4. Our Conjoined Future

Chapter 4, Our Conjoined Future, draws upon ‘regenerative landscape’ case studies to emphasise the need for a fully systemic approach to solutions that optimise outcomes for all ecosystem services and their associated beneficiaries, rather than perpetuating current narrow exploitation patterns that favour the few yet overlook the many. The chapter also addresses what sustainable development means in a world of growing human numbers reliant upon declining natural resources. It emphasises the importance of going well beyond current minimalist understandings and regulatory transpositions of ‘lightening society’s loads on ecosystems’, instead realising the explicit bold, intergenerational vision of the 1987 ‘Brundtland Commission’ definition of sustainable development. Systemic application of the STEEP framework is introduced as a systems-based model for understanding social and ecological interdependencies within complex contexts of technology choice and management in political economies. Consideration is also given to where leadership happens in society.