Healing Mother Earth, Healing Ourselves

I used to think progress was a line. Onwards and upwards, forever.

As an economist, I was trained to chase that line. I modeled growth, optimized productivity, built systems based on the promise of More. But the more I traveled through rural Indonesia, the more I saw that the line was a lie.

I met mothers, farmers, craftswomen — left behind by the very policies I helped shape. Their voices, like the prices of the products they made, had been steadily devalued.

And yet, they held the global economy together. Growing and creating the fabric that moved markets. Their labor sustained a trillion-dollar industry. But their dignity? Nowhere in the equation.

Ibu Lilik was one of them. I met her behind the kitchen of her house. She was stirring fabric in a vat of synthetic dye, her hands stained the color of bruises. The air was thick with chemicals.

“It burns my hands, my eyes, my lungs,” she said. “But what choice do I have?”

That sentence fractured something in me. Because behind it was a truth I had long refused to see: the cost of our convenience. The impossible decisions women like her are forced to make, so others can enjoy the illusion of progress.

And it’s not just fashion. It’s the food we eat, the screens we scroll, the comfort we expect. Someone else, somewhere else, is paying the true price.

In these communities, the soil is dying. Years of extractive farming have left it exhausted. Water sources vanish. Crops fail. And the women who carry ancestral knowledge are left without the tools — or power — to revive what’s been lost.

Then my own body made me stop. A bone tumor forced months of stillness — and with it, a question I could no longer outrun: What kind of legacy do I want to leave behind?

In that quiet, I heard Ibu Lilik’s voice again. The rawness in her words. The violence of having no real choice. I saw what I had spent my life defending: straight lines — drawn to maximize profit, erase complexity, and measure worth in ways that leave too many behind.

I couldn’t walk that line anymore. It had taken too much.

So I left my comfort zone and returned to the villages that had stayed in my heart like unfinished prayers.

There, I listened. To the Ibus — “mothers” in Indonesian — who welcomed me not with answers, but with memories. Of how their ancestors grew cotton without chemicals. Dyed with plants that healed. Wove symbols that carried generations of meaning.

They were sustainable before the word existed. But their wisdom had been erased. Their ecosystems collapsing. Kept small by a system that thrives on disconnection.

What I once called “externalities” in economics — soil exhaustion, poisoned rivers, broken communities — were right in front of me. But so was the solution.

I learned how Nature moves in cycles. Where nothing is wasted, and everything is connected. What if our economy worked like that too?

That question became SukkhaCitta, which means “happiness” in Indonesian. We began at the root. Growing indigenous cotton, planting natural dyes, and reviving Tumpang Sari, an ancestral polyculture that regenerates soil and protects water. We built schools where young women learn to lift their families from poverty — putting women and Nature back at the center.

We didn’t just make clothes. We reimagined the system, from farm to closet. One that begins with regenerative agriculture and ends with putting funds back into the hands of indigenous communities who have protected Nature’s balance for generations.

People told us it would never work. That paying women fairly was too expensive. That regeneration was too radical.

But purpose has its own rhythm. And slowly, change took root. Soil came back to life. Rivers ran clear. The Ibus, once invisible, rose as leaders and stewards of their land. Their daughters stayed in school while their ecosystems healed.

What began as a question became proof that a different path forward is possible — empowering lives, restoring soil, reviving biodiversity, and sustaining indigenous cultures through the power of what you wear.

Today, we are on track to impact 10,000 lives and regenerate one million hectares of degraded soil by 2050.

This work has taught me that the opposite of poverty isn’t wealth. It’s dignity. That regeneration isn’t a trend — it’s a relationship. That development without inclusion isn’t progress. And that the wisdom for a regenerative world is already here, if only we are brave enough to listen.

I believe in an economy where growth is measured by how well we repair what’s been broken: soil, rivers, dignity, trust. A future rooted in care. Handcrafted by many hands. Where no one is invisible. And no one is disposable.

Because we were never meant to live in straight lines.

We come from cycles. From land. From stories passed down in the smoke of morning fires.
Somewhere along the way, we forgot. But forgetting is not the same as losing. And we have the power to choose differently.

The future we long for will not just arrive. It must be woven, thread by thread, until the circle is whole again. Will you join us?

• Institute of Environment and Sustainability
• Pritzker Award