“What is 120 times the size of London? The answer: the land or ecological footprint required to supply London’s needs.” — Herbert Giradet

Our ecological footprint exceeds the Earth’s capacity to regenerate. A number of useful indicators and frameworks have been developed to measure the ecological impact that humanity and its dominant economic system with its patterns of production, consumption and waste-disposal are having on the planet and its ecosystems. The measure and methodology for ecological footprinting translates the resource use and the generation of waste of a given population (eg: community, city, or nation) into the common denominator of bio-productive land per person, measured in Global Hectares (Gha), that are needed to provide these resources and absorb those wastes.

Much of the educational power of this tool is its capacity to compare between how much bio-productive land exists on the planet with how much bio-productive land would be needed to sustain current levels of consumption. In addition it also helps us to highlight the stark inequalities in ecological impact that exists between different countries.

Source: Global Footprint Network

Ecological Footprinting is basically an accounting tool that compares how much nature we have and how much nature we use. He are currently using about 50% more ecological resources than nature is regenerating naturally every year.

Source: Global Footprint Network

This point of spending more than is coming in every year — or living of the capital rather than the interest — was reached by humanity in the late-1960s. It is called Ecological Overshoot and every year since Earth Overshoot Day — the day when humanity as a whole has already used up the bio-productivity of Earth in that year — is a little earlier. Here is a little video (3:30 min.) to explain the concepts of ecological overshoot and footprint.

Source: Global Footprint Network

The first Earth Overshoot Day (also referred to as Ecological Debt Day) fell on December 31st of 1968 and by the mid-1970s it was already reached at the end of November. Rapidly rising population numbers and rates of material and energy consumption, along with the accelerating erosion of ecosystems everywhere have resulted in the decline of the planet’s annual ‘bioproductivity’ and a reduction in ecosystems services each year since. Thus, the day on which we overstep the limits of Earth’s annual productivity is occurring earlier and earlier. By 1995 it was on October 10th, in 2005 we reached overshoot by September 3rd, in 2013 on August 20th, and in 2015 on August 13th, and by 2017 on August 2nd!

While agricultural inputs (fossil fuel based fertilizers), irrigation and technological advances have artificially raised the bioproductivity of agricultural land, the continued degradation of ecosystems everywhere leads to a drop in planetary bioproductivity every year. At the same time — the number of humans keeps rising, the average — or fair share — of bioproductive global hectares (gha) available per person has dropped from 3.2 to 1.7 gha from the early 1960s to today.

Source: Living Planet Report 2014

The global average ecological footprint per person is 2.7gha and therefore almost 50% more than would be sustainable (WWF, 2014). Averages are deceiving, as you can see in the graphic above, the five countries with the highest demand on the world’s bioproductivity and resources are consuming nearly half, leaving the other half to be shared among the remaining 190+ nations. We live in a world with extreme economic and ecological inequality!

Source: WWF 2016 Living Planet Report

Metaphorically speaking, if we think of global ecosystems as an apple tree, we can say that globally, until the late 1960s, we limited ourselves to harvesting the apple crop. Since 1968, we have started to eat into the wood of the tree, diminishing the crop that the tree is able to yield. In this way, we are eroding the habitats of other species as well as the bequest that we leave to future generations.

Finding an answer to this challenge through a shift away from fossil fuel and materials sources — a strategy that is moving towards the top of the agenda for today’s political and economic elites — will hardly address the core problem. Our numbers and the levels at which we are consuming are eating into the planet’s natural capital.

WWF’s Living Planet Index, that tracks populations of 3,038 vertebrate species — fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals — from all around the world, has found that the Index has dropped by 52% between 1970 and 2010 (WWF, 2014, p.16). During only 40 years of unbridled consumption and exploitative economics the planet has lost natural capital, bio-diversity and resilience at a catastrophic rate.

Meanwhile, regular reports on fish stocks, the health of soils, rivers and lakes, depletion of aquifers, and rates of deforestation leave us in no doubt that the ecosystems on which we are dependent are under serious stress (see Brown 2008). Lester Brown’s Earth Policy Institute has a data centre that publishes up-to-date research on these developments.

Staying within ‘Planetary Boundaries’

Another way of looking at the ecological impact of our current industrial growth society is the planetary boundaries framework that as first developed by Johann Rockström (video, 4 min.), director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and an international group of researchers in 2009 (download paper). It has been revised in 2015 and the graphic above the heading illustrates the levels to which we are already outside ‘humanity’s safe operating space’ on planet Earth.

There are nine planetary boundaries:

1. Climate change
2. Change in biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss and species extinction)
3. Stratospheric ozone depletion
4. Ocean acidification
5. Biogeochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen cycles)
6. Land-system change (for example deforestation)
7. Freshwater use
8. Atmospheric aerosol loading (microscopic particles in the atmosphere that affect climate and living organisms)
9. Introduction of novel entities (e.g. organic pollutants, radioactive materials, nanomaterials, and micro-plastics).

Source: Stockholm Resilience Centre (Steffen et al. 2015)

We — as humanity — have already crossed four of these nine boundaries (climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land systems change, and altered biogeochemical cycles). This transgression is directly linked to the cumulative effects of human activity on the planetary system and many of the processes that lead us to crossing these boundaries are linked to our systems of resource exploitation, production and consumption. To address this issue we need a fundamental redesign of how we think about and do economics on a finite and increasingly fragile planet.

NOTE: this is an (edited) excerpt from the Economic Design Dimension of Gaia Education’s online course in Design for Sustainability. The first version of this dimension was written in 2008 by my friend Jonathan Dawson, now Head of Economics of Transition at Schumacher College. In 2015–2016, I revised the Design for Sustainability course substantially and rewrote this dimension with more up-to-date information and the research that I had done for my book Designing Regenerative Cultures.

The next installment of the Economic Design Dimension starts on March 19th, 2018 and runs for 8 weeks online. You can join the Design for Sustainability course at any point during the year.

Source: Stockholm Resilience Centre on Planetary Boundaries

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Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product, […] if we judge the United States of America by that — counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

Senator Robert Kennedy, 1968

We have known for a long time that judging an economy’s progress and success in quantitative (financial) terms leads to dangerous distortions and misplaced priorities. In 1972, Limits to Growth warned of the potentially devastating environmental effects of unbridled growth and resource depletion on a finite planet. While some of the predictions made were delayed by the extraordinary resilience of the planetary system, recent research suggests that we are now very close to witnessing the collapse scenario of ‘business as usual’ that the authors warned of. In their 30 years up-date to Limits to Growth the authors emphasized:

Sustainability does not mean zero growth. Rather, a sustainable society would be interested in qualitative development, not physical expansion. It would use material growth as a considered tool, not a perpetual mandate. […] it would begin to discriminate among kinds of growth and purposes for growth. It would ask what the growth is for, and who would benefit, and what it would cost, and how long it would last, and whether the growth could be accommodated by the sources and sinks of the earth.

Meadows, Randers & Meadows (2005: 22) 224

The calls for ‘de-growth’ (Assadourian, 2012), post-growth economics (Post Growth Institute, 2015), prosperity without growth (Jackson, 2011), and a ‘steady state economy’ (Daly, 2009) have become louder and have found a much wider audience in recent years. All these more or less anti-growth perspectives make important contributions to our rethinking of economics with people and planet in mind, but they might be over-swinging the pendulum.

As a biologist who is aware of how growth in living systems tends to have qualitative and quantitative aspects, I feel uncomfortable with demonizing ‘growth’ altogether. What we need is a more nuanced understanding of how as living systems mature they shift from an early (juvenile) stage that favours quantitative growth to a later (mature) stage of growing (transforming) qualitatively rather than quantitatively.

It seems that our key challenge is how to shift from an economic system based on the notion of unlimited growth to one that is both ecologically sustainable and socially just. ‘No growth’ is not the answer. Growth is a central characteristic of all life; a society, or economy, that does not grow will die sooner or later. Growth in nature, however, is not linear and unlimited. While certain parts of organisms, or ecosystems, grow, others decline, releasing and recycling their components which become resources for new growth.

Fritjof Capra and Hazel Henderson (2013: 4)

Capra and Henderson argue that “we cannot understand the nature of complex systems such as organisms, ecosystems, societies, and economies if we describe them in purely quantitative terms”. Since “qualities arise from processes and patterns of relationships” they need to be mapped rather than measured (p.7). There are close parallels between the difference in how economists and ecologists understand the concepts of growth and development. While economists tend to take a purely quantitative approach, ecologists and biologists know how to differentiate between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of both growth and development.

It appears that the linear view of economic development, as used by most mainstream and corporate economists and politicians, corresponds to the narrow quantitative concept of economic growth, while the biological and ecological sense of development corresponds to the notion of qualitative growth. In fact, the biological concept of development includes both quantitative and qualitative growth.

(ibid: 9)

Life’s growth patterns follow the logistic curve rather than the exponential curve. One example of aberrant quantitative growth in living systems is that of cancer cells which ultimately kill their host. Unlimited quantitative growth is fatal for living systems and economies. Qualitative growth in living organisms, ecosystems and economies, “by contrast, can be sustainable if it involves a dynamic balance between growth, decline, and recycling, and if it also includes development in terms of learning and maturing” (p.9). Capra and Henderson argue:

Instead of assessing the state of the economy in terms of the crude quantitative measure of GDP, we need to distinguish between ‘good’ growth and ‘bad’ growth and then increase the former at the expense of the latter, so that the natural and human resources tied up in wasteful and unsound production processes can be freed and recycled as resources for efficient and sustainable processes.

(ibid: 10)

The distinction between good growth and bad growth can be informed by a deeper socio- ecological understanding of their impact. While bad growth externalizes the social and ecological costs of the degradation of the Earth’s eco-social systems, good growth “is growth of more efficient production processes and services which fully internalise costs that involve renewable energies, zero emissions, continual recycling of natural resources, and restoration of the Earth’s ecosystems” (p.10). Capra and Henderson conclude: “the shift from quantitative to qualitative growth […] can steer countries from environmental destruction to ecological sustainability and from unemployment, poverty, and waste to the creation of meaningful and dignified work” (p.13).

Nurturing qualitative growth through the integration of diversity into interconnected collaborative networks at and across local, regional and global scales facilitates the emergence of regenerative cultures.

[This is an excerpt from my book Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]

Photo by Tim @ Photovisions

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There is an important role for international trade and global exchange of goods and services, but not when it comes to meeting basic regional needs. Wherever feasible we should meet our needs as locally or regionally as possible and restrict the global exchange of goods to those that cannot be produced in a particular place.

Open innovation and knowledge-sharing at a global scale will be an important part of the process of re-localizing production and some global companies are already beginning to explore how to reinvent themselves as facilitators of the shift towards ‘distributed manufacturing’ and ‘the circular economy’.

Since 2013, together with Forum for the Future, I have been involved in conceiving and implementing a long-range innovation project for the Belgian manufacturer of ecological cleaning products and detergents Ecover. The project uses the unique island conditions of Majorca as a test field to explore how a global company like Ecover can help to facilitate a shift towards localized production for localized consumption based on local material and energy resources and in collaboration with local business partners. In the process we studied the potential of the Majorcan bioeconomy to deliver — in a regenerative way — enough biological raw materials (from waste streams) to produce cleaning products for the local market.

The island is particularly dependent on imports of consumer products and food, due to the increased demand caused by 16 million tourist visits each year. While the long-term sustainability of such mass tourism is more than questionable, these visitor numbers provide the economic engine that can finance the transition towards local production, food and energy infrastructures.

Ecover and ‘Forum for the Future’ collaborated with an on-island network of multi- sector stakeholders to create a showcase that, if successful, could serve as a transferable example and a model for a region-focused shift towards a renewable energy and materials-based circular economy (see Glocal, 2015).

Slide from one of my presentations about the Mallorca Glocal project with Ecover and Forum for the Future

We learned some very important lessons. Simply embarking on the process of co-creating an inspirational experiment like this and involving diverse stakeholders in it contributed to the wider transformation towards a regenerative culture. The conversation about re-localizing production and consumption on Majorca has started.

The regional experiment aimed to take a step towards a circular economy based on re-regionalizing production and consumption. It was motivated less by the potential for short-term economic success and more by the power of experimentation as a way to make sure we are asking the right questions. It catalysed a local design conversation while Ecover explores how it could reinvent itself as a global knowledge and business partner with a wide network of regional collaborators enabling distributed manufacturing and promoting regional economic development.

The transformation of our systems of production and consumption is a creative design challenge that will require whole-systems thinking and transformative innovation at its very best. The resulting disruptive innovations will ultimately make the existing system obsolete.

We were effectively trying to redesign production and consumption of chemical products, creating a local product by trying to operate more like an ecosystem. In an ecosystem, materials are sourced locally and assembled in non-toxic processes based on renewable energies.

The promise of this regionalized production system is a more diverse regional economy that generates jobs, encourages efficient use of regional waste streams as resources of production, helps local farmers get a good price for the food and biomaterials they grow, creates resilience by increasing self-reliance, reduces dependence on expensive imports, and contributes to the effort to quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by reducing transportation of feedstock and finished products.

The first steps towards achieving this are already being explored in many industrial ecology projects around the world (see Chapter 6). Even if some of these current projects are hybrid systems that still rely on fossil energy and non-renewable material resources, they are achieving increases in material and energy efficiency by connecting previously separate industrial processes in ways that turn one industry’s waste (whether material streams or waste heat) into another industry’s resource of production. They are second horizon(H2) stepping-stones to renewable energy-powered regenerative systems.

Unleashing the full potential of such ecosystems of production and consumption based on integrative industrial design requires regional collaboration across all sectors and all industries. The synergies that can be generated when previously separate industries are linked through ecological design thinking are substantial.

The book Blue Economy summarizes a number of such ground-breaking design solutions that are being implemented or are in advanced stages of development (Pauli, 2010). It offers inspiration for green entrepreneurs to get involved in H2+ transformative innovation.

The overall shift is away from a fossil fuel-based industrial system with centralized production facilities that rely on bringing raw materials from all corners of the Earth only to then distribute the finished products globally again. This wasteful system is based on outdated industrial design solutions developed during the first industrial revolution where the economics of mass-manufacturing meant bigger was better, and cheap abundant fossil fuels and non-renewable materials were taken for granted.

Currently, the vast majority of our consumer products contain petroleum-based materials. During the first half of the 21st century we will witness the transformation of this global system of production. We will begin to co-create a material culture that relies on locally available materials, green (plant-based) chemistry and renewable energy sources for regional production and consumption.

Integrative design based on whole-systems thinking and the kind of nature-inspired design solutions explored in the next two chapters will help us create ‘elegant solutions predicated by the uniqueness of place’. This is how my mentor Professor John Todd, a pioneer in his field, defines ecological design. Such solutions are an elegant blend of the best of modern technology and a rediscovered sensitivity to place, culture and traditional wisdom. New technologies are opening up a 21st-century, design-led re-localization enabled by global resource-sharing and cooperation.

Distributed manufacturing is becoming a reality as new 3D printing technologies enabling additive manufacturing at a small scale are developing rapidly alongside revolutionary approaches to open innovation based on peer-to-peer collaboration, the spread of ‘Fab-labs’ and a new maker culture, breakthroughs in material science, as well as diverse bio-economy projects. Much work is still needed in the area of developing locally grown and regenerated feedstock for 3D printing technologies.

The Open Source Ecology project started by Marcin Jakubowski demonstrates how inventors and technologists are already collaborating globally to recreate regional means of production that are increasingly independent of the centralized mass-production systems of multinationals.

The project’s aim is to create the ‘Global Village Construction Set’, an open-source design and engineering library of detailed blueprints that will enable people with basic engineering and technical skills to create the 50 most important machines needed to build a sustainable civilization. We are beginning to ask:

How can we implement the global shift towards increased regional production for regional consumption?

How can we create effective systems of open-source innovation that enable people globally to share know-how and design innovations?

How can we ensure that re-regionalizing production and consumption will happen within the bioproductivity limits of each particular region, and strike a balance between growing food and growing industrial resources regionally?

How can we make 3D printing technologies sustainable by ensuring that they use locally produced, renewable and up-cyclable feedstock in environmentally benign ways, powered by decentralized renewable energy?

How can we use bio-refineries and advanced fermentation technologies to facilitate the shift from a fossil fuel-based organic chemistry to a solar- powered, plant-based and non-toxic chemistry in order to re-invent our material culture?

An early lesson we learnt in Majorca is that a successful bioeconomy requires widespread collaboration between sectors. Policy interventions are needed to regulate access to biological resources and their sustainable (regenerative) production and use. With limited bioproductive potential within a particular region, we must find ways to create ecosystems of collaboration that optimize the use of available resources.

Regenerative design solutions require whole-systems design conversations across all sectors of society. From these conversations a guiding vision will emerge. This vision can be made reality, one place at a time, by all of us. [At the time of writing, the Ecover Glocal project is not advancing, due to a lack of funding. It created a network of collaborators and planted a vision that is likely to be taken up again in the future.]

Image Source

[This is an excerpt from my book Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]

Photo by POC21 – Proof of Concept

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A green economy is not an end in itself. Rather, […] it is a means towards a shared and lasting prosperity. But what exactly does prosperity mean? We propose a definition of prosperity in terms of the capabilities that people have to flourish on a finite planet. It is clear that a part of our prosperity depends on material goods and services. Living well clearly means achieving basic levels of material security. But prosperity also has important social and psychological components. Our ability to participate in the life of society is vital. Meaningful employment, satisfying leisure, and a healthy environment also matter. […] Thriving communities are the basis of shared prosperity. — Tim Jackson and Peter A. Victor (2013: 6)

In 2009, Professor Tim Jackson catalysed a step-change in the conversation about the ‘growth imperative’ that is structurally built into our economic system. In a report for the UK Sustainable Development Commission, Jackson dared to name the elephant in the room by asking whether “prosperity without growth” was a possibility, stating clearly why ‘business as usual’ was no longer an option (Jackson, 2009a).

[This is an excerpt of a subchapter from Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]

The report showed that while the global economy has more than doubled in size in the last 25 years, it has severely degraded more than 60% of the world’s ecosystems without delivering a more equitable sharing of wealth. To the contrary, inequality has grown both within and between nations. We live in a world with 5 billion poor and the bottom fifth of the world’s population have to make do with just 2% of global income. According to a Credit Suisse report, the richest 1% of people now own more than half of the world’s financial wealth (Treanor, 2014). This extreme inequality drives a series of devastating chain reactions, affecting health, community cohesion, national and international security, and the environment.

Yet prosperity and wellbeing are not simply a function of the (financial) wealth a person has. We need more than money to feel well. Participation in thriving communities makes individuals prosper and through collaboration in community we can create prosperity for all. The report by Tim Jackson and Peter Victor on Green Economy at the Community Scale (2013) concluded that communities can take independent positive action to create a green local economy and improve prosperity for all.

“At its best, green economy offers a positive blueprint for a new economics — one firmly anchored in principles of ecological constraint, social justice, and lasting prosperity” (p.6). Taking a systemic perspective on true prosperity means going beyond simply meeting material needs and giving equal importance to the establishment of social and psychological conditions in which individuals and communities can thrive. “Material bounds do not in themselves constrain prosperity; […] with appropriate attention to material limits, it may be possible to improve quality of life for everyone even as we reduce our combined impact on the environment” (pp.17–18).

At the scale of local communities, abundance and human thriving are not exclusively based on the availability of material resources and energy but on human creativity and relationships. Community and individual prosperity depend on how we collaborate to create win-win-win solutions for all. Jackson and Victor identified four enablers of thriving communities: “the role of enterprise, the quality of work, the structure of investment, and the nature of the money economy” (p.6). Entrepreneurial and business activities in a community need to offer people the opportunity to flourish. Beyond providing the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter, “prosperity depends on ‘human services’ that improve the quality of our lives: health, social care, education, leisure, recreation, and the maintenance, renovation, and protection of physical and natural assets” (p.7).

Almost all of us spend much of our lives working. In doing so we participate in important relationships that shape our culture. These relationships form part of the ‘glue’ of our society. “Good work offers respect, motivation, fulfilment, involvement in community and, in the best case a sense of meaning and purpose in life” (p.7). In the face of the multiple convergent crises that are challenging humanity, to participate in co- creating thriving local communities as expressions of a regenerative human culture can offer this sense of meaning and purpose in life. As previously mentioned, the restructuring of investment and the redesign of our monetary systems are two important enablers of such community-scale collaboration.

Many inspiring and informative examples from around the world show how communities and regions can start to create economic structures that facilitate the emergence of regenerative cultures. The website Global Transition to a New Economy maps many of these initiatives. They all have a common thread: The path towards prosperity for all is co-created through collaboration. Regenerative systems are collaborative! The ‘solidarity economy’ approach illustrates this. SolidarityNYC, for example, tries to give visibility to, and create synergies between, existing initiatives that are part of community collaboration within New York City’s solidarity economy.

The solidarity economy includes a wide array of economic practices and initiatives but they all share common values that stand in stark contrast to the values of the dominant economy. Instead of enforcing a culture of cut-throat competition, they build cultures and communities of cooperation. Rather than isolating us from one another, they foster relationships of mutual support and solidarity. In place of centralized structures of control, they move us towards shared responsibility and democratic decision-making. Instead of imposing a single global monoculture, they strengthen the diversity of local cultures and environments. Instead of prioritizing profit over all else, they encourage a commitment to shared humanity best expressed in social, economic, and environmental justice. — SolidarityNYC (2015)

The US Solidarity Economy Network supports this transformative impulse in the USA. Internationally, The Alliance for Responsible Plural and Solidarity Economy has stimulated dialogue on how we can co-create a collaborative economic model that builds rather than divides community in Asia and Brazil, and www.socioeco.org offers an excellent resource in this area. A UN Research Institute for Social Development report concluded: “Policy makers and the international development community at large need to pay far more attention to ways and means of enabling SEE [Social Solidarity Economy]. This is particularly apparent in the current context of heightened risk and vulnerability associated with economic and food crises and climate change” (UNRISD, 2014: v). Ethan Miller (2010) has attempted to map the diverse economic strategies, organizational forms and tools that can contribute to the creation of a solidarity economy (Figure 25).

Figure 25: The Solidarity Economy — Redrawn with original content with permission of Ethan Miller

Once again, the important message is that we are not trying to reinvent economics with ecology and community in mind from scratch. There are many time-tested strategies and tools already available to us today. They have been developed on the innovation-rich fringes of the mainstream. Some of them may well be H3 ‘islands of the future in the present’, waiting to be spread not necessarily by scaling-up but by employing and adapting them everywhere at the scale of local communities and regional economies. Even if the transformation of the wider macro-economic context will test our patience for a little longer, we are already beginning to meet the descending top-down globalized economic system with ascending H2+ bottom-up innovation. Applying scale-linking, health- generating design to economics means creating diversity and resilience by strengthening the solidarity economy at the local and regional scale. [… more on the 3 Horizon framework and transformative innovation]

…

[This is an excerpt of a subchapter from Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]

Photo by kingcountyparks

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Tarnas emphasizes that “although the Cartesian-Kantian epistemological position has been the dominant paradigm of the modern mind, it has not been the only one” and argues that with the work of Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, Emerson, as well as Rudolf Steiner, a diversely expressed but consistent alternative epistemology began to emerge based on the “fundamental conviction that the relationship of the human mind to the natural world was ultimately not dualistic but participatory” (Tarnas, 1996, p.433).

This alternative way of knowing does not contradict the Kantian epistemology, but includes and transcends it. It acknowledge Kant’s assertion that all human knowledge of nature or the world is ultimately determined by subjective principles; “but instead of considering these principles as belonging ultimately to the separate human subject, and therefore not grounded in the natural world independent of human cognition, this participatory conception held that these subjective principles are in fact an expression of the world’s own being, and that the human mind is ultimately the organ of the world’s own process of self-revelation” (Tarnas, 1996, p.434). Tarnas explains:

“In this view, the essential reality of nature is not separate, self-contained, and complete in itself, so that the human mind can examine it “objectively” and register it from without. Rather, nature’s unfolding truth emerges only with the active participation of the human mind. Nature’s reality is not merely phenomenal, nor is it independent and objective; rather, it is something that comes into being through the very act of human cognition. Nature becomes intelligible to itself through the human mind. In this perspective, nature pervades everything, and the human mind in all its fullness is itself an expression of nature’s essential being.” — Richard Tarnas, 1996, p.434

Deep Galaxy Field from the Hubble Space Telescope showing hundreds of galaxies with thousands of star systems in each of them.

Tarnas emphasizes that this participatory epistemology which Goethe, Hegel, Steiner and others, all expressed in different but related ways is not a form of regression to naïve participation mystique. Rather, it is a way of knowing that can be regarded as a dialectical synthesis of the long evolution from the primordial undifferentiated consciousness and the enchanted world of early humans when everything was sacred and alive, on to the dualistic alienation between self and world, mind and body, humanity and nature, to then arrive at a participatory worldview that embraces the paradox of being at one and the same time (seemingly) separate from and fundamentally interconnected with nature.

In being we are an individual self and integral to the whole’s emergence at one and the same time. This participatory epistemology “incorporates the postmodern understanding of knowledge and yet goes beyond it” since “the interpretative and constructive character of human cognition is fully acknowledged, but the intimate, interpenetrating and all-permeating relationship of nature to the human being and human mind allows the Kantian consequence of epistemological alienation to be entirely overcome” (Tarnas, 1996, p.435).

We can acknowledge difference and celebrate diversity without staying trapped in the alienation of separation. The qualities that define the uniqueness of ‘other’ come into being when the self takes a perspective from which to ‘observe’ the world. The perceived separation emerges through a way of seeing, but the world does not cease to be whole. Everything is an expression of the one unifying, living, evolving, and conscious process we can choose to call Nature, Universe, God, the Ultimate, the Whole, or the One. As there is nothing outside it — neither in space nor time since they only come into being through a participatory experience of this process.

For the One to know itself, it has to divide itself in order to get a perspective on itself. This first distinction makes experience and participation possible. We create the illusion of our separation as experiencing subjects in the very act of relating to the unifying process by distinguishing the objects of our experience. Precisely because we can experience Nature we are a part of it and not separate from it.

The perception of separation and experience of self and world — subject and object — are valid and important emergent properties of our participation in and as the One. By embracing the seeming paradox that in our very experience of separation lies the proof of our belonging, we can learn to celebrate diversity and difference as expressions of our underlying unity.

We can find peace and rest in the certainty that with all our striving, going somewhere, and creative passion to co-create a regenerative culture, we are — in every moment — arriving exactly where we need to be, the eternally transforming now of the present moment. Our level of consciousness affects how we perceive this moment. Our collective narrative about who we are and what future we want affects what future emerges.

The French writer Marcel Proust reminded us “the true journey of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.” The journey towards a regenerative culture is about embracing all of Nature as the ground of our being — seeing ourselves and thereby everything with new eyes. Once we do that we will express our experience of this new intimate relationship of belonging to Universe and to Nature in beautifully diverse and creative ways.

“For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its own being. The driving impulse of the West’s masculine consciousness has been its dialectical quest not only to realize itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, finally, to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life, and thus to rediscover its connection to the whole” – Richard Tarnas, 1996, p.443

A bright intellect advancing science and technology, striving for a ‘better world’ and a caring heart feeling deeply connected with all of life, celebrating the perfection of all-that-is, are not mutually exclusive. I have met many women and men who have integrated the gifts of heart and mind on their own path as cultural creatives of a humanity that cares for nature as nature — in humility, creative brilliance, and full recognition of our kinship with all of life.

Our path into the future is one of synthesis. Just as our experience of a separate self is what Einstein called “a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness”, our experience of time is also an illusion. It has us experience the transition towards a regenerative culture as a journey through time rather than as an arriving where we already are: bringing forth a world, by living the questions together.

[This piece is based on a chapter that my editor suggested I cut out of my book Designing Regenerative Cultures published by Triarchy Press in May 2016].

Photo by amandabhslater

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“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do […] HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?”

—R. Buckminster Fuller

“We cannot individually comprehend the range, depth and detail of the consequences we are collectively generating for ourselves.”

—Tom Atlee (2002)

My plane is inbound to Amsterdam. For the next two days I will be joining a group of innovators, futurists, designers, activists, and technologists who have been invited on behalf of the Dubai Futures Foundation to brainstorm and envision what the Museum of the Future exhibition for the 2017 World Government Summit might reveal to its visitors about the world of 2050. How did I end up in this film and on this plane?

Museum of the Future, Dubai

For more than five years I would not fly to avoid the carbon emissions and environmental impact associated with this mode of transport. I wanted to walk my talk. I was somewhat indignant of people who jetted around the planet, in a similar way I had been indignant about meat-eaters when I was a vegetarian for a year. I still don’t eat much meat, but I don’t judge others for it anymore.

I started flying again, to teach sustainable design and futures techniques to activists, innovators, policy-makers, and students. I traveled by plane to do foresight work on climate change impact and community resilience with government agencies, to take part in climate summits and activist gatherings. I also built up a fair few “love miles” when visiting family and friends.

On digging trenches, creating an other,and fighting against

There was a time when I would have questioned my own integrity and commitment to the cause over these actions. Have I sold out? Well, I am not sure if I earn enough to call it that. At least I make myself believe that I do most of my work to contribute to the emergence of diverse regenerative cultures, thriving local communities, and vibrant regional economies in global solidarity and collaboration.

Do I really not earn enough to call myself a sell-out? Enough seems to me a curiously relative concept that is subject to very different interpretations depending on someone’s point of view or level of consciousness. Our perceived needs seem to increase rather than decrease as we get wealthier and move in wealthier circles.

Over the last few years I made it my regular practice to “count my blessings”: health, a loving partner, good friends, meaningful work, access to beautiful nature, a roof over my head, running water, clothes to wear, and food to eat. None of that can be taken for granted in today’s world. Not to mention the rank and privilege that come with being a white male in his mid-40s with a B.Sc. in Biology, a Masters in Holistic Science, a Ph.D. in Design, and a German passport, who speaks three languages fluently. Who am I to ever complain about income or really anything else?

I do make it a practice to gently point out to self-righteous activists—still stuck in the fight-the-system or blame-the-perpetrators loop—who are angrily mobilizing against the evil “one percent,” that most of the folks who camped out in front of Wall Street during Occupy were in fact themselves part of the top 10, many of the top five, and some even the top one percent of the global wealth pyramid.

I personally know more than a handful of anti-globalization or climate change activists who are expecting an inheritance approaching a million dollars, simply because the properties their parents and grandparents live in have shot up in value. Expecting to own a million dollars in assets puts you into the top one percent yourself. According to the Credit Suisse “Global Wealth Report 2015,” 80 people (who would find a seat on a London double-decker-bus) own more than half of the world’s wealth, while the bottom 71 percent of humanity share only three percent of global wealth.

Have a look at www.globalrichlist.com and enter your annual income and where you live in the world. I did that for someone getting by on less than 12,000 dollars a year in Spain, and guess what, that person is still in the lucky top 10 percent of the global comparison.

My point? What is the purpose of self-righteous finger-pointing and feeling superior about our transport or dietary habits, our political convictions, our oh-so-evolved level of awareness, or for being a little further down the global wealth pyramid constructed on hundreds of years of colonialism and exploitation of people and planet?

What is the point in beating oneself up over one’s own imperfections or privileges we were born with? We need to start with self-compassion and gratitude for what we have, and then reach out to others to co-create a world that works for all of humanity and all of life. Trench-digging activism, based on more of the “them-against- us-thinking” that got us into this mess in the first place, will not heal this ailing world.

On building alternatives and activating a more beautiful world

“To make the world work in the shortest possible time for 100 percent of humanity, through spontaneous cooperation and without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

—Buckminster Fuller

R. Buckminster Fuller stands in front of a depiction of his domed city design at its first public showing at a community meeting in East St. Louis, Illinois. Photo: Steve Yelvington, Wikimedia Commons

To shift from a “story of separation” to a “story of interbeing” is how Charles Eisenstein framed the transition ahead in The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. In my recently published book Designing Regenerative Cultures, I explore how we might be able to individually and collectively facilitate culturally creative conversations that will help us to co-create this future.

We are capable of shifting our culture’s guiding myths and central story from the narrative of separation to the narrative of interbeing. Together, and only together as one humanity in service to life, will we be able to create that more beautiful world. It is already all around us, but the story of separation makes us blind to seeing it.

During my time at Findhorn, I had the opportunity to collaborate with May East on a wide range of projects. May is Brazilian and has been an activist since the 1980s. She is a cofounder of the Global Ecovillage Network and Gaia Education, and directed the United Nations training centre CIFAL Scotland. More than most people I know, May embodies the role of a global change agent and bridge-builder between the often-separate worlds of civil society, business, and governance.

Her work stretches from teaching capacity building courses to activists all around the world,to working with local and national governments on a wide range of sustainability issues, and delivering sustainability training courses for UNITAR and UNESCO. May actively contributed to the collaborative process that formulated the new UN Sustainable Development Goals.

May and I share our passion for helping diverse constituencies and stakeholders explore whole-systems design solutions that draw on collective intelligence and integrate diverse perspectives and needs into a win-win-win approach. I firmly believe that through bridge-building and new types of collaboration across “the trenches” we will be able to co-create a more sustainable world. We need to maximize the edges. The good old permaculture design principle suggests that the more diversity we integrate, the more creative, diverse, and generative our solutions will be.

May East teaching a Project Based Learning programme in Senegal for Gaia Education

May once shared her personal practice of activism with me: “The first thing I do after my morning meditation is to consciously choose where I will put my attention that day, what conversations and projects I will activate through the power of my attention.”

We are all activists, activating one story or another through the power of our attention and the way we participate in our communities. We can choose to activate and embody the story of separation or the story of interbeing. We can choose what kind of world we want to bring forth together with the people we are in contact with.

We are all designers! Regenerative cultures are co-created by people who have become conscious of the way their participation activates certain possibilities—people who share a vision for a better world, collaborating to co-create a thriving future for all Life. Mindful practitioners and conscious activists ask themselves every day:

How can I activate the future potential of the present moment by living a more beautiful world today?

The first step is to be aware of what we are activating in the world by the power of our attention and the story we propagate through our thoughts, words, and actions. We all are, already, shaping the future of things to come, by the power of our attention and by both our actions and our failures to act in the face of converging crises and abundant opportunities to create a more beautiful world.

The article was first published in Communities magazine No.172, pp.43-45)

Photo by Eugen Naiman

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Those of us alive today are the cast for an epic of civilizational transformation. Something the environmental activist and author, Joanna Macy, describes as “The Great Turning.”

As this story unfolds we will see humanity collaborating in the conscious re-design of its collective impact on Earth. This is already happening and this much-needed Re-Generation is on the rise. The biophysical reality of a planet in crisis dictates our design brief: We have to shift from the current degenerative, exploitative and competitive practices to regenerative, productive and collaborative practices.

If we want to co-create a future worth living, all of humanity will have to learn to collaborate. We need to come together in all our wonderful diversity as one Re-Generation facing our common challenge: to re-design our human presence on Earth in accordance with our place in the family of things.

Designing for sustainability and regeneration

Over a seven-year period, starting in 1998, educators and practitioners from many of the leading experimental communities and ecovillages within the Global Ecovillage Network have co-created a curriculum for ‘Ecovillage Design Education’ (EDE), which was launched as a contribution to the UN Decade for Education for Sustainable Development in 2005.

After finishing my PhD in Design for Sustainability, I joined Gaia Education’s first training of trainers at the Findhorn Foundation ecovillage in 2006.  Over the last 10 years, I have taught on EDE courses in Scotland, Spain and Thailand, and co-authored the curriculum of their online programmes. Apart from Schumacher College, where I gained a Masters in Holistic Science in 2002, I don’t know of any comparable organization providing equally transformative eduction for sustainability.

Since 2005, Gaia Education has successfully trained thousands of committed global-local change makers in 41 countries on 6 continents, moving beyond ecovillage design to supporting sustainable community development at village, town, city and regional scale.

After the Sustainable Development Goals were ratified by the United Nations in September last year, Gaia Education was invited to join the ‘UNESCO Global Action Programme‘ to support the on-the-ground implementation of the SDGs through its diverse educational activities.

Run by a small, decentralized global team, the charity offers design-centered education and trainings – both face-to-face and online. Its diverse programs are aimed at people of all ages who share the common wish to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. While most courses are vocational or life-long-learning offers, some also carry academic accreditation through partner institutions.

The sustainable design framework behind Gaia Education’s broad range of programs is a curriculum organized into the four dimensions of sustainable community development. These are: social design, economic design, ecological design and worldview.

The 4-D Framework for Integrative Whole Systems Design for Sustainability

Rather than sticking with the conventional ‘three-legged-stool’ framework of sustainability, Gaia Education has always highlighted the importance of culture, worldview, values and spirituality as a critical fourth dimension of sustainability.

Change in worldviews and culture change go hand in hand. They are the drivers of behaviour change. The why affects the how and what we design. As our worldview changes, so do our intentions and our real and perceived needs.

A holistic, participatory and ecologically informed living systems view of life explores the why of sustainability and regeneration providing a basis for reframing humanity’s guiding story from one of separation to one of interbeing. Such a perspective allows us to synergistically integrate the social, economic and ecological aspects of the transition ahead.

Social Design

During the social dimension participants explore how to create a shared vision for collective projects and improve their communications skills. Inclusive decision making, creative conflict resolution or mediation, and effective work in social networks form part of this dimension, just as much as constructive ways to celebrate diversity and work creatively with differences in perspective and worldview.

Participants learn to reframe biocultural diversity as a source of resilience and the collective intelligence necessary for transformative innovation. Multi-stakeholder process facilitation is a vital for effective change agents.

Economic Design

The economic dimension highlights the structural dysfunction of our current economic and monetary systems and explores diverse strategies for creating and strengthening vibrant local economies. Learning about BALLE, nef, ISEC, the New Economics Coalition and the Solidarity Economy helps participants realize that we already have viable alternatives to neoclassical economic globalization.

By introducing methods and principles for creating community currencies and exchange systems and new types of economic success indicators, and by reviewing the legal forms, business models and financing mechanisms that can support the creation of social and regenerative enterprises, the courses enable participants to become active catalysts in the transition to vibrant regional economies based on ecological and social values and supported by global collaboration and solidarity.

Ecological Design

The competencies that are fostered during the ecological design dimension include how to ‘carbon footprint’ a project and design for carbon-neutrality or even carbon sequestration. Regenerative water management that integrates with the unique conditions of place, and a basic introduction to a broad range of decentralized renewable energy sources and their most appropriate application, are equally a part of the curriculum as ecological building methods and sustainable materials that are elegantly adapted to bioregional resource availability.

An introduction to the importance of local food economies, key methodologies of regenerative agriculture, permaculture design principles, and the cradle-to-cradle framework, are part of enabling graduates to facilitate ecological design conversations in support of increased regional food and seed sovereignty, local circular bio-economies and a shift towards increase local production for local consumption.

A New Worldview

This dimension explores the why of creating sustainable and regenerative cultures. Participants are invited to contemplate the role of spiritual practices like meditation, pilgrimage, prayer or solo-time in nature in creating deeper socio-cultural and ecological ties with the place we inhabit and the communities we participate in. Studying integral theory, Aldo Leopold’s ‘land ethics’, the importance of a (bioregional) ‘sense of place’ and ‘sense of belonging’ lead participants to question and become aware of their own perspectives and those of others.

Methods for collective future state visioning and backcasting are introduced as potential catalysts for collective action and local collaboration. New and ancient (Indigenous) frameworks of meaning and the role of rituals and rites of passage, plus healthy lifestyles, socially-engaged spirituality and evolutionary activism are all offered as potentially useful methods and perspectives that can help individuals and communities to become more effective agents of positive change.

Glocal education: local and regional capacity building through global collaboration and exchange

From social entrepreneurs to design and planning professionals, intentional community initiatives, educators, social workers, cooperativists, people in a phase of reorientation or students on a gap year, many of have agreed that Gaia Education’s programmes had a transformative impact on their lives. Educating for the Re-Generation is about transcending specialization and helping everyone to appreciate that we all have a part to play in the transition ahead. What participants learn from each other and through collaboration has equal importance to the curriculum itself.

Including members of Transition Town groups in the Global North or in the mega-cities of Brazil, community leaders in illiterate rubber tapper communities in the middle of the Amazon, tribal villagers in Senegal, the Congo, Bangladesh, India or Thailand, or disadvantaged youth in favelas and African migrants on Sicily, school kids in Estonia, business leaders, impact investors, academics, and policy makers, the more than 7,000 current graduates of the Gaia Education programmes could not be more diverse.

Building on the ground capacity for community-led action and supporting effective change agents who help to drive local and regional transformation towards thriving communities and vibrant local economies is the goal of all Gaia Education programmes.

Local action is supported and inspired by global goals and international collaboration. There is a growing network of both trainers and graduates who have all learned to celebrate differences in worldview, skills, and perspective as a source of collective intelligence and as a bio-cultural resource rather than obstacles to overcome.

Gaia Education collaborates with more than 30 host sites across North and Latin America, many of them in Brazil where progammes have now been taught in 15 different communities and cities. In Europe there are 20 communities and education centres hosting programmes in 10 different countries from Northern Finland to Southern Italy.

In Africa and the Middle East, Gaia Education works with local organizers in South Africa, the Congo, the Gambia, Senegal, Israel, Palestine and Turkey. In Asia and Oceania programmes are offered in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, China and Australia.

Adapting to the needs of learners everywhere

Supporting sustainability and regeneration globally, regionally and locally cannot happen through a one-size-fits all approach. It needs to be supported by networks of collaboration that span the different scales of design. To offer a variety of entry points into a learning journey designed to support a broad spectrum of participants with a breathtaking diversity of ethnic, educational, and professional backgrounds, Gaia Education has evolved a variety of different programmes and modalities to support learning.

Example one: Project-based leaning in Bangladesh, India, Senegal, and Sicily

Working directly with disadvantaged people and communities on the ground has been an aim for Gaia Education for many years. The Project-Based-Learning approach enables participants to acquire tools, methods and design skills that support them in implementing practical solutions to some of their most pressing issues – with a direct and beneficial impact on their lives.

With support from the Scottish government and in collaboration with the Bangladesh Association for Sustainable Development (BASD), Gaia Education has created a series of capacity-building workshops that enable in women (in particular) to flood-proof their houses, create highly productive organic vegetable gardens and establish aquaculture systems to produce good quality local protein.

In Orissa, India, Gaia Education has led a Scottish government-funded collaboration with the local NGO THREAD and a local women’s association to promote ‘climate smart agriculture’ and strengthen local food security by building capacity to design and by implementing productive agro-ecological food systems that blend traditional techniques with permaculture.

Senegal has adopted ecovillage development as a national sustainability and rural development strategy in close collaboration with the Global Ecovillage Network. In the Podor Region of Northern Senegal, four villages have been supported by Gaia Education and local organizations – funded by UK Aid – to improve food security, income generation and environmental sustainability.

By learning on projects that implement agro-forestry practices combining traditional and modern land-use systems, villagers increase their competencies with regard to permaculture practices, food processing and trading in the local food economy. Thus these programmes have a direct beneficial impact on the quality of life of people living in these communities.

One of the design principles of Gaia Education courses is about maximizing the ‘edge-effect’ that works creatively with the diversity generated as two or more ecosystems, cultures, or disciplines meet. The more diverse the system the more resilient (and potentially innovative) its transformative responses to environmental, social or economic change.

The short video (embed below) explores this approach and introduces a variety of the project-based learning programmes around the world.

Example two: Grass-roots capacity building course in sustainable community (ecovillage) design

Gaia Education’s most established programme was originally called Ecovillage Design Education but in many countries is now simply referred to as ‘the Gaia course’.  This face-to-face programme has been taught in a variety of formats from four week long residential trainings to a series of weekend courses over a few months.

The 125-contact-hour programme follows the four dimensions of sustainable community design explored above and gives students a lived experience of co-creating whole systems design projects together. The basic syllabus for this course has been translated into eight languages and is available for free download in English, Danish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Finnish and Chinese.

Four books called The Four Keys – one for each of the dimensions of the curriculum – were published as an official contribution to the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNDESD, 2004-15). These collections of short essays by a wide range of practitioners and activists from around the world offer inspiration and advice on how to effectively support sustainable community and enterprise development.

A participant of an EDE course in Denmark commented afterwards: “I didn’t know a lot about sustainability before coming here. […] now, I look at sustainable community with new eyes and I totally embrace it all”, and a graduate from a USA based course wrote: “I finally crossed the threshold and will lead a life that serves our planet.”

The short video (embed below) describes the success of the EDE programmes around the world.

Example three: UNESCO endorsed on-line course in Design for Sustainability

 Since 2009 the Gaia Education has been offering a very content- and information-rich online course – called Gaia Education Design for Sustainability (GEDS) – to enable people to gain an even deeper knowledge base in the thematic areas of the four dimensions. Subsequently they are challenged to integrate their new skills and knowledge of each dimension within a collaborative design studio project focused on a real locality and real projects – often championed by one of the participants who is aiming to implement the project (see link for a wonderful diversity of case-studies).

The course is taught entirely on-line using a collaboration platform that enables students from all round the world to form an effective learning community, supported by skilled and experienced tutors. With a minimum of 450 hours of study and design time, this course requires a significant commitment. From 2016 onwards it is also offered as part of Gaia Education’s professional pathway and training of trainers.

The GEDS is offered in Spanish through the Open University of Catalunya with varying levels of academic accreditation, including the option of taking it as the first year of a 2-year online Masters.  The English version is currently offered directly through Gaia Education with an option of gaining academic credits through Goddard College in the US; and this year, a Portuguese version has been added.

Gaia Education’s Growing Edge

Among the new programmes that are currently being piloted or in development are:

the Training of Trainers aimed at creating skilled multipliers who can help Gaia Education to reach more people;

• a series of programmes adapting the curriculum for children and youth already underway in Estonia, India, and Brazil;
• a new partnership with the UN and Strathclyde University offering a short on-line module as an introduction to decentralized renewable energy systems at the community scale;
• a new project-based-learning program focused practical skills in regenerative organic agriculture and local food systems offered to migrants and unemployed youth in Sicily;
• a new introductory course, and a month-long online course in partnership with Ubiquity University; and
• the development of an ambitious regionally focused 9-month blended-learning programme to foster social and ecological entrepreneurship and create employment within a Bioregional Design Education (BDE) framework – to be piloted in Scotland, Spain, Italy and Israel in 2017.

My own path of learning has greatly benefited from the supportive community provided by both colleagues and students on Gaia Education programmes. The track record created since the official launch in 2005 is impressive. I am committed to making more people aware of Gaia Education so more people can benefit from their programmes and become skilled agents of positive and so urgently needed change.

I know of few organization that offer equally effective education for the Re-Generation, enabling people of all walks of life on six continents to help in the re-design of their communities. In doing so we really are beginning to redesign our presence on Earth in accordance with humanity’s place in the family of things.

Originally published at

Photo by Liamfm .

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The Transition Design Symposium at Dartington Hall was a resounding success. A wonderfully diverse group of practitioners, academics and cultural creatives gathered at Dartington, from June 17th to 19th, to explore the role of design in the societal transition towards sustainability and beyond.

Terry Irwin, herself a graduate of the MSc. in Holistic Science in 2003-04 and now the head of Carnegie Mellon’s prestigious School of Design, and Gideon Kossoff, who administered the Holistic Science Masters during its first 10 years, clearly sounded a note that attracted cultural change agents from all over the world to come together in exploration of change within and through design.

Over one hundred people gathered from as far away as Australia, Japan, India, Taiwan and Brazil to be part of what promises to turn into an impulse that will both transform design academia from within, and perhaps more importantly, help to inspire a new generation of design practitioners in service to the great transition humanity is called to make.

In the face of the converging crises of climate change, resource depletion, environmental degradation, and unacceptable economic inequality and suffering – particularly in the global South – designers everywhere are called to assume a deeper responsibility for the impacts of their work. Designers are finally stepping up to the challenge that David Orr so aptly described in The Nature of Design (link is external). We are challenged to “redesign the human presence on Earth.”

This task falls not just upon design professionals and academics, but asks all of us to become more aware of our co-creative agency and the way our actions and inactions contribute to bringing forth a word in conversation and by design. Ecological design pioneers John Todd (link is external) and Nancy Jack-Todd have told us for decades that “we are all designers”, called upon to co-create “elegant solutions carefully adapted to the uniqueness of place”.

With the outstanding leadership of Terry Irwin (link is external) at the internationally recognized Carnegie Mellon School of Design (link is external) taking these messages to the heart of the design profession, necessary changes within design academia will be greatly accelerated. Finally, designers are beginning to be educated to become active catalysts of transition. The transformative agency of design is beginning to transform design institutions, design as a discipline, and the way design impacts society at large.

Following Transition Design Up-stream

Together with the team from CMU, Schumacher College acted as a co-convener of the Transition Design Symposium – expertly co-organized by Ruth Potts and her colleagues of the MA in Ecological Design Thinking.

Yet Schumacher College had a much deeper influence on the genesis of Transition Design. The scientific and philosophical underpinnings that give Transition Design (link is external) its strength as a (r)evolutionary impulse are informed by many of the brilliant minds and hearts that have taught at Schumacher College over the last 25 years.

My personal epiphany of understanding the power and transformative agency of design occurred in 2002 when I was on the Masters in Holistic Science. Deeply inspired by Brian Goodwin, Stephan Harding, Henri Bortoft and Fritjof Capra, I was keen to see the coherent participatory worldview described by the holistic sciences put into action in society. During a short course with David Orr and John Todd and Nancy Jack-Todd I came to realize that ecological design was in fact the practice-end of holistic science.

In that moment I joined the large group of people who gained insights at Schumacher College that not only transformed their lives forever, but also enabled them to become more effective global-local agents of change. The effective alchemical cauldron that is Schumacher College has transformed so many people who have gone on to play their role in the great transition that is already unfolding within and through the more than 10,000 people fortunate enough to have had the privilege to be educated and transformed at this remarkable place.

I wrote my masters thesis, entitled ‘Exploring Participation (link is external)’, on holistic science and ecological design. It lead to Professor Seaton Baxter at the Centre for the Study of Natural Design (University of Dundee) finding me a scholarship and offering his deeply supportive mentorship to complete a PhD in ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health (link is external)’ in 2006.

In subsequent years, both Terry Irwin and Gideon Kossoff undertook their PhD research with Seaton Baxter. Terry worked on developing the content for a Masters in Holistic Design Ecology, which was never implemented because she took up her post at CMU. Gideon’s 2011 doctoral thesis (link is external) can be regarded as the founding document of Transition Design.

The insights and scientific frameworks so expertly curated into the Masters in Holistic Science by Brian Goodwin and Stephan Harding, have deeply informed the roots of Transition Design and of my own work over the last 15 years. I hope that my recently published book, Designing Regenerative Cultures (link is external), will serve the growing Transition Design movement as a useful resource.

Sustainability is no longer enough. We have degenerated our planetary life support system for so long and at such a scale that to be only sustainable – what William McDonough calls “100% less bad” – does not suffice. We urgently need to transition towards a diversity of regenerative cultures elegantly adapted to the bio-cultural diversity of the places they inhabit.

The transition ahead challenges us to transform the human impact on Earth from our current degenerative practices to the widespread regeneration of healthy ecosystems, vibrant regional economies, and thriving local communities everywhere. This 90 second video (link is external) explains the transition from business as usual, to “green”, sustainable, restorative, reconciliatory and regenerative design.

The new masters and doctoral programmes (link is external) in Transition Design at Carnegie Mellon School of Design and Schumacher College’s MA in Ecological Design Thinking (link is external), headed by Seaton Baxter, are offering transition designers an opportunity to deepen in their thinking and their practice so they can be effective catalysts of transformative innovation. Holistic Science provides a theoretical framework that all  these programmes and my own work as an educator and consultant have in common. One could say that Transition Design is Holistic Science in action.

Living the Future Today – a historical gathering of global-local agents of change

I arrived at the Transition Design Symposium after two intensive days of work with the Dubai Futures Foundation working on the possible content for next year’s Museum of the Future exhibition.  During these days we explored shifting the proposed theme of the exhibition from floating cities and space stations to large-scale ecosystems regeneration, biomimetic design and technology, and green chemistry.

So it was surprisingly synchronistic for me that Andrew Simms opened the Transition Design Symposium by reminding us of the urgency of responding to the immanent dangers of run-away climate change and the fact that the closest Earth-like planet – Wolf 106 1C – is so distant to our fragile home planet that it would take us roughly 206,192 years to travel there. We best sort out our own behaviour on this planet rather than setting our eyes on new planets – turning into the locust of the known universe.

Terry Irwin’s opening remarks highlighted the importance of moving designers from “the design of posters and toasters to design as a driver of societal change.” This was echoed  by her colleague Cameron Tonkinwise, who called upon the academics present to “change design, so design becomes an agent of change.”

Ingrid Mulder’s, who works on participatory city making, offered an important reminder that in order to be successful in this project designers need to leave behind the hubris of being the shapers of the world that everyone else only inhabits. Designers have to shift into the role of facilitators of social transformation by enabling transdisciplinary dialogue and widespread citizens participation in the co-visioning and co-design of our collective future.

Tony Greenham – director of economy, enterprise and manufacturing at the RSA – warned everyone to accept the current economic system as an inevitable given and highlighted that “the economy is designed.” He argued that we need “more design thinking in economics” and have to regard the redesign of our economic and monetary systems “as a design challenge.”

Schumacher College’s wise elder Julie Richardson offered a deeply insightful reflection on her own life as a committed agent of positive change in economics and design.  In her personal explorations of the inner and outer dimensions of economics, she came to realize that we can “live in the future today” and affect transformative change by starting with the inner or personal transformation of reconnecting to ourselves, to our communities and to nature as a source of insight and strength.

The effervescence of writer and artist Lucy Neal´s infectious optimism as a (r)evolutionary design activist reminded us that “joy is a radical force” and that art, theater and collective non-violent direct action offer ways to stimulate the imagination of what we can do together in community. “Between what is possible and what is not, there is a field rich in possibilities.” Through theater and play we can enact the future we want in the presence and plant seeds of transformational change.

Tom Crompton of the Common Cause Foundation stressed the critical importance of both extrinsic and intrinsic values in driving the transition ahead and invited designers to make the values that inform their practice more explicit. Robin Murray of the Young Foundation cautioned the audience not to blindly follow the economists call for “scaling up” and rather replicate effective transition design by diffusion – spreading rather than scaling.

The final panel of the symposium, hosted by Terry Irwin, had a number of leading design academics reflect upon the limitations that the current economic system imposes on design schools.  The dialogue highlighted the importance of reaching out beyond established and respected institutions like CMU, the Royal College of Art, the Open University, or the RSA to create effective transdisciplinary and multi-stakeholder partnerships that transform these institutions, design education and society at large.

For design to unfold its transformative potential, design academics are called to aid their own institutions to transition to a new way of doing things. This will have to be achieved by driving change from within, as well as, through building bridges to N.G.O.s and civil society. Design academics are invited to step out of their institutions to bring the power of transition design thinking into business schools and to visionary leaders in industry, politics and civil society.

All of the well-chosen panelist brought important contributions to the nourishing dialogue of the Transition Design Symposium, and maybe – as is so often the case at such events – the most transformative conversation with lasting impacts happened in the coffee breaks and during the Open Space Technology sessions of the second day when 100 transition designers were given the opportunity to network and learn from each other, co-creating a whole that was more than the sum of its parts.

As the global community of transition designers continues to grow, the design brief for all of us is clear. It was succinctly stated by the holistic design science pioneer Buckminster Fuller when he challenged us:

“to make the World work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

Book: Designing Regenerative Cultures (link is external) is published by Triarchy Press, 2016.

Article originally published in the Schumacher College Website.

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In the face of multiple converging crises, mere sustainability is no longer enough. Too much damage has already been done. We need to restore ecosystem and community health, and create regenerative systems that allow us to face uncertainty creatively.

After the post-war Baby Boomers came Generation X, followed by Generation Y – the millennials – and Generation Z – the iGeneration. So what’s next?

Creating a viable future for humanity on an overpopulated planet in crisis requires all of us to collaborate, across generations, ideologies and nations. We all will need to join the re-generation!

How do we keep the lights on, avoid revolution and turmoil, keep children in school and people in work, yet still manage to fundamentally transform the human presence on planet Earth before ‘business as usual’ leads to run-away climate change, a drastically impoverished biosphere, and the early demise of our species?

Rather than rushing for solutions we’d better make sure we’re asking the appropriate questions. Albert Einstein supposedly said:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask. For once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

It is time to step back from our cultural predisposition to want solutions and answers as quickly as possible. Do symptomatic quick fix solutions – rather than systemic transformation – actually serve the necessary culture change? Or are they merely premature responses to mistaken problem statements created within an outdated way of thinking, based on a cultural narrative that no longer serves humanity?

The right questions can reshape our perception of the world

By daring to ask deeper questions we begin to see the world differently. As we engage in conversation about such questions, we collectively begin to contribute to the emergence of a new culture. Questions – and the dialogues they spark – are culturally creative. We need to make sure we ask the right questions if we hope to bring forth the thriving, resilient, regenerative cultures and communities most of us long to live in.

The word sustainability begs the question what it is that we are actually trying to sustain: an outdated cultural narrative, an unhealthy conception of the relationship between humanity and nature, business as usual in a deeply inequitable world? Rather than simply sustaining a structurally dysfunctional system and worldview, our questioning has to go deeper.

We need to search for new ways to restore ecosystems, celebrate cultural diversity, initiate a worldview change, and facilitate the transition towards diverse cultures that regenerate not just vital resources and community resilience, but contribute to the health and vitality of nature’s life support systems.

Such cultures will assure the future of life as a whole and not merely sustain a humanity divorced from its roots and alienated from the ground of its own being.

What questions might serve to find potential pathways towards a regenerative human presence on Earth? Could we define a set of questions to offer an effective cultural compass that would help us steer our way into an uncertain and unpredictable future? Questions can help us navigate overwhelming complexity with humility and in full recognition of the limits of our knowing.

In Designing Regenerative Cultures, I explore a wide range of such questions along with many solutions and answers as transient means to ask even better questions.

More and more people are becoming aware that all our individual and collective actions and inactions are in fact interventions and do shape our collective future. This insight can motivate people to assume conscious responsibility for their role as change agents in the transition towards diverse regenerative cultures. If not us, then who? If not now, then when?

Transformative innovation and design

In the face of multiple converging crises, mere sustainability is no longer enough. Too much damage has already been done. We need to restore ecosystem and community health, and create regenerative systems that allow us to face uncertainty creatively.

To do this we need to go beyond ‘sustaining innovation’ and ‘disruptive innovation’ – as described by Clayton Christensen in 1997 – and effectively engage in transformative innovation. Any proposed innovations should be evaluated based on its potential capacity to serve as a stepping-stone towards regenerative cultures.

Transformative innovation requires integrative whole systems thinking. We can innovate win-win-win solutions and design for systemic synergy. To do so, we need to understand the interconnected nature of the converging crises and respond with an integrative and participatory approach to this complexity. If we pay attention to the appropriate scale, we can create solutions where the individual, the community and the ecosystem benefit.

The word resilience has become very fashionable, yet not many people have bothered to dive deeply into the rich understanding that 40 years of studying change and transformation in ecosystems has provided us with. Resilience research offers important insights for the co-creation of regenerative cultures. We can design for transformative resilience to keep our options open and anticipate the unexpected.

To do this, we need to value diversity, adaptability, redundance at multiple scales, and pay attention to the qualities of relationships and information flow. Transformative resilience is our individual and collective ability to anticipate possible futures and to maintain our health and integrity while we adapt and transform in response to the continuously changing socio-ecological systems we participate in.

Over the last 20 years, our understanding of the role of design in the transition ahead has expanded drastically. Design is the way our worldview and value systems express themselves in our material culture, through the artefacts, systems and processes we create. Past design decisions – like the buildings and cities we inhabit – in turn shape our worldview and value systems. Design is a conversation through which different perspectives are integrated into culturally creative action.

Clearly, there are limits to the extent that we can design regenerative cultures. All complex dynamic systems – our communities and cultures included – are fundamentally unpredictable and controllable.

We have to learn to see design and emergence of unpredictable novelty as two faces of the same coin. This will help us to design with humility and careful attention to systemic feedback.

Design as nature!

The false dichotomy between nature and culture is the root causes of many of the converging crises we are facing. Applying the lessons of eco-literacy and engaging in nature inspire innovation and design (biomimicry) drastically improves our capacity to meet human needs while re-designing the human presence on Earth.

We can do more than simply learn from nature: we are capable of designing as nature: maintaining ecosystems integrity, nurturing systemic health, and strengthening the planetary live support system we depend upon! We are already designing as nature. There are inspiring examples ranging in scale from green chemistry, product design, sustainable architecture, community design, industrial ecology, to urban and regional planning.

Building on the work of pioneers like John T. Lyle and William McDonough, the architect Bill Reed and his colleagues at the Regenesis Group have created a framework for regenerative design that transcends and includes green, sustainable and restorative approaches as stepping stones on our learning journey towards a regenerative human impact on Earth.

Here is a short video explaining this framework for shifting our mental models:

Let me give you just a few examples how we are already applying systemic biomimicry and an understanding of nutrient, energy and material cycles in mature ecosystems to the redesign of our impact on the rest of nature. The World Future Council and Herbert Girardet called for a transition from ‘petropolis’ to ‘ecopolis’ through the creation of regenerative cities.

Allan Savory’s work on holistic land management and holistic planned grazing offers tested methodologies for regenerating degraded grasslands and prairies. These techniques are part of the toolbox of regenerative organic agriculture.

This approach to the production of food and key resources for regional bio-economies also offers an effective way to slow down climate change and eventually return to pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The same techniques also regenerate soil fertility and aquifers through storing the carbon underground in the form of organic matter and root-mass.

This short video – from one of John Liu’s inspiring documentaries on large scale ecosystems regeneration – shows how China regenerated 8.6 million acres of heavily degraded land on the Loess Plateau in only 10 years.

Regenerative intentions and practices are spreading into all walks of life. Just in the last three years, we have started important culturally creative conversations about the transition to regenerative enterprise, regenerative capitalism, and a regenerative society.

Designing Regenerative Cultures

We are capable of aligning ourselves as evolutionary activists and culture change agents with the regenerative principles that have guided life’s evolution to increasing diversity, integration, and cooperation. “Life creates conditions conducive to Life!” stated Janine Benyus.

In the end it comes down to asking ourselves: Will we continue to strive to out-compete each other and in the process unravel the thread that all life depends upon? Or, will we learn to collaborate in safeguarding Earth’s life-support systems through transformative innovation and regenerative design? Will we co-create vibrant regenerative cultures and thriving communities for all?

Choosing the path of regeneration and cooperation will create a greater level of wellbeing, health, happiness and equality for everyone and all life; and in the process of co-creating a better future together, our lives will be more meaningful, fulfilling, creative and fun. That is the promise to those ready to join the Re-Generation!

If we choose to, we can generate collaborative abundance for all. The first step is to pause and ask: What if we choose collaboration and regeneration over exploitation and degeneration? What if we choose to thrive together, rather than compete against?

In the words of R. Buckminster Fuller “To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone.”

Lead image: Longji terraces in Longsheng county, Guilin, China, January 2009. Photo: Anna Frodesiak via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).

Cross-posted from The Ecologist

The post Creating sustainability? Join the Re-Generation! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A new generation of designers are applying ecologically inspired design to agriculture, architecture, community planning, cities, enterprises, economics and ecosystem regeneration. Join them to co-create diverse regenerative cultures in the transition towards a regenerative society. Humanity’s impact needs to shift from degeneration to regeneration before the middle of this century. We will all have to collaborate to achieve this transformative response to the converging crises we are facing.

Life Creates Conditions Conducive to Life

Janine Benyus, co-founder of the Biomimicry Institute, eloquently expressed nature’s most important lesson and humanity’s main creative challenge for the 21st Century. The post-War Baby-Boomer generation was born at a time when humanity’s impact on the planet became catastro-phically degenerative. The following Generations X, Y and Z were more and more confronted with results of our collective actions. We are beginning to learn the hard lesson that on an overpopulated planet, faced with multiple converging crises, even those who seem to win in the short term will lose in the mid to long term if we do not regenerate vital ecosystem functions and create conditions where all of life can thrive.

No matter which generation you were born into, all generations alive today are called to join the Re-Generation. If we choose to, we can move from a zero-sum world (of winners and losers) to a non-zero-sum world where life as a whole flourishes. Regenerative design is about co-creating a win-win-win future where the individual, the community and the planet win; and social, ecological and economic benefits mutually reinforce each other through integrative whole systems design. Competitive advantages tend to be short-lived. We know how to create cultures based on collaborative advantage for all of humanity and the wider community of life.

Many of the pioneers of the regenerative design (r)evolution are permaculture designers. Applying permaculture principles, ethics and attitudes to the redesign of the human presence on Earth offers effective strategies for the transition towards diverse regenerative cultures every-where. These cultures will be elegant expressions of the biocultural uniqueness of the places they inhabit – thriving communities in global and local collaboration.

Whether ecological design, permaculture, systemic biomimicry, or regenerative design, all these approaches share a design-based methodology that applies life’s operating instructions and ecosocial literacy to co-creating a future where humanity and all of life can thrive. We are the Re-Generation! If not us, then who?
If not now, then when?

The Rise of the Re-Generation

Here are only some of the many examples of how the intention and practice of regeneration is spreading fast and wide. Holistic land manage-ment and holistic planned grazing – developed by Allan Savory – offers tested methodologies for the regen-eration of degraded grasslands and prairies. These techniques form part of the diverse toolbox of regenerative agriculture, which PM reports on regularly. The Australian permaculture designer Darren Doherty (PM69) helped to promote this approach globally,¹ along with organizations like the Savory Institute,² the Rodale Institute³ and Eugenio Gras of MasHumus.⁴

Apart from the production of food and resources for regional bioeconomies, regenerative agriculture also offers an effective way to slow down climate change and eventually return to pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The same practices regenerate soil fertility, increase the water retention capacity of the soil, and replenish aquifers, by storing carbon under-ground in the form of organic matter and root-mass (see ‘Carbon Farming’ in PM88).

There are also many hopeful examples of large-scale ecosystems regeneration. The Chinese filmmaker, John D. Liu, has documented these projects over a number of decades.⁵ China regenerated 3.5 million hectares (8.6 million acres) of heavily degraded land on the Loess Plateau in only 10 years. Similar work is happening in the Ethiopian highlands and many other places (PM86 and 87). The Scottish company Biomatrix Water is pioneering biomimicry approaches to the regeneration of polluted waterways,⁶ rivers and lakes.

In the field of architecture and community design the Re-Generation also has globally recognized leaders. Inspired by the late John T. Lyle, these transformative innovators have demonstrated that buildings and communities can – by design – have a regenerative effect on place. Bill Reed co-founded the Regenesis Group⁷ and the Integrative Design Collaborative.⁸ William McDonough launched the ‘Cradle to Cradle’ approach to indus-trial production, which is now at the heart of the transition to circular economies (see Dame Ellen MacArthur interview in PM68). Jason McLennan has created the ‘Living Building Challenge’ and ‘Living Futures Challenge’ that have been taken up by built environment professionals around the world.⁹

We are also beginning to apply our understanding of nutrient, energy and material cycles in mature ecosystems to the redesign of cities. The World Future Council and Herbert Girardet are calling for a transition from ‘petropolis’ to ‘ecopolis’ through the creation of regenerative cities.

Regenerative design is also a key component of Jon Young’s ‘eight shields’ approach to mentoring and leadership.¹⁰ He collaborates closely with the permaculture teachers Penny Livingston and James Stark who set up a Regenerative Design Institute in Bolinas, California.¹¹ Over the last 12 years they have developed the 6.9 hectare (17 acre) site at the Commonwealth Garden into a wonderful example of regenerative design.

Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua pioneered the field of financial permaculture applying the design principles to the development of regenerative enterprises.¹² Their ‘8 Forms of Capital’ maps an economy holistically beyond just financial capital flows and reframes entrepre-neurship as a regenerative activity based on the co-creation of regenerative enterprise ecologies (PM68).

John Fullerton, a member of the Club of Rome and founder of the Capital Institute, started the important conversation about what a truly regenerative economy might look like, at the local, regional and global scale. The institute’s white paper on ‘Regenerative Capitalism’ explores how an economy that functions like an ecosystem can regenerate wealth and resources in ways that serve people and planet.¹³

Last year the Centre for Planetary Culture published Towards Regenerative Society: Plan for Rapid Transition.¹⁴ Daniel Pinchbeck – the centre’s co-founder – is now working on a Manifesto for a Regenerative Society. My own book, Designing Regenerative Cultures,¹⁵ explores many more examples of how the Re-Generation is on the rise and what questions might guide us in charting our course towards a regenerative future.

Designing Regenerative Cultures – Learning to Design as Nature

The false separation between nature and culture is the root cause of many of the converging crises we are facing. We have to move beyond simply learning from nature. We are capable of design as nature: maintaining ecosystem integrity, safeguarding diversity, nurturing systemic health, and strengthening the planetary life support system we depend upon! Human beings are perfectly capable of creating conditions conducive to life.

The good news is that we are already doing it. There are inspiring examples ranging in scale from green chemistry, product design, sustainable architecture, community design, industrial ecology, to urban and bioregional planning, and global-local collaboration and knowledge exchange. When practicing whole systems design aimed at improving human, ecosystems and planetary health, we need to pay attention to how all these different scales of design relate to each other and practice scale-linking design to weave the synergies between them.
Nature’s processes are inherently scale-linking. Regenerative cultures will be elegantly adapted to their locality and region. To achieve this everywhere we need national and global collaboration and solidarity. The health of individuals, commun-ities, ecosystems and the planet are intricately interlinked.

The evolutionary framework for regenerative design, created by Bill Reed, transcends and includes green, sustainable and restorative approaches as stepping-stones on our learning journey, as we explore how to live in ways that contribute to transforming humanity’s impact on Earth from being predominantly destructive to being regenerative.

Business as usual falls just short of breaking the law, sticking to the limits of what is allowed – what companies can get away with in their pursuit of profit. ‘Green’ often overly celebrates small voluntary steps to do a little less damage (e.g. so-called green building or industry standards). By the time we get to sustainable practices – what Bill McDonough called 100% less bad – we are no longer adding to the destruction that we have already caused. Yet, after a few thousand years of destructive agricultural practices and a few hundred years of exploitative industrialisation, that is not enough!

To create a thriving future for nine billion human beings and for all of life, we need to begin to reverse our destructive effects and start to heal communities, ecosystems and the Earth. Many, often well intended, restoration projects are still done with the arrogance of humanity as the ‘master of nature’ and we end up with projects such as planting Eucalyptus monoculture forests in already water-stressed areas and call it reforestation. We need to become humble apprentices of life.

Only if we heal the entirely mind-made separation of nature and culture, only if we truly understand our interbeing with all of life, can we reconcile humanity with the rest of nature. Once we take that step – which is primarily a shift in the way we think about ourselves and our participation in life’s evolutionary journey – we can begin to design as nature by co-creating elegant solutions adapted to the biocultural uniqueness of place.

The central task for the Re-Generation was summed up perfectly by Buckminster Fuller. Our design challenge is:

“To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous co-operation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone.”

Daniel Christian Wahl works internationally as an educator, activist and consultant, specialising in whole systems design and transformative innovation for regenerative cultures. He is a member of the International Futures Forum, a fellow of the RSA, and a Findhorn Foundation fellow. He co-authored all four dimensions (social, ecological, economic, worldview) of Gaia Education’s UNESCO recognised online curriculum in ‘Design for Sustainability’.¹⁶Designing Regenerative Cultures, Daniel’s first book, was published by Triarchy Press in May 2016. It is reviewed on p.70 in PM89.

^{1 www.regrarians.org
2 http://savory.global
3 www.rodaleinstitute.org
4 www.mashumus.com
5 www.whatifwechange.org
6 http://tiny.cc/floating-ecosystems
7 www.regenesisgroup.com
8 www.integrativedesign.net
9 www.living-future.org
10 www.8shields.com
11 www.regenerativedesign.org
12 www.regenterprise.com
13 www.capitalinstitute.org
14 www.planetaryculture.com
15 http://tiny.cc/des-res-cultures
16 http://tiny.cc/gaia-e-learning}

Photo by RobGreen

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