The third and final session of SSV's Sustainability 101 Series met August 11, 2011 at Lucas Hall on the Santa Clara University campus.  "Regenerative Capitalism and Regional Resiliency: Creating Solutions at the Scale of the Challenge" took participants further into systems thinking to consider the concepts of our traditional capitalism (what Marianna Grossman defined as "exploitative") against a type that would give value to externalities like waste and consider the whole product life cycle, providing needed products and services without the depletion and over-consumption we are so familiar with (the "regenerative" type referred to in the class title).  

As before, there was a quick review of “the long-term distant abstract emergency” that is climate change, before the discussion delved into examples of what some companies are doing to address the issues.  “Externalities” make it easy to obscure complexity but does not remove it--they should be called  “unaccounted-for costs."  For example, the cost of fossil energy doesn’t include the “externalities” of the environmental cost, the military cost, etc. (For a quick history of our relationship with fossil fuels, find the "300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds" video on EcoCloud). Very large companies and reinsurance firms know this and have ways of assigning values to liability from carbon debt, product toxicity and conflict.  The world needs globally accepted accounting procedures for resource and climate risks and impacts.

At a broader level, attendees were invited to consider the economies of "More" VS "Enough."  This spurred a good discussion of whose "enough" do we achieve--an American "enough" or a Chinese "enough" or . . .?  

Some big companies are trying to make the transition to a regenerative economy by having an inclusive focus, long term vision, life cycle consideration, fair allocation of resources, and local sourcing for labor, energy, water and materials, but it is a big challenge to change the way an entire economy works, and is that scale of change possible?  Consider smoking and not wearing seat belts--while those are smaller issues, what a broad shift has happened with habits that were once commonplace!  

Imagine a world in which products are labeled with ratings for fair labor, chemical use, or life cycle consideration.  Surely that sort of regulation would push companies in the right direction, and surely it is too much to expect that companies would make that sort of decision on their own without laws and policies.  As part of a broader picture, such actions would fix the broken feedback loops and show the true cost of everything.  (Find the Story of Stuff video on EcoCloud to see this concept explored more thoroughly).

Regional Resilience was defined as using local resources, augmenting regional food production, creating a smart infrastructure for water and energy, sharing information and culture locally and globally and investing in education, traning, and research.  An example would be a city updating their Land Use and Transportation Element to reflect those goals.  (Sunnyvale, CA is an example of one city undertaking this task with the Horizon 2035 effort).

As a final thought, Marianna encouraged participants to not be afraid to talk about the issues, or the solutions will be too small.  Think big, think holistically.  All we need to change is everything.