Paul Pivcevic 29/11/2024 Paul Pivcevic 29/11/2024

Regenerative Business and the Doughnut

Getting your business into the doughnut requires a new level of thinking…

Paul Pivcevic 24/07/2024 Paul Pivcevic 24/07/2024

Towards useful metrics in Bioregions

Bioregions: starting with the word already takes you to new places

*Bioregion: the word already takes you to new places*

As we evolve our role from an ecoliteracy and outdoor activities centre focused principally on school residentials to serving a wider local community, we’re thinking more about this term ‘bioregion’.

The local Council is thinking about it too. We’re fortunate to have a local Council whose leaders are right alongside us. In fact, we see each other as partners in moving towards a distributive and regenerative local economy, and thriving community. Almost certainly they will be looking for useful measures of progress.

First, how should we make the most of this idea of ‘bioregions’ which is capturing the imagination of communities worldwide from the Grampian Highlands of Scotland to the olive growing regions of the Mediterranean, from the Columbian Andes to the Pacific Northwest? Can it make a material difference to people’s lives, can it move us towards this new economy, and if so how are we and the other organisations and communities of the Forest to work together differently?

In the early 1970’s when inspired organic farmers in California first came up with the notion of the bioregion, they defined it as:

A distinct area with coherent plant and animal communities, and natural systems, often defined by a watershed. A bioregion is a whole ‘life-place’ with unique requirements for human inhabitation so that it will not be disrupted or injured.

Peter Berg, Planet Drum Foundation 1973

Then it had more than a touch of conservation about it: wanting to reconnect with and conserve the ways indigenous peoples had been caring and stewarding the landscape over millennia.

Today, for those of us more distant in time from the ancient peoples of our lands, faced with mounting inequalities and ecological degradation, the idea is if anything, more compelling. The word carries the potency to heal the separation of ‘bio’ nature, and human ‘region’; it brings them once again into a complete whole. It reminds us how successfully modernity has rendered the ‘bio’ a mute backdrop to our human drama; it reminds us we are all equal in the face of natural disaster.

In a society fixated with utility, where we speak of ecosystem services, carbon credits, biodiversity net gain, the ‘bioregion’ can connect us again to our deepest emotional needs and affirm nature’s place in the realm of the human spirit. We need the experience of awe in the every-day, not only in the exceptional, as GK Chesterton once wisely said. We yearn to root ourselves, to feel our sense of belonging to where we live, to the land we walk on, however recently we have arrived. And even to find our place in the on-going story of our place.

If the promise is once again to inhabit a vibrant, living, responsive world which has its own ways of speaking if only we could slow down to listen; if re-enchanting the places where we live is a way to reconcile ourselves to the inevitable upheavals of climate change; if supporting each other as well as nature is the path to survive and thrive through these times, then how must we be?

Our role must surely be to ask these kinds of questions.

Of Nouns and Verbs

One way of being we will need to challenge is that which fixes us on a world we can control, on targets that we ‘drive’ towards. Nature has no targets, it has no goal, and as the celebrated Chinese text the Tao Te Ching says: nature never rushes, yet everything gets done. Our language betrays our thinking. We use nouns to describe our world: house, community, car, job. Nouns we can manipulate, improve, change yet they are as dead as butterflies pinned behind glass cabinets, absent their living context. The risk is that the bioregion remains just another noun. While the term describes a ‘life place’, many who advocate for bioregional thinking prefer ‘bioregioning’ – the verb, to remind us that the work is alive, unfolding and unpredictable, without a determinate destination. Like the work with our thistles.

Interestingly, many indigenous languages are more verb than noun-based, highlighting relationships and the interconnectedness of life. It’s claimed that speakers of Mikmáq, a First Nation language of Canada's Atlantic Provinces can speak all day without using a single noun.

Politics, Power & Legal Rights for Nature

Before we dive a little deeper into the ‘being’ question it’s worth reminding ourselves of a huge bear trap bioregional thinking could unwittingly step into. We have heard that the term ‘bioregion’ has been co-opted by sections of the far right in Germany because it speaks to a nativist anti-immigrant ‘blood and soil’ ideology. Perhaps not only in Germany. Ella Hubbard, a geographer at Sheffield University whose essay earlier this year charted the history of bioregional thought reminds us not to be politically naïve, and champions using the verb:

Bioregioning refuses to know the destination in advance, instead focusing on the process, rather than outcome, of change. This turns the bioregion into a political project with the possibility of a radical critique of power.

There is power in saying who belongs, and who does not; there’s power in who allocates resources, who influences the cultural narrative, who owns assets, sets wages.

One critique of power is to follow the juxtaposition of ‘bio’ and ‘region’ to its natural conclusion: that nature should have the same legal rights as us. A campaign is growing for example to grant legal personhood to the River Wye, the much-loved local river. The Wye, together with the lower reaches of Britain’s biggest river, the Severn, forms the boundaries of our Forest of Dean bioregion. Wildlife in the Wye is being suffocated by eutrophication due to run off from agriculture and intensive chicken farming. A lawsuit to sanction these activities earlier this year was unsuccessful. But the legal ground is shifting. In October 2022, the UK’s Law Society publication ‘Law in the Emerging Bio Age‘ made the argument that granting legal personhood to non-human entities is essential to tackle climate breakdown and biodiversity loss. One of the reports co-authors Dr Wendy Schultz said:

We aren’t wise enough to...manage the ripple effects of decisions we make about our relationship with the living environment. Part of the issue is embedding some sort of framework for accountability and responsibility for the consequences of these things we do, and that’s where law comes in.

Who knows what ripple effect there may be on other unequal power relations if we elevate the status of nature? But more of that later.

Living Systems Thinking

Employing regenerative thinking and practice can also elevate us out of political naivety. It reminds us that living systems are nested; simpler systems take direction from higher-level systems and develop ways to add value to those higher ones. There are two radical thoughts within this understanding of life. First, that far from the bioregion being an entity to itself, a zone of exclusionary identity, it is in fact always nested in and contributing to wider landscapes. And second that the only way it can maintain its health is when there is a balanced economy of interests between parts and wider wholes. Think of the human body: no part of a healthy body gains its health at the expense of other parts. As Leen Gorissen and others write in a study on regenerative design for the Belgian Government (in their presidency role for the EU Council):

As long as the body is healthy, the body’s ecology and economy are one, there is no conflict. There are no rich and poor organs. The wealth and vitality of your body, as in any living system, is in the whole, not the parts...Vital for any regeneration process is thus living systems thinking, a discipline for seeing wholes, interdependencies, interrelations, and higher order potential.

Back to ‘Being’

Let’s return to this question of how are we being asked to ‘be’? It’s more nuanced than we think. Regenerative practice offers another useful framework. It focuses on three aspects of human nature: function, being and will. All three need to be in harmony with each other for systems to regenerate.

Function involves all that we do. In day-to-day life our predominant concern is with function—getting things done. But valuing only ‘doing’ and results, will be a restraint to doing or thinking about doing things differently.

Being has to do with who we are as we function. It’s a quality of energy. Fixing something requires a problem-solving energy: we objectify the world, break it into components, analyse, ideate and scale solutions. Restoring and regenerating wholes requires an entirely different quality of energy. We listen and watch, wait for patterns to emerge, experiment, let go and let come.

Will is the key. The quality of will that shapes our being and doing differently, is a will that is bigger than all of us. Rather than inner wilfulness, the nature of this will is sourced from outside ourselves. It’s the will of life to keep unfolding, changing, evolving. We are simply instruments of this wider whole, motivated by the potential we see that it has to evolve, and by the unique contribution we can each make to grow its capacity and capability to do this.

Implications for our work

Story of Place

How do we find this potential? The wider whole for us, the Forest of Dean bioregion, most definitely sees itself as a whole ‘life place’. Reserved as a hunting ground in the Middle Ages by the Tudor Kings, its great oaks also built their warships. Coal and iron ore were mined even before the Romans came for its mineral wealth. Then during the industrial revolution, a million tonnes of coal a year were pulled from the ground and shipped on barges down the Wye and the Severn. It has long been the engine of the old extractive economy. The story that inspires the Council now is that the Forest could be transformed to become the engine of the new green economy. It’s a neat reversal. But imagine if we could create and sustain the momentum for such an ambition through people creating an inspiring and shared narrative of transition, rooted in the essence of the place?

Regenerative practice answers exactly this. Asking questions like ‘how does this place renew itself; for what purpose; and what value has it consistently offered to people who are drawn here’, the practice looks for patterns through deep time, drawing on local geology, hydrology, ecology, migration flows, social history. It looks for patterns that resonate in the present, in people’s daily experience, and because it reaches deep into the core that vitalises the place, it can also surface an answer to the question what could the place now become in response to the challenges of the present?

Community Wealth Creation and Metrics

The prospect of starting this process with local people excites us. The promise is that the story shapes not only the higher state the place can evolve to, but also how to get there, rooted in the culture of the Forest community. To ensure that this work is connected, we hope to work with the Council to convene a diverse group of stakeholders, a local guild if you like of organisations including the Forest Food Network (see the first blog), who would commit to bring the vocation to life. This will require each guild member to ask what new capabilities will each of us need to develop if the vocation is to be realised? We will need to plan to get there. And we will need to ensure we build not only financial capital, but human, social, natural and made capital too so that we manifest wealth for the community in the round. These ‘systemic effects’ will become the source of our metrics, the goals each organisation sets for itself and the data we each collect that will tell us we are on track.

Climate Change

While we cannot predict what will surface through the process, it’s a fair guess that nature will feature. There is overwhelming local support for the Forest to be designated a UNESCO Biosphere. Yet nature like us is vulnerable to climate change. The sheer unpredictability of weather patterns is disturbing nature’s rhythms and relationships and we know already some species will not cope. We need eyes on the landscape to watch for changes, pick up patterns, to enable the community to learn together based on data how to intervene to ensure nature survives and thrives. Bioregioning Tayside in Scotland is pioneering this through locally resourced ‘community science’, rather than the more commonly known ‘citizen science’ which is driven by professionals and experts from outside the community. Many of us are considering following suit:

Community science is defined as scientific research and monitoring, based on scientific modes of inquiry, which are (i) community-driven and community-controlled, (ii) characterized by place-based knowledge and social learning, collective action and empowerment, and (iii) with the normative aim to negotiate, improve and/or transform governance for stewardship and social-ecological sustainability.

The Power in the Doughnut

Our final consideration is of Kate Raworth’s Doughnut, which has been hugely influential. We have experience with it, contributing to the creation of the Devon Doughnut. Our local Council in the Forest is considering how it too might use the doughnut in the work of transition. Given the arguments that regenerative practice makes for evoking ‘will’ for restoring the natural capacities for places to renew themselves, we now believe the Doughnut has greatest value when in service to a community generated ‘story of place’. The questions posed in the Doughnut’s 4 lenses below can shape the vocation the story points towards because they give language to challenges of today. We think these questions might serve how the Forest responds from its core identity to our social and ecological pressures, and through this, express the next level of its potential as a bio-regioning community. But we step into this process first with a clear, and felt sense of the patterns that have endured and have made the place unique.

In other words, the Doughnut is a valuable instrument for stimulating a dynamic image in our collective minds of a future more highly evolved state that the Forest could move towards, as a whole. But we focus first on understanding, embodying the Forest as a whole living being, always like ourselves, in the process of becoming.

*Courtesy Doughnut Economics Action Lab*

There's another useful dimension to the Doughnut too. Earlier we discussed bioregioning’s potential to critique how power works. Ownership of local companies brings considerable power. The Doughnut, as applied to business, champions a change to power relations for the sake of greater and fairer wealth. It points us towards the steward ownership movement pioneered in Germany by companies first Zeiss then Bosch and now many others. Steward ownership is based on a radically different view of who owns the value created in a business. Steward owners believe it is both founders and workers who own the wealth; that workers should be the guardians of its mission and purpose. A key belief is that profits are not extracted, but reinvested for the common good, often in the local community.

Imagine the impact on social inequalities if we could bring more steward ownership into this country?*

The Doughnut elegantly codifies this shift in what’s called enterprise design. Design of a business is explored across five design layers: a company’s Purpose, Networks, Governance, Ownership, and Finance, to facilitate the shift. We are registered to offer this work. But what's becoming clear through writing this piece is that this too is absent a context, a context that a story of place can provide. In fact if you look at 'enterprise design' through the lens above of function-being-will, you see that the change in 'function' that enterprise design invites cannot be transformative as an island. For this it needs to be congruent with a new quality of 'will' which is sourced from the spirit of a wider whole, in our case the Forest, and congruent with a 'being' state of care, and connection, and open to the Copernican revolution we talk about in the previous article. For those local business pioneers who feel a pull to play a bigger role in their local community we hope this framing might arouse their curiosity.

And there I think I'll stop. It's strengthened me/us writing this (I've been checking in with fellow directors) because we've realised we've needed to pause and clarify together what it is it that we're doing, also so we can weave a narrative for those who visit. But now that the buzzing in our heads has died down, we're all ears.

Paul Pivcevic, July 2024

Paul has been consulting to the Wilderness Centre since 2020. He has now joined the Board of Wylderne Ltd., a Community Benefit Society that plans to trade as the Wilderness Centre, and to develop its role into a bioregional learning centre for the Forest of Dean.

* The Employee Ownership Association promotes steward ownership in the UK

Paul Pivcevic 19/07/2024 Paul Pivcevic 19/07/2024

What Data Do We Need for the Green Economy?

What We’ve Been Humbly Taught by the Common Thistle

For a regenerative and distributive economy what is the data that we need in order to make decisions, to know we are on track, to alert us if we’re losing our way? This post looks at the question from the perspective of our business, the Wilderness Centre. The next post will look at it from the perspective of the whole Forest of Dean bioregion.

Let’s start with us. Here at the Wilderness Centre we are transitioning from running a for-profit business to a regenerative Community Benefit Society run by and for the community, with the purpose of doing our bit to enable the whole region to thrive.

This is transforming how we think about data.

Like every conventional business, we have so far been collecting and generating data that would be considered ‘good practice’: cash flow forecasts, monitoring costs and forward sales, watching changes in market pricing, checking in regularly with staff, collecting customer feedback.

But we’re also beginning to collect data to support the regenerative journey. So far that’s focused on developing the ’value offer’ for the schools who come here. This has meant giving the 30 acres of meadows and ancient woodland that surround us a chance to evolve in a way they once did before intensive farming arrived by introducing a variety of grazing animals. The effect of the Dartmoor ponies, grazing cattle and wild boar from the Forest has enormously enhanced the experience and learning of the children who come here on their school residentials.

Gathering data is adding value

To manage this successfully we have been gathering data: observing the behaviours of the animals, where they graze, what they feed on and what not, and how plant diversity, insects and birds are responding. Our instructors share with the students what we are learning. They bring the children into contact with the grazing animals, awakening their curiosity, and open their eyes to each living plant or animal, not as separate beings, but as part of the wider system they have a role to play in. The ponies will happily munch a willow branch the instructors give the children to feed them. But who knew that the willow tree, which provides not only an important habitat for many frogs and birds, and its blossoms an important source of early nectar for insects, was also the ponies medicine cabinet? Its leaves and bark contain salicin, a natural painkiller that eases joint and muscle pain.

The point to get across is that if we humans too are nature, then like the willow, we have our own unique role too. And this seems to be learning how to create the context for life to connect and thrive. How we collect data, see patterns, is reinforcing this role.

An independent local ecologist, and the University of Gloucester are doing the quantitative measuring of our increasing biodiversity. This is one way of measuring what impact the change in land use having but we need to understand is it also indicating healthier systems with a restored capacity to evolve! Over time it will also be important to know what capacity the uptick in biodiversity is giving the land to sequester more carbon. We have to do our bit towards net zero. Encouragingly, a report in March this year suggested that projecting forward 20 years or so, our wilding will have sequestered almost as much carbon had we planted native woodland. But meanwhile, we will have grown not only natural capital, but human and social capital too.

The Lure of Simple Metrics

In other words, we aren’t focused on or allowing ourselves to get distracted by any one data point, or measure. It would be easy for example, to focus only on carbon to the exclusion of biodiversity or get alarmed at the number of thistles spreading across the wildflower meadows. That would be to lose sight of the whole, of which carbon and thistles are both a part. It’s a discipline not to be dragged into: following norms set for business or by long-held tradition in land management.

Take thistles. The conventional wisdom is that grazing animals don’t eat thistles, they overtake grasslands, and they should be removed. However, we have found that this is simply not the case. Strimming just a few thistle tops has brought our Dartmoor ponies over to munch them where they’ve dropped. And in any case thistles have their role. They are a rich source of nutrients for animals as well as nectar that sustains many bees, migrating painted lady butterflies and monarchs, and their seeds are an important part of the diet of our finches.

That is not to say we have a definitive answer on exactly how many thistles is too many. Or too few for that matter. We just keep watching for patterns, notice how the animals respond, and continue to experiment. And sit with the discomfort that we’re not really in control. Amplified by the discomfort of farming neighbours watching us who like sitting on their hands even less.

We’re not complacent about carbon by the way, expecting that increased biodiversity in our soils will do all the work. We are making a strategic choice. The new government plans to decarbonise the electricity supply, so in addition to our focus on land, we plan to focus on decarbonising heating, and insulating the buildings rather than putting up more solar panels,. This is the straightforward but not unimportant part of regenerative work: maintaining business viability, at the same time as improving it.

In the conventional economy, data is collected in order to manage risks, to reduce costs and illuminate opportunities. Data collection is related most closely to maintaining, accumulating and accelerating the flows of finance, not to enhancing life or wealth in the round. The engine of this conventional economy, the profit-making business, is concerned with survival in competitive markets, its licence to operate, growth, and producing returns for investors. The business is at the centre of its universe.

A Copernican revolution

By contrast, a regenerative economy, an economy that is premised on us human beings seeing ourselves bound up with Nature demands nothing less than a revolution in this thinking. Of the same order as Copernicus proving that it was the Sun not the Earth at the centre of our solar system. That’s becoming clear to us.

In this new regenerative universe, the business is ousted from the centre, and replaced by its stakeholders. The business has transcended its ‘ego’. Its survival and growth is no longer the compelling objective. It takes its place in the world like every other living thing that has a lifespan and a season. Thriving and financial growth are a consequence of a healthy business ecology, not the sole driving focus. Growth becomes ‘wealth’, from weal in old English, meaning ‘the best for someone or something’. The role of business is transformed from accumulating wealth for itself, into convening and facilitating the best for its whole stakeholder system while holding in mind the regenerative value it can uniquely bring to its beneficiaries.

In fact, it’s role could be described as serving a ‘value-adding process for all stakeholders’ such that each can grow their own life-enhancing capabilities and express more of what gives them life and meaning. After all, a regenerative business is not an island: it cannot claim to be regenerative unless all is regenerating around it. For their turn, each stakeholder is invited to invest in a wealth-creating process for them all, while the business commits itself to do what it can uniquely do well to fulfil its purpose, in whichever place, or places it operates.

What does this commitment mean for the Wilderness? Our stakeholders are Nature around us, our wider Forest community and bioregion, our Co-creators (our people, our suppliers, our contractors) our Investors, and of course our Beneficiaries, the range of people who come here to learn and enjoy the place. What we can uniquely do, our essence as a business if you like, is to build people’s capacity for ecological literacy. We can reawaken their role in bringing thriving to Nature and thereby to ourselves, wherever they live, school or work. It’s a work in progress and always will be.

Systemic effects

We’re proud of where we’ve got to, but we are only on the first rung of the ladder. The data that would tell us we are on track with other stakeholders is glaringly absent. At our community open day in August we will meet the Forest Food Network, and hope to take an important next step. We will explore together the wider effect we might create together across the Forest region. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could feed all those who come to the Wilderness from food produced locally, including from our allotment garden. And at the same time through our alliance with local growers, lift up all local food production in a way that regenerates, rather than depletes our soils?

The schematic below we’ve found helpful. It was developed by a regenerative business practitioner colleague Beatrice Ungard. On the far left you have ‘systemic effects’. One such effect, or ‘end state’, could be a regenerative local food economy in the Forest that is so integrated that it has the capacity to keep evolving its role in creating ‘wealth’ for the Forest. But what could be the signs to look for that we’re approaching this state? If they were inspired by having an end state vision, we hope that Food Forest Network members might ‘run the movie’ of this regenerative food system in their heads and decide together what those signs would be, the data that would indicate the healthy food system we should be looking for. And it won’t happen by itself. As Beatrice’s schematic shows; there’s a plan to be putting in place.

**How to think about what data will measure the effects of regenerative business**
*Courtesy Beatrice Ungard, Regenesis Group*

Guided by the end state movie, members will need to develop new skills (new ‘ableness’), new ways of thinking, new business models. Only then can we know what is meaningful data to track at the individual organisation level, because at that stage each business will know both the big picture and what capabilities it needs to grow in order to develop its unique value-adding role. My particular beef at the Wilderness is changing the measure of what children value as a good breakfast: taking away the option of comforting but sugar-packed cereals and toasted white bread and jam and keeping the fruit option and local boar bacon or boar sausage rolls. Maybe having local yoghurt and nuts too. But that’s just me. And I’m jumping the gun.

Philosophically this approach is a world away from ESG, the measure the corporate world looks to in order to have a more positive impact and be a better option for investors. ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) is the collective term for a business's impact on the environment and society, as well as how robust and transparent its governance is in its leadership, executive pay, audits, internal controls, and shareholder rights.

Gathering data as development

In this universe, data is collected in fragments: employee surveys, environmental audits, human rights assessments. It may be well intended, but if you look again at Beatrice’s diagram, there is no systemic aim for all this data gathering that would tie it together for a collective regenerative purpose. Without a systemic end state in mind for the human communities, organisations and ecological systems a business operates within and has an impact on, there is not a chance of building the capacity of these communities or ecological systems to keep regenerating themselves. The business is again at the centre, floating in its profit-making bubble managing the inconvenience of the impacts of making money, and unable to see the financial economy as a wholly dependent subset tethered within wider nature that makes all life and wealth possible. Strong ESG ratings are only rated as important if they are linked to financial performance. That tells you all you need to know.

If however, we could lift up the purpose of ESG to serve a wider aim, and as in the case of the thistle, see data gathering as a learning process as much as a number to grasp and settle on, then its role could be a transformational one. It’s good to be reminded of Goodhart's law, warning of unintended consequences of non-systemic thinking: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".[1]

The next blog will look at metrics in a regenerative economy from the perspective of the ‘bioregion’.