Game of coins: what our economy can learn from ecology

As we travel to the universe below our feet, we see the flowing currencies of carbon and nutrients between vibrant microbiome communities. The exchange provides mutual benefit and fuels their enduring circle of life. Could we say the same about our economic system that makes billions of money fly across the globe every second? What can we learn from the way our ecosystems trade and exchange nutritional value? What would happen if our coins and the numbers on our online banking apps would be viewed in the same way; a nurturing flow to maintain and enhance our relationship with each other and our natural environment?

Balancing an economic tightrope

In this newspaper, we explored the miracles of the soils taking toxins out of the air and creating nutrients for living beings to thrive. This flow and trade create a balance that is to be maintained. Similar to maintaining the balance in the soil itself, we have the task of maintaining balance in our economy. Bela Hatvany, founder of Mustardseed Trust, shares his view on creating a balance in the economy: “We now know that our ecological function is that of stewardship to protect this equilibrium. Healthy soil is therefore a fantastic example of a healthy economy. Not as a single unit of measurement, but as a kosmos of interbeing we can experience. An economy is a sum of transactions. Our current economy is a sum of transactions of money mostly built upon productivity. It demands growth. If you have a single measure of growth, like a mono-crop culture, all you are doing is creating a destructive sickness.”

Our extractive economic model is based on the flawed assumption that resources and our capacity to pollute are infinite. In our economic theatre, the health of our ecosystems was not cast a role bigger than a trivial background extra. John d. Liu agrees. “Our current economic system tells us that the accumulation of material stuff – things that are dug up and manufactured and bought and sold – is wealth. While actually, this is causing enormous poverty for billions of people and degraded landscapes all over the world. You think the euro or the dollar is valuable, but only because you have been told so. When you extract things and destroy the natural cycles of ecology, you don’t have any real value. Currently, we are stimulating the economy by throwing a rock through a window [increased productivity]. That is not economy!”

Is there a way to create a better system?

To Bela, our greatest achievement would be to experience a sufficiency that allows balance. “Balance can only be maintained if we have an understanding of all factors that enable the balance. You measure that by taking in every dimension that we now know is significant for our planetary health. Our current understanding allows us to know that this is soil health, water cycles, social justice, early childhood development, and much more. This balance is a multi-dimensional perspective. An example that creates this view is Kate Raworth’s Doughnut economy.”

Similarly, John d. Liu explores in his documentary “The Real Wealth”, that we could start by re-evaluating what really matters. “If we can understand that the basis of wealth is the atmosphere, the hydrological cycle, the soil fertility, and the biodiversity… We could base our growth in wealth on ecological functions, rather than on finite resources. We would not be able to pollute or degrade, because doing so would cause us to have less, to be less wealthy. So all human effort would go to protecting, conserving, and restoring the planet’s ecosystems.”

Accounting for ecosystem functioning

What are the first steps towards an economic system where more values than just ‘productivity’ are taken into account? As we shift to a regenerative economy we correct destructive assumptions by pricing natural capital and internalising these long-disregarded ecosystem functions that we are caring for. In recent years, we have seen some of these shifts in action in the financial market economy. For example, investors start to ask companies for their Environmental, Social and Governmental performance. Easier said than done, as there is no easy metric to account for your role in the ecosystem you work in or affect.

Some of Mustardseed partners have dedicated their work to this. For example, the Weathermakers. Next to the major task of regreening the lifeless soils of a desert, they work on ways to reintegrate the value of ecosystems into our economy. As Maddie explains: “By making ecology measurable, attaching values to it, and making it a stakeholder in the development of for example infrastructure, we can create a symbiosis between ecology and money.” As an example, Maddie points out how the impact on ecosystems and hidden costs are often not accounted for when roads or new urban areas are being constructed. By being able to measure and calculate the lost value of ecosystems, nature becomes a stakeholder to consider in contracts. “This is key in changing the way that financial investments are made. We measure these values through water. Soil fertility can vary widely per square meter, so digging in a specific spot doesn’t make sense. So we measure rainfall and runoff in an entire area, calculating the life in the soil and its ability to store water.” By making these measuring methods widely available, the Weathermakers hopes to stimulate the adaptation of ecological market value on a regulatory level.

Joseph Nayeem, advisor on sustainable finance and impact investment, comments: “Thanks to digital innovations we now are able to more appropriately measure, report and verify natural capital. Standardisation and global regulation will enable us to align incentives and create the mechanisms to exchange them.”

Finding the flow of trust: finding humanity’s value back 

What can drive our economy to adapt, and find synergy with the nutrient flow in our soils and ecosystems? Let’s return to the value of our own natural abundance and take a look in the mirror.

In our economic story we have created a system where money became a commodity; a scarce good that is to be collected, hoarded and saved. By doing so, have we created a monster? One that disrupted a once delicate balance, resulting in many having access to little, and few having access to a lot? Nevertheless, the amount of coins in our piggy bank does not say anything about our trustworthiness and value as human beings.

Will Ruddick sees trust at the core of successfully flowing community currencies in the projects of Grassroots Economics. According to him, something very important to understand if we want the flow of currency only to be what it was meant to be in the first place: a method of exchange. “The idea of giving selfless service, of people being anchors of trust, is so strong and important. We are so far away from that somehow. How do you trust people without a genuine sort of service being involved? Can we envision a new economy where we decompose the value held in money, to enhance its flow, and bring new life to service exchange build on trust?”

Abundance

There is one thing all our partners concur with. They see it unfolding as they work on ecosystem restoration, community building, rural education, or regenerative agriculture and value chains. They all agree that our world is naturally abundant.

Not only within the exchange that takes place within ecosystems or between us and our natural environment, but also in what we have to offer each other.

Sometimes, even when community offerings are plentiful, our ability to exchange them is limited by something as seemingly simple as trading tools. Think of communities that cannot exchange their goods and services with each other due to the scarcity of sovereign, the national currency. Grassroots Economics enables communities to trade independently. The community members create exchangeable vouchers that are based on the agreed sum of non-monetary resources available within the group.

“The goal for us is to help a community see that they are abundant, that they can offer each other a lot without needing national currency,” Will Ruddick, who founded Grassroots Economics, tells us. “We show this by exercises like standing in a circle and making people throw lines to those who they can exchange products or services with. We create a complex web, with people sometimes moving to tears when they realise that this is their fabric, their abundance. In another game, we let them use beans to trade with. This process helps them see that the true value lies in what they have to offer each other – not in the currency itself. The final step is to design their own currency. The ‘profits’ go to community projects such as food forests. A conservation farming method, allowing the community to farm with nature, protect it, and enjoy its abundance by not having to skip a meal. Communities start thinking of currencies as a governance tool for a commons of people who trust and want to support each other.”

When we travelled to the universe below our feet, we saw the flowing currencies of carbon and nutrients between microbiome communities. Time to bring this flow back into our communities, and in our economies too.