Tag Archives: economics

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Thanksgiving for Independence Days

Among PermaCulture Designers,
planners and cooperative schemers,
choreographers and mappers,
therapeutic lyricists and historical poets,
and probably comedians,
there is a saying,
a principle of experiential truth:
For every healthy function
we discover many nutritional elements.

This has to do with commitment,
most resonantly shared with GaiaEarth,
to invest in polycultural multi-enculturing functions
to disinvest away from monoculturing
monopolistic pathologies of hubris,
a human environment supremely out of balance
with humane cooperative intent.

An important cultural health function in the U.S.,
as in other enriching societies,
is celebration.

Celebration is a health function
with many memorial and traditional elements.

Two of these celebrations
are in creative tension within U.S. cultural revolutions:
Thanksgiving Day and Independence Day.

Thanksgiving is healthy
and draws on elements of gratitude
grace
Earth and life as sacred ecological relationship,
as our shared evolutionary history
rooted in cooperative nurturing elements.

Independence,
like liberty and freedom,
is also healthy
and draws on elements of revolution,
too easily violent and emphatic disagreements
about redistribution of power and wealth
from royalist plutocratic homes
to mutually cooperative democratic co-investment networks
thankful for this new opportunity
to grow both Thanksgiving cooperation
and often-competitive WinLose crises
on thresholds of new-found Independence Days,
not possible to resolve
without dominance of interdependent Thanksgiving WinWin celebration,
memorials of Earth’s bounty
inviting humane benign parasites of Independence
from Earth’s other native elements,
back into more grateful abundance
through interdependent health functions
of more polyculturally empowering Thanksgiving.

Gratitude warmly embraces growing less defensively reactionary
about our grown-too-nationalistic and egotistic elitist
Independence Days.

To optimize health functions of Thanksgiving
and Independence,
Earth invites us to remember how ecosystems
create these two co-arising intentions together,
as root systems of multiculturing grace
interdependently flower mutually-held and celebrating
Independence Days
with ecopolitics cooperatively-owned and self-governed
liberty for all
capable of reweaving
Earth’s WinWin Thanksgiving Day supremacy
of healthy democracy for maintaining cooperative ecology
rather than over feeding wealth-hoarding plutocracy,
wherein every day is entitled to Christmas gifts
without the gratitude of a healthy Thanksgiving child.

While it is possible to celebrate Independence Day
each in our own King George throne room
and firing-up our own gated backyard grills
of me-first red meat,
Thanksgiving Day more patriotically invites
a table large enough
for all us native creolizing waves of immigrants
to give thanks for all Earth’s healthy gifts
brought together by these
grace-filling
nutritional polyculturing elements.

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I Believe

I don’t believe children could or would distinguish between
what is naturally healthy or pathological
and what is spiritually wealthy or anemic
any more than they would distinguish between economic health
and political wealth of power,
energy,
nutrition,
fuel,
strength and nurturing endurance.

And I believe adults are irrationally LeftBrain dominant misled,
and misleading,
to believe otherwise.

When I listen to my kids
before I begin to share my guilts and shames
and internal violence and fears and angers,
occasionally they remind me
we all started out as grace-filled immigrants
into Earth’s matriarchal sacred embrace.

Although,
it was easier to hear this reminder
when they were still newborn.

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HolyGaia Spirits

I wonder if one human life
comes with opportunities to try again.

TimeLine Do-Overs.

I wish I could have taught my kids,
and my neighbors’ kids,
and your kids,
that the Holy Spirit is to Christianity
as the Gaia Hypothesis is to EarthJustice and Peace,
to Bodhisattva Warriors,
to secular humanist ecologist atheists,
to Taoists,
to Buddhists,
to the Original Tribes of holonic-organic animists,
nature-spirit nondual co-arising worshipers
of each sunrise,
each life as gift,
grace,
sacrament,
wonder and awe,
not quite so much competitive,
win some but eventually lose it all
shock and awe.

The Gaia Hypothesis
plays a WinWin dominant game
as a creolizing
matriarchal-patriarchal equivalent
co-messianic ecopolitical economy of co-redemption,
Works for me
as both Earth-regenerative natural process
and HolySpirit-cooperative spiritual progress.

There is indeed something childlike
inherent in this view of Gaia as Sacred WinWin Ecology,
perhaps in a Gregory Bateson sense,
shared DNA-RNA memories
of Mother’s sacredly nutritious embryonic womb,
when communication about mutual health care-giving and -receiving
required no LeftBrain words not yet learned,
and yet infant production and host consumption levels
across the double-boundary of womb and embryonic new life
balanced cooperatively co-empathic
or both would perish as one Gaia Spirit.

Everything I have learned about life in the real world
other than this Virginal Gaia Spiritual experience
of matriarchal nurturing flow
to maintain bilateral primal relationships,
has fallen a bit patriarchally short of my initial anticipation,
expectations of meeting others
originally baptized in polypathic Gaia Holiness Spirit
and not really needing to remind their kids
that our shared HolySpirit is to multiculturing religions
as the Gaia Hypothesis is to polyculturing healthier outcomes.

I wonder if I had planted this message back twenty years ago
might Gaia as HolySpirit
sound less hypothetical,
and more exegetical,
today.

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Ecological Imperative

Ecologists seem more aware
than economic and political scientists
and capital and democracy leaders of state investments,
of the remarkable multi-functionality of natural systems,
like trees,
and river valleys
and their forests
with canopies of shade
enlightened from above by sun,
glimmered by moon and starlight,
creating energy,
nutrition,
predators and prey, but also beauty,
health and pathology,
feeding and bleeding co-invested systems
of interdependent relationships.

While multi-functionality of organic systems
is a complicated array of niches,
these are not just the economist’s consumer market niches
or just producers of goods and bads through labor,
through both WinLose and WinWin Games,
but more like all of the above.

This comes to mind
because as I have earned the perspective
of multi-functioning economic and political decades,
as both consumer and producer,
I have also noticed that polarized U.S. elected officials,
especially those working in, or even near,
our infamous District of Columbia,
have reduced the citizenry
to producers of tax revenues and votes,
expecting to consume diminishing returns
of peace and justice,
to expect Business As Usual,
a drought of functionality,
dwindling absence of Constitutionally protected returns
for health
happiness
and mutually cooperative prosperity.

Ecologists
and other health v pathology students,
learn to become more aware of the reciprocal,
perhaps even contagious,
relationships between producers giving care
and consumers receiving healthy care.

I don’t see many elected folks
working and living in our public sector
burning the midnight oil
pondering together
how to become more multi-functional care-givers
and care-receivers,
which requires cooperation more
and competition for votes and tax dollars less.

As a wanna-be culture of healthy ecopolitics,
we are too capital-mesmerized
by our own recent investment histories
in unhealthy pathologies,
driven to capture what’s left of value
on the verge of a no longer merely impending
humane energy production descent,
choking on our own culture of BadNews
competing consumer markets of polarizing pathology.

If economists and political scientists
and dipolar ecopolitical practitioners
like me
and you
and our families,
and our communities,
and our States,
and our Nations,
and our anthro-centric global population
were to burn what’s left of the midnight oil
discerning together this basic functionality
of balancing consumer markets for health and happiness
and producer forces and contagious flows
for cooperative wealth thereof,
WinWin Both-And options only,
like forest systems of democratic trees,
and other living, breathing cultures of Earth’s health,
I wonder if the return on our votes and tax investments
in mutual-care receiving
may pay off more robustly,
resonantly,
cooperatively,
organically,
permaculturally,
ecologically,
not quite so pathologically
polarized WinLose competitions.

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Teaching Power

Teaching can feel depressingly predative
to younger minds
preferring to not evaporate while preyed upon.

Mentoring can feel more hopefully symbiotic
with younger,
fresher,
less domesticated minds
preferring to mutually stalk
shared prey of symbiotic and creolizing truths
between generations,
ancient to yet unborn.

Parenting can feel parasitic
to younger minds and bodies
ready to break free
of aging hosts,
relentlessly hoping
to pass along some semblance of grace
as gratitude
for Earth’s co-investing gifts.

Parenting could,
in hypothetical theory,
invite mutuality,
more like benign parasites,
who know and love each other,
moving from harboring co-dependencies
to seeking mutual interdependence
for further good-humored
yet vulnerable
exploitations of honest life as mutual gifting forward.

Power,
energy,
nutrition,
even vibrant health
can feel like unmitigated competitions
where if I win
then someone else must lose,
when all the most important choices
are between Either Yes
Or No.

I suppose power could feel more limited.
Power to mutually avoid
and live in side by side autonomous silos
of live and let love,
where if I win
then so must you
and if you win
then so must I
and if this generation wins
then so must future generations
where all our mutually avoided choices
issue forth within Both Yes for me
And NotNot No for you.

Teaching power can feel predative,
as mentoring interdependent powers
invites deep harmonic ecology,
sacred symbiosis
of me
as also notnot you.

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The Eighth Principle

Integrate
rather than segregate.

Yin
rather than too much Yang dominance.

At least in the worlds of Permaculture Design
and Systems Theory
and Democratic Political Theory,
Polycultural outcomes
are healthier
and thereby wealthier,
than monoculturing economic and political,
ecopolitical-psychological
and social and cultural
and any system-balancing
obectives.

Monocultural objectives
in an overripe infestation time
can produce rabidly aggressive polarities
overpowering and devouring prey,
sources of nutrition and energy and fuel,
to a tipping point beyond regenerative replacement.
Sated monocultural predator overpopulations
on climatic edge
of hunger and thirst
for former neighbors,
now heading toward decline,
extinguished by supremacist WinLose Players,
populations,
species,
acting like cats
living on a continent of catnip,
constipated and out of nutritional balance,
satiated
just as catnip energy is at point of crisis.

Cats facing decline,
gradually wondering if they will have to end
by preying on each others’ young,
or escape this over-catted
monoculturing WinLose monopoly game
conclusion
to catnip bloated dominant patterns
learned from catnip-hungry teachers
and mentors,
parents and siblings.

So, whether cat or human,
designing and learning to cooperatively integrate
our integration objectives
is not just better
but healthier
and thereby wealthier,
more democratically effective,
more economically nutritional,
and more ego/eco-bilateral balancing
than segregating ego-centric
ethno-centric
anthro-centric
racist
sexist
ageist
xenophobic
paranoid
supremacist
monoculturing trends
toward dissonance and despair.

To paraphrase David Holmgren,
regarding human waste and effects of polluting Earth,
“Declining [health] energy availability
will shift the general [ecopolitical-psychological] perception
of these [cooperative symbiotic relationship] concepts
from romantic idealism
[RightBrain marginalization]
to practical necessity.”
[Left-Right
Yang-Yin Brain cooperative symbiotic relationship].

When we recall
we are an inherently ecopolitical species,
cooperative integrity unveils a primal practiced necessity
of Mother Earth’s gift-it-forward (0)-sum nutritional economy.
Then gratitude and grace
become as accessible to atheists,
and Bodhisattva Warriors,
and CoMessiahs,
to peace martyrs and justice prophets
as to any newborn on Earth,
learning embryonic embrace of matriarchal root systems,
womb through tomb lifetime co-investments
open to Earth’s regenerative gifts
of health as wealthiest nurture
of polycultural development,
healthier than segregating supremacist degeneration,
climate pathological objectives,
nihilistic WinLose planning
as if economic wealth optimization
could be rooted in segregated capital vaults
not investing in mutual Earth-Gratitude Integrity.

Interdependently integrate all positive nutritional trends
rather than merely segregate your negative ecopolitical predations,
victimizations and criminalizations,
from whom we truly have become,
for now.

Adopt active cooperativity
rather than adapt to fear and anger tolerance
much less mongering.
Both integration and segregation are mutually contagious.
One feeds love,
the other bleeds despair.

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Gathering Roots

“Gathering roots holds up a mirror between the map in the earth
and the map of our minds.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer “Braiding Sweetgrass”

Permaculture Design
is about landscape shaping programs and projects
with nutritional goals
and ethical/aesthetic WinWin cooperative processes.

In Apache,
the verbal label for land
also means mind.

To design landscapes for healthy polycultural progress
is also to mindscape for wealthy polypathic process.

PermaCulture Land/MindScaping,
like Positive Health Psychology,
is not restricted to external roots of nutrition,
although these are our internal root Elders.

Forest root systems are largely planted through cooperative self-governance.
But, when Designers plant roots
we usually feed and water those we are most invested in,
and sometimes those with greater internal needs than others,
harvesting their combined effects, affects,
resonance and dissonance,
and culling the most regenerative for replanting
to continue evolving next year’s deep diverse rooting system
of cooperative associations,
mature foresting networks.

So too, our sensory-neural mindbody root systems
we appositionally and oppositionally plant and grow
in reverse tree hierarchies of co-subsidizing responsibility,
co-responsiveness,
resonance feeding
and dissonance bleeding
our cooperative and competitive roots most exegetically invested
in each other
to continue harvesting resonant and dissonant climate effects, affects,
culling the most polypathic LeftYang deductive
and most resonantly polyphonic RightYin inductive,
dipolar co-arising
future internal landscape progress
through mindscaping process,
cooperatively recreating WinWin
enculturation of cooperative health norms, ethics, aesthetics
optimizing ecopolitical wealth
of lands and minds,
avoiding dissonantly pathological WinLose landmines.

It may help to see and explore
parallels between interior and exterior root systems
if we ease off on LeftBrain’s more form-labeled static view
of organic root nutritional networks
and invest a bit more in RightBrain’s ego/eco-functional view
of root health purposes.
How root systems act nurturingly
naturally
spiritually
in Yin-matriarchal symbiosis
with their Yang-patriarchal trunks and branches,
both within concave Right
and without convex Left
quite so awfully dominant.

Formed knowledge is to LeftBrain deducting roots
as function-flowing wisdom
is to RightBrain inducting roots,
and breaths,
and bilateral models of tree functions,
adapting/adopting
symbiotic acclimation networks
of health-rooting systems.

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Governing Climates of Change

“Laying open the soil is like a careful dissection and there is the same astonishment among the students at the orderly beauty of the organs, the harmony of how they rest against one another,
form to function.
These are the viscera of the forest.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Braiding Sweetgrass” p. 233

Climate change environments
with government authorities living inside central-air denial
are like a bullfrog
enjoying a nice warm healthy pond life
and stubbornly doing his best
to continue acclimating
as his pond turns into
a simmering pan of water
developing a fatal case
of climate pathology.

Communication
between organic evolving and devolving systems
is often recognized,
even frog to atmosphere deductively analyzed,
as formal verbal-rational logic choice.
Too often slighted
are aesthetic-harmonic forms
of co-arising dipolar functions
within co-passioning messages,
statements,
appositional architectures
assuming desire for continuing organic-systemic interconnection,
convex-form/concave-functional inter-relationship
between YangForms of effective verbal communication
and double-binding yin nonverbal enthymematic
co-passioning
Function.

Hopefully,
we learn this sacred ecology
as we mature in self-governing
with both deductively acquired knowledge
and inductively felt dipolar wisdom,
discerning appositional differences
between regenerate climates communicating healthy WinWin cooperativity,
and degenerate climates
denying self-perpetuating WinLose competitions.

Wise governing choices
are less likely
when YangLeft merely formally correct communication
of facts
overpowers rather than co-empowers
YinRight co-empowering functions,
harmonies,
balance,
both ego- and eco-systemic,
co-arising,
dipolar creative tensions
healthier than bipolar dissonant noise
of patriarchal capital-hoarding pedagogical dominance,
monocuturing merely formal ascent to short-term Wins
masking descent loss
of anthro-inhabitable Earth.

Unlike reptiles,
how might warm-blooded acclimators
define declining climates of competitive pathology?

I don’t know.
Yet I see decline
when I feel it as patriarchal violence
of form
over against
matriarchal function
of co-passioning wisdom.

How do you learn the difference
between revolutionary regenerative wisdom
and normal devolutionary dominance
of further articulating details
for merely deductive reason
within side-by-side silos of discovery?

By also learning their cause-effect
co-functional
correlational dipolar co-arising similarities,
replacing WinLose Either/Or deductive monocultures
with WinWin Both/And reverse-hierarchical
matriarchal polyculturing outcomes,
sometimes revolutionary Yang,
and normally evolutionary double-binding
self-with-other golden ruling notnot Yintegrity.

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Math Problems

The problem of PolyNomials,
equivalent or not?
with NotPolyNomials
hides a geometric assumption
that was profoundly challenged by Bucky Fuller.

Polynomial v NotPolynomial
assumes if we could distinguish NP from P sets of information
in advance of processing trials,
then we would know two sets of bipolar information.
Yet this is no more, or less, the case
than to say that something is not
is to contain and delineate more valued information
than to say it is
at least notnot right now.

This equivalence or not
between not polynomial information
and notnot polynomial information
may be better redeveloped,
more cooperatively regenerate,
to see PolyNomials as binary informating bits,
where two notnot negative exformating ambivalents
equal one positive PolyNomial equivalent
dipolar co-arising positive convex
as also dualdark co-gravitating concave bipolar.

For example,
YangLight c-squared
equivalent with YinYin e-squared
primal convex/concave
outside/inside
temporal double-binding relationship,
0-sum fractal prime function,
like DNA and RNA string theorems
of regeneratively double-bound in/ex-formation.

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Summer of ’67

My canopy of early summer sounds
in 1967
was as intimate as adolescent knowledge
might ever become.

My sixteenth summer
sweetly smiled with driver’s permit,
my first job,
economic promise while the Beach Boys
and the Beatles sang a rainbow
of boy band diversity,
sang stories of straight white male revolutions,
evolutions of June firefly evenings
resounding bullfrog and cricket background vocals
on our family farm,
where good Christian Republicans
longed for good old Eisenhower years
when Father was wise
and always knew best,
and Vietnam was no more than an acrid draft
of wasted social
financial
political
environmental
nutritional capital,
not yet fully present.

This summer of 1967
was when I knew both anguish of embodied defeat,
hopelessly homosexual,
an yet poignancy of emerging mystical wonder
about what this could mean
fifty years from now.

I could not help fantasizing
how Paul and Art
might not only sing,
but dance, in poignant harmonies.

And,
as much as I laughed and loved and longed
to hear Stevie Wonder wondering
and Otis Redding wanting,
Marvin Gaye worshiping,
I so wished they could sound even better
with me.

Joni Mitchell
and Joan Baez
and Judy Collins,
like John Lennon,
were compelled to write and speak and sing
songs of love as freedom
growing transcendent
yet deeply fertile
Aquarian promise.

A promise bombed out
by uncivil wars
bound by fear of egocentered failure.
Fear our parents,
and half of my junior year classmates,
found compelling enough to throw away dollars
to build and buy
and transport
and explode bombs and bullets and boys,
nearly oblivious to hundreds of thousands of innocent men
and mothers
and children wiped out
by a mere strategic choice
to cover partisan ass
as the biggest baddest bully
on Earth’s shrinking block.

I didn’t blame him,
but when I called James Taylor
to rescue the Johnson and Nixon White Houses,
he did not come,
as promised,
to rescue me,
to remind us about our friend and family connections
across cosmic time
and Earth’s regenerate space.
A great ballad was just not enough.

In June of ’67
I was singing both “I Believe”
and “Love is Blue”
with equally honest passion
and thriving off a translucent vulnerable cover song
between these two impossibly incommensurable positions,
surrounded by straight evangelical predators,
sniffing for pinko faggot weakness.

I was so guilty
yet so in love with rightness
and ripeness
of my generation’s possibilities
for revolutionary integrity,
drawing together economic health
with political wealth
in some new golden ruling age
of relentlessly cooperative incorporation
and association
and ownership
and self-governance.

In this early summer of 1967
Martin and Bobby still walked with us
and one still dreamed he might see
someone who looked and thought and felt like him
as President one day
and the other I dreamed would become President
while I was still a high school junior.

So much devastation and disappointment followed.
It took at least a decade
and hundreds of thousands of human lives
treated like conscripted fodder
for nationalistic hubris of false pride
to arrive at the very treaty
our Vietnamese opponents had originally demanded.
And long before anyone from the U.S.
had been drafted and killed
for this offensive cause
of nationalistic non-defense.

Other health care and defense abuses
and losses
followed.
Neglect of women’s health.
Pedagogical loss of children’s deep ecological listening opportunities
to nondually co-arise with Earth’s polyphonic voices,
resources of multiculturing nutrition.

Yet I have these summer of ’67 memories
when,
for one diastatic season,
my revolutionary age on planet Earth
stood between despair of guilt
for what and whom I could never become
and celebrating hope for joy
of what we might yet reweave
timelessly singing and dancing
chanting and drumming
revolutioning and evolutioning together.

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