This is an act that is immediately rewarding. Radically constructive. Thoroughly affection-riddled. Wendell Berry so beautifully evokes the power of affection that connects us to the land and to one another in the places where we live—this is that, expressed in economic action. (It must be noted, however, that Wendell assiduously maintains his skepticism of all movements and the ideological self-righteousness that they tend to engender. Which is just one of the many reasons we love him…)
Can we imagine the preservation and restoration of soil fertility and local food systems as a broad-based response to today’s multiple crises? A response as meaningful in its own way as efforts to reform industrial systems? Can relocalization become as integral to systemic change as regeneration?
If we are going to get to “Yes,” we’ll need significant new flows of capital, designed from the ground up. Beetcoin is one. Gathering capital from donors across the land and steering it to a distributed network of local groups, where all funding decisions are made and where the capital stays, recirculating in perpetuity.
The aim is not only to get money to certain food and farm businesses, but to do so by way of a distributed funding system, built on collective decision-making, mutuality and local knowledge. Something separate and apart from the world of trillion-dollar capital flows and institutional metrics of profit and risk. Hence, the phrase “healing pulses of capital and peaceable mobilizations of people” in AHA!: Fake Trillions, Real Billions, Beetcoin and the Great American Do-Over.