Financial Permaculture

I've spent the last four days at a conference focused on Financial Permaculture.  "What is Financial Permaculture?" you might ask.  Well, that was one of the things we tried to define.  In my own words, it is integrating the concepts of both finance and permaculture in order to make finance more green and permaculture more effective.  The financial guru in our corner is Catherine Austin Fitts, a former insider who saw what was wrong and tried to fix it, and in doing so realized that it was meant to be that way.  All of the poverty, death, and destruction on this earth is a result of the centralization of the financial system.  The rich continue to get richer at the expense of the earth and all the rest of its inhabitants.  Using Permaculture, we have developed methods and tools to heal the earth and re-forest the deserts, but we will never succeed if we cannot heal the financial system.  

Permaculture teaches us to solve problems creatively and strategize.  We realize that to combat centralization we must decentralize.  We must take back every county, every city, every town, and make them serve the inhabitants of those places.  To do that we must know who the players are in our financial ecosystem.  Where are the pools and flows of money in our community?  Most communities are like a leaky bucket.  Money comes in and goes straight back out again.  If people start shopping locally, the money circulates like a fountain.  

Another important aspect is banking.  For each dollar you keep in the bank, it can lend out $10.  If you keep your money in a national bank such as Bank of America, your money is used to fund projects such as coal power plants in Chile and Pebble Mine.  If you keep your money in a local bank, your money is used to fund projects that increase the health and wealth of your community.

The third thing that everyone can do to increase the wealth of their community is to vote.  Not just for the person they think will win, but for the person who has integrity and is truly looking out for the long-term health of the community.  Get involved in local politics and find out who these people are.  We need leaders that are not just looking out for their friends.

The economics of growing my own food

I will not kid myself that all the hours I spend tending my garden provide me with a lot of economic return.  I do it mostly because I enjoy the challenge and the fruits of my labors.  The tomatoes I grow myself taste ever so much sweeter than the ones from the store, even more so because I have tended so many tomato plants that have yielded not one ripe tomato.  But every year my garden gets better, more efficient as I learn.  

But besides the pure pleasure and enjoyment I am getting out of my garden, sometimes I wonder what is the monetary value of my work.  This was acutely brought to my attention last Sunday when Matt and I bought four cabbages (because the moose had eaten all of ours) and some pickling cucumbers (because we aren't very good at growing them yet) at a farm stand out in Palmer.  I love supporting our local farmers, but I almost choked when Matt handed over $27.  I felt completely inadequate as the provider of our vegetables.  So, I have started to pay more attention to what I'm eating and putting away for the winter.  

I packaged up just over 5 pounds of blanched kale (from my mother's garden because the moose ate ours.)  It took me about 5 minutes to harvest and 25 minutes to wash, blanch, package, label, and freeze it.   That is not taking into account the time it took to plant and tend the kale, which is a more complicated calculation.  A bunch of organic kale from Freddies is, what, $2.50?  So, if a bunch of kale is about a pound ( I should check these numbers) then I froze the equivalent of about $12.50.  If we pretend that it took about another half-hour of tending for those five bunches of kale, then the hourly rate would be about $12.50.  Not stellar, but it is something.  And the carbon footprint of the kale is much smaller than the stuff that comes from Cali in the dead of winter.  

Perhaps the raspberries will be more economical.  I spent about 15 minutes collecting about a pint of raspberries today.