A Human Economy Based on Nature: A Win-Win Situation

With proper care and respect, Earth can provide a high quality of life for all people in perpetuity. Yet we devastate productive lands and waters for a quick profit, a few temporary jobs, or a one-time resource fix.

Our current expansion of tar sands oil extraction, deep-sea oil drilling, hydraulic fracturing natural gas extraction, and mountaintop-removal coal mining are but examples of this insanity. These highly profitable choices deepen our economic dependence on rapidly diminishing, nonrenewable fossil-energy reserves, disrupt the generative capacity of Earth’s living systems, and accelerate climate disruption.

A global economy dependent on this nonsense is already failing and its ultimate collapse is only a matter of time. For a surprisingly long time, we humans have successfully maintained the illusion that we are outside of, superior to, and not subject to the rules of nature. We do so, however, at a huge cost, and payment is coming due.

To secure the health and happiness of future generations, we must embrace life as our defining value, recognize that competition is but a subtext of life’s deeper narrative of cooperation, and restructure our institutions to conform to life’s favored organizing principle of radically decentralized, localized decision making and self-organization. This work begins with recognizing what nature has learned about the organization of complex living systems over billions of years.

Our Original Instructions

Some indigenous people speak of the “original instructions.” Chief Oren Lyons, of the Onondaga Nation, summarizes the rules in “Listening to Natural Law” in the anthology Original Instructions:


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“Our instructions, and I’m talking about for all human beings, are to get along … with [nature’s] laws, and support them and work with them. We were told a long time ago that if you do that, life is endless. It just continues on and on in great cycles of regeneration. … If you want to tinker with that regeneration, if you want to interrupt it, that’s your choice, but the results that come back can be very severe because … the laws are absolute.”

Modern neuroscience affirms that the human brain evolved to reward cooperation and service. In other words, nature has hard-wired the original instructions into our brain. Extreme individualism, greed, and violence are pathological and a sign of physical, developmental, cultural, and/or institutional system failure. Caring relationships are the foundation of healthy families, communities, and life itself.

We are living out the consequences of our collective human failure to adhere to the original instructions—the organizing principles of healthy living systems readily discernible through observation of nature at work. These are the principles by which we must rethink and reorganize human economies.

So how would nature design an economy? An economy is nothing more than a system for allocating resources to productive activity — presumably in support of life. In fact, nature is an economy, with material and information exchange, saving, investment, production, and consumption — all functions we associate with economic activity. Absent human intervention, as Lyons says, “It just continues on and on in great cycles of regeneration.” .....

A Human Economy Based on Nature

A Human Economy Based on Nature: A Win-Win SituationIf nature were in charge of creating an enduring human economy, she would surely apply the same principles she applies in natural systems. Her goal would be a global system of bioregional living economies that secure a healthy, happy, productive life for every person on the planet in symbiotic balance with the non-human systems on which we humans depend for breathable air, drinkable water, fertile soils, timber, fish, grasslands, and climate stability.

Each bioregional economy would meet its own needs for energy, water, nutrients, and mineral resources through sustained local capture, circular flow, utilization, and repurposing. Decision making would be local and the system would organize from the bottom up. Diversity and redundancy would support local adaptation and resilience.

Nature's Original Idea Was A Better One

It takes humility to recognize that what we’ve called progress isn’t always for the better. Sometimes nature’s original idea was a better one.

This should be our goal and vision. With the biosphere as our systems model, we would design our economic institutions and rules to align with nature’s rules and organizing principles. We would replace GDP as the primary measure of economic performance with a new system of living system indicators that assess economic performance against the outcomes we actually want — healthy, happy people and healthy, resilient natural systems. These indicators might be based on Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index. We would redirect the time, talent, and money we currently devote to growing GDP, material consumption, securities bubbles, and Wall Street bonuses to producing the outcomes we really want.

We would favor local, cooperative ownership and control. Organizing from the bottom up in support of bioregional self-reliance, our economic institutions would support local decision-making in response to local needs and opportunities. Cultural and biological diversity and sharing within and between local communities would support local and global resilience and facilitate life-serving system innovation.

The result would be an economy based on a love of life that honors the original instructions and conforms to the organizing principles of nature, real markets, and true democracy. The challenge is epic in its proportion and long overdue.

We are Earth’s children; she is our mother. We must honor and care for her as she loves and cares for us. Together we can forge an integral partnership grounded in the learning and deep wisdom of her 3.8 billion-year experience in nurturing life’s expanding capacities for intelligent self-organization, creative innovation, and self-reflective consciousness.

This article is excerpted from a longer article
written by David Korten for What Would Nature Do?,
the Winter 2013 issue of YES! Magazine.


Book written by this author:

Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth
by David C. Korten.
  2011 Independent Publisher Book Award silver medalist!

Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth by David C. Korten.This substantially updated and expanded new edition of Agenda for a New Economy is a call for a national Declaration of Independence from Wall Street. What is needed, David Korten argues, is a system that favors life values over financial values, roots power in people and community, and supports local resilience and self-organization within a framework of living markets and democracy. The new edition is a handbook for a nonviolent Main Street revolution – because change, as he explains, will not come from above. It will come from below. He fleshes out his vision of the alternative to the corporate Wall Street economy: a Main Street economy based on locally owned, community-oriented “living enterprises” whose success is measured as much by their positive impact on people and the environment as by their positive balance sheets. Most importantly, he offers a groundbreaking plan as to what we as citizens can do to break through the political paralysis and replace the phantom-wealth Wall Street system with a living-wealth Main Street system that is responsive to the needs and values of ordinary people.

Click here for more info and/or to order this book on Amazon.


About the Author

David C. Korten, author of: Agenda for a New EconomyDavid Korten wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. David is the author of Agenda for a New EconomyThe Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World. He is board chair of YES! Magazine, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, a founding board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, president of the Living Economies Forum, and a member of the Club of Rome. He holds MBA and Ph.D. degrees from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and served on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. Visit his website at http://livingeconomiesforum.org/ You can also follow him on twitter.com/dkorten and https://www.facebook.com/davidkorten