All photographs copyright © Craig Mackintosh

My time in Chile was encouraging. It gives me some hope in mankind to see a community rallying together to meet present historical realities. Not all is perfect of course. Not all are fully lucid and fully engaged, and whipping up enthusiasm, ethically, in a way that respects individual choice, is a challenge in leadership and patience (sometimes the shock of an earthquake or other disaster can help a little here…), but the good news is that the needed work at El Manzano has more than begun, and it should beget hope for the rest of us – that it is possible to awaken the people around us to unite around intelligent, historically appropriate plans for transition.

The current indoor classroom, at right

On my way out of the country I stayed in a hotel, on the fifth floor. While lying on the bed I felt yet another tremor. I think it was the seventh since landing a month prior. This one made me feel more uncomfortable than most, despite being one of the smallest. I coudn’t help but feel more vulnerable in a large structure, and surrounded by a city dependent on centralised supply lines. I felt that if I’m to face disaster, I’d far prefer to experience it within a community that’s progressed to some degree in taking back control of its needs, like at El Manzano.

Although the team at El Manzano promise to send us updates, my personal series will end with this post. I hope you enjoyed the series, and have come away with a better grasp of the scope of the work happening with PRI Chile (Eco Escuela El Manzano). I also hope that those considering venues for their permaculture training will put this developing permaculture university onto their short list. You will learn a great deal, in very pleasant environs, and your tuition fees will support the development of what is fast becoming an excellent template for sustainable development. We would like support such endeavours on every continent, so that they can in turn help establish and support regional satellite projects. In this way we can raise the profile of permaculture – taking it out of a purely academic or idealistic ‘concept phase’, and pushing it into mainstream consciousness as a practical, viable alternative to our present political, economic and consumer madness.

I thought I’d close more pictorially – showing images of the area to further motivate prospective students to consider Eco Escuela El Manzano as an excellent place to learn. Although the base of a healthy society – indeed, the central platform upon which it must be built – is sustainable agriculture, the great news is that at places like El Manzano it’s possible to learn, and contribute to, even more than that. On the foundation of sustainable agriculture, El Manzano is attempting to erect a structure of mutually beneficial community interactions that include other key components of a truly permanent culture – including participatory democracy and sustainable economics – elements students would do well to observe along with their on-the-ground training, so they can take these concepts home with them too.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with a few photos from areas near El Manzano:

Thanks to all the El Manzano team for spending some time with me and giving me opportunity to share your work with the world. Please keep doing what you’re doing!

My time in Chile is almost at an end. But, before I go, I want to share with you the present and future plans for transitioning the community here in El Manzano. They are not insignificant.

The second community meeting I attended during my stay was to discuss these plans and solicit community input and participation. It is the end of the agricultural season here, so people are in high spirits and also have a little extra time for contemplative discussion.

But before I jump straight into the meeting it’d be good to get a grip on practicalities of advancement here.

Financials

Funding for transitioning at El Manzano comes primarily from the following three revenue streams:

1) The farm, consisting of 120 hectares of land: 80 ha of Zone 5 (70 ha of primarily pine and some eucalyptus trees and 10 ha of regenerating forest – i.e. re-establishing natives along stream beds and borders to protect the watershed and improve eco-system services, aiming to eventually become 30% of the property), 5 ha of organic blueberries, 30 ha of broadscale horticulture (horses used for cultivation as much as possible), 2 ha of orchards, and 3 in Zone 1 intensive gardening. The farm is entirely chemical-free, implements permaculture principles throughout and is steadily transitioning to increase diversity and reduce dependence. It currently employs seven of the villagers, and others work, as expressed in the last post, on a very appreciative voluntary basis so they can share in the farm’s harvest – essentially bartering labour for food.

2) Eco Escuela: Eco Escuela El Manzano translates to ‘Apple Tree Eco School’. It is the educational business set up by Grifen and Javiera, and includes other family members as business partners and teachers-in-training. The school has trained 145 students, now Permaculture Design Certificate holders, since the school was launched two years ago, and is poised to teach many more (more on that below). In addition two students have completed their two-year Permaculture Diploma here (Eco Escuela is also Gaia University Chile, the only Gaia University node in Latin America), and 33 more are current diploma works-in-progress. Funding through permaculture education is, as regular readers will know, part of our Permaculture Master Plan concept, where sites become financially self-sufficient, and self-replicating, through education – a proven and efficient way to move permaculture forward sustainably.

El Manzano’s outdoor class, when weather conditions invite

3) Grants: Funding is sought from outside individuals or organisations for various endeavours where possible. An example: two years ago the family met with the local community and discussed the need to transition the village to meet future resource constraints caused by energy descent (peak oil) and climate change. They determined to petition the Chilean Ministry of the Environment for funding to help implement initiatives that would reduce the village’s impact on its surrounding whilst increasing their resilience. Jorge and Carolina were subsequently delegated the task of creating the application, and their request was rewarded with support by way of U.S.$16,500. Another example is funding for the house project, a demonstration of sustainable post-quake redevelopment, where U.S.$5,000 was secured via Artists Project Earth, and of course the assistance of the Permaculture Research Institute, and the likes of you!

All of these aspects take time, dedication, persistence and vision. The good news is these traits don’t seem to be in short supply here.

The community discusses a possible budget

Back to the meeting

The main point of the meeting was to look at the financials – how much funding they had, and options for expenditure. Central in this discussion were plans the family and the community had long been brainstorming, which would utilise some of the family’s 120 ha mentioned above to develop new building and land features to benefit both Eco Escuela (the eco school) and the community. It was decided at this meeting that the plans had ripened sufficiently in maturity of evolution and consensus in thought, so that Angel Carrillo, the architect profiled in a previous post, could begin formal designs based on community feedback for this development.

The meeting broke into groups to brainstorm the design concepts

And then the three groups shared their ideas before the entire meeting

Until everyone came to happy agreement, and even applause!

There’s more than can be described within the constraints of this post, but in a nutshell, the new development would fulfil multiple functions:

1. increase the capacity of the villagers to work together in mutually beneficial ways to improve their lives along highly sustainable lines – one example is in converting the Adobe House into a food storage and preserving facility, village bakery, and potentially even an outdoor cafe supplied with farm produce, all providing employment for villagers and healthy food options for the increasing student numbers.
2. utilise some of the land to build an additional classroom that can be utilised by both the existing children’s school and Eco Escuela, and to create additional facilities (kitchen, accommodations, etc.) that can also be utilised by the growing training centre and the villagers.
3. create public spaces and environmental elements – a walkable landscape – that will benefit all of the above.

The goal, and one that seems entirely within reach, is for the community to become a beacon of realism, inspiration and reskilling – making not just the school a source of education, but also making the entire settlement a lesson in appropriate development, and cooperative endeavour. The designs being worked on today, once turned into reality, will essentially see a permaculture university in the midst of the village – with maximum participation and benefits for the villagers themselves.

Reversing the trend

These initiatives for El Manzano have great potential to not only stem the flow of rural migrants into cities, where they become wholly dependent on a collapsing money economy, but to actually reverse it. As the quality of life here improves, and resiliency builds – and the social order elsewhere continues to unravel – sons, daughters, brothers will notice the change during their visits and will inevitably decide to move back home and get involved. This is another motivating factor for the villagers who have up until recently seen their community steadily disintegrate as people head to regional capitals in search of work.

People want to see their families come to life again, and this work is making it happen.

Culture of plants, not careless propagation

One thing that needs to be clear, El Manzano is wholly unlike many ‘alternative communities’ we hear about, or have been involved in, where several well meaning but oft-naive folk decide to converge on a newly purchased property due to their shared, idealistic vision of the lifestyle they want to possess. That eco-village scenario is said to have a ninety percent failure rate. Comparable to plants being mismatched with soil and climate types, throwing westernised individuals together in situations out of their element can be rife with tension, misunderstandings, maladjustments and heartbreak.

Instead, El Manzano is about inspiring an existing community, in situ, to consider their future, and to begin to work together to achieve common goals – goals based on an increasing understanding of current events and a determination to meet them head on. The work here is taking a village and transforming it from within. This is the transition approach – one that arguably has a far higher likelihood of success.

Better to give

One thing I noted during my stay was the feeling of peace oozing from the Carrion family. Rather than cling to land ownership as an inherited ‘right’, or narrowly considering it as merely a means of securing short term gain, they’re gaining great satisfaction from finding ways to use it to create something of far greater value, and in doing so feel a weight is being lifted from their shoulders.

If this attitude were to become infectious, the world’s troubles could dissipate rather fast.

Continue on to read Part X: Eco Escuela El Manzano, a Nice Place to Learn

Contemplating the past, present and future – and land redistribution – in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Chile.

All photos © copyright Craig Mackintosh

He stares back at us from the t-shirts of millions of youths worldwide. Che Guevara’s face has become one of the most recognisable counter-cultural and political symbols ever known. The history books tell us the man was famously sympathetic to the lot of the poor, and that his overriding passion was to fight against inequality, oppression, control. Che comes to my mind as I write this article from South America, because, in his rise to power, one of his driving ambitions, and which became one of his key responsibilities under Castro, was land redistribution – where he sought to break the stranglehold that was keeping the masses impoverished and robbing them of their potential. I bring this topic up, as, when I look at what’s happening in the world, and the radical changes needed to put us onto a sustainable path, the issue keeps coming back to my mind. These two words – land redistribution – strike fear into the hearts of the rich, and feelings of ambition and even violent revolution in those of the poor, yet, if we’re to stake a claim on the future, I feel we must, both rich and poor, come to terms with them.

Those studying how to address our precipitant trends – our dire soil erosion issues, our increasingly desperate water situation, and the complete vulnerability of our having made our entire large scale food system, from seed-sowing to consumption, completely dependent on waning supplies of fossil fuels – will recognise the need to harmonise our culture with the realities of biology, of soil science, and the urgent need to diversify and relocalise our food production, and, indeed, the production of everything we need for human habitation.

Forging a permanent culture, particularly in the era of energy descent we now find ourselves in, necessitates a rapid shift of food production to small scale biodiverse systems – polycultures. A logical flow should cause us to turn to face our current predicament – where millions of farmers over the last fifty years have succumbed to the onslaught of ‘get big or get out’ agricultural policies and have done just that; gotten out. Most of the agricultural land in the ‘developed’ world today is held, and abused, by Big Agri. Indeed, only a handful of companies control the land, seed, fertilisers, pesticides and even distribution and sale of much of what we eat. Unfortunately it is not well recognised that the same can be said for much of the best land in the South as well, which is also largely serving only the needs of the wealthy – inefficiently, as industrial agriculture is – to the detriment of locals who should have the rights to that land (example) but who are exporting their water and their best soils in the produce that feeds the North.

The question of how to rapidly, but peacefully, transition society back to small scale farming systems should be on everyone’s mind, and should be pressed upon politicians at every turn. But, we should be aware that carving up land is never an easy ask. Historically, land redistribution almost never came without bloodshed. Land reforms, whether in the form of a centralised government-enforced collectivisation program or government-enforced redistribution, or whether by bloody grass-roots uprisings, are arguably the biggest cause of radicalisation, revolution and violent unrest within regional social contexts. The reason for this is simple – they are based on the most pressing of human needs: food and water.

But, worse, and this is central thought to this article: despite all the upheaval and unrest, usually these ‘reforms’, by whatever method, fail miserably.

Often, for example, the peasant class who might benefit from land redistribution look upon the situation as a way to ‘get even’ or to take back wealth from their ‘oppressors’. It becomes a class war, rather than a conscious, sober-minded and objective effort to rebuild society for the betterment of all.

Conversely, it is entirely difficult for those with large land titles to objectively appreciate the demands and needs of the landless – particularly when profits are still being made and an entire economy is based on the current paradigm. Just as medieval feudal lords fought to retain their hold on power, our contemporary corporate feudal lords will be just as unwilling to relinquish it.

And, often land reforms come to nothing because of a lack of skills, equipment or capital. People receive land, or take it by force, but then end up failing to accomplish anything with it simply due to their own inability to do so. Or, the rapid change brought about by redistribution rudely interrupts market mechanisms in place, and people fail to build a viable new system to replace it from one day to the next. This inability to plan, to strategically and objectively implement – to transition – has been the cause of some of the world’s worst famines and social implosions.

Why do I talk about these things in the context of this particular series? Well, the community development here at El Manzano is, I believe, better appreciated in the light of its historical context – and from it we may draw some lessons for the social adjustments we need to work towards and press for.

El Manzano history in a nutshell

In 1931, an ex-navy man by the name of Sydney Raby-Matthews (the great great grandfather of Grifen and Javiera’s son Anaru) bought 600 hectares of land right here in El Manzano, converting it to dairy pasture and installing electricity, fencing and roads. In the 1970s his son Lionel took over and continued with the same. El Manzano was highly self-sufficient in food, water, etc. and became a bustling little village with a much greater population than we see today.

This was the time of the Marxist politician Salvador Allende – one of whose defining acts was to expropriate lands from wealthy land holders for redistribution. The abject failure of this move set the stage for the U.S./CIA-backed military coup by Augusto Pinochet, whose regime, despite being highly repressive, happened to favour neo-liberal capitalism during the cold war years and thus endeared it to the U.S., who were, by the way, only too happy to assist him and other South American leaders in a rather muddied and murderous history.

Grifen Hope explains what happened here at El Manzano:

As the story goes, armed young men with training in Cuba came to El Manzano and rallied the villagers to take the land. They held the family at gunpoint for a few weeks in the house. They destroyed buildings and ate all the cows or herded them off. When the siege was over the leaders took everything of value – the machinery, tools and animals, etc., and left the campansinos the land. With nothing to work it they abandoned and sold it. People left and migrated to the cities of Concepcion and Santiago to find work.

Pinochet offered the land back to Lionel but he refused all but 120 hectares.

In 2004 the municipal government zoned El Manzano urban and shared the land with remaining families, giving them all a small plot. They have since constructed half of the promised homes, installed a pump, electrics and septic tank. Half the villagers remain in shacks. Around this time Maureen, the daughter of Lionel received the land and began to repair it. With her husband, Victor, CEO of a mining company, she planted 80 hectares of forest, re-employed seven of the villagers and began to live on the farm again. Her three children, Javiera (now my wife), Jorge and Jose, all with a passion for the farm and a desire to live here, trained as agricultural engineers and rallied to keep the farm in family hands and make it turn a buck.

Heavy influenced by Miguel Alteiri and Agroecology they began a process of transforming the farm to organic and started working with the village to improve quality of life.

Javiera, in a quest for knowledge that saw her visiting several countries, ultimately took a Permaculture Design Certificate course in New Zealand in 2006. One of her instructors, Grifen, quoted above, an accomplished kiwi permaculture practitioner and teacher, took an interest in both Javiera and El Manzano – resulting in Grifen leaving his country, culture and language behind to start anew in a strange land.

Investing in a future for all

Seeing great potential right here in El Manzano, Chile, the combined drive of Javiera and Grifen helped move the family’s plans ahead apace. Together they are seeing the kind of community development I’m endeavouring to share with you all. This development goes well beyond the kind of thinking that normally categorises land-holding elite. As well as seeking to transition the farm to sustainable systems and increasing diversity, some of the ‘oddities’ include:

• Encouraging and facilitating participatory decision-making for the community.
• A half/half system, where the farm supplies land, seeds, fertiliser (compost) and tools, and the villagers supply the labour. Come harvest time the villagers get half the produce. No money changes hands, no taxman, and fresh nutrient-dense food goes to families who do not possess sufficient land, and for very little input in time.
• Victor Carrion, the very supportive patriarch in this picture, is subsiding the farm with capital as it makes its transition.
• Maureen Raby, matriarch, is working with the family to bring to fruition long-studied plans to change the pattern of land ownership in the village. Legalities have yet to be finalised, but portions of land will be leased for token sums for long term use (100 years) by the community – for community facilities and common spaces (more details on this in a subsequent post). Rather than give land allotments to people outright – people who are not yet capable of making the most of it, or who are not fully aware of the crises we face and the need to maximise potential (and who may otherwise sell it or simply try to work independently of the community) – the plan will instead provide strong transition elements that incentise community development for a win-win-win scenario with promise.
• There are several transition initiatives underway (example from just my brief stay here). In fact, El Manzano is the only official transition community in Latin America.
• Assisting in times of difficulty – example.
• Five of the family members are working together as sustainability professionals to develop natural capital in the land, provide employment for villagers, and build an education centre that will increase capacity for the excellent instructional programs run here (Permaculture Design Certificate courses, full Permaculture Diplomas and even Bachelors and Masters degrees via Gaia University).

This scenario is very interesting to me. South America is well known for its massive land aggregation by the wealthy. Here many people are either Dueños (owners) or Campansinos (peasant farmers). Landlords or peasants. The family could easily just defend their ‘rights’ as land barons – and live for their own gain – but, instead, see their energies targeting the needs and development of the community around them. We see a determined effort to not only keep El Manzano alive, but to see it develop along wholly sustainable lines – to create a community that works in mutually beneficial ways, just like the symbiosis and synergism found amongst elements in a permaculture garden. And, more, the ambition is that this community will set an example to the rest of the region, country, continent and world for how people can work to create harmony and all the other elements that, in total, represent true wealth – fertile soils, clean water, sensible housing, and positive social interaction and interdependencies.

For even greater context – although the children of the community here go to school, many of the parents are illiterate. As such, it is harder for these people to progress their skills for land or any other kind of development. The family’s work to educate the community, and to educate in historically appropriate ways to build resilience (given our energy-challenged future) is thus a significant, positive intervention from people with the means to do so. In the context of peak oil and the inevitable social upheaval that will come with it, such community investment ultimately leads to self-preservation as well.

I said above that land redistribution rarely occurs without bloodshed. One exception that comes to mind – an alternative, if you will, to Che Guevara’s armed approach – is Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan movement. Vinoba Bhave was a disciple of Gandhi, and is often regarded as his spiritual successor. The Bhoodan movement was his effort to peacefully redistribute land – he walked from place to place asking the wealthy to voluntarily donate a portion of their land holdings to him, which he then passed on to the poor. In total some 5 million acres of land were redistributed, entirely peacefully, by these means.

But, it needs to be understood that, whether delivered voluntarily or by force of arms, distributing land to our current generation would, for the most part, end in catastrophe either way. Today, with an alarming proportion of mankind a few decades removed from life on the land, we’re now far more adept with our Xboxes and Chevrolets than we are with plants, life cycles and hand tools. With all of our technological smarts, we’re barely more capable at living off the land now as adults than we were the day our umbilicals were severed.

As much as many of us loathe the system we’re held captive in, the reality is if it were pulled down tomorrow, most of us would perish. This, again, screams of the need for transition – for investment in knowledge and commitment to training; for investment in community building.

In this sense, I wonder if there isn’t a place for feudalism, of an ethically motivated kind, where well positioned individuals and corporations – rather than defend their castle walls so they can cling to riches they can’t eat and hoarding their wealth for descendents who can’t possibly defend them from starving masses – consider the real needs of the future and start to use their means and potential to invest in natural capital and the knowledge needed to create and preserve it.

Imagine if the more privileged amongst us gave up the easter island attitude – vying to beat the other guy to take down the very last stand of trees – and instead put their means and energies into rebuilding the future, and in doing so creating sustainability and peace? Imagine land holders in every region coming to terms with reality, and beginning to work with the people around them? Imagine how fast the world could change for the better!

We share this planet with 6.8 billion people – more than half of whom are packed into urban centres. Re-educating the masses in sustainable and highly productive land management, and getting them onto plots they are incentivised to steward, has got to become a priority. I don’t know about you, but I shudder when I consider the alternatives.

Che Guevara took up the struggle by force of arms, living by the sword and dying at the hands of C.I.A.-backed Bolivian forces – summarily executed without trial. Today, I would propose, despite glaring flaws in his personal character, he has become the symbol for what is now a purely conceptual and impotent struggle against oppression and inequality. His face is meant to represent hope for the underdog, and be a warning to the leaders of unbridled capitalism – yet it has become little more than a logo, a brand name to be exploited by capitalism itself; a feel good but ineffectual abstraction to give a little identity to young capitalist drones.

But, as the world’s population rises, and resources deplete, and competition grows, the prospect of renewed and increasing calls for revolution seems likely. Desperate times lead to desperate measures. But, I like to dream of another kind of revolution – one based on foresight, on objectivity, on cooperation and on education. This kind of revolution needs to happen worldwide, but, at the very least, I think I can see these concepts coming to life here at El Manzano.

Continue on to read Part IX: Building Community Around a Permaculture University.

Please consider contributing to this worthy cause – you can do so via donation links on this page!

The chicken/egg argument comes into play here – as a community builds new homes, while the new homes build the community.

Miguel Louis Suazo looks forward to moving out of his shed
[Picture taken with ultra wide angle lens - room is much smaller than it appears]

The night of my arrival almost two weeks ago, I was invited to an El Manzano village meeting. Being dog tired, I wondered if I shouldn’t skip it so I could work more efficiently the next day, but, nevertheless, asked what would be on the table for discussion. It was being held to discuss who, amongst the many poor in the community, should receive the new earthquake-resistant, eco-friendly demonstration homes Grifen, Javiera and team were busy trying to secure funding for.

Initially these homes were intended to replace the two homes damaged in the quake, but one of these families, camped out with children in tents with the nights getting colder, needed to work quickly to put a roof over their own heads. Waiting for funding was not an option. With a lot of assistance from the El Manzano community, they managed to bring a replacement in from nine kilometres away on a truck (pink house pictured below).

This event was, Grifen described, the first time he observed the community really getting together to unselfishly support one family. It seems to have set a precedent for what, you will observe from the rest of this article, may well become a continuing trend.

Having one of the homes already replaced has really worked well in this instance, as many of the villagers here do not have a place they can call home. Some families are even split up from necessity – sons, daughters, husbands, wives, are billeted throughout the village where a corner can be found for them. Now there was the opportunity for this ‘extra’ home to find a good… er… home! Given this understanding, I wondered what the mood of the meeting would be, and how it would progress. I wondered how such a decision would/could be made. Who should get the new home?

Needless to say, I was going to the meeting!

The object was for the villagers to work together to build two low-cost, simple, sustainable and comfortable demonstration homes – which would then be showcased to local government as sensible examples of reconstruction for the recent earthquake, for future disasters, and, of course, for better housing technologies for all Chileans.

Representatives of the village families met together to discuss who should
get the new demonstration houses to be built

Grifen lead out in the meeting. Rather than dive right in and try to immediately ‘vote’ or otherwise find a suitable owner for the new ‘extra’ home, Grifen instead asked the representatives how this decision should be made. In other words, Grifen didn’t come with a pre-thought idea of how to go about this, but put it on the community to agree on a plan for their own process of elimination.

The community decided to make a grid on the board, that would be a matrix of the few simple parameters that all community residents fit within:

1. People with land but no house
2. People with land but a ‘crap’ house
3. People with no land and a crap house
4. People with no land and no house

They then started to write down where each family fitted within these categories. Some people had a ‘crap’ house to live in, but were living on land owned by their employer, so they didn’t want to put community effort and funding into land that wasn’t their own. They agreed that they should eliminate families within this part of the matrix.

People without land to build a house on were ruled out from necessity.

Finally it was decided that one older, single man should have the extra home – as he had land, but didn’t have a house. Funding was tight, but there should be enough for two small single resident homes. Up until now this particular individual had been living in a shed that was tacked on behind someone else’s house (see picture at top of this article, and the one below), and so really would benefit from having a place of his own:

61 year old Miguel sits outside his room
– a shed tacked on to the back of a house

It was great to see the community talking these things over, objectively, and coming to a compassionate resolution. And, yet again, as I did when covering Sarvodaya, I saw that the greatest need for community transition is community awakening. Blending people’s hopes, dreams and ambitions and merging them in constructive ways to align with current economic, political and environmental realities, is a dance that’s both challenging to enact and beautiful to watch. It cannot be hurried, it cannot be coerced.

Now we have the community of El Mazano starting to comprehend the implications of climate change and peak oil, and choosing to work together, to help one another, to work towards a united goal of building resilience and growing their community along healthier lines. The Eco Escuela El Manzano team are merely offering information, support and discussion facilitation. It’s up to the community to respond, and it appears beautiful green shoots of life are starting to spring forth from the seeds sown.

The new homes will be simple structures, just large enough for a single resident. They are being designed by two professional volunteer architects, who you’ll meet soon in this series, and will be built by all the able-bodied people in the community. I’m looking forward to seeing this come together, and hope you’ll follow along in this process!

As for Miguel. Well, he looked rather surprised, but very happy. On his way out the door at the close of the meeting, he took Grifen by the hand and simply said, "muchas gracias".

Stay tuned for the next edition….

On behalf of the Permaculture Research Institute USA, I am very honored and excited to announce our recently formed partnership with Hawaii-local grassroots group Sust `aina ble Molokai. The two organizations have pledged to work with one another and the community by sharing resources to create an island-wide Permaculture and sustainability education program. This Program is part of an ongoing local effort to heal the island’s denuded and eroded leeward mountain slopes, heavily silted reefs and threatened water table. This initiative exists in conjunction with Molokai’s long-term goal for a sustainable future, as put forward in the community initiated plan “Molokai: Future of a Hawaiian Island”. Sust `aina ble Molokai is adding to that vision and is in the process of creating a 10-year sust`ainability action plan with the community that emphasizes Molokai’s living culture and people, living in balance with `aina (land).

Last month, fellow PRI-USA colleague Jill Ross and I took a trip to Molokai to and had the pleasure of meeting Malia Akutagawa, lead organizer of Sust `aina ble Molokai. Malia, along with Harmonee Williams, also with that organization, took us on an amazing tour of some of the sites that are important to key environmental and cultural happenings on the island. Not only was Malia an excellent tour guide, she is also a profound storyteller of Hawaiian history and culture. We learned a lot about her island that day. It was a great start to our new partnership.

Through this Partnership, PRI-USA and Sust `aina ble Molokai will create and offer Permaculture training/courses, within the context of island-wide, on-the-ground projects. Courses will be available for both local and non-residents interested in both classroom and applied learning on Molokai. This model, commonly used in Permaculture training, will provide an opportunity for locals to become trained Permaculture teachers, designers and project workers, with added hands and expertise outside of Molokai to contribute to the repair of the island.

PRI-USA will provide the instructors for the initial courses. However, as locals are trained in Permaculture, they will become the trainers. The people of Molokai possess a deep knowledge of Hawaiian traditional agriculture practices. Bill Mollison had a special place in his heart for the Island of Molokai. He based Permaculture on many of these traditional Hawaiian practices. The people of Molokai who possess this knowledge will make ideal Permaculture teachers.

Sust `aina ble Molokai is a local, grassroots group formed to inspire youth and all Molokai residents to work toward a more sustainable future for the island. As a community-led and driven process, Sust `aina ble Molokai adopts a broad and inclusive approach and draws upon the strengths inherent in the island’s close-knit community; cultivates symbiotic partnerships; and seeks diverse partnerships for projects designed to become self-supporting. Sust `aina ble Molokai conducts education and advocacy work for sustainability that honors traditional and cultural pathways alongside modern strategies for sustainability. Sust `aina ble Molokai draws upon the strengths of its partners and community networks to restore `aina momona (abundance) to the land and people.

Sust `aina ble Molokai recently put together a sustainability conference titled "Sust `aina ble Molokai – Future of a Hawaiian Island" in July 2009 for over 400 Molokai residents and 60 off-island guests. Over 100 volunteers and local businesses helped with the event. The conference raised community awareness of innovative sustainable industries and successful models occurring in Hawaii and around the globe as they relate to food security, green building, alternative energy, education, waste management, green economies/jobs, indigenous knowledge and traditional resource management. The conference brought several of the world’s indigenous leaders and green innovators to Molokai to share practical knowledge and cultivate fruitful partnerships with the community.

Eventually, as funding becomes available, Sust `aina ble Molokai would like to set up a permanent sustainability center on the island. The Center would teach and model all aspects found on the group’s 12-point sust`ainability wheel.

Sust `aina ble Molokai intends to meld Hawaiian traditional wisdom with western sustainability concepts and take a multi-disciplinary approach in its education and training format. Courses would include sustainable construction and technology, architecture and design, environmental and traditional stewardship practices, Permaculture, renewable energy, etc. Sust `aina ble Molokai intends to do outreach into the schools from K-12 as well as cultivate college/university partnerships that would aid in providing vocational training as part of preparing Molokai’s workforce for 21st century, sustainable jobs.

Sust `aina ble Molokai would like to include in its concept for a sustainability center a strong partnership with PRI-USA to conduct ongoing Permaculture education and training, with Permaculture activities taking place onsite that would include a food forest and stand of sustainable building materials accessible to the community. Ultimately, Sust `aina ble Molokai would like to partner with large landowners to begin healing damaged landscapes and ahupua`a that have been denuded over decades of ranching, watershed diversions, and a high population of ungulates (goat and deer) and have subsequently impaired the island’s heavily silted fishponds and fringing reefs. Students and interns learning at the sust`ainability center would then have an opportunity to work on large Permaculture projects throughout the island.

PRI USA has been involved with the Island of Molokai since March 2009. We have held three Permaculture courses on the Island, including the 72-hour Permaculture Design Course, “Planning & Implementing a Permaculture Project” and “Permaculture Strategies for Tropical Drylands”. In conjunction with these and future courses, we also continue to work on establishing food forests at two different local sites. We are very fortunate to have made numerous connections with like-minded local residents during our visits that are always eager to lend a helping hand and work together to care for the Island.

Permaculture courses, in conjunction with this Partnership, will begin on Molokai in the fall. We plan to offer a sequence, that will include a PDC, a practicum and a teacher’s training course. Check back soon in our course listings for further details.

It is our hope that this partnership between PRI-USA and Sust `aina ble Molokai will help the island reclaim it’s title as the breadbasket of the Hawaiian Islands or “`aina momona” (the fat and abundant land) and lead others in Hawaii, throughout the Pacific Rim and beyond, as a positive model of true sustainability.

Click here (warning: 18mb PDF) to see Sust`aina ble Molokai’s latest newsletter announcing the partnership with PRI-USA and their goals for the Island of Molokai.

See the original “Welcome to Permaculture Island” article for a more complete background on the Molokai: Future of a Hawaiian Island document.

For inquiries related to Sust `aina ble Molokai, contact Malia Akutagawa at sustainablemolokai (at) hotmail.com

For inquiries related to the Permaculture Research Institute USA, contact Nichole Ross at nichole.ross (at) Permacultureusa.org

What’s left of a small house in the El Manzano village, Bio Bio region, Chile
All photos © copyright Craig Mackintosh

Señora Nadia makes the best of the situation

I awoke suddenly this morning at 6:03am. Despite being jet-lagged, my deep sleep quickly gave way to alarm as I felt the bed sway violently and heard the walls creak. I groped around in the darkness for some clothes, whilst wondering, drowsily, in the style that’s typical of my weird sense of humour, how many people die whilst delaying their exit in this way – just so they can look half-decent as they watch their world collapse around them?

The 5.9 magnitude quake, centred only 58 kms to the south-west and 35 kms deep, was the largest aftershock people have experienced here at El Manzano since the big February shocker. But, thankfully, it started to subside before I even made it to the front door. I met Javiera Carrión, the hostess of the house, just as the swaying stopped. After reassurance from her that it was safe to do so, I made my way back to the comfort of my pillow, and then lay there, imagining what the much larger quake of less than two months ago would have felt like. I remembered Grifen’s description of the 3am chaos – the house shaken so hard that the floor ended up being covered in everything that belonged on the walls and shelves and in the fridge, etc.

A partially destroyed house in El Manzano – all the main structural beams
shifted and broke away from their below-ground segments

The February 27 quake had a significant impact on the El Manzano community, but, strangely enough, that impact has mostly been positive.

Let me explain.

Over the last two years, in the lead-up to the February earthquake, Grifen Hope, his wife Javiera Carrión, his brother-in-law Jorge Carrión and his wife Carolina Heidke, along with other family members and volunteers, had been working with the local community, trying to develop ‘a culture of meeting’ – a culture of discussion, planning, collaboration and support. The community here is made up of poor families and individuals – many making just a subsistence living from seasonal agricultural work – yet, despite the poverty, the western cultural disease of ‘every man for himself’ is still strong here, and, with an uncertain future ahead, Grifen and family knew this needed to be addressed if the community were to survive.

Following the Transition Town planning process, that seeks to raise community awareness and subsequently facilitate discussion on issues such as peak oil and climate change, and how these will effect food supplies and other necessities, the family sought to inspire the community with what they could achieve, if they only wanted to. Although generally appreciating the concern, many of Grifen and Javiera’s ideas were shrugged off. Community members just didn’t feel the need to listen. With their low-carbon existence and their tiny ecological footprint, it didn’t seem that these warnings should apply to them. They weren’t causing the problems, so why should they need to do anything?

But, then came the quake….

Grifen Hope stands by what’s left of the Carrión family’s irrigation channel,
destroyed just days before a new power-generating turbine was to be installed

Although only a few buildings in the small community were damaged or destroyed, other aspects hit them. People couldn’t buy food – the closest markets were quickly looted and empty and fuel was rationed. The entire country was without power for several days, and the El Manzano community for ten. Since all the water here arrives to taps via small electric pumps, no power also translated to no water. The well-intentioned but somewhat annoying family now became a lifeline – as people lined up to use their well’s hand pump, one of the items the family had encouraged community members to obtain over the last two years.

The post-quake meeting saw the entire village come along

Seizing the moment, Grifen, Javiera and family quickly organised a community planning meeting. Instead of a handful of attendees, now everyone from the village – all 82 of them – met at the village school to discuss the situation. The turnout was without precedent. The meeting resulted in organised bartering of food and other items to help everyone get through the difficult time. The Carrión family gave lots of food from their organic farm, while those that had smaller surpluses in specific areas shared theirs. The village families soon discovered that, between them all, they had sufficient food and water and didn’t need to look elsewhere. They were thus able to avoid the chaos and dangers reported from larger centres nearby, where looting was rife.

As well as creating problems with physical needs, the earth’s violent upheaval left many in the village with clear signs of trauma. Slight aftershocks would send women and children into shrieks of fear. The community action and cooperation really helped here also, as people came to realise they were not alone and that people in the community cared for them. The realisation they were part of a larger cohesive whole noticeably helped the mental healing process.

Ultimately, the earthquake resulted in the village placing greater value on the invisible structures within their immediate community, and the necessity, and opportunity, of strengthening them and building additional resilience into their lives. Where people had until now been keen to find a way out of this small village, the natural disaster has, it seems, shifted their priorities and made them look towards each other, and their own respective ability to contribute, to create a better life for themselves – right here, right now. Like I was this morning, but in a more meaningful way, this community may well have been shaken awake.

Postscript/Video: Meet Doris. Prior to the quake, before the little El Manzano community decided it was pertinent to seriously consider things they could do to build resiliency into their village, Doris was already paying attention. She took the advice of the Eco Escuela El Manzano team and got herself a hand pump, so if the lights went out, it didn’t have to mean she and her family would be without water as well. Hence her describing the fact that the community had TWO hand pumps to supply water after the quake hit.

Now the whole village wants to get a hand pump. Imagine that.

Continue on to read Part II: Visiting Dichato – the Town That Was

Please consider contributing to this worthy cause – you can do so via donation links on this page!

Grifen stands on a pile of adobe bricks retrieved from destroyed buildings
in the neighbouring town of Cabrero – which he’ll use in constructing new
houses. What can’t be used will simply be broken down and composted

Properly defining and orienting permaculture is of prime importance in its being appropriately applied. I’ve found it to be a very useful personal exercise. Doing so prevents me from straying too far from its practical origins and helps to keep it from being transformed into some kind of Utopian, escapist ideal.

First referencing Bill Mollison’s definition (taken from The Designers’ Manual):

Permaculture (permanent agriculture) is the practical conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.

Permaculture, as a design system, attempts to integrate fabricated, natural, spatial, temporal, social, and ethical parts (components) to achieve a functional whole. To do so, it concentrates not on the components themselves, but on the relationships between them, and on how they function to assist each other.

It is in the arrangement of parts that design has its being and function, and it is the adoption of a purpose which decides the direction of design.

Permaculture is concerned with the institutional and functional design of the dynamic infrastructure provided by the natural world in the form of ecosystem services. We are given a concrete means of intelligently managing natural capital in a way that strengthens it while supplying our needs in an ethical, conscious manner.

Our practical goal is to create designs that self-regulate/self-manage – just like ecosystems do. Without pollutants. Without unnecessary extra work.

The purpose of a functional & self-regulating design is to place elements or components in such a way that each serves the needs, and accepts the products, of other elements.

An Important Factor to Consider:

The context in which permaculture is applied is critical. And, I’m not simply referring to the physical, geographical, topographical, climatic contexts.

It’s going to mean different things to different people depending on who you are, where you are and where you would like to go.

It’s very personal. The reasons for being drawn to permaculture are driven by a variety of factors. For some, it’s concern for the environment, for others it’s economic, or political, or social – or, more likely, a combination of all of these factors.

All of them are closely related. None of them exist in a vacuum or in isolation.

The Prussian military thinker Karl Von Clausewitz was quoted as saying:

War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.

A couple of useful corollary statements easily follow (attributed to the American dissident thinker Michael Ruppert):

Politics is a continuation of Economics by different means.

Economics is a continuation of Energy by different means.

Money represents the ability to do work. Fossil fuels furnish the ability to do work – quite a lot of it, and, for the moment, relatively cheaply when one accounts for the finite nature of its supply in relation to what it facilitates.

Before the advent of fossil fuels (and modern finance), the ability to do work was represented by the possession of human chattel – or slaves. History – in its politics, economics, and social development – can be condensed into the progressive unfolding of how we have determined the most effective ways for our human needs to be provided for and subsequently how wealth is generated. Permaculture has far-reaching implications in altering our understanding what is available and what is possible in every conceivable area of human endeavor.

From that perspective, permaculture stands as a wholly revolutionary concept in form and function given what it can potentially provide us with. We collectively cannot allow it to be made into another alternative lifestyle affectation. Or some sort of Utopian, escapist fantasy which marginalizes itself by remaining at the fringes, alienating those who need it most.

The modern era – the Industrial Age – is synonymous with the the Oil Age. One doesn’t exist without the other. Viewing our present world through that lens, it becomes quite easy to understand the state of things.

Given the finite nature of the lifeblood of the modern world, one can do nothing but concede that the economics and politics driving it cannot continue.

As Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under American Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, once said:

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

Economists are very good at saying that something cannot go on forever, but not so good at saying when it will stop.

We are all in some way, shape or form, implicated in these statements. We’re all affected by this reality.

Ultimately, we all have to answer a couple of questions given the aforementioned: How do we best supply our needs? And who determines how that question is answered? These are longstanding historical dilemmas requiring practical solutions.

Our collective sociopolitical/socioeconomic situation is dictated by how those questions are answered.

This lies at the heart of what drove the formation and development of permaculture in its ethics and practice.

The "Hi Lo-Tech" integrated design methodology embodied by permaculture will become an essential tool in formulating the vision of a post-industrial, post-oil world and what it needs to look like in order for it to be viable.

In case two trillion dollars doesn’t mean a lot to you – here’s an equation to help put this into perspective: If you were to spend one million dollars, every day, from today onwards, for the next 5,500 years, you’d have spent just a little over two trillion dollars….

No wonder these people are getting upset:

For more background details, be sure to check out Money As Debt, and The Crash Course, and follow up with Thomas’ excellent ‘Money Literacy‘ series, where we seek to find an economic model that works for people and place.

If you have ideas on economic alternatives you believe could foster a permanent culture, send them as explanatory articles to editor (at) permaculture.org.au for publishing.

Donate via PRI USA (USA residents)* Other non-paypal methods of donating here
Donate via PRI Australia (rest of world)* Other non-paypal methods of donating here
*Please be sure to click on the ‘Add special instructions to seller’ link, and then type ‘CHILE’ in the field provided, to ensure these fund are correctly diverted.

El Manzano in Transition – Towards Community Resilience, by Design

by Grifen Hope of Ecoescuela El Manzano

1. PROJECT AIM
2. BACKGROUND
3. PROBLEM & LOCAL CONTEXT
4. OBJECTIVES & ACTIONS
5. NETWORKS
6. FINANCIAL INFORMATION

1. PROJECT AIM

The primary objective of this project is to assist devastated communities of Chile to plan and design their own resilient settlements, to quickly recover from the devastating Earthquake of February 27 2010, and to build long-term resistance to the future effects of natural disaster, economic, climate, and energy disruption.

This project presents a call for regional, national and international investment in living examples of good practice in the planning and design of resilient human settlements. Evidence of the outcomes from this approach will be used to influence regional and national government officials and policy makers to replicate the model throughout the affected regions of BìoBìo and Maule.

2. BACKGROUND

On February 27th 2010 Chile was hit by a ´Mega-earthquake´ that shook the very foundations of Chilean society. In total 4.2 million people have been affected, many of whom are still without basic public services. Approximately 1.5 million homes have been destroyed or heavily damaged, with an estimated 1 million people left homeless. Initial estimates suggest the recovery will cost US$30 billion and take 3-4 years.

On reflection it could have been much worse. While the quake was 500 times stronger than that in Haiti and devastation is enormous, Chile has fared relatively well. Compared to Haiti the death toll and damage to buildings and infrastructure has been moderate. With a long history of devastating earthquakes the Chilean government and people are well prepared to withstand, respond and recover from a large earthquake.

At this point in time the priority is still on the relief response and providing basic needs to hundreds of thousands of affected people. However, attention is now turning to planning for the reconstruction phase. I think some concise reference to the vulnarabilities of modern industrial systems to multiple likely future impacts of peak oil, climate change, etc. is warranted to explain why this local resilience approach is so important to advance, rather than using existing local national and international capacity to rebuild communities on the old pattern.

3. PROBLEM & LOCAL CONTEXT

The village of El Manzano, home to 28 families, is the first official Transition Town in Latin America and in a pre-earthquake process of redesigning itself for resilience to disaster. The village remains highly vulnerable to the systemic crises of natural disaster, economic, climate, and energy disruption. Many of the basic necessities such as water, food and medical care are dependent on external resources, and existing housing is not fit for human habitation. These poverty related issues have been compounded by the recent earthquake. As El Manzano is out of the main disaster area it is very low on the priority list for recovery. In response the community has identified its own vulnerabilities;

1. Dependence on electricity for water for drinking, irrigation of crops and animals.
2. Lack of access to land for subsistence crops, low fertility and low moisture holding capacity of existing soils, with dependence on unhealthy external food sources.
3. Earthquake damage to two houses making them uninhabitable, and a general state of substandard housing for the majority of village residents.
4. Reliance on septic tanks for household and human waste disposal, subsequent excessive use of water and contamination of shallow groundwater used for drinking.
5. Low participation in community activities and the design of a community plan for the development of local resilience.

4. OBJECTIVES & ACTIONS

The community of El Manzano has identified the following priorities for disaster response and recovery in coming months. These activities will provide practical training opportunities for local residents and permaculture trainees in construction of simple systems, and in regenerative design that can be replicated in other communities.

1. To ensure water supply for 28 families independent of the electricity grid for drinking and irrigation.
   (a). Implement appropriate solutions for the supply of gravity fed household drinking water and irrigation systems to generate resilience in drought times or black out.
   (b). Manufacture of PVC hand pumps for extraction of clean shallow groundwater.
   (c). Recovery of existing deep wells which can extract water without electricity.
2. To ensure local food security for 71 people by increasing natural fertility and water holding capacity of soil using locally available materials and recycling of organic wastes.
   (a). Establish 1.2 hectares of community garden to meet the vitamin and calorie needs of 71 residents.
   (b). Cultivate 1.9 hectares of community compost and grain crops for the food self-reliance of 71 people.
   (c). Implement a local food cooperative so residents can purchase bulk food in the village.
   (d). Development of soil improvement techniques and organic soil amendments.
3. To rebuild two houses made uninhabitable in the earthquake (affecting 2 families: 3 children, 3 women, 4 men) as a model for other residents to improve substandard housing conditions.
   (a). Rebuild the 40 m2 house of Don Oscar and family using locally available natural materials to be earthquake resistant.
4. To ensure appropriate sanitation for 28 families, reduce need for water and reduce groundwater contamination.
   (a). Reduce water consumption and contamination of ground water with construction of dry composting toilets.
   (b). Implementation of simple bio-filters for the safe re-use of grey water in gardens.
5. To support the community design process in EL Manzano and develop a Community Resilience Action Plan.
   (a). Provide a model of community-led planning and design for community that can be replicated widely in the affected regions of BíoBío and Maule, and around the world.
   (b). Disseminate the results widely to local and regional authorities to attract attention and replication in other affected communities of BíoBío and Maule.

5. NETWORKS

Ecoescuela El Manzano (EEM) is uniquely positioned to make a big difference in the reconstruction process. EEM has developed strong relationships with the El Manzano Neighbourhood Association and Youth Group, and assisted a core team to begin the Transition planning processes here. Relationships have been formed with the mayor and local council of Cabrero and their PRODESAL programme supporting rural women in small enterprise. A partnership has been formed with the regional demonstration centre Centre of Education and Technology (CET) Yumbel to share resources and expertise. EEM is working with the foundation Work for a Brother to duplicate the El Manzano project in some of the worst disaster affected communities on the coast of BíoBío. An existing contract with the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) through the Environmental Protection Fund exists to install appropriate technology during 2009 in a community demonstration centre, and in 2010 in all houses in the village. In 2009 El Manzano was recognised as an example of best practice in community development by national organisation Territorio Chile. At a national level Ecoescuela has been instrumental in forming the Instituto Chileno de Permacultura and training a network of 140 permaculture designers and teachers. At an international level Ecoescuela is a regional training centre for sustainability in partnership with the Permaculture Research Institute, Holmgren Design Services, Gaia University and the Transition Towns Network.

6. FINANCIAL INFORMATION

Ecoescuela El Manzano has committed to raise US$50,000 to augment an existing US$17,500 for this ambitious and important project in 2010.

A donation from you will help turn disaster into opportunity. Through redesign of damaged settlements we can alleviate emergency need, and invest in long term resilience.

Gracias from Chile!

advance to the worldwide permaculture community for getting behind this work. You never know – in the future you may be the recipient of such assistance.

Donate via PRI USA (USA residents)* Other non-paypal methods of donating here
Donate via PRI Australia (rest of world)* Other non-paypal methods of donating here
*Please be sure to click on the ‘Add special instructions to seller’ link, and then type ‘CHILE’ in the field provided, to ensure these fund are correctly diverted.

"Money" is nothing but a social construct that comes with a number of "rules of the game". In one way, "money" has much in common with computer operating systems: most users are completely unaware of the degree to which these rules are flexible, malleable, and allow very different designs. So, before we ask ourselves: in what way could a different design of rules lead to a different role of money, it is worthwhile taking a look at what sort of phenomena the present arrangement gives rise to. A telling passage can be found in Bill Mollison’s autobiography:

For six days a week, 8 or more hours a day, for years on end, we felled and milled trees; at the end of each day, we had cut all the timber for houses. (…) On bad days, we cut five houses, on good days, seven.

We cut about 35 houses a week. But one lunch time, pondering on this remarkable record, I asked the apparently simple question of all seven of we mill-workers. "Do any of us own a house?" We all looked at each other; none of us did. To get a house, one would in those days borrow $7000, pay for 56 years, and repay $30,000 – 50,000 dollars. It all seemed ridiculous.

After very little discussion, we agreed to work one day for ourselves and easily cut seven houses.

(…)

Many working men must be able to count such wealth, but they never possess it. Something is seriously wrong and you cannot see what is wrong until you follow each product and its financing through. If I build a house for $7000 and it is ten years older, I may sell it for $30,000. The same house is sold for more money again and again and again. A confidence trick indeed. Every time it is sold, someone pays for it all their lives; yet it was already paid for! It seems clear that, in a very few weeks of a whole life, we could provide for all our needs; shelter, food, fuel, fibre, energy, the lot. But we waste our lives in debts. – Travels in Dreams, Tagari, p. 829

Things are quite a bit more subtle than presented here, but this passage certainly is valuable for raising the question: how big are the implications of the rules of the money game for society?

If money is needed for some specific economic activity, there are a number of alternatives to obtaining credit from a bank, which very often is the only strategy considered even though it may not be the economically most advantageous one. One such alternative would be subscription schemes: a book is announced and the money to print it is raised through pre-orders at a reduced price. Such schemes can become quite clever: The Permaculture Designers’ Manual gives the example of a restaurant that handed out dated meal vouchers at a reduced price ("A voucher for 8 dollars, for one 10-dollar meal, at one day in July") to raise the money for major refurbishment. Here, something interesting happens: as these vouchers have an immediately verifiable value, they themselves become a sort of "valid currency" (in the sense of "having a verifiable value", although they are not "legal tender") that can be used to settle debts between people who use them. In the end, what the restaurant did was to enlarge the money supply in circulation themselves, rather than asking a bank to do such a favour for them. (Banks have the exclusive strange privilege to expand the money supply, cf. [1], and charge massively for exerting this holy power, in the form of interest, ultimately paid for in real economic goods and services!) So, the provider is using his customers as a "bank" here. Once one starts to develop an eye for this, one discovers a zoo of such "banking with the customer" schemes already being in place, from cell phone top up vouchers, to customer accounts, and even "company money" [2].

The essential insight here is: banks are not "holy institutions", and there is pretty much nothing a bank can do (save from receiving large government bailouts maybe) which people themselves could not do as well – perhaps even in a much better way, considering the imperative of re-investing surplus from rehabilitative activities to further speed up rehabilitation, rather than re-investing loot to speed up plunder.

Wherever people can agree on rules to regulate the flow of claims on work, they can easily cast this into an own currency. As we have seen, taking away people’s freedom to come up with their own rules of the game for their currency is a serious step towards the destruction of their culture. But, this works in the opposite direction as well: if a culture wants to retain, strengthen, or rebuild its identity, it is well advised to take a close look into the money issue and start to design its own currency according to the rules that fit it best. The objective of such a currency is not to drive out the transregional currency, but it should be made very clear by which schemes the transregional currency in the past has elbowed its way into its present dominance.

There are a number of such regional currency schemes in place, quite many of them being based on ideas of the Austrian Silvio Gesell; a key one being that of "demurrage:" holding on to money rather than getting it back into circulation fast is punished in some form. While this rule seems somewhat popular among alternative currencies, it is by no means the only conceivable option: when it comes to the design of rules, the sky is the limit of our imagination.

A very interesting and quite successful regional currency scheme was set up in 2003 in a rural district in South-Eastern Bavaria (incidentally the home region of the author): the "Chiemgauer" currency [3]. This currency is restricted to a region of about 500,000 inhabitants and is governed by a few rules easily comprehensible by everyone, which, however, achieve quite interesting different effects depending on the role of the participant in the "Chiemgauer" economy.

Key rules are:

• There is a registered association, the "Chiemgauer e.V.", open to everyone, which administrates, runs, and sets the rules for the currency. The rules of the game are not cast in stone, but open for being fine-tuned by the inhabitants of the region (through participatory democracy) as needed in order to deal with positive or negative trends.
• Formally, the "Chiemgauer" is a voucher whose value is identical to the Euro. Available denominations presently are 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 Chiemgauer.
• When person X exchanges Euros for Chiemgauer, this is done at a 1:1 exchange rate. If, however, Chiemgauer are exchanged back by person Y for Euros, the reverse rate is 1:0.95. Of this 5% difference, 2% are presently used to pay the administrative costs for running the regional currency. The other 3% are passed on to a regional charitable organization (e.g. a kindergarten, a music school, a museum, etc.). This "charity tax" is entirely paid for by Y, the person withdrawing purchase power from the region (the reason for exchanging Chiemgauer into Euros, rather than spending them locally), while X gets to choose the charity (which is registered in a database along with the serial number of the bill). Charities receive the money generated from this scheme as Chiemgauer.
• There presently is a "2% per quarter" depreciation fee on Chiemgauer, i.e. a bill becomes invalid after three months, unless upgraded by a stamp costing 2% of the bill’s value. This provides an extra incentive to keep the currency circulating fast.
• From the perspective of a charity, asking their members to make their regional purchases in "Chiemgauer" with them as the re-exchange beneficiary is a great way of raising additional money at no additional expense to their members. As they receive this money in the form of "Chiemgauer", they have an incentive to preferentially spend it on regional products.
• From the perspective of a shop owner, the fee rates associated with accepting the "Chiemgauer" are comparable to the fees paid when accepting payment by credit card. However, it gives local businesses an interesting advantage over chain store competitors, as an enterprise that works by widely distributing centrally sourced identical goods throughout the country (rather than providing functionally equivalent goods produced from regional sources) is punished by the back-exchange tax not felt by regional businesses (who can pay their providers in Chiemgauer). As members of charitable organizations are keen on making their purchases in Chiemgauer, there is a need for opportunities to spend them, so accepting Chiemgauer means enlarging one’s customer base. Also, holders of Chiemgauer are keen on getting rid of that money fast, i.e. tend to pay their bills as soon as possible.
• From the perspective of a (residential) consumer, exchanging Euros into Chiemgauer is a great way of supporting specific regional organizations that contribute to the cultural strength and identity of the region without extra direct costs.

This fairly clever scheme seems to have proven its value, as is witnessed by the growing popularity of this currency. It clearly illustrates what can be done just through the design of the rules of a currency. One might expect that much more would be possible if a bit of effort were invested into educating people about what money is, and how it works – or rather, how we can make it work to our advantage by appropriately designing its rules.

References:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking
2. http://www.disneydollars.net/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_dollar
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgauer, http://vimeo.com/4606454