The Economic Realm: Regenerative Exchange

Economics should be about efficient allocation of resources to meet genuine needs while maintaining ecological and social health. Instead, it's become a tool for extraction, speculation, and concentration of wealth.

The Current Reality

Debt-based money, fractional reserve banking, stock market casinos, and planned obsolescence create artificial scarcity while concentrating wealth. Economic growth becomes the primary measure regardless of whether it actually improves wellbeing.

True Wealth

Real wealth is:

• Regenerative capacity: Healthy soil, clean water, biodiversity, social bonds
• Genuine skills: The ability to create value through knowledge and craft
• Resilient infrastructure: Systems that meet needs reliably
• Strong communities: Networks of mutual support and exchange

Money should be a tool for facilitating exchange, not a commodity to be hoarded or speculated upon.

Regenerative Economics

Alternative economic systems already exist:

• Mutual credit: Communities creating their own currency for local exchange
• Time banking: Trading skills and services based on time rather than arbitrary pricing
• Cooperatives: Worker-owned businesses that distribute profit and decision-making
• Gift economy: Voluntary exchange based on abundance and generosity
• Commons management: Shared resources governed by those who depend on them

The Call Forward

Peace Engineers experiment with and build regenerative economic systems. We demonstrate that exchange can circulate abundance rather than concentrate scarcity, and that true prosperity comes from strengthening the whole system.

The regenerative future runs on economic systems designed to serve life, distribute genuine wealth, and strengthen community resilience—economics as ecology of value exchange.