Our collective goal should be a planetary pluriverse

This essay originally proposed that we should build a new civilisation. After some excellent feedback from Bill Baue, I now think ‘a planetary pluriverse’ describes the goal more clearly, so I have updated the essay accordingly.

It is far from controversial to suggest that we need to transform society. In fact, the world’s governments officially agree, having approved an IPCC report in 2018 that said we need ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’. The climate protest movements of recent years have demonstrated that millions of people desperately want such a transformation to happen. Thousands of organisations are working hard to put one into action, and many brilliant thinkers are analysing our situation and trying to understand what we need to do. But despite all this, so far we are collectively failing to actually transform society.

Successfully triggering the needed transformation is perhaps the most urgent and important problem today. In this essay, I will set out a practical and conceptual approach that might help us do this, beginning from a paraphrasing of some famous words of Buckminster Fuller.

Buckminster Fuller is often quoted as saying ‘you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.’

The paraphrase I think we should use is this: ‘it is not enough to change the existing civilisation. We must build a planetary pluriverse that makes the current global civilisation obsolete.’

This paraphrasing probably brings two questions to mind: one, what is a planetary pluriverse, and why and how should we build one? And two, why would we want to make the current global civilisation obsolete? I will answer both questions in this essay, but I will begin with the second.

Why should we aim to supersede the current global civilisation?

To answer this question, I must first explain what exactly I mean by the current global civilisation. The current global civilisation constitutes the entire complex of organisational systems, technologies, and values underlying the societies that build and depend upon modern technology. While it can be considered the latest development of Western civilisation, I think it is better to think of it as the modern technological civilisation. The lives of almost everyone alive today rely to a greater or lesser extent on the globalised systems that currently underpin our use of material technology. While this includes high technology such as smartphones, it also includes the globalised industrial agricultural and manufacturing systems to which almost everyone is connected through the global economic system. Those systems, and that technology, are absolutely essential to the modern world, and form the basis of the current global civilisation.

But those systems so essential to today’s world are the exact things that are stopping us from averting the impending global environmental catastrophe.

The most obvious aspect of this is the problem caused by our energy system: easy access to fossil fuels has resulted in so much energy use that the boom in renewables has only mitigated the continuing increase in energy demand, without decreasing the total amount of fossil fuels used. There is no feasible route to decarbonising at the speed required without massively decreasing our total energy use. That in itself will demand a civilisational reorganisation. This problem is compounded by our economic system, which relies on economic growth, itself a core driver of increased energy use. In the current economic system, economic growth isn’t a choice, but a necessity, because fundamental components of the system, such as our debt-based monetary system, the need for full employment, and the profit-maximisation imperative of corporations, both drive and rely upon growth to continue functioning smoothly.

Beyond the energy and economic systems, each of our other societal systems have basic characteristics that stop us from decreasing our environmental impact sufficiently: industrial agriculture relies on vast amounts of fertilisers and pesticides that are made from fossil fuels, disrupt nutrient cycles, and exterminate the insects that form the basis of entire food webs. Representative democracy incentivises short-term decision-making through 5-year election cycles, and has failed to make any appreciable dent on global carbon emissions despite 30 years of trying. Even the values of individualism militate against us coming together to solve our collective environmental problems.

Our current systems are fundamentally at odds with the need to massively decrease our negative environmental impact. If we are to avoid catastrophe, this means we need to change the systems themselves – and they must be changes of the systems, not changes to the systems. This is true of so many of our core societal systems that it can only be done by completely redesigning the entire basis of society, which is to say, by superseding the current global civilisation. By recognising this, and remembering the immense variety of civilisations and cultures that have already existed, we can open our imaginations to new realms of possibility for our collective future.

A break from the past

In many ways, our situation isn’t really surprising or unusual, when looked at from the perspective of the history of humanity as a whole. There have been many major civilisations throughout history, and almost all of them have suffered decline or collapse. Climate change, inequality and oligarchy, and fragility borne of complexity, have all been common causes of collapse in the past, and are all factors contributing to our current crises. History shows that today’s situation is ultimately just another playing out of the usual consequences of human nature interacting with civilisational forces.

But this time, there are some fundamental differences with previous late-stage civilisations. The first is simply the global nature of our current civilisation – if it collapses, everywhere from Canberra to Chile and from Alaska to Zanzibar will be affected. A related difference is the sheer number of people alive today – before the Industrial Revolution, there had never been more than a billion people alive at one time. Today, there are 8 billion people, and more than half of us live in cities, which means being deeply reliant on complex supply chains for basic necessities like food.

There are other differences that are, in the long-term, even more consequential. These can be summarised into a single characteristic of our current situation: the geological scale of our impact. We may already have put in motion ice sheet melting that will take centuries to occur. If it does, it will raise sea levels by many metres, and it is unlikely to be reversible for millennia. There are multiple tipping points, such as a die-off of coral reefs, the Amazon switching from rainforest to savannah, and the collapse of ocean currents, that will become increasingly likely if temperatures continue rising. And the rate at which animals are going extinct has led scientists to warn we may be entering a mass extinction event – defined as a period in which 75% of all species go extinct. If this was to happen, it would take millions of years for new species to evolve and take their place.

Our geological impacts aren’t only a result of climate change: another is indirectly causing it. When we first began using fossil fuels, it was relatively easy to find them, as there were many big deposits close to the surface. But those easy to find deposits are now being used up, and we need to dig deeper, and go further, to find new ones. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – after all, a key element of avoiding catastrophe is stopping using fossil fuels – but it does mean that this civilisation is in a truly unique position. If it collapses, it is unlikely any future civilisation will ever access the massive amount of energy we use today. Although there will be fossil fuels, they will be out of reach for a society that does not already have technology that relies on them. And while we can now access large amounts of renewable energy, our ability to do so has only come about because we began by getting so much energy from fossil fuels.

This access to energy has resulted in our having a qualitatively different level of technology to previous civilisations. We have learned to extract and use a huge variety of minerals and elements; we have discovered and harnessed electricity and the electro-magnetic spectrum; and, by combining these with the energy we can access, we have invented technologies such as the internet that allow us to communicate and share information globally and instantaneously. All of this development has been reliant on our ability to access immense amounts of energy, which we could not have done without easy access to fossil fuels.

If we cannot pass down our technological capabilities in an unbroken line into the distant future, it is probable that future humans will never be able to recover these technologies. The ‘Carbon Pulse’, as Nate Hagens has eloquently named it, is a one-time opportunity.

A better option: a planetary pluriverse

These potential consequences of modernity are bleak and disheartening. If we continue with the status quo – for example, we succeed in gradually decarbonising capitalism over the next three decades or so – we will probably cause the climate to destabilise before settling into a diminished state, and possibly cause a concurrent mass extinction. But if the status quo gets violently disrupted before then – for example, multiple breadbasket failures start hitting in the 2030’s, causing civil unrest followed by supply chain breakdown – our complex global systems could collapse, leading to a loss of technological capabilities that we may never recover.

Fortunately, there is a third option: superseding the current global civilisation by creating a planetary pluriverse. But what exactly is a planetary pluriverse?

The pluriverse is a fairly new concept. There are various definitions of it, but perhaps the one that best conjures a sense of it is the Zapatista phrase ‘a world in which many worlds fit’. The idea is that rather than aiming for or imposing a homogenous global society, we should embrace the diversity of humanity and create a world in which many different ways of life, cultures and societies can coexist peacefully and without any one of them claiming superiority over any other.

While the idea of a pluriverse is quite new, pluriversality has to some extent been the default reality of the human species for thousands of years. If you were to pick any particular moment in the last few thousand years and examine all the societies and cultures in existence at that moment, you would find an enormous amount of variety. There would be agrarian societies, city states, empires, and nomadic cultures. Some societies would be highly egalitarian, others very hierarchical, and many would be somewhere between the two. In some areas, cultural complexes would span thousands of miles, in others there might be dozens of tiny cultures in a small area. Whatever societal feature you cared to look at, you would find immense variety around the world.

A diversity of cultures is one aspect of a pluriverse. The other aspect is that different societies accept each other’s existence without claiming superiority over them, and this has historically been less common. In recent centuries, cultural diversity has also greatly decreased as imperialist societies originating in Western Europe have colonised the world, first through direct conquest and more recently through the economic hegemony of capitalism.

We have already seen that the technological developments and population boom of recent centuries mean humanity’s collective impact is now of planetary significance. Environmental devastation isn’t the only negative impact of this expansion. Another is that the capitalist economic system underlying it causes and relies upon exploitation & embedded global inequality.

The basic dynamic is that modern technology is very useful for people around the world, but the terms on which it can be accessed by people on the periphery of the capitalist system are set by those in its centre. Part of the capitalist value system is that people can and even should maximise their personal financial gain in their transactions. This has resulted in the people in the centre taking advantage of the power imbalance to exploit the people on the periphery. The extremity of the exploitation has gradually decreased since the days when slavery and debt peonage were widespread, but as it has decreased, it has also become structurally embedded. Today, production and supply chains are global but there is massive inequality, exemplified by the difference in wages around the world. Whereas a factory worker in the UK earns a minimum of £11.44 an hour – about $14.40 USD an hour – the average hourly wage for factory workers in Vietnam is just $1.30 USD (31,510 VND).

An effect of this is that people on the periphery of the capitalist system – and there are billions of people in this position – have to work in full-time, low-skilled jobs just to access very basic modern goods. This is a major driver of the diminution of cultural diversity. Similar capitalist dynamics also drive the massive increase in environmental impact, for example through market forces compelling small-scale farmers to sell their land to corporations running vast monocultural agriculture operations.

This is how humanity has reached planetary scale, but we don’t have to stay this way, and we clearly shouldn’t. Instead, we need to be aiming for an equal, environmentally sound and exploitation-free world. Every society and individual should be able to choose for themselves how to develop and live, and to access the knowledge and resources they need to do so. The bounds on those choices and that access should be set not by relative positions in a competitive world order, by the need to allow others to live as they choose too, and to maintain a healthy planet.

In such a world, increased societal and cultural diversity would be possible, and therefore likely, considering the diversity of the past. But, unlike the past, societies around the world would be interconnected, through trade, communications, and information-sharing, including instantaneously via the internet. It would be a world that is simultaneously culturally diverse and globally interconnected: a planetary pluriverse.

The how

This is all very well, but how do we get there? There are of course many aspects to such a massive transformation. As the aim is to enable people around the world to choose their own ways forward, we should be trying to facilitate the emergence of a pluriverse, rather than dictate its form.

The key to facilitating such an emergence is to redesign patterns of production, distribution and consumption. It is our production and consumption that is causing environmental breakdown, relies on exploitation, and enforces cultural homogeneity. And it is the system that forms the basis of this – the capitalist economic system – that is keeping us locked into these destructive patterns. We need a new system that enables us to leave those destructive patterns behind, and acts as a foundation on which the pluriverse itself can be built. In this essay, I will focus on two key elements of this new system: the economic goal, and the systemic basis.

The goal: getting inside the Doughnut

It’s easy to say we should aim for a world in which everyone can live a good life and we do not cause environmental breakdown. It’s harder to describe this with enough clarity and precision to turn it into a specific goal we can actually aim for. Fortunately, though hard, it is doable. In fact, it has already been done.

In 2011, Kate Raworth combined two sets of indicators, one representing the basic things people need to be able to live a good life, and one representing the maximum impact we can have on key components of the environment without causing serious problems. The first set, the social foundation, was based on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The second set, the ecological ceiling, consists of the planetary boundaries, as defined by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Raworth drew these two sets as concentric circles and in doing so created an iconic image: the Doughnut. The aim is to ensure everyone has a good social foundation, while collectively we do not overshoot the planetary boundaries.

Both the social foundation and the ecological ceiling are clearly defined, including being broken down into components and each component having measurable indicators. And those indicators can be applied at multiple scales, including to the world as a whole, to individual countries, and to particular communities. This means each society can precisely understand how they are doing in relation to this goal: both where they are now, and how they progress over time. As well as this, the overall aim has been articulated into a single sentence: the goal of the Doughnut is to ‘meet the needs of all within the means of the living planet’. This combination of a clear definition and a simple articulation is very useful for integrating this societal goal into the systemic basis of the planetary pluriverse.

The systemic basis: bioregional cosmolocalism

The systemic basis of the planetary pluriverse is also a combination of two parts. They are bioregionalism and cosmolocalism, and they combine to become bioregional cosmolocalism. To explain what this is, I will describe the two parts separately.

Bioregionalism is a paradigm in which societal systems, including political, economic and agricultural systems, are organised around bioregions, which Joe Brewer defines as ‘geographic areas defined by the intersection of ecosystem boundaries – typically things like watersheds, mountain ranges and so forth – with human systems that have a coherent cultural identity’. Bioregions are quite large areas – One Earth has mapped the entire world into 185 bioregions. There are smaller scale areas within the same paradigm, such as ecoregions and individual watersheds and ecosystems.

Organising society bioregionally enables us to align with the natural environment and so decrease our negative environmental impact and regenerate nature. For example, it helps us integrate our food systems into ecological cycles to create increased diversity, resilience and abundance of both agricultural production and local ecosystems.

Cosmolocalism is an economic system that’s equivalent to capitalism, because its structure creates a dynamic that drives forward development. Whereas capitalism has a competitive dynamic that drives economic growth, cosmolocalism has a collaborative dynamic and includes a set of features that means it can be used to facilitate the emergence of a planetary pluriverse.

The organisations at the heart of cosmolocalism are global networks that connect local nodes. The local nodes only serve their local area, for example their local bioregion, while the networks connect them with similar nodes in other areas. The global networks include information commons through which every member node can access the innovations and experience of every other node, while remaining free to choose how to apply it in order to serve their own local area. This is what creates the collaborative development dynamic.

The networks also have charters, which set out the ethos and rules of the network and by which member nodes must abide. The charters include a description of the goal of the network, but they can also include a set of guidelines that steer the network’s development in a good direction. For example, by including a stipulation that nodes should aim to help ‘meet the needs of all within the means of the living planet’, a network can align itself with the Doughnut goal. This is what allows us to integrate the societal goal of getting into the Doughnut into the systemic basis of the planetary pluriverse. With similar stipulations in their charters, combined with the institutional infrastructure to ensure they are enacted, networks can require their nodes to have democratic and community-based decision-making processes, give equal importance to the interests of each of their stakeholder groups, and strive for regional circularity.

This basic structure can be applied very widely, including to makerspaces, local-scale factories, community horticulture, food forests, permaculture, community hubs, bioregional learning centres & projects, and research & development labs. Two examples of successful cosmolocal networks are Fab Labs and Transition Network.

Cosmolocalism is designed to be applied to local nodes, which means it is very well-suited to local-scale factories that supply some or all of a single bioregion. These factories and the associated distribution channels can be designed to create regionally circular material flows, so that the materials used in products cycle around the bioregion again and again. This not only greatly decreases total environmental impact, it also creates a new dynamic of bioregional self-sufficiency.

If the materials keep cycling around the local economy, then once a factory is set up and enough raw materials are supplied to fill the materials cycle, few outside inputs are needed. There will be an ongoing need for energy and labour to keep the system running, but these can be provided locally. So long as the factory itself is kept in working condition and the materials continue to cycle around the economy, only small inputs of capital and materials will be necessary.

This dynamic of bioregional self-sufficiency makes it possible for the cosmolocal networks to have truly global inclusivity. Even in an area that is currently extremely poor, once a factory is set up, the initial raw materials supplied, and the people taught how to run the system and access the cosmolocal network, they can quickly catch up to the level of development embodied in the globally shared knowledge database. They will have different needs to places in the West, but such variety is incorporated into the model: they can use the network to find others in similar situations and share their experiences with them to collectively discover the best ways forward.

This combination of global inclusivity and bioregional self-sufficiency can enable regions to emancipate themselves from the capitalist economic system without losing access to modern goods. The other global-local combination, of sharing developments globally while allowing different locales to apply them as appropriate to their own situation, means this system can also become the basis of a planetary pluriverse. In a cosmolocal system, individual bioregions can choose not only which material technologies they want to use, but also how they organise the work needed to manufacture them. This means that different bioregions can choose their own development paths independently of other bioregions, enabling new cultures to develop, and old cultures to be revitalised, around the world.

The overall picture

We can now see the overall outline of a world organised into the framework of bioregional cosmolocalism: hundreds of bioregions developing in their own ways while remaining largely self-sufficient, with materials cycling around the bioregions in a circular economy and most food being produced locally. Manufacturers, local organisations, and food producers at all scales are connected into global networks in their respective domains, enabling them to take on innovations developed in any other bioregion should they choose to do so. Overall societal organisation varies across regions, and again knowledge of such organisation is shared globally, so that bioregions can take on each other’s ideas, and people can move to the bioregion whose way of life they prefer.

This image of a world split into bioregions is a reasonable approximation of what a bioregionally cosmolocal world would look like, but in reality the actual system would include many more complexities. For example, there would be federations of bioregions, organised around geographic and cultural similarities and including a global organisation to deal with global issues. Some materials would circulate at a smaller scale, and some perhaps on a bigger scale, than a bioregion. And in some areas the main political organisation would likely be around nations or tribes as much as bioregions, depending on the historic and cultural intricacies of the specific area.

One simplification of the above sketch that bears particular note is the idea of self-sufficiency. The aim is not for each bioregion to be wholly self-sufficient and so materially independent of other regions. Instead, each bioregion will be fairly self-sufficient, but still engage in trade and exchanges with other regions. An example of this is that it is unlikely we will be able to achieve complete material circularity, so regions with natural resources, or the ability to grow particular crops such as cotton, will need to supply other areas to the extent needed to keep their material cycles full. But because each region will be as circular as they can, which includes building long-lasting products and engaging in repair and reuse as well as recycling, the amount of raw materials needed will be vastly lower than it is today.

Another example is the infrastructure underpinning cosmolocalism. This includes both the capital assets, such as factory machinery, and the technological infrastructure, such as the internet and data servers needed for the information commons. It is reasonable to suppose much of this can be built cosmolocally – for example, Fab Foundation, which runs the cosmolocal network of makerspaces known as Fab Labs, has already built Super Fab Labs, which are Fab Labs with the machinery needed to build more Fab Labs. Developing this aspect to the extent possible is important to ensure the system remains resilient. But it may be that some specialist items, such as satellites or trans-oceanic cables for the internet, will need to be built by bioregions specialising in those particular areas.

A third example is food production. At the moment, major crop-producing regions provide much of the world’s food supply. This is because those regions can produce huge amounts of staple crops, but it decreases the resilience of the food system, because if climate change causes low yields in a few of these regions simultaneously, the global food supply will be severely affected. In a bioregionally cosmolocal world, each bioregion will provide much more of their own food. This can be done, for example, through increased community-scale agriculture in the West – which Liege Food Belt is proving can be done for cities as well as rural areas – and increased access to good tools and techniques in the so-called Global South. There are also various kinds of agriculture, such as permaculture and food forests, that are relatively undeveloped at the moment but hold great promise. The collaborative dynamic created by cosmolocal networks will enable rapid development of these approaches, and as they spread they will increase access to healthy, local food grown in an ecologically sound way.

Even with increased community-scale agriculture, it is unlikely that every bioregion will be able to produce all of the food they need, and it would be unwise to aim for total self-sufficiency in each bioregion. This would decrease resilience, because when a bioregion was hit by climate disasters, their food production would decrease and people would go hungry.

Instead, with increased local food production around the world, backed up by abundant production in particularly fertile areas, resilience can be increased. If particular bioregions are hit by climate disasters, they can rely on a combination of neighbouring bioregions and the major crop-producers to help them out. If multiple breadbasket failures occur some years, the local production can greatly decrease the impacts in each bioregion around the world. And because local production will decrease the quantity needed from the big crop-producing regions, it should be possible to do farming there in a more ecologically positive way, for example by ensuring there are swathes of land left to nature.

A framework within which to thrive

A planetary pluriverse with a systemic basis of bioregional cosmolocalism would be a mosaic of different societies and cultures, each aligned with their environment and all able to provide for their needs and live in comfort. Every society would have the security of knowing they can be self-sufficient if disaster strikes, but in normal times they would have regular exchanges and enjoyable interactions with other bioregions. Each person would be able to see from afar the cultures and lifestyles of every society around the world, and either pick the best ideas to apply in their own society, or move to one they prefer to live in.

It’s true there would be some limitations, such as the need to live within planetary boundaries. Those boundaries are set by the nature of the world, so we cannot ignore them; but we can in a sense transcend them if we see them not as limits on our options, but as a framework within which to thrive.

Regional circularity and local self-sufficiency can greatly increase the level of material comfort possible within those bounds, while the reduction in the total amount of work needed to supply that comfort, and the freedom to choose how to organise the work, can greatly increase overall quality of life. Some enjoyable aspects of life in the West today will have to change, but even those can be changed for the better. To give one example, tropical fruits such as pineapples are currently available year-round in temperate places such as the UK. This is very unlikely to be possible in a world that’s inside the planetary boundaries – and because in reality it relies on exploitation, it isn’t really desirable either. Pineapples could still be an enjoyable part of life for people in Britain, however, by making them part of a festival exchange. 

Each year, a South American bioregion would send a cargo ship full of pineapples to the UK, and the UK would send a cargo ship full of cider to them. Then the two regions would have simultaneous festivals of pineapples and cider. It might be the only time in the year that people in Britain eat pineapples, and the only time people in the South American bioregion drink cider, but both would enjoy the annual feasts.

How to get there

There’s one big problem with this vision of a harmonious future: it’s very different from the way the world is actually organised at the moment. If we are to make it reality, we have a lot of work to do.

Fortunately, it is possible. A key characteristic that makes such a massive societal transformation possible is the fact that those of us motivated to do so can begin building parts of it now. We don’t need to persuade people with a vested interest in the status quo to agree with us: we can just get on and do it.

Many cosmolocal networks already exist and more can be set up and grow organically. I am currently working to design, and hopefully initiate, a set of cosmolocal networks that are aimed at spreading bioregional cosmolocalism and stimulating systemic change. I aim to seed networks of tool libraries, clothing factories, community hubs, and more. If you are interested in helping with this, please get in touch.

On the bioregional side, there are many organisations working on bioregional regeneration, and Tijn Toelker has made a list of them that’s a good place to start learning more. Many of these organisations are doing bold, large-scale work. That’s very important, but it’s equally important that we have a multitude of smaller projects, such as community farms, that each have positive local impact, and together help us move towards a new society.

These approaches are directly aiming at developing bioregional cosmolocalism itself. But there are many areas that need developing that are indirectly connected to the new paradigm, and are already being developed as part of the old paradigm. An essential element of building the new system is recognising that different approaches to the same work determine whether that work contributes to keeping the old system going for a bit longer, or to building the new system before the old one collapses. To explain what I mean, I will use the example of the circular economy.

The circular economy describes a material economy in which materials cycle endlessly around the economy and never become unusable waste. That’s a clear and simple definition. The problems come when you try to put it into action. It’s probably impossible to create a perfectly circular economy – there is always going to be leakage of materials, for example because there is a limit to how many times some materials can be recycled. So any ‘circular economy’ is in fact only circular to a degree. What we need is a functionally circular economy, in which very few virgin raw materials are needed and very little unusable waste is created.

The most basic way to begin making a linear economy circular is to do recycling, which results in at least some of the waste moving round the cycle to become a raw material again. However, most centralised recycling today doesn’t really make a circular economy, because the outputs from the recycling process are poorer quality than the original raw materials. This means those materials can only be recycled once or twice before they too become waste – in effect it just adds a loop into the middle of the linear economy. Doing this means the waste problem is growing more slowly than it otherwise would, but it only delays the growth of the problem, rather than solving the problem itself.

To make a very circular economy, we need a much more effective approach. Many good techniques have been invented, such as designing circularity into the entire materials cycle, including in the product design, business model and customer engagement; seeing waste as a raw material and upcycling it into products that will themselves become equally versatile raw materials at the end of their lives; and using biomaterials that can be composted and returned to natural cycles when no longer needed. By developing and implementing techniques such as these, we can create a truly circular economy, eliminating the waste problem completely.

There are companies implementing these techniques already, but these exemplars are the exception rather than the norm. The best most companies do is to make products from materials that can go into centralised recycling, adding a loop or two to the linear economy. The fundamental reason they are not trying to do better is the system they are part of.

Today’s capitalist economic system, which was already the dominant system when the ideas of the circular economy were first conceived, focuses on economic growth. The main type of organisation in this system is the profit-maximising business. Profit-maximisation does not have any intrinsic connection with the ideas of the circular economy: most of the time, creating material flows with a high degree of circularity doesn’t help businesses maximise their profits. As such, in the current system the circular economy is just an add-on. It is something businesses take part in, because they know it is a good idea and it makes for good marketing. But the core purpose of a business is to maximise its profits, so they can only aim to become circular to the degree that it helps them maximise their profits, or at the very least doesn’t interfere with them doing so.

On the other hand, circularity is an intrinsic part of bioregional cosmolocalism. To increase bioregional self-sufficiency it’s essential to ensure materials can cycle around the bioregional economy; and cosmolocal networks should explicitly reference circularity in their charters. Circularity is also an essential element of getting inside the Doughnut, because it increases the material quality of life possible within the planetary boundaries. This means an organisation working in this paradigm will not be content to settle for a slightly less linear economy. Being part of a truly circular economy will be one of their foundational goals.

As such, for an organisation looking to help build a truly circular economy, a good guiding principle is to think about how to ensure your model fits into the new paradigm of bioregional cosmolocalism. Are you designing your products to ensure the materials can remain in the local economy for as long as possible? Are you fostering a culture among your consumers so they actually do? Are you learning from others working on similar problems, and are you sharing your own findings and innovations so others can learn from them? Is your organisation designed to ensure people in different areas can adapt their approach to suit their locality? And does your organisation’s design mean its monetary success allows it to create more positive impact, rather than its impact being in service of increasing profits?

Second simplicity

Another general approach to building in the new paradigm is to look for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. To explain what I mean by this, I will use the example of toilets.

In the past, and in many parts of the so-called Global South today, instead of toilets people use latrines. While there are various specific designs, latrines are generally holes in the ground with a place to stand above them. They stink, they are unhygienic and they often spread disease. This is simplicity before complexity: it’s simple, but it doesn’t work very well.

The flush toilet was a big improvement on latrines, because it is so much more hygienic and clean. But it necessitates extensive sewage systems and centralised sewage treatment plants, that generally dump the treated effluent into local rivers, causing pollution. This is complexity after simplicity: it solves the problems of the simple system of latrines, but it is complex, material- and energy-intensive, and causes more problems of its own.

A better solution is to use a composting toilet and a humanure system. Composting toilets are loos that collect human waste so it can be composted; humanure systems break down the collected waste and turn it into fertiliser for crops. Well-designed composting toilets are just as hygienic and clean as flush toilets and can be installed in a normal bathroom. Good humanure systems can turn poo into fertiliser in about a year.

This system negates the need for sewage systems and turns human waste from a problem, needing cleaning and then dumping as pollution, into a solution, providing good fertiliser that can replace the fossil fuel-derived fertilisers generally used at the moment. It can also combine with other aspects of the new system. If a community horticulture scheme sets up a humanure station and encourages the use of composting toilets, the humanure produced can fertilise the very food eaten by the people using the toilets. This is second simplicity, the simplicity on the other side of complexity: good design negates the need for complexity, solves the problems of both first simplicity and complexity, and combines with other parts of the wider system to create extra benefits.

Cosmo-localisation

A similar approach is to find ways to relocalise things that have been globalised, such as the production of tools.

In the past, people mainly relied on tools they could make locally. Industrialisation and globalisation greatly increased access to sophisticated tools and products. But it has resulted in massive energy use and environmental impact and relies on complex global supply chains and the capitalist economic system.

We now have the opportunity to relocalise production and in doing so keep the ability to access sophisticated tools without needing to rely on the global industrial system to do so. Open Source Ecology (OSE) is a great example of an organisation doing just this. They are designing a set of 50 machines, including tractors, ovens and circuit-makers, that are ‘the most important machines that it takes for modern life to exist’. OSE is also a cosmolocal organisation: they are using an open-source model, so anyone can use their designs and help improve them, and they are creating a new model of distributive enterprise to enable collaborative entrepreneurship.

OSE is an organisation that’s firmly rooted in the new paradigm. They are using radical methods to enact a radical mission, with explicitly civilisational ambition. But it’s no less important to apply cosmolocal organisation in a way that’s useful in the old paradigm as well as the new. The Re-Action Collective, which focuses on decreasing clothing waste, is an example of this.

Fast fashion has resulted in an absolutely massive overproduction of clothing. It’s terrible for the environment in many ways, and very wasteful. To ameliorate this problem, in recent years there has been increased interest in repairing, repurposing and reusing clothing, for example through swapshops and repair cafes. This is something that’s well-suited to either paradigm – in today’s capitalist world, it’s demonstrating an alternative to the wastefulness of buying so much new clothing; and in tomorrow’s cosmolocal world, keeping clothing in use for longer before it’s recycled will help us live well within planetary boundaries.

It can also be developed in either paradigm – it’s possible to set up a profit-driven business enabling clothing swaps, but it’s equally possible, and much preferable, to set up a cosmolocal network dedicated to keeping clothing products out of landfill. This is what Re-Action Collective have done, focusing specifically on outdoor kit. Set up less than two years ago in a ski resort in the Alps, there are already 36 organisations in the network, spread around the world and working in many areas of outdoor sports, including tents, climbing gear and running clothes.

The organisations in the Collective were all already interested in improving their social and environmental impact. Joining the network supercharged what’s possible – they share ideas, motivate each other and find ways to collaborate. Here’s an example of such a collaboration that the founder, Gavin Fernie-Jones, told me about:

A shop in the peak district got donated a load of waterproof clothing. They have a Re-Action rail in their store where they sell second-hand clothing, including items repaired by another member of the collective. But they don’t resell waterproofs because the peak district is very wet and they can’t guarantee their performance. So they gave the waterproof clothing to another collective member in the Alps. That member rented them out all summer and gave the proceeds to Re-Action, who bought a heatpress that they gave to another member. This member receives a lot of sportswear from races – such clothing gets used very little, but because it has race logos on it, it isn’t normally resold. The heatpress solved this problem: they used it to put new Re-Action logos over the race logos and were selling the sportswear online within a week.

The fact that the Collective has grown to 36 organisations in under two years demonstrates another important difference between capitalism and cosmolocalism. In capitalism, there is a strong focus on scaling businesses – working out how to grow them as big as possible, to maximise their total value. In cosmolocalism, the idea is not to scale, but to spread. Having set up a reuse & repair hub in his own community, Gavin didn’t try to set up a dozen more of them in other areas, competing with their local organisations and trying to become a chain. Instead, he set up a network that enabled his ideas to spread by helping local organisations in many places collaborate and increase their impact. Because any interested organisation can join the network whenever they want, this actually increases the potential speed of impact. It would have taken Gavin many years to set up 36 shops as a chain, if he had gone that route. But in just two years 36 have joined the network – and if another 36 chose to join it tomorrow, they could easily do so.

A cosmolocal vision of the future

Each of the organisations and approaches described above might appear to be quite different. But they are all aiming in the same direction, a world in which we can live well within planetary boundaries. To maximise our chances of getting there, it’s just as important to keep abreast of developments in other parts of the overall movement as it is to concentrate on doing an individual project very well. This allows us to spot new opportunities that can arise when multiple projects find ways to combine and collaborate, and it is by taking such opportunities that we can create truly systemic change. The following is an imagined example of how this might happen.

Let’s begin from a network of community horticulture, fields dedicated to growing fruit and vegetables on the edge of towns and villages. On its own, a good horticulture project can provide cheap and healthy food, increase food security and social cohesion, and decrease environmental impact. By joining a network, it can collaborate with other similar projects to develop and improve. An obvious way this can happen is through sharing farming knowledge. Another way is through sharing ideas and experiences of new projects.

Some community farms might try humanure projects, or community grain growing, and let the rest of the network know what does and doesn’t work and how much impact it can have. Others might have expertise in growing food forests or doing permaculture and spread these skills through the network. Other farms might try different projects, such as having a small herd of cows.

Having a herd of cows might sound like a bad idea, as they produce a lot of methane. But in many places, eating beef is very culturally embedded. So having a small community herd could be a good way to significantly decrease the total amount of beef eaten, by changing it from a food eaten regularly at home to something that’s eaten occasionally and communally.

Once a month, the horticulture group would put on a feast in a community hub, such as a village hall, with all the food coming from the community farm. The feast would be set up as a real banquet, a celebratory event for everyone to enjoy, and beef from one of the cows would be a main ingredient. But there would be an agreement that participants in the event would not eat beef until the next feast – in a month’s time. The reasons for doing this would be made clear and people would help each other with information about how to have a healthy, tasty, and varied diet that’s mainly or entirely vegetarian – and people could buy their vegetables from the community farm itself.

This would turn decreasing beef consumption from an exercise in restraint left to each individual household to a culinary adventure for the whole community. On average, a single cow can provide about 850 half pound portions of beef, so if 200 people attended each feast, only 3 cows would be eaten each year. The manure from the cows would be used as fertiliser, and the cows themselves would have decent, comfortable lives.

The feasts would also be an opportunity to get people involved in more cosmolocal activities. One way would simply be to get people volunteering on the farm, but the community hub that hosts the feast could host other projects too, and they could get ideas by joining a cosmolocal network of community hubs. They might start doing a weekly repair café and running a small tool library. Bioregional learning centres could help community hubs begin learning about bioregionalism and give them ideas of how to connect into the wider movement in their bioregion.

Community hubs are ideal for many projects, so the hubs network would collaborate with specialist networks to spread best practices for each project. For example, one hub might start a small tool library and stock it with donated tools. Then they might connect with the tool library network and learn about organising packages of tools for particular jobs, or how to decide which specialist items it would be most useful to buy. Tool libraries and makerspaces are closely aligned, so the next step might be learning which larger pieces of equipment they might get to start a local makerspace.

Back on the farm, a lot of the work would be done by volunteers, and there might be programs to have vulnerable people, such as recovering addicts or people with disabilities, doing some of the farm work. But it would be essential to have an expert horticulturalist running the farm, probably working there on a full-time basis. Ideally, a second simplicity eco home such as an earthbag house would be built on the land with the farm fields. The horticulturalist would live there, get their food from the fields, and be paid the global average GDP per capita at PPP – currently about £1,150 per month in the UK. In a world in which carbon emissions are tightly coupled with economic size and there is huge global inequality, aiming for the global average expenditure is a good way for people in rich countries to bring themselves into one planet living. While the income from the farm would be variable, the network could include a system to even out the variations across farms so that every horticulturalist would have a steady income.

Although many of the workers would be volunteers, they could be rewarded for their work with food tokens. Food on the farm would be for the community, but to make it work economically it would probably be sold rather than given away. By volunteering at the farm, people would earn food tokens so they could buy food without spending national currency.

Such tokens would also be a route towards creating a true cosmolocal economy of one planet living. Let’s suppose that, by the time the horticulture project has got to this stage, there’s also a circular clothing factory in the local town, and another cosmolocal factory making basic consumer goods. Each of these factories will have some full-time workers, but they too could accept people who work occasional days in exchange for tokens.

The tokens might initially be specific to the network in which they volunteer. But as nodes of more networks are set up in the area, a new system of one planet tokens could be developed. This would be set up so that by working full-time you earn tokens that represent your fair share of the world’s resources. Full-time workers currently work 260 days per year, so for each day’s work, you would earn 1/260^th of your annual share. The token price of products would be calculated based on how much of the world’s resources went into them.

Initially people might find it impossible to live solely from one planet tokens, because there wouldn’t be cosmolocal networks for everything they need and, at least in the West, we have a way to go before our production and consumption is aligned with a one planet lifestyle. But with flexible work schedules in which people can work for tokens as much or little as they want, it would be possible to continue earning money from other jobs while spending some time working for tokens. This flexibility would also allow people to choose their work life – one person might like to spend most of their time doing indoor work, but one day a week on a farm; another might prefer to spend more time outside and just work in a factory one week a month. Workers’ choices would be limited by the needs of the workplaces, but within those bounds there would be much more choice than there is now.

A token system like this would realign incentives across the board. The less the environmental impact of the products, the more the tokens would be worth, so decreasing environmental impact would be in everyone’s interest. The more areas of our material economy included in the scheme, the less we would need to work in the old economy; and the extent to which we had to use old money would be the extent to which we were living beyond our ecological means, so building a bioregionally circular economy would be in our and the planet’s interests. If we could develop the cosmolocal production to be less labour intensive, we could also change the tokens’ value to reflect less work in the year: instead of a year’s work being 260 days, it might be changed to 200 days.

This system would also allow us to continue to have luxury goods, but in a fair and ecologically sound way. If people could provide for their basic needs with just half of their one planet share of resources, they could spend the rest on luxury. Some people might regularly partake in small luxuries, while others might save their tokens to spend on a single holiday or a special gadget. Because we would all have only our individual shares, those luxuries would themselves be shared between us rather than all being used by wealthy individuals. But if someone had done something particularly good for their community, others might decide to give them some of their annual share of tokens to show their gratitude.

There are of course many challenges to making such a scheme work. One issue is that, to make a currency of one planet living tokens possible, we will need to develop our tools and techniques for measuring and apportioning impact. Another is that I have imagined this from the perspective of rural England. In other places, some of these ideas would be valid, others perhaps not. As cosmolocal networks spread, there will be thousands of people experimenting to discover what works best in their area and sharing the results with everyone else. There will be many different approaches, and each bioregion can choose whichever they please – so long as they don’t use more than their fair share of resources, and they don’t exploit or oppress people.

Capital in Cosmolocalism

You might have noticed a serious issue with this plan: I have been ignoring the cost of capital. To set up a community farm, it is necessary to buy a piece of land on which to run it. The usual way to do this in the capitalist system is to get financed, with the financiers generally expecting a positive return on their investment. They either want a steady income from their investment and the ability to sell it whenever they want, or they treat the financing as a loan and expect a return that’s greater than the initial investment.

These traditional capitalist financing models are incompatible with cosmolocalism. If the financiers retain the ability to sell the community farm if they are not happy with their return on investment, the farm’s choices will be governed by the need to keep the financiers happy. This will severely restrict the positive impact it can have on its community and the environment. Capitalist expectations of return on investment would also preclude cosmolocalism’s opportunity for global inclusivity, because the financiers would be extracting from poor areas in exchange for capital.

To build the new system, it will be necessary for people who currently own capital to distribute it with the explicit aim of permanently decreasing how much capital they personally control. It is of course important that this is done in a fair and effective way, and the networked organisational structure makes this possible. For example, community farms in the UK could be funded as follows. Capital owners put money into a fund administered by the farm network. If a community wants to run a farm, it must meet a set of conditions set by the network, including that it has a good plan and enough interest to run the farm appropriately, it pays for half of the capital cost in a non-extractive manner, and the farm itself is put into a suitable community ownership structure. If the community does meet the conditions, the network fund pays for the other half of the capital cost, and the land becomes a community-owned farm. This allows the farm to be run without having to worry about repaying debts or the risk of the land being sold.

To fund the rest of the transition, a variety of similar methods can be used. For example, local-scale factories are more capital-intensive than community farms but can be run on a more commercial footing. In areas that are already wealthy, this means that the half of the capital paid for by the community can be funded as an investment by a group of wealthy local people. This would make it easier to get the requisite funding without affecting the running of the factory too much. In areas that are currently poor, on the other hand, the capital cost would be a far greater proportion of local people’s total wealth, so a greater proportion of the capital cost would need to come from the network fund.

Some people might think this is unrealistic: owners of capital want their returns on capital and this is not something that can change. But this is not wholly true at the moment, as many wealthy people engage in philanthropy. There are signs it is becoming less true, such as foundations beginning to spend down their endowments rather than invest and donate the interest. And as the environmental crisis intensifies, more wealth holders are likely to put more of their wealth into transformative action.

As cosmolocal networks can grow organically, beginning with just a few nodes before spreading more widely, the funding needed will also grow organically. Those first few nodes can be paid for through traditional philanthropic methods. The next growth stage will need more funding, for which there are various routes to larger funding amounts. In order to spread further, more innovative methods will need to be employed. For example, a pension fund could begin to go cosmolocal by putting a proportion of their funds into networks in exchange for their pensioners being given one planet living tokens as part of their pension. Companies such as IKEA and Patagonia are owned by charitable foundations, so they might see it as in their charitable best interests to convert themselves into cosmolocal networks. And ultimately, if bioregional cosmolocalism proves itself as a viable way for us to avoid a calamitous decline of our civilisation, wealth holders throughout society should recognise they must put their money into creating the new system.

Pluriversal values

Moving beyond the current norm of owners of capital expecting a positive return on investment is a deep and difficult change to make, because it is about changing values that are quite fundamental to today’s society. Different civilisations and societies do have different values, and we need to think carefully about the values appropriate to a planetary pluriverse. This is a huge topic that needs a lot of thought, but a good starting point is to recognise that the two aspects of being a planetary species and living in a pluriversal world imply a dual approach. On the one hand, the planetary nature of our species means it will be necessary for all societies to abide by some basic principles, such as remaining within the planetary boundaries. On the other hand, individual cultures within the pluriverse should be able to choose their own values within the bounds set by those planetary principles.

As we develop the planetary pluriverse, it will be important to build consensus regarding our planetary principles. This must include the specifics of the principles and how they should be applied to individual societies, such as how to apportion fair shares of resources within planetary boundaries between bioregions. It must also include agreement on the extent to which there should be a universally agreed moral basis in relation to laws that affect people within a society but do not directly affect other societies, such as what kinds of punishments or inequalities should be considered globally unacceptable.

All aspects of society

I have focused on how we can reorganise the material aspects of our lives. It’s a very important area, because our current material lives are causing the environmental crisis and there is still a huge amount of global poverty. But this is only one part of what we need to do. Although I have used many examples that are strongly aligned with bioregionalism, I haven’t actually described any truly bioregional projects, because the bioregional paradigm involves looking at whole ecological cycles rather than individual areas within them. Holistically managing at an entire watershed, rather than different owners managing different sections of a river, is an example of bioregional thinking.

As the IPCC said in their 2018 report, we need a far-reaching transformation of all aspects of society. To build a planetary pluriverse, we will need new political systems, legal systems, and education systems. We will need to develop our high technology in a way that aligns with the new paradigm. And we will need to reach a new understanding of what it means to live a good life.

In some areas, recent technological developments can easily be used to help build the new system. For example, computer-aided design and the metaverse can clearly be used to greatly improve the information commons at the heart of cosmolocal networks, while giving rivers legal personhood is strongly aligned with bioregionalism.

In other areas, applying the cosmolocal paradigm can open exciting new opportunities. Fab Labs is already researching how to use their network to radically expand access to medical equipment. If cosmolocalism can be applied to the decentralised production of medicines, and to provide training at scale to healthcare workers around the world, it might greatly improve health outcomes globally.

In yet other areas, we need to develop in ways that are strongly aligned with, but not specific to, creating a planetary pluriverse. For example, tools of participatory democracy such as citizens assemblies and digital democracy can be usefully applied in both the current system and the future system.

Practical and visionary innovation

In all areas of society, we need creative innovation that is both visionary and practical. The specific innovations will be different in each sector, but there are some general techniques that can help us envision them. One is to use the Three Horizons model, a conceptual framework that helps us clarify where we want to go, and whether a particular innovation will help us get there. Another, which I have described in detail in a video series, is to use the lens of the three timescales of short-term (the next 5 to 10 years), medium-term (30 years’ time) and long-term (hundreds to thousands of years into the future).

A third technique is to cast the net both wide and deep: wide by looking at solutions to similar problems in other contexts; deep by questioning the assumptions underlying conventional thinking. For example, thousands of cultures around the world and throughout time have developed a multitude of ways of organising societies. At first glance, they might not seem relevant to the modern world, because they were designed for much lower populations than exist today, or because they were embedded in exotic belief systems. But by looking beyond their specific details, we can find concepts and principles that can be creatively applied in new contexts.

The festival exchange idea I mentioned earlier is an example of this. I spent a year living in a society of indigenous Amazonians. In their culture, there is a complex and highly-developed system of traditional festivals. They have deep spiritual significance, and they also function as a way to bring people together, bridge divides and share abundance. Communities there often engage in festival exchanges. My knowledge of that tradition gave me the idea of festival exchanges between bioregions. But rather than try to use the entire festival system from the jungle, I simply thought of the overall concept and adapted it to a different situation.

While the design of bioregional exchanges should be specific to their contexts, the ideas underlying good design are often widely applicable, as another personal example shows. I recently learned about sociocracy, a self-governance system for communities and organisations. As I read about the basic decision-making process, I immediately saw that the structure was very similar to the traditional decision-making process used in the indigenous culture. The details were different, because the context was different, but in both cases people had designed processes for inclusive and consensual group decision-making, and the solutions they found followed the same basic principles.

There are undoubtedly many other examples of cultural customs that can be adapted and applied in new contexts. Here are a couple with potential.

The potlatch is a culturally specific ceremony from the Pacific Northwest. It probably shouldn’t be imported wholesale into another culture, but the general idea of formalised and inclusive celebrations of generosity could be applied more widely. It might be used to joyfully and respectfully balance natural differences in productivity between different regions or groups, enabling abundance within the bounds of the Doughnut.

Many traditional societies organised themselves using elaborate systems of kinship and clans. Their use of actual blood relations and lifelong ties might not be appropriate in the modern world, but the underlying relational structures and formal bonds linking disparate groups might used to turn cities of self-centred individuals into societies of interconnected brethren.

Modern technology is also enabling new possibilities, such as the use of combinations of AI, ecological data and innovative interfaces to give ecosystems a voice, and employing decentralised autonomous organisations to redefine ownership and create new kinds of group decision-making. Using these technologies in ways inspired by ancient organisational strategies is another promising way forward.

Working together

In this essay, I have mainly concentrated on big-vision ideas. Building a planetary pluriverse is a big vision in itself and necessitates quite a few big ideas. But it also necessitates a lot of hands-in-the-dirt work, and it’s important to recognise that both kinds of work are equally important. For every Kate Raworth, who invented the Doughnut and co-founded the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, we need thousands of people working on the ground, in communities, companies, councils, and everywhere else in society, to actually put the ideas into action.

Of course, this doesn’t negate the fact that we do need a lot of visionary thinking in many areas. Just as big visions can only come to fruition if there are many people working to implement them, the many people wanting a better future can only be effective in making it happen if they are working to enact a good vision. In reality, everyone should be doing a mixture of the two. And we need to do both parts together: to truly create a better world, what we really need are collective visions that we collectively put into action.

The overall goal of building a planetary pluriverse is a high-level goal that can help us structure our thinking as we envision a better future, and help us analyse the effectiveness of our actions as we work to build it. The specific visions we have to redesign particular aspects of society, from fostering a systemic move to bioregional cosmolocalism, to starting a community horticulture project, should each improve the world in their own way, and collectively come together to get us closer to our overall goal.

Getting to work

It’s important that we each think about how we can contribute to this work. Some people are already dedicated to envisioning and building parts of the new world, but of course many people work in ways that are not aligned with this. If your day job doesn’t seem aligned, that doesn’t mean you don’t have skills that have an important role to play. Organisations like Re-Action Collective, and so many others working on building a better world, need marketers, accountants, and lawyers to help them increase their impact and improve their approaches. Many organisations, such as Transition Network and DEAL, need people who are simply motivated to work in their communities, whatever skills they do or don’t have – you will be able to learn what you need to from the network community so you can apply it in your local community.

We also need to live in the new paradigm as much as we can, decreasing our reliance on the old systems and supporting the new ones instead. The reality of today is that we all rely on the old systems to some extent, but it’s important to recognise this in a constructive way. Such reliance doesn’t mean that parts of the old system need to remain, but that parts of the new system need to be built. Rather than seeing your need to work in the old system as a reason you can’t work on the new one, recognise the opportunities you do have to contribute to the new paradigm, and the areas in which you should extricate yourself from the old one. Think about the areas of your life you can change so you can live more fully in the new paradigm. Perhaps you should decrease your expenditure, change your job, or join communities of like-minded people to get motivated and inspired.

Another essential aspect of creating a planetary pluriverse is telling people about it. We need to transform the whole of society, and this means everyone in society should be involved in the transformation. So talk to your friends and family about how and why we need to do this, and inspire them to contribute too. One important element of this is the issue of money. There is a huge amount of money in the world, but most of it is held by people who don’t have a transformational outlook. There are a great many good projects limited by lack of funding. Put more of your money, including capital as well as income, into positive transformation, and if you know wealthy people, talk to them about the importance of using their capital to do good, without expecting a positive financial return on investment.

Ultimately, there is a massive amount of work to do. We can build a planetary pluriverse and avoid a catastrophic future, but it’s far from certain that we will. The deciding factor will be how much of ourselves we are willing to dedicate to this work. Between us, we have a massive amount of time, intelligence, resources, willpower and money. We need to put more of it into positive transformation, and we need to do it much more effectively. So work on doing this in your own life, and when you are unsure of what you should do, return to the Buckminster Fuller-inspired framing from the beginning of this essay, and ask yourself: ‘Are my actions contributing to the continuation of the old global civilisation, or the creation of the new planetary pluriverse?’