Bioregional Economics
Description
Benjamin Life:
"Bioregional economics is the study and practice of designing regenerative, closed-loop, cooperatively owned, place-based economies within the carrying capacity of their landscapes."
(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/an-introduction-to-bioregional-economics?)
Principles
The Four Pillars of Bioregional Economics
Benjamin Life:
"What follows is a set of design principles and conceptual pillars that would make such an economy real. Drawn from and inspired by John Fullerton’s principles for a regenerative economy, these pillars offer a place-based and post-capitalist grounding to the living systems principles articulated previously. Bioregional economics, as a subset of regenerative economics more broadly, inherits its principles while grounding them into place.
The first pillar is healthy, local, multi-capital circulation. The wealth of a bioregion is not the stock of value it contains but the volume of value in circulation within it. Value, unlike matter, increases as it is exchanged. Every exchange that stays local compounds: the dollar spent at the cooperative grocery pays the cooperative farmer who banks at the community institution that finances the housing cooperative. Every exchange that leaks, to the distant shareholder, the extractive supplier, the absentee landlord, is circulation lost. Bioregional economics optimizes first for circulatory volume and closure: asset-backed multi-capital flows at the institutional scale, mutual credit and obligation clearing at the enterprise scale, community currencies at the consumer scale, import substitution wherever carrying capacity allows. Fullerton’s principle of robust circulation, made operational at the scale of a watershed.
The second pillar is cooperative ownership. Democratic ownership is usually defended on grounds of workplace dignity, but its systemic function is subtler: cooperative ownership is the accountability architecture of a bioregional economy. When the people who own an enterprise are the people who live with its externalities, who drink the water downstream of it, breathe beside it, raise children in its labor market, extraction loses its structural advantage, because there is no distant party to whom the costs can be shipped. And because surplus distributes across the many rather than concentrating in the few, cooperative ownership continuously regenerates the social resilience the whole economy depends on.
The third pillar is mutuality. This one is less a mechanism than a metanoia, a change of economic mind. The strangest feature of modern life is the carve-out: we raise our children to share, to care for the vulnerable, to honor the people around them, and then we teach them that a separate domain called “the economy” begins where those commitments end, a zero-sum arena in which self-interest is not merely permitted but rewarded, often in proportion to its ruthlessness. The irony is that this betrays the market’s own founding theory: exchange was always supposed to be mutually beneficial. That was the entire argument for it. Bioregional economics recovers that insight and radicalizes it: in every transaction there is a third party, which is the whole, the commons, the aquifer, the soil. When I sell to you, the exchange strengthens or weakens the community, the land, the trust network within which both of us live, and an economy designed for mutuality makes that third party visible and vested, through the patronage structures, mutual vesting, and open books described above. This is the economic expression of what Eisenstein means by sacred economics: reciprocity as the basis of exchange, and of Twist’s distinction between the scarcity mind and the sufficiency mind. I am not selling to extract from you; I am providing value to a community whose thriving is the condition of my own. This is the ecosystemic self-interest of the relational self.
The fourth pillar is holistic wellbeing as the economy’s purpose and its measure. Economy descends from the Greek oikos, household, and nomos, management: the tending of the whole household, human and more-than-human. A bioregional economy exists to produce health: regenerating soil, recharging aquifers, thriving bodies and relationships and cultures within planetary boundaries, and must therefore measure what it exists to produce. This is not a reporting overlay bolted onto conventional accounts; it is a new accounting, with the plural currencies and multi-capital instruments to keep the feedback loop between economic activity and the health of the household short enough to steer by. What the double-entry ledger was to merchant capitalism, multi-capital accounting will be to the bioregional economy, not a moral gesture but the enabling infrastructure of an economic order.
These four rest on two commitments from the broader tradition of relational or ecological ethics: Subsidiarity, decisions made at the most local scale capable of holding them, with larger scales serving rather than commanding the smaller, and consent, the refusal of coercion as a coordination mechanism, whether the coercer is a state, a market, or a movement.
Set the four pillars on those two commitments and the specification is complete: an economy held within the carrying capacity of its landscape, owned by the people who live inside it, bound by mutual care, and measured by the health it produces. This is not a utopia; it is a design. Every piece of it already exists somewhere in the world. What has never existed is all the pieces at once, in one place, built as a single living system."
(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/an-introduction-to-bioregional-economics?)