Meet Leyla Acaroglu: a Champion of The Earth
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Photo Credit: James Duncan Davidson
by Daniel Simons
In 2016 Leyla Acaroglu was named a Champion of the Earth by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Her TED talks on rethinking environmental folklore and how to value invisible things have been viewed millions of times, making them some of the most viewed sustainability content on the TED platform.
She’s created the Disruptive Design Method, founded an experimental knowledge lab, The Unschool, and ran an organic farm.
Her pioneering work repurposing Melbourne’s unused news stands led to a revolution in the way we utilise abandoned spaces and she’s even made award-winning short films featuring a mobile phone having an existential crisis.
She’s now the founder of Circular Futures in Australia and the Chief Circular Design Officer for Circular Australia. She travels the world helping people and organisations think differently about the role we can each play in designing a circular, sustainable and regenerative future.
Local Peoples caught up with ‘Doctor Change’ to discuss how systems thinking can solve our urgent collective challenges, and why we need to create a world that is nature positive.
Why do people call you Doctor Change?
I did my PhD on ‘transdisciplinary practices for pro-sustainability design outcomes’, which I called ‘make change’. I think that’s where it came from. Also, almost all of my work is related to creating positive change in the world.
You’re a researcher, a sociologist, a serial founder, a filmmaker, a TED Fellow, a consultant and Circular Australia’s Chief Circular Design Officer. You’re always wearing so many hats. How would you describe what you are doing at the moment? What is taking up most of your time?
I always find it really funny when people ask me what I do as it’s quite a mix. Fundamentally, I’m a designer and a sociologist. I’m very curious about how to create positive impact in the world around us.
I’m deeply passionate about all of the magical realities of being alive on the only known life sustaining planet in the universe. I have a deep reverence and respect for figuring out how humans can live within the natural systems that sustain us, and I’m also very passionate about understanding how to improve the human condition and be more equitable.
I’ve been calling myself a ‘sustainability provocateur’ for over a decade, because I like to push at the boundaries and to challenge the way we do things. But more and more I would see myself as trying to create the conditions for us all to be more effective in creating a positive impact in the world around us through whatever skills we have and whatever resources are available to us.
Recently, I’ve returned to Australia to help the transition to the circular economy, because the federal government and many of the state governments have deep commitments, and that’s very exciting. I’m also working a lot with business and supporting the transition by providing frameworks and landscapes.
I’ve been working in this space for 20 years, but five or six years ago there was not the same amount of emergent explosive stuff like right now, just keeping up with the European legislation is a part time job.
I try to keep abreast and have a general knowledge around everything to do with sustainability and circularity.
Thankfully, because of my work in leadership and training – I run a lot of workshops with senior executives and in-house teams to get them skilled to be able to do this transition – I’m always having to make sure that I’m absolutely aware of everything that’s happening. So I can provide that appropriate advice and support, so that we do have leaders taking significant action that’s based on science.
For over a decade, I’ve run the UnSchool of Disruptive Design which is for individuals who want to transform their career. We teach systems, sustainability and design. It’s proudly rebellious in its approach and really tries to help people become change agents.
Over the years I’ve also really noticed that there’s a massive gap in companies’ knowledge, and that people want to quit their jobs to work in a more planet friendly space. I don’t think people should quit their jobs just because they care about sustainability.
Someone’s probably going to fill their job who might not care. We need to give the right people the right skills. That’s why I recently created Swivel Skills. The idea is that in a company you just need to swivel your existing skill set to sustainability and circularity and climate action by getting a better grasp of environmental literacy and systems thinking.
There really is a huge gap in peoples’ skill set when it comes to meeting what’s needed for a green transformation, and we do really need people to be rapidly skilled.
The aim of Swivel Skills is to fill in that ‘green skills gap’.
Leyla Acaroglu, sustainability strategist, at TED2013: The Young, The Wise, The Undiscovered. Wednesday, February 27, 2013, Long Beach, CA. Photo: James Duncan Davidson
You first gave your TED talk, ‘Paper beats Plastic?’ in 2014. Back then most people probably hadn’t even heard the term ‘sustainability,’ now sustainability, circularity, regeneration are everywhere. Have you seen a lot of change since you began working in this area? Are we there yet?
We’re not there yet, absolutely not. We still have a long way to go, and even if we get to our destination, whether that be circularity or regeneration, there’s still always going to be more work to do.
I think the most exciting thing right now is that there are many converging practices and movements that are helping to really supercharge the actions of key players.
Consumers are demanding changes and there are also a lot more social and regulatory pressures being put on businesses, especially to act on climate change.
Unfortunately, in the process of acting on climate we’re creating a lot of unintended consequences, such as the impact in lithium mining for example.
So the problem I see is that we don’t have that full systems perspective when we’re making decisions. Unfortunately, we just move the impacts around the system, which is one of the key problems I tried to express 10 years ago.
We need a systems approach that takes a bird’s eye view so that decisions can be made with a longitudinal framework and a deeper understanding of systemic impacts. I think we are starting to see a change. I’m very excited by the potential and I’m very motivated by how many people are now moving into this way of thinking.
You’ve also given talks on ‘regenerative leadership’. What does that look like and what role should regenerative thinking play in our future?
Full disclosure, I humbly acknowledge that I’m not an expert on regenerative thinking. I would say my relationship to regeneration is very personal, because for four years I lived on an abandoned farm, and I learned how to restore it.
When I was named UN Champion of the Earth in 2016, I had this hilarious experience where I realised that I had no idea how nature worked.
I was an expert in industrial systems and social systems, and I knew about nature. I loved nature…but I didn’t really ‘know’ nature.
One of the embarrassing stories I like to tell is about the time I wanted to grow a tomato plant. I was told I’d have to smoosh the flowers together to pollinate them. I thought ‘just make babies? What do you mean?’ That’s when I realised I really didn’t know enough about how things in nature worked. I loved that very embarrassing experience, because it drove me to really commit to figuring out how I could embody learning about these things.
The basic concept of regeneration, in a broad sense, is that we are learning to read and participate in the natural systems and cycles in a way that is adding more value than what we are extracting.
Right now, humans take way more than the Earth can reproduce. We get to our Earth overshoot collectively in July or August every year, so there’s a pretty basic understanding that if we keep going at the way we’re going, it keeps getting worse and worse, we’re going to run out of nature. If we run out of nature, we’re all screwed. If you look at the research related to our Planetary Boundaries and the Great Acceleration Graphs, all of the graphs look like hockey sticks. It’s really startling.
We have the ability to transform technical and human systems to fit within the wise natural systems, so that we don’t have waste crises or carbon emissions to the degree where they create climate change. So it’s a fundamental shift in the way we see the world and our place within it.
We can’t just think about one issue like climate change, it’s about all of the resources that we use to make the economy or our bodies function.
For example, the blue blood from crabs was critical in order for us to have vaccines during the covid crisis. We are inherently interconnected to the natural world in more ways than one, not just in the air we breathe.
Our future depends on our ability to work within natural systems, not against them.
There’s also a hugely exciting movement right now that’s emerged as a result of what the UN calls ‘nature positive’. There’s great work being done around new goals to be nature positive by 2030.
For me, the mindset of regeneration is to understand nature, to work within nature, to respect the knowledge that nature has, and to be able to bring that into our decision making.
In one of your talks you said that people should structure their careers around things that make them angry. What is making you angry at the moment? What are you passionate about?
I find it really problematic that the movement towards sustainability and regeneration is dominated by western world views and not Indigenous knowledge, which is what the regenerative principle is essentially founded on.
I’m on my own learning journey to connect with those knowledge systems, and to respectfully engage with the knowledge gaps that I have.
I’m a designer and a sociologist. It is so infuriating because you learn so much about the economy, economic systems, and human systems, and you see the same mistakes happening over and over again. I see that in how we are solving the problems. It’s often just replicating the same system, which is not going to get us to a good outcome.
Many people want a career that adds value to their own life and the world around them, this is often spoken about as finding purpose and for me that is connected to identifying knowledge gaps and being motivated by the things in the world around me that are frustrating.
That’s how I ended up restoring an abandoned farm, to fill my own knowledge gaps and work within natural systems.
Being at the edge of comfort is such a powerful tool for creativity and personally, I am not one to sit around and identify problems without contributing to solving them in whatever way I can.
What role do you think AI should, or will, play in our future?
AI definitely has the potential to operationalise sustainability at scale. It’s also being used pretty poorly in many ways.
I’m very on the fence about the whole thing. I do think we really need to improve the environmental impact of AI, because right now, it’s astronomical.
And I think that there definitely needs to be some standards, regulations and ethical codes of conduct, but for sure, in many contexts AI could dramatically help us solve a lot of our environmental issues, especially when it comes to efficiency and knowing how to turn systems on and off and so forth.
I think right now whether or not it’s going to be a net, positive or net negative is still to be determined.
I recently wrote an article on the environmental impact of generative AI. It has a huge ecological and water footprint, which I didn’t even know about. Apparently 20 to 30 ChatGPT searches was the equivalent of one bottle of water in cooling the servers.
Everyone gets excited about new tools like AI and rushes to use them without having that consideration and thought of the hidden impacts.
I always feel like it’s my job to help create that full systems perspective. That’s not to say generative AI is the worst thing ever, it’s not. It’s got a place. But we need to decide what that place is as a society. We need to have that conversation.
The people who are making decisions are often making decisions without understanding the full system. It’s alarming.
If I think about the big companies I’ve worked with, many of the decision makers have no idea about the impacts of their supply chains or products.
Where do you look for inspiration?
I would say, there’s some really prolific Aboriginal Australian theorists who are helping us understand First Nations principles, and how that applies to systems, and how we can all learn from nature. Tyson Yunkaporta is one of those. He wrote Right Story Wrong Story and Sand Talk.
There’s also some cool initiatives like the Systems Thinking Innovation Network, and Forum For The Future in the UK are good at advancing systems based sustainability.
I think we have to be aware that we are still in an emergent state and there is a lot of sifting that still needs to happen. A lot more people are starting to think about systems and contribute to the discussion.
Which is good.
Your first TED talk was back in 2014. If you were going to deliver a new TED talk what would it be about?
I do like the challenge of a TED talk, because you have to figure out how to make the narrative really fun and sexy and cool.
Right now I’m very interested in this Nature Positive movement. I’m really excited that as a result of all this work, we can legitimise caring about nature, because historically, it’s been a big problem…and there is already so much great science around the physical, mental and community benefits of having regenerated natural environments.
Now we just need the decision makers, policy makers, businesses and architects to bring nature into our communities, our cities and our homes.
If you think the future should be circular, regenerative and nature-positive and you want to be part of the new story, visit the Swivel Skills or UnSchool websites to learn more. You can also download the ‘Superpowers Activation Kit’ from Leyla’s website, explore the UN’s Anatomy of Action, or have a look at the LP deep dive into Australia’s Transition to an Eco Economy.