Regeneration: Discovering Nature's Math

? 2024 by Mick Dalrymple

What do your dog, gardening and heat pumps have in common? They each provide an example of a key ingredient for “regeneration”, an important concept gaining traction in sustainability action.

“Regeneration” is an acknowledgement that “less bad” and even “sustainable” is an insufficient response to our current environmental and social situation. And they aren’t very inspiring, either, even in the face of the current alternatives of extreme heat, flooding, drought, hurricanes, wildfires, climate migration, biodiversity loss, and micro-plastics found in human brains. Ugh. Regeneration is a strategy to get us out of a whole lot of messes but is also a motivational lifeline. It provides hope and inspiration for our journey into a better future. ?

Regeneration is often used in reference to agricultural practices that improve soil health and long-term farming productivity while also increasing biodiversity and water retention. Let’s consider it a bit more broadly, from the perspective of a biomimetic: Understanding that all things in nature (including us) are interconnected and, with that understanding, supporting conditions that promote life.

Regeneration is about aligning activities with nature’s life support systems in order to allow 1+1+1 to generate 5. For someone who studied math and engineering, it seems somewhat heretical to state that. However, life has taught me that our accounting systems reflect our own limited perspectives.

A gardener understands this. Working in higher education, I have seen gardening consistently demonstrate itself as a gateway activity to involve young people in sustainability and to lessen their climate anxiety. I have seen involvement in campus gardens lead students to broader climate action, to develop confidence & leadership skills, and even to change their majors and their careers. Gardening taps into the magic of biology to enable 1+1+1 to equal 5 by aligning our efforts with nature’s. It combines our labor inputs with genetic code (seeds), soil, microbes, water, air and sunlight to create something much greater than solely our input. And then it produces seeds and compost to do it all over again.

Gardening is only one example. Community can also turn 1+1+1 into 5. Grassroots organizers relate to the adage “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.” And to Margaret Mead’s famous quote "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world.?In fact, it's the only thing that ever has." But anyone who has ever been involved in an HOA can attest that 1+1+1 can equal 0 or less when members are not aligned! Alas, as we are all interconnected, community extends beyond the human species. Most people who have a dog can relate: While having a pet involves work, you generally receive more than you give.

How do we bring this math of abundance into our daily lives to build an economy that regenerates natural systems, social connections and our lives? It helps to take a systems perspective and incorporate circular economy and biomimicry approaches when designing everything from processes to technology. Termites in Africa leverage biology, community, and design to construct mounds with natural, passive air conditioning that keeps their nest at ideal temperatures despite temperature extremes outside. Human engineers created the heat pump, a mechanical device that produces a similar result. Instead of burning fossil fuel to create heat for a home, a heat pump uses a relatively small amount of energy to concentrate and put a lot more energy to use, pulling it from the outdoors to heat the inside of a home. And then it can be used to do the opposite in summer.

Our economy is structured from the viewpoint of humans being separate from nature rather than humans being one part of a greater whole. It views nature’s role as submitting to and serving our needs. As a result, our budgeting and accounting systems suffer from incomplete math.

Where does sunshine show up on a budget spreadsheet for a community garden? Or the oxygen exhaled by the plants? Or the beauty or physical and mental health benefits? Or the bioremediation provided by microbes in the soil? Or the weeds that need to be kept in check? These other factors are often referred to in academia with terms such as natural capital, resource economics, co-benefits, co-negatives, externalities, split incentives and the commons. The bottom line is that our math is narrow and incomplete. This is understandable as many of those co-benefits and externalities are very hard to quantify and allocate for daily, practical transactional needs.

How much does the pollution related to international shipping of goods cost in terms of human and ocean health impacts? Or the slowing of key ocean currents that moderate our climate? How easy is it to put an economic value on the shade provided by a single tree when the circumstances can vary so widely? Our financial systems, like most human systems, were built to simplify and to reflect the costs and benefits to a particular stakeholder. They are just not equipped to reflect the complex, interconnected systems of our world. That would be fine if we did not place SO MUCH trust and confidence in them. Because they are quantitative, we act as though they reflect reality. In truth, they reflect a small subset of reality.

Inception alert!

Let’s flip this conversation from biomimicry, math, and accounting to a perspective informed by physics.

I really enjoyed my college physics classes, particularly learning that light, color, sound, radio, x-rays, and heat are really just different frequencies of the same thing – electromagnetic waves. One of the more unsettling things I learned from physics classes was that the universe operates with increasing entropy – moving from more order to less order over time. Our expanding universe. Energy moving from concentrated to dispersed. Useful to unusable. But I only recently realized that life is a force for negentropy – the opposite of entropy. Life gathers dispersed materials and energy and assembles order from them. It turns 1+1+1 into 5 and produces food, shade, trees, beauty, oxygen, freshwater… and enables all the other wonderful things we derive from them: shelter, paper, art, clothing. Life and then death, decomposition, and pressure transformed sunlight into the oil and gas that continue to power much of our society. Negentropy that we are now undoing.

Unfortunately, our current linear economic system is designed toward increasing entropy. It relies upon huge stores of energy to provide the brute force to fight and overcome the patterns of nature instead of aligning with those patterns to leverage their own power. Regeneration is the difference between cranking the gas on a jet ski in order to pound against and overcome waves versus riding with the waves using a surfboard. I hope we have all felt a time when we were personally “in the zone” - where everything just seems to be in sync and flow. Imagine an economy that worked that way, in sync and flow with people and nature… and how nature would respond with abundance and regeneration. Like a garden or your dog or your heat pump.

And keep in mind:

Every day, each of us faces countless opportunities to respond to our world either as we perceive it to be or as we want it to become.