4.4.1 Signs of hope — locally, regionally, and internationally, regenerative economic patterns are evolving.

Our monetary and economic systems’ design has a significant structural impact on much of our daily behavior and cultural activity. A key factor in the move to a regenerative culture is their redesign. We must all re-learn how to learn as a result of our increased desire as a society to take part in the local, regional, national, and global reform of our economic system. We will need to spread information, co-design and co-create, trial with failures and successes, and use all of our collective intelligence liberated by focusing on collaborative rather than competitive advantage if we hope to leverage changes deep enough to prevent the extinction of civilization and stop further damage to ecosystems and the biosphere.

Our economic practices will need to change simultaneously at local, regional, national, and global levels in ways that are ideally synergistic and supportive of one another. It is more likely that we will continue to witness significant examples of regional and local transitions towards more viable and regenerative systems, while it will take much longer for global efforts to support these changes through a redesign of international trade policies and a fundamental overhaul of the broken structure of the present financial and economic systems. Over the past ten years, a variety of potential methods to redesigning our economic system have arisen. Rather than developing the mental habit of viewing these approaches as competitors, we should always first consider how they might complement one another at and across scales. Let’s examine a few of them.