Glomart, Gaia, and Garden Guilds

 Let's start with the basics, in the form of a catechism: 

Q: What is the biggest single problem in the world today?

A: The fundamental incompatibility between the production rules of Glomart and Gaia.

Q: What is "Glomart"?

A: The Global Market Economy, a self-organizing and self-propagating complex adaptive system based on the arithmetical logic (i.e. production rules) of money.

Q: What is the logic of money?

A: Basic arithmetic: (1) More is always better; (2) What's mine is not yours, and vice versa.

Q: What's wrong with that?

A: These two production rules engender an economy that has the following characteristics:

• Nothing has value until it has a price.
• Therefore, nature has no value at all until it is transformed into commodities.
• Commodities must have discrete boundaries in order to be assigned a financial value.
• The system depends on the endless growth of production and consumption of commodities.
• As resources diminish, the rich get richer while the poor get poorer--inevitably--since possession of resources increases one's ability to raise prices for those who lack them.

Q: What is Gaia?

A: The living Earth, a self-organizing and self-propagating complex adaptive system based on the logic (i.e. production rules) of living organisms and their ecosystems interacting with their mineral, hydrological, and atmospheric systems, which provides the fresh water we drink, the food we eat, and the oxygenated air we breathe, and the climate (and shelter) we need to survive and propagate.

Q: What are those production rules?

A: These consist of the following:

• Enough is  enough; all biological values are optimizing, rather than maximizing--too much or too little of any biological value is toxic to the system, whether that value is personal (e.g. body temperature or blood pressure) or collective (e.g. population density within an ecosystem). 
• There are no discrete "commodities" in Gaia; the value of any biological entity depends on its interactions with its environment and with other biological organisms.
• No matter what we may believe, we humans are a part of Gaia, and are every bit as dependent on these Gaian systems as every other organism on the planet.

Hence we have our predicament: Glomart--an inherently maximizing system that depends on endless growth of population, production, and consumption--is fundamentally incompatible with Gaia, an inherently optimizing system that is not growing any bigger, and in fact is already collapsing from overuse (via climate change, desertification, flooding, pollution, etc.)  And as the vast store of net energy (the very foundation of any material economy) available from fossil fuels is depleted, and its byproducts cause accelerated heating and chaotic fluctuations in our global climate, this basic contradiction between an "endless growth" economy and a finite biological support system is coming to a head. As we overshoot the limits of our energetic and biological support system, our global market economy is collapsing, first gradually, but then at an accelerating pace. There is no way out of this, at least collectively.

What about individually?  It's not certain, but here is one possibility.

What would happen if people with small bits of land at their disposal--front or back yards--started growing at least some of their own food. They would shortly find that there is much they don't know--much to learn--so (in addition to reading garden books or watching YouTube tutorials) they strike up a chat with their more experienced neighbors, as they are out in their gardens.

Then suppose a group of neighbors with interest in, or expertise in, growing their own food started forming neighborhood Garden Guilds, where they met once a month for potluck dinners, to share dishes, recipes, and ideas about gardening. On this basis, they started collaborating, so that people could expand their range of homegrown produce by trading it with their neighbors. As the garden guilds evolve, they could start holding reciprocal work parties as well, so that garden projects that exceed the strength or skills of one neighbor could be achieved by collaboration with others.

Multiple other benefits could arise from contiguous neighbors collaborating in this way. If, for example, a disaster struck--an earthquake, a drought, a wildfire, a flood, or a collapsing economy with hyperinflation, people would be surrounded by friends, rather than strangers, to whom they could reach out, whether to solicit or offer assistance. Ditto for external threats to the neighborhood, such as crime or violence.

Now imagine that city governments, Master Gardener chapters, churches, and civic organizations all jumped onboard, creating community-wide Garden Guild networks to promote and support the creation of Garden Guilds in adjoining neighborhoods, who all exchanged information and ideas with others. And imagine if the dominant theme of these Guilds was the study and practice of permaculture, based on the core ethics of Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share.  The mission of the Garden Guild movement, therefore, is as follows:

Grow Gardens, Grow Community, Grow Awareness by Learning, Teaching, Healing, and Creating. 

This would be a gift economy, rather than a zero-sum money economy where the rich get steadily richer at everyone else's expense.  In short, it would resemble the indigenous, pre-Glomart economies of our ancestors, with the added benefits of scientific inquiry, technological know-how, and global awareness and responsibility.

While such a development will not prevent the inevitable collapse of Glomart, it could nevertheless sow the seeds of a Gaian culture to replace it eventually--a culture based on creating a symbiotic, rather than parasitic, relationship between humanity and our biological support system, our unique living planet Gaia.