Living into the Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth

I’m not going to sugarcoat this. We are in ecological overshoot. All unsustainable human cultures on Earth are in the process of becoming compost for future generations.

This statement is empirically supported in two ways. Firstly, there are zero examples of sustainable empires or civilizations from the past. All of them have collapsed and the current one will be no different.

Secondly, the convergence of observations about every health indicator imaginable for the Earth reveals that the explosion of human population in the last century was at the expense of degradation for landscapes all over the planet. We have converted Earth’s biodiversity into human biomass and will soon learn what happens to any species that takes more than its healthy share.

The graphic above begins to articulate the purpose of Earth Regeneration. We are living through a time of population overshoot where the number of humans will soon begin to precipitously decline. If it gets to zero, we are extinct.

Living out The Design Pathway for regenerating Earth means a departure from the “business as usual” of unsustainable civilizations. It will involve a small portion of the human population and represents the aggregation of all sustainable human cultures on Earth.

This includes many indigenous societies, people who are practicing permaculture and related life ethics, and those who establish regenerative local economies in the midst of planetary collapse. Walking this path is a matter of fierce urgency. Most will remain in denial about the truth of our present predicament. In my experience, there will only be a handful for each million who feel the threat and then go on to take decolonization seriously enough to overcome this denial.

The scenario I find most helpful for the timeline we are in is from a computer simulation that was run in 1972 as part of the famous Limits to Growth study. While it was never meant to be a forecast or prediction, the scenario has tracked reality with frightening accuracy. A forty-year update showed that we were right on track for major trends related to resource depletion, energy prices, and instability of food supplies. The fifty-year update confirmed this yet again in 2022.

What did the scenario describe? Human population would peak around the year 2050 after starting its decline twenty years earlier. The specific sequence of events was that energy resources would start to become scarce, creating volatility in energy prices. Food systems then become unstable because the costs associated with growing, processing, transporting and consuming food become unpredictable from one month to the next. The result is societal unrest and breakdown in supply chains.

The decline in human population remains hidden in this scenario for two decades. This happens because population growth increases exponentially from one year to the next — meaning that death rates would need to grow even faster for overall numbers to begin falling. A lag time remains concealed in the pattern as overall population numbers continue to grow as the death rate speeds up to eventually surpass the birth rate.

The peak is where birth rate and death rate become equal. It is the moment when the direction changes rapidly as death rates continue speeding up while birth rates decline. The lesson for us is that if this scenario offers a useful planning framework, we will begin to really feel planetary collapse in human systems by around 2030. But by then it is far too late for many kinds of action because supply chains will have become too fragile and disruptions associated with conflicts over scarce resources are simultaneously felt all over the world.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that this scenario IS the future. Merely that it is a useful heuristic because the underlying patterns that were explored computationally have served as useful approximations to what has unfolded in the real world throughout the last fifty years. A conscientious observer would take this seriously because it is unlikely that such a simulation would track reality so well without having something to say about what is true.

In The Design Pathway, we explored other evidence to show that planetary collapse is already well underway. There are tens of thousands of books, videos, and other kinds of media that have already covered this ground. This book does not devote time to the various studies of topsoil loss, contaminated waterways, abrupt and intensifying climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, or the thousands of sub-topics that all converge on this robust conclusion. As I said above, let those who are not ready to accept planetary collapse walk away and depart from us now. This book is not for them.

Yet to look at the interdependent systems of the dynamic Earth that are currently collapsing in lock-step will be very useful for what we are here to do. We will need to understand how the planet regulates itself if we are to help restore its capacities to do so. There are several tipping points we are speeding past as these words are written to the page that reveal just how serious the urgency is to organize ourselves around Earth regeneration.

For now, I merely want to say that time is of the essence. The farther we go into already-existing planetary overshoot, the more intense and rapid will be the collapse in human capacities to respond in a helpful manner. More of the population will soon concern itself with survival — like the estimated one billion humans already starving on a daily basis right now.

The growing size of inequality together with desperate poverty numbering in the billions of humans will not bode well for a smooth transition when environmental degradation really takes its toll.

If we are to live as Earth Regenerators we need to get started now.

You can get involved by joining us in the Design School for Regenerating Earth.