Here's an idea.In order to survive as a species our capitalist world must turn into gaialist world, that is, Gaiatalism. In Gaiatalism, value generation consists in repairing the world in which we live, and take care of ourselves and the planet. Remember that our most precious capital is being alive. And there's no possible life if our waters and soils and air are dead. From where I'm standing now, being alive means to generate ways to live a dignifying existence with others, and being able to learn to be present and learn to act moved by love -not fear.
It's not Natural Capitalism, that puts a price-tag to contamination and creates green-guilt credit compensations (these sounds like the Taxa Camarae of the Catholic Indulgentiarum doctrina, through which you could pay after or in advance for the sins you wanted to commit, using a table to meet prices with sins). Gaiatalism inverse-engineers Natural Capitalism. Instead of monetizing Nature, it Naturalizes monetization. The real value does not reside in accumulation of human-centered artifacts (call it stocks, money, gold, etc.). Earthly value generation comes from helping Nature to flourish by maximizing our capacities to do so. By anchoring our human experience to regenerate local ecosystems we are part of, we are engaging not to pasive conservation pretending we are above Nature. We are increasing our personal and local levels of understanding of existing vital links between how we treat ourselves (our own body, our family, our neighbors, our fellow-humans) and how we treat Nature (animals, plants, micylium, water, air, etc.).
It's not Natural Capitalism, that puts a price-tag to contamination and creates green-guilt credit compensations (these sounds like the Taxa Camarae of the Catholic Indulgentiarum doctrina, through which you could pay after or in advance for the sins you wanted to commit, using a table to meet prices with sins). Gaiatalism inverse-engineers Natural Capitalism. Instead of monetizing Nature, it Naturalizes monetization. The real value does not reside in accumulation of human-centered artifacts (call it stocks, money, gold, etc.). Earthly value generation comes from helping Nature to flourish by maximizing our capacities to do so. By anchoring our human experience to regenerate local ecosystems we are part of, we are engaging not to pasive conservation pretending we are above Nature. We are increasing our personal and local levels of understanding of existing vital links between how we treat ourselves (our own body, our family, our neighbors, our fellow-humans) and how we treat Nature (animals, plants, micylium, water, air, etc.).
Since even in the near future money accumulation will be a symbol of achievement, I would anchor the value and generation of money to a particular achievement: repairing the planet, taking care of larger organism of which we are part: Gaia. If we are so smart, let's head the departments of Life Regeneration at Planet Earth Corporation. Let's have a Symbiotic Striving Index and Local Living Soils Index instead of DowJones or Nasdaq. It's time economics to enact the human-Earth existing connections.
In order to survive as a species, the NEXT BIG STEP for us contemporary humans is to connect two main cultural inventions (ie. capital and technology) to a new enjoyable accumulation goal that consists in giving back to Nature, creating the conditions for soils, wild life, and ecosystems to flourish.
It's a new accumulation game, a new path to generate wealth. The Gaia Game. It's time to get rid of the Win-Lose reigning paradigm, and let in a superlative paradigm that strives designing and propagating Win-Win situations into humans all around the world.
In down-to-earth actions, all the latter means that all institutions and individuals should be paid, and only be paid, not for producing stuff for humans, but for repairing the world, for taking care of our living planet. It's by taking care of the planet that we heal ourselves and other humans. A few examples here:
1) Persons and organizations that produce food should not be paid for producing food, but for regenerating soils and cleaning water beds by means of food production. It's not merely positive brand choice, or any stunt publicity. If Company X offers eg. a packaged yogurt, the whole value chain that made it available to consumers should be managed in such a way that its outcomes are: improving local phytofauna's ability to regenerate local soils, tracking dairy animals' life quality and fodder contribution to local soil's gain in microorganic life, near-local vs long-distance materials used in packaging and production supplies, tags packages with a value based on integrated indexes of contribution to Earths Regeneration -including consumers' accesibility to production sites, information, monitoring systems, and different levels to directly communicate with local producer to identify&define areas of improvement in the value chain.
2) Persons and organizations that create technologies, let's say computers, should not be paid by consumers for any computer, rather computers could be delivered initially "free", ie. propagated using consumers as pollinators of their technologies, and letting local governments and consumers pay the computer producers with money representing the validated amount of symbiotic growth (=humans maximazing their impact on local ecologic zones and levels, families' wellness based on communication skills acquired or excercised through technology, etc.) that has hence been generated by allocating and giving use to these computers in our house and our neighborhood. The idea is to expand the notion of "usability" not just to the human experience with artifacts, but to how the living creatures have better opportunities to enhance the life quality on a focalized area in which those computers are tested. The latter implies incorporating into artifact biologically-centered design criteria. For instance, computers that are fed not with regular grid electricity but with soil static conductivity (which only takes place for prolonged periods of time if soils are rich in microorganisms), or computers that measure our pH and chlorophyll levels in both our body circulatory systems and our local forest-based water systems.
3) Teachers are not paid for giving students information, since information is available freely through internet. Teachers receive money if and only if the amount of technologies and frameworks their students learn to use in their community can be validated by local wealth indexes, such as air quality, water qua
lity, identification-solving problem index, etc. For instance, a math teacher, gets paid not for teaching mathematical contents, but for eg. monitoring the integration of mathematical notions into home-made artifacts built or enhanced by individual and groups of students, by the ways parents participate on the process, how these artifacts' technologies propagate in the community, and the level of awareness of how achieved technologies affect human-Nature connections.
lity, identification-solving problem index, etc. For instance, a math teacher, gets paid not for teaching mathematical contents, but for eg. monitoring the integration of mathematical notions into home-made artifacts built or enhanced by individual and groups of students, by the ways parents participate on the process, how these artifacts' technologies propagate in the community, and the level of awareness of how achieved technologies affect human-Nature connections.4) Families and jobs can be framed as our main territories where we can learn to take care of public goods. Public goods are whatever becomes a source of dignity and fairness for us all (humans and non-humans). Public goods can be private or State-runned, and our always Nature-runned too. Jobs may be redesigned using this regenerative value and this taking care value, as a core criteria to grasp new efficiencies. The latter concepts mean that, for instance, jobs should be designed to deliver not only infrastructure (schools, roads, libraries, etc.), technologies, information, roles, organizations, etc. but also to generate and improve individual and group capacities to sustain meaningful relationships with people, other living creatures and our local territories, and with the planet as a whole. Capacities such as reading our bodies (emotions, movements, health signs, deal with anger, envy, fear, etc.) and reading nature (topographies, soils, clouds, seasons, stress, etc.) in order to learn to sustain conversations beyond human-centered search for profits. A person should have as his deliverables not only what he does on his job-site. We all humans should have as a deliverable to propagate a gaia-centric value re-generation paradigm (a taking care of the Earth paradigm) throughout our families, our neighborhoods, our communities, and our regions.
So the questions that I would invite others to ask themselves are: how should all kinds of foods and artifacts be designed if money would only be a result of having a proven impact on taking care of the planet? how can we generate and reward gaia-oriented strategies? how can we use "planet regeneration" instead of the dollar or gold as an economic parameter to set money's value? can you imagine a world where economic growth means regeneration and symbiotic gains, and not mere accumulation?
So the questions that I would invite others to ask themselves are: how should all kinds of foods and artifacts be designed if money would only be a result of having a proven impact on taking care of the planet? how can we generate and reward gaia-oriented strategies? how can we use "planet regeneration" instead of the dollar or gold as an economic parameter to set money's value? can you imagine a world where economic growth means regeneration and symbiotic gains, and not mere accumulation?
