Eiffel Over

Tag: CommunityResilience

  • Make hay while the wind blows

    Make hay while the wind blows. Riffing on yesterday’s theme of power, a few weeks ago as storm winds tore across the UK, I was kept awake by the sound of the plastic sheeting slapping against the scaffolding on the front of our house. 

    And I found myself wondering, what is the wind analogy to making hay while the sun shines? It’s an incantation to seize the moment and make the most of an opportunity while it lasts. And of course, we already harness wind power. I presume a lot more energy is generated on a stormy night.

    But like any abundance in nature, the wind doesn’t distribute its power evenly. It comes in surges. It’s a fleeting opportunity. 

    Storm’s blowing, quick—boil a kettle! Pump some water uphill! These were my middle-of-the-night musings.

    Eventually, my thoughts drifted to a memory from 2024: cycling along Loch Awe, near Oban. After a long day cycling in heavy winds, we reached a campsite in Dalavich that was attached to a well-equipped community centre. It had a restaurant and bar with a deck overlooking the lake, games rooms with pool and table tennis and excellent washing and cooking facilities.

    But it wasn’t just for tourists—the local community was in there too, enjoying the space. Curious, I wanted to know more about how this facility had been paid for, and it turns out that it gets funds from the community owned wind turbine at the top of the hill. 

    Brilliant, I thought: community energy, harvesting a local abundant resource—the wind—and reinvesting the money into the community.

    I suppose on gale-force nights, the drinks are on the house?

  • Seeing the latent potential

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    As Rob Hopkins points out in his wonderful book From What Is to What If, the climate crisis is, at its core, a crisis of the imagination. If we can’t envision a thriving world, we won’t be able to create it.

    A key skill in regenerative design is cultivating the conditions that allow us to imagine this thriving future.

    This requires us to not only see what exists but also to imagine what could be. For example, looking at an empty park and envisioning it full of people running (as highlighted in yesterday’s post), or standing on a traffic-filled street and picturing it so quiet that birdsong fills the air and people stop to chat.

    In these cases, the elements are already present—they are latent. But to unlock this latent potential, we must recognise both the desertified present and the abundant possibilities. Only then can we begin to design the next step toward that vision.

    Equipping ourselves for this imaginative work is, I believe, a critical part of becoming a regenerative designer.

    Hopkins, R., 2019. From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT.

  • From no run to park run

    A few days ago, Parkrun turned 20 years old. What started as a simple community gathering, launched by Paul Sinton-Hewitt on October 2nd, 2004, has grown into a global sports phenomenon with over 7 million registered participants. It began as a way for people to come together and socialise, and it’s evolved into so much more.

    I’m an occasional Parkrunner myself, showing up every now and then to run the 5km loop at my local park. And I often wonder: what would all these people have been doing otherwise? Twenty years ago, at 9am on a Saturday, this park might’ve had a handful of runners. Today, hundreds gather to run.

    To me, Parkrun is a story of what happens when something unlocks the potential in a system, creating abundance where there was once scarcity. Where there were only a few runners, now there are many. Where people might have spent their Saturday mornings passively at home, now they’re out in the fresh air, moving, connecting, and engaging with their community.

    What’s remarkable about Parkrun is that it’s powered by volunteers—ordinary people who freely give their time to make these events possible. This time and energy were always there, untapped, waiting for an outlet. Parkrun created that structure, unlocking this latent resource.

    In many ways, this is the essence of regenerative design: seeing potential abundance in situations that seem scarce. Parkrun didn’t introduce new people or new resources into these communities; it simply provided a framework that allowed people to organize and engage. The potential was always there—it just needed to be brought to life.

  • Desertification versus dessertification

    Desertification = a real word that refers to the process where fertile land becomes desert, typically due to drought, deforestation, or poor land management. It can also be used more broadly to describe when a population of living things becomes so small that it struggles to sustain itself.

    Dessertification = a word I’ve just made up to describe an abundance of cake.

    Yesterday I talked about overfishing leaving fish populations so sparse that they can barely survive. When a population is reduced to such small numbers, it may become almost invisible. The creatures that remain may live in small, isolated pockets that are vulnerable to disease, and don’t benefit from much genetic variation. Such populations are on the brink of local extinction. 

    But populations in a desertified state can slowly come back into a state of thriving. One way to help them do this is by finding ways to connect together isolated pockets. Connecting to smaller populations creates a larger one with the potential for greater genetic variation, and the ability to move further should environmental conditions change. Both of these increase the resilience of the population. 

    Here I am going to leap from talking about fish to butterflies and people.

    When I first visited Hazel Hill Wood in 2008, it was to take part in a butterfly conservation activity. Our task was creating open corridors through the wood that would allow populations of butterflies living on either side of the wood to mix. As we were told, butterflies don’t like flying through dense, dark, cold woodland. So the wood was effectively a barrier between these two populations. But creating wide openings in the wood lets sunlight in and provides a pathway that the butterflies can follow. Connecting the populations builds their resilience, and today the wood is rich with a wide range of species of butterflies fluttering by. 

    Doing the work of conservation also brings people together. During Covid, the wood was a place where people come together, out of isolation, to form community and build resilience. 

    It is pleasing to think that this work of countering desertification, be that of butterflies or sense of community, is fuelled at tea time by an abundance of cake. Dessertification indeed.

  • Plenty more fish in the sea

    Yesterday’s post on the fish écluses on the Île de Ré speaks to the idea of creating straightforward connections between the resources that humans need to live and thrive. 

    As engineers (and other humans) we need to find ways to harvest the materials and energy we need in balance with what the living and mineral world can sustain. So to help us understand how this can work I’m sharing Donella Meadows’s example of fish stocks to help see how humans can live as part of a sustainable system of supply.

    Meadows’s model concerns the local fish population in an area of sea. Left to its own devices, the fish population is stable because there is only so much food to go around. Too many fish, less food per fish, some fish die. Too few fish, more food per fish, they reproduce more. This feedback loop stays in equilibrium around a mean.

    Now, the local fishing fleet gets involved. By harvesting a small number of fish, the population goes down, increasing the reproduction rate of the remaining fish, and the population returns to what it was. Fish too much, however, and the fish are further apart. Fish that are further apart take longer to reproduce! And so for a while, there are few fish, the nets are empty and the boats go back to port. During this time the fish population recovers, and eventually the boats can go back to sea.

    This simplified model beautifully illustrates how humans can harvest what they need while still living within the ecosystem’s limits.  The key characteristics here are a living system that regenerates itself – the fish; and a feedback loop between supply and those doing the harvest. Simply, when the catch is too low, the boats go home. 

    This feedback loop between supply and harvesting is what interests us in regenerative design. It is what allows us to harvest abundance, and even create abundance, all while living within the ecosystem’s limits. 

  • Stone circles on the beach

    Hundreds of years ago, the inhabitants of the Île de Ré, just off France’s Atlantic coast, developed an ingenious way to catch fish. At low tide, they built large stone circles, say 20 metres or more in diameter, and formed by a rock wall about 50cm high. At high tide these stone circles are completely submerged. But as the tide falls, water remains trapped in them, and so do the fish swimming in that water. At low tide the water eventually drains out of the walls, leaving the fish lying on the beach, for the local fishers to just pick up.

    These stone circles, or ‘écluses’ in French, were very effective in providing a local food supply. So much so that during the Napoleonic Wars, recruiting officers for the army tried to destroy the walls in an attempt to starve the local population and force them into joining the army. Later, the owners of commercial fishing fleets sought to have them shut down as they proved a risk to their own market domination.

    Through a regenerative lens, in this example we see:

    • A local population connected to a local source of supply. 
    • A low-tech method for harvest that the community itself can build and adapt.
    • The resilience that local supply can provide (and therefore why the army and larger commercial operations sought to remove it).
    • A scale of operation that is necessarily limited – they can only harvest fish that swim over the beach; there’s literally plenty more fish in the sea. This is in contrast to the super trawlers that can take far more than their fair share.

    Community, ecology, supply and resilience. These are the sorts of stacked, multiple benefits that we are seeking to create through regenerative design.

    Today, groups of volunteers are protecting and rebuilding the walls. Perhaps for posterity. And, or, perhaps they see a time in the future when harvesting in this way may return stacked, multiple benefits to their community and ecosystem.