CHAPTER 1 – Living the Questions: Why change the narrative now? Questioning dangerous ideologies. Facing complexity means befriending uncertainty and ambiguity. Caring for Earth is caring for ourselves and our community. Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world. The ‘why’ will guide the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ Spirituality, soul and solitude in nature. Sustainability as a learning journey: pilgrims and apprentices. Sustainability is not enough; we need regenerative cultures!
CHAPTER 2 – Why choose transformative over sustaining innovation?. The Three Horizons of innovation and culture change. Evaluating disruptive innovation in the age of transition. Transformative innovation is about deep questioning. Sensitivity to scale, uniqueness of place and local culture. The transformative power of social innovation. Collaborative consumption and peer-to-peer collaboration.
CHAPTER 3 – Why do we need to think and act more systemically? Believing is seeing and seeing is believing. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. From the ‘crisis of perception’ to the ‘systems view of life’ Interbeing. How can we participate appropriately in complex systems?. The IFF World System Model Learning to see nature everywhere. Being a process, and seeing in relationships.
CHAPTER 4 – Why nurture resilience and whole-systems health? Rolling back Earth Overshoot Day. Learning to live within planetary boundaries. What exactly are resilience and transformative resilience? The adaptive cycle as a dynamic map for resilience thinking. Panarchy: a scale-linking perspective of systemic transformation. Local and regional community resilience building is going global How can we nurture transformative resilience? From control and prediction to conscious participation, foresight and anticipation
CHAPTER 5 – Why take a design-based approach? Design education enables cultural transformation. Design is where theory and practice meet Design follows worldview and worldview follows design. Ethics and design for regenerative cultures. Aesthetics and design. Emergence and design. Designing for positive emergence (a case study). Scale-linking, salutogenic design for resilience. The resurgence of a culture of makers: re-localizing production. Collective visioning and design conversations change culture.
CHAPTER 6 – How can we learn to better design as nature? Ecoliteracy: Learning from living systems. Valuing traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous wisdom. How does life create conditions conducive to life? Biologically Inspired Innovation. Green chemistry and material science. Biologically inspired product design. Biomimetic architecture. Nature’s whole system optimization informs community design. Living the questions together creates community. Industrial ecology and symbiosis are closing the loops. Ecologically informed urban and regional planning.
CHAPTER 7 – Why are regenerative cultures rooted in cooperation? Redesigning agriculture for food sovereignty and subsidiarity. Regenerative agriculture: effective responses to climate change. Learning from and mimicking healthy ecosystems. Redesigning economics based on ecology. Creating circular economies. Towards a regenerative economy. Thriving communities and the solidarity economy. Shifting from quantitative to qualitative growth. Valuing the commons by cooperatively sharing the gifts of life. Earth Law: the enabling constraints of collective living. Life’s collaborative lessons transform business. Co-creating regenerative enterprises. Collaboration and empathy as evolutionary success stories. Activism revisited: conscious participation and collective intelligence. We are coming back to life and this changes everything. Learning to listen deeply. Inner and outer resilience.
CONCLUSION – Regenerative cultures are about thriving together. Acknowledgements. References. About the Author.
