The Brazilian outlet Reset has reported on remarks by Gaya Herrington of Cascadia BioFi and the Brazilian economist and writer Eduardo Giannetti at the Encontro Futuro Vivo in São Paulo on September 1, 2026. The article, by Letícia Arcoverde, is titled “Para que crescer? Economistas questionam a lógica do PIB” (“What is growth for? Economists question the logic of GDP”). It is in Portuguese.
The blind spot in the price system
Reset opens with Giannetti, who argues that the market economy has a terrible blind spot: the price system says nothing about the environmental cost of the choices that produce growth. His example is an airline ticket, which pays for fuel, crew, and airport infrastructure but not for the carbon dioxide emitted along the way. He adds that GDP records nothing when a person walks to work, but it rises when someone spends hours commuting in traffic and works longer to pay the fare.
What Herrington adds
Herrington argues that an economic system that leaves the psychological and environmental costs of so many activities out of its main metrics may have set humanity on a path to collapse. Reset describes her as part of a movement that studies alternatives to an economy built only on growth, and as a sustainability consultant and adjunct professor at Harvard. She sees signs that we are nearing a breaking point that is social as well as environmental, driven in part by an unsustainable accumulation of wealth at the top. She says the changes are already under way and may include a period of unavoidable social instability before a more balanced horizon.
The foundation of change, in her view, is redistribution, and not only of income but of ownership. For companies, Reset reports, that would mean more community-based models of share ownership. She says there is still room to grow, but we need to be more selective about what and who grows: renewable energy and poorer social classes need to expand, while wealthy countries and wealthy classes should be first to accept less. Her thesis is that as instability deepens, investors’ bets will eventually stop paying off, and that will force change.
Both speakers, Reset reports, see reasons not to despair. For Herrington, passing through the turbulence offers a chance to return to a human nature built on collaboration rather than competition. Giannetti argues that Brazil can lead if it does not model its idea of progress on the United States and other developed countries.
Questions of ownership, community, and who decides how resources are used are close to the work of Cascadia BioFi and the landscape groups it supports. We are glad to see them discussed so openly in the Brazilian press.
Read the article at Reset (in Portuguese).
Photo by Wilfredor, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
