Eco-Justice Radio - Monday, June 22, 2026

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1. Duncan hosts the Upstream podcast, uplifting stories of regenerative economics.
2. She supports individuals working to align their values with their work as a right livelihood
3. coach.
4. She also works with organizations as a cooperative economic consultant and facilitates courses
5. and retreats around the world.
6. Aloha, this is Carrie Kim.
7. Listeners, thank you for joining us today to deeply ponder new ways forward for humanity,
8. socially and economically with renegade economist and consultant Della Duncan,
9. founder of the Upstream podcast.
10. We thank the Tongva ancestors for their legacy and stewardship of this region.
11. Our show comes to you from the ancestral lands of the Tongva.
12. Since the pandemic and long before then, many would concur that capitalism in its current form is failing here and globally.
13. Rooted in inequity, capitalism exacerbates inequality, disempowerment and poverty by benefiting only the few.
14. Ours is an opportune and urgent time to invoke systemic inspired change.
15. Alternative economic models prioritizing well-being are gaining momentum.
16. Countries like Bhutan, New Zealand and Wales have dispensed with GDP in favor of indicators such as gross national happiness and well-being to measure progress and success.
17. Globally, Indigenous nations have lived and governed to ensure their communities and environment
18. would be cared for and considered for the longevity and benefits of multiple generations
19. forward and back.
20. We invite all to ponder what is the purpose of economy?
21. What is capital?
22. What is value?
23. How is wealth created and sustained?
24. Are we engaged in meaningful work that promotes planetary health?
25. Can economics be woven into the social and spiritual fabric of our lives versus being treated as something outside of ourselves?
26. How might we use our gifts, contribute to society, meet our basic human needs, and thrive individually and collectively?
27. We welcome Della Duncan to share insights from the growing movement to revolutionize our perceptions, understanding, and practice of regenerative economics in our lives.
28. Welcome, Della.
29. Thank you so much.
30. Thank you for joining us on the show and for your deep dedication to ushering in new paradigms,
31. new sustainable paradigms. There's so much to discuss. So let's start at the beginning.
32. I would like you to begin with defining capitalism.
33. Yeah, I'm happy to. So when I think of capitalism, I like to pick it apart into many pieces.
34. So one of them is the classic separation of those who are the owners of capital, either landlords or owners of property, as well as owners of businesses and the workers.
35. So that separation, that's a very classic understanding of capitalism.
36. So supremacy of those who own capital.
37. And then there's other supremacies baked into capitalism.
38. So there is the view that nature is for our use and exploitation So supremacy of humans over nature And then there other supremacies patriarchal supremacy white supremacy that are also a part of capitalism and its history
39. There is the growth imperative that success is viewed as growth, growth for an individual in
40. terms of one's income, growth for a business in terms of profit, and growth for a country in terms
41. of GDP, gross domestic product, the total exchange of goods and services. So success, progress,
42. development are the growth of those indicators. And related to that is the not having other values
43. in mind, such as other things that may be important, things that may bring us more human
44. wealth and ecological health and well-being, other things that are very important to us.
45. So there's that piece as well.
46. And then I'll add one more, one way I think of capitalism is that it's often really viewed
47. as the only system.
48. There is no alternative to capitalism or neoliberal capitalism, as the famous phrase from Margaret
49. Thatcher.
50. So really this supremacy of capitalism as an economic system, this ever pervasiveness,
51. and also its lack of history, just knowing that we actually have had other economic systems,
52. and there are many other economic systems that exist even right now. And so capitalism really
53. denies that history, doesn't want us to look at the histories of colonization, slavery,
54. land theft that have become a key part of capitalism's rise and its monopoly today.
55. And also its supremacy over other economic forms. That's another area of capitalism. So those are
56. a few ways that I would describe what is capitalism. Now, if we would say that capitalism
57. is dependent upon capital, how would you encourage we define capital now? Does it matter? Because
58. maybe we don't want to embrace capitalism at all, but still, how should we be defining capital in
59. your view? Yeah. So again, if we look at the word capitalism, so it's the supremacy or the
60. domination of capital. Capital is the means of production. That's the classic definition. So
61. again, it's things like ownership over land, ownership over buildings, infrastructure,
62. and also the means of production. So that is what is capital. And those who are the owners of
63. are those who are the capitalists. So when I opened the show talking about
64. other countries who are using other indicators beyond GDP, like for example, Wales and their
65. assessment of well-being, they're considering four dimensions, human capital, social capital,
66. natural capital, financial and physical capital. And I wonder if you have any commentary on this
67. model and these ways of seeing other forms of capital as vitally important.
68. Yeah, thank you for expanding that. And that's a great example of that. So the way that I see the
69. Whales Wellbeing Act is, as you mentioned in the introduction, as an alternative to
70. gross domestic products. So an alternative measurement or indicator of the health or
71. success of the country of Wales. And so they have expanded not just growth of the economy in terms
72. of capital that I described but they expanded these other areas that they are deeming of importance as well As you said human capital is our connection social capital as well cultural capital ecological So it a way
73. that they are expanding that which is important to us. And I'm reminded of a quote by Dr. Hovind
74. To, who is a part of the former program director of the Gross National Happiness Center of Bhutan.
75. And he said, we are attentive to what we measure.
76. We are attentive to what we measure.
77. So again, Wales is really expanding.
78. What is it that we want to measure?
79. How do we want to define progress, health, success, development?
80. And that's really what they're pointing towards when they make those distinctions and expand
81. that definition.
82. You know, could you describe, you had spent some time with a Korean Buddhist nun.
83. And if you could talk about how you learned about Buddhist economies through that relationship or that encounter.
84. Yeah, I came to mindfulness practice in a very Nick mindfulness kind of way. And what I mean by that is I came to mindfulness as a way to ease my own feelings of anxiety or depression or overwhelm with everything happening today.
85. And mindfulness was first taught to me or offered to me as a way of easing my feelings in this current system, including our economic system, but also political, social, environmental.
86. And fortunately, I was kicked off the cushion into engaged spirituality and engaged Buddhism through Joanna Macy, who is an eco-justice Buddhist philosopher and activist in Berkeley, California.
87. And that led me to Naropa University for a program where I met the person that you spoke of. And I really was also on this journey of why is it that our economic system creates so much inequality and is causing so much suffering in terms of folks not having a way to access their passion and align their values with their work, in terms of inequality, in terms of war,
88. in terms of degradation of ecosystems. So I've been on this journey exploring that and had this
89. conversation with this Korean Buddhist nun around connecting the Buddhism that I was starting to
90. be interested in, the engaged Buddhism, as well as economics. And so that's where I first learned
91. of Buddhist economics. And then that led me to Schumacher College, which is named after E.F.
92. Schumacher, who wrote a book called Small is Beautiful, Economics as if People Matter,
93. with a chapter on Buddhist economics. So that conversation was very important for me.
94. Can you talk about your time at Schumacher and what you actually gained during that time? I mean,
95. you speak with all kinds of economists all the time, and you have your Upstream podcast.
96. So if you could speak about how Schumacher actually impacted your perception of the world
97. in economics now? Yes. So Schumacher College is in a tiny town in Southwest England, and it was
98. founded by a former Jane monk named Satish Kumar, who, as one of the many things that he's done,
99. traveled around the world as an earth pilgrim for peace without any money. And he's just a very
100. special, beautiful being. And he really wanted to create a university that was more like an eco
101. Monastery And Schumacher College is also again located in this town of Totnes which is important because that is the first transition town and if folks aren familiar this is a movement around the
102. world of communities that are working to transition their economies and ways of being off of oil and
103. in more regenerative and equitable ways so there's many facets to the transition town movement it
104. looks very different in different communities, but it's quite powerful. And the original economics
105. degree that I pursued at Schumacher College was called economics for transition. So it was directly
106. connected with this transition town movement. And yet it also, as I mentioned with Satish Kumar,
107. it had these elements of eco spirituality and really centered this question around what are
108. the worldviews that are underpinning traditional or I should say mainstream economic thinking and
109. practice? And what are the ways that we might rethink them or challenge them? Also ways they
110. have been thought of differently. So bringing in indigenous wisdom traditions or spiritual
111. traditions that think differently on these topics. And how might those alternative worldviews
112. create different economic realities in terms of practice and theory.
113. Well, wouldn't you say that that is one of the fundamental problems is that we have exported
114. this system of capitalism that is fundamentally divorced from anything spiritual or anything
115. actually overtly discussed as nourishing to the soul or the spirit or your heart or whatever you
116. want to call that. Absolutely. Yes. I think about Adam Smith, one of the fathers, quote unquote, of
117. mainstream economics. He was a moral philosopher and economics then was in the department of moral
118. philosophy. So I like to think that at least there was more challenging and questioning and bringing
119. in more about ethics and values then. And so sometimes I say, let's return economics to the
120. realm of moral philosophy, because you're absolutely right. These questions of what's
121. really important to us, what's the point, what's a right relationship of humans with the earth,
122. what does community health and vitality look and feel like, and how might that be supported by an
123. economic system? So yeah, our current economic system, again, only values growth and the bottom
124. line and profit margin and the income and the growth at all costs. And so there's so much that
125. is left to the wayside and even harmed by that singularity of focus. Yeah. And then we have this
126. compartmentalization, which is just like medical care here in the West, where you have everything
127. isolated rather than looking at it holistically. I mean, the fact that we even have to identify
128. economics in a way with the word, why instead of it's just our life, it's just part of our overall
129. life, our life philosophy, everything that we perceive. You know, I listened to your poem on
130. economics. And you literally covered just about everything. I was like, what is not economics
131. at that point? What does not involve economics on some level, whether it's a matter of exchange,
132. sacred reciprocity, however you want to describe it. So just a side note, I actually brought the
133. poem in case you want me to read it. So if that's of interest, feel free to ask that.
134. So one story that I'm reminded of is Satish Kumar went to the London School of Economics,
135. and he's again the founder of Schumacher College.
136. And he said to them, to the audience, he said,
137. how can you call your school a school of economics
138. without a department of ecology?
139. And he was alluding to the etymology.
140. So economics, oikos,
141. nomos, management of the home. And originally that was the management of the domestic home.
142. So our finances in and out. Then it became the nation state home, then the management of that
143. economy landscape. And as many folks, including fellow renegade economist, Kate Raworth says
144. that 21st century economics is management of the planetary home because we know how interconnected
145. we are, especially our planetary systems. So planetary home management, well, whose job is that?
146. And the importance then of ecology, ecology, knowledge of our home. So Satish was pointing
147. out, how can you seek to manage our home when you do not deeply know our home? So absolutely,
148. I hear what you're saying around how economics needs holistic thinking and needs to be in
149. absolute collaboration and partnership with sociologists, anthropologists, historians,
150. as well as many others. And by that definition of taking care of our planetary home or being
151. a planetary steward, every single person needs to be actually an economist. So I think when we use
152. the terminology, when we identify ourselves as this thing, that means someone else maybe is not
153. that thing. But if they don't consider themselves as economists, then will they be as invested in
154. caring for the planet, caring for the home, the way we manage it, all those things are our,
155. each individual and our collective responsibility. Absolutely. To think that we would leave our
156. planetary home management to a group of so-called economists who are largely, you know, very narrowly
157. trained and often, not exclusively, but often white men, white Western men. What does that do?
158. right? And what if we democratized economic thinking more? Because economics is how we
159. organize our lives. It's how we meet our needs. It's how we relate to each other, our work,
160. our purpose, and to the more than human world. So absolutely, I love what you're saying around
161. democratizing economics and seeing all of us as a part of planetary home management,
162. including the fungi and the trees and the birds and the pollinators as well.
163. So we are all a part of this.
164. So what does that mean to the realm of economics?
165. I think that's what something,
166. I think Kate Raworth of Donut Economics had also said that as well,
167. that we need to reclaim the word, right?
168. Take it back to the word of intelligentsia or elitism
169. and bring it back to just ordinary people living their lives
170. and how do we create a meaningful life and weaving economics into all of that.
171. Yes. And this is why. So the phrase renegade economist, I actually got as an inspiration from Kay Raworth. She was called a renegade economist because of her amazing work, really challenging economic thinking and offering alternative ways of viewing and rethinking economics. So right on.
172. So we have about one minute to where you're going to take a break, Della, but I wanted to ask you just kind of move into talking about want. Historically, many communities worldwide were perfectly content until Westerners sort of imposed upon them greed, learning to want more than they already had, sort of imposing upon them that what they had wasn't enough.
173. And we know that capitalism feeds upon discontentment It requires discontentment And Rashid Kumar who you been quoting a lot had claimed that countries like Burma the continents of India and Africa they did not need Western forms of development
174. And he affirmed that good economics is relational and implied at that same time that it's not
175. transactional. So we're not creating something new, but really more going back to original
176. ways that we lived traditionally and how we were with the land. So I want you to hold that. We'll
177. come back to this after the break and have you go deeper into this response.
178. Della, if you could comment on what I had said about what Rachid had mentioned about relational and transactional economics, the difference between those two, and going back to how communities existed indigenously all over the world, and they were content with very little, with so much less.
179. yeah i want to uplift what you said around to be content and to practice or express gratitude can
180. actually be a quite anti-capitalist thing to do to really be grateful for what we do have in practice
181. contentedness and yeah many of the traditions and places that i'm inspired by really consider
182. contentment sufficiency in bhutan the gross national happiness index they have sufficiency
183. levels for each of their indicators. So what is enough? What is enough for all of us? And
184. particularly in this time of climate chaos and ecological devastation, more than ever,
185. those of us in the global north ought to think about what is enough for sure.
186. And then I also, you mentioned Burma. I want to share a story. E.F. Schumacher, he was a
187. mainstream economist, and he traveled to Burma. And he had a moment of awakening due to exactly
188. what you're saying. He was there to help people get more and more in the classic terms of
189. development. And yet he had an experience where he found that folks had a different perception
190. of happiness, where they were actually trying to achieve happiness with less and less.
191. So there was a renunciation aspect to it, and it really shifted something for him. And that's why
192. Part of the reason why he wrote that book and the chapter on Buddhist economics.
193. So, you know, I do, I am not naive to say that happiness and income are not connected
194. at some level.
195. They are.
196. In fact, if folks can imagine, there's this classic graph in the literature and the research
197. that says that more money does equal more happiness until a certain point.
198. So there are many folks, including in the United States, who do not have access to clean drinking water or feel very precariousness or paying their health care bills as well as debt.
199. So there is a point, but then this point levels off.
200. So the graph kind of plateaus.
201. So more money at a certain point does not actually equal more happiness.
202. So yeah what would it look like to rise folks to the point where they do have enoughness and then recognize and express gratitude and appreciation for that enoughness when we have reached that And then what do we do with the excess What do we do with the greed What do we do with the ostentatiousness And one of the things I think about with that is what if in the future or even today excessive wealth was as offensive as racism
203. as we were able to say, hey, that is not okay, especially while there are so many who do not
204. have enough. So what if we were to shift our perception around that?
205. Well, I think the pandemic has brought for many people, not all, because some people became more compulsive and maybe overindulged in different ways because they were going through the pandemic.
206. But for many people, I think their wants actually became less because we went through so much, went through a lot of the supply chain issues and we were in lockdowns.
207. And so I think a lot of people actually already experienced less wanting and it's not coming back for many people.
208. I'm happy to hear that you have perceived that.
209. I don't say it exclusively, but I know that there's definitely people for whom that was another level of shifting.
210. And I could say it's probably for people who were already on that track that just became more aligned, even more with their their path of, you know, less is more.
211. but it feels important that we teach this value of enoughness to children and, and it has to be
212. modeled for children because it's not only just that we consider what is enough, but it is actually
213. saying there is enough. Yes. I'm reminded of a, an interview that I did with Rob Hopkins,
214. one of the founders of the transition town movement. And he described it this way. He said,
215. I want my child to grow to a certain height. And then I want my child to stop growing.
216. and then grown in other ways, right?
217. In their interest, in their hobbies
218. or their musical ability or their network or friends.
219. And so, yes, to work with folks to reach sufficiency,
220. to have their needs met,
221. to not feel a sense of precariousness
222. or lack or scarcity,
223. because scarcity and lack
224. are not just a figment of our imagination.
225. It's actually built into the system.
226. The system is a game of musical chairs,
227. as Charles Eisenstein would say. And so how do we get folks to reach that enoughness,
228. that social foundation, as Kate Raworth would say, but then to recognize that and to then
229. want to grow or develop in other ways that are non-financial or non-want based.
230. But Della, if you could please share a little about how listeners can stay in contact with you.
231. listeners definitely listen to Della's Upstream podcast that she hosts with other hosts. And
232. there's many, many very astute and dynamic economists on the show. There's great information
233. on the podcast. And if you could share some of your links. Yeah, thank you. So the Upstream
234. podcast is upstreampodcast.org. And there's some documentaries and then there are conversations.
235. And then more generally, as a renegade economist, I offer right livelihood coaching, alternative economics consulting, and general teaching of alternative economic tools and principles. So DelazieDuncan.com is my personal link for that. So UpstreamPodcast.org and DelazieDuncan.com.
236. But just want to end by just inviting folks to rethink economics, if anything felt inspiring
237. or interesting, or maybe uncomfortable from this conversation.
238. I encourage you to just look into it and see what stories of alternatives are out there.
239. Who is thinking about these topics out there And what are they prototyping and trying And how could you get involved And also to encourage folks to return economics to the realm of moral philosophy to just challenge to question mainstream economic thinking
240. And then finally, to uplift, water, and encourage those alternative economic models and practices
241. that you're already participating in to rise the set of the global sea of capitalism and
242. help us in the just transition to a more sustainable and just world.
243. Thank you.
244. We hope to have you back on again because this is just going to continue.
245. Really definitely would love to have you back on the show.
246. Happy to.
247. Thank you, Della.
248. Thank you to our guest, Della Z. Duncan, Renegade Economist.
249. And thank you to our listeners for joining us.
250. This has been Renegade Economics for a more just world.
251. Please connect with us on social media at Ecojustice Radio, SoCal 350 and Adventures in Waste.
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254. You have been listening to Eco Justice Radio, a project of SoCal 350.
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256. Created by Mark and JP Morris, executive producer Jack Geit, producer and co-host Jessica Aldridge,
257. co-host Carrie Kim, and engineer and original music by Blake Quake Beats.
258. And until next time, remember, the power is yours.
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