Hi Everyone 👋🏽

Welcome to Growth Imperatives, a curation of found ideas I send every other week that asks how we can imagine the world differently. This week, I've included articles that focus on reframing familiar concepts in unfamiliar ways, and as a result, help us to see how close change can actually be.

This week

💩 Sh*t as a resource
📍 Region as a verb
🦠 Humanity as an antibody

Sh*t as a resource

What if we saw circularity as a design opportunity—and took advantage of design as a chance to change cultural mindsets? That's what Tom Greenwood is really asking when he talks here about making tomatoes of his own poop. This is a fun read that reminds me that the gap between the present and the future is only a perspective shift away.

I really love tomatoes. I love them in a sandwich, as a sauce or in a curry. I love them sundried, roasted, with a drizzle of olive oil, or just on their own as nature intended. I love them so much that my wife Vineeta sometimes calls me Tomo Tomato, or if we’re really getting into the Mediterranean vibe, Tomo Pomodoro.

It’s therefore one of the greatest joys in life for me that every year we have tomatoes growing in our garden that at the peak of summer (in a good year) can be picked from the vine. One year we counted a thousand cherry tomatoes. Heaven! What’s even better about these tomatoes is that we didn’t even plant them. I love offering a juicy red cherry tomato to a friend and just as they are popping it in their mouth telling them that “they just grew out of our poo!" ...

Just over a decade ago we ripped out the 1960’s toilet in our house and replaced it with a Separett Villa 9000, a fantastically ugly composting toilet. It seemed like a high risk strategy, especially as we only had one toilet, but looking back it was one of the best decisions we made. Despite it’s aesthetic inadequacies, which still bother me on a daily basis, it’s advantages have been enormous. Compared to our old toilet we save around 27,000 litres of clean drinking water per year, have a warmer house in winter because we aren’t flushing heat out of our bathroom several times a day, and we now have an abundance of nutritious compost that magically grows tomatoes for us. I’ve estimated that since we installed it, we’ve collected and deposited on our garden around 1.6 tonnes of human manure, also know as “Humanure”. ...

You might laugh but something strange happens when you live with a composting toilet. Your perspective shifts from seeing your own produce as a disgusting waste stream to a valuable resource. You start to see the end of one meal as the beginnings of a future meal. This happens to such an extent that after a while, it becomes hard to use normal toilets in other places. You start wondering whether you can hold it in until you get home so that you don’t have to throw it away. ...

The water and sewage industry itself seems to already promote itself as an example of a circular economy in action, and in some ways that is true. The problem is that the first step in the process is to create pollution. To quote DEFRA “Sewage treatment is essentially about removing polluting organic material from waste water". What they don’t mention is why the “polluting organic material", also known as poo, ended up mixed with waste water in the first place. The basic principle of modern sewage systems is to pollute water and then attempt to unpollute it.

It’s this mixing of solids with water and urine that is fundamental to the standard design of modern sewage systems and it’s hugely inefficient. The solids get mixed together with everything else that goes down drains, from cooking oil to bleach, to engine oil, to house paint, to microplastics and to Cillit Bang, creating a toxic sludge soup that releases greenhouse gases as it anaerobically digests and is incredibly difficult to separate back out. Doing so is expensive and requires significant amounts of energy, producing more greenhouse gases. The solid waste that is eventually recovered is contaminated with hazardous substances including heavy metals that are almost impossible to separate out. Increasingly, these solids are returned back to the land, but in a form that then contaminates the soil, the water table and the foods grown on that land. ...

Could we use modern design and technology to make composting human excrement safe, affordable and socially acceptable? Composting toilets from companies like Separett and Air Head are a great start and they can be retrofitted into any home that has a garden with a compost heap, but they are ugly, expensive and the user experience struggles to compete with the “flush and forget” appeal of a normal toilet.

Would it be possible to design a toilet that solves these issues and appeals to normal people? Just as Tesla shifted perceptions of electric vehicles from “eco cars for hippies” to “I want one of those“, could the same be possible for composting toilets? Could they actually be more desirable than those water guzzling Victorian models?

Read: When will we face our own sh*t? by Tom Greenwood

Region as a verb

We often think of the word 'region' as static, or rooted in tradition. But "bioregioning," a half-century-old idea renewed by ecologists over the past decade, is an active verb rooted in addressing the ecological issues that politicians seem unable to solve. Essentially, it's the combination of nature (geography, ecology) and culture (traditions, customs) into an integrated future-oriented concept.

That sounds super niche, and it kind of is. But maybe—as this issue of Future Observatory Journal lays out—it can help lead the design industry, and the myriad industries it touches, to different ways of imagining, prioritizing, planning, organizing, and producing.

Note: This article is part of a new design sustainability journal started by the Design Museum, geared toward developing the cultural narrative around sustainability. Highly suggest checking the link below to read more!

Since at least the 1960s, radical political ecologists have criticised shallow reform environmentalism, calling instead for deep ecological movements that believe in the intrinsic value of nature and for a human society organised along ecological lines. Among these attempts to reimagine our relationship with the Earth is a concept that brings us down to Earth: the bioregion. ...

Bioregionalism as an eco-philosophy took root in California in the 1970s. The back-to-the-land movement was in full swing and, in recognition of the disconnect between (particularly Western) livelihoods and the ecosystems supporting them, eco-anarchists were criticising the state as a spatial configuration that was too big, too centralised and too unresponsive to ecological issues. ...

[Bioregion] refers both to a geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place. ...

One of the most interesting reworkings of bioregionalism is the emerging language of bioregioning, the verb, being mobilised by activists and thinkers such as John Thackara, Isabel Carlisle and the UK Bioregional Learning Centre. Bioregioning maintains the key provocations of bioregionalism but transposes them into a new register. Rather than seeking to define and map bioregions, looking for their true essence, bioregions are understood as dynamic, continually and actively co-created by those (human and non-human) that live there. Their truest form can never be achieved, and thus the negotiation of our togetherness is always an open question. Bioregioning refuses to know the destination in advance, instead focusing on the process, rather than outcome, of change. This turns the bioregion into a political project with the possibility of a radical critique of power.

Bioregioning cracks open the world into a patchwork of place-based experiments, each unfolding in negotiation between those that live there. Such an image is hopeful yet filled with tension, simultaneously dizzyingly complex yet brimming with opportunity.

Read: Contested Terrain by Ella Hubbard

Humanity as an antibody

Through the lens of cancer growth, biologist Spencer R. Scott writes about the need for cultural myths, what happens when those myths reach their end-of-life, and our response if no alternative myth is available. On the positive side, he also speculates about some 'pathways to recovery,' using humans as antibodies.

One of the better "capitalism-is-cancer" metaphors that I've read!

I’m not the first to relate our current economic system to cancer, but my past research in oncological immunotherapy has shown me that the metaphor usually doesn’t go far enough. If capitalism is a tumor, what does the inside of a tumor tell us about who we are as actors in this story? And what does this metaphor tell us about our pathways toward recovery? ...

In their insatiable hunger, tumors create a space inside them rife with excess. Inside a tumor there is an excess of necrotic tissue for bacteria to feed on (yum!). In our analogy, that means the material excesses afforded (to some), in the long arc, by forced labor and colonialism, and in the short arc, continued extractivism.

Drawing the connection between cancer and capitalism wasn’t as profound to me as drawing the connection between the interior of a tumor and what it feels like to be living inside capitalism. There is a sense of unrealness that comes from being dislocated from reality (the body/the Earth). And there is a sense of unease as the immune-privileged gorge themselves on the necrotic bounty of once healthy living systems, unaware of where the bounty came from and what awaits them outside the tumorous fortress they take for granted. ...

It seems, when you give a bunch of people temporary excess and protection from the realities of the Earth System, you get a maddening cesspool of ideas and systems that can only survive at the center of a tumor. ...

Climate change, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and microplastics in every crevice of the earth (including our organs and pristine mountaintops) are proving that if we won’t acknowledge reality, reality will acknowledge us. ...

At the center of all these unreal beliefs is the proliferation of ecological illiteracy. For almost all of human history, it was nearly impossible to be ecologically illiterate. You had no choice but to be in constant communication and relationship with the ecosystems around you. Being attuned to that relationship meant life or death. However, in this culture’s quest to dominate nature, and in its self-delusion that it has done so, ecosystems were abused and pushed aside. The people inside the system were largely protected from our ecosystem's potential wrath and therefore the need to build relationships with them. But that “dominance” was always tenuous and illusory, the abused ecosystems are breaking through the walls of capitalism to indiscriminately haunt us all. ...

The climate crisis has brought to our attention the dire need to regenerate and rewild our degraded ecosystems. We must also consider the human psyche to be a territory equally polluted by the same institutions and belief systems that polluted our world. ...

[W]e have reached an inflection point in the progress of the tumor, it is straining the body/Earth to the limit. We are being forced to consider what is next. If the denizens of capitalism are not provided with an alternative, they will continue to behave like a tumor: with no foresight. ...

My hope is to situate all individuals against the tumor, as capitalism will fail everyone in the end. While people currently exist along a spectrum ranging from extracted victim to beneficiary perpetrator even if we’re victims we have no choice but to strategize and implement the cure. With the cancer and immune system metaphors in mind I can see a few crucial paths to recovery.

Read: If capitalism is a cancer, what are we? by Spencer R. Scott

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading.

To help these ideas spread, please consider sharing a link to this issue or the entire newsletter with your friends or on social media.