earth repair – John Thackara

Designing for life: sounds nice, but where are the jobs?

John Thackara — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:28:58 +0000

The idea of “designing for life” sounds meaningful – but what do those words mean in practice? And especially important for young people: what jobs are available in that space?
To explore those questions, the 44 people shown above met last week in Chedun Town, a rural area near Shanghai, for Design Harvests – a walking, mapping and bioregioning workshop

mistraurbanfutures.org/design_harvest_design_approach_towards_sustainability.pdf

First launched on Chongming Island near Shanghai in 2008, by Professor Lou Yongqi, Design Harvests is an in-situ exploration of how rural innovation and development can be revitalised by design using an ‘acupuncture approach’.

In last week’s workshop – as part of the launch of Design Harvests III – a quarter of the group were urban-rural professionals with some kind of design background. Their number included a “Rural CEO’’, a “Rural Learning Centre Principal”, a “Rural Project Coordinator” and so on.

My contribution was to talk about unusual but real-world but jobs that are now emerging in rural contexts: jobs in food and water systems, building re-use, agritourism, next-generation hospitality, and the use of AI in social infrastructures. You can see the (one hour) talk here.

Our next step in Design Harvests will furnish our physical hub in Chedun Town with equipment, information, and people. As the interface to a physical-virtual knowledge ecosystem about all things urban-rural, the will help diverse actors in the territory learn from each other.

Then, later in the year, we hope to organise a three-day ‘semi-nomadic festival’. This will feature pop-up events distributed around the territory – for example in a farm, at the market, in a factory, by a river.

Each evening, we will all meet together in a central location; eat together in an informal food festival; and discuss, with each other, what we had seen and experienced that day. On the last day, everyone will share what relationships they planned to establish, or strengthen.

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A post-irrigation economy? Bioregioning as health care at Aral School in Uzbekistan

John Thackara — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 11:46:04 +0000

The Aral Sea in Karakalpakstan, an autonomous republic of Uzbekistan, is a supremely testing context.

Once the world’s fourth-largest inland lake, large-scale irrigation, starting 100 years ago, triggered the sea’s retreat. By 2000, more than 90 per cent of its surface area had disappeared. The result: multi-system crisesaffecting people, animals, and ecosystems alike.

Can design resolve the situation??

On its own? Of course not. No magical bullet solutions – technological, or design – will undo social and ecological damage that’s unfolded over the best part of 100 years.

But there are always next steps to be taken – and this is where the new Aral School comes in.

My contribution, as an invited lecturer, was to suggest that the school should design its interventions as a form of health care using the idea of bioregioning as a lens.

Commissioned by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation, and led by Jan Boelen, it will research, design and test system interventions into this highly complex social-ecological context.

The Aral School’s interventions will not be parachuted into the region from on high. On the contrary: Thirty seven million citizens live with the consequences ecological devastation every day – and have done for generations – so the School has set out to complement their lived experience.

Its work will also complement an already extensive restoration ecosystem. Several landscape-scale restoration efforts are under way to revitalise ecosystem biodiversity. Local scientists are involved in an Aral Sea Wetlands Project. 500,000 hectares of the former sea- bed are being afforested by 10 species of desert plants: saxaul, but tamarisk, capsicum and others. Crop diversification is widespread, with the planting of winter peas, mung beans, sesame. Micro-nurseries have been created that involve communities in restoring nature. Agroforestry is taking root. And incentives are in place to attract green investment in renewable energy, and eco-tourism.

At a microbial scale, too, agricultural innovations are being tested with local farmers.

Adding to this mixture, the Aral School brings together a multi-disciplinary team. Along with designers and architects, its 22-strong research cohort – half of them international – includes data scientists, public officials, geophysicists, biologists, a phytoremediation expert, a linguist, an anthropologist, and an environmental historian.

These direct participants are supported by mentors who are leading diverse restoration projects in the region already: water and food system experts, a microbiologist, a paleolimnologist, an archaeologist, a geographer.

In Nukus itself, Aral School is based near the Savitsky Museum. As a world class treasure trove of textiles, jewellery, ornaments, and dissident art, it’s a cultural anchor institution to die for.

What, in such a context, can Aral School usefully add?

That discussion is now underway. (The school opened in January). My contribution, as an invited lecturer, was to suggest that the school should design its interventions as a form of health care using the idea of bioregioning as a lens.

One Place, One Health

A new awareness is sweeping the world: Health and well-being are properties of the social and ecological contexts in which people live – so we need to shift our focus upstream.

Modern biomedical health systems feature prominently in the GDPs of rich countries. But these treat the effects – but not the causes – of ill health. Even as the costs of modern biomedical health systems escalate, the health of living systems – air, water, soil – continue to be impacted adversely by human activities.

So what to do?

My first proposal in Nukus,was that we call the world’s small farmers, parents, and cooks – who give us good food – “health professionals” – and those running the modern biomedical system, “sickness professionals..

This ecological health perspective- a whole of system approach – involves what Didi Pershouse calls “a living, ongoing, relationship between, practitioner, patient, plants, and landscape”. It directs our attention to natural farming, ecological restoration, soil care, river and watershed recovery, community health.

Easily said – but how (if at all) does this care for place narrative connect with the lived daily experience of the region’s people?

I acknowledged, in Nukus, that few things are more irritating than Fly In Fly Out (FIFO) experts who tell local people what to do as soon as their feet touch the ground.

Nonetheless, I said, care for people, as well as for places, is already a massive, if unrecognised, feature of daily life around the world. Ninety five percent of care already takes place outside the bio-medical system – among carers, farmers, teachers, nurses.

Were things totally different in Karakalpakstan?

Rather than answer my own question, I went on to describe system interventions in other parts of the world, in contexts as challenging as those in Nukus. These examples are not models, or templates, to be applied as is – but could connections be made with developments happening there now?

Food, Ag, and Fiber

Before the ecological disaster, many parts of Uzbekistan were self-sufficient in food. But.starting in 1913, irrigation-based agriculture was extensively developed to grow water-intensive crops – primarily cotton, to supply the Soviet Union’s s textile industry.

As the area of irrigated land expanded more than threefold, the Aral Sea began to shrink. Its unique fishing ecosystem, that had supported local populations or generations, collapsed. Increasing volumes of dust and salt particles in the air reduced precipitation.and threatened the lives of more than 60 million people in Central Asia.

Today, although the Soviet Union collapsed 35 years ago, Uzbekistan’s economy continues to depend in substantial part on the export of commodity crops.

Is a post-irrigation economy out of reach?

My response to this question in Nukus was to say that transformational change had seemed impossible in other countries, too – until it wasn’t.

India, for example, has become a global centre of care-based agriculture right now – at least, if if the growth of Natural Farming movement is any guide.

In the Andra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming movement (#APCNF) more a million small scale farmers have pretty much taught themselves how to practice chemical-free farming with a focus on local and traditional knowledge.

The Natural Farming movement is now active in 20 of India’s 29 states, and the national government recently launched an all-of-government National Mission on Natural Farming (NMNF). The aim is to enrol ten million farmers into 15,000 natural farming clusters across the country.

Is this appropriate for Uzbekistan?

The lesson in India, and around the world, is that bioregional agriculture is not a single method. But whatever names we use – agroecology, natural farming, or regenerative agriculture – these practices are shaped by common principles and values.

These shared values crop up repeatedly in Uzbekistan’s policy, documents, too.

Agriculture is not not just about production and consumption of calories. It also creates ‘public goods’ in the form of social cohesion, public health, territorial development, food sovereignty, farmer livelihoods, learning, innovation, and biodiversity.

Small-scale farmers care for 80% of world’s biodiversity.

Farming is cultural work shaped by time, place, and care — it’s not merely about economic output. Building stronger local agroecological food systems can address intertwined crises of health, climate, biodiversity loss, and precarious rural livelihoods.

So what practical acts of care might Aral School develop with the farmers of Karakalpakstan?

I don’t know. That’s a conversation,going forward, forAral School .

But when I put that question last year to the APCNF in India, a five point to-do list emerged:

farmer-to-farmer knowledge-sharing;
shorter routes to market;
on-farm diversification;
village-scale diversification;
appropriate agritech.

Potatosheds

That list is not a template for Uzbekistan, but a focus on food security is a priority for many countries – and not just poor ones. So I shared an experience Sweden that I thought might be relevant.

In a project called Back To The Land 2.0 a design school, Konstfack, posed the following question to a group of masters students: “what will a self-sufficient Hallefors Municipality taste like in 2030?”

The students in Sweden acted like talent scouts. They searched the bioregion the for unrealised food-growing potential – people, unused land, forgotten traditions.

One example was a farmer who’s started to grow heritage wheat, but could not find customers.

Another was a school teacher who wanted to connect his students with a working farm, but could not figure out how to do so.

At the end of each year’s course, students pitched their ideas to real-world professionals – for example, chefs, farmers, or food production businesses. Chefs, especially, proved to be effective ‘connectors’ between the course and potential partners.The best ideas were developed with help from Region Örebro’s innovation experts,

The work in Sweden was about the near future – but it also took inspiration from the past. Students explored what we grew 250 years ago – and how – and come up with new ways to connect past and present.

The Swedish grey pea, for example, is a classic but neglected Swedish crop. Peas were a staple crop for millenia before the global food system arrived. Making these staple crops delicious is an important contribution to food resilience.

Dr Magnus Westling, a noted expert on the history and potential future of the pea – worked with a designer, Corina Akner, on humus made with yellow peas.

In the wine business, close attention in paid to the ’terroir’ where a grape is grown – the influence of climate, landscape, soil, and geology on how a wine finally tastes. Magnus Westling wanted us to develop a similar appreciation for cereals, or peas, or potatoes – and our course was part of this innovation.

We also learned that pre-modern Sweden used to have thousands of ‘forest farmers’ – and that tradition is emerging once again. Our students develop new uses for berries, leaves, elk, boar. They persuaded local farmers to try other experiments, too, by growing new kinds of nuts, fibers, and dyes.

Licorice as a destination

In preparation for my visit to Nukus, I read that although most of its agriculture had been decimated by the ecological disaster, liquorice flourishes in salty soils of the dried-up Aral Sea. As The Economist put it in 2022, the region had. become “ the sweet root’s new production hub”. Large areas of degraded and saline land, it was thought, could be revitalised through increased production.

Regrettably, the value of liquorice as an export commodity led to over-harvesting. It was also discouraging, when I arrived, to read advice in a recent German report advised that “ploughing the land and applying fertiliser” would help meet meet demand (Sweet Success in Saline Land A Guise To Cultivating Liquorice In The Aral Sea Region).

Could a way be found to grow liquorice in ways that restore the land, and provide livlihoods for hard-pressed farmers, but without damaging ecosytems even more?

I remembered, at this point, that pastoral people “take their animals to the food, not food to their animals”. Could the same principal apply to humans, too?

Vogue opined recently that Regenerative Farming Is the Latest Wellness Travel Trend. Uzbekistan is home to more than 650 medicinal plant species, among which liquorice is the king pin. Why not develop a new kind of medical tourism and take high-end wellness travelers to where the liquorice grows?

I showed Aral School’s researchers images of Babylonstoren, in South Africa. Once a run-down wine estate, the terroitory now known asthe ‘Versailllles of vegetable gardens”. It now offers a range of food, craft and farming workshops as well as luxury accomodation and fancy restaurants.

The important point here is that agriculture is not just about production and consumption of calories. It also creates ‘public goods’ in the form of social cohesion, public health, territorial development, food sovereignty, farmer livelihoods, learning, innovation, and biodiversity. (Small-scale farmers care for 80% of world’s biodiversity.).

Farming is cultural work that involves time, place, and care — it’s not merely about economic output. Building stronger local agroecological food systems can address intertwined crises of health, climate, biodiversity loss, and precarious rural livelihoods.

Watersheds

Agriculture accounts for about 25% of GDP and employment in in Uzbekistan, and consumes about 90% of all water resources – so water use is a critical priority. Aral School has made it a priority to discover new opportunities, partnerships, tools and collaborations to do with water.

The challenges are severe.The volume of available water in Uzbekistan is forecast to decline by 30-40% in the coming years. And 80% of the ’available’ water, even now, is transboundary. It’s drawn from rivers that other countries have competing claims on, too.

Right now, the focus of policy – shaped by advice from international lenders – is on increased efficiency – but in an economy that remains dependent the export of thirsty commodity crops.

From a bioregional perspective, a “post-irrigation” economy would be preferable. But is such a future plausible?

More to the point, how does one answer the complaint that “you can’t eat bioregioining”?

Bioregioning:
Sounds Nice, but I Need a Job

The government is actively engaged in the search for alternative jobs and livelihoods. Training, reskilling and job-placement support is now provided in renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, environmental services, and circular-economy practices.

But in targeting these efforts, priority is given activities of high value economic value. The emergence of non-traditional jobs at a grassroots level get less attention. I don’t blame officials in economy ministries. The livelihoods that attract my attention must look small and insignificant.

But I remain convinced that a big opportunity is waiting to be unlocked. In diverse communities, new urban-rural relationships are emerging . They appear in in a piecemeal, bottom-up way – but they are diverse, and numerous.

In my own work, as a self-appointed talent scout, I’ve come across blacksmithing, outdoor education, learning farms, cooperative grain networks, and many others. I list dozens more in my post Bioregioning: Sounds Nice, but I Need a Job.

Other researchers confirm my conviction that the skills and energy needed for different a just transition already exist in communities the world over. But they are overlooked and unsupported.

What’s missing is a social infrastructure to enable more local people to work in place – an infrastructure which values local knowledge, and treats caring for place as a respected livelihood.

Community-based and small-scale vertical supply chains, for example, have a special potential in Uzbekistan’s food and fiber systems.,

Fiber expert Zoe Gilberston has discovered fibre-based enterprises in several countries in which turning flax seed into cloth, using vertically integrated micro manufacturing processes, is combined with traditional, artisan, hand tool methods. The result is economic activity in which nature, community, meaningful work, and beauty, are combined. “

These community projects can open the door to much wider interests and engagement: says Gilbertson; “they create value beyond the financial”

But they don’t, for the most part, assemble themselves.

Social Ecological Systems

If one theme emerges from 20 years of reseaerch into the Aral Sea disaster, it’s that the ecological catastrophe was multi-layered. Any next steps, it follows, need to be mulit-dimensional, too.

In social-ecological systems, the most effective interventions are multi-level. They address multiple layers of influence simultaneously, Rather rather than focus solely on individual behaviours, holistic strategies recognize that changes at one level can reinforce or undermine others, leading to greater sustainability and impact.

Success stories do exist.

Efforts to reduce sedentary behaviour in children are a good example. When interventions were targeted four levels – intrapersonal, interpersonal, organizational, and community – effectiveness rates of up to 78% were achieved. compared to single-level interventions such as a focus on individual education or awareness.

Single-point interventions, we now know, often fail due to resistance from other system components, connected by by interdependence and feedback loops. T

Now: For “child” read “place”.

As with children, the optimal development and well-being of place involves of networks of people and structures. To get there, from here, diverse actors and stakeholders need to be involved.

Culture is infrastructure, too.

Healthier relationships between people and their places are as much cultural as practical. Emotional, ethical and cultural connections are needed, between people and place, that foster belonging, responsibility and care.

I told a story from Scotland – 5,500 kilometres away – to demonstrate that these cultural connections can and are being be repaired and revived.

Nature recovery is urgently needed in the Scottish Highlands. Centuries of ecological degradation have resulted from deforestation, overgrazing and land use practices that diminished biodiversity and disrupted natural systems. To reverse that trend, the Findhorn Watershect Initiative is a multi-generational vision to restore a mosaic of nature rich habitats, grow a local culture of nature connection and enable a thriving nature-positive economy for the people and places of the River Findhorn’s watershed area.

Working as Human Ecology Researchers-in-Residence, McFadyen and Sandilands explored how Gaelic cultural heritage can rekindle nature connection, guide restoration efforts, and foster relationships of care for lasting stewardship. Sandilands and McFadyen explored maps, interviewed local people, and delved into archives, to discover how Gaelic place names, stories and songs connect the culture and ecology of the Findhorn River.

Their work demonstrated how Intangible Cultural Heritage – place names, creative cultural expressions and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK)- can repair damaged relationships between people and place, and support place-sensitive nature recovery that is inclusive, forward-looking, and adaptive.

“Integrating Intangible Cultural Heritage in nature recovery: a place-sensitive approach in the Scottish Highlands” by Mairi McFadyen, Chris Mackie, Elle Adams and Raghnaid Sandilands

inkedin.com/posts/thackara_findhorn-river-connections-human-ecology-activity

Bioregion as classroom:
my Aral School takeaways

The people of Karakalpakstan have lived with ecological collapse for generations. They continue to do so – with remarkable grace and determination. They are not waiting, now, for more research about its causes, homilies about resilience, or implausible quick fixes.

Rather, looking ahead, the region’s story “will be written by the communities at the forefront of adaptive design, scientific inquiry, and cultural reinvention” – as stated by Gayane Umerova, Chairperson of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation.

Jan Boelen invited me to Aral School to talk about bioregioning and health – and the way he describes the opportunity also rings true with me: “Bioregioning is less about redefining borders than it is about reconnecting to the local landscape and – perhaps even more – creating a network of relevant knowledge.

Seen (and practiced) through that lens, bioregioning is neither a blueprint, nor a method. It’s a set of values to guide constantly evolving actions in unique and complex contexts.It’s about embodied relational understanding. It’s a way of knowing, and being, that’s contextual, holistic, and attentive.

My visit to Nukus confirmed my conclusion that health and wellbeing – in a place, as in a person – are not something you ‘deliver’, like a pizza. The delivery word perpetuates the myth that health is something produced by one set of people [the professionals] for another [their customers]).

But Aral School is not in the delivery business. Health and wellbeing are properties of social and ecological systems. The desired outcomes of its work are healthy social, ecological and economic systems.

Many of the skills and energy needed to achieve these outcomes are already out there. What’s needed are new kinds of social infrastructure to enable collaboration. These social infrastructures are hybrid: analogue, but supported by digital tools and platforms.

Intangible cultural heritage is far more than a visitor attraction. It’s a medium of reconnection and healing. Looking ahead, one of the most important keywords is #envhist

Disaster tourism (‘dark tourism’) is over. My visit to Aral School was of the new kind.

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Care, Value, Place2, Mumbai, October 2025

John Thackara — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 10:57:31 +0000

The following is my introduction to the second edition of “Care, Value, Place”, a professional workshop hosted annually by #BITSDesignSchool in Mumbai. Our programme featured social and ecological practitioners, and project leaders, who met as peers to discuss care, value and place as an interconnected design space.

The design of products, places and services for health care has become a huge economic sector – in India, and around the world. So-called “digital health” , especially, is a substantial chunk of the global design economy.

But even as the costs of modern biomedical health systems escalate, a new awareness is dawning: modern health systems treat the effects – but not the causes – of ill health.

The alternative narrative – that caring for life should be at the centre of the economy, rather than production, and ‘output’ – is not a new idea. 2,400 years ago Hippocrates, father of modern medicine, said that “the health of individuals and communities depends on the health of airs, waters, and places.”

Even earlier than Hippocrates, the Taoist ritual of renewal, still performed by Taoist priests today, affirms a belief that the affluence of a society can be judged by the number of different species that live there.

“If all things in the universe grow well, then a society is a community of affluence. If not, this kingdom is on the decline”

Today’s concept of ecological health (sometimes called OneHealth) brings these ancient wisdoms back into alignment with today’s health narrative

Once you realise that caring for nature, and caring for people, are the same story, one’s priorities change profoundly. An ecological health perspective shifts our focus upstream – to natural farming, soil restoration and care, river and watershed recovery, community health, the foods we eat, the air we breathe, and so on.

As we learned at last year’s CVP, India is a global centre of care right now if the growth of Natural Farming is any guide.

In the Andra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming movement (#APCNF) a million and more of your fellow citizens are caring for life, in myriad practical ways, today.

We agreed last year that design has a lot to learn from this rainforest of social diversity, so I called Swati Renduchintala, their representative here last year, for an update.

Natural Farming

The Natural Farming movement is going better than ever. They are now active in 20 of India’s 29 states, and the Indian government has just launched an all-of-government National Mission on Natural Farming (NMNF). naturalfarming.dac.gov.in/AboutUs/MissionAndObjectives

Among the key objectives of NMNF are to promote chemical-free farming, and to do so with a focus on traditional knowledge. The Mission aims – in its first phase – to enrol ten million farmers organised into 15,000 natural farming clusters across the country. Swati also informed me that the Natural Farming Movement has launched pilot projects in Zambia, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka.

Talking with Swati reminded me of the confession I made on this stage last year: that I don’t care about ‘climate change’ as such. I don’t care about ‘sustainability’ Nor, for that matter, do I care about “saving the world”.

Our places and communities don’t need feelings, I said then. They need practical acts of care.

With that simple remedy n mind, I asked Swati what practical acts of care design might offer to India’s Natural Farmers. We rather quickly came up with an initial list:

– farmer-to-farmer knowledge-sharing;
– shorter routes to market;
– on-farm diversification;
– village-scale diversification; and – appropriate agritech – or what Swati termed “women-centric mechanisation”

That list from Swati Renduchintala, on its own, is a to-do list for many design lifetimes. And because it replaces passive anxiety with meaningful activity, it’s also a proven remedy for modern stress and burnout.

Which is the reason we chose Care as one of our three, interconnected, themes.

Value

Care is intimately linked to our second theme this meeting, Value.

Our renewed attention to care work is part of a larger transformation that’s now happening not just In healthcare and biomedicine, but also in food and agriculture, urban design, and regional development.

A remarkable new consensus is emerging that health and well-being are properties of the social and ecological contexts in which people live..

That’s why I say we should call the world’s small farmers, parents, and cooks – who give us good food – “health professionals”.

Place

Our third theme – and of course all three are connected – is Place .

The power of connection between people and place is a key ingredient in systems change. That’s especially important now that restoring our own health, and caring for place, are understood, once again, as single story.

For the architect Pamela Mang, “place is a doorway into caring. Place can unite people across diverse ideological spectra and makes a shift to true sustainability possible”.

So could we practice care as if the health of a place, and of the persons who inhabit it, are a single story?

For Didi Pershouse, place-based, and systems-based, ecological medicine, restores health to people as well as the social and ecological systems around them. This approach requires ecological literacy, and a whole-systems understanding of the world.

A corollary of Caring for one’s place is paying better attention to the local. ‘Local’ is great for two reasons.

First, because local uses time, space and energy in radically less wasteful ways than global does.

And secondly, ‘local’ is already mainstream. The vast majority of economic activity to meet daily needs is already local. Changing the word faster, to closer is not as hard as it sounds.

Desired outcomes

So Care, Value and Place are our three themes for the day. But what about our desired outcomes?

Well our first and most important desired outcome was to get you together in one room. And here you are!

Our second aim is to hear first-hand, from you, about place-based partnerships for social change. What are you trying to achieve? What works for you? What comes next?

Our third aim builds on that last question – “what comes next?” – by adding a supplementary another one: “are there ways that design can help?”

We are all here because the leadership and faculty of this design school are adamant that learning from and with places, and communities, will be central to this new education.

Easy to say – but what should next-generation community projects look like? Who else nebe involved, if not just designers?

In discussions project leaders before this event, we heard about several cross-cutting themes that are especially important to them, and that they they thought design might be able to help them with.

How to tell the story of a place in ways that will connect with city people;
How to meet the demand from funders for metrics of progress, how to measure positive social or ecological impact;
Better ways to host and organise meetings, and other ways of being together.

Those cross-cutting questions are a lot on their own – and only have one day together.

But let me end this introduction on a reassuring note. There’s no way we can ‘solve’ all these issues in one go. This event is not a problem-solving hackathon. It’s about making new connections, and starting new conversations.

As I said at the start, the variety and quality of people in this room answers the first of those two ambitions. As for the conversation part – well, it’s it’ time for me to wrap up here – and leave you to get on with it.

LINKS

Care Value Place 2024
www.bitsdesign.edu.in/news/care-value-place-conference-mumbai

My preview and summary of Care Value Place 2024 is here:
thackara.com/bioregioning/care-value-place-social-ecological-project-leaders-to-meet-in-mumbai/

Videos of the 2024 talks -and soon those from 2025 – are on the BITS Design School Mumbai YouTube channel. #bitsdesigncvp

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The ecological economy is now

John Thackara — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 09:38:37 +0000

The Ecological Economy is now: Five Design Hotspots

The following text is my keynote talk at last week’s World Design Cities Conference (WDCC25) in Shanghai. At that same event I was astonished – and delighted – to be awarded the Frontier Design Prize (linkedin.com/thackara_i-was-given-the-frontier-design-prize-by-activity). This talk (video below) is a fair summary of the work being recognised by that award.

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Shanghai, September 2025

Introduction

Our theme at this conference covers a lot of ground: “From Green Design, to Ecological Design”. It builds on the DesignS Manifesto we signed on this stage last year: sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii

I will come to that big picture story, but my main focus today will be on a pragmatic question. It’s one that I know concerns many of students and professional colleagues sitting here today. “Ecological Design: sounds nice – but guess what: I need a job”.

Or, If you’re from a company, or city hall, you’ll probably be thinking: “ Ecological Design. Those are pleasing words. But what do they have to do with growing my business, and our city?”

Please judge this talk by the degree to which I address those questions!

To begin, I need begin with a few words about the context of our back story – the transition from green design, to ecological design.

Green design, at its heart, has always meant “do less harm”. And we’ve tried diverse ways to do less harm over the last 60 years.

“Minimize environmental impact”. “Reduce waste”. “Reuse resources”. “Recycle products” .“ Green growth” . “Regenerative …’ – well, right now everything seems to be regenerative…

Over those “do less harm years”, and as public demand for action grew, many big companies responded – to a degree.

They invented a bunch Key Performance Indicators so they could measure progress: Net Zero; Cradle-to-Cradle; Circular Economy; Carbon Offsetting; Green Finance.

Those KPIs, in turn, spawned a multi-billion dollar consulting industry. Consultants designed an array of sustainability metrics, and then made more money in the business of sustainability reporting.

Biodiversity and carbon offsetting, were an especially clever bait-and-switch trick. Here’s how it worked. The bait? Investors were enticed by evocative images of an ecosystem getting healthier – which is great. The switch? Somewhere *else* in the world – off-camera – a company continued to burn carbon and/or destroy #biodiversity – secure in the knowledge that its activities have been ‘offset’. That’s it.

But all this “do less harm” activity distracted our attention from a problem. We were doing less harm inside an extractive and energy-intense economy that, over all, was growing exponentially.

People called it the Great Acceleration. The Great Acceleration was propelled upwards by a rocket fuel of intensive energy use, material extraction, and debt.

So I conclude my introduction with a painful reality check. Despite our good intentions, and intense efforts, the result of “doing less harm” – in an economy growing exponentially – is that more harm is being done to the planet, today, than when we started.

So that’s why green design – “do less harm” design – could never be our final destination.

It’s best thought of as a warm-up period leading to a more profound transformation that’s already under way.

This new economy is based on these simple statements:

When our places get healthier, so do we;
The health of people, and place, are a higher form of value than money,
or GDP;
Caring for place creates value.

It’s taking us a while for us to absorb the consequences of ecological design. But let’s not beat up ourselves too much. When Copernicus announced that earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way round, it took our cultures, schools and institutions another 100 years to adapt.

So that’s my introduction. I’ll now tell you about activities in four branches of an ecological economy that already involve substantial design inputs, and will soon need many more.

Ecological restoration

Ecological restoration, also known as earth care, involves a wide array of activities: watershed restoration, tree planting, soil repair, and other projects in which our environment – our lifeworlds – are being repaired in practical, hand-on ways.

In rich countries, at least, ecological restoration now provides more jobs than mining, logging, or steel production combined – all while improving the heath of the environment, instead of destroying it.
ecosystemmarketplace.com/ecological-restoration-25-billion-industry-generates-220000-jobs/

Millions more people around the world do this kind of work as volunteers. There’s a vast Pro-Am army out there that cares for its places – and rivers, and watersheds, and oceans – in practice.

A lot of this work is unknown to the broader public, and to most designers. Here in China, for example, an astonishing 3,700 wetland restoration projects have added over one million hectares of wetlands since 2012. New laws have been passed to protect wetlands, swamps and mangroves. More than two thousand nature reserves, and nine hundred national wetland parks, have been established. news.cgtn.com/26th-World-Wetlands-Day-What-China-has-done-for-wetland-conservation

Few of these projects advertise for “designers”, by that name, it’s true. But most restoration budgets include a requirement to create services, jobs, and livelihoods – the kinds of work that social innovation designers have been doing for years – at least in cities.

Community-based ecotourism, and education, are familiar urban-rural examples. But, as we discovered in the Urban-Rural festival in 2019 (slideshare.net/slideshow/urbanrural-exhibition-shanghai), dozens more jobs are emerging from the ground up.

New jobs in the textile sector, wellness tourism, and cultural services, have long been overlooked, but are now gaining serious traction.
blogs.griffith.edu.au/asiaiion. nsights/china-green-finance-status-and-trends-2024-2025

Wellness Economy

A second branch of the ecological economy is also low profile – in its case, because it caters for the most prosperous 1% of the world’s population. It’s called the Wellness Economy.

I did not realise until a week ago, for example, that, as I read in Vogue magazine, “regenerative farming is the latest wellness travel trend”.

Babylonstoren, in South Africa, is a startling example. This 200 hectare working farm has been described a “the Versailles of vegetable gardens”. For $500 and upwards a night you can stay among all this edible botanical beauty, live slowly for a while, and pamper your body in a super-luxury spa.

But high-end agritourism, to its credit, is not just about self-pampering spas. Babylonstoren also offer dozens of workshops and learning experiences. Their focus is on heritage crafts – from cutting and curing venison, and making vinegar, to leather work, bookbinding, and the basics of ironmongery.
babylonstoren.com/workshops

High end agricultural tourism is not much preoccupied with social justice, it’s true, but it’s a pretty large niche within a range of activities devoted to ecological restoration.

According to its trade body, Global Wellness (globalwellnessinstitute.org) is a hefty $6.3 trillion dollar economy. As well as Wellness Tourism, like that farm in South Africa, extensive ecosystems of people are engaged in wellness Real Estate, Spas, Springs, Complementary Medicines, Healthy Eating.

All of these involve work for designers.

AgriTech for Agroecology

High-end wellness agritourism, like that farm, may be niche for the riche, but agroecology – also called ecological agriculture, or natural farming – matters to us all.

The world’s small-scale farmers – including at least 250 million here in China – feed the world a with less than a quarter of all the word’s farmland.

With their a closer relationship with their land than remote ‘production agriculture’, they also steward 80% of the world’s biodiversity.

This is why, if public health & wellbeing are indeed the centre of an ecologiocal economy, then the world’s 1.6 billion small scale farmers are, for me, the most important health workers in the world. https://apcnf.in/

Can they fare better? Of course. The design opportunity, now, is to search for small practical ways to improve one aspect of the natural farming system.

Now for many design people in cities, their first thought has been about technology – and there’s a lot of excitement about AgTech as a potential market. Last year there were 5,000 agtech startups in China, more than 6,000 in India.

But there’s been almost zero participation by the world’s small scale farmers in this so-called innovation boom.

But here’s a thing. These ‘everyday experts’ are not anti-tech. Peer-to-peer, open source knowledge exchange is widespread in this movement,

Indeed, a new grassroots movement, Grassroots Innovations Assembly
(GIA gia-agroecology.org) has identified three pathways ways to enhance agroecology, using tech:

Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) systems and frameworks;
New market pathways for the products of small scale farmers;
Facilitate the co-creation and exchange of knowledge on agroecology.

Social innovation has a huge role to play in natural farming. Ecological agriculture is as much a social movement as a biochemical one – and, for me, the most dramatic impact of technology on food systems is a social one: putting farmers in direct contact with the city people who eat their produce.

Another example is fashion

For 35 years the “sustainable fashion” movement has struggled to find workable solutions – and we have largely failed.

Circular systems. Regulation. Renting. Recycling: Their effect has been marginal. A focus“do less harm” has been overwhelmed by a Great Acceleration in the material and energy throughputs of the global fashion system as a whole.

But there is one positive development we can build on: bioregional fashion systems. This is when fibre reproduction (plants and animals), design, processing and use, are integrated with land, soil and watershed care.

The Fibershed movement is by now a tried and tested example of this emerging synthesis. Check out, for example, Pennsylvania Fibershed. https://pafibershed.org/

Living infrastructure

In the USA, the Safe Clean Water Program: safecleanwaterla.org, allocates multi-million dollar budgets for infrastructures to mitigate droughts, heat, floods, and wildfires.

Until recently, it was well nigh impossible for ordinary citizens to choose what project to do, obtain permissions, or secure funding. Often, such information already exists – but in a multitude of specialised databases and municipal offices.

In Los Angeles, the Living Infrastructure Field Kit, is a free tool for L.A. residents to plan and fund local living infrastructure projects. livinginfrastructure.org

The tool can be used to map out rainwater capture for community garden, for schoolyards, parks, or green streets,

The Living infrastructure Field Kit provides a single point of access to 65 of the most detailed datasets available across L.A. County – normally known only to professionals. The Field Kit provides access to regular citizens through an intuitive interface.

Building on this work one of its designers, Steve Daniels, is now working on companion project – Terrain – that he says is a “tool for ecological intelligence”.

Terrain helps planners, land trusts, fire councils, and watershed groups target interventions to heal landscapes.

As with the Field Kit, Terrain integrates a deep library of geospatial datasets. But instead of requiring advanced GIS skills, you can simply ask questions in natural language—powered by LLMs.

Nature Connection and AI

EdenX is a digital platform, based on artificial intelligence, that enables more than human modes of dialogue about rivers, and their rights.

2024.xcoax.org/pdf/pestana.pdf

For me, Eden-X is an example of nature connection in which AI – as a medium of experience and learning – can enable relationships that reconnect man and nature.

In addition to being a platform for dialogue, EdenX works as a decentralized and self-managed deliberation and decision-making tool in which all stakeholders can make proposals and vote on proposals made by others.

This conversation you see here was displayed in a spatial setting that allowed viewers to be immersed in the fluid, watery universe of the assembly.

Here, AI re-awakens our capacity for ecological thinking – the ability to see the patterns of life as a connected whole in which we humans are a part.

This functionality is literally vital: The greatest challenge of our time is to foster widespread awareness of the hidden connections among living and nonliving, things.

Conclusion

I explained, at the outset, that because green design meant “do less harm” in an extractive economy that was growing exponentially, we ended up doing more harm.

Green design, I suggested, was best thought of as a warm-up period for ecological design based on simple propositions:

When our places gets healthier, so do we.
The health of people, and place, are a higher form of value than money,
or GDP.
Caring for place creates value.

I then told you about economic spaces in which new jobs and livelihoods are to be found for today’s, and tomorrow’s designers: earth repair; the wellness economy; technology support for natural farming; and nature connection.

Each of these involves ecological and social care in combination. It’s not a questions of either, or.

For business leaders here, I hope I’ve persuaded some of you that place-based partnerships for social change – Business2Place, or B2P – can be materially beneficial to your organisation. An ecological approach is not about box-ticking: it involves you in sustainability you can touch, and feel.

For all of us, the study of living systems tells a consistent story. Ecological design means engaging with nature as a complex of constantly changing lifeworlds.

Whether it’s sub-microscopic viruses, mosses, and mycorrhizae – or trees, rivers and climate systems – the health of an ecosystem lies in the vitality of interactions between its component species. Science has confirmed an ancient wisdom: All natural phenomena are not only connected – their very essence is to be in relationship with other things – including us.

So I conclude with the words of Andreas Weber . Our task now is to

design for shared aliveness

https://biologyofwonder.org/sharing-life

Contents:

The Ecological Economy is now: Five Design Hotspots
Introduction
AgriTech for Agroecology
Living infrastructure
Nature Connection and AI
Conclusion

The post The ecological economy is now appeared first on John Thackara.

Care, Value, Place: Social-Ecological Project Leaders to Meet In Mumbai

John Thackara — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 09:30:51 +0000

The launch of a new design school is a good moment to move beyond business-as-usual responses to climate change, and biodiversity loss. Care, Value, Place is a a two-day event in Mumbai, on 17, 18 September, hosted by the new BITS Design School with support from RMIT University.

A group of experienced project leaders, together with expert contributors, will collaborate to identify the practical steps can we take, right now, to effect lasting, positive system change. The outcomes will be place-based partnerships for social change, action-based learning networks, and a limited number of next generation projects.

Our focus (I’m co-convening the event with Nandita Abraham, Dean of the new School) is on how design can best serve communities that are already active in real-world, place-based projects. Participating project leaders include:
P. Sainath, Peoples Archive for Rural India
Siddartha Hande, Kabadiwala Connect
Ashik Krishnan Vikalp Sangam
Mick Douglas, Tramjatra, RMIT
Avinash Kumar, Quicksand
S. Vishwanath (Zenrainman)
Dr V M Chariar IIT Delhi
Mayur Patnala, Nirmaan
Swati Janu, Social Design Collaborative
Samidha Patil & Kareena Kochery, Urbz
Swati Renduchintala Andra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming

The event will explore such emerging opportunities as urban ecological restoration; community managed natural farming; new livelihoods in waste ecosystems; traditional knowledge and frugal innovation; two-wheeled commerce in 15-minute cities; water systems and social hydrology.

All places for Care, Value Place are filled at this time – but the organisers will publish highlights after the event, as will I.

[The visualisation – a suggestion of organic and technical worlds colonising each other – is by Dr Sophie Gaur].

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