In this series we are focusing on empowering individuals and communities to create a world where we all have the capacity to thrive, flourish. to be and feel healthy on a planet with a vibrant and healthy biosphere and life support systems. 

In this episode, I am going to talk about the biggest mistake I see people making when they want to be environmentally sustainable, take climate action and even change their diets. 

This will lead to the next episode where I start showing you a powerful technique, based on systems thinking, so that you can take transformative over incremental action to create the world you want.  

Now you might think that environmental issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, over use of resources and changing our diets are quite different things and you would be right and wrong. 

What do these things have in common? They are systemic problems. But there is also a lot of similar messaging and emotions that happen both around the majority of dieting and environmental sustainability efforts. 

This episode is going to look at the conventional approaches, and learn about why they don’t work. 

This episode is the first in a new series. This new series is going to focus on empowering individuals and communities to create the systemic transformation we need, so that that we all have the capacity to thrive, flourish on a planet with a vibrant and healthy biosphere and life support systems. 

Although some of the themes running through this series are fundamental in nature and are topics that underpin many aspects of our lives and societies, I am focusing on food, building human scale food systems. After all, food is the basis of our lives, our health, our relationships with each other, and with life on Earth, and every single one of us plays a role in food systems every day. 

So the focus of this series is to give you, a powerful approach to reimagine and build abundant, healthy, resilient, sustainable food and living systems you want and need. There are a few reasons why, I am showing you an approach rather than a series of steps…

The first is illustrated by this quote by Buckminster Fuller ““You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” 

We as individuals cannot easily change the predominant neoliberal, globalized, competitive economic system that is driving so many of our health, ecological, and equity challenges, but we can build a new model or many new models that replace it. 

The other big reason is that when it comes to issues of ecological sustainability and food systems, or even many other solutions to complex, interconnected problems, there is no single, one right solution. As individuals we all have different bodies, histories, cultures, lifestyles, we live in different locations and what is sustainable for one person or place is not for another. But there are universal underlying principles. 

The last one is that we live in a world where many of us are pulled too many different ways, in our lives. We are bombarded with content telling us various tips and lists to accomplish improvements in our lives for example 10 steps to reduce waste, cut your climate impact, lose weight, ditch sugar …..you get the picture and from my own experience these approaches leave you scattered, overwhelmed and stuck and once again they do not create the change we want. 

So what are some of the themes on this series? Since we are creating a world where we as individuals and communities have the capacity to thrive, flourish, to be and feel healthy and live to our full potential, we need to dig right down to the fundamentals. So we will be talking about what it takes for we humans to thrive and flourish, we are going to look at both the symptoms of our predicament as well as take a look at the underlying limits, we are going to talk about how we, see ourselves, our relationship with ourselves and nature, as well as limits, systems and structures. 

In a way we are creating a vision of the world we want, where we are now and what resources we have available to us and then learning about the strategies, skills and action to get us where we want to go. 

On this episode I want to talk about my (Dr. Tara Naylor's) own background, and how and where my ideas and beliefs around transforming our lives and societies from where we are, to living an abundant, healthy, thriving life within the limits of Earth’s biosphere. I am also going to talk a bit about why I think the future is in our hands, the everyday people to create the systems we need.  

I am not going to tell you my whole story, but just the parts that have really shaped my thinking and actions. Some of my biggest, aha moments have come from talking to other people, often very unexpected people who have asked a question or pointed something out to me that really got me thinking. Some of these questions have stayed with me for years, even decades. 

Hello and welcome to another episode of flourishing within planetary boundaries, with your host Dr. Tara Naylor. Today, I am talking about a topic that drives me crazy and that is the word and concept of sustainability. 

Because.. when it comes to the health and wellbeing of people and planetary living systems, words, images, and emotions matter. 

Then I plan to shift to an idea and term that is much more inspiring and empowering and that is regeneration. 

I tell you a story about the answers to the questions "How does the project contribute to reducing the impact of climate change?" Or “How does this project contribute to a sustainable environment?“ from some construction projects I worked on and what that meant for my own relationship with the concept of sustainability.

 All too often this term is used to highlight a few small things a person or organization has done, while ignoring the really big systemic issues. It has become this warm and fuzzy term that signifies improvement to environmental performance 

Now, when you look up the terms sustainable and sustainability in various online dictionaries, there are quite a few definitions but generally the main meanings seem to be related to 

1.    the ability to be maintained at a certain level or rate

2.    the avoidance of depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance. 

I don’t know about you but I certainly do not find those inspiring words or definitions to change my life. If you were to ask someone what they want to do with their lives, I would bet that most people wouldn’t say I want to sustain myself. No, as people we want to grow and be inspired and do something with our lives. 

In 2021 during the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 26), I was doing my autumn garage clean-up and listening to CBC radio.  The program was interviewing people in the Canadian fossil fuel energy industry about the impacts of an energy transition in response to climate change. 

The more I listened the more pissed off I became, the sustainability they were talking about seemed to be more about sustaining business as usual rather than any other meaning. 

I know that many people who use the term sustainable or sustainability do genuinely care about the health of our planet’s biosphere but for others it is a feel-good term that helps to assuage the guilt they feel for a highly consumptive lifestyle. 

So the big questions I have for anyone who uses this term to ask and think about are:

·       What are we sustaining and for how long?

·       What is our end goal and when are we going to achieve it?

·       How do we measure sustainability?

Because depending on  the answers to these questions, the results we see and the lives we live may be very different from what we really intend. 

Then Tara goes  back to basics and imagines a world where our human needs are met within the capacity of Earth’s biosphere. 

This where regeneration comes in and what I love about it, because, we have forgotten that we are biological beings that came from and are dependent on life and living systems. 

What I love about regeneration, is that it focuses on life and living systems. After all we are alive, we are complex living systems, and, without healthy living systems there will be no humans. We are all dependent on the air, water and food that living systems produce. 

On this episode I,  Dr. Tara Naylor is talking about building resilience into our energy and food systems. 

The topics that are being explored are: 

• What resilience is, in this context, 
• Why it is important and
• What some of the characteristics of resilient systems are. 

I also want to talk about some of the ideas that excited me as a young engineer on the food and energy front. I also plan to discuss some of our key challenges going forward and some of the ways we can face them to have the best chance of successfully navigating them.

This is a topic that I think about daily. Where I live, we have been through a winter with multiple disruptions on the electricity supply front. In fact, many of my notes for this episode have been written with my headlamp on my head, as our power is out due to a storm. 

On the food front, I have been working on my own food sovereignty and security for quite a few years now. Partly because I want to have the right to choose what goes into my body and where it came from, but also because I want to make sure I always have access to the food I want and need. 

So what is resilience in this context? Resilience is simply the ability of an ecosystem, species or other system to absorb a disturbance and still retain its basic function, structure or identity. 

There is a slightly different definition I found for community resilience and that is the ability of the community to absorb the effects of shocks and stresses and to recover rapidly to a better condition than they were in before. 

Just think about some of our key human systems like water systems, energy systems, transportation systems, food systems, communication systems. What would life be like, particularly in a city if any or several of these systems failed? We have all seen the fear and panic buying that has happened on food, bottled water, toilet paper, batteries, gasoline and generators either in anticipation of a big storm or after one or when the global pandemic started taking hold in 2020. 

So what are the characteristics of resilient systems? Because some of these characteristics are opposite to the way our major economics and other key systems are structured today AND, in some cases, they are opposite to the way some climate and sustainability actions are unfolding. 

This episode discusses our bodies’ connections to their environments and reconnecting to nature through food.
I talk about some of my own experiences of feeling disconnected after a relatively short period of time in urban and suburban environments. This disconnection, leaves me wondering what effect does living in some urban and suburban environments do to people for the long term. Especially as our world has become more urbanized? Because we human have so many connections to our environments. 

With so many people living in environments that are so disconnected to life beyond humans what does that mean for the mental and physical health of people living in those environments. 

I take a quick look at the way we humans are connected to the environment, through the air we breathe, the food and drink we consume, through our microbiome, our eyes and skin. 

But the predominant paradigm is that we are separate from nature.  This can be clearly seen through many of our human structures and institutions. All I have to do is drive to many newly built developments, even in a small town to see that nature and its importance to our lives is not valued, it is seen as a luxury. 

The big problem with all of this is that we are completely dependent on the life support systems provided to us be nature. So how do we start working our way back? When so many people live in these urban spaces, that are so disconnected from nature, how do we build these connections? 

With food of course? Most of us cannot easily affect change in city planning and design or even the design of our workspaces. But we do eat, for most of us, we eat many times a day. For me this is the connection point. From my own perspective, I may have been connected to the nature around me on some level, but what drew me in completely was food. By connecting more deeply with food, not just a consumer, I have come to learn and become completely engaged with the whole process of food. 

On today’s episode I want to talk about reconnecting the food cycle. When it comes to food, we spend so much time talking about what food we eat, and how that food is grown, that we miss the bigger picture connections. But, the fact is that if you want to eat food that is nutritious and tasty, then the whole food cycle matters. If you want to solve problems like food waste, energy and resource use in our food systems, then the whole food cycle matters. 
What I am illustrating is that where and how we interact with our food or food systems, through buying, collecting, trading, foraging for example ultimately affects things like the nutrition profile of your food, the relationship you have with growers, the packaging, the taste, flavour and waste generated. Each part is connected to the others in different ways. 

A few years ago, I embodied this idea into a framework that I call Dr. Tara’s Food for Flourishing Framework or Dr Tara’s Regenerative Food Framework. It is a visual framework for creating healthy food systems within planetary boundaries. The framework is two rings around an inner circle, but it all started with the food cycle. I will put a diagram in the transcript of the show. 

On this episode, I am talking about creating the world we want, with imperfect action. 
We are going to talk about my own process to create this as well as common challenges and mistakes we make. 
 
 It is no secret that my own vision, is to create a world, where we all have the capacity to thrive, flourish, to be and feel healthy, and have the capacity to live to our full potential, on a planet with abundant, thriving living systems. This vision is summarized by the phrase flourishing within planetary boundaries. 

But how to create this? Because it is clear to me, that we cannot rely on governments and large corporations, to create this for us.  

So where do we start? I have my own four-part process to do this, with my steps being:

1.  Imagining and visioning the “world” we want
2. Grounding our vision to reality, this is the limits and constraints
3. Learning from the wisdom around us 
4. Creating and living the transformation

I have talked a bit about the first three parts in other episodes, but today, we are focusing on creating, and living the transformation, and that, is where imperfect action come in. 

Now if you are anything like me, I have a challenge with the imperfect part of action. I always have this clear vision of how I want things to be, what the end result will be like. I want my action, my plans to be perfect. But I have come to learn that life, is not always as we imagine it will be. I have also learned, that this is often a good thing, because it allows for wonderful surprises, and outcomes to happen, that we could not even imagine. This is the challenge, and also the exciting part, of creating the world we want. This is also the challenge of taking any form of health or environmental action, there is no such thing as a one size fits all product or solution. 

One of the biggest challenges, when it comes to creating this world where we can all flourish on this finite planet, is that there is no, one size fits all approach. There might be certain elements or attributes we need, but how our models and systems perform is dependent on the place, people, events and circumstances involved. We cannot easily predict the outcome until we try and do something, there are just too many variables to consider.  Especially when it comes to the complex, self-organizing systems we encounter as humans and in nature. 

On this episode, we are going to dive into Nature’s strategies for abundant, healthy, resilient, ecologically sustainable food. 

I have had my frustrations with food and food systems since I was a teenager, the concerns at that time were food colourings and additives, and later I had concerns about animal welfare in industrial farms. In university, I added the equity of people around the world to the list, as well as the environmental impacts associated with food systems. And my frustrations have been growing over the years, the more our food is being messed about with. Frankly, I just want simple foods that are grown and prepared with the health and wellbeing of the customer, the people and animals involved in the food systems, and the health of biodiversity, and nature’s cycles in mind. 

Here is a quote I found that sums it up for me. This quote was made by Gerda Verburg during the 2021 Food for Earth: 24 hour global marathon for sustainability. The quote says “A healthy Earth is the foundation for life in general, and healthy food is the foundation for a healthy life.”

A few years ago I went back to first principles to develop a framework to distill my own thoughts on the key parts and connections of food and food systems. My own framework came from observations of nature and my own body, revisiting ecology textbooks; growing, storing, processing, preparing and eating food, as well as reading and listening to action-taking visionaries. 

My framework is a visual representation for me, of how to create abundant, healthy, resilient ecologically sustainable food systems. One of the key parts of this framework are six strategies that all work together to produce this outcome. The six strategies in no particular order are: local, seasonal, variety and diversity, low input, whole and finally, enjoyable. These strategies are pretty simple,. BUT, the difference between the majority of our human systems and nature, is that humans tend to pick one or two of these strategies, whereas nature uses all six strategies at once. If we are going to create abundant, healthy, resilient, sustainable food systems we too, need to learnt to use all six strategies at once.