A vision for a locally rooted, globally connected regenerative economy
By Daniel Ramos, Zach and the many conversations already unfolding across Machuca Valley, including in men’s and women’s circles, between neighbors, within families, and among friends.
As posted in the Machuca Elements Issue #55
Purpose Before Economy
Across the valley, in men’s and women’s circles and in many private conversations, a recurring tension keeps surfacing. We arrive here carrying a beautiful dream of building a different kind of life, and at the same time many of us are wrestling with the very practical question of how to sustain it.
The communities emerging here were not created simply as beautiful places to live. Many of us came here in search of a fuller way of life: more connected to nature, to each other, to our children, to our bodies, to purpose, and to the things we believe truly matter.
Costa Rica holds a special place in the global imagination because of its relationship with nature, well-being, and longevity. That inheritance is real. It is part of why we in the valley are now asking ourselves a larger question:
What needs to exist here to give us the greatest possible chance of living exceptionally long, healthy, active, connected, and meaningful lives?
That question asks us to think about the food we grow and eat, the water and soils we care for, the homes we build, the way we move, how we educate our children, how we work, how we care for one another, how much stress we create, and the quality of the relationships and communities we build.
And inevitably, it also asks us to think about economics.
Because if we want to transform the way we live, we will also need to transform the way we produce, exchange, learn, invest, and create value.
And there is also a more immediate reason this conversation matters.
Moving here is expensive. Building a home is expensive. It can place real pressure on savings, relationships, and family life. And because the local economy has not yet expanded to support the growing number of us choosing to build our lives here, many of us continue to depend on jobs elsewhere, businesses elsewhere, savings accumulated before arriving, or investments built somewhere else.
If living here can only be sustained through savings or income generated somewhere else, then the communities we are building remain vulnerable.
An economy in service of life must also include the practical economy of the family: how we earn enough to live here, how we pay for our homes, how we care for our children, how we create security, and how we remain connected to the families, cultures, and places we came from. For many of us, that also means being able to travel to see grandparents, siblings, and old friends.
So part of the task ahead is clear: to make it increasingly possible for us to build meaningful livelihoods here, so that choosing to live in Machuca Valley does not require choosing between purpose and economic stability.
A Regenerative Economy
La Colectiva Valle Machuca expresses an idea that can serve as an important anchor: true development should not be extractive. It should listen, reinvest, restore, connect, and place resources in service of the territory and the life within it.
That vision is deeply aligned with what we are proposing here, while extending that intention to a global scale.
Our starting point is local because this is the territory we inhabit, know, and are directly responsible for. But the territory we ultimately hope to serve is much larger: all the living territories of Earth.
Machuca Valley can become a place where we learn, experiment, build, and test models that can also travel elsewhere.
Our economy, then, is not the end goal. It is infrastructure in service of a fulfilling life.
We want an economy that creates meaningful and sustainable livelihoods, supports local producers and new enterprises, allows prosperity to be shared widely, while also exporting knowledge, products, and solutions beyond the valley.
An economy that helps our families thrive, regenerates the territory that sustains us, and lays foundations for our daughters, sons, grandchildren, and the world they will inherit.
An economy measured not only by how much it produces, but by what it strengthens in the process.
Learning From What Has Worked Before
We are not starting from a blank page.
Mondragón offers one of the clearest examples of what can happen when a community deliberately builds institutions that reinforce one another. What began in a rural town of northern Spain in the 1950s with technical education and a small industrial cooperative gradually became a network of companies, financial institutions, educational organizations, and research centers working within a shared ecosystem.
Today, Mondragón employs more than 71,000 people and is the fifth largest private sector employer in Spain. It has grown into one of the country’s largest business groups while remaining rooted in the same region and in the same basic idea: that economic institutions can be designed to serve both productive enterprise and the long-term flourishing of the families and communities around them.
The lesson for us is not that we should copy Mondragón’s legal structure or turn every initiative into a cooperative.
The deeper lesson is this:
A community can build a strong common organization that gives cohesion to many independent initiatives and helps them thrive together.
Such an organization can connect capital, knowledge, demand, education, production capacity, and people. It can make it easier for one successful initiative to strengthen the conditions for the next one.
Another useful reference is the Community Wealth Building approach used in Preston, England. Its core idea is simple: when more of the money already being spent by residents and institutions flows toward local businesses and suppliers, more value stays and circulates within the region, strengthening jobs, local ownership, and productive capacity.
Machuca Valley can learn from these and many other models while building something that is distinctly our own: deeply rooted in the reality of our land, while remaining connected to a much broader global network and the currents of our time.
The Critical Mass Is Emerging
Over the coming years, communities like Ecovilla, Alegría, Tacotal and Ecovilla San Mateo could together represent more than 600 families. At close to four people per household, that could mean roughly 2,400 residents living within a relatively small geographic area.
That concentration did not happen by accident. It is the result of years, even decades, of vision, risk, investment, experimentation, and work by the people who imagined and built these communities, and by the many families who chose to make their lives here.
But the numbers are only part of the story.
We are arriving from many different places, both within Costa Rica and internationally, and from many different backgrounds. We have deep experience in software, education, agriculture, construction, wellness, manufacturing, research, engineering, art, investing, design, entrepreneurship, and many other fields.
And it’s not just the talents we bring. The concentration of values, relationships, capital, curiosity, and willingness to experiment that we collectively represent creates unusually fertile ground for entrepreneurship and collaboration.
Many of us are early adopters, comfortable experimenting with ideas before they become mainstream. Our choice to move into new communities with diverse cultures already reflects a certain willingness to be adventurous and open to uncertainty, adaptation, and new ways of doing things.
At the same time, these communities we are building are part of a bigger picture. San Mateo, Maderal, Libertad, and the other towns, farms, businesses, and communities of the wider Machuca Valley already hold knowledge, relationships, productive capacity, culture, land, and experience that are essential to any economy we hope to build here.
The opportunity lies in connecting these worlds.
While living in the valley, many of us maintain professional and personal networks across Costa Rica and around the world. That means each of us is not only a potential worker, consumer, producer, investor, or entrepreneur.
Each of us can also be a node in a much larger network.
We can produce from Machuca for Machuca, creating more ways for our families to sustain their lives from within the valley itself.
And we can also produce from Machuca for the world.
At the same time, we can bring knowledge, technology, relationships, and resources from the wider world back into the valley to help solve local challenges and strengthen our territory as a whole.
What Comes Next
This essay is part of a larger conversation already unfolding across the valley.
In the coming weeks, we will continue exploring what kind of economy can emerge here, what structures might help support it, and what would be required for those structures to earn and keep our trust.
For now, the invitation is simply to imagine what becomes possible when a territory begins to organize its economy around the life it wants to sustain.