- THE METHODOLOGY -

1. Design

Permaculture

Permaculture is a branch of ecological design, ecological engineering, and environmental design which develops sustainable architecture/human settlements and self-maintained agricultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems. The core tenets of permaculture are:

• Take care of the earth: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply. This is the first principle, because without a healthy earth, humans cannot flourish.
• Take care of the people: Provision for people to access those resources necessary for their existence.
• Share the surplus: Healthy natural systems use outputs from each element to nourish others. We humans can do the same. By governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the above principles.

Permaculture draws from several disciplines including organic farming, agroforestry, integrated farming, sustainable development, and applied ecology. "The primary agenda of the movement has been to assist people to become more self reliant through the design and development of productive and sustainable gardens and farms. The design principles which are the conceptual foundation of permaculture were derived from the science of systems ecology and study of pre-industrial examples of sustainable land use."

Biomimicry

Biomimicry or biomimetics is the examination of nature, its models, systems, processes, and elements to emulate or take inspiration from in order to solve human problems.

Over the last 3.6+ billion years, nature has gone through a process of trial and error to refine the living organisms, processes, and materials on planet Earth. The emerging field of biomimetics has given rise to new technologies created from biologically inspired engineering at both the macro scale and nanoscale levels. Biomimetics is not a new idea. Humans have been looking at nature for answers to both complex and simple problems throughout our existence. Nature has solved many of today's engineering problems such as hydrophobicity, wind resistance, self-assembly, and harnessing solar energy through the evolutionary mechanics of selective advantages.

Biodiversity

The word 'biodiversity' is a contraction of biological diversity. Diversity is a concept which refers to the range of variation or differences among some set of entities; biological diversity thus refers to variety within the living world. The term 'biodiversity' is indeed commonly used to describe the number, variety and variability of living organisms. This very broad usage, embracing many different parameters, is essentially a synonym of 'Life on Earth'.

The period since the emergence of humans has displayed an ongoing biodiversity reduction and an accompanying loss of genetic diversity. Named the Holocene extinction, the reduction is caused primarily by human impacts, particularly habitat destruction. Conversely, biodiversity impacts human health in a number of ways, both positively and negatively.

The United Nations designated 2011-2020 as the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity.

Sustainability

Sustainability is the capacity to endure. For humans, sustainability is the long-term maintenance of responsibility, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions, and encompasses the concept of stewardship, the responsible management of resource use. In ecology, sustainability describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time, a necessary precondition for the well-being of humans and other organisms. Long-lived and healthy wetlands and forests are examples of sustainable biological systems.

Healthy ecosystems and environments provide vital resources and processes (known as "ecosystem services"). There are two major ways of managing human impact on ecosystem services. One approach is environmental management; this approach is based largely on information gained from educated professionals in earth science, environmental science, and conservation biology. Another approach is management of consumption of resources, which is based largely on information gained from educated professionals in economics.

Deep Ecology

Deep ecology is a contemporary ecological philosophy distinguished by its advocacy of the inherent worth of living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs. Deep ecology argues that the natural world is a subtle balance of complex inter-relationships in which the existence of organisms is dependent on the existence of others within ecosystems. Human interference with or destruction of the natural world poses a threat therefore not only to humans but to all organisms constituting the natural order.

Deep ecology's core principle is the belief that the living environment as a whole should be respected and regarded as having certain legal rights to live and flourish. It describes itself as "deep" because it regards itself as looking more deeply into the actual reality of humanity's relationship with the natural world arriving at philosophically more profound conclusions than that of the prevailing view of ecology as a branch of Darwinian biological science. The movement does not subscribe to anthropocentric environmentalism (which is concerned with conservation of the environment only for exploitation by and for human purposes) since Deep ecology is grounded in a quite different set of philosophical assumptions. Deep ecology takes a more holistic view of the world human beings live in and seeks to apply to life the understanding that the separate parts of the ecosystem (including humans) function as a whole. This philosophy provides a foundation for the environmental, ecology and green movements and has fostered a new system of environmental ethics advocating wilderness preservation, human population control and simple living.

2. Governance

Sociocracy

Sociocracy is a system of governance, using consent-based decision making among equivalent individuals and an organizational structure based on cybernetic principles. The most recent implementation of sociocracy by Gerard Endenburg, also known as Circular Organizing, was developed as a new tool for governance of private enterprise, but has been adopted in many different kinds of organizations including public, private, non-profit and community organizations as well as professional associations.

Sociocracy – the term means ‘collaborative governance’ – hard-wires ‘People Care’ and ‘Fair Share’ into the fabric of an organisation by ensuring that every member has an equivalent voice in policy. Like other living systems a sociocratic organisation relies on cyclical feedback processes to stay in tune with its members and its environment. Some call Sociocracy ‘organisational permaculture’.
To be sociocratic an organisation has to follow four principles:

• Organisation in circles: Circles are self-organising groups of people who decide by consent how they go about what they have to do. Sociocracy does recognise organisational hierarchy, but power is distributed through the hierarchy by double linking of circles.
• Double-linking between circles: Circles share at least two members; the operational leader from the upper circle and a representative from the lower circle. With the power of consent they act as a feedback and moderation loop.
• Governance by consent: A decision can only be made when none of the circle members has a reasoned, paramount objection based on the aims of the circle or the organisation.
• Sociocratic elections to roles: Choosing people for functions in a circle (facilitator, secretary or whatever roles are needed) is done by a special consent process based on reasoned nominations in a go-round.

Holacracy

Holacracy is a comprehensive practice for structuring, governing, and running an organization. It replaces today’s top-down predict-and-control paradigm with a new way of distributing power and achieving control. It is a new “operating system” which instills rapid evolution in the core processes of an organization.

3. Culture

Cultural Creatives

"The term "Cultural Creatives" to describe a large segment in Western society that has recently developed beyond the standard paradigm of Modernists or Progressives versus Traditionalists or Conservatives. "

"The Cultural Creatives are over 50 million Americans (slightly over one quarter of the adult population) who care deeply about ecology and saving the planet, about relationships, peace and social justice, but also about authenticity, self-actualization, spirituality and self-expression. So surprisingly, they are both inner directed and socially concerned. In fact they’re the activists, the contributors to good causes, much more than most other Americans. 

There’s a conventional media stereotype that anybody who is doing the work on their inner life is caught up in narcissism and ignoring the social problems of society. In fact, the data shows just exactly the opposite. The more people care about their inner life, the more they’re concerned about the condition of the planet and human rights. There is a very strong positive correlation between doing the inner work and caring about ecological sustainability and social justice."

"While Cultural Creatives are a subculture, they lack one critical ingredient in their lives: awareness of themselves as a whole people. We call them the Cultural Creatives precisely because they are already creating a new culture. If they could see how promising this creativity is for all of us, if they could know how large their numbers are, many things might follow. These optimistic, altruistic millions might be willing to speak more frankly in public settings and act more directly in shaping a new way of life for our time and the time ahead. They might lead the way toward an Integral Culture."

Innerpreneurship

  •  obsession with opportunity

But while entrepreneurs use their business for monetary gain, innerpreneurs use their business to find personal fulfillment (creatively, spiritually, emotionally) and create social change.

In 2008, there has been much discussion in the Western media on the 'creative economy' and the importance of the 'creative class'. Richard Florida published a series of books on this identified 'creative class' and their upcoming economic importance. Bill Gates spoke at the World Economic Forum 2008 on the need for 'creative capitalism' as a solution to the world's problems. They theorize that being creative and inventive will be the key to business success in the 21st century and that a country's economic success will be determined by its capitalists' ability to mobilize, attract and retain human creative talent.

Post-Capitalism

"An economic system has not been stipulated by nature, but is the result of human choices. The primary legitimacy of such a system is the care for a life in reasonable prosperity and well-being for all people, in respect for nature and environment. People do not live for the sake of economy, but the economy exists in behalf of people. And the choice for an economy of private profit and flat self-enrichment, based on alienation of the turnover from labour of others, should be replaced as soon as possible by a human and environmentally sound economic model."

"There have been a number of proposals for a new economic system to replace capitalism. Some are theorized to come about through spontaneous evolutionary processes as capitalism becomes obsolete, while others are proposed models to replace capitalism." Rejuvenation Network is not specific or selective about which process to endorse but focuses on a solutions based mindset in terms of the emerging economic dynamics.