Think “Economic Drawdown”
We can’t hold our breath waiting for the Earth’s carbon pump to rebalance itself. And in our highly populated culture of chronic stress, narcissism, and intractability, finger-wagging doesn’t achieve the same evolutionary function of influencing behavior that it once might have. But this doesn’t mean we should write off humanity as greedy and hopeless. That is closing one’s eyes- or freezing- a common trauma response to facing an existential trauma.
Instead, we open our eyes and look toward solutions, stay focused on them, and when barriers arise, use a Prosocial Process to work through those challenges- transforming ourselves, one another, and the planet.
One of the most eye-popping examples to look toward is Project Drawdown, a research and education effort focused on innovative solutions for sequestering carbon and mitigating climate change. From promoting girls’ education to bioplastics, Drawdown is a source of inspiration for activists, designers, and even investors.
Investors? If these ideas are so great and so promising, why are they not attracting more investments and scaling?
If the wellspring of great ideas and good intentions remain underdeveloped or simply not tried due to a lack of funding, then we know that we must do more than focus on the tangible, physical causes of environmental disaster. We must also focus on the intangible, fictional causes of death and destruction: finance.
It is time for Economic Drawdown.
And to get there, we can get creative, invert some paradigms, and design for peace, prosperity, regeneration, and wellbeing for all.
Economics as we know it is too often written off as the dismal science, invoking images of the bold, brave, and brilliant economists willing to sacrifice “fun” in order to balance interest rates, and consequently, the balance of everything else.
But, unlike what the textbooks try to sell, economics isn’t bravely tackling the abysmally dismal side of any natural law of scarcity and self-interest. Economic laws are not natural laws. They are, rather, laws that uphold the white patriarchy, death, and destruction. Economics is only dismal by design.
Let not all of your previous education in the dismal science infect you with either greed or despair. Economics education as it stands threatens the mental health of our students. The discipline’s extractive and exploitative methods chew up Life and spit it out as an externality, perpetuating a maladjusted sense of possibility and hyper-normalization of hell.
Carbon is not our enemy. Ancient health sciences, such as Ayurveda and Chinese Traditional Medicine know that any substance can either support life or end it, depending on the dosage. Carbon is elemental. It is physically tangible. It is the basis of all life and a visible, measurable marker of death as it continues to be disgorged into the atmosphere while the natural pump cycle is eviscerated. We see it, we feel it, we resonate with carbon’s fundamental essence of being both essential and threatening to life.
But while action and education on behalf of climate change get louder, in light of escalating death and destruction, it seems to be falling on deaf ears.
This is why we need a call for Economic Drawdown! The most important climate chaos causing cancer is money that grows, never dies, and siphons life up into its dark cloud of mystery and magical thinking.
Central to the laudable Sustainable Development goals is Economic Growth. However, looking at all the world’s money and markets in one visualization, we can begin to see how Economic Growth is actually causing the other problems, and Economic Drawdown is the goal we should gather around.
For that, solutions abound. We simply need to apply the same solution-oriented design-thinking to creating future economic security for ourselves and others, that we have applied to innovations in carbon sequestration and the personal profit motive.
Economic Drawdown is simply creating investment opportunities where money can be taken out of the speculative market- especially the possible $1 Quadrillion in financial derivatives, and sink it into regenerative enterprises and projects. The purpose of investments is to store value and ensure that that value is enough to meet our future needs and wants. As we know, money is never really stored, or it will lose value. It must be continuously lent out, put to productive use, and generate a return with a quantifiable increase in value. Seeking a return on investment has gone from ego-centric gamification (how much can I make?) to a sort of desperation in public finance (we must do whatever we can not to lose money!). But the hyper-focus is still on growing the money, and we haven’t transitioned out of this barbaric approach when what really matters for future security are:
1- Peace
2- Prosperity
3- Regeneration
4- Wellbeing for All.
One small step would simply be to expand the public definition of “Return on Investment” to include these four measurable and locally flexible indices.
There are so many ways to get to Economic Drawdown, any investor with a desire for future financial security and cares even a sliver for any of the above would scramble to divest from the cancerous cloud of financial derivatives and reinvest in communities, shared equity, local economic ecosystems, soils, forests, oceans, improved diets, and improved mental health.
We the people, with our many languages, cultures, customs, and interests can take many approaches to address this existential crisis of ours. Investing in re-designing economics education is one of the best. Around the world, lead by a singular neoliberal free-enterprise paradigm, economics education is almost exclusively a sales pitch to invest in the magical thinking of growing one’s wealth without considering the broader impact of that growth. The dismal science is rife with cognitive dissonance and thus perpetuates pathological thinking and behavior, and either self-interested or entirely depressed students!
We can do better. We can align our thinking with our hearts. We can re-imagine the way we teach about economics, talk about economics, and invest in Economic Drawdown.
