Part I — The Sea Remembers  

This is a story about an island — a place surrounded by icebergs, waves, and sky. Fogo Island is a place where time moves differently. The sky shifts quickly, and the wind is almighty. Our smallness is impossible to ignore, yet on the island, everyone matters.

Fogo Island is a place like any other.
A place holding intrinsic wealth and value,
as all places do.
A place rich in specificity,
as all places are.
A place of entangled relationality,
as all places can be.

Shorefast, as a Canadian registered charity under which several social businesses operate on Fogo Island, invited Dark Matter Labs to chart the history of discovery, collaboration, and regeneration made possible by those who have invested their time, energy, patience, resources, and financial capital into Fogo Island. By inviting us to develop a deep awareness of the island’s inherent value and place-specific richness, Fogo Island invites us to start seeing our economic system through a different lens, and it offers us a powerful model for investing regeneratively and systemically in place.

The curious Economist: It is not easy to tell the story of a place, much less a place like Fogo Island. If you ask ten people about the island, you’ll get ten different answers. That’s the beauty and the challenge of it. In our own telling of this – incomplete and flawed – we turn to the history of the island, the evolution of Shorefast, the felt experience of walking its shores and the personal narrative from Zita Cobb, Fogo Islander and co-founder of Shorefast. As an economic story, the evolution of the island, particularly the current structure of Shorefast, defies categorization. Is it philanthropy, entrepreneurship, civic infrastructure, community development, or something else entirely? It’s a place where a co-operative, five-star hotel, education hub, seaweed lab, art gallery all matter to the economic story of the island and the people it hosts. Impossible to fully grasp if you haven’t been there, what is clear is how much there is to learn from the island.

I invite you to travel in time, follow the tide, and listen to the rhythms of life.

Once upon a time, “there was an island off an island, far away from far away.” Out in the North Atlantic, Fogo Island lived by the pull of the moon and the temperament of fog. Eleven small communities, and a coastline that taught the first lessons of risk, patience, and belonging.

That land had been part of the ancestral homeland of the Beothuk, whose culture has been lost forever as a result of colonization. As early as the 1520s, the island appeared on Portuguese sailing maps as “y do Fuego.” In the late 18th century, fishers from Devon, Dorset, and Waterford arrived at the behest of merchants who had begun to set up premises on Fogo Island.

*Michael Crummey from the National Film Board of Canada, https://collection.nfb.ca/interactive/far_away_from_far_away

Zita Cobb: “They came for the cod, and they stayed for the cod.”

For several centuries, the island was powered by a symbiotic relationship between the people and the fish. Life moved to the rhythm of cod and seasons. Value circulated without money through the truck system — debt in spring, saltfish in autumn against spices and molasse. The island’s vocabulary came from labour and wind: punts drawn from curved juniper knees, stages racked with drying fish, families who measured wealth in skill, kin, and enough to make it through winter.

There was no money, but value was assigned by the merchants.

“Until I was 10, I lived in a perfectly intact community — in a life that felt whole.”

Despite their isolation, the communities were divided by religion,culture, and infrastructure. Until things had to change… In the 1950s, the tide turned: factory trawlers appeared offshore, harvesting in a day what inshore fishers might take in a season. Stocks thinned; certainty frayed. The questions multiplied, as they do in storm seasons: What can we preserve? What holds value? How do we stay safe?

“My father couldn’t understand why these boats would fish day and night, day and night, day and night. He said, ‘They must be turning the fish into money. When you grow up, you have to go away. You have to figure out how this money thing works, because otherwise it will eat everything we love.”

At that time, remote communities across Newfoundland were being displaced during a major resettlement wave, roughly between 1954 and 1970. The provincial, and later the federal government, encouraged population concentration and offered financial assistance to move to what they called growth centers.  Approximately 307 communities were abandoned and over 28,000 people relocated.

But on Fogo Island, something else happened.

In 1967, filmmaker Colin Low and Memorial University Community Development Officer Fred Earle arrived as part of a National Film Board of Canada project called Challenge for Change. At a critical time when the island faced the threat of resettlement, the film crews shot 20 hours of footage, resulting in 27 short films that reflected Fogo Islanders’ concerns and hopes for the future. These films were then played back to the individual communities, enabling Fogo Islanders to see themselves — and to hear one another. The method of using film as a direct means of communication and community building became known worldwide as The Fogo Process.

“I had seen the Fogo Process — this unbelievable and unexpected coming together of people across religious boundaries to demand better, and to work for better.”

People who had long been separated — by coves, by churches, by habit — watched one another speak. The similarities began to matter more than the differences. Relationships formed. From that, the Fogo Island Co-operative Society emerged: a community-owned, capability-building enterprise. What could not be done individually began to be possible together — a shipyard was constructed, a loan secured, processing plants developed, new markets opened.

The curious Economist: This phase allowed for the cultivation of the islanders’ self-awareness and, created value in the form of relationships and agency. Together, the Island’s communities were strong enough to find ways to stay on the island and sustain themselves. Isolated, and divided, this would have been impossible. As an economist this challenges our view of ‘assets’ and what is or not investable. We start searching not for things to extract and to accumulate, but intangibles, such as culture, relationships, identity, that have inherent value and the potential to evolve. In other words, the foundational layers of a placed-based economy are not assets but entangled flows of intangible values. What would it mean to make the intangible tangible? To price the true collective value of cohesion, relationship, art, shared governance…

Within a regenerative paradigm, our understanding of value must recognize the primary importance of dynamic and entangled relationships, rather than maintain a narrow focus on notions of discrete assets.

The island continued to evolve through a series of developments made possible by the Co-op. In 1972, Fogo opened its first non-denominational high school, and bus routes stitched the coves into a more continuous shoreline of relationship.

The tides of modernity brought electricity and television, but also new kinds of changes, for example as some women began working in fish plants, emptying houses.

The curious Economist: In Fogo everyone can sing and knows a poem or two. The islanders are living memories of times when there was no electricity. 

“We are not a culture that understands you sell your time.”

In 1992, the federal cod moratorium hit like a rogue wave. Livelihoods were upended, and a generation of young people left for work elsewhere. And yet again, the Islanders evolved into a new creative phase… But that story is for another day.

The curious Economist: Modern economic tools — money, markets, even energy itself — often arrive as promises of abundance. Yet, when untethered from place, they erode the very social tissue that sustains life.

We see here how relational capacity is not a soft asset but a vital one — the true currency of generative capacity. On the island, value lived in the hands that mended nets, in neighbours helping each other through winter, in the stories that taught belonging. When innovation and speed outpace those bonds, systems fragment; what was once entangled, intergenerational, and distributed becomes thin, isolated, and brittle.

Seen through the island’s lens, this shift calls for a re-evaluation of the infrastructures that shape our lives and identities. What if the institutions we design — from education and health care to governance and justice — were built on the assumption of interdependence rather than separation? What would justice mean in a world where we see ourselves as interconnected becomings?

Perhaps Fogo reminds us that the purpose of an economy is relationships and circulation of value through its living systems.

Contributors to the project: Anna Hutchinson, Indy Johar, Raj Kalia, Nathalia Del Moral Fleury, Leon Seefeld, and a special thanks to the team at Shorefast.