How do you fund Earth Regeneration? Colombia’s Joe Brewer is working out a new finance model, via the commoning of land
From Joe Brewer, ‘How to fund Earth regeneration?’
We are delighted to cross-post this Earth Regenerators piece from Joe Brewer, a leading light in eco-village activism and theorising about Culture Design, and current living with his family in Barichara, Colombia.
Joe is bold enough to suggest a pathway towards something we all would like to crack: ways of robustly financing our community and regenerative projects. See below:
I would like to invite us to explore the mechanisms of finance that might enable us to actively regenerate the Earth at appropriate scales. We are going to need to find ways to enable regenerative practices to spread across landscapes with tools that support the livelihoods for people doing the work.
Those of you who watched my recent webinar on land ownership will know that a major barrier we have to overcome is the fragmentation of the Earth into parcels of privately owned land. This includes how structural inequality arose through extractive practices related to the "capture" and legal ability to own land.
There needs to be a clear set of mechanisms to re-invest the wealth taken from the Earth during prior times of extraction. These mechanisms need to enable landscapes to be regenerated as millions of us live through the extremely difficult period of overshoot-and-collapse of the dominant extractive economy.
People will need (a) land to live on; while (b) participating in economic exchanges that maintain their wellbeing; so that (c) they can engage in regenerative practices for their landscapes that are (d) long-term and future oriented.
To meet these criteria, I would like to propose the creation of an Earth Regeneration Fund that enables people all over the planet to set up regenerative bioregional economies that restore ecosystem health and grow community resilience.
This becomes the investment platform for safeguarding humanity’s future. The fund would work like this:
Create a platform cooperative that manages the assets of the fund.
Pool funds for regenerating the Earth by making direct contributions from individuals and institutions with a vested interest in humanity continuing to exist.
Use the funds to acquire private land and place it in a community land trust.
Accumulate land across entire territories and remove it from the private market for whole-system regeneration efforts.
Support the education and livelihoods of those who train in regenerative design and devote themselves to Earth regeneration.
Set up monitoring systems that track progress toward regenerative goals.
Create a cooperative land bank that can re-invest value created by regenerative projects in the land and community whose livelihoods depend upon them.
The basic idea can be understood visually with the following diagram. What we need are mechanisms for collective ownership and management of land in service to regenerative practices. The essence of this is to provide clear mechanisms for how a legal entity holds the land in a cooperative trust while enabling people to live on the land so long as they contribute to its regeneration.
The idea of a cooperative land bank is that activities that create value must remain in circulation as investments into the land itself or for the community of people whose livelihoods depend on the land.
For example, if an agroforestry project were to be initiated on a specific degraded piece of land there would need to be mechanisms for providing free or low-cost housing to the people doing the reforestation work.
A little piece of this that might be overlooked is the role of the platform cooperative because this is an idea that is not yet widely known. Here we are talking about creating digital infrastructure that allows the system to grow rapidly while preserving the core architecture of ownership and decision-making.
Imagine (as a way to make this feel concrete) that there is a mobile app that links to an online database. The database holds information about bank accounts, legal contracts, various kinds of measurements for landscape improvements, and protocols for how cooperation is to be maintained in service to Earth regeneration.
If this fund initially had $10 million and the money was used to purchase 100 parcels of degraded land, there would need to be agreements about how each parcel is managed while also aggregating the regenerative impacts across all 100 parcels.
This capacity to collectively own and manage land is exactly what platform cooperatives do well. There may be goals set for capturing and storing carbon, increasing ecological connectivity, stabilizing or growing the biodiversity, as well as human metrics for affordable housing, food security, water availability, and so forth. All of this would need to be written into the community agreements for setting up legal contracts.
As this fund begins to operate, there is value created in the landscape restoration efforts. Food is grown. Housing is made available. Water is held in landscapes and increases productivity. How is this value recognized and re-invested? That is the role of the cooperative land bank. It's purpose is to keep value circulating through the landscape itself in service to more regeneration as time goes by.
Another example may be helpful here. Consider that a young person chooses to live on the land of one of these projects instead of going to college. They enter a training project in regenerative design to learn permaculture, practice agroforestry, and help increase food sovereignty for everyone living in their region.
The Earth Regeneration Fund can provide a living stipend and scholarship for them to be trained. One of their agreements might be that they apply what they learn on one of the 100 parcels of land that has been aggregated by the platform cooperative.
Here we see that skills and know-how becomes an asset with recognizable value. More people who know how to regenerate land within the community means more resilience and regenerative capacity for the community. So the cooperative land bank invests some of its resources in trainings so long as the value created remains in service to the mission of Earth regeneration.
Over time, as this model proves effective, we can envision how it grows in size and becomes capable of acquiring more land that is removed from private ownership and placed in a cooperative land trust. The "end game" being that all of the Earth is collectively owned by all of the humans -- constrained to operate within the principles and practices of regenerative design.
More here. Joe urges you to join his study group at Earth Regenerators if you’d like to develop this plan. And to conclude, here’s a tantalising tweet graphic from Joe: