A long time sustainability advocate, I never managed to get enthusiastic about beach cleaning days when the enterprise resource group at my employer would organise them. And I felt inadequate for not going. Why do I care so much about sustainability yet can’t get my a** to a beach cleaning day, I wondered? The answer to that question became clear in May 2021 when I started deep diving into Systems Thinking as part of a Circular Economy course.

Beach cleaning days are a bandaid, short term, downstream, wasteful, narrow and unsustainable solution to an enormously complex systemic problem. When we clean beaches we address the symptoms of the problem in a small way rather than focusing our energy and efforts on solving the problem at the source in a big way.  

Are you nodding right now? Do you feel a sense of relief? Great! 

Or is this statement making you feel uncomfortable, angry, frustrated and/or disappointed? I can understand, I’ve had to reconsider beliefs quite a few times before and it’s deeply uncomfortable at first. I certainly admire the persistence and dedication of beach cleaning advocates and in some cases, such as oil spills, beach cleaning efforts are critical. However, in many other instances it does little more than feeding the problem. How? Read on.

I can hear someone say: “beach clean up days make people feel good about doing something.” Do they? Really? People might feel good the first time, but the 50th time, how do we feel? Despair sets in because the waste keeps coming back, unrelentingly. We need to address problems at the roots, we need to address waste at the source. 

Someone else might say “yes, but if we don’t clean up the beach no one will get to enjoy it”. Yes, that’s true. But something else happens when we clean the beaches - we remove the evidence of the consequences of our behaviours. We blind ourselves which in turn reinforces the current waste patterns because the consequences of our actions become less visible. They remain just as visible to the sea animals, but as long as we don’t see it, it’s all good. Right? Have you ever pushed food crumbs under the couch? It’s a bit like that - we hide the problem or leave it for someone else rather than work on addressing it at the source. Out of sight, out of mind.

A third person might say “ok I hear you, but surely we should at least do beach cleaning days with our children as daycare or school excursions?” Yes absolutely, but we need to do it in a way that brings them hope as well as knowledge, skills and a different mindset to address the problem sustainably. It is critical for children to witness and understand causes and consequences and taking them to the beach is a powerful way to do that. What we desperately want to avoid is our children coming back from the beach outing thinking “we need to pick up rubbish at the beach to save the sea animals”. It would be such a missed opportunity at best and a catalyst for despair and repeating the same mistakes at worst. To make it clear: we don’t need to clean the beaches, we need to redesign products, solutions, business models to eliminate waste and pollution at the source.

I have met way too many young Australian children who think we need to clean the beaches to help the sea animals. And it gives me shivers. My great hope is that in a few years I’ll be hearing children en masse say “we need to redesign that stuff so that it doesn’t end up in the ocean if it’s not meant to” and “we need to design stuff that gives back to nature rather than destroys it”.

So when we take our children on beach outings, let’s remember it’s not enough to put our sun hat on, we need to put our investigator’s hats on to help them understand the big picture:

• Where does all this waste come from? Who made those things? Who used those things? For what purpose? 

• And where does it go from there? 

• What impact does this waste have on the sea animals? On people in other countries? On the climate? 

• What materials are being used? How are these materials made? By who? Why are those materials used? What are the consequences of using those materials? 

And we must also, very importantly, give them hope. IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY. In fact, it’s not that way in nature. There is no waste in nature, only resources. Nature is circular and regenerative by design. Despite being part of nature, we have over the past 500 years swayed away from circularity and regeneration. But it is not too late to rewrite the end of that story, we can do it together starting today at home and in our classrooms. 

So what can we do to never have to hold a beach cleaning day again?

We give our children the keys to the golden door, the one they intuitively want to walk through but don’t know how to unlock. We give them the keys - hope, mindset, skills, knowledge - to redesign a world where we eliminate waste and pollution, we keep products and materials in use for as long as possible and we regenerate natural and social systems. No, this is not an idea out of a fairytale, but a promising economic model which offers a clear roadmap to thriving within the limits of our planet: it’s called a circular economy. But to achieve this new economic model, we also need new mental models. To thrive within the limits of our planet we need to relearn to think in circular and regenerative ways like our ancestors did and many indigenous populations still do today.

Why is it critical to relearn to think in circular and regenerative ways? Because as Albert Einstein famously said: “we cannot solve problems with the same thinking we used then we created them”.

Let me elaborate on this. The majority of innovators, entrepreneurs, business people, politicians and other change makers are trying to address our complex problems with the same mindsets that created these problems in the first place. And it’s largely not their fault, most people mean well, they really want to make our world safer, fairer, more equitable, happier and sustainable. So why do we keep coming up with bandaid, narrow solutions that often create more problems than what they solve? 

Well, it’s because most of us have been raised to think in mostly reductionist ways. That means that we have a learned tendency to break everything into parts as a way to simplify. We believe that it is through simplification that we will gain greater understanding. This is what our parents and schools taught us. Again, no hard feelings here, at the time everyone thought reductionist thinking was the best way to go and it has certainly helped us make some important discoveries. But with an incredibly dominant focus on reductionism we’ve lost much of our ability to zoom out and sense the interconnectedness of all things. 

It is our reductionist thinking that makes us believe that cleaning the beaches is a worthy investment of time and resources. When we clean beaches, our reductionist mind has broken the complex problem of waste into independent problems to be solved one at a time. Our brain tells us “let’s tackle problem No 1 first: the beach is full of waste, so let’s solve this by picking up the rubbish on the beach”. We willingly ignore the broader context and its complexity to arguably feel like we’re making progress. Except we aren’t making progress because this approach doesn’t work. It cannot work because the world is deeply interconnected and so are our problems. 

I hear you say: so what should we do to develop those circular and regenerative ways of thinking and solving problems in ourselves and our children? What can we do as parents, carers and teachers?

Great questions, I’m glad you asked. There is a lot to unpack to answer these questions and I am afraid you will have to continue reading my blog to learn more. And no, no, no recycling isn’t the answer! 😉 You might remember I mentioned at the beginning of the article that I realised the downsides of beach cleaning days the day I came across Systems Thinking. Systems Thinking is the yang to reductionism and is an essential skill to effectively and sustainably solve complex problems.

In the next article I’ll unpack one way in which we can support children in the classroom to develop their circular and regenerative problem solving skills by introducing the practice of Systems Thinking, Design Thinking (a widely adopted innovation methodology) and biomimicry (the practice of mimicking nature to solve problems) through play. 

I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback, please do not hesitate to comment below or send me a message at dorothee@endlessplaystudio.com.