Dear Green Sanctuary 2014,
Please excuse two messages intruding from the year 2214, from our Green Sanctuary progeny, but I wanted to share these messages based on research from the Tellus Institute (www.tellus.org). Since the 1970s, Tellus has been contrasting the pictures we can project on our progeny if we follow Business As Usual, contrasted with a still possible future should we implement pervasive systemic changes, that I argue follow Permaculture Design standards, principles, and ethical norms, including (0) carbon footprint. Forty years, and one millennium, later does not seem too soon to incorporate this information into economic and ecological policy and procedure for community development and investment.
U.S. history unfolds replete with precedent for the religious sector taking an early lead on freedom and justice issues. This began with the primary motivation for many early European immigrants, looking for religious freedom and self-governance, to abolition of slavery, equal rights for women, through civil rights, more inclusively conceived. Now we come to the ecological, economic, and perhaps even the evolutionary rights of Earth.
Business As Usual, 2214
From your perspective, back in the day, I would probably be labeled as an autistic gamer, more comfortable below ground. Living in basements has become normative for their comparative effectiveness as contamination-resistant silos. Most of us are hiding from each other. Your corporate elite “won,” from a really sick way of understanding nihilism as success. They got the world they wanted, what’s left of it, and the rest of us mainly don’t think too much about how things might have been different.
I do wonder sometimes, though, if you had looked my direction with better foresight, maybe you would have seen how worthy of cultural ridicule those enormous wealth and power deposits were in your own time. Laughing at your Emperors With No Rationality, rather than voting them into office, and allowing them to control information and influence networks, to defend their own hopelessly ridiculous sense of values, may have been a more effective political weapon than all that anger and angst, and wringing of hands.
Anyway, my Business As Usual days do not include going outside unprotected. Most of the mammals and birds have died. Water is rationed, but there is lots of piracy. Even so, we would never use it for waste disposal.
What were you thinking, really? You starved our soil for compost while you took a shit in our water? It defies my increasingly autistic imagination and memory communication capacity to imagine a species that was so utterly benighted. Although the solar and wind powered energy caught on, as did fake commodified nutrition. Most of us use recycled bicycles to get around, when we have to forage.
Connecticut, and all land masses, is smaller now that coastal waters cover most of the towns and other habitats. Even so, we continue losing people faster than dry acreage.
They say that you used to experiment with rats, leaving them free of constraints to overpopulate, which they did. Along the way they developed their FatRats, with too much rabidity, chomping down on their smaller, weaker neighbors. All the rats stopped breeding, eventually, became sick, died off, some from vicious attacks without apparent cause or meaning.
So why couldn’t you see that you were acting the same way, with the same results predicted for my generation? Few of us left, and even fewer who have any hope, faith, or even basic desire for breeding.
I usually play on-line games in my underground silo, in he dark, waiting for the last satellites to fall, leaving me in a dark solitary confinement. That is when I plan to finish this death, already too long in process.
Truth, you were looking for Truth? If your Truth left you free for Business As Usual, I am barely here to tell you that yours is a Truth that cannot and will not sustain. Your intentions are good, but your precariously empty, pseudo-independent egos, homes, vocations, travel plans, food production practices are far from eco-logical. Replacing synergetic, loving ecological meaning and purpose with competitive economic rights of ego-self investment and extractive market developments was at least short-sighted, if not criminally sociopathic toward other species and your own future as a humane species.
Eco-dislogic dissonance degenerated into a competitive culture of increasingly autistic dismay. But, then, I’m just an Occupier Kid living in the basement of the old Unitarian Society of Hartford, all that’s left after the big 2213 hurricane that took the roof and most all the trees.
Anyway, I saw this message in your Green Sanctuary 2014 file that you wanted to hear from your future generations about what we think of your work to divest from the fossil-fuel business. Well, duh, good job on stating the embarrassingly obvious. But, would it have killed you to spend at least as much time on an ecological investment policy and procedure?
Back in your day, investing your lives, vocations, days, words, property, wealth in learning to live more cooperatively with nature, using natural, regeneratively balanced, system development skills and technology for creative design and learning and economic planning…. Well, hindsight is always 20-20.
Thanks for giving it your best shot. Sorry it took me so long to get back to you, I’ve been busy catching cockroaches for…, well, never mind. It’s probably kinder not to say.
Great Transition Message, 2214
OK, so I had this dream last night that back in 2014 our Green Sanctuary Elders specifically wondered aloud what Green Sanctuary would look like in 2214 and how their work on divestment would play out for the long-term.
So, yes, thank you for turning our investment strategy around from all that angry angst about losing fuel toward all that happy grace about gaining cooperative investments in your own future energy for our planet and our species.
Sync-ing pre-millennial Information Systems Theory with Deep Ecology and post-millennial Evolutionary Economics was so UU of you!
Today, Green Sanctuary continues growing your ReGenesis Project, for Reconnecting People, Place, and Planet. Intentional Communities (we stopped calling intentional communities “faith communities” when we realized that there is no such thing as a faithless community—an oxymoron if there ever was one) cooperatively invest in worker, resident, and consumer-owned services, products, enterprises, and natural construction habitats with organic food production capacity on site, all meeting (0) carbon foot print and (0)-sum economic transaction network Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) standards of Permaculture Design, which I think was still not quite evolved completely back in 2014.
At this point all food products are repurposed, with curbside pick-up and delivery through the ReGenesis Project’s communication and transport network of Transitio Teams. So is everything else recycled and repurposed, although we sometimes use specialized Transition Teams for non-food items like, you know, pianos, and wire, and all that plastic your generation could just not stop finding new reasons to produce.
We also have cooperative natural construction teams; organic farms, gardens, and nurseries; recycling/repurposing guilds, cooperative child and elder care; schools; bioregional credit unions; cooperative health care, including mental health care; energy and biofuel coops; artisan, craft, and performance arts guilds—using a surprising amount of stuff out of old land fills. Most people live in some form of cooperatively owned structure with occupants responsible for maintenance and resale or exchange within the economic network.
Your Low-Risk/Optimized Long-Term Return financial priority carries through to this time as Greatest Effect/Last Loss; a core principle of Permaculture Design applied to all nutrient, energy, and economic systems. Advocacy to that effect led to:
- A huge increase in cooperative loan fund investment dollars now easily accessible through individual and cooperatively-held retirement funds;
- Voters learning to ask which candidates for public office have the lowest carbon footprint and spend the least amount of money on campaigning, choosing from among these Green Mentor Candidates;
- Passage of the National Fee-and-Dividend Carbon Tax (see attached documents from Citizen’s Climate Lobby–www.citizensclimatelobby.org);
- Changes in income tax structures so that the top revenue generators has options of paying up to 80% of their income in taxes or investing up to 60% of their revenue in their bioregional community at 0% interest, for up to 20 years. These percentages and length of loan terms vary from highest for those in the top 1% revenue category, to lowest and shortest loan terms for those in the 21% to 30% of revenue in the prior year. Any wealth taxes paid in lieu of 0% interest bioregional loans are usually invested in cooperative homes, businesses, services, and commodities;
- Reversal of that weirdness about corporations having the civil rights of personhood.
Finally, these evolutionary economic measures culminated in our globally recognized Ecological Rights of Earth.
- CQI Information and Economic System Design Standards research equivalent analogs between permaculture principles, procedures, values, ethics and thermodynamically optimized sustainability of ecosystemic synergetic outcomes, with least dissonance and value loss.
- Economic positive value development systemically follows positive functional information string trends of Bayesian analysis. In other words, Win-Win gaming strategies optimize regenerative and inclusive development strategies, while win-lose assumptions tend to sub-optimize and become exclusively valued by those with greatest accumulated value (functional capacity) and power (autonomous force-freedom) frequencies, at global expense to sustainability of life.
- Competitive, ego-centric paradigms become exclusive, monopolistic, run-away positive feedback systems for wealth/power centers, becoming overly extractive of long-term sustainability from the population, polyculture, and ecosystem as a whole.
Once it became redundantly clear that competitive win-lose extractive markets, rooted in the assumption of self-perpetuating gravitation toward existing wealth and power deposits as normative ethical values (eco-normics) would always sub-optimize sustainability for future generations and sacrifice inclusive systemic diversity, thereby further eroding and weakening future evolutionary potential, then it became culturally normative to economically embrace our permacultured natural systems regenerative roots. Cooperative, diverse bioregionally-centric (rather than anthropocentric) markets, habitats, enterprises, gardens, farms, communities, communication, information networks emerged globally normative, and re-established a strong regenerative slow-growth ecological and evolutionary economic network. (See the attached study from the Tellus Institute for their research germane to future regenerative development trend comparisons.)
So, this cooperative economy did emerge out of your generation’s Permaculture Design, and your New Economics became Positive Evolutionary Economics, and your Deep Ecology, but this first appeared in the Synergetics of Buckminster uller, who grew up in a Unitarian cultures. Anyway, putting it all together led to global resonance for a (0)-sum economic norm for each living system. The true value of any investment measures time and energy resources committed toward the outcome in this moment.
Value has become more closely associated with nutrition and well-being and disvalue with dissonance and decay. A nutritious house is one that delivers energy and shelter and beauty, and smells and feels good, and interacts with natural sounds and light and does not pollute our soil, water, or air. A nutritious relationship is one that delivers energy and shelter and beauty, and smells and feels good, and sounds and looks natural, light, resonant, resilient. These are the value attributes for information, communication, communities, these are the relationships of belonging, a Green Sanctuary place called home. When we see and hear and feel and smell these values about ourselves, then we feel at peace and at home with ourselves, and with those around us, I mutually mindful gratitude for this Green Sanctuary economy of optimized ecological value.
No one owns time,
So no one owns temporally functional realities,
So no one owns this informating canvas of ecologically grown Earth,
So no one owns soil, water, air,
So no one owns information, frequency, force
Or form or function of any kind.
We are each and all of, by, and for this informating Earth-bound
Universal Intelligence we share,
As energy is to information,
Yang is to Yin,
Balanced Tao (0)-sum cooperative economy of grace.
We have worked on the pre-millennial Golden Rule, giving it a bit of a tweak, more of a permacultured brand and articulation:
- Assign to others the same responsibility and values that you are willing to receive from your own practice, as well as all that positive intention.
- Give others, including all species, past and future, the rights of freedom, responsibility, and integrity that you would have them give to you.
- The universal right of integrated freedom and responsibility optimally incarnates through balancing synergetic justice with responsible self-authority—mutual eco-logical subsidiary solidarity within Earth’s natural spacetime information systems.
- Water our confluent flowers and mulch them with our dissonant weeds. Harvest positively deviant seeds for strategic spring planting where most useful to Earth’s Common Tribe.
- Learn to fly cooperatively together, like flocks of airborne geese, so we don’t fly apart quite so awfully much.
I know your era of divestment, the post-millennial tipping point, was difficult, as are all Trimtab functions, learning from both confluence and dissonance how to more astutely aim for (0) eco-centric balanced cultural and economic values. I hate to think what might have happened if you had not done your best, as always. Maybe I would be living in some dark silo waiting for what’s left to end, longing to belong, yinning for Yang.
Your incarnation continues. Namaste.
gdill52 