Doughnut Economics
Regen Network as a 21st-Century Economy
In 2017, economist Kate Raworth published Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. The core concept of the book—the doughnut—has quickly gained prominence—from UN circles to alternative economic communities—as a way to summarize the tensions surrounding what might have formerly been called “sustainable development.”
On the interior of the doughnut is a social foundation. This is composed of human rights and human needs, such as access to clean water, healthy food, political voice, gender equality, etc. On the exterior of the doughnut is the ecological ceiling—the carrying capacity of the earth and her biological systems to sustain civilization. This is composed of ecological limits, such as ocean acidification, climate change, and chemical pollution.
As you can see from all the red in the above illustration, we currently live in a very fat doughnut, which fails to meet the social floor and extends far beyond the ecological ceiling.
So how can we transition into that nice green ring? Raworth explores seven avenues in her book.
Regen Network just so happens to have been oriented around establishing stronger ecological limits since our founding (as our tagline “balance sheet for earth” might suggest). In reviewing Raworth’s septad I will also highlight the ways in which Regen Network works in these arenas.
I. Change the Goal
from GDP to the Doughnut
Regen Network has the aim of planetary regeneration, and the goal of building the livelihoods of farmers by compensating them for ecological land stewardship.
II. See the Big Picture
from self-contained market to embedded economy
All of the human sphere, including our markets and our economic, are nested within earth systems. By working to bring ecological health into economic calculus, Regen Network helps to bring about a shift to the embedded economy where there are no such thing as externalities.
III. Nurture Human Nature
from rational economic man to social adaptable humans
As a blockchain enterprise, Regen Network is founded on the ethic of decentralization. Decentralization puts faith in the agency and ingenuity of individuals and communities to self-organize, rather than thinking of people as cogs in a massive economic machine.
IV. Get Savvy with Systems
from mechanical equilibrium to dynamic complexity
Our name, Regen Network, was inspired by the concept of regeneration. The definition of regeneration has been formalized by the work of Carol Sanford in the school she calls living systems. Categorically, living systems are about dynamic complexity and are the antonym of mechanical equilibrium.
V. Design to Distribute
from “growth will even it up again” to distributive by design
Farming is both the most common and least paid vocation on earth. By focusing on farmer wellbeing, Regen Network aims to focus on the class that growth economics have left behind.
VI. Create to Regenerate
from “growth will clean it up again” to regenerative by design
To cite Sanford’s work again, regeneration emerges out of seven first principles (with definitions given in Regen’s context):
- Whole: Regen Network works through the lens of bioregions and earth-as-superorganism.
- Potential: what do ecosystems look like when fully thriving? What does it look like when communities and landscapes become an integrated whole?
- Reciprocity: how do we cycle energy through biotic systems/economic systems rather than working with linear models of accumulations/depletion?
- Essence: what is at the core of a particular place, and how do we uplift and organize around it?
- Nestedness: properties nest within bioregions and watersheds nest within continents and the planet.
- Nodal: where are the epicenters of systems change? What attention in our economic systems, agricultural systems, and scientific systems will ripple out through entire domains?
- Development: how can we build the capacity of land stewards to be more deeply in relationship with their land?
VII. Be Agnostic about Growth
from growth addicted to growth agnostic
To be frank, this is one area that the crypto space could take some more time to reflect. Standard crypto-economic models necessitate growth; ethereum, Bitcoin, Cosmos, and Regen Network all currently have increasing supplies where network security hinges upon currency deflation driven by the exansion of market capitalization (the crypto-economic premises of this subject are beyond the scope of this post). That said, if the crypto space is good at anything, it is experimentation and iteration, and I anticipate some radically different token economic models coming online in coming years that work with demurrage and post-growth economics.
A Few Words on the Ecological Ceiling
In my view, the primary shortcoming of Raworth’s model is that it uses an anthropocentric ecological ceiling. The ecological ceiling is the threshold at which livings systems collapse. The problem with setting this as our limit is that it is deaf to the cries of countless others in the more-than-human sphere that are crushed on our path to that limit. Lots of species can go extinct, waterways polluted, and soils eroded before arriving at systems-collapse.
In other words, the ecological ceiling is utilitarian and instrumentalist; what utility does nature provide us with, and how can we maximize that utility up to the breaking point? This is a fundamentally violent approach divorced from a land ethic. Tree frogs, mosquitoes, and mangroves (even boulders) have their own lives and experiences which have inherent value.
The economy is a human-created sphere that operates within the human realm. How can we imbue the economy with consideration for the more-than-human world for its own sake? Do economic systems have the capacity to interact coherently with the sacred and numinous? These are some of the questions we’re exploring at Regen Network.
