Master the economy-planet relationship — and act on it

If you've found your way here, I suspect you share a particular kind of frustration — the feeling that most conversations about the economy and the environment are happening at the wrong level of depth. The headlines about net-zero targets and carbon markets and green growth are everywhere, but the underlying framework that would let you evaluate those claims rigorously, connect them to each other, and act on them with confidence? That's much harder to find.

That gap is exactly what Geonomics is designed to close.

I built this school because I believe the Anthropocene demands a new way of thinking about economic life — not a tweak to the models we already have, but a genuine reorientation. The economy is not a machine that occasionally bumps up against environmental constraints. It is a physical subsystem of the Earth system, dependent on energy and material flows, operating within boundaries that are non-negotiable. Once you see the economy that way, you cannot unsee it. And once you can't unsee it, you start asking much sharper questions: Which planetary boundaries are we closest to breaching, and what does the evidence actually show? What are the real trade-offs in decarbonizing steel or cement or food systems — not the talking-points version, but the hard version? What does a well-designed carbon price actually do, and where does it fall short? What does a genuinely strategic response look like for a firm, a government, or a civil society coalition?

Those are the questions this school answers — carefully, rigorously, and without pretending the answers are simpler than they are. We move from thermodynamics and planetary boundary science through the drivers of the Great Acceleration, into the full portfolio of decarbonization pathways, through the governance instruments that matter most, and finally into the strategic thinking that firms, governments, and civil society organizations actually need. The capstone asks you to put all of it together into a coherent geonomic strategy.

I won't pretend this is easy material. But I will promise you this: the intellectual investment pays compound interest. The framework you build here will change how you read every policy proposal, every corporate sustainability report, every headline about the energy transition — for the rest of your career. You will have a way of thinking that most people in these conversations simply don't have.

If you're a graduate student wanting an integrative framework that connects your disciplinary training to the biggest challenges of the century — welcome. If you're a policy professional or sustainability strategist who needs more than surface-level fluency — welcome. If you're a business leader who understands that planetary boundaries are now a material business risk and wants to think about it seriously — welcome. And if you're simply a thoughtful person who refuses to be satisfied with shallow takes on the most consequential questions of our time — you are exactly who I built this for.

Let's begin.