Sustainability/Regeneration

Sustainability/Regeneration:

“Sustainability” is losing its luster in some quarters, as it should. In 1987, the United Nations  defined it as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” But has what is being “sustained” become so degraded that the future needs met will be meager indeed? Sustainability has become a buzzword. Many organizations and corporations have added various twists to the definition. Corporations greenwash themselves, pat themselves on the back, and take advantage of markets for “climate-friendly” products, however interpreted. It makes good advertising copy. Oil companies revel in biodiversity language and color their advertising green. Businesses theorize “sustainable business models,” but that just means a model ostensibly designed to persist, not one that makes serious efforts to factor in the externalities that devour natural capital. A dictionary tells us that “sustain” means to keep in existence, maintain, continue, or prolong. It can also mean to “bear up under,” or to “suffer,” e.g., injuries.

Daniel Christian Wahl claims that the word doesn’t really tell us what we are trying to sustain. He argues that what we ought to sustain is an “underlying pattern of health, resilience and adaptability that maintain this planet in a condition where life as a whole can flourish.” Enter “regeneration.” Can ecosystems bounce back from temporary crises?  If so, they are healthy. They can regenerate themselves. Regenerative human design means cocreating with nature, which is possible because of the plasticity of life. It is renewal, a process by which we participate with other species and systems so they become stronger and more vibrant, able to repair and maintain an adaptive integrity. Jellyfish and salamanders, and many plants, can replace missing parts under the right conditions. It gets harder the higher up the food chain we go.  Greater independence from the environment paradoxically increases fragility and vulnerability. It is easier for large mammals to degenerate given how high they are on the food chain, i.e., how dependent they are on the integrity of what supports them. Mammals, including humans, do participate in some regeneration, e.g., red blood cells and skin, sometimes the liver—depending on the extent of the injury. We have the potential to learn from the ecosystems on which we depend and to get out of their way. Humans, as cultural-biological hybrids, must create the conditions that promote both physical and emotional regeneration. For regeneration theorists this means co-creating with the conditions of our own existence.

Ecosystem Restoration Camps, an organization that works bioregion by bioregion demonstrates that this is possible.