When the Biome Also Enters the Decision

From Body-Territory to New Metrics of Development

In Blog 9, we arrived at a possibility: to belong without remaining in the same position.

Jiwasa would not need to turn differences into uniformity. A Body-Territory could participate in the collective, move closer, diverge, leave, return, and transcend its previous configuration without allowing what it was yesterday to become a sentence determining what it must be tomorrow.

But something was still missing from the discussion.

Where is this Body?

What water does it drink?

What temperatures does it endure?

How long does it take to reach work?

What food can it access?

What air does it breathe?

How much does it cost to live where it lives?

Is there shade?

Are there trees?

Is there public transportation?

Is there a river?

Is there violence?

Is there work?

Is there forest, agriculture, concrete, mining, industry, coastline, or drought around it?

If Body-Territory is indivisible, then a Personal AI that represents only explicitly individual demands may still be representing an abstract person.

The territory also participates in the possibilities of Being.

And so our question changes.

How much does a region produce?

may no longer be enough.

We must also ask:

Is development expanding or reducing the possibilities of Being for the Body-Territories living within that biome?

When Conquest Also Teaches Us What to Desire

Extractivist models do not remove only resources.

They can also produce ways of imagining success.

Historical conquest did not operate through physical force alone. Laws, institutions, education, property, religion, language, and economic systems were also used, in different periods and contexts, to reorganize territories and populations according to the structures of those who held power.

The deeper problem appears when the conquered no longer dream of becoming free from the structure, but merely of changing their position within it.

The formulation popularly attributed to Paulo Freire — “when education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor” — does not appear in this exact wording in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but it summarizes a central problem in his work: the possibility that oppressed people may internalize the references and values of the oppressive system itself.

Freire contrasted what he called the “banking model” of education, centered on transmission and passivity, with a problem-posing education capable of allowing people to critically interpret and transform their relationships with the world.

Perhaps we can carry the same question into economics.

If a historically exploited community gains an opportunity to develop, does development mean finally being able to extract as much as those who once exploited it?

Or can we imagine other ways of producing value?

This distinction matters because the issue is not simply capitalism versus non-capitalism.

Markets, credit, property, trade, accumulation, and different forms of exchange existed long before modern industrial capitalism.

To call all of them “capitalism” would be historically imprecise.

But another question remains:

Why should we call an economic system more evolved when it increases production while simultaneously increasing inequality, material dependency, and the destruction of the conditions that make production itself possible?

What If Development Does Not Mean Taking the Conqueror’s Place?

David Graeber and David Wengrow challenged linear narratives according to which humanity necessarily moved from simple societies to agriculture, cities, hierarchical states, and finally to contemporary economic systems.

In discussions surrounding The Dawn of Everything, Wengrow revisits an argument previously developed by Graeber: certain modern conceptions of freedom can historically be examined in relation to slavery and commodification.

Within this interpretation, “freedom as personal possession” also becomes the capacity to dispose of one’s own labor power transactionally.

This is an anthropological interpretation of the genealogy of certain capitalist relations. It does not mean that every form of capitalism is simply equivalent to slavery.

That distinction matters.

We should not replace one simplification with another.

But we can still ask:

How much of what we call development continues to depend on converting Body, time, and territory into commodities?

In Latin America, this question is particularly material.

A 2026 study examining material extraction in Latin America and the Caribbean from 1970 to 2023 found a persistent connection between economic growth and expanding material extraction. Relative efficiency gains appeared in some contexts, but they did not consistently produce an absolute reduction in material pressure.

Other research on Latin American mining regions has shown that extractive specialization may coexist with environmental degradation, conflict, and limited productive diversification in the very regions that supply the resources.

Producing wealth, therefore, does not by itself answer the question:

wealth for whom, for how long, and leaving which possibilities behind?

The Biome Already Participates in the Economy - Even When Accounting Does Not Notice

A standing tree is not inactive.

It participates in water cycles, temperature regulation, soil processes, biodiversity, carbon dynamics, shade, and countless ecological relations.

A mangrove is not unproductive because it has not become a condominium.

A river that remains drinkable has not failed to produce simply because no company has bottled its water.

Biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people are spatially interconnected, and recent research increasingly attempts to identify areas where biodiversity conservation overlaps with the maintenance of benefits that are fundamental to human societies.

The problem is that our economic indicators can rapidly recognize what has been removed.

Tons.

Barrels.

Timber.

Ore.

Soybeans.

Energy.

Exports.

GDP.

But they struggle much more to assign economic value to what continued functioning precisely because it was not destroyed.

Within the BrainLatam hypothesis, this is where we introduce:

Biome Income

The proposal begins with a simple inversion.

If the continued functioning of a biome produces material conditions that sustain society, part of that value could also continuously return to the territories and Body-Territories participating in its preservation and regeneration.

BrainLatam has been developing this hypothesis as a way of economically recognizing water, soil, biodiversity, vegetation, ecological connectivity, territorial stability, and regeneration — without reducing the biome to a single metric such as tonnes of carbon equivalent.

Each biome would need its own metrics.

The Amazon cannot be measured exactly like the Caatinga.

The Pantanal cannot be measured like the Atlantic Forest.

The Cerrado cannot be measured like the Pampa.

The territory itself must be able to participate in determining what it means to remain functional within that territory.

Production of Excesses

This leads us to another BrainLatam hypothesis.

We are not against production.

Bodies need food.

Cities need housing.

Hospitals need equipment.

Countries need energy, infrastructure, medicines, science, and technology.

The question begins when production no longer predominantly responds to needs and instead becomes structurally dependent on producing more and more because any interruption in growth threatens the system itself.

We call this Production of Excesses.

This would not simply mean having a political authority decide that a certain product is unnecessary.

The issue would instead be to establish a relationship between:

need + ecological capacity + added value + territorial extraction + regeneration.

The further an economic activity moved beyond collectively defined needs while increasing pressure on finite resources, the greater its economic responsibility for restoring the biome could become.

Such restitution could take different legal, fiscal, or financial forms.

At this stage, the point is not to declare which mechanism is correct.

The principle is what matters:

extracting more territory to generate the same amount of value should not automatically be interpreted as superior development.

This remains a BrainLatam hypothesis: producing more knowledge, technology, and added value while proportionally removing less matter from the territory may represent a different trajectory of development.

And What About Money?

This is where the discussion reaches the concept of Citizen Drex.

An important distinction is required.

The official Drex, developed by the Central Bank of Brazil, is an infrastructure intended for transactions, settlement, and financial services involving digital assets. Its current architecture involves access through authorized financial intermediaries.

It is not a universal income distributed directly by the Central Bank, nor is it equivalent to BrainLatam’s proposal of “credit without debt.”

Citizen Drex is a BrainLatam hypothesis.

It asks:

what if part of monetary creation could reach citizens not initially as debt, but as a material expression of their belonging to the State?

And what if Biome Income became part of this metabolism?

We would then have two movements:

Citizen Drex → belonging to the political community.

Biome Income → belonging to the ecological relations that materially sustain that community.

The creation of money would no longer be conceptually isolated from another question:

what do we want to keep alive?

Personal AI: Not Deciding for the Biome, but Allowing the Biome to Enter the Decision

Here we return to Personal AI.

It should not merely report:

“Jackson wants X.”

“Maria wants Y.”

“This community prefers Z.”

Perhaps it must also be capable of recognizing:

water availability is decreasing in this region;

heat exposure is increasing;

commuting time has become longer;

food has become less accessible;

soil capacity has declined;

pollution has increased;

biodiversity has diminished;

a particular Body-Territory now spends more energy simply remaining alive in the place where it has always lived.

This does not mean that an AI can automatically decide what is good for a population.

Nor should an algorithm replace politics, culture, science, or democratic deliberation.

It means only that the biome no longer remains invisible when decisions about development are made.

In Blog 9, we said:

to belong without remaining in the same position.

Now we can add:

changing position requires that there still be positions to move toward.

There is no transcendence of Being in a territory from which every possibility has been removed.

There is no meaningful freedom of choice when breathing, eating, housing, moving, or obtaining water already consumes almost every available margin of that Body.

This is why Body-Territory is not a decorative metaphor.

It represents a change in the unit of analysis.

Which Economy Expands the Possibilities of Being?

Perhaps a new metric of development does not need to replace GDP.

It may simply need to put GDP in its proper place.

GDP tells us something important about economic activity.

But by itself it does not tell us:

Did the water improve?

Did the territory become more habitable?

Do people have more available time?

Has food become more diverse and accessible?

Can the Body move?

Can biodiversity continue?

Has inequality decreased?

Did the future gain possibilities or lose them?

From this perspective, Biome Income, Citizen Drex, and Production of Excesses are not ready-made answers.

They are hypotheses designed to make new questions economically formulable and scientifically testable.

Perhaps development does not mean finally allowing the conquered to become the conqueror.

Perhaps it means allowing people to no longer need to occupy either of those positions.

Neither conqueror.

Nor conquered.

But participants in a territory capable of continuing to generate difference, movement, and possibilities of Being.

The Jiwasa of the previous blog said:

I can belong without remaining in the same position.

The Biome now responds:

Yes — provided that our model of development does not destroy the very space you need in order to move.

And perhaps this is the question an economy of Body-Territory must learn to ask:

not only how much we produce, but how many possibilities of Being our production leaves alive after it passes.

References

FALCONÍ, F.; BURBANO, R.; CANGO, P.; INTRIAGO, R. Extraction and dematerialization in Latin America, 1970–2023. Ecological Economics, v. 244, 108947, 2026.

URIBE-SIERRA, S. E.; PANEZ-PINTO, A.; TOSCANA-APARICIO, A.; MANSILLA-QUIÑONES, P. Mining, development and unequal regionalization in subnational Latin American contexts. The Extractive Industries and Society, v. 13, 101209, 2023.

NEUGARTEN, R. A. et al. Mapping the planet’s critical areas for biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people. Nature Communications, 2024.

FREIRE, P. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Referenced here in relation to banking education, problem-posing education, internalization of oppressive structures, and critical consciousness.

GRAEBER, D.; WENGROW, D. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

CENTRAL BANK OF BRAZIL. Drex – Digital Real. Official documentation describing the Drex infrastructure and its intermediated access model.

BRAINLATAM. Quem mantém o Brasil vivo também produz riqueza? Development of the Biome Income hypothesis, 2026.

BRAINLATAM. Produzir mais até quando? Quando o excesso começa a produzir menos futuro, 2026.

BRAINLATAM. Quando o Estado pulsa em cada Corpo-Território. Discussion connecting Citizen Drex, State Income, Biome Income, and belonging, 2026.