[…] The science is clear, the facts are incontrovertible, and it is unconscionable to us that our children and grandchildren should have to bear the terrifying brunt of an unprecedented disaster of our own making. […] Our government is complicit in ignoring the precautionary principle, and in failing to acknowledge that infinite economic growth on a planet with finite resources is non-viable.

from XR’s first open letter of Oct 2018, endorsed by a multitude of academics and scientists.    

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The problem of exponential human growth and consumption across the planet (see compelling documentary Growing Pains), is nevertheless being challenged, by XR in this case, from within the dysfunctional socio-political system, of which we all remain an inextricable part. Given that capitalist, corporate, institutional and government interests – those entities that retain the balance of power – have hitherto not succeeded, or been interested in effecting a fundamental common understanding, respect and mutual interest in “the commons,” representing clean air, fresh water, ocean, soil, mineral, forest, human and animal resources; as not being subject to any form of ownership or sale at the expense of humanity and environment as a whole – there seems little chance that the burgeoning threat of climate change can be relied upon to be mitigated by said authorities. (In case you are in any doubt about the deep-set and unshakeable grasp of the dominant destructive forces, articles such as the LRB’s Gulf Bargain, or if you’re really brave Our Alien Planet ought to make it pretty clear.)

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”. Buckminster Fuller

It may be that, though resistance is a necessary challenge and stopgap to these forces, the scale and complexity of the entrenched causes mean that the relative mosquito whine of the eco movement can have only moderate enduring effect. (Note the erosion of civil liberties under the guise of national security, and the tendency of law to support the global “oil standard” rather than environment or civil humanity, let alone malfeasant activists. (See LRB article The Right To Protest.) Governments and private enterprise continue to expropriate planet-wide commons in covert operations at the abject cost of bio-diversity and humanity everywhere. (See documentaries Ocean Monopoly and Running out of sand respectively.) Lastly, compounding this dynamic, in the words of evolutionary biologist Dr Elisabet Sahtouris:

[…] Deep recessions happen when a financial system based on debt concentrates wealth unreasonably, the destruction compounded by other bad banking practices such as deceptively cheap credit, repeated ‘thin air’ derivatives and unholy gambling on peoples and nations’ debts. As banks require borrowing nations and businesses to shut down their economies, they cause massive unemployment and the reduction of services, while forcing them to sell off, to the already wealthy, vast amounts of infrastructure, from transportation systems to energy production to hospitals and natural land that should be commons. worldbusiness.org/celebrating-crisis-towards-a-culture-of-cooperation/

Maybe we need an approach that sidesteps rather than takes on the slippery and brutish old guard state of mind.

So what are the options for conscientious and concerned people across the globe? I might support the cause of XR, but I may not have confidence in the approach, so long as the balance of power remains squarely within the confines of such a divisive, if not duplicitous system – intentional or otherwise. As suggested, the problem with any confrontational approach, is that we can not be separate from the cause, no matter what our sensibilities and allegiances may be, so long as we are a part of the system we fight or uphold. But what about the evolutionary principal. The principal that may negate the need for a seemingly lame precautionary principal in a short sighted world.

Ecosophy philosophy

First and foremost, we must recognize globalization as a biological process – something that is happening to a natural living system we call humanity. Then we can see how an economics that violates the fundamental principles by which living systems are organized currently threatens the demise of human civilization. worldbusiness.org/celebrating-crisis-towards-a-culture-of-cooperation/

Our own bodies brilliantly model win-win living economies, as do mature ecosystems such as rainforests and prairies, thriving through sharing and recycling. The economic relationships concerning the acquisition of raw materials, their transformation into useful products, distribution, consumption, and recycling, is as applicable to human economies as to the economies of all nature’s ecosystems.

Towards a universal language

From the 2018 film Arrival

Consider an inter-dependent, peer to peer, global currency, reorienting monetary value towards a direct relationship with life and each other – as distinct from dissociative and disproportionate relationships with things, nation states, and the golden idols of wealth, power and ownership. Sounds like a fanciful solution to such a complex problem. Yet the burgeoning adoption of nascent blockchain technologies present a very real and timely opportunity to address the global socio-economic and political problems we are facing, from the ground up. To get a concise understanding of the principals and use cases scenarios for Bitcoin-like blockchain technologies, see this 6 minute video. Bear in mind that there already exists a proliferation of alternative cryptocurrency and blockchain solutions striving to solve problems like the one we are considering here.

[…] The Internet is perhaps the largest self-organizing living system on the planet, composed of living people using computers as tools for connection in distributed networks without central control. Thus it provides the practical possibility of its use for global cooperation, information sharing and distributed network governance, even for non-debt currencies. All of these are showing up more and more rapidly and extensively as our situation becomes more dire.

[…] Alternative currencies modelled on the equivalent ATP debit card system used in our bodies could restimulate economies overnight. worldbusiness.org/celebrating-crisis-towards-a-culture-of-cooperation/

ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) as quoted by Dr Sahtouris above, is the molecular unit of intracellular energy – the de facto basic unit of energy-currency across ALL life forms. In all biology, from cells to organisms to bodies to businesses to blockchains to ecosystems to Earth, homeostasis is only maintained by the equitable distribution of all available energy as required by parts of the whole. As such, ATP is representative of a scalable, biomimetic currency model that can support all of humanity, non human species and environment as a whole – the whole of life on Earth – if we collectively so chose to expropriate the responsibility for our own planet-wide wellbeing by utilising an ATP modelled blockchain protocol.  

This is an idea who’s time has come, not perhaps, because it’s a new idea in itself, but because these emerging, distributed, peer to peer, blockchain technologies, egalitarian by definition, have not existed up until now.

They continue to evolve virally and have done so since the birth of the internet with increasing rapidity. And whilst the information age has hitherto been subject to the paradigm of existing hierarchy and market forces, there are precedents in the blockchain space to demonstrate the readiness of the heart-mind intelligence that this idea is predicated upon.

• to facilitate the creation of a viral, biomimetic blockchain and token serving as a true unit of currency to facilitate the unification of core themes across individuals, cooperatives and organisations in all humanitarian-environmental initiatives. Namely those who strive to assume responsibility of care, where existing global hierarchical governance continues to fall short of a common cause of welfare for all human and non human species.
• towards a redistribution of global resources in a fashion that considers only the whole of life on Earth as one interdependent organism, based on the natural design principles of Ecological Economics (Natural Capitalism) and ATP.
• to generate empowerment and awareness of global interdependence through a common nominated currency.

There are a number of blockchain projects that are approaching this ideal, but most remain commercially oriented – none as yet taking the life first, biomimetic stance outlined here.

Development

Key Features

• Branched Participatory Budgeting (see open source platform consulproject.org for basis of PB)
  • community (seed – pod)
  • city (colonies)
  • global (system)
• Localised communities of up to 150 members
  • Based on localised community needs:
    • natural capital – environmental resource generation and protection
    • food / shelter
    • healthcare / education
• Trustless / self-sovereign identity participation
• Smart contract / DAO execution

Token

Sample value / attribution strategies:

• Use ATPcoin pegged to stablecoins (USDT) as alternative to fiat currencies ($£€) to encourage broader public donations through ATP-Human coin, with the intention of on-boarding existing non profit organisations.
• Airdrop (100 ATPcoins) to anyone prepared to register (anywhere on the planet, 800 billion supply.)  When anyone either gives or receives ATPcoin to nonprofit cause, a portion of the coins are burned (countering deflation) and giver and receiver get a second coin (Humancoin) which has a monetary value of ATPcoin x 1.5
• Donate (airdropped tokens) to increasing nominated non profit humanitarian / environmental groups or community pods. Groups acquire a wallet and accruing tokens until claimed / threshold reached for a given localised environmental / humanitarian project.
• To be further defined and extrapolated…

This writer is no one in particular per se, but We are everything. If you have critical and constructive thoughts around this idea, please get in touch. We need everybody! But YOU are the one we have been waiting for!

See also Your pocket guide to the digital cash revolution

Everything you and your mum need to know about the new distributed currency and the decentralised information revolution – how and why to get onboard, in a nutshell.