Building a Regenerative Future

Building a Regenerative Future

Sandra Waddock

Healing the World Blog (cc) 2017

How do we work towards building a world where everyone has dignity and can flourish, and where the planet can indefinitely support life? That was the core question that a recent conference called the Regenerative Future Summit (RFS), which met for three days in May 2017 in Boulder, CO, asked. A group of business entrepreneurs, financiers, thought leaders, NGO representatives, academics, and activists came together to think about how to build a future the world works, as Buckminster Fuller (and the conference theme) once said, for 100% of humanity and, I would add, for all of Nature’s living beings. Organized by leaders from the Leading for Wellbeing Coalition, Natural Capital Solutions, and the Alliance for Sustainability and Prosperity, with numerous local sponsors, the Summit was moderated and led by ecologist and thought leader L. Hunter Lovins, whose Natural Capitalism Solutions organization did much of the organizing.

Two things stood out for me from the summit. One was the quality of the keynote speakers and panelists, who shared multiple insights about what actually works in helping to build a thriving world and also in creating a movement to do so. The second was the quality of thinking and insight by attendees, who worked together on about 20 topics related to the summit’s theme to develop ideas, action plans, and strategies for actually bringing about this thriving world. In today’s context of political divisiveness and real fears associated with climate change, ecological sustainability, and inequality, the summit provided a sense of relief and belief that something can actually be accomplished to change the world for the better in its optimism and ‘can do’ orientation. That said, making the needed change won’t be easy in the context of today’s ‘wicked problems’ and in the complexity of the systems that need to change. Here I focus only on the ideas that two of the speakers presented.

The emphasis on regenerativity stands as a stark contrast to today’s more linear, reductionist, and fragmented approaches to thinking about economic and social activity. John Fullerton, former Wall Street banker and author of ‘Regenerative Capitalism’ noted that a regenerative approach to economics would recognize we humans’ deeply interconnected, interdependence with the natural environment. Healthy systems, from this perspective, have characteristics of learning (to revitalize themselves), circulation (in that nothing goes to waste), structure (since some sense of nested hierarchy is important), and relationships (since as physics now tells us everything is connected). Generally, the movement towards a regenerative future demands that we think in terms of structural redesign of the system. That redesign needs to move away from a land/raw materials to production to use to landfill cycle towards a system in which what is waste for one system become food for the next. As other speakers noted, it would be a system where what is local is valued at least as much as if not more than global, in part because local production activities are much less resource-intensive than are global ones, hence much more ecologically sustainable.

A premise of the conference was that a major contribution to creating a better world for all—where all includes other living beings and Nature herself—would be to reframe the economic narrative that guides much policy and most business strategies. A new narrative, as suggested by the conference organizers, would emphasize an economy in service to wellbeing, dignity for all, and life. The central idea of such an economy is regenerativity (renewal, restoration, and resilience) rather than rapacious exploitation. It would follow Nature’s strategy of producing abundance, ever-greater complexity, and diversity in locally (and hence globally) healthy systems nested within each other. This approach contrasts with the monolithic organizational and bureaucratic structures and institutions, monocultural agricultural production methods, and massive, scaled-up, and ‘efficient’ production approaches that create today’s excessive consumerism, materialism, and overproduction in some places with scarcity in others.

Another speaker, Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics, noted that it is past time to get rid of the idea of constant (economic) growth for its own sake, substituting instead that which has intrinsic worth—dignity, a better life for our children and their children, and a purpose of meeting the needs of all within planetary boundaries. Raworth’s huge insight in rethinking economics is that humans need to live within two sets of boundaries. First are the physical planetary boundaries described by the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s work on the nine planetary boundaries that we cannot transcend without risking our children’s future. These boundaries are biosphere integrity (includes functional and genetic diversity), climate change, novel entities, stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading, ocean acidification, biogeochemical flows, freshwater use, and land-system change, at least three of which have already been breached. Raworth’s Doughnut Economics says that in addition to these physical boundaries there are human system boundaries that also need to be respected. Building on the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, Raworth identifies eleven social boundaries that complement the planetary boundaries by emphasizing what all people need to live lives of dignity and wellbeing. We all need sufficient water, food, health, education, income and work, peace and justice, political voice, social equity, gender equality, housing, networks, and energy.

Taking just these two presentations what we get is an innovative set of ideas that, if systemically adopted, could transform our world. We would be able to adopt new goals for our societies and economies, goals that engender wellbeing and dignity for all in a context in which humanity lives within planetary resources. That would be a distinct contrast to today’s system, in which endless growth targets have already pushed human productive capacities and use of natural resources beyond, and in which both humans and natural resources are exploited as much as possible in the interests of cost-savings and presumed efficiency. This new vision would move us towards a world of neighbors knowing neighbors, local self-sufficiency in a globally-connected context, and profitability for companies as a (necessary) by-product of regenerative production.