It wasn’t planned. It just sort of came out that way.
During the Q&A at a talk this week, someone asked:
“Isn’t regenerative design just the new name for sustainability?”
The goal of sustainability, I replied, is to meet our needs without compromising the needs of tomorrow.
And then this metaphor appeared:
“It’s a bit like those signs you get in bathrooms that say:
Please leave this place in the condition you found it.
Sustainability says: don’t mess it up.
But it doesn’t necessarily say anything about making things better.”
In fact, what we like to do is offset our mess in one place by tidying up somewhere else.
As for toilets as for planet earth.
Regenerative design is a fundamentally different proposition.
It’s not cleaning up after our actions.
Or merely reducing their impact.
It’s taking actions that in themselves make ecosystems, communities and places healthier and more capable of thriving.
Now imagine a bathroom that did that.
(Actually, it’s not such a daft question. Think of all those nutrients we flush away every day. But that’s material for another post.)