Brainstorm of the day: Jan. 22, 2016
WildCommons, Beneficial Empowerment, Poverty…
Wild…land connected, indigenous, agrarian, or of such a mindset or intention
Commons… Both the collective asset and the collective ecological responsibilities…
Every type of non-parasitic creature from the tiniest microbe to the whale or elephant has a relevant and rightful collective commons that they grapple as a society with to both obtain sustenance and footprint of existence within, and to contribute back equally in stewardship to. The organisms known for bloom and crash such as rodents are the ones that focus more on consumption than on stewardship.
Ebb and flow in system
The ones that ebb and flow in system are the ones with stability in line with both the stability of their ecosystem and in line with their resilience and relevant speed and extent of adaptability. Many cold blooded creatures including many sea creatures are not known for adaptability and tend to crash easily with rapid ecosystem change or loss. Overly specialized creatures are magical to perceive, but tend to be much less rapidly adaptable. Our time is one where change is coming very rapidly and portions of such change are in our hands to drive in either direction; by example our deforestation and effect on desertification, though progressive over thousands of years has turned into a very rapid process that with changed values and intent could go just as quickly in the other direction by our human energy. Our agriculture could be restoring and regenerating soils and surrounding ecology, our fisheries could be adding in resilience and regeneration to coral and other aquatic systems. Our net effect of CO2 production could be turned around to a net effect of Oxygen production. Our net fresh water drain could be turned into a net effect of aquifer regeneration and functional seasonal soil efficiency. By extension, greater seasonal soil available water would drive resistance to drought effects and forest fire moderation, the lower extent of which has benefit in an ecological balance. Like micro-nutrients, fire in moderation slow fed over time into ecosystems is beneficial if not vital to long term system health. In such situations where soils are vibrant and stands are diverse and include the massive, naturally occurring fires tend to spread in small areas and extinguish. Drought eventually causes a purge of fire that turns a once forested landscape into grassland depending on the tree diversity.
Empowerment
Empowerment that is randomly thrust into a system creates warlords, monarchy, and feudalism. Long term driving ambition left unchecked can lead to the same or to elitism and puppet control of government and systems accomplishing and sustaining wide-scale parasitism. Nietzsche-ism is counter to my consideration in considering this good and proper. I would say that the concept of “civilization” implies the keeping of overly ambitious members within limits. A small percentage of individuals are apt to addiction. Like a would-be drug addict or alcoholic, in certain context, provision of drugs or alcohol will effect the start of a steady demise of character, lossed positive achievement, and exit from success and will have been no favor to the individual or those around them as they can be nearly powerless to resist the degrading route. In similar fashion a certain minor swath of humanity, if left an open road to advantage over others, will follow a route that they find themselves nearly powerless to halt, that will have been no favor to them or those around them. Civilization is society balancing out the excess of character as we all have in drugs, alcohol, overeating, pre-disposition to abuse of power, or even laziness. Civilization moderates extremes by definition and provides the restraint that allows for self-check to suffice for a generally peaceful and prosperous ebb and flow. The bent to unchecked ambition, as we see now, can poor out on people or on any aspect of the environment including other creatures. In my general region, buffalos, once the Western elk, wolves, old-growth forests, and now even the sublime 2nd or 3rd growth forestlands and upland meadows around and above our civilization that could or should provide for our clean water, our salmon, our wildlife, and rich our abundant existence are subject to unchecked ambition and steady degradation nearing destructive extents.
Smart Empowerment:
“Smart Empowerment” is the only type worth its mustard. Empowerment must push the bent to balance, excellence, prosperity… It must not drive the addictions to extreme or provide outflow of such. Smart contribution and venture will empower deep civilization.
The Modern Agrarian Paridigm:
How and why then do we empower rural agrarians, and in general the rural poor? First of all, it is the drive of conscience to help the less fortunate and our time is now for the rebirth of knowledge and conscience. Secondly, conservation is not near as powerful as husbandry and stewardship if done well. In Europe, vibrant and cherished ecosystems are now at risk for lack of stewards and agrarians living on the land and nurturing as only a simple connected humanity can. In the Americas, the loss of indigenous peoples and cultures has driven a great variety of dynamics. In the Amazon their effective success in soil husbandry laid the foundation for the richest growth of the Amazon in place of what may have looked like the mottled hedgerow and forest field mosaic of the remaining swaths in English/Welsh countryside. In the Pacific Northwest, the demise may have started sooner than the conquests, but the result was the most massive forests and richest deepest fertile grassland soils on the planet. In their absence…well, as long as the salmon prospered, so did the forest build-up, while the grasslands mottled with forests and oak savannah were not sustainable without the people and their agrarianism. Subsequent non-stewardship presence on the land has been and is parasitic by definition and that is another important point of this agrarian empowerment equation. Are the Bundies and the Bolthouses agrarians (large-scale Western Ranchers and Farmers)? No, there is a grave distinction between land-connected—by implication land dependant—and finance connected and dependant. Agrarians that are drawn into financial dependence loose their land connection and symbiotic bent. Finance rewards extraction and extraction becomes parasitism. Connection and deep interconnectedness swings the bent to stewardship and husbandry, which is intrinsic human reality. If trade to outside dominates, extraction dominates.
Do we empower to drive interconnection with ecosystem, land, local community, geology, and hydrology, or do we drive disconnection and extraction based rural existence? Agrarians and their culmination as evolving indigenous peoples, live within their ecological biome and in such come to depend on and nurture the systems around them, while financially dependant residents, investment ventures, and conventional farmers and ranchers reside in and take from their surroundings to export for gain.
Is the empowerment in-vitro—an artificially constrained environment, literally “in-glass”—or in-vivo which is to occur within a living thing? Economic paradigm is an artificial environment that is often preferred as it delimits, predicts, and shapes the outcome for ease of top-down control and management. It, much like the sterile laboratory test-tube, demands consistent feeding from outside and delivers predictable less-diverse responses since all contributions are controlled. In-vivo, or in a natural environment, there are uncountable variables that drive diverse response, relationships, and provisions. Once set in motion, environment buffers shortfall and increasingly so over increasing numbers of generations. c
Poverty is the lack of wealth in a system that withholds basic needs in exchange for such wealth. So Poverty by implication is gauged on the in-vitro metric under the assumption that non-industrial nations and regions or less industrial places are “developing nations”. We are there and they are on the way… to total dependence on financial in-vitro existence and therefore we should call a spade a spade and head-off the imminent problem of lack of financial wealth. It is circular thinking—as apposed to circular economy—while agrarians often want to take the “Y” in the road to self-determination and by implication an embrace of indigenization. Can they? Is that road open? Or is that road blocked with a detour sign directing them to the circular in-vitro “path to prosperity”. It is blocked in nearly every case where predominant development strategy has reach.
Alleviation of poverty is a concept based on pulling people out of self-determinative lifestyles and plunging them into what is in the West called the “rat race”. The metrics of poverty are from an opposite perspective, the assets of self-determination and progress toward indigenization. Poverty means, less financially oriented more functionally oriented. Destitution is another thing all together, not poverty. Destitution’s primary root cause is war, and its secondary cause is a loss of control of local resources.
I propose a venture that builds and delivers the increasingly full palette of commons back to the agrarians and the peasants in a form that is administrated through the best artificial intelligence innovation of our time. I propose to add in the commons of connectivity, knowledge, and communication flow, and optimized information aggregation to enable powerful indigenization and generationally multiplying stewardship success. I propose to add a global connectivity commons and apprenticeship protocol and administration and a global agrarian union functionality as well as a customized local wide web tool to assure the build-up and non-loss of relevant local knowledge and a re-infusion of generation to generation knowledge transfer.
I propose that we empower financially-optional agrarian prosperity with the ultimate tools for stewardship and the local control of local resources, the end result of which, by conventional metrics will not have irradicated poverty, but will rather have perpetuated it in its most excellent and empowering form; when what created poverty in a misfit externally imposed sustem becomes a route to sustainable environmentally and community integrated prosperity and success.
This proposal is a venture under development called the WildCommons. The basic web presence is here: WildCommons lets gang up and make this happen.
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Leo Tolstoi)
occupyconscience 