Regeneration Cycles. Regeneration Cycles Everywhere
Regeneration Cycles. Regeneration Cycles Everywhere
Learn to pay attention to all the regeneration cycles that sustain us - and you will see that our activities are breaking most of them. What can we do about it?
Let’s first make a little detour from the usual topics within sustainability and start with something very familiar to all of us:
sleep.
It’s one of the regeneration cycles that allows our bodies to function. Even without knowing the exact science of what happens during sleep and how it regenerates us, we know we can’t live very long without it.
Almost surely, you know somebody that has experienced a burnout. Maybe even yourself. And surely, you’re very well aware of what causes it. In simplified terms, it’s a consequence of failing to respect the limits that this regeneration cycle imposes on our productivity and capacity.
It’s very tempting to increase short term productivity by cutting rest time. And we can easily do it for some time because our bodies have a lot of buffers and backups. But if we do it too much, those buffers run out and our system collapses.
This is an example where short term gains (more things done in a day) are immediate, tempting and obvious, while long term damage is slow, more dispersed and difficult to pinpoint, but devastating.
Knowing this dynamic from personal experience, we can now scale our perspective to all the larger systems that sustain us - businesses, society, economy, ecosystems and the global biosphere.
Looking at these systems through this lens, you can recognise the supporting regeneration cycles (and how we’re breaking them) everywhere, on all scales. Let’s look at some examples on different scales.
Examples of regeneration cycles on a planetary scale include:
Carbon cycle: in a dynamic equilibrium, carbon flows through organisms and various natural buffers or stocks such as the atmosphere, ocean or ground in a circular loop that maintains fairly stable levels and enables stable conditions. By destroying ecosystems that absorb CO2 and increasing inflow by releasing stored carbon from fossil fuels, we’ve broken that equilibrium and we’re overflowing the atmosphere with CO2. As with sleep, there are natural buffers that allowed this to go on for some time without noticeable consequences. But, as rising heat and more frequent weather extremes are now becoming impossible to ignore, we can be quite sure this time is over.
Nitrogen cycle: Nitrogen is also an essential element of life that flows in a loop. Bacteria in the ground use nitrogen from the air and from organic matter (like ammonium from manure) and produce compounds that are soaked up by plants or by denitrification bacteria. The former get eaten by animals/decay and release nitrogen compounds back into the ground and the latter release nitrogen back into the air, closing the circular loop. By wanting to grow more than the regeneration cycle in the soil naturally allows (i.e. overexploiting the land), we're destroying the nurturing capacity of soil and becoming more and more addicted to the use of artificial fertilisers that have many negative consequences.
Water cycle: The circulation of water between clouds, ground and the oceans is a subject of elementary school education. But living ecosystems also play a hugely important role in this. For example, the Amazon rainforest is pumping 20 billion tons of moisture from the ground into the atmosphere, supplying much of the continent (and even North America) with rain and good conditions for agriculture. By destroying these ecosystems and disrupting the cycle, we’re risking global changes in weather patterns and collapse of life-sustaining systems of entire regions.
Examples on local ecosystem scale include:
Nutrient cycles: naturally, all the nutrients and essential minerals that get used from the ground eventually get back into it (organisms pee, poop, die and decay). Our systems, especially urban, have completely broken this cycle. Our pee and poop doesn’t return nutrients back into soil, but gets concentrated in sewer systems where it doesn’t go through proper processes of decay, but becomes waste and pollution that needs to be dumped somewhere. After we die, our bodies don’t decay in the ground where they could provide valuable nutrients to ecosystems. Much of organic waste from our food doesn’t get composted, but ends up concentrated in some waste management facilities. All processes other than composting (even “sustainable” practices such as conversion of organic waste into biofuel) are fundamentally unsustainable because they are breaking the nutrient regeneration cycle. They are taking more from the ground than they’re putting back and we don’t even need exact science to know this process cannot work for long.
Food webs and species populations: every species provides food for other species and these relationships form a web with many loops in it. These loops regulate populations in a way that allows proper regeneration of every population - because if one population collapses, it impacts the others too. Because it’s a web and not a single loop, ecosystems are fairly resilient and adaptive to disturbances. But the scale of our exploitation (facilitated by technology that allows much larger yields) is simply too big of a disturbance. Overexploiting an ecosystem or a specific species within it breaks its regenerative capacity and can lead to collapse. Cod fishery collapse in the 90’s is a good example of this. By overexploiting the fishery, fishers ended up destroying their own source of food and income.
Examples in man-made systems include:
Money cycles in economies: MONIAC was one of the first physical models of how the economy works which used a circular flow of water to show the flow of money. It could directly show that money also gets “regenerated” in loops - for example, people spending brings money into businesses and they pay out salaries and other costs that eventually bring it back to people (albeit more to some people than others, but that is a topic for some other time). How do these regeneration cycles get broken? One way is by greedily exploiting financial systems, like in the case of economic bubbles. Those show a typical pattern of exponentially growing financial yields, followed by a sudden collapse (this pattern is the same as in all the other examples - see the graph related to cod population collapse. This shows that even though these are different systems, the underlying patterns of behaviour are exactly the same). That can lead to recessions where the money cycle slows down - people spend less, meaning there is less revenue for businesses, meaning they can pay less salaries, meaning people have even less money to spend - forming a vicious cycle.
Resource flows through economies: this an example where circular regenerative systems should be in place, but aren’t. Vast majority of resources used in the economy flow in one direction - from extraction through manufacturing and use to waste. This system is, by design, destined to fail at some point. There simply aren’t infinite resources and infinite capacities to dump waste and pollution on the planet. Closing the loop is needed here by designing a circular economy.
What can and should everyone do about it?
Again, let’s draw conclusions from a familiar example - how do we prevent burnout?
First we need to acknowledge and give priority to our need for rest - if we tend to go too hard on ourselves, we just need to consciously remind ourselves that we’re not invincible and that resting is necessary. That means doing less work. It is what it is, no way around it.
We need to recognise what patterns drive us to overexploit ourselves. Are we trying to prove our worth by working too hard? Are we trying to feel important and fill a hole in ourselves by earning more? Are we afraid of saying no and take on more work than we can handle? By finding ways to be happy by means other than overworking, we solve the real cause of our problem.
We need to recognise what “solutions” we currently use to keep us pushing through and whether they actually contribute or make the problem worse. Getting dependent on coffee or other substances is a typical example related to sleep. It gets you to function in the morning, but it only masks your tiredness and in no way replenishes your energy. Because it helps you in the short term, it makes the problem seem less urgent, diminishing your motivation to solve it - thereby, making the problem worse.
We need to build structures and systems that support our new desired way of functioning. That might mean changing a job, breaking ties with toxic people, changing your eating habits, making a daily structure with a regular sleep schedule…
Now let’s map this to what we can do in our business and personal environments to prevent the burnout of our economy and society. In future posts, we will get in more details around each of these topics, so let this serve as a very high level idea.
Explore what our wellbeing (or the wellbeing of your company/society) depends on and how those things regenerate. Acknowledge these facts and give priority to ensuring regeneration - in the time when we’re on the verge of a planetary burnout, this is literally the most important job you can do. This might mean producing and consuming less. Hard truth. It’s a tough pill to swallow and you may feel resistance to the idea of being “forced to limit ourselves”. But limiting ourselves doesn’t mean being less happy. In fact, in this case it’s the opposite. Sleep limits your waking hours, but it doesn’t make you enjoy life less.
Recognise the patterns that drive our over-exploitative economy. For example our financial structures of businesses that makes them obliged to keep growing. Our culture dependant on consuming and owning more things. Marketing and advertising. Our illusion that convenience equals satisfaction. The fact that most retirement money is invested in funds that depend on the growing economy and therefore slowing the economy would mean imploding pension funds. Those are the real problems we need to solve. After recognising this, recognise how you play a role in these patterns and what you can change.
Recognise how your solutions may actually perpetuate the problem. Investing in carbon offsets instead of building better business models that reduce emissions is one example of this. Avoid such solutions and rather invest your energy and money into changing the toxic patterns from point 2.
Establish new structures that support the new desired state. This may include changing incentives within a company. Firing toxic managers. Hiring new ones. Implementing circular business models within which resources circulate instead of getting wasted. Forming pathways towards not depending on borrowing money from banks or investors. Scaling down your business (yup, that is a possibility too). Abandoning systems and structures that don’t serve the purpose. In all of those things, expect resistance because change is hard (even change for the better). You’ll need some balls ;)
We’ll explore specific topics in more depth next time. Until then - enjoy!
Ram