Suggested Reading
Regen Bridge is all about bridging the ecosystem towards greater coherence. Below we share some of the most impactful books we’ve read for the elements needed to drive forth a regenerative economy.
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki – How to empty our cups of our expertise and expertise in preparation for co-imagining and co-implementing.
The Limits to Growth by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William W. Behrens III. Our starting point. The case that economic growth cannot be dematerialized, that infinite growth on a finite planet is a self-terminating algorithm.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows. A way to shape our designing of new economic systems and how we might gently foster a truly regenerative society.
The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe by Jeremy Lent A complete recontextualization of the human predicament and approaching the universe as one vastly interdependent web, where “negentropy” is our clarion call and “Wendigo Inc.” the wrong turn we can choose to abandon.
Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist by Kate Raworth. The just, distributive and regenerative space within which human industry and civilization must learn to operate. Breaks the spell of the groupthink of neoclassical economics.
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. A Nobel winning meditation in behavioral economics and human decision making. The fallacy of homo-economicus exploded. The promise of applied behavioral science revealed.
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. On how money and ledgers shape our every experience and how market systems might be reconstituted based on different principles.
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. An exploration of the vast diversity of economics, social contracts and cultures that have run just fine on all sorts of agreements. Inspiration from the past to rediversify our futures.
Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Picketty. Summarized simply in the most well-researched way. Capital beats labor. Everywhere, but only according to our current rule sets.
Regenerative Economics: Revolutionary Thinking for a World in Crisis by John B. Fullerton. Few thinkers have done more to spread the ideas of a regenerative economy than John. Here our challenges, opportunities and terrain are mapped out. An important read to frame our time together.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall-Kimmerer. How do we learn from and integrate the wisdom of indigenous cultures into our attempts to transform our industrialized societies? With love, respect, care and the ten precepts of the “noble harvest,” Kimmerer reorients us towards awe, gratitude and the possibilities for equipoise and symbiosis with our more than human kin.
The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson is known as a science fiction writer but is in fact using near future scenarios to play out ideas as a political and economic theoretician. The Mars Trilogy is the birth of an ecological society where the primacy of biodiversity undergirds all aspects of a new society. In short this is a narrative in service to our own reinvention here on earth today.
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson has done his research and points out the shoots of the Third Horizon already here in this work of near future fiction. It’s a hopeful and rapid transformation of all humanity into an ecological culture, following on a climate change tragedy.
Creating Freedom by Raoul Martinez. Recontextualizes human agency, praise, blame and the ways in which we might imagine John Rawl’s “just society.” What do we owe to those born into less privileged spots in the birth lottery? How do we design so that nobody is ground down or left behind? What does it mean to maximize for the manifestation of human fulfillment, imagination and talents?