Mila Phiore is involved with these projects: on climate justice https://framingclimatejustice.org/
The project’s top ten things to do https://framingclimatejustice.org/headlines/
And she is involved with this project, 13 indigenous elders’ message https://www.wisdomweavers.world/
And this about collaborative loosely interdependent networks https://www.guardianoflife.org/
And two events
https://www.theimpossiblesummit.com/
http://www.valleyofrelation.com/
Lifted from Cory Doctorow’s daily email. This is worth saving.
🧑🏿🚀 Crooked Timber’s Ministry for the Future Seminar
Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel “The Ministry for the Future,” is a
fierce imaginative work. Robinson doesn’t just depict a future beyond
the climate emergency and capitalism itself, he depicts the specific,
wrenching transition that takes us there.
THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE
As I wrote in my review, the (variously attributed) maxim “It is easier
to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” isn’t quite
right. Imagining postcapitalism is an easy lift, but imagining the path
to that world is *very* hard.
Pluralistic: 03 Dec 2020
Robinson didn’t leap into this project – he’s been working up to it for
literally decades, at least since the publication of the “Three
California” books, which include one of the most uplifting novels I’ve
ever read, PACIFIC EDGE:
Pacific Edge, the most uplifting novel in my library
Meanwhile, his 2312/Aurora/New York 2140/Red Moon novels constitute a
kind of rangefinding exercise, starting 300 years the future and then
walking his projection backwards to find a plausible route to get there.
New York 2140: Kim Stanley Robinson dreams vivid about weathering climate crisis
But all these brilliant novels really seem to be warmup exercises for
the main event, The Ministry for the Future, which depicts the
intermeshed systems of economics, politics, geoengineering,
streetfighting and tragedy that might rescue us from dying in our own
waste-gases.
It’s urgent, frightening and hopeful, raising as many questions as it
answers.
These questions are now taken up in one of Crooked Timber’s “seminars”:
a series of interdisciplinary essays about the book, culminating in the
author’s response.
The Ministry for the Future seminar
The first of these essays comes from Maria Farrell: “What is Ours is
Only Ours to Give,” about the digital technology at the core of TMFTF,
namely blockchain and independent social media. Farrell is
characteristically incisive on these elements.
What is Ours is Only Ours to Give
Her thoughts here tie back to her notion of the “prodigal tech bro,” and
how we should treat the tech industry’s claims of genius with skepticism
– even when those claims are cloaked in confessions of being an EVIL genius.
Story ate the world. I’m biting back.
The next essay is Oliver Morton’s, digging into the solar geoengineering
in TMFTF, and the “sustained contradiction” such an effort might produce
– relieving the urgency of addressing carbon production and accumulating
new policy debt in the process.
On Solar Geoengineering and Kim Stanley Robinson
Morton’s a very good choice for this role: his 2016 book on
geoengineering, “The Planet Remade,” remains one of the best
technological, economic and political overviews of the subject:
The Planet Remade: frank, clear-eyed book on geoengineering, climate disaster, & humanity’s future
Next is Jessica Green’s “Can the World’s Bankers Really Save the
Climate?” which drills into Robinson’s fictional carbon markets, where
central bankers are pressed into service to save the planet in an unjust
(but rapid and necessary) compromise.
Can the World’s Bankers Really Save the Climate?
Green’s an expert on climate and finance, so she’s as good at spotting
the cards that Robinson palms here as Farrell is with tech. Green
credits Robinson with identifying the “true sources” of climate
obstruction, but thinks he’s missed the mark on how to deal with them.
Next is the Roosevelt Institute’s Todd Tucker with “Ministry for Your
Future Soul”: praise for KSR’s depiction of the scientific process,
scientists, policy wonks, and the progress of policy. Tucker calls
Robinson a “Gramscian science fictionologist.”
Ministry for Your Future Soul
Robinson’s “dynamic imagination…makes the book valuable to policy
nerds” because “fiction can inform planning,” specifically through that
exercise of starting with the outcome we want and then working backwards
to imagine the steps we need to get there.
This “backcasting” method has many and varied adherents. It’s the method
that Anonymous used to create its notorious ops, as documented in Biella
Coleman’s 2014 book on the ensemble:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-anonymous-ghost-in-the-machine
But it’s also the method that Amazon uses for new product decisions:
starting by writing the press-release announcement and then working
backwards to sell the org on developing the product to go with the
press-release:
Next is Belle Waring’s “Sudden Tempest of Ultimate Summer,” which goes
straight for the political violence in TMFTF, and KSR’s seeming
discomfort with this violence, coupled with his evident belief in its
necessity.
The Sudden Tempest of Ultimate Summer
As Waring points out, alongside all the nonviolent tactics Robinson
depicts, there is a lot of (mostly offstage) violence – and when that
violence is onstage Robinson pivots away from it, subjecting the Davos
hostages to Powerpoint presentations instead of a firing squad.
Waring also grapples with the intimate, gendered role that violence
plays in the book – the relationship between heroine Mary Murphy and the
traumatized antihero Frank May, who holds her hostage, and whom Murphy
subsequently dedicates herself to.
The next installment – Half the Earth? – comes from John Quiggin, a
trained agricultural economist who delves into Robinson’s depiction of a
successful “Half Earth” transition in which humans surrender half our
planet to other animals.
Half the Earth ?
Quiggin is pretty bullish on the possibility of this happening, noting
that we have more than enough food as things stand and that human
fertility is already below the replacement level everywhere except
Africa, where it’s still trending down.
For Quiggin, vacating half the Earth is do-able: “We are, suddenly and
surprisingly, at a point in history when radical change seems not just
possible but likely.”
Next is Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, whose “What’s In Our Way?” – a frank look at how
KSR depicts north/south politics, and the realism behind a scenario in
which mass death in India leads to little change, while the erasure of
LA sets change in motion.
What’s In Our Way?
Táíwò calls this “equal parts fatalism, pragmatism, and optimism,” and
while he acknowledges its realpolitik, he also calls upon us to imagine
something better – led by the global south, rather than the “elite of
the elites.”
There are three more responses to come: from Henry Farrell, Suresh Naidu
and Robinson himself – a contribution I’m eagerly awaiting. Based on my
own experience with the CT seminar on my novel Walkaway, this will be an
intense project for him.
Cory Doctorow seminar
For all that the seminar raises serious questions about whether TMFTF
can be a roadmap (as opposed to an inspiration) for a transition to a
better, sustainable future, the book remains an awesome, towering
accomplishment, a beacon and a delight.
What’s more, Robinson has walked back his early 2020 idea that TMFTF
would be his last novel for an indefinite period while he worked on
nonfic (about the Sierras and conservation). He says he’s back to
writing novels, which is *outstanding* news.
I read TMFTF as I was writing THE LOST CAUSE, my post-GND climate novel
about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias and
plutocrat wreckers.
You can read the prologue here:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-decameron-36398964
That book is now done, and reading TMFTF and thinking about its
boldness, its brilliance and its flaws made me reconsider my own story.
Imagining the end of capitalism remains the hard problem of our future,
and Robinson has done sterling work on that problem.
🧑🏿🚀 Crooked Timber’s Ministry for the Future Seminar
Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel “The Ministry for the Future,” is a
fierce imaginative work. Robinson doesn’t just depict a future beyond
the climate emergency and capitalism itself, he depicts the specific,
wrenching transition that takes us there.
THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE
As I wrote in my review, the (variously attributed) maxim “It is easier
to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” isn’t quite
right. Imagining postcapitalism is an easy lift, but imagining the path
to that world is *very* hard.
Pluralistic: 03 Dec 2020
Robinson didn’t leap into this project – he’s been working up to it for
literally decades, at least since the publication of the “Three
California” books, which include one of the most uplifting novels I’ve
ever read, PACIFIC EDGE:
Pacific Edge, the most uplifting novel in my library
Meanwhile, his 2312/Aurora/New York 2140/Red Moon novels constitute a
kind of rangefinding exercise, starting 300 years the future and then
walking his projection backwards to find a plausible route to get there.
New York 2140: Kim Stanley Robinson dreams vivid about weathering climate crisis
But all these brilliant novels really seem to be warmup exercises for
the main event, The Ministry for the Future, which depicts the
intermeshed systems of economics, politics, geoengineering,
streetfighting and tragedy that might rescue us from dying in our own
waste-gases.
It’s urgent, frightening and hopeful, raising as many questions as it
answers.
These questions are now taken up in one of Crooked Timber’s “seminars”:
a series of interdisciplinary essays about the book, culminating in the
author’s response.
The Ministry for the Future seminar
The first of these essays comes from Maria Farrell: “What is Ours is
Only Ours to Give,” about the digital technology at the core of TMFTF,
namely blockchain and independent social media. Farrell is
characteristically incisive on these elements.
What is Ours is Only Ours to Give
Her thoughts here tie back to her notion of the “prodigal tech bro,” and
how we should treat the tech industry’s claims of genius with skepticism
– even when those claims are cloaked in confessions of being an EVIL genius.
Story ate the world. I’m biting back.
The next essay is Oliver Morton’s, digging into the solar geoengineering
in TMFTF, and the “sustained contradiction” such an effort might produce
– relieving the urgency of addressing carbon production and accumulating
new policy debt in the process.
On Solar Geoengineering and Kim Stanley Robinson
Morton’s a very good choice for this role: his 2016 book on
geoengineering, “The Planet Remade,” remains one of the best
technological, economic and political overviews of the subject:
The Planet Remade: frank, clear-eyed book on geoengineering, climate disaster, & humanity’s future
Next is Jessica Green’s “Can the World’s Bankers Really Save the
Climate?” which drills into Robinson’s fictional carbon markets, where
central bankers are pressed into service to save the planet in an unjust
(but rapid and necessary) compromise.
Can the World’s Bankers Really Save the Climate?
Green’s an expert on climate and finance, so she’s as good at spotting
the cards that Robinson palms here as Farrell is with tech. Green
credits Robinson with identifying the “true sources” of climate
obstruction, but thinks he’s missed the mark on how to deal with them.
Next is the Roosevelt Institute’s Todd Tucker with “Ministry for Your
Future Soul”: praise for KSR’s depiction of the scientific process,
scientists, policy wonks, and the progress of policy. Tucker calls
Robinson a “Gramscian science fictionologist.”
Ministry for Your Future Soul
Robinson’s “dynamic imagination…makes the book valuable to policy
nerds” because “fiction can inform planning,” specifically through that
exercise of starting with the outcome we want and then working backwards
to imagine the steps we need to get there.
This “backcasting” method has many and varied adherents. It’s the method
that Anonymous used to create its notorious ops, as documented in Biella
Coleman’s 2014 book on the ensemble:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-anonymous-ghost-in-the-machine
But it’s also the method that Amazon uses for new product decisions:
starting by writing the press-release announcement and then working
backwards to sell the org on developing the product to go with the
press-release:
Next is Belle Waring’s “Sudden Tempest of Ultimate Summer,” which goes
straight for the political violence in TMFTF, and KSR’s seeming
discomfort with this violence, coupled with his evident belief in its
necessity.
The Sudden Tempest of Ultimate Summer
As Waring points out, alongside all the nonviolent tactics Robinson
depicts, there is a lot of (mostly offstage) violence – and when that
violence is onstage Robinson pivots away from it, subjecting the Davos
hostages to Powerpoint presentations instead of a firing squad.
Waring also grapples with the intimate, gendered role that violence
plays in the book – the relationship between heroine Mary Murphy and the
traumatized antihero Frank May, who holds her hostage, and whom Murphy
subsequently dedicates herself to.
The next installment – Half the Earth? – comes from John Quiggin, a
trained agricultural economist who delves into Robinson’s depiction of a
successful “Half Earth” transition in which humans surrender half our
planet to other animals.
Half the Earth ?
Quiggin is pretty bullish on the possibility of this happening, noting
that we have more than enough food as things stand and that human
fertility is already below the replacement level everywhere except
Africa, where it’s still trending down.
For Quiggin, vacating half the Earth is do-able: “We are, suddenly and
surprisingly, at a point in history when radical change seems not just
possible but likely.”
Next is Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, whose “What’s In Our Way?” – a frank look at how
KSR depicts north/south politics, and the realism behind a scenario in
which mass death in India leads to little change, while the erasure of
LA sets change in motion.
What’s In Our Way?
Táíwò calls this “equal parts fatalism, pragmatism, and optimism,” and
while he acknowledges its realpolitik, he also calls upon us to imagine
something better – led by the global south, rather than the “elite of
the elites.”
There are three more responses to come: from Henry Farrell, Suresh Naidu
and Robinson himself – a contribution I’m eagerly awaiting. Based on my
own experience with the CT seminar on my novel Walkaway, this will be an
intense project for him.
Cory Doctorow seminar
For all that the seminar raises serious questions about whether TMFTF
can be a roadmap (as opposed to an inspiration) for a transition to a
better, sustainable future, the book remains an awesome, towering
accomplishment, a beacon and a delight.
What’s more, Robinson has walked back his early 2020 idea that TMFTF
would be his last novel for an indefinite period while he worked on
nonfic (about the Sierras and conservation). He says he’s back to
writing novels, which is *outstanding* news.
I read TMFTF as I was writing THE LOST CAUSE, my post-GND climate novel
about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias and
plutocrat wreckers.
You can read the prologue here:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-decameron-36398964
That book is now done, and reading TMFTF and thinking about its
boldness, its brilliance and its flaws made me reconsider my own story.
Imagining the end of capitalism remains the hard problem of our future,
and Robinson has done sterling work on that problem.
The Crooked Timber seminarians are carrying on the work Robinson started
in TMFTF, shoring up its weak spots and calling attention to its sturdy
frame. Taken together, the CT essays and Robinson’s novel are a heady
tonic for a world in transition.
Posted in Uncategorized
Because of Shaun Paul’s extraordinary success with Ejido Verde at deploying Kiva to unlock the most important capital for these projects; capital that can wait until harvest, we are launching what we hope will become a guild on a quest to create a lab.
The simple question: is what Shaun Paul did replicable by smaller biomedicinal projects that accomplish the same kind of deeply culturally connected impact that also in the aggregate could be a big climate change response? Or do you need the scale of a commodity like pine resin to have this success, resin that’s in everything from the ink in your ballpoint pen to the adhesive that keeps your leather uppers connected to your rubber souls? Does it work for another non timber forest products, like biomedicinals with a complicated, to say the least, supply chain?
The deeper question the lab would address is this, perhaps: Should people working on projects wait on impact investors, or should they pivot and go for crowdfunding for the essential missing capital they need; money that can wait till harvest to get paid?
We will be talking to and asking that question of projects that look to create indigenous community wealth; not just jobs but assets owned collectively, either pledges of future revenue from pine resin, eventual transfer of ownership assets, etc. Does what works for a mass production project like planting 15k hectares of pine resin work for these more boutique, small scale biomedicinals? What part of the Ejido Verde story that resonates so well, carries over to culturally rich but locally unique biomedicinal production? Could these smaller projects that are often hyperlocal collectively do through crowdfunding that Ejido Verde does as one project, going to scale? Coordination comes at a high cost when you are working across time strapped, often underfunded social enterprises with deep community engagement creating both high social and environmental value at the grassroots level with real community leadership.
To start the quest to get some of those questions answers, I used the Field Guide to Transformation we soft launched at Transform to interview Marc Thibault this week, who is working with the Kechua people in Ecuador biomedicine’s project called Nativien about both these questions and as a way to get to know his project, which is aimed at creating a local, resilient next economy to fend off encroachment by oil, mining and logging interests back by the government.
The bigger question Shaun Paul, at least, is beginning to ask is, and that Marc was willing to perhaps entertain is, should those people leading climate change mitigating projects that create assets owned by the indigenous community, rather than standard colonial/industrial extraction modes bother waiting on risk averse impact investors? It takes them often a nearly infinite time, it feels like, to agree the stars have aligned to let them put their money where they say its intended to go, to real change at the root of the economic system? The Kiva money bridges that valley of death, as it’s known.
Risk averse impact investors are so hard to get to get to move into the valley of death, beyond accelerators and before institutional funds. And Ejido Verde can bring in $10,000 per day on Kiva, which adds up to more than $3.6 million if it were an everyday thing. Shaun Paul has contracted with a Kiva veteran, who was his own representative at Kiva to explore just how scalable and replicable, in what sort of formats, this extraordinary crowdfunding success is. The only thing Shaun Paul would commit to is that Ejido Verde is going to be expanding its crowdfunding, because it is working so surprisingly well, and study where to take it. Do more on Kiva, or could a new platform, or new white label of an existing platform make sense?
That’s where the team that created SOCAP, a market we believed would be real that we helped catalyze with a convening that ended up making it possible to think like a philanthropist; with the goals to solve a problem you have in giving, with the actions of a investor, and sometimes getting more positive impact by helping build a business where the mission is economically viable and not dependent on donations and can pay an appropriate return to patient capital investors who want a new way, beyond merely philanthropy alone, to make a difference you can measure.
Rosa Lee Harden are good at creating businesses around the conversations that need to happen at new intersections where unlikely allies emerge to help create markets that enable you to act your way into a new way of thinking. That’s what we did with impact investing and SOCAP. So in this case we are asking the question, could crowdfunding, rather than impact investing from professional funds, be the key to unlocking the most important capital to make non timber forest product biomedicinals reach its potential?
The question can also be phrased as where does crowdfunding fit, and how does it mesh or not with impact investing for this niche category? I will be using the field guide to ask varieties of this line of questioning various projects with the hope that we figure out there is a way these projects can emulate Ejido Verde’s success with more unique, story-rich deeply local biomedicinals. Perhaps it will be linked to the diaspora of those communities in the United States. Of the 44,000 Ecuadoreans in Minneapolis, a majority only speak Kechua. Buying medicine from home that has memories and cultural value that also makes their homeland more resilient and independent and has a great impact on our collective response to climate change, seems like a promising way to go Nativien. I’m talking to Simon Turner, of Regeneration Capital, of Brisbane, Australia, a regenerative ag and forestry fund about his thoughts on that next week (site is log in only).
Should Shaun Paul, getting back to him, forget about persuading risk averse impact investors to deploy their money earlier and with an eye to build the field while making a return in an early space they want to build and just tell his story to the people? The problem he has is one that a lot of, if not most of these projects that could have a massively positive climate change impact face. Investors want a return before harvest; they have internal rate of return; how fast they get their money back, calculations going on; they are used to seven year returns or less. They are bound by their allegiance to their view of the time value of money so it is often hard for them to see that the best way to collectively respond to climate change is to invest in these non timber forest projects in a way that the indigenous people create wealth and assets. The assets are created by the way you invest in the resources their trees produce, from pine resin to biomedicinals in the understory that need the trees to enable the high margin medicine to grow until harvest.
And that same question again, is it better to make smart appeals to the people who put up $25 apiece, rather than focusing on the professional investors, to fund these projects? Almost all these biodiversity meets indigenous wealth creation projects share one systemic blockage, one place the economic and funding system is broken. They can find early, mostly philanthropic support, as Marc has done, for the Kechua anchor of Nativien. But funding for infrastructure is harder, like the manufacturing plant that Nativien needs to be in the U.S.
Should projects like Nativien also look for crowdfunding dollars too? And how? And how should or could forest grown biomedicinals projects that create indigenous community wealth make a collective appeal? A lot of the most promising projects are small. Maybe they should figure this out collectively? All I’ve got at this point are questions and one interview.
Phillippe Greer who leads a transformative journey project with indigenous people in Brazil is also part of figuring out the story that will enable biomedicinals to tell a story that enables them to take advantage of crowdfunding at aggregate scale. Going to the place and seeing and being a respectful part of indigenous culture, through journeys like his, enable people to understand their connections with indigenous places, which helps them grow enough trees and make money around the trees to maintain them and keep the businesses going while creating a collectively great climate change response across a network of projects could be the way to go. I need to ask some network builders their thoughts on approaches to use.
So, the walkabout among biomedicinal and other non timber forest products via interviews and recorded zoom calls has begun. I will post the Zoom video of my talk with Marc, where Phillipe joined us, when I download it. And we will put up a google form for people to fill out the details around their project in this space, within the field guides discovery parameters of where the system is broken and a the shape of the capital that’s missing that if it were present would catalyze transformative change.
And the Field Guide works as an investigative tool. A lot of people are already using it and suggesting modifications, or additions to the roles.
Posted in Uncategorized
We are concocting a guild in formation with three projects that use non timber forest products to create indigenous community assets that are also adaptable responses to climate change through biodiversity and we are looking for more.
I have been working with Shaun Paul for going on five years, as the initial funder, failing to launch his fund, Reinventure Capital, the first time, when it was then focused on investing in and with indigenous entrepreneurs and investors focusing on biodiversity and community wealth creation and working with him through the subsequent launch of Ejido Verde. We, as investors through Good Capital, are still participating more passively in Reinventure, which continues to focus on the intersection of technology and under served communities.
Now Shaun Paul seems to have cracked the code that’s kept this non timber forest products embedded in communities from getting across the finish line before; the mismatch between investors expectation of financial return typically does not match the time to harvest. But with Kiva, Shaun has successfully gotten lots of individuals making zero interest loans to think like a tree; to wait until harvest to get paid. You can easily get three times your money in 15 years on these projects; a nice payout, but one you have to be patient to get. People can do that; people with an investor mindset can’t, as easily. He has a Kiva veteran working with him on that, and we want to help that platform come alive.
It’s worth noting that the wealth created, such as the $49 million that the indigenous community of Patamban in the Purapecha nation in Michoacan, Mexico, can expect to get on its 900 hectares, goes to that community. Each community gets its own wealth. Each agreement is worked out with each community, over days of tribal councils, in accordance with indigenous law.
Shaun Paul has also figured out how to invest in communities where no one owns the title; that piece of IP is replicable by itself and can unlock a lot. This project is beginning to be replicated in a couple of central American countries and could be replicated across much of East Africa. You need degraded but not eroded land that is owned by the community or publicly, and of course local pine varieties that are good for resin and bad for construction wood.
Shaun Paul wants to expand on his Kiva success with the Purapecha and see what more could be done to go beyond what they do with Kiva now; how to scale this success and make it available to others is the goal. I think this expansion on a ground breaking systemic funding problem is a trim tab; the key leverage point, and it will be hugely attractive to lots of projects with the same problem, of time to return vs time to harvest.
We only want to focus here on those that both create indigenous wealth and cultural value, using the reciprocity dashboard Shaun created with Guayaki, Lotus Foods and Indigenous Designs to measure value.
We will be using the field guide to Transformation as our discovery, problem definition, role scouting and roadmap formation tool.
We will also be using the field guide in the same way in Transform’s work with immigrants and refugees, focusing on the problem of culturally appropriate housing finance for New American Somalis in Minneapolis purchased cooperatively in a savings circle style model via a rent to own system that’s proven to work in at least one instance.
Posted in Uncategorized
An occasional blog by Kevin Jones on discoveries, things figured out, while living on the Swannanoa River across from Warren Wilson College, 28778.
The highway guard rail that stuck upright like an inverted v in the far sandy shoals a few months ago has created a tiny coherent ecosystem. A slender 25 foot tree with flaky bark fell onto the top of the v and lodged there, rather than being ripped out of the earth, by a following flood. So the shady leaves now go 25 feet diagonally to create a shady place. The guard rail also slows the flow of water, and diverts the fastest flows around it. So sandy soil has collected down stream that allows grasses to grow when the rocks just outside the protection are scoured. That part of the river bank is also growing soil into the river as the whole ecosystem establishes a place in the flow, but those peninsulas are usually the first to go.
Another discovery I announced on Facebook a few months ago, a big tree that fell but the big root stayed connected to the island, creating a 20 foot wide blockage of the river itself, upstream from the lower shoals ecosystem, on the little island downstream from the first, postcard rocky shoals; the most photogenic part of the Riparian area.
It’s created a whole new shoals as its become the place the river slows and rocks get dropped as the current has less force. It’s pretty much a long triangle from the farthest end of the root, back to the shore about 50 yards above the small water fall. I love shoals; interesting leaves and stick get stuck and change the laminar flow to turbulence around rocks. That starts to happen in the fall; for me my favorite time to take pictures. The colors here are things people fly from new york to come see in the fall. And I like how it creates the smooth, rippling patterns that are like collaborative standing waves from rocks and leaves stuck over small flows between rocks in shoals. And when the light is partly on them and partly not, from shade, it’s even cooler. Now there is a place where that will happen right on our side of the river; there hasn’t been since they created the waterfall to save Owen Park and its big ponds from being undercut and creating a major flood.
They built what’s called a J hook waterfall. It’s like a j with a fish hook on the end, on our side. It changed the flow so and they built some bank out from the ponds to create a base to change the flow. A friend said they must have spent $2 million on it. It was a contractor for the department of Natural Resources. They spent so much, he said because hundreds of people see it walking by Owen Park, across from our farm on the other side. We just got the benefit. It’s also a great place to take pictures. Anyplace that disrupts the flow and catches stuff interests me. I like the tension between laminar flow, when the water is smooth and rippled, and when it’s turbulent, and just foaming.
A highway guard rail and not fallen tree, a fallen tree and a two million dollar public works project are all part of the continual construction and reconstruction of the place the plants meet the river, the riparian way.
Most of the time I take a picture of what’s in front of me. Sometimes what’s new in front of me will make me understand the history, so far, of my life on this river. My daughter, BJ, said the river told her it would bring our family healing. It’s working for me.
I will publish pictures of all three on instagram and go back and put in the links.
Posted in Uncategorized
Talked to Jerome Bouillon, my friend and neighbor in Asheville and former structural banker about what the kids led savings bond Ejido Verde is contemplating should look like. He suggested carving out 60 cents on the dollar for something that would guaranty the return of capital, like a t-bill. So the kid would have no risk of losing her money; she would get it back. Then she would allow the other 40 cents to be put at total risk, like equity, for return at harvest, to do something big and good.
That 40 cents could wait for return, and with its long time horizon could afford to pay for capacity or infrastructure now that would create more value later. Oddly I am looking at that 10-year time horizon as our mutual insurance product that the neighborhood economics network is building. We think we could derisk these new opportunity zone funds through culturally literate community engagement to allow productive long-term partnerships that create more value starting in 10 years. Ten years, just like in pine resin. They can’t take it out for 10 years and then they cannot just extract it. It will be based on revitalized real estate in urban neighborhoods or rural towns.
We could probably structure a kids bond on some of that urban work, alongside our mutual insurance product which is derisking via capacity building with a loan loss reserve 25% above historical failure rate to start with. That reserve enables us to fund capacity now, as a way to reduce risk 10 years out. So we hire a system entrepreneur and give her a budget.
Posted in Uncategorized
We’ve got a $75 to $100 a week, 5-7 hours social media gig, telling the story of regenerative reforestation, indigenous wealth creation at market rate over the long term. with can evolve into a role in an event in May called Regenerative about regenerative economy and culture, with the Buckminster Fuller Institute with Amanda Joy Ravenhill leading it, relaunching Space ship earth. It’s the BFI challenge meets Clinton Global Initiative; come like Terragenesis and launch your blockchain for carbon, but the cohort wins, not one winner, and we create the network to help them succeed with funding, support of various kinds, linked to the SDG’s as key markers. UNDP doing creative stuff in Armenia, Georgia and Moldova on this one, too.
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Translating indigenous values into finance and enterprise
Venture philanthropy and impact investing are rapidly growing fields blurring traditional lines between philanthropy and for profit investing. Instead of turning a blind eye to applying values to investing, people are increasingly working from a perspective of interconnectedness where the same values that would be applied to grantmaking are applied to investing. While this is a new paradigm for finance, many indigenous societies have never separated commerce from honoring the earth and valuing the well-being of community. This lively panel was convened in October 2014 at the World Summit on Indigenous Philanthropy to share perspectives of indigenous values-driven business, grant makers and impact investors working to foster practical solutions to complex social and environmental challenges including job creation, cultural revitalization and environmental stewardship.
Moderator: Shaun Paul, Reinventure Capital
Panelists
Amy Fredeen, Cook Inlet Tribal Council
Sonja Swift, Swift Foundation
Donna Morton, Principum
Kevin Jones, Social Capital Markets (SoCap)
This is where I will start to put together, thoughts, partners, and the evolving framework of the kids-led riparian justice biodiversity bond. We are basing it on the real world example of biodiversity as the path to justice for indigenous people in Borneo that is told in the movie Rise of the Ecowarriors, with longtime partner in crime Mark White and Cynthia LaGrou of Compathos a film making and distributing foundation. We have parts of the team. We want to build use place-sourcing and pattern recognition to build regenerative communities within a network where peer learning and emergent adaptation thrives.
This bond is part of the Neighborhood Economics project, which has been given skunk works R&D funding for the past nine months by Good Capital, where I, Kevin Jones, lead portfolio company engagement. We will be talking about the progress toward the bond at SOCAP15, the largest social enterprise meets impact investor, meets development agency, meets foundations conference in the world, the place where people discover unlikely allies as they meet surprising but valuable strangers.
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Bio-cultural Resilience Tool 