June’s Sensemaking: Regenerative Thinking
“The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio. On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday’s Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed tubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services.
It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought, that you can measure Leonia’s opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new.”
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Like Leonia, we are living in a world built on ‘degenerative design principles’ — where we take the earth’s natural resources, turn them into stuff we use, sometimes just once, and then throw away when we’re bored or have moved on to the next thing we want. We’re caught up in a consumerist mindset where we are defined by our shopping basket, our taste in home décor, or our ability to keep up with the latest trends in fashion. A satisfied consumer is a fearful spectre, posing the threat of not buying anything, and therefore undermining the goal of continuous growth that was normalised in the last half of the 20th century.
In a world where ‘more’ is synonymous with ‘better’, cutting back on consumption and living in line with the planet’s resources can only really be understood as ‘lack’; or ‘going without’. It creates a sense of paralysis as each of us try to calculate what we might be willing to give up versus what we feel we’re still owed. I was talking to someone the other day who argued that it was fine for them to fly because they’ve cut out meat and dairy this year. What’s difficult though, is that the underlying mindset — that consumption is still the most desirable way of life — hasn’t changed.
Regeneration, which was the theme of our Point People gathering this month, offers the prospect of a different way of engaging with the world, with the potential to lift us out of the fear and paralysis so many of us are currently experiencing. We talked about ‘regenerative thinking’ as a mindset that has the potential to shape our individual choices and collective lives in radically new ways.
Kate Raworth has written about the seductive attraction of ‘growth’ as a metaphor for progress, that is deeply embedded in the Western psyche. To replace such a powerful frame requires us to find an equally compelling metaphor that has all the positive associations of growth, but that enables us to see the crucial importance of all the other elements of life and nature, beyond markets, that help us, and the planet, to thrive.
Regeneration and regenerative thinking could be just that frame. Regenerative thinking is built on a view that rather than humans being a virus on the planet, we have the capacity within us to regenerate the world. What feels important about ‘regeneration’ is that it has many of the positive characteristics of the ‘economic growth’ frame that has had so much power over the years. Both create a sense of forward momentum, of progress. And regeneration is fundamentally an imaginative concept, full of hope and the possibility of new life. It’s about joy, communion, connection and shared goals.
There were two themes in particular that we explored together.
Grounding our work
Here, our conversation landed on the question of what regeneration looks like in relation to our own practices at the Point People. Is consultancy inherently extractive? Can you be and act regeneratively without having some kind of more grounded connection to the land? What if we put our systems approaches into practice in order to advance our agenda? What would the Point People intentional community look like? We reflected on the power of the Bauhaus motto — ‘Hands On and Minds On’, based on the insight that we can’t think without doing, and that the two need to be deeply woven together for the richest and most powerful ideas. (incidentally I was reading the Peter Kalmus book noted below this week, where he talked about hands, minds and hearts — I think there is something very powerful in this).
My reflection after the meeting was that regeneration is fundamentally local at some level. Regenerative commerce would be local, embedded, and without long, complex supply chains that criss-crossed the globe and were shaped by global businesses motivated by a singular goal of extracting value for themselves. It would be about shared value, manifested in co-ops and other more distributed ownership structures, acting collectively in the interests of the community and the planet. Sounds like it might be time to dig out that copy of Small is Beautiful again…
Creating an non-performance space
We’ve always tried to create a space of honesty and authenticity at the Point People, but the group acknowledged that even when we’ve put that conscious work in, the monthly document we fill in has the unintended consequence of creating performance anxiety for a number of us. Am I busy enough? Am I having enough impact? Do I sound a bit boring, or like I’ve watched a few too many box sets rather than working on system change?
This pressure to perform feels like the opposite of regenerative thinking. In our consumer society, we have become commodities ourselves, constantly marketing ourselves in a quest to be seen, to extract value from others. Germaine Greer put this succinctly — ‘in this society, invisibility is tantamount to death.’ We need to perform our value at every opportunity online and offline, making ourselves desirable to our fellow consumers, and judging our success by how busy we are, and how many likes our posts receive. We all need to find more intimate spaces of non-performance, where the emphasis is on being as well as doing; on the collective purpose as well as the personal value. That’s what we’re continually trying to build through the way we convene as the Point People.
Themes of the month
Anyway, that was the meeting, and a chance for us to reflect on the huge amount of work we’ve done collectively on climate crisis this month, not only here in the UK, but also in Brussells, Barcelona and Klosters. What of the other themes from our work across the month?
Work, efficiency, wellbeing
Lots of us are working in different ways of building a new way of thinking about work and wellbeing; one that gets away from the notion of ‘total work’, of maximum efficiency, aggressive forms of scale, data use, market focus and production. My personal reflection is that most of us are pondering these questions at a societal level at the same time as trying to manage punishing workloads and therefore thinking about them at a personal level too. This touches on the wonderful conversation we had last month about care and self-care. In a regenerative frame, care of self, care of each other, and care for the planet will be much more significant, valued and interconnected.
Being courageous
I feel like June was a month of courage for the Point People. We’ve started new jobs, met forks in the road with exciting possibilities, secured new funders, and created new enterprises. As important as all this doing, in true Point People style, we’ve been reflecting on all that hard work, journalling, taking time out in nature, camping, walking and talking together about impact.
Organising ourselves
We’re experimenting with new ways of working together. There’s a clear sense of the need to change the funding models that support the social sector, including considering new models of community sponsorship and ownership. We’re asking questions about how to organise more effectively to allow for future-sensing and for radical innovation. We are experimenting with bringing together grassroots and system-level organisations in new ways.
Convening people
Collectively we ran and spoke at events that reached well over 1000 people, talking about climate crisis, innovation, gender, work, technology and mobilising communities. We stretched ourselves, and put our ideas out there. And let’s not forget the many birthday parties we seem to have held this month, for people aged between 3 and 50…
Some Culture
We are reading…
Radical Help, Hilary Cottam (which contains some lovely references to the one and only Point Person Jennie Winhall)
Daddy Issues, Katherine Angel
Being the Change, Peter Kalmus
All About Love, bell hooks
Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption, Bryan Stevenson
Hedge: a safety net for the entrepreneurial age, Nicolas Colin
All Out War, Tim Shipman
The Overstory, Richard Powers
Stories We Live By — a free eco-linguistics course, fascinating stuff about how the words and images around us shape our abilities to care for people and planet
The Mindfulness Conspiracy — is meditation the enemy of activism?
An American Marriage, Tayari Jones
Becoming Animal, David Abram
We are watching….
Ayana Ayana Johnson on everything to do with oceans. Watch this for how she talks about the need for triage in conservation — we can’t save everything so what do we save?
Kate Dundas at the RSA student design awards who is the City of Melbourne Planner and speaks in a great way about the hardware and software of a city.
Thatcher: a very British revolution — mindblowing to watch on so many levels.
Years and Years — not perfect, but surprisingly thought and discussion provoking in terms of what might be coming our way sooner than we would hope.
Juliet Arnott of Rekindle, talking about resourcefulness and regenerative practices as essential tools for human and planetary wellbeing.
