The belief that money can function as a proxy for meeting our most basic needs food, water, shelter is the central fallacy of modernity. Money is obviously a useful tool in organizing markets but when it disconnects us from direct reciprocity with forests, farms, rivers and their human stewards that actually meet our hour to hour daily needs, we end up defaulting to mass dependence on eco-cidal infrastructure awkwardly stewarded by both shareholder profit mandates and soviet level bureaucracies. Complete disintermediation from providence.
When we try and re-animate places that celebrate vital, flowing living water, food and forest into the infrastructure of daily life, the “free market’ fails because insanely subsidized extractive, commoditized food, water and shelter supply chains render their regenerative counterparts economically unviable.
Arts and culture lead us into a reciprocal paradigm is the only workaround. The reward is intrinsic to the process. This is true for anyone, even the cogs in the machine reliant upon grinding for paychecks delivered by commodity capitalism, fiercely guarding that inner candle that validates that our best life comes from the community of people dedicated to the sanctity of place. The best food, water and shelter are born from those that guard the remnants of goodness from the insatiable appetites of abstracted profits trading our security and wellness, with blinking numbers on your smart phone banking app as if that might save us from any number of financial mayhems.
Financial mayhem through history is extremely constant. Cities remain. Bioregions remain. Rivers remain. Farms remain. Monetary systems come and go. Some people call this long term thinking.
Let’s check our loyalties. For our own best life. Within our submission to the more than human provenance of all that is good lies freedom from the terrible delusion that our “social safety net” is wholly reliant upon a stock exchange that has been gnawing upon the foundational web of life, an ecology that gives us purpose, beauty and an inter-connected transcendence that liberate us from the turmoil of eternally grasping egos.
Reclaim our biology in a modern era means recognizing that our urethras broker nitrogen that enables plants to grow. Our gutters and drains broker water that when well directed or poorly directed can enable ecosystem renewal or ecosystem collapse.
We must rise above the false profits of hijacked markets and uncle sam big pipe paternalism and stare our biology right in the face, and with each breath, recognize and validate of our intrinsic regenerative biology.