Work On Climate and the Regenerative Economy: Introduction and Transition Pathways

Note from Eugene Kirpichov: This post is a combination of some thoughts I have published before and some new ones.

Our two original beliefs

Work On Climate’s original thesis — a community to help professionals find climate jobs — was grounded in two beliefs:

1. Professionals in each industry have what it takes to make it climate-positive: vehicle manufacturers are best equipped to build and sell EVs, food producers are best equipped to replace carbon-intensive meat with alternative proteins, finance institutions are best equipped to create the right financing vehicles for all of this, etc.
2. Sufficient transformation can happen within the current economic system: we just need to create “green” approaches that are more profitable than the “dirty” ones. It seemed like a good idea in 2020, when climate tech comprised 25% of all VC investment, and an even better idea in 2022 when the IRA was passed.

The first belief survived the test of time, the second one didn’t.

The polycrisis: Why change our economic system?

For me, it started with Daniel Schmachtenberger’s podcast episode about the polycrisis, and a year ago I wrote:

I have (yet) no idea how to get this done, and it’s not what Work On Climate is (currently) doing, and I’m not sure whether this is something Work On Climate should be doing.

That podcast kicked off a cycle of reflection for me, resulting in a few realizations:

• The cheerful adage of “sustainability is good for business” is based on collective incentives: “if everyone was sustainable, it would be good for everyone’s business” — true enough! But business actors work from individual incentives. Investing $1B into reducing your company’s emissions doesn’t give you $1B of protection of your assets against climate risk. The climate crisis is not really a crisis of profit-seekers failing to find the biggest profits.
• The climate crisis is not the only existential crisis humanity is facing: biodiversity loss, breakdown of democracy, AI risks etc. each can put an end to civilization as we know it, and none are even remotely on the path to being “solved”.
• The “good news” is that these crises share a root cause: Our economic system lacks capabilities to manage its own health or that of the natural/social systems it relies on.

The bad news is that this is a very fundamental capability, and we cannot compensate for it by inventing profitable green technologies, just like we can’t overcome gravity by throwing a rabbit into the air. To overcome gravity long-term, the rabbit needs to grow wings.

Our economic system doesn’t have wings. If we forget about that, we will keep playing whack-a-mole with the symptoms of each crisis.

Regenerative economy: What is it, and can it be done?

When I came across the concept of regenerative economics in John Fullerton’s original paper (now greatly expanded in his book), it was a profoundly shocking, almost spiritual experience for me. All I could think about was “how can we put this to practice?”

So, what is a regenerative economy? I like describing it in one of three ways:

1. It is an economy that successfully solves “tragedies of the commons” — and thus aligns individual and collective incentives. This framing tends to best resonate with people in the practical “problem-solution” mindset.
2. It is an economy where all activity strengthens the health of natural and social systems it depends on. This framing resonates with people in a more creative, visionary headspace.
3. It is a way of seeing the economy as a complex living system, albeit not a very healthy one today. When we think this way, we can learn from living systems that do a better job at maintaining their own long-term health and the health of systems they rely on. This framing gives us a hint at the “how?”.

Some people say: this is too “out there”, too good to be true, humans are selfish creatures, nothing can be done! But it has been done before — and if there’s anything the AI revolution (as harmful as its effects have been) has taught us, it’s that previously unimaginable capabilities can develop quickly.

Many human societies successfully managed their key systems without suffering from “tragedies of the commons” — in fact, Elinor Ostrom got a Nobel Prize in economics for documenting how they did it. Many human societies were “keystone species” where they lived — building massive metropolis-sized food and aquaculture systems that strengthened resilience and biodiversity.

We have simply evolved an economic system that learned to do many other really cool things, but forgot how to keep itself and its foundation healthy.

But can it be done today?

Some people in the environmental and regenerative movements say: “We must go back to our roots, give up our comforts, and live how people lived a thousand years ago: in harmony with nature and place”.

I do not share this vision. I keep coming back to Tom Chi’s talk where he observes that ants of the world consume 10x more food than humans, but play a regenerative role.

If we built regenerative economies even with very modest means, just imagine what kind of incredible regenerative economy we could build with modern technology, the internet, genetic engineering, space travel, AI, and everything else that we’ve discovered!

It’s going to be very different. Different from regenerative economies of the past, and different from the deeply broken economy of today. But I believe that it can be done.

Many elements of a regenerative economy exist today, and we must grow them and develop new ones — until the whole economic system becomes regenerative. The Mondragon Cooperative, Salmon Nation Trust, Beneficial State Bank, BioFi Project, and countless others embody regenerative principles. Check out the Capital Institute’s Field Guide to a Regenerative Economy for more stories.

Philosophies of a regenerative transition

Whenever I meet someone in the regenerative space, I ask them: how do you think we will get there? 

There is no consensus on “the right path”, and I haven’t met anybody who can say with a straight face that even their own idea is without serious gaps. We are in the early days of charting the path. But a few overlapping themes are emerging.

Cultural transformation. Many people believe that a profound, mass-scale cultural and personal transformation needs to happen. The question is usually “what will cause this transformation to happen at mass scale?”, but many work to create this transformation at an individual level. The Capital Institute, Beyond Duality, RegenIntel, and others all offer education with varying degrees of support for personal transformation. Vanessa Andreotti digs deeper into this area than anyone else I know, through her mind-blowing books “Hospicing Modernity” and “Outgrowing Modernity”.

Financial transformation. Many people believe that finance — the circulatory system of the economy as a living organism! — is primary, and they work to develop innovative financial structures. People and initiatives working in this direction include the BioFi Project, Graham Boyd, Alex Alegria-Seif (Ithaka Holding), David Cooper (TIFS); adjacent are efforts like TransCap Initiative, TWIST, FEST, and Pando Funding.

Policy transformation. Most people acknowledge that policy has to play a role — though its role is very different than in today’s economy: rather than the traditional spectrum of “Neoliberal free-for-all vs. communist top-down planning”, policy is seen as a way to create an environment in which the economy can self-regulate healthily. Wellbeing Economy Alliance, Sustainable Economies Law Center, Climate Justice Alliance, California Doughnut Economics Coalition all have efforts focused on certain parts of a regenerative economic system, but I don’t think that any systematic efforts to produce and implement a compelling policy roadmap have emerged yet (though John Fullerton’s book ends with his take on such a roadmap).

Structural rewiring. Many people believe that the fabric of our economy (the way it is wired together, and the types of structures, goals, and paradigms that hold it together) needs to be different. Follow Indy Johar and check out the work of Dark Matter Labs for very deep philosophical explorations of this.

Evolution. Some people draw parallels between the development of our economic system and evolution, observing that certain types of organizations and nations have “won” so far — but only in the same unfortunate sense in which a cancer “wins” by taking over the body. Nate Hagens recently offered a fascinating perspective, rooted in the work of Howard Odum that analyzes the patterns of living systems’ evolution (from forests to economies) from a thermodynamics perspective.

There are further differences in whether or not the transformation can happen incrementally or only through revolutionary change, in the degree to which it can be planned or only emergent, in how much destruction we will be facing along the way, and so on.

I personally am in the latter two camps. I believe in Donella Meadows’ profound thesis that “The defining characteristic of a system is not its individual parts, but the relationships between them”

I believe that we are stuck in an evolutionary “local maximum” of the way our economy is wired, and we need to undertake another evolutionary step to help our economy stop producing cancerous patterns.

In Part 2 we will discuss what this evolutionary step looks like, and the role Work On Climate can play in it.

P.S. Our post “Beyond the EPA Ruling: Building a more beautiful movement” effectively serves as the Part 2 for this post.