Nature doesn’t set out to be sustainable

It sets out to be regenerative. To add more than it takes across the domains of existence.

If we aim to be regenerative in all things, as an act, through design, by intention, then we will certainly get sustainability. 

It is helpful to be sustainable, but it is not sufficient for what the world needs now. Too often we do ‘check box’ corporate sustainability. A partial act to appease a client story.

It is not enough. It is applying a pretty dressing to a deeply festering wound. 

To become regenerative at every level is a disruption to every system deigned by man. 

Indeed unless we disrupt, breakdown and reconstruct new models – capitalism, currency, governance, politics, enterprise design, accounting, what we measure – we are simply reapplying the pretty dressing and hoping for a second order phase state change.

All the while the wound festers in ever increasing ways towards a tipping point that will be irreversible once reached. (We may have already crossed it.)

The truth is uncomfortable. It pulls the rug from under our feet. It liquifies solid ground. Our identity, education, status, privilege and wealth are threatened. 

So we fight to hold onto the last vestiges of the old. We plaster the fester with a pretty sustainable bandaid. 

Nature is regenerative by design. We are nature. Time to act like it.

Photo taken June 16th, 2019