omniharmonicBioregional Carrying Capacity
Bioregional carrying capacity is the threshold below which a place’s consumption and its regeneration exist in true homeostasis — Kate Raworth’s ecological ceiling brought down to the scale at which it stops being a metaphor.
As a planetary picture, the doughnut is indispensable and, precisely because it is planetary, almost unachievable. The ceiling becomes real only when it becomes a particular ceiling: not overshoot-in-general but this aquifer’s recharge rate, this watershed’s carrying capacity, this valley’s soil budget — quantities a community can actually read and actually live within. That means accepting there is no elsewhere to which overshoot can be exported. At bioregional scale the feedback loop between economic activity and ecological consequence is tight enough to be felt and responded to rather than merely reported and ignored.
Carrying capacity sets the outer edge of the bioregion: a bioregion is exactly as large as the loops that must close within it. Its inner edge is set by material solidarity, the relationships that must hold it together. The founding act of a bioregional economy is the determination of needs, capacities, and carrying budget — a radical reorganization, because the extractive economy has trained us to treat every desire as satisfiable from elsewhere and every consequence as exportable to elsewhere. In a bioregion there is no elsewhere.