Tell me again...what's the 'regenerative economy'?

Updated: Apr 24, 2020

As part of my job, I write about the environment. And most of the vocabulary I’ve been using over the past eight or nine months has centred around sustainability. That’s probably natural as that is the dominate term in media coverage and corporate statements.

But as this is a new field for me, I’m constantly wrestling with the language of it all and trying to understand what it means, what it looks like in practice and how it could save the planet.

Merriam Webster defines ‘sustainable’ as:

1: capable of being sustained – ie. maintained at length without interruption or weakening

2:a: of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resources is not depleted or permanently damaged

b: of, or relating to, a lifestyle involving the use of sustainable methods Over the past six to eight weeks, however, the idea of ‘maintaining’ unsettles me. I’m starting to feel like sustainability, when viewed from that angle, is about trying to protect or guard against loss constantly. I know there are finite resources on the planet, but I feel like I have been getting stuck on the idea that we need to ration them out sparingly or give them up altogether. And yes, in some instances that’s true. Fossil fuels are a natural resource we need to give up altogether, as quickly as possible. Perhaps it’s my sense of entitlement rearing its ugly head, but I want to believe that the future won’t be all lack and sacrifice and longing for the good old days when we had clean running water and birdsong in the trees and four distinct seasons. I want to believe that the future could still be bright, joyful and abundant.

The first time I came across the term ‘regenerative economy’ was on Lorraine Smith’s blog and it filled me with hope. She said that the concept could be seen as a reaction against the degenerative economy – or what we would call business as usual – but that it could and should go further than that.

‘…beyond a reaction against something bad, regeneration is about moving into the beautiful. It’s about acknowledging that the current state is based on a series of decisions – human choices – and we can make different ones.’

 

The three elements Lorraine believes form a regenerative business model and economy are ‘sequestering more greenhouse gases than you emit, increasing biodiversity by restoring ecosystems and creating a better quality of life by means that are fair for all people and other species’. Simply by being in business, you could choose to make the planet stronger, more resilient; you could choose shared humanity and dignity; you could ensure that tomorrow is viable.

 

Instead of a ‘first do no harm’ mindset, we need to pivot to a ‘leave it better than you found it’ mindset. We need to do that as individuals, businesses and governments.

 

I connected with Lorraine on LinkedIn and we had an introductory phone call where she was incredibly generous with her time and experience. One of the topics she returned to a few times was ‘dynamic living systems’ and the idea that everything is interdependent – the parts are integral to the whole and everything falls apart if the parts get out of balance.

 

That conversation laid the groundwork for what now feels like the beginnings of a personal paradigm shift.

 

As I continued to dig deeper into the regenerative economy, I found John Fullerton, an ex-JP Morgan managing director who is now part of the Club of Rome and president of the Capital Institute. His 2015 report on Regenerative Capitalism was hugely instructive and pushed me to the limits of my understanding. Which is exactly why I undertook this project.

 

The researchers began looking at nature’s ‘time-tested patterns and strategies’ for a potential framework for regenerative capitalism.

‘That is, since living systems are both sustainable and regenerative over long periods of time, we began exploring whether following nature’s rules of health and development might lead to sustainably vibrant economies as well. But the more we explored this thesis, the bigger and more diverse the picture became.’

 

What they found is that ‘everything in the universe is organised into “systems” whose interlinked parts work together in some larger process or pattern’. Lorraine’s dynamic system designs.

The report is long but well worth a read. I sat with it for a few days and here are my three key takeaways:

 

‘Capitalism as we practice it today has created the systemic crises we now face’

The challenges facing the planet today are a direct result of the type of economy we’ve built and how we define value.

 

As John Elkington said in Green Swans:

‘Capitalism is partly in the spotlight because it has embedded pernicious forms of myopia in our economies, which now threaten to crash the global biosphere. These problems were massively accentuated by neoliberalism. Yet our default setting, neoliberal or not, is to deny the very possibility of a collapse…’

 

What we need is a radical shift away from old-school capitalism to a regenerative economy which John Fullerton says:

• Acts in ways that support the long-term health of the whole society – a characteristic which underlies ‘fitness’ in an interdependent world

• Sees economic and financial health as inseparable from human, societal and environmental health

• Values richness and diversity, integrity and fairness and seeks excellence through constructive competition

• Responds to the full gamut of human needs, continuously adapting to changing circumstances and evolving to higher and more effective levels of organisation

 

‘There are no externalities…it’s all one system’ You know the feeling you get when a theory you’ve been trying to understand suddenly drops into place and you can see it so clearly that you actually have to push back from the desk and absorb the immediacy and weight and of the information? That happened to me with this point.

 

We operate as though there are externalities – that the impact of our choices is external to our reality and won’t really affect us. But it’s a myth. Everything is connected to everything else.

 

I remember talking to someone about America needing to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and them getting upset because they thought the focus should be on China or India’s growing middle class and their expectation that they’re entitled to burn carbon to catch up to the West. And it suddenly struck me that – as far as the planet is concerned – there is no such thing as American or Russian or Chinese or Australian.

 

Nature doesn’t give two fucks about the boundaries we’ve drawn on paper or which side of the equator you’re on. We’re all one human race in the grand scheme of things and we still only have one planet with one shared atmosphere. We try to hide behind flimsy walls of ethnicity and nationality and political ideology – but it’s all false.

 

We need to start seeing the problem as a joint one and start collaborating with each other on holistic, systemic solutions.

 

‘Sustainability is the outcome, not the design principle’ I loved this insight. Instead of chasing sustainability as the framework, it will be one of the signals of systemic health. What we need to focus on is a dynamic system that is operating with ‘healthy, regenerative energy flow networks’.

 

The report includes Dr. Sally Goerner article on 'The Science of Energy Flow Networks', and she describes them as systems ‘whose existence arises from and depends on circulating matter, energy, resources or information throughout the entirety of their being.’ And because the elements of a flow network are universal, we can apply it to the economy and society as a whole.

The regenerative economy, John writes, ‘differs from current approaches to sustainability in that, instead of focusing on social and environmental health using traditional reductionist logic to “solve problems,” it aims directly at building healthy human networks as the objective, drawing on universal principles and patterns, with “sustainability” becoming an outcome, a natural byproduct of systemic health. It is like (holistic) healthcare in contrast to (reductionist) disease care.’

I’m a bit clearer in my mind about the broad strokes of the regenerative economy, but I know this is only the beginning. I referenced John Elkington’s Green Swan earlier, which I’ve just started reading, and can tell it’s going to push me even further.

This feels hopeful. This feels doable. Yes, it’s challenging and yes, we have to move a lot of people into a new paradigm to make it a reality.

But with the disruption 2020 has had within its first four months, it feels like people might just be ready to hear the message