Jonny Gordon-Farleigh: Your new book, How to Thrive in the Next Economy, explores practical innovations in sustainability across the world. What stories would you pick out as the most instructive for the scale of change we need to see?

John Thackara: The sheer variety of projects and initiatives out there is, for me, the main story. No single project is the magic acorn that will grow into a mighty oak tree. We need to think more like a forest than a single tree! If you look at healthy forests, they are extremely diverse—and we’re seeing a healthy level of diversity in social innovation all over the world. Many people say we need to focus on solutions that scale, but to me that’s globalisation-thinking wearing a green coat. Every social and ecological context is unique, and the answers we seek will be based on an infinity of local needs.

JGF: What examples of inspiring stories can you give?

JT: The story of soil has been an epiphany for me. Soil is the largest living system on the planet; without it, we wouldn’t exist. But I only learned this a few years ago. At first I read a whole pile of articles and books, but it all came to life when I then went on a soil creation course in the Cevennes, the mountainous area in France where I live. Our teacher was a French agro-ecologist Robert Morez who has worked as an agricultural advisor in Africa for forty years. He showed us how to make a growing mound with a bunch of ingredients: bone meal, dried blood, crushed oyster shells, wood fire ash, onto a growing mound of wood, twigs, leaves, straw. Each layer is seasoned, as if with salt and pepper, by this powdery mix of minerals and biological activators. Robert told us we were learning “how to construct a bio-intensive planting mound”—but in my mind, I was making soil, rather than depleting it, for first time in my life.

JGF: There was a figure recently stating that we have around 100 harvests left.

JT: Yes, that figure was for British soil at the current rate of soil depletion. Other reports suggest that we are losing 3.5 tonnes of soil for every person on the planet every year. The numbers are either hard to grasp or just dispiriting, but either way, it’s enormous. But what I learned up the mountain is that we can restore soil because people in different regions of the world have been doing precisely that for a long time. On its own, soil formation is an extremely slow process— sometimes taking thousands of years—but a growing band of visionaries have discovered that the process can be speeded up dramatically if the right approach is followed.

JGF: Farming organisations, such as La Via Campesina, describe this approach as agroecology.

JT: Yes, they do. It’s an ugly word, I know, but it describes the practical wisdom of people who’ve been stewarding the land for generations. It’s not my job to tell La Via Campesina what language to use—the word make sense to their 300,000 members—but I think one of the things that we writers can do is come up with better words!

JGF: This leads into my next question: Early on in the book you remind readers to be careful of the words we choose to make sense of these new times. Noting, “one man’s energy descent, is another woman’s energy transition.” Words that I find unhelpful, and come to mind, are phrases such as ‘degrowth’. What language do you find alienating in the language around the new economy?

JT: I’m totally not a fan of ‘degrowth’. I’ve learned through experience that calling for people to give things up, voluntarily or otherwise, doesn’t work. Most people simply turn off when confronted by lists of prohibitions. I try, instead, to talk about kinds of growth we do need: land getting healthier, water getting fresher, air cleaner to breathe, communities more resilient. These kinds of growth add up to new kind of value.

JGF: You also write about healing the metabolic rift, a term that Karl Marx used to describe the loss of interdependency between social and ecological systems and the reason for recurring crises.

JT: The metabolic rift is another of the ugly green buzzwords that seem to plague us—but learning about the concept was another lightbulb-going-off-in-my-head moment. I’d spent half my life trying to figure out why even decent people who love animals and children persist in organising the world in such an obviously damaging way. An answer that makes sense is that we don’t experience the result of the damage that we do as visceral, embodied feedback. We don’t feel the pain felt by the earth because it happens somewhere else—out of sight and therefore out of mind.

JGF: Could you explain more about what the metabolic rift is?

JT: It’s not that our brains lack processing capacity—more, that they’re preoccupied by the wrong inputs. A combination of paved surfaces and pervasive media has shielded us from direct experience. Material progress itself has distracted us from the health of the natural living systems upon which we still depend—and, indeed, are a part. If you put it to someone—as I have done—that, without soil, humanity will quickly starve, they usually agree, nod sagely—and wait for me to change the subject. Few of the city-dwelling people I know ever touch, feel, taste or smell the stuff—healthy or otherwise. Our children are not taught about it at school. It’s the same with climate change, the loss of biodiversity, deforestation; or dying seas: Out of sight, out of mind. Why would we care?

The ways we understand the world are shaped by the political and economic system. As Jason Moore explains in his book Capitalism in the Web Of Life, the metabolic rift is not a regrettable side-effect of the modern economy; it’s written into its DNA. Our present economy has to grow in order to survive, and ceaseless growth entails ever-larger inputs of external resources and energy. Our problems started when we first travelled across the world to take other people’s minerals and resources—and that was 500 years ago. This is where the richness of the so called developed nations originates. The Spanish plundered wood from the Baltic region to build the ships in which they sailed off to the West Indies to bring back spices, and so on. A hundred million kilos of silver from Latin America provided much of the capital for Europe’s industrial revolution. Our bad behaviour dates back a long way!

JGF: Your book suggests that organising the world around bioregions is one way to close the metabolic rift?

JT: The notion of a bioregion appeals to me for a specific reason: Telling city people to take better care of nature has been one of my many failures as a writer. Intellectually, city folk buy the argument that growth should mean soils, biodiversity and watersheds getting healthier, and communities more resilient. But in the absence of positive feedback from some distant place called Nature, people just don’t connect with my exhortations. I realised that a more compelling story, and a shared purpose, were needed. So I started asking people two questions: “Does your city know where its lunch is coming from? And is that place healthy—or not?”

With the prospect of missing lunch as motivation, I’m finding that the idea of a bioregion is an appealing way for city people to reconnect with living systems, and each other, through the unique places where we live. It acknowledges that we live among watersheds, foodsheds, fibresheds, and food systems—not just in cities, towns, or ‘the countryside’. The idea is culturally dynamic, too—far more than abstract words like sustainability, or resilience, or transition. A bioregion is about unique geographic, climatic, hydrological and ecological qualities. These can be the basis for meaning and identity, and people get that.

But beyond the idea in general, what most turns people on—especially designers and artists—is the sheer variety of work to be done in bringing a bioregion to life. Maps of a bioregion’s ecological assets are needed: its geology and topography; its soils and watersheds; its agriculture and biodiversity. The collaborative monitoring of living systems, the interactions among them, and the carrying capacity of the land, needs to be designed—together with feedback channels. Spaces and places that support collaboration need to be identified and, where needed, adapted—from maker spaces to churches, from town halls, to libraries. New collaboration and peer-to-peer platforms are needed to help people to share resources of all kinds—from land, to time and knowledge. New economic and business models need to be adapted and deployed, such as peer production, commons economics, and open value accounting. Novel forms of governance and discussion must also be designed that enable collaboration among diverse groups of people and enterprises. Every bioregion will need its own identity, too—what the bioregion looks like, and feels like, to its citizens and visitors.

JGF: Those subjects are pretty broad-ranging. Are you suggesting that designers and artists are best-placed to take care of them all?

JT: None of these actions mean designers or artists are acting alone. Developing the agenda for a bioregion involves a wide range of skills and capabilities: The geographer’s knowledge of mapping; the conservation biologist’s expertise in biodiversity and habitats; the ecologist’s literacy in ecosystems; the economist’s ability to measure flows and leakage of money and resources. But in creating objects of shared value—such as an atlas, a website, a plan, a building, a landscape, or a meeting—I do think the design process can be a powerful way to foster collaboration among diverse disciplines and constituencies, yes. I’d also say that the service designer can bring something special to the creation of platforms that enables actors to share and collaborate. And—as you’ve shown so wonderfully in STIR magazine already—artists have a unique capacity to represent real-world phenomena in ways that change our perceptions.

GF: At the recent new economy summit we both attended in Bristol, I mentioned Charles Eisenstein’s claim that, “the city of New York, with over one million people, met all its food needs from within seven miles prior to 1850.” If you look at the scale of most UK cities, such as Bristol or Manchester, it’s a very possible project.

JT: It is very doable. Urban farming started off as a minority fad, but it’s quickly going mainstream in many northern cities. A lot of smart innovation to support urban farming is happening—but it’s not much about high-tech control systems. It’s more about new ways to share resources, and collaborate to get the work done. New kinds of enterprise are emerging: food co-ops, collective kitchens, community dining, edible gardens, new distribution platforms. The big change is an understanding that urban farming can encompass an archipelago of growing spaces within a 50-mile radius—a mosaic of growing situations that we can think about as a whole.

JGF: What examples could you give of urban projects that you experienced while writing the book?

JT: I’m very excited by a project called The Food Commons in the USA. This project marks a radical shift from a narrow focus on the production of food, towards a whole systems approach in which the interests of farm communities, the land, watersheds, and biodiversity, are all considered together as inter-dependent parts. The Food Commons is conceived as a kind of connective tissue that weaves connections between grassroots projects, on the one hand, and vital support services, on the other: legal, financial, communications and organisational.

Another great example is the city of Cleveland, also in America. It’s a classic rustbelt city that has lost large chunks of traditional industries. They have a particularly down-to-earth mayor who, when badgered by activists for the need for more urban farms, commissioned a three-year a peer-reviewed assessment of what could be grown on different patches around the city repurposed for growing food, such as abandoned lots, vacant buildings. The results surprised everyone. Something like 70% of all fruit and vegetables, and quite a big chunk of the dairy products, could be grown within Cleveland’s city limits. And that is without even venturing 20 miles outside the city. So now the Cleveland model, as it’s called, is almost a reincarnation of the new city model from the 1920s.

JGF: One of the big shifts you advocate in the book is to move beyond the language of ‘do less harm’ to the idea of ‘leaving things better.’ What inspired this change of approach in both thought and action?

JT: I had another transformational experience at a meeting of 200 sustainability managers at a famous home furnishings giant in Sweden. During 20 years of uninterrupted work on sustainability, they told me, this famous company has made thousands of rigorously-tested improvements that are recorded on what they call a “list without end.” The range of improvements I heard about was startling—even admirable—except for one fact: The one thing this huge company has not done is question whether it should grow. On the contrary: It is committed to double in size by 2020. By that date, the number of customers visiting their giant sheds will increase from 650 million a year at the time of writing to 1.5 billion a year. Sitting there, it hit me that there’s a problem with this narrative that concerns wood. The company, as the third largest user of wood in the world, has promised that by 2017 half of all the wood it uses—up from 17% now—will either be recycled, or come from forests that are responsibly managed. Now 50% is a vast improvement, but it also begs the question: What about the second half of all that wood? As the company doubles in size, that second pile of wood—the un-certified half, the unreliably-sourced-at-best half—will soon be twice as big as all the wood it uses today. The impact on the world’s forests, of one company’s ravenous hunger for resources, will be catastrophic. The committed and gifted people I met in Sweden—along with sustainability teams in hundreds of the world’s major companies—are confronted by an awful dilemma: however hard they work, however many innovations they come up with, the net negative impact of their firm’s activities on the world’s living systems will be greater in the years ahead than it is today. And all because of compound growth. This was the moment when I realised that it doesn’t matter how committed you are to doing less harm. If it is simultaneously committed to grow then they will inevitably leave things worse.

JGF: Throughout the book you look at ‘nonmarket work,’ life ‘without money,’ and the ‘commons of care,’ or what is sometimes known as the shadow economy. Commons advocate David Bollier claims “an estimated two billion people depend on various natural resource commons for their everyday survival—farmland, fisheries, forests, irrigation water, wild game.” And this figure dramatically increases when you add care and other forms of noneconomic activity. How much of a role can commons play in western economies, alongside co-operatives, social enterprises and other social business models?

JT: A gigantic amount. The commons is an idea, and a practice, that generates meaning and hope. I’m nervous of definitions—they cause endless disputes and also tend to freeze an idea in time —but I like the way Silke Helfrich talks about the commons as “all the things that we inherit from past generations that enable our livelihoods.” Seen through that lens, the commons can include land, watersheds, biodiversity, common knowledge, software, skills, or public buildings and spaces. The important thing is that the commons are a form of wealth that a community looks after, through the generations. The idea embodies a commitment to ‘leave things better’ rather than extract value from them as quickly as possible. They are the opposite of the impulse to monetise everything. And because the commons, as an idea, affirms our codependency with living systems and the biosphere, it also represents the new politics we’ve all been looking for to replace the industrial growth economy we have now.

None of this is new, by the way. The commons goes back an awfully long way. It describes the way communities managed shared land in Medieval Europe. Even earlier history, too, is filled with examples of communities managing common resources sustainably. Examples of water being shared as a commons date back 8,000 years. One of the things I’ve learned from the so-called undeveloped world is that the care-based economy has existed throughout human history—looking after each other, and the land, in a multitude of ways, many of which don’t involve paid-for work.

Writers like Hazel Henderson have been trying to refocus our attention on the care economy, writing 30 to 40 years ago. More recently, an important German writer called Ina Pratetorius has argued for a care-centered economy. In German the word care encompasses being mindful, looking after, attending to needs, and being considerate—caring for the world, in other words, and not only nursing and social-work activities or housework in the narrow sense. In a care-centered economy, the commonly held resources that enable us to look after each other, and nature, are part of the same story. Theodore Shanin, who has been called the peasant’s philosopher, makes a similar point: in terms of the land, the water and the air, so called peasants, farmers and poor people have been stewards of their commons for generations; modern, industrialised mass-production farming made it harder and harder to do their job. The care economy has always existed, and we now have the pleasant task to reinvent it for these new times.

JGF: The word ‘connection’ crops up a lot in the book. Is that a core theme?

JT: Too true, it is. I’m like an amateur EM Forster: Howard’s End opens with the words, “Only connect.” The word unlocks so many blockages. I’ve learned that too many of our most celebrated inventions have been the result of a design approach that strives for perfect, static, utopian solutions. These are different, in kind, from real-world ecologies that are dynamic and constantly changing. This habit of mind of ours is not limited to the engineering of hard systems; some visions of nature itself have been utopian in this sense.

Until recently, conservation research tended to focus on the individual species as the unit of study—for example, by looking at the impact of habitat destruction on an individual’s situation. I’m especially inspired by the work of the ecologist Jane Memmott. She has explained that species interactions may be much more important. All organisms are linked to at least one other species in a variety of critical ways—for example, as predators or prey, or as pollinators or seed dispersers—with the result that each species is embedded in a complex network of interactions. The extinction of one species can lead to a cascade of secondary extinctions in ecological networks in ways that we are only just beginning to understand.

The eco-philosopher Joanna Macy is another inspiration. She describes the appearance of this new story as the ‘Great Turning’, a profound shift in our perception, a reawakening to the fact that we are not separate or apart from plants, animals, air, water, and the soils. There is a spiritual dimension to her story—Macy is a Buddhist scholar—but her Great Turning is consistent with recent scientific discoveries, too—the idea, as articulated by Stephan Harding, that the world is “far more animate than we ever dared suppose.” No organism is truly autonomous. In Gaia theory, systems thinking, and resilience science, researchers have shown that our planet is a web of interdependent ecosystems. From the study everything from sub-microscopic viruses, yeasts, ants, mosses, lichen, slime moulds and mycorrhizae, to trees, rivers and climate systems, this new story has emerged. All natural phenomena are connected. Their very essence is to be in relationship with other things—including us.

For thirty years John Thackara has traveled the world in his search of stories about the practical steps taken by communities to realise a sustainable future. He writes about these stories online, and in books; he uses them in talks for cities, and business; he also organises Doors of Perception xskool workshops that bring the subjects of these stories together.

Interview by Jonny Gordon-Farleigh, originally published in STIR magazine no.12 Winter 2016 and reposted from STIR’s website.

The post Healing the metabolic rift: an interview with John Thackara appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Back to the Present

Trumpeted as ‘the most significant innovation in beekeeping since 1852’, the Flow Hive  was pitched to a crowd-funding site in 2015 as the bee keeper’s dream product.

‘Turn the tap and watch as pure, fresh, clean honey flows right out of the hive and into your jar’ gushed the website; ‘No mess, no fuss, no expensive equipment – and all without disturbing the bees’.

Helped by glowing reviews in Forbes, Wired, and Fast Company, Flow Hive’s pitch on Indiegogo worked like a dream; having sought $70,000 to launch the product, more than $6 million had been committed on Indiegogo at the time of writing.

Too good to be true? Sadly, yes.

As news of Flow Hive spread, natural beekeepers described Flow Hive’s approach as ‘battery farming for bees’. The modular plastic comb at the heart of Flow Hive’s design might well be convenient for honey-loving humans, they charged – but what about the welfare of bees?

As Kirsten Bradley explained, the combs in Flow Hive are far more neat and orderly than the ones bees make on their own. Left to themselves, bees set their own cell size according to the season, and the colony’s particular needs at that moment.

A beehive, in other words, is not just a factory; it’s part of a super-organism within which the comb functions as a central organ. The hive is the bees’ home, and supports their chemically enabled communication system.

The replacement of an adaptive wax hive a rigid by man-made plastic one creates a functionally depleted and sometimes toxic environment. The imposition of standardised cells prevents the bees from breeding drones throughout the hive; this reduces genetic diversity among surrounding bee populations, and resilience is reduced.

Instead of thinking of the colony as a complex living system, the inventors of Flow Hive seem to have imagined insects as components of a production machine in which they are manipulated to suit the human desire for profit and efficiency.

Flow Hive is just one example, among myriad human inventions, of a design approach that impedes inter-connectedness between the elements, and the whole, in healthy living systems.

In a perpetual search for order and control, we privilege the abstract over the lived, and impose idealised solutions that are at odds with how healthy living systems actually behave.

We strive for perfect, static, utopian solutions that are different, in kind, from real-world ecologies that are dynamic and constantly changing.

This habit of mind is not limited to the engineering of hard systems. Some visions of nature itself have been utopian in this sense.

Until recently, conservation research tended to focus on the individual species as the unit of study – for example, by looking at the impact of habitat destruction on an individual’s situation. But there is now increasing recognition that species interactions may be much more important.

As the ecologist Jane Memmott has explained, all organisms are linked to at least one other species in a variety of critical ways – for example, as predators or prey, or as pollinators or seed dispersers. Each species is embedded in a complex network of interactions.

The extinction of one species can lead to a cascade of secondary extinctions in ecological networks in ways that we are only just beginning to understand.

Since the 1980s, scientific discoveries have confirmed the proposition that no organism is truly autonomous.

In Gaia theory, systems thinking, and resilience science, researchers have shown that our planet is a web of interdependent ecosystems. The dead, mechanical object that has shaped scientific thought for most of the modern age turns out to have been misguided.

From the study everything from sub-microscopic viruses, yeasts, ants, mosses, lichen, slime moulds and mycorrhizae, to trees, rivers and climate systems, a new story has emerged. All natural phenomena are not only connected; their very essence is to be in relationship with other things – including us.

On a molecular, atomic and viral level, humanity and ‘the environment’ literally merge with one another, forging biological alliances as a matter of course.

Although our culture does not equip us well to grasp these hidden connections, this knowledge is literally vital.

For thinkers such as Fritjof Capra, the greatest challenge of our time is to foster widespread awareness of the hidden connections among living – and nonliving – things.

In a powerful follow-up to Capra’s challenge, Stephan Harding, in his book Animate Earth, describes how the world works not only at the macro level – the atmosphere, oceans, or Earth’s crust – but also on a micro level. Plankton and bacteria contribute to the formation of clouds by acting as nuclei for water droplets; micorrhizal fungi team up with plants that grow in poor soils; chemical signals called pheromones allow ant colonies to behave like a super organism.

Co-evolution – the formation of biocultural partnerships – turns out to be how our fertile planet thrives, says Harding. Although we have have ruptured these relationships, it is not to late to build bridges so that Earth can become healthy and self-regulating once again.

These scientific findings resolve a question that has vexed philosophers more than any other: Where does the mind end, and the world begin?

Until recently, we tended to think of the nervous system as a glorified a set of message cables connecting the body to the brain – but from a scientific perspective, the boundary between mind and world turns out to be a porous one.

The human mind is hormonal, as well as neural. Our thoughts and experiences are not limited to brain activity in the skull, nor are they enclosed by the skin. Our metabolism, and nature’s, are inter-connected on a molecular, atomic and viral level.

Mental phenomena – our thoughts – emerge not merely from brain activity, but from what Teed Rockwell describes as “a single unified system embracing the nervous system, body, and environment”.

The importance of this new perspective is profound.

If our minds are shaped by our physical environments – and not just by synapses clicking away inside our box-like skulls – then the division between the thinking self, and the natural world – a division which underpins the whole of modern thought – begins to dissolve.

Having worked hard, throughout the modern era to lift ourselves ‘above’ nature, we are now being told by modern science that man and nature are one, after all.

New materialism

Ecological networks also involve things.

In today’s world we are taught to perceive the things around us as lifeless, brute, and inert. Nature, insofar as we think about it at all, is a nice place to go for a picnic. With this picture of the world in mind, we fill up our lives, lands and oceans with junk without a second thought.

But we used to think quite differently: The idea that things might be ‘vital’ was first expounded formally by Greek philosophers known as ‘hylozoists’ – ‘those who think that matter is alive’; they made no distinction between animate and inanimate, spirit and matter.

For Roman sages, likewise: In his epic work On The Nature of Things, the poet Lucretius argued that everything is connected, deep down, in a world of matter and energy.

Ancient Chinese philosophers also believed that the ultimate reality of the world is intrinsically dynamic; in the Tao, everything in the universe, whether animate or inanimate, is embedded in the continuous flow and change.

In Buddhist texts, images of “stream” and “flow” appear repeatedly; they evoke a universe that’s in a state of impermanence, of ceaseless movement.

In seventeenth century Europe, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza conceived of existence as a continuum, an inseparable tangle of body, mind, ideas and matter. And just seventy years ago, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was an advocate of not only being in the world but also belonging to it, having a relationship with it, interacting with it, perceiving it in all dimensions.

The belief that matter matters, so to speak, was obscured by the fire and smoke of the thermo-industrial economy. Fossil fuels powered economic growth so powerfully since the nineteenth century that we lost sight of the fact that this model might be of limited duration thanks to resource constraints.

Now, as those constraints make themselves felt, many of these ideas are resurfacing. For thinkers in the ‘new materialism’ movement, our relationship with the material world would be more respectful, and joyful, if only we realised that we are part of the world of things, not separate from it.

Timothy Morton, for example, is adamant that there is more to “things” than we know in the ‘vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite centre or edge’ that constitites our world.

Another philosopher, Jane Bennett – responding, in her words, to a ‘call from our garbage – advocates a patient, sensory attentiveness to what she calls the ‘vibrancy’ of matter and the nonhuman forces that operate outside and inside the human body.

Our wasteful patterns of consumption would soon change, she reckons, if we saw, heard, smelled, tasted and felt all this litter, rubbish, and trash as lively – not just inert stuff.

‘Sometimes those sticking their heads in the sand are looking for something deep’ quips yet another philosopher, Peter Gratton. When everything around is understood to be ‘vital’, he asks, what political and ethical consequences follow? Do bacteria count as life? Viruses? A robot? Is the eco-system itself a life?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, or even maybe, Gratton argues, then the assumption that we humans have a right to exploit the world to our own ends begins to break down.

How innovation happens

In this context change and innovation are no longer about finely crafted ‘visions’ and the promise of a better reality described in some grand design for some future place and time. Change is more likely to happen when people reconnect – with each other, and with the biosphere – in rich, real-world, contexts.

This proposal may well strike some readers as being naive, and unrealistic. But given what we now know about the ways complex systems — including belief systems — change, my confidence in the power of the Small to shape the Big remains undimmed.

We’ve learned from systems thinking that profound transformation can unfold quietly as a variety of changes, interventions, and often small disruptions accumulate across time. At a certain moment — which is impossible to predict — a tipping point, or phase shift, is reached and the system as a whole transforms.

It’s a lesson confirmed repeatedly by history: “All the great transformations have been unthinkable until they actually came to pass” writes the French philosopher Edgar Morin; “the fact that a belief system is deeply rooted does not mean it cannot change”.

The eco-philosopher Joanna Macy describes the appearance of this new story as ‘The Great Turning’, a profound shift in our perception, a reawakening to the fact that we are not separate or apart from plants, animals, air, water, and the soils.

There is a spiritual dimension to this story – Macy is a Buddhist scholar – but her Great Turning is consistent with recent scientific discoveries, too – the idea, as articulated by Stephan Harding, that the world is “far more animate than we ever dared suppose”.

Explained in this way — by science, as much as by poetry, art, and philosophy — the Earth no longer appears to us as a repository of inert resources. On the contrary: the interdependence between healthy soils, living systems, and the ways we can help them regenerate, finally addresses the ‘why’ of economic activity that we’ve been lacking.

This new story does not negate the value of a proactive and systematic approach to design, but it does mean paying at least as much attention to the connections and interactions between elements of a system, as to discrete components.

As we saw with the Flow Hive, the danger in a product-only approach is that it imposes a too-rigid framework on a situation in which a community – like the bee colony as a super-organism – needs constantly to change if it is to remain healthy and resilient.

A growing worldwide movement is looking at the man-made world through a fresh lens. Sensible to the value of natural and social ecologies, they are searching for ways to preserve, steward and restore assets that already exist – so-called net present assets—rather than think first about extracting raw materials to make new components from scratch.

Designers and manufacturers have an important contribution to make in this movement. Designers can very usefully cast fresh and respectful eyes on a situation to reveal material and cultural qualities that might not be obvious to those who live in them.

This kind of regenerative design re-imagines the built world not as a landscape of frozen objects, but as a complex of interacting, co-dependent ecologies.

Photo by Miroslav Becvar

The post A beehive is not a factory: Rethinking the modular appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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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