Getting Into the Doughnut: What Doughnut Economics Can Learn From History
The Long Now Foundation
At their kitchen table, economist Kate Raworth and social philosopher Roman Krznaric take up a question that joins their two bodies of work: what can Doughnut Economics learn from history? Raworth brings the Doughnut, her framework for meeting everyone's needs within the planet's limits, and describes how cities are adopting it. Krznaric, drawing on his book History for Tomorrow, answers each design challenge she raises with historical cases showing that the alternative has been done before. Their shared position is that the transformation is urgent and far from achieved, but that historical precedents and present-day pioneers give grounds for hope rather than optimism.
The Shape of Progress We Inherited
Raworth starts with what she calls one of the deepest paradigms of inherited economics: the shape of progress. Politicians' speeches and their economists' advice rest on an image that is rarely drawn, the curve of endless exponential GDP growth. She points out that growth is prescribed for every country, however rich, as the answer to its problems. Drawn out, the curve "goes up through the ceiling," and she asks where it could possibly end.
In her account, the 20th century was dominated by this goal. It also left extreme inequality, nationally and globally, and a deeply degraded living planet. She argues it is time for a new shape of progress.
The Doughnut as an Alternative
Her proposed shape is a doughnut. Imagine humanity's use of Earth's resources radiating outward from the centre. The hole in the middle is where people fall short on the essentials of life, such as health, education, housing, food, water and equity. These 12 social dimensions are drawn from the Sustainable Development Goals, so every government has already agreed that no one should be left in the hole. Raworth notes that this part of the picture fitted the 20th-century vision reasonably well. In labour-intensive economies, growth meant wages that let families afford things and let governments provide essentials.
What we now know, she says, is that meeting needs this way also pressures the planet's life-supporting systems. Withdrawing water, converting forests to farmland, building cities, burning fossil fuels and applying fertilisers all push against an ecological ceiling. That ceiling is made up of the nine planetary boundaries that Earth system scientists have recognised since 2009, including a stable climate, fertile soils, healthy oceans, abundant biodiversity and a protective ozone layer.
The goal, then, is to leave no one in the hole without overshooting Earth's limits. This means thriving in balance rather than growing endlessly. Raworth compares it to bodily health, which depends on enough food, water and warmth, but not too much of any. She asks whether that intuition can carry over to planetary health. Could low-income countries meet their people's needs without overshooting boundaries as almost all nations before them did? Could middle-income nations reorient while coming back within limits? Could high-income nations massively reduce their overshoot?
The starting point is far from this goal. Billions of people fall short on every social dimension, in rich and poor countries alike. Scientists now say humanity has overshot seven of the nine planetary boundaries. Last century's economists never saw this picture, Raworth says, so their theories should not be expected to solve it. The same goes for last century's policies, business designs and ideas of what thriving means.
Why History, and Why Positive History
Krznaric calls the Doughnut the fundamental framework for all his thinking. His question is what it will take to get into that space, and what history can teach about doing so. He considers history one of our most undervalued resources for thinking about the future. Politicians, in his view, are trapped in "the tyranny of the now," focused on the next election or poll, or hoping technology will rescue civilisation. A culture of the "longer now" should mean imagining deep pasts as well as long futures.
Applied history is not new, he notes. The idea runs back to Thucydides and the 14th-century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun. Two centuries ago Goethe wrote that he who cannot draw on 3,000 years is living from hand to mouth. Usually, though, history is mined for warnings, as in the line about those who forget the past being condemned to repeat it. Krznaric's research convinced him that inspiration lies just as much in what went right: times when societies rose up, often against the odds, to overcome crises and injustices. Facing a polycrisis of climate emergency, AI risks and threats to democracy, he asks how we can "bend rather than break." Getting into the Doughnut is central to that, which means understanding the design traits economies need and then asking what history offers.
Redesign One: From Degenerative to Regenerative
Raworth argues that economies must be redesigned away from endless growth toward two dynamics: regenerative and distributive by design.
Industrial systems today are linear and degenerative. They take fish, timber, fossil fuels and minerals, turn them into products often used once, and throw them away, spewing waste into air, water and soil. This, she says, is what pushes us daily over the planetary boundaries. The alternative is a cyclical process in which resources are used again and again, more carefully, collectively, creatively and slowly.
She distinguishes two kinds of resources. Biological nutrients such as wood, food and fibre follow nature's own cycle, in which nothing is wasted and everything feeds the next process. Because those cycles have been so degraded, the task is to regenerate them. Technical nutrients such as metals, plastics and ceramics will not decompose naturally. For these, we must mimic nature by maintaining, repairing, refurbishing and reusing, and only ultimately recycling, "because there is no away." Running both loops on renewable energy, with a lot of "high-touch human care" and skilled, creative work, is what she calls the circular economy.
The reality check is that the world's material use is currently only about 7% circular, and that share is falling. Circularity looks beautiful, she says, but close to impossible.
Edo Japan as a Circular Economy at Scale
Krznaric replies that history opens the imagination by showing circular economies that worked at large scale. He takes listeners to the Nihonbashi bridge in Edo, now Tokyo, around 1750 under the Tokugawa shogunate. Edo had more than a million people, far larger than London or Paris at the time. It also ran what we would now call a circular economy, where almost everything was reused, repaired, repurposed and recycled.
Japan's policy of not trading with the outside world caused shortages of wood and cotton. One result was boro, meaning "tattered rags": patchwork garments sewn from old cotton and passed down the generations. Krznaric wears one during the talk that is over 100 years old. A kimono might become pajamas once worn, then nappies, then cleaning cloths, and finally fuel. Edo had over a thousand circular businesses. These ranged from collecting candle-wax drippings for remoulding to down-and-out samurai repairing umbrellas. Traders even paid for human waste and sold it as agricultural fertiliser. Strict timber rationing was introduced to restore depleted old-growth forests.
Krznaric calls this one of the world's first large-scale low-waste, low-carbon ecological civilisations. He stresses that it was no utopia, since it had feudal and patriarchal inequalities. Still, he sees it as evidence that economies can be driven by a deep culture of sustainability rather than the "ecological blindness and chronic wastefulness of consumer capitalism." Under what he playfully calls "Edonomics," standard smartphones would be phased out. These use many elements of the periodic table and are often discarded in under three years. Only modular phones with replaceable screens and batteries and recycled materials would be allowed on sale. He adds that Edo, like the ancestral circular economy of pre-colonial Hawaii, shows radical sustainability can coexist with cultural flourishing. The same society produced Hiroshige's art, Bashō's poetry and a thriving sumo culture.
Redesign Two: From Divisive to Distributive
Raworth turns to the second dynamic. Over the last decade, she says, more than half of newly generated global wealth went to the richest 1%, and the number of billionaires more than doubled. Inequality within and between countries has been supercharged by the pandemic and by digitalisation. In her view, getting into the Doughnut in such an unequal world is not feasible.
She argues that post-tax redistribution will never be enough. The deeper question is predistribution: who owns and governs the sources of wealth creation? Land and housing can be speculative assets for extracting maximum rent. They can also be held as communal value through community ownership, civic ownership or cooperatives that keep value in perpetuity. Enterprises can be dominated by shareholder-owned corporations chasing quarterly returns. Alternatively, there can be room for family-owned, cooperative, employee-owned and, increasingly, steward-owned firms. Citing Marjorie Kelly's work on next-generation enterprise design, Raworth describes stewardship as separating an enterprise's capacity to generate regenerative and distributive outcomes from owners' demands to extract value.
She also points to commoning as studied by Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel economics prize for showing a possible "triumph of the commons" instead of the tragedy asserted since the 1960s. Ostrom found that successful commoning communities broadly followed eight core design principles. These include a strong group identity and shared purpose, fair and inclusive decision-making, monitoring of agreed behaviour, fair distribution of costs and benefits, and sanctions and rewards. A commons, Raworth stresses, is "not a free-for-all" but a carefully stewarded set of rules. Today it is seen as a niche pushing back against market dominance. She asks whether history offers precedents for commons running enterprises, land, housing and utilities such as water and electricity.
The Tribunal of Waters in Valencia
Krznaric takes up water. Many of the world's big cities face acute water shortages in the coming years, including Los Angeles, Cairo, Jakarta and São Paulo, and rationing has already hit places like Barcelona and Delhi. He notes that only one in every 10,000 drops of water on the planet is easily accessible fresh water in lakes and rivers.
His example is the Tribunal de las Aguas, the Tribunal of Waters, in Valencia. Every Thursday at noon, outside the west door of the cathedral, eight black-cloaked figures sit in a semicircle beneath the stone apostles. He has watched this himself as a tourist. They are democratically elected by more than 20,000 local farmers who collectively manage the scarce water of Valencia's agricultural hinterland, the source of oranges, asparagus and avocados. Over centuries, the farmers developed rules to manage the water fairly and sustainably across generations, which he calls "very much a long now kind of institution." Krznaric says records of a tribunal meeting can be traced to before the 13th century. If a farmer breaks the rules, for example by taking too much water or neglecting the irrigation canal, they face a public hearing and may be fined on the spot.
Ostrom studied this tribunal in Governing the Commons, alongside cases like Swiss forestry and West African fisheries. Krznaric says she was "quite geeky" about Valencia, analysing in detail how the design principles operated there, down to the fines. He calls it not a miracle of the commons, since such arrangements are so common worldwide, and evidence that Doughnut Economics has deep historical roots rather than being "pie in the sky." Raworth's rejoinder: "It's not pie in the sky, it's doughnut right here now."
The Doughnut in Cities Today
Raworth reports that over 50 municipalities, districts, states and cities have embedded the Doughnut's concepts and visuals into their strategies and policies.
Amsterdam was first, in April 2020, at the height of the Covid crisis. It put the Doughnut at the heart of its ambition to be 50% circular by 2030 and 100% circular by 2050. Raworth likens this to "aiming for the moon" without yet knowing how to get there. When critics said circular building and fully electric transport were too expensive, the city began using an "avoided cost" methodology. It asks how much will be saved in future by investing now, given the crises and costs coming if nothing changes. Asked that way, the question gets a very different answer and pulls long-term thinking into the present.
A French city, whose name is garbled in the recording, set a vision in 2022. A child born there that year should, by age 18 in 2040, be living in an ecologically safe and socially just city. The city has been planting trees, making streets absorb water against flash floods and decarbonising, with broad public participation. In California, a civic movement rather than the state has formed the California Doughnut Economics Coalition to build a state-level Doughnut showing shortfalls and overshoot. A city in Malaysia, a middle-income country, is asking what regenerative and distributive development would look like from where it stands.
A recurring theme, Raworth says, is that city councils come back to Doughnut Economics Action Lab saying they must change the deep design of their own institutions. They work in silos and are caught by institutional inertia. She asks Krznaric what history suggests about governance and decision-making.
Alternative Democracies: Assembly Government
Krznaric, a political scientist by background, argues that sustainability targets achieve little if political institutions stay locked in short-term cycles and narrow national self-interest. Representative government, in which we mark a ballot every few years and leave the rest to politicians, is only one historical model. Writing his book, he was struck by how often he found alternatives better suited to getting into the Doughnut.
One is assembly government. British colonialists entering Igbo lands in 19th-century Nigeria looked for kings and rulers and found none. Igbo communities governed themselves through neighbourhood or village councils where men and women made decisions together, usually by consensus. Some decisions were delegated upward, for example to councils of elders. Between 1524 and 1799, a Swiss republic known as the Free State of the Three Leagues had around 250 neighbourhood councils. These sent delegates, more like messengers than representatives, to commune level, with a federal assembly meeting a couple of times a year.
A similar structure exists today in the Kurdish-controlled region of Syria known as Rojava. It improves on the Swiss version, where only men participated: every neighbourhood council has a male and a female co-chair. Krznaric adds, citing what someone recently told him, that in many parts of Rojava neighbourhood meetings do not start until the first woman speaks. Delegates are sent up the layers for bigger decisions such as national defence.
He argues such models matter because representative systems have systematically failed on climate. Global carbon emissions have more than doubled since the 1992 Rio summit. Trust in traditional parties has also declined, and people are turning to anti-system far-right populism in America and Europe.
Alternative Democracies: Sortition and Citizens' Assemblies
The second model is sortition, choosing officials by lottery, as juries are chosen today. Krznaric cites ancient China, parts of Indigenous India, and most famously Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. There, a randomly selected Council of 500, the boulē, served as the equivalent of a parliament for a couple of hundred years, though only men could take part and slaves and immigrants were excluded.
He sees sortition reviving in today's "deliberative wave" of citizens' assemblies. The best-known case is Ireland in 2017. Around 100 randomly selected citizens, balanced for gender, geography, ethnicity and age, met over several weekends across several months to deliberate on abortion. They recommended a constitutional referendum, which passed. Hundreds of assemblies have since been held across Europe and North America on climate, ageing populations and AI. In his view, ordinary citizens, unlike politicians "in hock to corporate lobbyists," are more likely to back transformative plans because they think about the town their children and grandchildren will grow up in. He would like to replace Britain's House of Lords with a house of citizens selected by lot.
Raworth links this to Doughnut practice. Amsterdam held a climate assembly, and an elected official backing it said she wanted residents to take the ambitious decisions politicians find so hard within the electoral process. The German town of Bad Nauheim randomly selected a diverse group of residents to spend several weekends creating the town's own Doughnut. Raworth says the Doughnut's visual simplicity invites this kind of participation. Krznaric adds that local, participatory decision-making also guards against capture, to which centralised systems are vulnerable from "strong men politicians and tech guru oligarchs."
The Problem of Speed and Scale
Raworth then states the central dilemma. In the five years since Doughnut Economics Action Lab launched, 50 local governments have embedded the Doughnut, more than 90 are exploring it, and over 60 community networks have formed, from Berlin to California to Brazil. All of it is bottom-up and self-funded; "no one's funding this," she says. Yet it is a tiny fraction of the places that need to change, and nowhere near the speed and scale required. She asks when in history ideas have spread at the speed the times demand.
The Disruption Nexus
Krznaric says this frustration drove much of his book. Financial crashes and melting ice sheets come and go without the system changing. He rejects Marxist-style "iron laws" of history but sees patterns, as Ostrom did. One he calls the disruption nexus, a model of rapid change outside extremes like war or pandemic, when governments sometimes act radically. It is a triangle of three elements: a crisis such as heatwaves, droughts or financial collapse; disruptive movements that amplify the crisis and put it on the political agenda; and ideas or models offering an alternative.
He applies it to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The crisis was the East German leadership's turmoil over how to respond to Gorbachev's reforms. The ideas were old ones: democratic freedoms, freedom of movement and speech. The movements were the Leipzig uprisings in October and the final wave in November that tipped the system. Protests in Berlin had gone on for years without effect, he notes, because the three elements had not converged. Sometimes only two appear. In 2008 there was the crash and the Occupy movement spreading from Zuccotti Park, but in his analysis what was missing were new economic models like Doughnut Economics and wellbeing economics, which have since become far more central to public debate.
Disruptive Movements and the Abolition of Slavery
Krznaric dwells on the movement element with the case of British abolition. In the 1820s, over 700,000 enslaved people worked on British-owned sugar plantations in the West Indies. Planters and financiers, he says, used arguments strikingly like those of today's fossil fuel executives. They conceded slavery was morally questionable but warned that ending it too fast could cause economic collapse, so it should be phased out over decades. The abolitionists themselves were organised as the Society for Mitigating and Gradually Abolishing the State of Slavery. "The name said it all," he remarks. Their reformist lobbying and pamphleteering made little headway.
The turning point, in his account, was the 1831 Jamaica slave revolt, in which over 20,000 enslaved people rose up and set fire to more than 200 plantations. The revolt was brutally crushed, but it panicked the British establishment into fearing the loss of Jamaica. Krznaric says multiple studies show it tipped the scales toward the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Without this radical flank, abolition might have taken decades longer if left to the reformist white elite.
He places today's criticised climate movements, such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, in this lineage. The lineage runs through the Jamaican rebels, the suffragettes, the Indian independence movement and US civil rights activists, all of whom shifted the Overton window, sometimes by breaking rules and laws. The tragedy, he says, is that figures like Emmeline Pankhurst and Martin Luther King Jr. are celebrated in school textbooks while their modern equivalents are "demonised by the press" and "criminalised by the police." "It's like we've learned nothing from history."
He describes himself as not naturally disruptive, someone happiest in his study or in old libraries. What he found in those libraries led him to lie in the road outside Parliament with his teenage daughter, exasperated by the government's glacial pace on climate. He acknowledges this annoys commuters but argues that inaction will infuriate future generations more, and that he can think of no better way to be a good ancestor. It is "too late" and "too reckless," he says, to leave the crisis "to simmer on the low flame of gradualism." He is clear that disruption is not the only thing needed. Lobbying, books and art matter too, but some element of disruption is necessary.
Raworth connects this to Regen Melbourne, founded after devastating fires in the region. Its founder told her they had "literally burned to the ground" their home, which made them conclude that the system did not work. They built a movement with the Doughnut at its heart. It is an example of crisis meeting ideas, and she adds the hope that we need not wait for too many more crises.
Wise Boundaries and Peer-to-Peer Permission
Raworth places the Doughnut among other new economic ideas, including regenerative and wellbeing economics. These sit alongside long-standing Indigenous economic ideas such as ubuntu, buen vivir and Hawaiian aloha, and different people will find different entry points. She addresses a common objection: people like the idea but dislike boundaries and want to break through them. Some boundaries deserve breaking, she agrees, like the glass ceiling of gender, race and class. Others are wise boundaries that protect the conditions of life. No parent of a one-month-old with a 40° fever urges the baby to break through that boundary; everyone acts to bring the temperature back into the range of health. The Doughnut's boundaries of human rights and planetary integrity, she argues, can unleash creativity in the space between them.
What sustains her is what she calls peer-to-peer inspiration and permission. When Amsterdam's vice mayor puts Doughnut Economics at the heart of policy, other mayors see someone like them doing what they thought impossible. That, she says, is the moment of permission and the source of possible momentum.
Hope, Not Optimism
Krznaric closes by distinguishing optimism from hope. Optimism is the glass-half-full assumption that things will be fine despite the evidence. He does not think things will be fine under business as usual, with planetary boundaries being breached and social foundations unmet. Hope, for him, means commitment to values and vision even against the odds, and history's many positive examples give him genuine hope that things need not be this way. He cites Howard Zinn's view that the great leaps in social evolution came from those who "acted as if" change were possible, such as those resisting colonialism in India. He also cites Slavoj Žižek's remark that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Historical precedents and today's Doughnut initiatives, he argues, help make fundamentally different systems imaginable. He warns against "hopium," hope without action, and ends with the Māori proverb kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua: "I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past."
The conversation leaves its central tension open. The ideas are spreading from the bottom up, and history shows that circular economies, durable commons, participatory democracy and rapid change driven by disruptive movements have all happened before. Whether Doughnut Economics can spread at the speed and scale the moment demands remains, by Raworth's own account, unresolved.
[Music]
Hello, I'm Rebecca Lendl, executive director here at the Long Now Foundation. We have a really special Long Now Talk for you today with social philosopher Roman Krznaric and renegade economist Kate Raworth. Both Roman and Kate are brilliant thinkers and adventurous communicators, so today we'll get to take a deep dive with them into how we can survive and thrive by looking to the past for clues on how we can build more regenerative frameworks.
Now, the breadth and depth of their work is really stunning, which means they're uncovering these dynamic insights from history, looking at peak moments when we've been capable of extraordinary recalibrations, and how these insights can open up imaginative possibilities for our futures. We'll get into some of the big civilizational aspects of their work along with the very practical ones, so everything from how we can better understand complex adaptive systems to what we can do tomorrow.
But most importantly, especially right now, their work is full of radical hope: the idea that to dislodge prevailing models we must propose new ones, that social innovation will be as important as technological innovation in transforming the fundamental paradigms in which we operate. With that, over to you, Roman and Kate.
Hello, I'm Kate Raworth. And I'm Roman Krznaric. And welcome to our kitchen table. We have had many conversations here about the connections and the synergy between our work, mine on Doughnut Economics and mine on the lessons of history, which I've been exploring through a recent book called History for Tomorrow. And today we're going to look at the synergies between our work, looking at a particular question, which is: what can Doughnut Economics learn from history?
So let's start with one of the deepest paradigms of the economics we've inherited. It's the shape of progress. What is the shape of progress that's written into our minds by the 20th-century economic inheritance? It sits behind every politician's speech and the advice of their economists, but it's never usually drawn, so I want to make it visible. It is the shape of endless growth, exponential, measured of course in terms of GDP, the gross domestic product of a country.
And let's just note that this isn't something that's been wished only for low-income countries; no matter how rich a nation already is, its politicians and their economists tell us that the solution to its problems lies in yet more growth, endlessly. You won't have failed to notice that this goes up through the ceiling, and we have to ask: where can it possibly end?
The 20th century was dominated by this shape of progress, apparently, and yet we also know so much more, that this has not been the story that the 20th century left us with. We've had extraordinary levels of inequalities amplified nationally and globally, and of course we are deeply degrading this living planet on which all our lives, all life, depends. So I think it's time to start with a new shape of progress, and I have one that I can propose. Yes, it looks like a doughnut; this is why it's called Doughnut Economics.
So seeing this image, if you think of humanity's use of Earth's resources radiating out from the center of a doughnut-shaped picture, the kind with a hole in the middle, then the space in the hole in the middle of the doughnut, that's a place where people are left falling short on the essentials of life. That is where people do not have the resources they need for health and education, housing, food, water, equity. These 12 social dimensions are crowdsourced from the Sustainable Development Goals, which means all the governments in the world have already agreed that every person in the world has a right not to be left in that hole.
You could say that was actually aligned with the 20th-century vision in economies that were labor-intensive: if the economy is growing, then workers are getting wages, they can afford things for their families, the government can provide for essentials. But now we know too much. We know that at the same time that we use income to seek to meet our needs and wants and get everyone over this social foundation, we also start to put pressure on the life-supporting systems of this planet. We withdraw water from lakes and rivers, convert forests into farmland, build cities, burn fossil fuels, apply fertilizers.
We have been putting pressure on this ecological ceiling, which is made up of the nine planetary boundaries recognized by Earth system scientists since 2009 as what they believe are the critical life-supporting systems that make life work on this planet, from a stable climate to fertile soils, healthy oceans, abundant biodiversity, a protective ozone layer overhead.
So the shape of progress is to leave no one in the hole without overshooting Earth's limits. It's a completely different shape from the 20th-century vision of this endless growth. It's about thriving in balance. And actually we can feel it like this, if you do it with your hands; it's like a heartbeat. And I think that crucially takes us to something we profoundly know: that in our own bodies, health is about being in balance, with enough food, enough water, warmth, heat, but not too much of any of these things. So we know in our bodies that health lies in balance. Can we take from what we deeply know of bodily health to planetary health and reimagine the shape of progress in the global economy?
Can we enable low-income countries to meet the needs of all their people without overshooting planetary boundaries in the way that almost all nations before them have done? Could middle-income nations utterly reorient to meet the needs of their people while already coming back within planetary boundaries? Could high-income nations massively reduce their overshoot of the planet?
If this is a vision for thriving, meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet, the deep challenge is that we are so far from this right now, as all the red quantification in this image shows. Billions of people worldwide are falling short on the essentials of life; on every one of those social dimensions there are people falling short, in countries rich and poor. And yet we've already overshot not only six but now seven, the scientists tell us, of these nine planetary boundaries. So this is the starting point for transformation.
And let's just remind ourselves that last century's economists never saw this, so why would we expect their economic theories to solve for this problem? Last century's politicians didn't design policies in light of this. Last century's businesses were not designed in the context of this reality, nor were last century's lifestyle aspirations, what we thought thriving means. So what kind of mindset, what kind of inspirations could give us even half a chance of getting there?
Yeah, well, for me the doughnut is the fundamental framework for all my thinking, all my writing, and I believe that it is the aspiration we should be facing as humanity. And the question I've been asking myself recently is: what is it going to take to get in there? And particularly, what can history teach us about getting into that doughnut-shaped space? Because I believe that history is one of our most undervalued resources for thinking about the future of humanity, and we have vast amounts of the stuff to tap into.
And yet if you look at our politicians and policymakers, they are so trapped in the tyranny of the now. They're looking at the next election, they're looking at the latest opinion poll, or they're crossing their fingers and hoping that new technologies will come to our civilizational rescue. And the idea of creating a culture of a longer now, which I fundamentally believe in, is partly about looking forward, far ahead in time, imagining long futures. It also has to be about imagining deep pasts and drawing on the wisdom of past generations.
And that idea of learning from history, what's sometimes called applied history, is far from new. It's an idea that goes back to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. It can be found in the writings of the 14th-century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun. Two centuries ago the German writer Goethe said, "He who cannot draw on 3,000 years is living from hand to mouth."
But typically, when we're trying to draw lessons from history, we focus on the warnings of the past, captured in that famous aphorism that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But from the research that I've done on my latest book, I've discovered just how much inspiration can be found in positive examples and stories of what's gone right, not only in the cautionary tales of what's gone wrong. Time and again our societies and civilizations have risen up, often against the odds, to overcome crises and tackle injustices.
And I think here we are in an age of extreme turbulence in the 21st century. We've got the polycrisis, we've got the climate emergency, we've got risks from AI, threats to democracy. The question here is: how can we bend rather than break as we face this turbulence of our era? And I think that raises real questions, because in order to bend rather than break, clearly getting into the doughnut is a fundamental piece of that puzzle, and we need to understand what are the different design traits our economies need to have to get into that doughnut-shaped space, and then subsequently ask what history can help us, take us there.
Okay, but if we're going to bend, not break, to get into this we definitely need to bend this, not break, and there's a real threat that we break. So we need to profoundly redesign our economies. Let's pick that up. I think we need to redesign them away from pursuing endless growth, which is so deeply written into the political narrative still today of politicians who keep selling us this utterly outdated shape of progress. We need to move away from pursuing endless growth towards two very different dynamics of our economies. I believe we need to create economies that are regenerative and distributive by design.
So just picking up the first of those, a little bit of hosepipe again. We have inherited deeply linear, degenerative industrial systems. For centuries we have been taking from Earth's resources, taking fish from the sea, timber from the forest, fossil fuels from the ground, minerals from the mountains, sticking them in the pipe of production, making them into stuff we want, using it often only once, and then at the other end throwing it away and spewing out the waste and pollution into the atmosphere, into the air, into the soil.
This linear degenerative process, this is what is running down the life-support systems of our planet. This is what pushes us daily over those planetary boundaries. So linear degenerative design is devastating to us. We have to turn this linear process into a circular or cyclical regenerative one, where resources aren't used up; they're used again and again, far more carefully, collectively, more creatively and slowly.
And one of the first insights we have to make actually is to recognize that there are fundamentally two kinds of resources in the world: the biological nutrients and technical nutrients. So on the biological cycle, all the wood, the food, the fiber that we consume, this is nature's genius. This is how nature works: she takes the building blocks of life and makes them into things and then decomposes them and reuses them continually, again and again. In nature there is no throwing things away; there is no such thing as waste. It's all food for the next process. But we have so degraded nature's cycles that we need to regenerate, restore nature's ability to make these processes, so that she can sustain the conditions conducive to life.
And then on the technical side, the materials that we've made, like metals, plastics, ceramics, things that have come from nature but we've transformed them so they won't decompose naturally if we were to return them to the Earth, we have to mimic those cycles of nature by first of all maintaining and repairing and restoring and refurbishing and reusing, and only ultimately recycling, but not throwing things away, because there is no away.
So this is what they call the circular economy, on both of these loops together. And by recognizing how we need to transform our industries to work with both of these loops, running on renewable sources of energy, with a lot of high-touch human care, there is work, skillful creative work, along all these processes, and deep redesign of the things we use. This would begin to take us towards a circular and regenerative economy.
But it sounds beautiful, and yet right now in the world, the world's use of materials is far less than even 10%; it's measured at something like 7% and falling. So even though we can aspire to circularity, it's got a beauty about it, and yet look at the world right now: it seems like an impossibility that we could ever actually create economies that live this way.
And this is exactly where history comes in, because I think it in a way opens our imaginations to a different way of doing things, different ways of doing our politics, our culture, but crucially our economics as well. And I think one place you can go to when you're thinking about the circular economy and whether it's actually feasible is to look back at the past, at moments where we've created circular economies at large scale, to show that it can be done.
And I think a great place to go to is 18th-century Japan. Imagine you're standing on the old wooden Nihonbashi bridge in the ancient Japanese city of Edo, now known as Tokyo. It's around 1750, in the era of the Tokugawa shogun. People are chatting, laborers are pushing cartloads of rice, seafood traders are rushing across to the fish market. Now, Edo wasn't just remarkable for being a huge city of over a million people, so far larger than London or Paris at the time. It was also remarkable because it operated what we would today call a circular economy, where almost everything was reused, repaired, repurposed and recycled.
So Japan's policy at the time of not trading with the outside world led to shortages of precious resources like wood and cotton. So a tradition of patchwork developed, known as boro, meaning tattered rags, where fragments of old cotton were sewn together into garments that were then passed down the generations, just like this one I'm wearing, which is over 100 years old. You might have a kimono, and when the cloth was worn out you would turn it into pajamas, then you would cut it up into nappies or diapers, then you would turn it into cleaning cloths, and finally you would burn it as fuel.
Edo at the time, in the 18th century, had over a thousand circular businesses, from collecting used candle wax drippings to be remolded, to down-and-out samurai repairing old umbrellas. Traders would even pay you for your human waste and then sell it on as agricultural fertilizer. And strict timber rationing rules were also introduced to restore the nation's depleted old-growth forests. So this was actually one of the world's first large-scale examples of a low-waste, low-carbon ecological civilization.
But it's important to remember that Edo Japan was certainly not a utopia, having feudal and patriarchal inequalities. Yet 300 years on, it offers hope that we can create economies today that are driven not by the ecological blindness and chronic wastefulness of consumer capitalism but by a deep culture of sustainability.
If we were going to adopt an economic mindset of what you could call Edonomics, we would rapidly phase out the sale of products like standard smartphones, which use over the elements of the periodic table and are often discarded after less than 3 years, and instead we'd introduce regenerative standards, so the only phones permitted for sale would be modular by design, with easily replaceable screens and batteries, and they would have recycled metals and other materials in them. That would be pretty good, I think.
But I think what's also really extraordinary about Edo is that, like many other historical examples of circular economies, like the ancestral circular economy in pre-colonial Hawaii, it also shows that it's possible to combine radical sustainability with cultural flourishing. It gave birth to the artworks of Hiroshige, to the poetry of Bashō, to a thriving culture of sumo wrestling. What's not to like about that?
Okay, so there is a very strong and compelling historical precedent for
...circular economy. So I want to bring our attention to the other fundamental dynamic, right? We need regenerative but also distributive economies, because we have inherited over centuries profoundly divisive economies that capture value and opportunity in the hands of a few. I mean, over the last decade, the increasing wealth that's generated globally, more than half of that has gone to the richest 1% in the world. The number of billionaires in the world has more than doubled in the last decade. We can see these extremes of inequality widening within countries and between. It's supercharged by the health pandemic, by digitalization. There's absolutely no chance of humanity getting into the doughnut, meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet, in such an extraordinarily unequal world. It's not feasible.
So we have to address this divisive dynamic and create a world that is far more distributive by design, one in which value and opportunity are shared far more equitably with all who co-create them, and I'd say that turns out to be the whole of society. So to think about that, rather than thinking of, okay, we'll create an economy, you know, economies throw up inequalities, we will redistribute post-tax, I don't think that'll ever get us there. We need to go deeper and think about predistribution by asking this question: who owns and governs the sources of wealth creation? What are the deep sources of wealth creation in society?
Think of land and housing. Who owns the land in a nation? Is it owned as a speculative asset for extracting maximum rents, likewise with the housing? Or is it owned and governed as a communal value that is used for a wider common purpose? Is the housing community-owned, civically owned, run by a cooperative, so that its value is held in perpetuity rather than extracting rents in the moment?
Who owns the enterprises? Is a country dominated by corporations owned by shareholders who want to see the highest financial rate of return quarter on quarter on quarter? Or is there also the emergence and the protection of small enterprises that are family-owned, that are cooperatively owned, employee-owned? And what we're seeing is the rise now of steward-owned enterprises. The theorist Marjorie Kelly has often talked about next-generation enterprise design and the importance of putting stewardship as an ownership and governance mechanism, so that we separate the actual capacity of the enterprise as a vehicle to generate regenerative and distributive outcomes from the financial demand of owners who want to extract value. Can we repurpose enterprise so that it's actually stewarded in a way that helps the world to thrive?
I think we can turn to the principles of commoning, which were made famous by Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded a Nobel economics prize for her work on recognizing not the tragedy of the commons, which we were told since the 1960s, but actually the possible triumph of the commons. Ostrom studied many different communities that were commoning, co-creating goods and services that they mutually valued, and found that they were broadly following a set of eight core design principles that include things like having a very strong group identity and shared understanding of their purpose, having fair decision-making inclusively, having monitoring of agreed behaviors, a fair distribution of costs and benefits, and sanctions and rewards for following those rules. So it's not a free-for-all. A commons is a carefully stewarded set of rules that mean people can work together.
At the moment I feel the commons is seen as a niche, right? It's rising as a pushback against the extraordinary dominance of market centrality that's still pushing over the last century. But can the commons be recognized again as more than just a niche area for small-scale organizing? Is there a historical presence we could look to and say this has been used well, whether it's for providing for our enterprises, our land, our housing, our utilities? Who runs the water? Who runs the electricity? So commoning, what can history give us?
Well, let me pick up on that example of water that you just mentioned there, because when we think about where we are at this moment in history, of course we have those multiple crises that we're facing, and one of them is around water, obviously linked to the ecological and climate emergency: the fact that so many of the world's countries will be facing, or are already facing, water shortages, acute shortages, as well as flooding of course. But many of the world's biggest cities are going to be facing acute water deprivation over the coming years, big cities: Los Angeles, Cairo, Jakarta, São Paulo. We're already seeing water rationing in places like Barcelona, Delhi. And although we apparently live on a blue planet, only one in every 10,000 drops of water on this planet is fresh water easily accessible in lakes and rivers.
So I think there's a real question there. Let's take that example of water: can we see historical precedents for managing it in a different way, kind of reflecting Ostrom's principles? And in fact we can, and there's many places we could go to, but one place we could go to which has a deep history of commoning is the Spanish city of Valencia. If you go and visit the cathedral there, outside the west door of the cathedral, every Thursday at 12:00, you will see an extraordinary ritual called the Tribunal of Waters, the Tribunal de las Aguas. And you can witness this, and I've been there as a tourist and watched eight black-cloaked figures walk out, and they sit in a semicircle under the stone apostles outside the west door of the cathedral. And this is the Tribunal of Waters, a water court which has been meeting there for hundreds and hundreds of years. These eight figures are democratically elected members of this court, and they're elected by local farmers, more than 20,000 farmers who collectively manage the scarce water resources of the Valencia agricultural hinterland, where Europeans get their tasty Valencia oranges and asparagus and avocados and things like that.
And because there's been water scarcity, they've had to develop rules over the years, over the centuries in fact, for how to manage the water fairly and sustainably in a multigenerational sense, so very much a long now kind of institution, and it works very, very effectively. And one of the extraordinary things about it is that you can actually go back to the annals of pre-Christian Spain, so before the 13th century, and there's even records of a tribunal having met.
I think what's also really interesting is that this particular institution, the Tribunal of Waters, was studied by Elinor Ostrom. If you look at her book Governing the Commons, this was one of her primary historical examples of commoning working through time, across space. And there were many other examples she looked at too: she looked at forestry management in Switzerland, she looked at fisheries management in West Africa. But the Valencia system was one that she was quite geeky about, actually. She went into incredible detail about how those eight rules that you mentioned actually function, the kind of fines that you would get if you took more water than you were supposed to. Because what happens in the tribunal meetings is that if there is a farmer who has violated perhaps the rules by taking maybe too much water or not looking after the irrigation canal, they are subject to a public hearing and they may get fined on the spot. So it's a really amazing instrument of commoning, showing the opposite of the tragedy of the commons, as you say, almost like not a miracle of the commons, because this happens so commonly across the world.
So this is one of the ways that I think that we can see the possibilities for doughnut economics having incredibly deep historical roots. This is not pie-in-the-sky utopianism. This is kind of commoning in action.
It's not pie in the sky, it's doughnut right here now. So there's over 50 municipalities, districts and states and cities around the world that have already embedded the concepts and principles and visuals of doughnut economics into their strategies and their policies.
Let me give you some examples. So Amsterdam was the first, in April 2020, right in the height of the Covid crisis. Amsterdam placed the concept of the doughnut at the heart of its ambition to have a circular city. They said, we will be 100% circular by 2050. That's like aiming for the moon; we don't know how we're going to get there, but this is the goal. We'll be 50% circular by 2030.
They've recently, really interestingly, in the pushback against people saying, but it's too expensive to make buildings circular, to make 100% electric transport in the city, the pushback of this is too expensive, they've started using what they call an avoided cost methodology: the question of how much will we save in the future by investing now. And when you ask that question, which recognizes that crises are coming, that costs are coming down the line if we continue as we are, you get a very different answer. And of course it brings the long-term thinking into the now: how much will we save by investing in that future now?
The city of Grenoble in France, they took on a beautiful ambition in 2022. They said, our vision is that a child who is born in this city this year, by the time they're 18 in 2040, they should be living in, experiencing and witnessing an ecologically safe and socially just city, that's one that lives in the doughnut. And they've been transforming, you know, planting trees, making the streets absorbent of water so they're not hit by flash flooding, decarbonizing, and again in a really participatory way, engaging with a lot of people in this conversation.
I'm going to jump to California, right? That's not led by the state but by a civic movement. There's an organization called California Doughnut Economics Coalition, cc.org. They are creating their own vision of a doughnut for California: what do we look like? Where are we falling short? Where are we in overshoot? How can this be part of a new vision for our state, so that we can build momentum in this direction?
And then the city of Ipoh in Malaysia, a middle-income country, saying, right, as we continue to develop and grow our economy, we want it to be regenerative, we want it to be distributive. What does that look like from where we are now? So this is being applied in very, very different contexts worldwide.
What struck me time and time again, when city councils have taken this on board, they've come back to us at Doughnut Economics Action Lab and said, hang on, if we're actually going to really become regenerative and distributive by design, we need to change the deep design of our own institutions. We're working in silos, we are caught by the inertia of our institutions. How can we actually deeply transform the way we work? So what could I be pointing them to from history to think about the way that they make decisions, the kind of governance that's actually going to give them a chance of bringing this about?
Yeah, I mean, I think partly because my background is as a political scientist, I'm always thinking about what is the design of political institutions we need to make the rapid transformative changes that are absolutely essential, like into the doughnut. And listening to those examples, particularly at the city level, regional level, municipal level, raises a real question about governance. Because I think you can have all the SDG targets and so on in the world, but if your political institutions are still caught up in very short-term cycles, if they're always looking at that kind of national self-interest and not looking at wider questions of planetary health, we're not going to get very far.
And I think it's worth questioning here the model of democracy that we take for granted, representative government, where we put an X on the ballot sheet every few years and then we leave it up to the politicians to rule on our behalves. Because actually that's only one model of democracy that you can find through history, and when writing History for Tomorrow I was astonished at how often I came across alternative models of democracy which I think are better suited for getting into that doughnut-shaped space.
So for example, one of them is known as assembly government, and it was stumbled upon by British colonialists when they went into the lands of Igbo communities in Nigeria in the 19th century. They were looking for rulers, for leaders, for kings, and they couldn't find any. Why? Because the Igbo communities ruled themselves through a series of neighborhood councils or village councils, where men and women could make decisions together, normally by consensus. Then sometimes there were decisions delegated up to a higher level, for example to councils of elders.
And that kind of bottom-up form of democracy has also existed in other parts of history. So in Switzerland, between 1524 and 1799, in a region of Switzerland called the Free State of Rhaetia, was a republic where they had this assembly-style government. Again, like 250 neighborhood councils would then send delegates, not representatives, more like messengers, up to the next level at a commune level, and then they had a federal assembly which met a couple of times a year.
And similarly you see that kind of assembly form of democracy today in Kurdish-controlled areas of Syria, in a region called Rojava, where they have these neighborhood councils. But they've improved on the Swiss, because in Switzerland a few hundred years ago it was only men who could participate, but in the Kurdish communities every neighborhood council has a male and a female co-chair. And in fact someone told me just the other day that in many parts of Rojava, in this Kurdish-controlled area, neighborhood meetings do not start until the first woman speaks, which I think is a pretty good idea. And they too have these multiple layers where they'll send delegates up to higher levels for bigger decisions about, for example, national defense.
But it showed us that there's another way of doing democracy, which I think is so important when we know that our representative systems have systematically failed to deal with the climate emergency. You know, since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, what's happened to global carbon emissions? As you know, they've more than doubled since then. They haven't gone down, which they need to. And also we've seen a declining trust in traditional political parties and democratic institutions, and people have been turning away from that towards anti-system, far-right populist parties, of course, across America and across Europe as well. And so we need to be thinking imaginatively about what democracy can look like using history.
And there's another kind of democracy we should be thinking about. So there's assembly government, and the other kind is what's known as sortition, which is the selection of public officials through a lottery system, which of course we have for our juries. But many places throughout history have had this kind of system for their regular political rule. You can go to ancient China, parts of indigenous communities in India, most famously in ancient Greece in the fourth, fifth century BC in Athens, where only men could participate in politics. It was limited, and also no slaves and no immigrants, but they had this random selection for their equivalent of Congress or their Parliament, the Boule, the Council of 500, randomly selected. This was a system which lasted for a couple of hundred years.
And we're actually seeing a revival of this sortition, random selection, in today's citizens' assembly movement, what is called a deliberative wave of democracy, where these new assemblies are being set up, most famously in Ireland in 2017, when they had a citizens' assembly on the subject of abortion, where they selected around 100 citizens, randomly selected but controlled for gender balance and geography and ethnic difference and age balance. And together they met over several weekends over several months, and they recommended to have a referendum to change the Constitution on the issue of abortion, and that famously passed. And since then there have been hundreds of citizens' assemblies across Europe and in North America as well, particularly on the issues around climate, but also aging...
populations and artificial intelligence and things like that, but this is much more local, much more grassroots, much more direct than our traditional representative system. And what you find in citizens' assemblies is that everyday citizens, much more than regular politicians who are in hock to corporate lobbyists and so on, the everyday citizens are much more likely to advocate for transformative plans for their towns and cities. Things like Doughnut Economics would absolutely make sense to your citizens who are thinking much longer term; they're thinking about the kind of city or town they want their children or grandchildren to grow up in.
And you know, I'd love to see citizens' assemblies everywhere, like replacing Britain's House of Lords, the upper house, with a house of citizens selected by lot. But I think that this is one of the democratic reforms where there's a lot of energy that could take us closer towards the possibility of the doughnut economy spreading even further than it already has.
So I'm charmed with what I've seen in some of the places that are adopting the doughnut. Like in Amsterdam, I know they held a climate assembly, and one of the elected officials in Amsterdam who was backing the assembly, she said, "I want to invite the residents of this city to take the ambitious transformative decisions that we as politicians find so hard when we're caught up in the electoral process." Exactly recognizing that. "So please, we give over that visioning to you, to bring it back to us."
In the town of Bad Nauheim in Germany, they wanted to create a Bad Nauheim doughnut, and they randomly chose a hundred residents from the town, again ensuring that it was a diversity of balance, for them to work together for several weekends to come up with their vision. So what I'm really pleased about is seeing actually many places taking this, because it's a very visual and easy to understand concept. It invites a lot of participation, it invites a lot of people's views: what does this social foundation look like for us?
And I think also actually doing it like that prevents the possibility of the decision-making being captured. You know, a centralized political system is so open to capture by, you know, strongmen politicians and tech guru oligarchs and so on. And if you bring the decision-making down to the local level, you're in a way insuring yourself against that kind of capturing.
So here's the thing. Over the last five years, since we launched Doughnut Economics Action Lab to work with practitioners who wanted to put these ideas into practice, 50 local governments have embedded it, more than 90 are exploring it, there are over 60 community-based networks from Berlin to California to Brazil, all over the world, which is amazing. And yet this is a tiny fraction of the cities, of the communities, of the places that need to be transformed.
So there's that dilemma of: it's amazing, it's spreading, these are all places that are putting their own finances in, no one's funding this essentially, it's all bottom-up initiative saying we want to bring this here. So it's spreading, but we're nowhere close to the speed and scale that this transformation needs to happen. So again, for me this raises this question: when in history have ideas that help bring about transformation actually been sparked to spread at the speed that we know the times demand?
Well, that's exactly one of the questions that I explore in History for Tomorrow, because I've been getting so frustrated by the way that we have these crises in society. You've got financial crashes, melting ice sheets, and yet the system doesn't seem to change. We've got ideas like Doughnut Economics which are spreading, but not, as you say, at the speed and scale that we need them to.
But I think one of the extraordinary things about history, you know, I don't believe that there are any iron laws in history in that kind of Marxist sense, but there are patterns, like the pattern that Elinor Ostrom noticed about the eight principles for successful commoning. But one of the patterns I've noticed is what I call the disruption nexus, which is a model of how change happens at speed outside extremes like wars or pandemics, when often governments do act in quite radical ways sometimes. But outside those times, when does it happen?
And the disruption nexus is a triangular model where three elements need to come together. First, you need some kind of crisis, like heat waves or droughts or financial collapse. The second thing you need are disruptive movements, which can amplify the sense of crisis and catapult it onto the political agenda. And the third thing you need are ideas and models around which can help provide an alternative to the existing system.
And I think you could see this very much in action, for example, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of state socialism in East Germany. You had the crisis part, the crisis in the East German leadership when they were all debating about how they were going to deal with Gorbachev's reforms. Then you had the ideas, not new ideas in that case, kind of old ideas around democratic freedoms, freedom of movement, freedom of speech. And then you had the great movements, the uprisings in Leipzig in October 1989 and then the final series of uprisings in November that tipped the system. And of course there had been protests for years in Berlin before that, but it hadn't changed the system because the three elements of the disruption nexus hadn't come together.
And sometimes you get two out of the three elements. So the financial crash of 2008: you had the crisis of the financial crash itself, you had the movements, the Occupy movement from Zuccotti Park, which spread around the world, but I think what was missing were the new economic models like Doughnut Economics, wellbeing economics, all the alternatives which have become much more central to public discussion since that time.
But I think it's worth really just focusing for a minute on the importance of the disruptive movements element, and let me just give a historical example here. I mean, if you travel back to the 1820s for a moment, to the time when over 700,000 enslaved people were working on British-owned sugar plantations in the West Indies. Now, at that time many plantation owners and financiers made remarkably similar arguments to today's fossil fuel executives to defend their actions. So they admitted that slavery, like oil and gas production, was morally questionable, but they argued, or claimed rather, that ending slavery too rapidly could easily lead to economic collapse. So instead they said that slavery should be phased out gradually over many decades, which is precisely the same excuse given by today's fossil fuel executives, who display the very same foot-dragging gradualism.
Now, back then the British abolition movement was organized in the Society for Mitigating and Gradually Abolishing the State of Slavery. Right, the name said it all. You know, its reformist strategy of lobbying politicians and writing pamphlets was making little headway. But the turning point came in 1831, in an act of disruption which sent shock waves through Britain, which was the Jamaica slave revolt, when over 20,000 enslaved people in Jamaica rose up in rebellion, setting fire to over 200 plantations.
Now, the revolt was brutally crushed, but it sent a wave of panic through the British establishment, who concluded that if they didn't grant emancipation they might lose the whole colony of Jamaica. And multiple studies have shown that the revolt tipped the scales in favor of abolition, leading to the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. And in the absence of this disruptive radical flank movement, it might have taken decades longer for abolition to enter the statute books if left in the hands of the reformist white elite.
And you know, I know that many people today are very critical of radical disruptive climate movements like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, but I think it's really important to remember they are part of long traditions of successful disruptive movements, going back to the Jamaica rebels, to the suffragettes, to the Indian independence movement, to US civil rights activists, whose actions have indeed catapulted those issues onto the political agenda, shifted the Overton window of the policies that are deemed to be publicly acceptable at that point of time. And in a way they've done it sometimes by breaking the rules and breaking the law.
And the tragedy, I think, is that while disruptive figures from the past, like Emmeline Pankhurst the suffragette or Martin Luther King Jr., are now celebrated in our children's school history textbooks, their modern equivalents in today's ecological movements are demonized by the press and they are criminalized by the police. I mean, it's like we've learned nothing from history.
And you know, as you know, I'm not a naturally disruptive person. I like sitting in my little study just over there, surrounded by books, or in old libraries doing research. But from what I've discovered in those old libraries about the power of disruptive movements, I found myself, as you know, lying on the street, blocking the roads with our teenage daughter in front of London's Parliament, exasperated at the government's glacial pace of action on the climate crisis. And you know, I know it annoys commuters, but our inaction is going to infuriate future generations even more. I mean, I can't think of a better way to be a good ancestor. It is too late, and I think too reckless, to leave this crisis to simmer on the low flame of gradualism.
So I think that the ideas of Doughnut Economics can be spread and expanded through the power of disruptive movements. I'm not saying it's the only thing we need. We need people lobbying governments, we need people writing books and creating artworks, but we also need to have an element of disruption to create the kind of change that we need.
And actually, you're making me think of people in Melbourne. There's an amazing movement called Regen Melbourne, which was founded a few years ago in the wake of devastating fires in that city and region. And the founder said to me, "We would just literally burn to the ground, this, our home. It made us say this system does not work. What else?" And they turned to the ideas of Doughnut Economics at that time. So it's actually a really nice example of that crisis, and they built a movement with the doughnut as a concept at the heart of it. So yeah, and may we not wait for too many crises.
But these ideas that we're talking about, I agree that there's Doughnut Economics, there's regenerative economics, there's wellbeing economies, these are the so-called new economic ideas. And of course they sit alongside long-known Indigenous economic ideas, from Ubuntu to buen vivir to aloha of Hawaii. These many ideas, they need to work together. Different people are going to be drawn to different ones as different entry points, but they are arising and emerging.
And I just want to come back to the concept of boundaries, because I know often when people see this doughnut, I've sometimes heard people say, "Nice idea, but don't like the boundaries. You know, if I see a boundary, I want to break right through it." And I would say to that: really? Think again. Right, some boundaries are absolutely worth breaking through, like the glass ceiling, which is a gender, a race, a class boundary for many people. Let's break through that boundary. But other boundaries are wise boundaries that actually hold and protect the conditions of life.
You know, if you have a baby child, one month old, whose temperature goes to 40 degrees, what parent says, "You good girl, break through that boundary"? No parent says that. Everyone acts to bring their temperature back within what we know is health, is life. So we understand in our own bodies the boundaries that keep us alive are essential to the conditions of life.
So the doughnut invites us to recognize the fundamental boundaries of human rights, the fundamental boundaries of the integrity of this only known, delicately balanced living planet. Let us unleash the creativity between. Right, these boundaries can unleash our creativity. That's what I'm seeing in the towns and communities and businesses that are adopting these ideas.
And for me it's seeing the peer-to-peer inspiration and the peer-to-peer permission. They're triggering each other. And it's when people see, like, when the vice mayor of Amsterdam says, "Of course we're going to put Doughnut Economics at the heart of our policy," then other city mayors and policymakers see someone who's just like them but already doing that thing they thought was impossible. That is a moment of permission: it's time to move, people like me are now in action, this is it, we're moving. And that's what keeps me on this, because that's where I see the possible momentum coming from.
And really, I think what I hear you saying is you're giving us a message of hope from what you're seeing going on in the spread of Doughnut Economics around the world. And I see a similar kind of hope in history. In a way, I like to make a distinction between optimism and hope. You know, optimism being that kind of glass-full attitude that everything's going to be okay despite the evidence. Well, I don't think everything's going to be okay. Of course, as business as usual, we are breaking through those planetary boundaries, we are failing to, you know, meet people's basic social foundation needs, as illustrated in the doughnut there.
But when I look through the past, I just see so many positive examples that it really gives me a genuine hope that it doesn't have to be this way, that we can have different kinds of economies and politics. And you know, for me, hope as opposed to optimism is all about being committed to your values and to your vision even when the odds are against you.
You know, the great historian Howard Zinn once said that the fundamental leaps in social evolution have come from those who acted as if. And what he meant was that, you know, those who were fighting colonialism in India were fighting something seemingly impossible, a giant system, but they acted as if change was possible. And I think this is what we also have to do with the aspiration to get into that doughnut-shaped space.
You know, Žižek famously said, the great Slovenian philosopher, that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And it's quite hard to imagine very fundamentally different economic systems, but I think history offers us those precedents. I think what's going on with the doughnut today is offering us those precedents. And we have to also remember to be aware of the dangers of hopium, hope without action. This is, as you say, all about action. But I think it's also about keeping the long view and honoring this beautiful Māori proverb, "Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua": I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past.
So friends, if you can imagine beyond the end of capitalism and towards perhaps the beginning of a doughnut economy, I warmly invite you to join us at Doughnut Economics Action Lab, where we are trying and seeking and working with pioneers putting these ideas into practice in a contemporary economy, inspired by the ideas of history. Let's take what we can learn from that long past and make it the future.
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