An important conversation is happening now about what has come to be called the nature funding gap for regenerative projects — where estimates have been made for how much money is needed to robustly move toward regenerative economies at the necessary scales.
Here is an example from the Ma Earth platform that recently mobilized $1,000,000 in matching funds for 200 regenerative projects around the world. They want to show that money can be pooled and distributed through processes that are more open and inclusive.
They explain how there is a “gap” of at least $1 TRILLION dollars, informed by the UNEP State of Finance for Nature 2026 report that came out earlier this year. What I want to do here is offer a bit of frame analysis informed by my background in cognitive linguistics to show how our mental models get in the way of seeing how financial flows need to be completely transformed.
The truth is not simply that there is an absence of financial resources — which would imply that we go looking for them to gather what is missing. We need to fundamentally reframe what an economy is if we are to move from a life-destroying system and arrive into a life-continuing pathway into the future.
If you would like to see some of my earlier work in this area, I was one of the linguistic analysts for the Finding Frames report co-authored by Andrew Darnton and Martin Kirk that revealed how deeply it would be necessary to reconceptualize our mental models of the economy if we were to bring chronic poverty to an end. That is one example among many that I contributed to between the years of 2007 and 2016.
With this in mind, let’s delve into the framing of regenerative finance to see how deep the rabbit hole goes…
Thinking with False Ideas of A Broken Reality
Let us begin with the language of a Nature Funding Gap. Where is the gap? Separating what? And how did it come to be empty in the space in between? This is where we can see something very perverse and strange. Nature is treated as somehow separate from the economy. What?!! That’s crazy talk. How can the human economy be something different from all the rest of nature in the entire Universe?
This is where we begin to see how deeply the dialogue about finance is skewed. Right at the beginning we are invited to question how there can be a “gap” between humans and the rest of the Universe. You can also see this in the graphic created by Ma Earth above — when they display Environment and Local Communities as each being different line items pulled out of the much larger category of All Other Causes.
How can the environment be a separate cause? What kind of semantic damage must occur for us to cut reality into chunks where everything in the natural world (which includes stars, planets, galaxies, and everything in the known Universe) is not part of anything that deserves the name “all other causes” — other causes than what? Here we see that human beings can engage in some really silly behaviors. We can imagine the world IN OUR MINDS in ways that are so blatantly wrong that only our mental gymnastics make it possible for us to not see what we are doing.
We can destroy the foundations of life on our Living Planet and call it progress. Grow the amount of money in the world while reducing biodiversity and claim we are somehow generating wealth. Ignore pretty much all of reality and call it the global financial system. This is — in a word — completely insane.
I’ll state it plainly. There is no funding gap. Nature is not on one side with the economy on the other. We don’t have a problem with how to fill the space between with piles of money. What we have is the problem of creating the mental gap in our thoughts. The problem is in our minds.
How to Fill the Nature Gap — See Reality As It Truly Is
I recently wrote an article titled A Flow Funding System that Works Like the Living Earth. Informed by the science of Earth Systems, I listed several major processes of our dynamic planet that give rise to the only real economy we know. The biosphere. An experiment in regenerative economics that has been running for 3.8 billion years.
Why would innovative designers of financial systems ignore such a test case? How could they fail to see that all real economic systems are ecological in nature? I mean this literally. They are ecological and they are IN nature. There is no separation!
Let me stress here that I am not criticizing Ma Earth for the terms they use in their graphic. They are among the people working to be sure The Regeneration Will Be Funded — a catchphrase they use in their work. What I am doing here is much deeper: Inviting us to question the metaphysical basis of treating economics and finance as somehow separate from everything else in the Universe.
Does it make sense to say that wealth only exists after life has been destroyed? Like when a timber company earns money for cutting down a forest? Or when decayed fossilized bodies from millions of years ago are dug up and burned, like in the fossil fuel industry? What if real economies happen before things are dead? What if they include the continual recycling of dead matter into new life? What if real economies are alive?
Hint: they are.
Finance as if Reality Was REAL?
I wrote the title for this section on purpose. Imagine if we treated the creation and movement of value as if reality was real. Seriously. Act as though the energy and matter of the Universe gives rise to the awe-inspiring complexities of life. Include this in our mental calculations.
How could we fund something like the rights of woman and claim it is not in the same category as the environment? Women don’t live in the environment? If not, where do they get their food? How did their species evolve? Are they not biological creatures? What about minorities? Are they not human? And are humans somehow not part of the Universe?
When we let the crazy go, we discover something profound. ALL finance is a subset of living economies. Humanity has a “global” economy that currently pretends it doesn’t exist anywhere on the globe — as if it is not part of the Earth. All social causes are expressions of human behavior. And humans, being mammals that evolved within Earth’s biosphere, are part of the only living planet we have found so far. This means all social causes are a subset of animal behavior and thus fit within the study of Earth’s biosphere.
The philosophers among us at this point might sign the argument with a QED. I have now proved what I set out to demonstrate. Finance is part of nature. It is impossible for there to be a gap between money and reality — except in the minds of delusional humans.
Let us fix this. See reality as it is, an integrated whole. Humans never were separate from nature. If we continue to pretend that we are, the consequence is quite natural. Nature will continue without us and we will go extinct. Insert another QED here.
I hope this tiny bit of frame analysis is helpful. Let’s deconstruct the unhelpful mental models getting in our way. Invest in reality more. Restore healthy relationships between humans and the rest of nature. You know, the nature that gave rise to us and is the reason we exist? Yeah, more of that please.
Onward, fellow Earthlings.
Natures ledger is a source that might connect to the point!
I think the idea of a standard is both fundamentally flawed yet - also there is a there there - the idea of a tangible reality backed value system... So within the gold argument is a stronger claim - the gold standard doesn't go far enough...
Back to natures ledger and beyond: having an ecosystem that can continue producing values - including life and leisure, but also consumable harvests like logging and wild crafting is possible to do sustainably whilst having the ecosystem continue to hold value for the respective subjects of such a market... I'd actually add real estate to that - like housing and worker spaces... Making say $10,000 the new $100,000... A project manager crew could have there housing provided... Then they make a deficit and start a money-value system coordination... It'd probably have to start off small scale but could scale and many of these small scale versions could eventually communicate to form larger communities of such money. Obviously beyond scope of this comment section but hopefully you get the idea... We have the tools for this type of social coordinations and most certainly should and could be doing this - starting with food , water and shelter systems. And also starting with functional transparency of the respective decision makers...
Jah know!!!
Perhaps the monetary/financial system leads to unsustainable economic growth, so maybe we also need to reform or transform the system, or build alternative exchange systems with new units of account.
Every official currency is basically created with the click of a keyboard by allocating credit and making digital accounting entries. But credit is often misallocated for unproductive or destructive purposes, which can lead to inflation and unsustainable economic growth. There is also an artificial scarcity and systemic shortage of money because it is typically created on the basis of interest-bearing debt, which keeps us in a collective state of perpetual debt and contributes to involuntary unemployment. Total aggregate debt, including principal and interest, is more than the total amount of money in existence.
Taxation can be used to disincentivize certain activities, such as pollution, but the monetary/financial system shouldn't be used to simply extract value and to further concentrate wealth and power. The production and exchange of value shouldn’t be artificially curtailed by an artificial scarcity of money.
There might be a finite amount of land, resources, etc., but money isn’t a scarce commodity. Money can be created as needed by allocating interest-free credit for productive purposes, within ecological limitations and material economic constraints. Maybe longer-term financing should be provided from savings (preferably as equity, not debt). But credit shouldn't be misallocated for unproductive purposes and money shouldn't be issued on the basis of interest-bearing debt.