For showing us how to live in harmony with the Earth & rethinking our economy to be regenerative
Like many of us, Isabelle Delannoy has spent the last decade searching for solutions to the ongoing environmental crisis. During her search, she came across the concept of a regenerative economy: the kind that, unlike our current, extractive one, seeks to give back and restore our Earth.
Isabelle says that it may not be possible for us to return or replicate all the oil extracted, nor to regrow all the mountains destroyed by mining. Yet, the natural world has a remarkable ability to restore itself, and not only can we assist in efforts to further its natural restoration, but we can also learn from this incredible wealth of knowledge that the natural world has. Indigenous peoples have been doing so for centuries now, and we can too.
So Isabelle believes we can invent non-extractive industries, which are building blocks of a regenerative economy that will drive us towards regenerative abundance. Her work as an agronomic engineer and environmental activist aims at doing just that. She’s focused on one idea within the regenerative economy: a symbiotic economy. Inspired by symbiosis, Greek for “living together”, a type of biological interaction that we continue to see all around us in nature, a symbiotic economy is all about balancing high levels of human activity with healthy, natural ecosystems, and finding ways that these two are mutually beneficial. In other words, to live in harmony with the Earth.
Today, Isabelle is the founder and general manager of Do Green-Symbiotic Economy, and is an expert in sustainable development and emerging sustainable models: of which, the symbiotic economy is one. In fact, she’s even written an entire book titled “Symbiotic Economy”, which lays out a modern economic model towards living together with the Earth, in hopes of regenerating our planet.