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Youth ReGenesis EcoMinistry Project

Doctor of Ministry Proposal, Hartford Seminary

Gerald Dillenbeck, M. Div., MPA, PDC

O Thou who created the universe

And all that we see on our planet,

We worship your pulsating presence

In all that you have made

And all you have made is in you.

M. T. Winter, p. 166, 2009

The 10-Story Elevator Speech Summary:

The Youth ReGenesis Project is

an inter-religious EcoMinistry retrovirus

with abundant sustainable intent

toward a deeply, and gratefully, and graciously prime rooted

PermaCultural Metaphysics,

with Positive Deviance natural/spiritual In/ExFormation Balance,

Open Whole System Group Theory

(0)-soul Vertex/Vortex Assumption,

with highly synergetic, and healthy, bountiful string-growth trajectory

toward what we have already absorbed through past generations,

with co-prehensile and comprehensively mindful gratitude.

Goal:

To join inter-religious youth EcoMinisters together;

to explore, discuss, discern, and comprehend more deeply

into a shared ReGenesis of spiritual and natural systems;

deep seeding a resilient and sustainable growth

toward an abundantly incarnated, inclusive, and equitable REcology of Gratitude/Grace.

Or, the Reverse Corollary: To reduce the dissonance between the Inductive (+e-frequency/function) Ecology of Grace (Right-brained message neural receptors) and the deductive (-e-frequency/function), Exegetical Economy of Law/Language/Logic (Left-brained DNA Codex receptors). Special Case Note: Only Physical Universe is available to metric/numeric systems comprehensive, transliterative, and predictive evidence confirmation.

ReGenesis Theory Vision:

Our nature-spirit Information System is optimally comprehended through analogically transliterating the Ecology of Physical Material Values through the PermaCultured [permanently encultured] Gratitude-Values lens of Yang/Yin Balanced RE-ligious Information Codex: The Golden Rule and the Golden Ratio are restatements of +/-.50%Yang Self-Individuation = -.50%Yin Not-Polynomial “Other” Identity without excluding Boundary [heuristically assumed to be infinitely inclusive]/2 = 0-soul Vertex/Vortex. (See Buckminster Fuller, Gregori Perelman, and Laotse).

First Stage: Urgent Need for a Climatic Trend Reversal AND Grateful-Mindful Leadership

The most gratifying attribute of cyclical and self-reproducing Living Systems is their permanence, their lack of ending. Their greatest weakness is the reverse view; there is no place in particular to begin to tell their story.

Connecticut is in disarray. Faith in the future evaporates with the aquifer, and healthy air and soil and lives. The sense of urgency, not for more random change, but for socio-economic and ecological transformation, emergently grows toward its own ominous conclusion; Business As Usual is dying.

The voluntary, and sometimes involuntary, exodus of the Millennial Generation from our places of formation–schools, temples, churches, farms, skilled labor guilds, extended families and small villages—leads to a healthy heuristic assumption that our need for urgency is sufficiently tilted toward a new “highest and best use” Search status. As an emergent post-millennial community of (0)-Carbon Footprint Faith, perhaps we are ready to re-link (re-ligion) our PermaCultured Golden Rule/Ratio Traditions to our Left-Brain’s favorite child, Deductive Scientific Method.

The literature on organizing improvement within faith communities (and the term faithless community appears oxymoronic to anyone who has ever tried to live in the semblance of a sane community, so perhaps we can simply agree that any assembly of people deserving the appellation community also deserves to be thought of as a “faith community”) redundantly emphasizes two necessary ingredients for successful change, urgency and mindful-grateful leadership; leadership quality that is itself openly and inclusively responsive to constituents. While some emphasize urgency over effective leadership (Schaller, Macy and Johnstone, Gershon, Kotter) and others appear to emphasize effective leadership over sense of urgency (McNeal, Bass, Schwarz, Dale, Atlee), probably we all agree that having both is optimal, and presumably necessary to sustain community spirit for revival into perpetuity.

The proposed D. Min. project topic, “Intentional ReGenesis: A Case Study in PermaCultured Youth Sustainability through EcoMinistry Formation,” is metrically and naturally rooted in Buckminster Fuller’s Theory of Regenerativity. However, it is spiritually and normatively rooted in an elaborate polycultural map. On this map, the Dalai Lama’s definition of compassion will point toward a collective sense of urgency to relieve shared suffering. Our Polyculture Map also uses the Dalai Lama’s definition of mindfulness as the necessary avenue toward an effective leadership of prehensile, enthymematic, and diastatically engorged gratitude.

Fuller’s Metaphysical metrics and predictions regarding “an eternally changeless definition of all understanding,” translated into Taoist, Buddhist, and Trinitarian terminology, offer us the heuristic assumption that the most regeneratively balanced ecology is the one that is most sustainable and resilient through transformative change. We will define this Prime Relationship Balance as:

Compassionate suffering Yin (purgative awareness) = -0 Prime-Linear Appositional Information about urgent disvalue (Ex-Formative sociopathology beliefs), AND

Mind/grate-ful mutual leadership Yang (sublimation is defined as mutual-exegetical synergetic understanding) = +1.00% Prime Binary Information System Value

In other words: Greatest Effect (Yang+e) with Least Effort (Yin-e) Balances PermaCulturally when assets/strengths are recognized as gratuitous resources to overcome our current socioeconomic pathology, or weakness. This is a Yang/Yin holistic feminist-inclusively-balanced teleological ecology.

When Yang and Yin levels within any one ecosystem, or community, are in balance, then we have an optimal environment for self-perpetuating and sustaining (regenerative) Deep Growth. Harmonious Tao-Centered trends facilitate multi-species’ (and multi-religious Traditions’) mutual nourishment, health, and well-being. Permaculture Design and Positive Deviance (PD) principles provide a ubiquitous and deep learning ecology through the development of language steeped in natural system metaphor, metric-numeric reiterative system-pattern development, and feminist/holistic therapeutic communication paradigms (David Abram, Julian Jaynes, Laura S. Brown, Miriam Therese Winter).

Second Stage: Cooperative Symbiotic Growth v. Competitive Linear Progress Myths

The literature on effective models for managing sustainable development includes some diversity of thought about how to best measure success. Are we about the business of growing in size, perpetually, across time, continuing to grow in numbers until the individual community, or paradigm, or belief system, or language, or species has created a monoculture? This sounds uncomfortably akin to Dr. Seuss’s parable of The Lorax. Alarmingly rapid changes in climate are teaching us that this way of defining human success points toward its own ultimate demise, bringing down most of our other-species allies with us. Basic laws of thermodynamic balance remind us that if the resources we expend outweigh the resources we take in on a sustained basis, then entropy describes our future. Our community’s most sustainable growth with least dissonance to the larger ecology may best be informed by a Deep Learning read of Fletcher Peacock’s Water the Flowers, Not the Weeds.

Much of the literature on growth of communities places more emphasis on qualitative measurements of success, or effectiveness. We might think of these outcomes as the slow, natural, rooting growth toward depth; becoming embedded in sustainable root networks of diversity and mutual enrichment (Dale, McNeal, Schwarz, Macy and Johnstone). To grow as a person of faith is to grow as a mutual minister embedded in a polyculture of EcoMinistry (Eco conjoins Economy and Ecology). Effective leadership follows growth in compassion; compassion emerges through the mutuality of cooperative, mindful, grateful development and stewardship. This natural systems analogical paradigm lies at the heart of Fuller’s Metaphysics of gratitude, belonging to the Commons, Spaceship Earth, (rather than materialistic reductionism, the memes of property and ownership), and the symbiotic, precessive, relationship-co-designing/desiring, trend of self-regenerative ecosystems.

Buckminster Fuller was interested, in his later years, in a Theory of Regenerativity. In his Synergetics and Synergetics 2 (1975, 1979), especially Synergetics 2, he may have anticipated Gregori Perelman’s proof of the soul conjecture (1994) in Mathematics’ Group Theory, assuming n-dimensional symmetric, elliptic, structural boundaries-as-Vertex/Vortex Janus-faced Relationship. Hierarchically staged (folding and unfolding) relationships in a 0-soul Core Vertex Universe are isomorphic, and therefore mutually holonic.

It is precisely this symmetrical/appositional Information Codex as normative that may have connected, for Fuller, with the issue of Special Case Information Systems as the land of Physics. Fuller defines our Whole Systems Universe as: “the integral of all metaphysical and physical phenomena.” (1075.22, 1979) Universe as a mental place of comprehended relationship AND the Exterior Landscape of physical/natural thermodynamic laws, AND an iterative conversation of mutual teaching-learning. He summarizes the metric and rhythmic significance of Einstein’s, and his own, prehensile attraction toward an optimally satisfying Universal Field Theory as

Whereas the physical disintegrates entropically to a limit of velocity and disorder, the metaphysically operative mind displays a reverse pattern to that of physical entropy [ e.g. Not-Polynomial Time and Space mental-universe only; exclusive of Physical phenomena], wherewith to define lastingly the mind seeks the orderliness of the principles that are discovered. As the human definitions can never be perfect [analogically holonic], the metaphysical mind of humans can only amplify and simplify the human statement of the comprehensive orderliness discovered and periodically reconfirmed by further experiences. (1052.60, 1979)

Third Stage: What is comprehensible (Polynomial Information-P) is appositional to what is proven to be Not-Polynomial Information-NP (confirmed not-real value).

Fuller believed that Polynomial Time and Space enjoy a self-perpetuating timeless P=NP equity balance. Information develops in ways that are normatively analogous to a Taoist description of Yang = +100% of Universal Natural Energy System and Yin = (-)100% of Universal Metaphysical System. Natural (Physical) systems thereby form the normative boundaries for (0) Balanced universal information system hierarchical-holonic structure.

Stored awareness of natural law boundaries within organic systems is Codex. Information Codex is bound by dimensional binary Information Balance structure, or staging, constraints of sequence and pattern, that we again discover in William Thurston’s 8-possible Prime Universes–spatial and/or temporal–in Group Theory. This Codex assumes that Polynomial Space/Time is indeed reversely equivalent to Not-Polynomial Metaphysical-Mental Codex Place/Moment Metric Systems. When that underlying assumption is supported and celebrated by our bicameral humanity, then Earth and her inhabitants improve our teleological pilgrimage trajectory toward consonant/dissonant abundant balance. Faith and hope flourish in a 4-Based Deep Econometric-Ecology, and blossom through Original Instruction Code to resist not-thriving, lack of string-resilience, increasing Problems of Incommensurability, in a bionic-binary-balanced In-forming Trans-Analogizing Metric/Linguistic Communication System.

Fuller often notes that the precessive/recessive patterns of space/time are redundantly expressed in the basic organic and sub-atomic structures of natural energy systems. Fuller’s Figure 203.09 (1975) predicts the underlying Codex expressed in the Higgs Boson, the tetrahedral 4-Staged structure of logic and trigonometry, laws of thermodynamic balance, analogy, communication, organic system regeneration (the life/death/fertilization/new-generation cycles of plants, and the 4-Season Earth-Sun Cycle Rotation, for example), RNA, octaves, and double-bind-fractals.

Fourth Stage: Aha! Insight and Fractal Synergetic Rhythm Metrics

It is interesting to speculate that Fuller may have, at least implicitly, predicted that a Millennial Generation would PermaCulturally become aware of the implications of his Theory of ReGenerativity. Eventually, when the springtime of human faith becomes ripe for Regenesis, we might find a successful resolution of Einstein’s pilgrimage of only relative-success, where P and NP remain winterized as not necessarily symmetrical; yet we hope they reflect Tao.

Earth, air, water, and bio-systems are overheating and moving toward entropic loss of Information organizing capacity, which will reverse after political, economic, and religious leaders recognize the abundant comprehensive power of (0) Balanced In/Ex-Formation as both normatively and metrically balanced.[1] In other words, if it were not true that Polynomial equals Not-Polynomial Information in reverse linear, hierarchical, and fractal-staged Prime Relationship sequence, then human comprehension would not be possible. When we comprehend (Fuller’s parallel to the Dalai Lama’s universal “mindfulness”) that Not-Polynomial Ex-Formation, in any (0) soul Prime Rooted Information Universe, equals (-)100% of Polynomial Deductive Logic Information pattern sequence, and rhythm, humanly cognizable in the eternal/permanent inductive moment.

Fuller provides us with a reverse linear-time rhythmic projection toward our immediate Aha! Experience in Figure 1130.24, pp. 452-3, in which the Second Millennial Generation rather miraculously, maybe even heroically, embraces the fundamental laws of thermodynamically balanced gratitude, ethically and naturally and spiritually, normatively and inductively, even synaptically. An ergetic un-forming, unfolding, abundantly diastatic retrovirus reveals her “anti-matter” Not-Self=NP. Discovering her as the shy, virginal Yin Muse of GratitudeInfused Creative Synergy, the feminist, our shared Right-Hemisphere reveals -.50% of the Original Instruction Codex soul; it is Self optimizing to do no harm to Other. Yang/Yin ReGenerative dynamic equilibrium revolves a taproot back to our First Millennium’s Golden Rule, Ratio, and Elixir. Individuated-Self is to Other as Other has always been to our We-Self RNA Community String, Story, Song.

To comprehend the Commons as we would have the Commons sustainably communicate with Humans (certainly including Self), is to optimize nutritional and economic abundance, depth, and wisdom. The Commons, including metaphysically encultured pilgrimage Traditions back to our Original Instruction, teaches our teleological mission to ReGenerate Deep Ecology.

Stage Five: TrimTab Primary Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Principle of Greatest Effect for Least Effort: adhere to Golden Rule/Ratio

As mystics, polymaths, artists, architects, have been noticing from earliest shamanic proto-history to present, the greatest effect for least effort fundamental design principle is a radically inclusive Golden Rule because we are all in this mess together (Macy and Johnstone). We literally and figuratively, normatively and metrically, nutritionally and bionically, naturally and spiritually, metaphysically and physically, are what we have absorbed from our progenitors; we absorb what is already potentiated (gratuitously prehensile, compelling, co-attracting) in the next Holonic Place/Moment. When our Bicameral Species globally comprehends our eisegetical Internal Landscape of Graced Ecology and exegetical External Landscape are mutually reiterative[2], then Fuller predicts (and perhaps Teilhard de Chardin) a Cosmic Aha! Event. This diastatic cultural event follows the dramatic comprehension of sustainable and equitable abundance through balanced gratitude-mindfulness. Our mutual suffering emerges as the emphatic and obvious reverse of our optimized confluent wisdom. Socioeconomic pathology conjoins socioecological therapy.

Wisdom, then, recommends mutually other-optimizing intent and commitment to cooperate socioeconomically and ecologically with the Commons (these are Win-Win Game Theory strategies for outcome optimization), which is the Explicate-Order (David Bohm) Exterior Landscape of our diverse polycultures, nutrient streams, communication systems. Grace-filled cooperative intent and practice evolves from our universally shared PrimeRoot Zero; a Deep Learning mutually-sustaining Core Vertex, liminally co-circumscribing a Feminist-Octave 4-Based Vortex.

We become abundantly sufficient, EcoMinistry balanced, when we practice our Species’ vocational trajectory back to the nutrient communication strings rejoining us to a future globally inclusive Gold-Standard Polyculture. This long-range, 8-generation, Original Instruction is now emerging through the moment-to-moment recognition of ourselves in grateful relation with Others, and SacredOther as the absorbed nutrients that In-Form “We-Self” identity.

Stage Six: EcoMinister as Dynamic We/Me Win-Win Facilitator

Christian Schwarz chooses empowering facilitative leaders as the first of his eight necessary qualities for Natural Church Development optimization. “These pastors equip, support, motivate, and mentor individuals,”…. “They do not use lay workers as ‘helpers’.” (p. 24) This is leadership operating in a cooperative transaction economy, and ecology. Capitalists and socialists, government regulators and “free” enterprise advocates alike need not apply for the role of Reverse-Millennial ReGenesis leader. Empowerment optimizes as grateful cooperation becomes equilateral, mutually initiated and received. This is a highly mindful and enriching cooperative value exchange—equal value for equal value. Enterprise is never free; there are always energy transfers in any endeavor, any change, movement, vocation, mission, business. Profit that only works one way is a distorted view; it lacks value-balance.

Leaders who realize their own empowerment by empowering others experience how the “all by itself” [TrimTab-post synergetic “gift” Yields derived from yoking GreatestEffect-TherapyStrength with LeastEffort-Pathology] principle contributes to growth. (p. 25)

Mutually empowering iterative loops are the economic-ecologists Positive Deviance way of advocating the benefits of designed-inclusion for optimizing cooperative transactions. Appreciative Inquiry (rooted in hope of mutual gratitude) within an intentionally diverse polyculture, is more likely to result in a long-term sustainably successful mutual-profit balance, than operating within a monocultural ecosystem. Positive Deviance selects for indigenous assets in response to urgent, and collectively shared, eco-pathologies. Cooperative value transfers intend win-win symbiotic value optimization—the emergent Ecology of Gratuitous/Gift all by itself Positively Deviant Evolution. This is the kind of reality that sounds like our most abundant purpose is to grow in mutual compassion and gratefully inclusive mindfulness, of “WeSelf” co-prehensile Awareness. The fruits of compassion are cooperative-oriented transactions, expressions of significant mutual gratitude relationships.

Schwarz further observes that empowering sense-builders appreciate bipolar balance between “goal” and “relationship” orientations. In his theological paradigm, too many of us are either imbalanced toward a technocratic Me-faith (YangSpirit) or a spiritualistic We-hope(YinSpirit). It is the adept religious leader who is able to consistently self-and-other empower, keeping both her faith-in-self-optimization focus, and hope-for-prime-relationship development, in equipoised balance.

Our polymathic ReGenesis EcoMinister maintains an internal and external holonic landscape that compassionately reflects gratitude for self as part of other, through hope for other as part of self; a combination of the Golden Rule and the enthymematic solidarity-awareness that “we are all, most-gratefully, in this together.” This is a solidarity that echoes the sacramental marriage bond, having a double-bind synergetic intent—but applied universally, radically, inclusively, embracing all species and all of nature.

Our millennial Positive Deviance facilitator transliterates the symbol-patterns within and between self and other during an inclusive pilgrimage toward a mutually re-discovered Universe of ultimate co-passion. This sounds like a good love thing. But, is this theology supported by what we discover in natural patterns of healthy development? This, after all, is the infrastructural analogy behind Schwarz’s thesis; we are an In-formation Bicamerally-Coded Language-string-reiteration Species of perpetually reincarnating nature-Events. He implies that spiritual and/or metaphysical information is morphologically comprehended through recognition of incarnated natural elements, confluent and dissonant symbols, value exchanges, and their systemic relationship patterns, development sequences and stages. These natural elements are in dynamic evolutionary relationship, so we can notice nature’s patterns to improve understanding of our regenerating Universe, and perhaps vice versa.

Stage Seven: Deep-Rooting PermaCultured EcoMinistry

The ReGenesis Project vision is that we are already an emergent Species of quasi-cooperative EcoMinister wanna-be’s. This Turning Point Generation faces a uniquely critical opportunity and is potentiated for this socioeco-equity transitional moment. Our hypothesis is that grace-filled apprehension toward a holistic teleological self- and world-view is more prominent within the Reverse-Bi-Millennial-ErgeticCusp Generation, and their PermaCultured RetroPositive Deviant elders. Further, our Project goal is to accelerate and democratize this Deep Grace/Gratitude Ecology through a variety of Dynamic Facilitation interreligious and secular youth leadership development venues. If we model a regenerative, dynamically inclusive process of Appreciative Inquiry, then the medium of dialogue will naturally revolve toward a mutually-held plan for regenerative Self-People-Earth development, with diverse paradigmatic applications—economics, creative design information technology, neighborhood revitalization, holistic health care, Time/Space v. Moment/Place autistic bipolar-affective dissonance therapy, Deep Learning pedagogy, green technology development toward 0 carbon footprint, improved non-violent communication practice, child, youth, and family well-being CQI policy reform, and public discernment/dialogue choice-making.

The Positive Deviance (PD) concept is based on the observation that in every community or organization there are a few individuals or groups whose uncommon but successful behaviors and strategies have enabled them to find better solutions to problems than their neighbors who face the same challenges and barriers and have access to [the] same resources.

The PD approach is a problem solving, asset-based approach grounded in the fact that communities have assets or resources they haven’t tapped.

Basic Field Guide to the Positive Deviance Approach, http://www.positivedeviance.org

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a method for studying and changing social systems (groups, organizations, communities) that advocates collective inquiry into the best of what is in order to imagine what could be, followed by collective design of a desired future state that is compelling and thus, does not require the use of incentives, coercion or persuasion for planned change to occur.

Gervase R. Bushe, “Appreciative Inquiry,” http://www.wikipedia.org

Both Appreciative Inquiry and Positive Deviance are community-improvement oriented systems models. Both easily fall within the Interior and Exterior Landscape vision of Permaculture Design, as well as Positive Psychology, and Fuller’s Holistic Teleology. AI and PD (which we will stipulate as a symbol for both Positive Deviance and Permaculture Design) actively search for the strengths currently indigenous to the community, or polyculture, to optimize these untapped resources for sustainable Continuous Quality Improvement. This is precisely what Christian Schwarz recommends to strategically bolster the faith community’s greatest weakness. Respond to system weakness by strategically focusing BusinessAsUsual- Deviant strength-nutrient out-lyers.

Achieving the greatest effect with the least effort is, perhaps, the prime principle of Permaculture Design. Designing for synergetic development by intentionally working with natural systemic assets, positive deviance, is efficient, and the most sustainable option among those available at any given time. Appreciate Inquiry and Dynamic Facilitation are public dialogue technologies designed to include affected, effected, and infected constituencies as diversely as possible in discovering the Positively Deviant resources already indigenous to the choice-making community. These PD resources are the dialogue population’s most under-employed, most richly-potentiated, asset toward a consensus solution of value. Consensus is limited only by the sufficiency of listening deeply to the diversity within the polyculture. The more diversity within the active polyculture, dynamically drawn-into the effective dialogue environment, the more sustainable the solution—rather like adding tangy yogurt to warm milk, to diastatically regenerate the milk into an optimized population of yogurt.

Schwarz (logically confluent with Fuller, and Macy and Johnstone) refers to the economy of grace, or gratitude, as the all by itself principle; the emergent outcome of system regeneration. Abundant fruition, or fertility, of a system is not only greatest effect with least effort, it is also the evidence of what Buckminster Fuller calls emergent precession. Metaphysical precessions and all natural precession trending systems comprehend, or culminate, in a fractal moment of regenerative intent, given sufficient urgency and an adroitly facilitated Appreciate Inquiry learning culture. Precession is positive trend toward syntropy, synergy, forming symbiotic, confluent, harmoniously intricate networks of patterned relationship. Positive Deviance may be what natural teleologists recognize as Original Meaning or Golden Rule-Original Instruction. Regardless, the taproot of comprehension brings further nourishment to the Original Meaning of enthymematic gratitude—now, also the all by itself intuitive effects of grace, or teleological gift, bounty, extra, optimized abundance within any system, paradigm, universe. Grace is what creation adds to learning; new identity adds to authentic self-articulation; care-giving mutual intent adds to the norms of belonging and nutrition and therapeutic practice (see Brown).

A great deal of Fuller systems comprehension turns (literally and figuratively) on understanding his binary map for transliteration between the Interior Landscape (Metaphysical Universe) and Exterior Landscape (Physical Universe).

System insideness and outsideness means two congruent, concave-convex systems, four corner-defining ins, and their four opposite windows through which the omnidirectional out nothingness is revealed. The eight were there all the time. The fourness of self and the fourness of otherness = comprehension. Comprehension involves tuned-in octave resonance as well as omnidirectional and local angular integrity. (268.02, 1979)

Systems are aggregates of four or more critically contiguous relevant events having neither solidity nor surface or linear continuity. Events are systemic. (400.26, 1975)

PD ReGenesis, whether Physical or Metaphysical, is trending toward better balance, toward both increased consonance and her Non-Polynomial Corollary, decreased dissonance.

Stage Eight: Youth EcoMinistry Pilgrims follow our ReGenesis Metric and Economic Value Story

A world of peace and prosperity

For all inhabitants of planet Earth

Can

And will

Come to fruition

Through rock-solid relationships.

Cross-cultural and interfaith relationships,

Personal and social relationships

[Economic and ecological relationships,

Natural and spiritual relationship,

Yang and Yin relationship

Day and Night relationship

Prediction and Reverse-Membering relationship

Explicate and Implicate Order relationship

Diastasis and Metanoia

Seeing and Tasting

Deduction and Induction

Alpha-Based Deductive Reasoning[3] and Holonic Feminist, Creative Learning, Nurturant-PayItForward Cooperative, EcoMinistry, Intentional Community of Gratitude [and Song/Oral Re-Telling] Ecology[4]

Quantum and Ex-formation relationship]

Are ways whereby we replicate

Our relationship with

The Divine.

Relationship is a succulent and savory fruit

Of our quantum Spirit.

The proof is

In the experience.

Spirit

Invites us

To taste

And

M. T. Winter, p.167, 2009, with some analogically creative liberties

This Youth ReGenesis EcoMinistry D. Min. Project begins with two Core Teams: an Interior Landscape (Metaphysics/Math) Team and an Exterior Landscape (Physical/Ecology) Team.

Both Teams will follow a Deep Learning path that explores Synergetics, Positive Deviance, Appreciative Inquiry, Non-Violent Communication, and Permaculture Design Principles. A second generation of Youth-led Teams will follow the combined work of these Core Teams, folding core findings into additional religious spirit- and nature-based languages and paradigms. For example, in what ways do the Eastern meaning and context of gratitude v. material objectification parallel (and appear dissonant with) the Abrahamic Myth-ecology of grace v. law, female v. male, Yin v. Yang, Wisdom v. Word, GraceCreation v. Structured Codex balance-issues?

How might these confluence/dissonance trends be further analogically enriched, or questioned, by Fuller’s understanding of ergetic, gravitational, function within a dynamically repercussive Metaphysical/Physical, recessive/precessive, implicated/explicated, Ex-formed/In-formation, NotPolynomial/Polynomial Space and Time Universe?

What, if anything, does the ReGenesis of Self Care, People Care, and Earth Care as 3 sides of a (0) soul Center have to do with my WeSelf Individuation, our WeSelf EcoMinistry intentionally inclusive vocation toward positive gratitude-nutrition-thriving cooperative outcomes, and my Natural HomePresence [Physically In-carnated] future?

The Metaphysics/Math Team, from secular and religious schools, and youth groups, will explore the hypothesis:

The universe is optimally comprehensible, and valued, when (0) Soul Vectored, thermodynamically and informationally equipoised.

Fuller’s geometry, mapped onto the Group Theory work of William Thurston and Gregori Perelman, defines (0), soul, vector, universe, and regenerative system.

CQI Standards: Report responds to the Clay Math Institute’s Challenge: Does Polynomial equal Not-Polynomial?

2. The Exterior Landscape Team will explore a teleological hypothesis, from http://www.neweconomicsnetwork.org:

The purpose of an economic system is to organize human activities in ways that support healthy and resilient…ecosystems for both present and future generations.

If both hypotheses 1 and 2 are True, then the 1st hypothesis may work as an analogical definition of :

• integral mindfulness, personally, bio-ethically, and as a species; Beyond Religion, Dalai Lama;

an eternally changeless definition of all understanding; B. Fuller;

• the Tao of Yang/Yin self-perpetuating and –defining Prime Relationship (0); Taoism;

• the regenerative development of a Deep Learning Ecology, in Permaculture Design and Positive Deviance design/planning practice;

• a new human species awareness of our universally recycled nature’s soul as Prime Relationship (0) = E/e² (Fuller, Euler) and 1/0 = Yang/Yin = P/NP = Me Individual-CoreVertex/We Identity-CoreVortex.

Impact

• If Fuller’s belief that a comprehended metaphysical infrastructure, meeting his optimized TrimTab design specifications, is correct,

• If the Youth ReGenesis Project is able to seed that comprehension through publishing a satisfactory response to the Clay Millennium Math Problem of Polynomial Versus Not-Polynomial equity conjectural proof,

• If Fuller’s Theory of Regeneration can be comprehended accurately as a (0) Soul Core-Vector Conjecture, then both Fuller and Stephen Cook predict globally transformative implications.

Then, Locally:

At least $1 million in cash award from the Clay Math Institute, to be reinvested in sustainability outcomes, potentially leading to $10 million in annual transaction values within 5 years, and $100 million flowing through a global PD cooperative financial investment stream, within 10 years.
Extensive lawn to organic edible landscape conversions; urban bicycle/pedestrian transportation infrastructure.
Sustainable and resilient, robust, ReGenesis Permaculture Design/Positive Deviance cooperative industry, vocations, formational and well-being strategies, financial support, regenerative evolution.

And Globally:

More dancing in circles; less marching in squares.
Holonic ReEco-Ligion: (0) Soul Teleological Original Gold Value Standard of PermaCultured Metaphysics and Mythology
Symbiotic Deductive/Inductive Deep Creative Learning Ecology of Gratitude/Grace
Unitarian Universalists embrace Buckminster Fuller in a more comprehensive way, and perhaps other religious traditions as well, the result of a universal field theory that conjoins (re-ligions) math, science, ethics, nature, communication, (+)in/(-)ex formation, and spirituality.

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Peacock, Fletcher, Water the Flowers, Not the Weeds, 2^nd Ed., Open Heart, Quebec, 2001

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Schwarz, Christian A., Natural Church Development, (7^th Ed.), ChurchSmart Resources, Emmelsbull, Germany, 1996.

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Communication, [which is also about the art of optimizing nutritional Yields in an Ecology of Gratitude], HarperOne, NY, 2013.

Winter, Miriam Therese, Paradoxology: Spirituality in a Quantum Universe, Orbis, NY, 2009.

[1] See Fig. 505.41, for a 4-Season view of In-Formation and Ex-Formation—temporal dimension reverse circuited, or implicate ordered, as per Bohm.

[2] Mutual reiterative feedback loops between Universe and Self, or any two or more variables, are what Fuller understands as a “precession” trajectory toward a synergetic event. Precession is co-prehensile, an attraction toward mutual gift, grace, gratitude, and, probably follows the energy metrics of gravitational pull, as compared to radiantly Ex-forming energy.

[3] See David Abram and Julian Jaynes on linguistic/logic/deductive Left-Brained dominance and the concomitant NotSoPermaCultural developments, starting just about 2,000 years ago.

[4] Please see Buckminster Fuller on the teleological significance of virginity and ex-formation in regenerative systems (e.g., #1076, 1979)

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Earth’s Easter Epic

Straight-lined radiance,

spiraling gravity’s view.

Gravity draws,

in search of gratitude,

requited.

Radiance flies toward Exterior Light,

Gravity dances with Interior Night,

A flight of fancy dance.

Radiant birth reaches tender tendrils

toward touch of bright.

Rich embedded birth searches below

with slender stealth

toward Other,

where We are One.

Born again in perpetual orgasmic grasp

And release of nutrients,

capital,

value,

meaning,

learning,

creating,

information conjoins ex-forming

and ex-formed.

Looking back,

Interior Landscape recalls gravity’s reverse,

spiraling toward future flower,

new eyes

raining seeds of hope

for Exterior Landscape’s ReGenesis.

Seeds spiral down

darkly,

richly rhyming

Earth’s PermaCultured Story.

Sublime Spring’s buds

Ergetically bloom

Facing blind bliss by Summer’s day,

wet caress by night,

Toward Falling gratitude,

Species’ seed prediction:

a wintry purgation of night,

while love unites

what Earth has harvested

for spiral-limned radiance of Spring.

Straight-lined radiance,

spiraling gravity’s view.

Gravity draws,

a song of gratitude,

radiantly requited.

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Positive Deviance

Positive Deviance may be more complex than gathering influential leaders with effective marketing, but Buckminster Fuller is not the only design expert who has advised us to encourage the demise of dysfunctional systems by building a more optimized, positive, better system. Building a permacultured cooperative deep ecology is effective marketing. It is being noticed.

There are two Positive Deviance efforts that I am aware of regarding the conversion of the public sector. The Nellie Mae Education Foundation is currently implementing a strategy to inoculate Business As Usual in the field of public education with a turn toward a Deep Learning Ecology, sometimes called Creative Learning. An important part of their strategy is to contract with local models of Deep Learning pedagogy to speak directly with strategically targeted distressed urban (first priority) public School Board Directors, as well as school staff and students, and require at least 2 citizen research-type D&D events (there is also enough money to incorporate an on-line dimension to these events, to broaden participation in core iterative discernment stages).

The second is more industry-specific, in a way. I think that Permaculture Design is moving in linked-arm step with EcoVillages, cooperatively-owned businesses and residences, alternative energy technicians, natural builders, organic growers and farmers to build cooperative demonstration networks. These, in turn, are moving toward deeper cooperative network dimensions through tools like Local Economic Trading Systems (LETS), and BerkShares, community currencies, equity-as-capital-based Deep PermaCultured Ecology models of positive deviance. This emerging Transitional Generation PermaCulture “deviance” has missed opportunities to engage the public sector, while busy building our alternative universe model. I, for one, believe the permacultural emergence is mature enough to strategize more explicitly about how to engage public officials, perhaps borrowing a page from the Nellie Mae Foundation.

We would do well to participate with more mindfulness toward our friends in the media, education, philanthropy, religious leadership, and political officials. Some specific allies who are better connected to these more public sectors than the permacultured guild of positive deviance might be NCDD itself, Habitat for Humanity, AmeriCorp Volunteers, homeschool networks, Cooperative Extension Services, which I believe are associated with land-grant colleges/universities in all 50 States, and inter-religious Eco-Justice networks, with potential global networking possibilities, inclusive of UNESCO as a “Greatest Effect with Least Effort” possible participant of interest.

Perhaps the ecologically sustainable educational system of positive deviance that David Orr, the Schumacher Center for New Economics, and many others are calling for is the emerging Gaia University (www.gaiauniversity.org) [I am not affilliated other than as a consumer of services, so this is not an advertisement; just an endorsement of potential value, where I believe there is already some form of UNESCO awareness, and maybe even some level of involvement–not sure about that]. Could NCDD partner with Gaia University’s on-line pedagogy, to extend the conversation toward a global cooperative economy and ecological awareness? Maybe the Transition Network (www.transitionnetwork.org) could incarnate these global topics within their local public sectors; a resource for educating their local officials about the importance of their sustained, mindful, support, and their sense of urgency, as active facilitators for local cooperative sustainability.

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Regenerative Leadership for a Global Millennial Community

Robert Dale, in Leadership for a Changing Church, claims we want leaders who make sense. At first blush, we might be tempted to respond that we also would prefer spouses, children, neighbors, and even books that make sense. To be fair, Dale further specifies leaders in sense-making as those who can effectively translate across paradigms and eras, and maybe even people, and scriptures.

Leaders provide continuity frames for between-the-times eras by showing what deserves to be preserved from the past and by creating what’s required of us for healthy futures. (p. 101)

This normative hope for post-modern religious leadership finds echoes in unexpected places. David Abrams describes the tribal role of the shaman as

the ability to readily slip out of the perceptual boundaries that demarcate his or her particular culture…in order to make contact with, and learn from, the other powers in the land. His magic is precisely this heightened receptivity to the meaningful solicitations…of the larger, more-than-human field. (The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 9)

In Genius 101, Dean Keith Simonton describes polymathic genius as an unusual ability to perceive patterns underlying paradigm perimeters. The polymathic religious leader maps patterns of confluence and dissonance across physical and metaphysical systems. Our Millennial shamans are paradigm and people transliterators in a Universe of symbiotic meaning development.

It is difficult to imagine what this string of abstractions would look like within one leader. William James argued that the incarnated definition of religious and spiritual genius is a renowned mystic or saint, or preferably both. For heuristic purposes, we might translate “shaman” as “Messiah,” operating within a defined historical-cultural information system.

Messiah: Shaman, a transliterative adept with universal paradigms and languages, and diverse species;
Messianic Universal Field: Functioning optimally within an Open Set 4-dimensional sphere with (0) Core Vector soul (see Buckminster Fuller and Gregori Perelman, and William Thurston);
Purpose of Religion/Spirituality: symbiotic meaning development.

Due to constraints of timeliness, let’s try substituting the word “compassion” for the two words “symbiotic meaning,” thereby synchronizing with the Dalai Lama’s, and perhaps Jesus of Nazareth’s teleological belief that “the whole purpose of our practice is to become more compassionate human beings.” (Beyond Religion, p. 183)

Messianic Leadership Purpose: development of compassion.

Even if all that does make sense together (and I have a dissertation thesis topic in mind that would investigate whether the hypothesis proposed is one that could be scientifically and religiously and/or metrically confirmed as “sense-making” or “True,” or not) what might it mean to say that our best and brightest spiritual leaders have the gift of transliteration?

To transliterate is to accurately exchange letters, words, information, thoughts, nutrients, into corresponding values of another language, or paradigm, person or information system. Transliteration is to translation as nutritious yogurt is towarm milk. Transliteration unveils, decodes, what translation reveals. Transliteration comprehends the why of what translation understands as a correlation of meaning. When we put them together, something diastatically metamorphic occurs, a new pattern of symbiotic relationships across what had been two distinct entities. Transliteration is the ability to translate, and accurately predict, emergent patterns across languages, individual organic systems, polycultures; each a type of Closed Set universe (or Group in mathematics and sociometrics) information system. The more adept at paradigm and person translation, the more compassionate becomes the leader; the more compassionate, the more adept at communicating with optimized sense-making, or mutual-meaning-creation, mindfulness, and effectiveness.

Christian Schwarz chooses empowering facilitative leaders as the first of his eight necessary qualities for Natural Church Development optimization. “These pastors equip, support, motivate, and mentor individuals,”…. “They do not use lay workers as ‘helpers’.” (p. 24) This is leadership operating in a cooperative transaction economy and ecology. Capitalists and socialists, government regulators and “free” enterprise advocates alike need not apply for the role of post-modern shaman. Empowerment optimizes as cooperation becomes equilateral, mutually initiated and received. This is a highly mindful and effective cooperative value exchange.

Leaders who realize their own empowerment by empowering others experience how the “all by itself” principle contributes to growth. (p. 25)

Mutually empowering iterative loops are the economic-ecologists way of advocating the benefits of local cooperative-based transactions with emergent win-win symbiotic value optimization. This is the kind of reality that sounds like our most abundant purpose is to grow in mutual compassion. The fruits of compassion are cooperative-oriented transactions and relationships of mutual gratitude.

Schwarz further observes that empowering sense-builders enjoy bipolar balance between “goal” and “relationship” orientations. In his theological paradigm, too many of us are either imbalanced toward a technocratic faith or a spiritualistic hope. It is the adept religious leader who is able to consistently self-and-other empower, keeping both her faith-in-self goals, and hope for relationship development, in equipoised balance.

Our polymatic shaman maintains an internal and external landscape that compassionately balances faith in self as other, and other as self; a combination of the Golden Rule and the enthymematic awareness that “we are all in this together.” This is a solidarity that echoes our theology of the marriage bond—but applied universally, radically, inclusively, embracingly to all species and all of nature.

Our millennial shaman transliterates the patterns within and between self and other during an inclusive pilgrimage toward a mutually discovered universe of ultimate compassion. This sounds like a good thing. But, is this theology supported by what we discover in natural patterns of healthy development? This, after all, is the infrastructural analogy behind Schwarz’s thesis; we are a system of nature. He implies that a spiritual and/or metaphysical information universe is incarnated as nature, so we can notice nature’s patterns to improve understanding of this metaphysical universe, and perhaps vice versa.

If an ecology of deeply balanced empowerment, internal to the religious leader, and external within the community’s culture, is fertile soil for our millennial shaman, then why,

Now for the good news: pastors of growing churches do not need to be superstars. Most of the pastors with the highest scores in our survey are little known. They generally provide us, however, with more helpful basic leadership principles than most of the world-famous “spiritual superstars.” (p. 25)

It would be interesting to analyze confluence and disparity patterns between “famous” spiritual leaders and “most helpful” spiritual leaders. On what basis does Schwarz establish transliterative ability; the gift of mutual compassion? Religious leaders are helpful, fruitful, to what end, for whom? Is the problem that famous-but-not-especially-helpful pastors are too goal-oriented or is the problem that the helpful-but-not-famous are too relationship oriented, imbalanced toward compassion for others? How do we balance compassion for ourselves with compassion for others? The problem, and the opportunity, with polarities is they are mutually self-defining.

Even so, certainly the fields of geometrics, biometrics, permaculture design, thermodynamics, and binary systems theory would all agree with our Taoist friends that sustainable optimized values are richer when polarities are balanced, than when not.

Schwarz perhaps misses an application of an old design principle that favors greatest effect with least effort. It is only implied that the six phases of his transformative cycle may be as true for the shaman as they are for the shaman’s exterior landscape, the faith community. His Stage Theory is anciently known and recognized. Perhaps this is acknowledged in his Three Color Compass, but not mentioned in Natural Church Development. For simplicity, compare Schwarz’s Growth Spiral stage theory to Bloom’s Deep Learning Taxonomy and Robert Norton’s Laws of Interaction (Communication and Consequences):

Polar Alignment Norton Schwarz Bloom

1. Yang (effective) Enthymematic Perceive Knowledge

Communication

2. Yin (mindful) Prima Facie Validity Test Comprehend

3. Yang (effective) Prior Dependence Understand Apply

4. Yin (mindful) Idiosyncratic Understanding Plan Analysis

5. Yang (effective) Sufficient Similarity Do Synthesis

6. Yin (mindful) Narcissistic Strength Experience Evaluation

——————————————————————————————————————-

Yang/Yin Deep Existential Excitement Perceive Self-Knowledge

Ecology Threshold Self/Other Group Identity

Yang translates Schwarz’s “technocratic” and “goal-oriented,” while Yin translates “spiritualistic” and “relationship-oriented.”

The concept of leadership is directional and temporal, enhanced with analogical balance between one’s interior and exterior landscapes. This leader is pointing us to where or what end in the future, with what evidence that this direction makes sense? Schwarz is working toward regenerating a permacultured planet of post-modern leaders who are compassionate, cooperative facilitators. This translation expresses faith in leaders who share a deep eco-equity learning culture.

The millennial shaman’s mutual ministry is EcoMinistry. This core solidarity, that we are all gratefully in this together, catalyzes a synchronic evolution toward a compassionate mecca of mutual gratitude; in this life, future lives, a trans-generational continuity of re-ligioning, reincarnated from generation toward ReGenesis. To do as Jesus did, to in-form the Body of Christ, to be today our faith for tomorrow, we cooperatively incarnate into our regenerated future, with gratitude. Always with gratitude.

Uncategorized

Earth Day Call to ReGenesis

Eastern voices speak of suffering.

Western voices never,

nor death,

nor failure.

We groan with pain.

Eastern hearts speak gratitude.

Western voices seldom;

We talk the power of love.

An Eastern call to mindfulness

Draws Western starched effectiveness.

It is wrong to aspire effect

when not mindful of intent.

The cart leads the horse

graceless

imprisoned

bound to stumble.

It is wrong

to replace gratitude

with the hope of love

when love blooms only where gratitudes grow together,

for pleasure and grace,

beauty and laughter.

Gratitude is love’s leprechaun.

It is wrong to have so much

I can postpone my pain

by ignoring your suffering.

When I find grace,

gratitude,

leaving you to suffer

without the rest of us

embarrasses me.

Suffering seeks an inclusive fair;

Climatic shifts fuel despair.

It shrieks of separate.

Fair distance calls my gratitude

for hope

you will notice

and care for me

and I for you

and yours.

last remnant of the Industrial Age,

stretch back with toxic baton.

Embarrassed,

yet not sure we could do better.

But you,

first glint of the Information Age,

Transitional Re-Generation;

Hear your Shambhala Call:

Regenerate our planet,

watch and hear yourselves

sing and march and dance

listen and understand and incarnate

We Are The World

synerlusciously

on every cell

every lap

every radio

every monitor

every prison

every asylum

every voice

every heart

every tear in every eye

a tear of gratitude

to belong together,

for respect

for caring for ourselves

each other

our Earth.

You can do this;

and you will.

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Faith Questions Fear

How do you hear me

without words?

How do you know what to hear?

Do you hear what I think

While I rinse out your sink?

Its more clear to be near how you hear.

Sometimes you’re up,

Most time you’re down;

I love your smile

But draw your frown.

We come alone

and so we leave

to flights of freedom

or fear.

It’s hard living queer

to not disappear,

out of sight out of mind,

out of faith, out of fear.

It’s more sane to be clear,

we all need

to be here

for each other’s real name to appear.

How do you see me

without eyes?

Where do you see what I feel?

When you lie there alone

While I drone on the phone,

I need to touch and be touched to be seen.

How can you know me

while you shout,

That its hard to be with me

so alone.

How can you show me

what you’ve not yet found,

That I need what you need to be here.

Why do I disappear

when you build the nerve

to draw near?

Why do you disappear

leaving me standing here,

frowning as I remember my name?

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The Regenerative Design Interview

I am working with a group of people who want to buy a 14-acre rotting estate and convert it into an ecovillage. As I pass by the half dozen log cabin structures, built around a rheumatic, yet lushly charming, apple orchard, my amazement at their intrepid courage propels me toward their future nearest neighbor.

Actually, their only future neighbor residing within a mile of the wildly abandoned estate. My job is to represent the Solidarity Ecovillage intention to this neighbor, and invite her to participate in a permaculture design interview. Basically, we want to find out if she is with us, against us, couldn’t care less about us one way or the other, and, if her reaction suggests an ally, to include her, and her aspirations for her own property, in the Ecovillage development plan.

The neighbor’s name is Gaia. Gaia What, no one seems to know. There are rumors, mostly benign and gentle, that she roots back to the Iroquois, and is eccentric in a shaman-ish way. This should be interesting.

Gaia: Who are you?

Me: My name is Gerald Oliver, and I am here on behalf of your future neighbors to learn how we can be good neighbors for you.

Gaia: I have been expecting your question for rather too long. It is a good question, an important one, so I wrote them some suggestions about what I think would be helpful.

Here, take it with you. If you have any further questions after reading it, you are welcome to return any time. My home is your home.

And with that, Gaia handed me a scroll and gently, but firmly, almost abruptly, closed her heavy door.

Eventually I closed my mouth, turned around, headed back toward the orchard where I knew of the perfect log, and the perfect vista, for reading–most anything–but especially this Gaia scroll.

The late-morning sun radiated gentle October warmth as I opened the scroll:

Dear Neighbors,

Thank you for your compassionate intent to practice remembering that we are all in this mess, and this potential paradise, together.

There are 4 interdependent principles in learning how to live regeneratively on this planet.

The first of these you have heard from land use planners, real-estate agents, community and economic developers: Notice the potential highest and best use of all resources and nutrients, all property, all people, all species.

The second is similar,but moves from noticing, toward understanding, from using to sustaining. How can we achieve the most abundant effect, and affect, with the least effort, cost, dissonance, chaos?

Combining these first two principles results in the Golden Rule of Regenerative Development: Optimize integrity by deeply learning inclusively holistic potential. In other words, intend and practice today what we all want to wake up to tomorrow.

Our greatest, most holistic, most resilient, most regenerative potential is discovered through Deep Listening together, the intentional practice of compassion. Deep Learning begins with deeply listening, noticing, and slowly, integrally, inclusively discerning a shared vision of optimized potential intent. This is true whether your shared vocation is to build a regenerative interior landscape, or exterior landscape. It is optimally and inclusively and resiliently true if your intent is to build a regenerative interior/exterior landscape together. Our species’ “Commons,” like the Commons of your Solidarity EcoVillage, expands inward and outward, fertilized by rich, abundant, diversity when we notice, listen, and fully value our current situation.

Fully valuing our current potential brings us to the 3rd principle of Regenerative Development: the Principle of Complementarity. Our Species’ Interior Landscape AND Exterior Landscape are complementary perspectives on one thermodynamically balanced NATURAL Landscape. Humans, at our best, bicamerally learn about our profoundly balanced and harmonious potential within a richly nutritious ecology of nutrients, energy. The “essential orientation of human nature,” to borrow a phrase from the 14th Dalai Lama is scientifically and religiously emerging as the essential orientation of all nature: thermodynamic balance is an Exterior Landscape way of cognizing the theo-dynamic balance of our Interior Landscape.

What we are trying to become, our teleological, and thermodynamic, mission as Earth’s bicamerally-reflective Species, with least effort and cost, suffering and resistance, violence and dissonance, is our highest and best regenerative potential. The most abundantly valued vocation for every intentional community, every faith community, every school, every farm, every government, every recreation center, every health care facility, every human service agency, every family, every individual, is to become the very best balanced Regenerative Research and Design Center possible, given current situations, developing compassionate understanding of complementarity between our natural Interior and Exterior Landscapes.

In our inclusive Research and Design ecology, we recognize communication and thought as information nutrients, with the potential to build up or dissemble, to increase confluence, or contribute to dissonance. The Principle of Complementarity is both spatially and temporally dimensioned. Its spatial dimension spreads across the Interior and Exterior natural landscapes. Its temporal flow dimension is either toward confluence, or toward dissonance, with complementary balance defined in physics and systems theory as intrinsic thermodynamically-valued polarity. What goes up must come down. What goes in must come back out.

The intrinsic value-balance within all religions, all faith paradigms, follows these same complementary patterns: As before, so after. As above, so below. As within, so without. If Self, then Other. If Yang, then Yin. If Becoming (regenerating), then Being. If sociotherapy, then sociopathology. If sociopathology, then sociotherapy. If confluence, then the potential for dissonance. If dissonance, then the potential for confluence. As theo-dynamism within, so thermo-dynamism without.

The 4th principle of Regenerative Development is the Principle of Holistic Subsidiarity. In systems theory, optimized abundant values matriculate up from integrated/confluent individuals and families, through neighborhoods, to communities, sub-regions, regions, and globally inclusive ecological integrity. There is no such thing as a “natural” division between sustainable economic wealth and ecological integrity. Economies are value-transfer systems within the ecology of our relationships.

The Principle of Subsidiarity is commonly understood, and sometimes practiced, as retaining choice authority at the lowest effective level of function. The form of our self-governance wisely follows functional practice and intent. It is most holistically efficient to leave our current effectiveness at the lowest level of functional autonomy. If I find my life and environment to be richly nutritious, satisfying, meaningful, fulfilling, then it would be a violation of this Principle of Subsidiarity for the Solidarity EcoVillage to even intend to fix what I believe is not broken.

Our current suffering has to do with those times, places, situations, when there is disagreement about which is most important, the Principle of Holistic Subsidiarity or the Principle of Complementarity. For example, if I am a cancerously expanding tumor within your brain, then you and I would probably disagree about which is the currently effective lowest level of functional autonomy. If I am a parasitic species, overpopulating and devouring a planetary ecosystem, causing great trauma to the planet, such as climatic dissonance and the extinction of species diversity, then the Principle of Complementarity reminds us to listen to our pathology because it is our complementary and wise instruction.

We recognize communication and thoughts as nutrient-value events. The lack of healthy, balanced nutrients is implicated, or potentiated, information of great value because of our faith in holisitic subsidiarity, and balanced thermodynamic complementarity. If we have a Whole System, then we have subsidiary parts. If the subsidiary parts forget the Principle of Holistic Subsidiarity, forget that efficacy is discerned within our intention for sustained whole-system regeneration, then our resulting sociopathology reminds us that our Internal/External health and wealth find therapeutic value by improving their complementarity. This provides us with both a positive and negative feedback loop. Both loops are needed for regenerative self-care, people-care, and Earth-care. Dissonance teaches us about the possibility of confluence. Confluence teaches us about the synchronization of balanced holistic subsidiarity.

The Principle of Complementarity is to Yang-imbalance as the Principle of Subsidiarity is to Yin-imbalance. The natural law of thermodynamic polarity balance, whole-system harmony, holds together all four Deep Ecology principles of regenerative systems development.

“Waste” is inefficiency, loss, dissonance and is heuristically held as a potential resource; a suffering that may teach us something we would like to learn. Waste, loss, harm management are all about planning sustained self-organization and self-maintenance through balanced sub-system subsidiarity and whole-system complementarity. This balance optimizes learning (highest and best use of our information ecology) while minimizing loss of thermodynamic balance, or dissonance, and ineffective sustenance, internally and externally.

Community builders, faith community organizers, intentional community developers, public dialogue facilitators, economists, ecologists, even lobbyists, recognize that where you end up is hugely and persistently boundaried by where you start out. Our self-regenerating landscapes value diversely entwined root systems, mutually defining and enriching, mutually protecting and promoting, nutritiously and lavishly seeded investments that will flower to reincarnate our Original Intent, our hope-filled active gratitude for Re-Creating most fully and bountifully together forever. Regenerative intention is the faith infrastructure that underlies the universe of religion, ecology, and Systems Design. Permaculture Design is our ecosystemic metaphor currently on pilgrimage toward a holistic, thermodynamic, Regenerative Systems Development Theory of permanent evolution.

Speaking of evolution, some of the Solidarity EcoVillage wanna-be’s are familiar with Thomas Kuhn’s Theory of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn became somewhat obsessed with an issue about knowledge; the Problem of Incommensurability. How can we be sure that we are using language to signify the same thing, or different things, or things that stand in the same relationship to other things, or not? How can we predict if a new idea will lead to the evolution of an entirely new paradigm, a new scientific theory, or whether it will not really become part of our culture, our way of seeing the world? How can I be sure that my values are, or are not, commensurable with your values, your thoughts, your communications, what feeds you, or causes you despair or anguish and suffering? How can I reliably predict that what I propose, what I notice and try to understand, will inform your interior landscape in the same way that it informs mine?

A theory of regenerative evolution responds to Kuhn’s Problem of Incommensurability with recognizing dissonance and complexity as more than hopeless suffering and confusion. We intend and practice active Complementarity, a compassionate faith that within dissonance lies the fertilizer of potential information. The issue of imbalance between intentions, the disparities of diverse practices and pilgrimages and paradigms, contains the seeds of a universally commensurable meaning. In this way, our pathological fears and concerns point us toward hope and faith in the potential for a more deeply integrated relationship. Compassion, empathy, Deep Learning, plus significant dissonant complexity, inspires revolutionary development toward understanding, integrity, resilience, inclusively rich information and nutrition; solidarity.

Our thermodynamically-balanced exterior informs our theo-dynamic interior, as Permaculture Design potentiates Regenerative Creation. The difference between Deep Learning and Deep Ecology is that one actively hopes for interior regeneration while the other also hopes for exterior regeneration.

Your grateful neighbor,

Gaia

As I rolled up the fragile scroll, I couldn’t think of any more questions, so I headed back home, not quite the same way I had arrived.

Uncategorized

Regenerative Allies: Habitat and Transition Teams

I sent this to the Hartford, CT, Habitat for Humanity chapter, Habitat International and to http://www.transitionnetwork.org. About regenerative and strategic partnerships informed by Bucky Fuller’s Trimtab, greatest effect for least effort, leverage design. But, also related to land use policy of “highest and best use.”

To the Board of Directors, Habitat for Humanity—Hartford:

Warm greetings and congratulations on 200+ low-income homeownership units during your first 25 years! Perhaps searching for a new Executive Director is not everyone’s favorite way of celebrating a 25 year anniversary; but there is much precedent and I want to encourage you to take this as an opportunity to look at this transition toward a vision that will serve the next several generations.

I have been around Connecticut and affordable housing, economic, and (0) carbon-footprint development since 1991. During the early 90s I was on the Board for Habitat in New Haven and did some consulting with the folks in Americus that led to federal grants for property acquisition, designed specifically to fit with the HforH mission. Then I worked with the YouthBuild-Hartford program for several years and, in that context, brought the first youth-targeted Individual Development Account program to the State of Connecticut. I also helped form Cheshire Interfaith Housing to retain its indigenous Cheshire leadership and autonomy, while also working on projects in partnership with Habitat-New Haven. This is a model that I believe has been used elsewhere to avoid the inefficiencies of balkanization of development corporations while enjoying the strengths of local faith-community leadership within each municipality. This organizational structure may be worth considering if you decide to move forward with a project in Cromwell that I have referred in your direction; the Tanner property.

With that as personal introduction, please forgive me for ruminating, perhaps at rather too much length, about the strategic issues faced by Habitat for Humanity globally, but also in Hartford County specifically.

Twenty-five years ago we defined “inadequate housing” much differently than we think about “unsustainable habitat” today, in North America. Back in the “growth-is-the-answer-to-all-systemic-problems” days of community development, we rightly gave priority to ownership and to affordability when we used adjectives like “decent” and “adequate” and “revitalized” in reference to housing and neighborhoods. Ownership and affordability remain tightly linked to sustainability, but continuing commitment to Business As Usual in the construction industry, use and reuse of materials and resources, the environment, our financial economy, our schools, our aging neighborhood infrastructures, our soaring fuel and energy costs, our continuing despair over health and child and elder care, and growing income disparity is evaporating within the religious sector. A permaculturally rich global and neighborhood habitat for humanity is increasingly informed by an interfaith eco-equity value system that asks “What on earth is adequate housing in Hartford County” from a profoundly different millennial perspective than Millard Fuller asked in Alabama.

So I arrive at Hartford Habitat’s mission, to “eliminate inadequate housing” in a 33-town Hartford area, thinking more like a soon-to-be-Certified Permaculture Designer, as well as an interfaith theologian, wanting to understand how we are going to jump from less than 10 units/year, on average, to address the habitat adequacy challenges of approximately 350,000 households in Hartford County. A truly strategic plan must confront that question with candor, integrity, drawing on the strength of experience during the first 25 years, but also recognizing that habitat issues have moved into an environmentally critical arena of systems analysis.

My work in affordable housing, community, economic, and now permaculture systems development, has often benefitted from what Unitarian Buckminster Fuller called the “Trimtab” leverage question. How do we get the most effect with the least effort? In a Deep Ecology, and faith, context, we are asking, both within our congregations, and without, Given our eco-equity challenges, where do we discover our most abundant hope for metanoia, for transformation, for regeneration? What is our shared habitat vocation?

The Tellus Institute (www.tellusinstitute.org) takes this question into the 21^st Century of computer simulation to offer us some comparative projections linking economic and ecological sustainability. We find the most abundantly sustainable trajectory in their Great Transition paradigm:

Reuse/recycle/incorporate materials and energy to increase the ecosystem’s regenerative capacity.

Strategically envision for the long-term (i.e., the “7-Generation” perspective of Native American cultures).

Increase inclusion and diversity in socio-ecological systems therapy.

Reinsert “humans” into our holistically inclusive concerns for sacred-nature equitable outcomes: optimized and sustainable solidarity, community, health and well-being for all individuals and species.

Enhance public choice-making to improve consensus (decrease polarization) and eco² [my own symbol for the combination of “economic” and “ecological”] sustainability.

Strengthen our eco² outcomes by folding in habitat-strengthening cooperative approaches to child care, education, health, pensions, elder care, nutrition, energy-production, acquiring both perishables and non-perishables, landscaping, self-care, employment as vocation.

Increase public and private investment in cooperative research and design, with specific priority for eco² sustainable well-being.

Develop and advocate new tax and financial institution regulatory policies and incentives to increase social capital investments. Grow a policy and investment infrastructure that reverses the trend toward economic disparity by committing our wealth deposits and property to a new cooperative-oriented economy of long-term sustainability.

Remember the Principle of Subsidiarity, and keep it holy, or holistic. In Whole Open Systems Theory, optimized abundant values matriculate up from integrated/confluent individuals and families, through neighborhoods, to communities, sub-regions, regions, and globally inclusive eco² integrity.

Re-member the PermaCultured Principle of Complementarity: The human-natural interior landscape and the exterior natural landscape inform, and mutually define, each other in a Deep Learning and Listening sacred process of sustainable regeneration. This is our Species’ interfaith hope; it is permanently encultured in all religious traditions and faith paradigms. It is our source of gratitude for Creation as a sacred gift.

Religious institutions, congregations, mosques, synagogues, ashrams, intentional communities, scientific communities, and think-tanks, even bionic intelligence, are discovering greatest effect for least effort by noticing the sociotherapeutic value of Deep Eco-Justice, Deep Learning, Deep Ecology, Regenerative Systems design and development. Faith communities that have worked on their “Interior Landscape Design” and their “Exterior Landscape Design” are emergently aware of synchronization around a slower cooperative economic-ecology of nutrient value abundance. As a Regenerative Faith Species, we long for nature balance, for goodness and beauty within and without, while retaining our values for effectiveness, optimized system function, fairness, freedom, inclusion, diversity, gratitude, hope, faith, love. Vibrant communities of intent, and intentional families, and intentional individuals, are those who holistically practice eco-equity caring for self, other people, and our planet. These three habitats, journeys, pilgrimages, are an integrally Trinitarian conversation.

We are remembering the permacultured time when what was good ecologically was understood as what was best economically because they were the same agrarian-natural value system. Prior to currency, this was obvious in the short terms of life and death growing seasons, and in the longer terms of a “7-Generation” hope for the sustainable future. Economic values separated from ecological values as we forgot that human nature is intrinsically tied to all organic nature. We share RNA back to a tap root much older than the “self” consciousness of our species.

I wonder how many Habitat volunteers and property owners identify themselves as global citizens more readily than members of a particular religious institution. If we are many, what can all of us global-habitat citizens from diverse faith communities, and neighborhoods, and families, do to strategically enrich our interior and exterior habitats?

The Habitat Hartford strategic plan does look for strengthening the Interior Landscape of the staff culture, and does aspire to strengthen the Exterior Landscape through developing ally partnerships. Both of these strategies could be envisioned from a Business-As-Usual perspective, or from a more Great Transition perspective. At this point it is probably clear where I would put my time and money, but I want to conclude with a more specific resource partnership suggestion. Theology, theory, even computer simulated scenario projections to the year 2100 are all fine and well, but Habitat for Humanity core volunteers tend to like something closer to nuts and bolts, hammers and nails.

Perhaps you are familiar with the Transition Network (www.transitionnetwork.org), which originated in the UK, and now has a National Hub in California. I have no direct experience with being part of a Transition Team, although I know there have been some projects in New England. I recently accepted an invitation to comment on their new strategic plan. Perhaps that is why they come to mind as a potential resource for incarnating HH’s Interior and Exterior Landscape improvement goals.

The Transition Network has a fairly well developed eco²-equity culture, and their mission is to help local volunteer groups, with emphasis on building adolescent and young adult leadership, improve their ecological and economic habitats. They have many on-line resources, project stories, and the intent to increase on-line communication and financial resource networking, including, perhaps, the capacity to link projects internationally. So, for example, if HH wanted to take on a neighborhood improvement and house renovation project while building communication and financial linkages to a Habitat project in Haiti, the Transition Network could probably help you with that. If a cluster of Cromwell faith communities wanted to organize and support a HH new construction project in Cromwell, linked to a new construction project in South America, or Africa, or not, the Transition Network (TN) resources and fundraising and organizing support system is as accessible as a laptop or smart phone.

TN as a Habitat ally, locally, and internationally, seems particularly compelling to me because there is great potential for participating faith communities to develop an inclusive interfaith permacultured eco-justice formation that could capture the imagination and momentum of high school kids and young adults. This is the age group most needed for a successful Great Transition, for successful Habitat projects, for vibrantly growing faith communities, and it is the age group of priority to the Transition Network.

If there were an interest in developing urban neighborhood interfaith, and suburban community interfaith youth EcoMinistry Teams working on HH and TN Interior-Exterior Landscape Care Designs for Self, Others, and Earth, while that is rather a mouthful, I might be able to help with that. These could also be urban/suburban yoked for increased eco²equity—greatest effect for least effort might also include international yoking, if HH might have a Habitat affiliate, or a TN affiliate, or everybody affiliated with everybody. In terms of religious maturation, this is also the time when we may be losing kids from intentional faith communities because they are more interested in spending some time discovering how their own spiritual path is informed by the “Religious Commons,” what is held as sacred by all faith traditions. This is precisely why Habitat and each of the religious traditions invested in Habitat and eco-justice need each other.

Resilient learning development systems help us understand “self” identity most effectively in an intentionally diverse environment, with others who we may primordially see as not like me. This seems to be true in all regenerative economies, whether they be pedagogical, spiritual, financial, communication, or possibly even genetic information systems. A Habitat-TN youth EcoMinistry, intentionally diverse and interfaith, could be regeneratively powerful at the local, national, and global levels.

The Tellus Institute forecasts an emergent Co-Operative CommonWealth. Some things that might emerge from Solidarity Habitat Co-Operatives:

Neighborhoods self-organize to cooperatively build solar or wind infrastructure, compost, organize Community Farm Associations, design organic, edible landscapes and gardens, open neighborhood cooperative stores and libraries to ReHabitat clothing, toys, books, tools, seeds, organic fertilizers, mulch.

Neighborhood cooperatives could fulfill multiple functions: child and elder care, employment support groups, homeschooling (maybe even with a “school nurse”), food banks, tax assistance, classes in nonviolent communication, writing, entrepreneurial development, natural construction and crafts, permaculture design, interfaith dialogue, cooking, yoga, Tai Chi, meditation.

With Habitat support, neighborhood cooperative centers might facilitate the formation of residential cooperative ownership in partnership with interested (and often absentee) property owners.

Faith communities might help individuals invest in CDFIs, cooperative loan funds, and do so themselves, if they have not already committed any investments in this direction (although many have been global leaders in disinvestment from sociopathology and reinvestment in sociotherapeutic economies).

Faith communities could work within their neighborhoods to convert lawns to beautiful and edible landscape designs that are self-regenerating and require no long-term care. The plants provide shade to each other so watering is seldom needed, if ever. They cross-pollinate and bring balanced nutrients into the soil. They self-mulch. Then the faithful may learn to see that, with sufficient diversity and some re-sourcing ingenuity, we can often take care of each other in ways that are analogous to the ways that our well-designed ecosystems take care of each other.

Faith communities might host the neighborhood cooperative schools and stores and libraries, as so many already do.

Faith communities might further develop our eco-justice agendas to attend more fully to public sector policies and procedures that would decrease income disparity while enriching the new cooperative, and regenerative, economy.

Habitat for Humanity is well-poised to help us move toward a more nutritious and inclusive, more affordable with less effort, regenerative interfaith journey. The Transition Network might be a useful ally, and the locally planted Habitat infrastructure and culture could help TN with some of their own sustainability concerns. Their all-volunteer, no paid staff, model does help keep the momentum on youth leadership, but young people have a way of going off to college, transitioning to new jobs in new locations. Perhaps the combination of Habitat for Humanity and Transition Network and interfaith volunteer networks is just what we all need to cross-pollinate and regenerate ourselves into the Great Transition.

Uncategorized

Order of Universalist Unitarian Intent

I have a concept for a dissertation. Want to “think it out loud” to you to get your visceral reaction about whether this feels like a fit for the Holistic Theology program and whether you would, could, recommend a “faculty advisor” for the topic.

Working Title: Regenerative EcoTherapy Development and Universal Research and Design

[“Eco,” as in EcoTherapy, is a double-intent abbreviation for both ecology and economics. EcoMinistry always holds these two paradigms as inextricably bound values that became separated when humans began to perceive themselves as alien from nature; contrary to the aboriginal Original Intent understanding of Gaia.

Thesis: Universal faith paradigms, including OUnI and the Unitarian Universalist Association, are explicit actors in the human species’ holistic therapy design process. They are also implicit explorers of a regenerative theory of global evolution. Whole Open Systems Development Theory is a universalist design paradigm now quickly, and ergetically, unfolding to reveal a Regenerative Theory of Integral Evolution.

Antithesis: Dividing the resources and continuing evolution, the EcoMinistry power and values, of integral interfaith networks, epitomized by OUnI, from the UUA infrastructure is transparently inefficient and costly, a sacrifice to the power of our shared Sociopathology Myth.

Implications: If EcoMinistry follows PermaCulture Design principles that are widely accepted as meeting Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) and LEED energy efficiency standards, then OUnI and UUA might want to give universal strategic planning priority to:

1. cross-recognition of each other’s ordinations–EcoMinisters would have dual ordination as UUA Interfaith EcoMinisters,

2. AIHT and UUA blended academic and M.Div. preparatory institutions offering interdependently accessible class offerings, incorporating face-time requirements for those who choose UUA physical classroom options and those who may also choose AIHT on-line-only options (retaining autonomous fee-structures),

3. developing an inclusive public sector EcoEquity tax and public revenue global advocacy agenda. This EcoEquity Universal Value Agenda will be carefully rooted in PermaCultured regenerative development principles of equity, nonviolence, and Cooperative-Gratitude Original Intent Prime Relationship Assumption. This Prime Relationship Assumption (geometrically, biometrically, and eco-theologically expressed by Buckminster Fuller, a Universalist) is continuously, and therapeutically, incarnated in proto-historic, aboriginal, nature-based, value systems. Earth, water, air, information, and health belong to the Holistic Gaia Commons; their intrinsic values are the basis for our species’ cooperative economy. This intrinsic value cannot be consumed, bought, or sold; but can be noticed, understood, explored, discovered, developed, enculturated, planted, harvested, facilitated, learned, synergized, replicated, and regenerated. The Gaia Commons is our bicameral species’ therapeutic design space for healing our pre-cameral Sociopathology Myth (see Julian Jaynes, John Bargh, and Edward Podvoll regarding sanity, pathology, and Right-hemispheric pre-conscious awareness).

Uncategorized

The Wealth Economy: Turning from Competition to Cooperation

Toward a PermaCultured Cooperative Financial Exchange Ecoministry

Just because someone is religious doesn’t necessarily mean that that person, or corporate person, doesn’t have an embarrassment of riches.

I look back over my 30 years in community building, 20 years as a grants and contracts researcher, writer, and manager, and have a profound discomfort with our philanthropic economy, with how it works as an economic system. It is highly inefficient. It has learned nothing about cooperative systems development theory; and seems to show no systemic value for the cost-effective benefits of returning to the community the wealth from which the wealth originated, as effectively as possible.

I could probably write a book about cooperative economic theory; which no one would read. So, let me give a specific example of an alternative model that has merit for consideration.

Today, if you are graduating from high school in the U.S., you can fill out one master application form and submit it to a central network for consideration. I believe every college and university in the U.S. can acquire access to that information (not sure about information confidentiality boundaries, but let’s assume that this now becomes public information). If a higher ed institution is seriously interested in having you join their student body, then they may ask you for a little supplemental info.

If a networked application system can work for individuals seeking a social investment in their personal contributions to society, then why on earth do we need 10 to 20 separate on-line sites for cooperative neighborhood and community, and regional groups to post who they are, what they have done to assess their shared values for the future, what they want to do, and what outcomes they expect, and how much money they need to do that? Maybe diversity is a good thing in that regard. Assuming that it is, why wouldn’t we want the stewards of our wealth to proactively harvest this information, organized so they could search for their specific social investment priorities and service territories, and consider these postings as applications for funding worthy of being treated like any customized application sent specifically to their overworked, tired, exhausted, frustrated grant officers who have a stack of applications sitting on their desks, most of which have only moderate synergy with what their Board of Directors wants to fund right now? I wonder how many grant officers have told me they feel like screening editors in a Publishing House, wading through stacks of material that they have to read just because somebody sent it specifically to them; not because it necessarily has anything to do with what they are hoping to support.

Perhaps the wealth deposit stewards could form a Cooperative Philanthropic Network that would help them figure out who gets to invest how much in our intentional community vocations? The Ashoka Foundation comes to mind as one that has tried to blend their grants with a social investment format, but it is cumbersome primarily in its isolation from a broader network of opportunity. And, the underlying economic assumption continues to be a competition between value outcomes that would work more optimally, and sustainably, within a cooperative economy.

The main beneficiaries of the current philanthropic system are grant writers and managers, foundation grant officers and senior executives, and the financial institutions that are managing the wealth deposits without (as a general rule) any consideration of value other than the accumulation of more capital, so the foundations can invest the interest only back into the community. But God only knows what permacultural crisis their stock portfolio is supporting in communities across our overheated planet.

Meanwhile fossil-fuel based wealth deposit growth is starting to slow down and our kids are increasingly recognizing that their adult reality will be lived out in a major realignment of social and economic systems, trending toward becoming information and communication-based. They will either re-learn how to live in a cooperatively balanced ecology and economy, or their kids will face some serious survival yuck.

If we have a shared vocation as a species to fix this, it seems like the prophetic voices are those who are participating in these stewarded public conversations. Is it appropriate for the D&D practitioner community to profile our wealth management system as a shared social investment values problem? Do communication facilitators inappropriately step out of their role if they speak collectively as a community that has been listening to regular people talk about what they want and don’t want for their futures and their childrens’ futures, and what that implies about a better, more efficient and effective, system for social investment than what we do now?

I’m not trying to bite the hand that has fed me so effectively during my career, but I do wonder if our wealth investment system is cancerously leaking our own life blood. And, it seems like it would be fairly easy to fix, if we wanted to.

One week later:

I am currently trying out a prototype survey to use with individuals, families, and project teams. I need to be a bit more sure that this will be viable as a format to begin what the Mondragon educators refer to as personal development.

I am waiting for a book I just learned about that is something about spiral and integral learning and communication development process. It sounds like there might be considerable confluence with sociocracy.

I had a highly resonant reaction to the Mundukide Foundation’s mission statement and what it sounds like they are trying to do. I am wondering if it would be possible to gather religious sector philanthropists into a collaboration with cooperative and permaculture/ecological network agencies at national and international levels to rethink our philanthropic economy as one that could be based on direct meme-value, rather than capital value. It seems like we might need an incarnation of this collaboration at a regional level to draw on as a resource for a more global aspiration. In other words, if a permaculture cooperative network were learning how to invest in shared social value enterprises and vocations in the CT River Valley (its only obvious advantage being that is where I happen to live right now–not that there is any infrastructure in place that looks particularly promising) and beginning to sync and develop more cooperative efficiency and economic inclusiveness for marginalized populations, then we could tell that story as a way of helping each other think about what that might look like globally.

Both the research and philanthropic grant sectors are increasingly drawn toward cooperative enterprises for learning, and for providing services. However, both grant sectors still use competitive processes to attract and process proposals. Even as enlightened an entity as the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s Fellowship program uses this model (and if institutional culture should understand the efficiencies of synergetics I would think it would be the BFI). I was reading through a list of their 10 finalists in 2013, of which they were probably only going to actively work with one. That is their structure. But, there were 3 of those 10 that were basically the same idea (something to do with a new design to bring potable water to villages with dysfunctional wells, if I remember correctly), but the focus was on three different areas of the planet, and their design concepts were probably not entirely redundant. Even so, if I could take a cursory glance at their list of finalists and see how much more bang for their buck we could all potentially get by helping those 3 finalists work together, well, you can finish that sentence for yourself.

Imagine what might happen if we had 10 seasoned grant writers actively scanning the 10 most active social investment websites for cooperative potential between proposed projects with similar missions and compatible outcomes. These grant “brokers” are acting as a collaborative team, sharing information about emergent trends and shaping potential multiple partners into effective cooperative partners with a shared revenue resource. If this Cooperative Research and Philanthropy Team was connected to a network of philanthropists, they could act as a communication hub between the wealth deposits and a portfolio of synchronized cooperative ventures needing grants and, possibly, loans.

There are a couple of advocacy dimensions to this cooperative economic development proposal. One is that religious and other “we are all in this together” oriented wealth deposit managers really need to talk to their grantor and social investor colleagues about their investment portfolios; encouraging more and more of them to invest larger and larger portions of their portfolios in community-value-driven vocations/enterprises, rather than financial bottom-line corporations that may be using our capital wealth for purposes that are not sustainable, potentially doing far more harm with the philanthropist’s money than the interest that they spend on grants does good. Most religious sector philanthropists have divested of investments that are ecologically counter-productive. If this trend became normative for wealthy foundations and individuals all across the planet, then a capital-accumulation valued economy might begin turning around toward a cooperative development valued economy and ecology.

The second area of potential advocacy has to do with tax structure. If wealth deposit managers took the lead in talking to government officials and other people in the top 1% globally about the havoc their accumulation is causing to the entire ecosystem, perhaps we could arrive at some consensus that the top 1% of earners each year (after taxes) could afford to either invest maybe 80% of that after-tax net income in cooperative/environmentally sustainable enterprises/vocations/habitations or pay that amount in taxes. In this way, the top 1% (subtracting last year’s income from last year’s taxes/social investments) would cycle each year. It would be only the most cancerously growing, self-isolating, wealth deposits that would pay the ultra-high pay-back tax, or social investment, rate in consecutive years.

Then maybe we could think about doing something similar, but at a lower rate, for the top 2 to 5%, then the top 6 to 10%. Reverse-trending wealth deposits toward a cooperative and inclusive economy might mean that the meme, or Information, value of currency would self-balance, if done globally and incrementally. Maybe we wouldn’t need Community Currency barter-exchange transfer records if we re-oriented our wealth deposits to actually serve our sustainable socioeconomic and cultural values.

But, this all needs to be talked about, especially by people who are already invested in permacultured systems-analysis and design, cooperative workers and residers, New Economy and Natural Resource and Whole Systems thinkers, and the religious/spiritual sector.

My personal paradigm is what is emerging under the label “EcoMinistry.” The difference between human service and ministry is that service is something a provider brings to a client while ministry is something that two or more people do together, from a position of solidarity. Eco is short for ecology, but it also works for economy; as an ecologically informed economy. So, in my sometimes not-so-humble perspective, we are an emerging species of ecoministers. This is about how we live sustainably together under the assumption that the Golden Rule always and inclusively applies to all species and all systems and all paradigms and all traditions and all memes, and all communication. It is a philosophy of mutually-assured nonviolence and affinitive hope.

I believe I know of a handful of foundation people regionally and nationally who would like to have this agenda spelled out theoretically and then described in terms of project activities, development trajectory, and budgeting. That is the direction I am taking and I am actively looking for a core design and consulting team toward that end.

None of this is intended to distract from the primacy of working directly with small groups of marginalized kids and young adults, more or less following the Mondragon pedagogical model of personal development, leading to social development, leading to shared vocational teamwork and intentional community-building. I find myself drawn to “deep listening” and “deep learning” models that are confluent with nonviolent communication and lifestyle paradigms. My 17 year old son and I are taking a University of Stanford MOOG starting on January 20th on the Deep Learning pedagogical model. We are also both taking a Permaculture Design Certification class. We are planning to apply what we learn with kids and young adults failing to thrive in the transition from poor learning environments into employment. Our emphasis will be on developing core healthy relationships to build shared, sustainable, vocations. (which I will choose to think of as ecoministry, but I won’t scare everyone with that concept, I think; at least not the first day). Our local headquarters is called the Auerfarm 4H Education Center, an independent non-profit, but part of the Cooperative Extension Service here in Connecticut. It is also a cooperative farm and includes some ingredients of an intentional residential community, with potential for more of the same.

I am learning to trust the process and let a big vision unfold in its own time. If it is not built together, then it is not worth building. The valuable feedback I am getting (and not always accepted with grace) is that I get too far ahead of myself, too impatient with development process, and too unrealistic about deadlines for implementing good public discernment and engagement design. To be less driven by grantor’s deadlines, and more in control of what has internal design integrity. If the design and theory and inclusive process are meant to be permanently sustainable, and revolutionary, then I must trust that money and other needed resources (nutrients) will be there when we need them. Whether it grows legs or not will ultimately not be about cash flow; it will be about good inclusive sustainable, permacultured design.

This feels like a highly promising opportunity to globally improve the effectiveness for health and well-being by working with philanthropic leaders to develop a cooperative grant information exchange network. This, rather than continuing to ask for cooperative proposals while setting up competitive application processes that are highly inefficient at a global scale, if our species’ goal is to optimize sustainable well-being by increasing the effective flow of our rather too calcified wealth deposits. No biological system can optimize nutrient flow and health when fuel-resources are hoarded for self-selecting subsystem nutrition, leaving the remainder of the planet to scramble for the crumbs.

We, the big WE, might benefit from inventing a variation on the stock exchange brokerage model that would be rooted in well-being value, rather than capital value; the exchange would be in the form of grants and low-interest loans rather than stocks, and a broker would be someone who works within a cooperative social investment ecoministry team, scanning on-line, internationally for cooperative investment opportunities that show high synergetic value (using something like Hubbard’s Whole Systems analysis, Spiral Development Theory, etc.), looking for resources to achieve significant permacultural optimization outcomes all over the planet, packaging these independent projects, adding a budget using cooperative synergy assumptions, and sending out the umbrella grant/loan package to appropriate philanthropists, within a religious, cooperative, ecological, peace, and public discourse investor network. A network of ecoministry (I think ministry can work in the British secular humanist way here) philanthropists to consider the umbrella investment portfolio collaboratively, each taking the piece most appropriate to their individual priorities, usually geographic.

There is something in here not only about shifting from competitive capital values to cooperative well-being values, but also to re-framing religious/spiritual ecology into its permanently encultured, proto-religious economic system roots; a regeneration of planetary information-transfer development systems. Not a species capacity before the current evolution-potential of the WWW.

From one guy trying to learn his ecoministry vocation, hopefully to another.

gdill52

permaculture, health, love, science, psychology, politics, economics

Author Archives: gdill52

Earth’s Easter Epic

Positive Deviance

Regenerative Leadership for a Global Millennial Community

Earth Day Call to ReGenesis

Faith Questions Fear

The Regenerative Design Interview

Regenerative Allies: Habitat and Transition Teams

Order of Universalist Unitarian Intent

The Wealth Economy: Turning from Competition to Cooperation