The Great Turning is a name for the essential adventure of our time: the shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization.

The ecological and social crises we face are caused by an economic system dependent on accelerating growth. This self-destructing political economy sets its goals and measures its performance in terms of ever-increasing corporate profits… A revolution is under way because people are realizing that our needs can be met without destroying our world…Future generations, if there is a liveable world for them, will look back at the epochal transition we are making to a life-sustaining society. And they may well call this the time of the Great Turning. It is happening now.

-Joanna Macy (Macy, 2009)

Living systems thinking is at the heart of designing regenerative food ecosystems that work to end food poverty, chronic disease and ecological destruction.

Centring our questions on an imperative of Health will enable us to navigate through complexity with the clear and constant aim of enabling conditions conducive to life.

- Janine Benyus, 2002

From restoring the soil to rebuilding people’s lives, the work of redesigning food systems is about raising awareness, shifting mindsets and creating ecologies of care.

Look to the Land

The ecosystem and social services provided by healthy, regenerative soil for people and planet could be the most strategic approach for realising Brighton’s Carbon Neutral 2030 and Food Strategy goals. Ecological transition plans (Horizon 2 thinking) should optimise opportunities for ecosystem restoration and regenerative agroecological food growing across Brighton and Hove, from neighbourly garden sharing to increasing the proportion of community allotments, and enabling peri-urban fringe farming. Holistic food ecology programmes for food practitioners and allotment growers could be training ground for the South Downs farms of the future (Horizon 3 visioning).

Taking a threefold approach, we can develop ecosocial models of food growing grounded in a holistic, practical understanding of the Soil—Food—Health interface. Any future technological scenarios for food growing must not diverge from this fundamental nexus – nutrient dense food grown in sunlight, clean air, on toxin free living soil. Important Health questions around vertical farming, lab-grown food, gene editing and other productivist tech fixes (Antoniou, 2022)(Bush MD, 2018)(Holden, 2021)(Kilcooley, 2022) demand rigorous, unbiased research and consideration. Ideas have consequences.

We are making choices that will affect whether beings thousands of generations from now will be able to be born of sound mind and body.

– Joanna Macy

Look to the People - Putting the last first

The Downland “farm of the future” can pioneer a new, whole systems approach to how we design viable regenerative community farms that end food poverty, provide health and wellbeing programmes and ecosystem services towards Carbon Neutral 2030. BH Food Partnership’s vision for regenerative community farms could include partnership schemes, prioritising the city’s most vulnerable communities. Designing for a regenerative future means creating radical models that make existing ones obsolete. (Fuller, undated) The South Downs farms of the future can take inspiration from care farm models and solidarity economy approaches that liberate land and food from market forces, restoring these to community homeground, drawing from the original CSA impulse.

The path to food justice will be unique to each community. Regenerative designs rooted in an ecosocial context of community and place, are the most promising pathways for securing long term food security, ecological integrity and community resilience. To echo the incisive words of Susan George,

….what can be a greater achievement than to prove we can put an end to the age-old scourge of hunger? The difference in the twentieth century is that hunger is no longer a scourge – it is a scandal. But it is not intractable: the causes are known, the remedies exist….If Brighton has the vision and courage, it can take its place as a beacon city of the human spirit.

– italics Susan George, 1985