A People’s Orientation to a Regenerative Economy

Regenerative Economy is based on ecological restoration, community protection, equitable partnerships, justice, and full and fair participatory processes. Rather than extract from the land and each other, this approach is consistent with the Rights of Nature, valuing the health and well-being of Mother Earth by producing, consuming, and redistributing resources in harmony with the planet. A Regenerative Economy values the dignity of work and humanity and prioritizes community governance and ownership of work and resources, instead of oppressive systems that devalue people and their labor through violent hoarding by a few. Rather than limit peoples’ ability to fully shape democracy and decisions that impact our communities, a Regenerative Economy supports collective and inclusive participatory governance. It requires a re-localization and democratization of how we produce and consume goods, and ensures all have full access to healthy food, renewable energy, clean air and water, good jobs, and healthy living environments. A Regenerative Economy requires an explicit anti-racist, anti-poverty, feminist, and living approach that is intersectional and eschews top-down, patriarchal, classist, xenophobic, and racist ideology.

Adapted from Movement Generation, Indigenous Environmental Network, Climate Justice Alliance, People’s Action, and Grassroots Global Justice Alliance drawing upon Indigenous leadership and generations of work and vision from Black farming cooperatives and labor movements.

Feminist Economy visibilizes and repairs the harms of capitalism’s exploitation of both paid and unpaid reproductive labor. It focuses on eliminating the gendered division of labor and gender binary that enforces global capitalism’s exploitation and extraction of resources from women all over the world—especially from the Global South, Black, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander, migrant women, and gender non-conforming (GNC) people. In a feminist economy, we recognize, value, and center reproductive labor—low-carbon, community-generating, life-affirming, and skilled work—that is necessary for the wellbeing of everyone and to sustain human society and nature itself. Feminist economy focuses on four principles to re-envision our world: ensuring bodily autonomy and self determination as it relates to feminized and GNC people; socializing reproductive labor; being in right relationship with people globally; and being in right relationship with nature. The Regenerative Economy is inherently a feminist economy because it understands life—its production, growth, sustenance, and reproduction—as the center of gravity from which value is created. A feminist economy  requires undoing centuries of extractive economic policy founded on the ideology of individualization, isolation, and invisibilization of the reproductive labor required to sustain human life from one day to another—from the carework that happens in the home, to the support that happens in communities, to the resource generation that happens in the planet. Rather than commodify war, the feminist economy engenders peace.

 Working definition and description by Grassroots Global Justice Alliance

An Extractive Economy is a capitalist system of exploitation and oppression that values consumerism, colonialism, and money over people and the planet. The extractive economy perpetuates the enclosure of wealth and power for a few through predatory financing, expropriation from land and commonly accessed goods/services, and the exploitation of human labor. An extractive economy views natural resources as commodities—expanding the free-market logic into all cycles and functions of the Earth with an oppressor mentality—which places a price on nature and creates new derivative markets that will only increase inequality and expedite the destruction of nature—to dig, burn, and dump with no regard for its impact on communities and utilizes oppressive force to undermine democracy, community, and workers.

Adapted from Movement Generation, Just Transition Framework informed by the Just Transition Alliance, Indigenous Environmental Network, and Climate Justice Alliance.

Climate Justice focuses on the root causes of climate crisis through an intersectional lens of racism, classism, capitalism, economic injustice, and environmental harm. Climate justice supports a Just Transition for communities and workers away from a fossil fuel economy and focuses on making the necessary systemic changes to address unequal burdens to our communities and to realign our economy with our natural systems. As a form of environmental justice, climate justice means that all species have the right to access and obtain the resources needed to have an equal chance of survival and freedom from discrimination. As a movement, climate justice advocates are working from the grassroots up to create real solutions for climate mitigation and adaptation that ensure the right of all people to live, learn, work, play and pray in safe, healthy, and clean environments.

Adapted from Alternatives for Community and the Environment and Indigenous Environmental Network

Energy Democracy frames the international struggle of working people, low-income communities, Asian and Pacific-Islander, Black, Brown and Indigenous nations and their communities to take control of energy resources from the energy establishment and use those resources to empower their communities literally (providing energy), economically, and politically. It means bringing energy resources under public or community ownership and/or governance—a key aspect of the struggle for climate and energy justice, and an essential step toward building a more just, equitable, sustainable, and resilient economy.

Fairchild, Denise and Weinrub, Al. Energy Democracy: Advancing Equity in Clean Energy Solutions

Environmental Justice embraces the principle that all people and communities have a right to equal protection and equal enforcement of environmental laws and regulations, including human health. Environmental justice recognizes that, due to racism and class discrimination, communities of color, low-income neighborhoods, and Indigenous nations and communities are the most likely to be disproportionately harmed by toxic chemicals, exposures, economic injustices and negative land uses, and the least likely to benefit from efforts to improve the environment.

 Dr. Robert Bullard and the Ella Baker Center

Food Sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.

excerpted from La Via Campesina – the Declaration of Nyéléni, 2007 Forum for Food Sovereignty in Sélingué, Mali.

Frontline Communities are those impacted most by climate change and its root causes, which include white supremacy, patriarchy and colonization. These communities are embedded in legacy struggles against social, economic, and environmental injustices exacerbated by extractive and pollutive industries that have been purposely and systemically situated adjacent to their communities, and in some communities, on the actual land of the communities. This disproportionate exposure to climate and environmental injustice results in acute and chronic impacts to human and environmental health. Frontline organizations are those created of, by, and for frontline communities, and are accountable to a base of frontline community members.

It Takes Roots

Green New Deal pays homage to one of the most exclusionary sets of policies in the history of the U.S. that advanced economic solutions at the expense of Black, Indigenous peoples, and poor white domestic workers. Paired with the forces of white supremacy, these policies have prevented Asian and Pacific Islander, Black and Brown people, Indigenous peoples, workers and communities from taking part in programs that created generational wealth for the majority of white people, while also contributing to the creation of sacrifice zones and frontline communities via redlining. For these reasons and more, we hold that a Green New Deal must be more than a resolution or set of policies. It must be a tool for systemic change that builds and sustains grassroots power in a way that supports and scales out existing initiatives, locally, regionally and nationally through translocal organizing models that address and repair decades of discrimination associated with the New Deal. For this to occur, and for the purposes of the UFT, any Green New Deal must align with the 1991 Principles of Environmental Justice and uphold the principles and tenets of Just Transition, energy democracy, and food sovereignty, as well as address myriad sectoral shifts including, but not limited to, housing, healthcare, mass incarceration and preservation of democracy and for Indigenous peoples – recognition of treaties and the US government to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We believe this to be the only way that a Green New Deal can be the vehicle that delivers us to an equitable Regenerative Economy available to, and accessible by, all.

Just Recovery is a framework that resists the status quo solutions of disaster recovery that focuses on aid, extraction, and displacement and moves toward transformative solutions that respond, recover, and rebuild. “Respond” means to activate mutual support networks to support communities on the ground to meet the articulated needs of those most impacted and vulnerable, rather than national emergency response that often marginalizes those most impacted. “Recover” means to provide resources and support so that all people can get back their homes and work, rather than extract cheap labor and land from impacted communities for exploitation. “Rebuild” means long-term support to communities so they are stronger than prior to disaster and no longer vulnerable, rather than displacing people from their communities. A Just Recovery framework was advanced after Hurricane Havey as a way to incorporate and build upon the incredible work of so many people and communities, particularly led by women of color, from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the BP oil disasters.

Adapted from the Just Recovery Framework by Jayeesha Dutta, the leadership of Bryan Parras and T.E.J.A.S., and Another Gulf is Possible. For more visit the Our Power Puerto Rico: Moving Toward a Just Recovery report by Climate Justice Alliance.

Just Transition is a framework for a vision-led, unifying and place-based set of principles, processes, and practices that build economic and political power to shift from an extractive economy to a Regenerative Economy. This means approaching production and consumption cycles holistically and waste free. The transition itself must be just and equitable, redressing past harms and creating new relationships of power for the future through reparations. If the process of transition is not just, the outcome will never be. Just Transition describes both where we are going and how we get there. The Just Transition framework focuses on stopping the bad to build the new by divesting from the exploitation of labor and extraction of resources and investing in cooperative labor and regeneration. Just Transition challenges the dominant worldview of colonialism, consumerism, and the concentration of power governed through violent force and advances a worldview of sacredness and care, as well as ecological and social well-being governed through deep democracy.

Climate Justice Alliance based on historical Just Transition principles developed by the Alliance informed by many members including the principles by the Just Transition Alliance, and the Indigenous Environmental Network and Movement Generation.

Reproductive labor encompasses all the work we do to create and sustain human life—from giving birth, parenting, and raising children to providing food, shelter, clothing, and care for people who rely on us to meet their physical and emotional needs. Reproductive labor encompasses building and maintaining familial and intimate relationships, broader communal ties, crisis planning and management, and passing on cultural knowledge and wisdom. Though this work implicates all of us, of all genders—and some aspects of this work have been commercialized by capitalism—the majority of it remains invisibilized, unpaid, and expected from bodies understood as women. This labor is neither recognized nor valued as work within the capitalist economy, enabling capitalists to accumulate massive wealth from feminized labor by not paying for it. The very concept of waged work in our present reality thus depends on, and simultaneously relies on the invisibility of, unwaged work.

Sacrifice Zones are communities that are poor and working class Black, Brown, multi-racial, white communities, and Indigenous Peoples whose health, wealth, and lives have been sacrificed to advance the profits of corporations that control polluting industries. These specifically include communities impacted by pollution hotspots created by ports, transportation centers, fossil fuel, chemical, manufacturing, mining, and industrial agriculture industries.

People’s Action based on the historical struggle of environmental justice and frontline communities fighting against extractive industries.

Translocal Organizing is a model of collective struggle that fosters the consolidation and diffusion of experiences, resources and wisdom across a given set of geographic space. Rather than viewing spaces of resistance as disconnected, translocalism advances a paradigm of interdependence that fosters a fusion of various local communities and movements. The desired outcomes include the cooperation of communities that are decentralized enough to address and dismantle local challenges, and centralized enough to effect change within larger geographic spaces both regionally and across state lines. Translocal organizing models provide communities with more power and greater ability to scale up and scale out their solutions while informing and influencing local and state governments, which can, in turn, leverage national transformations necessary to change the rules.