The Mangonomy: Celebrating the Mango Economy
By Satish Kumar, Editor Emeritus, Resurgence, U.K.
Satish Kumar, originally from India, is an author, editor, educator, and a world traveler. He lives in the United Kingdom. Photo by Daniel Elkan.
The economy of Nature is regenerative, resilient, abundant and cyclical. Nature produces no waste. In a forest there are no waste bins!
Take for example a mango tree and mango fruit. We invest one single seed in the soil, what I call the Earth Bank. Then there is slow but steady growth. That seed collaborates with the Sun, soil and rain, as well as pollinating bees and orchard keepers, and slowly it becomes a beautiful tree.
Within a few years that tree produces hundreds of magnificent mangoes, not just for one year, but year after year for forty to fifty years. What an amazing return! Each mango is delicious, nutritious, nourishing, fragrant, sweet, healthy, and beautiful to look at. The juicy and tasty flesh is packaged in a soft skin that can be composted to feed the soil. No waste, no pollution, and no plastic packaging. A mango tree gives oxygen in the daytime (which we humans need) and absorbs carbon dioxide for its own nourishment. What a great miracle!
The mango tree and the mango fruit are beautiful, useful, and durable. Artists take pleasure in painting them, photographers take photos, and poets are inspired to compose poems about them.
Each mango has a seed within it. The one seed that we planted a few years ago has now multiplied into hundreds of seeds! Eventually from one original seed we can create a whole new orchard. No scarcity of seeds. No need to buy seeds. This is the ‘mangonomy’ of abundance.
The mango tree teaches us the importance of generosity and equality. A king or a beggar, a saint or a sinner, a priest or a prisoner, a human or an animal, a bird or a wasp—everyone is welcome to enjoy and to be fed by mangoes.
Never will a mango tree ask you, “Have you come with your credit card?” Everyone is welcome to have mangoes. No discrimination, no judgement, and no money is needed as far as the tree itself is concerned.
A mango tree needs no fossil fuels, no electricity, no wind turbines, no solar panels, and no batteries. It only takes passive solar energy, which is in constant supply. A mango orchard requires no factory floors, no concrete construction, and no infrastructure. Mango trees are self-sufficient, self-managed, and self-contained.
A mango tree gives more than mangoes. It provides branches for birds to nest in. It provides cool shade in hot summer for people and animals to rest, and firewood in a cold winter. At the end of its life mango wood is made into objects of daily use. A mango tree comes from the earth and returns to the earth. During its lifetime it benefits other species and does no harm to anyone.
This is a perfect economy. We humans need to be humble and learn from mango trees in particular, and Nature in general. I have chosen the mango tree to illustrate my point. But this is true of all the fruit trees and shrubs, grains and vegetables, herbs and flowers, and Nature in her entirety.
Can any factory or industrial plant produce something as beautiful and beneficial, as good and harmless, as valuable and pleasing as a mango? Industrialists, business leaders and politicians talk about ‘the economy.’ But hardly anyone knows or understands the true meaning of economy. Economy is made of two Greek words: oikos and nomos. Oikos means ‘home,’ and nomos means ‘management.’ In the wisdom of Greek philosophers, the entire ecosystem is our home, and management of the ecosystem is the true economy.
But our modern economists, industrialists, businesspeople and politicians are not managing ecosystems. Instead, they are managing balance sheets, business plans, profitability, industrial production, and money supply. This is not the true economy. This is the ‘moneynomy:’ the management of money. They appear to treat ecosystems and Nature as a ‘commodity,’ a resource for financial gain, a means to the end of making money. Moneynomy is misnamed as economy, but, if the truth be told, moneynomy is anti-economy!
A PERFECT ECONOMY
Governments around the world agree on one thing: economic growth! Whether a government is capitalist, socialist or communist, whether it is Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist or atheist, they all have one common goal, and that is the goal of economic growth. All countries live under the dictatorship of the moneynomy. This is not true growth in terms of a true economy. The growth they seek is growth in moneynomy.
In Nature’s true economy or mangonomy there are two types of growth: vertical growth and horizontal growth. In vertical growth there is an optimum limit. A mango tree on average will grow to become thirty to fifty feet tall and then stop growing. An animal will grow to a certain limited height and then stop growing. A human being will not generally grow much beyond six feet. This is sustainable vertical growth. Then there is horizontal growth. Here we have much more flexibility. Forests, farms, and mango groves are not so limited in horizontal growth.
The mangonomy is decentralized and widely distributed. No concentration of millions of mangoes on one tree!
LONG-TERM WELLBEING
So-called economic growth is vertical. The rich get richer and richer. There is no limit. Financial wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands. Extremely rich individuals of this world pursue vertical growth. Corporations like Amazon, Google and Apple also have vertical growth. For them enough is never enough.
Five to ten countries out of approximately two hundred have much higher economic growth, even though within these rich countries large numbers of people have a very low income and a low standard of living. Many people live in slums, and many are begging in the streets of rich countries. Such economic growth or money growth is largely vertical, without any benefit to a large number of people, and in the long run economic growth of this type also creates growth in pollution, waste and carbon emissions, which are all harmful to planet Earth.
If we want the long-term wellbeing of the human race and the health of our precious planet, we need to shift our obsession with money management and focus instead on the proper management of ecosystems. Money should be simply a means to an end, the end being both human and planetary wellbeing. That will be the true economy! And the economy needs to be circular—what comes from the Earth goes back to the Earth. Minimum waste, minimum pollution, and minimum carbon emissions.
We can all learn this from a mango tree. Long live the mangonomy!
By Satish Kumar, Editor Emeritus of Resurgence Magazine based in Devon, United Kingdom. Satish is the author of many books, including Soil, Soul, Society and Radical Love, available from www.resurgence.org/shop
Note: This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist Issue 349, March/April 2025. All rights to this article are reserved to The Resurgence Trust and author. To buy a copy of the magazine, read further articles or find out about the Trust, visit: www.resurgence.org
