Is Regenerative Economics Inevitable?
Eugene Kirpichov on the polycrisis, civilizational risk, and learning to work for a future that may arrive after collapse.
This is a summary of episode #385 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, all of the other apps, and right below this paragraph.
🔹 Quick Takeaways
The climate crisis may not be a singular crisis but a polycrisis of climate, biodiversity, inequality, geopolitics, AI, and governance failures.
Most global problems share the same structure: multipolar traps, prisoner’s dilemmas, and tragedies of the commons.
Meditation didn’t make Eugene more optimistic—it made him more honest.
Systemic change is about changing dynamics, not accelerating with the same tools.
Helping people “get climate jobs” is insufficient at civilizational scale.
Leadership beats placement—change comes from coordinated actors, not isolated hires.
Regenerative economics isn’t ideology—it’s a property a system must have to grow and be stable.
Natural systems model successful economies better than modern markets do.
Technology innovation alone is like building “bigger bacteria” rather than an elephant.
What actually needs innovation is economic architecture: ownership, governance, finance, coordination.
Collapse is likely—the question is how many times it happens.
Hope doesn’t require believing collapse won’t happen.
The work is about making what comes after healthier—and sooner.
📝 Working After Certainty Is Gone
This episode begins where many climate conversations quietly end: after the optimism breaks.
Kirpichov doesn’t arrive at regenerative economics through hope, but through acceptance. Meditation didn’t soothe the reality of the polycrisis—it gave him the capacity to sit with it long enough to see it clearly. The way he sees it, climate change alone is not the threat; it’s the convergence of failures across every system modern civilization depends on, all locked into arms-race dynamics where prisoner’s dilemma defections are rewarded and cooperation is punished.
The result is grim but clarifying: no single technological acceleration can solve this, because every domain is constrained by the same underlying structure. We aren’t failing because we’re too slow. We’re failing because the system is wired to fail.
That realization forces a reframe. Work on Climate, originally designed to help people transition into climate jobs, confronts the uncomfortable truth that job placement does not change system behavior. You can’t throw the rabbit harder and expect it to fly. What’s required instead is leadership—people who can act within institutions, reshape incentives, coordinate across sectors, and push on leverage points simultaneously.
🌱 Regenerative Economics as a Survival Property
Kirpichov is careful to demystify regenerative economics. It isn’t a utopian blueprint or a return-to-the-land fantasy. It’s a necessary property: any economy that degrades the systems it depends on will eventually collapse. There is no alternative equilibrium.
The insight that grounds this vision comes from biology, not ideology. Cells, bodies, forests: these are all economies. They exchange resources and signals in ways that strengthen the whole over time. The striking contrast isn’t that nature is gentle, but that it is durable. Fifty-million-year-old rainforests outperform modern markets on the only metric that ultimately matters: persistence.
From this perspective, most climate-tech innovation looks misdirected. It’s optimization within a failing topology. Bigger batteries, faster models, smarter markets—all useful, but insufficient. True phase changes happen when the level of organization increases: single cells become multicellular organisms; organisms form ecosystems.
The economic analogue isn’t better firms—it’s better forms: ownership structures, governance models, financing stacks, coordination mechanisms. That’s where regenerative economics actually lives.
🔧 Why Collapse Doesn’t End the Story
One of the episode’s most bracing moments is Kirpichov’s calm acceptance that collapse is likely. Not as nihilism, but as historical realism. Civilizations fall. Complexity contracts. What matters is whether something healthier grows afterward and whether we can shorten the cycle.
This is where his hope resides. Unlike natural evolution, human systems can be redesigned intentionally. Even if the first collapse is unavoidable, the work now can reduce how many times we repeat it. Regenerative structures that survive stress, resist capture, and outcompete extractive systems don’t need moral purity—they need to win without becoming what they replace.
That tension between realism and aspiration, between woo and suits, between structure and spirit, runs through the entire conversation. Spiritual change matters, but it cannot survive hostile systems alone. Structure shapes behavior more reliably than virtue.
The task, then, isn’t to save the world in its current form.
It’s to build the scaffolding for what comes next… and to do it before the ashes cool.
