THE DOUGHNUT OF PLANETARY & SOCIAL BOUNDARIES is an image worth exploring. 

We probably need as many visual tools as possible to clarify and communicate the basic principles that might be able to shift our near future from global disaster to planetary thriving.  This image from Kate Raworth's team depicts the sweet spot that must become the goal and definition of ‘economic progress.’ 

Although Kate's work on Doughnut Economics originally focused on reorienting economics to favor the sane distribution of human rights, she has increasingly integrated her work with the reality of looming ecological constraints. 

It is not just about improving human well-being but it also matters HOW we do that because there are many ways to violate the basic parameters that allow our planetary biosphere to self-regulate (such that our species can flourish). 

So we will need memetic tools to help us focus on growing an economy that stays below the environmental ceiling & above the social floor.

Kate has a short article and summary video for Oxfam and she recently appeared on Nate Hagens' podcast The Great Simplification (The Superorganism vs the Donut). Early on in the video (3:30-13:30) she highlights numerous images to help clarify the joint economic constraints of social flourishing & a human-friendly biosphere. 
 
The basic principles of DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS include: seeing the Big Picture (planetary and social boundaries); moving the goal of economics beyond GDP; shifting from the disproven notion of a self-serving, rational human agent to the idea of a social, plural, adaptive and heuristic human being; introducing systems thinking into economics and basic education; designing economic goods for distribution rather than centralized control; shifting from generative to regenerative (loop-oriented) economies; being agnostic about growth

The PLANETARY BOUNDARIES that we cannot afford to transgress are: stratospheric ozone depletion, minimum necessary biodiversity levels, maximum sustainable presence of long-lived toxins, hormone disrupters & chemical pollutants in our food and environment, global temperature, ocean acidification, disruption of freshwater supplies, sabotaging of forests, grasslands and wetlands by mass conversion into agricultural zones, mass transfer of nitrogen and phosphorus out of planet fertilizer into the air and oceans and the general amount of particles in the air making it less breathable and dramatically disrupting weather patterns.

Our collective job is to maximally distribute freedom, fairness and survival to all types of human beings without violating any of the planetary boundaries.   


* BONUS *

Check out the DEAL (the Doughnut Economics Lab) to start taking action.