Slow Epiphany
Recently, people have been asking why we have become so obsessively focused on Permaculture and regenerative design. Hearing Charles Massey (author of Call of the Reed Warbler) talk at the Groundswell Festival today helped galvanise my thoughts into the following response.
The great acceleration, currently underway, sees exponential growth trends in both socio-economic and earth systems. Correspondingly, growth in human ill-health follows the same rapidly ascending pattern. These coincident patterns provide a cardiographic read-out of humanity’s crisis across four interrelated systems — energy, ecology, economy, and equity (@postcarboninstitute).
Around 40% of arable land on the planet is now in a severely degraded state (Massey). Regenerative agriculture can reverse this trend to degradation. Regenerative agriculture is also a 2.5 x more effective carbon sink than the next best sequestration technology (Drawdown, Paul Hawken).
Regenerative agriculture has many other positive side effects that are worth considering. Beyond its immense potential for carbon sequestration, regenerative agriculture offers potential for greater food security, the restoration of natural ecologies, improved human health, significant climate change mitigation and increased resilience at the scale of the local community.
The systems of Permaculture bring these regenerative principles to bare at the scale of the individual and the community. They synthesise regenerative principles into behavioural, biological and built fields (Retrosuburbia, David Holmgren).
As a designer (architect) armed with this new insight, my interests have shifted away from ‘built-form’ thinking into exploring how we might design our environments as affordances to more regenerative ways. A sort of preconditioning of our habitats for the emergence of new, regenerative habits.
We are not alone - There’s a profound and global re-thinking underway that is spearheaded by the regenerative movement. The slow epiphany for me is the cultivation of a ‘‘thinking AS nature’ through regenerative design, beyond the thinking about nature that characterised the sustainability movement.
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Written by Adam, September 2019