The analysis presented in my paper - Designing Regenerative Food Ecosystems for Brighton - led to the following personal approach in mapping a shared vision for regenerative and just food ecosystems for Brighton. I hope this can be helpful for food systems changemakers.

1

First do no harm – The Precautionary Principle

2

Stop the bleeding

Extraction and depletion of finite resources
Environmental degradation
Biodiversity loss
Pollution
GHG emissions

3

Think into Life and Health, not Death

Living systems thinking
Ideas have consequences
History of bombmaking—pesticides—agriculture

4

Embrace complexity

Interdependent systems, nested at various scales
Economy—rights—culture

5

Heal the separation

Find your homeground
Adopt ecologies of care
Cooperation not competition
Value-centred not profit-driven food systems
Regeneration not extraction
Social and ecological justice – putting the last first

6

Learn the language of wholeness

Find new metaphors of wholeness, Nature vs Machine
Grow beyond mechanistic, reductionist thinking
Quality over quantity
Foster solutions based on trust, solidarity, mutuality

7

Look to the land, not to tech fixes

Soil regeneration, carbon capture
Soil microbiome, gut microbiome interface
Soil, food, health interface

8

See the macro in the micro

Everything is both simpler than we can imagine,
and more complicated that we can conceive. – Goethe

Nested interdependent systems
Resonance

9

Leverage context and scale

Regenerative scale
Small, distributed networks, not monoliths
SLOC small, local, open, connected (E Manzini)

10

Reclaim the Local

Think globally, act locally then bioregionally
Place-based solutions

11

Reclaim the Middle

Restore the missing middle – processing facilities, abbatoirs
Transcend polarised, divisive, binary thinking

12

Reclaim the Commons

Rebuild the Food and Health Commons
Participate in ecological Commons governance

13

Design for Nature’s intelligence

Follow Nature as mentor and model
Biodiversity principle, mixed diversified farms not monoculture
Closed loop systems, self-regulation
Regenerate farming, policy, economics

14

Design for sovereignty, not dependency

Right to food, subsistence, land
Right to farm according to one’s moral principles
The farm organism, ‘terroir'

15

Design for emergence

From chaos and complexity to emergence