Andrew Curry

If Calvo is out at the front, all the same, he’s not there on his own. Colleagues in the field also believe that the ‘machine metaphor’ of body and brain is getting in the way of understanding—even preventing us from seeing what’s in the data we see in front of us.

The Pattern Book for Regenerative Design is written for ‘engineers (and other humans)’ who want to “transform the built environment industry into a force for good.” Despite coming into the “other human” category here, I found its mental models and some of its thinking devices useful.

The assumptions that sit behind this are that: consumption drives growth; that cheaper food is good for growth; that markets are the best way to provide cheaper food; that changing diets is not the job of government; and that food safety nets are not needed—or need only to be minimal.

The wider point here is that we’ve now reached a point where climate change has become a fact of life. One of the problems with this is that people in different silos are used to thinking of their climate change problems as being different from other people’s, rather than connected.

Every so often when reading an obituary of someone, or an awards citation, you realise that you have internalised their work into your thinking without having read it directly. So it was with Donald Shoup, the California transport academic who spent his life working on the problem of urban parking, and who died in February.

My suggestion here is that a politics of the future that might make a difference would be about reimagining our relationships, with each other and with nature.