For many people achieving sustainability might seem already like a visionary goal that is difficult to reach. Yet, we need to do even better to respond adequately to the converging crises ahead.

Just looking at the situation with regard to climate change alone, we have to now face the reality that we are in the midst of dangerous run-away (self-reinforcing) climate change. The window of opportunity to avoid catastrophic irreversible climate change is closing.

In reality there are already many climate catastrophes affecting people and biodiversity around the world. Maybe we should speak of ‘irreversible cataclysmic climate change’ as that is what we are rushing towards if we do not fundamentally redesign the human presence and impact on Earth.

Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene (Source)

Let me talk you through a framework developed by my friend and colleague Bill Reed, together with the team at Regenesis Group and in collaboration with Carol Sanford. It explains why we need to do more than just be sustainable and also why sustainability is still very important as a milestone along the road to regeneration.

As we move from business as usual — complying with minimum regulations enough to stay out of jail — to “green” we start to celebrate ourselves or our company for voluntarily doing a little less damage than we are legally allowed to get way with. It is true that this could be called ‘green washing’ and yet it is also a step in the right direction, even if only in response to growing public demand for companies to become part of the solution rather than the problem.

When we reach being “sustainable” we have arrived at the neutral point. Bill McDonough likes to say: “sustainable means 100% less bad”. It means not adding any more damage, but after 250 years of industrialization and 5000 years of deforestation and agriculture that is no longer enough.

We need to do more than simple be sustainable. We have to begin to reverse the damage we have already done! It is also important to point out that there are many people working on sustainability projects who hold a deeper vision for sustainability that is very much akin to what this article describes as ‘regenerative’.

So the next stage on this spectrum in which one stage transcends and included the other is to practice restorative design. That is to say we reforest and engineer — often large scale interventions in ecosystems. Yet, we do so from a mind-set of humanity as master over nature. The result are, for example large monoculture plantations of Eucalyptus in already water stressed areas.

Only if we take the step towards reconciling nature and culture & embrace uncertainty as being fundamental to the dynamics of the complex socio-ecological-systems we participate in will we be able to chart our path into the future through appropriate participation in the way that life creates conditions conducive to life.

Merely being sustainable is no longer enough, we need to learn to design as nature, engage in regenerative design and development, and create diverse regenerative cultures elegantly adapted to the bio-cultural uniqueness of place. Such cultures would design as nature understanding themselves as healers of local ecosystems and humble caretakers of the community of life — biodiversity — that shares a unique place with us.

In the process of global-local (glocal) collaboration in regionally focussed and locally implemented regenerative development we are matching people to their places again. Meeting the needs of people through elegant solutions that pay attention to the story of place, the uniqueness of local culture and local ecosystems and the opportunity and challenges that arise from those.

This 90 second video was recorded in March 2015 at the European Institute of Design in Madrid.

There is a groundswell of activity around the planet baring testimony that many of us have not given up yet nor are longer willing to let the shortsightedness and greed of a few put an early end to our promising but still young and somewhat immature species.

The regenerative (r)evolution is well underway. The Re-generation is rising to transform business as usual profoundly and just in time to avoid a global cataclysm.

To shift in time we need to be greener, more sustainable, engage in wide spread ecosystems restoration, reconcile nature and culture and change the guiding cultural narrative about who we are and what we are here for. Regenerative development works with and builds on all of the stages in the spectrum.

Just because the term ‘regenerative’ is gripping people’s imagination we should not dismiss the need for more sustainable practices, we simply need to see them as steps along the way and integrate them into a regenerative regional development process that involves people in place.

There is a confluence of activities, frameworks, initiatives that seems to agree on the need for bioregional transformation as the appropriate scale of implementation. We can improve planetary health bioregion by bioregion and ecosystem by ecosystem.

Regeneration, planetary health, resilience building, and regional ecosystems restoration are activities that mutually reinforce each other and help us to both begin the process of reversing climate change and prepare for the decades ahead when despite our best efforts climate chaos will lead to localized breakdowns and catastrophes.

The promise ahead — if we unite in glocal solidarity and bioregional collaboration to redesign our impact in Earth — is that towards the latter half of this Century we will begin to see atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases decline. Climate patterns will begin to re-stabilize as global forest cover drastically increases, biodiversity loss slows down rapidly, and bioproductivity increases as healthy ecosystems functions are restored.

For more information in this and to navigate this dynamic map, read on here

If we — our species — manage to not just prevail, but thrive and flourish in the 22nd century and beyond, if we pass through and grow wise as we undergo a species-level right of passage that lies ahead of us, if we cocreate a thriving future by redesigning the human impact on Earth, if we become a mature species that creates conditions conducive to life, then we will look back at the 21st Century as the Century of Regeneration.

A lot of ‘if’s? Allied with the community of life and committed to each other we can achieve these transformations. It will be worth it. Let me me frank the alternative will be a hothouse planet that is uninhabitable for higher life forms like us. It is time to come home into the family of life. Regeneration Rising!

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

— Mary Oliver

This is an interview that Ruth Andrade from Lush recorded with me at the pre-awards meeting of the winners and judges of the Lush Spring Prize 2018 at Emerson College.

The post Why sustainability is no longer enough, yet still very important on the road to regeneration appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Announcing Popping Bubbles workshop series and our first online Open Space event, part 2 (part 1, part 3)

REconomy practitioners is virtual community of practice (CoP) of and for regenerative entrepreneurs and community organisers. We care about planetary health and regeneration.

We are all over the world.

We do stuff where we live, and we connect translocally, transnationally and globally to benefit from peer-to-peer support, social learning and coordinated action. We do that primarily virtually, travelling to meet only when really necessary or when possible (most of the time we don’t have budgets to travel anyway, and if we would have that we would prefer to spend the money for something more useful). That’s also one more way to reduce our personal carbon footprint — we like to make that point to ourselves and others.

After emerging as transnationally distributed project team within Transition movement (in 2013, our timeline is shared here) we recently kicked off our own transition towards self-organised community of practice. To keep being useful for our members and the Earth we NOW need to do two things: we need to move on with the process of commoning and we need to do some good ol’ bootstrapping to finance our 2019 activities.

What do I mean by commoning?

Some of us understand commoning as something obvious and natural, and some of us are still rather confused about how this is done in business, or in our virtual community of practice. Recent TEDxTalk by Samantha Slade, co-founder of Percolab, might clarify some practicalities.

In our context commoning is this: whatever is done in our virtual community of practice belongs to humanity and life on Earth as a whole. It does not belong to any of us individually or to any of legal entities we are associated with. We are evolving our virtual community of practice as digital commons, in a way — because online platforms and tools we use are not commons, our network is —but that is so only if we keep having conversations that build our relationships of learning and action.

Now… whatever we do is created by somebody’s individual or by team contributions, and facilitating virtual community of practice requires quite a lot of skills and time, both with backend and frontend tasks (above the line, below the line — use whatever jargon works for you). The simple truth is: to achieve anything meaningful in the context of our work (planet Earth ecosystem regeneration during times of climate tragedy, remember?) a coordinated, sustained, daily team effort is needed. To move forward we need to create and fund this team (myself included). Monthly budget of €1,250 seems to be good starting point and we don’t want chicken or egg situation: once funds are in place, we move on. Some grants or awards for what we do might manifest eventually, but we are not in a position to rely on that. As self-organised and high-trust network for systemic change we better rely on ourselves.

And we are quite good at bootstrapping 

Bootstrapping is native to REconomy approach — as it really is for every true entrepreneur. Different languages have different words for that (anybody knows what stands for bootsrapping in French or Swedish?).

REconomy enterprises are normally community-led and often started with community-only support (which is not exactly the same as crowdsourcing, because community is not a crowd, and not exactly the same as tripple F financing because no fools are involved and everything is very deliberate). There is evolving practice among REconomy practitioners of convening Local Entrepreneur Forums where Community of Dragons is looking into ways to support new regenerative enterprises locally. We now need to replicate that for our virtual community of practice, using a medium that enables transnational collaboration — fiat currency (Euro in our case), here:

If what I wrote above makes sense, here is my invitation to you:

• visit our Open Collective page and set up your recurring monthly donation: to reach our bootstrapping budget of €15,000 per year we need 250 monthly donations of €5 or more; you can start supporting REconomy commons personally or as an organisation (there are other ways to contribute, of course, but what we need now is regular monthly income)
• if you have not done that already, join REconomy practitioners on online platform of your choice and meet with us on video soon, see here. Our video calls are meant to be shared experience that we don’t record (we don’t want to make a “content” to be “consumed” later… normally never). Next three REconomy online events are scheduled: for 25 October with Beatrice Ungard, for 15 November with Alanna Irving and for 6 December 2018 with Daniel Christian Wahl. I hope to meet you there.
• Join us on Thursday, 15 November 2018 at 9am GMT / 10:00 CET / 5pm SGT / 10pm NZDT for 2-hour online workshop on Full Circle Leadership with Alanna Irving. Attending our video conferences is the best way to connect and meet with REconomistas and Transitioners worldwide.

Photo by N1NJ4

The post Commoning and bootstrapping local to global economy redesign by REconomy practitioners appeared first on P2P Foundation.

About Team Human

A provocative, exciting, and important rallying cry to reassert our human spirit of community and teamwork.”―Walter Isaacson

Though created by humans, our technologies, markets, and institutions often contain an antihuman agenda. Douglas Rushkoff, digital theorist and host of the podcast Team Human, reveals the dynamics of this antihuman machinery and invites us to remake these aspects of society in ways that foster our humanity.

In 100 aphoristic statements, his manifesto exposes how forces for human connection have turned into ones of isolation and repression: money, for example, has transformed from a means of exchange to a means of exploitation, and education has become an extension of occupational training. Digital-age technologies have only amplified these trends, presenting the greatest challenges yet to our collective autonomy: robots taking our jobs, algorithms directing our attention, and social media undermining our democracy. But all is not lost. It’s time for Team Human to take a stand, regenerate the social bonds that define us and, together, make a positive impact on this earth.

Sourced from Amazon’s book description

The post Douglas Rushkoff on the importance of human connection in the digital age appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“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

The post Our Economy is a Degenerative System appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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.