If you have not read Riane Eisler’s “The Real Wealth of Nations” (2012) and John Michael Greer’s “Wealth of Human Nature” (2011), please do at least read one or the other.

Eisler thinks it is time to replace an overly-dominant, capital-based, competitive cultural understanding of Business As Usual Means Marginalized Lives Don’t Matter, evolved through the Industrial Age. She contrasts this with our “real”, but undervalued wealth of nurturance and care-giving. This is an explicit feminist perspective on economics and the logic and balance of ecologically-informed economics. My only complaint is not about what she has written, but about the “sin” of omitting all the vast financial and cultural research on co-operative economics, which seems to incorporate values for recycling, repurposing, rehabilitation, zero carbon footprint lifestyle intentions, as well as the organizing of co-operatives around child care, elder care, household cleanliness and order, landscaping, cooking and preserving, gardening and farming.  These are all cultural elements of what Thich Nhat Hanh would encourage us to think of as a nurturing-nutritional economy v. a domineering-toxic environment of oppressing and suppressing our natural and ecological instincts.

John Michael Greer’s analysis of our capital/commodity competitive Business As Usual economics-as-financial-transaction monopoly and monotony is entirely symbiotic with Eisler’s blistering critique.  His alternative trend view is more eco-logically focused as a logic that is our undervalued HUMAN natural wealth. If we follow what is ecologically rational more, and avoid further investment in what is merely more competitive ego-investment of an anthro-culturally supremacist species, we may have more sustainable hope for our collective future. Like Eisler, however, Greer fails to take that one additional ecological step, to notice that organic living nature is essentially co-operative until the point when trends start moving toward decay and devolution.  Economics, whether competitively-rooted in Win-Lose capitalist Game Theory, or cooperatively-rooted in Win-Win positive evolutionary Game Theory, is relational network praxis of ecological systemic intent, continuing our cultural revolution toward comprehensive consciousness.

Transactions and relationships are synonymous as reiteratively equivalent communication strings of memory and cultural history, whether we are speaking of micro-economics, or macro-economics, or both.  Our prime ecological assumption is that we live in a positively co-operative evolutionary environment, too often troubled by negatively competing Win-Lose strategies and logistics assuming a shortage of “wealth” resources, which may be reminiscent of Anderson’s “Emperor with No Clothes.” If the socioeconomic and too-long encultured pathology of over-valuing competition are precisely what point to their own nakedly devolving and decomposing future, then hope dawns with this red horizon; our socioeconomic therapy is a deeper permacultured economics of co-operative ecology, design, and developmental praxis.

At the micro-economic personal and familial and local community levels, I have found the following areas of discernment on “Win-Lose Competition Economics” v. “Win-Win Co-Operative Economics” useful:

1. Purchasing decisions: Housing, transportation, utilities, food, insurance come immediately to mind as having rich potential to benefit our shared environment and my personal checking account and the quality of my relationships with family and neighbors when approached with a “Group Purchasing Co-Operative” intention.  When do I need a car and when do I not, and do I know other people, or is there some way I could get to know other people, who might answer that question in a way that is mutually compatible with my answer?
2. Investment decisions: Insurance shows up here again, with retirement investment, and even regular savings and checking account relationships with financial institutions and companies who will use my payments to invest in what, exactly? I am increasingly uncomfortable with knowing that many insurance and financial corporations are taking my capital and investing it in Business As Usual, especially as it occurs to me that there are ways to invest in cooperative funds investing solely in my region of habitat, excluding those businesses with toxic outcomes for our shared environment, other species, and also for their employees, and giving preference to investments in worker- and resident-cooperative ownership.
3. Relational decisions: While purchasing and investment are also relational, we usually think of them as transactions. So, this broader category continues to evolve on my own path toward a more comprehensive ecological co-operative consciousness. How do I choose to respond to messages from my own family that betray contention between egocentrism and eco-logical balance?  These are at least potential opportunities for some rich conversation about what we value, including sustainability of life, and what we disvalue. As I am now well-immersed in my twilight years, it becomes increasingly obvious that what I have always enjoyed about my internal contentions is how they have a way of resolving most resonantly when my egocentric left-brain embraces my ecocentric right-brain’s intuitions for right-relationship, for what is, after all, transparently eco-logical.

Eisler and Greer both point to some public policy and priority changes that would help each of us sustain our ego-eco alignment. I agree with all of this agenda.  I further believe that the principles and ethics of Permaculture could be more broadly applied to any evolutionary paradigm for relationships, transactions, actions, being and becoming on planet Earth, within our bodies and families and neighborhoods and ecosystems. Some principles that feel permacultural, but may not appear in your sustainable agriculture text:

1. Never give up. Always, whenever possible, give downstream to enrich solidarity with those living more marginally than you are. This applies to investment and purchasing decisions, as well as all relational discernment.
2. Don’t give out after struggling and suffering against; always give in while struggling and suffering with others, nature, human nature, your own ecologic.
3. The best case scenario for sustaining  a Win-Lose Game, is to embrace Win-Win logistics and strategies whenever you can find a regenerative way to do so. Otherwise, the ecological long-term conclusion of Win-Lose ego-domination logistics is you might possibly win, but only after everyone else understands themselves as “losers” in your eyes; a pyric victory with deadening cost to water, soil, air, and the former wealth of human nature.