My name is Carlson, and I am an attorney licensed to practice law in the state of Tennessee. I earned my JD and Masters of Environmental Law and Policy at Vermont Law School. I founded Eco Demo in 2022.

I have a background working on cooperative corporations and renewable energy policy. Prior to law, I worked in food security, on teaching farms, and in intentional community. Liberation philosophies and permaculture led me to study environmental law. 

While studying the history of environmental movements, I learned that so much of environmental law is about correcting "externalities," the unaccounted-for costs of business-as-usual. These externalities are merely outputs, symptoms of ownership structures, where laborers and owners are not always the same people, and consumers are separated from the land that sustains them by invisible chains of commerce. 

When "thinking in systems," labor unions and employment law, food security efforts and environmental justice start to feel like mitigation–structurally predetermined responses to systems that produce unjust outputs, rather than instruments of systemic change. Mercy demands mitigation, but we need a paradigm shift in order to turn off the flow of unjust outputs. 

By promoting economic democracy from the ground up, we change the paradigm from an economy that maximizes value through extraction, to an economy that is marked by sustainable, equitable growth. 

Our human economy is a nested subsystem within the natural economy (or ecosystem). By harmonizing ownership structure with natural economic signals like price, profit, people, pollution, and place, we can cultivate resilient systems. Whether economic or ecological, resilient systems respond positively to change as they generate equity, equitably. 

So, one business at a time, one operating agreement at a time, one contract, one case, one policy at a time, let's work together to create our new economy – one that works for all of us.