What is Linear Living, What is Circular Living?
In dominant society for hundreds of years, our homes, families, communities, workplaces, modes of production, economies and whole lives have been built on a human-made idea of a linear world. Linear thinking is one-dimensional and narrow, and expects things to go neatly in sequence and result in a product. By definition, linear living needs an endpoint. A finish line.
Circular living, by contrast, has no beginning or end. It is a continuous cycle. Like all cycles, it goes through stages that change and evolve on an ongoing basis in response to the environment. Circular living is often restorative, often regenerative. It looks to the sustainable and ever-evolving cycles of our planet as inspiration. Its muse is the natural world.
Linear living is one directional, and is oriented towards achievement of a goal. Often this goal is impossible, such as an economy that produces endless exponential growth. Likewise, perfection is a hallmark of linear living — unobtainable and exact, we hold ourselves to its impossible and unnatural standard. Linear living is often extractive, in that it pulls on natural or human resources as it tries to achieve its goal, and expends waste at the end.
Circular living is not a “perfect” circle, but can meander and spiral. This can be uncomfortable yet exhilarating for our modern, linear, tidy minds. Circular living feeds back into itself, and considers “waste” to be food or fuel for a self-sustaining way of being. By definition, it continues forever.
Examples of linear and circular thinking are all around us. Let’s take aging. Linear thinking expects beauty and youth to last as long as possible, and uses makeup or surgery to elongate youth. We say, “Oh wow, she looks good for fifty!” as if it were better to look twenty for many decades rather than aging gradually and naturally. Circular thinking, on the other hand, sees and respects a cycle of youth, growth, maturity, aging and death.
Farming is another example. In agriculture, linear living would manifest as monoculture, aiming for maximum yield with one crop, at the expense of depleting the soil and injecting earth, animal and human bodies with chemical fertilizers. Eventually it would leave a patch of land barren. Circular living, on the other hand, cultivates a mix of plants and animals in a holistic ecosystem, nourishing and replenishing the soil over a series of years, with time allowed for rejuvenation. It calls on natural practices like grazing animals who are allowed and encouraged to express their biological tendencies, and in doing so working with the land through cycles of feast, famine, growth and decay.
In the economy, the linear approach would take a resource, make a thing, sell a thing, and finally waste a thing. The product would have a beginning and end, and from the very design of the object it would be expected to one day end up as waste. Nearly everything we buy is designed to someday end up in a landfill. It’s a part of the plan. It might be a shirt that is meant to last one season, or a fridge that is meant to last one decade. But it is meant to be bought, used and discarded. The circular approach sees another way. Circular design creates a product with the whole life of it in mind, including retrieving and reusing the materials at the end, as value to continue, ideally in a never-ending, waste-less cycle.
Examples of linear and circular living go beyond aging, farming and the economy. Our homes, personal care, families, fashion, food, cities, workplaces, cultures, processing of waste and connections to nature have all been deeply affected by our linear mindset — and they are ripe with possibility for a circular approach. The very way that we think, process information, and “solve problems” needs to become more holistic and, yes, circular in order to rise to the complex challenges that we face. This means intimately understanding the intersections that face people, communities and ecosystems — and it means embracing a relentlessly curious and brave approach of climate justice.
Every day, there are more and more stories of inspiring people who are living circular. Fashion designers, farmers, woodworkers, chefs, economists, grocers, entrepreneurs and activists. People who are rejecting the false linear approach that has been sold to us as the only way. There is also a growing body of research about how we can foster a more regenerative way of life — from how how. we farm to how we rebuild the economy. People are rethinking, redesigning and recreating how we operate, so that humans can be a regenerative force. Diverse movements, philosophies, data and lived experiences come together in the story of circular living.
We have reached the end of the line. It’s time to rise to the moment and find our place within the circle.
