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. Our economic "story" should serve society and all non-human life; right now it doesn't.
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 work and ways to restore nature, while the most polluting sectors like fossil fuels have been phased out. A society with much lower income and wealth inequality than today, powered by renewable energy, with high-quality public transport and housing, and in which fresh nutritious food is available to everyone and grown in a way that is regenerating, rather than depleting, the soil. A place where we feel satisfied on a fairly constant basis through the fulfilment that comes with a sense of connection to others, nature, and purpose. As Gaya often points out, we'd want to make this economic transformation anyway, even if we weren't facing ecosystem breakdown, because this place is where we long to be.
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.
By now, global society is already in collapse, and so Gaya has shifted her focus from collapse avoidance 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. The best way forward comes down to co-creation of local provisioning systems, tailored to the specific social and environmental needs and characteristics of a specific community. Such community-led, place-based provisioning systems like regenerative agriculture or community solar projects are not necessarily aimed at replacing current provisioning functions of the old system, but are expected to have to grow as a complementary power, to make collapse as congenial as possible.
Today, Gaya has become an advocate for bioregionalism, as this movement encompasses all the above-mentioned environmental, social, governance aspects. 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, as opposed to speculative ones that bet on market movements rather than solid real economy fundamentals like 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 new vision for those who feel part of a global village, but reject neocolonial extractive globalism with its monoculturalism, and a concrete action to take for each of us worrying about global collapse: find your local bioregionalism group.