Redefining Regenerative Design

What the Five Principles of Soil Health Can Teach Designers

Photo by Razvan Dumitrasconiu on Unsplash

“A regenerative human culture is healthy, resilient, and adaptable; it cares for the planet, and it cares for life in the awareness that this is the most effective way to create a thriving future for all of humanity.” — Daniel C. Wahl

I’ve been working to help create tools, resources, strategies, and materials to make sustainable design easier and more mainstream since 2004. These three beliefs form the pillars of this mission:

1. I believe in the idea of trying to live and create a dynamic balance with our natural ecosystems
2. I view sustainability as the foundation for how we should live and create.
3. I feel sustainability is likely in direct opposition to our current capitalist economic mindset of overconsumption and infinite growth

As my work in sustainable design has progressed, I’ve more often wondered “what are we trying to sustain”? Sustaining our current level of social ills, consumption, and environmental degradation is akin to driving off a proverbial climate cliff. Sustainability, or a net zero impact, is not enough anymore. We need a quicker reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC) and the regeneration of our land and water. Despite the hard work of my contemporaries, we’ve sped passed the effectiveness of what sustainable design can do to prevent the worst of the climate crisis.

My concern that sustainability was not enough led me to Regenerative Design. I learned about its principles through the writings of Daniel C. Wahl and films like Kiss the Ground. I think of Regenerative Design as a mindset to design to restore what nature was before the Industrial Revolution and after, continually create abundance following nature’s model. The Regenerative Design Institute imagines it as “a world in which people, inspired by nature, create and maintain healthy and abundant livelihoods that enhance fertility and biodiversity on the planet.” They “envision humans as a positive, healing presence on Earth, creating more abundance on the planet than would be possible without them.”

What is missing for me in both of these definitions, is how to realistically design regeneratively considering how humanity failed so miserably at…