The Ecological Citizen Vol 1 No 2 2018: epub-008 [online first]

Shann Turnbull: The survival of society may depend upon it becoming governed by the nature of its host bioregions, as occurred in pre-modern times with Australian Aboriginals. The three most important requirements for establishing a decentralized, locally governed ecocentric society are to:

1. adopt a framework of ecological property rights for land, buildings, enterprises and money;
2. adopt an ecological form of ‘network governance’ as was practised in pre-modern societies, and as re-invented in stakeholder-controlled entities;
3. encourage a decline in the global population through education and through providing universal basic incomes (UBIs) to remove the need for children to provide care and income for citizens.

These three requirements are mutually reinforcing. Ecological property rights create a way to provide citizens with income-producing assets to fund UBIs and in turn facilitate degrowth. Property rights become ecological, I contend, when rules of ownership adopt the ‘use it or lose it’ processes that emerge in squatter settlements, for instance (Turnbull, 1983). Ecological governance arises when network-governed social organizations introduce distributed decision-making to create distributed intelligences, enabling a comprehensive management of complexity. The John Lewis Partnership is an example of this, as are ants and bees who collectively decide where, when and how to construct and maintain their complex dwellings. Ecological governance would insure that income was: (a) appropriately distributed; and (b) not captured by the greedy.

Ecological property rights would counter inequality in three ways that economists generally neglect. These are: (i) overpayment of investors in a way not reported by accountants; (ii) windfall gains in urban land created by public investment and by others; and (iii) interest paid on money.

Tax incentives can be used to divert overpayments of investors to stakeholders and others to fund a ‘community dividend’ or UBI (Turnbull, 2015). Bottom-up decision-making with citizen referendums can provide a way to democratize the wealth of cities from self-financing infrastructure investment (Turnbull, 2017). It requires all windfall gains to be captured by a suburban real estate investment trust owned only by resident voters to eliminate the cost of land for commercial investors and homeowners. This was illustrated by the case of First Garden City Limited, which financed the town of Letchworth, 35 miles north of London in the UK (Purdom, 1913). As land is typically half the price of a dwelling, such self-financing would halve the cost of new homes to generate a virtuous self-reinforcing sustainable process.

Money that has a negative interest rate is ecological because it follows the ‘use it or lose it’ rule. It would avoid inequality generated from the unfair process of money being able to make more money through earning interest. Ecological money would be highly attractive. It would reduce the current excessive costs of the financial system by eliminating bank and credit card transaction fees. These are ten times greater than the costs of privately issued negative interest rate money used during the Great Depression (Turnbull, 2016). Ecological money would not carry out the conventional roles of money to be a store of value or a unit of value. It would simply become a medium of exchange to avoid the inconvenience of barter. A stable index of value should be established independently of the financial system. Real assets, mortgages and equities would provide stores of value.

There are a number of other ways of allocating resources than using markets. These include families, clans, tribes, communities, associations, networks and hierarchies in the private and government sectors. An ecocentric society would enrich democracy with a more humanistic mix of governance mechanisms. A more detailed outline of this vision and how to get there is presented in Turnbull (2015).

References

Purdom CB (1913) The Garden City: A study in the development of a modern town. JM Dent and Sons, Letchworth, UK.

Turnbull S (1983) Cooperative land banks for low-income housing. In: Angel S, Archer R, Tanphiphat S and Wegelin A, eds. Land for Housing the Poor. Select Books, Singapore: 511–26.

Turnbull S (2015) Sustaining society with ecological capitalism. Human Systems Management 34: 17–32.

Turnbull S (2016) Terminating currency options for distressed economies. Athens Journal of Social Science 3: 195–214.

Turnbull S (2017) Democratising the wealth of cities: Self-financing urban development. Environment and Urbanization 29: 237–50.

Discuss this piece

The Ecocentric Alliance runs a listserv (email discussion group) for people sharing an ecocentric worldview, as outlined in this basis for agreement. The listserv is a forum for discussing Earth-centred issues, including those raised in pieces in The Ecological Citizen. You can find out more about joining here.

Photo by Environment Agency Survey Open Data

The post A vision for an ecocentric society and how to get there appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A commons is a way to express a very old idea—that some forms of wealth are foundational to the wellbeing of life and belong to all of us; and that these community resources must be actively protected and managed for the good of all. Currently there is no automatic mechanism within the market to protect, build and extend the commons, nor is there any institution that presently exists to do so. ‘A Commons Equity Society’ is a prototype design for a community wealth-building network that uses the surplus of for-profit companies to develop community owned income and assets, thereby transforming companies into engines of social change.

What if the surplus realized by productive capital of a region of territory would not go to absentee owners but would be re-invested in the local economy through a kind of Commons Trust? This is the proposal of the Commons Equity Society, as proposed by Shann Turnbull and others. Read their proposal below:

Commons Equity Society by P2P Foundation on Scribd

Photo by Overpass Light Brigade

The post A New Institution to Build Commons Capital, Shared Wealth & Community Wellbeing appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Shann Turnbull argues:

“The purpose of this note is to suggest how to connect the value of money to the natural environment to allow both society and the environment to exist together on a symbiotic perpetual basis. This would correct the current problem of modern official money, and the numerous complementary currencies tethered to them, that are not fit for purpose because amongst other reasons their value cannot be specified by any one or more specific quantities of real goods and/or services. The value of money has become indefinable, unpredictable and not subject to control by any Nation State. Central banks of each nation try to manipulate its value but are overwhelmed by external factors like their nation’s terms of trade, government policies, international interest rates, currency wars, exchange controls, hedge funds, speculators, market sentiments and unpredictable financial problems.

So official money is not fit for the purpose for determining the prices of real things to allow their efficient, effective and/or sustainable allocation by the “invisible hand” of markets.

Intelligent people from another planet would think that humans who believed in a benign invisible hand were either mad and/or money has become a religion.

While there is no fully satisfactory basis for establishing a standard unit of sustainable value in each bioregion of the world, the least worst political, social and economically acceptable approach could be the retail value of electricity (Kwhrs) generated by a producer/consumer cooperative using energy from benign renewable resources.

Some of the compelling reasons for pegging, but not backing, the value of money in each bioregion to Sustainable Energy Dollars (SEDs=$Z), are:

(i) Creating a relative cost advantage for generating renewable energy to reduce and/or remove the need for carbon trading or taxing . The cost advantage arises as interest costs are removed 1 for investment in electricity production from any source. As the investment cost of generating electricity from renewable energy are much larger per Kwhr generated from burning carbon, renewable energy becomes more competitive.

(ii)Energy consumption correlates well with GDP.

(iii)Energy consumption is an essential requirement to sustain prosperity in modern societies. So energy consumption is also an indicator of the quality of a sustainable society.

(iv)A single service of nature that is so fundamental for sustaining life on the planet in perpetuity provides a basis for a highly participative, transparent and democratic governing architecture to minimise self-interested manipulation by minority interests that could arise from using a basket of commodities whose composition would need to be changed over seasons, regions and technological change by governing elites in each region without necessarily recognising long term sustainable issues like climate change.

(v) Market forces are created for distributing the global population to bioregions that possess advantages in the production of benign renewable energy.”

The proposal above does “not explain the profound significance of establishing a sustainable standard unit of value, or using self-liquidating money from a negative interest rate that removes money as a store of value so that role of money is reduced to being ONLY a medium of exchange. These points are developed in my cited reference at the end of my 500 words.

(Refer to:‘Terminating currency options for distressed economies’,at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2709413.)

A brief outline follows:

Because we have standards for weights and measures anyone can create tables and chairs of standard sizes and weights.

So a standard reference unit of value allows anyone to create contracts to exchange goods and services to democratise the creation of credit/money. The conversion of private credits into public money can then be achieved by credit insurance that guarantees the liquidation of democratically created credits/money.

The cost of the credit insurance would be carried by the contract used as money to create a negative interest rate. This provides a third way for terminating the existence of bottom up democratically created money.
No central bank is required as proposed by Mary Mellor or James Robertson.

The processes would mostly be regulated by supply and demand market forces for goods, services, investments and credit insurance.”Photo by Sunday’s child Photo by Eva Cristescu

The post Money should be tethered to a physical resource appeared first on P2P Foundation.

” just as standards of weights and measures are determined independently of those that use them as a common good.”

An interesting argument by Shann Turnbull:

(via email)

“I cannot see how money can become democratic unless its value is determined independently of the financial system just as standards of weights and measures are determined independently of those that use them as a common good.

A local standard of value established in each bio-region would allow anyone in that region to enter intro contract to exchange goods and services with reference to the accepted standard. There would be no need for either a centralised or distributed ledger even if one was kept.

Establishing the standard of value on a democratic basis becomes a governance problem not a financial one. Millions of producer and/or suppliers of benign renewable energy being shared through a cooperative creates a democratic governance arrangement that unlike LIBOR or foreign exchanges could have its value cross checked by millions of its stake holding suppliers/consumers.

I would caution the call of requiring money to be created without debt unless you also specify “Bank” debt. If we are going to use money as a medium of exchange it will be creating private peer to peer debt!

If you want democratic money then we cannot have money that creates money by earning interest. The ability of money to earn interest also misallocated resources to creating money rather than investing in real things that can increase prosperity on a sustainable basis without growth and even with de-growth.”

The post Money as a Commons requires a Local Standard of Value appeared first on P2P Foundation.