From a Global Casino Economy to a Global System of Regenerative Local Living Economies

Yet another false premise of the failed experiment of market fundamentalism is the idea that we humans live in a world of endless open frontiers with limitless resources free for the taking, a world where the aim of all economic activity is piling up ever more financial chips in the Wall Street casino. In fact, we inhabit a living Earth with a wondrous but finite capacity for self-regulation and regeneration, floating in the vastness of space. Apart from this home, no other refuge is to be found.

Earth has nourished us as a species through the years of our adolescence, absorbing the insults and injuries caused by our sometimes reckless behavior. But growth in our numbers combined with the scale of our consumption and the power of our technology has created a burden beyond what she can bear.

We must now act as responsible adults by bringing our population, consumption, and wastes into balance with the capacities of Earth's biosphere, while assuring that needs of all the members of Earth’s community are met. This requires redesigning our economic institutions to function as nested subsystems of Earth's biosphere, which over billions of years has learned to optimize Earth's capacity to support life by self-organizing everywhere for local self-reliance and ecological balance. [See Learning from Healthy Ecosystems]