A sustainable futures origin story
I accidentally changed the course of my life on a summer day in 1991.
With school finally behind me, I was about to embark on a degree in aerospace engineering at the University of New South Wales. I dreamed of building spaceships, maybe even becoming an astronaut.
Alongside my engineering subjects, there was space in my timetable for two mandatory General Education subjects. Resisting the trend towards more and more specialised studies, the university wanted first-year students to be exposed to ideas from outside their disciplinary area.
I thought this was a great idea but I didn’t think my choice of subjects would be at all consequential. As it turned out, ticking the box next to a subject called Ecosystems, Technology and Human Habitation would be lifechanging.
The subject was taught by the wonderful Ronnie Harding, a pioneer in environmental education, who is sadly no longer with us. The subject was my first introduction to the concept of sustainable development, which felt radical at the time. It was only four years after the much-quoted Brundtland Report had defined sustainable development as:
meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
I loved spending time in nature and I was vaguely aware that human activities were having environmental impacts but this subject tied the threads together and showed me the global nature of our sustainability challenges. I can’t understate the impact on my impressionable young mind. Like Nora Seed in Matt Haig’s novel The Midnight Library, I was now faced with a choice.
‘Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices.’
From The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (2020)
I could stay the course and become an aerospace engineer. Maybe then, in an alternate 2026, I’m working for Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, building and blowing up spaceships, entranced by dreams of Mars. Or, I could follow the call of this inspiring idea of sustainability…
I changed my degree to environmental engineering the next year. It took me longer to find a role focused on sustainability but I’ve now been in that role for 26 years at the Institute for Sustainable Futures. Ronnie Harding was one of my PhD examiners. All because I chose that subject on that otherwise uneventful summer day.
A regenerative futures reboot
I don’t share all of this just for nostalgia. The point is that we are constantly adapting and evolving. The boy that dreamed of space became a man who dreamed of Earth. We grow and change and learn in our ongoing search for meaning.
So, while I still work at the Institute for Sustainable Futures and love it, I can’t deny that the concept that so appealed to me in 1991 and well into the 21st century has picked up a lot of baggage along the way.
The simplest definition of sustainability is the ability of something to keep going, or continue to exist. That definition opens up a lot of questions. What, exactly, is it that we want to sustain? Do we just want to sustain human life? Do we also want to sustain other species? How should be best go about these goals? Different responses to these questions mean that people can have radically different definitions of sustainability in their heads.
This vagueness about what we are sustaining opens the door to practices that are fundamentally about sustaining the status quo. It has led to models of sustainability like the three pillars model, where sustainability is defined as balancing economic, environmental and social needs; in reality, there can be no society or economy without healthy supporting ecosystems. Such contestation over meaning is probably inevitable for any concepts seeking to embody progressive change but after decades of this contest, sustainability has lost much of its ability to rally social movements.
Sustainability remains a worthy goal, but it is not enough. As Bill Reed of Regenesis pointed out in a 2007 article1, sustainability is a neutral point where we stop wrecking the planet but have not yet begun to do good. It is a necessary point on our journey, but what lies beyond it? Reed argued that our next stop is restoration, where we start to repair the damage we have done to the Earth. And beyond that is regeneration. Below is an adaptation of Bill Reed’s original image of this trajectory, developed by John Fullerton in 2015.
The diagram clearly shows the issue. Sustainability is far better than continuing to degrade and degenerate the planet. But beyond sustainability is the promise of aligning and designing with natural systems. Almost as soon as I became aware of this diagram and the possibilities that lie beyond sustainability, I realised that I wanted to pursue regenerative futures rather than just sustainable futures.
Like sustainability, the idea of regeneration is contested. My colleague Ethan Gordon found nine distinct discourses in regenerative agriculture with their own definitions and practices.2 It’s fair to say that we are still, collectively, working out what regeneration means. That’s why the second part of the tagline for this blog is ‘imagining regeneration’; we’re still imagining our way into this possible future. I will no doubt spend many future posts exploring regeneration.
For now, here is one of my favourite concise definitions:
Regenerative design and development is that which supports the flourishing of all life, for all time.
Sarah Ichioka & Michael Pawlyn, Flourish (2021)
I love that word ‘flourishing’. There’s a real sense of possibility there, a sense that humans and non-humans together have immense potential to be more than we currently are. It’s a future in service of a different set of values. Instead of serving the needs of the economy, we become partners in the unfolding of life.
This brings me full circle to where I began the story. On that summer day in 1991, I chose two subjects. The second was called Beliefs, Values and the Search for Meaning. I confess that I had almost forgotten this. The first subject has always been part of my sustainability origin story, a key moment in my personal history. The second languished in the dusty recesses of memory.
Yet this second subject triggered a search for the meaning in life that led me to move from aerospace engineering, to environmental engineering, to sustainability research and onwards. It confronted me with that most basic philosophical question: how should we live? I discovered that I don’t just want to sustain, to continue, to merely exist. I want to regenerate, flourish and thrive. I want to imagine and realise futures where that is possible for all.
Notes
- Reed, B. (2007). Shifting from ‘sustainability’ to regeneration. Building Research & Information, 35(6), 674–680. https://doi.org/10.1080/09613210701475753
↩︎ - Gordon, E., Davila, F., & Riedy, C. (2023). Regenerative agriculture: A potentially transformative storyline shared by nine discourses. Sustainability Science, 18(4), 1833–1849. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-022-01281-1
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