A Regenerated World

Kate Raworth’s work on the Doughnut Economy over the last few years has been nothing short of extraordinary. She has torn up the economic text books of the last 150 years and asked some much better and kinder questions about the future we need. It is so exciting to read that in collaboration with Janine Benyus, using biomimicry, the model is now being implemented in the City of Amsterdam. It opens up a world of possibility for a reimagined future, in which our world becomes regenerated for both people and the planet itself.

 

Kate’s book and then her blog deserve serious attention and, in my opinion, a Nobel Prize! There is no way in this short blog that I can even begin to explore the exponential potential of the work, but I do want to highlight some of the key issues. So many people are saying that we simply can’t go back to how things were prior to Covid-19. If we’re serious about that statement then we need to begin thinking about how we will experiment with alternative models and ways of being together that will be good for the future of the environment and create a much more socially just framework for the global family of humanity. I love this model that Kate offers in thinking about what is important for a place – it contains four key aspects. Local/Global – Social/Ecological.

 

We can apply this model to any city or given area, and it allows the people of that place to work with the uniqueness of their geography and demography. I believe it is a really helpful and holistic model when thinking about population and planetary health.

 

There are then several aspects if a group wish to move from understanding their region to bringing about transformative action. Kate calls these the 8 M’s.

 

 

The model then includes 4 really helpful sets deeper questions to create the framework around the local/global – social/ecological foundations.

 

Firstly – what does it mean for people to thrive within their own Geography?

 

 

Secondly, what does it mean for the local environment/ecology to thrive and regenerate?

 

Thirdly, how do the local people contribute to the wellbeing of the wider family of humanity? How can they ensure they are good global citizens?

 

 

Fourthly, how does the locality contribute to the wellbeing of the whole planet, by how it behaves?

 

 

This way of working takes serious collaboration, co-production and real change-making. I love the way that Kate illustrates this:

Here in Morecambe Bay, we would employ things like ‘The Poverty Truth Commission’ and ‘The Art of Hosting’ to ensure that every voice is heard and we embrace ‘otherness’. It will involve partnership with the team at ImaginationLancaster, The Social Inequalities Research Centre and the Health Innovation Campus at Lancaster University, Cumbria University, The Eden Project and anchor institutions like our District Councils, County Councils, the NHS, BAE, EDF, School Federations, the CVFS and the network of SMEs. It will also mean developing the kind of culture I talk about here.

 

Out of the ashes of this devastating time, a phoenix can rise of a regenerated society and ecology. Are we up for it? I sincerely hope so and I wonder in how many places this can become possible. We need to create online and then, once lockdown is over, more real, radical spaces of hospitality and collaboration as we work together for the future that is calling us.

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How Well Are You?

I have the joy of leading some health and well-being retreats with a good friend of mine, who is a life coach. The retreats look at the idea of alignment. Human beings are unique and beautiful, incredibly intricate and are made up of layers, like an onion. Some of those layers are individual and some are corporate, because no person is an island. At the core of who you are is your spirit, your unique self. Then there is your soul – that sweet mixture of emotions, thoughts, ideas, hopes, longings, memories, hurts, resentments, desires, etc. All of that is encased in a physical body, with all the complexities that the intertwining systems entail. And these 3 parts of you are constantly interacting and affecting one anoiuther. For example, physical pain caused to you by another person, may cause you to feel emotionally hurt also (soul pain) and crush your spirit. Or indeed, as I see many times in my work, emotional pain leads to a resentment, which causes a bitterness which manifests itself in a physical pain and so too your spirit is negatively affected.

But you do not just float around in a bubble. You exist in a corporate body, in a family, group of friends and community. You live in an environment of some sort, and your surroundings have an incredible amount of ability to affect your health and well-being. This is evidenced in the effect of air pollution on respiratory disease or the effect of isolation or indeed bullying on mental health. We are all aware of the sights, sounds, smells and stressors in our physical geographies. Added to this corporate body is our corporate soul. And in the corporate soul we find corporate memories, ideas and beliefs, fears and dreams, things we have been taught, world views that shape us and all of this feeds into our meta-narratives, the stories with which we align our lives, that give us some sort of meaning. Surrounding all of this? The corporate spirit. Love. God is Love, not fear, or hatred or violence or bigotry or judgment, but Love. We find time and again in our own lives and in the lives of those who come on retreat the misalignment/disalignment/nonalignment that happens so easily, not necessarily through anyone’s fault, but because life is so complex.

 

It’s not as simple as tweaking one thing and then everything falls into place. Many of us still have to live with chronic and enduring illness of various sorts, be that mental or physical and achieving images“perfect health” may not be possible. But alignment is possible and it is this that gives us a sense of well-being. So, how well are you? Do you know how much you are influenced by the corporate body and soul? What are your meta-narratives? How aligned are you? There are things we cannot change, but we can chose how we respond to them and the choices we make within them. I want to unpack this a bit more in subsequent posts, but this might just kick off some musings.

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