recent publications

Economies of Scale-Linking, Part 1

PDF: Yanez (2025) – Economies of Scale Linking, Part 1

abstract: In this paper, Part 1 of a two-part inquiry2, I will weave together various strands of deep thinking on the workings of aspects of our world, relevant to the rethinking of value co-creation. The title is a play on words. It is intended to challenge the paradigm that we can and must sustain economies of scale, a fragmented and fragmenting worldview that, in the name of efficiency, extracts value from, and in so doing, depletes Life energies from our biosphere. Economies of scale-linking finds a different path forward, where aliveness, the free-flow of Life energies becomes central principle to how we create value in human social systems.

  • To do so, I have enlisted the assistance of some extraordinarily insightful minds. Together, we progressively image our way through to, what could lead to a veritable rewilding of (more-than-human) potential, manifested in practical terms, via how we engage in economy.
    Edgar Morin will assist us in to diagnosing what’s going on and open our vision;
  • William James and Adolf Portmann will be essential to establishing of premises/principles that guide my approach;
  • John G. Bennett will help us to understand the scales we propose to link;
  • David Bollier et al. with a rationale for rethinking what we value;
  • Brian Massumi will prove foundational for imaging the workings of capitalism, sensing into how Life’s economy works, understanding the interconnectedness of quantity and quality, and how we might hack capitalism via alt economics;
    And I, will act as re-source3, curator and guide for the experience, bringing it all together around how we might approach economies of scale-linking.

Yanez, Mario. 2025. Economies of Scale-Linking, Part 1: Re-thinking value co-creation, or the rewilding of potential… . Social Solidarity Economy & The Commons.

 

The Self-Organizing Bioregion

 PDF:Yanez (2023) – The Self-Organizing Bioregion

abstract: Human societies seduced by Western thought and (mis)guided by reductive science, continue to exhibit and perpetuate a limited capacity to interpret reality. This is having an increasingly impoverishing effect on Life: the unraveling of the extraordinary complexity of the living web, from which everything we know as human has emerged, of which we are an integral strand, and in which we have an essential role. This research’s aim is that Humanity might concretely operationalize self-organization in our knowledge systems and in our bioregions, enabling communities to better care for what we have in common.
Our point of departure is located in the notion that we, as makers of worlds, co-create our own reality: that, how we know what we know about the workings of our world, directly informs how we create it, over and again. This paper introduces a meta narrative which reintegrates the human as a wholly essential element in the continued regeneration of Life. Here we animate the concept of pluriverse, to set it in relation and put in motion with related concepts. We examine Edgar Morin’s principles on complex organization of reality, explore the potential of applying the principle of self-organization vis-a-vis Christopher Alexander’s Theory of Centers, and seek a significant upgrade to Hess & Ostrom’s conceptualization of knowledge as commons by introducing a  living systems approach to commoning. The author’s lived experience provides the connective tissue to integrate theories and concepts and lend concreteness to otherwise abstract notions.

Yanez, Mario. 2023. The Self-Organizing Bioregion: Commoning knowledge in a pluriversal, ‘already-shared’ reality. Social Solidarity Economy & The Commons.

 

Urban Food Forests and Community Agroforestry Systems

Munsell, J.F., C.J. Bukowski, M. Yanez, and J.A. Allen. 2021. Urban Food Forests and Community Agroforestry Systems. Chapter 10. In:  Garrett, H.E., S. Jose, and M.A. Gold (eds). North American Agroforestry. 3rd Edition. Agronomy Society of America.

abstract: This chapter focuses on urban and community agroforestry strategies that connect and expand urban food forestry systems. It offers insights into how these systems are designed and scaled to provide food, timber, fiber, and other materials in addition to eco-social benefits. Urban food forests are the cornerstone of agroforestry applications in population centers. Agroforestry is largely seen in terms of rural land use practices that integrate and thereby diversify farm and forest products such as crops, livestock, timber, and non-timber forest products. Residents and governmental and nongovernmental agroforestry allies alike are enacting agroforestry through local food movement initiatives, such as community-supported agriculture, farmers’ markets, and community gardens. The features of productive placemaking are best defined by residents who are embedded in their local eco-social system and consequently able to design meaningful systems. Urban food forests are created by planting a variety of annual and perennial plants together to form diverse food-producing agroforestry ecosystems.