The Standing Forest

Abstract

A picture that explains everything explains too little. The doughnut has been so successful as an image that it is sometimes asked to carry more than any image can: to be a theory of value, a policy programme and a moral compass at once. Kate Raworth never claimed that much for it. She called it a compass, not a map, in the title of her 2017 comment in The Lancet Planetary Health , and a compass tells you which way is north without telling you how to cross the river in front of you. The chapters before this one took the doughnut on its own terms: its history, its critics, the house's living-systems reading, a city, two governments and a forest, and then the year of work, the measures, the conversations and the household. This last chapter sets the ring beside four neighbouring ideas, each the subject of its own book in this lineage. Each adds something the doughnut lacks. Each is corrected, in turn, by something the doughnut supplies. Then it returns to the forest.