Nexus Thinking in a Vortical Economy

 Today on Carbon Radio I started talking about the concept I've been developing over the years called, 
"The Vortical Economy".
Not the Vertical Economy.. not the Circular Economy but...
The VORTICAL Economy. 

We started the radio show with a verse of the song "Spinning Wheels" by Blood Sweat and Tears, and I commented that in our pursuit of the circular economy we often ended up stuck spinning our wheels, mired in the metaphorical mud, somehow unwilling to effectively "recycle" and seemingly unable to  even get off the ground much less  achieve that Rostovian "Take off to Sustainable Development" that pundits and apologists for a global industrial economy promised us. 

So I suggested we needed to be "eccentric" and grow our circle - upward - toward a VORTICAL ECONOMY.


https://youtu.be/RGINkRdCrDU?si=8cj6WbK99c4akeYm

What is it?

Simply put, it is a form of "biomimicry" in the service of higher purpose driven governance and economics.

It promises EVOLUTION, not revolution.

A vortex is dynamic, self-reinforcing, and spirals upward or inward with increasing energy and order — unlike a simple circle (which might just loop endlessly without progress), a vortex builds on itself, accelerates, and gathers strength as it evolves.

Applied to economy, our idea of a vortical economy suggests:

• Upward Co-evolution: Instead of merely cycling materials, energy, and value around in closed loops (which can stagnate or just delay entropy), the vortical economy improves the quality, utility, and synergy of everything it touches over time. Each cycle brings uplift — socially, materially, ecologically.

• Self-Organizing Systems: Like natural vortices (think whirlpools, tornadoes, galaxies), economic systems would be self-organizing, adaptive, and resilient — driven not by centralized control, but by local action aligning with larger patterns of growth and balance.

• From Entropy to Negentropy: Rather than succumbing to disorder (entropy), each spiral of the economy reduces disorder, enhances coherence, and creates more opportunities for life, creativity, and well-being (negentropy).

• Value Creation, not Just Recycling: Instead of just recycling waste or resources in a "flat" circular model, the vortical economy adds value at every step — using ingenuity, biomimicry, cooperation, and innovation to upcycle and elevate.

• Positive Feedback Loops for Good: Instead of destructive runaway loops (like pollution feeding more pollution), the vortical economy would be positive spirals where success begets more success, solutions spawn better solutions, and health generates more health across sectors.

In short:
🌪️ Our vortical economy is circularity with transcendence.
It’s regenerative, evolutionary, and creatively amplifying — a living, breathing, upward-spiraling economy, not a mechanical, repetitive cycle.

Where did the idea come from?

In the summer of 2004 I attended a workshop in Jerusalem held by Gina Ross  created for war correspondents that used techniques from her book "Beyond the Trauma Vortex into the Healing Vortex".

While the guide was intended for personal healing, with my training in urban ecology and sustainable development I immediately saw the possibilities for applying these metaphors to planetary health and global healing.

Some years later, around 2013, I had the good fortune to attend a workshop at Zegg Ecovillage outside of Berlin given by Clinton Callahan, whom I recognized as the author of the book "Radiant Joy, Brilliant Love:Secrets for Creating an Extraordinary Life and Profound Intimacy With Your Partner." 

The book had been gifted to me by Domenica Ott when she attended MY workshop on biodigester construction at the Damanhur Ecovillage in Italy a few years earlier and I had immediately seen how I could apply its concepts to global healing if we simply considered "Mother Earth/Lover Earth" as our partner. I told Clinton that I had been using it in all of my Environmental Science and Environmental Psychology classes in the Behavioral Science deparment at Mercy University with great success.

He was flattered and said, "Ah... you get me! YES! The book is about ALL relationships and you are one of the few to recognize how the principles of 'radical adult responsibility' and healing can be  best applied to our traumatic relationship with our nurturing home planet."

Over the years as a "pracademic" (a practitioner academic who melds theory and practice into sustainability PRAXIS" ) teaching sustainability and directing the USF Climate Mitigation and Adaptation Concentration, teaching our Food/Energy/Water and Zero Waste Nexus Courses, I began to feel intensely uncomfortable with the "greenwashing" and Logic 2 envelope surrounding the business world's attempts to foster what they call a "circular" economy.

It seemed to me that we were literally going around in circles, stuck in the mud, spinning our wheels so to speak.  I began to think that the metaphor was all wrong. Meanwhile the concept of "recycling" was coming under attack, sometimes for nefarious reasons but often for reasons related to the second law of thermodynamics. 
We don't want a CIRCULAR economy, I thought.  What we want is a HEALING VORTEX ... we want a spiral that lifts us higher and higher with every turn.  

In Freiburg, Germany last summer with my children, I had the joy of watching paragliders take off from the hillside above the Medieval city, watched them catch the "thermals" and then ride them ever higher.

"Ah", I thought, "THAT is the natural metaphor we need to get out of the literal and figurative depression we've been in -- we need a VORTICAL economy that lifts us all out of the trauma vortex and into the healing vortex.  

A controlled tornado of thoughts began swimming in my head.  

I'd already visualized  the idea of the Drawdown Cloud of Solutions appearing as a vortex from which we could pull great solutions  in my Climate Mitigation course.  Having that imagery to guide my thoughts I kept thinking that we needed to expand the circle, just as Callahan called on us not to "think outside the box" but to "expand our box".

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpzo_W3I0RZ0pA_c6iodOPfk6XZSMzScb&si=9PXmFrbFFSq__syf

The idea of expanding concentric circles is core to Permaculture Training, but on two dimensional paper they always remained mere circles. 

Since I have been working with AR/VR/XR technologies for several years now and became a "Blender-head" doing 3D modelling, I got used to Nexus thinking in 5D (XYZ, T and a dimension of data).
So the idea that we could expand concentric circles in the Z axis (upward!) rather than merely in X and Y made sense to me -- you could pack so much more information in an expanding cone, and even more in a spiral.  

My mind began to conjure up images of DNA and other helical structures.  I became enamored with an animation of our solar system in which all motion was helical -- VORTICAL:

It represents a fundamental truth of our universe.  

And of course, when I related that to my time as a nexus technology instructor at the Tamera Eco-Village in Portugal it created instant synergy with the water vortex work they practice introduced by Viktor Schauberger, the Austrian forester and naturalist, who "developed a theory about natural vortices in water, believing they could be harnessed to improve water quality and generate energy" 

So this year, as the world seems to be spiralling toward oblivion and people start "circling their wagons", as I co-create our new "Navigating the Water/Energy/Food/Ecology" (WEFe) NEXUS course with our students and the great team at USF Innovative Education Studios, we will be visualization and philosophizing about the VORTICAL ECONOMY -- a radical and nature rooted improvement upon the circular economy that should help us upcycle our formerly wasted materials and uplift us all to a future of radiant joy, radical healing, and the promise of sustainable health and happiness. 

Let's twist!