Harvesting Pad 15: Gerald Dillenbeck

Part of "DandDTrans," a community of inquiry and action regarding the role that dialogue and deliberation can play in addressing the mega-crises of our time

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Image courtesy of www.NewStories.org

[Gerald Dillenbeck]

[gdill52@sbcglobal.net]

Please use the this space to share your thoughts now about Tom’s original question and what occurred for you over this past month of involvement: What do we, as members of the dialogue and deliberation community of practice, have to be and do to enable our most positive transformational impact in the face of emerging global crises which fundamentally challenge our business-as-usual habits and systems?

Use the queries below if they help but don’t feel bound to respond to them or be in any way limited by them. Tell the stories and give the details that will make your ideas and experiences come alive.

Please write your post in the "My DandDTrans Story" Isection below the three prompts that follow:

What you gained: What new insights, challenges, ideas, inquiries, or actions came up for you from your participation this past month? What possibilities have opened up or been further reinforced?

What you experienced: How did you feel or change at different points in this process? Which processes did you participate in? Which were new to you? For processes you’ve experienced before, what was it like doing them online? What worked for you, and why? What didn’t? How might you use or change these processes on another occasion? What about the web tools used? Maestro? Hackpads? Zoom (if you experienced that)? Any others?

What next: What are you doing, will do or might do as related at least in part to the question that brought us together and/or as a result of what we have done together? Who else would (might) you involve?

My DandDTrans "Story"

Please post below as desired. Feel free to copy the urls from other pad to refer to things you have written elsewhere.

This winter, while the Transitional Redemptorist process was in full swing and sway, I was in the midst of designing a cooperative economic network for some non-profits and their perhaps equally redemptorist constituencies: people living in rehab shelter, families struggling with mental illness, reconnecting after being torn apart by imprisonment and/or histories of chronic child neglect.

I like this word, redemptorist,. This seems an appropriate era for recycling it from the prior millennium when it was sometimes used to refer to indentured servitude. It is an excellent concept for a cooperative economist. To redeem is to "buy oneself back." In a post-millennial perspective, this feels like what we want to do together, to redeem our parasitic anthropocentric selves from climatic changes that threaten not only our own species, but our home, our Earth, and all her natural "pay-it forward" passive-solar fueled systems. As would-be mentor-facilitators of this evolving/resolving redemptive intention, our economic project emerges by looking through our competitive, eco-illogical, pathologies, to discover therapeutic adventures living in profound solidarity with ourselves, each other, and Earth.

While I may not recall the historically accurate sequence of unfolding, I believe what came first were two poems, as follows:

To Communion Mentors

Hosting optimized self-perpetuating

self-sustaining

self-defining regenerative spaces

for eco-logical cooperative choice-making

emerges a wise,

if maybe kinda spooky shamanic,

Eco-facilitation mentors normative orthopraxis

with Optimally Continuous Quality Improvement (OCQI)

performance standard permaculture design

and Original positive teleological Intent.

While holding eco-normic actions,

natural systems emerge more fully, globally,

from well-composted soil.

Economic sanity issues diastolically withdrawn

from ego-dominant irrationality.

Whether my faith declares

our ecological spiritual rights of nature,

or my intelligence designs

my-our ecological natural rights of biometric function,

divestment from extractive commodity-rooted over-investment

predicts richer and deeper yields,

with less risk of loss and dissonance,

within cooperatively rooted diversity of Earth.

Economic systems sustain self-optimizing Trees of Life

when we invest every breath

moment

thought

discussion

discernment

choice

meme

paradigm in cooperative inclusive Earth-Care spaces,

shared karmic vocation to grow

our mutually parasitic polyculturing economy.

Pathology has over-valued ego-dominant win-lose

unredeeming strategies

so our permaculture wise design

discovers therapy divesting of egocentric

incorporated

commodified

self-swelling strategies to win alone,

as if no longer interdependently

generating the very air we breathe

sounds we hear,

frequencies we see,

rhythms we prehend.

We are learning nature's deep eco-logic,

regenerative optimization invests in (0) sum global

win-win fair-share policies,

mutually prioritizing our subsidiarity to Earth's logic,

radiantly warm and light passive-solar consuming,

producing our revolving seasonal economic orbit,

webbing, weaving, warping global network,

tipping toward Original Intent's Omega point,

pacific eco-mindful balancing orthopraxis.

Green Revolution evolution

resolving dissonance within this Great Transition season,

producing new leaves of grass-fed transactions,

exchanging gratitude for winter's hibernation,

as Right-brained Yin inductively, eco-inclusively, leans

balancing her over Yanged Left-brain dominance

of ego-centric individualism.

Discovering spirit,

uncovering nature.

Nothing more,

if nothing less, or left over, or lost to

non-polynomially entropic despair,

hopelesssly confusing chaos.

Earth's righteously regenerative design

reveals spirit's leftover,

emergently abundant grace of incarnation,

our (0)-sum win-win global game

positively balanced spacetime economy,

thermomagnetic balanced deep ecologic harmony,

less marching in extractive market squares,

more dancing in globally networking circles,

singing active peace

wisdom's permaculturing psalm.

Greatest effect with least loss,

suffering,

winnow higher risk investments

selecting,

saving,

redeeming cooperative orthopraxis,

our polyculture's historic meaning

confluently drawing

resolving

each soul's unformed eco/ego-balancing function.

Stepping Into Dissonance

No one of us

and all of us together

believe in optimal power within

in total absence of any power among,

without.

Short-sightedness evolves

short-mindedness is

small-mindedness,

pretending Self and Other and Earth

are not eternally interdependent.

Pain and loss and blindness

cause long-sited suffering,

wrestling with God,

great aerobic exercise,

does not bully ourselves,

or Others,

or God,

and most certainly not Earth

in this her eternally holy Day.

Only competitive assumptions wrestle against;

while cooperative eco-normic awareness

wrestles with,

side by side,

each challenge shared.

Wrestling is dissonance resolving contention

toward harmonic contentment,

diminishing confusion to

chronic suffering of advent,

just the right amount of pain and ego-loss

for adventure's eco-redeemer,

perpetually-becoming birth,

eternally belonging,

flowing confluently free of unnatural restraint.

Pain, loss, dissonance deny

optimistic accidental history

but may ecologically coincide

with interactive mutually-held hope

that peace and justice full-spectrum rainbows

optimally emerge from each incarnation's incubating life.

While I was writing the above, and somewhat more (www.gdill52.com), and listening to the wisdom of Transition-Mentoring voices of D&D, I was supposed to be working on an article for the Community Development Association on the topic of cooperative community economic development, adapting a Permaculture Design frame for this admittedly ambitious task. The current draft of that project follows, heavily influenced by questions and issues I heard emerging within myself while listening to you. So, it wanders around a little too much; maybe a lot too much:

Permacultural Community Economic OCQI Standards for Orthopraxis

1. Climax Community Development Question: How are we, and how are we not, optimizing permanent enculturation, well-being development and design outcomes with, for, and by the full diversity of natural systems on, in, and above Earth?

2. Problem: How do we harvest development strategies demonstrating regeneratively diastatic economic and community performance standards? What are our Optimal Continuous Quality Improvement (OCQI) standards and principles, our economic and community development professional standards? Are they appropriately networked and prioritized to deal with global issues like climate change and the international challenges of degraded water, soil, and atmosphere?

3. Solution: Natural systems design and development paradigms, such as Buckminster Fuller’s Synergetics, Deep Ecology (e.g. philosophical, teleological and sociopsychological systems analysis within various Taoist and Buddhist and Shamanic cultures and linguistic-iconic systems), and Permaculture Design Educators, may share a strategic optimization principle of dynamically balancing positive function, called the Trim Tab effect, by Fuller, or the “tipping point” flow/functional change threshold in systems theory, and Permaculture Design projects, to produce self-regenerative, stable and resilient polycultural systems, and communities.

Strategic Questions about Post-Millennial Community Development

Global missions to symbiotically reverse climate warming and growing friction between those with profound economic buoyance and those without sufficient natural resources for full human development are popping up post-millennially like wild mushrooms. A rapidly growing natural system-reform and protection movement spreads through Eastern and Western religious sectors, ecological-economic cooperative information networks, and justice advocates of every “special interest” stripe. Is this engorging fascination with regenerative systems and bionic information processors an evolutionary virus, perhaps fueled by a spreading cooperative economic information network as accessible as a cell phone or laptop? Are ecological, economic, climate, social, racial, gender justice constituencies acting less specialized and more mutually mobilized for something that might be called Earth Justice?

Where might Community Developers ride on this bus? How many of us have already assigned ourselves an urgent seat for this journey? Do community developers and organizers wrestle with a critical, tipping point question: Has the time for Business As Usual approaches to social and economic systems development become too short? How might we effectively facilitate an economic system reversal away from extractive win-lose capital-based value exchanges? Are we headed for collective and climatic bankruptcy rather than the Climax Community[1] goal of permaculture design?

Permacultural Ethology as Exegetical Systemic Praxis

My own experience and training in public administration and community development traveled from organizing affordable housing cooperatives, to building multi-sectoral alliances for regional ecological policies and procedures, and then went to grant and contract resourcing for non-profits sharing a desire to respond to those left behind by our economically- and culturally-stratified society. Looking back through this vocational career, I find myself rediscovering an earnest desire to challenge assumptions about ethically acceptable behavior of our political and social and economic systems. More recently, I have begun theoretical and strategic design for a ReGenesis Project, while working on Permaculture Design certification. We plan to grow a rich and deeply organic cooperative economic network, while discussing together our emerging community and economic orthopraxis standards.

Permacultural practice evolves polycultural intent, like growing a garden, farm, or harvesting both renewable and non-renewable resources of any kind. Polycultures share a mutually contrasting spectrum with monocultures, which reside on the darker, more negative, less sustainable and inclusive, less lively and healthy end of our culturally comparative divide. Optimally functioning polycultures are organically integrated, multi-systemically harmonious, diversely inclusive, ergodic[2] self-perpetuating, self-care solidarity environments; a superlative perennial garden, or well-designed 0-carbon balanced, multi-functional property, or person, or Climax Community, or economy, or paradigm.

Permaculture has agrarian roots, deriving from “permanent agriculture” (Mollison and Holmgren), but has post-millennially morphed into an eco-systemic agenda to regenerate stable systems growing densely polymorphic between our Exterior Landscape, what Fuller calls our physical universe, and the Interior Landscape of metaphysical universes, like minds and their missions to derive information and systemic pattern out of non-polynomial noise and chaos. How, what, why, when and where we communicate and invest is our permacultural praxis. Nutrition and health outcomes reach for optimally sustainable diastatic[3] resolutions by developing cooperative, integrative, and self-regenerative economic performance, ethical principles of reverse-hierarchical subsidiarity, and inclusive solidarity in deriving choices, policies, procedures, and intervention strategies.. When mutually-cooperative economic intent and ecological systemic practice produce synergetic outcomes, then we are at least approaching permacultural orthopraxis. The proof of OCQI standard performance is in the polycultural pudding’s perennial outcomes.

Ethical norms for community and economic development, and also justice advocacy, evolve, revolve, resolve through adept experience designing inclusive, complex, dense, resilient Climax Community cooperative economies. These idealized Climax Communities articulate, individuate, as they diastolically resolve away from negative appositive descriptors:

· Monocultures, not polyculturing communities, trend toward monopolistic over-population and systemic collapse.

· Monocultures tend to have increasingly rabid monochromatic behaviors; they over-specialize, and destroy species diversity, including interconnected functional-nutrient diversity.

· Monocultural self-apprehension trends toward Closed System entropy and stasis; “we are slipping, failing, cramped, crowded, in climatic systems decay.”

· Monocultural over-populating spread of a dominant species, approaching a systemic tipping point economic threshold, will expand borders of nutrient marginalization and sub-optimization across other wilting and disappearing species. Healthy diversity evaporates.

Permaculture Design intends to reverse monocultural losses and waste, to optimize polycultural community and cooperative economic development. This increases diversity of yield while reducing risk in any one investment. OCQI design standards for orthopraxis are indicated by self-regenerative positive deviant trend analysis. In other words, as monocultural trends decrease, polycultural integrity and balance of nutrients and resources will “open” the ecosystem to currently enthymematic, or potentiated, positive trends, deviating from the prior dominant monoculturalist trajectory.[4] Positive deviance and multisystemic dissonance, including cognitive dissonance, are negatively correlated articulations of each other, like positive and negative, producer and consumer, or yang and yin; they are reverse symbiotic, dipolar.

A permacultural frame for community development implies that we are a species of polysystemic-functional/dysfunctional developers, applying tipping point strategies to cultural and economic dissonance issues. We actively anticipate positive deviant places, people, spaces, critical-event urgencies, systemic balance between positive prehensile values (e.g. cooperative vocations and homes and families) and negative aversive disvalues (e.g. competitive win-lose survival strategies and “Closed System” atmospheres). Mutual development and design mentors receive negative feedback as adroitly as disclosing positive feedback.

Climax Community developers’ praxis benignly hosts gratitude and boundless curiosity about natural system patterns and dissonance, rhythms, flow and force functions and dysfunctions, octave ergodic frequencies of form, sound, sight, information systems. Permacultural developers cooperatively and inclusively notice/apprehend, question, explore, comprehend, and then regenerate sustainably balanced economic outcomes, uncovering and embracing win-win strategic design choices. For example, rather than designing a top-down power hierarchy, creating scarcity and competition for economic, social, and political rewards, the ReGenesis Project invites worker-owned cooperative models that also support friendly “challenge” competitions between recycling teams, to yield greatest repurposing effectiveness with least loss into the land fill.

ReGenesis Project

The ReGenesis Project, like the rest of us, is a work in progress. Our overall mission is to synergetically regenerate people, places, and planet. Leading with Buckminster Fuller’s Synergetics, folding in Permaculture Design principles and procedures, seasoning with some Open Systems Theory, compiling Positive, Integral, Feminist, and Compassion Social-Psychology, then diastatically incubating in a natural solar systemic oven, we hope to live in early stages of a more cooperatively effective, and inclusive, economic network.

This project will rise or fall with an alliance of marginalized populations. Indigenous permacultural leadership recognizes opportunity for unusually rich compost in the sight, sound, and smell of “weeds” gathering in rehab and 12-step programs, asylums, prisons and deforming schools. Yeasty fermentation, a hibernating metamorphic decomposition stage of development, demonstrates rich potential for full-blown diastasis; opening Occupier spaces for rhetorical articulation, and springing spontaneous evolutions away from agonizing repressive extraction of resources, work, life, joy, hope, faith.

Buckminster Fuller predicted and prophesied on behalf of this post-millennial transition toward an optimizing community developer functionality as facilitators of cooperative-based, win-win strategic polycultural systems. He did not advocate for cooperative cultural systemic norms and ethics and economics because he believed this was the kinder, more loving, or more faithful, or religious way to unfold our ecologic—although he apparently did believe those things. He expressed optimal systemic design as the incarnation of innate human accessibility to Universal Intelligence. Neither intelligence, nor integrity, nor communication could exist at all, much less anything approximating a cell, much less a community, without intuited/inherited, regenerating, cooperative economic intention and praxis. From Fuller’s gnostic positive and panentheistic = eco-istic, regenerative teleology he derived his rational ecological conclusion that all systems are synergetically reformative, regenerative, redemptively, salvifically, positively, integrally, harmoniously balancing systems by Original Intent of Universal Intelligence. If not, then only entropy.

While Fuller believed we are all born with creative, regenerative intuitive intelligence, he was also concerned that this self- and other-redemptive autonomic system of natural intelligence quickly becomes depressed in overly competitive, quick-growth encultured economies. How holistic Positive Psychology cover-models grow into marginalized skins and neighborhoods and preditive, capital-monopolistic economies is our story of contention, dissonance, or, in the Buddhist tradition, suffering incarnation. Taoism agrees that nature is unkind, but regeneratively intelligent; except for human nature with all our confusion about justice and economic values that are nutritional disvalues, at least for some “Other.”

A profoundly significant tool introduced to post-millennial community development is our globally cooperative information network, already experimenting with alternative currencies, exploring ways to organize cooperative information and skills for survival and artistic expression, to facilitate public policy and budgeting choice-making, ways to record value exchanges primarily limited by the strength of their deviation from a (0)-sum centric cultural balance. The internet merges consumption and production issues through an increasingly accessible, deep-culturally rooted cooperative "decomposing" digitalizing information system—analogical bionic[5] systemic information translated into polynomial binary information. We grow followers and access to allies and accomplices from within our local silos of economic activity but also on-line, where we usually have a choice of free or fee services; a mixed economic culture of “pay-it-forward” equity contributions to our cultural Commons, and “what cost the public market will bear” investments for capital production. The consumer difference between choosing what a producer has to sell or doing without, on one hand, and capacity to choose what I have to sell or what somebody else is offering for free to anyone willing and able to receive it is the difference between a free market economy and a commodified-only market economy; where market is an icon of enculturing nutrient value.

Post-millennial young adults and adolescents often feel culturally alienated by competitive economies of scarcity, and concomitant hoarding of nutrients and wealth, as do more economically and socially marginalized populations of all ages, races, religions, and nationalities. These two population sectors, the young and the otherwise-marginal, grow in hope for Commons-held nutrient values and disvalues. Democratizing developmental orthopraxis among at-risk mutual-mentors turns toward discernment of which nutrients we choose to water and fertilize within each preferably cooperative moment and day, and which we thin, deliberately, attritionally starve and neglect.

Cognitive dissonance protects all of us from noticing inconsistencies between ecological intent, and Received View orthopraxis.. However, already wilting populations have more experiential, intuitive, and therefore accessible values for collective Commons cooperative economic design. Many have been bully-encultured as “parasites” infesting an otherwise benign “Host.” While we universally hear and feel miserable dissonance about what we should divest of, give up, at-risk community redeemers more readily agree that community development, at least theoretically, abstractly, intentionally, is all about investing in each mutually broken, wilting Other, as part of Self-identity. This emerges, issues forth, a position of deeper ecological solidarity.

Regenerating communities thrive on cooperative economic investment. In destitute neighborhoods of divestment, competitive win-lose strategic investment assumptions about risk and value loss are both cause and effect, stimulus and response, in a negatively-trending extractive divestment feedback loop. Community degeneration is run-away neighborhood and international incorporated divestment. Cooperative win-win investment strategies both stimulate and respond to marginalized people, families, neighborhoods, communities, more familiar with pulling together in “Holding Actions” of resistance and protest of chronic stress survivalist environments, to sustain life by minimizing competitive investment risks and loss of health, however temporarily. Wilting populations are more instinctively and nutritionally drawn toward cooperative systems thinking, but usually without the luxury of strategic and analytic support.

Poor polyculturing mentors recognize segregation of impoverished, even dying, and nutritionally undervalued species as intrinsically problematic for our entire ecosystem, a harbinger of imbalance. Somehow, somewhere, somebody is getting more than needed, over-self-investing, and hoarding, building up what often become cancerous cell deposits or stagnant wastelands of dehydration, needing investment to flow over to the other side of the economic tracks and boundaries. If segregating economic vulnerability, fragility, is our problem, then integrating monochromatic wealth forecasts an emergent tipping point toward a more positive polyculturally sustainable outcome.

Further enriching gated and guarded, over-commodified and incorporated populations of superfluous wealth further adds dissonance to economic systemic function. Hundreds of thousands of us already live far above the economic tipping point where having more resources no longer adds to any sense of well-being. What other economic value could be higher? Yet, we occasionally feel defensive, perhaps even threatened, by outraged and screaming wildness, prophets, occupiers, mystics, seers, and messiahs, the occasional community organizer, gone native.

Permaculture as Emergent Teleological Orthopraxis

Permacultural orthopraxis identifies human mind-nature as indigenous to, and reflective of, Earth’s nature. Intelligent design, if unique to our human developer’s perspective, has only anthropocentric credentials for self-regenerative potential. No scientist could support this hypothesis. By contrast, Earth’s value-exchange economies within and between soil’s formation, water and air flow, patterned seasonal and diurnal frequencies, and symbiotic consumer-producer functions, are each secondary to our planet’s passive (or pacifist and parasitic, if you prefer) solar fuelled thermodynamic balance. All values and disvalues of formation, investment function, nutrition, healthy yield, and well-being derive from cooperative win-win, host-parasite ergodic self-perpetuating dynamics between Earth’s solar subsidiary regenesis and the sun’s pay-it-forward production of heat, light, and gravitational pull, empowering visual, auditory, all bionic awareness of air, water, and soil.

Solar fueled frequency strings of functional energy and information evolved Earth’s ribonucleic regenerative development with an actively cooperative investment win-win strategic default, resulting in our multisystemic and polyculturally life-sustaining, renewable economy of incarnation itself. Polyculturalists search the wisdom to follow suit, designing, developing and administering gardens and farms, residences and vocations, economies designed to incarnate an ecological Commons, functioning with a “stone soup” cooperative orthopraxis. Who we are and wish to develop together is, ultimately, all we have for positive-functional investment and economizing.

The ReGenesis Project asks how can our community’s economic design regeneratively optimize life? Where do we find Positive Deviant trends within negatively trending neighborhoods and families? How can we mentor and facilitate the further integration of our indigenous nutritional wealth deposits (generalizing the word nutrition to encompass positive values resonant with our full diversity of sensory receptors)? A permacultural strategic approach to development begins with studying the restrictions and opportunities of Earth’s healthy development and climate change. Just as a permaculturalist’s job description is to mentor and facilitate Earth’s equitable rights and positive opportunities for healthy polycultural development, so too an ecological economy developer’s job description is to mentor and facilitate humane equivalently subsidiary rights and optimization opportunities for all species’ multisystemic nutritional development. This would seem to open our frame for Community Development to something more like Earth Systemic Mentors.

The Permaculture Design literature is thick with candidates for what we might label Economic System OCQI Standards. Community developers and organizers look for ways to facilitate Climax Communities. Bill Mollison, progenitor of the term permaculture, gives five “Attitudinal Principles,” five interdependent ways of describing prime economic relationship: diversely optimize positive systemic confluence by minimizing negative dissonance and loss:

The problem is the solution: All information grows both opportunity and risk of tipping points; we explore problems in our system and seek to solve them from within the dissonant tip-pointing system. What we view as a negative indicator also has a positive aspect that is significant to problem perception, framing of issues, and potential solutions. We might see economic stagnation as not just about too much competitive power, but also too little investment around already proven cooperative models of self-organization and regenerative intent.

If the problem is cancerous wealth deposits draining vital resources away from full organic function, then we might try to mentor and facilitate integrative mutual-investment wealth incentives. We might water investment in cooperative living by sustained living with and for those most at-risk of failure to thrive. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin speak eloquently on this topic of profoundly holistic solidarity with economic fragility as orthopraxis.

Work where it counts: Discover opportunities to intervene in systems with minimal effort to produce maximum effect; look for ways to strategically leverage tipping points. Unmet needs equal work, and work means time, energy and resources—therefore design to meet the needs of our ecosystem and reduce the amount of work we need to do.

We have neighborhoods and ecosystems and species at risk and we have households and neighborhoods and nations and corporations looking for opportunities to prudently invest in preventive, holistic, multisystemic mental and physical health systems. Indigenous cooperation, within oneself, each household, local community. These are our lowest strategically efficient investment risks; and therefore our highest optimization opportunities.

Everything gardens: Humans are an intelligent self-conscious part of a dynamic and ever changing ecosystem; we must recognize the part we play in setting systems in motion. Natural systems include food chains within a nutrient-absorptive/regenerating Host web. Healthy gardens are only secondarily concerned with the number of elements in their system and primally concerned with the interdependent connections and functional balance, complementarity, between elements. The economic effectiveness of positive, actively cooperative relationships dominates the more secondary, but by no means insignificant, work of comparative, win-lose weeding, thinning, winnowing and pruning challenges to optimize and sustain full polycultural yield.

Infinite yield: The yield of any ecological system is theoretically unlimited—except by the limited economic imagination of system designers. Literally, yield means to produce a return for effort or investment;; implicated redemptive intent. Too often ecological yield is viewed only through a quantitative lens, yet nutritional yields are primarily about qualitative well-being and growth, synergetically functional relationships intentionally and skillfully inclusive of diverse yield potentials.

Currency is not valued by counting caloric merit; but currency value does correlate with the quality of investment opportunity and risk, while burning and consuming calories.

Work with nature, not against: Ecological succession is a fundamental concept in economics, referring to orderly mutually redemptive exchanges in the composition or structure of a cooperative community. Mentoring and facilitating tipping-point succession allows a system to reach its OCQI perennial, and perhaps millennial, regenerative potential. Evolutionary economics is nature working ecologically, and polypathic parasitic creators learning from our environment’s emergent systemic issues and surprises.

Resolving Economic Functions

Chronic evolving and critically revolving systems all seek pacific harmonious resolution. Permacultural economic orthopraxis is rooted in optimizing the functional equivalent balance of Earth’s systems.

Our value-exchange relationships are enthymematically, or pre-judicially, intuitively cooperative dominant. In the absence of mutually informed, positive exchange intention stimulating an event, we would be more likely to call that event theft, robbery, rape, pillaging, terrorism, rabidity, bullying, or sociopathology than a trans-action.

Ionic functions, also known as biotic components, are:

Consumers: prey; passively absorbed value, ion, function, form;

Producers: predators; aversive to being absorbed; actively absorbing value, ion, function, form;

Decomposers: parasitic interactors, ergodic relational; relative equivalent value, ionic, formative nutrient-potentiated composting design/intention;

Regenerators: All of the above, harmoniously “hosted,” or sited, for mutually supplemental, perennially sustainable yields with minimal risk of catastrophic loss of any indigenous species due to buoyant resiliency of densely interdependent root-to-fruit systems.

When optimally combined, ionic systemic balance decreases stress, marginalization, disease, or loss trends. We are meeting OCQI community and economic development standards, moving toward that paradisiacal Climax Community; with an equi-valent polycultural and diastatic economy.

Empire-building relationships between predators and prey dominate an economy with monocultural, and monopolistic, tendencies. However, more benignly balanced and cooperatively complex relationships between a web of mutual parasites and hosts, consumers and producers, emerges as normative for developing polyculturally sustainable economic trends, while minimizing risk of Positive Deviant loss. Chronic evolution and crisis revolutions resolve toward a healthier ecosystem. Positive Deviant systemic trends emerge from intricately rich and dense mutual-mentor decomposition, winnowing and harvesting of form, function, frequency and flow trends, analysis of production and consumption complementary functions, occasional eruptions within our framed network of value-webbed transactions.

An economic tipping point away from sustainable optimizing trends occurs when wealth deposits develop vocational patterns that are eco-dislogically predatory, and productive parasites respond as marginalized, over-populating prey. Over-crowding often leads to unprovoked aggression, abuse and neglect of young, a spontaneous decrease in childbirth, increases in infant mortality, susceptibility to disease, including various forms of mental/neural illness, apparent memory loss, autistic relational barriers and defenses. Natural systems function decompositionally, but without equivalent regenerative yield, under chronically moderate to highly stressed dissonant conditions. Evolutionary anomalies tend to pop up as internal dissonance stresses the status quo toward a new tipping point of resonance, resolution of imbalance within our ecosystems.

Community and economic life find teleological purpose within resonant, or confluent, informational content. Value confluence and functional balance between biotic components do not cause cognitive or economic dissonance. Taoists call this wise purpose for life contentment. Fuller’s Trim Tab principle is about the positively potentiated dynamics of contention. Aware of dissonance within economic performance, a contentious “rudder within a rudder” gently invites our ever-evolving systems away from an off-center trajectory, and toward a still emergent (0)-sum balance. Zero-loss “Climax Community” decomposition reveals deeply integrated, all-inclusive consumption and diastatic re-production functions (i.e., regeneration) with decreasing risk of value and content loss.

There is no static stage of optimization called “contentment” in real-world natural systems and communities. Hence, the sexier term Climax Community. Evolutionary emergence of positive teleological trends might better be thought of as a verb, an active-peace process, of contenting, confluencing, not dissonating. Rich communal economic life is about deep ecological learning from contenting and discontenting experience. In this teleological paradigm, content is synonymous to nutritional information, while discontent grows more statically, dissonantly, chaotically, disformational, dysfunctional.

Comparing synergetic organic paradigms, the unfolding economy of love (Fuller mentioned love as a synonym for how he understood the action of synergy) and seasoned integrity, perhaps wisdom, becomes analogous with Fuller’s fractal unfolding of Universal Intelligence.

Permaculture Positive Affect Learning Seasonal Metaphor

Decompose form/function Attend/Presence Notice/Apprehend Winter/Advent(ure)

Consume function Hope? Question/Doubt Spring

Produce form Faith! Understand Summer

Regenerate information Love/Peace… Comprehend[6] Fall/Harvest

Regenerative systemic process follows a redemptive economic cycle, in which we intend to “buy back,” reinvest in those outcomes with the best sustained yield-value and least risk of over-investment. Risk aversion itself seems to recommend becoming as cooperatively self-invested as environmental circumstances allow, as a first-tier priority for OCQI yield development. Self-redemptive economies lead to mutually-redemptive economies, lead to self-regenerating Climax Community development, into perpetuity, or permaculturally..

Cooperative Conclusions

Issues continue to emerge on our permacultured pilgrimage toward nirvana, despite, perhaps even because of, our most cooperative intentions. Optimizing outcomes with least investment, loss, and suffering, begins with winnowing higher risk competitive investments, in favor of investing everything today in who and what we intend to become together yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

When we see regenerate systemic structure,

then we know regenerative prime development function,

of time and praxis,

of space and sequential proportion,

of polyculturing evolutions

devouring monocultures in warm synergetic redemptions.

[1] Polycultures that have reached dynamic economic diastasis. Demonstrating balanced flow, function, frequency and formative confluence, without aggressive monocultural, competitive or otherwise dissonant win-lose cultural nutrient-value trends.

[2] Webster’s (1985) hypothesis of the path of energy [and polynomial information?] 1: Of or relating to a process in which every sequence…is equally representative of the whole 2: involving or relating to the probability that any state will recur; esp : having zero probability that any state will never recur

[3] The metamorphic outcome of enzymatic actions used for brewing, making yeast-raised bread, yogurt. Diastase is also the regenerative process of decomposition in the soil used for generating richly fertile compost.

[4] For a less theoretical look at Positive Deviance analysis and community well-being interventions, please see the excellent work of the Positive Deviance Institute (www.positivedeviance.org).

[5] Webster’s (1985) defines bionic as having normal biological capacity or performance enhanced by or as if by electronic or electromechanical devices. We use the internet to increase our biological capacity to remember, communicate, build relationships with non-local others, to see what is happening all over Earth, to hear and read voices from an unprecedented range of species and languages and cultures, to design, to dialogue, to make collective choices, to figure out where we are in the world, to purchase and sell, to entertain and recreate, to play games, to have a conversation, to take classes and learn new skills. This Transition Generation is increasingly bionic multisystemic functional.

[6] All systems are subject to comprehension, and their mathematical integrity…and trigonometric interfunctioning can be coped with by systematic logic. (Fuller, 1975, p. 97) The fourness of self and the fourness of otherness = [binomial and bionic] comprehension. (Fuller, 1979, p. 49)

Finally, just now, I sent out a draft of how we could begin the ReGenesis Cooperative Network Project in Connecticut, after talking some with the Cooperative Development Institute, some of the non-profits in the Hartford area involved with reuse, repurposing, and recycling, in one way or another, and finding that our local Salvation Army Captain in charge of the state-wide rehab shelter, serving about 400 men and women, is extraordinarily taken with this concept.

So, what I'm wondering is if anyone else reading this has any interest in using this model for your own work and home and family, your own diverse mentoring economies. Could we unfold this in other states, bioregions, municipal areas? And how would we ever sustain this momentum without it becoming anything less than our 24/7 vocation, otherwise known as an ecologically therapeutic lifestyle?

Meanwhile, I'm plodding through fields of snow on Connecticut farms for sale, looking for land to plant this regeneratively viral seed.

The proposal draft:

ReGenesis Project Cooperative Proposal

2/9/2015

FROM: Gerald Dillenbeck, MPA, M. Div., PDC

Email: gdill52@sbcglobal.net

The ReGenesis Project has both a rural and urban platform, and both vocational and residential functions, designed for synergetic self-regenerative networking, to develop measurable outcomes using Optimized Continuous Quality Improvement (OCQI) Permaculture Standards and Principles.

Our proposed fiscal agent and project host is the Salvation Army-Hartford (SA-H). SA-H will absorb the ReGenesis Project as a cooperative non-sectarian venture, holding a voting share in the ReGenesis Farm Cooperative, for rural operations, and a voting share in the ReGenesis Urban Cooperative.

The ReGenesis Farm Cooperative

will be composed of those who make a vocational investment in the farm’s various productive projects. Each farm employee-owner will pay one-percent (1%) of the original cost for real property owned by the Farm Cooperative for each cooperative share, (100 total shares). Financial decisions requiring a vote of employee members carry the same proportional weight as the number of shares owned by each voter. Contributions of other real property (e.g., vehicles, farming equipment) may be substituted for market value. Member applicants may self-invest some or all of their share value in the form of deductions from future pay, as financially necessary. However, these members remain in probationary non-voting status until this debt is fully paid through any combination of cash, in-kind, or sweat equity.

ReGenesis Farm Cooperative could potentially produce (list is intended to be exploratory, not exhaustive):

·Organic edibles and medicinals—vegetables, fruit, honey, grains, herbs, mushrooms, preserves, cereal, tea, pickles

·Compost

·Lumber, wood products

·Fibers, yarn, rugs, afghans, quilts, sweaters, hats, mittens

Tiny houses

Electricity

Permaculture landscape, garden, interior neural-scape therapeutic designer, weavers, developers, cooperative contractors, researchers, regenerators

Any profit generated at the end of each calendar year will be budgeted for reinvestment in the Farm Cooperative, to reduce indebtedness, or, at their collective discretion, owner-employees may invest in other cooperative owners and members, either within the ReGenesis Project network, or without.

Investors who want to sell their ownership shares will give first opportunity to purchase all or part (in 1% increments only) to other cooperative owners. Any remainder may be sold for no more than the total initial investment to anyone meeting the approval of the Farm owners. In the event that none of the above is possible, the other owners will take a loan from a third party, or, if that is also not possible, will work out a repayment plan agreeable to the selling owner.

ReGenesis Cooperative Residences

Both the Farm and the Urban Cooperative will include one or more residences. Vocational (business) cooperative employee-owners, and their families, receive priority for vacancies within residences, whether urban or rural.

The number of residential shares within each household is the number of bedrooms on the property, with detached one-room units counting as one bedroom. The monthly mortgage/taxes/insurance payment will be divided by the number of bedrooms occupied by each resident. Those choosing to share a bedroom with another adult(s) would equivalently share the cost of one monthly occupancy fee, while a resident needing two or more bedrooms (perhaps for children), would be responsible for paying two or more residential shares each month of occupancy.

Residential Farm members who are also employee-owners of the farm receive a reduction in occupancy fee in proportion to the level of their Farm Cooperative equity position. For example, if a Farm owner has a 20% equity position in relation to the original purchase price of the Farm, and there are 5 occupied bedrooms on the farm, then that resident would only be paying for 20% of utility, food, transportation, and contingency fund expenses. Residential cooperative members will establish a reasonable monthly fee, in addition to the occupancy fee, for all household expenses, with a modest surplus intention to build a contingency fund, to be used as needed for repairs, replacement of appliances and tools, for residential improvements on the property.

Cooperative residences, whether urban or rural, will incorporate a permacultural therapeutic mission. Residents will share a household practice demonstrating capacity to preventatively care for individual and collective well-being. As bedroom capacity permits, and residents desire, they may choose to invite one or more interim residents with, or without, some third-party source of income for room and/or board. Should this contractual revenue exceed applicable occupancy and household/contingency fees, the resident-members may choose to add this surplus to the contingency fund up to $20,000 total, but once that maximum is reached, surplus will be used to reduce debt on the property, if any. If not, then surplus revenues will be invested in other cooperative owners or residents, whether within or without the ReGenesis Project network.

New residents with third-party income may also come with funds to hire care-support. Qualified residents may choose to provide this care for personal income. Stepping within this scenario, anyone residing in the house with an undisclosed criminal record could present a significant liability to this cooperative effort. At the same time, disclosed criminal records for cases that have been resolved need not present any insurmountable problem to this therapeutic mission, and might even become a significant resource.

Interim residential cooperative membership merely acknowledges that often people will come to the residence seeking a temporary safe haven, a place to heal and grow and learn, and move on when they are ready. Others may find a place that they never want to leave. When this feeling is mutual, after a period of at least 12 months, then they may be invited to become permanent residents. Because resident-only cooperative membership fees are occupancy expense responsive, with no additional financial investment expected, residential shares are not equity (ownership) investments.

While legal ownership will be held by SA-H, on behalf of ReGenesis Project Cooperative owners and residential members, rights of occupancy, divestment, and further investment are collectively held by worker-owners and residential tenured members, limited to properties specific to their vocational and/or residential investment, with the sole exception of SA-H, with one vote and power of veto for any ReGenesis Project divestment/investment decision pertaining to real property.

All cooperative members, whether also owners or not, should expect to leave a ReGenesis property with what they have put in, no more and no less.

ReGenesis Urban Cooperative

The urban face of this ReGenesis Project, like the rural face, includes both residences and vocational investment opportunities. This vocational piece will incubate in tandem with the Real Estate Agents Recycle revenue stream for repurposing and recycling and disposing of “clean out” donated items from clients of participating real estate agents either buying or selling a house.

The Salvation Army agrees to act as fiscal agent for the entire ReGenesis Project, host central administrative functions for the acquisition of real property, as needed, house and hub the recycling and truck pick-up and delivery functions of the Urban cooperative(s), to receive contracted user and fees for SA-H property and equipment, as well as a 5% fiscal agency fee.

ReGenesis Project coordinators will mentor and train cooperative owners and residential members, with the exception of training SA-H already has in place for their recycling and trucking operation. ReGenesis Project coordinators will broker the relationship between ReGenesis Urban and Farm Cooperative workers and Real Estate Agents Recycle, as needed and appropriate to the missions of the Project and SA-H. ReGenesis Project coordinators will also take the lead on securing funding for both vocational and residential acquisitions, inclusive of the Farm(s), and produce cooperative network Memoranda of Understanding as needed. For example, if the Urban Cooperative owners begin curb-side pick-up of organic waste and truck it to the Farm to decompose into compost to be used to improve soil in ReGenesis urban and rural gardens, that within-network cycle would require a multi-party cooperative contract to optimize ecological benefits, minimize ecological liabilities, and assure value-exchanges are equitable and to mutual advantage of all parties.

Urban Cooperative voting members are SA-H, ReGenesis Farm and Urban formative owner-coordinators, and other owner-employees who have contributed 10% of their first 12 months’ earnings, and are invited by voting members to join them. It will be assumed that formational coordinators for this ReGenesis Project network have each invested at least the equivalent of their ownership stake prior to their first day as employees.

Non-voting members of ReGenesis Urban Cooperatives are those still within their first year of employment. Urban Coop owners may choose to employ those without intent to purchase an equity stake with 10% pay deductions, as needed, giving priority to those who do intend to become co-owners.

Any profit generated at the end of the calendar year will be budgeted for reinvestment in ReGenesis Urban Cooperative(s), to reduce corporate or individual owners’ indebtedness, or, should neither of those seem prudent to the owners, to invest in other cooperative members, either within the ReGenesis Project network, or without.

In addition to cooperatively enculturing therapeutic residences, ReGenesis Urban Cooperatives might produce (again, an exploratory list with no intention of exhausting possibilities):

Repurposing items being cleaned out of residences for highest and best local use donation, with least carbon-footprint for transportation and disposal,

Staging cooperative to serve realtors preparing houses for showings,

Temporary lawn and exterior care for property owners in process of selling their homes, often after they need to relocate,

Repurposing Food Cowboy from producers of food to non-paying consumers who need nutrients,

Curbside brown and green organics pick up for compost service,

Cooperative “Cowboy” taxi service,

Furniture repurposing, refinishing, painting, upholstery, caning

Repurposing art supply, delivery,

Natural building construction.

Music, poetry, narrative writers and storytellers, dancers, performers guild.

Organic gardening and food preparation, including symbiotic relationships between farm production and urban food consumption, waste production and farm decomposition functions.

Permacultural Design and Development economic-ecologic standards, public policies, cooperative contracting and financial systemic procedures, loan and investment products and regenerative systemic-value equivalency principles, dialectic-behavioral mentoring and incubation functions.

Regenerative Seed Investments

Other strong potential corporate investors:

Buckminster Fuller Institute: Their Fellowship Challenge attracts design and development proposals that incorporate Fuller’s Synergetics to incubate a more cooperative and equitable economy and sustainable ecology. Entering this Challenge brings considerable international expertise, technical assistance, networking opportunities for finalists, as well as a $100,000 fellowship stipend for the annual winner. Proposal deadline is in April.

Clay Math Challenge—P v. NP: Dillenbeck’s conjecture cross-pollinates bionic information system design and development theory embedded within Fuller’s work in Synergetics with similar dynamic principles more recently evolved from Permaculture Design, to potentially resolve the prime relationship between polynomial-spaciated (digitized-ionic) information processing and reverse (not) polynomial temporal-only implicated information, binomially expressed with (0) Core Vector biometric equivalency. While this remains theoretically significant, and problematic, to information systems, physics, philosophy, and mathematics, a successful published proof that Polynomial spacetime either is or is not equivalent to Not-Polynomial information processing trends, would bring further credibility to the underlying teleological assumptions of the ReGenesis Project, and the possibility of a $1,000,000 cash prize.

Schumacher Foundation: has been instrumental in the development of BerkShares alternative currency as well as slow-growth cooperative economics and advocates for ecological balance and sustainability. They might be interested in helping us underwrite an on-line cooperative economic network, incorporating and expanding the nascent BerkShares network still struggling to come to scale in Western Massachusetts.

Food Justice/Food Cowboy application: Connecticut’s former ReUse Alliance and currently thriving Food Justice Network offer compelling strategic overlap and synchronicity of purpose, mission, and perhaps technology.

ImpactFlow: A new social investor/philanthropic organizing platform for posting cooperative local and regional proposals with therapeutic ecological, economic, and socially inclusive intent. This might be another strategic investment resource both for marketing and financing the ReGenesis Project.

Salvation Army and ReMax are both international corporate entities. A successful cooperative network prototype in Connecticut could become easily transferrable to other states and nations.

www.gdill52.com

Still snowing. Time to hibernate dreamy adventures.

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Gerald Dillenbeck 8 years ago

vocation.

Harvesting Pad 15: Gerald Dillenbeck
Main Menu: Welcome | About | Intros | World Cafe | Bohm | Open Space | Resources | News | Calls | Help | Harvest
[Gerald Dillenbeck]
My DandDTrans "Story"
To Communion Mentors
Stepping Into Dissonance
Permacultural Community Economic OCQI Standards for Orthopraxis
Strategic Questions about Post-Millennial Community Development
Permacultural Ethology as Exegetical Systemic Praxis
ReGenesis Project
Permaculture as Emergent Teleological Orthopraxis
Resolving Economic Functions
Cooperative Conclusions
The ReGenesis Farm Cooperative
ReGenesis Cooperative Residences
ReGenesis Urban Cooperative
Regenerative Seed Investments
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