisation as a pathway to diverse regenerative economies

A regenerative human culture is healthy, resilient, and adaptable. It cares for the planet and it cares for life in the awareness that this is the most effective way to create a thriving future for all of humanity.

Sustainability alone is not an adequate goal. The word sustainability itself is inadequate, as it does not tell us what we are actually trying to sustain. In 2005, after spending two years working on my doctoral thesis on design for sustainability, I began to realize that what we are actually trying to sustain is the underlying pattern of health, resilience and adaptability that maintain this planet in a condition where life as a whole can flourish. Design for sustainability is, ultimately, design for human and planetary health (Wahl, 2006b).
<h2>What is a regenerative culture?</h2>
A regenerative human culture is healthy, resilient and adaptable; it cares for the planet and it cares for life in the awareness that this is the most effective way to create a thriving future for all of humanity. The concept of resilience is closely related to health, as it describes the ability to recover basic vital functions and bounce back from any kind of temporary breakdown or crisis. When we aim for sustainability from a systemic perspective, we are trying to sustain the pattern that connects and strengthens the whole system. Sustainability is, first and foremost, about systemic health and resilience at different scales, from local, to regional and global.
Complexity science can teach us that, as participants in a complex dynamic eco-psycho-social system that is subject to certain biophysical limits, our goal has to be appropriate participation, not prediction and control (Goodwin, 1999a). The best way to learn how to participate appropriately is to pay more attention to systemic relationships and interactions, to aim to support the resilience and health of the whole system, to foster diversity and redundancies at multiple scales, and to facilitate positive emergence through paying attention to the quality of connections and information flows in the system.
<h2>Using the Precautionary Principle</h2>
One proposal for guiding wise action in the face of dynamic complexity and &lsquo;not knowing&rsquo; is to apply the Precautionary Principle as a framework that aims to avoid, as far as possible, actions that will negatively impact on environmental and human health in the future. From the United Nation&rsquo;s &lsquo;World Charter for Nature&rsquo; in 1982, to the Montreal Protocol on Health in 1987, to the Rio Declaration in 1992, the Kyoto Protocol, and Rio+20 in 2012, we have committed to applying the Precautionary Principle over and over again.
The Wingspread Consensus Statement on the Precautionary Principle states:
<blockquote>
&ldquo;When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically&rdquo; (Wingspread Statement, 1998).
</blockquote>
The principle puts the burden of proof that a certain action is not harmful on those proposing and taking the action, yet the general practice continues to allow all actions that have not (yet!) been proven to have potentially harmful effects to go ahead unscrutinized. In a nutshell, the Precautionary Principle can be summarized as follows: practice precaution in the face of uncertainty. This is not what we are doing.
<h2>Implementing the Precautionary Principle</h2>
While high-level UN groups and many national governments have repeatedly considered the Precautionary Principle as a wise way to guide actions, day-to-day practice shows that it is very hard to implement, as there will always be some degree of uncertainty. The Precautionary Principle could also potentially stop sustainable innovation and block potentially highly beneficial new technologies on the basis that it cannot be proven with certainty that these technologies will not result in unexpected future side-effects that could be detrimental to human or environmental health.
Why not challenge designers, technologists, policy-makers, and planning professionals to evaluate their proposed actions on their positive, life-sustaining, restorative and regenerative potential?
Why not limit the scale of implementation of any innovation to local and regional levels until proof of its positive impact is unequivocally demonstrated?
Aiming to design for systemic health may not save us from unexpected side-effects and uncertainty, but it offers a trial-and-error path toward a regenerative culture. We urgently need a Hippocratic Oath for design, technology and planning: do no harm! To make this ethical imperative operational we need a salutogenic (health-generating) intention behind all design, technology and planning: We need to design for humans, ecosystems and planetary health. This way we can move more swiftly from the unsustainable &lsquo;business as usual&rsquo; to restorative and regenerative innovations that will support the transition towards a regenerative culture. Let us ask ourselves: how do we create design, technology, planning and policy decisions that positively support human, community and environmental health?
<h2>Moving forward</h2>
We need to respond to the fact that human activity over the last centuries and millennia has done damage to healthy ecosystems functioning. Resource availability is declining globally, while demand is rising as the human population continues to expand and we continue to erode ecosystems functions through irresponsible design and lifestyles of unbridled consumption.
If we meet the challenge of decreasing demand and consumption globally while replenishing resources through regenerative design and technology, we have a chance of making it through the eye of the needle and creating a regenerative human civilization. This shift will entail a transformation of the material resource basis of our civilization, away from fossil resources and towards renewably regenerated biological resources, along with a radical increase in resource productivity and recycling. Bill Reed has mapped out some of the essential shifts that will be needed to create a truly regenerative culture.
<blockquote>
&ldquo;Instead of doing less damage to the environment, it is necessary to learn how we can participate with the environment &mdash; using the health of ecological systems as a basis for design. [&hellip;] The shift from a fragmented worldview to a whole systems mental model is the significant leap our culture must make &mdash; framing and understanding living system interrelationships in an integrated way. A place-based approach is one way to achieve this understanding. [&hellip;] Our role, as designers and stakeholders is to shift our relationship to one that creates a whole system of mutually beneficial relationships.&rdquo; &mdash; Bill Reed (2007: 674)
</blockquote>
Reed named &lsquo;whole-systems thinking&rsquo; and &lsquo;living-systems thinking&rsquo; as the foundations of the shift in a mental model that we need to create a regenerative culture. They go hand-in-hand with a radical reframing of our understanding of sustainability. As Bill Reed puts it:
<blockquote>
&ldquo;Sustainability is a progression towards a functional awareness that all things are connected; that the systems of commerce, building, society, geology, and nature are really one system of integrated relationships; that these systems are co-participants in the evolution of life&rdquo; (2007).
</blockquote>
Once we make this shift in perspective we can understand life as &ldquo;a whole process of continuous evolution towards richer, more diverse, and mutually beneficial relationships&rdquo;. Creating regenerative systems is not simply a technical, economic, ecological or social shift: it has to go hand-in-hand with an underlying shift in the way we think about ourselves, our relationships with each other and with life as a whole.
Figure 1 shows the different shifts in perspective as we move from &lsquo;business as usual&rsquo; to creating a regenerative culture. The aim of creating regenerative cultures transcends and includes sustainability. Restorative design aims to restore healthy self-regulation to local ecosystems, and reconciliatory design takes the additional step of making explicit humanity&rsquo;s participatory involvement in life&rsquo;s processes and the unity of nature and culture. Regenerative design creates regenerative cultures capable of continuous learning and transformation in response to, and anticipation of, inevitable change. Regenerative cultures safeguard and grow biocultural abundance for future generations of humanity and for life as a whole.
Figure 1
<img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/722a9009d9b7b5346e146611d956ef4886134c24.jpg?" alt="Regenerative design framework" />
Adapted from Reed (2006) with the author&rsquo;s permission
The &lsquo;story of separation&rsquo; is reaching the limits of its usefulness and the negative effects of the associated worldview and resulting behaviour are beginning to impact life as a whole. By having become a threat to planetary health, we are learning to rediscover our intimate relationship with all of life.
<h2>The new narrative</h2>
A new cultural narrative is emerging, capable of birthing and informing a truly regenerative human culture. We do not yet know all the details of how exactly this culture will manifest, nor do we know all the details of how we might get from the current &lsquo;world in crisis&rsquo; situation to that thriving future of a regenerative culture. Yet, aspects of this future are already with us.
In using the language of &lsquo;old story&rsquo; and &lsquo;new story&rsquo; we are in danger of thinking of this cultural transformation as a replacement of the old story by a new story. Such separation into dualistic opposites is in itself part of the &lsquo;separation narrative&rsquo; of the &lsquo;old story&rsquo;. The &lsquo;new story&rsquo; is not a complete negation of the currently dominant worldview. It includes this perspective but stops regarding it as the only perspective, opening up to the validity and necessity of multiple ways of knowing.
Embracing uncertainty and ambiguity makes us value multiple perspectives on our appropriate participation in complexity. These are perspectives that give value and validity not only to the &lsquo;old story&rsquo; of separation but also to the &lsquo;ancient story&rsquo; of unity with the Earth and the cosmos. These are perspectives that may help us find a regenerative way of being human in deep intimacy, reciprocity and communion with life as a whole by becoming conscious co-creators of humanity&rsquo;s &lsquo;new story&rsquo;.
Our impatience and urgency to jump to answers, solutions and conclusions too quickly are understandable in the face of increasing individual, collective, social, cultural and ecological suffering, but this tendency to favour answers rather than to deepen into the questions is in itself part of the old story of separation.
The art of transformative cultural innovation is to a large extent about making our peace with &lsquo;not knowing&rsquo; and living into the questions more deeply, making sure we are asking the right questions, paying attention to our relationships and how we all bring forth a world not just through what we are doing, but through the quality of our being. A regenerative culture will emerge out of finding and living new ways of relating to self, community and to life as a whole. At the core of creating regenerative cultures is an invitation to live the questions together.
This is an adapted excerpt from <a href="https://www.triarchypress.net/drc.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Designing Regenerative Cultures</a>. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability &amp; Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Sustainability is not enough: we need regenerative cultures

Our times call for “stubborn optimism”, as Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac suggest in their 2020 book The Future We Choose. We all owe them gratitude for their very personal effort in making the 2015 Paris Agreement possible. Since then, they have continued to stimulate action towards a transformative response to climate change. Together with the outstanding strategic work of Nigel Topping as the UK’s High Level Climate Action Champion in the run up to COP26, there is a basis for hope that we will see more bold and coordinated action within and across sectors after the Glasgow conference.

Why the potential of people, and the places that communities inhabit, is the key to addressing the climate crisis
Our times call for “stubborn optimism”, as Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac suggest in their 2020 book The Future We Choose. We all owe them gratitude for their very personal effort in making the 2015 Paris Agreement possible. Since then, they have continued to stimulate action towards a transformative response to climate change. Together with the outstanding strategic work of Nigel Topping as the UK’s High Level Climate Action Champion in the run up to COP26, there is a basis for hope that we will see more bold and coordinated action within and across sectors after the Glasgow conference.
<h2>Pathways towards a regenerative future</h2>
The capacity building work that Bill Sharpe and the ‘Future Stewards’ coalition have undertaken with industry-specific climate champions around the world by training them in the use of the ‘Three Horizons’ pathways practice, will provide a shared mental framework to address and implement systemic transformations at local, regional and global scale. We urgently need to get better at discerning how our visions of the future and our problem-solving mindset affect our individual and collective agency in working with the future potential of the present moment.
To navigate this turbulent transition and steer our path towards a regenerative future requires the capacity to listen and learn from diverse perspectives. Without the need to agree on everything, we can nevertheless learn to disagree more intelligently as we build collective capacity for transformative innovation.
The Three Horizons pathways practice developed by Sharpe and colleagues in the International Futures Forum is distinct from the ‘Three Horizons of Growth’ used by McKinsey. It allows us to collectively explore sector — or location-specific — transformations through the managerial perspective of Horizon 1, the entrepreneurial mindset of Horizon 2, and the visionary call of Horizon 3 for profound systemic and world-view transformations that will enable a viable future. All three perspectives are necessary to contribute to a regenerative future.
<h2>The human potential for regeneration</h2>
A regenerative human impact on Earth is not only possible but has been the norm for most of our species’ deep history. Oral traditions of indigenous cultures that pre-date agricultural or fossil fuel-based societies describe how human beings used to nurture abundance and diversity while actively regenerating the health of local and regional ecosystems.
Our indigenous ancestors predominantly lived as bioregionally based regenerative cultures. Scientific evidence suggests that entire forest ecosystems From the rainforest of Colombia (<a href="https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aal0157">ref.</a>) to the old growth forests of the Pacific North West (<a href="https://www.science.org/news/2021/04/pacific-northwest-s-forest-gardens-were-deliberately-planted-indigenous-people">ref.</a>) and and the ‘lost forest gardens’ of Europe’ (ref.) we are learning that our distant ancestors nurtured these ecosystems into increased diversity, biological productivity and abundance. To this day 80% of the global biodiversity is found within the ‘biodiversity hot spots’ of indigenous territories around the world (ref.). To create a regenerative future we will have to value and humbly learn from the indigenous knowledge and practices that informed our regenerative past.
How do we become healing expressions — rather than owners — of place?
How do we participate appropriately in nested complexity as we aim to align with life’s evolutionary pattern of creating conditions conducive to life?
How can we better discern which modern technologies and innovations truly support us in co-creating diverse regenerative cultures everywhere?
<h2>Are we treating symptoms or root causes?</h2>
The recent IPCC report on the physical science basis for responding to climate change clearly states that “… limiting human-induced global warming to a specific level requires limiting cumulative CO2 emissions, reaching at least net zero CO2 emissions, along with strong reductions in other greenhouse gas emissions” (IPCC, <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Full_Report.pdf">2021</a>, p.36). To do so is clearly an urgent prerequisite for a regenerative future. Yet we need to simultaneously address the deeper causes underlying the climate crises. We will fail if we structure our climate change response exclusively around carbon emissions.
At best, addressing climate change through the carbon lens will buy us time. At worst, techno-fix solutions and emissions trading will exacerbate an already wicked problem. How do we avoid carbon myopia and its unintended consequences? Precisely because of the urgency and the decreasing options if we get it wrong again, we should also ask ourselves:
What are we missing as we focus in on carbon metrics and structure policy to stimulate emissions reduction?
Is ‘fighting climate change’ the appropriate framing?
Could it be that to ask ‘how do we get to net-zero emissions by 2050’ is a dangerously insufficient approach that predisposes us to potentially ignore root causes?
I feel uncomfortable calling out the elephant in the room, as I understand the urgency and know the deep commitment to making a positive difference of many people driving the ‘Race to Zero’ is not in question. Yet, it simply can’t be emphasised enough that our culturally dominant narrative of ‘separation from’, ‘power over’ and ‘ownership of’ nature creates the mistaken belief that we can manage, technologically innovate and (carbon) trade ourselves out of the evolutionary dead end we have been heading into for a couple of centuries.
As Camilla Moreno and colleagues warned in an essay entitled ‘Carbon Metrics: Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide’ published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation: “Carbon or GDP alone will not point us the way. We need to challenge our mental infrastructures, how we acquire the established foundations for our thinking. … the all-powerful carbon paradigm can entail profound injustices. Beyond carbon, we need a multi-dimensional perspective, one which is aware of the metabolic, life-maintaining processes of the planet, taking into account its natural limits, as well as the fundamental rights and needs of all human beings and the ground rules of participation and inclusion as we move on (<a href="https://www.boell.de/sites/default/files/20161108_carbon_metrics_2._auflage.pdf?dimension1=division_iup">ref.</a>, p.54).”
Regenerative development does not solve global problems through scaling-up universally applicable solutions. It is not aiming to deliver permanent solutions, rather, the focus is on improving our capacity to co-create and keep transforming in response to changing context. When we talk about co-creating ‘regenerative futures’ it is best to let go of the notion that we will ever arrive and live happily ever after. Co-creating regenerative cultures is an ongoing community and place based process of learning.
Participation and inclusion are not just social ideals to aim for but fundamental prerequisites for the emergence of diverse regenerative cultures everywhere. Co-creating a regenerative future is about supporting people, places and cultures to express their unique contribution to the health and vitality of the nested complexity in which we are embedded as expressions of life. To do so simultaneously serves ourselves, our communities and life as a whole.
<h2>The potential of people and place</h2>
Faced with the climate emergency humanity is now undergoing a species level right of passage. We are challenged with nothing less than the redesign of the human impact on Earth. It is time to become mature members of the community of life and, as such, to learn how to create conditions conducive to life. Doing so appropriately invites us to pay attention to and learn from the bio-cultural uniqueness of place — community by community, ecosystem by ecosystem, bioregion by bioregion.
Paradoxically it seems that the path towards a globally regenerative human impact on Earth is one of local and regional regeneration everywhere. It is not a global problem solving exercise, but rather an ongoing collective learning and capacity-building process of people in place. The American essayist and poet Gary Snyder called this process reinhabitation (ref.). We are coming home to place rejoining the family of life.
Abstraction and generalisation, metrics and certification, control and prediction are central to a problem solving and solutioneering approach. This old way of working remains within the mental scaffolding of what Carol Sanford calls the ‘extract value’, ‘arrest disorder’ and ‘do good’ paradigms of modern living. To live regeneratively is to act from within a fourth paradigm: ‘evolve capacity/regenerate life’ (<a href="https://carolsanford.medium.com/a-white-paper-on-regenerations-significance-part-2-the-four-modern-paradigms-ef306f622d1d">ref.</a>). An approach aimed at building capacity and manifesting the potential of people and place focusses our attention on uniqueness and specificity, qualities and trust, participation and learning as we aim to regenerate life.
In a conversation I had with Bill Reed, principal at Regenesis Group he remarked “we can’t save the world, we can only save places.” For me this is an important reminder that what we do locally has regional and global effects. Just like the health of your body depends on healthy cells and healthy organs, planetary health depends on healthy communities, ecosystems and bioregions.
To bring about the now urgently necessary transformations over the coming decades we have to reinhabit the places and ecosystems we live in as a regenerative and healing presence. Humans have the potential to be a keystone species that nurtures biodiversity and heals ecosystems. If we begin to think and work over ecological time scales, we can heal many of the ecosystems, communities and places damaged by centuries of exploitation of the planetary life support systems and suppression of the rights of the world’s inhabitory people.
Responding to climate change is about much more than the ‘Race to Zero.’ An adequate response necessitates becoming conscious of our deeper relationship to life as a nested regenerative community. Life is a planetary process which has created the condition for more life to evolve and flourish over the long journey of 3.8 billion years. Our success and failure in co-creating regenerative futures will depend on our ability to realign with the syntropic evolutionary patterns of life itself — moving from competitive scarcity towards collaborative abundance.
<h2>The ReGeneration is rising!</h2>
I believe there is a basis for being stubbornly optimistic and confident that we can still choose a regenerative future. I base this optimism not on denying the real and present danger that cataclysmic climate change is imminent if we don’t change our current trajectory, but in people everywhere connecting with the regenerative impulse. Many of us are already nurturing the potential of a regenerative future and regenerative cultural impulses are connecting people and communities to their places and bioregions.
Here are some of my reasons for optimism: This year marks the launch of the ‘United Nations Decade on Ecosystems Restoration’ (<a href="https://www.decadeonrestoration.org/">ref.</a>) and landscape scale regeneration projects are proliferating (ref.). Working with the Commonwealth Secretariat’s regenerative development programme (ref.) and <a href="https://common.earth/who-we-are-backend">Common Earth</a> I had the opportunity to learn from regenerative practitioners in New Zealand, Australia, the Caribbean and Africa about their place-sourced projects.
There are national initiatives in Costa Rica (<a href="https://common.earth/regenerate-costa-rica-initiative">ref.</a>) and Australia (ref.). The ‘Regenerative Projects Map’ highlights many mature regeneration projects around the world (ref.). The Lush Spring Prize also offers a map of examples based on past winners and runner ups (<a href="https://springprize.org/">ref.</a>). The ‘Regenerosity’ platform is helping to resource regenerative projects around the world (ref.). Regenesis Institute is training regenerative practitioners which have formed regional networks. Carol Sanford is supporting people around the world through her change agents development groups.
Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm have deepened the conversation about regenerative leadership (ref.). John Elkington’s book Green Swans (ref.) and the ‘Green Swan Observatory’ have inspired board rooms around the world.
Regeneration International (ref.) is connecting the rapidly growing regenerative agriculture movement. Extinction Rebellion has made ‘We need a regenerative culture’ one of its ten principles (ref.). The Capital Institute in New York has created the ‘Regenerative Communities Network’ (ref.) of bioregionally focused regenerative economy projects. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics Action Labs are taking regenerative economics to active citizens engaged in creating thriving places (ref.).
Many people are offering regenerative learning journeys and programmes to collectively live into the process of co-creating regenerative cultures. Paul Hawken’s very recent book Regeneration: Ending the climate crisis in one generation (ref.) highlights many of these reasons for stubborn optimism. I am under no doubt that the RSA’s Regenerative Futures Programme will inspire many more people to join the ReGeneration. I hope you are one of them!
This article is also published on the <a href="https://designforsustainability.medium.com/building-a-regenerative-future-4b6bf40842b6">author&#x27;s blog</a>. Illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

You can’t miss it!

Daniel Christian Wahl

Daniel Christian Wahl

Why sustainability is no longer enough, yet still very important, on the road to regeneration

Recent publications

Readers also like

Want to know more about illuminem Voices?