Create to Regenerate

“Ecological degradation is not a luxury concern for countries to leave on one side until they are rich enough to give it their attention,” says Kate Raworth. What are the steps toward an economy that would be regenerative by design?

The common wisdom among economists is that GDP growth is the best asset countries can have to mitigate environmental degradation. Kate Raworth summarizes it this way: “First, as countries grow, they argued, their citizens can afford to start caring about the environment and so begin to demand higher standards; second, the nation’s industries can afford to start using cleaner technologies; and third, those industries will shift from manufacturing to services, swapping smoke stacks for call centres.”

Unfortunately, none of these steps make sense. 1/ Why would citizens have to wait for sufficient GDP growth to enjoy their basic right to clean air and clean water? 2/ Governments and corporations lack the incentive to do anything on these fronts until they are forced to by the citizenry.¹ 3/ Shifting from manufacturing to services is an obvious non-answer since pollution is simply displaced.

Facing up to the Degenerative Linear Economy

Factually speaking, “From 1990 to 2007 as GDP grew in high-income countries, so did their global material footprints. And not just by a little bit: the United States, the UK, New Zealand and Australia all saw their footprints grow by more than 30 percent over that period; in Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, they grew by over 50 percent. Japan’s footprint, meanwhile, grew by 14 percent and Germany’s by 9 percent: impressively lower than the rest, but still growing.”²

To address “negative externalities,” economic theory has its favored market-based tools: quotas and taxes. “To internalise those externalities, the theory advises, put a cap on total pollution, assign property rights with quotas, and allow market trading to put a price on the right to pollute. Or impose a tax equivalent to the ‘social cost’ of pollution, and then let the market decide how much pollution it is worth emitting.” But this does not work. At least, not to the extent it imperatively should. “. . . corporations lobby hard to delay their introduction, to lower the tax rate, to increase the quota and to get permits given for free, not auctioned. Governments, in return, too often concede, fearing that their nation will lose competitiveness—and that their political parties will lose corporate backing.”

The reason for that overall failure in regard, notably, to the importance of the cause and the emergency of the situation is that “quotas and taxes to limit the stock and reduce the flow of pollution are indeed leverage points for changing a system’s behaviour—but they are low points of leverage.”³ Far greater leverage can be obtained by changing the economic paradigm itself.

This change of paradigm is not about aiming for net-zero impact. Sure, the latter is a truly impressive goal when compared to the business-as-usual of degenerative industrial design, even more so if the aim is net-zero not just in energy or water but in all resource-related aspects of a company’s operation. However, this goal is doing less bad, not doing good. Changing the economic paradigm, by contrast, would be to aim at continually replenishing rather than more slowly depleting the living world. “More than an action on a to-do checklist, [this change of paradigm] is a way of being in the world that embraces biosphere stewardship and recognises that we have a responsibility to leave the living world in a better state than we found it. . . . because only generous design can bring us back below the Doughnut’s ecological ceiling.”

How to achieve this? First, by being aware of the paradigm itself. For Jeanine Benyus, a leading thinker and doer in biomimicry, we must take nature as our model, measure, and mentor. “With nature as model, we can study and mimic life’s cyclical processes of take and give, death and renewal, in which one creature’s waste becomes another’s food. As measure, nature sets the ecological standard by which to judge the sustainability of our own innovations: do they measure up and fit in by participating in natural cycles? And with nature as mentor, we ask not what we can extract, but what we can learn from its 3.8 billion years of experimentation.”⁴

The Circular Economy Takes Flight

To adopt the generous design Kate Raworth is alluding to, industrial processes must evolve toward what is known as a “circular economy.”⁵ As shown in the picture below, the circular economy’s visual representation is akin to that of a butterfly’s two wings. The key “is to think of all materials as belonging to one of two nutrient cycles: biological nutrients such as soil, plants and animals, and technical nutrients such as plastics, synthetics and metals. The two cycles become the butterfly’s two wings, in which materials are never ‘used up’ and thrown away but are used again and again and again through cycles of reuse and renewal.”

The idea of working through cycles is not a far-fetched engineer’s lunacy. Virtually all physical elements can be reused or recycled; we just need to look at them differently than in the cradle-to-grave manufacturing process—take, make, use, lose—imposed on the planet since the dawn of the industrial age.

“On the biological wing, all nutrients are eventually consumed and regenerated through the living earth. The key to using them endlessly is to: ensure that they are harvested no faster than nature regenerates them, harness their many sources of value as they cascade through the cycles of life, and design production in ways that gift back to nature. Take coffee beans as a simple example: less than 1 percent of every bean ends up in a cup of coffee, and the leftover coffee grounds are rich in cellulose, lignin, nitrogen, and sugars. It would be foolish to throw such organic treasure straight on to a compost heap or, far worse, into a rubbish bin, but this happens in homes, offices and coffee shops worldwide. Coffee grounds, it turns out, make an ideal medium for growing mushrooms, and then can be used as feed for cattle, chickens and pigs, and so are returned to the soil as manure. From the humble coffee bean, imagine scaling that principle up to all food, crops and timber, and scaling it out to every home, farm, firm and institution: it would start to transform our last-century forestry and food industries into regenerative ones that reap value from and then regenerate the living systems on which they depend.”

“On the butterfly’s other wing, in contrast, products made using technical nutrients, such as metals and synthetic fibres, do not naturally decompose so they must be designed to be restored—through repair, reuse, refurbishment, and (as a last resort) recycling. Take mobile phones, for example, which are chock-full of gold, silver, cobalt and rare earth metals, but are typically used for just two years. In the European Union, over 160 million mobile phones are sold annually, but in 2010, only 6 percent of used phones were being reused, and 9 percent disassembled for recycling: the remaining 85 percent ended up in landfills or lay defunct in the back of some drawer. In a circular economy, they would be designed for easy collection and disassembly, leading to their refurbishment and resale, or the reuse of all their parts. Scale those principles across all industries and you start to turn twentieth-century industrial waste into twenty-first-century manufacturing food.”

In the degenerative industrial economy that overwhelmingly operates today, value is monetary and created by searching for ever-lower costs and ever-greater product sales. This misconception regarding economic value is at the crux of global environmental degradation. “Economic value lies not in the throughflow of products and services but in the wealth that is their recurring source. That includes the wealth embodied in human-made assets (from tractors to houses) but also the wealth embodied in people (from their individual skills to community trust), in a thriving biosphere (from the forest floor to the ocean floor) and in knowledge (from Wikipedia to the human genome). Yet even these forms of wealth eventually dissipate: tractors rust, trees decompose, people die, ideas are forgotten. Only one form of wealth persists through time and that is the regenerative power of life, powered by the sun.”

1. See Torras, M. and Boyce, J.K. (1998) Income, inequality, and pollution: a reassessment of the environmental Kuznets curve, Ecological Economics 25, pp. 147–160.
2. UNEP (2016) Global Material Flows and Resource Productivity: a report of the International Resource Panel
3. See Meadows, D. (1997) Leverage Points: places to intervene in a system.
4. Biomimicry @ 20: A conversation with Janine Benyus, by Joel Makower, Chairman & Co-founder GreenBiz Group. See as well Biomimicry, by Jeanine Benyus. asknature.org and biomimicry.net are the websites where this author is directly involved.
5. About the concept of a circular economy, see in particular the Ellen Mc Arthur Foundation and its document titled Towards the Circular Economy, Isle of Wight: Ellen McArthur Foundation (2012)