In Ecosystem Restoration it has been taught to envision how a site could be improved. What does it look like for a degraded landscape to be restored? The act of imagining that and all the (thought) processes involved can be enriching.

This applies to different settings and scales as well. Self improvement can be seen as ‘ecosystem restoration’ in a sense. Ecosystems can teach us analogous lessons about oneself, as we are also a life system and embedded in the life systems. Restoration has a lot of overlap with regeneration and evolution/succession, and all of these processes can be present in one’s life. (More on my experience/thought on ecosystem restoration and oneself at Love what grows and elsewhere on this blog.)

The different scales of envisioning a better world are also related to one another. In some cases, I wonder if they’re related in any fractal way, with the patterns on one scale being replicated throughout other scales at different orders of magnitude. An important aspect of this is that the act of envisioning a better world on one scale can facilitate the actual building a better world on another scale.

To imagine a better world is a beautiful step toward a better world – only a step, but a step nonetheless.