Wellbeing economics and collapse resilience
Gaya advocates for a wellbeing economy, i.e., changing the current economic goal from growth to human and ecological wellbeing, Our economy is a social construct, wholly embedded in society, and society in turn is wholly embedded in nature.
With her research on The Limits to Growth, a 1972 bestseller that forecasted collapse setting in around now if humanity continued business as usual, Gaya showed how global society is essentially still on this course. However, Gaya has always emphasized that changing the economic goal is not a capitulation to grim necessity. Our obsession with growth is clearly environmentally destructive, but what's sometimes less understood is that a growth-based economy is also socially degenerative: it drives inequality, fraying social cohesion and eroding democracy.
In a wellbeing economy, people's needs are met by design, not indirectly - fingers crossed- through growth. That is a society in which we work fewer hours, in sectors that focus on care and nature-regenerative work, while the most polluting sectors like fossil fuels have been phased out. A society with lower income and wealth inequality than today, high-quality public transport and housing, affordable and nutritious food grown locally in a way that restores the soil, and powered by renewable energy. As Gaya often points out, we'd want to make this economic transformation even if we weren't facing ecosystem breakdown. Because we'd feel more fulfilled, though a sense of connection to others, nature, and purpose.
Earlier in her career, Gaya argued that humanity had a now-or-never moment in history to deliberately change its current trajectory. Her message focused on the Western countries currently living above their fair share of Earth's carrying capacity, who must bring down their ecological footprint.
These days Gaya has shifted her focus to collapse resilience. Collapse does not mean there's nothing left to do but cower and await a certain end. It means that overall, the trend of provisioning capacities of markets and governments will be declining over the next decade and beyond. Business and markets and governments still have major roles to play, of course, and Gaya advises these on polycrisis resilience.
She also works on building a third complementary force of rooted in communities and place. Such community-led, place-based provisioning systems like regenerative agriculture or community solar projects are not meant to compete with the old system, but are expected to have to grow as a complementary power, to make collapse as congenial as possible.
Bioregionalism is one movement wherein these provisioning systems are being built. Bioregion means “life place”, and bioregional communities organize within distinct landscapes and ecological regions, e.g., watersheds, forests, or mountain ranges. This facilitates human activity that is tailored to the local ecosystem. Bioregional projects are practically always so-called “productive” economic activities like in food, energy, buildings, education and health services. The projects are operationalized through participatory decision-making, leading to benefits being relatively evenly distributed and generated wealth staying in the community.
Landscape groups, ecovillages, ecoregion communities, and bioregion movements build up to the global level like fractals: unique while part of a larger whole. Bioregionalism thus offers a vision for those who feel part of a global village. Gaya works as the financing person for the Cascadia bioregional movement, identifying structures that help flow funding to productive projects and systems building.