omniharmonicCommissioned and Edited by Ali Katz & Eyes Wide Open Collective
I. Introduction
The Invitation
“Compost Capital or Die” sounds confrontational, perhaps even threatening. But this isn’t a manifesto or a call to the barricades. It’s an invitation to solve a problem together, one that concerns the continuity of life on Earth. The provocative framing serves a purpose: to cut through the comfortable narratives that allow us to sleepwalk toward systemic collapse while debating deck chair arrangements.
This essay is written specifically for those who have succeeded within our current economic system, those who have accumulated significant wealth through talent, hard work, timing, privilege or some combination thereof. If you’re reading this and you’ve done well financially, I want to be clear: this isn’t about assigning individual blame. The problem runs deeper than personal morality. It’s embedded in the structure of the game itself. Yet recognizing systemic dynamics doesn’t eliminate individual agency. Those positioned at the top of wealth hierarchies hold disproportionate power to shape outcomes, which means disproportionate responsibility for what comes next.
Those who’ve succeeded in the current game have mastered the rules of value creation as currently defined. But what if those rules are generating contradictions that threaten the very foundations of wealth itself?
The Reality of Collapse
We have to begin by confronting an uncomfortable truth: our current trajectory leads to collapse. The systems we depend upon, ecological, social, political, and economic, are showing signs of cascading failure. This isn’t apocalyptic fear-mongering; it’s the sober assessment of researchers across disciplines. Climate scientists document accelerating feedback loops. Sociologists map widening inequality. Political scientists track democratic decay. Ecologists catalog biodiversity collapse. Each crisis amplifies the others in ways our siloed institutions struggle to address.
The dystopian outcomes of systemic breakdown won’t spare anyone. Your quality of life as a wealthy individual depends fundamentally on systemic health. Functioning markets require stable governance, profitable businesses need healthy consumers, safe neighborhoods depend on social cohesion, and even the most exclusive communities rely on broader ecosystem services. History shows us that when societies collapse, the wealthy suffer too, perhaps not first, but inevitably and often dramatically.
Consider the quality of life in highly unequal societies today. Sao Paulo’s wealthy live in fortified compounds, traveling by helicopter to avoid kidnapping risks. South Africa’s affluent suburbs require private security forces. These aren’t markers of success; they’re symptoms of societal failure that diminishes everyone’s wellbeing. No amount of private wealth can purchase what a healthy society provides freely: the ability to walk safely in public spaces, trust in everyday transactions, a thriving cultural commons, and the innovative dynamism that comes from broad-based prosperity.
This isn’t an essay about charity. It’s about recognizing the rational self-interest inherent in maintaining the foundational systems that make quality of life possible for the poor and the wealthy alike.
Reframing Wealth Holders as System Stewards
This essay deliberately breaks from two dominant narratives about wealth. The first, common on the political right, dismisses inequality concerns as envy or suggests that wealth concentration is natural and beneficial. The second, prevalent on the left, frames wealth accumulation as inherently immoral, demanding guilt and shame from those who’ve succeeded financially.
Both narratives are counterproductive.
The first ignores mounting evidence that extreme inequality destabilizes the very systems that enable wealth creation and preservation. The second creates defensiveness and disengagement precisely when we need wealthy individuals’ capabilities and resources directed toward system transformation.
People who’ve accumulated wealth aren’t a different species. They’re humans who’ve successfully navigated a particular game with particular rules. Contrary to the played out leftist tropes, the ownership class isn’t evil but structurally positioned to pursue accumulation. Yet history shows that the most successful capitalists have been those who recognized when the rules needed to change, who understood that their long-term interests aligned with systemic evolution rather than defending an unsustainable status quo.
Beyond Guilt to Enlightened Self-Interest
The standard wealthy person’s playbook for addressing inequality goes something like this: feel guilty about having more than others, make charitable donations to hopefully worthy causes, feel somewhat better about the possibility of impact, all while continuing to accumulate wealth through the same extractive systems. Even in the best case, further accumulation is justified by the hope that increased wealth might enable even larger donations. But no amount of charity, paid for by wealth accumulated through extractive systems, can ever outpace the scope and scale of the damage the extractive systems themselves create. This cycle of guilt and absolution changes nothing fundamental. It’s a pressure release valve that prevents system transformation.
This essay neither demands guilt nor offers absolution. Guilt is unproductive. It leads either to paralysis or to performative gestures. But the absence of guilt doesn’t eliminate responsibility. What’s needed is clear-eyed recognition of how current wealth concentration emerged, what it costs, and what role those holding concentrated wealth can play in societal transformation.
This essay proposes an opportunity for genuine transformation rooted in both rational self-interest and historical awareness.
Investing in systemic well-being isn’t charity. It’s actually the most sophisticated form of wealth preservation available.
When you fund regenerative systems, you’re not giving money away; you’re purchasing social stability, environmental resilience, and economic dynamism that will benefit your family for generations.
You’re choosing between two legacies: having your name on a building in a collapsing civilization, or having your family office recognized as central to humanity’s transition to regenerative prosperity.
This reframing is essential because what follows isn’t a simple prescription but a complex analysis of our predicament and the possibilities it contains. To understand why “compost capital or die” isn’t hyperbole but accurate assessment, we need to examine the accelerating dynamics pushing us toward systemic failure, and why your personal security and generational well-being depends on addressing them.
II. The Urgency: Why This Matters Now
The comfortable distance between civilizational viability and catastrophe is collapsing faster than most realize. Understanding the velocity and interconnectedness of our crises is essential for grasping why traditional approaches, whether investment or philanthropy, cannot secure your family’s future, let alone address what’s coming.
Runaway Feedback Loops
Wealth concentration isn’t a static problem. It’s an accelerating one that threatens the stability that wealth depends upon. Thomas Piketty’s research demonstrated a fundamental mathematical reality: when the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth (r > g), wealth naturally concentrates. This isn’t a bug; it’s a feature of our current system. And it’s accelerating toward a breaking point that will affect everyone.
Consider the mathematics: if you have 700,000 per year without working. Someone working full-time at median wage earns about 10.7 million earning 7% (72,100. The absolute gap grew from 676,900 in just one year.
Noting this mathematical divergence isn’t a moralizing plea for wealth redistribution. Extreme inequality destroys the consumer base that corporate profits depend upon, undermines the social stability that protects property rights, and fuels political extremism that threatens market economies. You cannot maintain profitable investments in a society where the majority lacks purchasing power. You cannot preserve wealth in a system losing legitimacy. The same dynamics concentrating wealth in your accounts are destroying the foundations that make those accounts valuable.
Political economists have known for over a century that the rate of profit falls as capital accumulates, making it increasingly difficult to find profitable investments, leading to speculation, financialization, and ultimately crisis.
The concentration of wealth isn’t just a moral problem; it’s a mathematical problem that threatens the sustainability of returns themselves.
This concentration of economic power translates directly into political power, creating another feedback loop. Wealthy individuals and corporations shape legislation, regulation, and judicial appointments. They fund think tanks that produce intellectual justification for policies that further concentrate wealth. They own media outlets that shape public discourse. Initially, this seems like rational self-interest. But it’s creating a brittleness in the system, a loss of adaptive capacity and legitimacy that historically precedes dramatic reversals of fortune for elite classes.
Social Instability and Violence
In December 2024, Luigi Mangione allegedly shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street. The suspected shooter, a young man from a wealthy family with an Ivy League education, reportedly left a written statement condemning the health insurance industry’s practices. What shocked many observers wasn’t just the act itself, but the public response: the fact widespread expressions of sympathy, understanding, even celebration across social media platforms.
This reaction reveals something profound about our current moment. When violence against a corporate executive generates more public catharsis than condemnation, we’re witnessing a breakdown in the social contract that should terrify anyone with significant wealth. The Mangione case isn’t an isolated incident but a warning signal, like smoke before fire. The fact that the alleged shooter came from privilege himself suggests that even traditional class boundaries aren’t containing the rage against systemic extraction.
This erosion of class solidarity within the elite itself, when members of the professional-managerial class turn against CEOs, represents a particularly dangerous phase in systemic breakdown. It suggests that the contradictions and failures of our current economic system are becoming apparent even to those who’ve benefited from it.
History offers numerous examples of what happens when inequality reaches breaking points, and wealthy elites rarely fare well in these transitions. The French Revolution didn’t begin with starving peasants but with a frustrated bourgeoisie. The Russian Revolution was precipitated by educated urbanites. In both cases, it was the ownership class that was eliminated.
We’re seeing precursors everywhere that should alarm anyone with substantial assets: the mainstreaming of “eat the rich” rhetoric, the popularity of shows dramatizing class violence, the way “billionaire” has become synonymous with societal failure among younger generations. The privatization of previously public goods like healthcare, education, and housing all create the desperation that historically precedes not just social unrest but complete reversals of property rights and wealth structures.
Learning from the Gilded Age
America has been here before. The late 19th century Gilded Age saw wealth concentration rivaling today’s levels, with industrial barons accumulating unprecedented fortunes while workers labored in dangerous conditions for subsistence wages. The period from 1870 to 1900 witnessed violent labor strikes, the rise of populist movements, and assassination attempts on prominent industrialists. The Haymarket Affair of 1886, the Homestead Strike of 1892, and the Pullman Strike of 1894 demonstrated how quickly economic grievance could explode into violence.
What’s instructive isn’t just the unrest but the response. Wise industrialists recognized that their own security required addressing systemic instability. Andrew Carnegie established libraries, museums, and universities, not from altruism but from understanding that cultural institutions created social cohesion that protected property rights. John D. Rockefeller founded hospitals and research institutions, recognizing that public health protected everyone, including his family. The creation of the nonprofit sector itself emerged from this recognition that private wealth needed to fund public goods to maintain social legitimacy.
These responses represented what Antonio Gramsci would later theorize as hegemony, the process by which dominant classes maintain control not through force alone but by creating cultural and institutional frameworks that generate consent. The Gilded Age philanthropists intuited that naked class domination was unsustainable; they needed to create institutions that distributed enough value to maintain legitimacy while preserving fundamental power relations.
These weren’t acts of charity but sophisticated strategies for preserving wealth through system stabilization. The Carnegie Museum, the Rockefeller Foundation, the libraries and concert halls, these institutions served as pressure release valves that prevented revolutionary explosions while creating the cultural and intellectual infrastructure that enabled continued prosperity. The industrialists who understood this were able to entrench their fortunes and legacies in systems they controlled and whose legitimacy they deliberately cultivated through the earliest forms of social engineering.
Today’s wealth holders face a similar choice but with higher stakes. The Gilded Age industrialists could build a museum to ease tensions; today’s crises require more fundamental transformation. Climate change, democratic decay, and technological disruption create existential risks that philanthropy alone cannot address. We need not just pressure release but systemic regeneration, not just hegemonic stability but genuine transformation of how value is created and shared.
The Commons as Wealth Infrastructure
Even extreme wealth cannot purchase independence from societal systems. Your smartphone requires rare earth minerals mined in Africa, assembled in Asia, with software written by developers worldwide. Your food, no matter how exclusive the restaurant, depends on agricultural workers, supply chains, and ecosystem services. Your health relies not just on personal physicians but on medical knowledge production, soil health, and the overall public health of your community.
This interdependence reflects the reality that all value creation depends on vast networks of cooperation and shared infrastructure. The fantasy of individual self-sufficiency is precisely that, a fantasy that obscures our fundamental reliance on collective labor and social systems.
Individual thriving requires collective thriving. This isn’t ideological but a practical reality that directly affects wealth preservation and quality of life. You can’t buy your way out of climate change when the entire planet is heating. You can’t purchase clean air when wildfires rage across continents. You can’t ensure your children’s safety in a society where desperation drives violence. But more fundamentally, you can’t maintain the sophisticated quality of life wealth supposedly provides without functional commons.
The enclosure of the commons created the initial conditions for our current economic system. But the continued enclosure and degradation of both natural and social commons now threatens capitalism’s own foundations. Climate represents the ultimate commons whose destruction threatens all property values. Social trust represents a commons whose erosion raises transaction costs for everyone.
Consider what systemic health provides that private wealth cannot adequately replace: trust that lubricates all transactions, innovation ecosystems that generate returns, cultural dynamism that enriches life, and the social stability that makes long-term planning possible. The breakdown of these commons doesn’t just affect the poor. It degrades quality of life at every level, requiring increasingly expensive and ultimately inadequate private substitutes.
Understanding these accelerating dynamics reveals why our current approaches to capital allocation, both investment and philanthropy, are fundamentally inadequate not just for solving social problems but for protecting wealth itself. They operate within paradigms that are destroying the foundations of collective and individual prosperity.
III. The Limits of Current Capital Allocation Models
Having established that systemic health is a prerequisite for maintaining wealth and quality of life, we must examine why our existing tools for deploying capital, traditional investment and traditional philanthropy, cannot provide the security and prosperity they promise. Both operate within paradigms that perpetuate the very contradictions threatening systemic stability.
The Investment Paradigm: Extraction by Design
Traditional investment operates on a simple premise: deploy capital to generate maximum financial returns. This seems rational, even virtuous in the context of efficient market theories. But examine the deep structure of this logic and you’ll find it’s cannibalizing the foundations of its own success.
Consider how equity markets price companies. A stock’s value reflects expected future cash flows, discounted to present value. For a stock price to rise continuously, the expectation of investors, companies must grow earnings perpetually. This growth must exceed the rate of general economic expansion to beat market averages. The mathematical implication? Companies must extract increasing value from somewhere: labor (wage suppression that destroys consumer purchasing power), nature (resource depletion that undermines long-term productivity), society (externalized costs that degrade the commons), or future generations (debt and degradation that threaten your own children’s prosperity).
The drive for compound returns creates a linear extraction that depletes the circular flows necessary for systemic health. Environmental destruction, social fragmentation, and political instability aren’t unfortunate side effects but necessary outcomes of this extractive logic.
This extractive imperative isn’t a moral failing of investors. It’s structurally embedded in how investment works. This extraction is destroying the conditions necessary for sustained returns. Suppressed wages mean fewer customers for your portfolio companies. Depleted resources mean rising input costs and supply chain vulnerabilities. Degraded social fabric means political instability that threatens property rights. Environmental destruction means escalating physical risks to real assets.
Venture capital makes this dynamic explicit. VCs need “unicorn” returns, 100 to 1000x on some investments, to make their portfolio math work. This requires betting on companies that can capture and monopolize entire markets, extracting maximum value from users, workers, and competitors. The celebrated “disruption” often means destroying existing livelihoods and communities while concentrating gains among founders and investors. But monopolistic concentration creates the kind of systemic brittleness and social resentment that historically precedes dramatic reversals: antitrust actions, nationalization, or revolution.
Even “patient capital” or “impact investment” often remains trapped in this paradigm, just with longer timelines or additional metrics. If the fundamental expectation is market-rate or better returns, the underlying extractive logic remains. You cannot simultaneously maximize financial extraction and system regeneration. These goals are fundamentally at odds.
The Philanthropy Trap: Amelioration vs. Transformation
Traditional philanthropy appears to offer an alternative: give money away rather than seeking returns. Yet philanthropy as currently practiced often perpetuates the very problems it claims to solve, failing to create the systemic health that wealth preservation requires.
Consider the “non-profit industrial complex,” the vast ecosystem of nonprofits, foundations, consultants, and service providers that has grown up around philanthropic giving. In the United States alone, nonprofits employ over 12 million people and generate roughly $2 trillion in revenue annually. This sector has become dependent on the continuation of the problems it ostensibly exists to solve. Without an incentive to drive systemic change and dependent on funding from high net worth individuals invested in maintaining the status quo, the nonprofit industrial complex becomes a mechanism for managing the contradictions of capitalism rather than resolving them. But symptom management doesn’t create the systemic health necessary for long-term prosperity.
Food banks feed the hungry but don’t create the regenerative local food systems that make food accessible and healthy. Homeless shelters provide temporary relief but don’t address the private equity firms buying up housing supply, driving skyrocketing rents. Medical charities research acute illnesses but don’t address the holistic public health failures that cause chronic disease.
Well-meaning philanthropy can actually worsen problems by providing just enough relief to prevent explosions while allowing root causes to intensify. It’s like treating an infection with painkillers instead of antibiotics, temporary relief that allows the disease to spread. From a wealth preservation perspective, this is dangerous: it maintains an unstable equilibrium that’s prone to sudden, catastrophic shifts rather than building genuine resilience and systemic health.
The Tax Paradox and Public Goods
Here we encounter a profound paradox that wealthy individuals must grapple with. Taxes historically funded the public goods that created the conditions for prosperity: education systems that produced skilled workers, infrastructure that enabled commerce, research institutions that drove innovation, social programs that maintained stability. During America’s most prosperous period (1950-1980), top marginal tax rates exceeded 70%, funding the public investments that created the middle class and the consumer base that drove corporate profits.
This period of high taxes and strong public investment created what economists call “patient capital,” long-term investments in productive capacity rather than short-term financial extraction. The interstate highway system, the GI Bill, public universities, the NIH, NASA, these tax-funded institutions created the foundation for American prosperity that benefited everyone, especially those positioned to capitalize on new opportunities.
High taxes weren’t theft from the wealthy, they were investments in the systemic health that made wealth valuable. The decline in tax rates since 1980 correlates with deteriorating infrastructure, weakening education, declining social mobility, and the very instability that now threatens wealth preservation.
But here’s the contemporary dilemma: in an age of institutional decay, traditional tax-funded public goods are failing. Government agencies are captured by special interests. Public funds are misallocated through corruption and incompetence. Infrastructure crumbles despite billions in appropriations. Education systems fail despite increased spending. Simply paying more taxes into dysfunctional institutions won’t create the systemic health necessary for prosperity.
This creates both an opportunity and an obligation for wealth holders. Avoiding taxes in a dying system might be rational, but it doesn’t absolve the need to fund the public goods that prosperity depends upon. The solution isn’t traditional charity or conventional investment but direct funding of transformative public goods that create systemic health. Think of it as parallel public investment, building the new systems that can eventually replace or revitalize failing institutions.
The Systemic Crisis Connection
Our challenges aren’t isolated problems but symptoms of systemic dysfunction that threatens the foundations of wealth itself. From a wealth preservation perspective, these interconnected crises create compound risks that cannot be managed through traditional diversification. Climate change doesn’t just threaten coastal real estate, it disrupts agricultural systems, triggers mass migration, destabilizes governments, and undermines every sector of the economy. Inequality doesn’t just create social tension, it destroys consumer demand, fuels political extremism, and delegitimizes the property rights that wealth depends upon. Democratic decay doesn’t just affect governance, it undermines rule of law, contract enforcement, and the stable policy environment that enables long-term investment.
Traditional investment and philanthropy operate on linear cause-and-effect models that cannot address these systemic dynamics. But there’s a deeper problem: both approaches implicitly accept the continuation of current systems. Traditional investment assumes markets will continue functioning, property rights will be respected, and returns will be possible. Traditional philanthropy assumes the status quo is stable enough to focus primarily on symptom mitigation.
Neither approach questions whether these assumptions will hold as systems approach breaking points. Neither builds alternative structures that could preserve and regenerate wealth through transformation. This is why we need fundamentally different approaches to capital allocation, ones that create systemic health as the foundation for long-term prosperity.
IV. Introducing Compost Capital: A Third Way
The inadequacy of existing models demands innovation that serves both self-interest and collective wellbeing. Just as nature transforms death into life through decomposition and regeneration, we need approaches to capital allocation that transform accumulated wealth from extractive force into regenerative resource. This is the essence of compost capital, a dialectical synthesis that preserves the coordinative capacity of markets while transcending their contradictions.
Defining Compost Capital
Compost capital represents a fundamental shift in how we think about wealth allocation, one that recognizes systemic health as the foundation of long-term prosperity. Unlike traditional investment that seeks maximum financial returns while externalizing costs, or traditional philanthropy that gives money away without building regenerative capacity, compost capital operates on a different logic: the transformation of dying systems into fertility for new ones that can sustain prosperity indefinitely.
The metaphor is deliberate and instructive. In nature, composting transforms death into life. Fallen leaves, dead organisms, and waste products don’t simply disappear — they become the nutrient-rich foundation for new growth. The decomposition isn’t loss but transformation that creates more value than existed before. Similarly, compost capital takes wealth accumulated through extractive systems and transforms it into the substrate for regenerative ones that can sustain and multiply prosperity across generations.
This process represents what historians might call a dialectical transformation, not the simple negation of capitalism but its transfiguration, preserving what is valuable while transcending its limitations. The capacity for coordination and value creation developed under capitalism becomes the foundation for post-capitalist forms of economic organization.
This isn’t about sacrificing returns. It’s about recognizing that the highest returns come from systemic well-being. Where Carnegie built libraries to create an educated populace that could participate in industrial economy (while maintaining class hierarchies), today’s wealth holders need to build regenerative economic structures that can sustain prosperity through ecological limits while addressing rather than managing inequality. Where Rockefeller funded medical research to protect public health (and drive petroleum-based allopathic medicine), today’s philanthropists need to fund system transformation that addresses root causes of disease: poverty, pollution, stress, and alienation.
Key Principles
The first principle is regenerative rather than ameliorative action. Instead of treating symptoms while systems decay, compost capital addresses root causes to build foundational health. Rather than feeding the hungry while inequality grows, it creates regenerative food systems that ensure everyone can feed themselves healthy local food. Instead of pouring money into pharmaceutical research, it funds food as medicine to heal chronic disease. This requires longer time horizons but creates the lasting stability that wealth preservation requires.
The second principle is creating conditions for systemic resilience. Traditional problem-solving waits for crises then responds, creating vulnerability to cascading failures. Compost capital invests in prevention through system design that benefits everyone, including wealth holders. This might mean funding community land trusts that prevent both homelessness and property market bubbles, supporting cooperative enterprises that maintain employment and consumer demand during downturns, or building mutual aid networks that provide social stability without requiring constant charitable intervention.
The third principle is strategic mixing of philanthropic and investment approaches. Some interventions require pure grants: organizing, advocacy, and cultural work that builds the social cohesion necessary for a stable society. Others can be investments that return principal while generating systemic benefits that enhance the value of all assets. The key is portfolio thinking that recognizes systemic health as the foundation for all returns.
The fourth principle is focus on cascading benefits. First-order effects are immediate: a grant feeds families, an investment creates jobs. But second and third-order effects determine systemic outcomes. Compost capital prioritizes interventions that create positive feedback loops benefiting entire systems, including existing wealth holders.
The fifth principle is building legitimate prosperity. Rather than creating dependence or resentment, compost capital builds capacity for self-governance and economic self-determination that everyone can participate in. This means investing in education that creates worker owned cooperatives, social movements that builds civic engagement, and infrastructure that communities control and maintain. Legitimate prosperity, where success is seen as earned and beneficial, is far more stable than extracted wealth defended by force.
The sixth principle is funding transformative public goods. Recognizing that taxes in a dysfunctional system don’t create necessary public infrastructure, compost capital directly funds the public goods that prosperity requires. This isn’t charity but parallel public investment, creating the education, health, housing, and energy systems that make all economic activity possible. It’s taking responsibility for the commons that wealth depends upon rather than hoping someone else will maintain them.
The seventh principle is recognizing class divisions while healing class conflict. Compost capital acknowledges that different classes have different immediate interests while recognizing that all classes share an interest in systemic sustainability. It creates pathways for wealth holders to secure their long-term interests through contributing to rather than extracting from collective prosperity. This isn’t class collaboration in service of continued exploitation but class transformation through evolving and healing how power and wealth are developed and shared.
The Business Structure Revolution
Legal structures profoundly shape organizational behavior and systemic outcomes. Current business structures were designed for capital accumulation in an era of abundant resources and limited systemic awareness. We need new forms designed for regeneration in an era of planetary boundaries and systemic interdependence, structures that align private interest with public good.
The corporation, as currently structured, is rooted in a logic of extraction and concentration of wealth. Alternative structures offer the possibility of different logics.
Cooperative structures create resilience that benefits everyone. During economic downturns, cooperatives maintain employment and purchasing power rather than conducting mass layoffs that cascade through economies.
Community land trusts prevent speculation that creates homelessness while maintaining property values through stability. Benefit corporations consider stakeholder interests, creating the social license that prevents backlash against business. These structures don’t sacrifice returns, they create sustainable conditions for long-term prosperity.
Platform cooperatives offer a particularly compelling model for the digital age. Rather than extractive platforms that monopolize value, cooperative platforms share value among users, creating the broad-based prosperity that sustains consumer demand. The same network effects that created wealthy CEOs and shareholders in Facebook, Uber, and Amazon could create millions of prosperous participants through platform cooperative alternatives that provide social networks, ride sharing, and supply chains that are owned by workers and users. This isn’t just more equitable, it’s more stable, avoiding the concentration that breeds systemic risk and social resentment.
This isn’t about overthrowing capitalism but evolving ownership beyond the narrow optimization of extraction and profit toward organizational forms that can sustain prosperity indefinitely. Just as the joint-stock corporation was a legal innovation that enabled the transition from feudalism to capitalism, new organizational forms can enable the transition from extractive to regenerative economics.
V. Case Studies in Regenerative Capital Allocation
Theory becomes meaningful through practice. The following case studies demonstrate how regenerative capital allocation creates systemic health that benefits everyone, including wealth holders. These aren’t utopian experiments but functioning systems that outperform extractive alternatives on multiple dimensions, including long-term returns and stability. They represent “the new world struggling to be born from the old,” concrete examples of post-capitalist possibilities emerging within capitalism itself.
The Cooperative Advantage: Mondragon During COVID
The Mondragon Corporation in Spain’s Basque region offers compelling evidence that regenerative structures create superior outcomes for all stakeholders, including capital holders. As the world’s largest cooperative network, Mondragon encompasses 81 cooperatives employing over 80,000 people with revenues exceeding 12 billion euros annually. But it’s not the scale that’s instructive, it’s how the cooperative structure created resilience that protected both workers and capital through crisis.
When COVID-19 struck in 2020, corporations worldwide initiated massive layoffs, destroying consumer demand and triggering economic cascades that harmed even the wealthy through portfolio losses, business failures, and social instability. Mondragon responded differently. The cooperatives implemented voluntary pay cuts scaled to income levels, redeployed workers between cooperatives, and used solidarity funds to support struggling units. They avoided layoffs almost entirely while maintaining operational viability.
This was sophisticated risk management, not charity, that protected long-term value. By maintaining employment, Mondragon preserved consumer purchasing power in their regions, supporting all businesses including those owned by traditional investors. By retaining skilled workers, they avoided the recruitment and training costs that plagued companies that conducted layoffs. By demonstrating solidarity, they strengthened the social cohesion that enables business operation.
The economic outcomes vindicate this approach. Mondragon cooperatives recovered faster than conventional businesses, maintained customer relationships, and enhanced their reputation. Regions with strong cooperative sectors provide greater economic resilience, benefiting workers and investors alike. This demonstrates a crucial point: regenerative structures create the systemic stability that preserves and enhances wealth across entire economies.
Mondragon represents what economic historian Karl Polanyi called “re-embedding” the economy in social relations, reversing capitalism’s tendency to disembed economic activity from social life. Rather than treating labor as a commodity to be discarded when unprofitable, Mondragon treats workers as members of a community whose wellbeing is integral to enterprise success. This isn’t just more humane; it’s more resilient.
In the world of blockchain technology, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) function as internet-native cooperatives, enabling scaling and increased transparency for worker-owned enterprises. Importantly, DAOs support a plurality of tokens that represent different forms of investment, ownership, and governance. Different tokens can function as voting power (distributed meritocratically or simply one person, one vote) or as patronage shares (investment), enabling the distribution of dividends or even revenue according to token holdings without conflating investment capital with exclusive decision-making rights. By investing in the Mondragon model for the internet age, investors can support local economic resilience while benefiting from the tokenized patronage shares that align incentives, preserve democratic decision-making by workers, and generate sustaining prosperity for an entire community.
Alternative Currency and Exchange Systems
Local currencies might seem irrelevant to significant wealth holders, but they offer sophisticated mechanisms for maintaining economic resilience that protects all assets. When communities create their own exchange media, they’re building firewalls against systemic shocks that can devastate conventional investments.
During the 2008 financial crisis, when credit froze and dollars became scarce, communities with local currencies maintained economic activity. The Ithaca HOURS system in New York enabled continued exchange when global systems failed. BerkShares in Massachusetts keep wealth circulating locally rather than being extracted to failing financial centers. These systems didn’t just help workers, they maintained the consumer activity and social stability that protected local businesses owners.
By enabling exchange based on concrete community needs rather than abstract market valuations, local currencies partially escape capitalism’s reductive logic while maintaining economic coordination.
Time banks reveal something even deeper: it’s our social fabric that makes prosperity possible. By enabling non-monetary exchange, they build the relationships and reciprocity that create high-trust societies. High trust reduces transaction costs for all businesses, enables the cooperation that drives innovation, and maintains the social stability that protects property rights. Wealth holders in high-trust societies enjoy not just better returns but dramatically better quality of life.
Similar to DAOs, blockchains are able to scale these benefits. Blockchain-based community currencies create transparent, democratic monetary systems that complement rather than threaten conventional finance. They provide resilience against monetary crises, maintain local prosperity that supports all businesses, and build the social cohesion that prevents the kind of resentment that threatens wealth. Forward-thinking wealth holders should invest in these systems not as charity but as insurance for their conventional assets.
Bioregional Financing Facilities
Bioregional financing facilities represent a fundamental reimagining of how capital flows through landscapes. Rather than global capital markets that treat all places as interchangeable sites for extraction, bioregional finance roots capital in specific ecosystems and communities, with returns measured in ecological and social health alongside financial sustainability.
The concept builds on the understanding that economic activity is ultimately grounded in ecological reality. A watershed provides water for agriculture, production, and human consumption. A forest provides timber, air purification, carbon sequestration, and ecosystem services. A coastal region provides fisheries, tourism, and storm protection. When financial decisions ignore these ecological foundations, they undermine the very basis of economic activity.
The BioFi Project, for instance, focuses on developing financial mechanisms that specifically support bioregional regeneration. It aims to connect investors with projects that enhance ecological integrity and community well-being within defined bioregions, such as restoring wetlands or investing in local food systems. The project emphasizes measurable ecological outcomes alongside financial viability, demonstrating a shift from purely financial returns to a broader definition of value that includes natural capital and societal health.
Salmon Nation, another compelling example, envisions a resilient and interconnected bioregion spanning from Alaska to Northern California, united by the Pacific salmon ecosystem. It fosters initiatives that promote ecological health, cultural revitalization, and economic development aligned with the region’s natural rhythms. Salmon Nation acts as a convener and facilitator, directing capital towards projects that support regenerative aquaculture, indigenous land stewardship, and community-led conservation efforts. Its success is measured not just in financial terms, but in the health of salmon populations, the vitality of local communities, and the resilience of the ecosystem as a whole.
These facilities also make grants for community organizing and capacity building that will never generate financial returns but are essential for systemic change. They fund watershed councils, indigenous land back initiatives, and cooperative development. The combination of investment and philanthropy, guided by bioregional priorities rather than maximum returns, creates conditions for fundamental transformation.
Bioregional finance shows how capital can serve place and ecosystems rather than extracting from them. But transformation also requires building human capacity for self-governance and mutual aid. This brings us to investments in social infrastructure.
Social Fabric Philanthropy
Traditional philanthropy treats symptoms while systems fail. Social fabric philanthropy builds the civic infrastructure that creates systemic health benefiting everyone, especially those with the most to lose from instability.
The Boston Ujima Project demonstrates how democratic capital allocation creates legitimacy that generates systemic resilience. Rather than wealthy philanthropists deciding what communities need, breeding resentment, communities vote on investment priorities. This process builds the civic engagement that sustains democracy, the social cohesion that prevents violence, and the economic participation that maintains prosperity. Wealthy Bostonians benefit from living in a stable, legitimate, prosperous city, benefits that far exceed any traditional philanthropic impact.
This represents what Antonio Gramsci called “counter-hegemony,” building alternative institutions and practices that challenge dominant power relations while creating new forms of coordination. Yet paradoxically, these counter-hegemonic practices often serve the long-term interests of wealth holders better than maintaining existing hegemony, by creating the stability and legitimacy that generational wealth requires.
The Workers Lab incubates new forms of worker power for the 21st century economy. This might seem threatening to capital holders, but consider the alternative: without legitimate channels for worker voice, frustration builds toward explosive release. Strong worker organizations that have stakes in system success create the stable labor relations that enable long-term business development, the consumer purchasing power that drives profits, and the social stability that protects property. The alternative, seen in societies with suppressed labor movements, is periodic upheaval that destroys wealth indiscriminately.
Strong communities solve their own problems better than distant institutions ever could, creating the stability and prosperity that benefits everyone.
VI. Measuring Returns: Ripples of Impact
Traditional metrics cannot capture the full value of regenerative capital allocation. When we include systemic health in our return calculations, compost capital reveals itself as the highest-return investment available, not despite its focus on collective wellbeing but because of it.
The Sustainability Test for True Returns
Four questions determine whether an intervention creates real value or merely reshuffles deck chairs on a sinking ship:
Will the benefits continue without ongoing subsidy? Many interventions create temporary improvement that vanishes when funding ends, leaving systems no healthier and often breeding cynicism that makes future progress harder. Regenerative interventions create self-sustaining dynamics, cooperatives that generate ongoing prosperity, community land trusts that permanently preserve affordability, or educational initiatives that create capable citizens who solve their own problems. This sustainability means your investment creates permanent value rather than temporary relief.
Has capacity for self-governance been built? External solutions imposed on communities create dependence and resentment, dangerous dynamics for sustained transformation. Regenerative interventions build local capacity for self-determination within stable systems. This creates the legitimacy that protects property rights and the capability that generates prosperity. Communities that can govern themselves don’t need revolution; they create evolution that preserves while improving.
Are root causes being addressed? Symptoms will recur if underlying causes remain, eventually overwhelming any defensive measures wealth can purchase. Regenerative interventions address the structural dynamics that create problems, building systems that generate health rather than managing disease.
Can successful approaches spread organically? Solutions requiring unique circumstances or exceptional resources can’t scale to create systemic health. Regenerative interventions create models that inspire replication, open source documentation that enables adoption, and networks that accelerate spread. When your investment catalyzes thousands of similar initiatives through open source blueprints and horizontally scaling networks, you’re creating the systemic transformation that preserves prosperity at scale.
Portfolio Thinking for System Change
Sophisticated wealth management has always required portfolio thinking, diversification across asset classes, geographies, and strategies. Regenerative capital allocation extends this logic to the systemic level, recognizing that all conventional assets depend on system health.
A regenerative portfolio might allocate across multiple intervention types that reinforce each other: immediate harm reduction that prevents explosive crisis (maintaining stability for existing assets), capacity building that creates capable communities (generating the human capital that drives innovation and returns), infrastructure creation that enables regenerative economics (building the foundation for long-term prosperity), policy change that encodes new rules (creating the regulatory environment for sustainable business), and cultural work that shifts values (building the social license for legitimate wealth).
This portfolio approach recognizes that systemic health is the ultimate risk management strategy. Rather than trying to insulate wealth from systemic breakdown, an ultimately impossible task, it invests in preventing breakdown while building regenerative alternatives. This isn’t an alternative to conventional investing; it’s the essential evolution that preserves the value of all other assets in your portfolio.
VII. The Opportunity: Seed Capital for Life-Aligned Systems
We stand at an unprecedented historical moment where the concentration of capital, technological capability, and crisis awareness create unique opportunities for transformation. Wealth holders who recognize this moment can secure not just returns but legacy, becoming founding investors in humanity’s regenerative future rather than the last defenders of its extractive past.
The Historical Moment
Never before has transformation been both so necessary and so possible. The $13 trillion controlled by global billionaires, if deployed regeneratively, could catalyze systemic transformation that benefits everyone, including the wealthy themselves. This concentration of capital, while problematic systemically, creates unprecedented opportunity for rapid change.
This aggregation of wealth makes it possible to coordinate transformation at systemic scale. Ironically, the very concentration that threatens systemic stability also creates the potential for systemic regeneration. Individual wealthy people can make decisions that governments cannot, taking risks that public institutions avoid, supporting transformative work that threatens existing power structures but creates better ones, moving quickly when windows of opportunity open.
The technological tools now available, blockchain, AI, renewable energy, make possible new forms of economic coordination that transcend both market and state, creating what political economist Elinor Ostrom called “polycentric-governance.”
The parallel to the Gilded Age is instructive but the stakes are higher. Where 19th century industrialists needed to prevent social revolution, 21st century wealth holders need to prevent civilizational and ecological collapse. Where Carnegie and Rockefeller could build institutions within existing systems to bolster their hegemonic position, today’s philanthropists need to build new systems entirely that fundamentally reorient power relations and value creation. The opportunity is proportionally greater: to be remembered not just as benefactors but as participants in and stewards of humanity’s greatest transition to date.
But the window is closing. Each year of delay means more entrenched crisis, less social cohesion to enable peaceful transition, and fewer options for managed transformation. The choice is between being architects of regenerative prosperity or victims of chaotic collapse. History suggests which outcome wealthy elites should prefer.
Legacy as Regenerative Leadership
If you’ve accumulated significant wealth, you face a defining choice about legacy. Will you be remembered as among the last extractors, your name on buildings in a dying civilization, or among the first regenerators, your family office recognized as central to humanity’s great transformation?
Consider the contrast: traditional philanthropy might put your name on a hospital wing that treats symptoms of systemic failure, chronic disease caused by pesticides and pollutants. Regenerative capital allocation positions your family as founders of the health systems that prevent disease. Traditional investment might generate returns until systems collapse. Regenerative investment builds the systems that generate prosperity indefinitely.
Imagine being remembered as the family that funded the transition from extractive to regenerative economics, that seeded the cooperatives that became the foundation of sustainable prosperity, that built the institutions that enabled humanity to thrive within planetary boundaries.
But this isn’t just about how history remembers you. It’s about what your descendants inherit. Will your grandchildren praise your foresight in building regenerative systems that sustain their prosperity, or curse your blindness in clinging to extraction until it collapsed? Will your family office be studied as prescient pioneers who secured wealth through transformation, or cautionary tales of those who lost everything defending the indefensible?
The families that lead regenerative transformation won’t just preserve wealth, they’ll legitimize it. In a world trending toward resentment of extreme wealth, those who deploy capital for systemic health earn the social license that makes wealth enjoyable rather than embattled. Your children won’t need to hide their inheritance or live in fortified compounds; they’ll be welcomed as contributors to collective prosperity.
Practical Next Steps for Regenerative Wealth
Moving from theory to practice requires concrete steps that align self-interest with systemic health:
First, conduct a systems assessment of your wealth. How much depends on extractive systems approaching breakdown? What percentage could be redeployed without affecting your family’s security? Most wealthy families discover they could redirect a significant proportion of their assets toward regenerative systems while maintaining exceptional lifestyles and security. This isn’t sacrifice. It’s diversification into the most important asset class: systemic health.
Second, recognize your role as parallel public investor. In an era of institutional failure, wealthy individuals must fund the public goods that prosperity requires. Calculate what your fair tax contribution would be in a functional system (including unrealized capital gains), then deploy that capital directly toward transformative public infrastructure: renewable energy systems, community land trusts, regenerative agriculture, education innovation. You can think of it as the tax you should be paying to maintain civilization, deployed directly rather than through failing institutions.
Third, build your regenerative literacy. Study successful models like Mondragon, community land trusts, and platform cooperatives, not as philanthropic side projects but as investment vehicles for systemic stability. Learn from indigenous economies that maintained prosperity for millennia without depleting their foundations. Understand these as sophisticated technologies for sustainable wealth, not primitive alternatives. Read Marx not as an enemy but as a diagnostician. His analysis of capitalism’s contradictions can help you understand why transformation is necessary for your own security.
Fourth, connect with aligned wealth holders. Networks like Frequency, The Capital Institute, Resource Generation, Solidaire, and Transform Finance bring together families recognizing that isolated wealth is vulnerable wealth. These aren’t support groups for guilty rich people. They’re strategic alliances of sophisticated investors recognizing systemic health as the ultimate return. Collective action by aligned wealth holders can shift entire systems.
Fifth, begin with strategic experiments. Invest in a single worker cooperative in your local community. Support a community land trust that prevents both homelessness and property bubbles. Fund organizing that builds civic engagement rather than political division. Learn from each intervention and share what you learn publicly.
Sixth, integrate regenerative and conventional strategies. This isn’t about abandoning traditional investments but complementing them with systemic health investments that preserve their value. A portfolio might be 60% conventional assets, 30% regenerative investments, and 10% transformative philanthropy, all working synergistically to create the conditions for sustained prosperity.
Finally, engage your family office or advisors. The financial professionals managing wealthy families’ assets are beginning to recognize systemic risk to all conventional strategies. Progressive family offices are developing regenerative investment theses, recognizing that preserving wealth across generations requires preserving the systems that make wealth meaningful.
VIII. Conclusion: Composting as Creation
We’ve journeyed through urgency and opportunity, risk and return, arriving at a fundamental recognition: the choice before us isn’t whether to change but how, whether transformation will be conscious and beneficial or chaotic and destructive.
The Death-to-Life Cycle
Composting isn’t about destruction — it’s about transformation that creates more value than existed before. When organic matter composts, it doesn’t disappear; its energy and nutrients transform into forms that support abundant new life. The fallen tree becomes soil that nourishes the entire forest, creating more biomass and biodiversity than the tree alone ever could.
Our economic system is decomposing. The extractive economy is exhausting its resource bases, financial assets are increasingly disconnected from real value, social cohesion is fragmenting, and political systems are failing. Traditional economic theory has no solution because it cannot conceive of transformation, only optimization of existing structures.
But decomposition creates fertility for the new. The wealth accumulated through extraction can become the seed capital for regeneration. The skills developed navigating the old system can be reshaped into the relational skills required to create the new. The networks created for accumulation can be repurposed for transformation. The very concentration of wealth that threatens collapse also enables rapid reallocation toward regeneration.
This is the profound opportunity of our historical moment, not despite the crisis but because of it. We can consciously participate in composting the old system while nurturing the new, becoming transition architects rather than collapse victims. Just as capitalism emerged from feudalism not through simple destruction but through transformation of existing capabilities and resources, so too can regenerative economics emerge from capitalism by redirecting its accumulated productive forces toward life-sustaining rather than life-destroying ends.
The Choice Before Us
The choice is stark but clear: continue extracting until systems collapse, taking your wealth with them, or become regenerative capital allocators who build the foundations for sustained prosperity.
Continuing extraction leads predictably to comprehensive collapse. Not dramatic Hollywood collapse but the slow dissolution of everything that makes wealth meaningful: trust, beauty, community, innovation, culture, and ultimately the rule of law that property rights depend upon. It leads to a world where even the wealthy live diminished lives in gilded prisons, where children inherit trauma and degradation, where family fortunes are consumed defending against chaos rather than creating value.
Becoming regenerative capital allocators offers a path that serves both self-interest and collective wellbeing. It means recognizing that the era of extraction is ending whether we like it or not, and choosing to lead transformation rather than resist it. It means using accumulated resources to build systems that create wealth through regeneration rather than depletion, that measure success through systemic health rather than isolated accumulation, that enable your descendants to thrive rather than merely survive.
Call to Action
If you’ve read this far and you hold significant wealth, you face a decision that will define your family’s trajectory for generations.
You can close this essay and continue as before, hoping that somehow your wealth will protect you from systemic collapse, that private solutions will substitute for public breakdown, that your family can thrive while society fails. History suggests this is the path to losing everything. Ask the French aristocrats, the Russian nobles, or any of the countless elites who believed their positions secure until the moment they weren’t.
Or you can recognize this as your moment to matter, not just to society but to your own family’s future. Start by committing a significant percentage of your wealth to regenerative transformation. This isn’t charity that diminishes your estate. It’s investment in systemic health that makes all wealth valuable.
Begin seeing yourself differently, not as someone giving back but as someone building forward. Your networks can mobilize capital at the scale required. Your influence can shift narratives from extraction to regeneration. Your legacy can be founding the systems that sustain prosperity for centuries rather than defending the ones destroying it.
Connect with others on this journey, not for comfort but for leverage. When wealthy families align around regenerative transformation, they create unstoppable momentum. When family offices recognize systemic health as the ultimate return, capital markets shift. When philanthropists fund transformation rather than amelioration, new systems emerge.
Most importantly, act with the urgency this moment demands. Every year of delay means a more entrenched crisis, fewer options for peaceful transition, and greater risk to your family’s future. The choice between composting capital and losing it forever is becoming starker with each passing season.
The seeds of new systems are sprouting everywhere, but they need nutrients to grow. Your accumulated capital can be that fertility, composted wealth generating abundant life and sustained prosperity. The transformation from extraction to regeneration, from hoarding to circulation, from death to life.
The choice is yours, but it affects everyone. We all rise or fall together. The wealthy cannot escape to Mars or New Zealand or bunkers. These are fantasies that distract from the real work of building regenerative systems here and now. Your thriving depends on collective thriving. Your security requires collective security. Your meaning emerges through collective meaning. Your legacy lives through collective prosperity.
The old world is ending. This is a fact. A new world is waiting to be born. This is our opportunity. Your capital can catalyze transformation, seeding systems that serve life rather than destroying it. This is the ultimate return on investment, not just numbers in accounts but a world where wealth means something, where your descendants can live freely rather than fearfully, where your legacy is transformation rather than extraction.
This is what it means to compost capital: to transform the accumulated surplus of a dying system into the foundation for living systems that sustain prosperity indefinitely. To lead the great turning from extraction to regeneration. To leave a legacy not just of extracted wealth but of relational wisdom, the wisdom to recognize when systems must transform and the courage to lead that transformation.
The resources exist. The models are proven. The movements are building. All that’s needed is the courage to let go of the old and nurture the new. To trust that in composting extractive wealth, we create regenerative prosperity. To believe that another world is not only possible but emerging, and that our choices now determine whether it flourishes or stillbirths.
Compost capital or die isn’t a threat. It’s an invitation to secure your family’s future through systemic health. It’s recognition that wealth without foundations is an illusion, that prosperity without legitimacy is fragile, that legacy without transformation is forgotten.
This is our work. This is our moment. This is our choice.
Compost capital and live, truly live, in a world transformed, where your wealth has meaning, your children have futures, and your legacy has honor.
For those ready to begin this journey, transformation awaits. The path from extraction to regeneration has been mapped by leaders who’ve proven that systemic health generates superior returns, not just financially but in every dimension that makes life worth living.
Connect with networks like Eyes Wide Open Collective to help you begin the journey as a steward of the regenerative wealth transition.
Consider composting your capital with OpenCivics — a network of systems innovators creating regenerative impact from the ground up.
Learn from indigenous economic philosophies that maintained abundance for millennia — not as primitive alternatives but as sophisticated technologies for regenerative wealth.
But most importantly, begin. Take one concrete step toward composting your capital. Make one investment in regenerative systems. Support one transformative movement. Start one conversation with other wealth holders about systemic health as the ultimate return.
Compost capital and thrive.