(soon)
2/22/2004 9:30 AM
Rural America
Safe Net
Deep structure of event
analysis
I have posted your note anonymously in order to allow the small number of folks who are thinking through the issues to see where we are in various analysis regarding possible and potential aspects of a full rural development project:
http://www.bcngroup.org/beadgames/safeNet/eleven.htm
The introduction of new industry is understood to be one key to any successful rural development project.
The beads
http://www.bcngroup.org/beadgames/beads.htm
reflect an experimental methodology that will/can evolve into a visual interface tracking the elements of real social discourse. (I am making reference here to the simplification of knowledge interfaces that my lab has developed over the past two decades.)
One of the aspects about the beads is that they can individually be edited to reflect both a toning down of expression of crisis that might be occurring, and consequently deepen the persistent themes in that social discussion. There is intensity as we address real problems in real time. Editing allows a softening of this expression. (see the first three or four beads)
Our contacting you and thinking about how your work, and wonderful decades of work on ecological systems you have achieved, has enriched our thinking.
Here are the core operational problems we face. Perhaps you agree with this analysis.
1) Patented process, plants and animals create a drain on the economic return that might otherwise be useable for rural cultural renewal. In some cases, this drain actually works against rural renewal and reinforces a centralized, and often external, control that treats individuals as cogs in a machine and social problems as some one else’s problems.
2) Investment capability is now highly concentrated in the hands of those who develop a business model that depends on ownership of intellectual property to over compensate the owners of intellectual property. The development of these business models is considered to be a moral action justified by a type of religion, which has been called the Fundamentalist Church of the Entrepreneur. The Church is not a true expression of positive capitalism, but in fact a fundamentalism that seeks to reduce economics and ecology to narrowly defined and damaging objectives (under the control by a few).
3) Government support for agricultural renewal is more and more strongly influenced directly by lobby processes that direct money to certain outcomes, often completely ignoring the sense of community that rural residents would like to re-express. University agricultural outreach has been deeply influenced by the Fundamentalist Church of the Entrepreneur.
In addition to these three core operational problems we have to develop high detail and high value information about what might be available for rural renewal.
The solution space seems to require a positive evolution in our cultural viewpoint about the role and limits to ownership and capital formation. We can this solution space “Ecological Capitalism”.
I should restate that a National value is seen in the development of a real project that can be templated to introduce resilient communities renewal into all rural communities.