Living things require more energy than they have. They collect resources, convert and expend. This is continuous and living things depend on their environment to provide this additional resource. Living things need more than they expend in collecting resources.
The earth system, as well as living & dead organic materials provide chemical, thermal and kinetic. The sun (an input by day, absence by night) continues to add more energy, including differentials, driving change in thermal and chemical reactions, kinetic & electric energy, at large & small scales. The water & wind cycles & systems, organic, mineral and electricity cycles flux & flow.
Life takes and takes again every day from it’s environment. Life gives back through symbiosis, birthing and in death. Life participates in providing a changing environment of flow, growth, decay and collapse.
Additionally, knowledge (memory, analysis, applied method, technique & shared through communication & demonstration) is a form of energy and value which living things collect, develop, hold, use and create (as novelty). Humans are extraordinary in this category, including learning from life, natural & physical systems. We are a marvel, in the way we marvel.
When a collective living thing, a species grows too large for or demanding from its environment (or ecosystem, embedded in complex overlapping interactions), a corrective adjustment or collapse occurs.
The growth of human demand from the environment is unsustainable. So too, growing debt & hoarding of wealth (a concentration by a few, maintaining artificial scarcity for many) is obviously an issue and points to an eventual collapse, unless reversed through adjustment, temporary or systemic. In the meanwhile these are just another setup for further value extraction, from continuous resource collection and from value flow.
Debt release and wealth transfer (like a cull or collapse of a specie) is a method for adjusting or “fixing the problem”, toward a more balanced and sustainable system. Adjustments may occur in a considered and coordinated way or eventuate as a sudden cascade or uncontrolled demolition.
I see this group (originally written in the Community Currency Alliance group) as well as others, such as cooperative, open source & crowd sourcing, intentionally more distributed & fairer systems, are efforts to coordinate sustainably. We also provide potential off ramps from unsustainable practices, and on ramps to more environmentally, socially & economically sustainable and “regenerative” practices. However, debt release and wealth transfer will probably be needed in any intentionally corrective systemic adjustment to the human induced ecosystem.
Human induced ecosystem change? Where to from here?