Is it even possible to create regenerative businesses in a degenerative economic system, asks Daniel Wahl
The answer is yes—but Daniel Wahl, author of Designing Regenerative Culture, writes in this Medium blog about the careful discussions required with existing businesses. “We need to be midwifes to the new enterprises, and hospice workers to the old dying corporations”, suggests Wahl.
We recommend a full read of the blog - but here’s a useful passage below which clearly lays out why we need regenerative practice, and what regenerative businesses should do.
Why is regenerative practice needed?
On November 5th, 2019, the journal BioScience published the ‘World Scientist’s Warning of a Climate Emergency’ signed by over 11,000 scientists from around the world. It stated:
“… we declare, … , clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency. … Mitigating and adapting to climate change while honoring the diversity of humans entails major transformations in the ways our global society functions and interacts with natural ecosystems.”
Clearly, business as usual is no longer an option, and only rapid civilisational transformation with give as a chance at avoiding cataclysmic climate change.
There is a fierce urgency to respond to the converging crises of climate change, cascading ecosystems collapse, biodiversity loss, resource depletion and the disgusting levels of inequality we are faced with.
For too long a mistaken view of ourselves as somehow separate from the community life we depend upon has led us to exploit each other and the planet at our peril. We have been irresponsibly slow in responding to climate change and as a result millions are already suffering and billions will.
There are no guarantees that we are still able to reverse global warming to a point that will re-stabilise climate patterns, but try we must.
As Kevin Barron as so aptly put it: “We now must do the impossible, because the probable has become unthinkable.” It also serves to remember that there has never been any certainty that life as we know it will continue.
Maybe the very fact that the mid-term survival of our species now become uncertain will help us in the deeper transformations we now need to co-create?
We are at one and the same time emergent properties of, and co-creative agents in, nested complex dynamic systems which links the personal to the planetary. Complex systems are by their very nature fundamentally unpredictable and uncontrollable.
We simply have to embrace the limits of our knowing and yet still aim for appropriate participation in this wholeness.
In the words of Gerald Midgley — professor for systems science at the University of Hull — “everything is an intervention.” So everything we do, or fail to do, will affect the world we create together.
Over 8000 years of agriculture we have denuded the planet of its forests and 250 years of industrialisation and fossil fuel age have released ten thousands of chemicals and pollutants into our atmosphere, soils and water which will affect the future of life on Earth.
Simply not adding any more damage is not enough: we have to heal the damage we have caused to the ecosystems we inhabit as well as to the communities we live in. The 21st Century will have to be the ‘century of regeneration’ if we hope to have a viable 22nd Century and avoid unprecedented misery over the coming decades.
What does it mean to practice regeneration?
Regenerative practice is place-sourced. It is informed by the story of place and aims to manifest the potential that is created in the tension between local and regional opportunities and challenges.
Regenerative practice starts with personal development, enabling people to cooperate towards creating shared abundance rather than reinforcing outdated patterns of competitive scarcity.
Working regeneratively is about unveiling the unique essence of each place, individual and culture. It is about local and regional capacity building that enables individuals and their communities to help themselves, through adding health and value to the nested wholeness they are embedded in, from the local ecosystems and bioregions to the planet as a whole.
Regenerative cultures are characterised by elegant solutions carefully adapted to and born out of the bio-cultural uniqueness of place. Such cultures will mirror the diversity of species and ecosystems in their own diversity as an expression of life’s creativity, adaptability and health.
As we learn to live regeneratively, humans will become keystone species in the ecosystems they inhabit, nurturing diversity and health. As life, we are capable of creating conditions conducive to life!
What will it take to create regenerative businesses in regenerative economies?
Marshal McLuhan foresaw that the trend of rapid globalisation would inevitably lead to a renaissance of the local.
The only way that we can learn to appropriately participate in the complexity of the modern world is by combining the best of global cooperation, solidarity and knowledge exchange with the best of local collaboration, community and adaptation. The future of humanity and the future of business is glocal!
To prepare for the turbulent decades ahead, as we live through the collapse and breakdown of many of the systems that no longer, we will need to build local and regional resilience to climate change.
We will need to work locally and globally to restore ecosystems health and draw down excess carbon in the atmosphere back into standing forests, healthy grasslands, mangroves, sea-grass meadows, coral reefs and the soil.
The transformations we are now challenged to catalyse in and through business are less about how regenerative economics can serve business to become regenerative - and more about how businesses can become active agents of change in the redesign of the human impact on Earth. From being exploitative, destructive and degenerative, to being restorative, healing and regenerative.
Extra: Wired magazine on three easy ways to make sure your company isn't destroying the world. “Businesses have to make a choice: battle the climate crisis, or face the dire reputational consequences.”
By the way, they are:
Admit your company needs to change, fast
Get your board to commit to climate change seriously
Engage in collective action