Author: Joe Brewer
Chapter unread.
Chapter unread.
Chapter unread.
Chapter unread.
Link to chapter 5 on Earth-regenerators network
The term pathway is used with intention: that the steps toward any outcome (a "North Star") are numerous and unknown at the beginning of the journey. Yet, these steps becomes clear in retrospect after they are taken one by one, sequentially.
Reality of our context: humanity is consuming (energy, resources) at a much faster (1.5-2x) pace than the Earth can naturally regenerate.
This context has only happened once ever, at a global scale, in human history - now.
Our success, and ultimate outcome(s), must be defined within this context.
The planetary boundaries framework, created by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, is a good guiding framework to help inspire and prioritize ideas and potential actions. The goal coming out of this might be to return to the safe zone with all 9 boundaries.
Link to chapter 6 on Earth-regenerators network
Ecological economics is a topic to research further.
"...the foundations of regenerative economics are quite solid and can be built upon with rigor..."
Eight principles by John Fullerton from the Capital Institute:
- In right relationship: everything is connected, the capacity of a community depends on the balancing of this connectedness
- View wealth holistically: wealth is health of the entire, harmonious community and relationships thereof
- Innovative, adaptive, responsive: the fitness, or ability, of a community to effectively change in response to change in contexts
- Empowered participation: All actors of a community feel willing to participate in a way that health of the system, across all scales, is maintained
- Honors community and place: Maintaining health and resilience should respect unique context of the "...mosaic of peoples, traditions, beliefs, and institutions uniquely shaped by long-term pressures of geography, human history, local environments, and changing human needs"
- Edge effect abundance: Systems flourish at their boundaries and interfaces to each other
- Robust circulatory flow: Economies depends upon the continual movement of resources (like money, information, and other stocks as mentioned below)
- Seeks balance: Systems always seek, and never permanently achieve, perfect equilibrium
Critique: these principles are not consistent from a content perspective. One might work to improve the cohesion of the written structure and format of these principles.
These principles overlap heavily with concepts of systems thinking. Donella Meadows book "Thinking in systems: A primer" speaks very similarly. Principles 7, in particular, reminds me of the rates of inputs and outputs, levels of stocks, as well as the feedback mechanisms that influence the exchange of stocks.
Principles can be a way to ask questions about actions, events, or behaviors. Two examples:
- One person owning the majority of land w/trees is not right in relationships
- The inability to track the stocks of resources inhibits viewing wealth holistically
"A regenerative economy will include ethical training for leaders and strong management skills for how to cooperate and achieve shared goals."
Link to chapter 7 on Earth-regenerators network
A challenge of existing regenerative efforts: too fragmented to achieve systems-level coherence, even if many number of efforts exist. This points to larger-scale power structures already established that inhibit the ability of efforts to scale up. One example being the system of private land ownership.
"...functional landscapes are the organizing principles for regeneration to occur at whole-system scales."
Functional landscapes are the "units" of autonomy that enable emergent regenerative capabilities at the regional scale. My own interpretation for the definition of a functional landscape: the initial combination of physical factors (topography, hydrology, climate, etc.) that create the conditions to begin any amount of ecosystem succession. It may follow that the configuration of land, water, and energy creates an initial "day zero" capacity (or outputs) of regenerative systems. These systems then mature over time as the cycle of life and death itself increases that capacity dependent upon those initial conditions and further patterns of emergence.
Thus, when we look at challenges that face us, we should map these challenges back to the functional landscape.
"There is no such thing as water issues unrelated to biodiversity or prioritizing climate change over election reform."
Watersheds represent one means to define functional landscape boundaries, since water flow is a fundamental characteristic that enables life.
Human lifestyles have a significant impact on the how the capacity of a functional landscape changes over time. At the smallest of scales, fences and small private land inhibit the success of a functional landscape. At the larger scale, political boundaries influence management of human behavior that also inhibits the success of functional landscapes.
Link to chapter 8 on Earth-regenerators network
How might we organize and manage design frameworks when we find ourselves dedicated to one-to-few specific landscapes? How we choose to collaborate is an important part of answering this question.
I am reminded here that the principles and approach of co-creation, design justice, or inclusive design help to example "how" communities might accomplish the social, human side of this question.
Examples from the chapter follow.
A framework which is comprised of these, highly paraphrased, five steps:
- Assemble a core team of stakeholders to co-create the logistics for further work
- Facilitate the definition of the problem space, inclusive to the a detailed capturing of the context (past and present) surrounding it, and some idea of criteria to define what success looks like
- Brainstorm regional-level future scenarios and leverage some form of consequence mapping, tradeoffs of benefits or challenges, or expected success against criteria from step 2
- Create an agenda to implement an ideal future scenario that aligns to and reflects the expectations and short/medium/long-term goals of the local community
- Setup recurring evaluations of progress against the overall journey of the implementation plan, and ensure to experiment and iterate on methodologies used to achieve goals
Not much said in detail about this, but it seems to emphasize process evaluation as the journey to achieve goals matures. Requires further reading elsewhere.
Requires one or more people with knowledge and skills of how to manage restoration of a target ecosystem, deep listening, and community development.
Takes Berkana Institute’s Four Stages for Developing Leadership-in-Community
- Name - provide acknowledgement of value for existing local leaders
- Connect - create and facilitate community collaboration activities to share knowledge and resources
- Nourish - assemble existing local leaders together to support community learning
- Illuminate - showcase success and learnings to create leadership growth and opportunities
Applying regenerative economics you get the below modification:
- Name - identify leaders and rally them around goals for functional landscapes within their region
- Connect - build platforms spread and share knowledge and skills/practice at the region scale
- Nourish - create standards of success, educate, and align regional vision
- Illuminate - continually facilitate, participate, and propagate the urgency of regional regenerative economies or restoration of planetary health
- Redefine economic policies - story-tell a contextually successful regenerative economy that shows the flow of the living system
Link to chapter 9 on Earth-regenerators network
As regional economies work to become more resilient/regenerative, must expect environmental collapse events to occur within region and also in surrounding neighboring regions. Until some critical mass of regenerative regions or territories are established, planetary healing will have yet to begin.
Michael Quinn Patton and Glenn Page working on Blue Marble Evaluation approach to create flexible frameworks to be used map scales of regeneration and align them when they aggregate at larger scales.
Likely opportunities for people to create information systems for the above.
Link to chapter 10 on Earth-regenerators network
Two aspects to manage navigation of planetary collapse, and avoid humanity's extinction, while working towards a regeneratively healthy planet:
- Previous chapters' topics - the coordinated, collaborative networks of people, information, understanding, and resources
- More internal and psychological - the "...design for prosocial behaviors..."
"Prosocial behaviors are the sentiments and feelings, judgments and actions, and emergent social capacities for working together toward common goals."
Prosocial is a framework that is a combination of design criteria for common-pooled assets like pastures, waterways, forests (Elinor Ostrom) and these prosocial behaviors.
The below principles from this framework are from the book Prosocial written by Paul Atkins, David Sloan Wilson, and Steven Hayes.
- Shared identity and purpose
- Equitable distribution of contributions and benefits
- Fair and inclusive decision making
- Monitoring behavior
- Graduated responding to helpful and unhelpful behavior
- Fast and fair conflict resolution
- Authority to self-govern
- Collaborative relations with other groups
These principles can be used to evaluate or assess groups to find opportunities of improvement. Further research: acceptance and commitment therapy is a topic that has tools to enable groups successful collaboration. Note also psychological capacities for further research: emotion regulation, psychological flexibility.
There are other frameworks, like Prosocial, that exist to improve psychological capacities that lead to mature and healthy individuals and thus groups.
Link to chapter 11 on Earth-regenerators network
Living through our pain is a skill to be learned. This chapter emphasizes the need to accept grief and trauma, and also learn how to create support systems for maintaining and healing ourselves.
Link to chapter 12 on Earth-regenerators network
This chapter articulates a narrative vision of a potential design pathway for humanity.
"... all sustainable human cultures in the past were organized as bioregions."
It is quite fitting, after reading through this chapter and not desiring to take any more notes from it, that the following chapter's title reflects the exact direction of challenges and doubts that entered my mind on this date.
Jan 24, 2021.
Link to chapter 13 on Earth-regenerators network
"Here we are in 2020 (more than three decades later) and almost no one is aware that this may well be the ONLY viable path to planetary sustainability."
Humans are ultra social - we tend to trust and cooperate complete strangers.
An inflection point for determining when humans behave cooperatively vs. competitively depends on the perception of chronic, anxiety-inducing stressors (threats to our existence). This has been researched. Chronic stressors like frequency of extreme weather, natural disasters, etc. are very good predictor for the emergence of dictators, fundamentalists, dehumanization, etc.
What this means is climate change will bring these behavioral realities to light. And they have brought them. Relating this to the current events of the U.S., we should expect the continual rise of fascists, racists, etc.
"These people will be largely incapable of participating in the regeneration of the Earth"
More than that, they will exhibit behaviors that destroy what we're attempting to create. So what do we do?
We must learn to address this to survive collapse.
Link to chapter 14 on Earth-regenerators network
Learn to establish empowered participation; a term from regenerative economics.
"I cannot live without you. And you depend upon me for your survival."
At this time, I went on a tangent, looking to answer a question about how prominently economic journals include concepts or topics like regenerative economics. American Economics Association (AEA) journal searching comes up with zero results for:
- regenerative economics
- environmental economics
- ecology
While this is hardly a thorough investigation, such a quick and preliminary results speaks pretty starkly about how unconventional the idea of regenerative economies are. This supports a point the author previously makes: that no one is even aware that this is a path to survival.
chapter 14 incomplete