Image description: A block print style circular illustration depicting two outstretched hands exchanging a raw vegetable. This image is to illustrate the concept of Fair Share.

Let's get to it.

🎊 A key principle within Regeneration is the creation of surplus. That is, having enough to meet our own needs and to share with others.

🤝 Creating surplus could happen in economic systems, for example by sharing financial wealth and other resources fairly and equitably. Or it could happen in the wider, living world. For example, by sharing our spaces with wild, non-human animals, we can encourage more and more biodiversity.

👵 In order to generate surplus, we need to design and create resilient and fruitful systems that can continue to meet everyone’s needs into the future.

❓ We can ask ourselves:

• How might we grow our capacity to adapt to change?

• How can we design systems that are fair and equitable?

• What would a society developed around collaboration and cooperation, rather than conflict and competition, look like?

💰 Whilst we may see and hear more and more businesses and institutions talking about their ‘sustainable practices’, many remain heavily involved with extractive, depleting activities. These destructive practices continue to make a small number of companies increasingly wealthy. So not only are their practices damaging, but their hoarding of wealth is also not ‘fairly sharing’.

🫂 In most societies today, money is the main way we exchange value. But there could be many ways to exchange with each other, in order to meet all of our needs. Examples of alternative value exchanges are time banks, skill sharing cooperatives, or clothes swapping initiatives.

• What other value exchange opportunities can you think of? Can you take part in any of these yourself?

🤔 By becoming conscious and aware citizens we can support the call for regenerative practices by holding companies and institutions accountable.

🙌 It is crucial to instigate change on many levels - individual, collective and systemic. By investing financially and also with our time, our creativity and our vision, we can create a future that is fairer for all.

? Things do not have to be the way they are - we create our systems, so we can change them. A different paradigm is possible.

This week's challenge.

This week’s challenge is brought to you by Simon Constantine. Simon encourages us to be aware of greenwashing and to seek out transparency and traceability for the goods and services we purchase.

It can be helpful to consider where your consumer items are coming from - who made them? What embodied energy has gone into making them? By learning more about how the businesses we buy from are behaving, we can gain a genuine insight into the wider systems we are part of. Where is your money going? Are you happy with the answers?

Once you have thought about how you can avoid or minimise harm through the way you spend money, how could you take this a step further into the regenerative?

What would it look like to create surplus of value in the ways you live and work? What one way could you create a ‘fair share’ in your life this week?

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