Exame, the Brazilian business magazine, has reported on Gaya Herrington’s talk at the Encontro Futuro Vivo, held in São Paulo on September 1, 2026. Herrington works with Cascadia BioFi. The article, “Crescimento econômico não significa progresso nem felicidade, diz Gaya Herrington”, ran the same day. It is in Portuguese; the title translates roughly as “Economic growth does not mean progress or happiness, says Gaya Herrington.”
Growth is not the same as thriving
Exame reports that Herrington opened by noting that, despite all our progress and innovation, the same persistent problems remain. She told the audience that she is not against growth. The real questions, as Exame reports them, are growth of what, for whom, at what cost, and borne by whom. The magazine points to the latest warning that six of the nine planetary boundaries have already been crossed, and to her description of a polycrisis, in which climate, biodiversity, land use, and nutrient cycles are one system under pressure.
Her answer is to put well-being, not growth, at the center of the economy. Exame notes that donut economics, Indigenous economics, and post-growth economics all point in that direction. It also reports her argument that in the richest nations, what has actually decoupled is happiness from GDP, not carbon from GDP, which is why she places the first responsibility for reducing carbon footprints on those countries.
Bioregionalism as the alternative
The article then turns to what she proposes. In Exame’s words, the alternative has a name: bioregionalism. Instead of organizing production by administrative borders or by the theory of lowest global cost, the idea is to build production chains around real ecosystems such as biomes, and to prioritize local supply. Exame connects this to her critique of efficiency. She argues that the constant push for efficiency has made businesses too vulnerable, and she cites global supply chains as a model tuned for cost but fragile in the face of geopolitical, climate, or logistics shocks. The article adds that Brazil stands out for its potential in the bioeconomy and other nature-based solutions.
Collapse, belonging, and living within limits
Herrington defined collapse for the audience as the breakdown of an existing social, governmental, or ecological system, and said the present one would be the first of truly global scale. Citing the Cambridge researcher Luke Kemp, she described collapse above all as a flattening of hierarchies, and she said we should not fear it too much, because that fear belongs largely to the people with the most to lose. Once basic needs are met, she said, people look for belonging, and belonging requires community and purpose. Exame closes with the thought that the question may no longer be how to keep growing despite limits, but how to live well within them.
We are glad to see the case for bioregional organizing and well-being economics put before a business readership in Brazil.
Read the article at Exame (in Portuguese).
Photo by Laurenz.garbo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
