This is good news, I guess. But I’m skeptical because it enables us to persist in the delusion that an endlessly expanding, fossil fuel-driven global market economy can keep expanding (I.e. business as usual)—on a finite planet whose population, multiplied by per capita consumption of energy and material resources , has already exceeded the carrying capacity of our global biological support system.
The major premise of our global market economy is that “more is always better” and the zero-sum money game mandates this premise, else it implodes. Our biological support system—the land, air, fresh water, and biota that sustain us—is not growing any bigger, and its
essential production rule is optimality: “enough is enough” and too much or too little of any biological value is toxic to the system.
In other words, “Glomart”—the global market economy as a complex adaptive system—is fundamentally incompatible with “Gaia”— the complex adaptive system by which the ecological processes of life itself create and sustain the atmospheric, hydrological, and soil conditions that in turn sustain life. So our global market economy—based on endless growth of production and consumption of commodities, and therefore endless growth of population and capital—is the cancer of the Earth, and that cancer is now terminal. So rather than continuing to enable this cancerous economy, we need, if possible, to trigger viral ideas that will send. It incrementally into spontaneous remission.

Here’s one: Grow Gardens, Grow Community, Grow Awareness—by learning, teaching, healing, and creating. If this went viral, we could gradually displace zero-sum forms of capital (money) with regenerative, positive-sum forms, such as biological, experiential, intellectual, social, cultural, and spiritual capital…As scholar and activist Norman Myers once put it, “We have two choices: a Gaian future—or no future.” The power elite in today’s world have clearly chosen the latter. It is up to all the rest of us to sow the seeds of a Gaian future, starting in our own backyards.