There is no easy way to transition to sustainable, regenerative societies. The real world is complex and messy, and creating social change is hard work.
Greenprints offers guidance and access to experts who can help your journey. Like stepping stones through a murky swamp, the Greenprints approach offers some solid support.
The simple overview below is an outline of what we all need to do, to understand our ecosystems and bioregions, and transition human economies and societies to thrive within healthy ecological boundaries.
Like a blueprint for redesigning human activities, Greenprints can be tailored to suit your goals.
Contact the Greenprints Team to find out how you, your community or your organisation can use Greenprints – greenprints@earthlaws.org.au
Step 1 – Think Differently
We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.
To respond to the multiple ecological, social and economic challenges we now face globally and in Australia, we need to engage with different knowledge systems and different ways of thinking, feeling and acting. We need to connect with ancient wisdom and explore new approaches.
Thinking differently about our relationship with the non-human world or “nature”. Greenprints starts by inviting people to think about our dependence on and relationship with the living world. It invites us to see our local ecosystems and bioregions as the foundations of our societies, and the starting point for changing human governance systems. We must understand our local places and locate & pattern ourselves into the capacity of the natural world that we’re part of. Greenprints starts with what the living world needs to be healthy in our place, and then we work our way out from there.
Thinking differently about who can make decisions and plans for our community – Greenprints invites people to explore, understand and critique how decision making takes place right now, for our local and bioregional communities. And it invites people to imagine how governance, democracy and decision making should work in the future.
Step 1 invites participants to examine a wide range of ideas and practices, through workshops, discussions and experiential activities. Some of the ideas we explore include: ecocentrism, bioregional and planetary boundaries, Indigenous knowledge, decolonisation, Indigenous governance systems, reciprocity, creativity, the role of imagination and much more.
TOOLS – AELA’s Ecocentric Toolkit, regenerative design, bioregional governance and local democracy, Indigenous knowledge systems, the arts/storytelling/creativity, western science, philosophy, culture, psychology, critical thinking, systems change, deep ecology, history, different concepts of time, Nature Play, ecoliteracy, Greenprints Mapping Tool, Surviving the Anthropocene and more!
Step 2 – Define Your Ecological Boundaries and Locate Your Communities
To live within our ecological limits, we first have to define and understand our ecological limits. As outlined in Step 1, the Greenprints approach starts with the health of the living world. Choosing and defining boundaries provide an operational framework, for any scale.
2 steps are critical at this stage:
(1) LOCAL BOUNDARIES – OUR PLACE
What local scale is most useful to start our project?
To use the Greenprints approach, we first need to identify which local place we’re looking at. We can start with the natural features and boundaries of our local ecosystem, catchment, bioregion or sub-region. Or we can start with a political boundary (eg our Local Council area), and then map the living systems within that place. What’s most important is that we begin by grounding our work within a specific place and then working to understand that place.
(2) PLANETARY BOUNDARIES – OUR PLANET
How do we connect our local and bioregional activities to the 9 Planetary Boundaries?
How do we connect our local lives and local sustainability efforts, to the wider Australian continent and the interconnected Earth system? When using Greenprints, we explore what it means to be good bioregional ‘neighbours’ as well as good Earth citizens. We look to the 9 boundaries for a safe operating space for life on Earth as defined by Earth System scientists, and we connect many of our ecological themes to those global boundaries: climate change, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, nitrogen and phosphorus loading, freshwater withdrawals, land conversion, biodiversity loss, air pollution and ozone layer depletion.
TOOLS – Indigenous knowledge systems, western science, Natural Resource Management Plans, Catchment Management Plans, bioregionalism, Earth System Science, Planetary Boundaries, Greenprints Mapping Tool.
Understanding our local ecosystems, catchments and bioregion is essential for knowing how our place works. By grounding ourselves in this knowledge, we are better equipped to address the ongoing changes and impacts affecting our place, and we are better able to create new ways forward.
Step 3 of the Greenprints approach invites us to understand the ecological foundations of our place – our ecosystems, catchments and/or bioregions identified in Step 2. This includes collating existing research and talking to people who are working in different fields, so that we can answer these questions:
TOOLS – Indigenous knowledge, modern history, western science, bioregionalism, Greenprints Mapping Tool, Nature Play, bushwalking, land care, exploring, reading about and walking place, State of Environment Reports, plans and reports from Natural Resource Management groups, Landcare and conservation groups, and others.
Understand Human-Nature Relationships
Step 4 of the Greenprints approach is about developing an understanding of human activities and impacts – past and present – in our place.
By collating existing information and using the Greenprints mapping tool, we can begin to tell the story of what’s been happening in our place. All of this information lays a foundation for understanding and transforming human activities to be more sustainable and regenerative.
This step aims to help us understand:
(i) what the historical and current human settlement and human economic activities are,
(ii) what the historical and current ecological impacts are, from the human activities in our place, and
(iii) what the social justice issues and decision making approaches are within our communities.
All of this information helps us understand how we live today, and how to create a more sustainable future.
This step involves us collating information about our history, Indigenous cultures and communities, impacts of colonisation, land use and resource consumption, built environment and human settlements, how we source and use resources for provisioning (including food, energy, water, housing, clothing and consumerables). It also he;s us understand our economic thinking and frameworks, governance systems/how we organise ourselves here, social justice/how we share and distribute in this place.
This step involves using concepts from Steady State, Wellbeing and Doughnut Economics, to help us understand our past and present. It also involves analysing energy, water, food, health, education, income and work, peace and justice, political voice, gender equality and housing in our place. Understanding the material and energy flows of our current built environment and current human settlements is a critically important part of this step. So too is critically analysing the underpinning values and economic frameworks that drive our societies.
TOOLS – Indigenous knowledge, history, western science, Greenprints Mapping Tool, Doughnut Economics, Wellbeing Economy, Steady State Economics, Circular Economy, Life Cycle Benefit Analysis, material flows analysis, unique economic data for the region, social indicators and information for the region, sustainability analysis, State of Environment Reports, UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Health Check – Are We In Overshoot?
To understand how to transform our societies to live within our limits and respond to climate change and other pressures, we need to understand how ecologically effective (or not) our communities, organisations and wider society is operating at present. In this part of the Greenprints process, we use a number of tools to assess how life is going in our place.
Questions we address include:
TOOLS – Ecological Footprint Method, Bioregional Health Indicators, Life Cycle Benefit Analysis, Circular Economy, Planetary Boundaries, Doughnut Economics, Sustainable Development Goals.
Scenarios For Change
After we’ve developed our understanding about our place (Step 3) and developed a shared understanding of how human activities are operating here (Step 4 and 5), then we are in the position to identify what we’d like to change. A powerful way to identify options for transformation, is to create different scenarios. We can do this for different sectors (eg food production, energy, housing) or at any scale: for organisations and governments, and for entire catchments or bioregions.
For Step 6, in order to create Greenprints scenarios, we start by asking:
TOOLS – drawing all our other Greenprints steps together for Scenario Planning, we can use: our analysis of our healthy catchment and bioregion; forecasting and back-casting scenario planning; Indigenous knowledge systems to project good health into the future; Life Cycle Benefit Analysis to weigh up different options; Planetary Boundaries to guide priority areas of transformation, Sustainable Development Goals to benchmark our conformity with international aspirations; Doughnut Economics and Planetary Health to guide our economic and homosphere options; redrawing the Greenprints Map for our positive scenarios in this place
Transition Plans – To Build Healthy Bioregional Societies
Step 7 takes the chosen scenario/s from Step 6 and asks:
What are our next steps, and how can we resource and fund the transformation we need to make?
In reality, transformation projects will be identified throughout the Greenprints process, not just at the “end” of the process! As stated earlier, the ‘Greenprints Steps’ are really just a working guide for how to collate information for better planning and decision making.
Actions that can be undertaken will depend on the scale of the project/s. For example, a community may identify that significant law reform is needed to change local planning laws or other regulations; or a community might identify a range of smaller projects that can be developed to support ongoing sustainability and regenerative initiatives (eg small local food businesses, local repair cafes).
Chat with the Greenprints Team for ideas about what this phase might look like for you!
Email us at greenprints@earthlaws.org.au
Greenprints can help you understand the wide range of tools and systems that can assist regenerative projects, and help you choose the ones that meet your needs
