Category: Earth Intelligence

Credit is just as good as money. We can give each other credit. That means we can use our own money, no longer depending on the banks and the speculators…

Community Credit: The Next Generation of Financial Architecture

How would nature design a financial system?

What we can see today, if we choose to look for it, is a global permaculture of community credit systems emerging on the ground, from the bottom up, below the canopy of established finance. These systems, which could also be called community-based mutual credit systems, are consistent with biological design principles in all the ways bank credit is not. They are bottom-up, locally attuned and adapted, decentralized, diverse, self-organized, iterative and modular –  in short, everything we dream of from a biological design perspective.  Perhaps most important, these systems are not premised on quantitative expansion; instead, we could say they are premised on qualitative expansion, with quantitative stability over time. This is consistent with the design of mature biological systems and the phase our species is moving into now, as we reach the limits to our own growth.