Table of Contents
Foreword David Orr 11
Foreword Graham Leicester 13
Introduction 15
Chapter 1 Living the Questions: Why change the narrative now? 19
Questioning dangerous ideologies 25
Facing complexity means befriending uncertainty and ambiguity 28
Caring for the Earth is caring for ourselves and our community 31
Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world 33
The 'why' will guide the 'what' and the 'how' 36
Spirituality, soul and solitude in nature 38
Sustainability as a learning journey: pilgrims and apprentices 40
Sustainability is not enough; we need regenerative cultures 43
Chapter 2 Why choose transformative over sustaining innovation? 49
The Three Horizons of innovation and culture change 53
Evaluating disruptive innovation in the age of transition 57
Transformative innovation is about deep questioning 60
Sensitivity to scale, uniqueness of place and local culture 62
The transformative power of social innovation 64
Collaborative consumption and peer-to-peer collaboration 66
Facilitating systems innovation and culture change 67
Chapter 3 Why do we need to think and act more systemically? 73
Believing is seeing and seeing is believing 76
The whole is more than the sum of its parts 79
From the 'crisis of perception' to the 'systems view of life' 81
Interbeing 85
How can we participate appropriately in complex systems? 87
The IFF World System Model 89
Learning to see nature everywhere 92
Being a process, and seeing in relationships 94
Chapter 4 Why nurture resilience and whole-systems health? 97
Rolling back Earth Overshoot Day 99
Learning to live within planetary boundaries 101
What exactly are resilience and transformative resilience? 104
The adaptive cycle as a dynamic map for resilience thinking 107
Panarchy: a scale-linking perspective of systemic transformation 109
Local and regional community resilience building is going global 111
How can we nurture transformative resilience? 115
From control and prediction to conscious participation, foresight and anticipation 119
Chapter 5 Why take a design-based approach? 123
Design education enables cultural transformation 124
Design is where theory and practice meet 129
Design follows worldview and worldview follows design 131
Ethics and design for regenerative cultures 132
Aesthetics and design 134
Emergence and design 136
Designing for positive emergence (a case study) 138
Scale-linking, salutogenic design for resilience 142
The resurgence of a culture of makers: re-localizing production 144
Collective visioning and design conversations change culture 147
Chapter 6 How can we learn to better design as nature? 151
Ecoliteracy: Learning from living systems 154
Valuing traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous wisdom 157
How does life create conditions conducive to life? 163
Biologically inspired innovation 166
Green chemistry and material science 168
Biologically inspired product design 171
Biomimetic architecture 175
Nature's whole system optimization informs community design 178
Living the questions together creates community 180
Industrial ecology and symbiosis are closing the loops 183
Ecologically informed urban and regional planning 187
Chapter 7 Why are regenerative cultures rooted in cooperation? 191
Redesigning agriculture for food sovereignty and subsidiarity 196
Regenerative agriculture: effective responses to climate change 199
Learning from and mimicking healthy ecosystems 203
Redesigning economics based on ecology 209
Creating circular economies 214
Towards a regenerative economy 218
Thriving communities and the solidarity economy 221
Shifting from quantitative to qualitative growth 224
Valuing the commons by cooperatively sharing the gifts of life 226
Earth Law: the enabling constraints of collective living 229
Life's collaborative lessons transform business 231
Co-creating regenerative enterprises 236
Collaboration and empathy as evolutionary success stories 240
Activism revisited: conscious participation and collective intelligence 246
We are coming back to life and this changes everything 252
Learning to listen deeply 255
Inner and outer resilience 259
Conclusion - Regenerative cultures are about thriving together 263
Acknowledgements 271
References 275
About the Author 286
