Inspiration for A Sustainable Living

“The concept of sustainability encompasses not only environment but also poverty, population, health, food security, democracy, human rights and peace.”

Inspiration for a sustainable living will be promoted by Straagaarden with the following three goals:

  • To learn and deepen awareness of sustainable issues and realities.
  • To reflect on our modes of living, renewing these toward sustainability.
  • To empower each other to take concrete action to resolve the issues we face.

According to future reseacher Andrew Zolli, all resilient living systems do four things concurrently:

First, they build regenerative capacity –  they build the kinds of capacities that continually renew the system. In a community, this might be measured in terms of the creative capacity of its citizens, or its level of education or entrepreneurship. Building this kind of capacity is a slow and often invisible process, but it is essential because these are the kinds of capacities that are drawn on when things go wrong.

A second thing resilient systems and people do is listen for change. While not every surprise can be predicted, the very act of designing a system to listen for change is an essential capacity for resilience. This is not merely a matter of signal detection, but of creating a whole ecosystem of detection, analysis and understanding, and acting on such signals.

The third thing resilient systems and people do is respond to disruption. The most resilient responses to a disruption are rarely predetermined and bureaucratic; rather, they are what Andrew Zolli calls adhocratic–improvised, creative and collaborative.

The fourth thing that resilient, living systems do, is learning and transformation. In the aftermath of a disruption, the system learns to better protect itself against the risk to which it was exposed, or it is transformed so that it is no longer vulnerable to that risk at all.
Straagaarden will embody all four areas. We will build regenerative capacity. We will listen for change. We will respond to disruption. And we will continuously be learning and transformating ourselves.