RURAL & REMOTE | PASSION | ENTERPRISING | SUSTAINABILITY
Our name reflects the unique sustainability principles embodied by starfish as well as the many traditional stories of starfish which show us both how to be sustainable and some of the ways to shift to sustainability.
“The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.”
~ William Gibson
Starfish’s purpose is to create, lead, facilitate and support the changes that are required to be able to realise genuine rural and remote sustainability, being:
- well, inclusive and diverse people, families and communities (socio-cultural sustainability)
- meaningful, fair and responsible livelihoods and economies (economic sustainability)
- resilient, robust and productive environments for the planet (environmental sustainability).
Starfish’s sees sustainability as requiring a new way of living and being on Earth ~ one that both enables all of humanity’s essential needs, and the needs of all other lifeforms, to be met both now and for many generations to come into the foreseeable future.
This focus on “essential needs” rather than “wants” is most likely to present a deep challenge to contemporary culture and economics ~ and yet it is essential if the goal of genuine sustainability is to be met.
Starfish’s name has been inspired by the lessons for genuine sustainability that are given by the sea creatures and the book, The Starfish and the Spider.
Starfish are one of the few creatures on earth which are able to regenerate and replicate. Starfish are able to self-heal and regrow lost parts like a broken off limb. Amazingly, an entire new starfish can also grow from that lost limb. In this way starfish symbolise some of the key features of rural sustainability:
- Distributed rather than centralised ~ in terms of knowledge, capabilities, systems, resources and more. This principle is embodied in collaborative governance, renewable energy, the internet, community agriculture and more
- The importance of regeneration and healing to be able to work through the legacies of conflict, restore environmental health and be equipped to work through the likely future ‘great disruption’ and associated trauma
- Being of service and collaborative to enhance capacity and resilience in others ~ be they people, families, communities, organisations, networks or systems ~ and to create inter-dependent, not co-dependent, mutually beneficial relationships
“You never change anything by fighting the existing. To change something, build a new model and make the existing obsolete.”
~ Buckminster Fuller
There are of course other principles which are important to sustainability, however we are inspired by the beautiful creatures which have given us both our name as well as some significant guiding principles for our work.
