I attended a great permaculture bootcamp today. One of the instructors made a comment that got me thinking: There is a difference between eco-friendly and sustainable. So, on my walk home, I jotted down some examples of each. Then I remembered that the goal of permaculture is regeneration: A system that repairs itself and produces yields for a very long time (think rainforests…). Regeneration does not take resources from the system that it does not replace and, in contrast to sustainability, it adds or repairs resources. It is the goal of permaculture in the hopes of aiming for it, we will at least end up being sustainable. I thus added a column. Here is what I came up with.

Keep in mind that this isn’t meant as a list to tell us that we’re not green enough because we’re “just” eco-friendly. For one thing, I don’t know how feasible some of these things are – at least in the way we live now. The list is meant as food for thought. It is also meant to take an honest look at our lives and find areas where we might be green-washing our behavior – by really not being as sustainable as we could be. And I could be wrong with some of these. Please add your own examples to the comments! If you want my reasoning of why I put something in a certain column, please ask.