Less than two weeks into the new year and the world’s wealthiest 1% have already used their fair share of the global carbon budget allocated for 2025. 2024 was hottest year on record. How can we change our extractive mindset to a regenerative mindset? How can we evolve our systems from economic growth to a vision of regenerative living and eco-civilization?
Paul Shrivastava is Co-President of The Club of Rome and a Professor of Management and Organisations at Pennsylvania State University. He founded the UNESCO Chair for Arts and Sustainable Enterprise at ICN Business School, Nancy, France and the ONE Division of the Academy of Management. He was the Executive Director of Future Earth, where he established its secretariat for global environmental change programs, and has published extensively on both sustainable management and crisis management.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
So, as co-president of the Club of Rome, could you give us a little bit of history? I believe the Club is coming up to its 60th anniversary. For those who don’t know, it’s a think tank for leading scientists, economists, policy, and business leaders, a place to collaborate and promote leading-edge thinking, and has national associations in 35 countries and territories.
PAUL SHRIVASTAVA
The Club of Rome was established in the late 1960s. And yes, we are in our sixth decade, coming up on the 60th anniversary in a few years. It was established by Aurelio Peccei, who was at that time the CEO of Fiat, an automobile company in Italy. And his idea was that there were a lot of people thinking about challenges. Big challenges, global challenges. But the one area that was missing is some kind of long-term thinking on the prospects of humanity surviving in the long run. He put together this group, and they took on what they call the human problematic. By which they refer to the idea of how do humans survive through both the technological as well as ecological economic challenges that are forthcoming back in the 1960s. He designed it as a think tank rather than as a consulting company or as a research company, so it was supposed to be independent.
Over the 60 years, it has morphed and transformed, particularly in the last five years. Huge transformation. So originally, the number of members was 100. Now they're up to 150. There are a lot more women, a lot more younger people, a lot more people from the Global South. So it's not like a club of Italian CEO’s friends anymore. It's much more professional, and it has artists, and it has scientists, and it has politicians and business people, and we pride ourselves in our independent thinking. The method that we have adopted is one of systems analysis. So systemic thinking, how do we change and transform large-scale planetary systems?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Indeed, you need to involve all those actors in society, not just in our supply chains and businesses. The circular economy needs to bring in everyone, which I really appreciate about the Club of Rome. I believe today you're headquartered in Switzerland, so it truly is international. You mentioned the cofounder who was CEO of Fiat. So, I'd like to talk about consumerism and capitalism, which have accelerated the ecological crisis.
SHRIVASTAVA
I am in full agreement. Climate change is here. It's already causing devastation to the most vulnerable populations. We are living with an extractive mindset, as you pointed out, where we are extracting one way out of the life system of the earth. And we need to change from that extractive mindset to a regenerative mindset. And we need to change from the North Star of economic growth to a vision of eco civilizations. So those are the two main principles that I want to propose and that the Club of Rome suggests that we try to transform our current organization towards regenerative living and eco civilization.
So regenerative living means that the system that sustains us, we need to give back to it. We can't just one way extract out of it, whether it is fossil fuels, which you pointed out, or agriculture. Just extracting out of the earth without sustaining the soil is not a way that we can live for the long run. So for us, regenerativity or regenesis can be applied in many areas. In agriculture, there's already a big community of regenerative agriculture. There is regenerative medicine that people are thinking of regenerating at the cell level for health. There is even talk about regenerative economies, circular economies, and regenerative finance.
Because it's not just a question of knowledge. It's also a question of values and mindsets. We need transformation at many scales and all the life support systems that we have now, whether they are food, water, energy, transportation, entertainment, education, or the way our societies are organized, many of them are premised on that extractive model. We need to switch to the regenerative model, and where we want to take the world is not some kind of abstract economic growth utopia where everybody has a certain level of income, but a place where the earth systems are in balance, they are healthy, and they're supporting life. So we call this eco civilization with the idea that we want to see an integrated development of humans and nature in a kind of mutual harmony and balance with each other. Again, the idea of eco civilization, I mean, both Eastern philosophies and Western philosophies have multiple ways of expressing what an eco civilization is. Many countries today, including China, which is one of the largest economies, back in 2006 and 2007 proposed the idea of eco civilization economy.
Yes, I think you're absolutely right that the inequalities that have been created over the last 100 years have distorted even the principles of capitalism as it was originally conceived. Capitalism is not one thing; capitalism is not something. It has been around for 500 years, and over that time, you and I and the public have given it certain rights to do certain things in certain ways. They're all legal rights, but they've just accumulated them to a point that in the United States, a corporation is a person and a person who has more rights than all the human rights that we have. So it is in our interest, and it is our responsibility to reshape the rules of capitalism and to make sure that it both reduces the inequalities, the extreme inequalities, as well as allows the development of a healthy planet that doesn't extract the life system out of a healthy planet. Can that be done? Are there good ideas for doing it? My answer to that is yes. In the last 50 to 75 years, we have learned so much about the nature of what's going on in Earth systems as a whole. Whether they're mountains or forests or oceans or land masses, we have a tremendous amount of scientific knowledge. We have also a political understanding of the downsides of this extreme inequality and the advent of climate change because of the way we are utilizing our resources.
The current system benefits some people and privileges some ideas, and it's taken 500 years to evolve. It's not going to change in the next year or two or five or ten. It's a transformation process that we need to put into place. This has to be done together, and it has to be done in a collaborative way. If we kind of put an antagonistic lens that it is billionaires versus the poor, we are not likely to find a solution that easily. So we look for something in which each party can respectfully understand each other's positions and move towards that optimum solution that will be good for all.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Talking about billionaires. We've seen billionaires exerting new levels of control over economies and the political election landscape. Elon Musk gave 250 million dollars to the Trump campaign and was even offering people money if they went out to vote. If that's not buying people and influencing elections, I don't know what is. So, how do you see the future of our electoral story? Will AI accelerate the game of persuading and influencing the masses? Obviously, AI is transforming every sector of society as well as potentially creating remedies for diseases, widening inequities, bias, and accelerating everything.
SHRIVASTAVA
The kind of experience we went through in the last four months with the election and what we witnessed in terms of money influencing politics—not just Elon Musk's $240 million, which is one piece, but there are lots of other billionaires who have poured money into the political campaign on both sides—not just for Trump, but also for the Democrats. And so, while the economic wealth production system is broken, I think our political system is also broken. I mean, we allow this kind of money politics to prevail. We legislate; we make laws for this kind of flawed democracy to emerge, and we need to fix that also. How do we fix it? What I see in these risks that you pointed out—both climate change and biodiversity loss and AI—is that we are now facing existential risks that threaten human survival, the human imaginary in the current form. The response to it needs to be in the form of existential opportunities. It can't be just transforming a small piece here or a small piece there, whether it is the definition of democracy or the finance influencing democracy. We need to rethink what it means to be human in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene poses many challenges: ecosystem challenges, social polycrises, and all of that. So, what does it mean to rethink what it means to be human? To me, these opportunities can be designed around the two principles I mentioned earlier, which are regenerative living and eco-civilization. Those are ways of thinking about us as humans that will help us to jointly address the existential risks that now face humanity.
A word or two about AI: I think AI is sort of inevitable in some ways. It is not very intelligent right now; it is probably closer to artificial stupidity, but it's a question of time before it becomes smarter and smarter. We need to tackle the right to use question and the value question now as it is developing. It can amplify both the positive possibilities as well as the negative consequences, and we want to make sure that it benefits the largest number of people on Earth.
And systems themselves. Are there guidelines? Are there principles? The Club of Rome group has subgroups who are looking at AI, proposing a constitution for AI, and trying to influence its development, understanding fully well that almost $300 billion has been poured into AI already by the United States venture capital, and it is going to start having impacts. We can't stop it, but while the train is moving, we are trying to make sure some guardrails get into place that everybody plays by. All these transformations cannot be done one by one; they have to happen together in order to have an overall impact, and that is the challenge that not a single organization like the Club of Rome or a university or somebody can accomplish alone. All of us need to get involved.
Not only is this an intergenerational question, but this tendency for the techno-industrial shiny object to dominate is even suppressing our own humanness. Humans absorb knowledge in many ways. It's not just an intellectual, cognitive thing. We have emotional knowledge, social knowledge, traditional knowledge systems, and faith-based knowledge. What these industrial, techno-industrial knowledge systems are doing is suppressing all of those. We don't trust our own emotions. We are asked to actually doubt our emotions. We are actually asked to leave our subjectivity. We call this science; we call it progress. We need to be a little bit more thoughtful about what constitutes knowledge and wisdom. Much of this wisdom comes from our bodies; much of it comes from nature that we interact with on a daily basis, not some abstract concept of rainforest or oceans, but from nature that the moment you walk out and you experience a form of knowledge through your own perceptions. We have learned to devalue it. This is, I think, shortsighted. It ultimately transforms us into automatons of some sort, and we need to guard against it.
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It will dominate systems. So we do have to be very cautious because something that you mentioned earlier in the conversation was regenerative knowledge. You come from India, where there is a tradition of knowledge that’s passed on generationally. You didn't throw out the old information, you built upon it. And I fear, for all that AI can promise, it's this shiny new thing. And we could, as we have in the past, throw out and disrespect the older and sometimes slower ways of doing things for all that is shiny and new and faster. Whether it's regenerative farming... there are many ways that our ancestors knew what they were doing. We don't need to throw out all those old ways because they were actually more in harmony with the planet.
SHRIVASTAVA
I have, in my work, attempted to sort of bring about a more unitary understanding of knowledge where it's not just scientific knowledge. It also includes the social sciences, the humanities, the arts, and the emotional knowledge that is inherent in everything that we do. For many years, for five years, I ran this UNESCO chair for the integration of arts and science, implementing sustainable development goals at the ICN Business School in Nancy. We learned how important it is for us to be holistic because the transformation needs to be holistic. We can segment ourselves into digital or other worlds that we participate in periodically, but that's not all of us. That is a part of us, and we need to realize our full potential. I think that is our destiny as humans—to realize our full potential, which includes these multiple forms of knowledge.
Indeed, understanding that this embodied learning exists and that there are so many other things. If we look toward the natural world, non-human animals collaborate with remarkable synchronicity. You only have to look at starlings, their dance, their flight in the sky, or the shows of fish and coral reefs. All these things exhibit a kind of intelligence we can learn from. It's not all about individual action; it's about getting groups and society to work in harmony and maybe remember the natural circularity of the world, which we are a part of as much as we like to sometimes in our minds separate ourselves from.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
I know that you've taught this, talking about that course, managing with passion, bringing those kinds of thoughts of this embodied learning into management, into business, and other ways where I think this kind of synchronicity, which we also know has health benefits as well. It's not just about encouraging collaboration; we feel happier when we're working as a group and have this sense of oneness.
SHRIVASTAVA
Yes, I think it's a kind of evolution of consciousness that we need to experience. Not everybody is there, but I think being human allows us the ability to draw and grow. I feel that is what I'm trying to argue for when I talk about embodied learning: use your body to learn; don't just use what's between your ears, or engage in emotional learning, learning with passion about nature, about people, and about communities. What I'm trying to point out is the potential of what it means to be human in the future. Some of our humanity is going to be dominated by technology. There is no question about it. I mean, we benefit from prosthetic devices. You are wearing glasses; I'm wearing glasses. I mean, I'm wearing hearing aids. I'm wearing a heart valve. By the time you reach my age, you've got many of these technological enhancements, if you will. But we can't just be seduced by that. It has to play a role in the bigger conversation of what is meaningful for humans. What is the purpose of our lives? We need to be rethinking that and give place to technology and economics, etc. but realize that we are part of that bigger consciousness that is unifying.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
You mentioned bringing embodied learning into management and business. And there are other ways where I think this kind of, collaboration and synchronicity has other benefits for our health and well-being. We feel happier when we're working as a group. We experience a sense of oneness.
SHRIVASTAVA
It is more holistic. It almost sounds somewhat spiritual, but I mean, each of these words comes with a lot of baggage. I want to be careful that the people listening to this podcast don't misinterpret that. Science is very important, technology is very important, and economics is important, but it's not the whole thing. Each one of us has to manifest for ourselves, and it depends to some degree on our cognitive, emotional, and spiritual skills. Each of us will reach it to a different level. That is the future—the eco-civilization future I'm imagining. A lot of it also needs to be fleshed out and articulated in different ways. There's not a single ecological future or a single eco civilization out there; there are probably many of them. We need to design our own lives and our livelihoods to meet our sort of eco-civilizational future.
I do remember a few things about my upbringing that I think helped shape my systems view, and they're almost oppositional. So, on the one hand, Hinduism is a multi-god religion. They believe in millions of gods, and they have an understanding of cosmology that is multi-lifetime. You don't end your life in this one; you kind of reincarnate your soul into another one. So they have this big cosmological picture, which created a sense of wonder and awe in me right from childhood. Like, oh my God, we are not just living in this house, in this neighborhood, in this town, in this country, in this world. There is this whole big thing with time and space. So, it kind of unbounded my physical existence. On the other hand, the same precepts of religion and the caste system within the Hindu religion were another mind-opener. We are imposing these systemic rules on our lives, which privilege some people, privilege some ideas, and denounce other people and ideas.
And so, I was keenly perceptive that systems analysis broadly lacks a kind of self-reflectivity about its own boundaries. It doesn't allow non-material things, spiritual things, to enter it. To some degree, the Club of Rome's work also suffers from that. We do a lot of systems analysis of material systems but don't incorporate the spiritual, the emotional, the subjective as strongly into as the artistic and the aesthetic, etc. One of my goals now at the Club of Rome is to open up the dialogue beyond just the material systems and earth systems to include these human systems that are, in many ways, driving what's happening to the earth systems.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
We have to bring in that emotional aspect to get people to care and to commit their time, and then open up for that sense of wonder. When we're talking about moving towards a true circular economy, there are so many things like joy can't be commodified. So I think if you stimulate those more, they don't need to fill that voice with so many objects that weigh down our planet.
SHRIVASTAVA
I mean, I would love to have an educational system that allowed children to remain with that sense of wonder or retain that sense of wonder and the emotionality that makes them children. In our hurry to grow up and become rational—because rational gets rewarded by a rational economy—we have distorted many parts of being human.
And not just distorted, we systematically keep on suppressing and distorting it. It might be that at some point, humans—at least some humans—will realize the power and the utility of being emotional and being more natural to who they are; being feral in some ways, and embracing wildlife and nature in more naturalistic ways than we currently do through our socialized ideas about what nature is and what we can do with it. Because the socialized ideas are the ones that are destroying nature. They are making nature into an asset. Then you put a price on it, and you forget that it’s also a tree.
I feel that all this knowledge I’ve accumulated over 20 years in colleges and universities and working in those environments has diminished my own humanity. I think we are the final authors of our lives. If we look at ordinary things, we can make them extraordinary just by our sheer will and by experiencing them in a different way.
Ultimately, it changes the big picture because I see people changing jobs, changing their livelihoods, and changing their communities in order to maintain the integrity of what they want to do in these small, ordinary things.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
You mentioned the ordinary becoming extraordinary just by bearing witness. You were brought up in India, and you've lived around the world. Could you share with us ome particularly meaningful memories of your encounters with the beauty and wonder of the natural world, and how they continue to inspire you?
SHRIVASTAVA
The accident in 1984 showed me that the promise of technology and the promise of this industrial shining object is deeply flawed. It does not include a vision of being human, and it transformed my professional life going forward. I started looking at the downsides of industrialism, technology, and capitalism, trying to figure out how we can make improvements to bring in that humanness, compassion, and the interrelationship—the connection between people and between people and nature—that would make us more complete.
I still recall from my childhood experiences that involved animals. Learning from nature and animals, I have seen the hollowing of urban life from animals over the last 70 years, which I think is hugely detrimental to humans. Humans are a kind of animal, and we have lived in harmony with animals for the longest time—not in a subjugating animals way, not just killing 80 billion animals for our food, which we do today. This, to me, is not just morally wrong; it is incomprehensible that we do it. I can’t understand this because I’ve had a relationship with animals that has been much more equal in nature. I feel that everything I learn about emotions actually comes from my dog—how to rely on other people, how to trust other people. All of those emotions are common to animals.
