The PNW Needs a Fractal Approach to Circular Economy

As the Pacific Northwest continues to lead in zero waste and circular economies in the United States, we need to think regionally and fractal patterns in order to scale the circular economy in a just and natural way.

First, lets get a few bits of business out of the way. When I say “regionally”, I mean bio-regionally. In order for us to have true regenerative, circular economies, we need to think like nature, which means looking to see how nature has organized our interconnected planet.

When I say “fractal” I mean from the smallest ecosystem, to the largest. As we transition into a circular economy, we can’t think of only materials, or use old ways of organizing systems into predominantly centralized patterns.

We need distributed urban design patterns , that interconnect humans to other humans, regions to other regions, and eco-systems to other eco-systems, in a web that makes up our home, our planet.

In order to organize how we design human settlements, I’ve ordered and listed this out, not in order of importance, but of scale.

[Each stage requires energy:]

Bio-region to bio-region: Ecosystem based (soil, animals, minerals, water, air, etc), international (beyond the borders of the United States), global yet localized or “trans-local [hyperlink]”

State to state: Shared strategies and collaboration from states within the PNW

County to county: New ways of collaborating and learning from each other - again, “translocal”

City to city: Municipal, urban metabolisms [link]

Neighborhood to Neighborhood: Hyper-localization [link], community driven economics and design, distributed systems and design

Person to person: Somatic, justice & love, movements, democratic, human dignity and collaboration