Mario Prass: Spieglein Spieglein an der Wand, D-A-CH Tour 2017

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https://livingearth.one

The post Solutions for a New World appeared first on Rights Matter.

Mira Luna

The centralized creation of money and credit has a profoundly negative effect on local economies, sovereignty, and social cohesion. Bankers value profit at all costs, while locally-controlled institutions tend to prioritize other values like community, justice, and sustainability. Communities can regain some control of the flow of money and credit by issuing their own currency as a complement to conventional money. Local currencies can take the form of electronic barter networks, debit cards, mobile phone payments, Timebanks, or old-fashioned cash.

By altering the flow of resources, community currencies (CC) take power away from multinational corporations and put it in the hands of more accountable local entities. While community currencies can’t be too similar to or compete with national money, most countries allow it, and some, like Venezuela and several countries in the E.U., support their development. According to CNN, mediating underemployment and poverty is often a prime motivator for establishing a local currency, but there are also other specific purposes, such as small-business incubation, propagation of community gardens, and provision of healthcare for the uninsured.

Starting a community currency is not for the faint of heart. It takes a dedicated team years of effort. Learning from others’ experiences is essential. Here are some tips I gleaned from the experts and through my own experience. Find a group of people with common ground that are easy to get along with. It’s important to share goals and values with your core group, otherwise your project will be pulled in many directions. You may split into separate projects at some point; that’s often better than trying to duke it out with people who want to do their own thing. Focus on quality volunteer recruitment. Don’t get discouraged when people come and go.

1. Define your goals and prioritize them

Do you want to support local business or low-income folks? Do you want to encourage ridesharing or reward senior care? You may have many goals — local currencies can help alleviate many problems — but be clear about your priorities and target audience as this will shape all of your decisions, including what kind of currency you use.

“A currency is never an end in itself, but has to be seen as a facilitator of flows within the system of a whole community and economy,” says local currency expert and author John Rogers. “Its essential systemic role is to match underused assets and unmet needs.” The community meetings I held attracted all kinds of personal agendas and wacky plans that had no practical application. Your goals will be your compass.

2. Pick your tool appropriately and make it easy to use

Currencies are not one-size-fits-all. It is crucial that you pick the right tool, with the option to expand into multiple tools later. It should be as easy to use as the other kind of money. REAL Dollars of Lawrence, Kansas, ended because businesses didn’t have an easy way to spend them. Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility switched to open-source software for their business-to-business exchange to customize their interface and make it simple to use — a very smart investment.

3. Know your community

If your tool is online, but your community is mostly offline, it won’t get used. How does your community use money, what are its assets, and what does it need? Design a plan based on the reality of your community, not just on your own ideals. Whether you are working with businesses, nonprofits, or community members, survey them or conduct focus groups to test the new currency before you finish your design.

4. Do your homework and get a mentor

Choose a group that’s done a project similar to yours. Look up case studies that have worked. Many people sail out on a currency expedition without a map. Learn from others’ mistakes. Your membership and partners will trust you more if you’ve done your homework.

5. Define your governance and organizational structure

Like any project, you need good governance. John Rogers harps on this point: “Some people tell me off for going on about the importance of governance in getting community currencies to fly. They say a well-designed CC ‘should run itself.’ That’s a nice theory, but I don’t know any CC that has stood the test of time without some form of governance at work, i.e., someone making decisions.”

People will expect responsible and transparent governance for a resource as valuable as a currency — that trust determines its value. Encourage diverse community participation and representation in your governance, especially from your members. If you want to operate as a volunteer or worker cooperative, see my article on worker co-ops. Bay Area Community Exchange is a hybrid of a member and a worker co-op, though many currencies are either run as traditional nonprofits or business bartering exchanges.

Your decision to be a business or nonprofit will be determined by your goals, and currency type. Only entities that have charitable or educational aims can be nonprofits. That’s not to say your business can’t operate like a nonprofit, but you won’t be eligible for grants and donations, though you may be able to get small investments.

6. Define your geographic area

It may be helpful to incubate your currency in a smaller community. However, a wider geographic area may provide the diversity of services and goods that makes a currency useful. Too wide an area though, like the U.S. Southwest, may be meaningless and not effective in building trust and solidarity. Ideally, it would be an area diverse enough to provide most of the necessities of life, and small enough to allow direct exchange, community-building, and accountability.

Regional currencies have done well partly for this reason. If you don’t grow food in your community, you may want to expand your reach to farming areas. If you haven’t lived in your area for long, ask for advice from long-time locals who may have a sense of the resources and their flows.

7. Outreach through events

Hosting events to promote your currency and attending other groups’ events raises consciousness, develops alliances, recruits members/users and volunteers, and builds community. Think about your target audience and meet them where they are. Swapmeets and skillshares are useful demos of the currency that give a more concrete feel. Offer to speak, host a booth, or organize trading at relevant conferences, festivals, markets, and other events to promote your currency to potential members with aligned values.

8. Develop partnerships and take them seriously

Find allied organizations to help recruit members/users, develop programmatic partnerships, and raise your status in the community. An ally may serve also as a fiscal sponsor to bear the burden of organizational tasks while you focus on organizing. Choosing partnerships should depend both on your goals (for example, pick an environmental organization to support gardening or a social justice organization to reach low-income groups) and their ability to provide support, such as event space, outreach, trainings, or programmatic development. A good way to begin a partnership is to do a presentation to their staff and then ask them if there is one small thing they’d like to achieve by using the currency, like a website upgrade, and help them do that. Partnerships work best as a two-way street.

9. Keep the currency circulating

Bernard Leitaer, who is often considered the godfather of community currencies and helped design the Euro, says, “This is where a lot of community currencies have failed. They have neglected to close complete circulation patterns, and as a result… it tends to pool in particular parts of the system.” To keep the currency flowing, identify unmet needs and underutilized resources in your community, especially those not served by the conventional system. Be a matchmaker. If seniors need companionship and your pet shelter needs socialization for its animals, or you have unemployed people without job skills and a nonprofit or business startup that needs volunteers, you may have a match.

One of the biggest mistakes is assuming the currency will do everything itself. One or more exchange coordinators are vital, particularly in the beginning. Visiting Nurse Service of New York’s timebank has a bilingual or trilingual coordinator for each targeted community. Regular communication through email, newsletters, and your website reminds members what’s offered and needed, and the importance of mutual aid. Otherwise, members forget and default to using conventional money. Many currencies publish quarterly newsletters with directories of offerings.

Working on circulation means creating ways to both earn and spend currency. One way to increase circulation is to target entities with high-demand goods or services, but make sure they don’t over-commit themselves. One popular health food store ended up frustrated with loads of hours (the local currency) that they couldn’t spend, so they quit accepting it. Set up limits to make it more sustainable, like using vouchers during slow business hours only or on overstocked goods.

10. Use your currency to fund your currency

Hey, the government does it, why can’t we? As long as members agree it’s a good use of resources, don’t be shy about using your currency to pay staff, reward volunteers, put on events, or do marketing. Currencies are notoriously hard to fund. Relying on external donations can make the short-term sustainability of your project slightly more likely, but the long-term more precarious. Using your currency to fund your project is also good practice in learning how to use it. Membership or transaction fees are also a good practice. However, it’s helpful to lower the barrier to entry as much as possible in the first year or two so you have more members offering diverse skills and goods to increase your currency’s value (fees may slow that process).

Think about the option to pay member dues with volunteer work to support your currency project. A sparse directory with few members is not likely to encourage trading, as the now defunct Berkeley BREAD discovered. One of its most active members realized the currency she was earning with her counseling services would not be useful for anything she needed, so she stopped accepting BREAD. Alternatively, if you have lots of useful stuff in your store, people will flock to it.

11. Don’t give up but be willing to change direction midstream

Currencies take at least a few years to establish. In the meantime, you’ll have fun, make friends, and get some of your needs met. New Earth Exchange in Santa Cruz, California, went through several incarnations over the last several years to find better ideas instead of being stuck on their first idea. Now they are pioneers integrating an online business bartering exchange with a paper currency called Sand Dollars. It’s a lot of work. Have fun doing it, and you are sure to grow.

This article was originally published in 2012 and was updated in 2018. This article is part of a series of action-oriented guides that align with Post Carbon Institute’s Think Resilience online course. The Think Resilience course prepares participants with the systems-level knowledge needed to take meaningful actions as suggested in this and other “How to Share” guides in the series.

Header image by Jonny McKenna via Unsplash

The post How to start a community currency appeared first on Rights Matter.

reposted from Sharable.com

Photo credit: shoothead. Excerpted from the Policies for Shareable Cities report.

In a sharing economy, individuals look less to big chain stores to meet their food needs, and look more to each other. Food travels fewer miles between producers and consumers, making fresher, tastier, and often healthier food more accessible to city residents. Urban farms, food gleaning programs, community-supported food enterprise, home-based food enterprise, mobile vending, and shared commercial kitchens build food economies based on local production, processing, and exchange. This approach promotes health, local jobs, and community interaction, while reducing the environmental degradation, food insecurity, health risks, and unequal access associated with industrial agriculture and disjointed food systems. Cities can play a major role in removing legal barriers and facilitating the transition to community-based food production.

HOW CAN A CITY HARNESS THE SHARING ECONOMY TO EXPAND LOCAL FOOD PRODUCTION AND IMPROVE ACCESS TO GOOD FOOD FOR ITS RESIDENTS?

1. ALLOW URBAN AGRICULTURE AND NEIGHBORHOOD PRODUCE SALES

We recommend that cities allow and encourage urban agriculture by removing zoning barriers to growing and selling produce.

Urban agriculture has a long history in America, but increasing evidence of its benefits has expanded urban agriculture into a spectrum of farming practice ranging from non-commercial community gardens to commercial market farms.⁴⁴ Because many city zoning laws pose a challenge to urban food production and sale, some cities have taken concrete steps to encourage these activities.

Examples:

San Francisco, CA – San Francisco created a new land use category called “Neighborhood Agriculture” and permitted the activity in most residential, commercial, and industrial areas. This allows community gardens, community-supported agriculture, market gardens, and commercial farms of less than one acre to sell or donate their produce.⁴⁵ The ordinance also outlines rules for greenhouses, compost, fencing, and use of heavy machinery, and allows produce grown in a municipally defined “market garden” to be sold on-site during certain hours of the day as long as the sales occur outside the home.⁴⁶

Oakland, CA – In 2011, Oakland amended the Home Occupation Permit rules to enable the sale of food crops grown on residential properties.⁴⁷

Seattle, WA – Seattle permits urban farms of any size to sell produce grown on the premises in all zones, so long as neighborhood livability requirements and standards are met.⁴⁸ These standards include provisions that retail sales and related public activities occur between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., that deliveries may only occur once per day, and that vehicle and parking limits be observed.⁴⁹

Philadelphia, PA – In 2012, Philadelphia implemented a new zoning code that defines urban agriculture in four subcategories: community gardening, market and community-supported farming, horticultural nurseries or greenhouses, and animal husbandry.⁵⁰ Under the new code, community gardening is permitted in all zoning districts. Market and community-supported farms are permitted almost as broadly, but require a special review in certain districts.

Photo credit: Linda / Foter.com / CC BY.

2. FINANCIAL INCENTIVES TO ENCOURAGE URBAN AGRICULTURE ON VACANT LOTS

We recommend that cities provide a tax credit to property owners who farm vacant or under-utilized lots, as such activities create food sources, economic opportunity, and civic engagement in otherwise blighted areas.⁵¹

A recent study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine showed that community gardens contribute to an increased sense of safety in neighborhoods, and are associated with a decrease in crime in surrounding areas.⁵² Tax credits create an attractive incentive for property owners to open their land to community gardening or urban farming uses, with desirable public health and safety outcomes for cities.

Examples:

Maryland – Maryland passed a bill allowing municipalities to provide a tax credit for real properties used for urban agriculture.⁵³ To be eligible for the tax credit, urban real property in a “Priority Funding Area,”⁵⁴ between one-eighth of an acre and two acres in size, must be used exclusively for agriculture.⁵⁵

Philadelphia, PA – Philadelphia utilizes a carrot and stick approach for owners of vacant and abandoned lots – assessing a yearly vacant lot registry fee, which is reduced if the land is cultivated and which may be eliminated altogether if the garden is registered under the new zoning code.⁵⁶ Philadelphia also charges higher fees on properties if they have a greater area of impervious surface, recognizing that all impervious surfaces generate runoff that overtaxes the storm water drainage system.⁵⁷ This incentivizes all property owners in the city to decrease pavement where possible, and indirectly incentivizes creation of gardens.

3. CONDUCT LAND INVENTORIES

We recommend that cities conduct or support land inventories that explore the potential for food cultivation on unused land.

Beginning in World War I, land surveys have been used in the United States to identify optimal urban and suburban farming land. The National War Commission used the slogan “put the slacker lands to work,” implying that any tillable lands not being used for food production were slacking off. During World War II, individuals and families produced up to 44 percent of the country’s vegetables in “victory gardens.”⁵⁸

Examples:

San Francisco, CA – In 2009, former Mayor Gavin Newsom issued a directive asking the city “to conduct an audit of unused land—including empty lots, rooftops, windowsills, and median strips— that could be turned into community gardens or farms.”⁵⁹

Portland, OR – In 2004, the city council unanimously passed Resolution 36272 calling for an inventory of city-owned lands suitable for agricultural uses.⁶⁰ The end result was a publication entitled “The Diggable city: Making Urban Agriculture a Planning Priority.”⁶¹

4. UPDATE THE ZONING CODE TO MAKE “FOOD MEMBERSHIP DISTRIBUTION POINTS” A PERMITTED ACTIVITY THROUGHOUT THE CITY

We recommend cities allow food distribution points in order to increase access to local food while protecting zoning interests.

Community Supported Agriculture programs (CSAs) are an essential component of a robust food economy and an effective way for small, sustainable farmers to get their products to consumers. During regular delivery of fresh produce to distribution points within cities, a CSA farmer may leave 30 boxes of produce at one CSA member’s home, and allow the remaining 29 members to get their box at their convenience. Such distribution points are vital for the localization of food systems, but many city zoning laws prohibit this out of concern for neighborhood traffic and in order to preserve the character of residential areas. However, by adopting guidelines for food distribution points, cities can address these concerns and simultaneously support food distribution points.

Example:

Portland, OR – In 2012, Portland updated its zoning code to make food distribution an accessory use in all zones. CSA supporters, food buying clubs, and market gardens lobbied for the code change to ensure diverse methods of food access. In order to preserve the character of neighborhoods, the ordinance delineates the types of food distribution activities that are allowed, and includes regulations addressing the size and frequency of distribution, hours for pick-up, and locations for outdoor activities.⁶²

5. ALLOW PARKS AND OTHER PUBLIC SPACES TO BE USED FOR FOOD SHARING

We recommend that cities remove restrictions on food sharing in public places because these rules only criminalize the poor, burden our public institutions, and reduce a community’s capacity to respond to local hunger.

One in six Americans experiences hunger and food insecurity. The problem is not one of insufficient supply, but of insufficient access. Many city ordinances restrict food sharing in public places even when so many go hungry. Allowing people to share food publicly is an opportunity to build community and ensure that fewer people are struggling to find their next meal.

Example:

Ft. Myers, FL – In 2007, Ft. Myers attempted to implement an ordinance that would limit food sharing in public parks. The city abandoned the ordinance after receiving a negative public response, and instead turned to food advocates to collaborate on a new approach to food sharing. Out of this collaboration came a Hunger Task Force which coordinates public food sharing efforts.⁶³

Photo credit: ** RCB ** / Foter.com / CC BY.

6. CREATE FOOD-GLEANING CENTERS AND PROGRAMS

We recommend that cities support the establishment of food gleaning and redistribution centers to reroute some of the 40 percent of food Americans throw away each year.

Food producers and distributors are responsible for a large portion of food waste. Gleaning centers consolidate and distribute nutritionally sound but non-commercially viable food to people in need.⁶⁴

Example:

Iowa City, IA – The public school district in Iowa City received funding from the USDA to test a food gleaning initiative. In order to allow safe and easy transportation of recovered food, they used the money to purchase trans- port pans and carriers, a freezer to store their frozen food, and training materials on safe handling procedures for the staff and students.⁶⁵

7. MOBILE FOOD VENDING

We recommend that cities recognize mobile markets and food trucks as a low cost way for food entrepreneurs to enter the market, reach consumers, and create a diverse and resilient food economy.

New food businesses have high barriers to entry, including high rent, and build-out and permitting costs that often run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.⁶⁶ Allowing mobile vendors to sell fresh produce, value-added products, and meals not only reduces barriers to launching new food businesses, it also provides diverse food options to consumers who might otherwise have limited choices.

Chicago, IL – An ordinance passed on June 6, 2012 allows licensed produce vendors to sell "whole and uncooked agricultural, plant-based items, including, but not limited to, fruits, vegetables, legumes, edible grains, nuts, spices, herbs and cut flowers" on moveable stands.⁶⁷ The city-funded Neighbor Carts program grew out of this decision: It helps get food into food deserts and creates new food vending jobs. Licenses cost $75, and the Neighbor Cart program provides carts for lease, training support, and a product-sourcing channel.⁶⁸

Austin, TX – Austin has developed a reputation for its vibrant food truck (or food cart) scene. Low barriers to entry and the city’s clear forms and instructions enables entrepreneurs with limited startup capital to try out food business ideas.⁶⁹

8. ALLOW CERTAIN FOOD PRODUCTION ACTIVITIES AS A HOME OCCUPATION

Cottage food industries (value added food products made in home kitchens) increase the viability of local produce and enable food producers to benefit from profit margins higher than those earned through sale of raw agricultural products.

Cottage food laws allow home-based food production of non-potentially hazardous foods like jams, baked goods, cereals, spices, and dried fruits. Cottage food operations are currently allowed in more than 30 states,⁷⁰ and can create an important source of income to help offset increasing costs of living, and the debilitating effects of growing underemployment.

Example:

California Homemade Food Act – The state recently adopted a law that places a mandate on cities and counties to issue home business permits to individuals engaged in cottage food production.⁷¹

9. CREATE OR SUBSIDIZE SHARED COMMERCIAL KITCHENS

We recommend that cities create or subsidize local commercial kitchens that can be economic incubators for budding food enterprise.

Helping small businesses access commercial kitchens removes a major startup barrier.

Example:

New York, NY – Entrepreneur Space is a city-sponsored business incubator in Queens that helps food-related and general business start-ups across New York City.⁷² It is open 24 hours a day, and serves more than 100 entrepreneurs working to establish their businesses in New York. In its first two years, the incubator contributed an estimated $5 million to the local economy.⁷³

44 Calfee, Corinne, Weissman, Eve, “Permission to Transition: Zoning and the Transition Movement,” Planning & Environmental Law: Issues and decisions that impact the built and natural environments 64:5 at 4 (2012).

45 Id.

46 San Francisco Planning Code § 102.35 (2011).

47 Oakland Planning Code § 17.112

48 Goldstein, Mindy et al., Turner Environmental Law Clinic at Emory Law, Urban Agriculture: A Six- teen City Survey of Urban Agriculture Practices Across the Country, 20 (2011). Available at: https://www. georgiaorganics.org/Advocacy/urbanagreport.pdf.

49 Id.

50 See: Philadelphia Code Title 14 Zoning and Planning at § 601-602.

51 Garvin, Eugenia C. et al., “Greening vacant lots to reduce violent crime: a randomised controlled trial,” Journal of Injury Prevention University of Pennsylvania (2012), https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/ content/early/2012/08/06/injuryprev-2012-040439.abstract.

52 Id.

53 Calfee, Corinne, Weissman, Eve, “Permission to Transition: Zoning and the Transition Movement,” Planning & Environmental Law: Issues and decisions that impact the built and natural environments 64:5 (2012), citing H.B. 1062, 427th Leg. (Md. 2010), https://mlis.state.md.us/2010rs/billfile/hb1062.htm. 54 Priority Funding Areas are those areas that Maryland state and local governments have desig- nated for encouragement and support of economic development and new growth, including the entire area inside the Washington and Baltimore Beltways and urban and dense suburban locations. Pearce, Will, “Maryland General Assembly 2010 Session: A Summary of Green Building-Related Legislation,” Green Building Law Brief. Available at: https://greenbuildinglawbrief.blogspot.com/2010/04/maryland- general-assembly-2010-session.html.

55 Id.

56 See generally: Philadelphia Code, Title 14 Zoning and Planning.

57 Gardens and other open spaces can get a credit for up to 80% pervious surface, but are still currently charged a minimum stormwater fee, even if they are 100% pervious. “Stormwater Billing,” Philadelphia Water Department (2012), https://www.phila.gov/water/Stormwater_how.html.

58 Orsi, Janelle, “Policies for a Shareable City #11: Urban Agriculture,” Shareable.net, https://www. shareable.net/blog/policies-for-a-shareable-city-11-urban-agriculture.

59 Calfee, Corinne, Weissman, Eve, “Permission to Transition: Zoning and the Transition Movement,” Planning & Environmental Law: Issues and decisions that impact the built and natural environments 64:5 (2012); citing Josh Harkinson, “San Francisco’s Latest Eco-Innovation: Growing Product Almost Everywhere,” Mother Jones (9 July 2009), https://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2009/07/san- franciscos-latest-eco-innovation-city-effort-grow-produce-almost-everywhere.

60 Id.

61 Available at: https://www.community-wealth.org/content/diggable-city-making-urban-agricul- ture-planning-priority.

62 Portland, Oregon Urban Food Zoning Code Update, Adopted and Effective June 13, 2012. Available at: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/402598.

63 “A Place at the Table: Prohibitions on Sharing Food with People Experiencing Homelessness,” Na- tional Coalition for the Homeless & The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (July 2010), https://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/foodsharing/Food_Sharing_2010.pdf; Donlan, Franc- esca, “Hunger numbers in Lee County are Staggering,” News-press.com (8 May 2009), https://www. news-press.com/article/20090509/HUNGER/90508061/Hunger-numbers-Lee-County-staggering.

64 “Let’s Glean! United We Serve Toolkit,” USDA (2009), https://www.usda.gov/documents/usda_ gleaning_toolkit.pdf; “Food Waste: Americans Throw Nearly Half Their Food, $165 Billion Annually, Study Says,” Reuters (21 Aug. 2012). Available at: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/21/food- waste-americans-throw-away-food-study_n_1819340.html.

65 “Best Practices for Food Recovery and Gleaning in the National School Lunch Program,” USDA Food and Nutrition Service (1999), https://www.fns.usda.gov/fdd/gleaning/gleanman.PDF.

66 “Tips for Opening a Food Truck,” Zumwalt Law Group, https://www.zumwaltlawgroup.com/for- wardthinking/tips-opening-food-truck-texas.

67 Coorens, Elaine, “New Chicago mobile food street vendor ordinance impacts employment and community,” Our Urban Times (7 June 2012), https://oururbantimes.com/business-news/new-chicago- mobile-food-street-vendor-ordinance-impacts-employment-and-community.

68 See: https://streetwise.org/neighborcarts.

69 “Business Applications and Guides.” City of Austin, Texas Health and Human Services, https:// www.austintexas.gov/department/business-applications-and-guides.

70 See a list of states: https://www.theselc.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Summary-of-Cottage- Food-Laws-in-the-US-31.pdf.

71 Details of the legislation are available on the Sustainable Economies Law Center’s website at https://www.homegrownfoodlaw.org.

72 See: https://www.nycedc.com/program/entrepreneur-space.

73 Trapasso, Clare, “Entrepreneur Space celebrates 2nd Anniversary,” New York Daily News (8 Mar. 2013), https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/queens/entrepreneur-space-celebrates-anniversary- article-1.1282537.

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Environmentalism has been hijacked by people and institutions who are not nature lovers — but nature dies in the service of “sustainability.”

By Charles Eisenstein

A central theme of my book on climate is that if we are to focus our attention on a single substance, it should be not carbon dioxide but water. Beyond greenhouse effects, water is crucial in the ways the world maintains conditions for life to thrive.

One function of water is as a vehicle of heat transport, part of the physiology of this living planet. Please watch this brand-new animated video about how plants influence local and global temperatures through the movement of water.

This video, along with companion pieces on the biotic pump and hydrology, comes from an emerging understanding among many environmentalists that we have made a scientific, strategic, rhetorical and political error by reducing the ecological crisis to climate, and the climate crisis to carbon.

Earth is best understood as a living being with a complex physiology, whose health depends on the health of her constituent organs. Her organs are the forests, the wetlands, the grasslands, the estuaries, the reefs, the apex predators, the keystone species, the soil, the insects and indeed every intact ecosystem and every species on Earth.

If we continue to degrade them, drain them, cut them, poison them, pave them and kill them, Earth will die a death of a million cuts. She will die of organ failure — regardless of the levels of greenhouse gases.

That is why, if I may be so bold as to make a prediction, we will see increasingly dramatic derangement of weather patterns over the next few years. Indeed it has already begun.

Floods, droughts, fires, anomalous heat, cold, wet and dry at the wrong time of year will intensify — even in the absence of significant global warming.

Such is already the case. I’m sure you’ve noticed.

The weather has been weird the last few years; in some places, devastatingly so. Yet, global temperatures (according to the most reliable measure, satellite measurements of the lower troposphere) are about what they were in 2016.

The overall trend since measurements began is definitely a warming trend (about 0.13 degrees per decade), but it has not been accelerating.

Herein lies the strategic error. Having hitched the environmental wagon to the global warming horse, what happens if the horse stops running? It won’t mean that our environmental problems will have been solved. It won’t mean the crisis has been averted if temperatures stop rising.

That is because the core of the crisis is not warming, it is ecocide — the killing of ecosystems, the killing of life.

The video and its companion videos illustrate clearly some of the ways this happens.

Destroying soil and plant life, and all the other ecological actors they nourish and depend on leads directly to flood-drought cycles that then get blamed on global warming.

The complex, homeostatic feedback loops that maintain stability unravel. The loss of the Amazon can bring drought to Colorado. The loss of rainforests in Borneo and Sumatra might cause drought in China. The loss of the Congo causes floods in Nigeria.

Everything is connected to everything else.

Calculating our way to love?

I was hiking yesterday near my home in the Carter Preserve. Dead trees are everywhere. Almost all the oaks are dead. Elsewhere in the state, tracts of old-growth oak have been clearcut to make way for utility-scale solar farms. Let’s put that in quotes — “farms.”

Conservationist and entomology professor Douglas Tallamy has this to say, in response to industry advocates who claim that the ecological benefits of solar “farms” outweigh the benefits of a forest.

“Cutting down an existing solar plant, which is a tree, in order to build an artificial one is just ridiculous,” he said. “It’s more than energy. Solar doesn’t feed a single bird, it doesn’t manage the watershed. The only ecological value is capturing energy from the sun, which is what plants do, but it’s not passing it on to rest of the food web.”

Tallamy continued:

“It’s the plants and animals around us that run the ecosystems that we all depend on. I know we want renewable energy, but we’ve got enough land that has already been leveled. Put the solar arrays on rooftops. Put them on all the destroyed properties we already have. Don’t cut down existing forests. It’s totally antithetical to the goals of conservation.”

What is the basis of the industry’s argument that a solar “farm” is better than a forest?

Carbon math, that’s what. They add up the sequestration numbers of a mature forest and compare it to the fossil fuel equivalent of the photovoltaic output. This is an extreme yet all-too-common example of what happens when we define “green” in terms of carbon dioxide.

Further extremes are on the horizon. What happens if, as some think likely, carbon capture technologies reach economical feasibility? Already, carbon math sometimes brings perverse results, as with nearly useless carbon offsets.

Carbon math vastly underestimates the ecological utility of forests, given the role they play in the water cycle and Earth’s physiology. Inevitably, then, when carbon math defines “green,” the forests will suffer.

None of this is to say that greenhouse gas emissions are benign. The degradation of Earth’s ecosystemic organs renders her less able to cope with changes in atmospheric gas composition. The additional thermodynamic flux through an already unstable system exacerbates existing instabilities.

Moreover, from the living earth view, there are plenty of reasons to curtail fossil fuel development that have nothing to do with CO2 or methane.

Strip mining, drilling, fracking, burning, offshore oil development and so forth devastate ecosystems, poison whole landscapes, destroy habitat, acidify rain, contaminate water and risk catastrophic spills.

The solution is not to shift industrial civilization to another, equally- or more-damaging, energy technology.

We have instead to consider matters of scale and purpose. Scale: rooftop solar is different from utility-scale PV fields. Farm-based biogas reactors are different from industrial-scale mono-crop biofuel plantations. Micro-hydro is different from mega-dams.

In each case, the former fits into an ecological relationship to the specific beings, human and otherwise, of a place. As for purpose, do we really need to produce more and more energy forever?

Does it really contribute to human well-being? Bigger houses, more weapons, more stuff, the whole developmentalist technological program that separates us ever further from life and matter … what does it serve?

Ultimately, the “solution” to the ecological crisis is not technical. It comes from reclaiming basic values and changing our relationship to nature.

Commenting on the clearing of forests to build solar arrays, Tellamy wrote, “It’s totally antithetical to the goals of conservation.” Yes. The environmental movement needs to return to its roots.

Conservation does not mean to “use more slowly” or to “save for later.” What the word really means is to serve with. To serve together. To serve what? To serve life. It is a rhetorical error to frame environmentalism in any other way than to make it about love of nature, love of life.

No one becomes an environmentalist because of all the money they will save. No one calculates their way into love. And the changes that we will need to make to restore Earth’s aliveness from its current depletion will require a degree of courage and sacrifice that comes only from love. We will not be coerced or bribed into them.

A veteran activist once told me of a meeting he attended in the 1980s in which a group of leading environmentalists decided to adopt the term “sustainability” into their core lexicon. “We wanted to sound scientific,” he said.

“We didn’t want to use words like ‘love’ or ‘precious’ and be dismissed as tree-huggers. We wanted to give people a rational, hard-headed reason why we should protect nature. We thought that appealing to the beauty and sacredness of nature wouldn’t reach the people who were destroying it, so we tried to make it about their self-interest instead.”

Around the same time, global warming entered the awareness of the environmental movement, growing over the years to become its defining issue. At first, global warming (now called climate change) seemed a boon to the movement.

Now we would be able to force corporations and governments to do the things we’d always wanted, appealing not just to sentiments about nature’s magnificence, and not just to concerns over the health of some subset of people downwind, but to the survival of civilization itself.

One no longer need be a nature lover to support the aims of environmentalism.

Let that last statement sink in. One no longer need be a nature lover to support the aims of environmentalism.

The result is that environmentalism has been hijacked by people and institutions who are not nature lovers.

We see where it leads: Nature dies in the service of “sustainability.” Forests are cut for solar farms. Landscapes are sacrificed to pit mines to extract lithium, cobalt, silver, rare Earths, etc. for decarbonization.

There is an awful lot of money in the sustainability industry. It is the same story as before. Meanwhile, we neglect the priorities that are highest from the living earth perspective. The energy and funding and attention goes toward “saving the world” by reducing CO2.

Neglected in comparison are the seagrass meadows. The peat bogs. The mangrove swamps. The beavers. The elephants. The whales. The sharks. Yet all of these are vital to planetary physiology.

Three priorities for environmental healing

All is not lost. There is in fact a way to “save the world.” I put it in quotes because ultimately the choice we face is not about our survival, it is about what kind of world we choose to live in. One vibrant with life?

Or a gigantic strip mine/waste dump/parking lot? So let us say instead, there is a way to regenerate a world vibrant with life. The way is to enact a reverence for life in all its forms. This translates to three priorities for environmentalist attention and funding.

The first recalls traditional conservationism. We must absolutely protect any remaining intact ecosystems from development, whether it is for oil & gas, minerals, lumber, ranching, suburbs, dam reservoirs, industrial-scale fishing, or biofuels.

The few remaining intact organs of Gaia are its reservoirs of biodiversity and its memory of health. Note well that to “protect” does not usually mean to fence off and keep humans away.

In fact, right human participation can enhance the health of ecosystems when those humans have an intimate understanding and reverence for the places where they live.

The second priority is regeneration: the restoring of life to places where it has been depleted.

Regenerative farming and ranching, agroforestry, marine preserves, beaver reintroduction, salmon reintroduction, dam removal and water retention landscapes are just some of the ways to revitalize the organs of the Earth and bring them back online to stabilize the climate.

The third priority is detoxification. I suspect a lot of forest death (it isn’t just oaks) and insect collapse (in most places, at least 80% of insects have disappeared) is due to the ubiquity of herbicides, pesticides, toxic waste and other pollution in the environment.

It shocked me when I learned that vast areas of forest in the eastern U.S. are routinely sprayed to “control” pest insects. Dioxins, PFAS, antibiotics, pharmaceutical residues and agriculture chemicals contaminate every ecosystem on Earth, every animal, every cell. They are detectable even in Antarctica.

Add to these the aerial spraying of aluminum and other particles in geoengineering experiments, causing elevated levels of aluminum in place remote from any industrial source.

And let’s not forget the little-recognized impact of electromagnetic pollution, light pollution and noise pollution on ecosystems. All of the above harm Earth on the tissue level, further weakening her already compromised organs.

I do not worry that our system is not sustainable. I worry that it is. I am afraid that we can continue to lay waste to the living earth, indefinitely, ending up on a concrete world, so chronically ill physically and mentally that we must incorporate technological assistance into our very brains and bodies.

I am afraid we will compensate for the lost connection to a living world with a burgeoning array of virtual substitutes, digital realities and online adventures, tragically seeking something that we come to forget we ever had.

Do you remember how loud the frogs were? Do you remember flocks of birds extending from horizon to horizon? Do you remember the clouds of fireflies that lit up the nights of my father’s youth? I am afraid we will forget we ever lived in such wealth and make do instead with Mario Cart.

We are already far down this path to a concrete world, and far down the path of learning to cope with it. American doctors write every year around 120 million prescriptions for SSRIs, 118 million prescriptions for Adderall, Ritalin and other ADHD medications and 120 million for benzodiazepines. (I got those numbers by consulting the oracle. I mean, from ChatGPT.)

That’s more than one psychiatric drug prescription per capita! No wonder people have never been happier.

The inner desolation mirrors the outer. The ecological crisis and the spiritual crisis that we call “mental health” share a common source: denial of Earth as a living being, worthy of love, worthy of service.

The conservationist draws from a well of truth: that the purpose of a human being is to participate in the flourishing of life. To serve with.

Sundered from that purpose, we inevitably become sick. That inner sickness, that soul sickness, reflects the outer sickness of ecosystems. Could there ultimately be any doubt that the global climate reflects the social climate, the political climate, the economic climate and the psychic climate?

The three priorities I listed above are no mere technical tweaks to the project of engineering Earth. They occur naturally to anyone who beholds Earth as a living being with a complex physiology.

Beholding Earth as a being, a magnificent being, a gorgeous being, a sacred being, we fall ever deeper in love. Here is where to find again the soul of the environmental movement and fulfill its destiny to transform civilization.

Originally published on Charles Eisenstein’s Substack page.

The post How the Environmental Movement Can Find Its Soul Again — and Transform Civilization appeared first on Rights Matter.

By Tom Parker

As digital payments have become increasingly popular, many of the largest companies in this sector have used their dominant position to censor users, harvest their private financial data, and threaten them with huge fines if they violate vague and subjective rules.

Here are some alternative payment services that promote freedom, reject censorship, and/or have privacy-preserving features:

GabPay

A person-to-person payments network from the free speech software company Gab.

Gab uses the First Amendment of the United States (US) Constitution to guide its content moderation and describes GabPay as a solution that “allows you to spend your processing dollars with companies who share your values rather than major monopolies who’ve hijacked our payment processing sectors.”

With GabPay, users can instantly transfer money from supported bank accounts to anyone with a cell phone or email address. Funds can be quickly transferred from a bank into a GabPay account and this GabPay balance can be used to make payments. Users can also withdraw their GabPay balance to supported bank accounts.

GabPay supports both consumer and merchant accounts. GabPay says its merchant accounts allow businesses to “accept payments without the fear of charge backs, indefinite holds, or reprisals for political beliefs.” Merchant accounts can also integrate with many e-commerce, membership, and website-building platforms.

GabPay also offers vanity addresses which let users create an easy-to-remember link to their GabPay account.

GabPay’s fees are competitive and flexible. The service charges 1.9% + $0.15 per transaction which is lower than both Stripe (which charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction) and PayPal (which charges between 1.9% and 3.49% + $0.49 for most transaction). When making a payment, users can choose whether they pay the fee, the other party pays the fee, or the fee is split equally between both parties.

You can sign up for Gab Pay here.

GloriFi

An “unapologetically pro-America, pro-freedom, pro-capitalism” financial lifestyle app that offers credit cards, banking, and loyalty rewards.

GloriFi supports the US Bill of Rights and says it’s “non-negotiable.” GloriFi opposes “the corporate elite telling you how to think,” “woke companies,” and “big government” and describes its app as “a financial lifestyle app designed for We the People.”

Users can access GloriFi’s services via its mobile app which can be used to open accounts, apply for cards, monitor spending, and track loyalty rewards.

The company offers credit cards in several designs including a design that’s made from brass. These credit cards offer up to 2% in loyalty points with every purchase along with other merchant-specific rewards. Users can redeem loyalty points for cash and other rewards or award them to a law enforcement charity.

In the future, GloriFi plans to offer additional financial services including certificate of deposits (CDs), mortgages, and insurance.

GloriFi charges an annual fee on some of its credit cards. It also charges a balance transfer fee of the greater of either $5 or 3% per transaction and a cash advance fee of the greater of either $10 or 5% per transaction. Additionally, some of GloriFi’s cards charge a 3% fee on foreign transactions.

You can sign up for GloriFi here.

Second Amendment Processing

A veteran-owned and operated payment processing company that supports “American standards and values” and stands for “capitalism, free speech, and our children’s education.” It donates 20% of its fee profits to organizations that help protect Second Amendment rights.

Second Amendment Processing has vowed to fight for the rights of businesses that are blocked by other financial institutions and merchant processors for selling firearms legally or expressing opposing political ideologies. It believes that every American business owner has the right to run their business “how they see fit regardless of ideologies or agendas.”

Second Amendment Processing can process credit and debit card payments. It offers PayFac as a service, point of sale processing, mobile payment processing, online e-commerce processing, and desktop terminal processing. It also has partnerships with dozens of like-minded banks and financial institutions.

Its processing fees range from 1.5% to 2.9% for swiped cards and 3.5% for keyed-in transactions. The rate is influenced by the card network, card provider, processing volume, and type of business. However, Second Amendment Processing says it will guarantee users “the absolute best rates possible.”

You can sign up for Second Amendment Processing here.

Parallel Economy

A “censor resistant” payment processor that has received investment from the free speech video sharing platform Rumble and was co-founded by conservative commentator Dan Bongino.

Parallel Economy was founded in response to “tech tyrants [who] have hijacked our economy through the digitization of our world.” The company is “committed to fighting for a free, fair, and open internet.” It also vows to “respect your sovereignty” and never sell user data.

Parallel Economy has partnerships with major retail, hospitality, restaurant, sporting goods, and manufacturing point of sale companies. It also integrates with over 250 gateways and supports shopping carts such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Woocommerce, Authorize.net, Magento, 3D Cart, and Volusion.

Some of Parallel Economy’s other features include free next day funding, a free virtual terminal account, chargeback assistance, invoicing tools, expense tracking tools, and 24/7 merchant support. There are also no contracts and no surcharges.

Parallel Economy endeavors to “match or beat any competitor” on fees. Its advertised rates are 2.98% + $0.15 for card not present transactions and 1.49% + $0.15 transaction for card present transactions.

You can sign up for Parallel Economy here.

Revere Payments

A company that promises to process payments “without bias” and protect business owners’ “right to do business.”

The company’s founder, Wendy Yurgo-Kinnney, said she created Revere Payments in response to the growing number of US-based businesses that are losing payment processing services because of their conservative or religious beliefs.

Revere Payments provides an entire tech stack that’s customized to fit a wide range of businesses. This tech stack is compatible with many major payment solutions including Authorize.net, Shopify, and WooCommerce. It also supports multiple payment types including online payments, retail payments, point of sale payments, and donations.

In addition to the payment processing tech, Revere Payments’ virtual terminal can analyze data from sales channels, handles invoices, and more. The company also provides security tools that can detect and decline suspicious transactions, fight fraud, mitigate risk, and protect customers.

Revere Payments vows to “meet or beat anyone’s pricing.” It offers a competitive retail processing fee of 1.79% + $0.10 on qualified transactions and 2.79% + $0.10 on unqualified transactions. Its online transaction fees are comparable to Stripe at 2.9% + $0.30. It also offers special rates for non-profits and faith-based organizations.

You can sign up for Revere Payments here.

AlignPay

A freedom-focused payment processor that stands against cancel culture and vows to not sell users’ personally identifiable information.

AlignPay states that its free speech principles “preserve and strengthen the rights of all users to interact freely within the law.” It also vows that there is “no viewpoint censorship.”

AlignPay offers credit, debit, and Automated Clearing House (ACH) processing. It can support various types of payments including recurring donations and mobile payments. It also provides other technologies for improved functionality and integration such as application programming interfaces (APIs) and multi-layer encryption.

AlignPay is compatible with many existing payment processing systems and can be integrated with existing point of sale systems, donor management systems, and nearly 150 online shopping carts and ecommerce plugins.

On top of its payment processing features, AlignPay provides real-time transaction management, reporting tools, and invoicing tools which can integrate with business-to-business and business-to-government gateways.

AlignPay’s processing fees are comparable to Stripe’s at 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. However, there is a $25 minimum monthly fee that applies to users who don’t incur at least $25 in card fees during an applicable month.

You can sign up for AlignPay here.

Privacy.com

A privacy-focused card masking service with advanced features for protecting personal data and managing spending.

Privacy.com hides users’ real card details by letting them create virtual payment cards that have a unique card number. These cards work with pseudonyms and any billing address which means users can hide their real name, address, and card number when using virtual cards to buy digital products or services. Privacy.com also has a “Discreet Merchants” feature that lets users mask merchant information on their bank statements with a pre-determined name such as “Privacy.com” or “Privacy.com Smileys Corner Store.”

Users can create and manage virtual payment cards in Privacy.com’s web dashboard, via its browser extension, via its mobile apps, or via its integration with the password manager 1Password.

Privacy.com’s virtual payment cards automatically lock to the first merchant they’re used with to prevent them from being used elsewhere if the merchant is compromised. Users can also set spending limits, set expiry dates, organize their cards with tags, and pause, unpause, or close virtual cards.

Privacy.com’s free plan gives users access to most of its features and lets users create up to 12 virtual cards per month. Its paid plans give users more cards and all the features. The $10 per month Pro plan lets users create up to 36 cards per month and its $25 per month Teams plan lets users create up to 60 cards per month.

Privacy.com also has a card issuing service for businesses called Lithic which has flexible pricing.

You can sign up for Privacy.com here.

You can sign up for Lithic here.

BTCPay Server

An open-source, self-hosted cryptocurrency payment processor that supports 14 cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin and Monero. It also supports the Lightning Network, a second-layer payment network that’s built on top of the Bitcoin protocol.

BTCPay Server provides censorship resistance by allowing users to self-host the software and receive payments directly in wallets that they control. However, it can also be hosted on third-party servers.

Since cryptocurrency wallets are pseudonymous and BTCPay Server supports the private cryptocurrency Monero, the software can also boost user privacy when processing payments.

BTCPay Server integrates with several popular shopping carts including WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart, and Drupal. Alternatively, users can use BTCPay Server’s APIs for custom integration.

BTCPay Server also has custom apps including a point of sale app (which can be used to accept in-store payments), a crowdfunding app (which can create self-hosted crowdfunding campaigns), and a payment button app (which creates custom payment buttons).

Other BTCPay Server features include a dashboard (which displays recent transactions, wallet balances, apps, and more), hardware wallet integration, an invoicing tool, and several bookkeeping tools.

BTCPay Server is free to use and doesn’t charge any transaction fees. However, customers will pay a transaction fee to miners or node operators when sending cryptocurrency payments.

Exodus

A cryptocurrency wallet that supports over 245 cryptocurrencies and has a built-in exchange.

Exodus supports popular cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether USD Coin, and BNB) and privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies (such as Monero and Zcash).

Users can send cryptocurrency in Exodus with just a few clicks or taps. It also contains quick links for sharing wallet addresses and the associated quick response (QR) codes.

Since cryptocurrency payments are peer-to-peer and many cryptocurrencies are decentralized, cryptocurrency transactions are usually more censorship-resistant than traditional payment services.

Exodus also provides extra censorship resistance because it’s a non-custodial wallet. This means users have full control of the private keys that control their funds and Exodus can’t touch or move users’ cryptocurrencies.

In addition to this, cryptocurrency wallets are pseudonymous. This pseudonymity and the availability of privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies can boost user privacy when transacting.

Exodus has desktop and mobile apps and a browser extension. Its other features include wallet support for multiple portfolios (collections of wallets that are grouped together), wallet import, wallet export, wallet backup, integrations with several decentralized finance (DeFi) apps, and password protection.

Exodus doesn’t charge any fees for sending or receiving cryptocurrency but it does charge an exchange fee when swapping one cryptocurrency for another. Users also pay a transaction fee to miners or node operators when sending cryptocurrency.

You can download Exodus here.

Cake Pay

A service from the creators of the open-source cryptocurrency wallet Cake Wallet that lets users quickly buy digital gift cards with Bitcoin, Litecoin, or Monero.

Like Exodus, Cake Wallet is non-custodial and provides censorship resistance by letting users hold their private keys. The peer-to-peer and decentralized nature of the supported cryptocurrencies also provides extra protection against censorship.

Cake Pay lets users create pseudonymous cryptocurrency wallets and further boost their privacy by using Monero. The ability to purchase digital gift cards and use them for spending adds an extra layer of privacy because their gift card purchases are separated from their pseudonymous wallet address.

Not only does Cake Pay offer privacy-preserving features but it also makes it easy to buy products and services from merchants that don’t accept cryptocurrency. The gift cards can be used at 150,000 merchant locations in the US including adidas, AMC Theatres, Applebee’s, Banana Republic, Barnes & Noble, Domino’s Pizza, Hotels.com, Lowe’s, Sephora, and Subway. Many of the gift cards in Cake Pay are also discounted and Cake Pay says that users can save an average of 2% at most merchants.

Users can sign up for Cake Pay in the Cake Wallet mobile app which is available on the App Store, Google Play Store, or as an Android Application Package (APK). The only personal information that’s required to sign up is an email address.

After signing up, users just need to add some Bitcoin, Litecoin, or Monero to their Cake Pay wallet, search for the gift card they want to buy, and make the purchase. Cake Pay will store their digital gift card in the app and provide instructions on how to use it.

You can get Cake Wallet and sign up for Cake Pay here.

The post 10 PayPal Alternatives – For Privacy or Free Speech appeared first on Rights Matter.

Learn how to grow a regenerative organic vegetable garden the best and easiest way! Grow fruits and veggies with less labor, less watering, fewer weeds, and an extremely abundant harvest! Paul Gautschi, featured in the documentary Back to Eden, has popularized the use of free wood chip mulch from tree trimmings in vegetable gardens and orchards. Discover the regenerative organic gardening movement that has made millions of people worldwide love growing their own food by watching the film, streaming online for free!

OFFICIAL WEBSITE: https://www.backtoedenfilm.com
BACK TO EDEN DVD: http://www.backtoedenfilm.com/buyback...

FOLLOW ON YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/user/danasara...
FOLLOW ON INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/backtoedeng...
FOLLOW ON FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/BackToEdenGa...

Back to Eden shares the story of Paul Gautschi and his lifelong journey walking with God and learning how to get back to the simple, productive organic gardening methods of sustainable provision that were given to man in the garden of Eden. The food growing system that has resulted from Paul Gautschi’s incredible experiences has garnered the interest of visitors from around the world. Never, until now, have Paul’s organic gardening methods been documented and shared like this! You will walk away from Back to Eden Film with the knowledge of how to plant an organic garden and how to grow your own food. Back to Eden gardening is the best gardening technique!

RENT & BUY THE MOVIE Includes Bonus Features, Subtitles, and Closed Captions. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/backtoeden...

Produced by Dana & Sarah Films, LLC

TIMESTAMPS

00:00:00 PAUL GAUTSCHI INTRO
00:06:32 BACK TO EDEN
00:07:38 THE COVERING
00:19:40 SOIL PREPARATION
00:25:38 FERTILIZATION
00:38:36 IRRIGATION
00:47:21 WEEDS
00:50:47 PESTS
00:55:21 CROP ROTATION
00:57:06 PH ISSUES
00:58:08 CALIFORNIA DEMONSTRATION GARDEN
01:02:52 PENNSYLVANIA DEMONSTRATION GARDEN
01:11:25 HOW TO START A BACK TO EDEN GARDEN
01:12:35 HOW TO PLANT SEEDS
01:16:26 HOW TO MULCH AN ORCHARD
01:18:56 HARVEST
01:23:23 NUTRITION
01:30:32 TESTIMONIALS
01:35:00 CONCLUSION
01:39:11 END CREDITS

RELATED:
Global Safe Seed Supplier List

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Reposted from https://www.filmsforaction.org/
By Films For Action / filmsforaction.org / Oct 22, 2021

Our present moment is saturated in dystopian, apocalyptic fantasies of the future.

As the late Mark Fisher said, "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” We can envision a thousand ways that humanity might destroy itself and the rest of the world, but positive visions of the future remain severely lacking in comparison. Why is that?

The Dark Ages led to the Renaissance. Feudalism led to capitalism. No era remains stagnant forever. But there's an invisible meme in our culture today that says capitalism is the greatest economic idea humanity has ever invented and it will never be surpassed. That's why a thousand dystopian visions of the future all imagined that capitalism stayed the same, our economic paradigm never evolved... and then the world was eventually destroyed. Could the two be connected? Is our failure to imagine something better than capitalism going to be what actually leads to "the bad ending" for humanity? 

What this points to, in our view, is a crisis of imagination.

Humans at heart are storytellers, and we enact the stories we tell ourselves. As we've written before, our culture is enacting a story that's destroying the world. If humanity is going to unlock "the good ending," we've got to imagine it first. We've got to imagine ten thousand localized versions of it. That's how things change. 

Fortunately, visions of a more beautiful, compassionate, regenerative future already exist. But since they're not being broadcast daily on the evening news, we've got to dedicate a little more energy towards broadcasting them ourselves. This is what this list of films is for. These films decided that the apocalypse is canceled. Climate change is canceled. Biodiversity loss is canceled. A comeback of this scale has never been attempted before, but that's why it's going to work. Ya dig? The people in these films aren't listening to the folks that say it's too late. They're imagining the future they want, not the future they're afraid of, and they're bringing that future into being.

Whether we're ultimately successful is not the point, and beyond anyone's ability to truly know. The point is that our true nature calls us to choose determination over defeat, and resilience over despair. 

We hope these films inspire the former - that place in your heart that knows a better world *is* possible, and is ready to make it happen.

Bioregional Living: A Permaculture Guide to Food and Energy Independence | Andrew Faust (2020)

31 min · In this 30 minute video, Andrew Faust shares his inspiring vision for greater food and energy independence. It's a guide to feeding and providing power for our local communities in ways that are not just "sustainable" but truly…

The Evolution of Ecological Consciousness | Andrew Faust

The Evolution of Ecological Consciousness | Andrew Faust (2013)
109 min · Permaculture designer Andrew Faust gives us an inspiring and heady narrative about the evolution of all life and human consciousness on Mother Earth.

The Economics of Happiness

The Economics of Happiness (2011)
65 min · Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction…

Inhabit: A Permaculture Perspective (2015) ($5)

92 min · Humanity is more than ever threatened by its own actions; we hear a lot about the need to minimize footprints and to reduce our impact. But what if our footprints were beneficial? What if we could meet human needs while increasing the…

Renewables Can't Power Capitalism, But They Can Power Ecosocialism

24 min · This is a fantastic video essay. Sit back, relax, and enjoy it like a podcast for some serious knowledge gems.

The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation? (2020) ($5)

61 min · Opening with a powerful ‘deep time’ perspective, from the beginning of the Earth to our present moment, BAFTA-winning director Peter Armstrong's new film recognises the fundamental unsustainability of today’s society and dares to ask…

A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity (2016)

79 min · A Simpler Way follows a community in Australia who came together to explore and demonstrate a simpler way to live in response to global crises. Throughout the year the group built tiny houses, planted veggie gardens, practised simple…

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward (2011)

162 min · A feature length documentary by Peter Joseph that presents the case for a needed transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs the entire world society.

A New Story for Humanity (2016)

102 min · A New Story For Humanity presents a beautifully and sensitively woven tapestry of the rich diversity that is the human family. Featuring interviews on the essential topics of our time: from cosmology to ecology, from ancient wisdom to…

Money & Life (2013)

86 min · Money & Life is a passionate and inspirational essay-style documentary that asks a provocative question: can we see the economic crisis not as a disaster, but as a tremendous opportunity?

Feeding Ourselves (2017)

96 min · Feeding Ourselves weaves intimate stories from the hopes and convictions of rural BC farmers and producers as they navigate undercurrents of uncertainty with our food system. Their commitment to local food culture inspires us to…

Singapore: Biophilic City (2012)

44 min · A whirlwind week in Singapore exploring the amazing story of how Singapore came to be one of the most 'biophilic' cities of the world, on the cutting edge of ecocity design and innovation. Did you have any idea? There has been…

Tomorrow: Take Concrete Steps To A Sustainable Future ($5)

120 min · “Without question, this is absolutely the best and most creative film on the future of humanity and the environment”. — Paul Hawken

Within Reach: Journey to Find Sustainable Community (2013) ($5)

87 min · Within Reach explores one couple's pedal-powered search for a place to call home. Mandy and Ryan gave up their jobs, cars, and traditional houses to 'bike-pack' 6500 miles around the USA seeking sustainable community. Rather than…

The Nature of Cities (2010) ($5)

40 min · THE NATURE OF CITIES follows the journey of Professor Timothy Beatley as he explores urban projects around the world, representing the new green movement that hopes to move our urban environments beyond sustainability to a regenerative…

In Transition 2.0: A Story of Resilience & Hope in Extraordinary Times (2012)

66 min · This film is an inspirational immersion in the Transition movement, gathering stories from around the world of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. There are stories of communities printing their own money, growing food…

Communities Of Hope: Discovering the Ecovillages of Europe (2020)

29 min · COMMUNITIES OF HOPE is a film born from a quest to discover a regenerative culture.

Inner Climate Change: The Change Starts Within You (2020)

66 min · How do we navigate the intensity of emotions and reactions stirred up by climate change, or COVID-19 for that matter? How do we come to a place of peace, compassion, forgiveness and life-affirming action?

Rundown Apartments Reborn as Food-Forest Coliving Agritopia (2021)

55 min · In 2007, Ole and Maitri Ersson bought the rundown Cabana apartment complex in the city and immediately began to de-pave parking spaces to make space for what today is a huge permaculture coliving space and urban food forest. Today, the…

The Hardest Thing I've Ever Loved: Creating a Transformative Culture (2020)

36 min · This 36-minute documentary follows the lives of 5 young explorers on their journey through the 5-week Ecovillage Design Education program in Switzerland, which navigates today's challenges as opportunities to build a regenerative future…

Living the Change: Inspiring Stories for a Sustainable Future

85 min · Living the Change explores solutions to the global crises we face today – solutions any one of us can be part of – through the inspiring stories of people pioneering change in their own lives and in their communities in order to…

The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy (2018)

105 min · The global economy is in crisis. The exponential exhaustion of natural resources, declining productivity, slow growth, rising unemployment, and steep inequality, forces us to rethink our economic models. Where do we go from here? In…

Beyond Elections: Redefining Democracy in the Americas (2008)

95 min · From Venezuela's Communal Councils, to Brazil's Participatory Budgeting; from Constitutional Assemblies to grassroots movements, recuperated factories to cooperatives across the hemisphere -- this documentary is a journey, which takes…

What's a Colloquium? An Oral History of the Natural Building Movement (2020)

76 min · A small band of natural building enthusiasts and outlaws met in a field over 20 years ago at something they called a ‘colloquium’. The movement they created has grown uncontrollably ever since; reviving and innovating ancient building…

India's Healing Forests: Come Home, Be Healed (2019)

51 min · All our knowledge comes from nature and yet nature is a source of many mysteries.

A Convenient Truth: Urban Solutions from Curitiba, Brazil (2006) ($5)

51 min · Cities should be a solution not a problem for human beings. The city of Curitiba has demonstrated for the past 40 years how to transform problems into cost-effective solutions that can be applied in most cities around the world. A…

Prout: Economic Democracy in Practice (2004)

30 min · Economics of Prout covers the basic economic principles of Prout, which offers a viable alternative to the materialistic, anti human philosophies of Capitalism and Communism.

Fantastic Fungi (2019) ($5)

80 min · This is the film of the century! - Films For Action When so many are struggling for connection, inspiration and hope, Fantastic Fungi brings us together as interconnected creators of our world. Fantastic Fungi, directed by Louie…

A Bold Peace: Costa Rica's Path of Demilitarization (2016) ($5)

90 min · 70 years ago Costa Rica abolished its army and committed itself to fostering a peaceful society. It has been reaping the benefits ever since.

The Biggest Little Farm (2019) ($4)

92 min · The Biggest Little Farm chronicles the eight-year quest of John and Molly Chester as they trade city living for 200 acres of barren farmland and a dream to harvest in harmony with nature. Through dogged perseverance and embracing the…

Kiss the Ground (2020) (trailer)

3 min · Kiss the Ground reveals that, by regenerating the world’s soils, we can completely and rapidly stabilize Earth’s climate, restore lost ecosystems and create abundant food supplies. Using compelling graphics and visuals, along with…

Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh (1993) ($5)

59 min · Ladakh, or 'Little Tibet', is a wildly beautiful desert land high in the Western Himalayas. It is a place of few resources and an extreme climate. Yet for more than 1,000 years, it has been home to a thriving culture. Traditions of…

School Circles: Every Voice Matters (2018) ($5)

89 min · School Circles is an independent documentary that explores the practice of democratic schools in the Netherlands. The film shows students, teachers and staff members coming together to dialogue, discuss proposals, mediate conflicts and…

2040 (trailer)

3 min · Award-winning director Damon Gameau (That Sugar Film) embarks on a journey to explore what the future could look like by the year 2040 if we simply embraced the best solutions already available to us to improve our planet and shifted…

The Twelve: A Tale of Wisdom & Unity (2019)

75 min · “The Twelve” tells the story of twelve spiritual Elders from around the globe who gather at the United Nations in New York to create a unique ritual for Humankind and planet Earth. By interviewing each one of them in their home…

Regreening the Desert with John D. Liu (2012)

48 min · "It's possible to rehabilitate large-scale damaged ecosystems with the use of permaculture design principles and techniques."

PS. What are these bad and good endings we mentioned? Here's a snapshot:

The bad ending: globalized, unfettered capitalism powered by fossil fuels triggers a series of climate change feedback loops that destabilizes civilization and leads to 10,000 generations living in a permanently impoverished world, where most of the world's biodiversity went extinct, and humanity's worst impulses were magnified by scarcity, war, disease, and famine.

The good ending: humanity takes back control of their governments and enacts measures to prevent the corporate capture of "the people's house" forever, rapidly transitions to 100% renewable energy, stabilizes capitalism before it descends into totalitarian fascism by advancing a raft of democratic socialist programs, then transitions further towards an ecologically regenerative, cooperative degrowth economy, with thousands of localized variations supported by myriad experiments in liquid democracy and dynamic governance. The worst climate change tipping points are averted, and humanity becomes a regenerative, healing presence on the Earth. Measurements for freedom, happiness, health, equality and creativity are higher than ever thought possible during previous eras.

*Note: we could have written the "good ending" in 100 different ways because we don't think there's one good ending. The good endings are infinite. It's up to each of us to present our vision of what that looks like. Work it into being. Refine it. Synthesize it with other great endings. And then we'll see what happens! The future is unwritten, and we can all make a contribution, in collaboration with others.

The post Cancel the Apocalypse appeared first on Rights Matter.

It’s all falling apart right now as we face energy crises, banking crises, climate-change crises, energy crises, food crises, ecological crises and more, and we don’t have the slightest idea what to do about it.

But the crises we face on many fronts are symptomatic of a deeper problem, with more potential repercussions than those of any single cataclysmic event.

What’s ending is the story we’ve been told up until now about who we are and how we’re supposed to live — and in this ending lies the only path to a better future.

Our paradigm for living today has been built upon the premise that competition is the essential calling card of existence. Every modern recipe in our lives has been drawn from our interpretation of life as individual and solitary struggle, with every-man-for-himself competition an inherent part of the business of living.

Our entire Western economic model is built on the notion that competition in a free-market economy is essential to drive excellence and prosperity. The world, as Woody Allen once put it, “is one big cafeteria.”

The individualistic, winner-take-all zeitgeist of modern times is to blame for many of the crises we presently face in our society, particularly the excesses of the financial sector, with its insistence on a bigger and better profit every year, at any cost.

We urgently need a new story to live by, a new economic system – essentially a new capitalism. We need our work to be what psychologists call a superordinate goal – a goal only achieved by large cooperative teamwork of two or more people.

Engaging in sharing and teamwork tends to transcend differences, because it emphasizes the very heart of humanity — we are all in this together.  And if we are all in this together we are no longer competing for scarce resources.

Over the generations, certain far-sighted individualists have acted as change agents for a economic model using the idea of a superordinate goal.

During the midst of the Great Depression’s banking crisis in 1929, John Spedan Lewis, who became the head of the John Lewis department stores in Britain after the sudden death of his father, believed that the “present state of affairs” — by which he meant outside shareholders who separate the providing of capital and its use — was a “perversion of the proper working of capitalism.”

“Capitalism has done enormous good,” he wrote. “But the perversion has given us too unstable a society. It is all wrong to have millionaires before you have ceased to have slums.”

In this extraordinary statement for its time, he was saying that too many people owning stock in a company, but far removed from its operation, were freeloaders. He did not believe in socialism, but in a brand of capitalism where a person’s financial reward should be commensurate with his contribution.

He also understood that lack of fairness in a society was highly toxic to all, rich and poor. “Differences of reward must be large enough to induce people to do their best,” he wrote. “But the present differences are far too great.”

Lewis came upon the idea of creating a superordinate goal of his business – a goal that can only be achieved with the collective efforts of everyone involved. He turned his department store into a partnership, with each and every employee a part owner.

No matter how menial a person’s contribution, each employee would receive an array of perks, including excellent pension schemes and country-club membership for weekends away.

But the most radical idea of all was that profits would be split among all employees. Although the workers would receive differential salaries, according to their contribution, each employee, from the lowest shelf-stacker to the chairman, receives the same percentage payout of his own salary as a bonus.

During the 2009 financial crisis, John Lewis’s employees worked together to ensure that everyone survived. “It was tough,” said one employee about the 2009 recession, “but we all pulled together.”

The following year, when Marks and Spencers, Britain’s then No 1 retailer, made profits of just 5 per cent, John Lewis distributed £151 million in profits, with every one of the store chain’s 70,000 employees receiving 15 per cent of their basic salary — the equivalent of 10 weeks’ pay.

Lewis understood that he could create a resonance effect among all of his employees if they were all working for the good of the whole. The power of working together raises everybody’s game.

There are many other examples every day of the power of a superordinate goal.

Innovative organizations around America, for instance, have used the power of a superordinate goal to create collective ways of providing public services.

Southern Maryland Electric is a consumer-owned cooperative that provides power to a portion of the state, and Group Health Cooperative, based in Seattle, Washington, offers members the ability to govern their own nonprofit healthcare system.

Southern Maryland, one of 15 energy cooperatives in the US, are essentially owned by their customers. Any profits are first invested in new construction or improvements, but will refund any excess to the customer owners.

Since its inception, Southern Maryland has refunded $110 to its customers.

Although it still has to purchase energy from suppliers – and so prices will go up sharply this winter – unlike the energy companies, any profits will not into the pockets of faceless shareholders, as they are with the $11.5bn that Shell Oil is recording this year – a doubling over last year.

With any luck, Southern Maryland will be able to give some money back to its customers.

It’s time for all of us to figure out new models that reward working together for a common goal – so that we can all own both the problem and the solution.

Lynne McTaggart

http://www.lynnemctaggart.com

The post The Future of Capitalism appeared first on Rights Matter.