Regenerative Design - Regenerative Versus Sustainable

Regenerative Versus Sustainable

Regenerative and sustainable are essentially the same thing except for one key point: in a sustainable system, lost ecological systems are not returned to existence. In a regenerative system, those lost systems can ultimately begin "regenerating" back into existence. Put more simply, regenerative systems create a better world than we (humans) found it, now and into the future.

There is also a linguistic problem with the word "sustainable." The use of the word "sustainable," by experts in the field, is meant to mean "self-sustaining". However, an attempt to change this definition to mean self-sustaining is not faring well with the general public. Because the root word "sustain" means only "last" or "endure," the general public and even many non-experts in the industry define the word only as "able to last" or "the capacity to endure." The term sustainable is becoming a universal term to not refer to inequality in environmental, social and economic systems but for anything that has the capacity to endure. Under this term a plastic bottle buried in a landfill is sustainable because it has the capacity to endure.

"Regenerative" also has a linguistic problem, however a very different one, the term is still competing with the biological community in terms of its use for the re-growth of limbs. However once the word itself gains wide usage, it may become a non-specialized word and thus be applicable to all fields, much like the term "sustainable" has experienced. When this occurs it may not suffer the same fate as the term "sustainable" because a system or item must be renewable in order to be regenerated. Regenerative's root words are "re" and "generate" respectively meaning "again" and "to bring into existence." Thus the base meaning of regenerative means the "capacity to bring into existence again." So if an item or system is regenerative the item or system has the capacity to bring itself into existence again.