The Commonwealth’s 2012 charter was the model for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. “Right down to the choice of colours,” the Secretary General reminds us. Before that the UN had a lame set of Millennium Goals based upon a premise of endless, unsustainable growth on a finite world. Not much different than Donald Trump’s budget numbers. The pivot the Commonwealth will be bringing to COP-23 in November is Regenerative Design. That is why the right side of the room is seated here.
In David McConville’s presentation is an exponential curve. Call it what you will — human population; greenhouse gases; ocean plastic; wealth inequality. It is unsustainable. Then he shows the reverse — a logarithmic curve. The Fibonacci sequence — a snail shell, a nautilus, seeds in a sunflower, fruitlets of a pineapple, flowering of artichoke, an uncurling fern, a pine cone, and the family tree of honeybees. It is recursive, fractal, the K-sere stage in ecosystems.