What does 5th World do? What does regenerative living really mean? And, how can technology, nature, and humanity collaborate for a net-positive future?
We explore it all in this new series of interviews with our CEO, Marc Ziade.
Read Part One here, Part Two here, and Part Three here.
Do you perceive a mindset shift from sustainability to regeneration? What trends do you see in terms of awareness and action?
Marc: “I definitely do. I was talking to Rob [Avis, Chief Engineering Officer, 5th World] the other day and he said that sustainability practically means you’re trying to sustain something, right? But if you look at how things are today—for example there’s so much degraded land—we need to regenerate first before we can get to a point where we should sustain.
If you look at our history, we created agriculture and later on we discovered oil, and we invented these things basically under a ‘degenerative mindset’ wherein humans placed themselves above nature. We were just extracting resources and didn’t really care about the consequences because we were producing a lot of abundance. This isn’t a criticism by the way. A lot of people look at this as a rejection of the past. That’s not how we think about it. We don’t think anyone knew any better at that point in time. So we think of this increased awareness of externalities and the subsequent shift towards regeneration as an evolution in our collective and individual mindsets.
Over the last 30, maybe 40 years, we moved to the sustainability paradigm. And, there was a sense of guilt, right? For the negative effects persistently extractive business models had on our environment, and on ourselves and our societies. But now people are almost overcompensating for the past by placing humans below nature, believing we are an inherently destructive force.
We think we need to move from that mindset to something balanced: We’re not above nor below nature, we’re just part of it like any other ecosystem participant.
We just need to think of the work ahead of us in positive terms: How can we regenerate a lot of the resources that have been depleted? And, how can we move to a world where humans are a net positive to nature in a way that is not so much driven by guilt—but driven by the fact we’re all part of nature so we all have skin in the game to improve it? We all benefit from seeing nature regenerate.
When you look at all the issues we face today, such as environmental degradation, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we can’t really do anything as individuals; that the solutions need to come top-down, and it’s really about governments and corporations working together and figuring them out.
But we believe in bottom-up change too; that change can literally start in your own backyard. If you plant a tree or build a food forest or set up solar panels, these actions actually contribute to addressing these issues. These actions are small compared to how big the problems are. But if each of us starts going in the right direction and thinking through what we can be doing at the level of where we live—whether it’s our house, our land, our neighborhood, or our community—then in aggregate, we’ll see a bigger impact. We also empower individuals and communities to become more sovereign over their energy, water, and food systems.
And that’s why we believe in this concept of autonomous regenerative properties and communities. We at 5th World are helping to build these properties and communities, to accelerate this transition. We believe that over time we’ll see bottom-up solutions merge with top-down ones for compounding positive impact on environmental and human well-being.
I’ll also add that—with the sustainability mindset as opposed to the regenerative one—we think of solutions in a limited way. For example, many people think controlling carbon emissions is a silver bullet solution. But we believe it’s more complicated than that. Carbon is only one component. We follow a systems thinking approach, where we’re not just solving one problem and thinking in a linear way, rather, we’re addressing a multitude of complex, intertwined ones.
This is what the 5th World team does on a daily basis as part of our regenerative property design offering: We holistically assess the regenerative potential of land—looking at topography, climate, soil, flora and fauna, etc.—and design food, water, and energy solutions that harmonize with those features. We also engage with systems thinking through our education and community-building efforts. Specifically, we support peer-to-peer learning, solution ideation, coordination and collaboration at scale through our V DAO community activities.”
