A regenerative system, in Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua's 📝Regenerative Enterprise, is one that actively grows every form of capital it touches, going beyond sustainability's aim of keeping depleted stocks where they are.
The book sets three systems side by side. A 📝degenerative system grows financial and material capital at the expense of living, cultural, and spiritual capital. A sustainable system "maintains existing pools of each form of capital, while providing for the upkeep and replacement of the fundamental living capital that all beings depend on" (p. 15). But maintaining today's levels would lock in the losses already suffered — depleted fisheries, threatened species, cut forests, and eroded soil — so "we must move beyond sustainability and into regeneration of all forms of capital" (p. 15). Regenerative systems "actively build life, complexity and diversity" (p. 16).
Roland and Landua give regeneration three properties. The first is cultivation over extraction: extraction is "the removal of capital from a system in a way that diminishes its overall health, function, or resilience," while cultivation is "the addition to and removal of capital from a system in a way that develops and evolves its health, function, and resilience" (pp. 16–17). The second is growing 📝edges and connections rather than quantity. The third is 📝harvesting the surplus rather than the core.
The book also challenges the idea that sustainability means lasting forever. In ecosystems, death and decomposition return an organism's stored wealth to everything around it, so the authors propose that an enterprise in a regenerative ecology "will not 'sustain' forever, but will instead design its own eventual demise in a way that feeds the other enterprises in the system" (pp. 39–40).