“How does the world we create become compatible with the world that created us? ” Tamera

2020 exposed the cruelty of a system that enables state sanctioned violence against black and brown lives and unleashed a health crisis that foretells the breakdown of our natural environment. This double pandemic forced us to question our participation in our current socio-economic system and decide whether reform is still possible. CIT opted to shift our focus towards discovering alternatives. 

"The system is not broken, it is doing exactly what it is designed to do." Alec Karakatsanis

In our search for pioneers, we discovered Movement Generation (MG). In "From Banks and Tanks to Cooperation and Care", MG provides a framework for a regenerative economy that I summarize below. They outline a transition towards a visionary economy that centers care for all life forms and calls for strategies that democratize, decentralize and diversify economic activity. In practice, this new system is a deep democracy in which people control the decisions that affect their lives and live sustainably with the planet. This will take slowing down consumption and (re)distributing resources and power.

An economy, from “eco” (meaning home) and “nomy” (meaning management), means the management of home. It is how we organize our relationships in a place, ideally, to take care of that place and each other. An economy is therefore neither good nor bad, it just depends on how we do it and to what end. 

The pillars of an economy

In all economies we take natural resources and combine them with human work to achieve a particular purpose. Our worldview or culture, our languages, stories, and practices, help us make sense of the economy, define how we participate in it and set limits for what is acceptable and what is not. To govern means “to steer.” To steer what? The management of home. Form follows function so governance looks different at different scales and for different parts of the economy, however governance is there to organize and facilitate the effective management of the economy.

The pillars of an extractive economy

• Resources: our current extractive economy is fueled by natural resources, acquired through extraction, i.e. the forceful removal of resources from their rightful place within living systems, and put in service towards achieving a singular purpose.
• Purpose: the purpose of the dominant extractive economy, as determined by what it actually does, is the accumulation, concentration and enclosure of wealth and power. Stated purposes such as “alleviating poverty” are not born in facts.
• Work: human labor, a particularly precious renewable resource, is converted into a non-renewable resource. The mass enslavement of African peoples was the great input of energy into the system that enabled unprecedented extraction and created the American industrial empire as well as its extractive capital markets such as Wall Street. Labor is organized through coercive hierarchies and exploitation in places where we are expected to divorce our values from our work. 
• Culture: we are taught that we are a society made up of individuals, rather than relationships, and that the condition of our lives is a function and a reflection of our individual merit, rather than systems and structures. We live “life without limits,” couched in the rhetoric of freedom, yet desperately fearful that resources are scarce which drives us to compete against each other. Consumerism and the accumulation of resources is the paradigm that justifies the purpose of the extractive economy. The underlying assumption of this paradigm is that infinite growth is possible. There are many established legal limits that seek to constrain what can and cannot be done. However, these limits are routinely ignored or their violations explained away when they are in conflict with our pursuit of the primary purpose of the economy. The primary beneficiaries of this devastation are the financiers who profit from the movement of money.
• Governance: governance is designed to benefit those who accumulate and enclose wealth and power. Militarism isn't a problem, rather it is the defining feature of the governance system of an extractive economy. While a culture of comfort, conformity and consumerism can go a long way to ensuring the tacit participation of people, there are always limits to how far a person is willing to comply, and so, at some point force is required to maintain the economic system in place.

Because extractivism is an inherently depleting ideology, the continued existence of an economy based on it requires endless new frontiers of resources to extract, labor to exploit, and captives to be consumers. The endless growth economy requires armies and empires to ensure its continuity.

The pillars of a regenerative economy

"Given the scale, pace and implications of ecological erosion and the consequent collapse of the biological and cultural diversity upon which our collective well-being depends, we must realign the purpose of the economy with the healing powers of Mother Earth." Movement Generation 

To transition to a regenerative economy we must transform our very relationship to living systems. 

• Purpose:  we must make a fundamental shift towards ecological restoration, community resilience and social equity. These three elements are the necessary ingredients of a regenerative economy. Ecological restoration is the process by which we focus our labor on the preservation and promotion of bio-cultural diversity. Community resilience is the process by which we create the conditions for the maintenance of that diversity in the face of disruption. Social equity is the reparation and restructuring of our present and future to address the existential threat posed by the ecological crisis.
• Resources: then resources must be acquired through regeneration. We must nurture rather than deplete the soil. To do this, resources, labor, culture and governance must be aligned with the basic principles of ecology: 
  • Zero-waste: everything has a purpose and a place in the living world, nothing is “trash” or a “throw away”
  • Mutually beneficial relationships: interdependence is the defining feature of living systems, not individualism.
  • Dynamic balance: change is constant and everything is connected to everything else through diversity of scale, pace, cycles, and relationships 
  • Bio-cultural diversity: diversity creates resilience and is therefore our best defense against disruption
• Work: must be organized through democratic and voluntary cooperation, rather than coercion and exploitation. When we freely apply our labor together to solve our problems and meet our needs, we will both liberate the soil from the physical concrete that paves over life and liberate our spirits from the cognitive concrete that has paved over our imaginations. We must remember that our work is not just our job. Our work is everything we do.
• Culture: is based on caring and the sacredness of our relationships to each other and the world upon which we depend. This is a culture where love, humility and mystery guide us. A world where many worlds can fit.
• Governance: deep democracy will be diverse in form, but at its core people are in control of the decisions that affect their daily lives, from where they work to how they collectively manage shared resources at different scales. Another feature of “deep democracy,” is that primary decision-making happens at the smallest scale appropriate to the arena we are trying to govern. Different arenas of governance demand different boundaries. The rigid, arbitrary borders that fragment ecosystems and communities must give way to ecological boundaries that are permeable, flexible, and socially as well as ecologically defined, reimagining and realigning the very shape of governance within living systems. 

Getting from here to there

What the hands do the heart learns: If all we do is fight against what we don’t want, we learn to love the fight and have nothing left for our vision but longing. We must be both visionary and oppositional. 

"If it’s the right thing to do, we have every right to do it." Movement Generation

Based on two deeply related sets of collective rights: (1) the rights of Mother Earth and (2) the peoples’ right to the resources required to create productive, dignified, and ecologically sustainable livelihoods, we can begin this journey by assuming our very right to self-determination. We can engage in the daily practice of self-governance, from the workplace to the statehouse, not just to govern under the existing structures but rather to reshape governance to be more democratic and ecologically responsive.

We must demonstrate that our ability to self-govern is better at meeting needs than what corporations or states are doing. By implementing transformative justice approaches to repairing harm, we can break our dependence on policing and prisons. By building worker- and community-owned enterprises and land-trust housing, we break our dependence on bosses and landlords. 

A just transition therefore must:

• Shift economic control to communities
• Democratize wealth and the workplace
• Advance ecological restoration
• Drive racial justice and social equity
• Relocalize most production and consumption
• Retain and restore cultures and traditions
• Remember and re-align the economy to the bio-region

The new agreements that we forge between people must be irresistible and rooted in the wisdom of our ancestors. Our vision should nurture our cultures, our souls and our spirits, through song and rituals, through practice and play.

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Illustration by Sanya Hyland. "People not polluters"