Why Restoration Economics?

When we look at the natural world, we see a system that is both constantly changing and rhythmic. Constantly changing because the entire solar system is moving through a galaxy that itself is moving through the Universe. We are never in the same place from moment to moment. Yet a rhythm does exist because the earth revolves around the sun, the moon revolves around the earth, and these cycles give enough stability and predictability for life to emerge. Life that moves by the seasons, and depends upon the weather - a riotous, fantastic abundance and diversity of LIFE.

But here’s the interesting thing about Mother Earth. For the most part, all living creatures come into form, and then die, yet when they decay, their parts are (for lack of a better word) upcycled into future forms of life. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. The same atom that existed within a dinosaur millions of years ago still exists somewhere in the world today - perhaps in your cat or dog. This ability of the natural system to renew itself means that all of the abundance created through all of the millennium that humans have existed comes from the inherent capacity of nature to restore itself. To restore balance. To restore what is taken, eaten or lost.

All it takes is time. In time, restoration is the flip side of the “consumption” coin. Make no mistake - everything in nature consumes something to live. Yet, in the natural cycles of life, what gets consumed also, in time, gets restored.

The challenge we face today is that, in the last few hundred years, the human species has found a way to hack the system. We have invented energy sources just for ourselves that have given us such a huge competitive advantage, our human population is now 8.27 billion people. As more humans have gotten formed from matter (which can be neither created nor destroyed), many other creatures and species have declined. 

Hundreds, if not 1000+, species have gone utterly extinct in the last 50 years. Many species that remain have significantly lower populations. The competitive edge that our technological discoveries have given us may become so significant that we eventually out compete every other living thing on the earth. And what happens at that point is anyone’s guess.

It is my belief that we need to bring the law of restoration into our lives consciously, including and especially through our business models and language. Our species has evolved by being held in this natural system of consumption and restoration: a system which has provided ever-changing yet renewing resources that allowed our ancestors to pass life from one generation to another. 

Now that we are playing with god-like technologies, we need an approach that asks: How do we restore what we are consuming? How do we take human created things that have come to the end of their usefulness and integrate them into useful forms for the future? How do we re-imagine a financial vocabulary that accounts for nature’s power to restore and our own participation in that process? How do we create and nurture companies and careers which center these concerns?

These are issues of consciousness, conscientiousness, ethics, leadership, commitment and communication.

And it is these issues that this new venture - Restoration Economics - will build community around and explore together.

I hope you will join me in this journey.

With blessings,

Ek Ong Kaar K. Michaud