Inspirational books on regenerative theories and practices
Below is a list of books I have read that I have found particularly inspiring. Let me know if you have others I should read.
| Book name | Author(s) | Regenerative topic |
|---|---|---|
| A Finer Future - Creating an Economy in Service to Life | L. Hunter Lovins, Stewart Wallis, Anders Wijkman, John Fullerton | Excellent exposé of the absurdity and inequity of neoclassic economic thinking that ignores the resource limitations of our planet. 8 principles are put forward for a regenerative economic system in service to life. In 2016 Oxfam estimated that 8 people had as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion. Obviously our current financial system is unfair and lacking in values . |
| Doughnut Economics - Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist | Kate Raworth | A brilliant book showing how economics can support life within the limitations of the Planetary Boundaries. Raworth explains that the fixation on GDP is like a cuckoo in the nest, kicking out values and destroying the environment and creating awful injustice. It doesn't have to be like that. |
| Le Phénomène Humain | Teilhard de Chardin SJ (1881 - 1955) | Written in 1936, kept under wraps by the Vatican, this extraordinary book (title translated incorrectly as 'The Phenomenon of Man' creates a unified view of creation and the evolution of human consciousness starting after the big bang. A renowned palaeontologist, and Jesuit visionary, de Chardin observes a consistent pattern in the evolution of matter from sub-atomic particles to spiritual consciousness. The process he calls anthropogenesis. I quote him on the home page. See also the blog. |
| Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth | R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983) | Architect and polymath, R. Buckminster Fuller, another of the Four Wise Men article mentioned above, had a novel take on colonialism driven by pirates. His famous quotation should become the number one Regenerative Mantra: “To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.” Way ahead of his time. |
| A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Conservation and Ecology | Aldo Leopold (1887 - 1948) | Considered by many to be the father of ecology.A biological ethic is a natural limitation on all animal species’ freedom of action, which prevents them from over-exploiting resources on which all life depends. He observed that animals can only run amok when man interferes with ecological ecosystems through over-hunting predators or laying waste to habitats where they had thrived for the economic gain of the few.''To those devoid of imagination, a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.'' Another of the 'Four Wise Men' mentioned above. |
| The Condition Of Man | Lewis Mumford (1895 - 1990) | Mumford asserts that the rise of the machine and the fall of man are two parts of the same process. Machines have become more perfect than ever before, but humans have sunk to inhumane levels. Every gain in power and scientific knowledge has proved potentially dangerous because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline. I wonder what he would have said about AI? The fourth member of the above mentioned Four Wise Men |
| Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges | Otto Scharmer | Insightful transformationist, developed Theory U a group transformation journey which learns to drop assumptions and allow the 'pull of the future' to guide transformation. I joined his online course by the same title hosted by MITx. A valuable approach to co-innovation for a regenerative future. |
| Earth for All - A Survival Guide for Humanity | Club of Rome - Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Owen Gaffney, Jayati Ghosh, Jørgen Randers, Johan Rockström and Per Espen Stoknes. | An amazing book providing scientific evidence for what needs fixing and positive recommendations to meet the challenge. Fundamentally a systems thinking challenge - looking at the whole to understand the knock-on effects, and potential strategies to solve the challenges of injustice, and economics systems change. The Earth4All Model provides data on possible future scenarios. Very enlightening. |
| Limits to Growth - the 30 Year Update | Club of Rome - (Donella Meadows*), Jorgen Randers , Dennis Meadows *died in 2001, but author of the orginal LtG. | Published in 2002, this book provides a 3 year update to the original published in 1972. A new book evaluating the Limits to Growth Limits and Beyond: 50 years on from The Limits to Growth by Bardi, U. & Alvarez Pereira, C. (Eds.) (2022), shows that it is still very relevant. We are still at high risk of reaching overshoot on various planetary boundaries and the computer models used that also feed in to Earth for All. Donella Meadows legacy of deep systems thinking lives on. The new book is next on my list to read. |
| Quakernomics; An Ethical Capitalism | Mike King | The Quakers could be considered the original ethical, regenerative capitalists. Generating profits for the good of all stakeholders, including employees, communities and society. Having read before the histories of Cadburys, Rowntrees and others, I was intrigued with this book, providing a wider history and also clues as to eventual failure. Sadly many of these companies were before their time. We need them now more than ever, to create a fairer and healthier world for all life. |
| Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism | Mariana Mazzucato | Insightful book on the role of government in getting behind JF Kennedy's moonshot and why it worked so well. She also identifies four hostile forces that get in the way of current efforts to create a fairer, healthier society: 1.Short-termism of the financial sector 2. The financialization of business — ( parasitical value extraction fuelling debt — my own words) 3. The climate emergency 4. Slow or absent governments — backsliding governments regarding the UN SDGs. |
| Aldo Leopold | ''Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.'' Leopold highlighted the growing chasm between appreciation of the natural and material consumption. That was way back in 1948. He'd probably be shocked at how low we have sunk. | |
| The Enlightened Capitalists: Cautionary Tales of Business Pioneers who Tried to do Well by Doing Good | James O'Toole | A fascinating look back over our histories in the UK and US of pioneering business founders who put people first, beyond profits. Sadly many businesses have failed to continue as their founders wished. Nevertheless, that is more of a reflection on modern extractive values. |
| Manifesto for a Moral Revolution - Practices to Build a Better World | Jacqueline Novogratz | A book full of wonderful case-stories in Africa and Asia from the founder of a successful impact investor Acumen Organisation - 2001. Jacqueline Novogratz deserves to be canonised, positively impacting the lives of almost a billion poor people, in collaboration with businesses breaking the cycle of poverty. Extremely heartening, demonstrating that business can be a force for good. |
| Regenerative Enterprise - Optimizing for Multi-Capital Abundance | Ethan Roland & Gregory Landua | ''The current global society is organized and controlled primarily through the flow of financial capital, but the survival of any human or society depends primarily on living capital and the material capital that arises from it: food, water, energy, and shelter.'' The authors advocate a broader perspective on capital and define eight types: Social = relationships; Material = non-living physical objects; Financial = money, currency; Living = soil, water, plants, animals, humans, insects etc; Intellectual = ideas, knowledge; Experiential = know-how born of experience; Spiritual = awareness of a greater whole; and Cultural = mores, myths, music, arts; |
| The Regenerative Business: Redesign Work, Cultivate Human Potential, Achieve Extraordinary Outcomes | Carol Sanford | Sanford's decades of inspiring business leaders to create the conditions where employees flourish and grow as purposeful individuals. She cites her work with Seventh Generation, a certified B Corps and how employees unleashed their innate creativity generating rapid growth for the company while protecting future generations and supporting customers, communities, ecosystems and suppliers. It reminded me of Zoho Corporation's Transnational Localism philosophy. |
| Escape from Overshoot: Economics for a Planet in Peril | Peter A. Victor | ''By 2018 the global ecological footprint was exceeding global biocapacity by 75 percent..................Another way of thinking about overshoot is to recognize that each year global biocapacity — the regenerative capacity of the planet — is fully used before the year is over. The day on which this happens is Earth Overshoot Day. '' Main thrust of the book is that to overcome overshoot we must recover and recycle material and develop regenerative agriculture to improve health and reduce waste. Bring the economy back into balance with nature - regenerative vs. extractive. |
| Designing Regenerative Cultures | Daniel Christian Wahl | ''I believe that at the core of the cultural shift that will lead to the emergence of regenerative cultures everywhere is the realization that we are a process of relating in ‘delicate reciprocity’ with a living planet, and that our individual and collective success depend on the health of the whole and the community of life.'' Wahl applies systems thinking and deep questioning to expose what is wrong with the world, and the need for a higher level of consciousness leading to a Regenerative Civilisation. |
| Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today's Crises | Marjorie Kelly | ''In one paradigm, Wall Street is laying plans to begin extracting wealth from ecosystem services through Natural Asset Companies (NACs), a new vehicle announced in 2021 by the New York Stock Exchange and Intrinsic Exchange Group. It’s about “pioneering a new asset class,........Which view will prevail? Water as a human right, a global commons? Or water as a trillion-dollar market opportunity? Scary stuff that most of us are unaware of. It resonates with me in the UK where the water industry's shareholders have taken billions in revenue while happily polluting our rivers. |
| Thinking in Systems - A Primer | Donella H. Meadows | A repeated observation in many of the above books, is the need to think holistically and in systems. Narrow expertise cannot help unless it is part of a collaborative effort to understand entire systems. The famous butterfly effect. Few politicians think in systems and unsurprisingly suffer unintended consequences. As Meadows points out, when it comes to planetary and climate-scale systems negative impacts my surface after it is too late to do anything about them, risking overshoot and dire consequences for humanity. ''The Way Out: Specify indicators and goals that reflect the real welfare of the system. Be especially careful not to confuse effort with result or you will end up with a system that is producing effort, not result. |
| Plunder of the Commons - A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth | Guy Standing | A wakeup call, in his own words: ''About 2 million hectares of public land have been privatised since 1979 – an astonishing 10 per cent of all British land and about half of all the land owned by public bodies four decades ago. This sold land is worth an estimated £400 billion in today’s prices, a spectacular plunder.'' As town and city dwellers, most of us are oblivious of this theft. I don't hear politicians taking a blind bit of notice. Everyone just accepts it as normal in our cockeyed economies. |
| The Regenerative Life Transform Any Organization, Our Society and Your Destiny | Carol Sanford | Carol Sanford describes the the level of consciousness and various roles required to create a regenerative society, and organisation. She takes us through nine different roles, seven core principles and four levels of consciousness or paradigms, and illustrates them with real examples. The book speaks to regenerative transformation both at the spiritual, inner and external impact levels. A very thought provoking book. |
| The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World | Iain McGilchrist | Amazing book. Professor Iain McGilchrist explores the brain's left and right hemispheres. The Left seeks control and atomises everything into constituent parts, whereas the right seeks unified context, is empathetic and appreciates beauty. If nothing else, read the concluding chapter describing a world that is left-brained. It's frighteningly prescient, and I suspect AI will turn us into left-brained slaves with no appreciation of the sacred. God help us. |
