Regenerative Economics as a Pathway Forward for Humanity
Erin Axelrod of LIFT Economy on Practicing a Vision of Nonviolent Economics
On this episode of Nonviolence Radio, Michael and Stephanie begin with a discussion on Gandhian economics, highlighting its emphasis on simplicity, local self-reliance, and the moral dimensions of economic life. They then welcome Erin Axelrod from LIFT Economy, a worker-owned cooperative dedicated to accelerating the transition to a regenerative, just, and inclusive economy.
Together, they explore how economics is not just about policy or markets, but is deeply intertwined with philosophy, values, and daily practices. Erin shares insights into the “Next Economy” framework, the limitations of extractive capitalism, and the possibilities emerging through cooperative and regenerative models. The conversation underscores a powerful truth: that nonviolent movements cannot succeed without also transforming the economic structures that support violence and inequality. A truly nonviolent future, they argue, must include a reimagining of how we produce, exchange, and relate through our economies.
Transcript
Stephanie: Well greetings everybody, and welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I’m your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I’m here in the studio with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. And we are from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California, and our work is to help support the better understanding of nonviolence in our world so that people get rid of their misconceptions about it and start practicing it, start learning more about it and start seeing it around them when it happens. So that’s the point of our general mission in life and work with Metta and Nonviolence Radio. I wonder if you’d add something to that, Michael?
Michael: Only to say, Stephanie, that the way you presented it does give us a window into the fact that nonviolence is not just a technique that you invoke under certain circumstances, it’s really a whole theory of human reality. Who are we, how should we relate to one another? And, the more you understand it, the bigger it gets.
Stephanie: Yeah. I think I love that we’re starting off in this philosophical space because as we were coming over to KWMR, our mother station this morning to do this show, we were thinking about big life questions and we saw a stop sign, and then it said, stop genocide. Someone wrote genocide under it. And we looked at that, we said, yeah, that’s a good idea. And then we said, well, why not make that stop violence? Which is really a thesis that you have in your Search for a Nonviolent Future that we talk about all these different forms of violence, but we need to be talking about violence itself. So we said, why don’t we make that stop violence and then we were saying, well, wouldn’t it be nice to just be able to stop everything? Like, can we just stop? Can we just have 20 minutes where the world just, you know, stops for 20 minutes and we can all just take a breath and process everything and maybe make a different decision, right? This is something that I would love to see one day and in the best of circumstances. And then Michael saw a little sign that said, be prepared to stop. And so we were laughing at that. And then we were stuck in traffic line and we’re like, what is going on? And then we realized that that traffic sign wasn’t a philosophical prompt for us to think about stopping. It was like for us to stop driving the car. So we’re in a funny state of mind this morning. But that alludes to a story of the Buddha, right, this is also something that was what Michael and I were both thinking about as we were seeing these signs that say stop and stop violence. Which is that there was a bandit. Angulimala. And he’s named Angulimala, because he has people’s fingers around his neck, the mala of the fingers. And these are people that he’s robbed and harmed. And he sees the Buddha and he says to the Buddha, you know, “Stop.” And the Buddha says, “I’ve already stopped, you stop.” At which point Angulimala became one of his best disciples, which is also actually a very important part of nonviolence, isn’t it, Michael? That Angulimala became a very, ardent disciple of the Buddha. And even though having been a terrible, basically a terrible person before that.
Michael: Yeah, I mean, that underlying faith; that underlying all kinds of hideous behavior, there is a human being that can be redeemed. That, for us, has always been the core belief. That leads to all the nonviolent practices in the realm of economics, in the realm of conflict resolution, and in all the other ways that it applies. There is this idea that, as the Quakers used to say, there is that of God in every person.
Stephanie: I think they still say that.
Michael: There’s a lot of them. So they probably are saying that, and I’m not sorry at all, as Gandhi would say. Yeah, so when you pick up Gandhi’s thought, anywhere, it leads ultimately down to that basic belief, the belief in the regeneration, regenerability of the human being. And I just was noticing an article this morning, haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it said that we’re losing our faith in humanity. How do we get it back? I can’t imagine anything more important.
Stephanie: That’s why, when earlier in the year we put out a statement, that goes back to Gandhi, that he says, “I’ll never lose my faith in humanity.” And that it seems that part of the worst of the damage, to borrow a phrase from the, the late Joanna Macy, may her memory be a blessing, that the worst of the damage of all of this political violence that’s taking place in our country and throughout the world and the cruelty is really the damage to the human image and people losing faith. And what’s possible for regeneration and restoration of human dignity of right relationships with one another, with the earth, within ourselves. We call it “the third harmony.” So, I think it’s an important point, Michael, and I hope that our listeners will take some time to sort of meditate on that idea that where are the spaces where we’re losing our faith in humanity, and also the possibility, I think what’s beautiful about humanity and losing our faith in humanity is sometimes it only takes one person to restore that faith. And so you could be that person.
Michael: Yeah, because what you do in those cases is you hold up a mirror to the forgotten identity in the other person. And when they see your nobility, it resonates with the deep, hidden nobility inside them and evokes it, ideally, and that is exactly what a nonviolent interaction is about.
Stephanie: And for some reason, that also reminds me again, I guess I’m on a Buddhist kick this morning, but that there’s a line from the Dhammapada, I think it’s in the part of the Dhammapada called “The Elephant,” and it says, “people are people, often inconsiderate.” So how do we reconcile this kind of often inconsiderate behavior of humans with not losing our faith in humanity. What is that? Because it sounds like the Buddha doesn’t have faith in humanity.
Michael: That inconsiderate stuff is fatal. As long as we are, and I’m going to quote, use the term from Ken Wilber here, as long as we are flatlanders, meaning that we see behavior on the surface and we stop there; we don’t realize that, even in the most violent person, there is that core of human dignity within him or her. And as a matter of fact, all that violence is an attempt to recapture that dignity. So to use the terms of our late friend Marshall Rosenberg, the goals are never in conflict, but the means to achieve those goals often are. And that means that there is no such thing as an unresolvable conflict. Just let that sink in.
Stephanie, would you mind if I go back to something you said and flag it as a possible misunderstanding? You talked about wiping everything out for 20 minutes and starting over. It’s a very understandable impulse, but it can be misapplied, with very dangerous…
Stephanie: Yeah, I don’t mean that. That’s why I said in the best of circumstances, like if everyone can just… I think we see it across different movements at times, people say, let’s take a global minute of silence. Or something like, if we could just have everybody participate in a 20-minute space of rest, ceasefires, it’s the great vision. You know, all wars stop, they turn their swords into plowshares in those 20 minutes. All of it.
Michael: It makes me think of Mother Theresa going into Beirut to rescue some orphaned children, I think a lot of them with disabilities, and how this horrendous conflict, which seemed like nobody could stop it, it stopped, they stopped and waited for her to get her kids. Get out of the way and then they went right back at it.
Stephanie: She’s an original influencer, that woman. Michael, I want to flag something you said.
Michael: Uh-oh. Okay, I’m ready.
Stephanie: Okay, you said in the realm of economics and I think that’s really interesting the way that the human image ties into economics and in fact, I want to talk about economics today a little bit. So we live under a global capitalist system where everything that we do essentially ends up hurting somebody somewhere else along the line. So from our transportation to the minerals that we use for our computers to the haves and have nots. So if you’re doing everything right and then you have something, and somehow it’s taking away from others, it’s just, it’s wild, the inequalities that are part of the system that we’ve all, inherited and benefited from in a lot of ways. So I would love for you to, let’s think together, I’d love for you to think together with me about economics on today’s show. And the kind of new economics or Gandhian economics, there’s so many different kinds. I have a list here that I’d like to pull out from, you know, Gandhian economics, gift economy, new story economics, which I definitely want to talk about. And then we’re going to share an interview that we did with Erin Axelrod from LIFT Economy, which is an incredible organization that does consulting work on helping businesses prepare for the next economy and have really good values and good communication, and good tools and resources for doing business better. So we’ll have Erin on in a bit. So Michael, you are a scholar and I like to draw from you from time to time because otherwise what was the point of your classical education? So why don’t you give us a little bit of etymology for the term we use, “economy.”
Michael: Well that actually, it’s an interesting word. It did not occur in the ancient world. It’s a Greek term, but it’s a made-up Greek term because, it seems that the Greeks, despite their broad, deep outlook on life and their wonderful philosophies, the way that they started practically everything that worth going on, you know, healthcare, you name it, they had a version of it going and they were very…
Stephanie: It sounds like “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” the grandfather in that lake, everything like goes back to Greece.
Michael: Well, there’s a little chauvinism, perhaps in that remark, but practically everything does. But economics is not one of them. They don’t seem to have had a coherent theory about how economies work. Though many people have studied how the economics worked in ancient Greece, but, yeah, you’re asking about the term. It’s composed of two other words. “Oikos,” which means, homestead. It’s a very broad-reaching term. I mean, for example, when Odysseus comes back from his 20 years of knocking about in the outer world, in mythic world actually, comes back to the real world in Ithaca and has to clean things up and reestablish his domain; that domain of his is his oikos. So it’s not just house, it’s not just the building that he lives in, but it’s all the people living around who are part of his polity in some sense. So, and you know, if you look at a word like Beaverwick or any English place name that ends in -wick, that -wick is cognate with oikos, which started out as a “(w)oikos.” Alright, so now there’s more than you want to know.
Stephanie: Well, it makes, actually, it just makes me understand that home economics that we’ve had to take in seventh grade in middle school was redundant.
Michael: It’s a bit of a redundancy, you’re absolutely right. You get an A.
And then the other part of the word, it comes from a verb “nemo,” which again, is a very rich concept. Originally it seems to have meant the pasture. And, from pasture, it comes to mean habitual place that you go. And from there it starts to mean way of organizing or rules. So economics was composed sometime after the Greeks, I’m sorry, I don’t know when or by whom, it means how you run a household. Or how you run, however widely you want to understand oikos, your domain. So it’s originally, not just material. But, other modes of being that were involved originally. So it’s such a nice term.
Stephanie: Yeah, it is. Thank you. Everyone should know that, it’s quite important. And so Gandhian economics is a term that is passed around nonviolent circles quite a bit. And you’ll hear it at Metta, I mean, Gandhian nonviolence, Gandhian economics. So J.C. Kumarappa is really the kind of father of Gandhian economics, he coined the term. So Gandhian economics, it means economics based on nonviolent living essentially. What does it mean to you, Michael? Let’s unpack this idea, Gandhian economics.
Michael: It’s a wonderful term and I’m happy to unpack it as far as I can. There was a film, that’s pulled out of circulation I’m sorry to say, it was called “Gandhi’s India.” In that film. E.F. Schumacher, the author of “Small is Beautiful” and very important economic thinker, the late E.F. Schumacher, Fritz, as we called him; he appears in that film and he says, “I discovered that Gandhi was an economist,” and he talks about village economies where there is a balance between independence and interdependence. The village should be allowed to produce its basic needs, you know, food, clothing, shelter, but as Fritz said in this film, you can’t make a wristwatch in a village. So there’s a place…
Stephanie: Who needs a wristwatch in a village?
Michael: Well, in today’s world, you kind of do need one. Anyway, if we’re going to live in roughly the style that we want to live now, there’s a place for manufacturers. So, Gandhian economics started by rejecting the idea of a human being as we were speaking earlier, the human being as “ a rational actor, always seeking to maximize material self-interest.” Now, that’s the basis of what we call classical economic thinking. Adam Smith is responsible as far as most people. So what that leads to, and this is what Gandhi objected to, is that Western economic systems lead to, or are based on really what he called the multiplication of wants, and he was kind of horrified by that. I was horrified too long before I knew anything about Gandhi. I tried to take an economics course at NYU, you know, New York University. And in the middle of the course I tiptoed quietly out. I said, “These guys are crazy. They’re talking about indefinitely multiplying wants in a finite planet.That doesn’t work.”
Stephanie: Well. It’s really the basis of colonization and so you can’t take Gandhi away out of economics at all, can you? Because he was fighting against colonization.
Michael: That’s right. He didn’t start thinking about economics, though his relationship with Hermann Kallenbach probably led to some thinking along those lines. But no, he first started in decolonizing, first of all, the Indian community in South Africa and then India itself, when he felt strong enough. And then it led to his discovery that if people could be self-sufficient, you would not be able to exploit them.
Stephanie: I think people who study Gandhi know this. I’ll just repeat it though, the Indian freedom struggle was based on reducing the economic exploitation of India. So that’s why with the khadi or the cotton. They were producing cotton and then sending it to England, it was getting milled over there, then sent back to India, at which point Indians with their raw materials were then buying things back. Where other people were having jobs, Indians didn’t have jobs or money, and they had to buy expensive cloth in order to clothe themselves. And Gandhi, he said, let’s cut out the middleman and do it ourselves. So you cannot separate nonviolence from economic empowerment.
Michael: Well put. Well put Stephanie. Yeah, if you think about his overall strategies, his two biggest campaigns were salt and cloth. So food and clothing. And that taking cotton out of India, manufacturing it into clothing, and then selling it back to them at a high price was like, this is what colonialism was all about.
Stephanie: Yeah, and if we’re fighting, if we’re working against, you know, a capitalist system who can, for example, cut budgets from public funding for public broadcasting, these kinds of decisions that are being made where we’re being held hostage by the money that people are willing to give us, you know, we need to link our nonviolent movements to economic changes.
Michael: Yeah. So, he rejects the multiplication of wants and instead aims at the fulfillments of needs. And those needs would go beyond material needs to include the need for meaning, and the need for community. So there were basically two concepts that built his economic theory. One was swadeshi and the other was trusteeship.
Stephanie: Ah, swadeshi. Swadeshi means self, one’s own region. “Swa” means self; “deshi” region.
Michael: Right. Okay, good work. So when he went to Champaran, for example, his first major campaign in India, he extracted a commitment from the farmers to end caste discrimination and oppressive practices against women while he was launching his cooperative effort, and he promoted education, healthcare, and self-sufficiency whereby the villagers could produce their own clothes and food. So you see what a broad ranging approach it was. He was called in on one issue and he sees through that issue to understand the deep causality and he says, “No, we have to get rid of the whole thing. I’m not going to just fix this symptom and go back to my ashram or whatever.” So the other concept…
Stephanie, but I want to just say Zorba, the Greek; if we’re going to bring it all to the Greeks, what would he say Gandhi saw through it to the whole catastrophe.
Michael: “The whole catastrophe,” yeah. So, swadeshi is a wonderful concept and in a way there are some people who say that this was Gandhi’s basic discovery and you can really unpack almost everything from it. And I can understand that. But the other one was trusteeship. I mean, what is the relationship of a human being to an object? A possession, we say.
Stephanie: Well, it gives us meaning. It makes our lives worth living. We have objects. That’s our relationship is that it gives us meaning and happiness. What other point is there to life if not having things? Just kidding.
Michael: Well, gosh, Stephanie, I think I would say that what Gandhi would say is that you can use things but not own them. And again, this is basically a deep philosophical concept. Because the very beginning of the Isha Upanishad says, who owns anything? Really anything that we have the use of for awhile can be taken away from us in one way or another. So here’s where Gandhi really parts company with the socialists and communists, which a lot of people thought at first he was a communist, but no, he was not. He wouldn’t accept class warfare and he wouldn’t accept class-based revolution because he saw that it causes violence and disharmony. And he was interested in the preservation of human dignity rather than, or based upon a reasonable approach to material development. And so you could say there’s a distinction between the standard of living and the standard of life. And so trusteeship meant; while I don’t own anything, I use things at the sufferance of the community. And he said, don’t hold onto anything that you’re not using for the benefit of all.
Stephanie: Whereas the folk song says, Michael?
Michael: “Don’t you hold on to nothing too long.”
Stephanie: Yeah, that’s right. Well, you know, I’d love to bring in Erin Axelrod’s. perspective. And I think what’s important about that, and it ties into swadeshi, is that economics is a practice, it’s a way of life. And the more that we think of economics in terms of our way of life, the more that we create actually movements that are incorporating economic thinking into how we’re resisting the forces that are tearing apart the human fabric and tearing apart the human image. So there’s a lot more to say, I see you’re really itching to say something, Michael, what do you want?
Michael: Well you know, I just wanted to say that, it’s a new kind of economics, and I think people should pay more attention to Gandhian economic thinking, ala Fritz Schumacher.
Stephanie: Very nice. And I was also thinking of the Bible, you know, where one of those sermons of Jesus is like, don’t worry about what you’ll wear or what you’ll eat, just look at the lilies of the field. That they’re taken care of. Meaning if we live in harmony with one another and the earth, then that is sort of getting back to a kind of spiritual economy.
Michael: And they do say that one of the definitions of spiritual economy is getting away from scarcity. This idea that what we need in life is scarce and we have to fight for it, that leads to competition with others, and off you go.
Stephanie: Oh my goodness. Well, that’s a really tough conversation. I think we should continue it, but let’s bring up Erin Axelrod. So she’s with LIFT Economy, as mentioned, they’re a consulting organization/agency for what they’re calling the next economy. We got to talk to Erin a little bit about some of the work that LIFT Economy is doing and some of the deeper beliefs that she has that led her to the work that she’s doing, and I think it’s important to highlight people doing this work out there. So here’s Erin Axelrod.
Erin Axelrod: Well, I feel called to share that I grew up in unceded Coast Miwok territory raised by artist parents, and I feel that artists oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes tend to embody this notion that there’s more to life than just money. And of course the act of creating art can be such a powerful way to connect with that larger sense of purpose.
And I was very fortunate that my parents were very aligned with that sensibility of life being about giving back and the natural world and embracing the beauty that is all around us. And that sort of led me on this path of inquiry around permaculture, ecological design, agroforestry, agroecology.
And when I right out of college got a job with a permaculture-based nonprofit out of Petaluma called Daily Acts Organization, I just loved the work I was doing and this sense of mobilizing people around these community activation days where we would transform 10,000 square feet of lawn into an abundant food forest.
Transforming that lawn into biodiversity and food production and cracking the water bill by 80%. 80% water waste reduction, all in one fell swoop. And then I came to realize that a lot of what we were doing was made possible by the amazing generosity of volunteerism, but that it was only really happening with people on their weekends or on their off time, and the rest of their week spent, you know, these precious 40 hour work weeks was spent uplifting and pouring energy into the capitalist economy.
I thought, gosh, there’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a different way to actually have folks embody practices of regenerative economics in their livelihoods so that it really isn’t this bifurcation of our values from our work week, but that our work week can embody and exemplify a transformed economy that we know in our hearts is possible. So that’s how I got into it. And I left that nonprofit to apprentice with a worker-owned consultancy called LIFT Economy. And fast forward a decade later, I’m still with that consultancy now as a worker-owner.
Stephanie: I’d like to ask into this idea of regenerative economies some more for our listeners. Can you help us better understand what that is?
Erin: Yeah, where we are headed right now in terms of our current economic trajectory as a global human civilization, many, many would argue, is terminal. For people, for Homo sapiens. So this endless growth, overshooting, planetary boundaries and planetary limits, the extreme wealth chasm, the haves and the haves nots is inevitably going to lead to humans booting themselves off of the planet. And so the “next economy” that LIFT Economy refers to with that particular terminology is the one that is going to have to happen if humans are to stay here in this beautiful blue marble spinning in space, and you know, we have everything we need here in this incredible, diverse, complex, magical planet.
We haven’t even scratched the surface of what is possible in terms of a transformed economy that can meet high quality of life for the 9 billion people on this beautiful planet. And so the next economy will be one characterized by, democratic participation, it will be characterized by equity and justice in the way the resources are shared. It will be characterized by reparations, not just for Black Indigenous People of Color, but also reparations for the more than human species who we’ve extracted from. And repairing ecosystems. And I’m personally very motivated and inspired by that economy to happen sooner rather than later.
And you know, we’ve got a lot of very deeply grooved patterning to overcome from centuries of white supremacy, colonization, genocide and the exploitation of people and planet. All hands on deck. We need to mobilize towards that next economy. And it’s a polyculture of different approaches to get there.
Michael: Erin, I was one of the people that invited E.F. Schumacher to speak at campus. And he was very influenced by Gandhi and that actually… a bit of background here. I started to take an economics course when I was an undergraduate student at NYU studying literature and poetry and all of that. But I had to take one economics course. And I tiptoed out of that class thinking, you know, these people are crazy. They’re talking about endless exploitation on a limited planet. And it just didn’t make any sense. And it wasn’t until I heard from Fritz Schumacher and began to see that there were these alternatives that I got back into thinking economically. And so I would now like to throw out one term that comes from Gandhian economics. And ask you how it figures into the next economy thinking. And that term is localism. Take it away.
Erin: Well, Michael you are one ahead of me. I’ve actually never taken a formal economics course, and yet I am an economist by trade. So there you go. But I love this provocation around how localism plays in and yeah so just I guess defining terms, localism, probably many different people would define it differently, but I love this concept of a watershed to help us define localism or boundaries and movement generation. There’s an amazing worker-directed nonprofit that has published a popular zine on just transition and, and formulated a lot of frameworks that the climate justice movement uses. So they talk about this notion of bioregional governance. And when I think about localism, I think about realigning the way that we organize ourselves, the human social systems in accordance with the ecologies that we are embedded within. And that’s really what comes up for me when I think about localism. So it’s like, getting back into balance with where our water comes from. So that it’s not crossing artificial multi geographical boundaries, you know, through dams and pumps and pipes. Relocalizing where our water comes from. And then of course relocalizing where our food is coming from. And thinking… Rebecca Burgess out in Marin coined the term fibershed, thinking about where our clothing comes from. And one of the nuances that I like to bring in when I talk about localism is that this is not some hard and fast rule or some aspiration to achieve a kind of tokenizing or purist form of relocalization from an ego standpoint. But really because, if we stopped purchasing ethically fair-traded coffee or chocolate tomorrow, we would be left with a global economy that is still trying to overcome the ravages of colonization and exploitation without market mechanisms to help people meet human needs.
So it’s not as simple as just cutting off all global trade today. Which might not be very simple, but it could be– who knows what global calamities could facilitate that transition sooner rather than later, as we saw with the COVID pandemic lockdown. But that we need more creative polyculture solutions as bridges towards the vision that our globe could be a web of interconnected, self-reliant, intact living regenerative economies. And right now, because of the legacies of harm that I mentioned that I’ve been referencing so many communities, their ability to meet their basic human needs are compromised. In their own local bioregion. And so we need to remedy that at scale across the globe through a lot of creativity and innovation and also a return to old ways of doing things like sharing more, frankly, sharing more through our social capital networks, not just our financial capital networks.
Stephanie: I’m interested in thinking of economics as a practice as well as economics as policy. So from the standpoint of a practice, what would you recommend that people do to begin to engage with these ideas that you work with in consulting and that you’ve been thinking a lot about?
Erin: Oh gosh, Stephanie, I love this question because it is maybe 10% of my time that I spend thinking about economics as policy. Which is maybe quite different from the economists that your listeners are more familiar with, but I think of 90% of my kind of economic theory as practice and experimentation. What comes up for me a lot in my consulting work with organizations is, especially in the San Francisco Bay area, which is maybe where some of your listeners are based, I’m calling in right now from unceded Ohlone territory, and so many folks are struggling with really being beholden to the traps of capitalism, wherever they may find themselves in the socioeconomic positionality. And so what I mean when I refer to the traps of capitalism, it’s things like, well, I need to work a job to get a paycheck to pay for my rent or to pay for my healthcare costs. And I name rent, housing and healthcare, because those are pretty high in terms of the expense items that most people in this bioregion are facing. And across Turtle Island, so-called U.S. There are strategies, practices that are, by no means easy, but are accessible to people to try to mitigate the amount of money we spend on healthcare or housing.
I’ll take housing and I want to talk about different tiers. On the one hand, there’s systemic pieces, like you mentioned policy, but also systemic in terms of building different institutions. And I’ll give an example. There’s an organization called the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative. It’s a cooperative, it’s a multi-stakeholder cooperative that exists today in the Bay Area that is cooperatively buying commercial and residential properties in Oakland and Berkeley. Taking them permanently off of the speculative market so they will never again be bought or sold to generate profit for landlords and holding them in commons so that the rent for those properties actually goes down over time through collective stewardship of those… assets, if you will. And I hate to call land an asset, but here we are. It’s an institutional response to a systemic problem, which is that the speculative real estate market creates the high cost of housing that forces people into a dynamic where they have to sometimes even compromise their values in order to provide shelter, a basic need to their family.
So that’s more of a systemic solution. On a personal level, a practice could be, hey, instead of going and paying rent, I’m going to move back in with my family. Or, hey, I have a friend who has an extra room in their house that they own rather than paying a landlord who I don’t know, I’m going to pay her or them a moderate amount for the rent and then work trade a little bit on that house to share my time with them in exchange for meeting my housing need. And everything in between.
There’s so many other practices or strategies. Some of these we cover in a course that we offer called the Next Economy Living Course. And there’s another cohort that’s starting in September. But all of these practices when done by thousands or millions of people around the world, add up and make a difference in terms of very viable ways to reclaim control and reclaim agency over creating our own value rather than being beholden to the way that value is dictated by a power over mentality, over communities.
Michael: Erin, I’m finding this a very beautiful picture and I’d like to ask you this question; this is something that I’ve been thinking about now for a while. What is the magic ingredient that will create a tipping point such that these local experiments pull together and create a new order? Is that too huge of a question or what do you think? Have you been looking for something that would make all of these wonderful experiments and this wonderful thinking actually become prevalent and normalized?
Erin: I love the way you rephrased the question the second time around. The prevalent and normalization is definitely what I am going for as opposed to the notion that these strategies all need to be kind of employed in a centralized way. I really lean in towards this notion that, a polyculture approach, like a mycelial approach to seeding these solutions is probably going to be the way it’s going to happen. But to be honest, Michael, I feel very much with you in the unknown of, I don’t know what global events are going to precipitate some of these practices becoming more normalized or more prevalent. So, I feel very deeply humbled by your question because so much is unknown.
I’ll bring up a framework that I look to for inspiration, which is by Deborah Frieze and Meg Wheatley, which is sometimes referred to as the Two Curves model. And Deborah and Meg looked at systems changing and noticed that the more work that happens in what they call the hospicing out of the business as usual or the kind of endless growth model. So they define hospice work as this incredibly challenging work of helping to compassionately bring to an end what is no longer serving us, which is, you know, the limitless growth, the extractive economies. And it’s really hard work actually to like sit in an institution that is causing harm, and compassionately work within that organization to bring everyone in that institution along to help compost that institution in its entirety. And we’re seeing this a little bit in philanthropy with the movement around spend down, spending down the entirety of the endowment.
And then at the same time, there is midwifery work. This is the work of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, that they’re completely, transforming the paradigm of how we house ourselves. And of course there’s elements of East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative that would be more in the hospice realm. But there’s a lot of it that’s more in the midwifery realm. And so Deborah and Meg talked about how the more hospice work happens, the more visible the midwifery work is and that those two kinds of curves that create that system change really complement one another. And we can’t actually have one without the other.
Similar to a functioning ecosystem, we need so many different ways of creating this change. You know, I think about the war tax resistance movement, and I’m very inspired by that movement and so many other kinds of movements. I mean, the one that I’ll speak to as well, which is just, and I have a lot of problems in terms of somehow; permaculture has manifested and been co-opted in some cases, as not being true to the origins of the word and the original spirit or intent by which the movement was, you know, maybe conceived, but to its credit, I would argue that maybe the permaculture movement has been one of the largest global movements for transforming personal consumption patterns en masse across the globe. And it’s, millions of people at this point have transformed, some very over-consumptive patterns. Towards much more living in balance patterns to be in balance with the ecological limits of our planet. So I would say permaculture is one of my inspirations, but who knows what sort of catalytic event could create the shift of consciousness that you’re alluding to, Michael.
Michael: Bucky Fuller said, you don’t really disestablish a bad system. You build a new one. Then the bad system becomes irrelevant and shrinks away by itself. I am not sure I can completely believe that, but I do think that is the right way to go. And Gandhi talked about Constructive Program. And pointed out, for example, that you need to be able to make your own cloth and close yourself before you boycott British imports.
Erin: Well, Fannie Lou Hamer said the same thing, you know? She said, if you have 400 quarts of gumbo in your pantry, no one can tell you what to do or push you around.
Michael: In every field where we look at social change nowadays, there seems to be rising a consciousness of coalition building. So I’m wondering, do you work together with organizations and if so, how do you help each other? What forms does that take?
Erin: Yeah, absolutely, it’s core to what we do in terms of developing partnerships. We’re very conscious that we cannot do this work alone, or in siloed ways. And, I think we just have to balance that with trust that we also can’t know everything and we can’t be in conversation with everyone. And so we need to trust that, you know, there’s going to be a lot that occurs without our hand in it, and that’s great. And then, when we do have capacity, for example, we have a Next Economy MBA Program that’s a nine month online learning journey for aspiring entrepreneurs that covers nothing that we’ve ever seen in any formal accredited MBA program. So it’s a course that we created because we couldn’t find this curriculum anywhere else, and we thought it’s so desperately needed. You know, to cover things like self-set salaries, democratic decision making, nonviolent communication in a formal program where we talk about business and economics. And so we created that back in 2016. We now have 700 alumni, sorry, almost 800 alumni have gone through that program, and we’re welcoming our 15th cohort in the fall. And folks can just sign up for that. It’s not an application process, it’s just you just register and join and we need folks thinking more about their economic lives, how they can become activated and activists around their economic lives and domains. And so we have, for example, we have strategic partners for that program in terms of Post Growth Institute and Pachamama Alliance. And, many, many others that I won’t have the capacity to name here who share out about that program and we share out about their activities as an exchange. So, I love this prompt and, anyone who would like to strategically partner with us on any of their initiatives, I’m thinking there’s the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which I’m really inspired by.
Michael: I just find that so encouraging. I’m just really glad to hear all of that. And for my last question, Erin, I am going to ask something that is absolutely predictable and inevitable coming from us, and that is you mentioned nonviolent communication. Now for us, that’s just one application of a vast deep principle that we call nonviolence. And I am wondering to what extent that plays a role in the thinking and planning of LIFT Economy and the other organizations that you work with.
Erin: I love the question because we are a worker-owned organization, one worker, one vote, various perspectives. I’ll just speak from my own perspective that nonviolence is sort of a core driver. I think a lot about how to embody. principles of nonviolence in all the aspects of my life design. And, you know, paradoxically, I grapple with the reality that it is so hard to completely mitigate all forms of violence. Here we are, I’m talking to you on a computer. Now my computer was stolen and so I tried to replace it with a refurbished computer from a company called Framework that is creating infinitely repairable technology. I’m still using a battery and I’m still using you know, one place where violence I see emerging in a really strong way that many people are asking me because they don’t know how to get free of this is in terms of artificial intelligence and AI and how much energy consumption is rampant. Almost without our consent. We are getting, you know, all of our Google queries now, and research terms are mitigated by AI and there’s a huge ecological footprint associated with that. So even though there’s strategies like, you know, putting a little minus sign, minus AI when you run a Google search or creating your settings so that you’re not participating with the AI when you do those searches, but there’s so many ways in which it takes so much more energy for an individual to not do harm than to just go with the more violent, but more accessible approach of, you know, buying a Mac computer or, you know, using mined minerals. And what I would just say is, for me, it’s also a practice of nonviolence to give myself a lot of self-compassion and to say that I did not create these systems that I’ve inherited, and this is direct from my business partner, Phoenix Soleil, who is a nonviolent communication expert. And she runs courses on this through LIFT Economy that folks can sign up for. And she often says this also about racism. You know, we did not create the racialized system that we are born into and we can hold ourselves gently and compassionately to, you know, we’re not responsible for it, but we can, we do have agency and we can be responsible to interface in a way that seeks to dismantle it as best we can. And I feel that very strongly around our economic systems.
And the last thing I’ll say on this is that I try to surround myself with examples that animate my imagination around creative breakthroughs to get free of the places in my life that I’m looking at clearly, where violence is occurring and there are those examples. They’re chronically marginalized and invisibilized by our corporate-controlled media, but they’re out there. And one that I’ll name just to leave listeners on a very inspiring note is I’ve been having calls with the Possibility Alliance, which is an organization that started in Missouri but now is housed in Belfast, Maine. One of their core missions is to get free of complicit participation with empire and with the war economy, and they do that through very, very frugal voluntary simplicity. Back in Missouri, they sustained a population of 15 adults and kids on less than 10,000 a year, $10,000 US dollars a year through gift economy, through being frugal, through being off grid, and through, you know, deep downshifting and slowing down and lots and lots of political activism and mobilization and creating their own forms of entertainment and, you know, so on and so forth. And so they’re continuing that. lineage in Belfast, Maine, and they’re networked as a part of so many other institutions like them.
I’m thinking of Canticle Farm in the Bay Area, these kinds of pockets of people experimenting around how to live differently but not holding it as my individual burden to transform the system. But how do I as a collective embody nonviolent living under a system that is built on violence, it’s built on extraction, it’s built on militarism, it’s built on the war economy. How do I get free of that? It’s not an individual task, and I have an individual role in it.
Stephanie: Whoo. So that was Erin Axelrod from LIFT Economy. You can find out more about their work at lifteconomy.com.
Stephanie: We want to thank our guest, Erin Axelrod, from LIFT Economy, we want to thank our mother station, KWMR, to everyone who helps syndicate the shows, the Pacifica Network, Waging Nonviolence, and to you all of our listeners, thank you so much. And until the next time, everybody please take care of one another. We’ll be back in two weeks.