Why regeneration is the new sustainability.
If you’re anything like most people, you’ve probably had your fill of the word “sustainable”. From sustainable clothes to sustainable homes to sustainable finances, it’s pretty difficult to escape from the word in the 2020s. Well, the good news is that its days might be numbered as the new buzzword is regeneration. But what does that mean? Our founder, Lucy Johnson, explains.
For the past few decades, the term “sustainable” has become a catch-all word for taking care of the planet. Whenever you open a magazine, browse through Instagram or head to the shops, the word “sustainable” - or “sustainability” - is likely to pop into your eye-line.
But nowadays there’s a rethink going on. As we learn more about the scale of what we need to do to repair the planet, “sustainable” is becoming yesterday’s buzz-word. What farmers, foresters, entrepreneurs, governments and a growing tribe of consumers are thinking about is a newer idea: regeneration.
What does regeneration mean?
Imagine if we could impregnate a fully biodegradable shoe with nutrients that when it decomposed enriched the soil. And what if we made laundry detergent which wasn’t just free of harmful chemicals but contained key nutrients so that when it dissolved it would help clean up a polluted water supply?
This may sound like the stuff of fantasy - but, increasingly, the implications and possibilities - of a regenerative economy are inspiring designers, entrepreneurs, scientists and farmers - and turning into a reality.
Why have we been stuck at sustainable when what that really means is to stay where we are?
Sustainable has never been a word to conjur much enthusiasm. If you told someone your marriage was “sustainable”, they’d probably think you weren’t having much fun. But it’s the word that has been in the public lexicon since 1987. At that point, the focus was on managing and conserving nature’s richness.
Since then, we’ve seen the clear-felling of mile after mile of virgin tropical rainforest, the slicing up of peatlands, the pollution of marshes and mangrove swamps and the bleaching of coral reefs. We’ve also seen our fossil fuel use rise inexorably and with it the creeping up of our global temperatures to over 1*C above pre-industrial times - and begun our first forays into a hotter world of more wildfires, heatwaves and floods.
In other words, we have gone beyond a situation we want to sustain to one which we now need to repair.
Regenerative viticulture is one of our favourite types of regeneration at Green Salon
How does regeneration do the work of repairing our planet?
When an English couple, the Cronks, bought La Garde Freinet vineyard in France’s Cote de Provence two years ago, they described the vineyard as resembling a moonscape. Despite being surrounded by natural parkland, generations of intensive farming had stripped the soil of much of its organic matter and in order to squeeze any wine out of it, it required more and more synthetic fertilisers.
This is a story that is being repeated in vineyards and arable farms all over the world. Since the Second World War, farmers have been spraying synthetic nitrogen fertilisers on to their fields in order to raise crop yields. It’s had explosive results with the amount of wheat and corn we're able to harvest in the UK doubling. This in turn, has cut our national annual family budget spend on food in half since 1950. However, that short term crop boost has, in the long run, harmed the soil.
Over use of synthetic fertiliser destroys the organic matter in soil, reducing it in some cases from its average of around 4% of soil composition to 1%. The result is that vast tracts of soil are no longer acting as a carbon sink, drawing green house gases out of the air, and keeping the carbon cycle in balance as they did for hundreds of thousands of years. Instead, in many areas, soil has become degraded to the point that it slips away into rivers when it floods or gets blown away in high winds.
A growing number of farmers around the world are rethinking their farming model. They’re working out how they can stop using synthetic fertilisers and still create high yields while also enriching the soil. While organic farming is about what you don’t add to the soil, regenerative farming is all about how you rebuild the soil using nature to heal itself, using combination of the ancient practices of cover crops, crop rotation, less frequent tilling and swapping fields between arable and animals mixed with cutting-edge technology to monitor levels of organic matter.
Which brings us back to La Garde Freinet vineyard. The Cronks are working to restore the health of the soil, through, amongst other things, planting flowers amongst the vines which themselves add nutrients to the soil, while bringing back the birds, bees and other pollinators. They want to replace their moonscape with a Garden of Eden.
To find out more about regenerative viticulture, check out the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation, founded in 2021 by Stephen Cronk.
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