Symbiotic Economy :Regeneration of the Economy, Planet, and Society

By John Miller

This book has a very grand ambition. That of putting forth a fundamentally new economic theory—the symbiotic economy—that could bring about the coexistence of humans and nature.

John miller offers a synthesis of numerous methodologies and fields of study that have gained attention recently, including permaculture, the circular economy, the economy of functionality, peer-to-peer lending, the social and solidarity economy, and complementary currencies. This gets amazing achievements by combining the advantages of each of them and identifying the underlying idea. As we rebuilt the productive capacities of the regions, we were able to reduce our material consumption in several locations by more than 90%. By using plants instead of metal and ores, we may prevent the need to send people down into the mines. We could design communities that could provide their own water, energy, and fresh food.

The symbiotic economy is founded on the interdependence of technological advancement, natural ecosystem power, and human knowledge (the tools). It is feasible to generate without using up resources by striking the correct balance between the three.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miller
• Release date: Feb 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215158906

Book preview

FIELD OF POSSIBLE

The deep crisis that our societies are experiencing is obvious. Ecological disruption, social exclusion, unlimited exploitation of natural resources, relentless and dehumanizing pursuit of profit, widening inequalities are at the heart of contemporary issues.

However, all over the world, men and women are getting organized around original and innovative initiatives, with a view to bringing new perspectives for the future. Solutions exist, new proposals are emerging in the four corners of the planet, often on a small scale, but always with the aim of initiating a real movement for the transformation of societies.

PREFACE

All the environmental indicators are red. After being carried away in recent years, and more particularly in 2016, the average temperature is not going down (2017). Thawing permafrost releases more and more methane and the Alaskan tundra releases CO 2 . The submerged passive ice that protects the emerged glaciers of West Antarctica is breaking away en masse. The erosion of wild populations, of vertebrates in particular, but by far not exclusively, has notably accelerated in recent decades, weakening the numbers and areas of existence of even common species. A phenomenon that can only intensify the rate of destruction of species, already a hundred times higher than the traditional rate of disappearance. Material flows in the world are growing faster than GDP itself. Studies on the weakening of our food production capacities, due to heat waves and droughts associated with climate change, are increasing. Etc. All things to which John Miller, although she knows them perfectly, opposes an invigorating optimism. And she is right. It is in fact when things are going to the worst that we most need actors with steely optimism, charting ways to get us out of the jam and move forward as quickly as possible.

The main idea of this book is that there are, hidden in the territories, sometimes in certain laboratories, the pieces of a puzzle which, duly associated, reveal the image - and the logic - of an alternative economy, symbiotic and regenerative. From agroecology and permaculture, from ecological engineering to the use of complementary and electronic currencies, to the construction of a more horizontal governance, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, through the circular economy, the manufacturing of modular goods, the functional economy favoring the use and pooling of goods over their appropriation, the increase in our computing capacities by networking existing PCs, etc., a new logic, social and economic, is emerging.

Firstly, it is no longer a question of opposing nature, of systematically substituting artefacts for it, of upsetting it in all respects by upsetting its balance, but of playing not against but with it, of bringing it, to pastiche Aristotle, to do herself what she would not do spontaneously; for our happiness and without depriving other living beings. Here, agroecology is both the source of inspiration for this new logic in question and the provider of biosourced materials for our economic activities; they will gradually replace our extractive activities, ultimately dedicated to the smallest portion. Agroecology does not use any input, no longer requires dumping the fossil waste bins of the biosphere into the atmosphere, but plays on the complementarity of plants, regenerates the soil and stores carbon.

Secondly, we are turning our backs on pyramidal organizations and economic behemoths. Like ecosystems, we favor horizontality and cooperative governance, including monetary and financial matters. The achievements and models of international cooperation, open source, feed local achievements and productions. Global and local complement each other instead of opposing each other.

Third, the use of goods is favored over their appropriation and the emphasis is on modularity and interoperability. Parts of objects that wear out faster can be replaced independently of other components. Similarly, improvements can be made without having to change everything.

I reformulate these principles in my own way, inviting the reader to discover the six principles detailed by John Miller.

The key idea of the book is thus that we are now able to turn our backs on the past of historical, essentially extractive societies. And it is largely the extraction of fossil fuels and that of metals that have placed us in the delicate position which is now ours. It would indeed be possible to build a new prosperity by drawing our resources from the living, by applying our intelligence to them, but also by taking inspiration from the non-hierarchical functioning of ecosystems, and therefore by reducing our extractive activities to a minimum. We would thus free ourselves from what limits us while putting ourselves in danger.

Readers will be able to address some criticisms to the author: for example, the too rapid evocation of the rebound effect, the absence of calculation on the effects of such an economy in terms of returning to an ecological footprint of a planet, or concerning the long-term return below planetary limits, Rockström-Steffen style, the absence of a size limiting factor, that of human demography and its weight on wild populations, etc. This will be the subject of further research. Nevertheless, this important book traces a promising and salutary path. The interest of the solutions and the economy proposed by John Miller is to be attractive for the greatest number, and to be able to guide a large number of players today. Sulking our pleasure would be folly.

University of Lausanne, president of the scientific council

of the Foundation for Nature and Man,

former Nicolas-Hulot Foundation.

INTENTION

The objective of this work is to share the results of almost ten years of study of new economic and productive logics, which have appeared over the past fifty years and which are moving in the direction of greater sustainability of our societies. I will bring piece by piece the elements testifying to a new logic of thought and action in what characterizes an economic, technical and social system. If we define a civilization as the set of features that characterize a given society from a technical, intellectual, economic, political and moral point of view, this study leads me to think that a new civilization is emerging today. I leave to others the task of characterizing the political and moral system formed.

I distrust any opinion, including my own. My goal in this book is not to invent an achievable, but to show an realized and the potentials it opens up to us.

I am not exhaustive in what appeared. The cases number in the hundreds of thousands and I discover new ones every day. I seek to convey, from a few examples in each key area of what forms a productive, economic and social system, the innovations that have appeared, the face that they draw together, the new logical system that they reveal and the vision that they carry in our relationship to the living, to technology and to ourselves.

I express myself there in my identity as a woman, a Westerner, and a human being convinced that we form only one humanity, one living being, one Earth.

INTRODUCTION

Pathways to New Prosperity

But then, said Alice, if the world has absolutely no meaning, who prevents us from inventing one?

I NSPIRED BY L EWIS C ARROLL ¹

I was four years old when my father said one day in the living room that water would be the blue gold of the 21st century . Why ? – Because it could become rare and expensive, like oil. Thus, our generations are born into a world where what seems immutable – the availability of water, the blue of the sky, the shape of our coasts, the song of birds, the succession of winters and summers – is no longer a acquired. It moves into a questioning and a concern.

Many skeptics rise up against the idea of the announced ecological catastrophe, of its exceptional character, or even of its link with human responsibility. Voices are indignant at what they consider to be akin to green fanaticism which would deprive humanity of the possibility of continuing on the road to progress ² , and which would hide the hatred of man under the love of nature 3 .

What is it really ? What is the story written by the new ways of producing and consuming that have been invented mainly over the past fifty years?

They open the way to a whole new economy, which redraws the face of our landscapes and our societies. They show us that the hand of man can make living things grow ⁴ when it respects their balances and knows how to recognize their own intelligences. They show us that wealth can be born from cooperation and not only from competition.

This new economy is of the symbiotic type: it couples human activities with the growth of ecosystems and social ties.

It opens a new vision for humanity.

A little review of the current world economy

What does economy mean? The word comes from the Greek oikos , which means house, household, and nomos , management. The economy is therefore the management of the house and its inhabitants.

If we take a quick look at our current oikonomia , it is clear that it bears its name badly.

A third of the planet's soil is degraded, more than half of the world's forests and wetlands have disappeared in a century. Species are dying out at a rate 100 to 1,000 times greater than the natural rate of extinction. Biodiversity specialists fear that we will go to rates of 1,000 to 10,000 times higher by snowball effect: when too many species disappear, the ecosystem fabric destabilizes and can collapse like a castle. of cards from which those forming the base would have been removed. Two-thirds of the services provided by ecosystems are weakened. These services are the foundations of sustaining life as we know it: providing clean water, clean air, oxygen, fertile soils and abundant and varied food, climate regulation, flood protection, against the winds and the droughts... In fifty years, we have modified the planet more quickly and more extensively than during all the history of humanity ⁵ .

Moreover, the materials and energies that allow us to achieve such feats alter the global thermostat. Composed mainly of carbon, they enrich the atmosphere with greenhouse gases when they are used. And the atmosphere is heating up. The limestone at the base of cements, plasters and limes is a carbonaceous rock; oil, coal and gas, which constitute 80% of the energy sources we use or 100% of the bitumen on which we move, are carbonaceous rocks. This carbon was not present in the initial earth's crust, it was concentrated in the atmosphere. Its passage from the atmosphere to the earth's crust was achieved by the action of living beings which absorbed it and deposited it at the bottom of the oceans or in the terrestrial and lagoon geological layers. We release in a few decades a carbon that living beings took hundreds of millions of years to bury. We are destabilizing a system whose balance is at the origin of most of today's evolved forms of life, including our own. What we are experiencing has no common measure with the successions of glaciations and warmings that humanity has known during its epic these last few million years. What we risk is the destabilization of the very structures of the global ecological balance of the Earth. Since 2016, climate change has taken off: this acceleration is a sign that destabilization is working. Clearly, we not only cracked the walls of our house, we also touched its foundations. Will we be able to bring carbon home ⁶ ?

Inside, the household is no better. The living is in the grip of the sixth major extinction crisis that the planet has known. No cosmic or geological phenomenon is involved. This crisis is internal. It comes from the living itself and is linked to a single species: humans. Yet the species in question is prodigiously intelligent. She is able to understand what is happening while the scale of the phenomenon cannot be directly apprehended by her senses. This species knows how to describe the composition of its planet or its place in the galaxy by its only power of observation, logic and deduction. She knows how to see the invisible. She is not much better than her peers. Being alive among living beings, it suffers like the others from pollution. By the early 1990s, the rate of viable spermatozoa in the semen of men in industrialized countries had already halved ⁷ . Cancers continue their progression in the world. In 2014, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) estimated that the number of new cases could increase by 70% in the next two decades ⁸ .

Our oikonomia is not much better for physical health. Musculoskeletal disorders, for example, have for more than twenty years been the leading occupational disease in France and in other European countries ⁹ : the repeated actions of workers chained to the rhythm of the machines cause pressure on the muscles and the skeleton comparable to that experienced by a great athlete. But without compensation or recognition. Can you imagine what workers in sewing and assembly workshops in countries less wealthy than ours are going through? Unfortunately, it is not mental health that will boost the morale of the troops. Depression is the leading cause of disability and affects one in five people worldwide.

What meaning will we be able to give to progress?

Economically, wealth and power have become extremely concentrated.

A study conducted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich analyzed the decision-making system of multinational companies ¹⁰ . Of the 30 million economic players identified by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2007, 43,000 are multinationals. The Zurich researchers showed that 737 of them had developed a shareholder configuration allowing them to impose their decisions on the other 42,000. In this way, they would control 80% of the turnover generated by the multinationals. Among them, a super-powerful core of 147 controls 40 % ¹¹ . These are primarily companies in the financial sphere.

At the same time, only 3 to 5% of monetary flows passing through the financial spheres are reinvested in the real economy: 95 to 97% of trade there is purely speculative ¹² . Consequently, the real economy dries up: it is deprived both of the decision-making power and of the monetary flows that it has nevertheless itself generated.

The inequality in the distribution of wealth has become extreme: in 2015, 64 people on the planet would own as much as half of the world 's population ¹³ . In France, the world's sixth largest economy, one in five children now lives below the poverty line ¹⁴ . 30,000 of them live and sleep on the streets, 9,000 are lucky to have at least a makeshift roof and the solidarity of a slum, although the French state has banned them since the 1970s The less fortunate are the migrants, those people who are denied refugee status and consideration. In Paris, the NGO Doctors Without Borders denounced the confiscation by the police of their blankets in the middle of winter ¹⁵ . This increase in inequalities, both globally and locally, has been accelerating in recent years. It is a profound factor of social destabilization. It leads to stigmatization and violence. Indeed, it is not wealth that creates social cohesion, but its equitable distribution.

What system will make it possible to redistribute economic power and keep the wealth produced in the territories?

How can we still call oikonomia a system that is so lacking in the role to which it claims? Let's take the game of naming the facts by their name. Expressions such as planetary and social plunder or planned destruction would be more appropriate. We would thus no longer have, in our media and cultural landscape, magazines, faculties or eminent economic experts, but planetary and social plunder or programmed destruction. In the same way, how to call liberal market a world place where the flow is captured and orchestrated by the decisions of a handful, the exact opposite of what market ¹⁶ and liberal ¹⁷ mean?

This little rhetorical game allows us to reclaim the deep aspirations that these words carry and to put things in their place. It is not the concepts that are in question, but modes of production and exchange that have taken their name and do not or no longer correspond to them.

A discovery

When I started my research, I had just finished an important film on the state of the planet and the world, which showed most of the problems mentioned above: Home by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. This film, designed as a tool for mass dissemination and public debate, has been seen today by 800 million people, i.e. more than one in ten human beings. living on the globe. In this film released in 2009, we told a heavy truth: if we are not able to reverse the trend before ten years, we will fall into a planet with an unknown face. Following the deterioration of the base of planetary ecological balances – the destruction of ecosystems on the one hand, the growth of greenhouse gas emissions on the other – the climate could enter a phase of runaway which would tip the Earth in another state of global thermodynamic equilibrium. It was daring. No mainstream or scientific publication was so positive. But after having read, listened to or met the great world specialists in the climate and related phenomena, cross-referenced all the information at my disposal, it was impossible for me to think otherwise ¹⁸ . Unfortunately, the recent boom proves these words right.

Having been writing about the state of affairs for ten years already, I wanted, after this film, to resolutely turn to the side of solutions. And amplify their knowledge with the general public as I had done for disasters. I decided to devote myself to the only ecological plan; social problems, however growing, would find their defenders. I then systematically sought the economic and productive logics that could participate in responding to this destabilization of the Earth's global ecosystem and reverse the trend. I therefore examined any economic and productive model deployed by actors, which either structurally reduced the impacts on the biosphere or restored ecosystems. Structurally means in the structure, that is to say that I did not take into account the economic effects linked to an economic crisis, health, etc., which for example made it possible to temporarily reduce the demand for products problematic but did not answer the question on the merits. I have included the ecological problem of toxicities and in particular endocrine disruptors, less publicized but just as important and urgent.

I wanted models that were profitable and found their market. It was about being pragmatic. We had no time to waste. I found plenty of them. They abounded. They were found all over the world, in all latitudes and all climates, in urban and rural contexts, in poor and rich countries, and in all activities.

But I couldn't write a line. Because all of this turned out to be eminently too complex to reach a consensus. None of this logic alone was enough. Either it reduced the impacts in one place but increased them in another, or its scope was too limited, or it organized ecological regeneration but left the industrial problem vacant, or the other way around, or, or, or... Porter one or the other of these logics in solutions could only bring a salvo of very justified criticisms. All seemed very necessary but largely insufficient.

But as I searched, a pattern formed, a common design. I realized that, under their apparent diversity, they presented remarkable functional analogies.

For the agricultural engineer that I am, that is to say a scientist with a technical orientation, the principles that I saw taking shape were like the cogs of a new engine, the unitary elements of a new economic logic system, which eminently answered my thermodynamic question.

I saw the convergence of agroecology, permaculture and ecological engineering, the circular economy, the functional economy, smart grids ¹⁹ , the collaborative and peer-to- peer economy ²⁰ , governance nance of the commons and the legal structures of cooperatives ²¹ . In everything related to economy, living resources, technical resources, social resources, a new logic, identical under the diversity of vocabularies, had appeared.

I am not the first to talk about regenerative economy. Institutes like that of Allan Savory, in the United States, spoke of regenerative or restorative agriculture as early as the 1960s; Paul Hawken was one of the pioneers; Regenesis Group was founded in 1995 and extends this notion to territories including urban ones. The Buckminster Fuller Institute, founded in 1987, centers its thinking on what could be called the knot of the puppet, this level which activates all the others, design, and quickly integrates these concepts. Biomimicry, theorized in 1998 by Janine Benyus, also joins the thought of a regenerative economy, as well as the blue economy of Gunter Pauli, which derives from it.

Also my work is anchored in this current, even if it is not derived from it. It was very late, in the last years of my research, when I had already formulated the set of six principles and the logical system that was to follow, that I discovered the pioneers of the regenerative economy from overseas. Atlantic. The approach that I followed comes from what is also called practice theory : theorization based on practices. By identifying a logical system common to these practices, I was able to go as far as mathematical, systemic and thermodynamic formulations, and I am working on their publication with the Energy Center of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) . The contribution of my work is to show that this economy is emerging throughout the world and that the potential economic system it forms is complete. It also makes it possible to project its structure on a global level. Since 2012, the principles I am about to set out have been exposed and discussed in many conferences, many working groups. The symbiotic economy is today presented to the chair of regenerative economy of the Business School of the University of Louvain in Belgium, to the master Bioterre of the institute of geography of the Sorbonne and to the engineering students of the Institute superior of agriculture of Rhône-Alpes. They were also put into practice. I declined the logical system through different tools in my consulting agency for organizations and territories for the development of this new economy. I designed the assembly of local and international programs, and I participate in the current program Reverse the Dynamic of Climate Change, launched by the General Secretariat of the Commonwealth with the Cloudburst Foundation. An association, L'Atelier symbiotic, was created around the theory formed by actors of change. We have tried to apply its principles to the functioning of a social and entrepreneurial group. Not without difficulties.

This does not in any way mean that all of this work has stopped. On the contrary. Every day, I discover a little more the subtleties of the system that these assembled economic and productive logics form.

Transformation of the economy

This new economy is radically different from the current one. It can be described by six principles (which I will call in this book the symbiotic principles) which are at the origin of the added value produced by these new models. They are based on:

– free and direct collaboration between entities;

– a diversity of players and resources that respect the integrity of each entity;

– territories of common flows, accessible to all equally; they are material territories where resources circulate, but also immaterial ones where interests and values intersect;

– priority use of services provided by ecosystems;

– the search for maximum efficiency in the use of resources, whether they be matter, energy or information;

– the search for the inclusion of human activities in the major cycles of the planet preserving its global ecological balance.

We find them in the management of living ecosystems, industrial ecosystems and social ecosystems. They apply to production, consumption and modes of governance, including the redistribution of value. They form a new economic logic.

When these six principles are respected in all of these dimensions then the resources enter into symbiosis. Why speak of symbiosis? Because I'm going to show that these different major logics, structured in the same way, are compatible like the cogs of a clock: they aggregate and complement each other. The resources produced by one correspond to the needs of the other. They form a symbiosis between the technicality of the living and its beauty, the power of human design and organization, and the efficiency of its technique: each nourishes the other and vice versa. The elements in the pot do not differ from the current system. It is the way of associating them that changes. As the butterfly and the caterpillar are both one and the same individual, and different expressions of what composes it, this new