Perin L.Z. Ruttonsha
PART 1. The Triple Nature of Sustainability
This workshop is part 1 of a nine part series.
Sustainability is a contemporary field and movement, as well as a long-standing process, wherein human communities, societies, and civilisations have been learning to adapt to complex planetary social-ecological systems, across space and time. Some would say it is an old wisdom: “For most people in most human communities since the dawn of time, the main earthly objective was to continue” (Gibson et al., 2005, p. 39). As a contemporary international agenda, we have identified critical targets for immediate action (United Nations, 2015a, 2015b); whereas, as a long-range process, we are working to reverse path-dependent trajectories of growth and development that were initiated hundreds to thousands of years prior, with a view to the wellbeing of at least seven generations into the future, and without a clear sense of how ecological, social, cultural, economic, political, and technological systems will evolve.
In this respect, we can adopt a multilevelled approach in facilitating global sustainability transition, which I refer to as the first, second, and third nature of sustainability; or, in other words, first-, second-, and third-order sustainability. This terminology reflects cybernetic thinking (see Glanville, 2015), yet inverts its logic, to connote a first-principles view of social-ecological systems regeneration. In short, (iii) the third order comprises responses to immediate and critical risks and challenges; (ii) the second order entails considering long historical and future trajectories of change; and, (i) the first order involves analyses of planetary social-ecological systems complexities and evolution.
Finally, while sustainability targets and indicators remain important as a means by which to mobilise and track progress towards shared goals, the broader endeavour of global transition reflects a repatterning of our own human ecology and eco-social-psychology, within planetary systems.
A Quest for Roots—Pluralising Processes of Deep Scaling for Regenerative Sustainability
Global sustainability transition is inherently complex. Further to this, we could argue that the emerging paradigm and era of regenerative sustainability is being catalysed in response to increasing complexification across interconnected, co-evolving, planetary, social, and ecological systems. As such, profiling, mapping, and analysing relationships among the domains of sustainability, complexity, and evolution, while also integrating concepts and methods therefrom, is essential as a strategy by which to facilitate cross-scale systems transformation, and deepen relationships among people, people, and planet.
The nine exploratory themes to follow are intended to capture the history and essence of regenerative sustainability as a paradigm and era, and also predicate new approaches to scholarship, innovation, governance, and community action, which are pluralistic, systemic, relational, adaptive, and evolutionary: (1) the triple nature of sustainability; (2) integrative knowledge; (3) problem framing and knowledge structuring; (4) cycles of transformation; (5) the age of planetary complexity; (6) structure, function, composition; (7) science, society, spirituality; (8) a quest for roots; and (9) form, matter, process, meaning.
Deconstructing challenges and opportunities for global sustainability transition, as these extend from planetary social-ecological systems complexities, these themes are designed to envision diverse principles, parameters, processes, patterns, and pathways for systems change, and by which to facilitate deep scaling for regenerative sustainability, across multiple sectors, phases, layers, levels, and scales. In this workshop, participants will apply these themes as pertaining to a select subject of study.
Keywords: regenerative sustainability, scaling deep, social-ecological-technological systems complexity