Even those who are on-board with a sustainable paradigm are often still hampered by a way of thinking that has been conditioned into them their whole lives. It’s a part of the system we live within generally titled ‘consumerism.’ I talk a lot about this and if you rad any part of my blog there will be some reference to this. At some point we need to address our worldview and to actively and consciously change it to a more earth friendly worldview. In the 1960s, Rachel Carson (author of Silent Spring) said as much, “Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.”
The desperate need to think ‘differently’ has many avenues, but all have to be done as an alternative to consumerism not an extension to it. One I haven’t covered much yet is that of ‘regenerative’ thinking. This is akin to indigenous thinking but brings it into alignment with 21st century complexities. This mindset is one that sees the world as built around reciprocal and co-evolutionary relationships of humans and the natural world. We must, without exception, recognize that humanity understands and lives harmoniously with all living beings and ecosystems, and understand how we all rely on one another for health, and shape (and are shaped by) connections with one another. Simply said, we either restore humanity and the planet to a healthy condition or continue in decline to find humanity degenerates, stagnates and removes itself from the global system. At this point the remaining life will thrive in our absence.
There is a difference between restorative and regenerative thinking even though both have been used interchangeably. Restorative implies endless use, reuse, and repair. Regenerative speaks of a life cycle that maintains and more importantly, upgrades conditions of ecosystem functionality that creates full harmony within the system. “Regenerative design thinking uses whole systems thinking to create resilient and equitable systems that integrate the needs of society with the integrity of nature.” And that will not happen while we have corporate and elite systems controlling global economies focused solely on profit at all times that drive governmental policies to maintain their agenda’s.
I was reading James Lyons-Weiler’s work and liked his statements, “Sustainability would have us capped at a population level below the carrying capacity of the planet along with a reduction in consumerism. But sustainability is a stalemate, locking ‘consumerism-lite’ in perpetual motion, and doing nothing to actively undo the harms of corporatism” and, “ In the 2020s, our concern should be focused on [ecological] toxicity as well as establishing regenerative paradigms that supplant ‘sustainability.’ The goal of regenerative paradigms is to encourage and support the thriving of the things and processes that might be lost under ‘sustainability.’” Basically, we cannot tweak our way out of this global ecological shit-storm we have created. We can pretend for a while longer but as that great sage Aldo Leopold from the 1940s said, “A system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are essential to its healthy functioning. It assumes, falsely, I think, that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts.”
We can learn a lot from the Past. Ancient Sumer had productive irrigation farming, but they obviously didn’t understand the problem of salination of soils that easily occurs in irrigated systems. Sumer’s wheat eventually failed to grow, so they resorted to salt tolerant barley that managed to thrive for a while (typical symptomatic solution) but that crop also failed. The land productivity decreased along with the empire we knew as Sumer. The Norse in Greenland thrived for a short while, but when the climate changed, they seemed unable to change their farming methods to cope with new and harsher climatic conditions – they seemed unwilling, for whatever reasons, to eat the bounty of the Arctic waters. The Norse culture perished even while the Inuit cultures, just up the coast, thrived. Yet, in similar conditions, the Norse communities in Iceland thrived and avoided ‘a tragedy of the commons’ through a rigid self-policing of grazing rights.
So, what was it that made the difference and what can we learn from it all? All of these cultures, failed or successful, were aware of the problems that were occurring, just as we are today. The question we need ask is why those that failed did not have the political will to change? It is notable, that like the Greenland Norse, many cultures, even knowing the food shortages were happening, most failed to make the necessary decisions to survive and kept blundering on with the mindsets that created the problems in the first place. It all comes down to making hard decisions when the time is right. For us that time is now. But few people with power to make the decisions it seems, understand resource limitations and usage on a global scale. Most remain true believers in their faith of a Free-Market economy. The same economy that has created explosive capitalism as we currently practice it for the past two centuries. And that mindset with its exponential growth on a finite planet will be our undoing. Only this time it will not be limited to a region, but be global in scope. OK, enough of the doom and gloom and a more practical projection.
Our global culture is fixated on solutions that are financial and utilitarian. As Lyons-Weiler states, “we think we can tax our way to a solution (gas taxes, carbon taxes, etc.), but the funds are never used to effect solutions that are impactful or productive. There must be a 1:1 correspondence between a negative action, the correction or adjustment and the correction or adjustment should benefit nature in a way that fosters ecosystem health. Such a program should be voluntary, without mandates from governments, nor enforced by social pressures of any kind.” In short, a solution with a change in worldview in which everyone knows that their actions benefit all life and the future of the planet, not simply self-interest. That’s sounds like a tall order, but in reality if we start locally, as I have said in the last few posts, we can learn to find the ‘better angels’ in our human nature that allows us to rethink life as a solution and not profit.
So what are the Key features of regenerative thinking? First, all our goals must offer net positive, enduring contributions that value and build social and natural capital. We must look at the big picture of solutions that create co-evolutionary and patterned relationships between systems. That demands we take a ‘transdisciplinary approach’ to make Quality of Life (all life) the focus and not standard of living (see, Centralized versus Decentralized Living 5 – Another look at SOL and QOL {November 2019}) and not keep compartmentalizing everything into disciplines like economics and ecological sciences as isolated topics. Investing is a ‘Living systems theory’ for instance (Living Systems Theory is a general theory about how all living systems ‘work,’ about how they maintain themselves and how they develop and change. By definition, living systems are open, self-organizing systems that have the special characteristics of life and interact with their environment).
Once we can see a different reality where the ‘Web of Life’ is defined by nested systems and energy flows our valuations will naturally change such that we see social and ecological factors across temporal scales. The way we teach and learn would naturally change to reflect the social-ecological story of place that we would now be living within. The next generation would find this thinking easy since they wouldn’t be hampered by our current discipline based educational systems – they would think whole systems as a matter of course and embrace a breadth of knowledge sources. Our measurements of success would also quickly and naturally change to ones of process instead of outcomes, and impacts on the system instead of outputs we gain from the system. The system becomes primary. We are nor simply trying to restore the global system but regenerate it and along with it, transform and heal humanity from millennia of miss-thinking.
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