Right around this same time, in 1739, the colony of South Carolina made it possible to pay taxes in rice. In 1740, they collected 1.2 million pounds of rice. People who were owed money by the colony were given rice orders, which were redeemable at a rate of 30 shillings per 100 pounds of rice. The rice orders circulated as a form of currency — people used the slips of paper for other purchases outside of the South Carolina government.15
Today, the idea of food as currency has been resurrected by the residents of the small, northern California town of Willits. Mendo Credits are backed by food — a stash of rice and beans in a local warehouse is the bank, for example. Mendo Credits can be purchased at several participating businesses, and the notes circulate just like national money in the local stores. Fully backed by commodity food, this is money you can eat. While Mendo Credits are not a true complementary currency, insofar as people use money to buy them in the first place, they do offer an alternative store of value for money that in turn supports the food system.16
Systemic Interventions
Food currencies can play an important role in reversing the effects of the global commodities market by providing local farmers with a source of income that is not reliant on the debt and investment cycle which has driven the global food industry to the brink of economic and ecological collapse. A local food currency can mobilize people and resources without using money and start to rebuild a system that relies more on local capacity and less on global supply chains.
To accomplish this goal, a complete circuit needs to be constructed, so that local food workers, farmers, grocers, restaurants and the processing, distribution and storage companies circulate the food currency among themselves as partial payment for the food they grow and use. The structure of the currency could be something like the Mendo Credits mentioned earlier, where food in storage serves as the store of value and the coupons circulate with the knowledge that they can always be redeemed for food. Or, a food currency could take on more of the characteristics of a commercial barter system, where businesses involved in food and related industries have a system of credits and debits among themselves that would be independent of national money — similar to the WIR system in Germany.
In either model, the addition of local food currency could mobilize local resources and build real wealth in the local food sector. Food workers would have additional income to supplement their wages. Farmers would have additional income to supplement the money they get for their crops. Perhaps most importantly, local grocers, processors and restaurants would be able to pay comparable prices in dollars for local produce to offset the competition of the cheap imported food from the global commodity system, paying the difference in a local currency.
The two systems would be complementary, insofar as they would exist together and work to maximize the income and wealth of the people in the food sector. By addressing one of the critical economic traps of the commodity food system, resources could also be more available to address resource depletion and environmental pollution. Most of the depletion and pollution can be addressed with more labor, and so the availability of a local currency to mobilize more of the labor pool to, for example, construct wetlands to manage agricultural runoff, to plant trees in areas which have been harvested, to compost food waste to rebuild depleted soils — none of the solutions to these problems needs to be capital intensive.
In every area of the world, there are people who need work. In every agricultural operation, there is endless work that needs to be done. The main cause of unemployment in the face of critical work tasks is a shortage of money to pay the workers. The shortage of money, as we have said before, is a function of the structure of the monetary system we have constructed, not an inherent lack of human ingenuity or motivation.
In this system, the national debt-based money plays its role, and the local currency supplements it and mobilizes more local workers to help offset the need for temporary immigrant labor on farms. A balance can be found between the two systems that benefits the agricultural producers, the communities that rely on their productivity and the environment we all rely on to continue to provide us with the food and water we need to survive.
Farm Stand: Vermont’s Food Currency
The Central Vermont Food Systems Council was established by the City of Montpelier in 2008 to develop a plan for increased local food production and food security. The Council recruited representatives from all the different parts of the food system to form committees and research the needs and goals of each sector. Committees were formed on food production, food infrastructure (processing, storage and distribution), food policy, food justice, food education, consumers and households, and Gwendolyn chaired a food currency committee to explore what possibilities there might be for a local currency to help achieve the goals of the Council.
FIGURE 12.3. A Complementary Food Currency System
For any system, it takes time to discern how a currency might work to connect underutilized resources with unmet needs, and so the Food Currency committee didn’t really get moving until late in 2009. The December meeting that year featured a presentation on a new statewide initiative to understand how to strengthen the food system’s role in the economy, and at this meeting some of the local farms described how they currently had extra food storage capacity that was going unused.
The light bulb went on, and the ideas for a local food currency started to gel. If there was underutilized food storage capacity in the region and if food storage in general was something we wanted to foster to develop better local food security, then this might provide the basis for a currency. Willits, California has shown that people were willing to invest in food storage as a backing for a local currency — Mendo Credits are based in food. If a similar system were used in Vermont, this might provide a local currency to circulate locally, but also could help build additional food storage capacity.
Several people who had attended the Food Systems Council meeting kept talking about the possibilities afterward. Another recurring theme that emerged was the need farmers have to understand their markets and to have dedicated customers in advance of their season every year. One farmer on the committee thought it would be a good idea to get people together to figure out how to organize a buying co-op, so that consumer demand could be aggregated for local farmers, giving them a more predictable market.
The two needs — food storage and aggregated consumer demand — gave rise to the idea of an online Farm Stand, a website where farmers could post products they have available, consumers could post the needs they have for food and other products and services that support the food economy could also participate, all facilitated by a local currency.
Local farmers are more open to using an alternative currency system as long as they are still able to have part of the costs paid in dollars. The Farm Stand website offers three alternatives for payment: dollars, food storage units and food credits. The food storage units are purchased with dollars, but then they can continue to circulate as currency — the buyers of the units know that their currency is ultimately backed by food that is in storage locally. The food credits are not purchased with dollars or backed by food storage — they are more of a pure complementary currency that is backed by the goods and services available in the system.
Farmers can post items for sale for dollars, or for a mix of dollars and the two types of food currency. Consumers can ask for different products and offer to pay dollars or a mix of currencies. One of the important features of the system is that people can offer farm labor for a mix of currencies. This helps farmers lower their real costs, which in turn can make it easier for them to accept the different forms of food currency for their products.17
Food is such a basic human need that it is imperative that we find ways to support the people who grow it so that they are not living below the poverty level. A food currency is not the whole answer to this question, but it’s a start. Farming practices that are more decentralized, that use lower levels of non-renewable
resources, that protect the resource base on which they depend need to be rewarded, and the destructive practices in place now need to end. One of the ways to intervene in this system is to change the way the rewards and penalties work. Changing the market — the mediator of rewards and penalties — needs to be done in both bank-debt money and complementary currencies.
PART III
MAKING IT HAPPEN
CHAPTER 13
Intentional Cities
Ultimately, human intentionality
is the most powerful evolutionary force
on this planet.
GEORGE B. LEONARD
Cities can take a leadership role in creating wealth, but they need to find new ways to mobilize their residents around a common agenda. All of the currency strategies we have discussed so far require someone’s vision, a plan, and specific strategic actions that bring them to fruition. The different solutions that have been proposed in the previous chapters will all be highly empowered and effective if a city decides to create an explicit shared vision: what we call an intentional city. Cities often undertake public planning projects that offer the opportunity to create these aspects of collective action, but most city plans have remained in the domain of experts, rather than engaging residents and other stakeholders. This chapter and the next tell the tales of four cities which took the initiative to create a long-term vision, to identify how needs are met in their community, and to articulate a sustainable strategy for the future. All of the cities described included complementary currency interventions in their plans.
Mobilizing Collective Action
What we are calling collective action — one aspect of which is political will — is based ultimately in what we hold dear, the things and values we care about as a people. If we value freedom, the legal and economic systems we create allow for it. If we value justice, there is a reliable rule of law, corrections for inequities, and fair, reciprocal checks and balances for the government. Values themselves contain a goal, or a vision, of an end result.
The challenge for society has always been to find enough common ground among competing values to exercise the political will needed to create systems and institutions that reflect and sustain the underlying ideals of the culture. A corollary challenge has been to hold true to our deepest values even when convenience, greed, fear, hardship and power threaten to derail the original intent of particular initiatives. This is the power of vision; communities need to come together to craft one that is compelling enough to have staying power, with strong shared values, so that it overcomes the usual bumps in the road.
In fact, businesses have long recognized the importance of creating and following a vision. There are thousands of high-level executive seminars on the topic, and the more successful enterprises are continuously refining and testing their actions against their vision. Since the vision approach to business came into fashion back in the 1980s, research has demonstrated that those companies who have managed their business around a vision are more successful than their competitors.
One example is Whole Foods Market, which is committed to a vision that goes beyond being just a grocery store. “They actually want to change a part of the world in which they operate. Even though they don’t obsess over the bottom line, their earnings growth rate is triple that of the industry in which they operate. And their stock price over the past two years has more than doubled.”1
Choice of the Methodology
A number of different ways are available to tackle the complexity of sustainability planning. Let us only briefly mention here well-known ones, such as the Natural Step, the Agenda 21, the Local Environmental Action Program (LEAP) and the World Health Organization’s Healthy Cities program. The Natural Step was developed by Karl-Henrik Robert, a physician in Sweden who was alarmed at the increasing rates of cancer in the country and worked backward to determine what the root causes were. He posed four system conditions that need to be met for a sustainable world, and offered a methodology for cities and companies to achieve these system conditions.
Local Agenda 21 was the local government response to the Earth Summit in Rio, which culminated in Agenda 21, a program for the planet to achieve environmental sustainability and community development. While its scope was originally broader than the environmental agenda, as it has been implemented over the past 20 years, the programs that have tended to be implemented as Local Agenda 21 in cities are local recycling campaigns and other environmental projects. Local Agenda 21 offers few tools for systematically considering the economy, the governance systems or the social development of a community.
LEAP uses a comparative risk assessment methodology to determine the impacts of different environmental threats, and then offers a program for addressing the problems. Healthy Cities encourages cities to study the health conditions of their populations as a way of making plans for environmental protection and social and human development.
Each of these programs have their specific strengths and advantages, but you will have noticed that they have in common the tendency to focus on only some of the dimensions involved in sustainable community development.
The approach described in Creating Wealth is original in that it attempts to be more comprehensive, to approach a long-term vision and integrated plan that deals with all dimensions needed to create an intentional city. While this may appear overly ambitious, some cities have managed to achieve this aim. Each of the four cities described here realized that they needed to take an integrated approach to planning rather than continuing to look for solutions to isolated problems.
The cities had leaders who appreciated the insights that system dynamics and the Earth Charter could offer city planning, and were inspired to take the approach Gwendolyn advocated in her previous book The Key to Sustainable Cities.2 The four cities are very different, ranging from a very small state capital of 8,000 people to a small, impoverished city on the Hudson River, a regional center of commerce and one of the wealthiest cities in North America with over 1,000,000 people.
Visionary Cities —
Creating Excitement and Momentum
Unlike businesses, where the vision is often introduced by high-level management, the most effective city visioning processes engage a broad cross section of city residents, businesses, educational institutions and other stakeholders in an extended planning process that defines a vision and also includes specific actions that need to be taken to make the vision a reality. The four cities we use as examples have engaged in a vision process with a strong emphasis on long-term sustainability. They have asked their residents to imagine their city 30-100 years in the future. After this, they set intermediate goals and objectives, designed strategies to meet the goals and established ways to measure and report on progress toward the vision over time.
In a business, customers, clients, market and product lines limit the range of possibilities for a shared vision. In cities, where all dimensions of human life are expressed, there are a number of challenges when it comes to creating anything that could be called a “shared vision.” One of the important questions to ask is whose vision is it? A statement that is issued unilaterally by people in power is not likely to capture the values of the whole community, and even less mobilize them to take the necessary initiatives to achieve it.
If the goal is to create a vision statement that does reflect the values of the whole community, how do you get the whole community involved? Most city leaders hold traditional public hearings on policy initiatives, to try to encourage public input. They draft the policy proposal, and they ask the public to comment on it before it becomes official. They complain of community apathy when only a small group of people show up for a hearing, typically at City Hall. Cities that have done a good job of community engagement have learned to attract more people to their policy discussions by structuring the possibilities for public input as the kind of activities that people normally like to attend, like sporting events, celebrations and cultural events. If you make the polic
y process fun instead of being wonkish and boring, you are more likely to have more people participate.
So in Calgary, the public outreach staff for the imagineCALGARY process showed up at a visit by the Queen — a crowd of 10,000 — and handed out brightly colored surveys for people to complete. In Newburgh, the city named their long-term planning process “Plan-It Newburgh” and printed t-shirts and buttons for people who attended a festive kickoff event scheduled at the same time as the regular Arts Celebration on the first Saturday in September. In Burlington, balloons with “I’m part of the Legacy” were made for the kickoff ceremony, held on Church Street, a busy pedestrian mall in the heart of the downtown on a busy Saturday in September.
These cities sent a message to the public that city planning is fun and interesting, and in all cases, people responded by getting involved, either by simply filling out the visioning surveys or by joining stakeholder groups. Some took their interests a step further and stepped up to serve on the City Council or Planning Commissions.
A second challenge for cities trying to develop a shared vision for the future is the subject matter of the vision statement. Vague generalities about being a livable city aren’t enough to carry more difficult policy agendas forward when priorities are set and trade-offs need to be made. An overarching view is important, but the vision needs to be detailed enough so that direction is clear. For this reason, the cities described in these chapters have used long-term sustainability as a methodology, a system that involves looking closely at the question of how human needs are met today without denying future generations the ability to meet their needs. The needs themselves can frame the vision and the goals, as assets are inventoried, systemic patterns uncovered and leverage points to change problematic behavior of meta-systems identified for strategic intervention. The balance of this chapter describes four case studies, different in their scale and means available, different also in terms of objectives pursued.
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