omniharmonicAn Introduction to Bioregional Economics (Part I)
Design Principles of a Bioregional Economy
This series is a work of synthesis, in dialogue with — and in debt to — the thinkers and builders of the regenerative economics field: Samantha Power, John Fullerton, Michel Bauwens, Charles Eisenstein, Lynne Twist, Joe Brewer, Bill Baue, Austin Wade Smith, Gregory Wendt, Evan Folds, Gregory Landua, and many others. My aim is not to reinvent their work but to add to it.
Over the past decade, a remarkable community of thinkers has assembled most of what a regenerative economy requires: its first principles, its financial instruments, its ways of accounting for the many kinds of capital a balance sheet conceals. But a disproportionate amount of that work lives at the layer of finance, the monetary instruments and investment vehicles upstream of the real economy. What has not been articulated with sufficient concreteness is the layer those instruments exist to serve: the material economy of a place. Its supply chains. Its ownership structures. The metabolic architecture through which food, housing, energy, and care actually move through a community. That layer is what I mean by bioregional economics. This essay attempts to further define it and lay out its specification. Part two of this series asks how it gets built, the sequence and capital stack required to create a closed loop bioregional economy within a bioregion’s carrying capacity. But any developmental journey requires a map of the territory. This essay attempts to offer one by weaving together the work of many of my colleagues, stacking their work together and grounding it into practice. The emerging field of bioregional economics would not exist without the foundational work of thinkers who pushed the edges of regenerative and bioregional finance, so let’s begin by honoring that field.
Honoring the Field
The field of regenerative economics offers us a discipline, a genealogy, a literature, and a growing body of practice. Its ancestors are the heterodox economists of the twentieth century kept in the footnotes: E.F. Schumacher insisting that scale itself is an economic variable; Herman Daly building the case that the economy is a subsystem of the biosphere and not the reverse; Donella Meadows among the first to say the quiet part out loud when describing the limits to extractive economic growth; Wendell Berry keeping alive the old agrarian knowledge that an economy is a household before it is a market; Elinor Ostrom winning the Nobel Prize in Economics for proving, against the tragedy-of-the-commons myth, that communities govern shared resources successfully all the time, given the right design principles. What has happened in the last fifteen years is that these tributaries converged into a holistic research and design language, assembled now from coherent layers, each their own body of work that deserves to be honored.
At the deepest layer sits the language that first bridged classical economic thinking into the regenerative paradigm, the first principles of an economy modeled on life. John Fullerton, the former JPMorgan managing director who founded the Capital Institute, gave the field its most rigorous articulation in Regenerative Capitalism, deriving eight principles that living systems share: right relationship, holistic wealth, robust circulation, empowered participation, honoring community and place, edge effect abundance, seeking balance, and innovative, adaptive, and responsive. His argument hinges on the realization that an economy embodying these principles is not a moral luxury but the only kind that survives its own success. Gregory Landua and Ethan Roland contributed the field’s foundational ontology, the Eight Forms of Capital, which recognizes financial capital as one currency among eight: social, material, living, intellectual, experiential, spiritual, and cultural. They made visible the truth every community member knows and every balance sheet refutes: most of the value produced in an economy never touches a bank. Landua then carried the ontology into infrastructure, co-founding Regen Network to make ecological state itself legible and verifiable: soil carbon, biodiversity, watershed health recorded and credited on a public ledger so that regeneration could become something an economy accounts for rather than merely aspires to achieve. Ferananda Ibarra, through her work with the MetaCurrency and Holochain projects, extended Landua’s plural accounting methods through her work on asset-backed currencies, informed by the thesis that currents or value flows that can be made visible (current-see) will eventually become self-regulating through adaptive response. And Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics gave the whole endeavor its boundary conditions, redrawing the economist’s frame as a ring bounded by the social foundation every human requires and the ecological ceiling no economy may breach, a frame concrete enough that Amsterdam adopted it as municipal policy, proving the doughnut is something a real place can actually govern by.
Beneath the language runs the mythology that conditions our understanding of economics at the root. Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics is the fullest excavation of that mythology. Drawing on the anthropology of the gift, he showed that human communities are constituted not through barter but through giving. A gift extends a bond where a finished transaction severs one. He also observes that money as we have built it is a primary technology of that severance, a universal solvent that renders all things commensurable and, in so doing, dissolves the uniqueness-in-relationship that makes a thing sacred. Its engine is interest, which compels the endless conversion of gift and commons into commodity and manufactures scarcity in the midst of real abundance. Yet his is finally a redemptive argument rather than a renunciatory one: money itself can be made sacred, designed to circulate rather than accumulate, backed by the wealth of the commons, an agent of connection rather than separation.
Where Eisenstein works at the level of myth, Lynne Twist works at the level of the collective nervous system. Decades of raising and allocating capital across the full range of human circumstance, from the boardrooms of billionaires to villages in the grip of famine, convinced her that scarcity is not a truth about the world but a lens placed over it: the reflexive conviction, running beneath conscious thought, that there is not enough, that more is better, and that this is simply the way things are. In The Soul of Money, she shows how the scarcity driving our economic behavior is not a fact about the world but a wound in our relationship to it, that money is a carrier of intention, and flows toward whatever we truly commit to. Her essential move is to deny us the usual exit, because the answer to scarcity is not abundance, which means only “more than enough,” and so still takes its measure from lack, but sufficiency: not an amount at all but a stance, the recognition that what is already present is enough, and that we ourselves are enough. From that ground, money changes character, becoming less a substance to accumulate than a current to direct. Like water, it carries whatever intention we send through it, and what we give our attention to is what grows.
At the institutional layer, the breakthrough came in 2024 with Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet, lead-authored by Samantha Power of The BioFi Project and Leon Seefeld with collaborators at Dark Matter Labs and the Buckminster Fuller Institute. Its diagnosis is exacting: enormous pools of capital are beginning to flow toward “nature,” and if they flow through the existing financial architecture they will reproduce the extraction they claim to remedy because the people best positioned to regenerate a place are precisely those whose projects remain structurally illegible to capital. Its answer is a family of new financial institutions: the bioregional trust, venture studio, investment company, and bank, phased in as a bioregion matures, functioning as what Power calls the “connective tissue between centralized financial resources and the mycelial network of regeneration.”
At the socio-political architectural layer sits cosmolocalism, the design pattern developed by Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, Jose Ramos, and the peer-to-peer economics tradition. Its principle is elegant: knowledge and design are global commons; production and governance are locally sovereign. The global network amplifies local capacity instead of extracting from it. The pattern has been tested at a scale most movements only theorize. In 2013, the government of Ecuador commissioned Bauwens to lead the FLOK Society process (Free/Libre Open Knowledge) the first attempt anywhere to design a national transition to a commons-based economy. Housed at the IAEN national university and developed in dialogue with buen vivir, the indigenous Andean philosophy of collective flourishing-in-place that Ecuador had already written into its 2008 constitution alongside the rights of nature, FLOK produced an integrated Commons Transition Plan with fifteen legislative frameworks, the first time a concrete third way, neither statist nor neoliberal, existed as implementable policy rather than critique. The political window closed in Ecuador, suddenly and silently cancelled by government officials. Ecuador recommitted to its extractive economy, leasing its forests to mining interests, and the plan was shelved. But Bauwens’ own retrospective on the process contains a seed this essay is attempting to germinate. The next iteration of the commons transition, he concluded, could not stop at knowledge commons. It would have to extend to the physical commonification of land, money, and labor themselves. FLOK may have died in Quito, a cautionary tale for any regenerative economist seeking to implement commons-based peer production in partnership with a state that is deeply embedded in neoliberal economic policy and structurally trapped by natural resource rent-seeking extraction, but Bauwens’ research corpus is part of our collective inheritance, ready to be picked up and implemented bioregionally.
And at the level of place-based economies and liberatory pedagogy, Joe Brewer’s Design Pathway For Regenerating Earth lays out a practical, systems-based framework for navigating ecological overshoot and civilization-scale collapse by organizing human societies around regenerative, bioregional economies. His central insight is that all truly sustainable human cultures in history were organized as bioregional economies, social and economic systems scaled to the ecological and cultural boundaries of a place. The book’s pathway calls for building a planet-wide network of such “learning ecosystems” that can support the emergence of regenerative bioregions during and after further collapse. Joe’s work with his partner Penny Heiple on the Design School for Regenerating Earth has seeded a planetary network of these bioregional learning centers, the learning ecosystems his book describes. Joe’s work combines the pedagogical dimension, seeing education as a radical and liberatory and necessary precondition of bioregional economic formation, and local community organizing methodologies that mirror how living systems function. Metabolic, a global think tank for the regenerative economy, has drawn inspiration from Joe’s bioregional learning centers vision, publishing a report in early 2026 detailing the structural considerations behind what they call biohubs, a similar concept with additional economic infrastructure.
Stack these layers over one another and we arrive at a very nearly complete design for the next economy. But more work is needed to define the structural considerations of the bioregional economy itself, the functioning, self-reproducing economic whole of a place: its foodshed and housing stock, its biobased materials and supply chains, its energy systems and care networks, its enterprises and the trade among them, developed as one system. This is the missing middle where all the layers described above would have to integrate. The field has written the economy’s grammar, drawn its boundaries, designed its financial organs, and seeded its schools. It has not yet formed the body.
To work towards filling that missing middle, it feels important to further articulate the discipline that would integrate these layers at the scale of the bioregional economy itself so that those of us engaged in this work and those who want to lean in but don’t know where to start can better align on shared definitions and design principles. Second, we need to work together on the design and implementation of institutions capable of seeing a bioregional economy as a living whole and of capitalizing it as a system. This first essay attempts to add to and weave with the many emerging definitions and the design specifications of bioregional economies. The second essay takes up the institutional layer. But before we can begin to describe a specification for a bioregional economy, we must first explore the design criteria required to transform our economic life at the root. Where living systems principles provide the north star for where we’re headed, understanding the current dynamics driving extraction is equally critical to ensure we transform the structure of the economy at the level where extraction first emerges. Extraction is a predictable output of two of our most foundational economic structures and their inversion provides the first design requirements any bioregional economy specification must address and include.
The Two Machines
The first structural driver of extraction and ecocide is debt-based money. Nearly all of the money in circulation is created not by governments printing bills but by banks issuing loans: money comes into existence as interest-bearing debt. This has a consequence so simple it hides in plain sight. If every dollar is born owing more than itself, then the system as a whole must continuously generate returns in excess of what was lent, and that surplus has to come from somewhere. There are only two ultimate sources of value in an economy: human labor and the living Earth. So the surplus is driven from them. Wages are suppressed, technologies are developed to extract more for less, forests become board-feet, aquifers become inputs. Extraction is not an unfortunate side effect of our monetary system. In many ways, it’s the debt repayment schedule of a civilization-scale ponzi scheme.
The design has a second-order cruelty, one Richard Cantillon noticed nearly three centuries ago: new money benefits whoever stands closest to its creation. Banks, asset holders, and the financial industry receive fresh purchasing power first, while everyone downstream receives it last, after prices have already risen to meet it. The way our money is created is not neutral plumbing. It is a standing subsidy to the actors best positioned to financialize the world: to convert homes, farms, clinics, and firms into commodified assets and drain them for yield. When private equity acquires a functioning business, strips its assets, loads it with debt, and leaves a hollowed shell, it’s consummating the monetary system, not betraying it.
The second structural driver of extraction is the corporation. If debt-money creates the pressure to extract, the corporation is the legal technology that consolidates the proceeds. Its architecture is elegant and brutal: the people who create value, workers and the living systems whose fertility underwrites all production, are structurally severed from the people who capture it. Surplus flows upward to an ownership class by fiduciary mandate, and that mandate compounds. Capital, often stolen during the process of colonization, becomes profit which becomes more capital. Capital buys more capacity to extract which produces more profit which concentrates into more capital, and the distance between creation and capture widens exponentially with every cycle. The end state of such system dynamics is the income inequality now threatening not only the human social fabric but the web of life itself, because an ownership class abstracted from any particular place, empowered by the universal solvent of the global petro-dollar, has no obligation to any place or any people and no limit to where capital can flow to extract and accumulate.
Everything we experience as the pathology of late capitalism is the derivative byproduct of these two machines running together. The brittleness. The consolidation through vertical integration, as firms that have exhausted genuine value creation swallow their own supply chains to squeeze margin from every link. The phenomenon Cory Doctorow named enshittification: the terminal stage in which an enterprise, having captured its market, no longer needs to provide real value at all and monetizes the degradation of its own product. And the political corollary: a state so thoroughly captured by the interests it was meant to regulate that its capacity to price externalities has been stripped away, leaving the machine to run without a governor. This is the endgame we are living inside: intensely consolidating, structurally incapable of self-correction.
I say all of this not to catastrophize but to derive design criteria. If extraction is the output of debt-based money and the profit-consolidating corporation, then a regenerative economy is not achieved by making marginal reforms to those structures. It requires two inversions. We must rebind money with life. And we must change the structure of the enterprise itself.
Money That Remembers Where It Lives
The most underappreciated thing Satoshi Nakamoto gave the world was not a speculative asset. It was a demonstration that ordinary people, armed with cryptography and consensus algorithms, can issue currency that no state manages and no bank creates. Most of the maximalist devotees of both Bitcoin and Ethereum have lost this thread in the legitimization-by-financialization of crypto, but the original cypherpunks understood what was at stake. The state maintains hegemonic power through two monopolies: the monopoly on violence and the monopoly on the issuance of currency. The first is well theorized. The second is nearly invisible, which is exactly how the monopoly on the medium of exchange has preferred to remain ever since the soft coup of 1913 when private banks took over this public infrastructure. To distribute the authority to issue money is to begin dismantling one of the two load-bearing walls of the imperial order.
What the blockchain made possible, then, is the thing community currency advocates have pursued for a century with paper scrip and ledger books: the ability to program our values into our money. And the first value a bioregional currency programs into money is bounded embeddedness.
In a world in which we’ve grown accustomed to frictionless transactions at the tap of our phone, a currency that can only circulate in a specific geographic region may seem like a radical regression, but that is entirely the point. The petrodollar gave the world a universal unit of exchange, and that universality is precisely what makes it a solvent, a medium in which every place dissolves into every other place, every forest into its board-feet, every neighborhood into its market segments. A universal currency produces an extractive monoculture, because value denominated in it can leave any community as frictionlessly as it entered. A bioregionally bounded currency is the opposite of a solvent. It’s a membrane. Value inside it circulates rather than evaporates, and the more it circulates, the higher the velocity of the money supply within the membrane, the more wealth the community actually holds. Boundedness is how a community keeps what it creates.
We know the reverse pattern much more intimately. The CARES Act, providing $2.2T in COVID financial relief that went disproportionately to millionaires and billionaires, combined with the lockdowns that shuttered Main Street while designating big-box retail as essential, together represent among the largest upward redistribution of wealth in US history. In the aftermath, the ownership of everyday commerce consolidated dramatically into corporations with no embedded relationship to any place, enterprises structurally committed to paying the least, externalizing the most, and remitting the profit to distant shareholders. When those firms compose the majority of a local economy, we all become wage-slaves as the economy pulls value in one direction, up and out like a straw, blights the landscape, and then rents us the goods and services we need to survive. A community currency inverts the straw. While it can be cashed out for US dollars, the penalties of doing so are baked into the mechanics themselves, a downward pressure on exiting the local circulatory system that makes extraction dramatically more expensive. A bounded currency is a firewall as much as a membrane.
Such a firewall, however, can itself still tip into the narrow optimization of single currency monocultures. If the deep pathology of the current monetary system is that it reduces all value to a single measure and then optimizes for money-on-money returns, a bioregional economy cannot simply swap in a better version of the same monoculture. It needs a plurality of currencies, because a place holds a plurality of values.
Here the programmability of digital money becomes genuinely new terrain. Beyond the circulating community currency, a bioregion can issue asset-backed currencies whose creation is tied not to debt but to verified regenerative activity: soil carbon built, watershed function restored, biodiversity returned. Money issued against ecological value inverts the original sin of debt-money: instead of a currency whose creation requires extraction to service it, a currency whose creation records regeneration. The point is not to financialize the forest. The point is an economy whose feedback systems can finally see what it exists to produce.
When value circulates almost metabolically through federated cooperatives, when the currencies of a place register its ecological health, when no actor can profit by draining the whole, something begins to appear that neoliberal economics has no word for but our biology does: homeostasis. An economy that self-regulates within planetary boundaries the way a body regulates within the narrow band where life is possible. Everyone provisioned; nothing drained. This is what it would mean to cybernetically design an economy that serves life, an economy in which the incentives of the individual and the collective finally align, and human dignity and ecological thriving are not trade-offs but twin outputs of the same circulation.
But a currency is only as real as what backs it. A community currency isn’t backed by gold or debt or even speculative value. Such a currency is backed by the productive capacity of the community itself, the goods and services its people can actually render to one another. Which raises the harder question. What if the community’s productive capacity is itself owned by the extractors? A local currency circulating among enterprises that bank extractively, buy extractively, and remit their profits to absentee shareholders slows down the rate of extraction but has nowhere to sink and store that value within a community. This is why the currency, though it sits at the foundation of the blueprint, cannot complete it. To create a truly regenerative, closed loop economy, we must invert the enterprise itself.
The Federated Supply Chain
I have written elsewhere about the cooperative as a structural inversion of the corporation: the same people who create value share in its benefit, surplus distributes across the many rather than concentrating in the few, and the enterprise becomes accountable to the place its owners actually live. I won’t repeat that argument here. What this essay adds is the move that turns cooperatives from good, ethical businesses into a different kind of economy: federation.
Embedded in an extractive economy, the lone cooperative buys from extractive suppliers, borrows from extractive banks, and sells into markets that drain its surplus toward distant shareholders, becoming, despite its virtues, simply the newest node from which value is extracted. Closure, the point at which what a place produces, exchanges, and consumes circulates within an economy tuned to reciprocity, is not a property of individual businesses. It is a property of whole systems. A single cooperative cannot close a loop any more than a single artery can constitute a circulatory system.
Federation is how the loops close, and it works through a mechanism with an almost embarrassing elegance: cooperatives cooperating. Within a bioregional economy, each business unit along a supply chain must be cooperatively owned so that the profit generated at every scale is distributed equitably to the people producing the value, returning purchasing power to households and keeps the surplus itself circulating locally rather than departing as dividends. And then those cooperatives federate, pooling capital through special purpose vehicles and shared financial instruments like cooperative banks to collectively own the infrastructure that no single cooperative could ever afford alone. The federation is a cooperative of cooperatives, and its jointly held infrastructure is where the economy fundamentally transforms.
To illustrate what this looks like in practice, let’s imagine a regenerative, closed loop bioregional economy through the sector where the pattern is most visceral and the opportunity for transformation is greatest: food. Begin with small-scale regenerative farms, each cooperatively owned by the people who work it. Standing alone, every one of them privately bleeds against infrastructure built for industrial scale: the distant USDA processor, the corporate distributor, each a tollbooth extracting margin from the chain. So the farms federate. Through jointly capitalized vehicles they come to own the secondary layer themselves: the processing facility that turns produce into shelf-stable goods, the storage and aggregation hub that holds harvests for market. Critically, that infrastructure is held by the federation rather than by any single farm, so the chokepoint of the old supply chain can never become the new point of extraction. The processing and distribution layer then federates in turn, economically and socially, with the retail layer: the food co-ops where the final goods are sold, whose members are the very households doing the eating. From soil to shelf, the eater is not the consumer at the end of a long extractive value chain composed of rent-seeking middle men. The consumer, the producer, and the distributor are all member classes in the same federated cooperative supply chain.
In a conventional supply chain, the game is positional. Capture a chokepoint, the processor, the distributor, the shelf, and rent-seek against everyone upstream and down. In a federated chain, the profits generated at each scale are shared across the scales, through intercooperation equity of the kind Mondragón has run for decades: solidarity funds into which cooperatives pool a share of surplus, multi-class membership that gives farmers, workers, and consumers a stake in the network’s health, open books across every node. Mutual vesting ensures that every participant holds a stake in every other participant’s flourishing, and the supply chain stops being a series of tollbooths and becomes what the business schools always claimed it was: a value chain, in which contribution rather than position determines reward.
Mondragón has run this federated architecture, the cooperative bank, the solidarity funds, labor that flows between cooperatives without losing rights, for seventy years in the Basque Country, through recessions that shattered its conventional neighbors. A growing roster of federated food-system precedents now runs from Wisconsin foodsheds to national grocery federations, which the second essay examines in operational detail. And because the pattern’s knowledge layer is cosmolocal (designs circulate globally, production remains locally owned) no bioregion starts from scratch: the governance structures, legal instruments, and coordination software of every federation created becomes the inheritance of every federation that follows.
The pattern, meanwhile, is sector-agnostic. In the housing sector, imagine cooperatives that steadily acquire buildings and land, federated so that a member’s equity becomes portable. In such a system, I could move my stake from one cooperatively owned apartment complex to another across the network, exiting the speculative market entirely without forfeiting what I’ve built. In health, imagine local care cooperatives in which members pay into a pool drawn as credits with holistic health practitioners, federated so that if my cooperative lacks a service, I can access it through a neighboring one, the value of one treatment transferring for another. Energy, childcare, fabrication, media, anywhere a supply chain exists it can be rebuilt as a federation of cooperatives with mutually vested stakes. Which raises the last structural question: why should all of this happen at the scale of a bioregion?
Why the Bioregion
A regenerative economy must be just large enough that its loops can close, and small enough that its flows stay embedded in real, accountable relationships. Below that scale the loops leak: no neighborhood grows its own grain or generates its own power. Above it, the relationships thin into abstraction. The bioregion is the middle band between, the scale at which an economy can close its loops while remaining bounded by the living systems that are embedded in real relationships of mutuality, reciprocity, and solidarity.
Life’s design principles are relatively universal: Fullerton’s living-systems laws and Raworth’s boundaries hold anywhere, but an economy is not its principles; it is its flows, and flows are always particular. Not “food” as a global commodity but this foodshed, these soils, that snowpack, the people who work them and the people whose diet depends on local soil health. You cannot regenerate a place in general, any more than you can love humanity while ignoring the person in front of you. The moment regenerative economics touches ground it becomes bioregional economics, because the ground is where the values actually express themselves in form.
The point sharpens when set in dialogue with Kate Raworth’s doughnut, an economy between two rings: an outer ecological ceiling it must not breach, and an inner social foundation beneath which no one should fall. As a planetary picture it 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, which means accepting that there is no elsewhere to which the overshoot can be exported. Bioregional carrying capacity, the threshold below which consumption and regeneration exist in true homeostasis, is Raworth’s outer ring brought down to the scale at which it stops being a metaphor. At bioregional scale, the feedback loop is tight enough and the social foundations are embedded enough to both perceive and act upon overshoot.
Raworth’s social foundation, that no one falls beneath a life of dignity, is not met, at the scale where people actually live, by abstract redistribution or a transfer from somewhere far away. It is met by material solidarity: the concrete, reciprocal relationships of care and provision through which real people hold one another up: the upstream farmer and the downstream consumer vested in each other, the housing cooperative that carries a member through a hard year, the mutual aid pool that a neighbor can draw on. Solidarity of that kind cannot be scaled by decree because it is made of relationships, and relationships are not abstract. You can be woven only to people you can know, trade with, show up for, and be answerable to across a table. Push an economy past the scale of knowable relationship and its social foundation thins into ideology or bureaucracy. The bioregion is the largest economy that mutualism can still bind, because it is the largest whose members remain particularly bounded by ecological reality.
So the two rings of the doughnut turn out to be the two edges of the bioregion. The ecological ceiling sets its outer edge: a bioregion is exactly as large as the loops that must close within it. The social foundation sets its inner edge: a bioregion is exactly as small as the relationships that must hold it together. This is the claim beneath the word bioregional: not that the local is quaint or virtuous, but that the bioregion is the one scale where an economy can be ecologically bounded and socially embedded in the same act.
The tighter the loop between production and consumption, the shorter the feedback between economic activity and ecological consequence, short enough, at bioregional scale, to be felt and responded to rather than merely reported and ignored. And tight loops impose a discipline the global economy has spent a century evading: a community organizing its economy within a watershed must actually determine what goods and services it needs and how to produce them within its own ecology. That determination: needs, capacities, carrying budget, is the founding act of a bioregional economy. Such a reframe implies 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.
Permaculture teaches a principle for water on a landscape: slow it, sink it, store it, so that rainfall becomes aquifer and ecological abundance rather than flood and runoff. A bioregional economy applies the same principle to value. Community currencies slow it: value moves, but within the membrane. Cooperative ownership sinks it: surplus settles into the households and enterprises that created it rather than sheeting off to distant shareholders. Federated infrastructure stores it: the processing facility, the land trust, the housing stock become the community’s aquifer, assets held in common that no downturn and no acquirer can drain. What emerges through the embedded relationships of a place is material solidarity: not the ideological solidarity of people who agree with each other, but the structural solidarity of people whose incentives have been braided together, the upstream farmer and the downstream consumer, vested in one another by design.
What Crosses the Membrane
Before arriving at the conclusion of this initial design specification of a bioregional economy, it’s important to address the elephant in the room: if a place must draw its needs from its own soils and waters, is a bioregional economy simply a poorer one than its globalized and profit-maximized predecessor, a patchwork of provinces walled off from the world and impoverished by their own boundaries, each forgoing whatever its climate and population cannot produce? Or, put more succinctly: does sufficiency mean isolation?
A membrane is not a wall; its defining property is selective permeability, and a cell dies as surely from a sealed membrane as from a dissolved one. Bounded currencies are one such membrane. The bioregion is another, larger one. What it holds inside is the circulation that meets our basic needs: food, shelter, energy, care, the high-volume everyday provisioning that ought to be met close to home because meeting it close to home is precisely what makes a place resilient and self-reproducing. What it produces is genuine surplus, a yield not derived from global price arbitrage but from its own contextually abundant nature. In an economy in which there is no “away” to which consequences can be banished, the real cost and production of goods is based on what naturally flourishes in a bioregion without externalizing costs. Each place with its own ecological and human genius produces a unique surplus.
The distinction between what circulates bioregionally from what circulates continentally is among the oldest patterns of human economic life, and the peoples of the Americas exhibited such an economy for millennia before the extractive order arrived. Turquoise cut from the hills of the northern Southwest traveled south into Mesoamerica; scarlet macaws, copper bells, and cacao traveled north in return, their remains recovered now in the great houses of Chaco Canyon, a thousand miles from any macaw’s range or cacao tree. Along the Pacific, Spondylus, the thorny oyster that grows only in certain warm waters off the coast of present-day Ecuador, was carried by seagoing balsa rafts and then overland deep into the high Andes, where Chavín, Moche, and Inca prized it as the sacred substance of water and rain, valued above gold. The jade the Olmec and Maya carved came overwhelmingly from a single valley in Guatemala. And across the Andes, communities practiced what the anthropologist John Murra called the vertical archipelago, deliberately keeping fields and colonies at many elevations at once, so that a single people drew maize from the warm valleys, potatoes and wool from the high plateau, coca from the eastern slopes, fish from the coast, braiding a dozen ecological tiers into one economy. Not all of this was gentle; some of it moved as tribute and prestige under empires. But the organizing logic beneath the best of it is the one worth recovering: exchange arranged around what each place, by its nature, was actually suited to give.
That logic is the precise inverse of the one governing global trade today. The classical name for why places trade is comparative advantage, and in theory it is sound: let each place do what it does best. But in the extractive order “best” has quietly come to mean “cheapest,” and cheapest, followed to its root, means whoever can most completely hide the cost: suppress the wage, externalize the pollution, draw down the aquifer and leave it off the books. Cheapness is often just a measure of how well a harm has been concealed. Bioregional trade asks the ecological question in place of the price question: what is in right relationship to produce here, within this carrying capacity? What does this land yield in genuine surplus when worked with rather than against? Consider the almond. California grows most of the world’s supply in a drying Mediterranean valley, on mined groundwater and subsidized irrigation, a crop so thirsty that by widely repeated estimates each single nut stands for about a gallon of water, much of the harvest then shipped abroad. This is not abundance. It is artificial abundance: a plenty that exists only because its true cost is charged to an aquifer that will not be repaid, and it cannot survive the moment that cost returns to the books. In a bioregional paradigm, California’s almond groves all but vanish, not because almonds are forbidden but because they were never in right relationship with that water supply, and the crop simply returns to the drylands whose nature it actually fits. Multiply that one correction across ten thousand commodities and you have the great sorting a bioregional trade order performs: not the end of trade, but the end of trade waged against the earth.
What remains, once the artificial abundance is subtracted, is a leaner and truer exchange between places: real surplus moving along routes that behave less like supply chains straining for the lowest price and more like circulation in a living body, arteries carrying what each organ makes to the organs that cannot make it. That is what a planetary economy could be, not one market flattening every place toward a single global price, but a body of distinct and thriving places, each meeting its own needs and trading its genuine surplus, the globe woven together through relationship rather than the race to the bottom.
From Moral Authority to Parity
The second obvious objection arrives here: the extractive economy is so vastly subsidized, by externalized ecological costs, by monetary policy, by captured regulation, that no real competition with it can exist. On present terms, evaluated purely on price parity, this is simply true. A federated cooperative food chain cannot beat a big-box grocer on sticker price while the grocer’s true costs are billed to the atmosphere, the aquifer, and the future.
But the competition does not begin on price. A parallel cooperative economy thrives first on legitimacy, on moral authority, on the relational pull of an economy in which people can feel that their spending builds their neighbors’ wealth rather than a distant portfolio. Households with the economic surplus to do so migrate their spending for reasons of meaning and membership before reasons of margin. This migration is the ignition. Then the terms of competition themselves shift. As prices in the regenerative economy begin to decrease through closed loop and mutualistic cooperative financing and infrastructure, extraction is becoming more expensive. The externalities are coming home: as uninsurable regions, snapped supply chains, volatility that reprices everything, while the cooperative economy’s structural advantages compound: economies of scale that federate without extracting profit to shareholders, obligation-clearing among enterprises that trade with each other, a workforce that owns its work. Parity arrives when these two trajectories intersect and the regenerative economy becomes the economy, not through good will and not because the cooperative economy learned to extract but extraction’s mounting costs finally exceed its benefits. And past parity lies the upward spiral: circulation compounds. Every turn of the spiral cooperative revenue to worker-owners, household prosperity sinks into local spending, surplus is used to feed solidarity funds, solidarity funds establish new cooperatives. We do not need the whole economy to convert. We need one spark, one lightning strike, one closed loop in one bioregion whose demonstrated prosperity becomes the template every other bioregion adapts.
Bioregional Economics, Defined
Bioregional economics is the study and practice of designing regenerative, closed-loop, cooperatively owned, place-based economies within the carrying capacity of their landscapes. 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.
This essay has drawn a map, and a map is not the territory. Everything specified here still waits on the question a specification cannot answer: who picks up the tools? Who convenes the cooperatives? Who capitalizes the shared infrastructure? What kind of institutions can hold an entire bioregional economy in view and grow it as one living thing, without becoming the very extraction it was built to end?
Those questions reveal the missing middle of bioregional economics and they are where part two begins.