I love this cartoon!! It totally nails it.
Avoiding the scenario in this cartoon means we need to start doing business on planet Earth a whole new way. We need a whole different valuation and prioritization of our processes. But what other way is there? How doe we get out of capitalism? This happens to be something I’ve been passionate about figuring out full out on the last two years. I’ve been lucky to connect with some inspiring folks who have pointed me into some really exciting ideas.
in my particular case, for the ecobrick movement, we need to work with money and capital. I’ve been hyper-aware that we have to go about using capital very carefully. Plastic, like nothing else, shows the direct connection between money, capital, our petroleum powered economy…. and the rampant environmental degradation that follows. The plastic strewn beaches of Bali come right to mind. Plastic, however is simply a sympton and we must not confuse it for the cause. When you follow the sympton, you get to the heart of the mater: captial. Afterall, money/captical put to use in our day and age buys stuff, and that stuff (if it isn’t made from plastic already) comes… in plastic!
So how does a movement to transcend plastic avoid the useage capital that leads to plastic being produced?!
That whole new way of doing business.
I am really proud of what we’ve come up with for our enterprise. We’ve consulted some of the leaders in the global movement for a paradigm shift in business conceptualization. In doing so we’ve been able to structure our “Global Ecobrick Alliance” the name for our enterprise. Notice how I avoided saying “company” or “NGO” or Foundation? Inevitably, paradigm shift require a conscious evolution of our language, words and terms. I feel the word ‘enterprise’ sums up much better our financial reason for being. In fact, to be more precise, we’ve gone on to call it an “Earth Enterprise”– as our essential desire is to serve the Earth (and it has a nice ring to it, yeah?).
For the last year I’ve been reflecting and discussing and researching to discern precisely what this means. We’ve developed seven key principles and done a full revamp of our Intention Map (a.k.a “business plan”) where concepts like regenerativity and ayyew take the forefront. These concepts then flow into and qualify exciting and powerful principles like open source, class transcendent, open books, leading by example, and more. The Intention Map and our Principles make clear how our creation of revenue, spending of it, and more will serve to enrich the earth, and the people and our fellow species on it.
In Noam Chomsky’s 2019 book “Who Rules the World?”, he goes deep into the geopolitical and capitalist dynamics making our world today. However, at the very end of the book, Chomsky comes to the conclusion that instead of asking the question “Who rules the world?” we should be posing a far more revealing question, “What principles and values rule the world?”
He nails it too.
If you’re curious, we’ve got a great summary web page up on our site that goes deep into the principles we’ve developed for our Earth Enterprise concept for the Global Ecobrick Alliance…
