When it comes to regenerative design, it’s not just where we make but also where we take that matters.
For the last two decades, engineers (and other humans) have become more conscious of reducing their impact. Of how energy efficient our buildings are. Of reducing pollution from our sites into the surrounding environment.
These are ways of reducing our impact where we build buildings and infrastructure. In the places where we make.
(more…)Restorative and regenerative are two words I am hearing used interchangeably. Both are relevant to engineering and design. Both are approaches to design that are valuable. But they need differentiating.
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Yesterday a council contractor rode up and down our street spraying weed killer on the pavements, grass and tree pits. I was dumbstruck. This is the biodiversity crisis manifesting literally on my doorstep. And at the same time double standards. Here you have a council that has led the way in the UK in declaring both climate and ecological emergencies. All the while its contractors are spraying weedkiller on its streets. For me this encapsulates the fundamental challenge of the ecological crisis: we understand at some high level that something must be done but we can’t translate that into what a thriving ecosystem looks like.
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Planting parking spaces is a dismal affair.
When you water them, the water just drains away.
The rich soil underneath is capped.
Parking spaces don’t flower; don’t make nectar, don’t produce fruit that we can eat.
Insects stay away; birds fly over.
Never do they grow, rise up from the ground, spread their branches to oxygenate the air.
No one returns in 30 years time and says I planted that parking space.
No generation thanked the last for planting more.
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The biodiversity emergency requires us to change how we value and relate to the ecosystems that support us.
Values shift when we change our habits. Habits are the rituals and routines that form part of an organisation’s culture. Work the habits to shift the culture.
We see it in Toyota’s Improvement Kata, which uses habit to reinforce behaviours around improvement, adaptation and innovation. We see it in the ‘safe-start’ procedure used for meetings in safety-critical industries.
And so I’m wondering what might be questions that we might routinely ask each other of our projects in organisations that have declared a biodiversity emergency?
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For my birthday this week my partner Mary gave me Alistair Humphreys’s inspirational book ‘Microadventures’. According to Humphreys, a microadventure is an adventure that is short, simple, local, cheap – yet still fun, exciting, challenging, refreshing and rewarding. Last night I undertook my first mission – to go and sleep under the stars in the garden. As adventures go this reads as really not very challenging at all, but I was surprised by how unorthodox it felt.
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