To: John Fullerton, Capital Investment

From: John Suter, Communications Consultant

John,

Your answer to the question “What does a Regenerative Economy look like?”  was that it was already happening.   I think this is going in the right direction but much too slowly.  You need to find a community that can create or find the ideas that will make the transformation more real and give it words and concepts.   Mainstream media is too far behind and will not develop the words and concepts needed.

I was a member of the Slow Money of Northern California and we too had farmer entrepreneurs.  We had events on organic farms and played folk music for the crowd.  It had a following, but yet has not come into mainstream consciousness.

You need a community with competition among small teams (a division of labor) to find the ideas that will transform us into a Regenerative Economy.  Books like the one that Hunter Lovins suggested,  “Story Wars”, imply that the whole thing will happen from the seller’s point of view.   It ignores the listeners and buyers ability to filter the information.

At the 25^thanniversary of RMI, Amory Lovins said that he would have done things differently if he knew what he did now.  Why does it take so long?   It’s probably a complex set of behaviors when looked at from an academic point of view, but from a competiton, sports, or even a child’s point of view, it does not have to be.  Set a goal. Try.  Evaluate the feedback.  Try again.  Democrats see things as a one-size-fits-all.  Conservatives realize that human activity must match up with the local space and the local environment.   We actually need both, but it seems Democrats and Conservatives are not talking much these days.

I agree that we need to look at living systems.  Looking more closely, there are cells and sub-cellular organelles that are organized into their own units with some external connections for energy and waste management.  Does this provide a model for us?  It might, but the organization and creation must come from within too.

If you don’t look at the receiving end and simply create more small organic farmers, you are a supply side economist.  That may work up to a certain level.  We tried a community-farm-association delivery of food, but there is a limit to the number of tomatoes and lettuce that one can eat.

We must have some competition for moving useful information.   It must be judged by locals too, with input from any source. We have a newly developed nervous system mostly in place (Internet, etc) but need to develop “motor end plates” and other interfaces with the nervous system.  It should evolve rapidly with the right tools.   I can help if you don’t know how to get there.