Flourishing within Planetary Boundaries

Today’s topic is creating healthy people and planet from the bottom up. This episode is in response to the biggest mistake I see people making when they want to be sustainable, take climate action and even change their diets. 

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 dieting and environmental sustainability efforts. 

The fact is, that if we want to make meaningful change and deal with these issues we have to change the approach. 

My approach to challenging problems is not unique but it has allowed me to solve many challenging problems in different work environments where other people with much higher levels of technical expertise have stumbled. 

I want to start off by talking about the conventional approach to many problems but particularly environmental sustainability, including climate impacts, and also food and dieting approaches. 

This is essentially the top down approach. To explain this we are going to talk about four common strategies used, what they are and later I am going to explain why these are doomed to fail. 

This is why, if we want to address big issues like our personal health, collective health, and ecological impacts we must change our approach, to a bottom-up approach. 

This episode is about “transforming ourselves and our world with food” 

When I talk about food and transformation to some people, they automatically think about those before and after weight loss pictures. This is not what I am talking about, I am talking about something much bigger and deeper. 

In this episode I am going talk about why I think changing our food and food systems can change the world, and why this change will come from the actions of individuals, and communities; and finally I am going to tell you a bit about my own journey with food. 

I always like to start with my vision rather than the problems. My own big vision is that everyone has the capacity to thrive, flourish, to be and feel healthy, and have the capacity to live to their full potential on a planet with abundant, thriving, living systems. 

But our existing economies, food and energy systems are not structured to provide this. In fact, I believe that the only way we can create thriving, healthy, lives on this planet is to create nourishing resilient human-scale food systems that reconnect us to one another and our living planet"

 This episode is really about setting the scene on what flourishing within planetary boundaries is all about. 

This is the show where we embrace the real physical limits that exist on this planet, and learn how to work with them, to create thriving and flourishing people, communities, and ecosystems. 

All to often when it comes to planetary health, we talk in symptoms for example climate change is a symptom as is biodiversity loss and deforestation. For me they are symptoms that our key human systems and aspirations are not designed for a living finite planet. 

The common mindset in today’s day and age is that we humans can overcome any limits. Many people have this complete faith that there is a magic technology or technological solutions that will solve all our problems. For me this is the same as a superhero flying in and rescuing us from our problems, but this is not going to happen. In fact, these beliefs disempower us from getting stuck in and creating the world we want ourselves. 

Although I believe that we have only scratched the surface of our human potential in so many ways, the fact is that we are bounded by physical limits and universal laws. 

Today, I am going to dive into the calculation and physical limit that really transformed my own thinking and life and that is the space that we have. 

When you get right down to it there is only one Earth and although it is really obvious in some ways, it is also something we forget. We can’t make the Earth any bigger and we can’t just hop off to another planet to get some more room.  

And when you really stop to think about it, this is biggest limit we have, the size of the Earth. We might talk about economic growth. We might talk about energy. This is the absolute limit. This is the space we have. As the human population has, has grown, this means there's less for each one of us. And when I first started thinking about this and did the math, it completely shifted how I operate, how I think about things, how I think about what a good life is, what it really means to me.