Undualing the Economy and the Ecology
* Article: Undualing. By Austin Wade Smith. April 12th, 2023
URL = https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/1wdm8BNkLJWnnzwshtYEmHYlHaXxRF3bLEt4y4-9OE8
Description
1.
"This project is an exercise in collective imagination about a future where economic value is aligned to the ecological health of our planet, and what the systems might look like to make that future real. The first essay, Undualing, explores foundational assumptions on the nature of prosperity which perpetuate our era of mass extinction. Unlearning these assumptions introduces poignant technical and ethical questions to be explored in the subsequent essays, Commons Sense and Market in the Temple. Our goal is to reformulate a shared understanding of social and economic well-being which is no longer reliant on the division between a human society that is here, close at hand and a wild nature that is out there, and far away. In framing these challenges, I hope to contribute to a common vocabulary in technology, ethics, and ecology which in turn, supports a diversity of approaches to meaningfully engage regenerative economics."
2.
Austin Wade Smith:
"Regeneration is a practice of undualing. Undualing isn’t really a word, I made it up to emphasize that the separation between ourselves and the world which sustains us has never existed. The dualism of Society and Nature is in turn, also the separation of economy from ecology. This is the creation myth upon which Modernism is built. [6] We’ve embedded it into the policies, infrastructures, and algorithms which run much of contemporary life. The separation of ecology and economy is synonymous with extraction inasmuch as the world beyond the human is considered a resource to be managed. Our default conflation of economic wealth with ecological extraction fundamentally drives the climate crisis ; and is a manifestation of the incredible narrowness of our definitions of wellbeing. Rather than a world co-created by a multitude of players, locations, and timelines, the dualism at the heart of modernity is a retreat from a diverse set of “worlding” practices to one universal world, centralized across time and space.
In contrast, undualing is the invitation to thicken the cast of characters which create value and sustain planetary livelihood. It is the practice of reanimating lifeworlds against forces of singularization. It resists the collapsing of many to the few. How might we nurture this pluralism in the infrastructures, organizations, and technologies we build? Through what scales and systems does regeneration offer a way out?
A start might be to develop and organize systems of value at a meso-scale, one which tethers the individual to planetary and upstream to downstream. A scale whose boundaries are already defined by the living world: the bioregion. Regeneration is a bioregional endeavor and in order to undual ecology and economy, our definitions of prosperity must be re-scoped."
(https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/1wdm8BNkLJWnnzwshtYEmHYlHaXxRF3bLEt4y4-9OE8)
Excerpts
Austin Wade Smith:
Context
"Many individuals living in the modern world have internalized a contradiction about the relationship between the living world (”Nature”) and the economy (money).
It goes like this:
- Societal economic wealth is independent from planetary ecological health. Prosperity emerges more or less autonomously between these worlds, and thus we can treat them separately.
Well into the planet’s 6th mass extinction, most individuals see this severance for what it is, wrong. Further, many recognize how the policies, infrastructures, and ideologies which maintain such a separation ultimately perpetuate the complex intersection of social and ecological issues we refer to as the climate crisis.
We need to formulate a notion of prosperity which does not rely on a dualism of ecology and economy. What might we call that which stands outside this opposition?
Regeneration, as a philosophy and broader practice of systemic interrelation, offers a conspicuous path out."