CREATING REGENERATIVE ECONOMIES USING THE LAWS OF A HOLISTIC
UNIVERSE
Our latest scientific understanding tells us that, notwithstanding its many achievements,
today’s form of capitalism rests upon outdated reductionist thinking that is fundamentally at
odds with both the finite boundaries of the biosphere48 and the laws of systemic health in
an interconnected world. Despite lifetimes of admirable struggle and superficial signposts of
progress, our effort to address symptoms instead of causes is a losing battle that has blinded
us to the underlying decay in our economic fabric. It is now clear that those leaders of
commerce and governance who seek to support the transition to a Regenerative Economy
must discard the outdated intellectual maps that created today’s crises, and instead help chart
a new course using a new intellectual map.
As we work to craft our new road map, our goal must be to ground
Regenerative Capitalism in both the solid empirical understandings of
the laws and patterns of systemic health, and in wisdom traditions that
have stood the test of time and which are remarkably aligned with this
new scientific understanding.49 Instead of the self-serving, commandand-
control methods we so often use today, we must seek to align our planning and policy
interventions with the self-organizing, self-nourishing, self-regulating characteristics of healthy
systems in nature.