The São Paulo newspaper Estadão has published an interview with Gaya Herrington of Cascadia BioFi, recorded after her talk at the Encontro Futuro Vivo on September 1. The article, by Luis Filipe Santos and Shagaly Ferreira, ran on September 25, 2026, under the headline “‘Podemos ser felizes com menos’, diz professora de Harvard sobre limites do crescimento econômico” (“‘We can be happy with less,’ says Harvard professor on the limits to economic growth”). It is in Portuguese.
Collapse as a falling standard of living
Estadão recalls that Herrington’s 2020 analysis of The Limits to Growth, the 1972 report by MIT researchers, found its projections to be correct or very close to reality. The newspaper reports her view that collapse would not mean absolute destruction but a steady decline in living standards, especially among the poorest, which is why an economy that pursues growth at any cost has to be avoided. One route it names is bioregionalism, which the article describes as a philosophy in which territorial and growth limits are set by the ecosystem rather than by political or regulatory impositions.
Letting go of growth is a choice
In the interview, Herrington says that many people hear “giving up growth” as a permanent recession, because livelihoods have come to depend on growth. She disagrees. In her words as the newspaper prints them, it is a design choice and a political choice, and it means securing livelihoods as the default. Poor and middle-class households would be better off, she says, because their needs for education, health care, housing, and food would be met.
Bioregionalism, trade, and Indigenous knowledge
Herrington notes that bioregionalism makes people think of rural villages, but she says it is by no means against trade, which people have practiced since long before capitalism. Most food will naturally come from rural areas, she says, while cities have more potential for a radical circular economy because of their density and technology. On Brazil, she points to its great natural wealth and to its many Indigenous peoples, who she says still hold the knowledge of how to practice bioregionalism. She adds that Indigenous peoples in the United States have been marginalized in the same way, and that she works with them because they know the most about regenerative agriculture.
Hope without toxic optimism
Asked about hope, she says the word can lead to toxic optimism, so she prefers to speak of reasons to be encouraged. People will have fewer things and will see social upheaval, she says, but they will also have more than enough connection, community, and purpose, because collaboration, not competition, is the basis of life.
We are grateful to Estadão for the care it took with this conversation.
Read the interview at Estadão (in Portuguese).
Photo by Wilfredor, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
