Toward Regenerative Libraries

This note is part of a series that challenges the status quo of "green libraries," exposing greenwashing and tokenism, and exploring viable alternatives, such as minimalism, degrowth, upcycling, and "slow libraries." Check all the notes in this section's index.

Introduction

After years of following the path of incrementalism, token gestures, and photo-op sustainability, it's time for libraries to stop asking how they can be a little less harmful — and start asking how they can become engines of regeneration.

Throughout this series, I've torn apart the comforting illusion of "green libraries." I've exposed the superficiality of recycled aesthetics, the colonial logic of carbon offsetting, and the delusions of techno-optimism. But if we're going to break away from the green façade, we need more than critique. We need vision. This is where everything comes together —degrowth, minimalism, biomimicry, ecological justice— to reimagine what "success" could mean in library spaces that don't hide behind labels, but lead the radical transformation we actually need.

What does a regenerative library look like? Not a building with solar panels slapped on top. Not a digital platform hosted in a server farm powered by coal. Not a place where people read about climate justice while the institution maintains extractive partnerships and toxic procurement chains. Regeneration is not decor — it is a commitment to live, act, and build in ways that give more than they take.

The End of Expansion: Degrowth as Library Praxis

Traditional success in libraries has long been measured in metrics of growth — circulation numbers, square footage, acquisitions, digital subscriptions, funding volume. But what if success meant shrinking where necessary? What if success meant refusing the endless expansion of collections, services, and infrastructure, and instead cultivating relevance, repair, and redistribution?

Degrowth doesn't mean austerity — it means liberation from the logic that more is always better. A regenerative library operates within ecological limits, prioritizing the long-term well-being of its community and environment over short-term metrics. It invests in adaptive reuse instead of new construction, focuses on low-energy services, and builds mutual support networks that don't rely on growth for legitimacy.

Degrowth invites libraries to stop mimicking corporations and start aligning with ecosystems.

Minimalism with Teeth: Subtracting to Make Space

Minimalism in libraries is not about bare walls and empty shelves. It's about intentionality. It's about refusing clutter —material, digital, conceptual— that takes up space without adding meaning. It's about letting go of what we accumulate out of inertia, prestige, or institutional anxiety.

A regenerative library asks: What is truly essential to knowledge, memory, and community survival? And then it sheds the rest.

In practice, this means curating collections that serve real needs, eliminating redundant subscriptions and energy-hungry infrastructure, and repurposing spaces not for aesthetics, but for function and healing. It also means resisting digital hoarding and the myth that cloud services are immaterial. Every byte has a footprint. Every server farm has a shadow.

Minimalism becomes an act of resistance — against waste, against overproduction, against the illusion that "more access" always equals more justice.

Nature as Blueprint: Biomimicry as Structural Rethink

Rather than retrofitting human systems with symbolic "green" touches, regenerative libraries can learn from nature — structurally, functionally, and philosophically.

Ecosystems don't grow endlessly; they cycle, adapt, compost, regenerate. Waste doesn't exist — what's discarded becomes food. A regenerative library emulates this logic: furniture is repurposed, water is captured and reused, light is harvested, materials are sourced locally, and digital systems are powered by renewable energy and ethical infrastructure.

But beyond the material, biomimicry teaches libraries to design for resilience. Distributed systems. Redundancy. Modularity. Locality. Mutualism. These are the principles nature uses to endure. Why wouldn't libraries?

Justice or Bust: Facing the North-South Divide

Any vision of regeneration that doesn't include ecological justice is just polished greenwashing. Libraries in the Global North cannot claim leadership while sitting atop extractive supply chains, unacknowledged colonial legacies, and digital infrastructures powered by fossil fuels and child labor.

Regenerative libraries reject the logic of offsetting and embrace the ethics of solidarity. They divest from exploitative platforms, support open and decolonial knowledge systems, and redistribute power — materially, epistemologically, and symbolically.

They serve not just their own communities, but act in deep accountability to those on the frontlines of ecological destruction — Indigenous peoples, peasant farmers, land defenders, displaced migrants. That's not a side issue. That's the center.

Redefining Success: From Metrics to Meaning

So what does success look like in a regenerative library?

It's not in the numbers. It's in the quality of relationships — with people, with land, with memory, with the future. It's in the ability to adapt, to listen, to shed excess and nurture resilience. It's in how much a library can unlearn the frameworks of colonialism, capitalism, and false neutrality that have defined it for centuries.

Success is measured in care. In reciprocity. In humility. In the ability to hold space without conquest.

From Resistance to Reworlding

I began this series by tearing off the façade. Now we build. But not upward, not outward — we build inward, downward, into soil, into relationship, into complexity. Regenerative libraries are not future utopias. They are possible now — but only if we have the courage to let go of the metrics and illusions we've clung to for too long.

This is not a call for libraries to survive the crisis. This is a call for libraries to change the terms of survival itself.

Regeneration is not an outcome. It's a commitment. One that starts with refusal — and ends with reinvention.

Readings

• Jackson, Tim (2016). Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow. London & New York: Routledge.
• Martin, Laura J. (2022). Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Saito, Kohei (2022). El capital en la era del Antropoceno. Madrid: Penguin Random House.
• Schmelzer, Matthias, Vetter, Andrea & Vansintjan, Aaron (2022). The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism. London & New York: Verso.
• Simons, Marcy (2018). Academic Library Metamorphosis and Regeneration. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Smith Aldrich, Rebekkah (2018). Sustainable Thinking: Ensuring Your Library's Future in an Uncertain World. Washington: American Library Association.
• Westra, Laura (2009). Environmental Justice and the Rights of Ecological Refugees. London & Sterling: Earthscan.