How To Go With The Flow, Regeneratively

With regenerative farming practitioner Kevin Skvorak (pictured center), we talked about how a regenerative economy creates the conditions for experimenting with alternative forms of business ownership, including worker cooperatives, and how communities can intentionally support these kinds of experiments in ownership.

Most of the ways we measure the economic and social health of a community today are flawed because they focus only on outcomes rather than the underlying processes that make or break local economic vitality.

Instead of measuring the health of an economy by whatever it produces —including “extractive” products and services that actually do damage to human society and the environment— regenerative economics seek to understand the overall flow of human activities — economic, cultural, and social — within a community, and to identify which ones are contributing to its long-term health and which are not. It looks at those flows in the context of the larger network of interactions that take place outside the community’s boundaries.

Regenerative development strategies seek to remove bottlenecks to those healthy flows that strengthen those healing networks. The goal is to expand them and make them so robust that the unhealthy flows diminish or cease entirely. This strategy validates what many researchers have long observed and local residents have intuitively recognized makes their communities thrive. It is also the strategy residents and stakeholders on New York City’s forgotten south shore are trying to implement.

Learn more about their efforts to go beyond GDP and build a sustainably vibrant local community as they rediscover and reweave the critical social bonds broken down by an extractive economy.

Want to get engaged? Explore Regenerating Tottenville.