Earth’s Solar Economy
The sun can bathe filth with its light
But the sunlight will never be tarnished
Rumi (trans. Margam Mafi, 2014)
Client: Earth
Evolutionary Project: Passive/Active Solar Economic Incubator
My Permaculture Design Certificate came from Shutesbury, MA, last year, with Kay Cafasso, hosted by Sirius Eco-Village, where, indeed, things can become serious, especially in January, when we started. Later last year, I was ordained as an EcoMinister, by the Order of Universal Interfaith (OUnI), to co-facilitate and mutually-mentor with my “client” Earth.
Now I realize how silly that sounds. I mean I don’t really think of Earth as my client, but I do think of her as my vocational, and residential, host. I like this better than client, for reasons that are transparent to anyone who has wrestled with our parasitic infestation of Earth’s warmly embracing natural economy. And, host reminds me of Renaissance artisan and design economies, when a wealthy sponsor would requisition a project for his (too occasionally her) habitat.
There is another problem up there in that first paragraph. I thought I was ordained, but then Rev. Miner (no, seriously, that’s his real name—I know, I can hear all those “mining for Earth’s ecological riches” metaphors going through your analogy-drenched consciousness) couldn’t host the ordination scheduled for a gorgeous early October Sunday afternoon, embedded in an 8-day Work That Reconnects training with Joanna Macy, in Rowe, MA. Although I have no OUnI credential, I still hold that time as when I stepped into this Permaculture Design and Development vocational stewardship with Earth.
The first step, as you all know better than I, is to visit the site and notice. If you have the leisure to string this noticing stage through all four seasons, so much the better. In that Earth happens to be my sit-spot, my cooperative intentional community, as well as my vocational host, I have been keeping my journal for a full year now.
As I understand it, which is a significant caveat, Earth chose me for this Solar Incubator project because of my commitment to cooperative economic development. So I am tailoring my sit-spot host interview questions toward what I notice about Earth’s ecological, and sometimes not quite so logical, economic system.
I turn to my Questions for Client Interviews and skip past the first section, Questions About Use, because the second section, Questions About the Client (aka Host) seems more urgent.
I see no question like “what is your gender” because I suppose that isn’t germane or, if it does matter, the answer will be self-evident. But, I’m new at this, so it takes me a minute to realize that the answer is either bisexual, or perhaps polysexual. I think there is some kind of virus or bacteria that has eight distinguishable sexes, which seems like a confusingly ambiguous way to procreate but apparently it’s working out for them, so who am I to judge, right?
Going through the questions, the first few don’t seem to apply to Earth. Or do they?
How many family members now, ages and interests. Future growth of family.
Earth has a dense polycultural diversity of species. Most act like family most of the time, except one, kind of adolescent, one might even say tantrum-prone toddler, species with precociously competitive, acquisitive, extractive, ego-centric interests.
Human economic systems have been a chronic risk to the future growth of Earth’s family since Left-brained dominance replaced LeftYang/RightYin hemispheric balance, maybe. Family history is not my strength. But, from an economic perspective, risk to future development seems to have started with the extraction-fuelled economy, ramped up later with our capital-drenched value enculturation, now becoming linguistically monopolistic over what once was solar multisystemic ecological consciousness, awareness, maybe even Buckminster Fuller’s Universal Intelligence.
Where did you grow up?
Earth evolved out of regenerative plasmatic stardust; kind of an immaculately informative co-receptive conception, like the regenerative fertility emerging from unions of sunlight and Earth. Solar radiant sperm gratefully received by Earth’s ribonucleic parasites, perceived as light and warmth and energy, magnetic waves and functional balance, dynamic yeast absorbing into Earth’s revolving polycultural skin, pores, ciliating succulent dynamic solidarity. Earth emerges as a reiteratively evolving, cooperatively regenerative home; and host, in this case.
What was your last home like?
Hmmm. OK, just move on, maybe that’s a question for our future generations. And I certainly hope they have a more generous answer than my adult kids have for that question.
How long do you plan to live here?
Well, the long-term strategy appears to continue regenerative system development as long as we have sufficient light and heat, and not too much light or heat.
What occupations?
Regenerative Multisystemic Designer, Developer, Processor, Facilitator, Host, Incubator, working within a subsidiary and primally dynamic solar economic system. In other words, Earth enjoys a revolving ecology that distributes light and dark energy with both electromagnetic and thermodynamic balance. This balancing vocation may be threatened by extracting weight from Earth’s core faster than it can be reabsorbed and by unbalancing the weight and/or speed of appositive polarities, like the North and South Poles.
Describe your neighbor relations.
Cordial. We all tend to stay in our own interdependent orbits around the sun, except our moon, of course, but that relationship is the exception that seems to prove the mutual subsidiary ecological rules within our planetary neighborhood.
Do you have any allergies?
Earth’s natural systems appear to be allergic to dissonance; defining dissonance as dysfunctional frequencies, flow disruption and turbulence, anomalous arrhythmic loss of pattern articulation and boundaries. These economically incarnate as deviations from a (0)-sum balanced Win-Win strategy, with small investment risk, sustained slow growth, ecological exchanges of time, language, energy, information, resources, nutrients, fuel, and, sure, capital too, why not?
Eating habits
Diverse polycultural form and function. More economically nutritious during light exposure, leaving plenty of time to digest deep dreams in more reflective, and redactive, moonlight frequencies. Prefer abundantly positive banquet style with a seat and place setting for everyone, all species, all generations including those no longer reconciliating and incarnating with the rest of us, and those who are with us only in more DNA/RNA encoded future form.
No one gets seconds until everybody has had a balanced sustainable intake of positive nutrients. No table is served twice until all tables on Earth have sustainably balanced nutrient delivery sufficient for all species at all tables.
Unfortunately this nutrient exchange economy has slipped away with the onslaught of TV dinners, and instant breakfasts.
How self-reliant do you want to be? In what ways?
Finally, an economic question. I was wondering if we would ever get to the nutritional investment and value exchange question.
Earth most certainly does NOT hope to ever become self-reliant, any more than she would deliberately choose to be an impoverished, orphaned, single-parent with way too many hungry moon dependents that she is doing her best to mentor in the ways of regenerative economic balance—all of which requires actively cooperative interdependence, or synergy.
If Earth did not have her moon to worry about, then the natural rhythms and patterns of her light and dark nutritional, fuel, and relational economies would be considerably less complex, sometimes even disturbing. That said, she seems to love Elder Moon, and the gravitational and luminary atmospheric anomalies need not detain us from our focus on Earth’s primary dynamic vocation, to interdependently continue, with her Solar Systemic Family, orbiting around the sun with gravitational polar and circumferential balanced frequencies and positive, clockwise, spin trajectory, to optimize Permacultural Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Ecological and Economic Standards.
This evolutionary project is not about self-reliance, Earth’s permacultural design vision is optimized cooperative, inclusive, life-sustaining abundance; all made possible because of her ongoing synergetic romance with Sun.
Pets livestock, wildlife enhancement?
Well, duh, yes! This is Earth we are talking about here. We’re all residents at the same Solar Systemic address. The Golden Rule of ethics applies globally. No way Earth wants to lose any of her DNA/RNA regenerative investment in life’s future.
So, OK, now I think maybe I should skip ahead to the Priorities questions, because I just have too many unanswered “sit-spot” questions remaining About Use of Property and maybe going to what stands out as the main patterns I noticed will help me sort out my own priorities.
Worst problems? Why?
Earth’s prime economic problem is the evolution of a competitive capital-dominant monopoly in human-nature’s economic value system. Why doesn’t human nature notice that Earth’s prime natural systemic economy is cooperatively nutrient-driven and polyculturally regenerative?
Solar energy grows Earth’s photosynthetic breath and warms her atmosphere, solids, liquids, atoms, molecules, cells, organs, communities, species, food, both prey and predators, subsidiary parasitic populations, and ecosystemic hosts. Any gardener knows this stuff.
Earth has passive and active solar energy. Active solar energy is designed and developed to serve the nutritional and other fuel needs of humaned nature. I don’t know, maybe its hu-maimed nature. Again, I get confused when I start thinking outside my “sit-spot” perspective, which is populated by deer and turkeys and hawks, an occasional eagle overhead, squirrels, sparrows, trees, grasses…but only occasionally by humans, and dogs.
Earth’s solar economy is renewable, I think, or hope so anyway. The sunlight falls on everybody, every form, creating the very possibility of information and a system, rather than chaotic absence of relationship. Earth is our economic Commons because Sun radiates light with pay-it-forward investment in the production of consumable nutrients, absorbable energy, breathable air, drinkable water, listenable octave sound and perceivable octave sight frequencies.
To date, Sun has not given Earth notice that transferring solar values within this cooperative organic economy will result in loss of light or solar energy, so the Commons economy is indefinitely regenerative, contingent upon Sun continuing to radiate frequency and functional values that synergetically balance Earth’s ecological design and development.
Earth’s primary economic development problem is human nature’s competitive, Left-brain dominant, and therefore ecologically imbalanced, blindness to our permaculturally dominant passive, and pacific, solar energy, nutrition and wellness economy. Radiant light grows natural systemic Basic Attendance. Solar energy develops Earth’s prime economic values and relationships, forms and functions, through her balancing natural frequencies.
Where on your site do you like the most? Why?
Earth’s solar economic sweet-spot is what a Game Theorist, blended with a Group Theorist, like Gregori Perelman and his 0-soul Theorem, might understand as a (0)-sum Win-Win inclusive cooperative gaming strategy. Earth does best being able to absorb all of Sun’s radiance, feeding and heating and regenerating her DNA/RNA value-cells, without any loss of balanced and harmonious atmosphere. Everybody’s end-game goal is to win together, or nobody ultimately wins. Every organic system’s ego goal is to end play with no more and no less than when play started, back with the egg and sperm event, speaking of DNA.
Some passive solar economic techniques to consider:
- Reorient Earth’s human nature toward (0)-sum solar cooperative economics. Go full passive solar cooperative across all paradigms and value exchanges.
- Select nutritional options for optimizing informational absorption, depth, density, thermal mass.
- Reflect light’s reiterative and regenerative, and reflective, properties when developing inclusive polycultural value-optimization design. Cognitive dissonance theory, and a little too much experience, tells me that if I don’t mentor my own cooperative ecological hopes and dreams, if all I do is write in my sit-spot journal about them, then that is just not pay-it-forward enough for optimizing economic outcomes.
- Design comprehensive spaces that naturally circulate ecologically balancing values, like information and energy and air.
- Solar value absorption purifies, and pacifies, salves, conciliates what we feel without becoming ego-competitively contaminated.
As to the question of why Earth likes this (0) sum Win-Win strategic game best, as plain as the sun on my face, I suppose she really likes her unique Solar Systemic role as a passive solar revolutionary economic incubator, flawlessly spinning out Permacultural CQI Optimization Standards, except for that over-populating, extractive, Right-brain oppressing, human DNA species.
But, that’s OK, the problem is the solution. I learned that in my permaculture class.
