What Data Do We Need for the Green Economy?
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
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’.
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.