Namaste.

I am soon-to-be Reverend Gerald Dillenbeck, M.Div., MPA, Permaculture Designer, ordained by the Order of Universal Interfaith as an EcoMinister, to facilitate self-, other-, and Earth-care.

My vocation is currently expressed through listening to kids, and some adults, sorting through issues of environmental and economic justice.

Bruce Schumann recently encouraged the NCDD to become something more than it is; a network of wise facilitators looking at a shared issue map and sharing our solution stories between communities, as solution histories respond to locally-voiced hotspots of intention. Intent is understood as a positive tension toward resolution.

This concept sounds like an appropriate use of the WWW, with regenerative potential. However, it does not look quite right to me because it is not as explicitly global in its intention as would be optimally and sustainably effective.

Buckminster Fuller would love Bruce’s idea. It incorporates his view that we do better not to invest all our resources in propping up socioeconomic (and political) systems in decay. It is more persuasive of discovering and then embracing positive solutions to design a better system.

As I imagine the NCDD facilitator map there are important voices in our geopolitical system that are missing. These include solution formation facilitators in smaller, less wealthy communities and nations. Also significantly missing are the voices of our children, and their children; and the voices of other species, and their future generations. The global outcomes we can most universally embrace are discovered through inclusive solution story networking.

Essentially, Bruce, an information system networker, is recommending replacing a competitive geopolitical map and game strategy with a cooperative strategy. For this, we need globally inclusive-of-vast-diversity Win-Win rules of communication and economic transfers.

A concern for those of us not inside the NCDD plenary, as well as for those who are inside, is this issue of a problematic competitive human culture merging toward cooperatively self-administered design.

It is a proverb among community and economic facilitators that who you start with (and who you leave out) best predicts who you will end up with at the end of our regenerative intentions. This proverb is liminally supported by statistics on poverty and marginalization. Those most likely to die in poverty are those born into a competitive culture that does not have enough room for them. Poverty predicts poverty as margins predict socioeconomic boundaries.

In Permaculture Design, as well as Buckminster Fuller’s positive Trimtab conjecture, we learn that our most global polycultural synergy evolves outward into incarnation in the real world as our competitive monocultural exclusive divisions fade into softly dissonant loss and  memory. The wake of a Trimtab, tipping point, event reminds us of pilgrimage, our journey toward a diversely shared positive deviance from everything else–which is what a richly nutritious Climax Community, or polyculture, or ecosystem, or civilization, as you prefer, provides.

Permaculture Design, and many formation paradigms, also rests on two prime relationship principles: complementarity and subsidiarity. Our competitive geopolitical history has been primarily concerned with evolving our complementarity. Competition builds healthy complementarity. Diverse missions, purpose, interests, and practices nourish and enrich each other, or there is that potential in a naturally balanced ecosystem.

The Principle of Subsidiarity, however, gives equal emphasis to cooperative, Win-Win, decision strategies at the most inclusive grassroots level feasible, while balancing our systemic complementarity; physical boundaries of location impact communication and nutrient-value transfers.

Competitive “self-challenges” build resilience and sustainability so long as the formative cultural understory assumes a subsidiary value for globally inclusive cooperation that transcends not only subcultures and nations and languages and species, but also time from past toward future regeneration.

Speaking as a Permaculture Designer, with Positive Deviance Intent, for Bruce’s network we need an Earth Coalition for Positive Discernment, which could indeed be composed of wise Solution-Mentors, especially those whose own lives and families and communities indicate they have walked the walk at least as well as we talk our talk.