How to Save Our Home
With Options That People Everywhere Want to Adopt
An option allows its user to get more upside than downside as [the user] can select among the results what fits [the user] and forget about the rest.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Our one and only home is on fire.
The Stockholm Resilience Centre has mapped the biosphere’s ecological crisis as the sum of nine planet-scale ecological crises (the “Ecological Crisis”) created by humanity’s “overshoot” of “planetary boundaries” …
People everywhere deciding to adopt simple “regenerative options” for meeting human physical needs …
… deliver simple “regeneration benefits” (in the form of avoided things-we-extract flows and avoided pollution flows) …
… that scale back the things-we-extract flows and pollution flows of the Human Enterprise as a whole …
Scaling back the things-we-extract flows & pollution flows as a whole allows the planet’s biosphere to regenerate itself as a whole …
The planet’s regenerated biosphere reverses the Ecological Crisis as a whole …
… and saves our home as a whole …
Just because a regenerative option delivers regeneration benefits (measured by increased # of species per area or avoided pollution flows) does not mean people will want to adopt it.
If a regenerative option does not meet a human physical need – for food, for water, for heat, for shelter, or for transport – people are not going to want to adopt it.
Similarly, if a regenerative option that meets a human physical need costs more money than a non-regenerative option that meets that same need, people are not going to want to adopt the regenerative option.
If people want to adopt a regenerative option, they need to persuade themselves of two things:
First, they need to persuade themselves that the regenerative option meets a human physical need. In other words, the regenerative option has to work. It has to perform. It has to deliver nutritious food, or drinkable water, or a habitable building, or safe transportation, or usable electric power.
If a regenerative option meets a human physical need, if it works, if it performs, it may be said to deliver “performance benefits.” If a regenerative option does not deliver performance benefits, people are not going to want to adopt it …
People adopting regenerative options that deliver “performance benefits” (for meeting human physical needs) is what keeps intact the things-we-extract flows (in orange) and things-we-use flows (in white) for meeting every human being’s physical needs …
Second, if people want to adopt a regenerative option, they need to persuade themselves that the regenerative option avoids more costs than it incurs. In other words, the regenerative option has to deliver avoided cost savings compared to the non-regenerative option currently in use.
If a regenerative option avoids more costs than it incurs, it may be said to deliver “economic benefits.” If a regenerative option does not deliver avoided cost savings, decision-makers are not going to want to adopt it …
In the words of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a regenerative option that people everywhere want to adopt delivers “more upside than downside” in the form of performance benefits, economic benefits and regeneration benefits …
People everywhere wanting to adopt regenerative options – that deliver “more upside than downside” – scales back the things-we-extract flows & pollution flows and allows the regenerated biosphere to reverse the Ecological Crisis as a whole.
If you can find a simpler process – usable by people everywhere – for reversing the Ecological Crisis and saving our home, please let me know.
My aim – in writing Solving the Eco-crises – is to shift you out of the old paradigm of struggle and into a new paradigm of thinking like, trusting and co-creating with the biosphere for solving and reversing the Ecological Crisis.
Are you ready to get started?
Thank you for reading and aloha!
P.S. I cross-posted this article on Medium for greater reach.