Regeneration – Stephen Hinton Consulting

Ecological Insolvency: When the Forestry Industry is unable to restore its damage

The term insolvency is normally used in finance. A company is insolvent when it can no longer pay its debts. What if we applied this concept ecologically?

Sweden’s forestry industry is in a state of ecological insolvency. It cannot meet the environmental obligations that come with responsible land stewardship. The industry is profitable and not financially insolvent. However, it fails to maintain biodiversity, soil fertility, water quality, and climate stability—its ecological “debts” continue to grow. This is a perfect example of where Real Capital – the forest ecosystem – is extracted and degraded and converted into money. It is becoming so degraded that it may even lose its material-producing capability.

This is what a regenerative economy looks like

Imagine. You buy an orange from the store and trigger a whole chain of positive reactions. Staff get paid, public infrastructure gets repaired, rebuilt and improved, the land the oranges grow on gets fertilised and new orange trees get planted. It is not such a stretch of the imagination as you might think, because that is the way nature operates. By feeding, creatures actually steward and improve the eco-system. You could say their feeding, moving through and manuring nature regenerates the capability of the eco-system.