1. The State of the Planet: From Anthropocene Dominant to Regenerative-Adaptive Futures

 From the twentieth to the twenty first century humans have passed through a unique period; one in which the planning, design and construction of the built environment has been almost un-imaginably bad and unacceptable. The way we have designed and built our cities has resulted in a degeneration of the earth’s natural systems, now eventuating in unprecedented impacts of a changing climate. The dominant approach to address this planetary issue is to apply sustainable development practices, focusing primarily on reducing damage to nature and aiming for a ‘neutral’ outcome using resources more efficiently. Ultimately, this practice is only resulting in a mitigation approach that is just slowing down the degradation of our living earth. Missing from the design, planning and adaptation practice discourse is a more deeply integrated approach to the design and planning of human settlements that considers the whole, which moves away from the current view that humans standing apart from nature, rather than participating, co-evolving and adapting with nature. Identifying key issues of concern to be dealt with – our human’s affinity to water and unprecedented coastal development; the challenge of a changing climate with increased natural disasters; the degradation of ecosystems; and the half-hearted attempt by a global anthropogenic and utilitarianism society to achieve sustainability; this chapter introduces a pattern language approach to deal with these complexities. The narrative sets out the fundamentals for a more holistic, all encompassing, integral method, presenting a regenerative-adaptive pattern language for sustainable development, that re-establishes our wholeness with nature, and considers the vulnerabilities of a changing landscape. Setting in place the typical structure of a pattern language, the chapter concludes with the fundamental pattern The Whole, [1].