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The nature of positive
Pamela Manga & Bill Reeda
a Regenesis Group, 1219 Luisa Street, Suite 5, Santa Fe, NM 87505, US
Published online: 25 Apr 2014.
To cite this article: Pamela Mang & Bill Reed (2015) The nature of positive, Building Research & Information, 43:1, 7-10, DOI:
10.1080/09613218.2014.911565
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09613218.2014.911565
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COMMENTARY
The nature of positive
Pamela Mang and Bill Reed
Regenesis Group,1219 Luisa Street, Suite 5,Santa Fe, NM 87505,US
E-mails: pamela@regenesisgroup.com and bill@regenesisgroup.com
The ‘net-positive’ concept could serve as both a new direction and an aspiration for evolving sustainable design beyond
minimizing human damage toward human habitation that is a source of life. This commentary posits that realizing that
potential depends on how practitioners define positive. Describing net-positive as ‘buildings that “add value” to ecological
systems and generate more than they need to fulfil their own needs’ moves net-positive beyond simply a technical challenge
of creating surpluses to one that requires confronting the widely different interpretations of value and value-adding held
within the sustainability movement. ‘Green’ building, like the building industry, generally defines and measures a
building’s value in terms of human benefit. Ecological sustainability defines value in terms of benefits to the systemic
capability to generate, sustain and evolve the life of a particular place. Reconciling these different definitions could
transform how society conceives of and designs the built environment. Building professionals seeking to translate net-
positive into practice could play a leading role in that transformation. Practice will need to embrace ecological
thinking to create design, construction and ongoing management processes that stimulate dialogue about what it
means for humans to play a value-adding role in the ecological systems where they are constituents.
Keywords: built environment, ecological sustainability, living systems, net-positive, place, regenerative design, social–
ecological system
The term ‘net-positive’ is a succinct and catchy phrase
that could serve well as both a signpost for the direc-
tion that needs to be pursued beyond ‘green’ building
and a standard-bearer for rallying the energy, enthu-
siasm and creativity required to make human habi-
tation of the Earth a source of life. It could provide
the framework for pursuing what has always been
implied in the concept of sustainability. However,
this was not explicitly recognized until recently: if
what society seeks to sustain are the conditions
required for healthy life through time, then the way
humans create and inhabit the built environment
must contribute to those conditions. Whether it suc-
ceeds will depend in large part on how those working
to translate it into practice define positive.
In more popular literature, net-positive is often used as
short-hand for buildings that generate more resources/
energy than they consume. Given the increasing sophis-
tication of green technologies, it is not surprising that
generating a surplus beyond a building’s needs is seen
as an inevitable and exciting next step. Its pursuit is
made even more attractive by the implicit potential
for economic return. However, such a pursuit is not
without significant hazard.
In nature, an under- or unused surplus is a pollutant
with potentially disabling if not toxic results for the
larger system (Mollison, 1999, p. 18). Humans are
already the primary source of such surpluses turned
pollutants, e.g. so-called ‘nutrients’ that wash into
streams from fertilized fields, leaking dairy waste
storage ponds and, most famously, greenhouse gases.
In this light, the Building Research & Information
‘call for papers’ summary of net-positive
1
as ‘buildings
that “add value” to ecological systems and generate
more than they need to fulfil their own needs’ adds a
significant caveat to what makes surplus a positive.
This caveat seems key to differentiating net-positive
from simply a more advanced version of green technol-
ogies with wider marketing appeal. It also positions at
the core of the net-positive design challenge the need to
reconcile the widely different interpretations of value
and value-adding that exist within the sustainability
movement.
Green building was developed from the sciences of the
physical world and a mechanistic worldview. This is
the same foundation that most of the thinking and
technologies of the building industry rely on. It has
produced an industry structure and culture in which
BUILDING RESEARCH &INFORMATION 2015
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the value of a building is still generally defined in terms
of human benefit, most often measured in relatively
short-term financial returns and human health. From
this anthropocentric perspective, ‘ecological systems’
are resources or amenities to be managed and utilized
for human purposes, so adding value to an ecological
system must perforce mean making it more valuable
to sustain human activity. The movement to assign
monetary value to ecosystem services, which was
stimulated by the desire to prevent further destruction
of natural resources, was an effort to broaden this defi-
nition. So long as it is rooted in the anthropocentric
and building technology-oriented way of thinking, it
may simply be seen as an infrastructure-oriented and
quantitative accounting exercise. The implicit sugges-
tion is that such anthropocentric and technological
perspectives may be abandoned if the numbers do
not add up.
In contrast, from an ecological worldview, the almost
infinite interrelationships of ‘ecological systems’ are
the way living entities, including humans, relate to,
interact with and depend upon each other in a particu-
lar landscape in order to pursue and sustain healthy
lives. Eugene Odum spoke of ecology as the study of
living beings in their home (Odum & Barrett, 2004).
Many indigenous people refer to the plants, animals,
insects and even geological features they live with as
relatives. Regenerative Development uses the term
‘partners’ (Reed, 2007) to describe the members of
an ecological system in the sense of partners in the
business of creating the conditions that support
healthy life in the place they co-inhabit. In this bio-
centric perspective, value is defined in terms of benefits
to life. Adding value to an ecological system means
increasing its systemic capability to generate, sustain
and evolve increasingly higher orders of vitality and
viability for the life of a particular place.
These are radically different ways of defining value.
Despite their implications for sustainability, they
remain largely unreconciled, in part because they
are usually held unconsciously. Net-positive has
tended to hover uncomfortably with a foot in both
camps. This is not simply a philosophical discussion;
the definition used has implications for every aspect
of a net-positive building, from the starting point
for design thinking to how to measure the effect
and effectiveness of how surpluses are deployed.
Setting a standard of adding value to ecological
systems will hopefully bring the question to the
fore. Indeed, it could be argued that net-positive’s
real potential resides in transforming how society
conceives of and designs the built environment. It is
not a question of the new performance standards
such buildings deliver. Instead, its potential may be
its invitation to explore the questions these new per-
formance aspirations raise: how society defines and
measures value, and what it means for humans to
play a value-adding role in the ecological systems
where they are constituents.
An example of how net-positive could stimulate such
an exploration has precedent in the investment indus-
try. A parallel to net-positive has emerged under the
term ‘impact investing’ – investments that move
beyond socially responsible investing (SRI) (i.e. mini-
mizing damage) to investing for a ‘positive impact’
(Freireich & Fulton, 2009). When the term was
coined in 2007, hundreds of initiatives had sprung
up around the world aimed at leveraging financial
investments to create greater social and environ-
mental health. The term provided a common identity
to these diverse but largely unconnected initiatives,
and catalysed a more aligned effort to increase both
the number and the effectiveness of investments
aimed at positive impact (Story of Place Institute,
2013).
Initially, the main focus of impact investing dealt with
the technical aspects of how to attract and funnel more
investments into addressing social and environmental
issues; this is the equivalent of net-positive’s focus on
how to generate excess resources to support ecological
systems. The dominant industry paradigm that invest-
ment was about growing stocks and flows of financial
capital was largely unquestioned. The only issue was
how to divert more of that capital for ‘positive’ uses.
Spurred by a grassroots’ local economy movement,
interest in impact investing is now multiplying
rapidly. The challenge of translating impact investing
into tangible, measurable advances at the community
level is bringing professionals and non-professionals
together to explore the meaning and purpose of invest-
ment.
2
A more ecological way of thinking about invest-
ing is dismantling the old silos of interest and
catalysing an outpouring of creative, unorthodox
investment models and partnerships that would have
been inconceivable within the old investment
paradigm.
For many building industry professionals, the world of
ecology and living systems can seem dauntingly
complex. The innovations emerging from impact
investing illustrate that the inclusion of ecological
thinking does not require everyone becoming an
expert in the discipline of ecology. Impact investing
innovators striving to apply ecological thinking to the
design of new investment models are making up the
design process as they go. In contrast, net-positive
can draw on a number of methods and practices that
have emerged over the last few decades from within
what David Orr (Orr 1992) called ecological sustain-
ability (in contrast to technological sustainability).
Grounded in the belief that sustainable living is
rooted in a deep understanding of place, these
methods have allowed the application of key concepts
and principles drawn from living systems and utilized
Mang and Reed
8
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by applied naturalists and ecological systems experts to
shape design and construction processes for years. For
example, regenerative development, regenerative
design and integrative design processes use ecological
thinking to guide a collective discovery process.
The intention of this process is to develop a deeper
understanding of how a project’s context works as a
living, multilayered whole when it is healthy, what is
currently depleting its health, and the unique value-
adding role the project can play in contributing to
conditions that can restore and enhance that health
(Mang & Reed, 2012).
How would ecological thinking shift the way building
industry professionals think about adding value to
ecological systems? One shift directly relevant to
determining how to add value has to do with the
idea of causation. Gregory Bateson (Bateson 2011)
noted that in order to think ecologically, a shift is
needed in the way people are trained to think about
causation. One of the best-known and clearly docu-
mented examples of why is what happened in Yellow-
stone National Park in the United States when wolves
were reintroduced in 1995 after a 70-year absence.
3
Within a surprisingly short time, valleys and gorges
started to regenerate and bare valley sides turned
into forests of cottonwoods, aspens and willow. In
some areas trees quintupled in height in less than six
years. Populations of songbirds, beavers, muskrats,
fish and reptiles multiplied. Hawks and eagles as
well as bears showed up in greater numbers. Even
the physical geography and behaviour of the river
changed to support more life. The wolves ‘caused’
these changes, but not in the linear way that tra-
ditional thinking posits about cause. Instead, the
wolves are living out their role within that ecological
system.
4
In an ecological system, one species fulfilling
its role enables all the other species to play their roles,
even those where there is no direct connection. The
value of a role in an ecological system derives not
from how something functions, but rather from the
pattern of relationships that enable particular
exchanges of value.
Thinking of causation in this way, building industry
professionals would ask very different questions. For
example, instead of starting with the building and
what surplus it can generate, a designer would start
by asking what ecological services have been disen-
abled in this place and what roles are missing that
enabled those services in the past. Instead of asking
how to deploy any excess in order to add value, a
designer would ask what is the role of this particular
project and the land it occupies in the larger systems
of its place. How does its role enable other entities to
play their roles? What are the patterns of relationships
that need to be established or re-established between
the building, its occupants and its community to
enable their positive roles reciprocally? And then,
what specific ‘positives’ can this project offer and/or
catalyse.
Design, construction and ongoing management pro-
cesses that integrate these kinds of questions can
become educational vehicles for the design team, the
client and community stakeholders. Situating a build-
ing’s role within the ecology of its place requires a
different way of thinking to understand it. It must be
conceived as an ongoing process as well as a structure
that, like the example of the wolves, has wide-ranging
systemic implications for shifting patterns of behaviour
in a positive way far beyond its immediate physical
sphere. It is an example of the nature of ecological
thinking described by Orr 20 years ago as ‘the ability
to comprehend patterns that connect, which means
looking beyond the boxes we call disciplines to see
things in their larger context’ ... to see ‘the larger pat-
terns and flows’ that then inform human purpose
(Orr, 1994, p. 108). Performance targets then grow
out of a much broader-based understanding of opportu-
nities for synergy that are specific to the role a project
can play in the evolution of its place.
Buckminster Fuller thought of himself as a designer,
and the process of change as a question of design. He
believed that the only way to change things was to
build a new model that made obsolete the existing
model.
5
The example of impact investing demonstrates
how a new and very small sector within the investment
industry is shifting the conversation in surprising quar-
ters; doing so by bringing in new ways of thinking.
Net-positive design has the same potential – provided
that value is understood in the context of place, time
and relationships within the whole living system
within which the project plays a role.
References
Bateson, N. (2011). An ecology of mind. (film) Bullfrog Films.
DVD ISBN 1-59458-905-4.
Freireich, J., & Fulton, K. (2009). Investing for social and
environmental impact: A design for catalyzing an emerging
industry. San Francisco: Monitor Institute. www.
monitorinstitute.com/impactinvesting or http://www.
thegiin.org/cgi-bin/iowa/resources/research/6.html
Mang, P., & Reed, B. (2012). Designing from place: A regenera-
tive framework and methodology. Building Research &
Information,40(1), 23– 38.
Mollison, B. (1999). Permaculture: A designers’ manual. Tasma-
nia: Tagari.
Odum, E. P., & Barrett, G. (2004). Fundamentals of ecology (5th
ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson Brooks/Cole.
Orr, D. (1992). Ecological literacy: Education and the transition
to a post-modern world. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Orr, D. (1994). Earth in mind. Washington: Island Press.
Reed, B. (2007). Shifting from ‘sustainability’ to regeneration.
Building Research & Information,35(6), 674–680.
Story of Place Institute. (). Place-Sourced Impact Investing: Invest-
ing as an Instrument for Community Transformation, http://
storyofplace.org/SF_Impact.html
The nature of positive
9
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Endnotes
1
Call for papers, special Building Research & Information
issue on net-positive. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/cfp/
rbricfp.pdf
2
Place-Sourced Impact Investing: Investing as an Instrument for
Community Transformation. http://storyofplace.org/SF_Impact.
html
3
Ecological Benefits of Wolves, Sierra Club Wyoming Chapter.
http://wyoming.sierraclub.org/ECOLOGICAL%20BENEFITS%
20OF%20WOLVES.pdf
4
How Wolves Change Rivers (video). http://www.wimp.com/
wolvesrivers
5
Fuller, R. B. (January 20, 1975) ‘Everything I Know’ – session 01.
http://bfi.org/about-fuller/resources/everything-i-know/session-1
Mang and Reed
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