This is not an attack but an honest and sincere call to action from me to our sector, It is delivered in the spirit of an activating force seeking resistance from conscious minds looking to do the best they can in their life's work 

You and I are failing, and we have blinded ourselves to the artful subtlety of Capitalism. 

As a friend would say “Capitalism is nimble”. It hides and wraps itself in many different well meaning faces, though we have to be honest with ourselves about the core mechanism of the economic machine we run modernity through 

For every bit of good you do that has a financial value uplift, you are feeding a perpetually reinforcing inequality machine, designed on extraction, simplification, and oppression. 

What's worse, the better you do in your quest to contribute to a better world, the more proportionately you are making it worse through the system of capitalism itself 

There is a very important distinction to make here though… capital itself is not Capitalism. Capital is an activating force, its the system it is a function of that is creating this 6th mass extinction event 

So what is the solution?

For a start, stop solutioneering, we don’t have the answers. We have to stop thinking we have the answers and step outside our comfort zones. We have to open our eyes and explore possibilities for managing ourselves and exchanging value with one another, particularly how we structure debt and leverage, and what in the deep history of our species' technological evolution we should now class as global commons 

We have to be both brave and realistic in equal measures, and start where we are individually, what sector are you in?

Im from built environment, you might be in the sector that finances that, supplies to it, supports people in it, governs over it, or fights against it on behalf of the natural world, but all of the aforementioned are based in the same economic system, perpetuating extraction, simplification, and oppression 

As we, as a global community, explore the Meta-Crisis topics surrounding our global economy and our options for change from regenerative, circular, degrowth, post-growth, steady state, etc, we have to remember we do have tangible mechanisms to use now to begin our journey in changing the function of the system… Do what you can, where you are, with what you have 

Regenerative development is a process that can be applied to any of these systems to leverage the activating financial capital into creating natural, human, social, and produced capitals, with the potential for creating place-sourced economic models outside the wider system of capitalism 

Community Land Trusts are a legal structural system with the potential for creating place-sourced economic models outside the wider system of capitalism 

Permaculture is a life focused system of design with the potential for creating place-sourced economic models outside the wider system of capitalism 

First Nation Treaty’s development offers us an excellent opportunity to reinvent ourselves as a nation and global community with the potential for creating place-sourced economic models outside the wider system of capitalism 

And the combination of these has exponential potential and is somewhere in the field of where we need to be gravitating towards

But how do you use capital to support system change in a capitalist system that needs you to grow capital when that is the problem?

Think more in terms of project equity instead of debt as an activating force. Be more creative in how you recycle and de-risk capital through project investment ecosystems. Understand the flywheels within capitalism and how they can be generative for the transition of financial capital into the other forms of capital… and most of all, start talking to people outside your silo that are working on models that restructure the structure 

And remember…

“If you are working on the accounting side of a degenerative system, whether that's measuring cash or carbon, you are part of the problem… Only system change will save us”