We recognize that many groups are actively working to develop alternative indicators for sustainability. We embark on this study to see if calibrating biocapacity may offer the kind of impact valuation for agriculture which does not exist in the market economy and its system of metrics.

Essentially, Biocapacity is the dynamic balance point between the number of organisms within a given area and the amount of resources that are needed to support them within this area. Thus, agricultural biocapacity indicates the degree to which the population of a bioregion is greater or lesser than the food that is available from the bioregion to feed it.

By combining scientific reason with place-based knowledge, culture and history, biocapacity provides a baseline for sustainability by showing how different interventions will effect different outcomes. This allows communities to develop evidence-based guidelines for organizing their own resource sufficiency while regenerating the ecology of their life-places.

Excerpts

On Bioregionalism in the Bay Area

Gradually, this eclectic group of naturalists began to call their field “bioregionalism” (bio is the Greek word for life; regere is the Latin word for a place to be managed). So, bioregionalism is essentially the idea of lifeplace — a way of extending the life of a community to the life of the biosphere through the ecological renewal of a particular area. The new bioregionalists wanted to combine local knowledge, beliefs and values with the unique characteristics of the climate and topography, the soils and plants, and the animals and habitats where they lived.

These ideas spread across the United States, but San Francisco was the epicenter for this people’s movement. They called on citizens to stop running away from the problems of industrial economy to better understand the land around them, the limits to its resources, and how this could help meet the needs of the diverse species who live there, including homo sapiens. Their vision was the development of new social and cultural relationships within the context of geographical communities.

Bioregionalism was a unique perspective for addressing major environmental challenges on a human scale. It acknowledged that solving large ecological problems by ‘thinking globally’ is much too disempowering for the average person. Although ‘acting locally’ is clearly the practical first step, it operates on too small a scale to impact environmental governance. The activities of localization simply don’t generate enough political power within small communities to stop centralized governments and markets from exploiting these decentralized life-places for their own ends.

The bioregionalists explained why there are so few decision-making organizations or networks at regional levels, where harmful ecological problems could be most effectively addressed. They showed how history and economics had prompted leaders to draw artificial local, state and national borders that seldom conformed to the ecological zones which overlap with them. Hence, natural boundaries have little correlation with our present political, economic and social boundaries and their institutions. To be sure, many ecological problems — involving personal and collective choices and action, as well as their cumulative effects on human lives — cannot be resolved within existing political jurisdictions. Ultimately, we become inhabitants separated from our own habitats.

How is cooperation over resources even possible if our geographical borders cannot be redrawn to protect and manage the environment? An engaged movement for a more ecological society cannot succeed without some kind of graphic image of the bioregional boundaries which are hidden from view. Such a map would focus on a region’s hydrology, geology and physiography, but also reflect its culture, history, present land-use patterns and climate.

From the Conclusion

Based on our research, most of the region will exceed its biocapacity to produce food for its growing population within two or three decades.

Industrial pollution, climate change, sea level rise, invasive species, water diversions and loss of wetlands are threatening enormous swaths of human habitat. Before 2050, the prodigious agricultural production of the San Francisco Bay Watershed will fail to produce sufficient quantities of agriculture for its population due to uncertain rainfall, flooded coasts and inlets, depletion of aquifers, topsoil loss, an export-led business model and a lack of cooperative dialogue among its political subdivisions.

Our study indicates that locally-produced calories have more monetary and ecological value when consumed in the same life-places where they are produced. Yet as long as the San Francisco/Oakland/Hayward MSA continues to import agriculture from elsewhere, the community will be impacted by rising food prices. Importing food into the dense population of the Bay Area will be possible until its food suppliers — foreign, domestic and regional — face their own supply limits for finite energy and raw materials and the breakdown of their own their fragile infrastructures.

When the Bay Area becomes too severe a strain on the bioregion itself, the reversal will be rapid. The external dependency on food will collapse and the capacity of the entire San Francisco Bay Watershed to sustain itself will be overtaken by extreme costs in food, water, energy and housing.

Why do we exploit our ecosystems instead of restoring them as life-places for habitation? This was the basic question raised in 1968. Now, ironically, San Francisco’s ‘back to the land’ diaspora could turn into a mass evacuation from the region as its resources continue to decline and its self-sufficiency falters. How this existential crisis is addressed in the San Francisco Bay Watershed — and in bioregions everywhere — will determine the ecological future of all life-places and our sustainability as a species. The question then will be, not how sustainable but how inhabitable is my own bioregion?

Still, if there’s any area that can break down the barriers between people and their land-place, integrating the human community with the ecological community, it’s the Bay Area — the spot where modern bioregionalism began and remains a vital part of the cultural memory. Community members are the very organisms that depend on environmental resources for support.

Now we must learn how to restore this dynamic balance. The issue is not if we have the will to do this, but how soon can it be done?

For more information, please contact James Quilligan or Patti Ellis at economicdemocracyadvocates.org

Photo by RhyoR

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Consider how odd this is: the demand for goods is used as a proxy for the relative accessibility of non-renewable resources — yet the increasing scarcity of fossil fuels isn’t showing up in the price we pay at the gas pump. Same with water and rare minerals, which are not valued according to their declining availability. Nor does eco-value appear on the spreadsheets of most stock traders, insurance companies or other businesses.

What’s causing such rampant misreporting and misallocation? I’ve come to see this now as more a problem of accountability than accounting. Frankly, the challenge is to admit our mistakes and reconceptualize the modern system of economic valuation, starting with the theory that it’s based on a fundamental law of equilibrium. Take, for example, Adam Smith’s idea that the efforts of individuals in pursuing their own interests naturally benefit society, or the notion that an organic circular flow exists between market prices and people’s incomes. Are these assumptions valid? And what do we mean by economic balance? Is it a principle of physics or biology?

Let’s begin by asking, is supply and demand truly able to manage the thresholds of resources which an environment can sustain, or to ensure that these resources are allocated sufficiently for the population living in that environment?

In both classical and Keynesian economics, the ratio between the supply of a quantity of a good or service and the demand for it is determined by the price of this quantity. What is tallied on the supply-side of this equation are production costs, which include labor, capital, expectations of future prices and suppliers, and the technology that’s used in production. The relative availability of materials and energy for production is also listed as a supply cost, although seldom in ecological terms. The rate at which people and their organizations may harvest or use a particular resource within its regenerative capacity is not normally registered on the supply side as an ecological yield, but as a financial outlay. Nor are the negative effects of pollution, waste, ill-health or risk typically included in production costs.

Conversely, the demand side of the market economy measures consumer income, tastes and preferences, prices of related goods and services, expectations about future prices and incomes, and the number of potential consumers. Rather than reflect actual human need, demand is a measure of individual consumption at the point of sale. It’s simply the price at which a person is willing to pay for something, signifying how much cash or credit is exchanged in the transaction. But what’s not measured by demand is the individual’s accessibility to breathable air, clean water, nutritious food, adequate shelter, or meaningful security, love, belonging and inclusion. Subjective expressions of need, beauty, volunteer labor, loss of commons or health and safety risks are simply not involved in the transmission of demand through the cash register, barcode scanner or wireless purchase.

A similar structure for market equilibrium is applied in banking and finance. Just as the supply-demand formula in microeconomics is based on a functional connection between producers and consumers, the supply-demand ledger is used in macroeconomics to express a similar type of relationship between lenders and borrowers. Here, the equilibrium between the money supply and the demand for money is adjusted through an interest rate, which represents the price that is charged for money.

Once again, this represents a certain kind of transactional balance within the marketplace, but does not reflect the broader relationship between the ecology and its population. When all that’s expressed in the standard supply-demand equation is the price of a particular commodity or good, or an interest rate which signifies the price of money, neither resource preservation and replenishment rates nor specific measures of the human need for this resource are accounted. Nor does the supply-demand equation convey the underlying costs of social harm or environmental damage that may be incurred.

This disequilibrium in value has also led to deep political biases in how the supply-demand model should be applied in society. On one hand, classical and neo-classical economists say that ‘supply creates its own demand’. They promote strong policies for investment and production through individual initiative and limited government intervention in the economy, while rationalizing endless resource extraction, production, growth and waste. In using supply-demand for their scale of balance, these analysts rarely question why the exponential values in the economy are so disjointed from the biological growth rates which occur in the natural world.

On the other hand, Keynesian economists say that boosting wages and purchasing power generates demand. They promote policies of shared investment and production through intervention by a government in its economy, while ignoring the destructive competition which this creates between available resources and the needs of a population for these resources. Here, Keynesians are little different than classical economists: both schools assume that meeting human needs is dependent on extractive production, expanding population, continuous demand, increasing personal income, rising consumption and the unintended but inevitable byproducts of manufactured pollution and disposable waste.

Neither choice is correct because the basic theory of market equilibrium ignores environmental and social costs, deeply misinterpreting the dynamic link between ecological support systems and the people who depend on them. This vital connection is seen simply as a ‘supply chain’ through which a quantity of something demanded by consumers or borrowers is delivered to them based on the quantity that firms or banks can supply. Neither the classical or Keynesian approaches to supply and demand reflect the constraints to the productive capacity of Earth’s resource base or the maximum size of a population which can be maintained indefinitely within that environment.

Our economic proxies for environmental balance are directly to blame for these fateful miscalculations. As a subsystem of a larger ecosystem, the supply-demand model does little to equalize the natural sources of productive input with the natural sinks of consumed output or waste, leading to massive market failure. Under the illusion of supply-demand equilibrium, human population is now using the basic resources of food, water, energy and minerals faster than Nature can replenish them to meet the needs of its people. To reverse this critical overshoot, we’ll have to transform our epistemology, our ideologies, our institutions and rules, as well as our methods of accounting.

All of this requires a clearer understanding of the interactions between the biosphere and human society. The ecological threshold of available resources and the allocations of those resources to meet the needs of a population are actually opposing forces which continuously counteract one another. This dynamic principle exists between every species and its environment: living organisms react to changes in their ecosystem and make adjustments to survive.

Through this constant interplay between natural and physical forces, instead of supply creating its own demand through prices or demand being dependent on income, the signaling of need by an organism routinely triggers the creation of its own supply. These self-regulating forces work in Nature and within the biology of the human body; they must also work in human societies. Measuring the replenishment of renewable and non-renewable resources will enable a society to sustain their yield relative to the offsetting needs demonstrated by the size and growth of the human population.

These divergent forces must be given an empirical basis in socioeconomic policy beyond the inept framework of supply-demand. Counterbalancing the needs of a population with its resource support systems requires a major readjustment. Here’s how this might work. What’s now included on the supply side as extraction, production and waste is redefined as the self-organization of resources within the ecological limits of the planet for their regeneration. And what’s now reported on the demand side as a measure of income is redefined as the  of people in meeting their daily requirements through the common use of these resources.

When supply becomes an ecological value and demand becomes the value of human need, ‘build it and they will come’ is transformed into ‘demonstrate the need and it is met’. Now, instead of a crude approximation for economic equilibrium, we have an actual measure for the cooperative activities of people managing their resources to meet their needs — a measure based on the level of regenerative output which their ecology can optimally ‘carry’ or sustain.

The term for this dynamic equilibrium between people and their environment, which points the way out of our supply-demand matrix, is biocapacity. Biocapacity expresses the intrinsic value of sustainability within an ecosystem. It is based on the thresholds of resources which can be sustained in an environment as measured against the allocations of resources sufficient to meet the needs of its population. Through this ecosystem value, biocapacity offers direct indicators and guidelines to help us organize our own sufficiency through the steadily fluctuating, self-adjusting metabolism of society as a living system.

Note: James Quilligan presented these comments at the Global Thresholds and Allocations Council (GTAC) Kickoff Meeting at the Royal Dutch Federation of Accountants in Amsterdam, convened by Reporting 3.0 on 31 January 2018, in a session on Allocation Approaches with fellow speaker Mark McElroy of the Center for Sustainable Organizations, moderated by Bill Baue of Reporting 3.0. The 35+ global experts gathered at the meeting sat in rapt attention while James spoke, and broke into spontaneous applause when he finished. Please see the GTAC Landing Page on the Reporting 3.0 website for links to the GTAC Concept Note, Meeting Presentation Deck, and Meeting Program (with abstracts by all speakers, including GRI Co-Founder Allen White, Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Doughnut Economic author Kate Raworth, Future Fit Foundation CEO Geoff Kendall, International Integrated Reporting Council Managing Director Neil Stevenson, and many others.)

This article was first published in Sustainable Brands.

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Read their whitepaper draft. Additionally, here is Regen.network’s website and the following text, written by Gregory Landua is reposted from their Medium account:

Implicate Intersections: The Global Weirding

The Emerging Crisis of Trust

Gregory Landua: Centralized failures of management of resources resulting in cascading ecosystem failures, increases in surveillance of citizens by unaccountable agencies as well as corporate actors, behavior and social manipulationthrough media and social media, and engineered mistrust intersect to form a general crisis of trust. Even trust in neighbors is undermined as polarized views and media is used to divide and conquer. This all forms into the necessity of revisiting trust as a fundamental layer for social interactions and the basis of our social contract. Regen.network is built to grow the capacity to focus on common interests and empower all stakeholders to hold those resources in trust as stewards of both outcomes and verification of those outcomes, providing a remedy to the generalized malaise of rightful distrust of centralized, opaque and degenerative governmental, economic and social structures.

Machine Learning

The rise of AI, big data and machine learning is already having huge impacts on society. Many of the impacts are visible in the earlier mentioned crisis of trust and incomplete machine learning algorithms are used to manipulate behavior of citizens as consumers. The larger debate about the safety of AI ranges from Elon Musk’s alarmist stance and public statements that AI should be governed and humans augmented, to enthusiasts who are blindly investing billions of dollars and significant human resources to feed the growth of “artificial” intelligence. Whether or not machine intelligence is truly artificial is not the focus on this conversation, however it warrants further discussion. AI is an important emerging disruption to our reality and, as such, warrants significant design consideration in any Information Technology project. Regen.network aims to grow the capacity of machine learning and attend deeply to the subtle nuances and complexities of ecological dynamics, health and regeneration, and to create a space for a deep human-machine partnership with the biosphere. This dynamic partnership is essential for all three elements of the whole to thrive.

Ecosystem Collapse

The rapid acidification of oceans, increasing rates of soil loss, accelerating loss of biodiversity, warming climate, environmental toxicity, and global scale degeneration of living systems is all emerging faster on a wider scale than humans have had the capacity to deal with. Humans are notoriously bad with exponential foresight and decision making. Apparently calculus is not our strength, and most of us, especially in governance decisions, have very short aims focused into the sharp point of survival instincts gone awry in the form of greed, optimization of financial liquidity at the expense of eco-social health. This collapse is passing our ability to attend to and respond to with centralized and glacial scientific structures. The structure of academic peer review is broken and mostly used to maintain positions of status instead of increase the capacity of the learning community to understand complex systems. The perverse economic and bureaucratic incentives of centralized power must be removed as obstacles and the ability of business, community, and individual initiative must be unleashed to find creative solutions to regenerate ecosystems around the world. Regen.network will start with terrestrial agriculture and expand to other lands, mariculture and ocean management as quickly as the creative genius of communities around the world can be unleashed to solve for peer-to-peer monitoring and verification and baseline calibration solutions for ecosystems.

Money Eats the World

Whether the destructive power of hyper liquidity in financial markets ripping away the foundation of living capital and turning it into financial instruments, or the massive energy weight of running proof of work consensus to avoid coercive centralized currency issuance, it is plain to see that money is literally eating the world. While we believe that the transparent costs of a proof of work cryptocurrency is far preferable to trust we all have in the continue ability of the US military to control the worlds metro-resources that makes the dollar the global currency, Bitcoin’s designed decentralized inefficiency is still world eating. It is less bad, but not good enough, and needless to say it is certainly not regenerative. The imperative to generate a decentralized currency system based on regenerative utility, that is a real use that increases the health of ecosystem through use is essential to a healthy functioning economy, and the maturity of the cryptocurrency and blockchain community which threatens to teeter into a war between crypto kitties and hyper liquid financialization instead of fulfilling the philosophical promised and potential of what the distributed ledger and decentralized economy can bring.

The Distributed Economy

Distributed ledger technology, sharing economy (both real and pseudo-sharing economy), micro transaction networks, token economics, and the new decentralization and distribution of technology and fungibility of decentralized cryptographic network tokens that represent various forms of assets unlock the potential for a new economy optimized for cooperation, evolution of diversified niche economic roles, and massive participation in a non-coercive mutualistic network economy. This emergence is not a minute too soon. Massive experimentation is now underway and many DApps and platforms are being born. Regen.network is designed to be a network and platform that serves to accelerate decentralized innovation to reconnect human economy with living systems and the imperatives for biological and ecological health. This is accomplished by providing the framework for the exchange of verified ecological data as the basic currency for a new regenerative, bioregionally-sourced, global decentralized economy.

Regenerative Agriculture

The growing movement to leverage the potential of soil to sequester carbon including governmental and business initiatives globally, also has deep strategic and ethical imperatives. As noted in the previously published Levels of Regenerative Agriculture white paper (Soloviev, Landua 2016), Regenerative Agriculture goes far beyond simply soil carbon sequestration. Soil Carbon Sequestration represents a regenerative outcome, but all levels of the value stream from soil to the human consumer of a product and back to the soil are part of the regenerative imperative that is now growing into a movement. Individuals and businesses are increasingly motivated to explore how to participate in a co-creative and regenerative economy where human needs are met in style while ecosystem health is increased and the capacity of the system itself and all members of the system to evolve more robust vitality and viability is grown.

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To what degree are we, digital workers, contributing to the welfare of society by helping these information corporations spread their network effects and consolidate ever-larger monopoly information platforms? This is one reason why we have to organize ourselves as cooperative workers in a way that demands, leverages and generates dividends based on our production, distribution and use of the commons.

Another reason is that a social movement is waiting to be developed for creating commons and commoning practices around digital labor. Platform cooperatives are a start, but only when we use them in the development and management of municipalized and bioregionalized communities (through the mutualization of ownership and participation in these commons cooperatives). Digital labor and traditional/industrial labor are not opposing poles, but part of the continuum of evolutionary human labor. Digital labor has to get this right, because it forms our motive power in organizing the commons. This integration represents a complete liberation of technology from the industrial age (and the notion that we are mere information service workers destined for marginal wages), yet also reveals the roots of our mental work in physical work. We can’t think, write, plan, organize, or take social action if we don’t eat and our bodies are not supplying energy for these activities. As digital labor integrates the mental and biophysical, ending the socially determined mind-body split, it will also be breaking through the industrial forms of the division of labor and the modern social control, generating a new social contract for a sustainable economic and social system. This is entirely in the lineage of the traditional/industrial labor of our ancestors, who produced the commons which we have inherited, and from which we have greatly benefited.

A third reason for a digital labor movement is the influx of robotics in production. If AI manages to lower production costs, drive out a large portion of human labor, and destroy jobs and income, is the commons community adequately prepared to either embrace or stand against the social revolution that this will bring? This is where we now need to put our attention by developing a new understanding of labor. Obviously, our labor is both physical and mental, for it is the biology of our bodies that keeps both forms of labor in motion. This is why digital labor is a dead-end path if it is not grounded in, and vitally interconnected with, the biophysical labor that it takes to build thriving ecosystems from the commons of our current social economies. This integration must be taught and practiced if we are to join together for sustainability. That is why I say that digital labor for the building of commons cooperatives is how, why and what we must organize.

Photo by Tim Proctor

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But the fog of this battle seems to reveal only a miasma of viewpoints, which is distracting society to the point of utter confusion. In the US, we see this in the conflict between a fake news vernacular, which is desperately trying to shape itself as the people’s story; and the media ‘mother tongue’, which is desperately trying to represent the interests of a corporate elite. Meanwhile, the actual vernacular of the workers’ common tongue has been lost — besmirched and degraded by low wages and the even lower significance accorded to industrial labor and jobs.

This loss of identity becomes very clear in America’s present power struggle between the poor white nationalists and the rich white globalists, in which all people of color are collateral victims. In the Hegelian solution to this problem, commoners are now rediscovering their roots in agroeconomy, as they volunteer to relocalize and thus revitalize their communities. They are also using digital technology to support these efforts. But in reaching back to their pre-industrial roots in ecology, while using the digital technology created and controlled by corporate monopolies, our commoners have not developed a vision or explanation as to why they are still so disjointed from their vernacular. They have not yet recognized nor claimed their identity as digital workers. They have yet to develop a view of themselves as local people who are building the cooperative sustainability of their commons for present and future generations.

When the smoke of battle lifts, and they fully recognize themselves as embodying the vital force of a new, digitally-supported labor movement dedicated to a sustainable society — seeing themselves as workers wresting their lives and livelihoods from the local ecology through new forms production and provisioning, supported by digital cooperatives — the new vernacular of the commons will appear, and people will recognize, deep down, in the very the cells of their bodies, that they knew this all along. ¡Cómo no! They will reconnect with their ancestors’ dreams for the common good, celebrate the joys of collaborating with their neighbors and build a new social contract of cooperative sustainability for their descendants. The irony of the ‘commons’ is that capitalism has made the commons so invisible and unrecognizable that it has become uncommon — uncommon not as in something wonderfully unique, but rather low-caste and useless. Here, I think, is the key to the vernacular epistemology of the commons: to turn what is uncommonly vital — the evolutionary power of labor in the sustenance of life, knowledge and culture — back into what is common.

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In other words, Ostrom and the commons movement have yet to define the dynamic equilibrium which they seek as the balance between two opposing forces – population and resources – which continually counteract each other. Instead, the commons movement is more focused on counteracting the Market and the State than on measuring the replenishment of renewable and non-renewable resources and managing them to sustain their yield. In short, the commons movement does not seem to be producing alternative indicators for the production and provisioning which can be used to guide policy.

The book, Secular Cycles, made me realize that the commons, as Ostrom viewed it and as others are now envisioning it, is too informal and small-scale to work in a way that establishes empirical targets that will bring down exponential growth to arithmetic growth levels; and thus organizing society according to the dynamic equilibrium between population and the availability of food, water and energy. Instead, what we get in the commons movement is a general opposition to quantitative analysis because it reminds people too much of the metrics of unbridled capitalism.

My point is that if we don’t know how to develop evidence-based policy for a soft landing toward a reasonable level of subsistence — and I’ve seen very little of this in the commons movement — then I don’t know how we expect to create a long-term system for meeting human needs through sustainable yields. I would hope that the commons movement begins to create the basis for a viable new society by actually focusing on the optimum rate at which a resource can be harvested or used without damaging its ability to replenish itself. That would be something.

Let me put this in more structural terms. First, the carrying capacity rate for renewable resources follows a carefully guided policy of maintenance and sustenance to ensure that resources are replenished sustainably in meeting the needs of people in the present. This requires that social policies are made more equitable to ensure that everyone’s needs are met. Meanwhile, the needs of people in the future are in no jeopardy, so long as renewable resources continue to be replenished and provisioned within their carrying capacity. Hence, the carrying capacity rate of renewables is geared toward market coefficients for provisioning resources, goods and services for people at the current time, and will continue to be sustainable far into the future. This carrying capacity rate, based on renewable resources, in no way precludes (in fact, should be accompanied with) the creation of taxes toward a universal basic income and for maintenance of renewable resources.

Second, the carrying capacity rates of non-renewable resources are much more challenging and must be treated very differently. Society must decide scientifically how much non-renewable resources to use in the present and how much to save for the future. By guaranteeing that valuable resources will be ‘left in the ground’ or put away securely into a tamperproof lockbox, as it were, this formula has a benefit which, in one way, is similar to how gold used to function as a guarantee of reserve asset values and as a disciplining measure for currency exchange rates. Since a certain percentage of non-renewables are held in strict reserve for future generations, adherence to this process creates a value which is entirely *independent of the market* and is based on a relative scarcity index of non-renewable resources. This fraction (how much non-renewables to use for people now / how much non-renewables to set aside for people in the future) provides for a fixed and stable monetary rate that is tailor-made for the valuation of currency in the present.

In a society which is facing net energy loss and steep declines in non-renewable resources, this would be an extremely stable, strong, treasured, desired, sacrosanct and entirely non-marketized value. Instead of looking at productivity indices, commodity market rates, price inflation or unemployment indicators, monetary economists really ought to be turning their attention to the long-term carrying capacity of the planet’s non-renewables and their sustainability rates. I am in no way suggesting that the world should return to a gold standard; but to generate a system in which currency values are fixed to a meaningful measure of non-renewable resources, similar in some ways to the way that gold used to function. If this is done, the correlation of ecological sustainability with monetary sustainability will become a primary way of steering the world’s economy on a middle path between exponential growth and arithmetic growth, ensuring the sustenance and safely of society during a period of economic decline (originally posted to Facebook, August 2017).

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Earth is exceeding its ability to replenish its own resources. Each year, human beings consume our natural stocks at about 160% of their sustainable yield. Obviously, we cannot continue to use resources faster than the planet can replenish them without serious ecological and socioeconomic consequences.

Economic Democracy Advocates recognizes that the next economy will have to balance the needs of Earth’s expanding population with the shrinking level of resources which are available to everyone. This dynamic equilibrium is called carrying capacity. It is a middle path between the faster, geometric growth rates of human population, individual consumption and economic production, and the slower, arithmetic replenishment rates of water, food and fossil fuels.

Why the ‘Market Myth’ is Ending in Ecological and Social Chaos

Historical records, from the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia to early civilizations in the North and South Americas, provide numerous examples of carrying capacity practiced successfully by people in local settings over long periods. Yet, as towns developed and began to control the raw materials and labor of their countrysides, profitable strategies for resource extraction, production and trade gradually displaced the agrarian customs of living sustainably within the cycles of nature.

During the past five centuries, these same methods for social control — enclosing the commons, devising unequal trade and enforcing those restrictions through the armed might of governments — were scaled up to the global level. Following the earlier pattern, imperial centers of capital controlled the resource-  and labor-rich fringes of their rural empires through iron-handed colonialism.

The latest chapter in this saga — of enterprising groups claiming exclusive property rights over those who live and work amid nature’s capital — is harder to see, but still deeply inequitable. Everywhere now in the world, decentralized communities struggle to reclaim the social ownership and natural wealth of their commons from centralized corporations and their shareholders, who produce and trade these same commodities virtually unnoticed across vast distances.

There are no easy or familiar solutions for these non-regenerative, structural imbalances. Except for small groups of indigenous peoples, farmers and land planners from whom we still can learn, carrying capacity has never been a core part of our conventional economic system. Somehow, civilization neglected to measure the differences between the needs of an increasing population and the diminishing resources available for each person. Somewhere along the line, we forgot how to inventory and quantify our commons and plan for the long-term future.

We Are What We Measure

This is why EDA employs the metrics of carrying capacity to prevent renewable and non-renewable resources from being consumed beyond their maximum sustainable yield. The goal is for renewable resources to be harvested or used at the same rate at which they replenish themselves, and for non-renewable resources to be extracted and consumed by the present generation at a significantly slower rate to preserve these commons for future generations.

Many people today are reconsidering the self-sufficiency and sustainability of their own neighborhoods. There’s renewed interest in the re-localization of resources and avid curiosity about the democratic, cooperative management of local and regional commons. Particularly as climate change creates the possibility of extreme storms, wildfires, floods, rising sea levels, drought, crop failures and other economic uncertainties, people want to know how to make the living systems on which they depend more resilient in the face of such risks.

‘Supply and Demand’ is Not an Organic Cycle

Yet, unlike any previous era in history, when new ideas for resource management might be tested over long centuries or even millennia, humanity no longer has the luxury of time. What we know now — by comparing present water, food and energy yields with their availability for the world’s population — is stunning.

The next three or four generations represent our last chance to safeguard the Earth’s essential hydrological, nitrogen and carbon cycles from the destructive business cycles of production, trade and consumption. By the end of this century, it will be nearly impossible for the human race to transform this failed system of resource extraction and predatory exchange, and embark on an ecological path which is not plagued by economic scarcity and social unrest.

Need Measured is Need Met

This is why EDA is dedicated to both community-building and empirical research in the protection of declining resources. We’re measuring the sustainable yields of American counties and bioregions as a way to define, apportion and distribute what every person needs, and ensure that the commons are healthy and accessible for future generations.

At the same time, EDA is introducing this evidence-based framework to a broad constituency across the United States through research, education, training, advocacy and legislation. We want to see carrying capacity — the maximum number of people which can be supported by the resources available within an environment — become a practical and enduring foundation for social policy.

Please join Economic Democracy Advocates and assist us in this important work. We urge you to learn about the opportunities available and to engage according to your own level of interest. Contact the EDA Carrying Capacity Team:

Patti Ellis – [email protected]

James Quilligan – [email protected]

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