The Connection Between the Economy and the Environment

[@DrNancyLivingCoCreatively]

Lucid, sobering and hopeful. Thank you.

[@TheNaturalProgressive]

Love this talk.. Thank you.. So much common sense..

[@biljanao448]

Comprehensive and insightful. Thanks for the presentation, Charles!

[@cameronsmith1877]

So the only way to move foreword is to move backwards? Return to the source? Sounds like mysticism. I like it.

[@forfreedomssake4315]

Fascinating. Thank you thank you thank you

[@albaLu02]

Thank you, I appreciate you. 💪👁️👁️🌎❤️

[@lorebrown5307]

A couple of points. You can live collectively under capitalism i.e "the Farm Commune" in Tennessee. And other communes. Chrony captlsm. Is different than free markets. People are rising up out of dire poverty. Interest and dividends currently provide for retirement, would you change the whole structure of this? More humans, currently need more resources. I think people need to want to change how they live to a holistic way but so many are not inclined to value nature or are trapped in the consumerist status symbol land ratrace. It's like we are different species of humans. I just ordered my organic seeds and fruit/ berry trees/ bushes. I have family that live in Mc Mansionland whose feet never leave carpet. How is this going to play out?

[@emrakul1]

Those communes are exceptions. They will not survive long term unless they grow. They will grow either at the expense of the environment, the "commons" as Charles calls it in his book: converting more aspects of the world into monetized commodities such as child care, therapy, land, leisure time, or at the direct misfortunes and indebtedness of someone else. Or, they can live completely off the grid. This last option happens in rare cases and seems to me to be a rejection of something fundamental in humans, the desire to create and collaborate. Charles is offering a solution to economies of scale. Benefiting from technology, but having a sane, natural money system which encourages the kinds of tech we actually want, and not the kind which is created solely to make profit. I fell in love with his book. Highly recommended. He addresses all of your concerns through and through. I think your concerns are in the class of what he calls "trivial objections". Also, there is a kind of spiritual awareness underlying his thinking that can take some time to grok. It's that awareness that he's really promoting, and his economic ideas reflect that attitude, hence the name of his book, sacred economics.

[@lorebrown5307]

@@emrakul1 I finally bought his book, it's on my winter reading list. As for trivial objections, if it were so easy to shift the entire system,for the "good" perhaps it would already have happened successfully. There are a lot of Christians that have "awakened mind" to making the world a better place place and actually act on it . When current systems fail in terms of so many sick children now, perhaps main stream people will wake up. Start by being the change however small you have to start out, it puts things in perspective.The Farm commune has been around for approx. 50 years. I'm curious if you have such a track record living the change?

[@emrakul1]

@@lorebrown5307 so excited that you're going to read the book! I would say that the system as it stands now is a reflection of our inner attitudes towards ourselves, each other, and the planet: separate. The solutions Charles is suggesting go along with a shift in perception. The reason they haven't happened is because most people are still buying into an old story. Also, we believe that life is supposed to be difficult, that things are the way they are and it'll only be through really hard work that anything could get better. That's the same attitude every child learns about themselves in school, namely that to be worthy of love and attention, they must perform. It is not the case in reality. Being the change you want to see is critical, and at the same time it's critical to move to change the world as a reflection of that. Self and world are one entity, two parts of one whole. Just as we shape the institutions of the world with our beliefs about ourselves, those institutions reinforce beliefs in us based on their underlying stories about life. So really it's a both/and issue. I went through a fierce political phase in my 20s, then gave it up to pursue self realization and self healing. After reading Charles' book I have begun to feel that the two are part of the same process. Charles so clearly lays out the path forward economically, just as spiritual teachers lay out an inner path to liberation. Of course it's not quite that simple. And just to reinforce the point about why things haven't changed if they were so easily changed, it's the same reason why there is such trouble in letting go of ego. There are deep structures, both in mind and in society, in place which resist and fear letting go and seek to maximize control and maintain a status quo. There wouldn't be such exorbitant wealth inequality in a system which incorporates negative interest and UBI, and the owners of the country know that.

[@lorebrown5307]

@@emrakul1 I agree with a lot of what you've said. My journey to permaculture came from a place of chaos and dealing with human ugliness to a holistic healing / growing system that had cooperative values and order to it. Ubi was partially intended to replace govt. Jobs and their attending costs, with free money. I guess there are times of Transition, gain here, loss there. Change is happening with more people accessing info and chosing holistic health, homeschooling etc.., the dinosaur institutions may crumble by free consumer choice for their own best interest. Every year I try and financially contribute to people making a difference. I've read parts of Charles's books through the library but this year I bought 4 to contribute to his good work and so I can thoroughly enjoy them at my leisure. I like connecting with others who are on this path. Thanks for the dialogue

[@emrakul1]

@@lorebrown5307 I'm new to posting comments on the internet and I'm having a very positive experience with it so far. Thanks for talking with me.

[@Juliet04738]

Wow ❤

[@grb1969]

Yes, two regulatory reforms to the administration of money, as a social management tool, are “negative interest rates” and “Guaranteed Minimum Income”. Revolutionary changes in monetary systems would potentially include both variable interest rates and “variable fungibility” via direct-democratic subjective feedback as public control. Alternative value exchange metrics are needed to address existing problems of moral hazard and the inevitability of moral and ethical corruption, which has been enabled and empowered by monetary debasement in conjunction with the privatization of the global commons (good and wealth). Money, as a social institution, has been structured, not only as a mechanism of class oppression -where the rulers alter the terms of scarcity to enhance exploitation in productivity- but also, money is a methodology of self-suppression where we self-censor divergent cultural and economic expressions in the devaluation of ourselves as commodities or proxies of transactional exchange. Money is simply a mechanism for labor’s enslavement and the transfer of those rights of violence in civil governance to the private institutions of corporate governance and market monopolization. Capitalism is merely the preferred economic methodology of enhanced resource extraction and wealth acquisition. As a systemic equivalent of a confidence/Ponzi-scheme, Capitalism is predictable in its endgame where systemic failure occurs in an act of mutual denial, and the most corrupt of a psychopathological society rise to the level of global tyrants until mutual self-extinction is compulsory. Money will continue to be the unmentionable instrument of social distortion until the systemic design of money is changed to value the subjective goods of negative growth, equitable and ethical distribution of income, and preservation of social ecology. Fortunately, this is technically simple. Unfortunately, this is politically untenable and will likely only occur as institutionalized “Social Credit,” which is a fascist precursor to the global usurping of public representative governance and public controls. An alternative pro-social revolution and civil redemption is warranted to disintermediate moral corruption at the systemic and institutional levels.

[@derksenmartijn]

So far for the SDG’s? Unless we address the root cause, its hard to move into a regenerative world. Therefore without fundamental changes to the financial system we cannot really change.

[@forfreedomssake4315]

Love it :)

[@amyjones2490]

Capitalism has turned away from supply and demand to supply side economics. Capitalists have turned away from caring for a community to getting every thing on the cheap creating a nomadic society where workers must follow the job just like they used to follow their sheep.

[@leifcian4288]

True, It would be nice to have 'real' nomadic work on the landscape properly organised. Propagating perennial crops in intuitive layers and patterns to strengthen the watershed, moving livestock much further around in proper accordance with growth phases of different biomes, developing greenbelts around city's for leisure, developing a network of wildlife corridors between national parks and greenbelts through farms and city's ect... Could just be a huge variety of reasonably straightforward manual labouring tasks in a variety of areas, reliable staple work for as many people who need it. Could be a way to save up and get on the housing ladder after a few years living in a inclusive scheme where there are communal meals and little mobile pod things with a bed, desk and Internet for private space at the end of the day. Like little roaming modular villages. Never in the same place long enough to ruin it rather than improv and help alleviate overpopulation in city's so they too have room to be re developed more intuitively and sustainability. All makes sense in my imagination anyway.

[@leifcian4288]

There's plenty to develop, we're not however developing the things we need to in the way we should be, generally only things that are relatively simple and convenient to replicate/scale rather than developing robust and complex systems. Economic Growth should be in line with Ecological Succession.

[@leifcian4288]

Surly there's a difference between a free market society and capitalism. Capitalism seems more like an ideology that shoehorns a lot of belligerent acquisition of natural and industrial resources with the ''pretence'' of certain more justifiable aspects of market/economic theory. Capitalism and Communism are both ideology's that subvert or dominate markets, they both rampantly deploy and scale industrial practice at an unreasonable pace, creating a lot of pollution and wasted opportunity for things to be made the most of with some extra time. It's not even the engineers, technicians ect that call the biggest decisions at the end of the day, they might get paid quite a lot more than average wage, but still comparatively little to those who do call the shots in society.