Tag Archives: systemic change

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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.

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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.
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